Author, editor, attempter of this thing called life. Social anxiety warrior. Re-Connections, a collection of short stories, published with Ocelot Press, 15/10/2025.
Yes, I know I haven’t been here much since returning from my trip to Britain, and I have to keep this short, but I want to tell you that I will soon have a visitor here: Jean Davison, author of The Dark Threads, which tells of her experiences after being misdiagnosed (unknown to her) with schizophrenia as a teenager.
If you haven’t read it, this might be a good time to do so.
“Multi-tasking” is a word that originated from the computer world. As I have belonged to that world for a long time, I probably knew it before it became common parlance. In that sense, it doesn’t really mean that a computer performs several tasks at once. It means that the computer performs one task at a time, but can hop between the tasks so quickly that it appears to us to perform them simultaneously.
Do humans multi-task in the same way, or do we really have the ability to do more than one thing at a time? I think the answer is the latter – up to a point. If women are considered to be better at multi-tasking than men, why am I so bad at it? I think that’s because I’m too busy thinking about what other people think of me. I multi-task even before I try to do something else as well.
Anyway, that was just a preamble to telling you that I’ve been reading two books at once – in the computer sense, that is. A chapter from here and a chapter from there.
One of the books was The Dark Threads by Jean Davison, about the true and awful years during which the author was misdiagnosed as being mentally ill. I was very moved by this story and might devote another post to it.
The other was a pocket novel. Pocket novels are (or have been up to now) romances with happy endings. They enable readers to escape from the real world and lose themselves in a world where everything comes right in the end.
The two books couldn’t be more different and complemented each other perfectly. I was able to escape from a real and frightening world whenever I wanted to.
I remember school teachers telling us not to start reading a book before finishing the previous one. I can’t remember why. Perhaps they thought the first book would probably remain unfinished.
Do you multi-read?
The challenge: 104 words including:
… as the apple fell …..
It’s time to return to the challenge and a timely prompt, as apple and honey symbolises hopes for a sweet year, which is what I hope for all my readers.
Sweet Dreams
As the apple fell from the tree, it wondered what would happen next.
Would it fall far from the tree?
Would it join other apples in apple-pie order or make up an apple-pie bed?
Would it be compared to oranges?
Would it be the apple of someone’s eye?
Would it upset the apple cart?
Would it become a bad apple?
Then it hit the ground. That was the last it knew. Just as well. A little boy found it and ate it all up. And that was the end of the apple.
Except for the core, from which grew a beautiful apple tree.
It’s good to be back home. It really is. Back to my family, my home.
But. Twenty-five days without news (almost) was great. The news here seems to be designed to make us melancholy.
On top of that, this is a day for remembering. Eleven years ago, I was at work. Someone told me a plane had crashed into a building in New York. I thought it was an accident. On the way back home, it became clear that it wasn’t.
We were on holiday in Ireland when our ten-year-old son announced that Princess Diana had died. “Not possible” was our reaction. We were wrong.
As a child, I was always at home when these things happened. John F Kennedy and his brother. Aberfan. And more. The TV screen didn’t lie.
But I have come across some good news today. About our gold medal in the Paralympics. And about a rather special army officer. They put me in a better mood on this sad day. So does Andy Murray’s well-deserved win, which I stayed up to a rediculous hour to watch.
… mid September.
I’m off to the UK. I might post while I’m away, but then again I might not.
Enjoy the rest of the summer!
I’ll leave you with my Twitter banner:
The challenge: 107 words including:
… would seven prove to be too much? …..
I found this one hard for two reasons. It was hard to think of a case when a number could be “too much” and not “too many”. Then it was hard to fit the prompt into the text. I think I succeeded in solving the first problem, but not the second.
Is seven too much?
She was looking in her purse. Tomorrow, I would take her back to the airport, and we could all relax. No more talk of good Uncle Ray, who miraculously came back from the dead to take her to the airport. Or Uncle Simon – the bad brother.
“I want to give some money to the children. Is seven too much?”
Seven hundred shekels each? How generous!
She started counting out coins and the penny dropped. Seven shekels each. Enough for a cheap pen or small bottle of cola. Yet she was right to wonder: would seven prove to be too much? “Keep the money for your next visit.”
The challenge: to use 100 words to produce a creative piece with this prompt:-
…together the flames…
Together the Flames
together the flames
divided the ash
together the harmony
divided the discord
together the landscape
divided the debris
together the meal
divided the nibbles
together the discussion
divided the argument
together the system
divided the crash
together the bonding
divided the loneliness
together the book
divided the pages
together the story
divided the words
together the outfit
divided the rags
together the dance
divided the steps
together the pie
divided the ingredients
together the material
divided the strands
together the computer
divided the components
together the sport
divided the farce
together we stand
divided we fall
together we live
divided
Boaz, the friendly dance instructor has taught this dance twice recently, so he won’t be teaching it again. He’s also put up a video of it on YouTube.
But I still don’t get part five. It’s hard. And the next folk dancing session is this evening. Oh well…. I’ll fake it as usual.
The challenge: to write 104 words including:
…. the line was drawn ….
Julia said this was simple, but I found it hard to decide what to write until I remembered the way we had to write up science experiments at school. And the green squiggly lines that appear whenever I use the passive voice.
The Experiment
Aim: To draw a straight line.
Tools: Pencil, paper, ruler, sharpener.
Method: The pencil was inserted into the sharpener and turned until it was sharpened. The paper was placed on a flat surface, the ruler was placed on the paper and the pencil was placed against the ruler. Keeping the pencil adjacent to the ruler, the line was drawn.
Result: The paper was found to contain a straight line.
Conclusion: It is assumed that a straight line can always be drawn in this way.
Evaluation: Passive voice has been used throughout this write-up. Unhappiness has been felt by a certain word processor.
I hesitate to file this post under Everyday life in Israel. What happened yesterday doesn’t happen every day. Ten years ago, it felt as if it did. Then a fence was built and, without going into a discussion about whether it was good or bad, it cut down on the number of attacks. Considerably.
So now they attack us in other countries.
When these things happen, everyone knows, everyone listens, everyone feels the loss, even if the victims were unknown to them. And everyone continues as usual and pretends everything is normal because there’s no choice. Perhaps, in this country, that is normality.
Oh, and we write about it. We write about trying to be normal, and we write about how a comedian responds. I’m not a comedian and I’ve never made a good job of trying to be normal, but I’m Israeli and I wanted to say something about this attack on this day.
Miriam Drori, Author