Posts filed under 'Imagination'
I grew up in the school of “if it’s a good joke, it’s worth repeating”. I suspect that, separate from this, I am genetically predisposed to like puns, which are a form of repetition in a way, causing you to think about what you’re already familiar with. But the upshot is, I’m all too good at telling people something again…or yet again…because I think it’s worth a mention.
So here’s today’s moment: managed to leave work early, and include a quick visit to RealFoods. I’m about to go in, and smell the familiar health food shop smell…and think, ah that reminds me of the health food shop I briefly worked in…and then remember that I’ve already written about it…
Now admittedly, I’m not visiting the shop all the time, having that scent-memory, boring you with the recollection etc, on a regular basis. But I do forget what I’ve said to whom, or what I’ve written. And the more I think it’s worth passing on, probably all the more likely I am to keep telling the story.
Catching myself at it again tonight, I felt a bit like the goldfish with the 10 second memory. I don’t want to write a string of blog posts that add up to “Nice bowl! Nice bowl! Nice…” And I also know that I get to see plenty of new things, because my brain takes in the fact that they’re new.
Every year I deal with applications from people who have hobbies I’ve never heard of before (underwater hockey, anyone?), health conditions I’ve never come across. And they go off abroad and email with situations I’ve never had to come up with a solution to before. That’s all before I spot things on buses, or open the paper to find out about the latest whatnot we’re all supposed to be interested in.
Blogs are partly about novelty, I guess. You don’t expect to see the same story cut and pasted in, day after day. Perhaps what I’m aspiring to is columnist status, where you can actively get away with repeating yourself, or mentioning particular people, because your readership has got to know them too, through you, and wants the latest installment.
Probably one of the main reasons I write a blog is because I love ideas, I love the variety in the world, I love seeing whether someone else has come across the same, and what they think about it. And some of you even tell me, too…
Some of the nicest thoughts are like the first strawberry of the year. (Yes, I have a conscious awareness of the first strawberry of the year, and a first mince pie too, bracketing the year.) You’d never claim that it was the first ever. But the ‘first for a while…and good!’ is worth a shout about, don’t you think?
November 21st, 2008
It’s a serious question when you’re eight, going on nine. Things are not just out there. You need to know whether you like them or not.
Rachel and David’s eldest is keen on space. She and Dan had fun setting up her telescope while we were there, and while you or I may be struggling to think what to wear tomorrow, she is looking ahead to 2020 and the next manned mission to the Moon.
At one point, she mentioned that she liked Neptune best as a planet. “Why?” “Just do.” (This is also important when you’re eight. And twenty eight or more. Sometimes we just do.) I think it helped that it was also blue.
What was interesting was that then the adults started saying which planet they like. I liked Jupiter, because it was the biggest. Her dad liked Saturn, because of the rings. Dan liked Pluto, because it was also the name of a dog.
It was a great reminder that we too had our preferences, even though we might have long forgotten some of them. Life gets a lot more complicated when we have to justify why we like something (or more often as an adult, why we are still doing something when in fact we don’t want to).
Perhaps it’s a good incentive to have a more immediate response to things. Meanwhile, I’m off to practise a learned response - a cup of tea.
November 20th, 2008
Public transport. It’s a marvellous thing for writing inspiration, or even just a little entertainment at the end of a working day. Sights from today’s bus ride home:
A Goth at a bus stop with black gloves with a skeleton pattern on the backs of the hands. As I tend to sit upstairs, I got the bird’s eye view, which included seeing a skeletal hand holding an apple…very Snow White?
Person sitting in front of me on the bus at one point, who had a fur trim to the hood of her coat, which matched the colours in her hair ie salt and pepper dark hair. It made me feel quite positive about the greying process to come, if you can make it seem like a fashion statement…
It’s all about perspective really. Left to my own devices, all too easy to climb inside my head, as it were, which can be a dark and not particularly cheerful place to be. (Particularly in the mornings on the way to work, when it’s not that much lighter outside.) But a bit of distraction is a good thing - we don’t grow out of the need once we’ve passed the stage of toddlerdom, it seems to me.
Equally, meeting with friends in cell group yesterday always brings perspective. Even though we’d not seen each other for just a couple of weeks, there seemed to be plenty to catch up on.
The morning papers at work fulfil a similar function. Yesterday’s G2 main article covered the issues of organ donation through very moving interviews with various people involved with the procedure in some way, from the parent of the child who donated his liver, to the man who received it, and the nurse who put the two together etc. However grouchy I may feel at students doing not doing what they should abroad, it’s a salutory reminder that I am not being asked to face the same level of difficulty in my life just now.
Of course, these various scenes, snapshots of others’ lives, are not just for my benefit. But I can choose to keep my eyes open to them - and remind myself to have eyes to see, where God has something to show me.
November 19th, 2008
Honest, it started as a book review, it is in no way intended to comment on any cabinet reshuffle…
Spent some pleasant time with Graeme and Shona over yesterday afternoon/evening and this morning, and discovered that one of the books in Shona’s recent acquisitions for her girls is Milly Molly Mandy.
For the uninitiated, Milly Molly Mandy is, as you can probably tell, very much a book that girls get to read at a youngish age. It fits in quite well around the Enid Blyton type stage. MMM (as I will now refer to her) lives in a little white cottage with a thatched roof, and has a series of shops at her disposal in the village. For added interest, there is a map of her village in the front of the book, to help you picture it for yourself.
I enjoyed MMM when younger, though to be honest any books that came within range were devoured from c. 6 onwards. Looking back it it, I realised I had to do a bit of explaining for Janna, my story time listener. Some of it is long changed: one of her friend wants to be a nurse, ‘with a hat with long white streamers’. Some of it seems up to date again: MMM helps her friend’s dad repaint a garden roller and a water butt. It won’t be so long until thatched roofs are back in, surely?
But after all, MMM speaks to all kids who want routine plus a little excitement. MMM has a group of friends, and they all talk about what they want to do when they’re grown up. MMM gets to mind one of the shops for an hour, and decides that, although she’d like to work in that kind of shop in the future, an hour is enough for now.
No one is talking of three day weeks just yet, as their economic strategy for surviving the recession, but perhaps an hour of work here or there, that you could happily stop when the owner came back, does sound attractive…
In these dark days, I do commend to you another childhood pastime which does well in adulthood: making up sequel titles with a given phrase. Perhaps it’s time to write “Milly Molly Mandy goes to Hollywood”, that long undiscovered follow up…
October 11th, 2008
Yesterday I did some half-hearted moaning about life in one’s thirties; today there’s another phenomenon that seems to creep up with age.
It’s well known (or well alleged) that women end up becoming like their mothers; I think the process is accelerated if you become a mum yourself. Facing tiredness or shock, whatever the cause, the brain seems to think the easiest option is to revert to saying what you heard when you were growing up.
Earlier on in the summer, I managed to cut one knee quite badly. Between shock, disbelief, and a fair amount of pain, it became difficult to say what I had hurt where. But one thing I knew: I was ’in the wars’, a family phrase which I hadn’t heard or used for some time, but that dropped back into my mind when trying to work out what had happened.
Sure enough, when I phoned my mum on our return, the first thing she said was, “Oh dear, have you been in the wars?” I didn’t know whether to feel comforted by the reference, or confused about being returned to an 8-year old state (or equivalent), where mums need a good stock in trade of phrases to say when something goes wrong. (This was probably better than her asking if I had ‘happened’ my knee - another phrase based on my brother saying that he had ‘happened his finger’, which then became used for other situations of minor injuries.)
The funny thing was, commenting to Dan that I was ‘in the wars’ made me look at the phrase at face value. In comparison with soldiers coming into the line of fire, in Iraq or Afghanistan, an accident at home hardly counts. And yet, in a child’s eyes, a big fall or something else upsetting needs a suitably big statement to go with it.
So, feel free to use it for your own mishaps. Or send in your own equivalents. Life has its tumbles, and if language has its comforts, one of them is having a good set of sayings to get you through a situation and back to some sense of continuity.
October 7th, 2008
It’s not something I want to promote about myself. But a little bit of virtual aggro, via the Heroes application on Facebook, does seem to help when winding down for the day. (I can at this point blame David Wilson, who invited me to try this application. It all started with fast cars, too. It’s a slippery slope.)
Something funny seems to happen in your thirties, when it comes to letting go of what’s happening in the day. There’s not much of the day left to disconnect from, by the time you get home. How do you do it, without taking the evening over it?
Not being much of a drinker, alcohol got left out of the picture as a way to unwind, for a long time, but I think it’s trying to make more of an appearance on my weekends. That sense of ‘phew, got to the end of the week’ seems to need more celebration as I go on. (Food is clearly enough of a companion to my days, as you already know, so it’s not necessarily helping me hit the ’stop’ button in the same way.) Let’s say I appreciate the treat when it comes.
Gardening started trying to enter the race this year. And yes, coming home from work, and saying hello to the plants (watering them too, on occasion) was a good option. But now it’s wet, or cold, or both, and the garden is back into that phase of being left to its own survival mechanisms for the next few months.
There is blog writing - though perhaps I need a new injection of ideas. Perhaps time to start listening into other people’s mobile phone conversations a bit more. (As if. I could probably write a new radio show a week on what I ‘overhead’ (without trying) on the bus each day.)
And for points of trying to make mind and body agree to slow down in the adrenaline rush, there can be su doku. A nice long bath is a winner in this department.
Recently, I have been feeling more and more that my earlier ambitions to make a difference in the world, to contribute, are getting worn away in the need to keep up - and then recover afterwards - day by day. No claims of special workplace trauma - we all have it, in fairly intense ways for many.
Is the solution to find a ‘quicker’ way to unwind, so that I can make the most of time outside of work? I’m coming to the conclusion that letting go of one set of lists at work, only to pick up another at home, doesn’t seem that attractive.
Probably the thing that cheers me up, and therefore helps me let go of work, is finding out how other people are doing. Ergo Facebook in general. I might even finally put up some photos of my own, given how much I like seeing other people’s.
Perhaps it comes down to holding on, rather than just letting go - holding on to what is important to you, day by day. And on that note, I’m off to hug the hugsband.
October 6th, 2008
It seems that blogs could be seasonal. A bit like soup. It gets a little darker, the need for stodgy food reappears on the shopping list…and for words, that familiar comfort, to make an appearance.
Or maybe they’re seasonal creatures, like birds. Come the spring, blog words need to go to warmer climes (warmer than Scotland anyway), and desert me. Maybe they lie on beaches and actually go quiet. Maybe they take a vow of silence and sit in a secluded monastery for a few months.
At any rate, words, ideas for the blog have been clustering about me again. It’s the inverse of that quote I’m sure I’ve used before - words vs digging ditches. In the spring, I did actually dig some ditches for a change - or at least, put seed into pots, and attempted some gardening.
Now the writer says to hell with digging ditches (too wet, too cold) and longs to write words. And perhaps you, who are her friends, write back…
September 16th, 2008
Same again folks. Back to the Isle of Jura. For all that it’s good to see new places, it’s also great to have ones that stay in your mind - and that you are part of.
We had been away three years. I couldn’t quite believe it was that long, but we added it up. However, Jura has been ‘abandoned’ by me before - but there’s always the opportunity to pick up again.
Jura is now one of two places that I have known and returned to since early childhood. The other is my granny’s house in Edinburgh. As people and places move on, and as I do too, being somewhere that is so familiar can be a great relief. Going there on holiday is continuity - not just with my past, but with my family.
We have family connections with Jura going back several generations. Although it’s about 4 generations back that direct family actually lived there, I become part of the subsequent story - the families who retained the link, who went there in their holiday time, and so on.
When I was a child, there was a lot of effort involved in going there - driving up from whichever part of England or Scotland we were in, breaking the journey with our aunts in Greenock who own the cottage. From there on, every part of the journey is mapped - enough of the excitement is in passing the places along the route that also have their own connections, or maybe just attraction.
As a child, driving up a hill called the Rest and Be Thankful had a huge impact on the imagination. Passing Inverary, where we had had separate visits - and where I could see the remains of a little tower on the hill that Dad had climbed up to. Driving alongside the Crinan Canal, sometimes seeing sailing ships passing along, above the height of the car. Coming into the painted enclosure of the harbour at Tarbert - and remembering the one overnight drive to Jura, where we woke up in Tarbert, and had sandwiches for breakfast, overlooking the pier.
For a child mostly living fairly far inland, access to a beach was a big attraction. But also to ferries - the big one and the small one. To seals. To red deer. To a coastline where each little part had its own name - and a story that, if it didn’t belong to me, belonged to another family member.
There is a point on the big ferry, heading out from Kennacraig, where you pass the opening of the headland, and come out to run alongside the Mull of Kintyre. Behind you is green, fairly flat - and ahead of you, an island - your island! With its distinctive three main hills, the Paps, it is a key moment.
Why take so long to tell all this? Normally I would get to that view and cry. This year, for the first time, it didn’t happen. I had returned to Jura more as an adult - somehow thinking more about others’ responses to the island than my own recollections.
Going on holiday allows you to keep an idealised view of a place. Not everyone gets to go to an island on holiday - even with Britain as it is - and to a cottage that ‘belongs’ to them. This time I saw the life on Jura perhaps more as it really is - hard work at times for the locals, what with rough seas cutting off ferries, pot holes that the council seems to avoid filling, new attempts to fill the main additional ’shop’ with a business venture that will last.
And in this era of being seen to be holidaying in Britain, spending to support the (local) economy, and so on, returning to Jura feels not just a logical choice, but one that contributes to more people’s future than my own.
March 25th, 2008
It’s how we’re built. Danger, uncertainty, you name it, humans are driven to one of two choices quickly. We’re familiar with the phrase ‘fight or flight’ to describe how our bodies make these choices very rapidly, even where our brain is not quite tuned into what we’re doing.
When it’s a sabre tooth tiger, fair enough - and a straight forward choice. But what of the colleague at work who sets us on edge, but who we have to keep working with? What about the sudden crisis or the email that demands immediate action? And what happens when, like it or not, we have to stay, for reasons of income, prestige, and so on?
Fight is not an option sanctioned by HR - at least, not the blow to the jaw type. All flint-topped spears to be checked in at reception before proceeding into the main building. While there’s various little fights going on with our environment, whether in our heads, our emails and so on, I suspect that flight is the main alternative for many of us.
And what is flight? I thought to call this post ‘Escape’, and often that’s part of the fantasy, whether through holidays, through weekends away, or even just the late-night gig. I guess I’m interested in thinking about the level to which we’re aware of our flight away from stresses, and the way in which it becomes hidden under other motives.
We have to eat. No quibble there. We have a nice range of foodstuffs available, lots of shops and eateries prepared to cater to us round the clock. But the chocolate bar on the Friday afternoon to keep going, the swift drink on arrival home, how many of these are treats, and how many are little escape mechanisms for us?
Stone-age man had perhaps some difficulties staying in one place - what with needing to seek out food, protect himself from others who might take this from him, and so on. Flight was probably forced on him more, but there were some advantages to it to.
Mortgage holders will know that flight becomes a more limited option when you have a reason to stay put year after year. Marriage, families, all of these are built to benefit from you sticking around. Hopefully, these things also mean you have less reason to flee, or even to fight so much to secure what you need.
But what happens when these responsibilities and different ‘threats’ seem to co-exist? How, equally, do we keep the threats from spilling over into the other areas of our lives?
You can see from the length of this that I’m musing, rather than offering solutions. The more I go on, the more I discover how many little escape hatches I use - and how, in various ways, they seem to become more necessary as life goes on.
Given that the blog offers its own means of escape, at times, I’ll reengage for now…for a bit, at least. Sunday evening TV is all about escape. Perhaps it’s time to do some more research.
February 24th, 2008
The home improvements continue…well, not apace, but at least they continue.
Part of the grand plan is to get more storage inside our wardrobes, and thankfully, the powers that be at IKEA foresaw that people would want to shift things around at different times, and created lots of nice holes to move new shelves into.
I wouldn’t put us as IKEA frequent flyers - it’s more like a once a year military operation, once we have secured someone’s car to make it worth our while. But I do love a good kit to put together. I do obviously let Dan have a go too, but I will even volunteer to put other people’s IKEA units together.
Why the appeal? Kits are good news for those of us who aren’t so hot on drawing, or cutting things terribly accurately, but still want to make things. It’s also quite fun to see things assemble gradually, particularly if they are a) big and b) handy for moving stuff off the floor/bottom of other wardrobes etc.
I tend to think that liking kits is also part of learned behaviour. Dad was very into model making when I was little, and I graduated to this myself in various forms: plaster of Paris moulds for various things you could then paint, peg dolls, soft toys.
Best of all was a model theatre - first you made the theatre from card, then you had a full opera and ballet with backdrops, bits to move on from the sides, fiddly characters to cut round, the works. I even learned the story of ’La Boheme’ from the synopsis they included with the kit, which comes in handy for watching ‘Moonstruck’ in later life.
Recently, makers of kits have been staging a comeback. Makers of Airfix kits - model aeroplanes and so on - decided to run an ‘experiment’ where one group of kids got to make a model, and the others got to play on their Playstations, or something similar. At the end of the time, those making models were asked if they would do it again, and if they liked it more than their usual computer game type hobbies.
I’m never too sure with tests like this how representative the findings are, but evidently a good number of the kids said yes, they’d give it another go. Besides, there are still kit cars you can make (and get a Q at the start of your number plate - a definite incentive), and even kit houses for those who want to build their own but fancy a bit of help. Onwards and upwards, see.
February 12th, 2008
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