Paper Never Refused Ink

Writer · Poet · Artificer

The sea, service, and the people caught between them.

One True Sentence

A thought, driven by rain, in a car park.
It’s not often that a Nobel Laureate and a Norrie spark an idea to coalesce from the firmament and strike one square in the brain. It must have been driven by the rain, as I sat in the car park. I’ll be publishing a sentence daily as a post. Those posts will live here on this page, under this menu, and in chronological order below.

A Moveable Feast.

“Sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, ‘Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.’”
~ Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

One Short Story to be Told
A dear friend of mine, the one-and-only Stan Notte, had a wonderful project called One Short Story to be Told, where he self-published a truly unique series of books between 2010 and 2014. The rare tomes contained just one short story each. These carefully crafted editions then circulated from reader to reader, navigating their way across the globe. I am so pleased to have been fortunate enough to read a number: to read, absorb, and enjoy the story, and then be part of such creativity by ensuring the story found a home with someone who would appreciate the wonderful tale as much as you did.

A thought, driven by rain, in a car park.
I will likely come back and edit this introduction; however, I’m going to riff off the bould Ernest and my pal Stan. This page is going to contain a unique series of true sentences. A little like the successful daily poetry prompt I devised for a small group of online friends and poets during the first COVID lockdown, I’ll try to make this a daily challenge. Whatever form they take, they’ll steer their own course. I intend to show the evolution of the sentences, if and when it is appropriate and/or interesting.

I often find that my observations lodge as a kind of shorthand. It is only later, when taking the time to dwell on them, that they can be rolled around the mouth. Unlike a gobstopper, instead of reducing layer by layer until the single seed of anise is revealed, these tend to grow. I’ll draw the line at going down the pearl analogy, as self-deprecation insists that I should quip about being more gong farmer than pearl farmer; however, it is true that it is these bits of grit around which many of my stories and poems grow.

(By the by, that likely wasn’t a seed of anise at all, but a rapeseed. Another childhood myth shattered!)

What is a sentence?
The Oxford English Dictionary defines a sentence as “A set of words that is complete in itself, typically containing a subject and predicate, conveying a statement, question, exclamation, or command, and consisting of a main clause and sometimes one or more subordinate clauses.”

Thursday, 24th April 2025.

Today’s sentence:

“Shimmering like a starling’s wing, the puddles of the pockmarked garage forecourt were the only brightness in a forlorn day.”

How did I arrive at the sentence above?
Well, it started in a garage forecourt on the most miserable of wet days in Ireland. The iridescence of the slick of small droplets of fuel oil, a permanent feature of any busy petrol station, was glistening on the many puddles. The surface of the station forecourt was cracked and worn, its concrete fractured and uneven. The colours reminded me of a starling’s plumage as it hung from the peanut feeder throughout the winter, shimmering like a living Christmas tree ornament. It chittered merrily as it dined, often upside down, on my cherry tree.

The sentence lodged for later use as:

  • “The diesel stained the puddle like a starling’s wing.”

It evolved as:

  • “The puddles of the broken garage forecourt shimmered like a starling’s wing.”
  • “Shimmering like a starling’s wing, the puddles of the pockmarked garage forecourt were the only brightness in the day.”
  • “Shimmering like a starling’s wing, the puddles of the pockmarked garage forecourt were the only brightness in a forlorn day.”

The daily sentences

Each day’s sentence has its own post, listed here in chronological order: