In your own time.

There are seconds when time skips by, and then there are seconds that thud.

A big thank you for meeting me here! The star of today’s story is Time.

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind. — Nathaniel Hawthorne.

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There’s an antique clock that's found its home on my desk and it thinks it can boss me around. It has a hollow tick that echoes and on the hour it tolls in a tuneless, sullen voice that reminds me of funerals.

I felt guilty and ungrateful when we opened the clock face and stopped the pendulum, though if I accidently move my desk, the brass pendulum picks up on the jolt and starts to swing again in an endless motion that never hesitates to file my thoughts away before I’m done.

There is nothing beautiful about this clock we inherited apart from the wooden case. It is ignorant of the fact that time can inch forward softly and slowly, like honey, like when I slept all snug under the stars on a top deck on the Aegean Sea.

Try telling this clock, that when I’m lying flat-bellied on the beach, photographing sea-kissed shells, that time turns to mist. It will never believe that in those moments, I just am and the horizon, just is. I listen only to the pendulum from the gods in the waves. They make me feel alive.

Neither would it believe me, if I said, that time was all of a dance when I was falling head-over-heels. Then the beat of my heart swooned only to the second hand of love.

This clock could accompany a drumroll, and times overruled by fear, like when a furious, drugged-up driver rammed our car and held us hostage at a red traffic light, our babies, strapped in the back seats, watched their parents, who couldn’t hide their fear.

This clock resonates with those seconds that dragged like lead in water, those seconds that stumbled in clumsy thuds to my stomach. It’s no wonder the golden polished face only glows in silence, in honour of time.

Time changes everything, except something within us, which is always surprised by change. — Bertrand Russell

Rye hands ticking to the time in the wind.

The idea for this week’s story came from a three-hundred-word-story challenge entitled, ‘Time redux’, posted last week by the author,

The Cure for Sleep with Tanya Shadrick

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Tanya especially deserves a mention with all her hard work. She won Waterstone’s, non-fiction prize in 2022 and yet she continues to support new writers (and people who enjoy writing like me) by posting a prompt, once a week, to a writing community that I am thrilled to have come across thanks to

Susie Mawhinney

. It’s just what I needed to focus. Since my book arrived in boxes in January, I found it hard to choose a topic. What’s more Tanya not only promotes this community but supports them by writing in person, saying what she gets from each piece. She is amazing and I admire her energy and her will.

I hope you are having a good week. I’ve been busy preparing for my first slide show (ever) on my very new book release, ‘Sanctuary’. I have never done a slide show, don’t even possess a projector or a screen. Something borrowed something blue… So all new territory.

A book promotion reel is ‘in the pipeline’. This week, I have learned how to use PowerPoint for the first time, yes, I know,

‘But Pipp for heaven’s sake!.. Where have you been all these years!!?’

Luckily, it didn’t get the better of me! I even learned the point of PowerPoint this week. (I always wondered when the kids were doing them for school). Yep. I had all my photographs numbered in order and that’s when it dawned on me, that unless they are in some kind of program, they won’t roll from one to the next!! Der.

This week, thanks to connecting with community writers with Tanya, I came across the whimsical illustrations by

Emily Charlotte Powell

who shares that timeless feeling when she’s drawing, why not take a look?

While I Was Drawing

Oh, and

David Knowles

wrote this beautiful, timeless piece of ecological fiction called ‘The Pool below the Force’. He writes with such love for the environment that I will never forget this story. This story was introduced to me by

Anne Thomas

…linking in lovely people who are trying to get noticed, like me. :)

The pool below the force* and the heavens above

See you next week!!

Lots of love.