Jane's Writing Shed.

On the strength of a tribute to Charles Causley recently on Radio 4, I sourced a copy of his collected poems and as I'm enjoying reading them so much I want to encourage more people to try his poetry.I was hooked right away with the first poem in this collection Keats at Teignmouth which combines one of my favourite poets with one of my favourite places. As a subscriber to Brittle Star,I received my copy of the latest issue 33 this week.I was intrigued by the illustration on the back cover and on looking more closely I realised that far from being a cake it's the keys from an old fashioned typewriter.Brittle Star have changed their format to a paperback edition published twice a year and as it's full of excellent poems and short stories,well worth supporting.

In the 1970s I drove from Essex to Birmingham and back in an old Austin with a broken clutch which is what lots of people did back then. I think we put up with things breaking down more often and were less frantic about having to have shiny new objects. This is a preamble to mentioning that for months now I've had a problem getting 'wireless' on my smartphone despite having broadband at home and being surrounded by wireless hotspots. I've been able to get 3G but that's not sufficient to do internet browsing. None of my techie friends or family were able to understand what the problem was. Then yesterday I was in Carphone Warehouse on Princes Street when I noticed that they had a Geek Helpdesk. The young techie took one look at my phone and mentioned that the reason for my non-connection to wireless might be that I'd incorrectly inputted a password on my home broadband. So he 'unremembered' my password and subsequently I've been connected to the wor

Last Sunday November 10, marked the beginning of a collaborative project for my poetry group.We have given ourselves about a year to visit a variety of derelict buildings particularly those on the edge of a town or city in and around Edinburgh,the Lothians and the Borders.We will write poems,take photos,make sketches with a view to publishing a pamphlet based on our project. So we arrived at Mavisbank near Loanhead for our first field trip on a beautiful autumn day.Poems will follow soon....

What a cheek! But having stumbled on the fabulous sight of a galaxy last week, which initially caught my eye because it looked like a curious smudge, I started writing a poem ( as you do) trying to capture the feel of the night. As a non-astronomer I tried to describe where the galaxy was located and remembered that Cassiopeia was visible nearby so included a reference in the poem. It was only a few days later that I googled 'galaxy east of Cassiopeia' and immediately came up with Andromeda on the earthsky.org website (see link). I highly recommend taking out a pair of binoculars on a clear night and if you can find Cassiopeia, the big W shaped constellation and go right and down using the W as a directional arrow,you should find it. The smudgy effect seems to be caused by the effect of billions of stars in the galaxy some of which you'll see even with low strength binoculars. A further discovery was that in Greek mythology, Andromeda's mother was Cassiopeia who

Andromeda galaxy is Milky Way's next-door neighbor | Clusters Nebulae Galaxies | EarthSky