What was once new?

(fast forward to 1999)

October 20th, 1998

• Yes, it's true - a second post in the very same week! Not only that, but it's another short story called "The Misfits".

October 18th, 1998

• For many people, times of emotional stress leads to periods of intense creativity. I count myself as one of those people and so over the last 2 or 3 weeks I've been pretty busy. Frustratingly, a bug that appears occasionally when you try to post files from FrontPage Express direct to the web led to my main poetry page being deleted so I have also been busy rebuilding that. I think I've just about caught back up now so here are a couple of my more recent musings. First of all, here is a poem inspired by National Poetry Day back in the "old country" - I tried to think about what poetry means to me and the result was "Soul Food". Also, I offer up the first short story that I've written in a l-o-n-g time (that isn't to say that I haven't started a few in the meantime - I seem to have a healthy amount of "works in progress") and it's called "Life goes on".

September 27th, 1998

• This week-end has seen the 5th anniversary of my dad's death and I've found myself spending a lot of time alternating between laughing and shedding a few tears. For those of you who know me, you'll know that my dad was my best friend and that we shared the same slighty offbeat sense of humour. For those of you who knew my dad, you might remember his habit of forever buying weird and wonderful gadgets (from store demonstrations, from newspaper advertisements, from passers-by in the street sometimes) that somehow never quite lived up to their initial promise. I was thinking about this today and came up with a poem called "As seen on TV" that sort of sums it up. Enjoy!

September 17th, 1998

• Are you going to nag me for it being so long since I posted anything up here? Doesn't "well, I've been so very, very busy!" cut it with you? How about the age-old excuse of "creative juices temporarily drained?"
  OK.. well, it's a fair cop and society is to blame, I suppose. Please think kindly of me as you read Setting Sun. It was written after peace descended after a summer of 3 teenagers (and associated extended family) in my house. Now that they've all returned to whence they came (including my darling wife and daughter), I find that maybe silence isn't so golden.
  

June 18th, 1998

• OK, so back to the standard guilt trip about not writing or posting anything new. I guess that saying I've been too busy being a corporate dweeb just won't cut it, huh?
  Hmmm.. well, what can I say about Waiting except its creation was fuelled by too much work, too many late nights, too much coffee, too much experimentation with my new cocktail shaker and most definitely too much of an incessant Joy Division / Cure soundtrack (circa "17 Seconds")!.
  Don't worry - I am over it now (or am I - only time will tell)!

May 15th, 1998

• Two new postings in a single week! "Is the guy doing drugs or something?" I can almost hear you ask. "Is he hanging out at Borders hitting those quadruple shot espressos for all he's worth?"
  Nah! I just felt in the mood to write something a little different for a change. Don't look back is a poem about the way fear can feed on itself if you let it.

May 12th, 1998

• I know, I know, I know! I do realise just how long it is since I posted something new up here and I'm feeling suitably guilty, OK! I'm not really sure what happened to the rest of February, all of March, April and the beginning of May except that I seemed to be travelling a lot. The good news was that my wife and daughter were also travelling a lot too (with me!) so we did see a lot of each other, albeit in three different time zones. I close my eyes is a poem I wrote on my most recent travels and tells of the magic of rekindled love and how it transcends distance and time.

February 8th, 1998

• A long and busy week has meant that I've neither been creative or industrious in loading the backlog of old stuff onto here. I did make a start by copying all of the old files onto my new PC. Hopefully, it should be a lot quicker now to get up to date. Just to whet your appetite (or maybe cause you to groan - who knows?) here is a song in the style of Elvis Costello (my all-time musical hero for those of you who I haven't bored to tears yet with my excessive fandom) dating from 1996 called "Absolute Divinity". As you'll see from the copyright notice, it was written with a friend (he wrote the music to my lyrics) and concerns the woes of another friend who was involved with the latest in a long line of reprehensible shits (I'm glad to report that she's very happily involved now with a very sweet guy).

February 2nd, 1998

• So much for "the best laid plans of mice, men and certified webheads!" I had all these plans to publish some more of my poetry here over the week-end but the extended outage on GeoCities put paid to that. Instead, I sat down with pen and pencil (Ed: For the benefit of our younger readers, these were old fashioned writing implements that preceded the keyboard and mouse) and wrote another poem for my wife called "Side By Side". She hasn't actually seen this yet as I thought I'd stick with the "Golden Age Of Communication" theme and rely on the traditional British postie to deliver it for me!

January 21st, 1998

• I decided to do a little tidying up around here. You know, stuff like this "What's New?" page so that visitors can see what I've been doing while they've been away (Ed: hmmmm, doesn't this assume that people will actually bother to come back?). Anyway, I did that and then created a couple of snazzy graphics (feel free to "borrow" them in the spirit of the internet - just drop me a line and let me know where they've ended up!). Finally, I added another poem from the end of last year called "Some Lay Flowers". I wrote this for my wife after the most difficult year of our lives together. It tries to put into words just how much I love her but once again proves to me that sometimes words just can't say all that you want them to say.

January 20th, 1998

•  Browsing through the excellent resources provided by fellow homesteader Dyllea, I came across a background tile (Ed: quite literally a tile, as you will see) that inspired to write the following poem called "Kitchen Floor"

January 17th, 1998

• Good question, what is new? Well, let me tell you that as of today, much of the stuff (Ed: technical term) up here is new. Well, new to you maybe but not to me; parts have apeared on the web over the last few years in various previous incarnations of "Brittle Views".

  My intent is to take advantage of those awfully nice people at Geocities (hmmm.. do you think that if I continue to creep at this level that they might give me some more free space?) to show you the innermost thoughts of a thirty-something Brit (hmmmm... a scary thought, huh?)

  So, where do I think you should start? Well, right now this site consists of some of my poetry amassed over the years and some of my more recent excursions into the world of short stories. In the future, I intend to publish more of my back catalog but also publish some of the other creative things that I like to play around with (like the graphic of the hands on the home page). I'm toying with also putting up background details on where the poems and came from - I think it adds something to be able to see from the inspiration through to the final article.

  Anyway, what goes up here over time depends to a large extent on what you, the viewing public, want to see. If you don't want to see anything, then that's fine (ok, you might not get your wish on that one but you can always choose to utilize your discretionary browsing time elsewhere!). If you'ld like to see more of the same or know more about me and what makes me tick, drop me a line here at BrittleViews.

  If you've got this far down the page without falling asleep, thanks!

  Robert Ford
  January 17th, 1998