The Aspiring Bard

A Reminder from Myself to Myself You're young yet, so go ahead! Burn the candle at both ends. (This we've already done on many and many a long and sleepless night). Fill up your days from dawn to dusking with talk and talk. Toss worldly weights into the morning tea, submerging them with a joke, a jibe, Resolve all cares across a pot of rice; dishing beans and laughs in equal portion. Advise, defend, tease endlessly the ones we love so well. Speak lightly things designed to make them smile. Treat life as the spectacle it is, and you, upon the commentator's box, Broadcast your jolliness to all the world. Spill over with your joy, your endless laughter, the seeing of all things as but a jest. Fill up, fill up, your days with gleeful clamor, With voices loved, With words that build  A shining, stretching web betwixt us all. For it is good, indeed, it truly is,  For kin to live thus, all harmoniously! But don't forget t...

This was originally intended to be an Instagram post for #artstew52, but it ended up wanting to go on a bit longer than I'd anticipated. So here we are at the old blog... Source - The Black Forest Cake - I think we're all agreed that I'm a fairly patient person. But at 8:30 on a Thursday night, after a full day's work and an after-hours meeting, to be confronted with the prospect of a birthday cake and Domingos' reassurances that I would make it and he would instruct...I knew my patience was about to be tried. First of all was the sugar. "Três chávenas de sugar?" "Yeah." "This kind or this kind?" He points to one of the biggest mugs. "Three! Three of those chávenas?" "It's gonna be a big cake." He reassures me. He's the one who went to cooking school. I'm the one who believes that recipes are there to be altered and/or ignored. So, in goes nearly a bag...

Another Location Challenge , because one was clearly not enough. We have to have one real and one fictional, you know. Sunga Park - The Old Man & The Sunrise - The stones hold memories. Uneven, crooked, cracked and worn with age, the old man wonders how many times his feet have trodden them. Ever since his boyhood, it's been. His boyhood, when the alley was newly-paved and hopes were high. Things were different, back then. Fresh-cut cobblestone and fresh-painted houses and fresh-faced boys running and hollering and tussling about. Well, things have changed, and that's for certain. He hadn’t really noticed the changes as they happened. But, he considers, that's the way of things, isn't it? Gradually shifting and falling apart and no-one ever noticing until one day when they wake up and the world has gotten unfamiliar. He certainly has to pay more attention now than he did back then. Back in the day, when the paving was clean and eve...

I was browsing about at The Pen of a Ready Writer yesterday, and found this fun  Location Challenge . So, naturally, I wrote something. Enjoy! Busy Day | Charles Nkomo - Tour de Chappa - Morning wind, still cool, blows in from the ocean. I pick my way across the puddles left by last night's rain, avoiding a gaggle of medical students in white coats, scanning the writing on the rear windows of the chappas lined up by Hospital Central. Estoril via Chipangara Ponta-Gea via Macuti The writing is, of course, more of a guideline than an actual indication of route. You should always ask before getting aboard. But, when a third chappa wheels in, Macuti via Matacuane, I press forward hopefully. "Shopriteee! Shopriteee! Shopriteee!" The coprador shouts. That's far enough for me. I take my place in the jostling group (you couldn't call it a line, not really) that waits for the passengers to get off and give us their sea...