Wild, Wet and Windy Weekend

It wouldn't be a normal August Bank Holiday if it didn't have rain, and we had rain here in bucket-loads. Stair-rods. We had wanted to go out somewhere as it's the last week of Carol's holidays. We have had some outings as already mentioned in earlier blogs on here, but it turned out that we'd be stuck in watching television instead.

I haven't mentioned that I am booked onto a creative writing course. I have mentioned the one-day course I did back in November at the Milton Keynes Art Centre and how it had sparked me off on quite a bit of writing. I had then booked on to a ten-week course, again at the Arts Centre and again lead by the same leader who lead the one-day course and it was intended as a Christmas present and running from mid-January. Unfortunately it was cancelled due to ill health of Deborah Fielding, the leader. I had hoped that it would be re-scheduled but nothing came of it and the money that was paid out was refunded. I had been looking around to do a similar course elsewhere and had found nothing suitable. Then Carol did some searching on the internet and found this Beginners Novel-Writing course which just happened to be starting on September 23rd and on in the evenings at the Milton Keynes Academy for 8 weeks. Just too good to be true as it means that I don't have to worry about parking as it's only a short walk there and a complete coincidence as Carol works there so it has worked out well. Just a bit annoying that I don't get any sort of discount but never mind. It's now paid for and all things are settled.

At Milton Keynes Christian Centre we're having an Alpha course starting the Monday before my writing course starts. I've been on one of the courses before when I lived in Bedford and went to Brickhill Baptist Church and then as a helper when I went to Rutland Road Church. So it looks as if I'm going to be busy staring in September. The Alpha course runs for eleven weeks and you get food at the beginning of the evening which is good enough reason to go. And knowing M.K.C.C. the food should be good!

Alice Neel painting inspires me to write!

Last Saturday I went on a creative writing course at Milton Keynes Art Centre in Great Linford and lead by Deborah Fielding. As part of the course I wrote the following which was inspired by the above painting, which is called "Nancy and the Rubber Plant" by Alice Neel.

The rubber plant had been a present. It took up almost half the room, which made things worse. To say it was unwanted would be stating the obvious. But how do you dispose of an unwanted present, particularly one which seemed to dominate the sitting room so obviously?

It had come from Steven's mother, but Nancy hadn't got on too well with her, which didn't help matters. She thought Steven was being controlled by the woman, and he was pretty well terrified of her. Shat she said had to be adhered to totally. So when she had arrived ove afternoon with the wretched rubber plant, Nancy's face had turned ashen. She'd hated the thing from the start. She had stuck it in the corner of the room and shoved the armchair in front of it, as if hiding it would somehow make it disappear. But Steven had looked after it, as if it were a child, watered it, cleaned it, suing a special rubber-plant leaf-cleaning fluid he'd managed to discover in a garden centre and generally fussed over the horrid plant. As a  result it had just grown and grown. Nancy had hoped that it would just die, but it didn't. It seemed to her that it had a life of it's own, that if she sat in the chair in front of it, it would somehow attempt to strangle her, or poison her, perhaps wrapping a branch round her neck until she was gasping for breath, or it stuck a poisoned thorn into her arm, which was absurd, as the plant had no such thorns. All this was in her imagination. But Steven just shrugged all this nonsense off, telling Nancy she was becoming paranoid.

Steven's mother had never really liked Nancy. She's told him that he could have done much better than to marry beneath him, which was why she'd imagined such awful things of his mother and her wretched present. Perhaps next time she'd bring them a venus fly trap, so that would DEFINITELY seal the deal!

She'd been watching far too many late-night horror movies, particularly those directed by Roger Corman,  and especially the sort which had carnivorous plants in them, the one which came from outer space, or the one where humans get turned into cactuses or something and end up having ridiculous green faces with prickles sticking out all over the place, or that one where pods keep appearing in peoples gardens, rather like huge pea-pods and people get taken over by yet another alien race from the planet Zog.

Perhaps she could chop bits off the rubber plant, so Steven wouldn't notice, so eventually the horrid plant shriveled up and died. But, unfortunately, Steven spent too much time fussing over the awful plant, so he'd see immediately if a leaf or a branch was removed. Just to keep his MOTHER quiet, because when she came to visit, which was quite often and on the least pretext, she'd look at the plant to see how it was doing. So Nancy was stuck with it and it seemed  that there was no way on Earth could she think of to get rid of the evil thing.