Carry on regardless...

Totally Optional Prompts.
Hey, there's a new web site on blogspot called Totally Optional Prompts. The idea is that they give you a poetry prompt each week and then every thursday you publish it to your site and put a link from their site, sort of like Poetry thursday used to be. Anyway, clink-the-link and find out for yourself. Oh yeah, my poem Salt Girl: is HERE!
NATIONAL POETRY DAY:
It was National poetry day last week and I took Nicola to a poetry 'read around' at Oldham library. I had written a new poem for the day but as luck would have it there were more important people there than me and by the time it was my turn they were in a hurry to close the event. I really didn't want to rush my new poem so I did a very short and very old rhyme - maybe next time...
ANYHOW!
I'm not in a rush right now! And if you don't have to hurry, you can clink-the-link to my pub-poetry page and read it for yourself. It's called TOUT-TOUT... I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it. I've numbered it PC28907 and it will be added to my ever growing Paris collection.
MODIGLIANI
The poem is mainly about Modigliani, the Italian artist. He spent most of WW1 in Paris. What strange times they must have been. Anyway, if you do get a minute to check TOUT-TOUT you should know that Jeanne was Jeanne Hebuterne the mother of Modigliani's daughter, who shared the same name. Mario, was Mario Varvogli the Greek musician who was reputedly the last person to sit for Modigliani before he died in 1920. Livorno, was the Italian town that Modigliani came from. The model who posed for Nu Couche in 1917, I'm sorry I don't know her name. But Nic has a very nice picture of her on her wall.
TALKING ITALIAN
We went on one of those end of season bargain breaks, three weeks for the price of two, granny goes free, and gratis car-hire if you book a budget airline flight thru the same agent. We only wanted to go for seven days so when the company lady added up the deal and subtracted the discounts they actually owed us money! How mad is that? When they say it's cheaper than staying at home, they really mean it. We'd have been daft not to go, so we packed our bags and headed for Lago di Garda!
SUMMER SUNSHINE
It was a bargain break on a budget airline and we had to fly from Liverpool's John Lennon airport. How Rock 'n Roll's that? I had flown from Liverpool airport many years ago on one of those wind-up-and-go-planes to Ronaldsway in the Isle of Man. In those days Liverpool airport was called Speake and the terminal was like a garden shed! I know they've done it up now - it's more like a double garage these-days! Don't you just hate flying? I do! But what can you do, if it's cheaper to go abroad than to stay at home - then you'd be a fool not to go! Anyway, as it turned out we left on a miserable autumn day and flew for two hours to Milano, where we encountered summer sunshine.
LAKE GARDA
We picked up the gratis hire-car from the aeroporto and drove for one hour to our accomodation on the banks of Lake Garda. The nice car-hire people had up-graded us to a large four door vehicle, which was very handy for Ziggy! So, thank you very much to the wonderful staff at Bergamo airport, which is about as close to Milan as Liverpool is to Manchester, but that's budget (bud-jet?) for you I guess. As it happens, it turned out in our favour as Bergamo is a lot of Kilometers nearer to Lago di Garda than Milano. So, the sun was shining and the camp site was first class, did I mention that we were in a tent? Well, you can't have everything, can you? And the tents are FM! flaming massive!
UNIFORMS
One thing we noticed this time in Italy was the number of people wearing some kind of uniform, we were strolling along the lake road when a bunch of people on bicycles came towards us, there must have been fifty people in the group, men, women and youngsters. There were fat people and thin people and tall people and small ones, but the funny thing was they were all wearing the same outfit, black lycra style cycle shorts and a black and red vest. We sat by one of the little harbours on the Lakeside near Simione and a car pulled up and six young men got out. They walked towards the harbour wall in single file. They were identically dressed in long blue shorts and white pumps and socks and purple polo shirts with a little anchor motif on the chest. They climbed down the wooden ladder to a waiting boat and sailed out into the morning mist on the lake.
THE SOPRANO'S
The best uniform buddies that we saw were the Soprano's. The campsite thermometer thingy read 32 degrees and these guys were dressed in wellington boots and orange waterproof trousers, big oven-mitt style gloves and blue polo shirts and dark glasses. They all looked and acted like Tony Soprano and they were the campsite bin-men. All the happy campers on the campsite had seperated their empty bottles into one bin and their plastics into another, cardboard into a different place and general rubbish into another skip, all for recycling and then the Soprano's came along and recycled everything! Into one big dustbin-cart!
MORE NEXT TIME.. CANAL WALKING IN VENICE... DRIVING ON THE WRONG SIDE of the car! and Pub-poetry Update!