A Blackbird Sings

The second small stones anthology, "A Blackbird Sings", will be available shortly. Now I'd be misleading if I said you should buy it because it contains my work. It does, but that's misleading nonetheless. It contains a single piece of my work which consists of a grand total of twenty words. So if you don't want to buy it because it's me, then why should you buy it?

Good question.

You should buy it because it's full of tiny observations about the world we live in from all sorts of writers. The brief was, as in the previous collection, to write things that are short, perfect reflections of our everyday experiences and they writers manage to do just that. Every piece, selected from thousands by the editors -Fiona Robyn & Kaspalita Thompson-, is a small polished gem of writing.

 

So where can you get it?

You can pre-order it from Amazon right now and on the 1^st November, for one day only, the Kindle edition will be free to download. As soon as I have a link to buy the book I will post it here.

Meanwhile don't forget that my own books, which actually contain considerably more than twenty of my words, can be found by visiting

http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/Robert_Hale_travel_and_poetry

They are also available from Amazon though I'd prefer you to visit the publisher directly on the link.

KTFV

I've talked about KTV before. It's one of the standard ways in which Chinese people amuse themselves. For those who may have forgotten my previous post KTV is a kind of Karaoke but the difference is that you hire a private room, go in with your party and sing KTV to each other - nobody but your friends to see (or hear) you. I have a new question about it though. Why do so many Chinese people seem to get so much enjoyment out of something they are so bad at? Now I have no illusions about my own singing voice. Frankly it's awful. I couldn't carry a tune in a bucket but compared to the friends who yook us last night I am Pavarotti, Freddie Mercury and Elvis Presley rolled into one. The hideous racket that ensued whenever one of our CHinese friends took the microphone was like the wailing of damned souls in the lowest pits of hell.
Now I do know a couple of people here who can actually sing, whose songs may be incomrehensible because of the language barrier but who can, nevertheless, belt out a decent, entertaining tune in a close approximation to the original. They weren't there last night. Instead we were at the opposite end of the scale. It's good of them to invite us but, on the whole, I'd prefer a less painful evening out. Say a root canal filling.

A rare delicacy

A post that is meaningful to so very few people...

yesterday, after a year of trying, I found a shop in Baiyin that sells baked beans. Just cheese and bacon left to find, now.

On one page (addendum)

I inadvertently missed out the most impossible* one of all.

5. At this time tomorrow __________ the museum.

a) we're going to visit
b) well be visiting
c) we'll visit
d) we're to visit

If you can pick between those four answers your better at this language lark than I am.

(* And yes, I know "impossible" is supposed to be one of those adjectives that you can't put "more" or "most" in front of. I don't buy it. Never have. It's just more bad advice.)