Inky coincidences

How strange life is sometimes. There was I, babbling on about my father's Adana printing machine yesterday and, I have subsequently learned, at precisely that moment he was clanking away - kerchunk, kerchunk - printing some invitations to my sister's apres-wedding ceilidh. The first time he has wrestled the machine out from under the stairs and inked it up for many a long year.

The wording on the invites includes an email address, but he hasn't got an @ character, so has used an 'O' and family members are busy turning Os into @s by hand before they are all sent out. How sweet. But isn't it amazing that the nostalgic smell of printing ink should have wafted 100 miles or more north-eastward at that very instant, and been, in part, the inspiration behind yesterday's blog?

I did not enquire whether the invitations have been printed on those peculiar deckle-edged cards. I await the arrival of mine (always assuming that I have been invited!) in the post in due course.

I mentioned last week a forthcoming Ivor Gurney event, War’s Betrayals, at Colchester's Headgate Theatre on 22 September. Since then I have discovered this comprehensive Ivor Gurney website .

Finally, on the subject of poems, here's one I discovered courtesy of the Green Chair Press Blog that I noted yesterday. It's called At the Mermaid Cafeteria by Christopher Morley (d. 1957) - and will chime with anyone who's ever tried to write poetry:

TRUTH is enough for prose:
Calmly it goes
To tell just what it knows.

For verse, skill will suffice–
Delicate, nice
Casting of verbal dice.

Poetry, men attain
By subtler pain
More flagrant in the brain–

An honesty unfeigned,
A heart unchained,
A madness well restrained.