Through to Glasgow - and beyond! The bright lights of Glasgow Queen Street Lower Level - and the even brighter yellow plastic seating - are good for keeping you awake when heading from A to B.
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.
September 9th, 2009
I know I’ve said before that this blogging lark is more for me than it is for you (though I hope that’s not a selfish statement). Having come home stroppy two nights in a row, part of what made the difference yesterday was sitting and writing, and having a chance to calm down.
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’.
September 9th, 2009
Only one more this evening, I promise…that’s the trouble with writing about food, you always think you can fit another one in…in this case, one more blog post for the night.
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.
September 8th, 2009
I thought I’d write a food related post, just to flex the blogging muscles a little further. What I really meant to write about was starting making things again: jam, pickles, that sort of stuff. But that title just slipped in there…so I’d better try to incorporate it.
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…
September 8th, 2009
So, hello! It must be the autumn, time to stay indoors, and maybe write a few blog posts again…
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.”
September 8th, 2009
We’ve all heard it - London grinds to a halt. The Midlands gets snow, and Edinburgh…not a lot.
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.
February 5th, 2009
So, who got the latest Guiness Book of Records? More to the point, who’s prepared to own up to it? For years, it seemed to be standard issue that someone, somewhere, would be understanding of small boys’ needs for Facts, and make sure that the latest collection of Useful Information was dispatched. Henceforth, and, indeed, forthwith.
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.”
January 1st, 2009
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:
- Get your cholesterol levels checked to give yourself a base for future comparison
- See if your blood pressure is where it should be
- 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.
December 29th, 2008
It’s a children’s classic in the making, I just have to work out how to write it. Socks are making a reappearance as a welcome Christmas gift, if only on for fuel economy reasons. (Or maybe early onset circulation options. Take your pick.)
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…
December 29th, 2008
Christmas tree a go go. After a few years of being in London at Christmas time, the fixture is back to Scotland, and we’ve got ourselves a tree again. I can peer at it happily over my laptop as I type.
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.
December 24th, 2008
Next Posts
Previous Posts