Each month we try to have an Autumn Voices member contribute to the blog. This could be anything from poetry to pottery and if you’d like to be a guest blogger then apply once you’re logged in as a member.
Our theme for December is ‘a bit of coorie and hygge’, which frankly we all need at the moment after being thoroughly launched into winter with torrential rain and flooding, then blown away in Storm Arwen and pelted with snow! It’s definitely time to stay warm and cosy, and in our online content this month … Continue reading A recipe for heaven
How is it possible to love someone so much and yet to know so little about them? So asks Fredrik Backman in his book My Grandmother Sends her Regards and Apologises. It’s a question that has popped into my head many times over the last few months – particularly since joining the Devils’ Porridge research … Continue reading Flora Makes the Devil’s Porridge
I never knew my grandfather Joe. He’d been in the army since his teens as a member of the Royal Horse Artillery’s ‘L’ Battery. He was born in 1890 in a tiny house opposite the gasworks in London’s Pimlico (long before it was fashionable), and he was 24 when war broke out. He was a … Continue reading My Grandfather Joe
For those of you who enjoyed Lizzie’s second blog instalment last week, Women Without Men, this recently released book by Lucy Fisher might be of particular interest: Women in the War For those of you who watched or attended Remembrance services this Sunday just past, Lizzie’s third and final instalment of her war poetry and remembrance … Continue reading The World Will Soon Forget
Much of the poetry I found was written by women; there is hardly any need to state the sadly obvious reason for this. They were still alive, and they were still willing to take up their pens to add some postscripts to their war poems. There is much of the grief of bereavement in their … Continue reading Women Without Men
One hundred years ago the world was in a state of recovery. The immense trauma of the First World War had been swiftly followed by a pandemic, as the Spanish flu tore through country after country. The last cases were recorded in 1920, so that for the duration of six years, death, destruction, uncertainty and … Continue reading The Empty World
Abdourahim was born in the Comoros Archipelago on the island of Grande Comoro (Ngazidja) in 1953 into a family of ten and grew up in the capital city of Moroni. There, he received both his primary and secondary education. Following the award of his French Baccalaureate Diploma, he got a scholarship to further his studies … Continue reading Black History Month: From the Comoros to Scotland
On the 1st of December, 1980, I bundled two small boys, two collie dogs and some random bags bulging with essential everyday paraphernalia into my yellow Ford Escort. I loved that car! I was setting off on a journey from Tain up in Rosshire, all the way down to the south to the quiet little … Continue reading A High Street Vet
All images taken by Polly Pullar Sleep has been hard to come by, for I have been rising in the small hours to nurture a minute red squirrel kit, rescued by a Braemar Mountain Rescue Team member, and aptly described as ‘another climber’. We care about red squirrels. Imagine one hundred people together from all … Continue reading Squirrel
‘If you go down to the woods today . . .’ . . . you don’t usually expect to come face-to-face with an emu. But last week I did. And I have to admit that, fence or no fence, he was a scary-looking character! I’d gone for a walk from the small Perthshire town of … Continue reading ‘If you go down to the woods today . . .’
Our CLANGERS project has come to a natural end, but our content from Autumn Voices members and bloggers goes on! We thoroughly recommend you continue to practice the principles of CLANGERS as part of your creative activities, and you may yet here more from us about them (this is deliberate intrigue on our part here) but we … Continue reading A Scottish Seabird Centre Volunteer writes . . .
Renita kindly offered us some of her bedtime stories to help us nod off to sleep last month. To round things off, and to get us into the mood for our September theme of pets, animals and the natural world and our forthcoming poetry competition, she has a woodland theme and a poem for us. … Continue reading Renita’s Last Bedtime Story
Renita has kindly offered us some of her bedtime stories to help us nod off to sleep this month. She normally reads them to young children, but we think bedtime stories are for everyone, so either share this with someone to help them fall asleep or keep it all to yourself! As a preface to … Continue reading Renita’s Bedtime Story
My Open University degree was in maths and sciences – several different sciences. I then worked for fifteen years in geology, and another fifteen years in botany, with my part-time Strathclyde doctorate being in information science. So, I can’t say anything about sleep with any degree of scientific authority. What I’ve learned about the science … Continue reading Sleep Patterns
Renita has kindly offered us some of her bedtime stories to help us nod off to sleep this month. She normally reads them to young children, but we think bedtime stories are for everyone, so either share this with someone to help them fall asleep or keep it all to yourself! As a preface to … Continue reading Another Bedtime Story
