Weekly Photo Prompt: “Across the fence”

Welcome to my weekly photo prompt!  Every Monday I will share a photo which I like, and taking it as a starting point, I’ll endeavour to come up with a piece of creative writing.  This might be a 100 word story, a poem, haiku, limerick or longer piece – I’m not setting any rules apart from committing to a regular writing challenge to exercise my brain.  If you like the image I’ve shared, please feel free to use it as a prompt for your own work, give me a pingback and I promise to read and give my feedback.

The photos I use will be either my own or taken by my snap happy husband, so you have our permission to use them for the purpose of this writing prompt.  If they aren’t our own photos, I will only use them with permission and credit them to their source.

So without further ado, here’s this week’s photo, and my take on it:

A flutter of blue behind the hedge. A glimpse of hands, pegging out washing on the line. A neighbour, on a different street, whose house backs on to mine.

“I phoned the council about that tree you know. Parks and Countryside. Useless, they were. Didn’t do anything. And then, election time, that lass came pushing leaflets through the door, and I said to her ‘you just come round the back and take a look at this’ and you know, good enough, she did. And I told her straight, ‘you want to take some photos’, because look at the state of it. But then she couldn’t do anything about it really. It never used to be that overgrown. And the squirrels, of course, when they get into your eaves, the damage they can do. Pests, that’s what they are. Just vermin. My husband, of course, he used to keep on top of things like that, but now… You know, forty three years we’ve been here. It didn’t look like this then. None of these trees. But the council, they never do nothing. Don’t know what they spend all our money on. Oh well, my love, don’t let me keep you, it was nice to say hello.”

Let me know what you think in the comments,  and if you’d like to share your own piece of writing in response to this photo prompt, I’d be delighted to read it!

 

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