Rainy Sunday.

      Hello again, and apologies for my prolonged absence. Once again 'Groundhog Day' syndrome has had me in its grasp and time drips by without any particular feature to distinguish day from day. I would like to say that I have been busy and productive, but nothing could be further from the truth. The one thing I have done is to look out my poetry which has been languishing in a folder for years.
Actually it is a good exercise, because it has forced me to look back at my life in terms of when I wrote the odd verse to express how I was feeling. The first was about leaving Primary School and I have progressed now to when I moved to London and started working in Advertising. There is still plenty to come, and it is surprising to me how much just reading it brings back those moments and experiences. They are vivid again and so are the feelings that were brought to the surface. I think it was Wordsworth who said that poetry was 'emotion recollected in tranquility'. Well maybe it was for him, but I can vouch for the fact that mine (whether it's very bad or not) still feels raw at times. It has me totally removed to where I was and what  I was doing. There is still plenty to go, and it may not amount to anything in the end, but I feel it is necessary to go on and finish what I have started.
      I have been virtually meeting up with various friends and we have been setting  challenges for  each other. The best one has been a cookie baking challenge which I have taken up with gusto. My version is not with Crunchy Peanut Butter (simply because I'm not fond of peanuts) but with Crunchy Almond or Cashew Nut Butter which you can find in any Health Food Shop. It has been so successful that I make a batch most weeks: it takes about ten minutes to put together and another ten minutes to bake. I use a jar of nut butter to two tablespoons of brown sugar and one egg, simply mixed together in a bowl until it's doughy (if it's still too sticky you can sift in a tablespoon of flour and mix in well). Then put tablespoons of the mix spaced out on a baking sheet lined with baking paper. Bake in the oven, on gas mark 4, for about ten minutes.
And I can promise you that they're divine - a Lockdown Treat. I have to ration myself to two a day:))