boldly going beyond spoons

I’m looking at my jotted notes again. When I check my inspiration tank, it’s pretty empty, maybe it’s leaking, or maybe I’m not working hard enough to fill it. My head used to be full of people, connected or disconnected from each other, all busy having adventures, but I think they’ve all wandered off somewhere. Maybe they’re having coffee or a pint with each other, or maybe they are on their own, lost in a tangled forest of random words. Or maybe – and I actually have a little image in my mind, a picture of a small rowing boat with a small figure paddling round in circles.

I was watching a programme on TV about amateur craftspeople who hope to turn their hobby into a business. There was a young woman with lovely eyes who carved spoons. She took pieces of wood and made them into beautiful spoons of varying shapes. I was fascinated to see how she found a spoon inside a chunk of wood by gouging it with a rather dangerous looking tool. I don’t know if they were described as pocket spoons, or if I imagined them as pocket spoons, but I thought it was a rather interesting idea. I think the expert who was advising her (a wood carving expert, not a spoon expert I think) told her to boldly go beyond spoons, but maybe I just thought he said that. Did I also imagine he spoke about spoon butter. not a spoonful of butter, but spoon butter – maybe it was a butter spoon, if there is such a thing.

For some reason I was also looking up the word pruner, I have no idea why, some passing thought must have prompted me because it’s pretty obvious that a pruner is one who prunes, or an item that is used to prune.

Lest thy redundant juice
Should fading leaves, instead of fruits, produce,
The pruner ’s hand with letting blood must quench
Thy heat, and thy exub’rant parts retrench.

This was by John Denham, not the person who is Professorial Research Fellow in the Department of Politics at the University of Southampton, nor a  Labour MP for Southampton, Itchen, who left the Commons on 30 March 2015,  but  Sir John Denham, a poet born in 1615 who was buried in the spring of 1669 in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, not far from Chaucer’s tomb.

I have other jottings, none inspire me to write anything, ‘the terrible poet’, ‘the hidden oak’, ‘the idea of west’, ‘Andrew Snowball’, ‘dead man’s teeth’, ‘the past is a poem to the future’, and most mysterious – ‘I caught a haddock, I never caught a haddock before!’ The real challenge of course would be to write something containing  all of these jottings.