Archive for November, 2007
Everyone likes a good rainbow eh? Double ones good value too and all that.
Coming back from our recent holiday, we had a new sight - a rainbow from above. You are basically talking a stripy donut shape, but it’s still exciting. Even better - we got to see two different ones, about half an hour apart.
Maybe this is God’s view of rainbows? I guess you’d have to be a fairly high flying bird to get that view too often.
I know the thing is meant to be the crock of gold at the end of the rainbow, if you can ever work out which end it’s at. But all the same, the treat was seeing something you are used to, but from a completely different angle.
Admittedly, there’s less time to go through the whole ‘red and yellow and pink and green…’ shtick when you’re flying over. Which is just as well for the other passengers.
But it’s probably a good example of some of what I treasure in life - getting to see, or think about, or hear, something in a completely new way. Second in line is finding out someone else has seen that, heard that, thought that too. More on that next post.
November 19th, 2007
You know the signs. Interest in gardening, cardigans, family history…among the list of signs that you are getting on. (Some of us have liked cardigans for a while, but we won’t dwell on that.)
Perhaps one of mine is an interest in a little more tradition for the weekend, or something to mark the fact that the weekend is a time to slow down. I’ve probably already written about my cooking phases, and the fact that roasting chicken in different ways is the current focus. So here’s my chance to champion the Coop, and their chickens that are organic, reasonably priced, and even better, delicious!
But alongside this, starting to think about ‘oven economy’, and how to get best use out of the oven when it’s on. Last weekend and this, trying to do some baking while the oven’s on. I wouldn’t claim to have this sussed - and in fact, the aim is to get a double oven so I can only have the appropriate bit on when I need it, or cook things together at different temperatures.
I know that in the past, there were different days for different household tasks. Washing day, baking day, etc. I don’t know that I’ll ever get as far as a fixed baking/cooking day (and I certainly don’t want to have a washing day - three cheers for washing machines!). But I certainly agree with Nigella et al that there is something soothing about cooking various things together.
It allows for a different rhythm to part of the week. How much of the rest of the week allows me to do one kind of activity (apart from sleeping, I suppose) for more than an hour or so? Life at work can get very fragmented - certainly felt like this last week, settling back in and going from task to task, or even bits of tasks, before being pulled on to something else.
There is a sense of peace from doing these things that permeates into the start of the week. Knowing that there is more ‘already done’ for the next few days makes it easier to deal with that unhappy bump back into Monday mornings.
Maybe the nicer side of getting older is realising that there are certain patterns to life, and that we can choose which patterns help us, which to take on as our own. Alongside this, our concern about what others will think starts to wane. So hurrah for cardigans, Sunday roasts, and slippers…
November 18th, 2007
Dear Mr Fischbacher,
I am not trying to nick your song lyrics - in fact I listened to them again last weekend. But I need to overcome my fear of gardening. I know that the seeds may be seedy, but I fear I am weedy (the grass certainly is) when it comes to getting on with planting things.
This might otherwise be entitled ‘Missing the bus and visiting Poundstretcher (again)’ - there’s a rather convenient shop near the bus stop I use when heading home after work. Rather than stand at the stop for the next 14 minutes (bus comes every 15 anyway), I nipped in, and came out with lots of packets of seeds.
I am actually thinking of them for a friend as part of a Christmas present. But they had multiple types of seed in each packet, including a Mexican one with seeds for peppers and chillies, a Chinese one with pak choi…you get the picture. If I combine my love of things international with my devotion to food, it might get me back to the soil.
Even better…they turned out to be a bargain! Each packet was meant to be 99p, but for some reason, they sold them to me for 49p a packet. I now have 15 varieties of seeds for £2.45! All of which should help if a few of them fall on rocky wocky soil, or that kind of thing.
Spoke to my gardening friend at work, who informed me that I can also plant garlic and onions at this time of year, plus broad beans. Not a fan of broad beans, but the other two, always useful. Garlic, I’m told, is as easy as taking individual cloves of garlic, sticking them in the ground one by one, pressed down by your thumb. You could even mark out a bat shape if you wanted them to be particularly effective, I guess. (I decided to pass on jokes about staking them out.)
Hopefully, now I’ve got your interest in my gardening potential, you can reply, and shame me into planting them.
And for Mr Fischbacher’s song writing talents…find out more about what happens when seed falls on goody woody soil: www.fischy.com (It’s a Noisy World album)
November 16th, 2007
Here I am, chugging away at the blog, and all of a sudden, there’s two comments in a couple of days. Someone, nay, two somebodies, are reading what I’ve written!
Now I know this is part of the point of a blog. You can have lovely conversations about the same things - or violently disagree - or deploy increasing amounts of punctuation to form faces, smiles, beards, polar ice caps, that kind of thing.
Probably there’s a sneaking concern about people reading what I write. Yes, this blog is probably meant to read a bit like a newspaper columnist, but really it’s a bit of a diary too. And who wants to have someone reading their diary?
I still have my teenage diaries, and I have to work out whether to keep them for historical purposes (what were people watching on TV 20 years ago?), counselling ones (can this help us work out how our kids might be feeling in the future?), or burn them before those same teenagers find out how much time I spent worrying about boys.
In the case of these two comments, the trick seems to be to write about someone important to the commenter. The only difficulty is, this could get complicated. My reasons for writing about the people in question were personal, spur of the moment celebration of them. To go round the houses, writing about people you know - yes you, person reading this! - is unlikely to keep working. I may get completely the wrong take on your auntie you’ve mentioned, your brother I met once, and so on. And having just captured you as a reader, I’m hardly going to want to let you go, let along have you run headlong from these pages.
But write a reply…go on. Even to the naff puns about Wispas. It allows me to keep my little dream that maybe, somehow, one day, someone might even pay to read what I write. And the longer you indulge me in that dream, the cheaper it remains for you, eh?
Alternatively, post your latest photos on Facebook, and I’ll be over there like a shot.
November 16th, 2007
Time for some mention of “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” - a TV show surely dedicated to people who love alliteration.
I’m probably one of the few people in the Western world who didn’t watch “Friends”, the long-running US comedy. I therefore never saw Matthew Perry in the show, and so when he turned up on Studio 60 as one of the main characters, I was seeing his work for the first time.
And he is really good. Funny, ironic, annoying, but his best turns are the serious, even anguished ones, which perhaps gives him a whole different area to play from that of “Friends”. Having been away on holiday, “Studio 60″ was probably the main thing we wanted to catch up on, given his character’s pretty serious relationship break-up just before we went away. That’s a lot more anguish waiting to spill out.
It’s not really about the anguish. Perhaps even more so than on the writer Aaron Sorkin’s previous show, “The West Wing”, the characters seem to have permission to be human - real characters, with good points, flaws, working in an industry that shows up both aspects in equally extreme ways.
Both shows have characters working in highly pressured environments. Yet in “Studio 60″, Sorkin seems to be taking even more opportunity to make different sections of American society meet head on. The characters of Matt (Perry’s part) and Harriet are perhaps overly unlikely to be together, so different are their values, their mindsets. With Harriet as the Bible believing Christian, Matt plays devil’s advocate with fair venom at times.
But still, the scenarios they face as characters, together, and apart, do help to question what makes a ‘good’ person. For all of Matt’s ability to mouth off about various sections of society, there are other areas in which he is determined to do the right thing.
As a Christian myself, it makes for interesting viewing. There are plenty of times where I’m in situations - at work, with friends, in a social setting - where it’s not always clear what is the ‘right’ thing to do. The show reminds me how everyone is facing the same complications, whether they have a faith to guide their values or not. And perhaps some of the environments which are less likely to be seen as moral - such as the entertainment industry which is the feature of “Studio 60″ - have in fact some of the most compelling dilemmas to face.
It’s perhaps even more frustrating, then, to know that “Studio 60″ was only given one season to run. So even if this is a short-term Friend, I’ll be continuing to tune in, while these debates, and story lines, continue to twist and turn.
November 15th, 2007
Most nights, no problem selecting what to write about. Tonight, I’m feeling weary, and suspecting a cold coming on.
Still, not to worry, as I’ve read enough of these journalist “oh dear, I don’t have anything to write about but I’ll spin some words” pieces.
Actually, if I’d called it “Has anyone seen my Topic?”, as I considered while typing it, that suggests whole new vistas of chocolate snack bar to explore. Not an inconsiderable subject, given that there’s been enough public interest in the UK to bring back Wispa bars.
How do people make the decision that they want to bring back a chocolate bar? I suppose you build a petition online these days, though the option of marching on the Bourneville factory dressed in large crinkly wrappers is another way to make your point.
Perhaps the other question to ask is, at what point does a company decide it’s a good PR point for them to bring something back? I’m aware of other companies which have strong customer loyalty - thinking of Lush, and Lakeland - which also herald when they are reintroducing items at readers’ demand. But to go back into production for a chocolate bar, with all the economies of scale and so on - you must need to be sure that people will buy it.
Fortunately, it’s not difficult to like a Wispa bar. It really is just chocolate. Easy. Except a little bit softer in texture, I suppose we should say. Not difficult to build up a new fan base when you have a product like that.
So, be careful of your water cooler discussions, my friends. You never know what a careless wispa could spark next.
November 14th, 2007
A little light tidying at work to finish the day. Our team has run an annual course for our students before they go abroad, and over many years, a lot of teaching textbooks have built up.
As it’s now been decided we won’t be running the course any more, in order for us to take on new work, those textbooks need a home. Thankfully we have a couple of colleagues just off to do TEFL courses (or CELTA as they are these days), who’ve been able to make use of some. And yes, I couldn’t resist keeping a few myself.
Some are collectors’ items in their own right, interesting now for what they reveal about life at the time they were created, as well as how people thought we should learn. Picture dictionaries are particularly revealing: what are the food items available on the nice picture of the market stall (and what aren’t), what clothes are the people wearing, what social patterns are revealed by who’s doing the shopping, and so on. Even a more recent book refers to ‘micro-computers’ and ‘diskettes’ - your average school child would certainly think the computers used even ten years ago were micro indeed.
Been reading one of them on the way home, on teaching vocabulary, and how much it relates to personal responses to words, exploiting different ways of learning etc. One of the authors, Mario Rinvolucri, comes up with some great exercises, some borrowed from psychotherapy techniques, such as having conversations in numbers so that you can express e.g. anger (or in fact other emotions) in another language without coupling it to words, and having to deal with meaning too. It’s the reverse of counting to 10 to calm yourself down, I guess.
It reminded me how closely linked are some of the things I love about language: teaching it, writing it, using it as a vehicle to explore who we are, our personal stories, and how we live and learn. I’m hanging on to the vocabulary book as much as anything to give me writing ideas, pre-set exercises that I can just try out, as a way of getting into writing without having to derive everything myself from scratch.
Some of the sentences in the book - that a whole world is within a word, through the meanings it conjours up - could apply just as much to teaching, as to counselling, as to writing. It’s that worlds within worlds that I love. A Roald Dahl short story also had a brilliant notion of words as a series of cogs, interlinking. The narrator of the story talks of the effect of putting a small word next to a really big one, and, in effect, setting it spinning.
At any rate, here’s some ways to get some words, and ideas, spinning, wherever they turn out to be useful.
You know me. I gotta use words, whatever I’m up to.
(PS the title comes from a poem, which the editor cites, but doesn’t say who wrote it. Anyone know?)
November 13th, 2007
Another title I planned a while ago, and on a much happier note.
I’m no expert, but I’m fond of the odd haystack. Bountiful nature and all that. Going on holiday to the Isle of Jura most summers when I was growing up, a relative there still had a smallholding, and you could see him out in the fields, gathering and forming the stooks by hand.
Later, there were the ‘burnt cupcake’ haystacks of Monet, in shades of pink and blue, as well as more strawy colours. One year I discovered the upstairs floor in the National Gallery in Edinburgh, which has quite a collection of these. Monet got a bit obsessed by these - as he did by waterlilies and a few other things - but it’s amazing the number of different colour combinations he comes with. Much of the time, though, the stacks remain the same shape.
I was going to say you can imagine my delight when… - and it wasn’t really as strong as that - we got to see loads more variants when on holiday in Poland this summer. But really, when you’ve grown up with square bales, roly poly round bales, and perhaps the handgathered wigwam type, I was struck by how many other variants you could come up with, should you have the time, energy, and more importantly, enough straw needing drying.
What was more impressive was how many there were in a relatively small area. We had been staying in Warsaw and came down on the train to Zakopane, the main mountain resort in the south. After Krakow, the train meanders for a while, in and out of foothills, for a couple of hours. In that time, we saw I think seven different variants, including ones with ‘ears’, ones that looked like double axles, etc. A couple of years further back, we saw another variant in Slovenia, where there are covered drying racks in many fields, something that seems to be distinctive to that country.
My question is: who teaches them how to do that? Is it set for the area, or is it up to the farmer’s own choice - and perhaps time? It’s not that the hills are so high in that part of Poland that you are really cut off from other areas, as you could argue you might be elsewhere, as an explanation for why so many types remain.
Perhaps it’s also that in the UK, we’ve been told how mechanised farming has become, how industrialised, effectively. Travelling up to Aberdeenshire in September to meet foreign students, where field after field was full of identifcal cotton reel bales, you had some sense of this. Yes, it was quite pretty, but you also lost sense of how far you’d been travelling after a while. Which is why it was nice to see in contrast such variety, ingenuity - and personality.
Making hay while the sun shines eh? It’s a lifestyle thing.
November 12th, 2007
I planned this title on the way home. Should it be horrors of…? when in fact I am a card-carrying (well, bus pass carrying) bus user, or horrors on…? There are many of these, particularly the ones who listen to music tracks at double speed on their mobiles, at full volume.
The thing is, neither. The real bugbear at the moment is the number of horror films that are being advertised on the side of Edinburgh buses, in full view of children, and equally people like me who prefer to avoid horror films, particularly first thing in the morning and at the end of a working day, which is of course when I wait for buses, ride on buses, see the sides of other buses etc.
Saw IV has been particularly nasty, and on seemingly 1 in 3 buses before we went on holiday. Coming back, the number is fewer, but some have now been replaced by Shrooms, next in line. Yes, a picture of a skull is a bit easier to take than a picture of a head with a mantrap around it, but really, it’s not about the choice, is it? The whole issue is the lack of choice, as a pedestrian, as a commuter.
I don’t have a problem with film adverts on buses - it helps me have a vague idea of what’s going on at the cinema, and then I can find out more on Tony Pugh’s blog in due course. I do have a problem with the nature of the pictures, the excessive number of them.
There was an article in the paper - I braved a broadsheet, and actually read bits of the Herald main section today - about trying to have a ban on advertising products that are overly fatty or sugary, until after 9pm. Nothing new there, except they are trying to widen it to include programmes on after 9 that are particular popular with younger audiences. There seems to be some sense that things which could be considered harmful are on after the watershed.
Difficulty with the buses is there is no watershed. There is no choice. Except turning your head away, time and time again.
November 12th, 2007
Now for once, this post isn’t about food. Caught you there!
Sunday does seem to be a day for comfort food versions of TV though. One of the Channel 4 repeats channels had wall to wall recent Jamie Oliver episodes - everything to do with the veg you’ve just grown (so I guess food does come into the picture again, unsurprisingly). Equally, there’s this newish channel called Dave which shows lots of episodes of QI (hurray) but equally doesn’t stint on Top Gear (can do, but less what I’d choose to put in).
Nothing like Sunday night for a travel programme, and as that nice Mr Palin has done his stint in Eastern Europe, it’s over to Charlie Boorman and Ewen MacGregor to get down and dirty riding motorbikes from the north of Scotland to the tip of the African continent. More swearing than on PalinTV (though there may be a certain amount off camera, one would anticipate), but also some heart - Ewen going off camera when affected by how many children face living in areas with landmines, on the Ethiopia-Eritrea border.
Our regular comfort food TV for a Sunday - West Wing repeats - have been moved over to a Saturday slot. The things they do when they hear you’re out of the country, eh? They even mucked about with the TV format in the Saturday Times TV section, which has until now been one of the clearest to read. Lest it be said that we spend all our free time watching TV, I would note that a good TV guide makes it much easier to work out what you DO want to watch, rather than channel hopping via the selection onscreen.
Dan’s version of comfort food TV would probably have to include black and white Sunday matinees, as a result of spending time at his uncle and aunt’s while younger. Not a bad investment when you grow up and discover that knowledge of black and white films offers a certain level of trendiness…or so we are still led to believe.
For those of a certain era, surely the testcard would have to be the final option in comfort food TV (though Dan has also watched Open University programmes put on at very late/very early times, another of those store cupboard staples of programming).
Whatever your meat (or poison), hopefully such stuff allows you to be suitably soothed on a Sunday night that you can face the week ahead. So far, so good.
November 11th, 2007
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