Wednesday, 21 March 2012

First Pointless Literary Exercise


We’ve come through the winter and spring is a wonder. Those cold months can start to be romanticised now. Certain glimpses of nature, hard to appreciate at the time, come back as reflections of awesome beauty. Frozen trees sum it up; branches white with frost, stood still in a quiet world.
We went walking in the woods. I remember having painfully cold toes and a constantly hunched back. Muscle strains came from being so tense all the time. Walking around the icy lake, we were flanked on one side by white woods, the odd leafless sapling poking up out of the snow.
Now birdsong and sunshine are miracles. It seems we spent week after week in an anti-social fug, indoors with computers and TVs. Not so different from now, but with the added perplexity of endless night. All that darkness bored me stiff. I’m waking up now, a little late.

This aim of this first pointless literary exercise was to see what I could write in five minutes. In this arbitrary amount of time I could have simply typed as much as possible, but decided to split my time into about three minutes spent putting down random ideas and two minutes spent editing them.

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