David in Pen and Pics

First, up the steps, I must count them all

Past the poplars, gaunt and tall

Must stack that wood before I quit

It’s cool, by 5 the fire lit

A beer, and then the dinner call

A & G Price is a local heavy engineering business providing   employment going back to our gold mining days.

These days it is held in some affection, many of our Thames families have connections with the gold mining industry.

It was founded in 1868 in Onehunga, New Zealand by Alfred and George Price from Stroud, Gloucestershire. It manufactured locomotives, rolling stock, repaired ships and flax-milling machines.

In 1974 the staff of A & G Price alone was in excess of 520 people.

Today, global trading and we live in precarious times. Ingenuity in locating contracts worldwide provides for few skilled workers.

Morning walk
Keep fit, thoughts bobbing, cats to greet, an eager dog strong at the leash.
“Morning, another good day on the way.”
An old identity.
“Oh no, I’m still seen as a newcomer. I’ve only lived here for forty years and the old timers, lovely people, taking their time to see me as one of them.”
One of them. Working on it. I moved here in 2004.

Longer days
Colour dances in the wind
Two pedestrians, hum of traffic
Morning

End of a sunny day. Mornings of spring chill. Longer days.

Then the sound of individual hailstones. Many, a short, heavy hailstorm. So endeth Friday.

Just one glass and time for memories.
Surprised that so much recalled after such a long time. Confidence of an old friendship.
Sun slips below the window sill.
Bone structure. That never changes. That patina of age.
Yes, the mannerisms of speech so familiar now. The mouth, eyes looking up, a cconsidered reply.
Long married, successful adult children, grandchildren
Its been a long time

Local cafe. Dreams. A cafe in Paris. A cafe infused with discussion, deliberation, dissent.
Pablo Picasso,  Hemingway, Dorothy Parker,

“Learn the rules like a pro, so you can break them like an artist.” ,
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
Brevity is the soul of lingerie

Marcel Proust, Sartre, Beauvoir, Hemingway, T.S. Eliot,

“Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind

The birds and I. Now alone, content, I ride at my own speed. Each trip I ride further, and like a kid, ‘just to the next corner.’
And the next, where pukeko lazily scuttle aside, grazing cows ignore me, always above the blue, blue sky.