A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter B

Blashey-wadder

Dialect
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Wet, stormy weather; a blustery mix of rain and wind typical of Scottish conditions.

Detailed Definition
"Blashey-wadder" is magnificently compound and expressive, capturing the particular miserable combination of rain, wind, and general meteorological unpleasantness that characterises so much of the Scottish year. The word is itself a kind of weather — gusty, splashing, unruly. In poetry it sets a scene instantly and adds a darkly comic element of complaint about the climate that is central to Scots cultural expression. Weather in Scottish verse is never merely background but a participant in the human drama, and "blashey-wadder" makes that participation palpable.
Example
Example in poetry:
"Blashey-wadder" means wet, stormy, unpleasant weather; A poet might write: "Out in the blashey-wadder grey, / the shepherd trudged his thankless way." to set a scene of hardship; "Blashey-wadder fills the glen, / and drives the cattle hame again." establishes agricultural rhythm; "Who would walk in blashey-wadder air / unless love pulled them, bold and bare?" uses harsh weather as a test of devotion; "The blashey-wadder lashed the pane / while inside, kettle sang its refrain." contrasts outer storm with inner warmth; "She was born in blashey-wadder's grip, / the storm still resting on her lip." uses birth imagery to explain a fierce nature
Additional Notes
Blashey-wadder is a compound that demonstrates the Scots genius for precise meteorological vocabulary. Scotland's climate has generated an unusually rich set of weather words, of which this is among the most expressive. The "blash" element suggests the wet slap of rain; the "wadder" is simply "weather." Together they evoke a specific kind of miserable, grey, driving dampness that anyone familiar with the Scottish climate will recognise immediately. For poetry students, blashey-wadder and its kindred terms — "dreich," "haar," "smirr" — illustrate how environment shapes vocabulary, and how poets can deploy precise weather words to establish mood, setting, and cultural identity simultaneously.
Also Known As
Slush Dirty water Muddy water
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