Posts filed under 'Media'
It’s a gardening term, isn’t it? You dig a trench, and move the soil back into it. In this case, with Christmas around the virtual furrow, it’s time to back fill some more stories onto the blog, so that there’s something there for people to read when you eventually send them their Yuletide email.
Last year, after getting the laptop, I spent quite a chunk of time filling in the blanks of previous months’ activities, for that very purpose. This time, I’m filling in the Spring-Summer Hiatus (ooh, there’s some sun out there…somewhere…I’ll not turn the computer on), which isn’t so daunting. You never know, I might even get Dan to remind me how to add pictures again.
One of the features of this year is not so much back fill as tum fill. We have started having weekend breakfast options, things to help you feel like you are actually resting, and that take longer to make and eat than you might make time for on a week day. It feels very peaceful, anyway, building family traditions, that kind of thing.
I should probably add that various of the options have come out of Nigella Express. But I would add that for some reason, reading about breakfast or brunch options in cookbooks is particularly restful. One of my early memories of cookbooks for pleasure was managing to borrow an American one from somewhere, where it devoted large sections to the value of breakfast or brunch as a way to do relaxed entertaining. It even had quotes about food items for breakfast, which your then very literary writer was particularly pleased about.
Summer has brought in the partially frozen banana smoothie - an alternative to filling my freezer with bananas that have gone beyond eating point, without as much effort ask making a banana cake. Now we’re back to central heating days, the main options are porridge or pancakes - Scotch pancakes, drop scones, you know the ones.
The porridge making started on our Easter holiday, staying in a cottage that had not been visited for a few months. We needed to be warm AND we needed options for not consuming milk too quickly, being on an island. Porridge fitted the bill very nicely, particularly with the discovery of adding brown sugar to the top. Crunch vs smoothness. Even for a child brought up to believe that syrup was the real way ahead with porridge, this was a definite discovery.
We have also happily discovered that two people can indeed eat their way through a whole batch of pancakes for brunch, although if they have a guest staying, they will be polite enough to share. We’ve even invested in a large silicon pancake flipper, when I realised the spatula I’d been using was threatening to become another flavour on the pancake.
Our particular tip is slightly acidic jams to offset the thicker pancake - apricot was particularly good, blackberry also worth considering. Marmalade can be good, but not as good. At least with a batch, you have plenty of opportunity to experiment on which toppings work.
So, send in your brunch options, and we’ll even fork through a few, if they’re good. Avoid overly eggy suggestions, or pass them straight to Dan, who has a better stomach for eggs than me.
But more importantly, start a few food traditions of your own at the weekend, if you haven’t already. Particularly ones that cause you to linger, and admire the day outside, the person sitting next to you, or simply the notion of slower food as a regular household blessing.
November 24th, 2008
Public transport. It’s a marvellous thing for writing inspiration, or even just a little entertainment at the end of a working day. Sights from today’s bus ride home:
A Goth at a bus stop with black gloves with a skeleton pattern on the backs of the hands. As I tend to sit upstairs, I got the bird’s eye view, which included seeing a skeletal hand holding an apple…very Snow White?
Person sitting in front of me on the bus at one point, who had a fur trim to the hood of her coat, which matched the colours in her hair ie salt and pepper dark hair. It made me feel quite positive about the greying process to come, if you can make it seem like a fashion statement…
It’s all about perspective really. Left to my own devices, all too easy to climb inside my head, as it were, which can be a dark and not particularly cheerful place to be. (Particularly in the mornings on the way to work, when it’s not that much lighter outside.) But a bit of distraction is a good thing - we don’t grow out of the need once we’ve passed the stage of toddlerdom, it seems to me.
Equally, meeting with friends in cell group yesterday always brings perspective. Even though we’d not seen each other for just a couple of weeks, there seemed to be plenty to catch up on.
The morning papers at work fulfil a similar function. Yesterday’s G2 main article covered the issues of organ donation through very moving interviews with various people involved with the procedure in some way, from the parent of the child who donated his liver, to the man who received it, and the nurse who put the two together etc. However grouchy I may feel at students doing not doing what they should abroad, it’s a salutory reminder that I am not being asked to face the same level of difficulty in my life just now.
Of course, these various scenes, snapshots of others’ lives, are not just for my benefit. But I can choose to keep my eyes open to them - and remind myself to have eyes to see, where God has something to show me.
November 19th, 2008
I’ve come to realise that the way to get people’s attention online (or at least on Facebook) is to write about food. Mention your latest eating experience - or even, your anticipation of that - and you get lots of virtual joining in.
Is it the dark days of recession affecting us? We know that in times of economic difficulty, food sales still do well, if not better, as a cheering up device. Is it the onset of winter, hopeful that if we anticipate food, we will feel warmer, or at least better about the nights drawing in?
Maybe it’s more of the thirties malaise. We start to realise that we may not climb the corporate ladder the way we might have thought (most corporate ladders looking pretty rickety, at this point in time); we will not now wow the world with our looks or various other talents if we haven’t done so already. (I’m still holding out for a late-onset writing career - that area does seem to reward late bloomers.)
What’s left? Family, friends, TV…and of course food, which we can always anticipate, because of our need to refuel fairly often. (I’m not limiting life to these alone, honest. But they do all allow quite a lot of ‘me too!’, which is perhaps part of why online stuff is popular.)
So what foods are most likely to make you ‘write in’ in agreement? So far, risotto, peanut butter, classy macaroons and hot dogs, judging by recent comments on my Facebook wall and others.
It could be the start of a whole new ‘what’s your favourite food?’ discussion. I would also like to suggest a ‘guess how much I paid at the Co-op for…?’ game, which allows a spot of ethical consumerism to combine with (nearly) freegan activity, and some public endorsement of thrift…
I’m actually finding it hard to come down to a favourite food, but my inner five year old is still convinced that sausages, baked beans and chips are a good place to start. How about you?
October 9th, 2008
Sometimes it seems I’m at my happiest when heading from A to B, with space to think up titles for blog posts, or the like. After much deliberation for this one, I settled on black gold.
Would it be a hard-hitting commentary on oil over-dependence? Not really. An oblique Asterix book reference? Closer territory, though as I recall, that was about oil too. What is far more important to the world economy at the moment, is free stuff. And the black gold of the article is all about the joy of brambling.
Had a half day off, after my time on the exhibition stand, and by five o’clock or so on Friday, decided that a good use of time would be to head off to the cycle path, not far from our flat, and pick some brambles. Usually we’re off doing this earlier in September, but one way or another (ie rain), bramble plans had been delayed.
Life along the cycle path is quite pleasant. Cyclists were heading home from work, or on early weekend excursions. One chap stopped me to ask where my rucksack came from - this turned out to be a lament on the fact that he couldn’t replace his current one with a similar kind, and hoped that mine (which looked like his) might be a new one. There were a few dogs to say hello to, but mainly there was the fun of filling tubs with brambles.
When I was little, brambles tended to get used up in crumbles. Any juice left over from stewing the fruit would be kept as a sauce to pour over ice cream - this was known as ‘blood’. Very satisfying when you’re 8, and the attraction of it still remains. Equally, I had a birthday book, and on the page opposite the start of September (and my granny’s birthday) was a picture of the Flopsy Bunnies out picking brambles. (I think Beatrix Potter called them blackberries, but obviously you can’t be good at everything.) Being a bit of an afficionado of autumn, the conjuncture of all these things on adjoining pages seemed to suggest the essential importance of brambles.
I’m sure that if I kept brambling enough, I would be able to come up with some kind of complicated metaphor for what it teaches you about life, given the twin perils of nettles and bramble thorns that you have to overcome. It is true that the fattest brambles seem to grow behind nettles. Equally, turning slightly around from where you’ve been picking shows further drifts of fruit that you didn’t spot first time.
Like many things in life, the ultimate bramble patch is the one just further along the path from where you are…where all fruit will be large, juicy and easy to pick without getting skewered by the nettles again. But perhaps another, deeper appeal of all this is filling one’s storehouse with good things - and only for the cost of looking, and a few stings. Some entertainment comes without batteries, and some food is not vacuum packed within an inch of its life.
For both these things, and for switching off most of your brain for an hour or so, three cheers. Next stop, elderberries - perhaps in a couple of weeks or so.
September 28th, 2008
It’s how we’re built. Danger, uncertainty, you name it, humans are driven to one of two choices quickly. We’re familiar with the phrase ‘fight or flight’ to describe how our bodies make these choices very rapidly, even where our brain is not quite tuned into what we’re doing.
When it’s a sabre tooth tiger, fair enough - and a straight forward choice. But what of the colleague at work who sets us on edge, but who we have to keep working with? What about the sudden crisis or the email that demands immediate action? And what happens when, like it or not, we have to stay, for reasons of income, prestige, and so on?
Fight is not an option sanctioned by HR - at least, not the blow to the jaw type. All flint-topped spears to be checked in at reception before proceeding into the main building. While there’s various little fights going on with our environment, whether in our heads, our emails and so on, I suspect that flight is the main alternative for many of us.
And what is flight? I thought to call this post ‘Escape’, and often that’s part of the fantasy, whether through holidays, through weekends away, or even just the late-night gig. I guess I’m interested in thinking about the level to which we’re aware of our flight away from stresses, and the way in which it becomes hidden under other motives.
We have to eat. No quibble there. We have a nice range of foodstuffs available, lots of shops and eateries prepared to cater to us round the clock. But the chocolate bar on the Friday afternoon to keep going, the swift drink on arrival home, how many of these are treats, and how many are little escape mechanisms for us?
Stone-age man had perhaps some difficulties staying in one place - what with needing to seek out food, protect himself from others who might take this from him, and so on. Flight was probably forced on him more, but there were some advantages to it to.
Mortgage holders will know that flight becomes a more limited option when you have a reason to stay put year after year. Marriage, families, all of these are built to benefit from you sticking around. Hopefully, these things also mean you have less reason to flee, or even to fight so much to secure what you need.
But what happens when these responsibilities and different ‘threats’ seem to co-exist? How, equally, do we keep the threats from spilling over into the other areas of our lives?
You can see from the length of this that I’m musing, rather than offering solutions. The more I go on, the more I discover how many little escape hatches I use - and how, in various ways, they seem to become more necessary as life goes on.
Given that the blog offers its own means of escape, at times, I’ll reengage for now…for a bit, at least. Sunday evening TV is all about escape. Perhaps it’s time to do some more research.
February 24th, 2008
I’m a little concerned by health warnings. Always drink responsibly…sounds like you shouldn’t consider stepping out of the door without a bottle in your hand.
The next issue to focus on is gambling, as mentioned by the coin machine shop by my bus stop. Hanging about, waiting for the bus home, I have plenty of time to admire not just their pictures of Elvis on repeat on the screens by the shop window, but also the injunction: “Always gamble responsible”.
This one could of course be a trap by the grammar police - adjective or adverb, punk? - but it could equally be an opportunity for the punctuation secret service. Just one comma, and it becomes the kind of suggestion you expect to come up in an arty film.
The screen flips to show “Always gamble, responsible”. I should take this as my cue to hurl my work badge into the path of an oncoming bus, before diving into a nearby charity shop for a cocktail dress, as the scene shifts to the nearest speakeasy.
Perhaps I should go back to my roots as an English teacher. Does it get any better if I substitute “Occasionally gamble responsible”? Sometimes I know when to fold, but mostly I push the chips forward with the air of a James Bond villain?
However these things get written, I can’t help but think they look more like an encouragement to go ahead with the problem behaviour, rather than to rein it in. Maybe the ad men need some people to lose at gambling, so that they can further increase their earnings on a slogan that doesn’t actually work.
Well then. That’s my “eats shoots” moment done. Next week: stray apostrophes, which I have recently learned are known as the ‘grocer’s apostrophe’. I’m sure there’s a link between fruit, and fruit machines, that I can work on.
February 23rd, 2008
The music collection is building up. Rather later than much of the rest of the population, I have also now tried acquiring some more songs via iTunes.
Recently I read a music journalist talking about converting his prized collection into digital format. Having it all neatly amassed, and no longer vinyl, or CD, to hold in his hands, he suddenly felt like the process of collecting was no longer what it had been.
What happens when it’s suddenly easy to find the items you want - even the obscure ones? Does the thrill of the chase diminish? What does it mean to collect when you just find and pay for tracks in a bundle, separated from their original ‘packaging’ as part of an album?
Others have written about the loss of the homemade tape as an initial sign of intent from a boy to a girl. We may not put together a ‘mix’ in our own way, but on the other hand, we can keep mixing and remixing our sets of favoured songs. And we can avoid buying the whole album for the sake of the one track we’re actually bothered about.
Another shift is removal of the need to do your own cataloguing. A feature of my childhood was my dad’s homemade logs of music, films and so on - the indication of careful collecting. Now the programmes for buying and assembling collections do that for you.
It does save the writings and transcribings, the noting down of tracks and times and even dates you made the recording. Perhaps some of the ’romance’ is lost, setting out and staking down your own musical territory. But the gains of arranging and rearranging playlists, and above all, listening again to treasures that were forgotten, seem to outweigh the changes.
February 7th, 2008
The tide has been stemmed. I no longer have to walk into a branch of, say, Accessorize, and feel like I’m back in my first school disco just because they’re playing Aha.
Nor have I been frequenting 80s revival discos to get a fix of high energy pop. Truth be told, I haven’t been frequenting any discos. I don’t think I was very frequent about them in the first place.
But in the comfort of your own home, it’s quite fun to look up some music from your school days. You can still have that whole ‘do you remember where you were when you heard…?’. (And then, if you’re so inclined, you can email your 80s friends on Facebook, and see if they do too.)
Part of the fun of it is also who different songs evoke. For whatever reasons, you’ll have a particular friend who liked track X, and someone else who liked something completely different. It’s like a school roll call in musical form, moving from person to person.
But another part of the fun comes from that devilishly clever Amazon-style ‘if you liked this, you’ll like…’ Or equally, ‘people who listened to the track you just picked also listened to…’
I am back onto eMusic, a service a friend told me about around Christmas time. I have already used up my free credits in a big rush, and now I am paying for my musical indulgences. They operate in this ‘recommending’ way, and so as soon as you select one thing, you get to see a few more options that are seen to be similar.
I guess it’s the online equivalent of flipping through albums in a bargain section, and suddenly having a ‘gosh I’d forgotten all about them!’ moment. In terms of the musical roll call, it’s a bit like having the class surround you, turning round in a circle blindfolded, and suddenly pointing at one of them. Then doing it again a few more times. (No, thankfully my school discos, while scary, were not that scary.)
Kindly, the service will also tell you which are the popular tracks. So if you only want the one-hit wonder, you don’t have to remember which album they are on. And of course, it helps you spend your credits that bit faster.
February 4th, 2008
Maybe it’s another birthday. Or maybe it’s just Facebook. Here are all the ways to try out new cars, pose, acquire a car that suggests there’s a crisis of some kind, or just enjoy beating other people…
It probably doesn’t sound terribly healthy. But the Facebook option - aka Petrolhead - does mean that you have a few big advantages to trying to do these things in real life:
a) no cost of car - in any way
b) change your mind and switch to another car in the same kind of group - apparently at whim, but certainly with no car dealer involved
c) no petrol, no pollution, no driver tiredness either, as you’re only allowed ten races every day
d) you can’t cut out road rage and general obnoxiousness in driving, but at least you are not personally directing it at others. Perhaps the fact that many people race their peers makes it easier to be good. (Or maybe not. Competition can be sweeter when you know who you’re beating.)
e) yes, your car choice still says something about you. But it can be a more interesting car, or one you would never hope to own, but like the look of. I was quite chuffed to ‘drive’ the Morgan Aero, new car in the Morgan range, having previously lived up the road from the Morgan factory.
(If you don’t know about Morgans, look them up. You may need to get on the waiting list now. There’s another six years to wait meanwhile, but that’s plenty of time to get your Facebook rankings up.)
Sensible mid-life crisis is in fact one of the categories of car, as you make your way up. I’ve moved on from sensible, but am not in the flagrant ‘couldn’t care less’ category of the Millionaires Club, which Daniel has reached.
Meanwhile Eric is racing happily too - in as yellow a vehicle as he can find each time. Happy days.
January 31st, 2008
It’s that post-Christmas time when you are allowed, nay encouraged, to do some thinning of your possessions. Spring may feel far off - it certainly did this morning when I was soaked by hail at the bus stop - but it is clearly never too early for spring cleaning.
Charity shops have long been on our high streets, and certainly within my sights for second hand books. Now they seem to be getting bigger business, or perhaps rather, understanding how to make things easier for people to donate.
This week saw two different bags put through the door to encourage us to donate items. Usually it’s clothes, shoes, linen. You can safely watch any amount of clothes shows that encourage you to have a good sort-out of your wardrobe, smug in the knowledge that you didn’t need prompting.
The second was one of a newer type - they are open to you putting in other items, and even include the fateful words ‘bric-a-brac’, just in case you were in doubt as to how much in the way of household junk you could include. They also included a useful bag design so you could a) get lots in and b) tie the handles at the top. all for the good in encouraging you to put in lots.
I’m starting to think that, for all of local councils encouraging recycling, charity shops are filling many of the remaining gaps. I’m not saying that we should give them our dross - we shouldn’t - but there are always items that are not quite packaging for regular recycling, but that could find a new life somewhere else.
However, the key touch today, when I came home from work, was finding a card through the letterbox from the charity which did today’s collection. They said thank you for the items, and they indicated just what a local charity shop could hope to achieve in a day, week, month, year, through our contributions.
Importantly, they encouraged me to keep going. I’m sure I could choose to sell some of my stuff on eBay, but I’m now all the more excited to find out how much of a PhD I am indirectly funding to help with cancer research. That’s better than a quality seller’s record - and much easier than all those trips to the post office to send off the items.
On the principle of awarding merit where it’s due, support Cancer Research, folks. They know what they want, they declutter you better than an article in a woman’s magazine will do - and they remember to tell you why it matters.
January 24th, 2008
Next Posts
Previous Posts