There’s a bloke out there who makes cheese. Cheddar, I believe. He has a website about cheese, and a webcam of a particular cheese, so you can watch in mature in real time. I read somewhere that there’s another bloke who logs on every night to see how the cheese is getting on. He finds it soothing, something peaceful at the end of the day.
Meanwhile, I have my one remaining tree that’s not quite out in leaf. This week, it’s finally started sprouting. Soon, the leaves will droop like normal leaves do, and it’ll look like the rest of the trees, where you can’t quite believe they haven’t been in full leaf for ever. Trees look mighty permanent at that stage. (If you really want to know, it’s the big tree by Mansfield Traquair church, just by the bus stop. Eye level view if you sit upstairs on the bus.)
So I shouldn’t really complain that there’s another season of Big Brother starting…and Dan working his way through episodes of The Apprentice. We all like to see how something’s going, little by little. We’re also quite keen on big changes, out of nowhere. Why else would we watch sport, if not to think that any minute, it could all change…or something of that kind. (You can probably tell I don’t watch a lot of sport. But I do make an effort when the Olympics are on, or something of that kind. Life achievement stuff. Theirs, not mine, I mean.)
We like to see the passing of time, I suppose, in ways that help us feel we are in control, rather than having it happen to us. The tree blooms, the cheese matures, whether we’re watching or not. But spectators that we are in this day and age, we like to take part a little. If only to have something to write on our blog.
June 1st, 2007
Met with various friends over the holiday weekend, and one asked what I read.
Given how much Dan and I like our books, I found it quite hard to answer, and having been mulling this one over since.
Part of the issue comes from the fact that we have different reading habits at different times. I read loads, for years - pretty much anything I could lay my hands on, but certainly lots of fiction. By A Level time, with 3 different subjects all with set texts, I was starting to burn out on improving fare. I would revise for a chunk of time, then go off and read Arthur Hailey novels for something completely unrelated.
Getting into the world of work, I’d love to say that I am working my way through a list of grand novels, but it just isn’t happening. Partly, the time over for private reading is short; less suited to the kind of indulgent read-for-hours stuff that I used to do. Partly also, the number of other things I have to read has gone up - with around 700 students to look after a year, their tutors, their parents, the local authorities where they work, there’s an awful lot of emails to keep up with.
So now I read short stuff - and lots of that, with luck. Articles in the daily paper supplements over break time and lunch. Saturday paper - again, more the comment than the news. A chapter a day of the Bible, on the bus into work. Hopefully some time for reading before bed - a bit of a return to science fiction at the moment, lots of classic Asimov. Sometimes Dan and I have a phase of reading to each other at night - quite good for Harry Potter and the like.
Holidays are the points where it can be possible to read more. When we were away last autumn, it got quite close to meaty stuff: I, Claudius (we were visiting Rome), and some travel writing.
Work trips are possibles for reading - particularly train journeys or hanging around airports. Worked through another couple of the Thursday Next books on my Germany-Austria trip last year - interesting, but also funny, which is a plus when you want some distraction.
Every now and then, something around counselling/work-life balance etc is good - a point where your brain is clogged up and some reflection can be helpful. (Having finished the counselling course recently, though, it’s quite nice not to have to read anything ‘official’.)
Children’s books are also favoured ways of switching off, as are cook books. I don’t go as far as having a copy of the cook book for the kitchen and one for the bedroom - but there is something very comforting about reading cook books. More a winter pastime, probably.
Then there’s the internet - again more at work, but I end up researching quite a varied range of subjects in the line of publications activities. Occasional forays onto wikipedia to find out more about something. Did you know that there are around 3.5 million speakers of Lithuanian? One of my colleagues could have looked it up himself, but I think he’s decided it’s more fun to make me find out instead.
So that’s probably quite a lot. Dan and I seem to have swapped places - he spent his school years reading more non-fiction than fiction, with me clearly focused on fiction. Since then, I still love stories, narratives, descriptions, but I find myself more and more interested in the world too; a closet social scientist, looking at trends, movements, shifts in public opinion.
Probably we all still read for the main things we used to read for: excitement, relaxation, expanding our horizons. We just find that we can get the same things from sources we might not have looked at before.
Words are still my original drug. And thankfully, you can indulge in them with a cup of caffeine in the other hand.
June 1st, 2007