Posts filed under 'Out and about'
The sun has been shining on Edinburgh, shining with all its might, even at the weekend, apologies to Lewis Carroll notwithstanding. Last Saturday, we managed an Outing which I am now thinking of as a bramble ramble. The fact that I can also now write about it may make it a (short) ramble about brambles, so the title stays.
The cycle path network is where trains used to run in the past through the north of Edinburgh. Our possible commuting loss is our free time gain, and one of the reasons I like living where we do - easy to get about without always travelling on main roads.
As well as the brambles, we saw quite a lot of (mostly now empty) raspberry canes too, which led me to think that we need an earlier sortie down there next year. We were also able to get some rosehips, some elderberries, and some other berries which I enthusiastically hoped were sloes but turned out not to be when I got them home and checked.
There’s clearly a good level of traffic up and down the cycle paths - some cycles, plenty of people out on foot too. What interested me was the range of responses that our brambling brought out in passersby.
Most positive: two sisters plus dad: “Blackberries! Excellent!” said the younger sister, and they stopped to pick and eat near us. The elder sister lost no opportunity to tell the younger one what not to do; the younger one lost no opportunity to eat brambles and ignore her sister.
Next response: a dad and a son going by. They both seemed to know what we were doing, and the dad then proceeded to talk to the boy about large bramble roots as they then walked on. He had a point - some of the runners coming out from the plants were particularly impressive (or aggressive, depending on your interpretation) this year.
Somewhat worrying response: family and friends party on foot, youngest girl in full princess dress regalia, but still at least four years old, I think. As they passed, she was heard to ask “What are they doing?” I had to hope that someone would tell her, but they didn’t while we were in earshot.
What saddened me about the last response was that such a simple and easy activity was unknown to the girl, and that she and her family were missing out, not just on treats but free treats, and a family activity too. When you can get free and exciting sauces for icecream from cooking brambles, as well as the brambles themselves, what price princess dresses?
September 15th, 2009
…sing along! This post is dedicated to Oscar, who came all the way from Germany to see us in February. (His mum Grit, a former flat mate of mine, tagged along too.)
Oscar has been learning some songs in English, and their visit was punctuated by spontaneous “If you’re happy and you know it” singing sessions. Two on the Royal Mile, on separate days, one on the way up Arthur’s Seat (if I remember rightly for the last day).
What was nice was a) getting a sense of when Oscar was enjoying himself, by his choice of song and b) seeing the reactions from passersby. One couple clearly thought this was a good idea and joined in one occasion. But for me, the fun was also seeing Edinburgh from the perspective of a 5 year old boy, and enjoying all the spontaneity, singing included, that that allowed for.
Oscar was occasionally unsure of what he was actually singing…”Slap you sigh…” turned out to be [if you’re happy and you know it] slap your thigh! But his number skills in English were well developed, allowing for some good bus number spotting when heading into town, and we all got by in a mixture of English and German (a bit of a treat for me too, that way).
We took in tourist attractions, to be sure, but also identified car types on the road, collected shells from the beach and strung them together, discovered a sea slug which was iridescent, played some card games, posed for LOTS of photos, tried bilingual bedtime stories (having the same book in two languages), and engaged in significant role play while climbing Arthur’s Seat, following orders from General Oscar. I was certainly happy…and thankfully, I think our visitors were too.
September 15th, 2009
None too good at lucid thought in the mornings on the way to work. There’s a reason why they put free papers on the buses in the mornings. It gives us something to hide behind.
I’m usually not even awake enough for that, more about staring out the window and hoping to wake up after the mid morning coffee, at least. But every now and then, I see a few sights from the bus that wake me up a little: if only to try to work out what I saw.
Large man approaches the nursery near the entrance to Granton Road. He is carrying a small girl on his shoulder, and her rather pink rucksack in one hand. As the bus pulls past, I realise that he has a tabard on the back which says “Security”. Is this a metaphor for our society’s fear of harm to children, or just a man dropping off his daughter at nursery before going to work?
Passing a group of commuters, one reading a paper while standing at the bus stop, I realise that he appears not just to be reading it but sniffing it…Is he hoping to impart the information more quickly? Are there any lingering solvents he’s trying to take in?
Another man stands at a bus stop, with a small child in a sling on his front. The child gets gradually larger as the weeks go by. I never see him interact with the child. The child never looks up at him either. But the child does seem peaceful. Perhaps they are just allowed to be as vacant as I am in the mornings.
Another lady boards the bus in a smart outfit, all vintage dress and flowing shawl. She carries what seems to be a wheeled suitcase, and at first I think she is a tourist. Then she keeps turning up with the same suitcase, but different outfits each day.
She still wears the shawl on a day which is tipping it down. I still wonder if she is in fact a tourist, as opposed to a resident, who will either wear a wind and rainproof jacket all year round (like me) or a T shirt all year round (like some of the people who wait at my morning bus stop).
When I was a waitress full time, for part of my gap year before university, I worked in a cafe which had a lot of regulars. As members of staff, we knew to expect them. Some of them even gained nicknames in time (whether they knew them was another matter).
As a usually daily commuter, at times I feel similar to this, spotting the regulars as well as the ‘irregulars’, in terms of the unusual. Certainly I don’t think I dress in an exciting enough way to stand out to other people watchers. But maybe I’m a regular to someone else, caught in their own dream of morning on the move.
September 14th, 2009
We’ve all heard it - London grinds to a halt. The Midlands gets snow, and Edinburgh…not a lot.
What we do get is ice crystals on bus stops that look like Jack Frost is a grafitti artist. A girl goes past a bus stop in a woolly hat - bonnet style, strings underneath, but with a woollen mohican incorporated. And our pond freezes over…well, the dip in the back garden that fills up with water every now and then.
It’s not as fun at the chinchilla pushing a snowball on the BBC site. Or the harbour freezing over at Padstow. But then we do promise that you can access the blog without the site crashing…or the buses coming to a halt.
February 5th, 2009
We had a bit of a shock on Saturday when found out that our friend Neil had had a heart attack.
It happened while he was in Tesco pointing out an offer on ice cream (the 3 for 2 of the title) to the assistant at the checkout. Whether it was the stress or just that it struck at that point, he doesn’t know, but it was enough to make him sit down for a few minutes.
When the pain in his chest had subsided (at this point he didn’t know what it was), he cycled home. After carrying the shopping up a flight of stairs he felt bad again and took to his bed for a few minutes. Realising it wasn’t going away, he asked his lodger - a nurse - what she thought about his symptoms.
She whisked him off to the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh and after an aspirin and a shot of morphine, he was pretty much straight into a laboratory to have a stent fitted (up the artery in his arm, across his chest and into his heart). As shocked by it all as anyone, Neil then asked that a few people were called to let family and friends know what had happened.
I visited Neil in hospital yesterday afternoon and he appeared to be very well; mentally adjusting to needing to put off decorating the flat himself for a little bit and giving himself two months off work. He had a second stent fitted this morning and is fine.
Fragility and care
What it brought home to me was just how fragile we are and that someone who I think of as being the most sensible person I know (healthy eating, cycling everywhere), was vulnerable. I should point out at this point that he is in his 50s and only last year became a grandfather, so he’s not a contemporary. His lifestyle however is probably healthier than mine and so it was a bit of a wake up call.
So, lessons to learn even before the New Years resolutions can be put to paper:
- Get your cholesterol levels checked to give yourself a base for future comparison
- See if your blood pressure is where it should be
- Adjust your lifestyle accordingly
I need to sort number 1 and then see what I can do with number 3 (number 2 is fine).So the moral of this story is not to be too intent about getting your moneys worth on 3 for 2 offers on ice cream tubs.
1 is enough and when you get it, it’s best to share.
December 29th, 2008
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 Inigo 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.
December 15th, 2008
Travel broadens the mind, it’s said. I’m not sure where that leaves commuting, and its potential to stimulate good ideas. But it does allow the linguist space to contemplate why words do different things, and try out a few alternatives, without too much distraction.
I was thinking about nouns turning into verbs, as they often do in English. Why would nouns that seem related, or at least similar in content, work so differently when they become verbs? Bag and sack are my examples - to bag someone for your team is very different from sacking someone, semantically.
I started to think about other related options. You can dog someone’s footsteps; you can also hound them - those would seem to have a similar impact. Not all of them work: we can cap someone (in sport) but we don’t seem to hat them, for some reason.
Some nouns seem to be missing a trick, not going for verb conversion (to continue the sport metaphors). You would think that someone would see the potential of baconing, as an alternative to chickening, or worse, goosing. But with news of pig infections in recent days, we are perhaps rightly cautious, for now.
Perhaps it’s down to me choosing some very everyday nouns for my examples, which could allow for more imaginative metaphors when they become verbs, because they’re so widely understood. You can understand that ones related to animals or food would more easily be taken into new contexts, for example.
If we look at who’s doing all this verb conversion, a big contribution must be made by business, constantly chasing the next fresh image as well as the bottom line. Some must come out spontaneously, with someone not quite selecting the right word, but realising that the new coining has impact, and using it again.
So, the next time your bus is taking ages to move along its route, or whatever other commuting option you have, test out a few nouns for me, and let me know if you’ve got any more examples where seemingly related nouns behave completely differently as verbs. And create some new ones, if you fancy. Where the economy may be shrinking, language is thankfully almost always expanding.
December 9th, 2008
However many shopping days to go, and all that. The weekend papers fill up with more supplements of presents to buy that promise to help you control your kitchen, your bathroom, cats that visit your garden. Meanwhile, Lakeland continues to attempt to take over the universe…or at least, tries to add to the prospect of taming chaos, all with a nice biscuit to hand.
I have a slightly love-hate relationship with Lakeland (formerly Lakeland Plastics). I suspect quite a lot of women do. One of the Times columnists who writes in the T2 supplement during the week confessed her excitement, earlier in the year, at the latest catalogue arriving - and how many of her friends she would then have Lakeland discussions with. Another friend on Facebook seems to have a fairly similar reaction.
What is it about Lakeland? They are clearly doing something right, yet a bit different, with ever more stores opening up, yet still none in central London, for example. I should be properly grateful that Edinburgh is considered nice enough to have a store - along with other gentle (or is that genteel?) destinations like Bath, Canterbury and York. I’m told that the customer service over the phone is second to none, though the ladies who police the Edinburgh store tend to be slightly on the officious side, on the whole.
And this, it seems, is how Lakeland divides - as well as conquers. As does the list of products. Because for every item that seems over fussy and controlling, or rather too twee, there are some tremendous ones that find you circling items, or even, bending down the page too, so that the male of the household might find them and respond appropriately.
No to tea bag squeezers. To washing up gloves with very long sleeves. To water carafes with matching glasses painted with spring flowers. But yes to yoghurt makers, silicone baking tins, to sets of stacking bowls that get constant use. And they are very good at adding new products, so you have to look at the next catalogue…hmmm.
The bit that confuses me more is where kitchen items, cleaning items, are not enough - Lakeland must also be the first thought when you want to buy craft materials, or, now, toiletries, and other items that Boots would probably prefer to monopolise. I’m not sure what their main age range demographic is for customers, but clearly, they are very sure that their customers want to be clean, tidy, good at thoughtful presents, and at times, creative too.
What interests me is that you’re not being sold just one lifestyle, as you are with a lot of other brands or stores. But I do think that, ultimately, Lakeland conspires to sell you products to make you feel that some things are working properly in a few key parts of life - perhaps a very female wish, and part of the reason for their success.
It’s not just men that want new gadgets. It’s just that they don’t seem to need as many ‘inverted commas’ statements in the advertising copy to encourage them to do so.
December 8th, 2008
Next door bought a large trampoline earlier in the year. Perfect child magnet. (It works quite well as an adult magnet too, but only as long as the adults consent to have their performance critiqued by the kids). We haven’t yet been asked if we want a go, but as long as we keep making approving noises at our neighbour’s routines on the trampoline, I’m sure it’s only a matter of time before we’re given a shot.
But what happens when the year turns cold, and there’s no time to play out? You need a few other options up your sleeve. Many of our readers are familiar with our yellow friend Eric - and for those who aren’t, type in ‘Eric Frydman’ on Facebook and see what you find. Eric is happy to add child magnet to his list of abilities (as well as conducting, playing charades, and general making us laugh duty).
In fact, such is Eric’s appeal that we had to find additional Erics for our friends in Italy, and Dan’s small cousin on the west coast. Other friends’ children have wised up to Eric’s importance in the household - when I got in the car to get a lift from the family a month or two back, the first question was ‘Is the yellow thing with you?’ Eric consents to dance, hang upside down, spin round and round, be tied in knots, quite apart from laughing obligingly at each ‘look at this!’
For parties, we have another trick up our sleeves - or in the box we bring out for parties involving small children (that is to say, all parties now, pretty much). One of my toys from my childhood is a Viewmaster - essentially a way to view pictures in 3D, by inserting a disc of images in the viewer and looking at the overlapped images. Despite the fact that kids now have lots of access to films and cartoons, this always gets played with and marvelled over by new visitors, particularly when they get the hang of working it themselves.
Tall bloke, child magnet. Dan discovered on our recent trip to Italy just how tempting it is for kids to have a moving climbing frame that will also tickle you and hold you upside down. Unless of course three medium sized kids jump on the climbing frame at the same time…and even then, there’s a happy balance between pretending you’re completely outnumbered and actually being so.
Meanwhile, I’m off for my tea - food being a long favoured magnet of most children, and thankfully, adults too.
December 8th, 2008
Late night shopping eh? It takes on a different edge in the weeks leading up to Christmas. Crowds five deep, an air of slight panic among the shoppers - and the shop staff, who are piling on the discounts to get people through the door. But this is Edinburgh, and the setting is a definite incentive - even if only to find a safe place to stand in order to look at the lights.
Edinburgh has its light switching on evening at the end of November - although I’ve discovered that in fact it has several of these, beyond the one that puts on the lights on the Christmas tree on the Mound. The Grassmarket has its own; Leith seems to have one too.
But the one I’m looking out for is the star on top of the City Chambers. It’s of the ‘lots of sticky out lines’ kind of star that you learn to draw when you’re small. It’s not the most modern or distinctive of items, but I realised the other day that you see the star on the horizon, all the way to the north at the top of Inverleith Row. This means that you feel slightly like a wise man, ‘following the star’, while on the bus heading to work.
I’m also keen on the ‘bare tree branches covered in lights’ kind of decoration. Most years, they brighten up the edge of Princes Street. This year, they’ve added them to trees in St Andrews Square - a sign that someone is determined to keep one of the better redone parks of Edinburgh sleek and beautiful, by night as by day.
But my other favourite Christmas decorations are a little more of the regular shopping track. They are, again, to be admired on my bus route, this time heading home. Close to Tesco’s by Broughton Street, there is a car park where you can buy Christmas trees. That’s not the sight - it’s all the lights strung down the big stone wall by the car park, along with the conveniently placed ivy which grows there all year long.
And just at the bottom of that hill, as the wall stops, there’s a little church building, which looks more like a house, but puts up the most fantastic nativity picture, in a slightly Russian Orthodox style around the eyes of the figures. Having lived close to there in our previous flat, I’ve had the privilege of looking out for these for around 8 years now, and that’s good enough for a Christmas tradition for me.
Beyond these familiar sights, coming across them means I’m heading home - and for all of the distractions of a big wheel and carousels, back in town, it’s home that’s our favourite sight at this time of year. Mine, anyway.
December 7th, 2008
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