Ways to keep the brain exercising

 My wife and I are going to the USA from late March to mid-April, to see our son and his wife and their four children. We haven’t seen the two youngest children face to face before, so we’re looking forward to that. The youngest will be about three months old when we arrive, so it’ll be nice to handle a baby again – haven’t done that with any of our family babies for some years now.

I haven’t travelled such a long distance since 2012, so I’m having to get my brain into gear to deal with a couple of long flights. My wife, on the other hand, has been to the UK several times in the last couple of decades. She seems to cope with travelling in a matter of fact way, which is great.

And there’s a great deal more fiddling around with phones and devices this time – far more than I did on previous trips. Thankfully my wife is now experienced in the quirks of dealing with these things. On my own I would have had no idea what I was doing.

Thus, just over two weeks out from leaving, things feel a bit like they’re in limbo round here. People keep saying ‘you’ll be looking forward to it’ and I keep having this kind of blank in front of me. I think it’s partly a way of coping with the travelling. I’m happy to get to a place. Getting there, particularly by plane, isn’t my favourite part.

So it’s not easy to get on and work on the book at present. But writing these blog posts helps – they’re a way of getting the fingers into gear before tackling the vagaries of the book itself.

And another help has been writing Daily Quordle Poems. I started doing this in mid-2022. DQPs are four-line poems that take the four words from the Daily Quordle puzzle and use them as the starting words of each line. The poems may be serious, they may rhyme or not rhyme, they may be witty or funny or odd. The writer has the choice.

I’ve done DQPs that have the key word at the end of the line. Or two at the beginning of the first two lines and two at the end. Since the rules aren’t so strict that you have to stick to them in a Pharisaic way, I’ve played around quite a bit.

And at one point, because the person who was letting us know what the words were got a bit behind, I’ve written poems of twelve or sixteen or twenty lines, all with the Quordle words (usually in alphabetical order, just to add to the mix) as the first words or each line.

There are some 1800 posts on the official site – dailyquordlepoem.com – from a variety of writers.

Check a few of them out. Or try your hand at one for own entertainment.  

Here are a couple of mine from the past:

LIPID ain’t limpid, like your limpid eyes, my dear.
TULIP ain’t two lips, though you have two, it’s clear.
MUCUS ain’t music, though your words are music to my ears. But…

SPADEs is trumps, so it’s clear, hear this in your ears, I win again, my dear.

and this is a catch-up one with two days' worth of words:

DINER, perusing the racing guide, at LUNCH, in a
TRICE, changes his mind re the HORSE, whose
STYLE is in a state of SULLY after
COYLY losing not just the bettor’s shirt but his INGOT.