Soundtrack of my life

It’s a quote isn’t it?  Can’t remember where from.  But Dan was kind enough to lend me his iPod when I had a work trip to London at the end of last week.  This meant that I had the option of watching the scenery roll by while listening to whatever I fancied.

Now Dan and I quite like soundtracks to films.  Like lots of other music too, but have a soft spot for a soundtrack of a film we’ve enjoyed.  Probably the top one on the list would be “Sneakers“, one that Dan got me into, with Wynton Marsalis adding to a sense of excitement and espionage.

The thing about listening to a soundtrack while on the move is that you feel like you are becoming part of the film.  Or, perhaps even better, starring in a film of your own.  One that uses a soundtrack related to Paris (“Amelie”, since you ask) with a backdrop of London.  As I was going to a work meeting relating to languages, this was probably a reasonably good match.

Funny how good a bit of good music can be to help one’s mood.  Going to a work meeting in another city, you can be a bit concerned about arriving on time, and something peaceful in the earphones helps in this way.  And when a meeting has lasted a bit longer, had a few things you weren’t expecting, and so on, same peaceful music on the way home is also no bad thing…

 

Mr Manners

Who’s heard this one: ‘leave something for Mr Manners’?

Despite my mention of useful Men earlier in the week, this is not he.  But I was reminded of this saying at work today, seeing the ‘polite’ remainders that people leave behind.

We’re a very foody office.  Although our work has a great Cause, people view it in lots of different ways, and food is one thing that actually draws us together. Add to that people going on work trips/holiday to various interesting places, leftovers from events, and you get a sense of a lot of surveying of food that appears in the office.

Fairly consistently, though, no one seems able to take the final piece of something.  This means that you can leave even a large piece of packaging with one tiny bit left, and this excuses you from doing any further tidying up.

Today, it reached greater proportions than usual – at one point, the piece left over was half a fruit danish pastry.  I ignored it, and had my bowl of soup.  When I looked round again, someone had taken the pastry, but left the decorative grape…

I’m aware that in other cultures, if you do finish everything, it suggests you want more, or even that you are not satisfied with something.  I’m also aware that we have a small kitchen for c. 60 people, and leaving bits of wrappings about doesn’t leave much space to get your lunch out of the fridge, as well as looking a bit grungy after a while.

So, Mr Manners.  I ate your grape.  I am the one who throws away your empty packets.  But I also put on new pots of coffee, clean worksurfaces and do other socially contributional things.  I may upset the food status quo.  But I do create space for people to put something new down…and start the whole process again.

Book club for one

Book clubs.  Another invention for society that has less reason to get together? Or a great way to encourage people to keep thinking, discussing, and so on?

Your choice.  Personally I am fairly happy to have opinions about books without needing to consult others on them.  But there is something good about seeing what others think – memories of class discussions in English Lit classes.

To be honest, if book clubs had been around when I was in 6th form, that would have saved some of my teenage ‘no one understand what’s important in the world!’ grips.  (Or maybe not.  Teenagers are fairly robust in their assertion that people don’t understand, even if they do.)

It dawned on me recently that I could write book reviews on the blog as well – a kind of book club of one, if you like.  Others write their fairly regular film reviews, or reviews of sermons/tapes etc – why not regular books too?

Facebook of course seeks to capture that discussional interest. You can have virtual bookshelves – and film and music collections too – to show off your favoured artistes.  I add a few more books most times I go on - some from ages ago, some that I’ve read more recently, but I quite like seeing pictures of the covers come up, and seeing what others are reading.

Meanwhile, however, I have been back to reading in the bath.  Despite my recent posts on the joys of magazine articles, it is not as easy to read them in the bath.  Newspapers are a bit big, and likely to disintegrate on contact with water.  Books it has to be.

So I picked out “Perfume”, a book made into a film earlier this year.  As we’d had a holiday in the south of France this year, not so far from the perfume making centre of Grasse, I wanted to remind myself what it was about.

I read “Perfume” in my teens, I think.  I was captivated by the description of how perfume was made, how people worked out what scents were in a particular concoction.  It also evokes a particular era in France, and brings to life the teeming masses, the public celebrations, the various occupations that are less well known today (tanners, wet nurses, and so on).

So far, so good.  But “Perfume” is also subtitled “The story of a murderer”.  Less cheerful.  The writer, Patrick Suskind, takes two starting points: a man who has a brilliant ‘nose’ for scent of any kind – and the same man who himself has no personal smell.

Other reviewers have called his work Gothic.  You could equally say that he takes these ideas, and pushes them to their logical – and even illogical – conclusions.  This is where the book gets its power – there is a Greek tragedy at work in the plot, although one where you also get the sense of choice, of the protagonist having the opportunity to turn back or pursue another course at different stages.

Reading it again this time, I was more aware of the morality around the story.  The tale starts with adults’ responses to the character as an infant – their fear of him because of his lack of personal smell, their sense that he is somehow in league with the devil.

Easy enough to dismiss, in our more tolerant society.  But as those around him perish – and in some cases, Suskind shows how they perish decades later, in a setting they have sought to avoid – there is a growing sense of doom for all who work with him; those who show kindness, those who do not.  As this continues through the book, it becomes more and more unsettling.

In other ways, this morality holds sway for the main character, Grenouille, too, even though he does not recognise morality, or at least church jurisdiction.  Even when he attains what he sets out to do, it does not give him what he hopes, and the result of this impacts back on him, drives him to a particular end.  There is perhaps a more ‘natural’ justice coming out of this macabre tale, despite the way this doesn’t seem the case at the start.

Enough thoughts for now.  But perhaps these book reviews will also help in the long slow quest to write more of my own stuff, literature or otherwise.  The next question is how brave I feel to share my own creative writing with others.  Judging by the place where I’m doing most of it – online – I think I have to answer that with “braver than I have been…”

Memorial bussed

Got home early today – though up scarily early to do a day trip for work.

My noble steed to carry me home was a Lothian Regional Transport bus – nothing special there.  But it was one of the old ones, which are becoming quite scarce today.

I’d been reading a magazine on the way back from the worktrip, where a couple had a sign from a London Routemaster bus – when these were decomissioned, parts were sold off to transport enthusiasts (and no doubt the odd mechanic too).  I’m not suggesting that I want to keep specific items for an earlier LRT bus – that suggests a little too much devotion.

But it got me to thinking about why I have a soft spot for these older buses.  Various features that you can’t quite put above your mantlepiece:

The spiral staircase – the stairs on these buses have a genuine, regular curve.  This actually makes getting downstairs easier, even when going round corners, because you can always move down in the same way.  Newer buses are of varying models – some have shorter stairs, some longer, but they all tend to pitch you headlong if the bus is going at any speed.  And this is even when you are hanging on to both handrails.

The luggage compartment – there is a specific luggage compartment for suitcases etc.  This is a real help if you are getting the bus up to the station or the airport bus – there’s a specific place to put your case, which stops you taking up an extra seat or blocking the gangway.

Two sets of doors – now I know some of the newer buses have this too, but it does make life easier letting people out of one door, and new ones in the other door.  After all, this feature was meant to speed up time spent waiting at bus stops for passengers to finish moving about.

On the other hand, because more of the newer buses require you to walk back past the driver to get off, I hear more people saying thank you before they get off.  This is a) polite and b) preferable to yelling ‘thanks driver’ half way back down the bus…

Sitting sideways.  You don’t get so much of this on the new buses.  I’m not sure that I should be championing this, given that I try to face forwards when travelling, if at all possible.  But as a child, sitting on a sideways seat, it feels a little different.  Decent sized sideways seats are excellent again for two people, big or small, plus luggage or shopping.

The higher up seats in the middle of the bus.  These are really useful if you get on with large items of luggage, or other things to hold onto – you don’t have as far to sit down, and it’s easier to get up again.

For fairly similar reasons, they are popular with the elderly.  There is however a certain fun in sitting with a friend in the higher seat behind the driver – it’s a bit like having a booth to yourself in a restaurant, because of being self contained.

I understand why the buses have changed.  Legislation for disability you need to be able to get wheelchairs on.  The same space is a real boon for parents whose tot has just gone off to sleep in the pushchair, and avoids you having to hoick the child out, disgorge shopping etc, just to get on the bus.

(I’ve not had to face oneupmanship between parents who think they have rival claims on this space – it only takes one pushchair – or how it feels to hope for a space and find it already full.)  The new buses can go lower to make them easier to get on and off – back to support for the elderly.

All of these groups are particularly likely to need to use buses, quite beyond equality of access.  It doesn’t take much looking at our local paper to see how people have lobbied for more of these buses to start their service in our area, because there are lots of people wanting the benefit of this kind of bus.

So three cheers for a decent public transport system, that’s also affordable, on the monthly pass at least. But still…these were the buses that captured my attention when, as a child, I got to ride them into town while visiting my grandparents on holiday.

At least there are a good number of double deckers around still, new bus or old.  The delights of sitting at the front upstairs still persist.  And with a husband who needs the legroom, surprisingly, it’s often still better at the front than in seats further back.

LRT seem to keep winning awards for their bus service, so something’s going right.  Let’s hope they can acknowledge the earlier buses in their hall of fame, as well as their innovations.

Just a trifle

Chilly? Just a trifle.  Our central heating boiler is playing up.  We have a Man coming to fix it (our former landlady had a stream of little Men who came to fix different things…and no, not those kind of little men, and definitely not wearing green either).

I have counted blessings as a way to calm down about it – we have separate gas so we can cook, we still have electricity for other stuff, we still have a shower that runs separately so can ablute, and so on.

Feeling rather foolish not to know to do boiler servicing – but there again, the people we bought from didn’t tell us anything about it, parents didn’t mention it, etc.  The back of the little on box seems to suggest the boiler was last serviced in November 1999…hmm…

Meanwhile, however, there is always food as a distraction.  Today have had a shot at making a different kind of trifle for our small church group meeting on Wednesday.  My manager has been on holiday to Switzerland, and came back with Lebkuchen.  It was rather sturdy just for eating this afternoon, but with a little liquid soaked in, it should make rather good trifle.

I have started to experiment with different kinds of trifle, mainly relating to variants on the cake part.  Today lebkuchen.  On one memorable occasion, panettone, with a little rum on top – that one went down VERY well.  Occasionally failed chocolate cake, sometimes cheap sponge on offer from the Co-op.

It’s not that I don’t want to spend money feeding guests.  But I do like good leftover ideas, and trifle is as much a left-over dish as a create from scratch with wonderful sponge fingers kind of dish.  In any case, I think the whole trifle sponge thing is really something you buy – a savoiardi biscuit, or something like that.  I suspect macaroons would be good; I think brioche might almost work too.

My other innovation in the trifling department is different ways of soaking the sponge/cake bit – see rum reference above.  Sherry – always good option.  But was also rather pleased at using the juice from stewed fruit to soak through the sponge – success a few weeks back with brambles as the fruit content, and bramble juice turning the sponge a particularly exciting colour.

You could claim all this is just distraction.  You’d be right, certainly tonight.  It makes me grateful that we both go out to work, and can rely on someone else paying for heat, somewhere else, during the day.

But it’s probably better than too much kicking ourselves, which is always a bit limited after the event.  Plus, this way, it entertains people – and perhaps it even entertains you, dear reader, finding out about it, or considering your own cake and fruit creations for the future.

Feeling better?  More than a trifle.