Tag: stories

All quiet on my front

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It really has been some time since I posted. But who wants to write yet more after trying to write another novel? And the discovery that a one-and-a-half hour train journey to London is quite ‘do-able’ has meant my attention switches to there rather than here. Visits to museums, art galleries, shops not available in a closing-down seaside town, and now lectures and courses at colleges and museums has taken up my time.

As a new member of the British Museum, I have been impressed with their courses and lectures and members’ tours. This coming Saturday we shall be attending their yearly Classics Day, three or four lectures by eminent historians and writers. With a 10.30 start and the Museum only opening at 10.00, we took the (expensive) decision to go up on the Friday and stay over until Sunday. A Saturday evening looming free in London, we were amazed how many theatre shows had tickets available at such a relatively late date. We have booked a visit to the Cambridge Theatre to see Matilda, having seen an exert on TV recently and been blown away by the young actors. So, what started as a spend on train fares and a Museum lecture has snowballed into a two-night hotel stay and a musical, with all the extra meals thrown in to the total. This third book had better be a bestseller!

The British Museum’s Classics Day is partly held through City Lit, a college sited just off the Strand near Charing Cross station. I had signed up to City Lit a year or so ago for some reason but had never been to any of their courses or watched one online. As I was signing up for the Museum’s day through the City Lit website I noticed a course on the archaeology of Southwark, an area along the south bank of the Thames and where I had created my imaginary theatre for my most recent books. Being outside the city walls in the 16th century, the area was outside the laws of the city and that is why the theatres, gambling houses, stews (brothels) and many taverns were established there, as others were to the north of the wall in Smithfield and Shoreditch. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity, and the coincidence, and went to it last Saturday. Starting a little later at 11.00, it was no hassle getting up to London on time, trains busy but no problem, everyone going out somewhere or on a journey and not worried about work…at least not many. An excellent day, nine people there, enough to get a mix of views and a chance to talk with all at some point. I am considering two or three other courses in June and July and then the college closes for August so will have to wait until September for more. Some courses last over several weeks, others form part of a qualification, but I think I will settle for a variety of one-day courses on any subject I’m attracted to…rail strikes and engineering works permitting…hmm.

City Lit, London. My photo 08/06/2024

What else? The third novel in what has become a series about the boy actor at this imaginary late 16th century London theatre is complete in its first draft and editing has started. It stalled several times so it will be interesting to see how it reads. I definitely brought in too many characters early on and will have to sacrifice or combine a few. These three seem to have covered approximately Spring, Summer and Autumn 1590 so I think another will have to move forward a year or so. A plague struck London around 1591/2 and the theatres had to close with the troupes going ‘on tour’ to avoid the disease and to make a living. It would make an interesting back-drop for another story. I also just recently got the idea of a biography of the main female character, a kind of woman who had to write under a man’s name and had to remain unnamed despite her important ideas and contributions. Whether she writes her autobiography or her husband writes her life or a modern-day historian does after stumbling on her papers, I have not decided, and it may never take off, it’s just a vague idea at present.

Whatever you’re doing in your life, remember never to stop learning – find a course or museum near you and discover new things. It will keep you young and may just stave off those terrible illnesses of old age.

Old friends

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It’s sad how the passing of someone you knew long ago can lead to reconnecting with people you haven’t seen for the same length of time. The death of a deputy head from my old secondary school brought many people together either at the memorial service or to watch it online via YouTube. While many had kept in contact with a small group of schoolmates, either ones they encountered in their professional lives or had continued to share an interest from schooldays, suddenly everyone was connected again, initially through shared memories of the teacher then through individual memories of our time together at school. The teacher was a remarkable man, one of those strict disciplinarians with a heart of gold, an unbelievable intellect and a human touch. |Of course he had his faults and I expect his wife could have doubled the length of the service by listing them all! But the fact the church was jam-packed and hundreds followed online suggests the man had something special about him.

What followed, after the initial recalling of incidents involving the teacher over the many, many years of his service, was a gradual recollection of major and minor moments from schooldays. Riotous behaviour mixed in with innocent incidents, almost criminal activities alongside annoying a quietly-spoken Music master. And people who we had not seen, met, or spoken to for nearly fifty years were ‘liking’ and replying as if we had just met up after the summer holidays. Much is said about the harm of social media but here was an example of its positive side. Many may never speak again to their classmates, teammates, or fellow ’70s teenagers, but for a week or two we were all back together again, hopefully a little more tolerant and understanding after a lifetime of batterings, losses, and loves. Our hairlines might have receded, our waistlines increased (unless the doc has got hold of us), but in our heads I guess we are all still that 14-year-old schoolboy with long hair, flared trousers and teenage hang-ups (do they ever really go away?).

It will be interesting to see how the next few weeks play out. I expect the number of posts will fall away – after all, how many incidents can you recall after so long and how many were just things that amused you or involved you and no one else. In the end I guess we will all end up speaking to ourselves. But, maybe not, maybe old friendships will be renewed, new ones made even at this late hour, and as the few other staff members pass away I suspect we will all meet up online again, a few fewer each time. Let us hope the cohorts of the ’80s and ’90s pick up the baton, as the cliché goes, and continue the meet-ups. And the generations beyond them.

Hey, Honey, I’m selling…!

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Okay, one key word missing from that heading in case you think I will adding ‘New York Times Bestseller!’ to my next book cover – FREE. Still, these days, when I don’t really try to send the books anywhere apart from family and friends, it’s quite pleasant to check a Kindle Freebie Promotion and find a few books – yeah, only four as I type – have actually been downloaded. I’ve read in a number of forums that these free promotions no longer guarantee multiple, or any, ‘sales’. Even in my little corner of the Kindle world I used to get ten or twenty ebooks downloaded when I put a volume in a free promotion for five days. More recently I found none shifted, then one last time, and, hell!, four so far this time. It’s interesting that it’s a book I wrote a few years ago, Home Run, which doesn’t feature the New York PI I created. It’s a simple tale of a boy and girl who were best buddies when ten then the girl’s family disappears overnight. The story then picks up years later when the young man sees who he thinks is the girl from his childhood. And so on…crime and the underworld come in and we head toward several possible endings. I really enjoyed writing that book, particularly the opening chapter when the two are kids playing baseball in parking lots. Let’s hope the four people, three in USA and one in Canada actually read them all the way and maybe even click a rating, good or bad. If you see that storyline pop up on Netflix or Amazon Prime in the next few years give me a buzz – I always worry someone might steal one of my badly written stories and make something of it. Wouldn’t that be the cruellest irony?

Photo by Eugenio Mazzone on Unsplash – MY KDP BOOKS IN TEN YEARS TIME…

Still, for a second it was a nice feeling this morning when I opened up the Report page of KDP and saw ‘6’ sales! I thought my latest Elizabethan adventure had hit the ground running. Never mind, the Elizabethans are a popular topic in USA according to my use of Wikipedia when checking information for the book – nearly 50% of the useful sites were based there, mainly in universities, so hopefully these four readers may check out my other books and progress to the 16th century rather than 1950s and 1960s New York.

Anyway, fellow writers out there, I hope your sales, even free ones, are not four, but forty, or four hundred. You probably deserve it more than me.

UPDATE: 24 hours later …and we’re up to 10 free copies downloaded! Move over Patterson and Rowling, your time at the top is over.

What? Another one? Nay…

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This is becoming a VERY occasional blog now, as I see I missed the entire month of February. My defence is that the new book, mentioned below, has taken a long time to write and edit. Hopefully mistakes are minimal. There are a couple of places where the plot threatens to repeat itself, but I think I have explained that way in the dialogue or narrative. I just haven’t the energy to remove one and then have to read through the book again to check if there are any references to it still there!

Photo by Simran Sood on Unsplash

And, yes, I’m cheating a little here by copy and pasting a couple of paragraphs from the new front page of this website, based on the new book (probably not yet posted by the time you read this).

So, Acts of Intrigue, is the sequel to my last book, A Play of Deceit, continuing to follow the adventures of James Sandys, a boy actor in London of 1590. Alongside him still is Cressida Somerville who he met in that first book. It’s taken a while to write and edit, ending up as the longest novel I’ve written so far, around 153,000 words. That sounds great, but, boy, does it take time to edit! I intended to order Amazon’s proof copy but having a choice of waiting about ten days with free postage or six days for a cost of around £6.80, I decided to print the pages out myself, as I had done so with a few previous books. With four ‘book’ pages to a single sheet, it only took 100 sheets and five minutes or so – a lot quicker and cheaper. It always surprises me how many errors I miss on screen after staring at the words so long. I’m sure the ‘finished’ copy is not perfect but you have to draw the line somewhere – life needs to go on…and the next book is tapping at my head already!

I’ve written in other posts how certain music or singers or bands become linked to each book I write, either through discovering a new genre of song from the plots or listening on the computer from my various iTunes songs or BBC downloads. This book, Acts of Intrigue, has become heavily linked with the Kent group, Keane, who first came on the scene back around 2004. I had lost track of them since then but it seems they went on to solo projects and are back together now and on tour. I’ve rediscovered their incredible debut album and slowly become hooked on their songs since then. I would thoroughly recommend a ‘Best of…’ album for anyone new to them or go back to their first one, Hopes and Fears.

And so, we plough on, to Book Three in the series (yes, I’ve used Amazon’s relatively new facility to group books together if they form a series). Some written so far while editing the new book, now time to write the various plots out on a diagram and work out where it all may lead. Writing certainly becomes a compulsion – I look around at other people in coffee houses reading the papers, reading a book, staring out the window, and I just think, ‘What a waste of time! You could be writing a novel!’

It’s Xmas, Jim, but not as we know it…

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Thought I would search out a few different readings for you over the Christmas period, but still with a Christassy feel.

First up, how about a dash of JRR Tolkien’s The Father Christmas Letters.

Every December an envelope bearing a stamp from the North Pole would arrive for Tolkien’s children. Inside would be a letter in spidery handwriting and a beautiful coloured drawing or sketches. The letters were from Father Christmas. They told wonderful tales of life at the North Pole: how all the reindeer got loose and scattered presents all over the place; how the accident-prone Polar Bear climbed the North Pole and fell through the roof of Father Christmas’s house into the dining-room; how he broke the Moon into four pieces and made the Man in it fall into the back garden; how there were wars with the troublesome horde of goblins who lived in the caves beneath the house! Sometimes the Polar Bear would scrawl a note, and sometimes Ilbereth the Elf would write in his elegant flowing script, adding yet more life and humor to the stories.

Next, Washington Irving’s The Christmas Sketches.

Dickens once remarked, ‘I do not go to bed two nights out of seven without taking Washington Irving under my arm upstairs to bed with me.’ Irving’s old-style oratories are as sugary-sweet and pleasing as a tankard of heavily fortified mulled wine.  In ‘The Stage Coach’, the Christmas break was such that: “It was delightful to hear the gigantic plans of pleasure of the little rogues, and the impracticable feats they were to perform during their six weeks’ emancipation from the abhorred thraldom of book, birch, and pedagogue.”

In ‘Christmas Eve’, we catch a glimpse of old games we might struggle to know these days, even those of us who grew up when ‘games’ on Christmas Day involved people and not screens – ‘shoot the wild mare’, ‘hot cockles’, ‘steal the white loaf’, ‘snapdragon’.

And, Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather.

IT’S THE NIGHT BEFORE HOGSWATCH. The stockings are hanging ready, the sherry and pies are waiting by the fireplace – but where is the jolly fat man with his sack? Why is Death creeping down chimneys and trying to say ‘Ho, Ho, Ho’? Susan the gothic governess has got to sort it out by morning, otherwise there won’t be a morning. The 20th Discworld novel is a festive feast of darkness and Death (but with jolly robins and tinsel too). As they say: ‘You’d better watch out…’

Lastly, for now, Adalbert Stifter, Rock Crystal.

Rock Crystal contains one of the best descriptions of a frozen landscape you’re likely to encounter in any book, as well as the most affecting Christmas miracle in world literature. Author Adam Kirsch called it a ‘parable of frightening depth.’ Two children―Conrad and his little sister, Sanna―set out from their village high up in the Alps to visit their grandparents in the neighbouring valley. It is the day before Christmas but the weather is mild, though of course night falls early in December and the children are warned not to linger. The grandparents welcome the children with presents and pack them off with kisses. Then snow begins to fall, ever more thickly and steadily. Undaunted, the children press on, only to take a wrong turn. The snow rises higher and higher, time passes: it is deep night when the sky clears and Conrad and Sanna discover themselves out on a glacier, terrifying and beautiful, the heart of the void. Adalbert Stifter’s tale, beautifully translated by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore, explores what can be found between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day―or on any night of the year. (Description courtesy of Amazon UK books).

So, enjoy your Christmas reading whatever it is. Personally, I shall be pulling out those old comic annuals of yesteryear and becoming an eight-year-old again.

Oh, okay, here’s the Star Trek team ready for the festivities…

I’ve missed me.

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Naught published here for a while due to writing the sequel to my first Elizabethan England novel. I just can’t do both, that and this blog. In the evenings I need the unthinking distraction of the TV or the very advanced thinking of wife and family. And cats.

Speaking of TV I recently signed up with Amazon Prime for a second time and came across an excellent series called The Continental. It’s something about providing the backstory of characters from the John Wicks films. I haven’t watched those so I came to the TV show as a stand-alone. It’s over the top with the violence and shootouts but not graphic, Mel Gibson is a hoot as the head bad guy, and the sound track is absolutely STONKING! It’s set in 1970s New York and you get a fantastic mix of ’70s music, even prog rock. I love it when shows get the music right, and for me this is spot on.

On that topic, I am still working my way through The Marvellous Mrs Maisel. I love it but find I need to space the episodes out. I think too much quickfire Jewish humour wears me down. It too has a great set of songs for the credits at the end of each episode. Very often they are 1980s pop songs, all relevant to the episode’s storyline, even though the story is set in the late ’50s and early ’60s. (some may be from the late ’70s, I’m not going back through them to check every single song…).

Of course, like most unpublished writers (published by a company that is) I fantasise at times about which actors I would have in a movie of my books and what music. For the former I always say I would want to give the chance to unknown actors, give them their big break, and see them on the stage at the Oscars (hah hah). Musically, for my last book, set in 1590 England I would go for the prog rock I mentioned above. I think there is a real connection between the period and the music. The second half of the 16th century saw an explosion of literacy in England, fuelled by the Reformation, printing and the theatre. I read somewhere that by 1600 the literacy rate was around 50%, up from about some ridiculous 5% or so in 1500. In the 1590s there was a real ‘fad’ for middling people to write a journal, something fashionable now, and many of these are waiting to be read by historians rather like the hundreds of WW1 soldiers’ diaries held at the Imperial War Museum. I just feel prog rock represented a similar burst of creativity and the long experimental, intricate, and, at times, ridiculous songs match the mood of Elizabethan times. It was my teenage period so I have to admit to a personal bias. I would love to hear YES’ ‘Wonderous Stories’ used as the backing while the theatre troupe get ready for a performance!

Right, better put this up before I lose it through forgetting how to publish on WordPress. Enjoy your writing, your reading, and your music!

Finishing line in sight – don’t dare move it!

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As long as I do not start to read the pages again, and spot an infernal error, I have finished editing my attempt at an historical novel (although it might be said my tales of a PI in 1950s New York qualifies as ‘historical fiction’). Three times is enough. Anyone who finds mistakes can give themselves a prize. This edit certainly denied the odd adage of losing around 20% of the original text; this time I gained an extra 5000 words. But understandably, since the first third was written while I edited the last book so research was limited, and being set in the 16th century there was quite a lot of historical references I had forgotten or simply got wrong. It was an enjoyable story to create and never lost my interest, in fact the danger was in continuing the tale too far as it would be an easy thing to do with two storylines and the background of theatre life, plays and writers providing endless lines to follow.

Members of the Stratford Festival company in Shakespeare in Love

One weakness I succumbed to along the way was to use more and more 16th century terms. Initially I was determined to stick with ‘Yeas’ and ‘Nays’ and ‘Forsooths’, a little taste of the times but not sounding like a poor man’s Shakespeare. But as I checked various items such as clothing, hats, food, I came across lists of words used in everyday speech (often produced by teachers in preparation for a class visit to a Tudor house) and it was too much of a temptation not to add a few ‘haths’, ‘doths’, and ‘trows’ (I trow = I believe). It’s not a mire of impossible sentences but I expect there is some inconsistency. I will know better next time and start with a list of terms to use and ignore any others I discover. Having looked at many authors of that period there is great variation in what language to use, some enjoying the avoidance of all contractions and all the ‘-th’ endings, others reading like a modern thriller with a brief narrative of the political situation to remind the reader it’s supposed to be set in the reign of Henry VIII or whoever.

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Addendum…by the time I posted this I had uploaded the text to Amazon and e-book and paperback should now be live. This is the first time I have actually felt exhausted at the end of a novel. Maybe it’s the greater length and therefore the longer editing time, or maybe it’s the historical element, so many little things to check. Hopefully there are not too many words used which did not enter the English language until later than 1590 – I’m told early on in Wolf Hall there is a word which only came into being in the 19th century; nice to think I may share something with Hilary Mantel.

Ramblings of a tired editor

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Don’t get me wrong, I do enjoy editing my books, it’s always a great surprise to read something I wrote a couple of months earlier and find it not only makes sense but that one or two sentences actually make me sit up and think ‘Gee, did I write that?!’. But after the second or third edit you start to wish you could rush ahead, search for the cover image, start the Amazon malarky which always seems to have changed since the last book you uploaded and then get to that wonderful pricing page and press ‘Publish’. At that moment I forget about that book and my attention goes 100% to the next which I have already started writing in the coffee house each morning. Of course, the sudden sale of a hundred or so copies on Amazon might bring my attention back to that just finished novel but I wait to see that happen.

In the meantime I entertain myself as best I can while editing. I mentioned previously the podcasts of History Hit, a streaming service. They continue to be of great interest and very informative, not just about the Tudor and Elizabethan period my book is set in, but also on Medieval, Ancient and American history. Sometimes the title of a new podcast can have me exclaiming ‘Oh, no!’ and thinking I will have to go back through earlier broadcasts to find one more interesting. Only to be proved very wrong, of course. When I read the words ‘Transgender fairies…’ at the beginning of a title you might imagine my facial contortions and exclamations. Being a man of many years who recalls cowboy serials, Batman thumping The Joker, Top Cat’s laconic asides, and the original Star Trek, you might excuse my initial lack of political correctness. Well, I listened to ‘Transgender Fairies of Early Modern Literature‘ and…it was darn interesting! Puck, Ariel, etc and learning how fairies changed in their appearance and roles from medieval times into Elizabethan, due largely to the rise of the theatre and the need to ‘show’ fairies through boy actors, and I had my eyes opened to aspects of Shakespeare, in particular, which I had never been aware of before. Yes, (or should that be ‘Yea’, steeped as I am in Elizabethan times), the highly qualified expert seemed incapable of saying a sentence without using the word ‘gender’ but she was extremely knowledgeable and a very fluent speaker. Another podcast on the theme of Shakespeare’s Henry V also opened my eyes to many other themes within that play which I, and I suspect many others, always saw as a pro-war piece of work which could be used by anti-war factions too. If Shakespeare meant all these aspects of his plays, then, boy, what a heck of a writer he was.

Margaret Leighton as Ariel, The Tempest SMT 1952
Photo by Shakespeare Birthplace Trust on flickr

To massage my aching brain after all these intellectual discussions I turned to iTunes. Loaded on my PC, I go for months not using it then have a spending spree usually after something in my writing sends me googling a specific genre of music. Hence my obsession some months ago with smooth jazz for my last book. This time I suddenly realised I was missing a lot of my older downloads in my iTunes ‘library’. Annoyed I had been somehow diddled out of my purchases because I had changed my computer, I did eventually explore all the menus within my iTunes and discovered that the songs were all there but were held on a different page and needed to be downloaded again, without cost, to my present library of purchases. So I spent a pleasant morning rediscovering songs I had bought over the last ten years and selecting just some to download again (a very quick operation I must say).

Among the menagerie of tunes was this one, from a phase of discovering dance songs from the clubs, courtesy of a young woman I corresponded with in the late 2000s when I was working partly online for a franchise website. Most of the songs no longer hold my interest but this one does, the relentless beat of the Freemasons and the ethereal voice of the daughter of Judie Tzuke, a singer I recalled from my younger days, one Bailey Tzuke.

And isn’t it strange how our brains work? I spent an afternoon editing one chapter which starts with the main character’s female sidekick donning breeches and doublet despite having another character say earlier that she must never be seen in such an outfit outside of the theatre (long story…). Later in the same chapter she is mistaken for being the narrator’s ‘escort’, despite still disguised as a young man, and goes into a tavern with no query of her odd appearance. I seemed to have completely forgotten what she was wearing and completely missed it all again during the edit! Then, about five hours later as I sat watching TV, it suddenly came into my head what I had done. Quite crazy. So, upstairs I shot, scribbled down the error needing to be fixed, and corrected it the next day. It makes me wonder what other gaffes I have overlooked…

A Woman Loved

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Two library books in a row which have caught my interest! Strange how this happens. On the lookout for something similar to the last book about Eleanor of Aquataine I came across this one about Catherine the Great. In my ignorance, I had not heard of the writer, Andrei Makine, before, despite the fact he has written a number of books and is highly thought of. Russian by birth, he writes in French and this copy is translated into English. I have cheated and copied below the library blurb about the book as I didn’t think I could better it. I was, however, disappointed to discover that this is the only book by Makine in my county’s library stock – in fact this is the only copy! – and a search of the neighbouring county showed they only had one other book of his. Looks like Amazon will be busy for me, even Waterstones fail to have copies in stock or speedily on order.

‘Catherine the Great’s life seems to have been made for the cinema. Countless love affairs and wild sexual escapades, betrayal, revenge, murder – there is no shortage of historical drama. But Oleg Erdmann, a young Russian filmmaker, seeks to discover and portray the real Catherine, her essential, emotional truth. When he is dropped from the film he initially scripted – his name summarily excised from the credits – Erdmann is cast adrift in a changing world. A second chance beckons when an old friend enriched by the capitalist new dawn invites him to refashion his opus for a television serial. But Erdmann is made acutely aware that the market exerts its own forms of censorship. While he comes to accept that each age must cast Catherine in its own image, one question continues to nag at him. Was the empress, whose sexual appetites were sated with favours bought with titles and coin, ever truly loved?‘

This is not a ‘heavy’ history book where you need an intricate knowledge of Russia over the last three hundred years. It is easy to read while slipping in comments about the developments in the country over the last thirty or forty years, and drawing parallels about life there before and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and putting in enough about the earlier times relevant to Catherine. The layered approach, about Oleg and his life, Catherine, and Russia, works very well and never becomes complicated or confused. The parallels in their fates are never forced upon the reader and the observations of similarities sensitive and informed. The book makes you feel you want to read more of Makine’s works – which suggests he must be doing something right with this one! His three-way tale has made me reassess my attempt at writing a book set in the past – Elizabethan England – and try and apply the same approach, although admittedly in hindsight and through careful editing. I thoroughly recommend this volume of Makine’s.

Spring is springing!

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Well, the clocks are going forward or will have gone forward by the time I finish writing this post so Spring is more or less upon us. And it was my rediscovery of this wonderful song by Viktoria Tolstoy, unbelievably the great-great-granddaughter of writer Leo, rather than the clocks going forward here in the UK which made me realise where we were in the year. Our weather has been up and down, cold and warm, dry and wet, no sense of a season. And to say ‘rediscovery’ is a little fraudulent as I only first discovered Ms Tolstoy a few months ago when I had my Eureka moment with smooth jazz referred to in other posts. She might not rival Stacey Kent in my affections but on this particular track she hits everything right, a stunning performance. And talking of Stacey, I saw the other day she is appearing at Ronnie Scott’s in London in April. Sadly I discovered this too late, every show is booked out. Ah, next time, next time.

A much earlier reference to Spring came to me many years ago when studying Shakespeare. His Sonnet 98. The absence of his love makes all the signs of Spring still seem like Winter:
‘From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April, dress’d in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh’d and leap’d with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds, nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue,
Could make me any summer’s story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew:
Nor did I wonder at the lily’s white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem’d it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play.’

Maybe we should go back further, to Aesop and ‘Winter and Spring’. Here Winter tries to lay claim to being of greater importance than mere Spring:
Winter made fun of Spring and mocked her for the fact that as soon as she appears, nobody can keep still;  some people go off to the meadows or into the woods, others like to gather flowers and lilies or perhaps to gaze upon a rose as they twirl it in the air or to twine it in their hair; while some board ships and even cross the sea to meet different kinds of people; no one worries any longer about the winds or the great downpours of rain from the sky. ‘Whereas I resemble a dictator or a despot,’ said Winter. ‘I command everyone to look not at the sky but down toward the ground; I frighten them and make them tremble and sometimes I make them content themselves while having to stay at home all day.’ Spring replied, ‘Indeed, that is exactly why mankind would be glad to get rid of you, whereas even the mere mention of my name is enough to bring them pleasure. By Zeus, there is no name more pleasant than mine! That is why they remember me when I am gone and give thanks when I appear again.’

And maybe to finish a spring forward to Rosamund Marriot Watson, writing under the name Graham R. Thomson, in the late 19th century:
‘THE YELLOW light of an opal
On the white-walled houses dies
The roadway beyond my garden
It glimmers with golden eyes.
Alone in the faint spring twilight,
The crepuscle vague and blue,
Every beat of my pulses
Is quickened by dreams of you.
You whom I know and know not
You come as you came before
Here, in the misty quiet,
I greet you again once more.
Welcome, O best belovèd—
Life of my life—for lo!
All that I ask you promise,
All that I seek you know.
The dim grass stirs with your footstep,
The blue dusk throbs with your smile;
I and the world of glory
Are one for a little while.
*****
The spring sun shows me your shadow,
The spring wind bears me your breath,
You are mine for a passing moment,
But I am yours to the death.‘

Whatever Spring brings you, may it be be full of hope and happiness.