I am finally learning to respond to inspiration, or is it the normal working of a creative mind, that my projected meeting in January forming a local writer and journal / diary group is important and should come about.
By ‘local’ I mean Paulton, Midsomer Norton, and Radstock.

I received the idea today, Sunday morning, 22nd December 2024,  whilst listening to Radio 3 which has a blessed amount of wonderful inspired Christmas music at this time of year.

If ideas come at me from ‘out of nowhere’ that is a good sign.

I always enjoy meeting people with similar interests so how jolly it would be if we could meet under one roof so to speak. It is the nature of British people to be reticent about their needs and not very verbal so the more groups the merrier.

As I write this sentence, the morning sun has just cast a bright ray on the tree in my garden against a very dark background and this has encouraged me to look at the natural world and how things grow and thrive. Everything starts small. We came to be because an egg and the sperm met together. You cannot see it with the naked eye. Same with groups.

Groups and movements start with an idea, a meeting with small group of people, manifestation and a decision to continue and hopefully some fruit.  Most groups are however ruined by lack of vision and the tendency to power grab even at an early stage; I have written about this frequently so I won’t bore you to death through repeating it.

The job of an originator or chair or facilitator of a meeting is to understand or seek to understand, to enable the stories, desires and aspirations of the audience to be made manifest. This sounds almost biblical but why not. I cannot stand seeing the English language being massacred by the interjection of the word ‘like’ and ‘sort of”. It dilutes and trivializes the syntax, rhythm and form that should be a part of every sentence.

I am not  saying that we should be super serious I’m saying that we should be coherent.

I did make some considerable effort with the Frome Collective Writers Group but I found that unless I made an approach no one took any notice of me or commented on any of the verbal comments that I made and I felt it was a bit too well established and dare I say it cliquey for my liking.

The journey to Frome only takes about 15 minutes by car and is a decent drive but I do like to get something out of it in terms of human contact. When I did take the trouble to speak to people there was no commitment on their part. They were polite rather than anything else so I felt that for various reasons my face did not fit. They seem to be in a Frome ‘bubble’.

So be it. We move on.