Rediscovering lost skills

Sometimes, it isn’t the new that delights, but the old that feels new. Chatting over lunch on Saturday led on to a little light paper cutting activity, and soon we were on to making Christmas snowflakes.

For the uninitiated (and in case you DO want to try this at home), cut out a circle of white paper. You can use a square too, but the circle gives you a better snowflake shape. An easy way to do the circle is to draw round a side plate. Feel free to use paper that’s already been printed on one side – you’ll cover up the reverse later.

Now fold the circle into quarters, so you end up with a pie/piece of cheese/wedge shape. Trace some shapes on the thinnest edge (ie the ones with all the cuts to the outside): geometric shapes like squares or triangles can look good. Make sure that you don’t draw too close to the point of the pie.

Take some sharp scissors, and cut out the shapes from the outside edge. You can get fancy, and do some shapes on the inside edge, and even cut into the middle of the pie shape, but start with outside edge for now. Unfold the shape carefully. You now have a snowflake.

To add to the full homemade Christmas decoration feel, stick the snowflake onto coloured tissue paper and trim the edges. The tissue paper will show through a bit like a stained glass window. For full effect, blutack the decoration onto a window or glass door panel. The light will shine through AND show off your snowflake. Sorted.

We must have spent upwards of 40 minutes, cutting more and more snowflakes, as we remembered how to do them, how to make them look fancy. Cutting bits out of the middle does help the snowflake effect – think slightly like a paper doily, but more holes/shapes in the middle. You can of course put cake on top of your snowflake, but then it won’t look as good hung up afterwards…

I remember making lots and lots of these at my grandparents. They had spent time in Germany when I was tiny, and had a homemade Christmas decoration book. A lot of things in there were more complex, but this was the one we did a lot. For full stained glass window effect, you can cut the shapes out of black card, so that they form the ‘lead’ connecting the ‘glass’ of the coloured paper shapes.

Today, all of a sudden, it was making paper fans. Lots of concertina folds along a piece of paper, bend over one end of the paper once done. Proceed to fan yourself with gusto. But all of a sudden, we started remembering more – sticking multiple fans together to create a peacock, or even enough to make a whole pleated circle. It’s a good enough way to let your tea go down, I guess.

I won’t claim that we’d make Blue Peter makes status. But there is something about making an item from hand, with a humble material such as paper, that is very appealing. When we’ve moved on to paper chains, I’ll let you know.

Annual tasks

Sounds dreadful when I write it. Too much like tax returns. But I’m thinking of the quieter, less marked annual occasions. Big celebrations for birthdays, Christmas and so on have a whole different set of feelings attached – this is simpler. Pared down. A point to do an annual task, and take note of the passing season.

Today, it was time to bag up leaves that had fallen in the garden. We are fortunate to have a beautiful copper beech close by to us, and its leaves tend to end up in our garden. They even seem to stop at the dividing line between the (shared) drying green, and the back chunk of garden that is ours. They’re clearly on our section of moss – I mean lawn – and we get to rake them up.

It’s probably really two times worth, in the end – one to get the main lot of leaves, and another time later to catch any strays when the final leaves have come down. I am not much of a gardener in the end, despite intentions. But I can rake leaves, stuff them into black binbags, punch holes in the bags with a garden fork, and leave them to rot down to leaf mould.

Whether or not I get as far as applying earlier leaf mould depends. Some years I do. I have done so with the two little girls from nearby who decided to be my garden helpers one time. They were caught between frenetic activity and the yuk factor that comes with handling the leaf mould when it’s ready to go onto flower beds. Quite fun to watch.

There’s meant to be a hierarchy of black bin bags, so that the ones at the bottom have rotted the most, and are meant to be the ones to use first. But with all the storms this year, a section of fence/trellis came down, and I can’t reach it yet. I’m waiting for the clematis to stop growing, before I cut a bit back and reveal where the bin bag stash is meant to be.

Sadly, I seem to be better at doing the final tidy up for the winter than the actual planting and enjoying in the spring and summer. The weeds get going more quickly than I do, and I can feel caught out. But bagging some leaves – I can do that. A bit of pruning at the end of the year – that too.

Nice weather today – not too much wind (tricky when you’re trying to rake leaves in one direction, and they’re being scattered before you know it). A bit of sunshine. A little chill in the air, but not enough to freeze the hands. A chance to look up, and be in autumn before it goes. A time to look at leaf colours, and admire the bones of the trees, reeemerging now the leaves are down.

It’s not as good as the first strawberry of the year. Or the first mince pie. But it roots me in a moment, in a task that I can do without too much thought, allowing my mind to move back and forth with the movement of the rake over the grass. Or simply stop that mental gymnastics, for a few moments. That’s something to treasure.

All together now

Weekend. No plans. It’s the best. Let there be downtime. But part of the downtime is not just time to yourself – it’s also time together.

Now I tend to be a time on my own girl. That’s how I recharge. So quite a lot of the box of delights contents so far have been solo ones. But today’s one is about being together – on the times that it works. Where we connect, where we share a moment, if you will.

When everyone’s weeks have been different, it can be hard sometimes to work out how to be together again. You need time to be running at the same pace again. So part of the trick tends to be the things that have worked before, that we know how to do together, so we can focus on enjoying being together.

What do we choose? Top Trumps works well. A favourite on train journeys, we’ve been gradually adding to our stock. You know you’ve been playing for a while where you can guess what others have, purely from the scores they say. The current favourite is Indiana Jones Top Trumps.

Mythbusters is part of the Saturday morning experience. I’m not always part of it, but with a positive round of Top Trumps under the belt, we’re already in synch. I may be sitting in the background, typing away, but we’re all enjoying it. Discovery channel, if you need to know.

Mythbusters can of course be viewed at other times in the week, but it particularly lends itself to Saturday mornings. A little light explosion, a helping of scientific principles, and some comedic voice-over work. Add coffee, a comfy seat, and shared expressions of incredulity at particularly large explosions, and you’re away.

TV aside, the next step is lunch all together. Hard to achieve in the week, it’s a lovely part of the slowdown process. Thinking brunch is a good way to go, and/or comfort recipes. Pancakes. Quesadillas. Big bowls of soup. Variants on bacon and eggs. Not needing too much thought, but still great for taste – and great for the experience of shared meal.

What comes next? I don’t know. It may be together, it may be separately. But we’ve had a combined recharge. It’s a good place to begin.

Being silly

Being silly is one of the things I love most. Michael Palin, esteemed traveller, once commented that there are two countries where people really know how to be silly: Britain – and Tonga. I would love to hear more about silliness in Tonga, but I did think it was a great starting point.

So why is it so hard to be silly? To take a moment, and engage with it in a funny, upside down kind of way? Because adulthood gets crowded out with to dos, and lists, and how to behave, and being around people you don’t know that well but maybe don’t want to look stupid in front of…

Silly is different from stupid. Silly is inspired. Stupid is generally unthinking. Stupid is doing the thing that doesn’t make sense, and people groan. Silly is doing the thing that doesn’t make sense, isn’t expected, but instead makes people laugh.

I went to the swimming pool with another adult and a couple of kids today. Swimming pools seem to have got a lot more fun since I was the kids’ age. There are large floats that are pretty much rafts, and that can hold the weight of two children. There are medium sized floats that you can dive bomb from the side. There are curly floats called noodles that you can ride on, a bit like a curly hobbyhorse.

What brought delight was the chance to be silly in the water – not in an unsafe way, but in an unexpected, madeyoulaugh kind of way. Chasing after floating toys in a cowboy on horseback kind of way. Throwing a stick shaped float, pretending to be throwing a stick for a dog – and then have the other person bring the float back in their mouth. Standing in front of the ‘fizzy’ inflow pipe that bubbles and seeing what it feels like against the back of your legs.

You know you’ve succeeded in being silly with small people when you get gales of delighted laughter. It’s so intoxicating, you just want to keep going, turn another cartwheel (as it were – but not underwater), turn yourself into a whole troupe of clowns just to see their faces again.

I am actually quite good at being silly. I just need a little encouragement. And an easily amused audience. But what I’m really hoping is that the silliness will permeate memories – theirs, mine – and remain in us as a part of who we are.

A child’s smile

Bus journeys provide lots of opportunities for people watching, people listening, and space sharing (depending on how much Christmas shopping they’ve been doing). Today’s moment for my box of delights was seeing a little girl sitting on her mum’s knee.

She was maybe about 2. Dressed quite like mum, though not a mini-me. A chance to see what she might look like when she gets bigger, but still her own little person. And she sat very still, and smiled. With her whole face.

When I think about it, her mouth didn’t smile, but the effect was like all of her was smiling. I think it’s the freshness in younger children’s faces. They can simply be looking straight ahead, but they haven’t yet learned to be coy, or shy, or bored, or a host of other feelings. They are simply themselves, fully in the moment.

Lots of kids draw attention to themselves on buses: talkingtalkingtalking, banging windows, kicking the seat in front, all the favourites. She drew attention to herself by being perfectly still, and perfectly herself. For at least 5 minutes.

Lots of grownups love gaining kids’ attention on the bus: pulling smiling faces, nodding, waving back, and so on. I don’t know whether she caught anyone else’s eye or not. But she had my attention: because she was looking at the world in the way I would like to.

Not hiding. Not confronting. Not dissembling. Just being alongside it, and in it, and fully part of it – and fully something much softer than the world.

Firstly, we need to remind ourselves to stop, and look around us. Then we need to look in a way that suggests we really do see the world. As much of it as we need to. More of it than many. Not so much that we take in what will do us harm.

I am sitting here tonight, hoping she enjoyed the rest of her journey, imagining where she and her mum were heading to. I am grateful for the evident peace in her life – the peace that, in turn, spilled into mine this morning.