Fireworks

Been meaning to post these up for a while, they were taken during a thunderstorm (obviously) between around 9.30 and 9.45pm in late July. This was not long after I got my digital camera and I was stood at the back door filming with a mixture of patience and excitement.Thanks to a friend of mine I've discovered at last how to convert the images into stills and into jpeg format.

Tragedy

I saw this headline on a newspaper stand today:

Win Family Break At Alton Towers

I didn't get the chance to read the article. At such a difficult time however, my thoughts and deepest sympathies are with those who knew and loved the Win family.

Award

Thanks to the dynamic blogger that is prada pixie, I have another award to add to my list (of one). I must admit to being rubbish with these things : I haven't doled out the last stack of awards in response to the previous one that came my way. My excuse is that I'm waiting for an ultra rainy day. Yes I know, we've had plenty of those, but it wasn't the right kind of rain.

I don't even know how many I'm supposed to give out, but what I like about this one is that no-one who has received it seems to know exactly what it's for: for me, that is precisely its appeal.

So, thank you pixie!

I shall bestow this on to just one other person, otherwise I'm in danger of passing it on to a number of people who already have it. For general all-round good bloggyness, frequently playful, thought-provoking and/or poignant writings, I salute you anna mr.

Landscapes of the mind (2)

I've the small matter of accepting another award to put up on my sidebar (thanks pixie!) but before I do that, here's something else.

I went to take photographs of the spot mentioned in this post. Here are the ones which best capture the atmosphere I was trying to, er, capture: it might be interesting to compare them with the drawings in the aforementioned post. It's a shame I forgot to change the camera settings back up to the highest amount of megapixels, but such is life.

(An) observation

Such is the excitement of my daily journey to work (roughly four miles), that if I'm not already miles away in thought, I'll play little games to pass the time. Hardly amazing stuff: counting people I recognize is the usual one.

Today I decided I would count all the security cameras I could see: this being on the bus journey and then my ten-or-fifteen minute walk through town to work. I was expecting that I would see maybe 25 or 30. I'm sure I didn't count them all, due to the limited viewpoint from the bus, the fact that the windows were steamed up, and I didn't want to crane my neck. There were 86.

On the journey home I noticed a few that I missed as well.

Update: On my way into town this afternoon (unencumbered by steam or other inhibiting factors) I decided to have another go, and reached 116 before I lost count (clearly I can only count up to 117).

Dream

This was my dream on Monday night, i.e. after a day spent at an Art Therapy workshop-event-taster-type of thing:

I was being tormented by someone who was bullying me: it was causing me much pain, fear and resentment. It was also greatly inconvenient (not that you hear many victims of bullying coming out with such a complaint I'm sure...."Stop Bullying Now! It's Inconvenient!") because it was the day before a wedding, and I was to be Best Man. I was trying to out the finishing touches to the speech I'd prepared, and I'd also been asked to do an extra piece because someone was unable to make it to the wedding.

I was happy to do this (despite my fear of public speaking). However when I tried to work on the text of the speech, my tormentor would suddenly appear and start dragging me away and beating the crap out of me. I was scared, he seemed to have power over me, yet somehow - though it wasn't clear in the dream, the implication was that it was through sheer persistence - I managed to get the speeches sufficiently prepared.

It seems the bully didn't want me to be at the wedding. He made threats that there would be more torment if I was there and if I made these speeches. These threats made me feel weak, but I knew I couldn't miss the wedding.

On the day of the wedding, the bully was there, glowering at me, his eyes communicating yet more implicit threats should I dare to speak. I was painfully aware of this and yet enjoying the throng and the sense of occasion, and speak I did.

The speech seemed to give me power: my tormentor hadn't stopped me, despite his threats.

Soon after, he came over and started to cause more trouble with me, hissing words of pure malevolence and threatening more pain. I took a step back and told him loudly to stop: lots of the other wedding guests were all around and they noticed this. In front of them all I confronted him and let everyone know all the efforts he had been making to cause me pain. He began to deny it and shrink away, but I persisted, categorically running through all the things he had done to make life difficult for me. He seemed to be visibly weakening, and I continued to denounce him. It carried on for minutes: by the finish he had no power to reply.

I even got a round of applause from all the other guests.


Funny what an Art Therapy taster-session-workshop-event-type thing can cause your subconscious to tell you, loud and clear, innit?

Awake

I had an amazing day yesterday. It's not very often I say that about Mondays, especially working Mondays. It wasn't a normal working Monday for me though: I was at an event focusing on Art Therapy. It was a hands-on, participatory event aimed at interested parties such as practitioners in the arts, caring professions, social workers and so on.

I've been to similar events before but not for a long time. I was accompanied by a very very senior person from our organisation who had approached me about it thinking it was likely I would be interested. Oddly, when I first thought about it some weeks ago I wasn't sure. My previous involvement in anything linking the arts to my daytime job had always been with an emphasis on using it as a recreational activity: therapeutic, undeniably, but not Therapy. I'd never considered this as being something that I might be interested in pursuing (not least because it would involve lots more study and expense).

I got a hell of a lot out of this event yesterday though, primarily due to being able to take part in the sessions: which meant being able to draw and to express a number of things as a result. I felt in my element, reconnected to something essential but all-too-often-neglected.

There were a number of other potential positives arising from the day. I'm not going to spell them out here because it would feel incautious, and at the moment any grounds for optimism in this context have to be tempered with a very liberal sprinkling of caution. All the same, it gave me a bit of a boost.

Last night, following on from all this, I had a very telling dream: I'm debating whether I should write and post it, though it won't be this evening.