My writing companion suffered a workplace injury a couple of weeks ago, so I have had to lay low whilst she recovered. As a hound, her primary interests are sleeping, playing, receiving pats and eating – more or less in that order. Whilst cavorting by the river with a deerhound, she sustained a small puncture wound in her side. I wasn’t too concerned initially as the injury was only about the size of the end of my finger, so simply I washed it out.

The next day I took her to the vet as I was concerned the wound might become infected. Fourty-eight hours later she had a large bald patch, eight stitches, and what a friend refers as the ‘cone of shame’. I was given instructions to ‘keep her quiet’ for two weeks till the stitches came out.

Harper is by nature a lazy beast, but she is also young and athletic and weighs 46kg. As time ticked by and she started to feel better keeping her ‘quiet’ required some supervision on my part which kept us home-bound. On a positive note it created ideal circumstances for writing and cooking.

I dusted off and edited a couple of short stories which I sent off to competitions. I also submitted my manuscript for consideration to another publisher after another round of editing.

In exciting news, a short piece I wrote on the theme of ‘Trash and Treasure,’ was accepted for a zine due out in February in time for Festival of the Photocopier (FOTP). Festival of the Photocopier is a zine fair coordinated by the Sticky Institute. Zine is pronounced ‘zeen’, as in the shortening of magazine. A zine is an independent publications made on the cheap. FOTP is normally a two day fair hosting hundreds of zine’s but will be online this February due to COVID restrictions.

Summer is a busy time in the garden and being close to home has meant plenty of time for green thumbs. My peach tree produced a great crop this year, but it’s a short season and one person can only eat so many peaches… The fruit is great for drying however, and makes little sweet fibre filled wrinkled gems that are like healthy lollies. Drying is a simple task – you just cut the fruit in half, remove the stone, dip the cut side in lemon juice to hold the colour and wack them in a dehydrator for about sixteen hours. Meanwhile the apple tree is lining up it’s bounty.

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