a little bit of news

It is the time of year when the sun comes out and the dust is revealed.  Time for a Spring Clean.  The fact that it is mid June is not lost on me.

Skybluepinkish will still be here and postings will be as fast as I can read.  I have been on a reading binge and will share my reading list with you.  Meanwhile over at  one pair of shoes at a time  I will be charting my progress towards a Zero Waste Home.

I look forward to seeing you around both places 🙂

in which i reveal the secret of my sandals

Today this arrived.  I am desperate to start reading but instead it is sitting on the table next to me as I write.  Tempting me.  However, I have decreed that I will not even open the cover (though I can hold it and feel it) until I have done at least half of today’s list.  That includes writing today’s blog post.

Has anybody else noticed the slight contradiction yet?  I have a new book, a new thing, a new possession.  Yet the possession in question is a guide to simplifying my life; a guide to reducing the things and the stuff which clutters and suffocates.

I am a reasonably sensible, well educated woman who took on board the refuse, reduce, reuse, repair and recycle mantra long before it was considered normal let alone essential.  I turned into my mother at an early age; keeping the plastic bags that magazines and catalogues came through the post in, carefully storing yoghurt pots for the seedlings and cutting up plastic milk bottles to make seed markers.  I never bought dusters I just cut up old sweat shirts and I could make a roasting joint last for up to three meals plus sandwiches (roast, shepherd’s pie and stovies since you ask).  I have never actually cut the toes out of my children’s crepe soled start-rite shoes to turn them into summer play sandals however.  There were some depths to which I would not go.  Yes, reader, I wore such sandals for playing outside when I was a little girl.  It was the sixties, I think she can be forgiven.

 I have a collection of household books and life simplification books that would not disgrace a small public library. Why?  I really doubt I am going to find anything totally new in this book, yet I can’t wait to curl up with it.  What is going on?

What I think is going on is confirmation.  I can read this book and I will feel good because even if I’m not doing all of it, I will be doing some of it and I will have thought about doing some of the rest.  It’s the feel good factor.  I am a good person. 

I don’t think the same applies to other genres.  I also have substantial collections of gardening books, cookery books, knitting/sewing/craft books.  I have books on organisation (from homes to minds) and a vast array of books on self sufficiency from keeping hens to how to survive Armageddon.  Another corner of my library houses books on the desert fathers, monasticism and meditation.

All of these offer me something new.  I know that I will learn new skills, tricks and develop new ideas every time I pick them up.  I am not so arrogant as to say that this particular book will teach me nothing, but put another way – I probably don’t really need it and the irony is in purchasing it I am committing the fist sin by not refusing something I don’t need.

But I do know I am going to love it and love transcends everything.

Planner Hall of Shame

While undertaking some therapeutic displacement activity I discovered a whole new genre of planners.  Planners designed specifically for writers.  I felt that my heart should have leapt, but instead it sank.

Surely the planner junkie in me would be whooping (much like the way the Inner Goddess cartwheels through Fifty Shades).  But instead it sighed and clicked somewhat despondently on the link.  It was not disappointed.

What do writers need in a planner that engineers, dancers, doctors and flower arrangers do not?  Answers on a postcard please, or you could just write on the back of a stamp.  When was the last time you saw a planner dedicated to the needs of a butcher?  I rest my case.  We all have appointments, commitments both one off and regular.  We all have to do lists (even if those of my husband are always, without fail, on the back of an envelope) and some of us have goals and monthly targets both practical and emotional.

Most of us need planners.  Actually we all need planners, but sadly some people believe themselves to be exempt from this rule.  They are the ones whose necks have been wrung on a regular basis (in fact I could even schedule the neck wringing in my own planner).  What we do not need are twee quotes “to encourage you along your journey”.  I’d love to see what would be selected for a planner dedicated to an abattoir manager.  Okay so I am edging on the edge of facetiousness but I hope you get my point.

There are a lot of things that as a would be author I need to know.  I can find them all in the wonderful Writer’s Yearbook, or on any one of the excellent blogs and websites dedicated to the writing process.  I do not need them in my back pocket or taking up valuable space in my planner.

So here is a sample of the Hall of Shame.

 A working writer’s daily planner – your year in writing  I note this is the 2011 version ……

Mslexia Writer’s Diary   I love Mslexia but why oh why did you stoop so low and why does it have to have a twee yellow flower on the front ……

Writing World    Fortunately I suspect that most people would have lost the will to live just trying to find the link to the planner.

Personally I find it all bit condescending.

wheelbarrows and trust

 

I read this today.

There was a man entertaining the crowds with his tightrope act, pushing a wheelbarrow across the rope over a deep abyss.  He asked the crowds “Do you think I can do this?”  “Yes, we believe you can do it!” they replied enthusiastically.  “Okay,” said the tightrope walker, “Who is going to get in the wheelbarrow?”

The difference between trust and belief.

How often do we confuse belief with trust?

 

Dear Sir or Madam

(drawing courtesy of RSPB)

I have been wondering if I should rethink my submission letters.  What about this one?

Dear Sir or Madam

I just know that you are going to love the enclosed novel it is just your thing and you are just the person who is going to “get” the totally new concept of a love story set on the moon between a rock and a sparrow which hitched a lift on Apollo 13.  It takes romance to a whole new dimension and is going to be the book that makes your name as the most forward thinking agent on planet earth.

I have taken the liberty of enclosing the whole book (complete at 300,000 words) because I know that you are going to be so hooked and drawn in by the magic of the words that I weave as I create a very unique tale of love lost and found.  You won’t be able to put it down, you will be on the phone to me before you have even reached chapter 59 and I will be here waiting for your call.  Together we can make marvellous literary music, soar to heights never before reached by a team that will be as fantastically amazing as ours.

I haven’t bothered with a synopsis as I don’t want to spoil the ending for you but as you will see I have a very sparse style of writing, neat and closely edited with carefully constructed sentences that contain only the key essence of that required to get the full meaning of their content across and you will find the book, despite its size, a simple yet meaningful read.

I won’t waste your time with any more of my words as I know that you are just chomping at the bit and dying to get your teeth into “The Rock and the Sparrow on the Moon”  subtitle, “The story of a rock and a sparrow who meet on the moon.”

Yours

Did anyone spot the deliberate error?

 

 

 

 

chocolate friday

Today is Friday.  Today I am having a day off from being cerebral.  Today I share with you the essential rules of chocolate.  Have a wonderful weekend.

1. If you have melted chocolate all over your fingers you are not eating fast enough.
2. If you are struggling to carry four pounds of chocolate home from the shops then just eat it in the car.
3. Tip for dieters – eat a large bar of chocolate before each meal and it will take the edge of your appetite.
4. Chocolate covered raisins, cherries, blueberries, goji berries etc.  all count as fruit so you can eat as many as you like over and above your five a day.
5. Chocolate covered ice creams are dairy and are also essential for fat soluble vitamins.
6. Chocolate comes from the cocoa bean, a bean is a vegetable.  See (4) above.
7. A Terry’s chocolate orange contains approximately 900 calories enabling you to conveniently consume your daily calorific intake in one go and still have some calories left over for that health giving glass of red wine.
8. If you eat plain, milk and white chocolate you have a balanced diet.
9. Chocolate contains preservatives and thus will help you stay young.
10. Chocolate is keeping the Spanx industry alive.  Would you want all those people to lose their jobs?
11. If you cannot eat an entire box of chocolates in one go you need more practice.

Finally, calories are afraid of heights.  If you break your chocolate bars in half and put them on a top shelf for 24 hours all the calories will jump out.

Enjoy…..

the power of small

“Four things on earth are small, yet they are exceedingly wise: the ants are a people without strength, yet they provide their food in the summer; the badgers are a people without power, yet they make their homes in the rocks; the locusts have no king, yet all of them march in rank; the lizard can be grasped in the hand, yet it is found in kings’ palaces.”  Proverbs 30:24-28

There are plenty of proverbs (both Biblical and otherwise) that point out the strength both physical and mental of something apparently tiny and weak.  In many cases it is through working together as a team that they make their achievements, in some they work alone but the point is that the appearance is deceptive. Just because something looks weak or its challenge looks impossible doesn’t mean that it is.

We all have the same words, granted some people invent their own, Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll were particularly prolific word generators and there is hardly a family in the land that doesn’t have its own shorthand for even the most everyday items.  We, for example, put our dirty dishes in the washdisher.  But on the whole we communicate using a prescribed set of mutually understood words.  There is nothing special about our words.  They have no innate power to change.  But change they do.

It is when they are placed together in a certain way that they power behind them is intensified.

I tried to think of some novels that had changed me, made me behave differently or changed my views or way of thinking.  It was very hard, I could think of a plethora of novels that I love, that I read again and again.  But had they changed me?  I didn’t know.  Then it occurred to me that perhaps I was not meant to know.  If I knew then the change would have been more superficial.  For the change to be fundamental, to really change me then I would not notice the change for the change would be of me.

But what about novels that change not just individuals but whole nations?  Can there be such novels.  Of course, essays and non-fiction can and do.  From Mein Kampf to The Age of Uncertainty writers have set out to change individuals and nations.  But do novelists aim to do the same?  Or do we just want to tell a story?

 

the sounds of silence

Silence.  I cannot write with the radio or television on, but I do like to write with other people around me so long as they are not talking to me.  I often work alongside my children as they do their homework.  Mutual encouragement perhaps.

I used to have Radio4 on pretty much all the time but recently I have taken to silence instead.  I wondered why.

As many of you will know I suffered from a sudden and severe bout of depression last year.  I have been on medication which is brilliant.  I also realised I had to slow down.  I have been practicing yoga for several years and recently have taken up meditation.  I make an active effort to be mindful of all that I do.  I don’t multitask, I do one job at a time and concentrate on what I am doing even if it is just putting the ironing away. I have a morning ritual that includes, prayer, Bible reading and meditation.  I have kept a gratitude journal for five years and write in it daily.

I am realising that I don’t need or want the background noise.  Previously it was my prop, or perhaps better described as my insulation.  Alone in the house with no radio I have to listen to myself, there is no insulation.  Sometimes, at first it was rather scary, I wasn’t sure I liked what I was hearing, who I was.  But I am getting to know me better, I know what makes me tick  (I’m nearly 50 so it really is about time).

When I think I am too busy to meditate, to write morning pages, to pray; when I skip a yoga class; it shows.  I tend to turn on the radio, I seek out noise and avoid silence.

I prefer the silence.  It tells me more.

house editing

I am editing the house.  It has accumulated far too many adjectives, they are quite surplus to requirements and need to be evicted.  I have moved everything into the Barn and Gin Gan which means that the rest of the house is more pared down, neat and exact in places.  Unfortunately open the door between the Barn and the Kitchen and the evidence that this is not true editing, that I have cut and pasted and kept all the extraneous stuff in another file “just in case” is plain for all to see.

I was forced to focus on this problem when it transpired that rodents have eaten yet another bit of wiring (I do hope they don’t have little wellington boots and they fry as they chew) and the lights in the Barn and Gin Gan were turning themselves off and on in the style of a fast moving Samba.  The lovely chap from Tom Hibbert Electricians return to inspect the damage and performed exquisite gymnastics over the carefully built obstacle course behind the Barn/Gin Gan door. The fact that the lights now stay on only highlights the severity of the situation.

In the manner of a master wordsmith I intend to edit this house from the kind of book you buy at an airport because it is three inches thick and will last the entire 12 hour flight regardless of the quality or storyline to something more akin to Julian Barnes.  Small enough to slip into your handbag to read at the bus stop or in a traffic jam.  Enough in a couple of paragraphs to satisfy.

chickens, questions and elevenses

There is a very nice small hotel on the A68 just before Edinburgh called The Stair Arms.  It is known to us as the Chuck up Inn. Not, I hasten to add because of their food, but because it was about here that the travel sickness brought on by the 300 mile trip from Durham to Ardgay usually resulted in an upchuck of some colour or other.  Pink (following a milkshake) was a particularly memorable one.  Especially as one child let rip on arrival necessitating the poor Boss to go in and ask for a table for five and a mop and bucket; and a second child revisteted the pink milkshake (I know it was our fault) on getting in the car and getting a whiff of her sister’s regurgitated breakfast.  Back goes the Boss to get another mop and bucket …

You may also know that for many years I was The Chicken Lady.  Latterly keeping poultry has become quite common.  But way back when the Boss persuaded the Dancer that she wanted a trio of Saxony Ducks for Christmas it was not quite so a la mode as it is today.  Our assorted fowl and poultry were excellent babysitters for all the little ones who came to play.  Pigs can do the same when they are small, they were a bit scary to anyone under 30 stone when they were fully grown.

Consequently when I first saw a blog called Vomiting Chicken  I could not resist.  Amy’s blog is a wonderful and very dry (I do love a good dry sense of humour) observation of the oddness and loveliness of life.  It is also the reason for today’s post as I have been nominated for a Leibster Award.  As the kind of awards I usually get are for the most green triangles from the Christmas Quality Street tin eaten in one sitting, this is a bit more upmarket.

The Liebster Award is given to “up and coming blogs,” and encourages the discovery of cool new blogs.

So here’s what is involved:

When you receive the award, you post eleven random facts about yourself and answer eleven questions from the person who nominated you.

Then you pass the award onto eleven other blogs (making sure that you tell them you nominated them) and ask them eleven questions. (One might wonder at the significance of the number “eleven” here, but that would probably be silly.)  You are not allowed to nominate the blog that nominated you!  So here we go:

Eleven random facts about me

1. I am completely deaf in my right ear following repeated Cholesteatomas as a child (go on google it, you know you want to).
2. I can burp the entire alphabet including W.  This was a great hit at one of my younger sister’s birthday parties and my mother was mortified when all the little girls went running out to their mummies saying how cool Katie’s big sister’s burps were.
3. I have sat on John Lennon’s and Yoko Ono’s knees.  My father was the lawyer for Apple Records and they used to give a Christmas party for the child of every single person who worked with them from the CEO to the cleaners.  One of their artists was asked to play Father Christmas.  John and Yoko played Father and Mother Christmas…
4. I love all offal except tripe.  I particularly love fried sweetbreads.
5. My first dog was named after a wine – Figeac.  As I was only 3 when I got her you can imagine that it was not me who chose her name.  My father went on to have cats called Petrus and Yquem, no plonk here.
6. I can sing all of Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrika in Xhosa.  I learned it whilst living and working in the Transkei in my gap year.  I cried all the way from Umtata to Johannesburg (it is a LONG journey by bus and train).  I didn’t want to come home.
7. Just like Amy (see number 4 on her list) I am an official extractor of spelts, remover of wobbly teeth (and popper of spots if allowed).  I have also removed teeth from other people’s children at their behest.
8. I have very flexible joints and can make my fingers do all sorts of weird bendy things.  When I stand up straight my legs curve backwards.  It’s hereditary and I will probably have dreadful arthritis but there is nowt I can do about it.
9. My first car was a white Mini Traveller called Emma.
10. I used to make tar lollipops in the summer when the tar melted and seeped into the gutter.  We would roll twigs in it and line up the “lollipops” on the kerb.  I ruined several dresses but the punishment was worth it for the fun.
11. What I have to think of ANOTHER one?   Sigh.  I long to have longish nails .  I don’t bite them, I just don’t seem to be able to have a full hand of nails all the same length at the same time.

Now to answer Amy’s questions…

1. What is your favorite meal?
   I’m tempted to say anything with food in it.  If I absolutely HAD to choose I would have bread and butter pudding, that bit was easy.  As for the rest oh heck….  Roast turkey with all the trimmings, lots of bread sauce, shed loads of sprouts and proper homemade orange and cranberry relish.
2. Do you believe in space aliens? If so, how would you describe them?  No.
3. How do you keep your house clean?  Really, I want to know. I need help in this area.  Ah well first I must confess to having the wonderful Lisa and Yvonne who do most of the  hard grind.  But I am a bit anal and organised when it comes to the house and that would be a whole post (or even series of posts).  Suffice to say you need a plan and you need to put things away and clean up AS YOU GO ALONG!  No dumping of stuff please, everything has a place and it should be in it.  Oh and wash the shower before you get out and give the bathroom a whizz as you clean your teeth.
4. How do you stay fit when you spend much time at the computer?  Have you seen me?  I went for an excellent Swedish Massage last month and Jilly took one look at the apparently huge muscles in my back and asked me if I worked out.  I almost fell of the couch.  Work out?  Do I look like I work out?    Seriously, I do at least 2 yoga classes a week and walk the dogs a lot.
5. What’s a dream that you hope to accomplish this year? To be taken on by an agent and get a publishing contract.
6. Do you own a grand piano?  Do you play an instrument? No only an upright, though I have my eye on a baby grand (The Boss doesn’t know this).  I play the flute and piccolo, the piano (very badly) and started sax lessons a year ago, though they have been put on the back burner
7. How will you spend your birthday this year? I don’t know about the day itself.  But on the Saturday evening following the day I turn 50 I am having 16 friends around for a wonderful dinner to be cooked and served by Andy from  Papaya Catering
8. What are some of your favorite movies and t.v. shows? I am currently addicted to Broadchurch and as it is the final episode tonight and we find out whodunnit I will be glued to the screen ignoring all phone calls and fire alarms should they ring.  More generally I thought State of Play (the tv series),  The State Within and The Sandbaggers were all outstanding.  Filmwise I am a sucker for older films.  Battle of Britain, Twelve o’ clock High, Carve her Name with Pride, Inn of the Sixth Happiness,   The Longest Day, Casablanca, Lawrence of Arabia, High Noon, A Night to Remember.  All films I used to watch with my father, who would then tell me who every single actor was and what else they had been in and anecdotes about working with them.
9. What are you reading right now, book and magazine-wise? Struggling to be Holy by Judy Hirst and Oriental Vegetables by Joy Larkham.  I can’t recommend either of them enough.
10. Are you a cat person or a dog person or a gerbil person?
    I don’t do small furry animals, mainly because we have three dogs who regard them as snacks.  However we have 5 cats, 3 dogs, 1 parrot, 2 goldfish, 2 geese and assorted chickens.
11. Do you have a favorite Youtube video that you’d like to share with the class?  Loads.  But as I have been listening to this a lot recently I shall share my recent  musical earworm with you.  Bird House in Your Soul. 

Gosh this is hard work.  I thought this was an award not one of Hercules’ trainer trials.  Here are my 11 questions.

1. Have you ever had a dream come true?  How?
2. What was your most serious misdemeanour at school?  Were you caught?
3. Do you snore?  Have you ever voluntarily or involuntarily tried any cures?
4. What was the last song that stuck in your head?
5. Tulips or daffodils?  Why?
6. Do you prefer to cook or to eat?
7. Are you a Townie or a Country bumpkin?  Not in reality but in your heart.
8. What is in your handbag/briefcase/rucksack/pockets right now?  Chose one or more 🙂
9. Do you think beauty is in the eye of the beholder or are some things inherently ugly?
10. Do you have a party trick? (and what is it….)
11. What do you do when faced with a big spider staring back at you from the bath?

And these questions I send on their merry way to:

1. Donna at Lost and Found
2. Seymour at Seymour Writes
3. Homebaked at Homebakedonline
4. Anna at Skin & Blister
5. Caroline at Caroline Smailes (though she is so busy with the launch of her new book The Drowning of Arthur Braxton that she might not make it)
6. Nettie at Nettiethompson
7.  From a Country Cottage
8. Zeb’s Mum at Zeb Bakes
9. Amanda at Paper Pens Ink
10. Catherine at Close Encounters, because she needs a break from writing her current book so that I can catch up!
11. Ann at Singing in Paradise because her blog is wonderful and gets lots of visitors but nowhere near enough comments.

Now if you ever think of starting something like this, can you keep the numbers down.  Eleven of everything is an AWFUL lot.