Posts filed under 'Out and about'
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
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
Not quite the ton (that really would have been scary), but I reached national speed limit type velocity today on the A1. What’s more, both I and other drivers lived to tell the tale. (Mind you, you would hope so, with the driving instructor next to me.)
Driving lessons continue, and today included driving in the dark - though heading back into Edinburgh through an amazing sunset first. Doing 50 on the old A1, not many other cars about, you get the feeling that you might just be able to do this…or so I hope. The really scary part will be getting in a car on my own, and going from A to B. (Not to mention actually owning a car…Perhaps I really should have done this in my teens instead, when optimism might have outweighed natural wariness a bit more.)
I now take very seriously how people talk about getting tired doing motorway driving, as I certainly was tired heading back. But overtaking lorries seems a little more familiar now, though having a bus overtake me on the inside lane of dual carriageway on the way back into town was less helpful. Particularly when he’d parked somewhere silly outside Haddington earlier on in the journey.
I am doing other things than driving, but when the driving goes OK, it seems a bit more noteworthy. Maybe a different topic next time.
October 28th, 2008
I am trying to remind myself that learning is incremental, and that you don’t always move forwards. (Especially when you’ve tried reversing into parking bays for the first time.) Interest rates can go down as well as up, as well we know. But it’s frustrating when you’ve a limited chunk of time booked for driving lessons to start me off again.
Still, there are some good things - building up familiarity with roads I know I will need to use locally, gradually learning I don’t have to change down gear by gear every time I approach a queue of traffic. The sun has shone pretty much all week so far, which helps. I have survived driving roads which I worry about, like Sir Harry Lauder Road, and my roundabouts are improving a bit. I have even discovered what electric wing mirrors are for - only to be aware that I won’t have them in the car I’ll get to drive.
Was reading yesterday about kids’ behaviour deteriorating just before they master a big developmental change. Maybe I can claim the same, and some smoother driving is just around the corner…
October 16th, 2008
But can you name the tune the words come from?
I am having refresher driving lessons. Fifteen and a half years on from stunning my mother with my ability to pass my driving test (she took me out to lunch on the strength of it), I am actually behind the wheel again - and so far, actually quite good.
So, I can change up gears (changing down not as good), brake going into bends and accelerate coming out of them, and actually start to believe my driving instructor that I can do more in higher gears than I thought. I can also go over speed bumps…a necessity where I live. And I even got to practise putting fuel into a car for the first time.
Driving is definitely in the ‘feel the fear…’ category, but as it is moving into the ‘feel the need…’ category more, I think I might finally have incentives for keeping going. Even the fact that I am not back to complete beginner status is a boost to the ego.
The strange thing is being able to drive through areas that feel busy, because there’s someone at my elbow to tell me what to do. My bus journeys in the morning are a bit more interesting now, because I am even trying to read the road ahead, as though I were driving. (The only down side is, every time I think we should be changing up a gear, we pull into a bus stop. Obvious limitations with this form of virtual driving.)
I’m not even going to think about how many million lifts I owe in lieu of how many I’ve been given over the years. But at least some of them have been paid in cake or other foodstuffs, I reckon. And for those friends who live outside of the reaches of Lothian Buses, I might even be able to visit you. Not immediately, but a lot sooner than walking over, anyway.
Dan pointed out that we missed our window of opportunity to drive when fuel was cheaper. My inner Scot/Yorkshirewoman is going to be terrified by the cost of it all. But little by little, we’ll get there.
October 14th, 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
Off to Peebles last weekend to see my parents - and go to part of Peebles’ second ever autumn food fair. Not quite the highlight of the social calendar that the spring book fair is, but a good enough excuse to go and support a local event.
What I hadn’t quite bargained on was that there would be quite so much emphasis on meat. Fair enough in some ways, given that there’s farms around, proper butchers and the like. But if you were a veggie and/or had problems seeing meat, you would probably have had to avert your eyes for about a third of the stands…
Other friends have done the farm shop thing, and shared out half animals, that kind of thing. I must admit I thought it would hard to fit e.g. half a lamb in a freezer - and which end would you get? But then we saw what that looked like, which was certainly a lot of meat. We’re even thinking about splitting a half lamb order with my parents to make it a bit more affordable (at least, spending money on meat rather than a second freezer). Except I have to eat some more brambles first. Or maybe make rather a lot of risotto to clear out some stock. Etc.
It’s all nice and green and Guardian reading of me to want to get local produce - which I do. And help farms in Scotland keep going - which I do. But then I see the prices of the food and baulk a bit. Even the veg boxes are more than I’m prepared to spend, it seems, which is a shame for one who really likes fruit and veg.
So, as ever, we bought little things - though this does allow me to plug the Chocolate Tree, based (I think) in Gifford, East Lothian. Not only do they do the dark chocolate with interesting flavours thang, they also do a proper Nutella alternative. They even boast that you’ll never go back to Nutella after you’ve tried it. Now the difficulty is whether to open the jar - and fulfil their promise - or inflict that on someone else by passing it on as a present…Food for thought, one way or another, if not as much food for the plate.
October 2nd, 2008
Sometimes it seems I’m at my happiest when heading from A to B, with space to think up titles for blog posts, or the like. After much deliberation for this one, I settled on black gold.
Would it be a hard-hitting commentary on oil over-dependence? Not really. An oblique Asterix book reference? Closer territory, though as I recall, that was about oil too. What is far more important to the world economy at the moment, is free stuff. And the black gold of the article is all about the joy of brambling.
Had a half day off, after my time on the exhibition stand, and by five o’clock or so on Friday, decided that a good use of time would be to head off to the cycle path, not far from our flat, and pick some brambles. Usually we’re off doing this earlier in September, but one way or another (ie rain), bramble plans had been delayed.
Life along the cycle path is quite pleasant. Cyclists were heading home from work, or on early weekend excursions. One chap stopped me to ask where my rucksack came from - this turned out to be a lament on the fact that he couldn’t replace his current one with a similar kind, and hoped that mine (which looked like his) might be a new one. There were a few dogs to say hello to, but mainly there was the fun of filling tubs with brambles.
When I was little, brambles tended to get used up in crumbles. Any juice left over from stewing the fruit would be kept as a sauce to pour over ice cream - this was known as ‘blood’. Very satisfying when you’re 8, and the attraction of it still remains. Equally, I had a birthday book, and on the page opposite the start of September (and my granny’s birthday) was a picture of the Flopsy Bunnies out picking brambles. (I think Beatrix Potter called them blackberries, but obviously you can’t be good at everything.) Being a bit of an afficionado of autumn, the conjuncture of all these things on adjoining pages seemed to suggest the essential importance of brambles.
I’m sure that if I kept brambling enough, I would be able to come up with some kind of complicated metaphor for what it teaches you about life, given the twin perils of nettles and bramble thorns that you have to overcome. It is true that the fattest brambles seem to grow behind nettles. Equally, turning slightly around from where you’ve been picking shows further drifts of fruit that you didn’t spot first time.
Like many things in life, the ultimate bramble patch is the one just further along the path from where you are…where all fruit will be large, juicy and easy to pick without getting skewered by the nettles again. But perhaps another, deeper appeal of all this is filling one’s storehouse with good things - and only for the cost of looking, and a few stings. Some entertainment comes without batteries, and some food is not vacuum packed within an inch of its life.
For both these things, and for switching off most of your brain for an hour or so, three cheers. Next stop, elderberries - perhaps in a couple of weeks or so.
September 28th, 2008
…Post-it note?
But of course there is. A free pen. A free cotton bag. A free jute carbon neutral bag. In fact, a free policy booklet that you hadn’t planned on reading in the first place.
Despite Scotland’s happy insistence on state schooling for the majority of its pupils, there’s clearly no such thing as a free education either, if you’re running an exhibition stand. I was struck by the number of IT exhibitors whose products started at a couple of grand upwards. Struck equally by the teachers I spoke to who were enjoying the seminars and the buzz, but had no money really available to spend on their department.
Having just come back from two days on an exhibition stand, at a Scottish schools event, one thing that struck me particularly was the waste that comes with a large exhibition. I was heartened by seeing one company retrieve their quantities of bubble wrap, and rewrap the materials they brought, but they did seem to be an exception.
The talk, however, was free - and teachers enjoy a good talk, so there was plenty of chatting. After two seminars with very low numbers, I was pleased to be in one where a teacher name checked half a dozen opportunities my organisation offers, AND got that response we all long for: the immediate “Wow, how can I get some of that?” That’s the kind of response, from speaker and audience, that you can’t buy.
Thankfully, smiling is free. Encouraging teachers in celebrating their successes. But I discovered that saying thank you to the organisers, when leaving, was in fact priceless - one person in the site office commented “No one ever stops to say thank you…”
Results: one heart at ease; one pair of feet waiting to be freed from their shoes.
September 25th, 2008
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