Posts filed under 'Imagination'
Most nights, no problem selecting what to write about. Tonight, I’m feeling weary, and suspecting a cold coming on.
Still, not to worry, as I’ve read enough of these journalist “oh dear, I don’t have anything to write about but I’ll spin some words” pieces.
Actually, if I’d called it “Has anyone seen my Topic?”, as I considered while typing it, that suggests whole new vistas of chocolate snack bar to explore. Not an inconsiderable subject, given that there’s been enough public interest in the UK to bring back Wispa bars.
How do people make the decision that they want to bring back a chocolate bar? I suppose you build a petition online these days, though the option of marching on the Bourneville factory dressed in large crinkly wrappers is another way to make your point.
Perhaps the other question to ask is, at what point does a company decide it’s a good PR point for them to bring something back? I’m aware of other companies which have strong customer loyalty - thinking of Lush, and Lakeland - which also herald when they are reintroducing items at readers’ demand. But to go back into production for a chocolate bar, with all the economies of scale and so on - you must need to be sure that people will buy it.
Fortunately, it’s not difficult to like a Wispa bar. It really is just chocolate. Easy. Except a little bit softer in texture, I suppose we should say. Not difficult to build up a new fan base when you have a product like that.
So, be careful of your water cooler discussions, my friends. You never know what a careless wispa could spark next.
November 14th, 2007
A little light tidying at work to finish the day. Our team has run an annual course for our students before they go abroad, and over many years, a lot of teaching textbooks have built up.
As it’s now been decided we won’t be running the course any more, in order for us to take on new work, those textbooks need a home. Thankfully we have a couple of colleagues just off to do TEFL courses (or CELTA as they are these days), who’ve been able to make use of some. And yes, I couldn’t resist keeping a few myself.
Some are collectors’ items in their own right, interesting now for what they reveal about life at the time they were created, as well as how people thought we should learn. Picture dictionaries are particularly revealing: what are the food items available on the nice picture of the market stall (and what aren’t), what clothes are the people wearing, what social patterns are revealed by who’s doing the shopping, and so on. Even a more recent book refers to ‘micro-computers’ and ‘diskettes’ - your average school child would certainly think the computers used even ten years ago were micro indeed.
Been reading one of them on the way home, on teaching vocabulary, and how much it relates to personal responses to words, exploiting different ways of learning etc. One of the authors, Mario Rinvolucri, comes up with some great exercises, some borrowed from psychotherapy techniques, such as having conversations in numbers so that you can express e.g. anger (or in fact other emotions) in another language without coupling it to words, and having to deal with meaning too. It’s the reverse of counting to 10 to calm yourself down, I guess.
It reminded me how closely linked are some of the things I love about language: teaching it, writing it, using it as a vehicle to explore who we are, our personal stories, and how we live and learn. I’m hanging on to the vocabulary book as much as anything to give me writing ideas, pre-set exercises that I can just try out, as a way of getting into writing without having to derive everything myself from scratch.
Some of the sentences in the book - that a whole world is within a word, through the meanings it conjours up - could apply just as much to teaching, as to counselling, as to writing. It’s that worlds within worlds that I love. A Roald Dahl short story also had a brilliant notion of words as a series of cogs, interlinking. The narrator of the story talks of the effect of putting a small word next to a really big one, and, in effect, setting it spinning.
At any rate, here’s some ways to get some words, and ideas, spinning, wherever they turn out to be useful.
You know me. I gotta use words, whatever I’m up to.
(PS the title comes from a poem, which the editor cites, but doesn’t say who wrote it. Anyone know?)
November 13th, 2007
Another title I planned a while ago, and on a much happier note.
I’m no expert, but I’m fond of the odd haystack. Bountiful nature and all that. Going on holiday to the Isle of Jura most summers when I was growing up, a relative there still had a smallholding, and you could see him out in the fields, gathering and forming the stooks by hand.
Later, there were the ‘burnt cupcake’ haystacks of Monet, in shades of pink and blue, as well as more strawy colours. One year I discovered the upstairs floor in the National Gallery in Edinburgh, which has quite a collection of these. Monet got a bit obsessed by these - as he did by waterlilies and a few other things - but it’s amazing the number of different colour combinations he comes with. Much of the time, though, the stacks remain the same shape.
I was going to say you can imagine my delight when… - and it wasn’t really as strong as that - we got to see loads more variants when on holiday in Poland this summer. But really, when you’ve grown up with square bales, roly poly round bales, and perhaps the handgathered wigwam type, I was struck by how many other variants you could come up with, should you have the time, energy, and more importantly, enough straw needing drying.
What was more impressive was how many there were in a relatively small area. We had been staying in Warsaw and came down on the train to Zakopane, the main mountain resort in the south. After Krakow, the train meanders for a while, in and out of foothills, for a couple of hours. In that time, we saw I think seven different variants, including ones with ‘ears’, ones that looked like double axles, etc. A couple of years further back, we saw another variant in Slovenia, where there are covered drying racks in many fields, something that seems to be distinctive to that country.
My question is: who teaches them how to do that? Is it set for the area, or is it up to the farmer’s own choice - and perhaps time? It’s not that the hills are so high in that part of Poland that you are really cut off from other areas, as you could argue you might be elsewhere, as an explanation for why so many types remain.
Perhaps it’s also that in the UK, we’ve been told how mechanised farming has become, how industrialised, effectively. Travelling up to Aberdeenshire in September to meet foreign students, where field after field was full of identifcal cotton reel bales, you had some sense of this. Yes, it was quite pretty, but you also lost sense of how far you’d been travelling after a while. Which is why it was nice to see in contrast such variety, ingenuity - and personality.
Making hay while the sun shines eh? It’s a lifestyle thing.
November 12th, 2007
We’re told that inspiration strikes in unlikely places. So today, while hanging up the washing, came up with a new pun on the former UN Secretary General. I thought it could come in useful for someone who is trying to be very diplomatic, and has big intentions, but is limited to operating in (rural?) Scotland.
Now I’m sure there aren’t lots of occasions where those options combine, although it might have been an option for my grandfather, who came from Skye, and went on to be a diplomat.
I digress. The main thing that came to me, just after feeling smug at this combination, was the sinking feeling that someone, somewhere, must have spotted this, and got there before me, probably while Perez de C himself was still in the job.
This is the trouble. There are all kinds of nice potential titles out there, with wordplay, puns even, and I have the awful suspicion that someone else has got there before me. Perhaps the best option is to keep a list as they occur to me, test them out, and perhaps do a google search to see if anyone else has used the same.
It probably says more about a) the non-phonetic nature of English writing, which allows you to have various phrases that are written differently but sound alike b) the prevalence of puns in British newspaper articles and c) my own fondness for wordplay.
Now all I need is another useful phrase to round off the post, but perhaps I’ll save it for another title…
October 23rd, 2007
All of a sudden, quite a lot of new stuff coming up all at the same time…
I’ve been on the singing team at church for quite a while - not bad as a way to be involved, and more creative than cleaning the loos. (If you’ve come up with a creative way of cleaning loos, let me know. Although it may depend on what state the loo was in to start with. Maybe we’ll leave that one there…) This means I turn up around once a month, practise the songs with the band, learn any new ones, and sing with the rest of the band during the morning service.
This morning, things felt a big sluggish, and I could feel myself getting a bit miffed, because we were singing some good stuff about God. There are usually gaps for people to sing out their own songs to God (ie made up on the spot, though usually familiar words), and all of a sudden I found myself doing this.
Now you might think that if I could sing into a microphone in front of others, it wouldn’t be such a big deal to do this. But it’s bit nerve wracking, particularly with the thought “Is this right? Is this what God wants to say at this point?” And I don’t want to sing platitudes for the sake of it, just because there’s a gap.
I was almost literally shaking by the end of it…but I also knew that it had all come from God. Because the uncertainty went, the words were there, the tune was there, and somehow, I also knew how to lead it back in so that others could sing bits of it too.
Why write about this? Because it’s another mark of what God has been changing in me. I love music, I’ve sung or played for ages. But it’s taken nearly ten years to break through to this in what is my familiar church, the place where all the significant things have happened since I became a Christian.
Coming home afterwards, I spoke on the phone to Dan’s mum, and was mentioning a group I’ve been to one life stages. Talking to another person in the group, they had also experienced changes, confusion, but a greater creativity coming with it. It’s something I’ve found too, that’s moved me on to getting this laptop and writing. But to gain this for something else that’s important to me…I didn’t hope for it. I didn’t ask for it. But I’m certainly grateful.
Will I do it again? Perhaps the more important issue is: am I prepared for God to do it again? I think the answer has to be yes.
Will I go along with Him? If He can help me, and show me now, the hardest step has already been done.
October 21st, 2007
It’s my new regime - although I’ve now broken it by starting a new post after already writing one.
Getting my laptop, I decided that moderation would help in my first forays online on my own computer. So: one blog post a day. One friend invite a day on Facebook. All very sober and self-contained.
Except there are days when the writing juices flow a little more, and this seems a little constricting. But then, I think it’s probably good. Having said I want to write more, and got myself a laptop to make myself do so, having some regular daily writing habits helps me get beyond any notion of writer’s block that I might have. (It does happen. But not much. My last performance appraisal notes that I do ‘at times’ express myself in a rather lengthy way. Perhaps the managers have just been tuning the rest of it out.)
Given that I’d like this writing game to be a longer term one, it’s probably good however to start with good habits. I’m not sure that Facebook is a good habit, but at least it gets the fingers moving on the keyboard, which can be a problem in the morning. So far, have NOT been looking at Facebook in the morning - far too tempting to keep checking it - but you know, should I manage to work from home and need to do some light typing to wake up to, it could be helpful…
I’m sure there’s other useful one a days that would keep me going. I could learn a new word a day. I used to write a new quote a day in my diary, when I kept a daily diary - although I didn’t remember them, I have to say.
Perhaps it’s worth continuing to do at least one nice writing thing a day that is just for me - beyond blogging etc. I’ve started some ideas for a cookbook cum food memoir, and am adding new categories fairly regularly. Maybe I’ll add a new category on the blog, and start it off there.
One a day. One way to a writing habit.
October 17th, 2007
I promise I won’t write too many posts that start ‘the joy of…’ Because we know what the original was, and that’s one thing I won’t be writing about here…
But anyway, leftovers, because as ever, my mind turns to food, and what to do when there’s more ingredients in the house than are scheduled to appear on a menu that week. (Yes, I do plan meals for a week. It’s a lifesaver when you both leave work at 7pm and can’t make any decisions by the time you get home.)
Dan’s brain is well tuned to come up with completely new options. I find I probably do better with a bit of input - in this case, a few assorted ingredients, around which I can turn out variations. Many of the things I cook regularly - risotto, vegetable casseroles, omelette - are interesting to cook, and eat, at least in part because they aren’t the same every time.
So, today, this meant I could cut up and freeze a parsnip for future use (probably a risotto), make some carrot and caraway soup, and finally, the new recipe, make some pomegranate icecream…This because we took several attempts to buy cream for another recipe, Dan bought some and brought it home after we had then got cream elsewhere, so of course it had to be used up…and the Coop was kindly selling pomegranates cheap…etc.
I was chatting to a friend on Sunday about mammoth cooking sessions (yes, we’re both a little obsessional in our devotion to cooking), and the fun of actually cooking that flows from day to day. By flow, this isn’t where the food is sliding off work surfaces or out of compost bins (hopefully), but where there is enough time to make use of leftovers.
I had a time like this around Easter last year, where I was meant to be gardening and painting. In fact, the other family members did these, I cooked for them all, and everyone seemed to be happy…It felt like there was enough time to be a bit more flexible, experiment with new ways to use things, different leftovers suggesting new combinations, and so on.
I’m not sure why I have such a strong need not to waste things - it’s part of a generation’s advice that has (until relatively recently) seemed very out of date. Now we’re all meant to be saving the planet by every small decision, being frugal with food, planning ahead, it’s actually quite trendy. I think. It’s strongly supported by Nigella, anyway.
In the meantime, talking to the same friend and her husband, we think we’ve come up with a new group for Facebook. It’ll be ‘Look what bargain I got at the Co-op’, or something similar, as they heard through our breathless excitement at the treasures marked down day by day. They are moving to another town, but will be near a Co-op. What comparisons to come, eh?
October 16th, 2007
Ages since I last wrote a blog post…but hopefully that’s about to change. I am now the proud owner of my very own laptop…Many thanks to Dan who took my list of what I wanted it to do, read up for me, made recommendations, and even collected it today.
The title is an attempted play on Virginia Wolf’s essay, “A Room of One’s Own”, esentially arguing for women to be given status as writers. The notion is that a woman who wants to write needs somewhere to call her own. In Wolf’s view, it was having a room, somewhere to go, and in her terms, to write fiction.
Now, with the internet, there’s plenty of places to go to write, and plenty of things to write, too. But having the means to write…that’s the key.
Years ago when I wrote lots - a daily diary, regular poetry, as well as lots of school work - it was pretty much all long hand. Paying attention to my English teacher, I learned to touch type as a skill he said was really useful - and this really before computers were making much of a presence in schools.
Turns out that now, as he described, it really is just as easy to compose when typing as when writing by hand. Easier in some ways, faster, with a certain happy rhythm to it. Not that I don’t like writing by hand, but I found that the words don’t flow in quite the same way now.
So, here’s to my own laptop. In time, maybe I’ll lower my standards, even use it for work in the 9-5 sense. But the big reason for getting it is finally to have a computer to play on, to do fun stuff. The writing, the surfing etc, is meant to be for leisure, rather than justified by performance or to do lists.
Talking to a few other women, it does seem to continue to be the case that the men rather hog the computer in evenings and weekends. Mine has the excuse of running his own business, and working from home is a perk in this case. But I thought there could well be a reason why there’s more men writing their own blogs than women, and time on the computer is probably part of it…
So, some rom - even some ram - of my own. Here’s to making the most of it.
October 8th, 2007
I’d love to say that I’ve done lots of writing this summer, after all my ‘I must write’ blog posts, but I have made a little start.
I now have a notebook for writing. Some of it is just funny things that I see or come across, in the hope that they may form the basis for writing. I’m finding myself thinking a lot about the mechanics of writing, what beginnings look like, what endings look like, and examples of what seems to work, from film and TV as well as fiction, to work out how good stories are put together.
I’m also working out what I enjoy reading/viewing, in terms of stories, and hopefully that may give me an idea of what I want to write about.
I should probably take my notebook on the bus, as my best option for observing people, one-off stories in newspapers, signs misread that suggest a different meaning, that kind of thing. While my journeys to and from work have usually been about pacing myself into, and out of, work, perhaps now I can use that ‘not required to do anything’ time to take my imagination for a walk.
I also find I’m reading the literary sections of newspapers more, seeing what critics think of books, though not so that I can only write in a way that ’sells’. There are times when critics express that happy amazement you get with books that do take you somewhere new, or when they write about what and why they write.
Jeanette Winterston has some amazing pieces fortnightly in the Times Book Review where you can feel yes, I really am doing society a favour if I write. All of this is good for enthusiasm that books and writing are about pleasure as well as about ideas, both of which I want to hang on to in the process of trying out some writing.
Just after coming back from holiday, Dan and I met with a Polish couple living in England but visiting Edinburgh for the festival. The lady was a former pupil of mine when I last taught in Poland, and has gone from strength to strength, say I with pride though not much responsibility. The man is a lecturer in marketing, but went on to tell us the kind of societal trends behind products that he actually researches.
Probably no big surprise that it’s more and more about story telling in marketing, so that a product is based in the context of a story that you can be in too. I’d read a few months back about society shifting away from acquiring things to acquiring experiences, and he agreed that the story telling comes into this too.
In some ways that’s good. It doesn’t take much looking around to see that with the web, everyone has the chance to tell their stories more. In other ways, it can be a pressure - there are yet more stories out there, what space is there for mine? But I have to remind myself that my criteria for writing when starting in this direction were not of marketability, but of doing something that I love, for my own ends rather than anyone else’s.
It’s tricky to keep this focus as I start out, not to interrogate what I do too much. Thinking about writing while on holiday, I distinguished between writing as art and writing as craft. Sometimes with crafts, the fun is more in the process than in the end product. I’d like a nice end product too, some day, but for now, there’s no substitute for hard craft.
August 25th, 2007
I feel a little retro in a much earlier sense. I’m finally reading some Sherlock Holmes stories, and yes, they are cracking!
No, you can’t guess really what is happening, because Holmes does get to comment on things that you only hear about in the next paragraph, rather than Conan Doyle giving people more clues as Agatha Christie does.
I should admit at this point that I am not a huge reader of crime fiction, so I’m not very well placed to work out what happens next. But there again, I read a bit of newspaper on the bus yesterday where Ian Rankin had been commenting on JK Rowling being a classic crime writer in the way she sets up her stories. We did guess a bit of what was coming in Harry Potter (though not ‘the big revelation’ in book 7) so maybe my powers of observation are just not elementary enough for Holmes.
The books are fascinating - so much of it is familiar, but some of it clearly lost as far as our society is concerned. At one point, Holmes and Watson proceed to a scene where there is a scissors grinder, plying his trade on the street. I’m sure some people would like there to be scissor grinders still, but it’s not something that makes it into G2 as a complaint against the Government, for example.
We also saw a great couple of interviews last week, one about Stephen Fry, one with him. Reading Holmes, I feel that Stephen might approve…It’s not his ‘holy canon’ of Woodehouse, Waugh and Wilde, but it is of a society where indiscretion could ruin a reputation in a much more serious way than the supposed shock headlines re celebrities.
A society of bonnets, and smoking jackets; of people having probably more regularised habits than today, so that Holmes can tell how they type, where their bootscraper is placed in relation to their front door…I did wonder slightly whether our fragmentation might allow him to draw as good a set of conclusions
as in his books. Or perhaps Holmes would have a good career ahead of him as a social anthropologist, a reader of people’s food habits, a pundit of what their clutter really says about them. No doubt the joke ‘alimentary, my dear Watson’ has already been made, so I’ll stop right there…
August 25th, 2007
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