For Lent ...

.. .I am giving up Procrastination.

Yeah, yeah.

Something I've been promising to do for a while is to post links to short stories online. There'll probably be a slant t'wards genre fiction, because so far I've found more SF / fantasy than anything else. But I'll try to include other fiction too. One a day, until Easter.

'The Lotus Eater', by Somerset Maugham
I (and thousands of other 'O' level students) read this at secondary school. It made such a strong impression on me that even a quarter of a century later, I find I still recall some sentences verbatim.

Rereading it now, though, I find that my interpretation's quite different, my sympathies tempered with a greater understanding.

FLARKE! FLARKE!

Flark: A Swedish term referring to limited, usually elongated, wet areas of exposed peat having an algal film and sometimes a sparse cover of sedges. The flark may be several hundred meters in length. On sloping sites flarks are narrow, being only a few meters wide but on horizontal peatland they may be a hundred or more meters wide. The flark axis is always perpendicular to direction of the contours. Synonym of mare (French-Canadian), rimpi (Finnish), and kulju.
(from the Arctic Geobotanical Atlas)

Alt: something that IKEA claim to have, but don't.



Fingers crossed for stealth shelf-purchase tomorrow ...