non-disclosure agreement

in one of the James Bond films do you remember the health club

so with enough ado I'll pass you over to my colleague to talk you through some of the technical

auditorium
mind-crops
percolating
zooplankton

this basically means that what you can can monitor is completely limited by your imagination

desktop
blue sargasso
reflects along
clipframe

& all the other good stuff we've shown you

70-221 Designing a Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Network Infrastructure

...mostly consisted of fragmentary epics, whose main theme was getting out of bed. He was just in the middle of revising an old one, as it happened. No-one had ever bothered to mention that they were all about getting out of bed, and it seemed he had not noticed this himself. I couldn't trust myself not to put it dismissively, so I shut up. Anyway, most of my own stuff was about getting up, too. As if one day he and I would really both rise from our beds and live... but properly, somehow.

I'm working for a technical exam at the moment. This has changed my lifestyle just for the moment - for example, I've read no poems for a few days and I don't want to. Instead I've been watching Newsnight, listening to Moyles in the shower, reading World History. And then there's a domino effect and I'm suddenly writing my blog properly, like other people do, in my own voice. All of this is happening just because of that technical exam. The snowdrops at my feet when I arrived. The snowdrops were so lovely that I felt tearful. Perhaps it was the shock of seeing them in the same moment that I switched off the engine and the Davidsbündlertänze - piano work by Schumann - broke off in mid-glory :- transformed into this still group, proliferous bulbs under the moss and their cool, solid corona, white and waxy.

In Place

Like a Bobcat, but a bit larger I suppose. It had a detachable head for planing off the old bound material and another one with a rotary brush that sweeps into a trap.

I'm more interested in a nice hot Cappucino

When you drive to somewhere that is near the sea - Highbridge for example - and you get the sea-feeling going to and from the car because it's only a mile or less; and then you come away and veer back along the Poldens on the A39. Thinking about it you feel a sharp ache of didn't-make-it-to-the-sea - And then you settle, telling yourself how you like to be marine, coastal, rivage, waterside character, in the zone of Grass Vetchling, how you like the space, and winds that have always something warm. You use literary words to make you think you had something but you didn't. That's how you learn to accept things; to say, well, I did have the proximity...

Look, I'm talking to the pathless backwoods now, the place where my dead ones are seated, with their looks of recognition, waiting for me to come to them. I've just heard about Schumann's aria and chorus for an opera about The Corsair (sketches of 1844). Give me a performance of this now!! (Berlioz's overture can come later - it wasn't originally connected with Byron's poem at all, though that's what the final title permits us to imagine...)

The Smallholding

I‘ve got to. Because of their paddock. I’ve got everything I need. And today’s all right.

He meant that although it was dry there was a waft of air, not too much. Inside the shed it smelt shadowy; along his legs the tube coiled, stiff metal. Because of the slope you’d have to walk it with a pack on your back.

I’m supposed to have a certificate.

They went on talking about it. The plants were rising tall out of the crumbling bank, green spreading yellow.

- But Mum might.

He burst out laughing. Likely!

I mean she could do it. Born before 1964, see? She’s exempt.

I’ll do it.

Ask her!

No. I’d best get on with it.

Hold the nizzle downwind.

He made an unhappy chuckle. I know how to piss in the wind.

She was like a truck. Her voice was so centred he curled up and slept in front of it, his brain did.

*

She panted up to a shoulder; there on the far-off clouds it was still gold over Winscombe. It had been fine before tea; now it was sombre and puffs of wind rose. That was his lookout. Aileen was her daughter, but — ! If anyone should happen to ask, perhaps you might say... He just thought... Her face twisted. Though she was alone on the bank, it twisted with his whining and her distaste. Well, you know what thought did, she said to him now. She stabbed at the trigger, and blitzed.

How had it got to this? Were they not supposed to be greenies, for Christ’s own sake —. Even he said so, but if Aileen weren’t there he’d no doubt change his ways.

So now, the ragworts were taking a double dose...

She saw their silhouettes, most of them still the right shape. Where many a bee may sip, she thought sadly. And why after all was she bothering, having him stare out anxiously from the kitchen into the dark? (Oh, he could keep watch on her, he had X-ray vision these days.) It was so easy to brew in a guilty man. What a mess their lives were, nothing really clean or in its place. However, that was Tompsett foxed; she really had done it like she said.

But the task dragged on and she was getting careless. The pack was a monster, the bank was cow-poached and riddled with warrens too. Blah – the spray wafted up to her eyes. She started to sit down and was not stopping, blacking out and coming back up for grey. That was a close one. It wouldn’t do to snap a bone... Almost a grandmother after all. How he held her arm so gingerly after the check-up. Aileen at least didn’t know; that was a mercy. When she went inside, she would say something kind to him. In fact this: you missed a few, it’s as well I did go over it.