TAP...TAP...TAP ...WITHOUT A SOUND

I’m still practising. Reaching down for whatever might be lurking just below the surface of my mind. This may not get published because I’m still groping and no-one is here to help but I find that’s the best way. I’m forced to study the keys and repeat things. Just don’t go away. I will soon get up to speed and into the meat of things. There’s a couple of promising nice mixed metaphors and i just found the key that moves me forward along the line without obliterating what I just wrote.

Bear with me please. Don’t ever leave me I need to do it to get back into the swing of it.

I’ve been writing for more than eighty years. Starting with letters, written by hand of course. I’ve wondered why my bent was not recognized and encouraged. Then realized it was. When my brother’s plane didn’t return from a bombing raid, he was reported missing. I was assigned to write to newspapers for particulars every time we read of airmen in a dinghy being plucked from the ocean. When the war ended and we heard from the father of a flight crew survivor who had been a prisoner of war, that my brother had been killed, I wrote to the War Office to inform them. Whereupon they promptly sent back the information...in a blue-banded telegram. It signified urgency, they were informing us that he had been killed.

Last week someone posted an old Scottish class photo on line. There were forty students in the photo.Today’s teachers think twenty-four students are too many. They are not even teaching them cursive writing and if comments made in social media are an indication, English grammar is a lost art also.

When we came to Canada, there were three Toronto daily newspapers and a section for Letters To the Editor. I took to that like a duck to water. It evolved to a weekly column in the Aurora Banner. The editor was patient and instructive. I learned. I did some reporting.

During...before...and after.... I became involved in politics and my education broadened enormously. NO college or university can teach what there is to learn in politics.

At seventy-five, after a fourteen year absence, I put my name forward again and was re-elected and served three more four year terms. During which time social media presented. To the consternation of some, the delight of many and with the help of Heather Sisman, a young friend at a loose end, I published a blog. 

Never, in a million years could I have ever imagined the opportunity. Without really meaning to, I stopped writing posts and took to commenting on Facebook instead. It’s less work. More casual. But the current state of politics in Canada, from top to bottom is lamentable.

It wasn’t always thus.

I am forever grateful for the opportunities I have received.

The Blog is payback.