Delicious kindness

We have just come back, my daughter, Mia, and I, from a trip to Bristol.  Keen shopper and general merchandise consumer that my daughter is, we left early so that we could spend some time shopping in the centre of Bristol before going on to stay with family  just outside the city.  We stopped to buy lunch in a busy and fast pace sandwich/ warm snack cafe.  I ordered and paid and too late,  noticed a soup on the menu that sounded delicious. The person service us must have heard me talking about it because as he laid out our lunch on the tray, he added a cup of the soup. " You should try it," he smiled, " it's delicious. On the house!"
Maybe it was just a loss leader, maybe he had been asked to promote the soup, maybe the soup had almost run out and he wanted to finish it off but I like to believe that he was just being kind. And believing that warmed me to my heart and made the thought of 3 hours shopping much more bearable.  And it made me realise how rarely in our manic, often self-absorbed race through life, we have time to be randomly kind and how much difference it could make if we were.  The smallest action can make the hugest difference. Most of us can probably count on our fingers the number of times we have been truly randomly kind to someone, friend or stranger. wanting and expecting nothing in return other than the pleasure that the knowledge of having done it can give us. Yet all of us will remember the times when an unexpected kindness  has changed the way we walked through a day.

" You read too much into that whole soup thing," Mia says. And maybe she's right but it"s still making me smile two days later- and it was delicious!

Imaginings and football dreams

The tortoise and the cat and I are chilling by the fire, waiting for the rest of the family to come home from a trip to London to watch an Arsenal match.  By the skin of their teeth, Arsenal won, which is a relief to all of us.  The house is quiet, free from the noise and clutter that comes with family life and I can feel myself slipping into an imaginary world where the house stays tidy for whole days at a time and the television is covered in dust from lack of use.  Today at "miniGIANTS," our football club for under 5's, one of the children ( there for the first time ) came in and just stood, gazing around him at the footballs and the other children and the parents.  "It's alright," said his mum, " It's just that he's spent so long being part of his imaginary football team, that this real one is quite confusing!"  And I think I know what he means.  Sometimes reality can be so much more confusing and complicated than anything we ever imagined!

Ninesh and the kids have just arrived home, filling the house with noise and chaos.  Reality bites- but the truth is, it doesn't hurt and living in that imaginary world can get lonely!

Small world, wide roads

Yesterday at the Children's Centre, a kid's Spanish group linked up with a group in California to sing Spanish songs and dance together in hyperspace. In California, their day was just beginning, ours was almost ending. But it made no difference to the chaotic fun, breakfast time or dinner time, kids know how to hop, skip and twirl through days!   The world has become a small place where we can almost touch hands across oceans. Yet I watch Betty,  who lives opposite us as she opens her front door to collect her milk. Wrapped in a cornflower  blue dressing-gown, her white hair slightly more dishevelled each morning, I realise how rarely I reach out across the road to touch her life. The distance from one side of the world to the other can seem so small and the distance from one side of the road to the other, so vast.
Last Summer we had a Diamond Jubilee street party. We thought it would be hard to organise, the few of us who met over tea and beer to organise it.  But on the day, the street was hung with fluttering bunting ( made by our neighbour ) parked cars disappeared and by 1 pm tables, covered in colourful table -cloths ran the length of the street. And from every house people began emerging with plates piled high with cakes and sandwiches ( some with the crusts cut off! ) and drinks and crisps. And the party began.  And for an afternoon neighbours forgot their quarrels, children played in the middle of the road, young and old sat laughing together and for just a few hours, we understood what if felt like to be part of a community.  And outside her house, Betty sat, cup of tea in hand, smiling. It has made the distance from one side of the road to the other seem shorter and now we know most of the people who walk past our window and smile at our neighbours.  But the truth is, it's still easier to come home, close the door, switch on the computer and skype someone on the other side of the world than it is to walk normally across the road.

A while ago I met up with one of my friends who is a head teacher. At the end of the school day he was called by one of the class teachers to deal with a problem.  She had handed out a page of homework to the children and one of her pupils had eaten his!   My friend went to talk to the child.
" How are you going to do your homework if it is in your tummy?" he asked.  " Are you going to swallow a pencil too?"   " Miss said our homework was so easy today it was a piece of cake." replied the boy " and I was hungry."

Misty aspirations

The Autumn mist is wisping around our garden and swirling right up to our windowpanes this morning.  And I am thinking how nice it would be to stay at home, hidden away.  That way I could just sit through Thursday in my pyjamas, instead of getting dressed and walking through it normally. Mist is strange because it fills even the most familiar objects with magical potential.  In the vagueness of their outline, a leafless tree could be a frozen monster, an overflowing bin - a crashed rocket, the houses on our road could really have disappeared leaving only roofs and chimneys suspended in mid-air.  Life might be much more interesting if every day was misty.  At least everyone would have to walk more slowly and have time to think more deeply.  Listening to politicians on the radio is a bit like listening to verbal mist- except that instead of magical potential, there is only the potential to mislead. Policies and ideas take on different shapes depending on who's talking about them, truth and lies get muddled up and words are left suspended in mid-air, floating above the emptiness of their meaning.
The mist is clearing outside, shame our politicians haven't noticed!

Walking back from work with my 15 year old daughter, Mia,  yesterday, she pointed at a crowd of girls with their blue school uniform skirts rolled up as high as they could be, their hair blonde, long and unmovingly perfect.  "They're the ex-YTS," said Mia.
"YTS?" I asked, thinking maybe some youth club members or a work experience team.
"Year Ten Sluts," explained my daughter.  " Only they're in Year 11 now so they are the YES.  Except that the new YTS are more popular than they are so they hate each other. THose ex-YTS's keep writing letters to the new ones saying things like " just because you've slept with more boys than me, doesn't make you a better YTS!"
They've obviously worked hard, those YTSs and YESs to get to where they've got to today.  Makes you proud of our English education system!

The beauty of sadness

I often wonder if it is ok to  feel sad.  If we are lucky, we spend a lot of our lives smiling and laughing and loving and being loved. But sometimes sad things happen and I find myself pretending they don't.  When people ask me how I am, I usually just say " fine, how are you?" I wonder what would happen if I said, "I'm feeling a little bit sad today, how about you?"
Yesterday I stood by and watched as one of my oldest and best friends stood in front of the coffin and said goodbye to her mum . She and her family were so strong and dignified in their grief that it made me realise that sadness, with all its pain, can be beautiful. Once the sense  of shock and loss and emptiness and grief  that inevitably comes with death has passed, there comes a gentler sadness that we will carry with us always. It is sadness that creates a hole in our heart that is the shape of the person we have lost.  It can never be filled by anyone else and it will never leave us but its very presence helps us move on.  It is a hole we can sometimes disappear into for a few moments, a sadness we can touch when we need to, just to make sure we haven't forgotten. A place where the memory of those we have loved and lost, will always be kept alive and safe.  So I think today, it will be ok to feel sad and when someone asks me how I am, I will try and be brave enough to say " I am feeling a little bit sad today. Do you sometimes have days like that?"

RIP Sheila.

Films, words and red balloons

One of my friends just gave me Stephen King's " Hope Springs Eternal,"- the short story on which the film , The Shawshank Redemption ( my all time, one- of -the -seven- things -I -would -save favourite) is based. Now that I have read it, it has set me to wondering about films and books because I think it is one of the few times when I believe the film is better than the book. It is an ongoing argument in our house.  Every time my kids go to see a film based on a book, I try to get them to read the book first  explaining to them that films are nearly always a pale shadow of the original story.

" Films are always disappointing if you've read the book," I say.  

To which they reply, " Then why would we want to read the book? We don't want to be disappointed."

And as usual I am dumbfounded by their teenage logic!

Most of the best lines in the film are taken directly from the book but I think the twists that have been added in the film make it a better and more compelling story. In the end though, the message is the same- hope is a good thing! And I think that is why I love the film so. Because if I had a mantra I think that might be it, although there are times, when I am about to walk into a room full of people wearing smart clothes and high heeled shoes or , even more scarily, a room full of teenage parents, when I have to keep repeating the words " Remember they are more scared of you than you are of them, remember they are ...." Maybe mantras, like priorities, change depending on what you are doing and who you are talking to. At work, I often find myself saying to people, that if you think "blue sky,"  you have more chance of your hopes and dreams coming true than if you think grey, cloudy sky. And when I am talking to my daughter, upset once again because of a friendship crisis, I tell her the most important thing is " to be true to herself," while to my son, raging at some new injustice we have imposed upon him, I say the most important thing is to think of others. And to Ninesh, I mostly say that there are more important things in life than football.  And the truth is, they are all just words.. Which is probably why I will always prefer books to films, whether or not I win the argument at home.

The sky outside our bedroom window has just filled with red balloons, hundreds of them floating fby with tags attached.  So for a few minutes even the air is filled with words!  

Playing I Spy at work the other day, someone told me how his family  had been playing it with their 3 year old  daughter.

" I spy with my little eye, something beginning with "b," she said.  The family spent the next 20 minutes guessing and asking for clues.  " No," she said to every guess, " no, not that." Finally they gave up and admitted defeat. " What is it?" they asked, " Tell us.  " Oh, I don't know," she said, put her sunglasses on upside down and fell asleep.

Rain, grumpy teenagers and inconvenient tortoises

Outside the cars swish through the puddles The familiar sound of morning! It seems like a long time since since a day began with warm sunshine pouring through the window!  One of my German friends tells me that the English are obsessed with the weather.  I always tell her that is just stereotyping, but on reflection, I think it might be true. The first thing my husband ( Ninesh ) does every morning is check the weather forecast on his computer, even though all he will be doing for most of the day is sitting in an office.  At least he will know what "shade of grey," to expect from his window!
 Last year we spent Christmas in Sri Lanka with Ninesh's family. His mum and dad have lived in England for a long time now but something about  the warmth of the sunshine, the friendliness of the smiles, the brightness of the colours, seemed to bring his dad back to life. It is as though, in England,  his colours are hidden and it  took the sunshine and the sense of  truly belonging, for the bud, closed up inside him for so long, to unfurl.  So perhaps we are right to be obsessed with the weather.  Perhaps it is an intricate part of what defines us.  Perhaps if we English woke to sunshine every day we would feel lost and confused- not sure that I would mind though!

Just woken up my son, who told me to " go away," said good morning to my daughter who hasn't slept a wink I needn't think, and fallen over the tortoise who always seems to fall asleep in the middle of the living room floor. Rain, grumpy teenagers and inconvenient tortoises.  Think I will need steel- toed wellies and armour to walk through today.

Gadgets, memories and tranquil Tuesdays

I kept asking people yesterday what 7 objects they would save, if they had to have the biggest car boot sale in the world and sell all their other worldly possessions. 7 is hard,. 1 or 2 is easy.  Most women said they would save a piece of jewellery, a photo, an old love letter.  Most men said their mobile phone or a toolset. My husband said could his whole record collection (1.000 records) count as one thing. But after that it gets hard.  How do you choose between your all-time favourite pair of shoes ( I would save my DMs with the red roses embroidered on them ) and your kitchen table that belonged to your great-grandmother. Or between your new laptop and the hat your wife gave you.  Are memories worth more than possessions? Meaningful gifts worth more than useful gadgets?  Wandering through some woods in Thailand a few years ago, we came across a saying, nailed to a tree:
" Hundred years from now, all new people."
Maybe it should have said " Hundred years from now all new gadgets. ( So why did you bother saving your iphone."

 Out with some friends at the weekend. we started talking about times when our children were little and motherhood was new to us. And about how easy it was, in the cotton-wool headedness of sleep deprivation, to forget things.  One of my friends said that when her brother was tiny, her mum had wheeled him to the shops in the pram and taken the dog for a walk at the same time.  She had tied up the dog next to the pram outside a shop, bought everything she needed and gone home.  After a little while, she suddenly realised that she had left the dog outside the shop. It was only when she ran back and saw the pram next to the dog, that she remembered she had left her son there too.

Onwards into tranquil (!) Tuesday.

Circuit boards and unused fondue sets

Monday morning here again! How did it get here so quickly.  Feels like it was Friday evening just  a few minutes ago, with the weekend lying dreamily in front of me. It's hard to believe that there are still 2 months worth of days getting shorter to contend with. It already feels that daylight is just the thinly spread filling between two thick slices of darkness!

At the Children's Centre on Friday a group of 3 year olds walked proudly into our office.  They had been given the head teacher's old laptop to take apart and were carrying it carefully, screwdriver's in their other hands.
"Look!", they shouted triumphantly, " we fixed it!" And opening the lid of the laptop, we all watched as keys, circuit boards and bits of wire scattered all over the floor. Looking gleefully at the other computers in the office, they advanced, screwdrivers ready, saying " can we fix these now!"

Did a car boot sale yesterday.  The sky was blue, the sun was ( unusually ) shining and my two nephews were helping me, full of enthusiasm and special offers for anyone brave enough to touch anything on our table. A whole car park full of the unwanted clutter of so many lives. I was wondering what would happen if everyone was told they had to have a car boot sale and could only keep 7 objects from their lives. What would they be?  Cuddly toys, chipped cups, baby clothes, unused fondue sets, old mobile phones?  A new version of Desert Island Discs called Can't Live Without It!

The shoes of the day are waiting to be slipped on! Here goes Monday.

Chocolate booking forms

Strangely, it;s not raining! Very strange not to wake up to the patter against the window. Just trees bending in the wind. When our friend died 2 years ago, leaving behind 2 little children and a mountain of broken hearts, the weather stormed around us, thunder, lightening, rain slashing, trees crashing.  It lasted days. She never was one for going quietly, our friend.  Today when I look at the more gentle bending of branches, I imagine new souls, touching the leaves as they pass in a final farewell.

We have a new multi-agency room at work.  People keep coming and asking us what the booking system will be.  We have so many bits of paper to book so many different rooms in our building, that we have decided " no more."  Instead of a booking form, priority will be given in direct proportion to the amount of chocolate people bring with them.

Think maybe I will try walking backwards into Friday, the view from behind at the end of the week, might be better!

Parenthood, posterity and international banking

Just sitting by the fire, watching the lights being slowly turned on in the other houses in our road. Chichester is waking up and it is time to begin the walk through another day.

Been preparing for a parenting group this afternoon.  Every time I plan the sessions, I realise that most of the time I don't do any of the things it tells parents to do! But I've noticed in general that it is often teachers and people like me running courses like this, who have the worst behaved children!  The truth is, that as a parent, we never get it right and we never stop feeling guilty about that..  If you read the job description for " parent," before having children, I don't think many people would apply! . There is definitely no walking normally through parenthood, mostly just groping blindly and hoping  you sometimes get it right!

In the end book club last night was really interesting although no one liked the book much.  Spent a long time talking about how sad it is that no one writes letters anymore.  And wondering how posterity is going to remember us when future generations will have to trawl through reams of spam and boring emails to find the one interesting thing that happened.  We were thinking maybe we could collect all our most important emails and save them in a file marked " for future generations!"

My sister and I were discussing future generations and the mess bankers are helping us make of this one.  She said she had met lots of international bankers where they live and the strange thing was that none of them seemed very intelligent.  My brother-in-law said that actually, the strange thing was that my sister thought that being an international banker and being intelligent had anything to do with each other!

Almost all the lights in the road turned on now. Time to turn from blogs to packed lunches.

Dreams, tortoises and cat food

The first sip of coffee in a peaceful house! The right way to begin a day, even a wet and dark and windy one.
The thing about  calling a blog "walking normally," is that I think about walking normally all the time, (which usually makes me want to hop or skip or twirl! )Today, the kids are going to my parent's house after school.  My dad can hardly walk at all now.  Each tiny shuffle costs him so much energy and loss of dignity, that he prefers to just sit and ponder the injustice of it all.  He says he knows what he needs to do to  put one foot in front of the other but his legs just won't do it.  It makes me realise how easy it is to take walking or hopping or skipping  for granted. Sometimes, when I go round to their house, he is sitting in the kitchen with a faraway look in his eyes and tells me of the dream he has just had where he could walk. And turning to me he says " the hardest part is that when I wake up, for just a moment, I forget it isn't true."

Our tortoise, on the other hand, races across the living room floor as soon as he hears the cat munching on  its breakfast.  The cat watches warily and eats faster to avoid the daily head -to-head. Never knew tortoises ate meat but given the choice between cheap cat food or wholesome fruit and veg, cat food would win every time.  Probably also true of my teenage son.

Never did finish " Instead of a Book," - wish I could have read almost any book instead of that one. Time for finishing it is up today! Book club tonight and I wonder how many people will have read it. Quite glad I don't like it.  Book clubs always work best when at least one member hates the book.

Still searching for the tranquility Tuesday didn't bring - perhaps it belongs to Wednesday this week.

Iced biscuits and fiery redheads

Just been helping at a club for kids with additional needs.  Icing biscuits.  After covering ourselves in icing sugar and pouring most of the water over the table, we managed to make the icing.  One of the kids picked up a spoon dripping with icing and said: " I am just going to let this drip on my tongue so the biscuits don't get dirty."

Heard the best name ever today: Attaine Kildaine.  Conjures up a picture of a small, fiery red-haired woman wearing a kilt and wedges and carrying a spike.

Gold crowns and mobile phones

Finding myself becoming addicted to this blogging!  Instead of collecting gripes and grumbles all day at work, I have started collecting snippets of people's lives to share! Lucky no one knows I am writing this!

My 13 year old son is sending off his no -longer-on-trend mobile phone and will get £35.  One of my friends has just had to have a tooth pulled out because his gold crown fell out.  If it hadn't been for the fact that he has found out he can sell his crown for the gold, he might have felt old and depressed. Instead he is spending his time trying to choose which company to send it to!  And I am picturing a set of scales.  On one side a complicated electronic device and on the other a tiny, chewed on gold tooth crown.  And I am wondering which way the scales will tip.

Harvest deliveries and hoovering in your underwear

I don't think there is any way you can walk normally through  Mondays.  Rush chaotically or zig zag defiantly ...but walking normally...As a mum it usually begins with your children screaming at you because they can't remember where they threw their PE kit on Friday and a frantic search for something to put in packed lunches.  In a Children's Centre it begins with most of the families you work with having a  crisis because they have had a whole weekend without one.  And throughout the zig zagging of the day, you keep remembering all the things you forgot to do last week. It is always a relief when you reach the relative normality of tranquil Tuesday ( ever the optimist! )

One of my colleagues came in this morning mortified. Yesterday afternoon there was a knock on her front door.  "Thank you," she heard her husband and young daughters say as they closed the door and came into the kitchen, arms full of tins and vegetables, harvest festival goods from their local church.  Obviously it had been meant for the old couple who used to live there but the members of the congregation who delivered it were not deterred by the fact that a young father and his 2 daughters opened the door.

Great excitement when my boss's long awaited new hoover arrived at work this afternoon.  She told her husband that he'd probably find her hoovering in her underwear when he got home from work. He replied:
"I don't care what you're wearing.  Just do the hoovering!."

And maybe doing the hoovering in your underwear is about the most normal way this Monday can end!

Great grandads and trampolines

Dads Aloud full of dads and kids using boxes, glue and bits of string to make amazing models, dripping paint over the floor and hammering nails into little bits of wood. When the kids got bored, they went outside to play and left their dads to finish. And they did.
Just been at my niece's birthday party.  Lots of her friends find walking normally hard but their sense of achievement when they make it to the trampoline shines loud on their faces.  One of them told us that her great grandad is 96 or 97, she's not sure.  He lives next door to her grandad but they would like him to go into a home.  When  I asked her why, she said "because he drives them mad.  My great grandad drives everyone mad!' and then she joined her friends on the trampoline..

Dads Aloud and books full of holes

 There is nothing better or more delicious than the first sip of coffee in a quiet house.  Have lit the fire and am watching the tortoise basking in its heat, with the cat curled up dreaming next to him.  Thinking maybe I was born into the wrong species. Working later, Dads Aloud. Dads bring their children to play in the Nursery, leaving the mums at home.  First one of this academic year so I am never sure how many dads will be brave enough to come. I always watch them as they walk uncertainly under the enormous horse chestnut tree towards our Children's Centre. Holding hands, pushing prams.  Feeling unnatural.   Many of them out of role and even more of them out of comfort zone. I imagine how it must feel. Don't think Ninesh ( my husband ) would have been brave enough to do it! Don't think I would have been brave enough to come to anything like it either. It must be scary wondering who will be there, will everyone be watching everyone else.  Will their son/daughter have a tantrum.  Will they know what to do if that happens!  But as soon as they step into the organised chaos of our Nursery: paint and glue and bricks and train tracks and play dough and bikes and footballs, nervousness disappears and playing takes over.  And before you know it, they are elbow deep in glue or constructing an amazing boat or covered in paint. Kids and dads engrossed!  And I always wonder at what a leveller being a parent is.  Makes no difference if you are a politician or a plumber, a head teacher or work in Argos, if you have had no sleep because your kids have been up all night, or had to deal with a tantrum in the middle of a shop, the exhaustion you feel and the worries you have are the same! And the deliciousness of the sausage sandwich before going home is also probably the same for everyone!
Coffee finsihed.  Got to read 300 pages of Diana Athill's Instead of a Book by Wednesday.  Quite hard going.  Reading one sided letters is a bit like reading a book full of holes.

walkingnormally.

The first post is the hardest.  Should be the title of a song.
So here I go.  Walking normally through life with its constant detours and u-turns is hard enough! Writing a blog when you are as computer illiterate as me, might be even harder. But when there is laundry to put away and a house to clean, anything is worth a try. So here goes.
This is meant to be a collaborative blog with me ( Becky- in Chichester ), Mandy ( in Germany ) and Cath ( in Liverpool ) but setting up a collaborative was far beyond my skill level.  But as the three of us were told to "walk normally," on a film set we had walked into by mistake last weekend, the seed for the walking normally blog was planted. And anyway, what is walking normally?  There's the tripping stiletto walk, the wobbly wedge walk, the confident DM walk, the shuffling slipper walk, the squelchy welly walk ( all those who were at Greenman this year ) , the defiant teenage swagger walk, the swaying-hips sensual sexy walk- and the sidling-off-the-film set- you-are-not-meant-to-be-on walk.  Like everything with the word " normal," in it, walking normally means whatever you want it to mean and is however you are walking today.  Perhaps the real skill is to walk differently and look like you mean it. Maybe that's what we should have called the blog!
Going to practice walking differently now as I walk to my son't bedroom to put away his clothes!