I get lost quite easily. I get disorientated and am surprisingly easily distracted. I stop looking at where I am going and start to get interested in a woman with a fractious child passing by, a window display, faces in the passing tram, or I get involved in mentally planning the week’s menu or my new outfit. None of these things are helpful when you are walking along new streets in an unfamiliar city and need to be able to retrace your steps to the car – or remember where you parked it!
I no longer drive. It’s probably just as well. The lethal combination of driving on the ‘other’ side of the road, in a car with the controls on the ‘wrong’ side of the car, scary trams who wait for no-one, busy bike lanes and, worst of all, my ability to get lost, has all become too much for me! Too much for my potential victims too, so I give them a break. I content myself with the excellent public transport system and if I forget the way back to the tram stop I can always go back on a different tram. Problem solved!
Come to think of it, life itself is a bit of a labyrinth and it can be tricky sometimes following its twisty path. As an instinctive distruster of technology I have a hard time of it in the twenty-first century. In fact, considering my natural temperament – as an incurable dreamer – and my distrust of machines, even the ones that navigate cyberspace, I do pretty well! Trained on a manual typewriter, having practised on my Dad’s antique one – the kind with the stand-up metal keys you can jam your fingers in – and graduating to an electric typewriter in my early twenties, I braved that monster, the word processor, in my early thirties, with an enormous noisy printer shut away in a soundbox. My first experiences of owning a real computer came much later when, as a mature student, later in my thirties, I had the use of my friend’s one whilst she was taking a year out in America. Now I do email, blogging, online journals, internet research and all the rest of it – well, not quite all. I draw the line at twitter – I use too many words.
But this is not the natural me. The natural me is a lover of outdoors, a lover of sunshine (not doing too well at present), a reader of books (hard copies) and an incurable thinker – hence, Mostly Meditations. It’s what I do best. Join me in my mental labyrinth during 2011 and follow me down some unusual thought paths…
I no longer drive. It’s probably just as well. The lethal combination of driving on the ‘other’ side of the road, in a car with the controls on the ‘wrong’ side of the car, scary trams who wait for no-one, busy bike lanes and, worst of all, my ability to get lost, has all become too much for me! Too much for my potential victims too, so I give them a break. I content myself with the excellent public transport system and if I forget the way back to the tram stop I can always go back on a different tram. Problem solved!
Come to think of it, life itself is a bit of a labyrinth and it can be tricky sometimes following its twisty path. As an instinctive distruster of technology I have a hard time of it in the twenty-first century. In fact, considering my natural temperament – as an incurable dreamer – and my distrust of machines, even the ones that navigate cyberspace, I do pretty well! Trained on a manual typewriter, having practised on my Dad’s antique one – the kind with the stand-up metal keys you can jam your fingers in – and graduating to an electric typewriter in my early twenties, I braved that monster, the word processor, in my early thirties, with an enormous noisy printer shut away in a soundbox. My first experiences of owning a real computer came much later when, as a mature student, later in my thirties, I had the use of my friend’s one whilst she was taking a year out in America. Now I do email, blogging, online journals, internet research and all the rest of it – well, not quite all. I draw the line at twitter – I use too many words.
But this is not the natural me. The natural me is a lover of outdoors, a lover of sunshine (not doing too well at present), a reader of books (hard copies) and an incurable thinker – hence, Mostly Meditations. It’s what I do best. Join me in my mental labyrinth during 2011 and follow me down some unusual thought paths…
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