Martha's Marvellous Munchies

Image by Pexels from Pixabay   At church this morning I was leading the kids group for the five- to seven-year olds. We are studying parables at the moment - the short and punchy stories that Jesus told. Today's was about the persistent widow, who kept on going to the judge's house to demand justice. As I read it, echoes of The Very Hungry Caterpillar came into my head: "...and he was STILL hungry!" as well as images from We're Going on a Bear Hunt: "Mud! Thick, oozy mud!" So here is the version of The Persistent Widow that Jesus would, I am sure, have told, if his audience had been a group of infant school kids. They seemed to enjoy it. I hope you do too.  If you have a small child to help with the knocks and the "No!"s, so much the better. The Very Persistent Widow Lydia was a widow. That means her husband had died. She didn’t have any children, so she lived all by herself. Now someone had done something wrong to Lydia. Maybe someone had...

Maria thought of plants at school - beans in jam jars... and mustard and cress on bits of flannel.  But what I like, she thought, is not all that but the names of things.  And every single kind of thing having a different name.  Holm oak and turkey oak and the sessile and pedunculate oak.  Sessile and pedunculate... 'What?' said Mrs Foster. 'Nothing.' Holm oak - quercus ilex I have on my bookshelf a faded paperback in a cracked plastic cover.  On the front cover, a girl with windblown hair gazes into the distance; below her, small silhouetted characters in top hats and Victorian dresses parade on a beach; and under them are grey stones with swirly ammonite fossils etched on them in white.  The title, in block capitals, is A STITCH IN TIME by PENELOPE LIVELY. I had never given much thought to the author until I happened upon a book in the library called Ammonites and Leaping Fish: A Life in Time , also by Penelope Lively.  Despite the referen...

A book can't last several thousand years unless it contains some properly good stories, can it?  And the Bible has plenty of them, from the inspiring to the gory to the downright odd.  We meet people that we would like to be, people we wish we weren't, and people who we would like to ask a lot of questions. But when I was asked to write a tabloid version of any Bible story for my writing group, there was only one character who really stood out.  Larger than life, always getting into trouble (and then getting into more trouble to cover it up), and with a thunderous end: Samson is prime tabloid fodder. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons The original version of Samson's story is in Judges, chapters 14-16.  It is not the kind of nice improving story that you might hope to find in a sacred text.  Samson falls for a girl who is an enemy Philistine, and orders his parents to get her for him. (Nice and polite, then.)  They oblige, and on the way to meet...

I would not describe myself as a gifted public speaker.  Watching the 2017 Great British Bake Off , I empathised most with Steven, who went brick red at the slightest opportunity.  Me too, Steven, me too.  I prefer beavering away behind the scenes to bounding on to stage, and I have yet to master the art of the dramatic pause. ... See? Despite that, I somehow ended up delivering several talks during the autumn term.  Writing talks is a slightly different thing to crafting stories or blog posts, but it's all words.  So that's where my writing efforts have gone, these last few months. The first was a cake decorating demonstration for a social group called Choices.  They have a different speaker at each meeting, and the lady who organises it had asked me months ago if I could explain the art of icing cakes.  I started off with a brief chat about the different types of icing and what you can do with them - which was a chance to show lots of photos ...

Write, they say.  And keep writing.  Every day if possible.  That's what you do if you want to be a writer. Right, I say.  Writing.  I'll get to it as soon as I've done the shopping cleaned the bathrooms called some volunteers mowed the lawn hung up the washing got some exercise spent time with my family.  Um.  Maybe tomorrow. So writing has slid backwards from being a priority, when I called Cafes with Kids my job and reviewed a cafe every week, to a sideline, now that I'm the other side of the counter and, once again, calling cafe management my job.  And, as a bonus feature, actually getting paid for it.  It's exciting.  It's rewarding.  It's also all-consuming and completely exhausting, at least in these first few weeks when I'm trying to learn everything and everyone all at once.  That breathing space seems a long time ago already. But sometimes you have to carve out space for who you want to be as well as who ...

As homework for the writing group I've joined, we each drew three cards from an envelope: a person, a place and a thing.  Our task then was to link these three randomly chosen items together to form a short story. I picked an angel , a guard's van and a whip .  What would you have made of that?  This is where my creative juices took me... [For those of you who didn't grow up in the UK in the late 20th century, you may need to know that the names mentioned in the final paragraph are brands of instant pudding mix.] Visions of Delight In the guard’s van, Ted relaxed back in his chair.  His duties done for the evening, there was nothing more to worry about until the train reached Carlisle in two hours’ time.  Usually he’d pick up a newspaper to pass the time.  Tonight, though, he was tired.  His eyes settled on the dark night swishing past the window, as his mind vaguely toyed with the options for his midnight snack.  The train wheels rumb...

Well, the Christmas cake is made, a nativity play has been written, and that all means it must be getting close to.... Advent!  In fact, closer than you might think; because Christmas Day is a Sunday this year, that means the first Sunday of Advent is the earliest it can be, on the 27th of November.  The church has to fit its four Sundays in, you see, even though the calendars limit themselves to 24 days.  Don't tell the kids, or they'll be wanting an extra five days of chocolates. The main reason that all interests me this year is because I've decided to write a series of four Advent reflections, one for each Sunday.  So watch out for the first one on here in 10 days!  The theme is Jesus' incarnation, which turned into a set of rather neat prepositions: Jesus came to earth - to reflect God to us to suffer with us to die for us to be glorified over us If you or anyone you know would like a pdf copy, to print, email or otherwise distribute, please do ...

On a recent trip to the library, I picked up a book called A Place of Refuge , by Tobias Jones.  It turned out to be the story of Windsor Hill Wood , the community that he and his wife set up in Somerset - a house in an abandoned quarry, surrounded by woods, welcoming to all who came.  They cleared trees, planted vegetables, raised pigs, carved wood.  Their three children grew used to having different people around the dinner table every night.  And over the first five years of failure and success, they gradually learned how to make a working community with hurting, messed-up people. It was fascinating on several different levels, but I realised it resonated with me for one particular reason.  It reminded me of Yeldall Manor . For many of my growing-up years, my dad worked at a drug and alcohol rehabilitation centre.  At that time, staff were encouraged to "live in" with their families, in self-contained flats on site, and we did so for three years....

Hi!  Did you miss me?  Sorry it's been a bit quiet over here.  I have been working hard on colonizing a new corner of the web.  It's not even finished yet, but I am coming to realise that websites, like many other things, never achieve a static state of perfection.  So it is launched, nevertheless, and thank you to all those who have already paid it a visit.  And for those who haven't, here it is: Cafes with Kids So why, when I already have one blog on my hands, would I want to saddle myself with another one?  Well... mostly as a learning opportunity for myself.  Hopefully also useful for other people, and possibly even vaguely financially lucrative (I wish... haven't done much on that part yet!)  Just the initial setting up has got me grappling with colour choices and page design and (aaarggghh) html code and (more aarrggghh) social media promotion and all that wonderful stuff.   I tell you, writing is the easy bit.  ...

Well, what is a blog?  And why am I asking the question now, after seven years of writing one?  You'd think I might have worked out the answer already.  But there's nothing like meeting hundreds of other bloggers to start you wondering again... Of course, the first shock is that there actually are hundreds of other bloggers.  And that they make so much NOISE!  As I descended the escalator to the venue for Mumsnet Blogfest 2015, the clamour of dozens of voices rose up to meet me.  There was no one in the crowded hall that I knew; but although many others had also come alone, you couldn't have told it from the level of conversation. Panel session with live link to Margaret Atwood It quietened down once we had drunk our coffee and entered the auditorium.  The speakers covered a wide range of the writing world; from authors to agents, columnists to comedians, and brand experts to bloggers.  Every discussion was very entertaining, with plenty...

Today is National Poetry Day .  Poetry is the fine dining of literature.  We spend most of our days tossing together the everyday pasta of prose, finding a few quick metaphors in the fridge and splashing in a dash of humour to add to the flavour.  But sometimes we want to spend the extra time to make a meal to linger over.  We pick out the best of our rare similes and assemble them artfully, paying careful attention to rhyme and metre.  The restrictions force us to pare down to the essentials, letting the flavour of the ingredients speak for themselves.  The intention is not just to sate the appetite for words, but to stroke the senses and stir the imagination.  To create an occasion.  A poem. I'm afraid my blog is not a fine dining establishment this evening.  I tried to put some ingredients together, but they somehow failed to produce anything worth keeping.  Fortunately others are better poetry chefs than I am, and they have lef...

So it's the middle of May, and Derby Museum doesn't seem in any hurry to announce the winners of their writing competition, which were supposed to have been decided by the end of April.  I wish I could present this as the winning entry, but hey, I'm proud of it anyway.  This is the letter I wrote for the 1001 Words competition. Letter from White Watson to his nephew William Inspired by the White Watson tablet of Ecton Hill Bakewell January 9 th , 1799 My dear William I take up my pen to write, hoping this finds you in good health and safely established in London.   Bookselling is a fine profession; I am sure you will soon excel in it.   If you should happen across Priestley’s Passages of Scripture send it to me, I would be most grateful of it.   Your father & sister & brother are all well & send their love. I enclose £1 in thankful recognition of & payment for your kind help with the fossils, and   beg ...