Books

Aren’t books brilliant?

I remember the excitement of finally being able to read for myself. Once I’d got the hang of it I absolutely loved it, and I read all the time.

I remember reading under the bedclothes with a torch at nights.

I remember hot, sunny days in the garden, lying on a blanket with a stack of books and just reading my way through them one by one until my eyes hurt.

I read everything.

My parents let us have free rein over all the bookshelves in the house, and the library where we went at least once a week.

I remember trying to read Kafka’s ‘The Castle’ at the age of ten.  I didn’t get very far with it. I remember thinking it was very silly indeed, and taking it back to the library, but at least I gave it a whirl.

It seems such a cliche, but it is true that books really did give me an escape into another world.  I found growing up hard work. I was painfully shy but with the added handicap of being very opinionated and totally unable to keep my mouth shut.  It made for a bit of a bumpy ride.

Books, and the worlds they opened up for me, were and are the best thing that ever happened to me.

My son, who is five, is struggling learning to read.  It’s not that he can’t do it. He is more than capable, he just mixes a healthy dose of ‘can’t be arsedness’ with an unwillingness to make mistakes, and lo’ his mulish stubbornness about reading.

He loves books. He loves stories.  He is creative and imaginative.  He just doesn’t see why he should read for himself.

The other day at the dinner table I was trying to explain the enormous freedom that books give you.  The fact that you can read what you want, when you want, the way you want.  The fact that you can fill in all the details for yourself, and create and inhabit a whole world of the imagination.  The fact that reading and being literate give you so much power, not over your imaginative self but over your own reality.

People who are truly literate, people who can read and understand what they read can think and question and argue and understand and stand up for themselves.  They have so much more in terms of resources than those people who can barely string a sentence together, who misunderstand and misuse words and who find themselves baffled and inarticulate and full of rage.

You can travel, and time travel, meet people from history, meet people of the imagination.  You can think about how it would be to fly or dive or inhabit new worlds. You can understand your own mind or how to build robots or what it would be like if you only had fins instead of hands. You can put yourself in the skin of others. You can climb outside of yourself and think about how it would be if you were just thoughts drifting through space.

With books anything is possible.

With books everything is possible.

Pouring

Hot showers.

God how I love hot showers.

The hotter the better.  I like it so I can barely stand under it, and as soon as my skin makes contact with the needles of water it starts to redden horribly like a lobster.

That’s the best sort of shower.

And it cannot be weedy either. I cannot abide a weedy shower.

I love a massive rain head type attachment so that you can stand under it and be drenched, without having to worry about bits of you sticking out and freezing to death.

I also love it when the water pressure is as punishing as the heat.

I once stayed in a hotel where the shower had not just an overhead head, if you see what I mean.  It also had water jets at other intervals further down the shower stalk thing.  This meant you could angle yourself to be washed all over in a very thorough way.  I approved highly.

Then there was the fact that the main head had different pressure and pulse type settings for the water flow.

And there was a steam shower button thingy too.

And a place you could sit down inside the shower cubicle.

Now I am not usually a great one for gadgets. I am an old fashioned type of gal when it comes to most things, but I have to say that I whole heartedly approve of this shower innovation.  It is absolutely marvellous.

The other thing I am a stickler for in my search for the perfect shower is the consistency of water temperature.

I am English. Showers have not been very good in England for a very long time. Excellence in showering is a recent innovation in the British Isles.  It was only really ushered in during my twenties.  As a child I hated showers and couldn’t see why anyone in their right mind would prefer to have one given the choice between that and the luxurious wallowings of a bath.

This was down to the fact that until I was nearly twenty the only experience I had of a shower was as a kind of medieval torture implement.  They had them in the changing rooms at school, and the P.E. teacher was a stickler for making sure you showered, even though the showers were freezing cold, dribbly, and hadn’t been cleaned since the Middle Ages.

Then there were the ones at people’s houses, where the cubicles were only fit for grey hounds as long as they stood on their hind legs, the soap dishes were invariably grimy, and the water came out in a pathetic coughing dribble, from a too small head.  The water that did issue forth from this sorry excuse for a shower was invariably either scalding hot or freezing cold, and quite often would switch rapidly between the two temperatures with absolutely no warning whatsoever.

On the rare occasions that you would be able to get the water to approximate a normal, soothing temperature, someone would invariably flush the toilet or put on the washing machine in another room.  This would immediately alter the water pressure and temperature of your shower.  You would either end up naked and soapy with no water, or boiled, or frozen, or all three.

Gah!

So you can imagine my delight when I experienced my first power shower.  I thought I had died and gone to heaven.  It was an extraordinary experience and one of lasting pleasure and sensuousness.

I have had other, more satisfying showers since, but that first one sticks in my memory as a kind of wake up call as to what showers could be really like.

Plus they’re good to eat fruit like oranges and peaches in without getting all messy.

The only thing they haven’t managed to do for me yet, that would make the shower my perfect bathing experience, is invent a way to read a book in it.

I expect it will happen in my life time.

I hope so.

Ode

Poetry is one of my favourite things.

I keep scrap books of individual poems that I like. I have done since I was in my late teens.  But it’s not just certain poets or certain poems that I love, it is the whole concept of poetry.

Poetry, to me, is like a condensed form of writing.  You have to fit what you want to say in such a small space, and yet convey such immense meaning or paint really vivid pictures.  Poetry is like a novel that has been boiled down to its most basic elements and yet when you read it, and savour it, and unpack it, you can find enough to say about it to fill two novels, and you could talk about it for hours.

I shall be adding favourite poems and poets as this blog grows, but at the moment I am dipping in and out of a poetry anthology called Being Human.  It is the third in a trilogy by the excellent poetry publishing house, Bloodaxe, and it is an anthology of poems from all over the world about what it means to be alive and living today.

So many people, when they think of poetry at all, think of some incomprehensible sonnet or dreary, long dead poet that they were forced to study at school, which means nothing to them, speaks of nothing they know and seems scary and alien.

I’m not criticising old poems by the way. I have favourites from all eras, but I guess what I’m saying is that I think poetry can be powerful, and reach people, and talk to them about the things that matter to them, and school is a good place to teach people that poetry is relevant to now, and that it concerns them, and it is a shame that they don’t seize this opportunity when it comes around to include people rather than alienate them.

This trilogy, Staying Alive, Being Alive and Being Human, redress the balance and are the finest anthologies I’ve had the pleasure to read for a long, long time.

This is a poem called Funny by Anna Kamienska

What’s it like to be a human

the bird asked

I myself don’t know

it’s being held prisoner by your skin

while reaching infinity

being a captive of your scrap of time

while touching eternity

being hopelessly uncertain

and helplessly hopeful

being a needle of frost

and a handful of heat

breathing in the air

and choking wordlessly

it’s being on fire

with a nest made of ashes

eating bread

while filling up on hunger

it’s dying without love

it’s loving through death

That’s funny said hte bird

and flew effortlessly up into the air.

Cats for the Win

This is Derek.

Derek is my new kitten.

I love cats.  Absolutely love them.

My husband doesn’t like cats at all.  He says that cats are disloyal and unfaithful to their owners.  He says cats always put themselves first, and don’t care about anyone but themselves.

He prefers dogs.  He says that dogs are the exact opposite of cats.

I agree but the other way around.

Cats are no nonsense. If they take the time to be with you, you know it’s because they actually like you, not because they’re staying with you because they’re too hungry to leave or too stupid to work out how to unlock the door.

Cats are independent.  They don’t really need you for very much at all.  They go their own way, do their own thing and have no intentions of pandering to human beings.

And cats crap outside and don’t expect you to clean up after them.

There is a great deal to be said for cats.

I don’t hate dogs.  I’ve known some very lovely dogs in my time, but they get on my nerves when I have to look after them.

Dogs are needy.  They always want something, and they always want you.

Dogs pooh a lot, and you have to clean it up.

And worst of all. Dogs smell of dog.

Which is certainly not something you could ever accuse a cat of doing.

I rest my case.

Hydrangeas

I am a fan of flowers in general. I have always believed that if someone buys you flowers it is a sign of great love.  They always cost so much money and yet are so ephemeral.  It is a bit like someone burning a fifty pound note for you.

Very decadent.

One of the flowers I love the most is the hydrangea.

You only ever used to see it on bushes in gardens, but in the last few years it has had a bit of a renaissance in florist shops, and you can get them everywhere.

Hydrangeas originate from Asia, which may explain why I am rubbish at growing them.  I have tried on several occasions to grow my own, so I can cut them for myself rather than buy them from a florist, but I have never, ever managed to get one to last more than about three months.

I have given up buying the plants now. I feel like too much of a murderer when I see another one drooping in the borders while I stand helplessly by.

Someone told me that their colours change depending on what type of soil you grow them in, which is quite cool.  I don’t like the pink variety but I love the blue, white and green ones with a passion.

There is something so sculptural about them, and their dusty colour is so appealing.

They even look beautiful when they are dried and I am usually not a fan of dried flowers at all.

I also love the fact that they have huge flower heads. I do not do one bloom artfully arranged in a minimalist Japanese way. I like big sheaves of flowers all clustered together, and you can achieve this effect with hydrangeas with very little effort at all.

Marbles

Marbles are great, aren’t they?

I’ve always been fascinated by how they get the whorls of coloured glass inside the clear glass. I always wondered how come marbles are solid when they look so liquid?

It’s all very hypnotic.

That’s what I think about marbles.

I know there are lots of scientific reasons why marbles are the way they are, and I have seen glass being blown and how they twist and pull and shape it.

You can’t tell me it’s not magic though.

Recently I bought a beautiful, hand crafted marble from a car boot sale.

It is modern, but has been made in the way Victorian craftsmen made marbles back in the day.

It was larger than your average marble. Even larger than the ones we used to call bully’s when we played with them at school.

It also had a slightly flattened underside, which was signed by the makers.

It was a glorious object.

See…

Eventually I sold it.

It was worth a lot more money than I paid for it, and I wanted the profit to fund my current pottery mania.

I was sad to see it go though.

I carried it round in my pocket for the few days I owned it, stroking it.

It made me feel quite zen.

I could always buy another one if I wanted, but half the delight was finding such a treasure on a tatty little stall at a car boot sale.

Just in case I ever change my mind about owning one though, here is a note to self.

You can buy them from a company called Teign Valley Glass, who make them for House of Marbles.

Beautiful aren’t they?

Stuff ‘n’ Things

This is a hobby blog.

I have a real blog.  A blog where I spill my guts about life, love and laundry.

This is a place to stick stuff I like.

A scrapbook really.

But an internet one.

This is good because it means I save money on Pritt Sticks.

Oh yes.

I am wise.

Did I mention that?