Winter Sun

Bright the sun,
Streaming through glass,
Wind piercing and cold.

Warm, her song,
Vibrant and rasping.
Breaks through my daydreams,
Beckons me into her world.

Warm and bright –
My world takes an upturn!
Mood lifts, then
Suddenly,
Life is more inviting…

Mood is fragile,
A precarious butterfly,
Flitting on the breeze
Like a snowflake in the sun.

Bright the sun,
Streaming through glass,
Wind piercing and cold.

A Listening Ear

Is anybody out there? Of course, the internet is a special case. When I am blogging, or writing my journal for the online information service, I am contacting cyberspace – I am writing for Mr. (or Ms.) Invisible. I shall never know who’s out there reading, listening and taking it all in.

Not so in everyday life! I talk – to my husband, to my children, on the phone, or to the doctor… I know who is supposed to be listening – I can see them or I dialled their number and they were in. But are they listening?

Do you ever get that feeling – like you are the one who is invisible? Do you sometimes feel like you are talking into thin air? What does it take these days to get someone to really listen? It’s a rare treat and one that should be cherished these days. We are all so busy nowadays and even when we are apparently engaged in conversation with another human being our minds can be on another planet, planning our schedules, worrying about tomorrow’s meeting or simply daydreaming.

We had friends for dinner the other night. They were work colleagues, busy, busy people, younger than us and full of life. We sat around the table after work, eating, drinking, chatting and listening to a selection of music, trying to identify our similarities and our shared tastes. It was a good evening and we went to bed with a warm glow, from good food, good wine and congenial conversation. They were good talkers. More than that, they were also good listeners. A couple of days later we received a thank you note (how wonderful!) on a well-chosen card, bearing a picture of a beauty spot on one of our favourite stretches of coastline – another shared interest we had uncovered.

The card thanked us for the evening we had spent together and the ‘quality time’ we had all enjoyed. We had had a conversation that night: we spoke and they listened; they spoke and we listened – a simple formula that never fails. It’s a rare gift – the listening ear. We need to cultivate it… then all our time rapidly becomes ‘quality time’.

January blues

I strolled out to the shops last week to try and beat off the post-holiday blues - yes, already!! Christmas is over. New Year fireworks and hangovers are done. It's January and it's grey and rainy. Time to think about booking the summer holidays, but too long to wait till summer. Time for a spot of retail therapy: the January sales...

Has anybody else tried it lately? If you want a dishwasher, a toothbrush, a new bathrobe or a pair of kitchen scales now is probably a great time - although not so great now as a week ago if you live in Britain, following the VAT increase. Here in the Netherlands things are in transit. Before Christmas it was time to buy winter boots, leather bags, luxury products of all kinds that never appear on the shelves at any other time of year. Party attire was good too but not too practical now January has bitten and the parties are over. Out with the old and on with the new - but where is the new stuff? It's sales time and time for shops to clear the decks.

I guess I was too optimistic - I just wanted some good old-fashioned elegance, plus a bit of colour to brighten up the new year, preferably at bargain prices. Why not? I toured the fashion outlets. What did I find? Baggy old trousers, saggy old tunics, grey ones, mud-coloured ones, dry-clean ones that look like a bargain till you read the small print on the label and find that you will have to spend a fortune getting them cleaned, mis-shapen sweaters, drab T-shirts, jeans that look like someone else already wore them for a year and then got fed up with them...

But I guess I will have to wait. Here, in late February, the shops will come to life again. Whilst we shiver in the snow and long for a sunbed on the beach in Tenerife, the local shopkeepers will taunt us with their new fashions, leaving me gasping with amazement - did I really wear that sort of thing last summer? Did I really have all that bare flesh exposed? Could it possibly ever have been that warm? But will there be the warm, woolly sweaters that I need right now? Will there be longjohns (if you're under 30 don't even ask...)? Will there be sheepskin mittens on the shelves? No. For a couple of months yet there will be nothing I could possibly even consider wearing till May.

And now, when I am out there, wandering the shops in the high street, a potential customer in these hard times of economic crisis, they have nothing to offer me except the dregs of last year's failures, extra small, extra extra large, too stretched, the wrong colour, the wrong cut, a broken zip... Oh well, maybe I'd better go back to the daily grind and wait till spring!

Bringing out the best...

“Death brings out the worst in people” she said as she wandered past. “Makes them kind of ‘stiff’?” I quipped, muttering it softly to myself so as not to cause offence. I wondered what kind of story went along with a comment like that and chided myself for my flippancy and lack of understanding. No doubt she meant that death brought out the worst in other people (herself?), not the poor, unfortunate deceased who no longer had anything to worry about.

“What brings out the best, then?” I wondered, turning the chance comment around and pausing awhile to ponder on it. Sometimes it seems like adversity brings out the best in us – or so people say. In times of war, financial hardship, natural disasters and sickness people rally round and help each other. When someone is diagnosed with a terminal illness or a loved one is suffering, we are brought up short and start sifting through our lives, trying to discard the trivialities and focus on the things, and especially the people, that are special to us.

But what about those minor irritations? Do they bring out the best? Not in me, certainly… Under pressure, I get grumpy. When arrangements fail to work out, when the weather spoils my plans, when I can’t sleep or my favourite sweater shrinks in the wash after I only wore it once, I get grumpy!

In common with a lot of people, I’m at my best when the sun shines, when my neighbours smile at me, when I have a great holiday to look forward to or when someone tells me “I love you!” A lot of things bring out the worst in people – death is the ultimate hurdle. Too late to worry at that point! So let’s try and bring out the best – in ourselves and in each other.

We all need what our American friends call ‘warm fuzzies’ – a wonderfully evocative phrase. Teddy bears are great when you are five years old but, sadly, most of us need more sophisticated warm fuzzies when we get older, although I’m still a great believer in teddy bears! So, why not smile at a stranger today and make their day? Dream about your next sun-drenched holiday, even if it is a long time coming, or, tell someone “I love you!” However, if all else fails, treat yourself to a new bear. They’re very understanding, listen very patiently and never disagree.

Lost in thought

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…

For the sake of auld lang syne...

It’s the end of the year again and we all have our funny ways! Nations are no different. Back where I come from, we all send each other sentimental greetings at Christmas or New Year, with bits of updated news about our children, our grandchildren and this year’s holidays. At the end of the year many of us party, linking hands at midnight and singing (drunkenly) a rather peculiar centuries-old song, remembering and honouring old friendships in old-fashioned words nobody really understands. It’s a tradition.

This year, writing the annual Christmas cards got me thinking. Each year the list is subtly changed. A few names are added; a few are crossed off. Life has become very mobile and new acquaintances are many. The list becomes too long and unwieldy and difficult choices must be made. My parents’ Christmas card list seemed to stay the same until the day they died and I still send cards to one or two of those old family friends who seemed to have become almost as close as blood relations. We have a few of those on our list too, friends who were at our wedding or whose children were early friends with ours. But the rest are fluctuating. Some years I feel ruthless. Names are crossed off, because they never get in touch. More names go because we fell out: their children behaved badly in our home; we disagreed about politics or religion; they never even rang us after we moved away but dropped us because we no longer lived round the corner…

This year I am looking at things from a different perspective. I must be getting old! Life is too short, it seems, for those kinds of disagreements to matter. I am busy putting names back on the list. Surely, in view of our common humanity, there are more things to agree on than to dispute? Friends are precious. I am slowly learning that and would like, if it were possible, to retrieve the addresses of former friends, probably long moved on, who we have lost, through differing opinions or just neglect although, realistically, I can’t send cards to them all! Looking back, we’ve had some fun. Some of those friendships were very special, some of those families had children who watched the same firework displays with ours on Bonfire Night and shared the same tricycles in the back garden at weekends; with some of them we spent long nights, with a glass of wine in hand, discussing the nature of God and the universe and putting the world to rights. Of course we fell out – it happens all the time! But they were friends.

Nowadays we live in a temporary community. We are expats. Life is ‘temporary’; we live amongst people who are on temporary contracts, living in temporary houses and, worst of all, sharing temporary friendships. At least, that’s how life could be if we let it. I’m not keen to leave it that way! I have another growing list of friends – we email, we send photos, we forward jokes and thought-provoking anecdotes and one day, hopefully, will meet up again, in England, Turkey or Australia or who knows where? ‘Lest old acquaintance be forgot’, I must look forward to another new year of emails and phone calls, photos and maybe visits one day and I must remember to value those close-at-hand family and friends whilst I have them, ‘for the sake of auld lang syne’.

A very happy blogging New Year to you all!

As pleased as punch

It's one of those phrases! We trot them out, heedlessly, and then sometimes, in reflective mood, we think "Why did I say that? What did it mean?" Where do these sayings originate? Who was the first person to be as pleased as punch - and why?

Back in the days of our youth (not long ago really)... we were famous for the odd lovers' tiff. These we executed with passion and panache, with cries of "what about the neighbours?", followed by "s.. the neighbours!" It was colourful, it was dramatic and then it was over. Making up was fun. Back in those heady days we were once christened 'Punch and Judy' by a group of delightful young people we helped to escort on a youth camp. Hilarious, eh? Well, not at the time...

So am I as pleased as Mr. Punch? Am I happy, like Punch, to entertain the children on seaside proms along with the wife, the dog and Mr. Plod? Was Punch pleased? Did it make him deliriously happy to wield a policeman's truncheon and terrorise the wife, the dog and the policeman and then threaten the audience? And, anyway, whoever allowed a tale of domestic violence, grievious bodily harm and cruelty to animals, let alone acts of aggression against the police force, to become holiday viewing for kids? They seem to have found it good, harmless fun for more than a century - the precursor to 'Home Alone', I guess.

Maybe it has something to do with the current festivities and that innocent little cocktail brewed up with an indeterminate number of bottles of stuff, of varying potency, together with deceptively healthy-looking pieces of fruit floating in it? Pleased as punch? Drunk with punch? Punchdrunk? Drunk as a skunk, perhaps? Now, there's another one...