Thick and Thin

I’ve just been sharpening a new pencil I’d picked up from my kitchen drawer to replace the stub of my last one. But it has no marking on it and when I wrote the first word on my desktop notebook the lines were too thick to be of any use. Why don’t all pencils have HB or whatever on them.I actually didn’t...

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Colour Fades

Even the sun was partially eclipsed today, draining colour from the morning sky. But that same sun has been steadfastly bleaching pictures on my walls and the spines of books on my bookshelves for years, turning bold colours to muted pastels. Strong light destroys pigments. There's probably a scientific...

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Colour

What’s the most popular colour in the world? I’ll come to that in a minute but I can reveal now that it is not a beigey sort of brown. No, that’s just mine. I met a Colour Therapist on a train journey many years ago who explained that the seven colours of the spectrum relate to the seven main chakras...

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Colour

 How dull life looked in monochrome. My old photographs are all black and white, including my christening. I expect my family heirloom gown was white, but I’ve no idea what colours my relatives were dressed in and there’s no one left who would remember. I can understand why my grandchildren might...

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Artifice

It has not been a good week!  I'd avoided the seasonal scourges of colds, flu, norovirus that seem to have been bouncing around since New Year, but over the last few days I've gone down with some nasty bug that has left me with a running nose, a hacking cough, sore ribs, feeling chilly and with...

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Artifice

If you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. A quote that seems attributable to a few people including Groucho Marx and George Burns and as Artifice can be described as something intended to craftily deceive I’m going on that basis to have a look at various deceptions that certainly use craft to fake...

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Happenstance

I had absolutely no idea how I was going to tackle a blog about happenstance until I made a throwaway joke to a friend about Adele (who sings with local opera company Musica Lirica) being in a production tomorrow in Lytham St Annes - something about car men.😉Of course, I know it's a production of Bizet's...

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Happenstance - It Was Meant To Be

Happenstance (noun): Chance or a chance situation especially one producing a good result.I’ve come to the conclusion that life - mine in particular - is made up of ‘what ifs’.What if I hadn’t written that letter? What if I hadn’t gone to that party? What if I’d been a few minutes later? What if I’d...

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Happenstance

I’m going to use the words of the wonderful Helena Nelson to describe the starting of HappenStance. I can’t do better:"If I had another life, and was choosing the name of my imprint again, I wouldn’t go for ‘HappenStance Press’. Before I tell you why, I’ll explain how the name HappenStance first came...

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Happenstance and the Surrealists

Surrealism is an art movement that began in the 1920s and is known for the creation of hybrids of words and images often generated through the experiences of happenstance, a circumstance especially due to chance. Tangible and intangible materials acquired in this way and used within the creative making...

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