All Birds are Dinosaurs - a poem for younger readers

 Today, all birds are dinosaurs, the scientists have agreed.

A Moorhen swimming on a pond and Sparrows in a tree,

An Ostrich in the desert and King Penguins in a pool,

All of them are dinosaurs, I think that's really cool.

 

Trees are where it all began, when little dinos climbed

To get away from huge T Rex and all his fearsome kind.

They had warm blood and feathers too, that kept them nice and warm

They built nests high on trees and cliffs so their eggs came to no harm.

 

So, when that fatal meteor struck and all the big ones died,

The little dinos spread their wings, flew somewhere safe, to hide

They found just enough to eat, while the planet came alive.

They changed their shapes and habits, learning how to thrive.

 

Some lived down on forest floors, the Chickens and Peafowel

Others with claws liked eating mice and they became the Owls.

A few just loved the feel of air, flew everywhere to feed

They’re the swifts and albatrosses, who only land to breed.

 

Now, we’ve bred monster chickens who can’t stand on their feet

And we poison all the insects that the small birds need to eat.

The Gulls have learnt to grab our chips, but we destroy their nests

We steal their fish, invade their beaches, then we call them pests.

 

They watch us with their yellow eyes and clever dino minds.

They’ll summon up enormous flocks, crying out to all bird-kind.

The Vultures, Hawks and Eagles are all longing for a fight.            

The dinosaurs are coming and it truly serves us right.

Jane Goodall - obituary

 Very sorry to learn of the death of Dame Jane Goodall. She was a truly remarkable, practical zoologist who did so much to make the human race realise we are not the only sentient beings on the planet. 

I first learned about her work with the chimpanzees of Gombe National Park in Kenya when I read her her book 'In the Shadow of Man' in the early 70's. Even my father, a doctor, animal lover and natural history enthusiast, who taught me a lot about the natural world, especially birds, didn't really see non-human animals as intelligent, thinking beings. Jane empathised with the chimps and showed the intelligence and personalities of individuals. She convinced me of the arrogance of human attitudes.

Jane Goodall still campaigning on environmental issues 

shortly before her death on 2 October 2025.

After twenty years she widened her field of concern and became involved in worldwide environmental campaigning. She was a hugely important ambassador for wildlife and the environment and the world will be a poorer place without her. 

Red Bones by Ann Cleeves - review

 I've begun reading The Shetland series by Ann Cleeves, for those who don't know, some of this series has been adapted and turned into a very successful TV series, much of it really filmed for the BBC on Shetland. The TV shows are atmospheric, tense, well acted and visually striking, with a very film noir feel about them.

The books so far (I've read 3 of the 8) are different, a bit more mundane in places, and characters and subplots are different. Red Bones is the third in the book series and I have some memories of the TV production of this storyline. However the book is better, with more character development, particularly for the more minor characters. I won't be reviewing them all, but red Bones is my favourite so far.

Red Bones is set in the small island community of Whalsay, the sixth largest of the inhabited Shetland Islands. The name Whalsay means whale island. The sparse landscape and overwhelming foggy weather is beautifully depicted.

Mima was a mother, grandmother, gossip, floozy or witch, depending on who detective Jimmy Perez speaks to. She was always the life and soul of the island, but who shot her? This tiny community harbours secrets, it lives on lies as well as fishing and crofting

And whose is the red skull dug up by visiting archaeologists?

This novel has some beautifully depicted characters, particularly Mima, Sandy who is her grandson and a junior police officer, and the young archaeologist, Hattie.

I remembered some of this story from the TV series, but the characters are differently drawn, subplots are different and any foreknowledge didn't spoil my enjoyment. Plus I couldn't remember who dunnit! In a way solving the murder was subsidiary to the story of this community and its secrets.

A really enjoyable read, thoroughly recommended.

Life's a Beach - flash fiction

 Life’s a Beach

Alex saw the crab first. It was on its back, deposited on the pebbles by a rolling wave, eight legs flailing in the air, claws grasping at nothing. Before Alex could get there to right the poor thing, there was a crackling of pinions over his head and a massive black-backed gull descended, its wingtips brushing his face. That was the end of the crab.

He sat down on one of the wooden posts on the breakwater and pulled out his phone. Still no message from Cally. Three days and nothing from her, had she lost her phone again, or was she ghosting him? Alex decided he didn’t care. He was only really going out with her because you had to have a girl, or the guys in the class would mock you. He knew this from experience.

Alex wasn’t especially interested in Cally, or any of the girls round here. Maybe if he could get into one of those London art colleges, the girls would be better, somehow.

He tried skimming a few stones, but that wasn’t something he was good at, any more than he was good at dating girls. His first stone bounced a couple of times before it sank. The next few were no better.

The monster gull had finished eating the crab, it flew off, ignoring Alex. The crab shell was lying empty on the stones, picked clean by the gull. Although its beak looked huge the bird knew how to use it with precision, to completely eviscerate a crab. Alex turned the shell over with the toe of his trainer. Now the crab looked whole again. He photographed it, then piled random stones over the body and arranged alternate black and chalk-white stones in a circle around the pile. A cairn for a crab, he photographed his work and posted it.

The wind was getting up, Alex had decided to abandon the beach when a guy in a dark wetsuit walked past, carrying a huge board. His dark hair was whipped by the wind and his face looked full of joy. Alex watched as he assembled a windsurf board and sail, the guy’s movements were skilled and lithe, he was fit.

Before he launched, the guy turned and waved to Alex, then he launched and almost before the board hit the waves, the wind caught the brightly coloured sail and he was off.

Alex sat on the pebbles and watched the wind-surfer hurtling across the waves, almost flying. He took out his phone to take a photo, then stopped. He stuffed the device back in his pocket and rummaged in his backpack. His sketchbook and pens were right at the bottom, he hadn’t used them for weeks. He began to draw the man in the dark wetsuit as he conquered the waves with his rainbow sail.

Writers Groups are so Supportive and Helpful.

 I've been in five different writing groups over the past 30 years. All have been friendly and encouraging, some have been more helpful on a practical level than others but all were/are supportive. I didn't realise how lonely writing is as an activity before I joined my first group, probably 30 years ago. I've moved on but I still remember some of the others involved in that group, and I have a novel by the group leader, James Waddington. 

As a solitary writer long before I joined my first group, in the mid 1990's, it was terrifying sharing my words with others for the first time. Any attempts to read my work to family or friends were largely greeted with indifference. The attitude seemed to be, why couldn't I have a more interesting hobby? Archery maybe, or pottery or baking and anyway if I liked words so much shouldn't I be interested in crosswords? Or playing computer games with my children. I tried all those, some with more conviction than others, but nothing replaced the stories and characters in my head, keening and thumping to get out.

In a writers' group, there are people who can understand this. People who know you need to leave others watching Coe Dancing, Breaking Bad or playing Warhammer and go elsewhere to tackle your own battles with pen and paper or Microsoft Word. 

So my current writers' group, The St Leonards Writers, help me share my work, stimulate new ideas and, now I'm seven years in, are giving me the opportunity to encourage other writers who are newer to sharing their love of this engrossing and, to normal people, crazy activity. 

Starting a new story, but where's it going?

I've written the opening for a new story,  I've got plenty of details to fill it out  with but I don't know where it's going, not yet. No plot, you see! Ideas sometimes stall completely, I hope this isn't one of those.

Berlin Bear  (working title)

He had always been her favourite thing. He was black, neatly carved and had little white eyes and straight white teeth inside his open mouth. He walked along in a stately manner and was about as tall as Lydia’s mum’s blue tea caddy, and as long as her brother’s orange book with a penguin on it. He seemed quite small, for a bear.

Lydia was four, she wasn’t allowed to touch the bear, it had been her grandpa’s, he’d brought it back from Germany after the war. The bear lived on the shelf over the coal fire in their sitting room. When Lydia asked what his name was, her dad put his head on one side and said he wasn’t sure. Her mum came with a mug of tea for Dad and milk for Lydia, so she asked Mum. 

‘Sit down and don’t spill your milk,’ Mum said. Lydia sat on the little green stool that Dad sometimes put his feet up on, and she sipped her milk.

‘But what’s his name?’ She asked again.

Mum smiled. ‘Grandpa brought it back from Berlin,’ she said. ‘So I suppose that’s its name. Berlin.’

Much later, by the time Berlin Bear took in pride of place on Lydia’s retro modular shelving unit in her Fulham flat, she had learned that he wasn’t from Berlin, or even from Germany. He was carved in Brienz, the small Swiss village that had become famous for its wood carving. Berlin was a black forest carved bear, although he wasn’t from the Black Forest either, that was 270 kilometres to the north of Brienz.

It had started with the wooden bear, her collection of wooden animals, then stone animals, then things to display her animals on, hence her modular shelving. It was the first non-new item she’d bought for her flat. It wasn’t antique, although she had found it in an antiques centre and mid-century modern hadn’t yet become expensive on the vintage market.

She’d originally started furnishing her flat with five-hundred pounds, buying new things. By the time she’d got the essentials, a fridge, a bed, duvet, curtains and a cooker, there wasn’t much of her five-hundred pounds left. Forty-seven pounds and fifty-four pence to be precise. New furniture was out of the question. A junk shop on the corner opposite had sold her a red Formica topped table and two matching plastic seated chairs for twenty quid and a colleague at work gave her two sheepskin rugs which she claimed had made her children sneeze, and an old, not very clean couch, which Lydia had scrubbed with carpet shampoo, but still smelt vaguely of children and dogs. 

Her collection had stayed in boxes for years, until one Friday she saw, in the window of the Charlton antiques centre, another Black Forest bear. She went back the next day and bought it, never mind that it was seventy quid. The modular shelving unit it was sitting on was half the price, but she’d have to pay for delivery.

Jamie, the guy who’d delivered it, plus a green leather couch she’d seen later and added to her shopping list, was very happy to assemble the shelving for her. He told her the shelving was called Ladderax, from the sixties, very soon it would be considered retro, she was ahead of the trend. He said he’d only let her buy it because he needed the floorspace for a Regency bookcase which was worth thousands rather than hundreds. 

Jamie also said her flat looked a bit bare, he suggested she could buy more from the Charlton Antiques Centre. She put her new bear on the shelving and told him she had more, she pulled out the boxes containing her collection. He was keen to see what she had and she became excited too, finding things she’d forgotten about.  He helped her to unpack and arrange her animals. He was enthusiastic when she unwrapped from its newspaper nest a stone animal she had regretted buying when she was sixteen, because it was so heavy and she’d had to carry it home on the bus.

‘Do you know what this is?’ he asked her.

‘I think it’s a whale. I found it in a junk shop ten years ago,’ she said.

‘It is nice.’ He turned the piece around in his hands, examining it from all angles. ‘You’ve got a good eye. Not a whale though, it’s an Inuit carved walrus. See, the tusks?’ He pointed to parallel carved grooves down the chest of the beast and she could see it, of course it was a walrus, she just hadn’t looked hard enough.

  

The Guardians by John Grisham - book review

*** 

Well enough written as you'd always expect with John Grisham. The Guardians contains two of his gruesome scenes, although the first is the worst. I don't read his books very often, I have an increasingly delicate constitution!

The Guardians are a crusading group whose aim is to help wrongly convicted prisoners who are serving serving life sentences or worse, sitting on death row. Their tally of victories stands at eight, there are twenty more men and women on their list who need saving.

If the author never wrote about anything else he'd have twenty more stories here!

Good stuff, but only three stars because I wouldn't read The Guardians again.