Having favourites

Bad for people. No one wants to be left out. But good for things? Absolutely. Because one of the ways we appreciate those delights, those moments, is by having ones we can go back to, time after time. A favourite repays. It becomes the moment anew, in the reexperiencing.

Watching a favourite film today. It’s someone else’s favourite – and one of mine. We both care about the points when the hero seems so far away from his goal. And the points where he gets there. Where he learns that it’s partly about how you see yourself. We are both delighting, right there, even though we know the dialogue, when the funny bits will come along.

I’ve noticed that quite a lot of the items for my box of delights are favourites. Maybe current ones, maybe ones from way back. They already have a positive connection for me. I’ve been slightly surprised how many are rooted in past delights, earlier moments that were special, and that my brain likes to remind me were good.

As we go on in life, there are probably more reexperienced moments, fewer new ones. I’ve written on that already this month, but that’s reexperiencing for you… 😉 Maybe what gets to be new is sharing them with new people, taking that item out of our box of delights, and passing it over to be admired, hopefully.

What we are also giving is ourselves, our clarity of being at the point when we experience something we love. We are giving ourselves as we would like to be, more of the time.

It doesn’t always happen, but when kids like what their parents like, I believe part of it is because of how the kid experiences a fresh aspect of their parent – a person who experiences joy, and who is so caught up with it that it conveys that to someone new.

I can think of my parents’ favourites in some areas – how their expressions would change if they suddenly came across those favourites. The smell of woodsmoke. Of honeysuckle.

As I experienced the pleasure of seeing them particularly happy, their favourite jumped into my memory too. Now I come across these scents for myself, and enjoy the two together.

Just as I have these joys, I have the other option: the points when a new person experienced a joy for the first time, and my enjoyment of being with them right then. It may be one of my happy things too, it may be something completely new – it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that, in that enjoyment, they claim it for themselves. And I claim it too, remembering their joy, and mine at seeing them caught up in that experience.

When we come across these triggers for joy again, time stops still. In those memories, whether wholly ours or connected with someone else, we and they are present. We and they take on a permanence in the remembering, even if that moment of remembering is soon past.

And where we are sometimes distant from those other people – distant in space as well as of course over time – it becomes a way to be together again. It’s time travel without a tardis. And it’s as available as those triggers.

The longer we live, the longer we are with others, the more times we and they experience joy – the more we have an unexpected storehouse of experiences, memories. Happy things. Favourites. They are ours and they are shared, and we are more than ourselves, both in the moment, and in the remembering.

Off to score some books

Friday afternoon, and the library beckons. I took the last lot of books back in a rush, a day late, and didn’t get more out at the time. So now, more intentionally, we’re off to score some books. Because this is a household where new book acquisitions, even where they have to be given back after a bit, are greeted with great joy.

Once upon a time, I went to the library. A lot. I was around 6, and I remember getting my first Asterix book at the library. I can still remember the feel of the building inside. Clearly I was impressed, or hooked, or both. Years of regular library trips followed.

My other main library memory is the one from the town where I spent my secondary years. Light, spacious, extensive section for kids and teens. Heaven. I even tried to get work at the weekend there, although this was at a time when I believed being a librarian was more about how many books you got to read.

Studying, I still went to the library, got books, but now they were for work. There was a big watershed at the end of A Levels, where I stopped reading fiction, to all intents and purposes. Three A Levels with literature components later, I was kind of full to the brim with stories.

Academic reading took off – had to, really, at university time. Reading was still regular but less for fun (though a lot of it was still fun. For example, you could read linguistics journals with articles about whether guinea pigs would jump over little hurdles when played various sound segments. And call it work.).

There’s more in between, but suffice to say, I got back into the library habit a few years ago. Grand. It makes an outing out of an afternoon, you have all the adrenaline rush of a charity shop bonanza, when you find the good stuff, but you don’t have to spend money.

Mind you, the librarians know me, so sometimes I do. Today I was pointed at the ‘withdrawn from the library section’ and essentially told to help myself. I felt that wasn’t quite right, so I gave them a couple of pounds – it won’t do a great deal to boost the staff Christmas night out, but it’s a step in the right direction.

There are several delights to all this. The heading out, with library intent. The choosing. The chatting to the librarians, sometimes to others pouring over the picture books. The returning, straining a little under the weight of books. Getting home, laying them all out. A little pause. Then diving in. Bliss.

When the moment comes, let me know

A brief interlude in the collection of delights, or moments. When I started my collection of things that brighten my day, I did so with the plan that I wouldn’t store them up: I would write about a particular moment, on a particular day. I wanted these to reveal themselves to me, and in their realism, I would (hopefully) spot them, and write about them.

So what’s wrong with November 15? Where is my moment? Don’t get me wrong, it’s not been a bad day. It’s been fine. Got some work done, did the school run home, cooked tea, that kind of stuff. Fairly like other days. But I do know you can end up second guessing yourself in trying to identify when a moment is…well, a Moment.

Thing was, yesterday, I felt like I had several other experiences which would have done just as well. Getting off a bus, late into the evening, and seeing the trees nearby in the streetlight. All of a sudden, in that particular glow, they seemed hyperreal, as though being 3D wasn’t enough. They seemed to project across the street, in the way of 3D films. (And no, it wasn’t to do with what I had eaten or drunk.)

Equally, heading out earlier, seeing the streetlight through a slightly rainy haze, you could see the starlight effect, like those special camera lenses that make a camera flame look like a star. And I’m sure there was another, only now it’s gone. I guess part of the value of capturing these moments is in being able to remember them, reflect on them later, draw comfort from doing so at other times.

Part of the notion is also, that if there’s a special moment in a day, it lifts it. That you only need one moment a day to turn a day around. Isn’t three or four a bit greedy? But in those big experiences like holidays, or the beginnings of a relationship, or any other intense experience where we see it all through new eyes, we get multiple moments. And we can get hungry for that rush, that saturation of experiences all tangled up together.

The truth is, meals need to be cooked. Work needs to be done. Carpets need hoovered from time to time. There is far more repeat in the everyday, and while that’s sometimes frustrating, it can be comforting too. So one new moment – like sighting the first star in the sky – can be enough to lift our heads.

And if there isn’t one today? Look back at the list. There will be more moments. The last 14 days is proof.

Useful Facts

I’m not a fan of over-capitalisation, but on this occasion it’s deserved. For useful facts are such fun, they are indeed Useful Facts, guaranteed to brighten a (particularly grey) day. You don’t have to be a nerd to enjoy them (although now that it is cooler to consider yourself one, and broadcast that fact, I can confirm that I am, and have long been, a nerd).

So today’s useful fact is about alpaca, which I’m learning lots about in order to write about for a client. I found out that alpaca fleece was so prized, it was reserved only for Inca kings to wear. Pretty cool – or in fact pretty warm. Go on, ask me another. Alpaca yarn is 8 times warmer than sheep’s wool. Remember that next time you’re thinking about buying socks.

In the past, Useful Facts were something you might tell friends – or grownups, to impress, if you thought it would work. Sometimes, a good Useful Fact is one that you hug to yourself, waiting for the time to be right to convey it. Now, useful facts are part of my world. They’re called USPs (or Unique Selling Points). And they’re just what a client is looking for if they want their product to stand out in the market place.

What with the web and all, it’s much easier to find out facts; much easier to share them. Much easier to stick them all together and build something new with them. It’s no longer uncool to like knowing stuff.

This is a great source of comfort to my inner nerd, from a time when it wasn’t so great. Meanwhile, nerds can also become teachers (on occasion) so they get a larger audience for their Useful Facts. (Yes, I did that too.)

I will no doubt be back to tell you more about alpacas at some point. For now, I’m honing the remainder of my useful facts about them, and wondering which ones will need to be left out in order to save space on a computer screen. But in the meantime, they’re all going in.

Channelling your inner Julie Andrews

We started listening to The Sound of Music in the car at one point on Sunday. All very nice, all very singalong. Today, one of the songs came back to me again – the difference was that I found myself wandering around, singing it. In the car. At the supermarket (sotto voce in store, a bit louder in the car park).

The Sound of Music soundtrack is very familiar to me. I can do all the Julie Andrews vocalisations – the bits where she speaks it rather than sings it, and so on. But I really hadn’t done this for a long time, and it was funny to find myself doing so. But reassuring too. Singing the songs on Sunday, with others in the car, it made me think about the words more, the messages behind the lyrics.

At an earlier stage in life, I had a record player (gasp!) and, at that time, a set of records which had belonged to my parents, and which they let me play. Boy did they get played – over and over again. The Sound of Music. West Side Story. I would sing ‘Gee, Officer Krupke‘ ad infinitum – as well as singing ‘Edelweiss’ to myself once I’d put the light off for the night. And others.

And there were other soundtracks in other formats: memorably, The King and I, and The Jungle Book, both on reel to reel (double gasp!). I had to ask to have those put on if I wanted to hear them, so they felt extra special, aided no doubt by the cover picture of Deborah Kerr as Mrs Anna, in a VERY big dress.

Part of the fun of singing these kind of songs again is the element of vocal exercise.
I know what they’re meant to sound like. Can I repeat them? Can I remember not just the words, but the nuances? Can I sing them without the music on in the background? What do I learn about how the song is put together, through the repetition?

Today’s delight is not so much about the reflecting on the song – or even getting the words right. It’s about singing for your own sake, over and over again, being spontaneous (if singing a song again and again can also be spontaneous).

Somehow, the music is new in the experience, because I’m there in the moment, singing it. I may not have a four octave range, but I can channel my inner Julie Andrews – and enjoy it, too.