ITS MY WRITE

I like writing, sometimes words, sometimes letters. That’s not letters as in writing to a person but actual letters such as A, B, C etc…I like the shape and arrangement on a page. I write mostly using a biro on paper. I do type but feel there’s is no feeling, no emotion that the reader can see.

When at school and when I was given lines to write for punishment, which wasn’t that often I focused on the gaps between word. So the first line which read, “ I must not do…….. (fill in gap) was repeated say one hundred times. I would select a word such as “must” and on every line move it slightly left or right as compared to the same word on the line above. When looking at the whole page of lines the gaps between the words “must” and “not” swerved as if a river of emptiness flowing down the page. It amused me if not my teacher!

Letters and words of course have to mean something as this is the main way, we humans communicate. If I mentioned “elephant” then most will see an animal with a long trunk. Mind you if I say 2the elephant in the room” a different meaning maybe seen. Complicated I accept.

I wanted to create a series of glass human shapes and give this series a group name. The title “Mr Men” was already in circulation and everybody knew what that meant. I had the idea that I would call my series “Mrs Men”. Of course almost immediately I realise the gender specific reference which was not my intention so a name change was required. I moved onto “Mrs Meme” but flet the so called surname needed to be plural. Hence a change to “Mrs Memes” which I liked. All was going well and I made a few glassy figures in various poses. One reaction caused me to rethink. Someone mentioned a female reference to a comment. This was based on the letters “Mrs” being seen as female. Again this was not what I was aiming for so changed to letters or initials that were gender neutral. After all I was not making glass men nor women. I settled on “M.r_s Memes” which I hope is seen as meaningless as it is intended!

One of my Father-in-L aws, (being married twice entitles me to the bonus of having two sets of in-laws!) used to write letters to various people which were liberally sprinkled with words written in uppercase to emphasise a point. This gave a very arty appearance to the whole page, and one forgot the rambling lowercase diversions created with a scrawling biro.

I usually write in glass using uppercase but a recent commission saw me writing not only in lower case but in italics! Its actually quicker to write in glass using this approach although I enjoy capital letters all the time. Its my default and what gives me most enjoyment.

When it comes to engraving on glass then again its uppercase all the way. No room for any fancy fonts for me I’m afraid. Tricky enough to get all the letters the same size let alone making it more complicated with loads of curling words. Dates are different and pose a slight dilemma in that is “2/2/23” more attractive than “2nd February 2023”? I think we can forget about writing numbers as words although depending on the occurrence of numbers in an article I would always try and write a number out in full

So my take on writing is that its just a series of words arranged in a understandable fashion. My local priest has Dyslexia and sometimes gets his sermon mixed up. I await the day when its not that God is all around but we are all around God!