The importance of holiday dreaming

I am sitting here enjoying the early morning peace that comes with holidays and sleeping teenagers.  
No groaning about having to get up so early.
No last minute searches for PE kits that should have been washed.
No panicked realisation that there is forgotten-about homework to hand in today.
No battles over uneaten breakfasts.
No packed lunches to prepare.
No reproachful rushing out of the door with cries of " I'm late now. Why didn't you wake me up earlier!"

Holidays are great.

Not just school holidays but all holidays. 
And not only if you are lucky enough to spend them on sunny beaches or in exotic countries.  
What's special about holidays is that your days belong to you. 
 They are not defined by lessons or meetings or deadlines. Instead they are filled with the things that are really important in life: relaxing, laughter, friends and of course, Facebook, Twitter and re-watching sit coms. 
Like islands surrounded by weeks, holidays are what we are always sailing towards.  
The thought of being away from work or school is what keeps us going. 
Even if it is simply  staying with friends for a few days, or relaxing at home.
 The break from routine helps us re-charge our batteries, reclaim our lives and put things in perspective.
When we lived in America, I was horrified by how little " vacation," people were allowed to take.  
Working life there does not begin with a certain number of vacation days already allotted.  Instead you have to earn them: a day a month.
 If you work for 6 months you get 6 days holiday and if you use them all up on a six day vacation, you start again from zero.
 The trouble with that is (or the benefit if you are an employer ) the longer you work, the more holiday you accrue, so better to just keep working and save the vacation time. 
And in the end work becomes what is safe and familiar.
 People start to believe that they are indispensable, that if they take a holiday everything will fall apart.  
The thought of taking a vacation becomes more stressful than the thought of staying at work.  
And so holidays are put on hold, days off spent in the office.
 Enjoying life with your family becomes something you wait to do when you are retired - if your family is still together and remembers who you are by then. 
When we moved from sunny, work-driven California to the lush green pastures of family-centred Switzerland, the change in work ethos was extraordinary. 

Swiss pastures

People begin their working life with 5 weeks holiday and if you are still at work at 5.35 pm, your boss asks you if you have a home to go to or if you are experiencing family problems. 
On bank holidays and Sundays offices and shops are closed completely. The only places open in town are cafes -  packed with families and friends and laughter. 
And everyone, everyone takes all their annual leave. 
The strange thing is that the work still gets done. the deadlines are still met and Switzerland, for all its natural beauty, is a famous international business centre.

Switzerland-interanational business centre.

The hardest thing to do in life is prioritise.  
There is always a reason to believe that what you are doing now is more important than what you should be doing next. 
But if you never take a break, never take time out to re-assess, relax and re-charge, how will you ever know what is truly important - even if it is just the peace of early morning and the knowledge that the rest of the day belongs to you.


    Leisure by W H Davies

What is this life if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

No time to stand beneath the boughs

And stare as long as sheep or cows.

No time to see, when woods we pass,

Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass.

No time to see, in broad daylight,

Streams full of stars, like skies at night.

No time to turn at Beauty's glance,

And watch her feet, how they can dance.

No time to wait till her mouth can

Enrich that smile her eyes began.

A poor life this if, full of care,

We have no time to stand and stare.

Brighton-ing up the weekend with friends

Ninesh and I have just come back from a weekend away in Brighton.
We were with friends from our student days.  
Friends who we have known for so long that our lives have become interwoven, held together by the threads of warm memories, shared dreams, dashed hopes, drunken evenings and the simple pleasure of each other's company.

When we first met, the 6 of us,  we were all young, free and single.  More than two decades later we are middle-aged, tied down and coupled. 
We have swapped gossip about last night's party and which pub to meet up in later, for talk about our children's GCSE options and our plans for retirement.
But there is something about Brighton that helps you to forget all that. 
Something about wandering along the sea front, browsing The Laines, watching through coffee shop windows or from cocktail bars as musicians, transvestites, old hippy dreamers and young trendy would-be-ers pass by.
 Something about it's bohemian vibrancy and colourful energy that pulls you in. 
You never know what street performers or artists you will bump into round the corner.

 Or what every day object or body part will suddenly become a work of art. 
Wandering through a tiny alleyway, we came across Jamie McCartney's body casting shop. There is not a single part of the body he won't cast for you. 
In the window he has a panel from his installation: " The Great Wall of Vagina." 

Some of The Great Wall of Vagina

It made us women blanche and our men pull out their cameras, while we chatted to the friendly artist, who almost convinced us that a group casting would make the perfect family Christmas present. ( You can even have it as a mug! )
" You'd be amazed how many people get it done," he said. 
" Are they waxed?" we asked, voices quavering.
" Mostly," he said, sipping thoughtfully from his mug of tea " but not always." 
That was enough for us. 
 We left the men chatting and went shopping. 
Consumer therapy and a bar of Montezuma chocolate is what you need when you feel faint! 
And that's Brighton. 
Even when it tries to shock you, it's done with a friendly chat over a cup of tea.  Everything is acceptable and nothing is impossible. 
And after a while you begin to believe it too. 
As the weekend wore on, we stopped talking about our children's exams or the woes of work or the daily grind that defines our lives.  
Instead we talked about the dream houses we would one day live in, the canal barges we would buy, the camper vans we would go travelling in.
 Because slowly, very slowly we realised that while we no longer believe we can change the world, there is, at least, still time for some of our dreams to come true.
As we sat over our very last cup of coffee together, we planned where we would meet up next year. London, Birmingham, Liverpool- but I have a feeling, it just might be Brighton.

Brighton Beach and the disappearing old pier

Street Partying

There's something about a street party that breathes life back into a community. 
Last year the country was full of them. Streets closed and lined with tables piled high with cakes and sandwiches getting soggier and soggier in the torrential rain that marked the Queen's diamond jubilee.

 Yet despite the rain, everyone who went to a street party will  tell you that it was the best day of the year.
One of my friend's at work told me that when they had their street party, one of their oldest residents came. He spent most of his days by himself and didn't really know anyone in their close.  But he motored around the party on his mobility scooter, balancing a beer on the handlebars.  And at the end of the evening, he wheeled his way home grinning, telling his newly familiar neighbours it had been the best day of his life.
He died a week later, not lonely and forgotten but part of a community.
I'm not sure why it is that, as a nation, we seem to spend very little time getting to know our neighbours
Perhaps it's because of the weather. 
When it's cold and wet, it's easier to stay inside huddled around the television than to brave the elements and pop next door.
Perhaps it's because none of us stay in one place anymore.  
In the past, generations of families would live on the same street, parents, grandparents and great-grandparents all living next door to each other with the grand children and great-grandchildren constantly drifting through the always open doors. Your street and local community were based around your family.
Perhaps it's because we are all so busy balancing work and family, living such hectic lives that there is not enough time and it is just too tiring to make the effort.
Perhaps it's because computer games and on-demand television can keep children entertained for hour upon hour,  without needing to find peers on their street to play with.
Making time to meet neighbours who you know nothing about, who might come from a different country, a different culture, a different generation, is not easy. 
But it's definitely worth the effort.
And street parties make it much easier because, you suddenly have something in common: a  shared memory.  
And shared memories are often the place where friendship begins.   

Like many other roads, we had a street party last year, full of Union Jacks and snail races and drunken half-renditions of God Save the Queen. It was only a few hours,  but in that afternoon we stopped being just a street and became a community.
Our road is not a long road.  It has about a hundred houses. We have lived here for most of the past 13 years and yet, last year, I met people I didn't recognise. 
This year we knew almost everyone.
The Diamond Jubilee was a good excuse to close the road and dance on the street. 
This year we didn't have an excuse or a reason.  When people asked why we were having another street party, the only thing we could think to say was: "Why not?"  
And that seemed to be reason enough for everyone.

So on last week's sunny, blue-skied May Day Bank Holiday, we put up official "Road Closed," signs,  emptied the street of cars ( the hardest part, but in the end there was only one left ) set up covered tables down the middle of the road, put an urn in the front garden, a cool box full of beer on the pavement, speakers in our neighbour's garden .....and waited.

                                And gradually the tables filled with delicious food.

                                And the road filled with people. Old....

                                 
                                  and young....

                                   
                                    and teenagers ...

                            

                                 and everybody in-between.

  

And instead of cars accelerating up the road, all you could hear was music and chatter and laughter. The kids - big and little -covered the street with chalked pictures, glue and play dough.  And while the" street seniors," helped us judge our newly traditional May Day hat competition, teenagers lounged on chairs and secretly sipped Pimms, while people from opposite ends of the street met and smiled and became friends.

And when, at 8 pm we had to take away the " Road Closed," signs, no one wanted the party to end. So we moved it onto the pavement.
And children didn't go to bed and neighbours didn't stop talking and cars driving up the road again, didn't stop us feeling that old and young and in-between, we were all part of this place.  And small as our road is, we all belonged to it. 
And that sense of belonging leaves you feeling warm inside, long after the sun has gone down.

It's a simple thing, a street party.  
But it made me wonder.
Wonder what would happen if we all spent more time getting to know each other.
Wonder what would happen if we all felt part of a community, even a community as small as a street.
Wonder what would happen if, instead of building walls between ourselves and our  neighbours,we built bridges.
We live such scattered, isolated, separate lives that it is easy to forget how important it is to sit and talk and laugh. And maybe even dance.....


  

The terrible UKIP triumph - we are all to blame

Today is not a good day to be British.
The shocking United Kingdom Indpendent Party result from Thursday's local elections should have left us all reeling.
The complete apathy of the more than 60% of our voting population who stayed at home  should make us all feel ashamed.
The complete lack of belief in the trustworthiness of MPs or in their ability to represent and truly understand the views of the people, should make Whitehall wince.
And the fact that a quarter of the people who did vote, voted for a nationalistic, racist, policy-less party, should be a wake-up call to everyone.
But the truth is, no one cares.  
If they did, they would have voted. 
Instead poling stations were empty, ballot boxes left unfilled and a minority party was able to win the day.

Our local poling station most of the day, 2nd May 2013

For the first time, I am pleased that we don't have proportional representation because if we did, our local government would now be led by Nigel Farage and his crazy UKIP gang. 

Nigel Farage

And that would be a day to dread.

And it is not ok to say you didn't vote because none of the politicians have anything to say to you.  

And it is wrong to say you stayed at home because your vote wouldn't have made a difference anyway. 

Every vote makes a difference, even if it is just to protest.

Your vote is your political voice. If you can't be bothered to speak, don't expect anyone to listen.
In the constituencies where the most people voted ( still only 39%)  UKIP did worst.
If more people had voted in the places where UKIP did best, the result could have been different. 
Your vote could have been that difference.
Edmund Burke once said:

" The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing."


And on May 2nd 2013, too many good men and women in Britain, did nothing.

1 million people vote for the X Factor.
Why do people believe their vote can make a difference on a TV show and not in an election?.
The simple truth is that we care more about who will be the next big celebrity star, than  what is happening to our country.
Today is a sad day to be British.
And it is easy to blame the politicians, the system, the weather, the day. 
Much easier than it is to blame ourselves. . 
There is much that is unfair and wrong in Britain today. But we live in a democracy. 
And as voters we have the power, it is up to us to use it.
I know It is easy to be melodramatic about Thursday's result. And it is too easy to define UKIP as a purely racist party.  But it is a platform for racist views and it is frightening.
When our mixed race 15 year old daughter heard the local election results on Friday, she turned to me, her deep brown eyes full of panic.
" I'm frightened mum,: she said, " Are they going to throw us out of our country?" 
And I know it doesn't and I hugged her tight and told her so.
But somewhere, deep inside, I'm frightened too.
Because a seed has been planted and it doesn't need much for roots to take hold.

First they came for the Jews and I did not speak out because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for the Communists and I did not speak out because I was not a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak out because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for me and there was no one left to speak out for me.

 Martin Niemöller

When they do come, let's hope we are not all too busy sitting at home, watching "The X Factor," to notice.