World of more

We paddle in the shallows, waves splashing over our ankles.  The water cools the skin and forces blood from the toes so we flatten the ribbons of sand with stamps to squeeze warmth back into our feet.   The sky ripples with cloud, and wind squeezes under cuff, up trouser leg and down collar.  Our shoulders hunch and hands search into pockets to stave off the cold. She gossips and smiles, but anxiety billows and ebbs in my stomach even as I grin at her stories.  Somewhere at the base of the dunes, where the grass gives way to sand, lies the source of my tension.  A ring, sized to slip over her finger, sits in a box, which in turn lies in a bag.  It cannot be seen from here but each time she glances up the beach time slows as I wait for awareness to break across her face.   She asks what we will do next.  I tell her we need to leave and my gut stabs with nerves as the moment of action draws near. We pad across the expanse, tracking footprints over b...

Kicked by Google's decision to switch off FTP transfer for Blogger created blogs, I've moved this website to the fantastic Movable Type 5.  I've used Movable 3 in the past and been impressed, but 5 is something else entirely.  I'm still not convinced it's legal for such a powerful piece of software to be free (for me anyway). Installation was straightforward.  Migration was not.  There's plenty of sites out there that will tell how to format a Blogger export so that Movable Type will read it, but try as I might I couldn't get MT to parse it correctly.  Even more frustratingly it would tell me had been successful, but no entries would appear. The solution was a little arcane, so I thought I'd post it to help others in the same boat as me.   In short, it seems MT is very picky about line endings.  I'd been saving the import file on my Vista laptop, which of course then puts a Windows standard line ending on it, which in turn caused MT to throw a wobbly...

For the first exercise in my creative writing class we were asked to write something "inspired by" the similies we had generated in class. He was glad to finally be alone.  Four hours of walking had carried him up and away from the bustle of the cars and villages; the nagging intrusions of billboards and shopfronts had given way to a calming view of forest, lake and rock. His walking poles clacked a rhythmic accompaniment to his strides over scree and boulder at the base of a limestone cliff.  He'd been contouring below this vertical rockface for ten minutes, searching without success for a break or ramp to allow him access to the higher reaches of the mountain. A hundred metres away a bare patch of turf abutting the rockface hinted at a path that ended at the cliff itself, but as he reached the small plateau of dusty earth it became clearer the path continued into a huge crack cleaving the cliff.  Jagged fists of stone faced each other across a vertical cleft no wider th...