I’ve not ventured into Second Life - first life quite occupying, thanks. But there are still some attractions to having an alter ego, maybe particularly online, but perhaps a few variations in the everyday too.
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?
December 21st, 2008
You know it’s Christmas when the fridge is full of cheese (a slight exaggeration, but happily, only slightly) and Aardman has decided to issue a new Wallace and Gromit. My cup, mulled or otherwise, runneth over.
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.
December 21st, 2008
I suspect it won’t become a hit single. But after fairly relentless wind and rain (both of us ended yesterday with broken umbrellas), a spot of sunshine today needs a mention, if only for how it changes your view on life.
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.
December 20th, 2008
Star Wars Monopoly…The festive season is now complete - or at least, the activity while hanging around indoors with people bit. Following Dan’s brainwave for a present for his cousin, who at a tender age has embraced the excitement that is Star Wars, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get a set for ourselves too.
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…
December 18th, 2008
An infrequent occurrence - out for drinks on Friday night last week, meeting Dan’s colleagues and their partners/wives/girlfriends etc. Some of the talk circled, unsurprisingly, around Inigo and other techy stuff. But I also got chatting to one of the women there about what it’s like not to work full time any more - and how we’re both finding surprising stresses in it.
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.
December 15th, 2008
Paris in the spring…With a few more days to go of nights drawing in, it’s harder to imagine a time where the light will become clearer again, even beautiful. There is something about spring light, and the promise it holds of cheer now, and cheerful times to come.
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.
December 13th, 2008
Travel broadens the mind, it’s said. I’m not sure where that leaves commuting, and its potential to stimulate good ideas. But it does allow the linguist space to contemplate why words do different things, and try out a few alternatives, without too much distraction.
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.
December 9th, 2008
The season of hibernation continues. Do habits set in more quickly when it’s dark all the time? At any rate, we’re back to a reading aloud at the end of the day habit, and the book we’re on, “Full Tilt”, seems worth a mention, particularly when it contains descriptions of blue skies and heat.
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.
December 9th, 2008
However many shopping days to go, and all that. The weekend papers fill up with more supplements of presents to buy that promise to help you control your kitchen, your bathroom, cats that visit your garden. Meanwhile, Lakeland continues to attempt to take over the universe…or at least, tries to add to the prospect of taming chaos, all with a nice biscuit to hand.
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.
December 8th, 2008
Next door bought a large trampoline earlier in the year. Perfect child magnet. (It works quite well as an adult magnet too, but only as long as the adults consent to have their performance critiqued by the kids). We haven’t yet been asked if we want a go, but as long as we keep making approving noises at our neighbour’s routines on the trampoline, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we’re given a shot.
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.
December 8th, 2008
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