50:50

 As a child I loved to write but I haven't done very much of it since leaving school. This particular challenge then, will hopefully reignite my passion for creative writing! I decided on a poem as my weekend project, I wanted to write something that could be completed in a relatively short time so that I wouldn't lose interest and put it aside. Then I decided to try a sestina because my biggest problem is settling on a topic and getting started and the tight constraints of this style narrow your choices. A sestina is a poem with 39 lines. The final words of the first six lines are repeated in the other lines, in a specific pattern so the same words keep coming back like echoes. They are a bit like a puzzle so they are lots of fun to write! The inspiration for my sestina was a photograph of a tree that was felled to make way for the HS2. It has been widely shared on Facebook and it royally pissed me off, I don't mind telling you! I hope you like my poem, please let me know ...

How I managed to get to my age without having played Dungeons and Dragons before is a mystery, particularly as many of my student friends were members of the university WARPSOC - that's Wargaming and Roleplaying Society to lesser mortals. Nevertheless, o n my 49th birthday, the members of my bubble joined me on my first adventure.......... On a dirt road, stretching alongside uncultivated fields of overgrown grass, a plucky but inexperienced young fighter, Shuli, and a novice wizard, Califragilistic, made their way in what they hoped was the direction of some ancient ruins that they had heard about. The fighter's motive was the treasure that could apparently be found there; whereas the wizard, although not uninterested in riches, was on a quest for knowledge. ..................After feeling awkward to begin with, birthday cocktails soon increased my confidence and Shuli became quite a headstrong, intolerant warrior who was quite scornful of her poor companion's low level sp...

During these strange times, which seem impossible to describe without a cliché, another birthday approaches.  I will be 49 on the 21st of January but there will be no parties or get-togethers this year; no boozy brunches or civilized afternoon teas. Like everyone else who has celebrated in the past ten months it will be a birthday of compromises - enjoyable but not exactly what I might have chosen in normal circumstances. So here I am, on the cusp of my half century. On the same date my mum would have been 73 years old. Before she had reached her own 49th birthday she had suffered an aneurysm and stroke which permanently changed the final twelve years of her life. So the big five - oh  fills me with gratitude rather than dread, because not everyone has made it this far.  It is in that spirit of seizing the day that I decided to make a list of 50 things that I would like to achieve before I'm 50. I do love a good to-do list! It's a strange hotchpotch really, made up of ide...