M is for Mr Men

Returning from a very happy playdate this afternoon, I come in and remove my shoes. There is something extra on the bottom of my sock – I can feel it as I move through the house.

On closer inspection, it’s a Mr Men sticker. And I smile, because being a parent is often about the tiny found items that accumulate around children.

—

It wouldn’t have to be Mr Men – or even a sticker. It could be a stone – to accompany a stone – to accompany another stone. The daughter of one of our friends specialised in pebbles, at a certain age. She was clearly delighted on coming across a gravelled drive.

There is a whole plethora of Useful Sticks out there in the world, just waiting to be discovered. (And a whole series of discussions about Why You Can’t Bring Your Stick Home This Time.)

At one stage, Junior Reader and I could not come to meet a friend without giving them a leaf. Or several. Perhaps a twig. I liked the fact that it was something natural, while trying to avoid the ‘taking handfuls of hedges’ scenarios that can ensue with this approach.

—

As adults, we see rubbish in the gutter – or, more likely, we don’t even see it. But children feel the need to stoop, and grub around, and pick up whatever objects catch their eye.

If you were going to be an artist specialising in works made from found items, you would really want to employ a child as your assistant (barring the underage work implications), because they have a very keen eye for things that others pass by.

Digging in the garden a year or so back, Junior Reader unearthed a glass bottle top – the kind of stopper that would go in medicine bottles. That was a good find, and worthy of going in the box specially reserved for treasures.

We, as the curators of the many tiny things, can sometimes find it hard to keep up. Is the item of real importance, emotional significance…or is it really just a bit of fluff?

Not always easy to tell. But children also leave a trail of found items for us – perhaps we are the ones who need them more.

We need to see the world afresh; to consider everything important and worthy of inspection. And if we are truly lucky, after visiting this museum of the everyday with them, we may be allowed to take some artefacts home. To remind us of them, and their unswerving interest in the world.

Even if some of the artefacts are stored on the bottom of your sock.

 

3 Oct: What if…

Another writing prompt for today.

What if…starts me into a nonsensical spiral. What if the worlds of Dr Seuss are real? What if the first of Octember will really come? And what if any of the wonderful dreams of children’s books can come true?

I think this is where I go when I hear what if. What if is permission to dream. It’s permission to think crazy thoughts, believe things that don’t function in ‘real life’, and generally have fun with all that imagining.

What if is a compulsion to build bigger and higher and funnier stories and imaginings. Maybe than others – what if I can imagine more than you can? But I really want you with me in my imaginings, because imagining is even more fun when it’s shared.

What if that kind of imagining was a job? Or a way to earn a living? Or a way that you were simply allowed to spend your time? It’s the kind of question people are thinking about when they ask ‘What would you do if money were no object?’

What if is also the world of philosophy – of software design – of big budget action movies. What if that car were to be picked up and abducted…by a helicopter? What if an old man’s house were to float away in a cloud of balloons? What if we really could remember everything we’d ever thought: would we have time to think anything new?

You might be able to guess (or remember) some of the answers to these. I’m also remembering that there are people called ‘imagineers’ (I think for Disney?) whose job it is to come up with great, wild and wonderful notions that others will fall in love with.

What if there were really a platform 9 3/4 at Kings Cross? What if you could drive a car which had a conveyor belt of soda bottles with straws, so you would never run out? What if a mother had multiple sons and really did call them all Dave?

Really, what I love is coming up with my own what ifs, and enjoying the what ifs that are out there to encounter. Because some of the what ifs of the past might just become reality – in fact, have already done so. Didn’t I read this week that they’ve actually developed a kind of light sabre now?

Given that ‘the truth is stranger than fiction’, we may also find that there is plenty out there fulfilling our imagined what ifs. What if there were rabbits the size of medium-sized dogs? It’s the world of the Guiness Book of Records, and QI, and behind the scenes documentaries.

What if…is hopeful of wonder. What if is expectant of surprise and delight. What if is guessing, and finding out you were right all along. What if we could all do that more often?

[I thought about putting links to these to show the answers to some of these what ifs. But I decided not to. What if you asked them as true, wondering questions? And what if you looked them up, and enjoyed what you found out?

So let me know if you do.]

31 days: S is for soya chunks

There are found items – and then there are found items. I guess it depends on how much hunting you put in to find them – and how much you are surprised by what you find.

I have a very small kitchen. I like it a lot – you can stir something on one work surface and reach behind you to get a teaspoon out of the drawer on the other side of the kitchen. That small.

I’m not into small kitchens per se, though it does mean you can get into the cooking when you’re at it. But it also means you need to be wise to how to fit things into a small space.

As time has gone on, more and more food items have tended to go up on top of the cupboards. (Don’t get me wrong, I also keep food in the cupboards. And the fridge. And the freezer. And under the sink, otherwise known as the area where jams and pickles get kept, in the dark.)

But there is more food to keep – particularly if you do things like cook gluten- or dairy-free food. Not all the shops sell what you want, so I tend to buy more at a time when I can get those items. (To be honest, I overstock. I’ve admitted it before.)

I’m telling you all this so that you understand about the space on top of the cupboards. A lot goes up there. Occasionally items get hidden behind other items. And so on.

—

All this is help you understand why I discovered soya chunks on top of the cupboards. They were behind something else. I did a bit of kitchen sorting a couple of weekends ago, and found them there.

‘S is for soya chunks’ is not exactly expected. S might be for sunshine, or stones, or squashed items in my coat pockets that I discover on my way to school pick up.

But soya chunks it is. Because it conveys something about me and food: there are always new things to try. I like food, I like cooking (most of the time), and I like trying new ingredients. And most of the time, I do use them. Really.

—

I love the lure of food shopping – the discovery element. I particularly love it when abroad, because then it’s exploring in its best sense.

We don’t always know what items are. We may find familiar items next to unfamiliar ones. We may wonder why bread and cigarettes cost the same, and imported yoghurt costs almost twice the same as either. (My experience in Poland, the first time round.)

I don’t get to go abroad so much these days. But a bit of pottering in a Chinese supermarket, a Polish deli, a Mediterranean cash and carry – that almost counts. It is food, but it is not fully familiar to me.

So it is that items like soya chunks get discovered. Or gram flour. Or little cakes of rice that you soak for a long time and then add to a stir fry.

Some of it can be working my way through alternatives to wheat flour. Some of it can be considering ways to expand our diet, and enable the junior eater of the household to try new things.

And some of it, of course, is culinary opportunism.

—

The soya chunks are sitting on the work surface by the cooker. They look a tiny bit like the dog biscuit our first dog used to eat (and which I would pinch from time to time).

My sous-chef likes the look of them, and reckons that you can eat them as they are – maybe like small knobbly rusks. But I don’t think we’ll risk that.

What they need is some ideas – maybe a rifle through the cook books. Maybe a quick check online. For now, they sit there, taking up food preparation space, and looking at me, just a little accusingly.

—

The extra thing to know about me and food is that I hate wasting it. Call it the inner environmentalist, or the part of me that was surely told to think about children who didn’t have enough to eat. (That thought is still true today, but the style of it suggests that it comes from an older relative.)

So I’ve bought it, I don’t always know what to do with it – but I will use it. Sometimes the household endures experiments because I didn’t want to throw things away. (Some of the experiments also turn out well, but it’s fair to say that they don’t always.)

Between the ‘how do I use this?’ and ‘I should use it!’, some items go back up on top of the cupboards again, there to be discovered when I do a bit of reorganising. And others are left down To Make Me Use Them, like our friends the soya chunks.

—

It’s fairly easy to have found items in our homes, at least in Western countries. I do my best not to bring unnecessary stuff through the door in the first place, but it can happen.

With food, it can be easier to make the excuse. Because food doesn’t stay in the same way as a table, or a scarf, or even a second-hand book. Food is there to be cooked, to be eaten, and for the cycle to start again.

There are more dangerous habits to have, I know. But in the meantime, I need to stop backing away from the soya chunks, or at least use things up before I decide to travel again by food shopping.

31 days: P is for postcard

I mentioned the poetry postcard yesterday: so it really had to start the series off. This is the postcard I picked up. I loved the title: The Travel Guide to the Country of Your Birth.

Some day, if I’m feeling brave, I may write my own story to that title. Although the poem itself does focus on a country (I need to do my research to pinpoint the right one), the phrase has the feeling of revisiting not just a location, but the past itself.

I find myself sharing family stories more and more, at home. Some of them are about family a generation or so up from me, but others are about me. A me, and a past, and a location that seem more and more distant and strange when I try to recall them.

The past is indeed a foreign country. I know. I even read the book that coined the phrase (thanks, school reading list), so I can be sure of it.

But for now, I’m going to write about postcards themselves. That’s my prompt. Stick to the brief.

—

I looked in the postcards drawer today. There is a postcards drawer, you see. Postcards that I’ve bought, or Dan’s bought, or I’ve come into possession of.

Postcards that are kept, because the pictures are lovely, or the purchase marks a special visit, that kind of thing. They live in one of those card files that you pull out, like old-fashioned library cards (the card file in itself, part of a foreign-country past, of an office I used to work in).

There are also postcards that have been received that are kept. Reasons for keeping these are about the recipients, maybe the location where they went to, and their act of thinking to write and say how they were.

There are the postcards previously used for teaching, relics of my TEFL-past when no free postcard was safe if it could be put to educational use.

I am also rather a fan of the bad postcard. There are books for this, if you’re interested. Or at least Flickr groups. The notion is that they are unintentionally bad – they mean to be cheery, but they end up looking silly, at the very least.

When I was first in Poland, back in 1993, it wasn’t that long since the fall of Communism, and the postcards available tended to reflect that.

Regimes tend to help set the tone for bad postcards (though not exclusively, of course). Think heroic skyscrapers and patriotic monuments that are really not that great to look at.

So I have quite a few postcards that cover skyscrapers, monuments – or, at points, both. They are fascinating in terms of helping you think about what a country, or city, wants to say about itself to others.

—

Postcards are invested with traditions, one way or another. That same long-distant office had its own tradition of sending postcards: if you were on holiday anywhere interesting (and people generally were, it was that kind of office), you sent the office a card.

The cards went up on the wall, or a notice board, I think. Some of them then got nobbled by the stamp collector of the office. I didn’t much like having to think about work at the point of being on holiday, sending the required postcard, but I did like looking at the cards that others sent.

Another set of postcard traditions were around the ones my granny received. One of her sons was particularly adept at this – whenever he went somewhere, for work or holiday, he would send a card.

The cards would go up on the serving hatch in her kitchen. (This makes it sound grand but it was one of those useful slide up bits between kitchen and dining room, so you could put food through without needing to carry it round between the two rooms.)

It wasn’t quite a shrine. Granny would not like that suggested. But it was a focal point in the kitchen, in its own way, and I liked it for that.

—

I used to be better about sending postcards – or even just cards. I would sit in airports on work trips, using the time before flights to write (yes! by hand! with a pen!) to friends in different places. It was a way of showing them I was thinking about them, in the days before Facebook.

These days, Facebook itself is probably a form of postcard. A series of postcards, one after another – particularly where people tag themselves at a given location.

They may not be saying ‘Weather is here, wish you were wonderful’, but we know they are postcards. After all, they go up on a wall – or rather, a Wall.

Postcards are short and sweet. In the past, you might press hard with biro and draw an arrow to show your location, on the photo side of the card. (We stayed…here!) Now, you just tag yourself to show you were there.

—

We tend to send postcards when we travel. But really, postcards from home are fascinating too.

I like Facebook for encouraging that element. Those little notes we put up for others, relating to very everyday life at home, that somehow we want to remember, or at least laugh about…these are what I think of as postcards from home.

You and I may live in the same city – or somewhere much more distant. Our days may have much in common – or little at all, even if we are only a few miles away.

But at least we remembered to send a card. Those few short sentences – maybe even just a few words. We put them together and sent them off, and others get to look at them on their own walls, even if only fleetingly.

So go on, post something. Write from the outpost of wherever your life is at today.

One day, that little note will feel like it came from a foreign country – and your later self might just be pleased to receive it.

—

Tomorrow’s post: S is for…

2 Oct: Today

Here’s the prompt for the extra writing group I mentioned. 5 minutes on ‘today’:

Today is the middle of the week. Wednesday is often a good mood day for me – made it this far in the week.

Today was grey all day, however. ALL day. With that looming, hovering greyness that promises rain but barely lets any through.

Today was a chance for a bit of me time after a day playing teacher plus nurse yesterday to our wee one off school.

Today was a game of mix and match on leftovers in the fridge. Despite them not seeming like they might go together, in the end they did. And the rest got finished up into teatime or packed lunch. Success.

Today was a day of looking at beautiful food photography for fun – the amazing bento boxes done by Jill Dubien in Canada. I don’t have a fussy eater, nor was I one, but I can see that some fun food would captivate anyone reluctant to try things.

Today was a day of seeing fridge stocks run down, and gearing up for the week’s food shop on Friday. I like that pattern of planning out the food, seeing it used up, and then ‘re-setting’ for more.

Today was a day of saying yes to writing – two lots! And planning how to keep the daily posts going on the main theme, over the October holiday week.

Today was a week day. Nothing remarkable. There are more weekdays than weekends. Sometimes that seems pretty unfair, but today, that was fine. Despite the greyness.