A Few of My Favourite Things

A WordPress weekly writing challenge.

Lemon Drizzle

Mum buys home-baking from local coffee mornings, and one of our favourites is Lemon Drizzle. It is moist and sweet without being too sweet. We fell in love with it, and I always make room for it in my daily calorie allocation. (I still manage to lose weight, and it makes me happy, so it’s not a problem)!

There are lots of recipes for Lemon Loaf online — I compared several before settling for this one from Daily Mail Online: Crunchy Lemon Cake.

It tastes very like the coffee morning cake, though I learned not to use a small food-processor for the batter! There isn’t enough room. Next time I’ll just use big mixing bowls and a hand blender.

Super Sad True Love Story (Gary Shteyngart)

I love my Kindle, but it would be nothing without the books.

One Kindle feature is that I can rate each book after finishing it. I keep a personal database of Kindle books (mostly so I can keep tabs on which books in a series I haven’t got) but I also note down the scores I give each book.

According to my database, the top scoring book on my Kindle is Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart — I gave it 45 points out of a possible 50. So far it’s the only book on the Kindle that I’ve given five stars.

I was interested in the ‘big brother’ aspect of the story (the scary thing is, I can imagine life turning into that). I liked the fact that the main character had a diary and was wrestling with issues similar to mine (logging the nice stuff and avoiding the bad)…. it just tickled my funny bone.

Although he begins by sounding like somebody you’d prefer to have nothing to do with, you can’t help feeling fascinated by his whole way of life… and you get very fond of him by the end. In fact he’s the most decent man in his social group.

Main characters in books don’t have to be young, beautiful, strong, clever, and sociable… in fact none of these qualities are necessary. They have to seem real and be vulnerable, have to have experienced things I recognize from my own life… and they have to be trying to be good rather than bad.

Perfection is not required in a human being, unless true perfection is having the right balance of imperfections! I think it may have been achieved in this book.

Piggin

…just because everybody needs Piggin Friends!

This boyo here has his own box of trinkets. The bigger and bulkier the trinket, the more he loves it. You don’t leave anything sparkly lying around, because it will disappear into Piggin’s treasure chest.

He has even snatched costume jewellery from beneath other customers’ noses. Mum bought a string of cheap bulky beads from a stall, and another lady said, “Oh, you beat me to it! That’s just the kind of thing I love!”

I said, “I don’t suppose you told her it was going to be worn by a Piggin?”

“No,” she said.

Good call.

Kindle Waffle

We meant to go to the supermarket this morning, but the car refused to start. Mum says the battery has gone flat (again). We don’t use it enough!

When I was glancing at my list of old Kindle purchases on Amazon, it said there was an update available for one of the ebooks. Any notes and highlights I made on that particular book would be wiped out… but I don’t care about that. I can always put them back in!

I’ve seen people saying on a Kindle forum that they are sometimes offered these ebook upgrades… but I don’t think I was notified about mine by email. I should check the full list of purchases in case there are other offers!

Mum has apparently been going crazy watching me share many happy hours with my Kindle, because she suddenly announced that she wanted one too. Instead of sitting around waiting for one to arrive through the post, she bought a Kindle Touch from Argos. (Reminds me of the Argos advert… she’ll be the one darting brightly through the door with Argos bags, while my house of cards tumbles down about my ears).

She wanted to make the font larger, as she can’t read very well in bed. It took us both a little time to find out where Amazon had put the font sizes… it’s right there on mine, but harder to find on hers.  Anyway, it’s all sorted now.

She seems to be reading Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death. Maybe I should do all the cooking for a while…

A Nothing Day

Totally lacking energy right now…  nothing to say. Try to do things and they don’t work. Write a blog post and there’s nothing to blog about. Read a book and it’s full of dry bits. Friends and family on Facebook no closer than they were. Makes you wonder what Facebook is for.

I prefer quiet conversations with just one person at a time.

Sometimes feels as though life is something you are forced to do when you would rather keep out of it! There is no way you can say “I don’t want to do this, thanks…. I don’t have the right kind of brain.” I always wanted my life to be a book I could learn from without being hurt in any way.

I’m the heroine of my own story, and I don’t like it at all. I’d much rather read about it.

At the end of the novel I would turn round and be at home with my family. No other kind of existence is imaginable.

But for now the book is still open…. the next chapter could be filled with masked highwaymen (or did we just have that one?) Or howling wolves in a cold Scottish forest (think I’ve done that one as well). Or a shipwreck, and pirate’s treasure. Or there’ll be a hobbit and a gold ring.

Is that all just wistful thinking?

Courtesy is Dead

Woke around five a.m. and read my Kindle… Alfred Tennyson by Andrew Lang.

I liked the following…  it reminds me of modern TV:

“The brief life of the Ideal has burned itself out, as the year, in its vernal beauty when Arthur came, is burning out in autumn. The poem is purposely autumnal, with the autumn, not of mellow fruitfulness, but of the “flying gold of the ruined woodlands” and the dank odours of decay. In that miserable season is held the Tourney of the Dead Innocence, with the blood-red prize of rubies. With a wise touch Tennyson has represented the Court as fallen not into vice only and crime, but into positive vulgarity and bad taste. The Tournament is a carnival of the “smart” and the third-rate. Courtesy is dead, even Tristram is brutal, and in Iseult hatred of her husband is as powerful as love of her lover. The satire strikes at England, where the world has never been corrupt with a good grace.”

All this talk about flying gold, ruined woodlands and dank decay reminds me of a perfume I like… Calvin Klein’s Secret Obsession. Moss, wet earth and cool, damp leaves… beautiful. Perhaps the courtiers were wearing it at their Tourney.

There were words concerning women trying unsuccessfully to be like men (rather dubious, I thought!) and although I couldn’t find online commentary on the subject, I saw he had written a letter to Jane Austen in Letters to Dead Authors. I downloaded 10 or more Kindle books by Andrew Lang, including Letters to Dead Authors and Letters on Literature. I also found A Collection of Ballads, A Short History of Scotland, Tales of Troy and Greece and New Collected Rhymes.

A reviewer for The Book of Dreams and Ghosts said if anyone understood it enough to get more than 40% of the way through it, they were ‘ratty and silly’. Eight people out of eight said the review wasn’t helpful.

My Kindle was running out of power, so I connected it to the computer to recharge, washed a splash of coffee from its pink Shocksock and hung it up to dry. Then I went back to bed, as it was still quite early.

Had a horrible dream about a friend I fell out with…

In the dream I was happy and excited, telling her how I could visit a site of hers any time to see what she was saying and how she was getting along. It was like being subscribed to somebody’s blog, and there was nothing wrong with it. I thought she would be chuffed, but she told me that my frequent visits were causing problems on her site, and I shouldn’t be online so much, as it led to system overload.

She said I should unplug everything and stay offline. She didn’t say “check a few times to see how I’m doing!” or anything else nice; she gave the impression she wouldn’t care if I never went online again.

Obediently, I unplugged everything and thought, “well, I can do a little housework now.” I stared through a window at the garden. The day was slowly darkening, and shadows stretched across the lawn. The leaves stirred restlessly in the encroaching chill. I could hear my friend in the next room… she was clacking eagerly around her kitchen, talking to her husband. She had forgotten I was there, and was telling him that now they were free to do whatever they wanted, and she had lots of plans for the two of them.

I woke up again, depressed, and discovered I had slept so long it was lunchtime! The song Vienna by Ultravox was in my head.

The feeling has gone, only you and I,
It means nothing to me
This means nothing to me…….

Book on Blogging, Tweeting and Facebooking Dangers

I recently read Blogging and Tweeting without Getting Sued by Mark Pearson. It’s available as a Kindle book or a paperbook. (It may also be available in other ebook formats too, but I haven’t checked).

When trying to decide whether or not to buy it, I worried that it might be dry or unnerving, but decided that it didn’t matter. As a blogger, I should read it anyway.

In fact I enjoyed it, and made a lot of highlights for my personal reference. (Incidentally, I decided a long time ago that I would only allow people to see highlights I made on older books such as Dickens. I’m just being cautious!)

It looks at international issues, which is something that affects all online communications anyway. It doesn’t pretend to cover all of the dangers, but I learned things I didn’t know… as a very new and uncertain Facebooker, it was mostly Facebook issues I didn’t know about. But there are issues everywhere, really. Better to be aware of them than not.

Inner Rabbit

This is me… wearing Euphoria perfume and making mistakes! Missing words when I write and adding wrong endings such as ‘-ing’ and ‘-ed’ where they aren’t wanted. Making a multitude of typing errors on the flat Mac keyboard (ones that I don’t make on ordinary keyboards… in particular I seem to hit the comma when I’m aiming for the full stop. Worse, I scatter the letter ‘f’ through my words when trying to find my place by touch).

Trying to find somewhere on my desk to lay out a sheet of paper I’m copying from, but there’s no room. Then I remember I’ve got a nice solid copy holder somewhere, but I’m not sure where. Find it on my desk, sitting beside me. Prop the paper on it, not bothering to fasten it with the bar. This won’t take long.

*** *** ***

It’s half past 8 on a Tuesday night — feels more like it was Monday. Golden sunlight in the dimming outdoors, glancing off the tops of the clematis and off the sides of the trees. Sky a soft pale blue. Sun was pouring down through the loft hatchway upstairs, pooling in the middle of the soft gloom of the landing.

TV downstairs is on — one of those music shows of Simon Cowell watching dance groups that all look the same. A very nervous girl has just walked offstage in a skimpy outfit she’s not comfortable in — she looks as though in her mind she has already lost, and she is probably right. I don’t hear their remarks on the TV, or any of the music… though the music phantom in my muffled brain is playing some dignified, ‘big’, dramatic voiceless rock music that I know well and can’t identify. It’s one of the tunes that’s often there. Makes you think of sun setting slowly over heavy, glinting seas.

I’m drinking the dregs of yesterday’s coffee — it’s like stewed sawdust in water. There’s milk in it but no sugar. There are pigeons in the trees outside. Pecking, preening, flying off occasionally but always coming back. This is their home. They suffer somehow through the frosts of winter and are still here in the spring. I watch them and they watch me.

Mum is playing solitaire on her laptop. She’s moving the cordless mouse on a tray on her knee and is leaning back. It seems tired and disengaged. She said during the day she had a headache — perhaps it has not gone.

*** *** ***

My eyes smart a little, especially the left. I was at the opticians today, having a ‘full’ eye test. At one point in the proceedings she was shining a very white bright light in my eyes. The left eye stood up to it reasonably well, but the right eye kept fluttering and closing.

I nearly started whimpering in the middle of my interview with the optician — she pretended not to notice, but her bright cheeriness and warmth redoubled. I’d been upset all morning. I felt tired of trying to talk to people, maybe about important things like my eyesight, and not hearing anything they say unless they repeat fifty times or write it down. You miss things and make mistakes because of it, which results in repeat appointments etc… the very last thing you want.

I’d even got tired of pretending that I’m on board with everybody else — the polite nodding and smiling that smooths most of it over while feeling confusion about who people are and how they spend their time. Pretending I know whether a stranger has said “may I sit here?” or “is anybody sitting here?” to which the answer will be ‘yes’ or ‘no’, or ‘no’ or ‘yes’, depending. And all the time, a guilty, creeping boredom and resentment that has to be disguised.

Today I froze in the headlights, and waited for it all to stop.

I sighed and cheered up when the optician said my eyes were very healthy. I notice she didn’t add “for your age,” but I knew it was true. With my floaters, dry eyes, varifocals and blurring eyesight, it seemed an unlikely diagnosis. Especially when she said “you see better than 20/20 with your spex [sic]“, which my mother said she thought only Superman could do. Last week she said she and my sister have high blood pressure and that I might too… but I haven’t yet, it seems. Maybe because I’m the protected youngest, or because I was so sluggish this morning. “I felt like roadkill,” I said, and Mum said “you looked it.”

I suppose the thought of being deaf AND blind terrifies me. I wouldn’t be able to read what people say to me, and that would destroy what communications I have. It would just be me and the ‘music phantom’ in my head, and vague rumblings and vibrations in my environment. Perhaps a cat on my lap.

*** *** ***

It’s 0:20 the next morning and I’ve gone to bed. A Piggin leans on my shoulder. I’ve drained a glass of slightly too acid tomato juice — won’t buy that brand again. My Kindle is next to my bed in its pink Shocksock… I’m reading a rather poor whodunnit set in Egypt. But it’s not so poor that I need to stop.

The Kindle changes the way I buy books. I nearly bought an L.E. Modesitt Jr hardback for £1.50 from a charity shop, but when I noticed the stained pages, I put it back. I wonder, “do I really want MORE books taking up space, especially blemished ones that I’m too squeamish to touch? I could buy it for my eReader and highlight the bits I like, and leave it in my Amazon archive.”

It’s more comfortable reading and writing without my glasses. Everything at some sort of distance is a blur… shape, colour and a soft shine… no detail. Closer to, my hands and writing are clear. My long hair is a dark haze that frames my vision.

Last night I dreamed about white werewolves. As I watched a big one loping along, I grew nervous and asked myself why I was so relaxed? Then I remembered the werewolf was a friend who was helping me. I relaxed again, but then woke up and remembered the optician, and really didn’t want to go out.

Day came to an end eventually though, with golden sunlight and so on. It wasn’t all bad, any more than the werewolf was… though my inner rabbit waits behind my eyes, ready to pounce!

Thoughts on Middlemarch

“That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.”

Yesterday I finished Middlemarch by George Eliot.

I don’t believe the following is a spoiler, as I don’t refer to the plot or individual characters, but if you are going to read the book, wish to start with a blank slate and don’t even need the persuasion, you might want to skip this, in case.

It was a surprise of a book… a slow and graceful waltz which illustrates life in a small English town in bygone days. I didn’t know if anything more would come of it, but in fact the pace quickens and there’s a strong finish.

George Eliot is at pains to point out that life continues after that climax, with people either becoming what they want to be or getting lost along the way. Eventually they pass on, leaving room for young hopefuls, who tread similar paths while thinking them new.

Major social events (such as weddings, births and funerals) tend to be skirted around, with the main focus falling on events both before and after: the things that make all the difference.

It’s remarkable how a person’s life and character can be so affected and changed by individual decisions, both great and small. One person getting married or deciding to do good instead of evil, evil instead of good, or walk this way instead of that, could utterly transform the lives and characters of the people around him/her.

It reminded me of An Inspector Calls in that respect… how separate and apparently irrelevant actions by different people could impact on one individual’s life in a major way.

Parts of Middlemarch are dry and hard to follow, but there is plenty of humour and liveliness, and the style in general seems to loosen up in the latter half of the book. A quality I like about some of these older books is that there is a focus on redemption, forgiveness and change of heart, whereas many of today’s books and films have a shallow quality, demanding indignities and vengeance to be inflicted on unsympathetic characters.

“What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?”

Sometimes I couldn’t decide if I liked or sympathized with a Middlemarch character or not, which is like real life in that we don’t know everything about people. Our views are irrelevant anyway, because people have both good and bad things about them, and have good and bad experiences regardless of our opinion, and they make friends with people we like, even when we wish that they wouldn’t…

“‘I suppose we never quite understand why another dislikes what we like, mother,’ said Mary, rather curtly.”

I was amazed at the corners and shadows of human nature that George Eliot explored; it made you wonder what she has experienced in life to know all of this. Some of it falls in your own experience. It’s unsettling to know that you are thinking and feeling no differently from people back in the 1800s, but then you ask yourself what else you expected? As George Eliot said, these paths have been trodden and these stories have told many times before.

“I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect.”

“…people were so ridiculous with their illusions, carrying their fool’s caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque while everybody else’s were transparent, making themselves exceptions to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they alone were rosy.”

Slight Disruption

Was unable to get into my blog last night… some other sites failed as well, but I was able to get into yet others. Must have been something to do with my ISP. I kept getting email notifications about an ongoing discussion on a forum that I wanted to read, but I couldn’t get in!

I whiled away the time by searching for a new ISP, but I haven’t found one that’s at all satisfactory. They cost too much, have too many unwelcome stipulations (e.g. routers you don’t want), have too long a contract, offer too low a download limit, don’t appear to have good customer service, etc etc… at the top of the ISP review site should be a sign: “abandon hope, all ye who enter here!”

Had a short break from Middlemarch while my Kindle recharged. I could have read it while it was recharging, but that would have chained me to my desktop. I picked up a paperback (Homeworld by Harry Harrison) but Middlemarch is my first priority. It would be too infuriating if I stopped at the same spot I broke off at before!

By joining Facebook, I have shaken the resolve of a friend who was determined not to, and now she’s wondering if there’s anything in it for her too. I think it’s a bit of a tiger to have by the tail, but could bring certain benefits. Was going to talk to a cousin about family history.

I wonder if I’ll be able to get into my blog tomorrow… fingers crossed! We haven’t exceeded our download limit, so it’s not that.

I tend to hibernate at this time of year… and just now, the early New Year, is always the worst part. It’s a time when I should be doing this or that, but can’t put my mind to it.

Will potter off now… (Fails to get up from chair).

Being and Facebook

I’m halfway through Middlemarch now. It’s like wading through treacle, though a cousin says he read Being and Nothingness by Jean-Paul Sartre and by the end of it, he still didn’t know what any of it was about. At least Middlemarch isn’t that bad. But, for example, it said something about ‘a small innocent noise as of a tiny timid quadruped’, which I assume is a periphrastic way of saying “squeaked like a mouse”.

You do have to have your brain switched on. Fortunately I read this half of the book before, making a surprising amount of sense out of it (more than I do now!), so I can afford to coast a little.

I finally got dragooned into using the dreaded Facebook and it’s a bewildering world indeed. I thought I could just sit there in my Faceburrow and only talk to three or four family members, but I seem to have befriended others along the way. Facebook isn’t interested in people staying walled off. It says “there are all these people you could be friends with; they know everyone you know!”

It unnerves me how you have friends from the next village talking to your family who live several towns away and have never met. It’s a weird feeling, like mixing curry and cheese.

I suspect the main reason for my finally joining Facebook is that I noticed I could annoy people from my Kindle with highlights, notes, ratings and “I bought this novel on Amazon.” I rather wanted to do that. Of course, instead of impressing them with some of the weightier titles I downloaded beforehand, I seem to be going through a Children’s Books phase. So at the moment it’s “I downloaded Five Children and It!” Maybe I should keep quiet till I’m back to George Eliot and her like…

My excuse for downloading A Christmas Angel (if asked) is, “I went looking for Jean-Paul Sartre but got side-tracked.” It’s true, after all…

Going Yellow

Decided to try a blog post a night.

I worry (ludicrously) that I will zoom so quickly through all the books available to my Kindle that there will be nothing left in the world that I haven’t read. Maybe my mother had a similar sensation when she was young… she said she read everything that came her way, in no particular order. (I was asking if there was any reason why she picked Pickwick Papers as her first Dickens read).

For the Kindle I downloaded two free books today: The Enchanted Castle by E Nesbit and Daddy-Long-Legs by Jean Webster. I chose the first because I don’t think I’ve read it, and the second because I read it ages ago and enjoyed it.

I’m still slogging through Middlemarch. Still finding a lot to highlight, despite the heavy language. It’s interesting how she switches through different varieties of heaviness depending on the speaker.

We went to a neighbouring town today, and the Kindle came along in my trolley. I didn’t think I would get a chance to read it, but it was nice to know it was there. I was giving it a little polish just now with a microfibre cloth. They say you can’t get fond of ebooks the way you get fond of printed books, but I’m not sure I want to, any more… an e-reader is risky as it is; it becomes ‘all books’ to you, or at least ‘most books’; a kind of companion.

You begin to understand why some might try to cut themselves off from possessions in an effort to just ‘be’… to avoid negative emotions connected to desiring things or trying to keep what you have. Someone was saying in a Kindle discussion that you have to move on from your old books, even if they meant more to you than books you obtained more recently. He doesn’t think we should have our Wind in the Willows (or Narnia books or Rupert the Bear books or whatever) just sitting there because we’ve always had them and can’t imagine letting them go!

It did surprise me when I had a look inside some small Asterix paperbacks I’ve had since the 80s — I found those (despite my care of them) were going slightly yellow. Books (printed ones) get old. That’s how much time has passed since I was a student…. yellowing time!

But I wonder if it’s unreasonable to think we shouldn’t get attached to possessions… it’s part of who we are. You get used to things, especially the useful things that you handle every day. There are the objects that act as ‘landmarks’ in a sense…. “you are here… nowhere else.” What is unsettling is the sensation that things are lost as you go through life. Books come and go, as do other things…. people and animals come and go… homes and places change… some find that places they knew change out of all recognition, and they don’t want to go back because it will be just like any other place. And, right at the end, all that you are is lost as well, and seeps away into the cold and dark.

Perhaps books continue to hold a spark for us of people who have already gone, but we don’t need the old yellow copies in order to love and keep them.