Thursday, 24 January 2008
On the bright side...
Definitely some twilight still in the sky when I came home tonight. And it feels like Spring in the air.
Tuesday, 22 January 2008
Should I be worried?
On two successive days, my morning bus has had the same driver. On both days, a pair of glasses has been prominently on display on the dashboard in front of him.....
Monday, 21 January 2008
That'll teach me....
Apparently, one recent visitor (from Leeds) got here by Googling "Autolycus meaningless character". This blog comes out top of the search results for those terms.
Oh, the shame.
Oh, the shame.
Monday, 14 January 2008
Five things
Claude says she's not a fan of memes. I know what she means - I've read a few and thought I couldn't possibly do them. Why would I tell complete strangers n things no-one knows about me (those would be either not worth knowing, or private) or n things to do before I die (I tend to be timid but impulsive rather than an ambitious planner)?
Of course, I could have started a blog in an entirely different personality - the lovechild of an oil sheikh and a filmstar, perhaps, who plans to tap-dance with the Dalai Lama and play the spoons at a Buckingham Palace banquet. But I could never keep it up. Fiction isn't me - I'd rather evade than invent.
Come to think of it, I have occasionally had a yen to learn to play the spoons (but then again, to paraphrase PG Wodehouse, a gentleman is one who knows how to play the spoons - but doesn't). That, and being the last person in Britain to talk about "listening to the wireless".
Strangely, the only memes I've tried have been those on Claude's blog, and now she's specifically challenged me to have a go at:
Five things in my life that I would never have imagined at the age of 25
Hmm..
25 - the mid-1970s, still finding my feet in my first job, not finding my feet socially or emotionally.. the whole idea of being nearly 60 was unimaginable, never mind trying to imagine what my life would be like.
1. Technology
This is so obvious - and diamondgeezer has written about it so well - that I thought to leave it out: but my memories go back so much further than his. We wrote letters and cheques; we queued at banks to pay money in and take cash out. Making phone calls away from home was a lottery: getting the door of the phone-box open could be a struggle, and what you might find in it a challenge - and that's assuming you had the small change to put in the slot. When I was 25, I didn't have (didn't expect to have) my own washing machine, and took the weekly visit to the launderette as a handy occasion to catch up on my reading; impossible to imagine the dishwasher I have loved but rejected as expensive and wasteful (well, that's love for you).
Most of all, of course, I couldn't have imagined I'd be working on the internet, without being one of those hidden acolytes of the humming roomful of card-readers and tape-drives known as The Computer and its arcane languages. (Let people have their own computer? On their own desks? Madness!). In one of my early jobs, I was in charge of the storage box full of the Gestetner stencils we used for form letters and updated every year till they fell apart: it's a wonder we weren't all high as kites on the fumes of correcting fluid. To think of working almost entirely without paper files, as I do, would have been fantastical.
2. Property
My parents always rented their home. I suppose I absorbed the general feeling of the 60s and 70s that all the financial advantage was in buying if you could, but at barely three years into my first job, somewhere I didn't really intend to stay, I really couldn't see where, let alone how, I was going to get a foot on the ladder. I did in the end, but in 1973, where I'm living now was a derelict factory, and the area would have been thought a slum.
That said, what would really have surprised me is that later generations would actually find all this a bit harder than ours did, notwithstanding the unstable inflation and interest rates of the 70s and 80s. On the one hand, getting some sorts of credit is far too easy now: but to think you would need to have saved more than a whole year's worth of more than the average salary as a deposit before you could get a mortgage!
3. Travel
I never expected to have a job that required international travel, but for some years, I did get to a range of places in Europe and Asia, and once to Buenos Aires. And before the Channel Tunnel and cheap flights, it was out of the question to think of nipping off to Paris for a weekend with as much ease as to Manchester. Even more striking would have been the idea that the Wall would be barely a memory, and all the capitals of central and Eastern Europe as easy to visit as, well, anywhere else. I saw the Wall from both sides. If there is one great moment in my life, it is that autumn of 1989.
4. Security without a career
I was raised to put a very high priority on financial security ("Never have more than two things on hire purchase at the same time" was one of my mother's sayings). Security lay in a permanent job with an organisation, though of course we were more conscientious than to "Sit on your arse for fifty years, and hang your hat on a pension.".
So I became a university administrator, with a secure (if not wildly generous) pay scale and a pension scheme that looks positively Utopian nowadays. And yet, at 50 I took a deep breath and left to do another degree and change my line of work. Not perhaps as dramatic a change as it sounds, since I'm now working on the website of a government department. But I'm a sort of permanent temp, a semi-detached fixture that might possibly become fully detached at a couple of weeks' notice. What makes that possible, of course, is having paid off the mortgage, and built up some savings. I may not sit at home caressing my bank books (it's a long time since I've seen one of them), but I'm a great fan of deferred gratification. Or at least, some careful evaluation of what might be really gratifying before parting with the bawbees.
5. Contentment
And this is the most surprising of all - and perhaps the most difficult to write about. I've always been relatively solitary. At 25, that seemed - felt - abnormal, and then and for some years afterwards I made myself quite unhappy about it; but through various ups and downs over the decades, I've arrived at a point where, actually, I'm comfortable with who and what I am. Smug, even.
Of course, I could have started a blog in an entirely different personality - the lovechild of an oil sheikh and a filmstar, perhaps, who plans to tap-dance with the Dalai Lama and play the spoons at a Buckingham Palace banquet. But I could never keep it up. Fiction isn't me - I'd rather evade than invent.
Come to think of it, I have occasionally had a yen to learn to play the spoons (but then again, to paraphrase PG Wodehouse, a gentleman is one who knows how to play the spoons - but doesn't). That, and being the last person in Britain to talk about "listening to the wireless".
Strangely, the only memes I've tried have been those on Claude's blog, and now she's specifically challenged me to have a go at:
Five things in my life that I would never have imagined at the age of 25
Hmm..
25 - the mid-1970s, still finding my feet in my first job, not finding my feet socially or emotionally.. the whole idea of being nearly 60 was unimaginable, never mind trying to imagine what my life would be like.
1. Technology
This is so obvious - and diamondgeezer has written about it so well - that I thought to leave it out: but my memories go back so much further than his. We wrote letters and cheques; we queued at banks to pay money in and take cash out. Making phone calls away from home was a lottery: getting the door of the phone-box open could be a struggle, and what you might find in it a challenge - and that's assuming you had the small change to put in the slot. When I was 25, I didn't have (didn't expect to have) my own washing machine, and took the weekly visit to the launderette as a handy occasion to catch up on my reading; impossible to imagine the dishwasher I have loved but rejected as expensive and wasteful (well, that's love for you).
Most of all, of course, I couldn't have imagined I'd be working on the internet, without being one of those hidden acolytes of the humming roomful of card-readers and tape-drives known as The Computer and its arcane languages. (Let people have their own computer? On their own desks? Madness!). In one of my early jobs, I was in charge of the storage box full of the Gestetner stencils we used for form letters and updated every year till they fell apart: it's a wonder we weren't all high as kites on the fumes of correcting fluid. To think of working almost entirely without paper files, as I do, would have been fantastical.
2. Property
My parents always rented their home. I suppose I absorbed the general feeling of the 60s and 70s that all the financial advantage was in buying if you could, but at barely three years into my first job, somewhere I didn't really intend to stay, I really couldn't see where, let alone how, I was going to get a foot on the ladder. I did in the end, but in 1973, where I'm living now was a derelict factory, and the area would have been thought a slum.
That said, what would really have surprised me is that later generations would actually find all this a bit harder than ours did, notwithstanding the unstable inflation and interest rates of the 70s and 80s. On the one hand, getting some sorts of credit is far too easy now: but to think you would need to have saved more than a whole year's worth of more than the average salary as a deposit before you could get a mortgage!
3. Travel
I never expected to have a job that required international travel, but for some years, I did get to a range of places in Europe and Asia, and once to Buenos Aires. And before the Channel Tunnel and cheap flights, it was out of the question to think of nipping off to Paris for a weekend with as much ease as to Manchester. Even more striking would have been the idea that the Wall would be barely a memory, and all the capitals of central and Eastern Europe as easy to visit as, well, anywhere else. I saw the Wall from both sides. If there is one great moment in my life, it is that autumn of 1989.
4. Security without a career
I was raised to put a very high priority on financial security ("Never have more than two things on hire purchase at the same time" was one of my mother's sayings). Security lay in a permanent job with an organisation, though of course we were more conscientious than to "Sit on your arse for fifty years, and hang your hat on a pension.".
So I became a university administrator, with a secure (if not wildly generous) pay scale and a pension scheme that looks positively Utopian nowadays. And yet, at 50 I took a deep breath and left to do another degree and change my line of work. Not perhaps as dramatic a change as it sounds, since I'm now working on the website of a government department. But I'm a sort of permanent temp, a semi-detached fixture that might possibly become fully detached at a couple of weeks' notice. What makes that possible, of course, is having paid off the mortgage, and built up some savings. I may not sit at home caressing my bank books (it's a long time since I've seen one of them), but I'm a great fan of deferred gratification. Or at least, some careful evaluation of what might be really gratifying before parting with the bawbees.
5. Contentment
And this is the most surprising of all - and perhaps the most difficult to write about. I've always been relatively solitary. At 25, that seemed - felt - abnormal, and then and for some years afterwards I made myself quite unhappy about it; but through various ups and downs over the decades, I've arrived at a point where, actually, I'm comfortable with who and what I am. Smug, even.
Sunday, 13 January 2008
Flights of angels?
If I said "museum of medicine", you'd be thinking pickled body parts in jars and serried ranks of gruesome surgical instruments, no doubt.But the Wellcome Collection, a recently-opened "white space" in one of those pompous 1920s office buildings on Euston Road, aims at the point where scientific and anthrological understanding of medicine meets the creative imagination. And the results can be quite fascinating.
Their current (until 9 March) exhibition, on Sleeping and Dreaming, takes you through both historic and current knowledge and research on things like sleep deprivation and disorders, hypnosis, narcosis, coma and faints, lullabies, sedatives and stimulants, the social contexts for sleeping, and the physiological and imaginative uses of dreams. The results can be - entertaining (there is an apparatus for reviving people from unconsciousness by blowing tobacco smoke up their bottoms)
- surprising (apparently, dreams are claimed as the inspiration for the sewing machine, the periodic table, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Goya's Sleep of Reason)
- baffling (Un Chien Andalou is playing on a loop - I'm so disappointed that I managed to miss the eyeball-slicing)
- alarming (on the pressures to be alert and available for work at all hours)
- endearing (there's a case of Japanese aids to napping that includes pillows in the shape of a lady's lap and a gentleman's left arm and torso).
Of course, Shakespeare's Dream isn't overlooked (back to Bottoms again). Freud and his Wolf Man get a mention, but interestingly, there seems to be more about the Sigmund Freud Institute's current research on the physiology of sleep and dreams than on his Interpretation of Dreams.
Upstairs are two permanent exhibitions. One is Medicine Now, a display of current scientific topics (including a complete multi-volume printout of the human genome) and artworks inspired by them - this is Twenty-Three Pairs (of socks) by Andrea Duncan. On the theme of Obesity, there's a case of 600 diet books: you're asked to put them back if you look at them, but no sign that anyone actually has done so.The other exhibition a sample from the collections of Sir Henry Wellcome (here are the gruesome surgical instruments, also a Chinese torture chair with a seat and footrest of sword blades, both erotic and obstetric models, and a mummified Andean body - so perhaps not the thing for an impressionable child).
It's all free - and there's a rather good café (I began to curse the toughness of the pastry on their pie, till I realised they were using an odd sort of bamboo dish) and bookshop.
Just to avoid any confusions, there is an entirely separate Wellcome Museum of anatomical specimens for professionals only; and if you really want pickled body parts, you could visit the Hunterian Museum.
Saturday, 12 January 2008
Utterly trivial
So...
Yesterday I had a lovely lunch with a really nice group of messageboard contacts - friends I hope.
Today, the books I'd reserved turned up at the Library.
I thought I'd lost my gloves, as I expected I would, went back to all the places I'd been to but couldn't find them anywhere.
But I got a warm glow of self-righteousness from swapping my last incandescent bulbs for energy-savers (can't you tell Mayor Ken's up for re-election?) - and celebrated by buying a pot of hyacinths that must have been forced with heaven knows what carbon footprint.
The gloves, of course, turned up in the one place I hadn't looked (yes, Alzheimer's definitely setting in).
And I made the first sponge cake of my life, and it was so good I scoffed the lot.
No wars, floods, tempests, plagues: aren't we just too lucky?
Yesterday I had a lovely lunch with a really nice group of messageboard contacts - friends I hope.
Today, the books I'd reserved turned up at the Library.
I thought I'd lost my gloves, as I expected I would, went back to all the places I'd been to but couldn't find them anywhere.
But I got a warm glow of self-righteousness from swapping my last incandescent bulbs for energy-savers (can't you tell Mayor Ken's up for re-election?) - and celebrated by buying a pot of hyacinths that must have been forced with heaven knows what carbon footprint.
The gloves, of course, turned up in the one place I hadn't looked (yes, Alzheimer's definitely setting in).
And I made the first sponge cake of my life, and it was so good I scoffed the lot.
No wars, floods, tempests, plagues: aren't we just too lucky?
Wednesday, 9 January 2008
Enjoy your trip?
Just recently, I seem to have taken a few unpredictable tumbles in the street. Once, simply hurrying across a main road while the traffic lights were at red (fortunately), several times catching my foot on uneven paving stones, most recently on a slightly cobbled slope that I've managed to step up without trouble more or less every week for ten years. The odd thing is, it reminds me that at about the same age my mother was doing exactly the same thing. We'd be walking along quite normally and she'd suddenly be sprawling at our feet (mind you, she had another thirty years of a busy life ahead of her).
Which brings on a fit of wondering which of the minor incidents of life are just that, and which are symptomatic of, well,.... you know... [whisper] getting on a bit?
That name that seems to have wandered from the tip of my tongue to some dark recess in the back of my mind: could it be - Alzheimer?
That strange crick in my neck of a morning: does that mean I need a new pillow, or is some muscle wasting away or some joint wearing out?
Which is the greater sign of ageing - all those physical changes or simply the fact of worrying about them?
But perhaps I shouldn't stay for an answer and just get back to the gym, as I've been meaning to for weeks. Once the latest set of grazes has healed up, of course. Till then, tea and cake, I think.
Which brings on a fit of wondering which of the minor incidents of life are just that, and which are symptomatic of, well,.... you know... [whisper] getting on a bit?
That name that seems to have wandered from the tip of my tongue to some dark recess in the back of my mind: could it be - Alzheimer?
That strange crick in my neck of a morning: does that mean I need a new pillow, or is some muscle wasting away or some joint wearing out?
Which is the greater sign of ageing - all those physical changes or simply the fact of worrying about them?
But perhaps I shouldn't stay for an answer and just get back to the gym, as I've been meaning to for weeks. Once the latest set of grazes has healed up, of course. Till then, tea and cake, I think.
Monday, 7 January 2008
Ambition
Riding to work on the top deck of the bus, I became aware of a disgruntled child's voice from downstairs - well, it is the first day back at school.
I wasn't sure I'd heard it correctly, but when I came down the stairs to get off, the smiles all around confirmed it. Granny was obviously taking her to school, so a very determined six-year-old was chanting "I want to retire! I WANNA RE-TIE-AH!!!"
I wasn't sure I'd heard it correctly, but when I came down the stairs to get off, the smiles all around confirmed it. Granny was obviously taking her to school, so a very determined six-year-old was chanting "I want to retire! I WANNA RE-TIE-AH!!!"
Friday, 4 January 2008
If on a winter's night....
I stop myself, just in time, from simply copying out the best part of a page and a half of Calvino's litany of all the different kinds of books that seem to waylay you in the bookshop. I've evidently come very late to this particular cult, and it would be rather gauche to do something so obvious, however amusing it is to read it for the first time.
Instead, I'm following up a meme based on it that I found on Amy Nelson-Mile's Books blog. Here's what I'd fit into Calvino's many categories:
Books You Needn't Read
Instant celebrity memoirs
Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading
Coffee table books; I have given - and been given - some beautiful ones, but somehow I don't think they get looked at very often.
Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written
Most of those would-be humorous books that are only produced for the Christmas market.
Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered
Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback
Luscious cookery books (I confess I didn't buy Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries till I saw it at half-price); and large and important history books (Peter Ackroyd's London: A Biography, for example). An alternative Calvino doesn't mention is Books You'll Put On Reservation At The Public Library - are public libraries not so useful or available in Italy, or was he hoping to encourage book sales?
Books You Can Borrow From Somebody
Well, that answers my question about public libraries - they'd be my Somebody.
Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too
Catch-22. I tried, I really tried, but I just couldn't get into it. Likewise more or less the entire oeuvre of Martin Amis (I can't stand all those "Look, Daddy, no hands" metaphors).
Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages
Don Quixote - somehow I think I may never get round to it - and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.
Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success
This is a bit of a cheat (because I could easily buy it any time), but I've been waiting for ages for someone to return to the public library Carmen Callil's Bad Faith, which I've now reserved by inter-library loan, so I might get it fairly quickly.
Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment
These would be exactly the kind of thing I'd look to the library for. But I still occasionally turn for reference (and because it's lovely to look at it, if a bit dated now, to my own copy of Darcy DiNucci's Elements of Web Design.
Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case
A remainder store occasionally has a book sale where I work, and I actually bought The Times Complete History of the World from them very cheaply. If I ever want to know about the Alans, the empires of Asia or pre-colonial Africa, this will be the place to look.
Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer
Assorted detective stories, and assorted prize-nominated and newspaper-recommended novels I've never caught up with. I might be looking for A Thousand Splendid Suns, The Yacoubian Building, What Was Lost, Wildwood, The Wild Places.
Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves
More of EF Benson's Mapp and Lucia, and Orlando Figes's The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. That's a weird-looking juxtaposition, but I suppose the former reminds one how lucky we are to be in a position to laugh away some pretty horrible human characteristics.
Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
I picked up a German overview of "digital literature", complete with CD, when I had some time on my hands and was fascinated by interwebby-techno developments. Still haven't really got into it, let alone follow up on the authors it discusses, and it's probably been long since overtaken by events.
Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread
Tristram Shandy (hmm, compare and contrast with If on a Winter's Night), Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories.
Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. I had to read the first two books as set texts once - I keep meaning to catch up with the more louche bits. I even bought a nice new edition in Paris a few years ago. I avert my gaze from it on my shelves - as with quite a large pile of other books waiting to be opened.
Instead, I'm following up a meme based on it that I found on Amy Nelson-Mile's Books blog. Here's what I'd fit into Calvino's many categories:
Books You Needn't Read
Instant celebrity memoirs
Books Made For Purposes Other Than Reading
Coffee table books; I have given - and been given - some beautiful ones, but somehow I don't think they get looked at very often.
Books Read Even Before You Open Them Since They Belong To The Category Of Books Read Before Being Written
Most of those would-be humorous books that are only produced for the Christmas market.
Books Too Expensive Now And You'll Wait Till They're Remaindered
Books ditto When They Come Out In Paperback
Luscious cookery books (I confess I didn't buy Nigel Slater's Kitchen Diaries till I saw it at half-price); and large and important history books (Peter Ackroyd's London: A Biography, for example). An alternative Calvino doesn't mention is Books You'll Put On Reservation At The Public Library - are public libraries not so useful or available in Italy, or was he hoping to encourage book sales?
Books You Can Borrow From Somebody
Well, that answers my question about public libraries - they'd be my Somebody.
Books That Everybody's Read So It's As If You Had Read Them, Too
Catch-22. I tried, I really tried, but I just couldn't get into it. Likewise more or less the entire oeuvre of Martin Amis (I can't stand all those "Look, Daddy, no hands" metaphors).
Books You've Been Planning To Read For Ages
Don Quixote - somehow I think I may never get round to it - and Dickens's Our Mutual Friend.
Books You've Been Hunting For Years Without Success
This is a bit of a cheat (because I could easily buy it any time), but I've been waiting for ages for someone to return to the public library Carmen Callil's Bad Faith, which I've now reserved by inter-library loan, so I might get it fairly quickly.
Books Dealing With Something You're Working On At The Moment
These would be exactly the kind of thing I'd look to the library for. But I still occasionally turn for reference (and because it's lovely to look at it, if a bit dated now, to my own copy of Darcy DiNucci's Elements of Web Design.
Books You Want To Own So They'll Be Handy Just In Case
A remainder store occasionally has a book sale where I work, and I actually bought The Times Complete History of the World from them very cheaply. If I ever want to know about the Alans, the empires of Asia or pre-colonial Africa, this will be the place to look.
Books You Could Put Aside Maybe To Read This Summer
Assorted detective stories, and assorted prize-nominated and newspaper-recommended novels I've never caught up with. I might be looking for A Thousand Splendid Suns, The Yacoubian Building, What Was Lost, Wildwood, The Wild Places.
Books You Need To Go With Other Books On Your Shelves
More of EF Benson's Mapp and Lucia, and Orlando Figes's The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia. That's a weird-looking juxtaposition, but I suppose the former reminds one how lucky we are to be in a position to laugh away some pretty horrible human characteristics.
Books That Fill You With Sudden, Inexplicable Curiosity, Not Easily Justified
I picked up a German overview of "digital literature", complete with CD, when I had some time on my hands and was fascinated by interwebby-techno developments. Still haven't really got into it, let alone follow up on the authors it discusses, and it's probably been long since overtaken by events.
Books Read Long Ago Which It's Now Time To Reread
Tristram Shandy (hmm, compare and contrast with If on a Winter's Night), Wodehouse's Jeeves and Wooster stories.
Books You've Always Pretended To Have Read And Now It's Time To Sit Down And Really Read Them
A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. I had to read the first two books as set texts once - I keep meaning to catch up with the more louche bits. I even bought a nice new edition in Paris a few years ago. I avert my gaze from it on my shelves - as with quite a large pile of other books waiting to be opened.
Monday, 31 December 2007
Still....
Picking up a challenge from Claude, here's an end-of-year review sort of thing:
Still grateful: that I have my health, most of my wits and the ability to support myself.
Still reading: anything I can lay my hands on.
Still hate: that there are just too many things to read, to look at, to listen to.
Still grateful: that I live where people are free to create so much, and I'm free to read what I like.
Still starting: what I can't finish, half the time.
Still laughing at: the wrong moments. And the ridiculously smug and self-satisfied.
Still hate: the ridiculously smug and self-satisfied when they think everyone not like them is morally deficient.
Still not: voting Conservative. Or smoking.
Still drinking: too much tea.
Still sticking: to my sofa far too much.
Still feeling: peripheral. And occasionally pointless.
Still missing: whatever it was I came in here to find.
Still being: probably too polite for my own good.
Still not wearing: prosthetics of any kind.
Still making: whoopee - quietly and in moderation.
Still wondering: about the choices I didn't make when I stuck to the cosy option.
Still lacking: the self-belief to make those choices.
Still glad: I summoned up the courage to change my life when I did. Even if I should perhaps have done it earlier.
Still working: to live, and not the other way around.
Still will never: vote Conservative. Or smoke.
Still grateful: that I have my health, most of my wits and the ability to support myself.
Still reading: anything I can lay my hands on.
Still hate: that there are just too many things to read, to look at, to listen to.
Still grateful: that I live where people are free to create so much, and I'm free to read what I like.
Still starting: what I can't finish, half the time.
Still laughing at: the wrong moments. And the ridiculously smug and self-satisfied.
Still hate: the ridiculously smug and self-satisfied when they think everyone not like them is morally deficient.
Still not: voting Conservative. Or smoking.
Still drinking: too much tea.
Still sticking: to my sofa far too much.
Still feeling: peripheral. And occasionally pointless.
Still missing: whatever it was I came in here to find.
Still being: probably too polite for my own good.
Still not wearing: prosthetics of any kind.
Still making: whoopee - quietly and in moderation.
Still wondering: about the choices I didn't make when I stuck to the cosy option.
Still lacking: the self-belief to make those choices.
Still glad: I summoned up the courage to change my life when I did. Even if I should perhaps have done it earlier.
Still working: to live, and not the other way around.
Still will never: vote Conservative. Or smoke.
Sunday, 30 December 2007
Fans and folderols
If you walk just a little bit away from the traffic and tourist crowds in central Greenwich, into the quiet Georgian streets beside the park, you'll find the Fan Museum, just across the street from the Greenwich Theatre.This is quite a revelation if all you, like me, know of fans is the flick and flutter that underlines some witty (or smutty) remark from a Sir Foppington Sneerwell in a Restoration comedy (by the by, whatever happened to Restoration comedy? It used to be all the go, but we don't seem to hear much of it nowadays).
In two ground-floor rooms, there's a permanent exhibition of techniques and materials used to make fans - including a fan of ivory so delicately pierced and worked that it looks like the finest muslin - and some samples of basic types, including a fascinating all-purpose job with a little mirror, a thimble and compartments for a sewing kit and smelling salts. There's a final nod to modern industrial and battery-powered fans, but they're not what we've come to see, are they?
In two rooms upstairs is a temporary exhibition, currently on a theme of "Celebrations", with plenty of examples from the collections. Mostly French, with some Italian, Spanish and English examples, commemorating variously royal weddings and births, revolutionary anniversaries, the first balloon ascents, Christmases and New Year celebrations. The stars are the fans by Gauguin and Sickert.
The earlier they are, the more classical many of the decorative themes (a handy explanation here of how to tell your Cleopatras from your Calypsos): but there are special party fans from the nineteenth-century (some beautiful art nouveau peacocks in mother of pearl, and some rather gruesome embossed paper pugs and cats), and calendars as commercial promotions.
Downstairs at the back is the Orangery, a modern building but painted in vaguely Georgian style with trompe-l'oeil flowers and trees, which offers teas on Sundays and Tuesdays (buy a ticket at the desk). A "half tea" for £3.50 included a large pot of properly strong tea, two warm scones with jam and cream (whipped, though, not clotted) - in proper dishes, hooray, not those fiddly sachets. A full tea at £4.50 includes a cake.
Friday, 28 December 2007
Some Christmas logodaedaly
In the true spirit of a family Christmas, I think I shall treat you to the benefit of one of the books I was given.
I don't think I can quite sustain a complete consuetudinary to the tralatitious Christmas celebration, but you may take it from me that our gulosity deliciated in my sister-in-law's magirologistic skills - no omophagy here. We are hardly prone to polydipsia, but we can appreciate a certain nippitate nittiness at this time of year - thank goodness, not a trace of the jumentous! Of course, there was much galimatias, but on the whole we avoided the risk of becoming temulent or succumbing to the woofits.
The children there were delightful as ever: not at all mammothrept - not a sign of momurdotes. Of course, there were times when might wish for a sitooterie, particularly when a grandparental whigmaleery presented a three-year old with one of these. Oh the rimbombo!
How was your Christmas? Were all your gifts cromulent? An autogeneal curwhibble, perhaps, or something from the knackatory? Were the presents you gave crumenically laetificant?
I don't think I can quite sustain a complete consuetudinary to the tralatitious Christmas celebration, but you may take it from me that our gulosity deliciated in my sister-in-law's magirologistic skills - no omophagy here. We are hardly prone to polydipsia, but we can appreciate a certain nippitate nittiness at this time of year - thank goodness, not a trace of the jumentous! Of course, there was much galimatias, but on the whole we avoided the risk of becoming temulent or succumbing to the woofits.
The children there were delightful as ever: not at all mammothrept - not a sign of momurdotes. Of course, there were times when might wish for a sitooterie, particularly when a grandparental whigmaleery presented a three-year old with one of these. Oh the rimbombo!
How was your Christmas? Were all your gifts cromulent? An autogeneal curwhibble, perhaps, or something from the knackatory? Were the presents you gave crumenically laetificant?
Friday, 21 December 2007
Thank goodness for market stalls. I finally gave into winter today and bought a pair of gloves - only £1.99, so I won't mind too much if I manage - as I usually do - to lose one within a few weeks.
I suppose I ought to do the old mums' trick of threading them on elastic up one arm of my coat and down the other.
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed in my paper that someone was selling an all-in-one scarf and gloves - sounds perfect, till you start to think what might happen if the scarf's wrapped around your neck and you suddenly try to hail a bus or have a conversation in Italian (perhaps that's why the only one I can find online is on sale in Japan).
Another of those wonderful ideas that might not be quite so clever is the single slipper/footwarmer for both feet that you occasionally see advertised in the back end of magazines for the comfy-minded. They make me wonder what happens when the doorbell rings and a forgetful wearer rushes to answer it......
I suppose I ought to do the old mums' trick of threading them on elastic up one arm of my coat and down the other.
A couple of weeks ago, I noticed in my paper that someone was selling an all-in-one scarf and gloves - sounds perfect, till you start to think what might happen if the scarf's wrapped around your neck and you suddenly try to hail a bus or have a conversation in Italian (perhaps that's why the only one I can find online is on sale in Japan).
Another of those wonderful ideas that might not be quite so clever is the single slipper/footwarmer for both feet that you occasionally see advertised in the back end of magazines for the comfy-minded. They make me wonder what happens when the doorbell rings and a forgetful wearer rushes to answer it......
Monday, 17 December 2007
Films I'm so glad I didn't pay to see, part the umpteenth
One good thing about being a bit of a stick-in-the-mud is that I find I don't regret not going to the cinema that often, and finding that I can see on TV things I let slip by.
Another is finding that something I wouldn't have paid to see anyway turns out to be a real stinker. I went to a festive dinner and DVD show with a group of friends last night: someone had chosen The Holiday, as it was vaguely Christmas-themed. Oh dear, what a waste of time and some good actors. It's supposed to be a romantic comedy based around a home exchange between two women who want to get away over Christmas from their romantic disasters. The English leg is set in Hollywood's mysterious England-land, where it always snows for Christmas, and people who write up society weddings for the Daily Telegraph can afford to live in a twee cottage in Surrey, down a twisting forest path too risky for a hire car to drive down (until it suits the plot for it to do so later on), but still "only 40 minutes from exciting London".
It expects Kate Winslet to be a drippier version of Bridget Jones, who is inspired to realise her strength by a twinkly old screenwriter and a quirky nerd; and who expresses it to the cad (who has turned up on her doorstep in Los Angeles - oh yeah?) in yards and yards of psychobabble (all the women in our group were shouting "Just tell him to eff off!"). It expects Jude Law to change from gadabout drunk to charmingly sad widower with impossibly cute children, and to explain this - with a straight face - by saying "I know I come as a package, and I realise my package isn't very impressive".
Is there some sort of "cute by numbers" kit they issue to Hollywood scriptwriters?
Another is finding that something I wouldn't have paid to see anyway turns out to be a real stinker. I went to a festive dinner and DVD show with a group of friends last night: someone had chosen The Holiday, as it was vaguely Christmas-themed. Oh dear, what a waste of time and some good actors. It's supposed to be a romantic comedy based around a home exchange between two women who want to get away over Christmas from their romantic disasters. The English leg is set in Hollywood's mysterious England-land, where it always snows for Christmas, and people who write up society weddings for the Daily Telegraph can afford to live in a twee cottage in Surrey, down a twisting forest path too risky for a hire car to drive down (until it suits the plot for it to do so later on), but still "only 40 minutes from exciting London".
It expects Kate Winslet to be a drippier version of Bridget Jones, who is inspired to realise her strength by a twinkly old screenwriter and a quirky nerd; and who expresses it to the cad (who has turned up on her doorstep in Los Angeles - oh yeah?) in yards and yards of psychobabble (all the women in our group were shouting "Just tell him to eff off!"). It expects Jude Law to change from gadabout drunk to charmingly sad widower with impossibly cute children, and to explain this - with a straight face - by saying "I know I come as a package, and I realise my package isn't very impressive".
Is there some sort of "cute by numbers" kit they issue to Hollywood scriptwriters?
Saturday, 15 December 2007
I've reached the age where book tokens are what the young people in the family give to Uncle (i.e., me) rather than the other way around. Or in other words, in our family (perhaps in most) Christmas shopping isn't the stressful, anxiety-ridden nightmare we're led to believe it might be. It helps me that I'm single, lazy and regularly expected at someone else's Christmas celebrations, so I've not had all that to worry about; and being peripheral to other people's lives puts me in the position of the Victorian child whose anxieties about her party frock were calmed with the assurance that "No-one's going to be looking at you anyway, dear". As long as I don't set out to give something downright offensive, whatever I give is unlikely to upset anyone else's equilibrium, so I don't need to worry too much about the balance between heart, head and wallet that comes into play when buying presents.
So once again, pacing myself over several Saturdays for some repeated trawls for books and consumables gets the job done. I can't claim to be as organised as my mother, who had a whole drawerful of "useful and acceptable gifts" bought throughout the year just in case anyone had been forgotten when the time came (not that stopped her fretting): but that's a useful reminder. It is the thought that counts.
If the weather hadn't been so perishing cold today, I'd have been able to linger and enjoy the decorations and entertainment in Covent Garden this afternoon - as you can see, a genuine balancing act.
Wednesday, 12 December 2007
Spooks
Sitting slack-jawed in front of Spooks (well, it's been a tiring week at work and all I want to do at the moment is hibernate), it took me a while to feel it's all getting a bit.. well, repetitive?
It's the same high-glitz, high-energy mix of moral dilemmas (ends vs. means, individual vs. collective loyalties, lurking doom and count-downs to disaster, in plotlines that are no less improbable for a modish nod to contemporary issues. The "one in, one out" policy for central characters is as rigidly enforced as in the days of uniformed commissionnaires controlling the queues for the one-and-nines. Some praise is deserved for making the geek and an older woman into central, decisive and authoritative characters (is naming her Connie a knowing hommage to Le Carré's Smiley's People?).
But I'm starting to get the impression that, for all Rupert Penry-Jones showing us more than perhaps he intended, his shoulder-rolling walk is starting to look like Roger Moore's eyebrow in semaphoring a performance. And the central conceit of an impossibly small group of people doing all the impossibly dangerous and glamorous and techno-whizzy stuff (no computer system ever breaks down) is starting look - well, as though they work in an office plastered with those signs saying "The Impossible We Do At Once - Miracles Take Longer" and "You Don't Have To Be Mad To Work Here, But It Helps" and take them all seriously.
It's the same high-glitz, high-energy mix of moral dilemmas (ends vs. means, individual vs. collective loyalties, lurking doom and count-downs to disaster, in plotlines that are no less improbable for a modish nod to contemporary issues. The "one in, one out" policy for central characters is as rigidly enforced as in the days of uniformed commissionnaires controlling the queues for the one-and-nines. Some praise is deserved for making the geek and an older woman into central, decisive and authoritative characters (is naming her Connie a knowing hommage to Le Carré's Smiley's People?).
But I'm starting to get the impression that, for all Rupert Penry-Jones showing us more than perhaps he intended, his shoulder-rolling walk is starting to look like Roger Moore's eyebrow in semaphoring a performance. And the central conceit of an impossibly small group of people doing all the impossibly dangerous and glamorous and techno-whizzy stuff (no computer system ever breaks down) is starting look - well, as though they work in an office plastered with those signs saying "The Impossible We Do At Once - Miracles Take Longer" and "You Don't Have To Be Mad To Work Here, But It Helps" and take them all seriously.
Saturday, 8 December 2007
Lèche-vitrine
Charing Cross Road, Saturday afternoon - a crowd outside Central St Martin's School of Art display windows. Why are they all staring at a steamed-up window? Well, it is near Soho - and it was an advertisement for an exhibition at the Barbican: Seduced: Art and Sex from Antiquity to Now. But this wasn't quite as exciting as all that - it was a young woman licking chocolate off the glass.Lèche-vitrine, if you didn't know, is the French for window-shopping - but I don't think they imagine it happening from the other side.
Creature comforts
Is there anything better, on a dark, dank, dismal December afternoon, than knowing you've actually made a start on the Christmas shopping, and coming home to Marmite crumpets?
Sunday, 2 December 2007
Amusia
Sitting indoors with the makings of a cold on a wet winter Sunday, catching up on yesterday's newspaper, my eye lights on the word "amusia".
For a moment, I thought of a mythical country where the national sport might be giggling, the national anthem Will You Stop Your Tickling, Jock, and the most solemn day of the year would feature the laying of a wreath of water-squirting flowers to commemorate those who died laughing. But like all utopias, it would have its dystopian side: can you imagine what Kafka would have made of The Laughing Policeman?
As it happens, the reality of amusia would be even worse for me: the inability to recognise music as music. It's discussed in Oliver Sacks's book Musicophilia (another one to add to the pile of fascinating things to find out about), but I remember now there was a flurry of interest about a year ago, about the Delosis online test. (I've just done it again, and from what I recall, my score's gone up since I did it a year ago - I seem to be more aware of rhythmic variations).
We might occasionally debate whether it would be worse to lose one's sight or one's hearing. Heaven knows, I hope never to find out. But if there's one thing worse than losing the hearing of music, it would be having hearing but experiencing music as a meaningless clatter indistinguishable from all the other extraneous noise of the world. Imagine, none of the inspiration or consolations of great music (or of the cheaply potent).
For a moment, I thought of a mythical country where the national sport might be giggling, the national anthem Will You Stop Your Tickling, Jock, and the most solemn day of the year would feature the laying of a wreath of water-squirting flowers to commemorate those who died laughing. But like all utopias, it would have its dystopian side: can you imagine what Kafka would have made of The Laughing Policeman?
As it happens, the reality of amusia would be even worse for me: the inability to recognise music as music. It's discussed in Oliver Sacks's book Musicophilia (another one to add to the pile of fascinating things to find out about), but I remember now there was a flurry of interest about a year ago, about the Delosis online test. (I've just done it again, and from what I recall, my score's gone up since I did it a year ago - I seem to be more aware of rhythmic variations).
We might occasionally debate whether it would be worse to lose one's sight or one's hearing. Heaven knows, I hope never to find out. But if there's one thing worse than losing the hearing of music, it would be having hearing but experiencing music as a meaningless clatter indistinguishable from all the other extraneous noise of the world. Imagine, none of the inspiration or consolations of great music (or of the cheaply potent).
Saturday, 1 December 2007
It's a commonplace that one of the best ways to learn a language is to fall in love with a native (I'm bowdlerising a bit, I think): one of the next best is to fall in love with a song.
I picked up on a phrase in one of Claude's posts that called to mind a song sung by Jean Sablon which I have on a 78. And in hunting for an online recording for someone else, I found on Youtube a whole treasure trove of chanson: Sablon, Trenet, Mistinguett, Lucienne Boyer, Damia. In amongst them was this one of Jean Sablon's that I didn't know:
I picked up on a phrase in one of Claude's posts that called to mind a song sung by Jean Sablon which I have on a 78. And in hunting for an online recording for someone else, I found on Youtube a whole treasure trove of chanson: Sablon, Trenet, Mistinguett, Lucienne Boyer, Damia. In amongst them was this one of Jean Sablon's that I didn't know:
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