Welcome to justthoughtsnstuff

I started posting to jtns on 20 February 2010 with just one word, 'Mosaic'. This seemed an appropriate introduction to a blog that would juxtapose fragments of memoir and life-writing. Since 1996, I'd been coming to terms with the consequences of emotional and economic abuse that had begun in childhood, and which, amongst other things, had sought to stifle self-expression. While I'd explored some aspects of my life through fiction and, to a lesser extent, journalism, it was only in 2010 that I felt confident enough to write openly about myself. I believed this was an important part of the healing process. Yet within weeks, the final scenes of my family's fifty-year nightmare started to play themselves out and the purpose of the blog became one of survival through writing. Although some posts are about my family's suffering - most explicitly, Life-Writing Talk, with Reference to Trust: A family story - the majority are about happier subjects (including, Bampton in rural west Oxfordshire, where I live, Oxford, where I work, the seasons and the countryside, walking and cycling) and I hope that these, together with their accompanying photos, are enjoyable and positive. Note: In February 2020, on jtns' tenth birthday, I stopped posting to this blog. It is now a contained work of life-writing about ten years of my life. Frank, 21 February 2020.

New blog: morethoughtsnstuff.com.

Saturday, 1 October 2011

harvest festival, that paris year












Busy at the library, what with the start of the Oxford term coming up--0th Week from Sunday.

Thank goodness for those days away in Somerset.

Headed for the allotment at 7.30 am before the temperature rose--and this is the first day of October!

Did an hour's digging and some picking. Everything is slowing now, despite the weather. I'll probably take down the runner bean wigwams tomorrow (you can just glimpse their tops in the second-from-bottom photo and the base of one is shown in the photo above that--some lush self-set Swiss chard is growing amongst the runners). Then, next week, I'll grub up the courgette and squash plants before digging the area over, and that will be more or less that for the winter, apart from the occasional harvest of the few remaining crops--chard, carrots and beetroot. Though in store are potatoes, onions and shallots.

It's been difficult to find enough time to do the allotment justice but great fun when I have got up there.

Meanwhile, a publisher friend in the States has a new Kindle ebook out: That Paris Year by Joanna Biggar: UK, US, DE.
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