W is for wood smoke

High on the list of found items is scent. It’s not so much that you find it – it finds you. That’s the beauty of it.

Walking to do the afternoon school pick up, I was overtaken by the smell of wood smoke. It’s early October, and those with working fireplaces are starting to think about fires.

I wrote about woodsmoke a while ago. It’s one of those borrowed things: something that my parents both enjoy, and that I have learned to love as a result of seeing their response.

I am getting more aware of smells just now – particularly, the opportunity to take in lovely smells. Walking to school, through a residential area with lots of nice gardens, there are good opportunities to do just this.

To stop and smell roses. It may sound like a cliche, but I do it anyway, especially where the roses are just by the front wall of the property.

To run your fingers through a lavender bush. Again, if they are overhanging a fence, or growing through a gate, it’s perfect. Fun too to see the lavender in all its growing stages, including the ones where it looks a bit like cuckoo spit, with little white drops hanging on the plant.

Some smells on this walk are less sought after. Sadly, there is a strong smell of urine by a particular bench I pass. I can only hope that this is not someone’s regular stop off.

Scent these days seems so often chosen for you, rather than encountered. The supermarkets that install bakeries near the entrance, and waft baking smells over you as you enter.

The growing number of places that squirt it over you – sometimes as much as ever five minutes, it seems. Good idea in principle for public toilets – less good when it catches you in the face as you straighten up from the washbasins.

But the smells of wet undergrowth on the cycle path – or piles of cut grass going a little brown around the edges – or the lingering nature of last night’s cooking smells that greet you the next morning…

These I welcome. They remind me that my body is in the real world, even if my head is jumping between lists and memories and ‘need to take that out of the freezer’ thoughts.

Among all those ‘life is too short’ statements: surely life is too short not to enjoy good smells, when we get the chance. And to go looking for them, when we need topping up.

8 Oct: once, at an amusement park…

…I went on a ride with no seatbelts. And lived to tell the tale.

THE best ride that stands out in my mind is one I went on with my dad when I was quite little, maybe seven years old. We had this thing, you see, going on fairground rides together.

As the oldest child, with my brother only about two at the time, it was clearly my duty to remain a tomboy and go on scary rides with my dad. I was happy to rise to the challenge.

Back to the ride. It was called The Drum. Picture something like a circular cake tin in shape, with mesh walls. The walls had little padding bits on them – at adult head height, not mine. But I was still allowed on.

Then imagine that the cake tin is on a kind of spike. The cake tin spins round, faster and faster, then the spike lifts it up and it tilts. In mid air.

The only thing holding you up at that point is centrifugal force. Which is clearly pretty good at sticking you to the wall when you’re going fast enough.

I wonder about it now – whether you would still be allowed on. It was the early 80s – people hadn’t really started talking about fairground safety at that time, I don’t think.

So we went on the drum. I think it was maybe the last thing we went on that day. I was (am) into rollercoasters, so speed and movement were fine by me.

I don’t know how high it lifted up. Enough so that it could tip the drum part without it hitting the ground, at least. And so we hung there, in mid air, going round and round.

I don’t entirely remember the feeling – but I do remember the back of my head being uncomfortable against the mesh walls. I’m not sure that I would have gone on again straight away – but I must have enjoyed it to remember so many of the details.

I’ve been on some rollercoasters since – or rides where they suddenly drop you in something like a cable car. But I still reckon the drum was the best.

I tried hunting for some more information, and found that in some versions of this ride, the floor dropped away too…but I think the drum part stayed put.

I feel like there ought to be a bit more to the story than that. In my mind, I have a montage of film clips about fairgrounds, with big wheels and mysterious gunmen, and maybe even Jaws from James Bond. I can’t quite remember.

None of those – thankfully. Most likely to be somewhere near Scarborough, not necessarily a hub for scary fairground rides. Better known for donkey rides on the beach and then still genteel hotels near the front. (They may still be genteel. I haven’t been back in a while.)

Once, at an amusement park…only once. But once is enough to remember.

 

Interlude one: how much does an item need to be found?

Starting in on the topic of found items, it seems easy. When they drift across your path, that is. When small people come up and press them into your hands.

But when the breeze stops blowing, or the child moves off in search of something else, it can be harder. They start to become Looked For Items, rather than found ones.

I discovered by about day 2 that this was harder than I thought. Which is OK, really.
A number of the topics I’ve picked for myself to write about have turned out to be harder – it’s just that I normally discover this on day 10, or thereabouts.

One option can be to put yourself in places where it’s easier for items to be found. Looking in shop windows, checking the floor of a bus, keeping your eyes peeled while doing a familiar walk.

That has certainly helped. But it becomes less spontaneous after a while. And I think that, at least on starting out, the found item has also needed to be one that Suddenly Arrived.

Unplanned. But recognised as right. Something that resonates with you, something you were looking for but didn’t know until you found it.

Pretty soon on after starting this series, I understood that I approach learning in this way, as a series of found items. In the past, I was confident that I could keep reading and master a subject area.

Now, that seems an impossible task. So much is written, constantly, that you couldn’t ever hope to read it all. And these days, I’m not reading for an exam. I don’t need to try to do so.

The rush of reading that started last autumn was a realisation of how much you could learn, simply from going from blog post to blog post, link to link, author to author.

Part of the reason I kept reading instead of writing was the lure of the unexpected information hit. Keep reading, keep following links, and BAM! you’ve learned something new.

(I toyed with spending October writing about what I’ve learned – without planning to – over a year of reading lots of blogs. But then the postcard turned up, and I changed direction. Which suggests something of the positive effect of a good found item.)

I’ve come to think that much knowledge arrives in this way – certainly now when so much information is available online.

With the web a blur of tiny pieces, touching and not touching, sometimes you can only start to glimpse it when you turn over one tiny piece. When you read one blog post, and make a connection as a result.

The same is true of newspapers, actually. Encyclopedias. Almanacs. It doesn’t have to be online – but online makes it easy to roam freely in your reading.

For all of this, the topic of found items also seems to suggest that at least some of those items need to be ‘real’ – as in ones that you can touch, smell, encounter in the physical world.

If Duchamp had just gone around thinking, and not considering real items (like the famous urinal), art wouldn’t have gone in this direction. And actually, it can be great to see something considered everyday, and view it in an entirely new light.

I don’t know how many small pieces of revelation-waiting-to-happen are lying in wait for me. I don’t know if it’s pie in the sky to think that way, to expect the world to constantly surprise you.

But I think the opportunity to see the great in the small, familiar things is one worth seizing. We may go looking, rather than simply finding.

But at least we are expectant that something good is out there, and that it will reveal itself to us if we are willing to wait, and look again.

7 Oct: the one minute biography

I caught sight of today’s prompt earlier on, and I confess I have been cheating. The prompt is meant to take just one minute of writing – hardly any time at all, even if you are fairly nifty with the touch typing.

For the woman who loves to write, at length (yes, think you’d spotted that), a little early planning might just mean I could fit more words into my minute. Do it more justice. Right?

Hmm. The plus side of writing for a short time is the chance for spontaneity – which is now gone, given that I know about the prompt. No one stood beside me, as on a sports field, and said: ‘One minute: write about yourself. Starting…now!’

And sometimes, spontaneity is what we’re after. That’s why things like Five Minute Friday have become so popular – because it’s about getting the words out fast, not worrying about the spelling, the grammar, the punctuation, and so on.

I’ve done a little bit of low-minute writing, a few months back. It can be quite fun, there’s no denying. But part of me seems to be wrestling with the need to have longer to say who
I am. Why?

Some of it feels like the fear of the misinterpreted exam question. ‘Oh – you meant…that kind of me.’ What kind of biography are you meant to write? Dates and locations? A series of adjectives or roles for yourself?

I’m not that good at spontaneity. That’s why other people’s writing prompts can be very good for me. They free me up. They stop me second guessing too much.

The thing with being a writing person is that writing gives you another chance to say what you mean. Who you are. It’s the clever backchat several years after the embarrassing event. It’s the conversation you wish you’d had with a friend. It’s coming to your own defence when you are not always sure who else will come.

It seems to take a certain level of self-belief to combine writing with the baldest facts about yourself. I think that’s why I’m stalling. Out here, online, I can spin you a few tales, rehearse a few memories – and leave you with what I choose to.

It’s not just me. It’s lots of bloggers. Because unless you can blog in the format of The Truman Show, you’ll never get the whole truth. There’s just not enough time to fully capture it – and would people want to read the blow-by-blow account? Would I, even?

Blogging allows you to be selective. How much to say about one thing – how to totally avoid saying something about another. And actually, that’s OK. We often write what we want to read, write the conversations we’d like to be having with our friends face to face – and write what cheers us up, on occasion.

Having got all that off my chest, I might be coming closer to giving it a go. This first bit is maybe the dragging-tyres-on-chains kind of training that sprinters do, before they are released from the weight training to just run. Fast. Maybe it’ll help.

Timer set…

=======

English mum, Scottish dad

Brother

A dog a decade

England, Scotland, England, Poland, Scotland, Poland, Scotland…

Self-doubt. Self-belief.

Writing. Always more writing.

Starting to write my own stuff.

Marriage. Family. All the hard stuff – all the amazing stuff.

=========

Done.

 

T is for toffee doddles

I think window shopping counts as found items, don’t you? When I work in town once a month, I sometimes have a little time spare on the route back through to school pick up.

It was mild today. Mild enough to decide to get off the bus early, walk a bit, then get on another bus to take me on up to school. So I took in Leith Walk in all its splendour – the long road that connects central Edinburgh with the port of Leith.

I didn’t do the whole of the Walk. Just a bit here and there. And I came across a rather lovely looking sweet shop, the name of which I wasn’t able to remember. Because I was too taken up with the names of the sweets.

Words certainly count as found items, as far as I’m concerned. And I had never come across the names of some of these sweets before. Toffee Doddles? Tiny Tatties? Odd Fellows? I was entranced.

Learning about new names of sweets made me think of Roald Dahl. There’s plenty of sweets, of course, in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – and in The Giraffe and the Pelly and Me (not as well known as some Dahl, but still lots of fun).

What I didn’t know until more recently was just how much Dahl loved sweets – there’s a whole focus on them in the first part of his autobiography, Boy. He even got to test chocolate for Cadbury’s, as did his classmates – can you imagine schools permitting that now?

But I think that Dahl would have made it a mission to memorise as many types of sweets as possible. I only managed three new ones (and a fourth which is not yet on the tip of the tongue, but half way back. That’s where you only have an inkling of part of it.).

I think the shop counts as a further found item, because I had no idea it was there. Edinburgh has been adding sweets boutiques over the last few years – the name seems fitting, not just for the potential to throw in a rhyme, but because they are a bit more upmarket.

Dahl would have recognised your regular sweet shop, with rows of jars of sweets, and others in view on the counter. But these shops want to sell not just to the school child, but the grownup who remembers blowing their pocket money on sweets, and still wants to now.

At least a bit.

Nostalgia is a big business in confectionery sales, at least in the UK. It brought back a chocolate bar that had been out of production, and led to the revival of Creamola Foam (one of my holiday favourites).

And it has stocked the shelves of these shops which sell the sweets of your youth. I can think of at least two other shops in Edinburgh already doing this, and I’m sure there’s more.

Sherbet Dib Dabs? Cola Bottles? Flying Saucers? Kola Kubes? These and many more are now within reach – even easier reach, in the age of internet sweet shopping.

But new sweets? Do we need them? Well, partly no (sensible adult) and partly yes (intrigued inner child). I didn’t buy any today, but I might just venture back.