Month: June 2025

The Great Unread

I tried to read you. Couldn’t get through you. Did I even get past Chapter One?

For some reason we never hit it off, did we ‘Dune’?

It all began when someone I admired said they’d read you.

It was Holly Johnson from Frankie Goes to Hollywood. It was an answer to a question in one of those pop music magazine bio’s. There were questions like ‘What’s your favourite colour? What book are you reading at the moment?’ This would have been in the mid eighties.

So, I did the natural thing, I went out, saved my pocket money and blew a few weeks worth on Dune by Frank Herbert.

Anyway, couldn’t get through Dune, gave it away in the end. My motivations for having the book were all wrong. I just wanted it because Holly had read it. How shallow. How silly. How embarressing but looking back, in my defense, I was fourteen and smitten.

The same thing happened when I was about eighteen with ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanphropists’ by Robert Tressell. About five different people recommended it to me, including my dad. So I bought it and couldn’t get past Chapter One.

I discovered that a couple of other people I knew had tried reading ‘Dune’ but couldn’t get through it, and they were hard core fantasy/sci fi fans. So then, I didn’t feel quite so bad. Interestingly enough, some of those people were able to get through it easily enough on audiobook.

I’m not an audiobook type of person but I might just buy ‘Dune’ again and this time just buckle down and also read ‘The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists’ because I’m no longer a teenager, a lot of water has gone under the bridge and I’m not idolizing pop groups anymore.

When I start a book, I like to follow it through to the end, the ‘I’ve started so I’ll finish’ mentality but sometimes, just sometimes in life, there remains the great unread.

Then Comes June

Everyone danced around you

Made me dizzy

Intoxicated others

Like the maypole

Garlands were hung from you

Celebrating the joy of summer returning

But you transcended all seasons

Evergreen

Immortal

Maypoles are made of

Pine, birch, elm, ash

You are ash

And hold all the secrets of the dead

Maypole, you wrapped us tightly

In your beautifully coloured braids

Comforting, yet

Uneasy entanglement

Pleasing, yet

Troubled bondage

Soul ties promised

Safety and fun

But always at a price.

We all fell

As your ribbons unravelled

Hoping and praying

That when the maypole falls

Then comes June.

The Joy of Moist

Apparently, some people don’t like the word moist. I think damp is a worse word with more negative connotations, conjuring images of ruined blackened walls, fungus, mould and spores that lead to ill health, suffering and eventual death.

I don’t know why some people don’t like the word moist. Maybe they connect it to the word sweaty, or areas of the body that may be overheated, but even in that case, moist is better than drenched or wet or sweaty, smelly, sticky or stinky. I don’t particularly like the word sweaty but I think all words are good. They all describe. Sweaty is descriptive, it’s powerful, it’s evocative but why would it be preferable to moist? Sweaty cake or moist cake? Sweaty soil or moist soil? There’s no competition. Moist is not too wet, it’s not too dry, it’s the goldilocks of H20.

I’m at a loss to understand what is so bad about the word moist. It even sounds good phonetically. A soft velvety sound, relativelty easy to spell, looks good, sounds good.

In the seventies and eighties, when I was growing up, the word moist didn’t seem to be a problem. I discovered that a lot of women shudder at the word moist. I don’t understand why that is. There are many other words that would make you shudder. What I learned lately is the amount of men who don’t like it either. If people can’t bring themselves to like the word, perhaps they could appreciate the positive connotations of it in some circumstances. Moistness can be a help and not a hindrance and in this world where things are either too wet or too dry, it can be a boon to life.

When I think of moist, I think of moist soil. A plant with moist soil is a plant that has watered soil which will make a very happy plant that will thrive and grow. Also, when I think of the word moist, I think of moist cake. There’s nothing more delicious than a moist cake. There’s nothing worse than a dry cake that should be moist, yet no-one falls over into a dead faint at the word dry. Dry cake, skin, or soil, does not have so much of a future as moist cake, skin or soil. So as far as I’m concerned, moist is a great word.