Cheese, Gromit

You know it’s Christmas when the fridge is full of cheese (a slight exaggeration, but happily, only slightly) and Aardman has decided to issue a new Wallace and Gromit.  My cup, mulled or otherwise, runneth over.

We’ve got rather used to Wallace and Gromit now, but what the animators achieve, painstakingly, lovingly, is indeed a present of great proportions.  Yes, they’ve done a film, but really, it’s in the half-hour special that they truly come into their own.

Flicking through the TV section in the bumper two-week listing (more on that later), I discovered that I had shared a ‘Wal and Grom’ moment with Russell T. Davies, no less (a chap also somewhat linked to Christmas, what with Dr Who specials).

It’s the moment in the second animation – the one with the dastardly penguin – when Gromit is chasing the penguin on a model railway, runs out of track, grabs the box and starts to lay new track.  I too remember that delighted ‘no!’ moment, when you don’t know what is coming next but you know that it is going to be amazing…

Part of the enjoyment is an opportunity to rediscover my inner Yorkshirewoman, and soak up all the deadpan jokes.  Wallace allows us to remember how British the slightly potty inventor is - British too the elevation of pets to equal, if not greater, characters.

We’ve become used to televisual sweetmeats, TV treats at Christmas time.  But amid all the reruns – and reissues of previous comedy programmes – Wallace and Gromit are, like cheeses at Christmastime, something you can always take a little more of.

Sunshine on Granton

I suspect it won’t become a hit single.  But after fairly relentless wind and rain (both of us ended yesterday with broken umbrellas), a spot of sunshine today needs a mention, if only for how it changes your view on life.

Tomorrow is the shortest day, and after that, even where it’s not quite believable, let alone visible at that point, we’ll start to get more light again.  I read a Monty Don book on gardening one time, where he talked about the time between the clocks going back, and the shortest day, as the hardest point in the year.  Forget whatever date in January is meant to herald mass depression, being low on daylight makes it harder to add joy to whatever seasonal comfort you may be indulging in in December.

Last year, I felt very aware of looking out for this change, perceiving the creeping extension of daylight during January.  This year, I know about it, but that doesn’t always bring the acceptance of it that I’d hope for.  Different features of it seem to affect different people: some hate it being pitch black when the alarm goes off in the morning, others find the darkness so early in the afternoon a difficulty.

In my gap year, I spent the first half waitressing, and realised how easy it was in the winter not to really see the sun at all, especially where you are facing in from a shop window rather than looking out.  In an office with large windows, or a home with a good amount of light, it’s a bit easier, but not that much.  I should probably try to go out at lunchtime, while it is genuinely light, but that requires a bit of energy, which is also harder in the winter.

Somehow, when you’ve closed the curtains and settled in to lower levels of light for longer, it becomes easier.  One of my friends referred to the season of ‘candles and snuggly blankets’ returning, and that helps it seem a cosier prospect.

What I’m trying to suggest is that this is a time of year for needing a little encouragement.  Whether that’s enjoying a spot of sun, an extra slice of stollen, or a longer letter from a friend you’ve not heard from for a while, it makes it possible to go on living in the dark for a little longer, with some indication that there is light still to come.

Three little words

Star Wars Monopoly…The festive season is now complete – or at least, the activity while hanging around indoors with people bit.

Following Dan’s brainwave for a present for his cousin, who at a tender age has embraced the excitement that is Star Wars, we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to get a set for ourselves too.

So it was lovingly unwrapped and put to use yesterday, having a social for our church small group yesterday.  We knew that one of the others was well set for board games, having seen her in action on our June holiday, but were waiting to see what happened for the other group member…who promptly walked off as the highroller of the evening.

Despite my more recent move to gameplaying interest, I feel I should give you an overview of what it’s like.  You get nice little figures as pieces to move round the board, ie familiar characters from the films.

Dan noticed that there are five goodies to three baddies, but then I think that’s as it should be, really.  You also get currency in credits (I think), rather than pounds, and instead of building houses or hotels, you build colonies (small space ship pieces), working up to star ports (larger space ships – in this case, a Millenium Falcon).

You also get to swap the familiar destinations of London for Star Wars ones.  It doesn’t take a lot of thinking through to agree that Yoda’s swamp is the least attractive (or rather, cheapest) location on the board, with the heart of the Empire, Coruscant, as the most expensive.

A few elements of the board could have been jazzed up a little, in line with the theme – why not go to a penal colony, rather than jail?  Or use a star ship motif, rather than a car, in Free Parking?

But aside from this, there is of course great opportunity to a) listen to Star Wars soundtracks while playing (check), b) swap Star Wars viewing stories (check), c) make noises like the characters when doing well or thwarted (no we didn’t do this, but I’m sure it should be mandatory from now on), etc.

And of course, you can mortgage all your properties, all too swiftly, in keeping with this year’s financial theme, sadly.  But if you lose, hey, it’s all in a galaxy far far away…

Gainful employment

An infrequent occurrence – out for drinks on Friday night last week, meeting Dan’s colleagues and their partners/wives/girlfriends etc.

Some of the talk circled, unsurprisingly, around the web and other techy stuff.  But I also got chatting to one of the women there about what it’s like not to work full time any more – and how we’re both finding surprising stresses in it.

You can boo me offstage at this point (panto metaphor appropriate at this time of year), but even changing to a 9-day fortnight has had more of an impact on me than I expected.

The person I was chatting to had reduced her working week too.  We both felt better for it.  But we also felt guilty, less in control at work than before, perhaps a little smug that alternative arrangements weren’t quite such a good replacement for us at full-time work.

One of my theories in this is that it’s partly a generational thing.  At school, as a girl, you got encouragement to keep going if you did well.

But the image of keeping the home as well wasn’t out of the picture, maintaining a lot of the ‘knitting things together’ tasks that often fall to women.  Even if you didn’t put yourself as part of the knitting brigade.

Somehow, the two of us realised, we keep looking for more ladders to climb, more things to do, being capable.  It’s a drug, doing well, being measured by others’ comments on our achievements.

Which is also a bit concerning in an era where more and more, pay is performance related.  It’s not that that is such a bad thing per se.  But it’s the constant increasing of required activity, in so many jobs, that makes it harder and harder to keep achieving at the same level.

So what happens if you do less – if you’re not there all the time?  A sneaking suspicion that you’re not quite pulling your weight.  An added pressure to ENJOY! when you are away from work – which can itself be a pressure, at the very time when you were meant to be reducing the pressure…

A few months ago, earlier on into the shift of working pattern, there was also a sudden realisation – that you can work fewer hours.

The world does not fall apart.  Ye verily, there are even others around working fewer hours than me.  There comes the smugness again – but also the the thrill and anxiety combined of doing less.  And getting away with it.

Sometime I hope, there will come a middle ground, or at least less of a rush up and down the xylophone of opposing feelings.  And less of a desire to check that this is still acceptable, permissable.

Which is needed, given that I will be trying out this working pattern at a particularly busy time of year, in another few weeks.

I’ve heard often enough of the injunction to be a human be-ing rather than a human do-ing.  At least the wind-down in the year, with Christmas, suggests an opportunity to practise being for a while – if that isn’t too active a response.

Europe in the spring

Paris in the spring…With a few more days to go of nights drawing in, it’s harder to imagine a time where the light will become clearer again, even beautiful.

There is something about spring light, and the promise it holds of cheer now, and cheerful times to come.

For me, spring is also linked to travel to Europe.  In spring, we start to move out of our near-hibernation, into broader activities, and for me, travelling to ‘the continent’ seems bound up with that move to wider spaces.

Looking back through my notebook for writing ideas, and our travel-related posts, it seems a shame to miss this one out, especially in the dark of the year where we need things to look forward to.

Europe in the spring started with German exchanges.  In the days before cheap flights (and from reading others’ Facebook posts, even now), school trips abroad tended to involve lots of long overland travel.

So we got the obligatory 5am coach ride from the Midlands to Dover, got on a ferry to Ostende, and from Ostende onto a train that would take us through Belgium and down the Rhine in Germany, for our host families to meet us in Mainz.

I was at an event celebrating Germany yesterday, and one of the activities in the group for young people was talking about things we saw in Germany that surprised us.

Even before getting to Germany itself, our group discovered the older kind of European train rolling stock, with seats that push together in the middle of the compartment to make beds.  We had no idea that German trains would be so conducive to playing sardines, and set off to see how many teenagers we could fit in one compartment…

One of the advantages of going to Europe in the spring is that it’s a few weeks ahead of the UK for signs of spring – blossom is already out, trees are in leaf, people are already sitting outside cafes (and not just because there’s a smoking ban).

Life starts to feel more expansive, more open to possibility.  Even when you have to go back to the UK, there is hope that these options are not too far away for us too.

Later, studying German at university, and trying to keep up some Polish, spring became a good time to try to go back to either country to see people.

Certainly in the first year or two, before grants were frozen, my travel plans took in quite a few places – with the opportunity to travel by train, heading through wider landscapes, and gaining more of that spring fever.

Since then, worktrips have enabled me to continue the trend, as our main set of annual meetings with agencies abroad is usually around Easter time.

It’s not just about the travel, good though that is, or the places themselves.  Europe in the spring has become something of a state of mind, a boost for the synapses as well as the spirits.

As the year draws to a close, we tend to go back into familiar patterns, traditions for Christmas and New Year, reviews of what has passed.  It’s good to remind myself that there is also a time for new things to come after this, new perspectives – and new delights the world has to offer.