Frydmania

In a previous working life, I inhabited one main world for almost a decade. I knew how the thinking about it worked, how to make decisions (or at least some principles for trying). Then I jumped ship. And now I get to be a social anthropologist of websites.

These days, what I end up writing about (for money) is as varied as the number of businesses or organisations that happen to pick the web company I do writing work for. Some of those worlds are familiar: those that include food, or tourism, for example.

And others require a much bigger leap of comprehension to get inside their worlds, and see their business, and their opportunities, through their eyes – but also those of outsiders, like me.

I get to wear both hats – trying to understand the new reader who comes to their site, and the intentions of the site owners, and (hopefully) finding a middle way to respect both in what I write.

I remember reading actual social anthropology texts in my first year at university. Three or four different cultures – some closer to home than others, but all with very different ways of seeing the world.

We looked at topics like magic, or ways of keeping clean, or how to treat an older child when a younger one comes into your family. Some of the other cultures’ practices were radically different from my own responses, but part of the fascination was understanding why they made the choices they did.

I sold the books when I stopped the course, and I kind of regret that now. I’d like to make the journey into those worlds again, though I could probably identify the books at some point, and do just that.

What has stayed with me though is the role of the social anthropologist: in the midst of it all, living, being human, and trying to make sense of everything as it happens before them.

I can feel a bit like that when I approach a website that’s for a subject matter that’s completely (or pretty nearly) new to me. I discover familiar words used in new ways. I get my head round some new jargon, make guesses at acronyms that may or may not be explained later.

In other words, I start to build a sense of the culture of that ‘new world’. What’s crucial. What’s less important. What’s distinctive for that ‘tribe’. And also what I uncover while getting to know them: the things that they may take for granted, that actually are pretty amazing.

It’s the reverse of my earlier post, really. Sometimes, what is everyday to the company is worth shouting about. Worth rearranging the ideas for, so they stand out more strongly. And I relate to them, because of having ‘lived with them’ in the reading of the site, the getting to know you stage.

The reading, on these occasions, is quite hard work – grappling with concepts when you don’t quite know the framework. Taking in words, when you later realise that they might mean something a bit different.

But when the reading is done, it’s a great feeling. I feel like I’ve mastered a new subject – in reality, I’ve skimmed the surface, but I feel like I can now swim along in that new ocean.

That process of mastery, the satisfaction in it – I wonder if that’s why autodictats often do so well for themselves. They’ve taught themselves, they’ve taken in new information, and become new themselves in the process. Why wouldn’t you go back for more?

Fortunately, I get to do just that. I wouldn’t be able to claim a specialist subject for Mastermind. But I might just do a bit better on a general knowledge round – and that I can certainly enjoy.

When I started planning these posts, I had a few that were already good to go.

The one about sandwich eating, for example. But over the course of writing this month, I realise how much books become a way that you enter into a whole range of experiences and understandings. Including of other cultures.

When I was at secondary school, the world of textbooks became that much larger.
It had been there at primary school too, of course, but there were more books that still felt like regular books. At secondary school, you had a bag full. But they weren’t all the same.

Some seemed to be full of things to push into your head (or to find, in desperation, when the Chemistry teacher assumed we all knew about valencies rather earlier than I think we were meant to).

But others were ways of opening doors, and discovering new parallel worlds. Ones where there were completely different signs for bus stops – and yet people coped!

The book was Deutsch Heute, and I was learning German. (I’d had a little go at it earlier, but you can read about that a few posts back.) I knew the words were different – some of the sounds were different – but it never occurred to me that people would then think to change how their daily worlds looked and functioned.

This wasn’t jingoism – it was not having been abroad at a time when I could really take in the world. I knew already that different parts of the UK had different words, different expressions, and had got used to switching to whatever was needed.
But postboxes were still the same – in other words, there were still landmarks that helped you orientate yourself.

When you learn another culture, those landmarks shift. Sometimes, you can recognise what they mean quite fast – you learn the word for bus stop (Haltestelle), you see the textbook showing signs by the side of a road with an H on. In a while, you might put the two together.

Anyway. I learned German. The school kindly decided to start their first exchange with Germany, and I was booked on it fairly fast, along with many of my friends. I had a few ideas of what to expect – but I was unprepared for that moment of visual recognition when I was there, and suddenly started seeing The Things That Were In the Textbook. Imagine!

Bus stops. Post boxes. Signs with the capital B shape that is really a double s.
(That itself is now more of an endangered species, since German spelling reform.) They were all there – and people were living around them and using them, and taking them for granted. And life was clearly still working.

These days, travel is much easier, quicker, cheaper. Brands work in multiple languages – what we know at home is available elsewhere.

Equally, what we know at home is also now in multiple languages. All those boxes, bottles and so on in my German teacher’s classroom have less of an impact than they did when they were our early introductions into packaging in other languages.

So we have more signposts. We are also more familiar with the foods, the music of other cultures. All this is good. It helps see what is important to our friends. It helps us prepare, if we are going to go to other places.

But books are partly there to tell us that the world is full of strange and sometimes wonderful things that we have not even thought of yet. Things that millions elsewhere take for granted, yet that leave us not knowing their purpose, their importance, and so on.

And textbooks – other books too – are ways to gradually break down the culture shock. To show us not just the stand out cultural features, the monuments, the national symbols, but the everyday ones too. The ones that are so familiar to them – but not to us – or vice versa.

This kind of book also encouraged an early social anthropologist outlook, in a way. To look on and work out the importance of a thing, its role, by how it was used. To see that it was familiar to others, to accept that, and move on.

By the time I made it to university, and a whole other set of textbooks, I was ready to explore ways into worlds further away from my own. And more able to spot the signposts for these worlds – ones that I might in fact recognise as important in my own.

Food. Shelter. Transport. Opportunity. Because sometimes the greater shock is, after the difference, seeing how much we actually do have in common.

I spent a lot of the last couple of months reading. I found a blog or two I liked, and through those, found more. And through these connections, I found websites of others who love both reading and writing. One post struck a chord: about Louisa May Alcott, writer of Little Women.

Little Women is a classic. The title may now not have the same resonance as it did when it was written – but this is a story of four sisters growing up. Their father is away in the war at the start of the story; the mother (Marmee) is holding everything together but still encouraging her girls to find their individual path in life.

Most of us love Jo, the headstrong second daughter. In her, I found an ally – someone who loves books, loves writing, and tries to make a way for herself in the world through it. Jo makes mistakes, she avoids housework yet gives in to it when needs must – she is real, and familiar to us in so many ways.

One of my abiding reading memories is of the early description of Jo, up in the attic, reading and reading, eating her way through a box of apples while she does, and crying at points over some of the stories. I love the abandonment to words, being prepared to go where the story takes her – and the value of food alongside the reading process.

I think part of me has always wanted to write. So when I found characters like Jo who were immersed in words, who tried their hand at writing, I felt encouraged. Even though Jo in time finds a different path (and I won’t say what, for those who haven’t read the book), you feel sure that books and words are still valued in it.

Back to the post about Louisa May Alcott. I discovered that she and her family were unusual in their choices, their focus in life. Behind the story of Little Women, which offers various ways to develop into yourself as a woman, was an even more unusual life that formed the book – and its sequels.

But in discovering about Louisa May Alcott, I also chanced upon a writer in the person who told me about her life – one whose own site is full of a love affair with words, worked out in various ways.

More recently, on the same site, which has guest posts by a range of writers, I’ve encountered another blogger who is also keen on writing, and writes about writing – and reading – and encouraging others in both. I look forward to exploring more of these two blogs, and the stories of the writers behind them.

Wherever we are in our own musings on where life is heading, it is great to find soulmates along the way. Even if their path differs from ours, even if the way their talents are worked out is different – they still care about the same things. And they take the time to express that – in a way that celebrates the craft of writing and the sheer love of reading.

I suspect all three of us love the spiky yet honest-hearted Jo, as so many others still do. And, through Jo, and other reading-and-writing characters, we go on to find our own words, and our own way, in the world. We are better for knowing there are companions in our journey – wherever it is we come across them.

Before self-help books, there are how to books. Perhaps they’re more prevalent for girls. In thinking of books I’ve read that have impacted me, or shaped the way I think, it includes books that are intended to help girls work out how to be…women?

I should probably note here that I don’t have a sister. Nor did my mother. Nor did her mother. And part of how we learn about what it is to be female is through examples in our immediate family. We will learn from our mothers, true, but sometimes we also want someone else along side.

I think some of the earlier ‘how to’ books for girls were much more about preparing you for marriage (the expectation): how to keep house, how to sew, how to remove stains of various kinds.

They could well have been Mrs Beaton, but for a few things thrown in for a younger age group – I think this included signalling in semaphore. Sadly, at this point, I think of the Monty Python sketch of Heathcliff and Cathy, signalling their hopeless devotion through semaphore, and have to conclude that I don’t take it very seriously.

But still. I read the older book – or dipped in, at points. So I think this is also the one with how to sew French knots – which admittedly helped at the making a decorative pin cushion in primary school stage. (Step 1: make a felt pin cushion. Step 2: sew whatever else – you now have your trusty pin cushion to assist you.)

Later, in my teens, I came across another one called Girl Talk. This one was a bit more updated – how to look after your skin, yes, but also how to get a part time job. What to do about mean girls – what to do about unwanted attention from men.

Teenage magazines did some of this too – and sleepovers at friends’ houses were also part of where those ‘how is life meant to work?’ discussions happened. But the magazines were generally borrowed, and the sleepovers didn’t happen so often. So the book got read in the meantime.

I remember the cover, the attempt to show a range of styles of dress, haircut, etc among a group of girls, huddling together and reading the book. Yes, it was one of those books that has people reading the book – and on the front cover of the book is a picture of people reading the book…and so on.

Whatever the books, the magazines, even the friends, told you – at some point, you had to work it out for yourself. What worked on the page was not necessarily what came up in real life – particularly when it comes to opening lines at parties…

And actually, what came up in real life for me, for my peers at school, included things that were way outside what the book included at the time. Parental illness. The complications of old age for grandparents. The impact of parents’ jobs, the economic climate, the societal shift towards greater consumerism.

These days, I suspect so much of that is covered in fiction – and covered way earlier, too. Yes, there was Judy Blume for teens in the 80s – but the Jacqueline Wilson books of the last decade or more cover a much wider range of home lives, and complications for the characters.

There will always be a need to find reassurance, answers – or at least, someone going through something like us. In our teens, wanting to show our mastery of life – yet, equally, at sea with a host of changes – we need a second opinion. A neutral observer.

Who knows how that second opinion will be offered in the future. But whether or not we have sisters, friends, confidantes – we will need sources of advice for our time, even if that advice seems strange later, at a distance.

For we would far rather have that advice than not. And we will cling to it until we realise how much we make our own ways through – and equally, how much we need advice, not just in our teens, but right through life.

Had a ‘day off school’ day yesterday. Me too – strange sickness bug going about. Luckily we’re back to normal today. But it got me thinking about a craft book I had when I was little (and still have): the Stay in Bed Book.

There were (are) two of these books: Stay in Bed and Play Indoors. By inference, they are for those moments when you can’t be active, can’t be outside. The preface of the Stay in Bed book shows it is aimed at a child in bed with measles, or a broken leg – something where you have to stay put, but still want something to do.

The Stay in Bed Book has a splendidly seventies cover, with a child in paisley pyjamas cutting away at a pompom hedgehog with a felt body. (I’ve been struggling to find a link to it that actually show the cover – you’ll just have to imagine it.  Or pop over and have a look at my copy.)

I made that hedgehog – though, probably, not when I was ill. (I can’t speak for the paisley pyjamas. I don’t think so. But then I may have blocked that out.)

I wasn’t ill a lot as a child. Grateful for that. But I do recognise that listlessness when you aren’t quite feeling right, want something new to do that cheers you up a bit, and need something that isn’t too demanding.

I find myself thinking back to more Robert Louis Stevenson when I consider this book – and his poem about the Land of Counterpane. Stevenson certainly knew illness as a child, and I’m not surprised that he chose to picture this when putting together his collection of poems.

The copy of the Child’s Garden of Verses (from which this comes) I had was memorable for this page – the illustrations showed him moving his toy soldiers about on the blanket of the bed.

The other key book I think about is A Big Ball of String, by Marion Holland. One of the Dr Seuss library of books written by other authors, this was one that lived at my grandparents, so I only got to see it when visiting them.

The boy in the book is ill, and required to stay in bed. He finds he can make a few things work around his bedroom with bits of string, collects up more and more of it.

By the end, as the title promises, he has a big ball of string that is making about twenty different things work. He can turn the light on and off, alter the blinds, flick the switch to make his model train go, and lots more cheering up activities.

You do notice that he does get out of bed to put the things in motion – and by the end, operating everything at once, you do get the idea that he is pretty much better. But it’s still fun to think that ‘With a big ball of string //I can do anything // Anything at all!’

It seems a bit of a niche, books for things to do when you’re ill. But I think it impacted me more by making me realise that others might be ill more, or for longer times.

I didn’t necessarily realise in my childhood that some people have poor health for far more of their lives, and that working around it is still important.

But that is also the role of books: to help you understand others’ lives, other situations that are valid, even if you don’t share them. Because you might at some point. And you can have some appropriate concern in the meantime.

Having a quick flick back at the Stay in Bed Book, I quite like the look of weaving with wool and drinking straws. Perhaps it’s time to practise looking peaky again.