Skeleton Architecture

Last summer we gave our neighbours a gift and swapped homes for a little while with a lovely family who lived in Barcelona. They had a great time exploring Scotland and getting to know our neighbours while we enjoyed being hot in Barcelona. It was incredibly hot, there was a reason the Barcelonians wanted to escape to Scotland, but we enjoyed making friends with their kitten and chilling out in their gorgeous home in the day time, going out in the evening when the heat was more tolerable to explore gorgeous Barcelona. Things we loved most were:  Seeing La Sagrada Familia - we didn't go inside because the kids didn't want to, but there's a great play park behind it where we watched parrots fly and admired the building. Shopping around Las Ramblas - so much fun and lots of silly little shops. The area has a reputation for pickpockets but we were fine with our purses tucked away. The CosmoCaixa museum - this was a fantastic visit, we adored the museum which had so...

Happy New Year! I hope you've had a great Christmas and New Year. We did, although it was a bit quiet. The last week of the holidays dragged, mainly because I got a stinking horrible cold on January 1st, which is making me feel totally rotten. Ugh. Anyway, things are going pretty well on the writing front. I had two poems out last month, and I also got shortlisted for the Great British Write Off, which was totally unexpected, and kinda lovely. I've also had lots of things rejected, and failed to get placed in my local writing group's competition. I worked really hard on that poem and I'm annoyed with myself for not doing better, I'm trying to tell myself it's all subjective, but the usual suspects got placed again. Maybe it's just not my audience. I am slightly gutted that Maddy at Writing Bubble is going to be too busy to run the What I'm Writing Linky this year, but so glad that she's got lots of interesting things on. However, Sara at Mum T...

Today, for Prose for Thought (which I've just realised, I never share prose on - sorry!), I'm sharing my poem about Chocolate. There's a bit of a chocolate theme to the blog lately isn't there? The last post was all about chocolate too . I'm blaming the Easter eggs which are still sitting on top of the kitchen cupboards. I'd say we're all bored of chocolate, but it's really just the kids. I'm desperate to make it into cakes and sauces, cookies and truffles, but I'm not allowed. 😢 Anyhow, I wrote this poem for the Scottish Book Trust last year, and you'll find it on their website here , but I'm now able to share it right here, so here it is - a bit of chocolatey goodness for all you lovelies. Chocolate All my life I've loved chocolate. The love is in my genes, and some would say (the cheeky ones) it's also in my jeans.  I passed my love of chocolate to my babes in the womb. They drank it in their breastmilk and dan...

Sometimes, when I'm stuck on how to make something work, or I've lost the point of a poem I will use a formal poetry technique to shuffle the cards in my deck and come up with something different. Usually I do this with poems that aren't working for me, but sometimes I do it with other texts which I like, but am not getting any inspiration from. It can spark new ideas. I tend to make things into poem structures that use repetition, making the words learn the steps of the sestina, pentina, tritina, pantoum, or villanelle. I've just had a villanelle accepted for publication which started life as a free verse poem which just wasn't working. I love the circling and the repetition of these forms because I think they bring more focus onto the moment of the poem.  Of course, things don't have to stay formal, often, usually, in fact, they break down having once come together, but the process helps to reveal patterns and the little important things which can mak...

Do you do any of those photo challenges on Instagram? I used to do it more than I do now, but I still take part in the So Good in Every Way  fortnightly themes (sometimes), and the Snap Happy Britmums daily prompts (again, sometimes). Todays prompt was words, and I was sitting in my kids' school this morning, waiting to help out with walking a bunch of kids to another school, and thinking about how the rhyme, 'sticks and stones' has changed as schools have become more cognicent of the long term damaging effects of verbal bullying. When I was a kid we taunted bullies that words would never hurt me. My own eating disorder, other self harming, and so much other stuff can testify to the nonsense of that. Now my kids are taught the rhyme 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can really hurt me.' and it's true. Physical violence is rubbish, but we should never underestimate the long term harm of verbal violence. Hence my poem today. It's almost a ...

That prompt from Sara at Mum Turned Mom, 'Embrace', has got my mind wandering down all sorts of rabbit holes, I shared one with you yesterday , and here's another, about the sort of embraces you probably shouldn't have ever had. Probably. One peculiar night when there was just us we drank the bar. I said  you could do  better than that whispering nothing who dangles your heart like a bored cat's toy. I said  you could have me and knew I'd gone too far to stay. I walked home on feet that wanted to return to you. Buried my fear of repurcussions in instant noodles and there you were! Swinging on the lampost, grinning through the window. I smuggled you in. Drunkenly fumbling in bouts of incompetence. You kissed me, said we could brave the storm if you could shelter in my heart. I offered shelter but you caught her sparkling thread and returned to whispers. Ⓒ Cara L McKee 28/2/17

I have tried to do yoga in recent years. I have had babies and required physiotherapy, and got older and stayed fat, and had years of not getting enough sleep. I wanted to regain the feeling that my body was strong, that I was flexible. I also wanted to focus on the breath. I went to my local yoga class where the teacher was lovely, but I don't think she was experienced in dealing with fat bodies, perhaps she just wasn't experienced in dealing with mine. She gave me blocks and things to help me get the positions rightish, but I simply couldn't breathe in some positions, and I was acutely aware of what I looked like. That said, I know that no-one was looking at me, but I couldn't relax for imagining my oxygen starved frame toppling over like an elephant on stilts , domino-ing into my neighbour and causing havoc. When it came to the relaxation I was able to breathe. In the quiet of the room I told the tears running down my face to stop, but they didn't. I wipe...

Did I mention that I'm a massive fan of George RR Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire and of Game of Thrones? I spend far too long listening to long podcasts about the History of Westeros (honestly, it's fascinating). Anyhow, the lovely Sara at Mum Turned Mom's writing prompt for this week was SNOW , so there was only one thing on my mind. I am very much aware that as well as writing this about Jon Snow, I've written the Edge of Doom inspired by a photo of Kit Harrington who plays Jon in Game of Thrones, so I'd like to take a moment to stress that I am not interested in Jon that way . He's so very young, and so very näive. If anything I'd just want to look after the boy and maybe make him a nice warm bowl of soup. If I was shipping myself with anyone in Game of Thrones then I think that despite his myriad flaws I might be looking at Petyr Baelish, because you'd want to be on his good side! Mind you, I'm probably best off out of it.  You kno...

One of the things I love about writing poetry is that you can put in secret messages. Some of them are so secret they might never be decoded, others can be pretty obvious, but still offer an opportunity to plead innocence. Weather is a good way to talk about things, we are all used to weather being used to tell us things in programmes and in books, so it works easily in poems too. I've written a poem about books which was actually about a person I know, although that one's not currently available. This poem is about plants. Honest. Worthy of the sun This seed is just as worthy of the sun but staked and tethered has no room to thrive instead, the same trees race to feel gold rays, taking the place of others pushed aside. Many, it seems, must naturally fail, yet flowers are diverse here down below and if we could find more space in the sun who knows what wonders we who tend might grow? For those who fear the plant may 'come a weed, shading the leaves that ...

Hello there This winter has been pretty uneventful on the storm front. I thought that was what the weather was now, storm after storm after storm, but instead it's been pretty much OK, and not even that cold. It's been grey and wet and windyish the last few days, but nothing exciting. No power lines have been torn down, I have not struggled to close car doors, no crazy snow storms, it's even been pretty calm on the wind front, so I've actually been using an umbrella, which is pretty rare around here! But I'm feeling down in the dumps (lots of rejections, lots of rain, this will pass), and the news just keeps on happening, and who the hell is running the world and why did we let them? Ugh.  So, my writing prompt today was to write up a storm, and I looked out of my window and wrote what I saw, then thought about it and rewrote it to reflect how I'm feeling and how the world looks through my eyes. And here it is: What the wind wreaks Mostly you can...

I've been listening to talk about dress codes and sexual discrimination on Woman's Hour . It's taken me back to the years when I worked in offices. I tried to dress 'appropriately' but was constantly getting in trouble about my appearance. My hair was the wrong colour, my shoes were the wrong height, I wasn't allowed to wear trousers in court, I needed a tailored jacket, and so on and so on and so on. I once had a workplace appraisal (joy) wherein my line manager told me that I was scruffy and wouldn't be taken seriously. She was wearing a waistcoat so I chose to ignore her sartorial advice. It's incredibly difficult to find clothes that are deemed suitable for an office and which also fit chubby bodies... I suspect that it's actually the bodies that are deemed suspect.  Anyway, according to recent research discussed on Woman's Hour women, espeically young women are still being required to dress for other people's gaze, to wear high heel...

Hello! The prompt over at Mum Turned Mom is History , which immediately makes me think of Herstory, and how History is written by the victors, and there are many stories to explain the same event, and even one person's story changes over time, and memory is malleable and all that stuff. I wasn't going to do it, because I didn't want it to be too big and too heavy, and I've had so much fun working on a short story I'm submitting to a competition, which is weird because I usually hate writing short stories, but this was perfect, so I celebrated that story with a cup of coffee, in a cup my sister gave me which she didn't realise would match my new wallpaper/curtains - I can't remember, I was pretty sure it was wallpaper, but have no memory of wallpapering, although I am still pretty sure there was wallpaper, particularly on the wall with cupboards and a fireplace, because that was a total pain to do. There must have been wallpaper, but there were ...

I wanted to say thank you to all you lovely people who have read my blog over this last year. Since I've made it focus on the poetry my readership has really grown, so I thought I'd take a virtual leaf out of the blogging book of Carol at Virtually All Sorts  and do a top ten of my poems from the year (according to my blog stats, because you've got to use something, right?). I'll link to all the poems, in case you missed one, and repost my favourite here. Hopefully your favourite is here too, let me know in the comments. At number 10 is Mirror Games , a sonnet about looking into the mirror with my daughter, written at a time when it seemed I thought in iambic pentameter! At 9 is May Sun in Scotland , a poem about that wonderful, tenuous moment when the warmth comes back, and how incredibly precious it feels. Pig headed , my post Brexit whingeing poem is at number 8. I've gone right off this since then. There's still a (big) part of me hoping Brexit n...