What part of your routine do you always try to skip if you can?
If something is successfully skipped from a routine, often enough, I would suggest that it is no longer in the routine. I routinely read the daily prompts from Jetpack, via my WordPress Blog platform. But I skip them more often than I respond. I don’t try to skip them. They are mostly of no interest and eminently skippable. Unless like this one I can give it a few moments of ponder. Before I pondered or blogged on a daily basis I already took random photographs The two I am sneaking into this blog were taken 5 years ago in Seoul. They have appeared in blogs before but they are actually 5 years old today, so an anniversary outing and a random ponder with nowhere to go is a useful combination.
I have had pets all my life so I have no way to judge the merits of pet owning versus not. For me the game changer was becoming a dog owner. No longer able to allow my pets to just be. Dogs required more of me than any cat/ guinea pig/ rabbit or mouse. Dogs do not passively love in return for good food, a clean environment and affection. Dogs actively love. This was a shock to me 10 years ago when I became a first time dog owner. But the biggest benefit of dog owning is the regular and at times tedious walks that they require. I had 42 years of a career in medical imaging. A working life spent often in basements with blackout screens on windows. As a non dog owner I believed that I loved walking. Walking on weekends or days off is not the same as walking three times a day, often on more or less the same routes. I am very very lucky with my dog walking. For a long while the dogs were walked in the epic landscape of London, then for a while on a Cornish nature reserve and now on a peninsula of land surrounded on three sides by the sea. For the first time in my life, dog walking connected me to the changes of the seasons on my daily walks. I am acutely tuned in to the minor changes of my outdoor environment.
I still go for different walks on weekends as a treat, but the daily walks are the foundations of my life. They punctuate the day, make me weather and daylight aware. Sometimes they are the inspiration for this blog. I talk to strangers. I notice things…
This painting is on a noticeboard near one of my regular dog walks at Mount Wise. I see it so often and yet until yesterday I had never given it time. It is painted in the style of an Old Master and features a rural bucolic theme of a shepherd tending his sheep, overlooking the Hamoaze. For the first time ever I realised that the painting has modern super yachts moored at one of the pontoons. I am going to have to go back and actually read the noticeboard now. Give it some time in fact.
I suppose I was alert to incongruity yesterday.
Yesterday a German warship sailed, as they often do, up towards Devonport Dockyard. Not something that would have been calmly observed in 1943!
32 years ago this was not even a question. The first website went up in 1991.
In 1991 a favourite website looked like this.
In 1991 we would all have been quite used to questions about our favourite music, food or books and any other of millions of experiences. For most of us these questions cause a fair amount of thinking/pondering. Favourite things need placement, timing and circumstance. You could ask me to create a list of my ten favourite things today and I could probably come up with an interesting list. Tomorrow that list might have some different answers. Next year my list may be significantly different. I am fairly certain a favourite website will never feature in my lists. However reliant I am on the World Wide Web I can’t see a time when I would ever bother to have, or even think about having a favourite website. The real world is so much more worthy of being favourited.
An early or timely blog appears hard on the heels of a late one. Today’s prompt from my blog hosts is a strange one for a whole host of reasons, all of them impractical. But for the sake of a fantasy natter I would choose the ages of 15 and 16 to repeat. In much the same mindset as repeating an exam that I failed or required a higher mark from. Do it again and do it better.
Is there an age or year of your life you would re-live?
There was much, in my opinion, that I got right. But goodness, some confidence would have made things better. One thing that I wish I had realised I got right was my choice of Lipstick. If only I had known that No. 7 Plum Beautiful, was the Pinnacle Lipstick of choice for me. Life could have been simpler if I had known that my first tentative purchase at a make- up counter was ‘the one.’
It would not be the ages of 15 and 16 if I don’t mention sex. How I wish I had known less about it, my mother ran sexual health clinics. The nuts and bolts. The nitty gritty. The facts plain and simple, felt indelibly etched onto every part of me. I wanted no part of it because I knew too much. I hid myself in books. Lord of the Rings and War and Peace. Books so big and so lacking in any form of romance or lust that I could immerse myself away from the hurly burly of a normal adolescence.
I discovered a love for live music and dancing. Happily attending gigs all over the place, often alone and relying on public transport. That world was not a scary space for me.
If only I could have lived those vivid, vibrant years with wisdom and more friends.
All my own faults of course, nobody forced me to be that way. Thank goodness I got the lipstick right.
Sometimes I wonder if I should read The Lord of the Rings and War and Peace again…
Here I am the original Halloween grinch starting a blog with a carved pumpkin on the 31st of October. Needs must. I have 3 granddaughters, something has to give. Hannah, who has lived in North America, feels much warmer towards the event and carved a vomiting pumpkin.
I am going to have to find a way around my long held dislike. Eventually I can introduce the small people to the Mexican Day of the Dead. A festival I very much admire, who wouldn’t want one last party before entering a different realm.
Maybe we will enter a new phase of marking Halloween with pumpkins good food and wholesome autumness. A Harvest Festival/ Halloween mash up. Maybe with some magic wishes from good witches thrown in.
As if by magic, coincidence or me being sneaky the blog host suggestion for today mentions wishes from a genie. Agnostic in the mystical world and the religious I will take my wishes from whatever source is offering them.
You have three magic genie wishes, what are you asking for?
World Peace and good health for all knocks off two wishes instantly. But the third would have to stay in my pocket. I would need to observe the chaos I had caused by using the first two. No one ever gives parameters or protocols with wishes. The strength or longevity of the wish is never mentioned. Surely wishes should come with a set of instructions or a users guide. Improvising or just hoping for the best seems somewhat irresponsible. Maybe my very first wish should be for some learned guidance, in life and in fantasy.
Tonight’s early evening dog walk will be a precious thing. The last one before the clocks go forward and early evenings get dark. Too dark to sensibly walk beside the sea where there are no street lamps. Last nights walk was enlivened by a particularly high tide. The bay felt full and the song of the sea, as it hit the cliffs was much more powerful than usual. Ordinarily we might have arranged an early evening swim with the bobbers on a high tide. But for some reason we didn’t and that was a good thing, there was nothing safe about the water conditions last night. We all love a bit of bubbling choppy water but the fun needs to be safe. I was anxious to take some photos to share with the bobbers so we could all feel wise and sensible about not being cold and wet on a Friday evening.
This was the wave that made me cold and wet on a Friday evening. Rather than stop at the pink step as all the recent ones had. This one got an additional power surge and crashed into the stone steps, sending a spray of water 8 feet into the air. What goes up came down and I was drenched from head to foot. It was unexpected and exhilarating and just made me laugh as I retreated to safety. Now I am a fairly risk averse person but in that moment the unexpected joy of being powerfully splashed reminded me of being a child squealing at the beach. Which brings me neatly to the prompt that my blog hosts offered today.
How much would you pay to go to the moon?
Honestly I have no desire to go to the moon, so there would never be any spending by me to take a trip there. But if I could safely be tossed around in a clear plastic ball/bubble on and in a rough sea just for twenty minutes I might consider investing a small amount. It would have to be as safe as the wildest ride at a water park and I would like to be plunged down the huge underwater cliff that is just a few metres from our swimming zone to meet the deep sea creatures that are invisible to me on my daily visits. I have always felt this way. 54 years ago the first man on the moon failed to excite me, but give me a library book filled with deep sea creatures and I was lost for hours . Jacques Cousteau a diver and television documentary maker was a far more romantic and heroic figure than Neil Armstrong could ever be.
The sea, for me, is the Final Frontier. Space is for other people.
P S the eagle eyed noticed an error, the clocks go back. Dark evening panic over for a few weeks.
Almost every day I ponder on an alternative career choice. Not because I am hugely unhappy in the choices I made but because I am aware that the choices I made at 18 also shaped the person I am now. Insular, bookish me would have chosen to be a librarian at 18 if I had realised that it could be such a rich and varied career path. Arty me really wanted to be arty, but science me, the least authentic of my personas somehow took charge and the rest is history.
What alternative career paths have you considered or are interested in?
Has choosing the least exciting path, for me,been a bad thing. I really have no idea. But that path got me to where I am now with my great loves, books and art still exciting and nourishing my soul on a daily basis.
Because I didn’t much like science but was competent enough at it, the path I chose made me work harder to get the results required. I wish I had taken a little time out to learn the skill of teaching. Not because I have ever wanted to teach exactly but because in all jobs there is an element of teaching required, as there is in life generally. I would love to be able to feel confident that I pass on my skills, knowledge and nonsense effectively.
So in answer to the question. What alternative career paths have I considered or am interested in.
Just about every career path I ever meet on a daily basis. I think I am inherently nosy. Doing something I have no idea about intrigues me.
Of course I would be useless at so much. But maybe somewhere out there my, as yet undiscovered, hidden talent is out there waiting for me. Wondering why it took me quite so long to find it.
Yesterday I made Quince Jelly for the first time in my life. The success or not of my endeavours have not yet been tasted, but my early reaction is to suggest that being the Queen of Quinces is a career path that will be short and forgettable.
Everyone reading this blog has lived through the same historical event.
What major historical events do you remember?
The Covid-19 Pandemic is unforgettable for every single one of us. Millions and millions of unique recollections of a global event stored in our memory banks. I have never been one to wish for advanced old age or immortality. Covid-19 gave me an intellectual and low grade fascination with how the pandemic will be viewed through the lens of passing time. I am fascinated by the changes, big and small that already affect our day to day lives. Covid-19 made me want to live to be a sparky 100 year old who can sagely point a finger and flash a twinkling eye before delivering a witty, eloquent and fascinating monologue on the day to day life changes caused by the pandemic. As expressed by a sweet old lady who has become, if not a ‘National Treasure’, then at the very least a ‘ National Trinket’. I already own the hat for my promo portrait. Just a few more years to live…
It has been a whirlwind of family interactions in the last few days. Some planned and some serendipitous. Our dogs love having an increased pack. Yesterday Hugo took a little time out and perched on a small dining chair as if it was the only place he could find a space for a five minute gap.
By coincidence the two British locations our family occupies are represented by these little books in the prayer book shelves.
What have you been working on?
In answer to the above question I imagine Hugo could be wondering where the Little Book of Hong Kong was for him to do research Then he would then fully be able to fall asleep surrounded by books that represent his entire human family.
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