L'enfer, c'est les auteurs.

I went to my first ever Creative Writing class today, @ the local library as part of the Scottish Mental Health Arts and Film Festival.

One of the exercises was haikus. Proper 5-7-5 haikus, with a seasonal imagery and dynamic middle line. We were given an object to inspire us...in our case, a lichen-covered, autumnal twig.

I wrote three thematically linked stanzas:

A brittle tree branch
snapped from its mother forest.
Fodder for writers.

Dark evenings' fun
from dry kindling. Nature
dried out for poems.

How cold these scribbles.
Wood burned, on table not hearth.
Sends out autumn warmth.

(extra points for spotting the Basho reference in the last one.)

Then we had to spend five minutes writing something - anything - about hands. Given that about 70% of the class was women over seventy...perhaps it was fortunate that I didn't have to read mine out:

Hands give great pleasure - which is why, in primates, god placed them so that they are adjacent to the genitalia when the primates are in their normal standing or resting positions. There are many other things that primates can do with their hands, but the African Ape species Homo is by far the most dexterous (or in many cases, sinistral). While the other two members of the chimpanzee subspecies, pan paniscus and pan troglodytes, are extraordinarily adept at unpeeling bananas with their feet, only the hairless chimpanzee is able to use its hands to communicate. This it achieves by tapping its fingers repeatedly against a complex arrangement of oil-based polymers.

Doris Lessing meets Douglas Adams meets Max Bygraves, I thought.