Sometimes the world goes rattling ahead and we expect that nothing will stay the same.  But he’s still a teacher, I’m still working with teachers (and aspiring ones), and all of a sudden you realise that quite a few things can stay the same.  And it’s rather a nice feeling.

I also heard from a friend working abroad - who is taking the trouble to put up lots of nice pics on his blog of life in Asia.  Having another friend living in the same country, it’s great to get more of a sense of what life is like there, with both of them in mind.  Sometimes speed of change is good - how much easier is it to keep up with people, even after a gap, when it’s so quick and easy to find out how they are getting on, via emails, blogs and so on?

Today, it was time for a game of ‘oh, you know…X too’?  A friend at work was showing pictures of his wedding, and we recognised that their photographer was probably related to someone I know from a completely different context.  Admittedly, the longer you stay in Edinburgh, the easier it is to play this game, but it’s still nice when it happens, particularly when you’re also saying goodbyes to other people heading away from Edinburgh.

What also interests me here is that all these connections this week came through men - when it’s still probably assumed that women have the monopoly on keeping address books, remembering birthdays, and generally keeping communication flowing.  Maybe these chaps are all in the New (Communicative) Man category.

But still, three cheers for continuity.  Britain may be a bit hard pressed at the moment, what with difficult financial circumstances at so many different levels.  It’s not the ‘Blitz spirit’.  But it’s still welcome. 

The part of the paper this was in has two regular columns - one is a country perspective (written from someone who seems to have started living in the country more recently, and at times is rather bemused by it), another a very townie perspective (particularly that week’s one, where life anywhere other than in London is treated with a certain suspicion).

Nothing new, eh, but given that most of us swapping jams etc live in or near cities, I wondered if that makes us city bumpkins?  Perhaps there’s a lot of us in that situation - we may have grown up in smaller places, have come to the city to study or work.  Several years on, here we still are, enjoying a lot of the benefits of the larger place but hankering after some of the aspects of smaller places, such as being a bit closer to nature.

Maybe instead those of us who got together are foodies, or environmentalists, or both, responding to this particular economic phase: looking at the recession, natural resources reducing and so on, and having a spot of home production to go with it.  Or it may be a stage in life, if trying to feed growing families.  (Maybe we can get a group grant from Good Housekeeping, or the Guardian, if we feel particularly self-righteous about it…)

Maybe it’s part of (early?) middle age - enjoying the little things in life, simple pleasures like watching the colour of elderberries as they’re cooking away; doing a task that allows you to slow your brain down a bit.  Maybe it’s the belated fun of the pick ‘n mix - swapping things means that I get to try other people’s food that maybe I wouldn’t have thought to make, or to sample something new amid the other familiar items. 

For my part, it’s also part of a growing desire to be creative - to make things, have fun doing so, and share a bit of that with others, particularly if they enjoy that too.  Yes, I’m doing it in part to avoid too much Christmas present shopping later, but also because I like the process of making things - particularly food-related things.

All of the above.  But what matters this weekend is that the apple chutney I made in September is now tasing very good with cheese…

Sometimes, in the midst of waiting for various things to happen in other quarters, life takes a slight turn, and I find my own green shoots - small perhaps, not a ‘green shoots of recovery’ moment, but still worth celebrating.  Spending time with family, doing new things with friends, trying new recipes…

For all of my struggling with decrease of daylight at this time of year, somewhere along the line I find that this year’s autumn has a bit more of the mellow, less of the mists of the same time last year.  Blogging at that point was an escape, a place to rail a bit at life.  This year, I restart the blog again…and then find I am doing things again, away from writing, and that there is perhaps a better balance.

A friend of mine is also exploring new directions, like me a little at a time.  Neither of us necessarily sought out these things, whether hobbies or new approaches, but we’re finding life in them, and turning to find others encouraging us on.  That helps me breathe a bit easier - enjoy what’s in front of me.

Sometimes hope is stronger than we realise.  The green shoots may seem thin, but we see them there one day, return to them the next and find them still there.  Sometimes they stand out because of the earlier days spent looking at ‘bare ground’, waiting for something to change - but not just because of this.

Much of this experience is tenative, a little fearful still.  There is not the big rush of the large celebration, the milestone in life.  But it’s still there, still real, a small harvest.

The Economist has been the way I ‘connect’ with the real rather than the virtual world over the last ten years and I think it may have just lost the plot.

We are being encouraged to save more - or at least pay off our own debts - and buy less so that we don’t get into debt in the first place.  To find a voice that is so usually sensible suggesting that a nation of savers has got it all wrong is a bit of a shame.

Germany is Europe’s best hope of encouraging a change towards responsible citizenship, enlightened laws, local action and green industry.  I wonder if Cameron, Osborne, et al will berate Merkel for her country not buying enough tat.  Hopefully not.

Having just bought something of value - a watch - the first one I’ve bought since 1995 (or worn since 2003 if I’m honest), we should indeed be saving more and spending less.

Tut, tut Mr Economist.  Go for it Mrs Merkel… get those Euros in the bank.

Renault’s marketing people have - as the title suggests - given a very poor name to their new eco car.

It’s called the Fluence.

Unfortunately if you put an e at the start of that, it sounds like e(f)fluence.

To be fair, an effluence is a flowing out, something being let loose.  In my mind it has connotations of a bit of a pong.

He used to say ‘what an obnoxious effluvium’.  Quite a vocabulary building lesson for a seven year old.

So, a car called Fluence might be okay if the electricity it uses will eventually come from rotting veg or human poop, but I don’t think their marketing department covered themselves in glory on this occasion.

What is impressive is that it will charge to 80% capacity from a 230v source in 20 minutes.  That’s quicker than my phone…

The cycle path network is where trains used to run in the past through the north of Edinburgh.  Our possible commuting loss is our free time gain, and one of the reasons I like living where we do - easy to get about without always travelling on main roads. 

As well as the brambles, we saw quite a lot of (mostly now empty) raspberry canes too, which led me to think that we need an earlier sortie down there next year.  We were also able to get some rosehips, some elderberries, and some other berries which I enthusiastically hoped were sloes but turned out not to be when I got them home and checked.

There’s clearly a good level of traffic up and down the cycle paths - some cycles, plenty of people out on foot too.  What interested me was the range of responses that our brambling brought out in passersby.

Most positive: two sisters plus dad: “Blackberries! Excellent!” said the younger sister, and they stopped to pick and eat near us.  The elder sister lost no opportunity to tell the younger one what not to do; the younger one lost no opportunity to eat brambles and ignore her sister.

Next response: a dad and a son going by.  They both seemed to know what we were doing, and the dad then proceeded to talk to the boy about large bramble roots as they then walked on.  He had a point - some of the runners coming out from the plants were particularly impressive (or aggressive, depending on your interpretation) this year.

Somewhat worrying response: family and friends party on foot, youngest girl in full princess dress regalia, but still at least four years old, I think.  As they passed, she was heard to ask “What are they doing?” I had to hope that someone would tell her, but they didn’t while we were in earshot.

What saddened me about the last response was that such a simple and easy activity was unknown to the girl, and that she and her family were missing out, not just on treats but free treats, and a family activity too.  When you can get free and exciting sauces for icecream from cooking brambles, as well as the brambles themselves, what price princess dresses?  

Oscar has been learning some songs in English, and their visit was punctuated by spontaneous “If you’re happy and you know it” singing sessions.  Two on the Royal Mile, on separate days, one on the way up Arthur’s Seat (if I remember rightly for the last day).

What was nice was a) getting a sense of when Oscar was enjoying himself, by his choice of song and b) seeing the reactions from passersby.  One couple clearly thought this was a good idea and joined in one occasion. But for me, the fun was also seeing Edinburgh from the perspective of a 5 year old boy, and enjoying all the spontaneity, singing included, that that allowed for.

Oscar was occasionally unsure of what he was actually singing…”Slap you sigh…” turned out to be [if you’re happy and you know it] slap your thigh! But his number skills in English were well developed, allowing for some good bus number spotting when heading into town, and we all got by in a mixture of English and German (a bit of a treat for me too, that way).

We took in tourist attractions, to be sure, but also identified car types on the road, collected shells from the beach and strung them together, discovered a sea slug which was iridescent, played some card games, posed for LOTS of photos, tried bilingual bedtime stories (having the same book in two languages), and engaged in significant role play while climbing Arthur’s Seat, following orders from General Oscar.  I was certainly happy…and thankfully, I think our visitors were too. 

I’m usually not even awake enough for that, more about staring out the window and hoping to wake up after the mid morning coffee, at least.  But every now and then, I see a few sights from the bus that wake me up a little: if only to try to work out what I saw.

Large man approaches the nursery near the entrance to Granton Road.  He is carrying a small girl on his shoulder, and her rather pink rucksack in one hand.  As the bus pulls past, I realise that he has a tabard on the back which says “Security”.  Is this a metaphor for our society’s fear of harm to children, or just a man dropping off his daughter at nursery before going to work?

Passing a group of commuters, one reading a paper while standing at the bus stop, I realise that he appears not just to be reading it but sniffing it…Is he hoping to impart the information more quickly? Are there any lingering solvents he’s trying to take in?

Another man stands at a bus stop, with a small child in a sling on his front.  The child gets gradually larger as the weeks go by.  I never see him interact with the child.  The child never looks up at him either.  But the child does seem peaceful.  Perhaps they are just allowed to be as vacant as I am in the mornings.

Another lady boards the bus in a smart outfit, all vintage dress and flowing shawl.  She carries what seems to be a wheeled suitcase, and at first I think she is a tourist.  Then she keeps turning up with the same suitcase, but different outfits each day. 

She still wears the shawl on a day which is tipping it down.  I still wonder if she is in fact a tourist, as opposed to a resident, who will either wear a wind and rainproof jacket all year round (like me) or a T shirt all year round (like some of the people who wait at my morning bus stop).

When I was a waitress full time, for part of my gap year before university, I worked in a cafe which had a lot of regulars.  As members of staff, we knew to expect them. Some of them even gained nicknames in time (whether they knew them was another matter).

As a usually daily commuter, at times I feel similar to this, spotting the regulars as well as the ‘irregulars’, in terms of the unusual.  Certainly I don’t think I dress in an exciting enough way to stand out to other people watchers. But maybe I’m a regular to someone else, caught in their own dream of morning on the move. 

What stood out for me more was a Storyville documentary on the impact of the Beatles on the young people of the Soviet Union in the early 60s, and beyond.  An example of good journalism, I would say: the starting premise - that the Beatles’ influence helped the fall of Communism even more than perestroika etc - was actually confirmed, again and again, through the film.  The maker of the film indicated his initial uncertainty at this claim, but there were so many people interviewed who iterated the claim that you got to feel by the end that it must be true.

The bit we laughed at was hearing how someone worked out how to make a guitar pickup out of telephone components - result: sudden rash of vandalism of call boxes the next day as lots of people rushed out to try it for themselves.  (Not commending vandalism, but in terms of an example of effectively railing against the system, it did have a certain kudos.) 

By the end of the programme, seeing footage of Paul McCartney playing a concert in Kiev - to a crowd standing there throughout pouring rain, hearing one of their heroes playing “Back in the USSR” to them - it was hard not to wipe away a tear. 

For some of the interviewees, it also brought home to me the impact of banning religion under Communism, and the desire of people to find something to believe in.  Lennon may have quipped about being bigger than Jesus, but if Jesus is banned, then it’s not entirely surprising if people choose to find something or someone else to believe in, and some people really did see the Beatles in a more religious light, even before their visits to India. 

It also reminded me of the impact of what people pass on to you.  Both Dan and I grew up with hearing the Beatles - my parents had the records, Dan’s mum even got to go to a concert or two and scream with everyone else.  Reading this little booklet from the newspaper, with current and contemporary assessment of the albums and individual songs, it was interesting to compare their comments with my own take on some of the songs.

Sergeant Pepper is the album everyone know - or feels they do. As an adult, the trippy references become clearer - as a child, it just sounds like something akin to Alice in Wonderland “where looking glass people eat marshmallow pies”, part of that same happy environment of nonsense that is hardwired into children’s literature in the UK. 

It was quite fun reading others’ comments in the booklet about their own take on certain songs, if hearing about the Beatles as a child. My brother thought that “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” was about our dog Lucy (there’s not a lot of dog references in the song, I’ll give you), for example.  “Yellow Submarine” may annoy adults, but works perfectly well as a kids singalong - not every pop band can achieve that, as well as astounding the adults with their latest innovations in sound.

It wasn’t just that the songs were part of my childhood.  References to the songs were also part of my childhood: Peter Sellers’ take off of “A Hard Day’s Night”, in the style of Richard III; “Here Comes the Sun” being used for the theme tune to the Holiday programme on TV.

They formed the backdrop to key activities such as holiday car journeys - the album Hard Day’s Night was a crucial part of the car tape repertoire, which in turn meant that we all sang along.  Long car journeys from various parts of England, up to the west coast of Scotland, give you a long time to tune your ear into their harmonies, and to experience that thing so satisfying as a child, your parents enjoying something for themselves and including you in it.

So it seems that wherever we are on the long and winding road since Beatlemania, we still need them.  We still enjoy them.  Through new computer games, we can even learn to play and sing like them (finances and equipment permitting). And we still find new uses for their songs. 

Reading this little booklet, there are several references to Paul McCartney adding in the song “Her Majesty” at the end of one album, and various people (Lennon and critics alike) disliking the song.  Cut to a few decades later, and a certain concert for the Golden Jubilee - and suddenly we realise that there’s even a song there, ready made, when a certain songwriter is important enough, and long lived enough, to sing that song to the lady herself.

Stew vs. mash is not my evening meal quandry (particularly as Dan is kindly off cooking something completely different), but more of a musing on terms used to indicate when a cup or pot of tea is ready.  Brew, draw, etc, all fine - but how likely is it linguistically to get two terms that get used for other food activities AND actually fit with each other, in terms of their other meaning?

Purists will tell me that stew is the point when the tea has gone beyond ready, but it just interested me to see this little pattern arising, in relation to that beloved drink of the UK.  I was going to write national drink, but a) coffee may have overtaken it and b) the news is now in the papers that Diageo will not keep jobs in Kilmarnock (for Johnny Walker whisky), so those viewing whisky as the national drink have enough to worry about without a rival claim from tea today.

Meanwhile, the Scotsman did one of its longer pieces on a forthcoming book about an enterprising Scot who did lots of exploring (and/or smuggling, according to your viewpoint) of plants in China, ultimately leading to the identification of a wide range of tea plants.  The article tried to hang it on the idea of the man being responsible for tea coming to the UK - perhaps not, but another of those popular science stories that turn out to be fairly amazing.

Dan is reading “Connections” - not an English text book (ah, all those travel-related titles beloved of ELT editors) but the book accompanying the James Burke TV series of many moons ago.  The gist of it is that one invention or discovery, big or small, may lead on to many others, and the cumulative effect may be far more than anyone would have thought at the time of the original discovery. 

I don’t know quite what you would trace as a line of inventions coming from tea, but I do know that I would ‘invent’ far fewer documents or other items of hopefully (useful) purpose without a certain reliance on tea in the afternoons.  Maybe that’s enough connection.  From stew to mash, and hence to gravy (train)?

But what I’d noticed last time I used this station, and was reminded of today, was the almost constant injunction over the tannoy: “Always hold the handrail - and take care on the stairs.”

Now this is all well and good, all risks assessed and dealt with.  What interests me is the little light attempts at poetry that public announcements offer. It could be a missing verse from Paul Simon’s “50 ways to leave your lover”.  If only he’d taken care on the stairs, he might not have needed to slip out the back, Jack…

Some of these announcements are so ingrained, you almost feel you could slip them into conversation to change the tone, if you weren’t sure what to say next.  The melody of them, familiar as verse because we hear them so much, is comforting - as well as becoming fairly devoid of meaning, after a while.  Some of them even slip into everyday use, usually to parody ourselves: “exits are here, here and here…”

You can probably add your own, but here’s my selection of ‘public poetry’ options for your next cocktail party:

- “the person you are calling knows you are waiting”

- “a trolley service…of drinks and light refreshments…is available on the train”

- “or why not send a text?”

- “…and…Glenrothes with Thorntons.”

They don’t really say Thorntons.  But I live in hope that the trolley service might hand them out some time, as we prepare to uplift all our personal belongings.

But then, when people do comment, it makes it all the more worthwhile - particularly where I learn more about them, or their thoughts on life as a result.  Last time I restarted the blog, I had comments from male friends - maybe not so surprising given that it’s still more the men than the women who blog. 

This time, great to hear from female friends straight off - so perhaps I can encourage some of them towards their own blog writing?  Many have really interesting thoughts to share.

One of the other things I’ve enjoyed for myself, and am now trying to spread a little further, is the art of sending parcels. When I lived in Poland the first time, I was working in a school for the blind, and my mum learned that you could send up to a kilo of parcel for free (in most post offices) if it was marked ‘for the services of the blind’.  She must have kept the local post office very busy, anyway, because I got some great parcels!  And the kids I worked with got benefits too from sheet music and other things she sent over which I could use in teaching.

I’ve been reminded of it when sending parcels to friends in Italy.  Being both frugal and enjoying a spot of tesselation (that’s cramming multiple items into boxes to you), I’m having fun seeing how much can be fitted into the standard boxes you can buy from the post office.

Book reviews torn out of the weekend newspapers make great padding for smaller items, I’ve discovered, and I have a suspicion that squashy bags of ground coffee might work well too. (Coals to Newcastle, I’m sure, sending coffee to Italy, but it’s part of a particular theme for that parcel.)

The memorable parcels were ones we used to get on holiday on the Isle of Jura.  It tending to be somewhat wet in the west, shall we say, relatives who knew we were going on holiday would put together parcels, knowing that there would be a wet day (or more) AND that the books we had taken with us would run out at some point.  Getting a parcel part way through, with new books, but perhaps also sweeties or a game…great excitement.

The ultimate parcel? A sofa bed, which was in the cottage on Jura for many years.  One time, those staying in the cottage were told by the postmaster that there was a ‘parcel’ for them at the pier…the sofa bed had been delivered and was waiting to be collected.  It was known forever more as ‘the parcel’, which allowed you to have somewhat opaque conversations with nearest and dearest about the relative merits of ’sleeping on the parcel’.

One reason for blog absence in the last few months has been because of doing more stuff to our flat: this time, taking out the lovely fake fireplace in our bedroom (70s brickwork, anyone?), getting the wall replastered, plus new paint and carpet.  A variant on the kind of things we had done last year, but with the added satisfaction of gaining a tool called a gorilla, for levering under bricks (and in the process worrying a few people who were trying to work out what on earth we were talking about on Facebook).

With the best of intentions, building projects don’t always finish when you intend…and some don’t quite get finished.  But yesterday, we got some pictures back up on the walls, and had a sense of things being nearly done.  Sometimes the list of DIY tasks sits unaltered for months, looking back at me reproachfully when I check in my useful notebook.  But it’s great not just to tick them off the list - but enjoy the benefit of them as well.

One of the big gains, although not so much in feet and inches (or metric, for that matter), is some extra space in our bedroom where the fireplace and corner unit used to be.  Now we can fit an armchair in, and start using the room for being somewhere quiet during the daytime or evening - in fact, I am writing from there.  Sofas are quite fun for blogging from, but for now, armchairs are even better - particularly when I get a nice view of the sky when getting home from work early enough.

New rooms for old.

Seeing some friends recently, one spoke of the Economy Gastronomy series and book: encouraging us to get more meals out of our ingredients, as it were.  Others have written on this before, under ‘100 ways with mince’ and other such inspiring terms (see, I knew I could make the connection sooner or later).  But it’s quite fun not just to use free ingredients for cooking (last year’s stock of brambles in the freezer, for example), but to look at how to use what I’ve got in already, in different ways.

I don’t really want extra uses for mince, I suppose.  But turning a rice and veg set of leftovers into little savoury burgers - that might be different.  Or making things that I might otherwise have bought, such as flavoured oils.  (I’d better not mention too many, or there will be no surprises left for my family at Christmas.)

I know it probably sounds too ‘knit your own yoghurt’ for some, but I have decided to make food related presents for family this year.  Partly I think I’ve used up most of my good present ideas for them already; for some, they are not really looking for Things at this point, but Useful Presents of a food nature might just slip in under the wire.

What’s more, it’s been fun.  Making maybe one thing a weekend, I’m trying some new things, or making extra of others that I already like, and know others like too.  I’m not yet doing the bumper batch of Lebkuchen - I’ll wait until nearer Christmas for that - but this way, if something doesn’t work out, I’ve got time in hand to try something else.

So, hopefully if the rain lets up a bit, might be a chance to try picking this year’s crop of brambles, and putting them to work…

I’ll do a wee update blog in a bit, for anyone particularly concerned with chronology and Frydman activities in the last few months.  For now, I’ll start with what’s been on my mind this week:

Started going through a whole collection of cards, birthday cards, postcards, letters, you name it - some recent, some going way back.  I knew that my mum was good at sending cards of all kinds, but starting to stack them all up…really brought home her ongoing care towards me.

At this point, you may be wondering why I keep all this stuff anyway.  But don’t we love rediscovering ‘treasures’ of various kinds from the past? Don’t we love receiving things through the post? According to a short piece in the Saturday Times recently (fount of a certain amount of my knowledge, as regular readers will know), there’s something of a renaissance going on in letter writing. 

Email, texts, instant messaging, all good - but what happens when you turn off the device? I speak as one whose courtship partly started online (yes, there was a key email from Dan, and a lot more emails between us after that), but what I love to look back at is the cards and letters he sent me during our long first year apart, when I was teaching in Poland. 

So far, so good, on the warm fuzzy feelings front.  What feels stranger, and I’m still thinking over, is the potential for revisionist history when going back through all the letters.  Friendship didn’t work out or only lasted for a time? Do I get rid of the letters they sent, and alter the history between us, as it were, or keep them but know I won’t necessarily read them again?

In other cases, there are friendships that have drifted - but I still think of the other person happily.  The letter is a link with them - worth hanging onto a bit longer? And in a few cases, the other person has even taken the time to say that what you did, at a particular time, helped them or meant something to them.  That thing may be long forgotten to them now - but it’s good to be reminded that you can help at points, even in a small way.

And in some situations, musing over a relationship that is not so good just now, the cards and letters remind me of another person’s care and attention, maybe over a long period of time.  Is it not worth giving it another go?

I’m still working through the paper - and my reactions.  I’m reminded of a quote I’ve used before, but this time to focus on another part of the quote:

“Sometimes the poet says to hell with words//And longs to dig ditches

She writes of her longing, and you, who are her friends, write back.” 

What we do get is ice crystals on bus stops that look like Jack Frost is a grafitti artist. A girl goes past a bus stop in a woolly hat - bonnet style, strings underneath, but with a woollen mohican incorporated. And our pond freezes over…well, the dip in the back garden that fills up with water every now and then.

It’s not as fun at the chinchilla pushing a snowball on the BBC site. Or the harbour freezing over at Padstow.  But then we do promise that you can access the blog without the site crashing…or the buses coming to a halt.

We happened to see a current Guiness Book of Records earlier in the year.  Dan quickly checked key info - world’s oldest man, world’s tallest man etc.  It’s rather more glossy now, and probably all highly weblinked, which partly defeats the point, in a way.  In pre-internet times, that was why you needed the book, with all key info in one place, to be able to ensure that the world was still spinning as before, with the correct number of baked beans in a bathtub, and so on.

So, I didn’t receive the book, though my brother did, and I peeked over at it from time to time.  I did however gain a love of facts, particularly offbeat ones which can be brought out as conversational morsels when the need arises.  Which is more often than you think - particularly if you are in the company of others who also like facts.

Imagine therefore my happiness in discovering a new fact, courtesy of the Economist, in a book review.  The book was all about hedgehogs, and I discovered that not only does North America not have any native hedgehogs (ie all imports), but also that hedgehogs have species-specific fleas.  How mindboggling is that?

Sadly, I don’t think these elements are incorporated into Trivial Pursuits (favoured category brown (literature), general preference to avoid all questions on sport), but the flea one should definitely be incorporated into a family version.  Small boys everywhere will be in agreement on the importance of knowing about fleas (if not, hopefully, being too closely acquainted with them).

This just leaves me time to pass on my favourite piece of information of this kind: that Sweden imports dust for use in scientific experiments.  (I think it has something to do with not weighing things in a vacuum, so you add dust to an experiment so that it simulates normal conditions, or something like that.)  Yes, I knew you’d thank me for that one.

I leave it to Robert Louis Stevenson to add his stamp of approval to the value of facts:

“The world is so full of a number of things// I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings.”

We had a bit of a shock on Saturday when found out that our friend Neil had had a heart attack.

It happened while he was in Tesco pointing out an offer on ice cream (the 3 for 2 of the title) to the assistant at the checkout.  Whether it was the stress or just that it struck at that point, he doesn’t know, but it was enough to make him sit down for a few minutes.

When the pain in his chest had subsided (at this point he didn’t know what it was), he cycled home.  After carrying the shopping up a flight of stairs he felt bad again and took to his bed for a few minutes.  Realising it wasn’t going away, he asked his lodger - a nurse - what she thought about his symptoms.

She whisked him off to the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh and after an aspirin and a shot of morphine, he was pretty much straight into a laboratory to have a stent fitted (up the artery in his arm, across his chest and into his heart).  As shocked by it all as anyone, Neil then asked that a few people were called to let family and friends know what had happened.

I visited Neil in hospital yesterday afternoon and he appeared to be very well; mentally adjusting to needing to put off decorating the flat himself for a little bit and giving himself two months off work.  He had a second stent fitted this morning and is fine.

Fragility and care
What it brought home to me was just how fragile we are and that someone who I think of as being the most sensible person I know (healthy eating, cycling everywhere), was vulnerable.  I should point out at this point that he is in his 50s and only last year became a grandfather, so he’s not a contemporary. His lifestyle however is probably healthier than mine and so it was a bit of a wake up call.

So, lessons to learn even before the New Years resolutions can be put to paper:

1. Get your cholesterol levels checked to give yourself a base for future comparison
2. See if your blood pressure is where it should be
3. Adjust your lifestyle accordingly

I need to sort number 1 and then see what I can do with number 3 (number 2 is fine).So the moral of this story is not to be too intent about getting your moneys worth on 3 for 2 offers on ice cream tubs.

1 is enough and when you get it, it’s best to share.

It’s interesting seeing the Saturday supplements reinventing present giving for tough times.  Evidently you can give cheap gifts if you buy them in multiples.  So buying lots of groovy socks for someone is acceptable, particularly because they are Useful.  (Unlike many of the options available in Saturday supplements.)

I had thought it one of the unwritten rules of life that not only do the meek inherit the earth, a wife can inherit her husband’s socks.  Oddly, this seems to work even if the husband’s feet are quite a lot larger than the wife’s.  At any rate, it’s got me through several years of marriage and much foot pounding up and down the Royal Mile to work and back. 

So it was a nice surprise for Dan to come home from the sales with socks for him and for her.  After years of black socks that eventually turn grey, I have some jazzy ones with stripes.  Dan has ones with matching heels and toes, in a range of colours, so you can do the conformist turn while shoes are on, while secretly aware that your socks are much more fun than anyone might suspect.

Sadly, there’s not a lot more I can write about socks without jokes about smelly feet.  That didn’t stop Spike Milligan coming up with an idea for a sound effect of hitting the wall with a sock full of custard.  He actually went to the BBC canteen to get custard to try it out, but evidently it didn’t sound as good in real life. 

Shame.  But maybe if you are still looking for a use for leftover stuffing, this could be just the thing…

The nice ‘green’ feature writer in the Times made me very happy recently when she confirmed that it’s better to get a real tree than an artificial one - real trees put oxygen into the atmosphere while growing, can be pulped down afterwards (should your council be so obliging) and can of course be replanted if you buy one with a root one.  My family tried this one year, but the tree lasted until November, and then went yellow, which was particularly sad with only a month to go.

The whole point of real trees, it seems to me, is the smell.  For others, scent of pine is reduced to male bath products (or possibly loo cleaners), unless you’re out walking in the woods on a regular basis.  But if you are prepared to sit under the tree for a while, preferably when it’s already dark and the only light in the room comes from the tree, then it’s nigh on perfect.  (The second scent of Christmas, incidentally, is the citrus of satsuma.  You can sit under the tree to consume your satsuma - and if it’s come from your Christmas stocking, so much the better.)

I’ve written before on knowing I can’t go back to earlier experiences.  But somehow, scent always gives you that hope that, in fact, you have, even if the rest of you is saying something different.  Yesterday, Dan only had to bring the tree into the house, and I knew, before I had even seen it, because of the scent of it, stealing ahead into the sitting room, working out where it was going to be placed.

It’s in our study, in fact, and because there’s no door between that and the sitting room, you can sit on the sofa and see the tree.  I’m quite pleased with that, as the thing of being by the tree seems to be one of being quiet, even on your own, and putting the tree into the study seems to allow for that.  We went and sat under it last night, just for a while.

So is it real?  It’s a ‘real’ tree.  It’s a real memory.  And it’s a real tree in the here and now, evoking this set of responses right now, as well as triggering memories.  Some may be unhappy at the symbolism of the Christmas tree, but I think we are all hoping for a little mystery at this time of year, something that pulls us beyond our surroundings, and our immediate thoughts, into other notions of how to view this strange and wonderful time of year.

Merry Christmas. 

Before this all starts sounding too ‘multiple personality’, we all do it - because we all fit into each others’ lives in different ways.   I’ve sat in on those team build-y type exercises where you have to describe who you are - and often it’s in terms of labels, many we give ourselves and some we let others give us.

Back to online: I was expecting a few more pseudonyms in some of the Facebook applications, particularly the ones which allow you to beat up people who have (probably unwisely) agreed to be your friend.  Given that a lot of superheroes do have alternative names, I decided to be Superfrau for the purposes of the game.  (Superfrau has a real life aspect too: it’s written on a small soft toy key ring I was given by the German interviewer of the students I send abroad.)

Sadly, only one other person I knew picked out an alter ego, although there are plenty of others out there on Facebook who are perfectly happy with their pseudonyms, mostly nicked from the TV show Heroes (which seems fair enough, as the game I play is based on that premise).  But it got me thinking about which of our alter egos we keep as we go on in life.

When I was 19, I did the gap year thing, went to Poland for half a year.  And yes, it was the life-changing experience that gap years are heralded to be - in loads of different ways.  I hadn’t expected to, but I linked myself with Poland.  It influenced how I decorated my room at university, how I cooked, the kind of music I listened to.  It had a major impact on how I viewed things like hospitality, and other positives I wanted to emulate, when back in the UK.

Part of this was also what I told others about myself.  For some time, any connection with Poland - even if it wasn’t the exotic gap year that some had had - seemed unusual for a UK citizen with no family ties there.  I enjoyed a perspective that was European, but a different kind of Europe.

Now, over 15 years since I first went there, I find myself identifying myself less with Poland.  It’s not that the significance has faded.  But Poland is less part of my life than it was.  My point is, it is unlikely to regain that position it had - because I have moved on too.  Other identities have entered my life, many of which get lived more on a daily basis than the Polish aspects I hung onto.

So what?  Life today offers vast amounts of change, choice, alternatives.  Perhaps I put more stock in particular identities because I don’t have the consistency of belonging that some do.  I don’t come from one particular place - though Edinburgh does offer the best option, having been home for a good number of years. 

There are other identities that we gradually realise have been passed on to others.  Mid thirties, the desire to change the world quite so much, the capacity for large amounts of caffeine, these seem to have slipped quietly out the room, probably when I was doing something significant like hanging up washing. 

Perhaps what I’m struggling towards is a notion of letting go of some aspects of who I’ve been - but not feeling diminished in the process.  Quite enjoying a little more space - equally, not rushing to fill it. Meanwhile, can I recommend Captain Fantastico for your day to day superhero requirements?  

We’ve got rather used to Wallace and Gromit now, but what the animators achieve, painstakingly, lovingly, is indeed a present of great proportions.  Yes, they’ve done a film, but really, it’s in the half-hour special that they truly come into their own. 

Flicking through the TV section in the bumper two-week listing (more on that later), I discovered that I had shared a ‘Wal and Grom’ moment with Russell T. Davies, no less (a chap also somewhat linked to Christmas, what with Dr Who specials). 

It’s the moment in the second animation - the one with the dastardly penguin - when Gromit is chasing the penguin on a model railway, runs out of track, grabs the box and starts to lay new track.  I too remember that delighted ‘no!’ moment, when you don’t know what is coming next but you know that it is going to be amazing…

Part of the enjoyment is an opportunity to rediscover my inner Yorkshirewoman, and soak up all the deadpan jokes.  Wallace allows us to remember how British the slightly potty inventor is - British too the elevation of pets to equal, if not greater, characters.

We’ve become used to televisual sweetmeats, TV treats at Christmas time.  But amid all the reruns - and reissues of previous comedy programmes - Wallace and Gromit are, like cheeses at Christmastime, something you can always take a little more of.

Tomorrow is the shortest day, and after that, even where it’s not quite believable, let alone visible at that point, we’ll start to get more light again.  I read a Monty Don book on gardening one time, where he talked about the time between the clocks going back, and the shortest day, as the hardest point in the year.  Forget whatever date in January is meant to herald mass depression, being low on daylight makes it harder to add joy to whatever seasonal comfort you may be indulging in in December.

Last year, I felt very aware of looking out for this change, perceiving the creeping extension of daylight during January.  This year, I know about it, but that doesn’t always bring the acceptance of it that I’d hope for.  Different features of it seem to affect different people: some hate it being pitch black when the alarm goes off in the morning, others find the darkness so early in the afternoon a difficulty.

In my gap year, I spent the first half waitressing, and realised how easy it was in the winter not to really see the sun at all, especially where you are facing in from a shop window rather than looking out.  In an office with large windows, or a home with a good amount of light, it’s a bit easier, but not that much.  I should probably try to go out at lunchtime, while it is genuinely light, but that requires a bit of energy, which is also harder in the winter.

Somehow, when you’ve closed the curtains and settled in to lower levels of light for longer, it becomes easier.  One of my friends referred to the season of ‘candles and snuggly blankets’ returning, and that helps it seem a cosier prospect. 

What I’m trying to suggest is that this is a time of year for needing a little encouragement.  Whether that’s enjoying a spot of sun, an extra slice of stollen, or a longer letter from a friend you’ve not heard from for a while, it makes it possible to go on living in the dark for a little longer, with some indication that there is light still to come.

So it was lovingly unwrapped and put to use yesterday, having a social for our church small group yesterday.  We knew that one of the others was well set for board games, having seen her in action on our June holiday, but were waiting to see what happened for the other group member…who promptly walked off as the highroller of the evening.

Having ticked the review category, I feel I should give you an overview of what it’s like.  You get nice little figures as pieces to move round the board, ie familiar characters from the films.  Dan noticed that there are five goodies to three baddies, but then I think that’s as it should be, really.  You also get currency in credits (I think), rather than pounds, and instead of building houses or hotels, you build colonies (small space ship pieces), working up to star ports (larger space ships - in this case, a Millenium Falcon).

You also get to swap the familiar destinations of London for Star Wars ones.  It doesn’t take a lot of thinking through to agree that Yoda’s swamp is the least attractive (or rather, cheapest) location on the board, with the heart of the Empire, Coruscant, as the most expensive.  A few elements of the board could have been jazzed up a little, in line with the theme - why not go to a penal colony, rather than jail?  Or use a star ship motif, rather than a car, in Free Parking?

But aside from this, there is of course great opportunity to a) listen to Star Wars soundtracks while playing (check), b) swap Star Wars viewing stories (check), c) make noises like the characters when doing well or thwarted (no we didn’t do this, but I’m sure it should be mandatory from now on), etc.

And of course, you can mortgage all your properties, all too swiftly, in keeping with this year’s financial theme, sadly.  But if you lose, hey, it’s all in a galaxy far far away…

You can boo me offstage at this point (panto metaphor appropriate at this time of year), but even changing to a 9-day fortnight has had more of an impact on me than I expected.  The person I was chatting to had reduced her working week too.  We both felt better for it.  But we also felt guilty, less in control at work than before, perhaps a little smug that alternative arrangements weren’t quite such a good replacement for us at full-time work.

One of my theories in this is that it’s partly a generational thing.  At school, as a girl, you got encouragement to keep going if you did well.  But the image of keeping the home as well wasn’t out of the picture, maintaining a lot of the ‘knitting things together’ tasks that often fall to women.  Even if you didn’t put yourself as part of the knitting brigade. 

Somehow, the two of us realised, we keep looking for more ladders to climb, more things to do, being capable.  It’s a drug, doing well, being measured by others’ comments on our achievements.  Which is also a bit concerning in an era where more and more, pay is performance related.  It’s not that that is such a bad thing per se.  But it’s the constant increasing of required activity, in so many jobs, that makes it harder and harder to keep achieving at the same level.

So what happens if you do less - if you’re not there all the time?  A sneaking suspicion that you’re not quite pulling your weight.  An added pressure to ENJOY! when you are away from work - which can itself be a pressure, at the very time when you were meant to be reducing the pressure…

A few months ago, earlier on into the shift of working pattern, there was also a sudden realisation - that you can work fewer hours.  The world does not fall apart.  Ye verily, there are even others around working fewer hours than me.  There comes the smugness again - but also the the thrill and anxiety combined of doing less.  And getting away with it.  

Sometime I hope, there will come a middle ground, or at least less of a rush up and down the xylophone of opposing feelings.  And less of a desire to check that this is still acceptable, permissable.  Which is needed, given that I will be trying out this working pattern at a particularly busy time of year, in another few weeks.

I’ve heard often enough of the injunction to be a human be-ing rather than a human do-ing.  At least the wind-down in the year, with Christmas, suggests an opportunity to practise being for a while - if that isn’t too active a response.   

For me, spring is also linked to travel to Europe.  In spring, we start to move out of our near-hibernation, into broader activities, and for me, travelling to ‘the continent’ seems bound up with that move to wider spaces.  Looking back through my notebook for writing ideas, and our travel-related posts, it seems a shame to miss this one out, especially in the dark of the year where we need things to look forward to.

Europe in the spring started with German exchanges.  In the days before cheap flights (and from reading others’ Facebook posts, even now), school trips abroad tended to involve lots of long overland travel.  So we got the obligatory 5am coach ride from the Midlands to Dover, got on a ferry to Ostende, and from Ostende onto a train that would take us through Belgium and down the Rhine in Germany, for our host families to meet us in Mainz.

I was at an event celebrating Germany yesterday, and one of the activities in the group for young people was talking about things we saw in Germany that surprised us.  Even before getting to Germany itself, our group discovered the older kind of European train rolling stock, with seats that push together in the middle of the compartment to make beds.  We had no idea that German trains would be so conducive to playing sardines, and set off to see how many teenagers we could fit in one compartment…

One of the advantages of going to Europe in the spring is that it’s a few weeks ahead of the UK for signs of spring - blossom is already out, trees are in leaf, people are already sitting outside cafes (and not just because there’s a smoking ban).   Life starts to feel more expansive, more open to possibility.  Even when you have to go back to the UK, there is hope that these options are not too far away for us too.

Later, studying German at university, and trying to keep up some Polish, spring became a good time to try to go back to either country to see people.  Certainly in the first year or two, before grants were frozen, my travel plans took in quite a few places - with the opportunity to travel by train, heading through wider landscapes, and gaining more of that spring fever.  Since then, worktrips have enabled me to continue the trend, as our main set of policy meetings with partner agencies abroad is usually around Easter time. 

It’s not just about the travel, good though that is, or the places themselves.  Europe in the spring has become something of a state of mind, a boost for the synapses as well as the spirits.  As the year draws to a close, we tend to go back into familiar patterns, traditions for Christmas and New Year, reviews of what has passed.  It’s good to remind myself that there is also a time for new things to come after this, new perspectives - and new delights the world has to offer. 

I was thinking about nouns turning into verbs, as they often do in English.  Why would nouns that seem related, or at least similar in content, work so differently when they become verbs?  Bag and sack are my examples - to bag someone for your team is very different from sacking someone, semantically.

I started to think about other related options.  You can dog someone’s footsteps; you can also hound them - those would seem to have a similar impact.  Not all of them work: we can cap someone (in sport) but we don’t seem to hat them, for some reason. 

Some nouns seem to be missing a trick, not going for verb conversion (to continue the sport metaphors).  You would think that someone would see the potential of baconing, as an alternative to chickening, or worse, goosing.  But with news of pig infections in recent days, we are perhaps rightly cautious, for now.

Perhaps it’s down to me choosing some very everyday nouns for my examples, which could allow for more imaginative metaphors when they become verbs, because they’re so widely understood.  You can understand that ones related to animals or food would more easily be taken into new contexts, for example.  

If we look at who’s doing all this verb conversion, a big contribution must be made by business, constantly chasing the next fresh image as well as the bottom line.  Some must come out spontaneously, with someone not quite selecting the right word, but realising that the new coining has impact, and using it again.

So, the next time your bus is taking ages to move along its route, or whatever other commuting option you have, test out a few nouns for me, and let me know if you’ve got any more examples where seemingly related nouns behave completely differently as verbs.   And create some new ones, if you fancy.  Where the economy may be shrinking, language is thankfully almost always expanding.

We’re both keen on travel books, in this case the kind where someone else does the travelling and writes about it in a witty way.  We have a few stacked up to read, and finally started this one, written by an Irish woman, Dervla Murphy, who decides to cycle to India.  As you do.  Or in fact, as she planned to do from the age of 10.  But, unlike many of us and our early-stated ambitions, she actually sets off to do it, once in her 30s, and with a suitably heroic bike which becomes a second leading lady in the story.

She writes in the 1960s, when the Soviets are being seen to be gathering in around Afghanistan, one of her countries on route, but have not yet got going fully.  The Shah is still in place in Iran (or rather, Persia, as she calls it), and hitchhiking is still an option - all to the good for Dervla, if her bike breaks down or the road gets impassable.

Rather nicely, she includes an equipment list in the back of the book, so you can work out how many tubes of sun lotion to take on your next intercontinental trek.  She also packs a pistol, literally, and writes about the uses of it in amazingly understated ways (let’s just say, there are still wolves in the woods of central Europe at the time she is passing through).

In some ways, we are happily ploughing through the next set of adventures; at points, we look at each other and say ‘Nutter!’ at the general endeavour.  People are often saying how it’s difficult to do travels that others haven’t done - but you would have to ask yourself how many lone women would set out to do that kind of journey now, only a few decades later, even if she’s had the sense to send spare tyres and inner tubes ahead to a certain set of international organisation’s offices.

We have just reached the point where she is entering Afghanistan, and it will be interesting to see how the descriptions compare with the images we have from news stories of recent years.  And in our current midwinter torpor, reading about someone casually knocking off 80 mile cycle rides, day after day, brings only admiration.

Meanwhile, Dan looked up Dervla’s name online, and found that she is still trying to do epic cycle rides now, in her 70s, though somewhat hampered by hips and knees not behaving themselves.  Once an adventurer, always an adventurer?  I suspect we will be looking out for sequels.

I have a slightly love-hate relationship with Lakeland (formerly Lakeland Plastics).  I suspect quite a lot of women do.  One of the Times columnists who writes in the T2 supplement during the week confessed her excitement, earlier in the year, at the latest catalogue arriving - and how many of her friends she would then have Lakeland discussions with.  Another friend on Facebook seems to have a fairly similar reaction.

What is it about Lakeland? They are clearly doing something right, yet a bit different, with ever more stores opening up, yet still none in central London, for example.  I should be properly grateful that Edinburgh is considered nice enough to have a store - along with other gentle (or is that genteel?) destinations like Bath, Canterbury and York.  I’m told that the customer service over the phone is second to none, though the ladies who police the Edinburgh store tend to be slightly on the officious side, on the whole.

And this, it seems, is how Lakeland divides - as well as conquers.  As does the list of products.  Because for every item that seems over fussy and controlling, or rather too twee, there are some tremendous ones that find you circling items, or even, bending down the page too, so that the male of the household might find them and respond appropriately.

No to tea bag squeezers.  To washing up gloves with very long sleeves.  To water carafes with matching glasses painted with spring flowers.  But yes to yoghurt makers, silicone baking tins, to sets of stacking bowls that get constant use.  And they are very good at adding new products, so you have to look at the next catalogue…hmmm.

The bit that confuses me more is where kitchen items, cleaning items, are not enough - Lakeland must also be the first thought when you want to buy craft materials, or, now, toiletries, and other items that Boots would probably prefer to monopolise.  I’m not sure what their main age range demographic is for customers, but clearly, they are very sure that their customers want to be clean, tidy, good at thoughtful presents, and at times, creative too.

What interests me is that you’re not being sold just one lifestyle, as you are with a lot of other brands or stores.  But I do think that, ultimately, Lakeland conspires to sell you products to make you feel that some things are working properly in a few key parts of life - perhaps a very female wish, and part of the reason for their success.  

It’s not just men that want new gadgets.  It’s just that they don’t seem to need as many ‘inverted commas’ statements in the advertising copy to encourage them to do so.

But what happens when the year turns cold, and there’s no time to play out?  You need a few other options up your sleeve.  Many of our readers are familiar with our yellow friend Eric - and for those who aren’t, type in ‘Eric Frydman’ on Facebook and see what you find.  Eric is happy to add child magnet to his list of abilities (as well as conducting, playing charades, and general making us laugh duty).

In fact, such is Eric’s appeal that we had to find additional Erics for our friends in Italy, and Dan’s small cousin on the west coast.  Other friends’ children have wised up to Eric’s importance in the household - when I got in the car to get a lift from the family a month or two back, the first question was ‘Is the yellow thing with you?’  Eric consents to dance, hang upside down, spin round and round, be tied in knots, quite apart from laughing obligingly at each ‘look at this!’

For parties, we have another trick up our sleeves - or in the box we bring out for parties involving small children (that is to say, all parties now, pretty much).  One of my toys from my childhood is a Viewmaster - essentially a way to view pictures in 3D, by inserting a disc of images in the viewer and looking at the overlapped images.  Despite the fact that kids now have lots of access to films and cartoons, this always gets played with and marvelled over by new visitors, particularly when they get the hang of working it themselves.

Tall bloke, child magnet.  Dan discovered on our recent trip to Italy just how tempting it is for kids to have a moving climbing frame that will also tickle you and hold you upside down.  Unless of course three medium sized kids jump on the climbing frame at the same time…and even then, there’s a happy balance between pretending you’re completely outnumbered and actually being so.

Meanwhile, I’m off for my tea - food being a long favoured magnet of most children, and thankfully, adults too.

I am intrigued to know, because I am attempting to listen to Christmas-related music while Dan writes Christmas cards - and clearly, Christmas songs are a broad church.  Admittedly, I’m listening to an Ultralounge Christmas collection, which makes it a slightly more chi-chi experience, but there’s certainly some stuff there that I struggle to relate to Christmas, apart from the slight note of cheese, which probably has to accompany many seasonal song collections.

Clearly, it’s something people take seriously, because otherwise, why would there be so many Christmas compilations on sale in the shops?  And admittedly, if you give lots of parties at that time of year, it could be handy to have a collection of songs to put on that help your guests get in the mood. 

Dan points out at this point (clearly he’s not concentrating that hard on the cards) that you could have a variety of Christmas collections, according to the various groups you might be dealing with at the meet and greet time of year.  The subsets appear to be: cheesy, carols, classical music that makes you think of Christmas, rock Christmas.

So, for your entertainment, we present some of the music that helps us start to feel a bit more ready for/interested in Christmas.  Mine combines classical and cheese, as I grew up listening to James Last German Christmas carols and classical music most years, while decorating the Christmas tree with my family.  I downloaded it recently, and now the cheese factor does come through more than it did when I was 7, shall we say.  But heck, German Christmas carols are really good, and bring us close to the second entry, which is Christmas related choral music.

When I was at secondary school, and getting into singing, we attempted our first oratorio type stuff in school choir: Vivaldi’s Gloria, plus Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols.  Not hugely well known, but a good excuse to sing a bit of Latin, bit of medieval English.  The older the carol, the more it’s likely to challenge what you think the season is about.  “This little babe, so few days old, is come to rifle Satan’s hold…”  Not a crowd pleaser chorus, no mention of figgy pudding, but one that sticks in the mind.

While I’m at it, I’ll add my favourite carol, the Coventry Carol (Lullay, thou little tiny child).  It does that great thing of being mysterious, beautiful, a bit scary (Herod the king, in his raging…), and uplifting (the wonderful change to a major key at the end of the piece). 

We have to even the score at this point, and let Dan have an entry.  His Christmas album is Take 6’s ‘He is Christmas’, which has probably become our joint ‘getting ready for Christmas’ album to put on.  Lots of joy, lots of peace.  I have also just consulted Dan on his favourite carol, which is Hark the Herald Angels Sing. 

So there you have it.  Feel free to add your own faves below.  I’ve just realised that I have to add Mike Oldfield’s “In Dulci Jubilo” for a bit more cheese but good quality jingling.  Moreish, these Christmas tunes. 

Edinburgh has its light switching on evening at the end of November - although I’ve discovered that in fact it has several of these, beyond the one that puts on the lights on the Christmas tree on the Mound.  The Grassmarket has its own; Leith seems to have one too. 

But the one I’m looking out for is the star on top of the City Chambers.  It’s of the ‘lots of sticky out lines’ kind of star that you learn to draw when you’re small.  It’s not the most modern or distinctive of items, but I realised the other day that you see the star on the horizon, all the way to the north at the top of Inverleith Row.  This means that you feel slightly like a wise man, ‘following the star’, while on the bus heading to work.

I’m also keen on the ‘bare tree branches covered in lights’ kind of decoration.  Most years, they brighten up the edge of Princes Street.  This year, they’ve added them to trees in St Andrews Square - a sign that someone is determined to keep one of the better redone parks of Edinburgh sleek and beautiful, by night as by day.

But my other favourite Christmas decorations are a little more of the regular shopping track.  They are, again, to be admired on my bus route, this time heading home.  Close to Tesco’s by Broughton Street, there is a car park where you can buy Christmas trees.  That’s not the sight - it’s all the lights strung down the big stone wall by the car park, along with the conveniently placed ivy which grows there all year long.

And just at the bottom of that hill, as the wall stops, there’s a little church building, which looks more like a house, but puts up the most fantastic nativity picture, in a slightly Russian Orthodox style around the eyes of the figures.  Having lived close to there in our previous flat, I’ve had the privilege of looking out for these for around 8 years now, and that’s good enough for a Christmas tradition for me.

Beyond these familiar sights, coming across them means I’m heading home - and for all of the distractions of a big wheel and carousels, back in town, it’s home that’s our favourite sight at this time of year.  Mine, anyway.

Cunningly, this is a partial news update, from mid-September up to end of November.  If you want April - Sept, click ‘general overviews’ in the right hand column, and you can get that chunk there.  For anything earlier than that, if you’re still game for a look, have a browse on some of the individual posts.

September is always busy for me at work, and end of September saw me having a second go at arranging a stand for the Scottish Learning Festival.  It’s the big education exhibition of the year in Scotland, and I coordinated the people and materials for the two days worth of visitors.  Meanwhile, we tried to get on with putting more things back after carpet fitting at the start of the month - pictures up, bookcases back in place etc.

September also brought new work colleagues for Dan, and the opportunity to put some new systems in place for building websites.  So far, the response from potential customers has been positive, and hopefully this will continue. 

October had lots of time with people.  We went to a friend’s wedding in picturesque Aberlady, followed by reception and ceilidh in the village hall, which had a nice log fire to keep the autumn chill at bay.  We managed to see some friends at various points, and visited my brother and his fiancee in their first home together, in Otley, near to Leeds.  This included a quick look at the school where they both work, and a drive to Ilkley, home to one of the braches of Betty’s, the upmarket tea rooms in three different Yorkshire towns.

October also saw a big step forward - I started refresher driving lessons, after 15 years of cheerfully cadging lifts and avoiding the issue of driving in a big city.  Still lots to learn, but lots of improvement, and the prospect of further practice to come, as Mum and Dad are passing on a car to us. 

The initial terror of getting behind the wheel has been replaced by the next terror of having to drive solo, without the instructor and a spare set of pedals…Thankfully, people have been very encouraging about the time it took them to be confident in a car, so I hope that I can improve little by little, and also do some of the things we’d like to do more easily, such as visit friends who live outside Edinburgh.

Dan’s birthday came by, and with it a James Bond premiere…It was kind of them to arrange it the same night, we thought.  One friend asked if we were dressing up for going to the opening - we said no, but then saw quite a few guys in full tux, at the end of the film, and one woman in a ballgown, so perhaps we’ll have to make more of an effort next time. 

We did manage to squeeze lots of people into our flat the same weekend, so Dan could have a ‘bread and soup plus cake’ birthday party (tested as an option back in January, when a friend and I had a joint party). 

I had a quick work trip to Paris in early November, followed by us heading on to our friends in Italy for a week’s holiday.  My arrival was a bit delayed, on account of not being able to book a night train after the work meeting, and having to stay a night extra in Paris at short notice.  However, the train route was nicer for being able to take it in in the daylight, at least for part of it, and being met at Milan Central by Dan and David. 

We had a good week reacquainting ourselves with Rachel and David and their four kids - as well as where the contents of the family bookcases were up to, a year on.  And on return, trying to do a bit of garden tidy up, my garden helpers of earlier in the year reappeared, and seemed perfectly happy to sweep leaves and cut down stems of plants that had tied back.  Clearly they don’t make Barbies that interesting any more…

2008 has brought lots of new arrivals among friends, and it’s been great to see pictures via the wonder that is Facebook.  As university classmates become ever more farflung, and life remains busy for everyone, it’s nice to catch up a little this way.  And yes, we might even manage to put some of our own photos on there for people to see - sooner or later.

2008-9 is a special run of birthdays and anniversaries in the Frydman and Mackenzie households, so there’s plenty to look forward to over the coming months, including my brother’s wedding in April.    But we equally look forward to hearing from you, finding out how you are getting on - drop us a line or email, and let us know. 

Wishing you a peaceful Christmas and a happy New Year,

Love from

Dan and Alison

Ghostbusters was probably my first real recollection of a film phenomenon.  Now, with monthly passes for cinemas, or renting recent releases through the telly, it’s harder to get a sense of a big film even, for all of the efforts of bus advertising to make you think so.  My upbringing was one of cinema being a treat, so when you went, you wanted it to be GOOD.

So, what of Ghostbusters?  The first time we tried to see it, we queued round three sides of the block to get in to the cinema - and were turned away, with only 10 people in front of us, because the cinema was full.  That makes it an Event.  Thankfully we persevered and came back another time, without quite such a queue, and were able to get in.  And yes, it was well worth it.

It’s also an early awareness of a film soundtrack being significant.  Part of the continuing to enjoy the film, for me, was listening to the soundtrack again…and again…I even bought it on record, which shows that life and technology has moved on just a tad.  But there’s so much humour and enjoyment in the soundtrack, as well as atmosphere - it does what you want it to, in underpinning and enhancing the story. 

Despite 80s fashion reappearing (neon socks anyone? Seemingly very fashionable again), and 80s music being played in shops, watching an 80s film does show you that time does move on.  The amount of casual smoking is a bit of a surprise.  The haircuts are always good for a giggle.  And in a film like Ghostbusters, where a certain amount of ‘kit’ is required for the story, carrying a tape recorder on a strap doesn’t really look like big science any more.

So why watch it?  Because the humour is still good.  It’s fun to be reminded of just how sharp the timing between Bill Murray and Dan Aykroyd is.  The effects are there to make you laugh, the slapstick is there too, but the verbal humour still sings, and not many films even bother with that now.

I rest my case. And my photon accelerator.

For those with kids, where days of the week start at pretty much the same time every day, I don’t mind if you feel you need to turn away.  It is a bit indulgent still to have this space.  And it’s not so much about not doing as the chance to talk, and say where our thoughts and feelings have been going over the previous few days. 

Resting is all about recharging, if you get a shot at it.  Similar to a post about learning to relax, that I wrote a month or two back, it’s about things that are consistently good in enabling you to unwind, and feel better afterwards.  Or be ready to tackle a bit of life again.

Part of the treat, for me at least, is also having some time where there’s nothing written against it, in a real or mental diary.  I need some headspace to explore, to pick things up and put them down again.  These things may not form part of a ‘to do’ list, but that’s their very appeal.

Was remembering about The Idler - can’t quite tell whether it’s now a book, or a blog, or multiples of all of that.  http://idler.co.uk/ - see what you make of it.  But part of what they are talking about is giving yourself time to think, rather than just doing. 

For someone like me, who can be fairly said to be a Protestant with a work ethic, it’s invaluable to be reminded to find this space.  I enjoy doing, of various kinds, and I’d never claim we can get through life without doing, but I am certainly thinking more and more that just being is a pretty good pursuit. 

When we think back to treasured memories, holidays, that kind of thing, often what we’re remembering is the space to be; to idle; not just to let our mind work out what is really going on, but to allow our heart to be part of that too.

Too much gobbledy-gook?  Well, I’m good at that too.  But along that path, sooner or later, some wisdom comes out, something to help me be happy in my own skin and at peace with God.  I’ll raise a mug of coffee to that.

Last year, after getting the laptop, I spent quite a chunk of time filling in the blanks of previous months’ activities, for that very purpose.  This time, I’m filling in the Spring-Summer Hiatus (ooh, there’s some sun out there…somewhere…I’ll not turn the computer on), which isn’t so daunting.  You never know, I might even get Dan to remind me how to add pictures again.

One of the features of this year is not so much back fill as tum fill.  We have started having weekend breakfast options, things to help you feel like you are actually resting, and that take longer to make and eat than you might make time for on a week day.  It feels very peaceful, anyway, building family traditions, that kind of thing.

I should probably add that various of the options have come out of Nigella Express.  But I would add that for some reason, reading about breakfast or brunch options in cookbooks is particularly restful.  One of my early memories of cookbooks for pleasure was managing to borrow an American one from somewhere, where it devoted large sections to the value of breakfast or brunch as a way to do relaxed entertaining.  It even had quotes about food items for breakfast, which your then very literary writer was particularly pleased about. 

Summer has brought in the partially frozen banana smoothie - an alternative to filling my freezer with bananas that have gone beyond eating point, without as much effort ask making a banana cake.  Now we’re back to central heating days, the main options are porridge or pancakes - Scotch pancakes, drop scones, you know the ones.

The porridge making started on our Easter holiday, staying in a cottage that had not been visited for a few months.  We needed to be warm AND we needed options for not consuming milk too quickly, being on an island.  Porridge fitted the bill very nicely, particularly with the discovery of adding brown sugar to the top. Crunch vs smoothness.  Even for a child brought up to believe that syrup was the real way ahead with porridge, this was a definite discovery.

We have also happily discovered that two people can indeed eat their way through a whole batch of pancakes for brunch, although if they have a guest staying, they will be polite enough to share.  We’ve even invested in a large silicon pancake flipper, when I realised the spatula I’d been using was threatening to become another flavour on the pancake.

Our particular tip is slightly acidic jams to offset the thicker pancake - apricot was particularly good, blackberry also worth considering.  Marmalade can be good, but not as good.  At least with a batch, you have plenty of opportunity to experiment on which toppings work. 

So, send in your brunch options, and we’ll even fork through a few, if they’re good.  Avoid overly eggy suggestions, or pass them straight to Dan, who has a better stomach for eggs than me. 

But more importantly, start a few food traditions of your own at the weekend, if you haven’t already.  Particularly ones that cause you to linger, and admire the day outside, the person sitting next to you, or simply the notion of slower food as a regular household blessing.

A reading rat  - Leseratte - is the German equivalent to a bookworm.  It was featured on a set of postcards from the Goethe Institut - they know how to do their advertising, I have to say.  I sent it over to David, who is interested in German at the moment, and rediscovered it in a book, while we were over. 

Shame in a way to choose rats and worms for such things - here are these wonderful things, books, and our way to talk about people who like them is to relate them to animals which are often the source of fear or disgust.  My guess is that there’s probably some implied reference to devouring anything, which probably is true of serious book dependency after a while.

An alternative might be to talk about book fever - the illness that besets one when discovering just how addictive books are.  I’m not just talking ‘can’t put them down’ thrillers.  Even Enid Blyton can hit that craving button, when you are six or seven, and there just aren’t enough hours in the night to read.   Talk about reading yourself into an early pair of glasses, as I did.

They warn you about sweet shops, and fast food stores, but libraries are pushers too. Want one? Why not take six?  In fact, read three in the first day, take them back, and take out another six in addition to the ones you’ve not started yet.

This visit to Italy, both the older girls were getting stuck into books.  The younger of the two is into Geronimo Stilton, mouse detective, whom I can only hope will get translated into English at some point.  The cartoons that go with it are certainly fun. And I remember my discovery of Asterix at a previous age.  The one thing better than a really good read is the discovery that you’ve only just started the series, and that they are still writing more…

These days, it’s getting harder to let animal instinct take over when it comes to reading.  Time is shorter, and I find that I read several shorter things, rather than start a longer one and have to stop. 

I quite fancy the idea of being some kind of reading polar bear - take on enough books to see you through the winter, in the way that they take on enough food supplies to keep going, and then dig yourself into a nice snowdrift (or equivalent) for a few months.  If only they’d let you stay in bed to read during the winter, rather than going to work,  I’m sure we could all achieve fuel efficiency too, because we’d still be warm enough. 

If there’s any readers who can comment on what imagery is used for voracious book reading in other languages, would be interested to know. Next week, magazine locusts… 

I still don’t know why it should be.  Perhaps it helps that some of the board games available now are more interesting than the ones I played as a child.  (I still hold a torch for Mine-A-Million, which allowed you to build up oil reserves, and ship them to the other side of the world.  But what with global warming, and pirates taking over oil tankers, I don’t think that one’s going to come back into fasion.)

I’m talking about games like Carcassonne and Settlers of Catan.  And I rather like Ticket to Ride, particularly the European version where I can distract others from my losing by being smug and saying “been there!” on some of the more obscure routes.  Games which are different every time, in terms of how you make up the board, keep me interested - and take the sting out of losing, or at least of not winning.

Our friends Jan and Paul are good on the board game front, and introduced us to both Settlers and Mah Jong, though we clearly need to build up more practice on games in between visits.  But the real shift was going on holiday with friends in June, and playing board games most nights.  And liking it.

When you are a child, winning and losing is a much bigger deal, and having siblings to taunt you, or parents to point out that you are a bad loser, tends to distract you from even trying to put a brave face on it.  A couple of decades down the line, and you’ve realised that there are many ways to win and lose in daily life, and so a brief stint at a board game is perhaps easier to take on.

In the case of our trip in June, it perhaps helped to be there with a very competitive friend, who you knew would win (almost) all the games anyway.  This took the actually trying to win part out of the equation, leaving you focus on banter, admiration of nice design of board game, an additional glass of wine, and so on. (Obviously, if wine had been in the equation as a child, who know how many people would have stopped being bad losers much earlier?)

But I think the real reason for it is a desire to be with people.  To do something together that you can remember, but that isn’t that big and important either, so you can focus on the people too.  Perhaps the addition of a nice fire, or bad weather, or large amounts of chocolate etc, add to the picture of it being a very positive thing to stay indoors and be with people you like.

And for that, I can even risk the possibility that some competition might come into the equation.

Targets on the list?  France is rather good at pre-dressed salad, as was Germany, back in the spring, and both were overly salty.  Top marks back to Italy, where you can generally dress your own salad at the table, although there’s still more of a tendency to add salt. 

I still find salting a salad vegetable a bit strange, particularly when you could choose a tangier lettuce if you wanted more of a taste hit, but it still sits easier with me than adding cream to lettuce (my former flatmate in Poland.  It was just cream. I like a cream-y sauce on a salad from time to time, but not quite in this form).

Morning coffee in Italian hotels can be a bit of a disappointment - and this in a country which is really rather rated for its coffee.  Best trick is probably to forgo a hotel breakfast and get a quick breakfast in a nearby bar - which clearly works very well for the commuting population too, in many places.

We’re used to ’serving suggestions’ on packaging, those kind of pictures that help you understand what to have on a plate with mayonnaise, for example.  France goes a step further, and suggests on its packets that you should actively have chocolate at breakfast time. 

I know that many people need no encouragement in this area, but normally chocolate gets brought out later in the day…once something’s gone wrong…or you’re flagging at work?  Maybe we have completely the wrong attitude to chocolate - maybe our days would go much better if we had chocolate at breakfast time, and mustered the will to strike much earlier in the day.

I had an unexpected stop in a French hotel recently, and they offered the usual buffet breakfast option.  What was interesting was the paper serving mats on the table - like you get in fast food places here - only in France, it told you what elements you should be having to start the day. 

There were 4 of them, and as far as I remember, you should have some protein, some carbohydrate, some fruit and something to drink to rehydrate you.  I’m sure chocolate was included in at least one of the categories as a serving suggestion…

Does this mean that the French are constantly thinking about how to balance their diets?  Is the placemat for visiting foreigners who need to shape up in this area - but need to be able to read French to do so?  Or is it a sign of a country also worried about its children going the way of the fast food chains?

Final food note: restaurants in Germany put rice in pots of table salt - I think this is to absorb any liquid which might get in, and cause the salt to dissolve, or clump, or something of that kind.  It makes lots of practical sense - but it doesn’t look quite as nice to look at.

Aesthetics eh?  You get them where you can.

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? 

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.

It’s now nearly 8 years since R and D decided to head to Italy, and interesting to see how friendships develop when you see people less often.  For a while, we managed to see each other nearly every 6 months.  Rising numbers of children on their side, and work commitments on ours, now stretch it to a yearly catch up.  But it’s still well worth it.

One of the features of going over less often is that we end up with a snapshot of life there that may only last a week.  Especially with the youngest at a year and a bit, change is a very rapid thing among children.  We pick up their catch phrases, identify their favourite books at that time, and see other ‘big’ changes that in fact came in over time: both older girls now reading independently in both English and Italian, for example.

Even being around for just a week, it’s terribly gratifying for you to hear one of the children saying “I want my Alison”, or for another to call you auntie by mistake.  Even the littlest went from hiding from us earlier in the week to accepting being fed by us, as well as a few games together, such as repeated shaking your head while holding a naughty grin at the same time.  (She started it, not me.)

Time also shows what has lasted since a previous visit - the eldest remembering how to play ”Sausages and chips”, where you try to make the other person laugh by asking them silly questions.  She will also set up photo opportunities for their Flat Eric, as we tend to do with ours, having seen our pictures in the past. 

Other elements that we completely forgot - interim books that went into a parcel at some time, colouring in stencils on windows - are still part of life there.  I remember hearing Rachel’s grandmother saying to me one time, with some pride, an estimate of how many English books she had sent over to Italy while Rachel and her siblings were growing up there, and I started to feel that we might be continuing a little of that trend.

Apart from the food products, there’s always things we bring back.  A growing interest in the Veggie Tales’ “Silly Songs with Larry”, which was principal CD in the car while we were there.  Photos of another year.  An even greater appreciation of R and D’s skills as parents.  A couple more pictures to go on our fridge.

Some people go on holiday for a change.  I do that too, but it’s sometimes even better to go on holiday for more of the same.   

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. 

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.

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…

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.

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… 

Is it the dark days of recession affecting us?  We know that in times of economic difficulty, food sales still do well, if not better, as a cheering up device.  Is it the onset of winter, hopeful that if we anticipate food, we will feel warmer, or at least better about the nights drawing in?

Maybe it’s more of the thirties malaise.  We start to realise that we may not climb the corporate ladder the way we might have thought (most corporate ladders looking pretty rickety, at this point in time); we will not now wow the world with our looks or various other talents if we haven’t done so already.  (I’m still holding out for a late-onset writing career - that area does seem to reward late bloomers.)

What’s left? Family, friends, TV…and of course food, which we can always anticipate, because of our need to refuel fairly often.  (I’m not limiting life to these alone, honest. But they do all allow quite a lot of ‘me too!’, which is perhaps part of why online stuff is popular.) 

So what foods are most likely to make you ‘write in’ in agreement?  So far, risotto, peanut butter, classy macaroons and hot dogs, judging by recent comments on my Facebook wall and others. 

It could be the start of a whole new ‘what’s your favourite food?’ discussion.  I would also like to suggest a ‘guess how much I paid at the Co-op for…?’ game, which allows a spot of ethical consumerism to combine with (nearly) freegan activity, and some public endorsement of thrift…

I’m actually finding it hard to come down to a favourite food, but my inner five year old is still convinced that sausages, baked beans and chips are a good place to start.  How about you?

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.   

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.