Archive for May, 2007
A group night out for our little church group, for a birthday. We went to see “Bridge to Terebithia”, admittedly a children’s film, but actually pretty moving. I’ll try to keep the plotline, in case you do want to go to see it, but it has lots to say about how kids deal with difficult things in life, including bullying and parental expectation.
Why the impact for me? The main characters, a boy and a girl, are each outsiders in their primary school. She has words. He has pictures. Together, they encourage each other in imaginative responses to their environment, and to issues at school.
Given that I loved writing, and Dan loved drawing, it seemed like a familiar tale. You could equally say that we’ve managed to continue these things into our current careers. But it can be easy to continue the activity, and forget the passion, the excitement that it used to have.
Perhaps the main impact of the film was to encourage me again to continue writing, whether it’s sensible or whimsical, useful or perhaps just indulgent.
It’s good to live in the real world, but it doesn’t mean that the worlds in our minds are necessarily to be abandoned.
May 27th, 2007
There had to be an admission sooner or later. My name is Alison, and I confess to Su Doku. Do you play it? Do it? Is this now something to confess to, given that su doku fever has dimmed a little?
Perhaps I can give a comparison. Back when I was teaching English in Poland, words were my stock in trade, morning noon and night. I enjoyed it, but it meant I wanted something unrelated to words to wind down in the evening. Mum kindly sent me cross-stitch samplers, which did the trick.
Not that much has changed on the words front. I may not teach now, but much of my work involves words, emails, letters, phone conversations etc. Numbers have become quite a good way to relax, particularly on work trips, where words continue from morning to night, including over mealtimes with clients.
Yes, it is addictive. I can’t do the fiendish ones very often, but I can usually manage the difficult ones fairly reguarly. It doesn’t matter that you’ve just solved one - you feel the need to do another one. Immediately. And preferably even faster than the previous one. No wonder the Japanese, the originators of su doku, include how long they take to solve a puzzle.
Now my travel kit includes a magnetic su doku board. I admit that I’ve still to get the hang of it a bit more - the hand and eye skills are a bit different to writing in the numbers with a pen.
Having chosen a job that is ‘useful..worthwhile…’ and many other balanced, equatable things, it’s quite nice to do something that is not particularly constructive, but just fun.
May 27th, 2007
April and May have seen further departures from my office. Out of around 50 people, 15 have left, and potentially another 5 may do so…that I know of…
It’s hard to keep up with. On each of the main days of my work trip to Paris, we learned of another departure to come. Coming back from the Spanish equivalent meeting in London last week, there was another. In between, people actually have their last days, and fewer people are around to see them off.
I’m aware that work life moves fast in the UK, but in my small section of civil service, it hasn’t tended to do so as momentously as this. We may have to re-employ the earlier people if only to pay for the next leaving card and contributions at this rate.
At the same time, those who remain are starting to look out for each other a bit more. A former colleague visited to show off her twin baby girls today, and even with fewer people in the office, there were still a good 10 or more who turned up to meet the girls and their mum.
Dan has Inigo as a category for this blog. Perhaps I need one for my workplace. But the organisation does liken itself to a big family around the world, and family seems an appropriate one, particularly when I’ve now spent as much time with these people as I did at secondary school.
To continue in Sylvia Plath’s words:
“Frost drops even the spider.
Clearly the genius of plenitude hides himself elsewhere.
Our folk thin lamentably.”
It’s taking some perseverance to think of spring, not winter, at this time.
May 14th, 2007
Having revisited one former home, found myself visiting the town where I spent my secondary years, only half a week later. (Reasons for this less positive, though perhaps I’ll do a separate post about that.)
Otley has its market, and Upton-on-Severn has its maps…and also morris men (though thankfully not all the time). I used to live in Malvern, where the water comes from, and Morgan sports cars. A good place to mention with the centenary of Elgar this year - one theory suggests that the outline of the Malvern Hills was an influence on the structure of his Enigma Variations. That’s something to ponder during the ad breaks on Classic FM.
Upton, meanwhile, is a few miles away from Malvern, and tends to be good at various festivals, including folk, and jazz. The weekend when we were around happened to be one where over 100 different morris dancing troupes had gathered together, so it was testing stuff elbowing your way through the bells and floral hoops and along to the river to have your sandwiches. This is the advantage of central England - a great location for all the nutters to travel to and congregate in.
Upton also has a map shop…Mum loves maps, and with my brother about to do an extended trip to Australia and New Zealand, this was the opportunity to investigate what maps might be available.
This particular shop has previously offered maps of obscure parts of Warsaw that I would later teach in. This time, it had no difficulty in turning up a multilingual copy of a map of the Tatras Forest Park (alpine part of Poland, with the main mountains mostly on the Slovak side). Had I wanted to go back to Legnica, where I also worked, I would have been able to buy a map of it on the spot - and of at least a dozen other small Polish towns that most people have never heard of.
(Mum incidently made it out the shop with only 4 maps, which was quite good going for a trip that she isn’t going on herself.)
I saw the map shop recently featured in a travel article, as one of the top five map shops in the UK. It stocks 55 000 items. You can also buy items online. What are you waiting for?
May 14th, 2007
It’s not often that I manage a politics reference, but here’s my chance.
Ten years…well yes, it’s about Tony Blair, but also about me and Dan.
We chalked up ten years together at the end of April. Admittedly, we then spent a lot of the first year apart, while I was teaching in Poland, and Dan was finishing his degree, plus a few work trips on either side since then, but it’s still a decade of thee-n-me, which is quite something.
So yes, our relationship has been played out with Blair in the background, and all the New Labour developments. We predate Tony’s election result by a few days, but thankfully we aren’t now off to do speaking tours around the world. (Occasionally, it feels slightly like that on the odd work trip…)
Given that we’re in the generation which had never really known anything but Tory governments until New Labour came to power, it’s quite something to see the end of another long-running campaign. In addition, with the swing towards SNP in the recent Scottish elections, the political background is set to change quite a bit more.
Here’s to another decade in power meanwhile…(sorry love. Both of us. Really. Of course.)
May 14th, 2007
Rather aware I haven’t written for a while - and simultaneously, have discovered a few more friends who have their own blogs.
Andrew Philip, a poet and reporter for the Scottish Parliament, who was part of the same linguistics department as me a few years ago, has a fairly frequent looking kind of blog, with lots of critiques of poetry, some thoughts on politics, and probably more. As I only discovered the blog today, haven’t yet seen much more than that.
Tony Pugh, a friend from church, and well-known cinema goer, has also got a blog, which includes his film reviews, and probably some more politics, with a global/social perspective.
Rupert, one of the leaders at church, now puts all his sermons (or seems to, anyway) on his blog, as well as a lot else, and encourages people to continue discussing with him after the event. (He also kindly writes comments on our blog - one of the few who do - so has to get a citation for that, at least.)
So where are all the women? Given stereotypes about which sex has more to say, there ought to be a lot of blogs written by women out there. Probably there are, and I just haven’t found them yet. Probably also, it’s a lot of fun writing your own posts, and this can detract from getting round to reading other people’s.
Meanwhile, Dan seems to be advising ever more clients to consider using blogs to manage comments from staff (on an intranet), or include advice from visitors to a site who have used a service (like a reviews site, but a little more informal?).
Actually, the one other woman I know using blogs is a contact through work, who is part of a local authority which publishes most of its international education activities online, as well as managing conference information and feedback, sharing good practice, posting photos of events…so it’s clearly do-able.
Anyway, I’m just getting into my stride here, and have managed to write a post that isn’t about food, or travel, so I’d better go back and consult my notebook as to what else I’ve been planning to write about for the last few weeks…
May 14th, 2007
Have just looked back at the last two posts, and funnily enough, they are both about food. Again. So I might as well have thirds, and write another post about food.
Dan has put up a picture of Eric in Paris, but truly, we were there too…We had three and a bit days there before a work meeting for me, and made the most of trying out the amazing range of restaurants around the Montparnasse area where we were staying.
Adding on my few days for work meetings too, managed to truffle through Japanese, Moroccan, Vietnamese, French (restaurant, and bistro-style), Breton (ie crepes). In a work culture where you have wine at lunchtime, lunch is subsidised at the office you are visiting, and the meal lasts two hours, it was all very pleasant.
Meanwhile, the b’stilla is a reference to the Moroccan restaurant we visited. B’stilla (or pastilla) is a dish I have wanted to try for a long time, and the restaurant happily had it on the menu. It is essentially a speciality of the kind brought out for weddings - a very special chicken pie, or pigeon in the more traditional version. It is encased in very fine filo pastry, and has the sweet-savoury thing popular in the eastern Mediterranean and middle East. For the pie, this meant that the top was dusted with icing sugar and cinnamon.
The other attraction of the restaurant was the cat. As we arrived, we could see a waiter trying to catch a cat which was paused to run into the restaurant - and as we walked in, so did the cat. This is clearly not very hygienic, it’s true, but we happened to be given a table by the waiter’s stand where the bills were made up. The cat was clearly well known, and ended up curled alongside the senior waiter, who laid on a saucer of something, while directing the other waiters.
The cat knew its stuff too, and proceeded to charm several other tables. I’m sure that there must have been some kind of truce between leftovers and pushing your luck, and the waiters seemed pretty relaxed about the whole thing.
The title is of course an attempt at a pun on a line from Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody. The middle talky bit, that everyone thinks they know. Go on. You know you want to sing along.
May 14th, 2007
I shall start this blog with a couple of literary references, neither as yet checked. My French is also not strong enough to be sure whether biscuits needs ‘perdu’ or ‘perdue’.
Anyway, Proust wanted to do a bit of rediscovering of the past, and managed something like that through the (for him) evocative taste of madeleines, the shell-like sponge cakes that you can buy fancy moulds for in nice cookshops.
I can’t claim that I’ve read Proust - and I am told that his Recherche de temps perdu is pretty long, so this could be deliberate on his part. However, I have now attempted my own equivalent, on a long weekend in and around Leeds.
I lived about seven miles outside Leeds between the ages of c. 4 and 7, in a village called Bramhope. (Small world statement: a lady from my church in Edinburgh also grew up there, and the pictures of her eldest being taken out in the pushchair around the village look very like those of my younger brother in the same setting.) A few miles up the road is Otley, a market town, and site of the hospital where my brother was born. At the time when you had to be born in a particular county to play cricket for it, it was heartening to know that he had got the best - Yorkshire.
Bramhope has now become quite posh, and we saw at least one DJ’s car (with souped-up number plate) as well as what are some huge houses. But this is still Yorkshire, where people are careful with money. The lady in the travel centre in Leeds would not allow us to buy two adult bus day tickets when we could buy a family ticket and save 20p. (I have to say that we also got slightly odd looks from the bus drivers that day, wondering where our brood had got to.)
Here comes the second literary reference. An ancient Greek writer claimed that it was not possible to step in the same river twice, because it was always flowing, so the water was no longer the same, even though the river continued. A good statement to bear in mind when revisiting former haunts, as time, like the river, does tend to move things on.
However, what amazed me that weekend was how much was still there, over 20 years on. One particular highlight was visiting the market in Otley, and finding that they still sold the same kind of ginger biscuits that we would buy there when I was a child. Not only that, but they sold them out of a mobile caravan type van, as they did years before. The only difference was that now they are pre-bagged in plastic rather than sold in paper bags. This means that the stall holders can’t indulge in the knack of swinging the bag round by the top corners to form a seal, but otherwise it was very satisfactory.
Are the biscuits truly the same? Perhaps a little less gingery. But then I think this has more to do with my tastebuds tolerating spicier food than I might have done at six.
Sadly, I don’t know what Proust actually did when he got his madeleines. We bought two bags of biscuits and went back to Bramhope on the bus. A grand day out.
May 14th, 2007
So, the soup making has abated a little, mostly through being away a bit.
In the meantime, the seed potatoes passed on by Mum have actually been planted, and are starting to come up.
Mum and Dad grew potatoes in pots last year, and we were with them one weekend when we earthed up a pot. “Treasure!” said one. “Lucky dip bran tub!” said the other. (The parents, not the pots.) It is quite fun reminding yourself that potatoes do come out of soil, rather than pre-printed bags from the Co-op…
So, this year, we were given six seed potatoes, nestling happily in an egg box, with a useful instructions postcard which explained that we should put them in the soil, they grow, we put more soil on, they grow more, and we put yet more soil on.
I can’t tell you it was excitement I felt when I checked today and saw they’d done the first growing spurt, and were due their first soil top up. But at least they were doing the stuff.
Those of you who knew our previous flat in Inverleith would have seen our garden all in pots. I became confident with things that grow in shade, damp or both. (Scottish gardening at its best??) Moving to a garden with soil and grass, I became a bit afraid of the big stuff. Doing a job where activity peaks in spring and autumn doesn’t really help for gardening either.
Anyway, now we have some plants in the two flower beds, and plans for a further one. I suspect we’ll enlist the mums again. But for now, it’s back to stuff in pots. Self-contained (naturally) and satisfying. Almost as much as picking snails off things and whanging them over the fence into the gap between our garden and next door’s wall. That’ll set back their plans for world domination…for a few more hours.
I will of course give you an update when it’s tattie howking season, but if I’m lucky, I might even manage another food crop like lettuce before then. (The snails meanwhile think I’ve planted several: clematis, magnolia…)
May 14th, 2007