Back to the beginning with a new setting and new people.
Starting a group based in Comrie is a different challenge and certainly brings some new positives (access to the natural world) and negatives (limit of cultural spaces). However, the aim is to be inspired and Strathearn has beauty in abundance.
Comrie Croft is a campsite, a bike repair shop, a myriad of mountain bike trails and walking routes, a bunkhouse, a farm shop, a cafe, a wedding venue and occasionally a music hub.
There are also symbiotic small businesses adjacent such as Tomnah'a market garden.
Here is some of Tomnah'a's flowering wisteria, beautiful and dreamy, especially with the early summer sunlight and cool air sinking into its leafy shade. However, it's not what I was initially drawn to or wrote about...but I neglected to photograph the silver birches!
Five minute task
Silver birches - I sat between the craggy trunks of the silvery birches, like an elephant's legs, but not its trunk.
Above the young rounded leaves weep on soft branches, fluttering back and forth in the wind with a soft ripple against the first lime catkins.
Something happens to me in the freaky five minutes I give everyone for the first task; I do something I always advise against, I am overly flowery in description. It leads to saturation (the one thing I recall being "taught" in a writing course from many years ago) and it detracts from the highs and lows of the prose. However, it is what I did here and I cannot promise I will not do it again; it's the pressure.
Main task
The Bikers - The man smiled as he stopped and put his foot down. The trail was rocky, dusty and uneven with dips where puddles had once been but now dried up in the warm air.
The breeze rustled the forest leaves above his head and cooled the light sweat on his brown. He was high above the croft but could hear the low thrum of the A85 and the booming of guns; was it clay pigeon shooting? He wondered.
The track was wide enough for a landcover now, not as narrow as the board and rock path he had heaved his mountain bike over higher up the hill. He took a swig from his water bottle, the liquid was body temperature but he was grateful of anything to moisten his parched throat.
The road forked here and the steeper route down the hill was marked with a black arrow.
He pushed off, standing on the peddles so as to save his tender rear end from the worst of the rocks and bumps that were testing his fork suspension.
A screech of brakes from behind him made him move to the left but it was too late, another bike barrelled into him. Two bikes and two riders tumbled down the gravelly path.
Dust and small stones stuck to his sweaty skin, his shin was burning and he looked down at the bloody graze in the confusion of pedals and legs and handlebars and hands. He shook himself and realised there were not all his, the other bike and rider were tangled up with him.
After this session, in which I got chatting during the strict 40 minute writing period, it occurred to me that maybe carrying a piece of writing over to another week might appeal to the group as an option. Clearly I finished my story in media res here, which was not planned and I could resolve if I returned to it in another session.
Sometimes you just run out of time.
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