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a poem for an old lover

what magic is this  that can draw such visceral glory,       glittering and scarlet, from the scars of these bitter old wrecks we carry ourselves around in the peal of an ancient song pounding in our ears tugging at my skirts what magic is this this pounding and tugging what magic is this pouring forth like a river      melting we pour forth  cascading over the roughs we make a waterfall 

Lady Demelza's Year in Books 2022

 New Year's Eve and the annual reckoning of the books - my favourite holiday ritual! You can click on the link at each book's title to find out more about it. 1. Traditional Healers of Central Australia: Ngangkari by NPY Women's Council Aboriginal Corporation 2013  2. Fight Like A Girl by Clementine Ford 2016 3. Desert Country by Nici Cumpston 2010 4. All Systems Red by Martha Wells 2017  5. Artificial Condition by Martha Wells 2018 6. Splitting by Fay Weldon 1996 7. The Sudden Appearance of Hope by Claire North 2016 8. Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari 2011  9. Rogue Protocol by Martha Wells 2018  10. How We Became Human by Tim Dean 2021  11. Once Upon A River by Diane Setterfield 2018  12. The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa 1994, English translation by Stephen Snyder 2019 13. The Rain Heron by Robbie Arnott 2020 14. Soil by Matthew Evans 2021 15. Oryx And Crake by Margaret Atwood 2003 16. The Second Cure by Margaret Morgan 2018  17. The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida

Lady Demelza's Year in Books 2020

Here we go for my traditional yearly book list, which traditionally I would publish at New Year. However, I seem to have spent most of January floundering around like a shipwreck, and I'm just finding my feet again now. I can face things like embedded links again. Here is what I read in 2020. 1. The Night Brother by Rosie Garland 2017 2. To The Land of Long Lost Friends by Alexander McCall Smith 2019 3. Melmoth by Sarah Perry 2018 4. Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton 1973 5. Heroes and Villains by Angela Carter 1969 6. The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson 1959 7. Mother, Sister, Daughter, Lover by Jan Clausen 1980 8. Everything is F*cked by Mark Manson 2019 9. The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay 2020 10.  The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern 2019 11. Boys Will Be Boys by Clementine Ford 2018 12. Sand Talk by Tyson Yunkaporta 2019 13. The Great Cosmic Mother by Monica Sjoo & Barbara Mor 1987 14. Nightflowers by Kathleen Stewart 1996 15. Fire

and then there were ten little Vintage Children's Book Illustration cards

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My mum loved the bunting I made from children's book pages, and she asked me to make her some cards with pieces of similar pages. I didn't want to buy new cardboard and matching envelopes to make a set, though, that would be going against my buy-(almost) nothing-new guidelines. But then I found a set of ten matching cards, new and unopened, in an op shop. They had pictures on the front and logos on the back, but the insides are blank. So, this is what I came up with. I covered the logos on the back with some scraps of book pages or wrapping paper. Each card has its own matching square envelope, with the postcard squares and everything. Schmick. And there we go, that's a project finished that I started years ago and have been meaning to get around to finishing one day for all the time in between. Satisfaction feels! 

Lady Demelza's Year in Books 2019

Haha you thought I'd forgotten, didn't you! No, it's not that, but my procrastination is rotten. My book reading habits are also still suffering terribly at the hands of social media. But anyway, here we are. 1. Lost Souls by Poppy Z. Brite 1992 2. Every Word is a Bird We Teach to Sing by Daniel Tammet 2017 3. The 8-Week Blood Sugar Diet by Dr Michael Mosley 2015 4. Soul by Tobsha Learner 2006 5. Aspecting the Goddess by Jane Meredith 2018 6. Year of Wonders by Geraldine Brooks 2001 7. My Mother's House by Colette 1922, English translation by Una Vincenzo Troubridge and Enid McLeod 1949, and Sido , 1929, English translation by Enid McLeod 1949, published in one volume 1953 8. Witchcraft into the Wilds by Rachel Patterson 2018 9. The Clever Guts Diet by Dr Michael Mosley 2017 10. There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried to Kill Her Neighbour's Baby by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, 1987 - ?, collected and translated by Keith Gessen and Anna Summers 2009

Lady Demelza's Year in Books 2018

Well I must say I am ashamed at the paucity of this list, yet again. I have recently been learning about how social media changes your brain, making it want to take in information in small pieces and articles, rather than reading books the old-fashioned way. I've had to realise that this is an issue, and I've started making some changes to address it. I hope that my efforts will be reflected in the next Year in Books. 1. The Walworth Beauty by Michele Roberts 2017 2. Bright Young Things by Scarlett Thomas 2001 3. The Children's Home by Charles Lambert 2016 4. After Me Comes the Flood by Sarah Perry 2014 5. Christmas Days by Jeanette Winterson 2016 6. Midwinterblood by Marcus Sedgwick 2011 7. Reasons to Stay Alive by Matt Haig 2015 8. The Summer of the Bear by Bella Pollen 2010 9. Songs of the Gorilla Nation by Dawn Prince-Hughes 2004 10. Dragon's Green  by Scarlett Thomas 2017 11. Kleinzeit by Russell Hoban 1974 12. The Olive Readers by C

in which our Heroine discovers she has Autism Spectrum Disorder, and it really explains a lot

Today is World Autism Awareness Day. Many people in the autistic community would prefer it be known as Autism Acceptance Day, or even Autism Appreciation Day. For me, the acceptance and the appreciation flowed very easily, once I had the awareness I had been missing most of my life. Ten years ago, I had no idea that I was autistic. I didn't see myself as being anything like the image I had of what an autistic person is like, which was probably, as for many people of my generation, associated with Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man . Looking back, the first clue could have been reading The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time by Mark Haddon . Did you ever have the feeling that there was something about you that was so very different to everyone else you knew, that you felt you were completely alone in this experience? And then one day, did you happen to discover, through chance or as a result of your own investigations, that there was someone else out there who felt the sam