Shopping with a 4 year old

Of all the joys of getting older, being a Baba to my girl gang is one of the best. I love spending time with them and getting to know their personalities. I had the particular joy yesterday of taking my eldest Little Explosion shopping for wellie boots and slippers for playing outside and inside when she visits.

The shopping was easy and the salesman engaged with LE beautifully. It helped, of course that there were a range of choices in the wellie boot display. Not that it mattered as LE was completely focused on one particular pair – dinosaur boots! Luckily they fitted as she was determined there were no second choices. The same criteria were applied to slippers! And so it came to pass that dino boots and slippers were purchased! My only disappointment was they didn’t come in matching adult sizes!

Any shopping trip worth its name has to have a coffee-and-cake break so we stopped at a cafe where I had a tea and croissant and she had a juice and easter biscuit. This particular cafe, a well known chain, had wallpaper showing various stages of coffee production. LE let her imagination go wild and imbued each person portrayed with a characteristic. There were mummies and daddies, teachers, workers and bad guys! One ‘bad guy’, a woman in a business suit, had, she informed me ‘stolen all the money’. Luckily there were also ‘policemen’ in the tableau who were going to put her on the naughty step until she saw the error of her ways! I love how imaginative she can be. Her stories are now becoming more detailed and inventive!

After our break we were walking back through the shopping centre towards the car park. Suddenly LE announced that the floor was lava! Baba needed a lot of encouragement to avoid the dangerous lava tiles on the floor. There was jumping involved! First only the green tiles were lava, then the white tiles! Soon it was only safe to walk on the black ones! It was an adventurous and joy-filled shopping expedition and I can’t wait to do it again.

Cemetery Strolling

When I was a child I was frightened of cemeteries. I guess ghost stories had something to do with it. The thought of ethereal spirits or animated skeletal remains are scary to an active young mind. No one wants a bony finger tapping you on the shoulder.

We often confuse cemeteries as places for the dead, locations of grief when we lose a loved one, but they are also places for the living, where we can sit beside the last resting place of those we love and remember. I have spent some very sad moments in cemeteries but equally some very consoling and peaceful moments.

On another level, I find cemeteries evocative of the lives of others. A kind of people watching of the dead. Whether long or short, a life engraved on a memorial stone offers a glimpse of that person, even if only the dates between their birth and death show the time in which they lived. Often it shows who they loved and lived with. Sometimes a little window on what they did. All together these snippets of a life can create a small memory of that person even when we did not know them. When we lose someone dear to us, we are often told to say their name as a way to keep their memory alive. To remember them, to talk about them. Reading memorial stones is a way to do this for our forebears and even strangers.

I have a particular love of cemeteries and as I am currently in Paris I decided to pay a visit to Père Lachaise cemetery in the 20th arrondissement. It is an enormous cemetery with higgledy piggledy ‘streets’ of tombs to browse ordinary Parisians, many celebrities and renowned persons. I was particularly on the look out for three: Jim Morrison of The Doors, Edith Piaf, and Oscar Wilde.

The cemetery is a bit of a labyrinth but with some careful map reading I found all three. Morrison and Piaf are both off the main thoroughfares but are reasonably easy to spot, both by the numbers of visitors and the floral and other gifts left by admirers.

Oscar Wilde’s last resting place is very grand and in an art nouveau style. It has been shrouded in a Perspex shield with a notice which politely asks that visitors not deface the screen. And yet it is covered in lipstick kisses. I was left wondering what Mr Wilde would have thought about such female attention.

Oscar Wilde’s imposing tomb. The many dots are lipstick kisses.
A closer look at the adoring kisses.

Clean Plates.

Bonjour from Paris! I have been very excited about this trip (more about the reason later). Apart from a complaint I have to write to Air France our little holiday has started well.

Last night we had booked to eat at Bouillon Racine and it did not disappoint either in decoration, atmosphere, service or food.

There are several Bouillon restaurants to chose from and they all were founded to serve traditional and affordable food to working people in the city. Bouillon Racine was founded on 1906 and is decorated in the art nouveau style, a style I particularly love.

The restaurant is definitely popular so I am glad I made a reservation. It caters to young families, groups of friends, couples, young and old, but watching the customers queuing for tables there seemed to be a lot of younger people. All were treated with the same level of professional service.

Our waiter kindly complimented my (terrible) French but was happy to talk to us in English. I ordered the escargot to start followed by scallops while the Wing Commander had the foie gras and the Angus beef. The food was very good and I ate everything, using the bread to mop up any traces left on my plate!

I ordered the crème brûlée but the WC decided not to have dessert. Nevertheless, the waiter provided 2 spoons without being asked! After tasting mine the WC decided to order his own! Again the waiter provided 2 spoons. The second dessert prompted a long debate about what makes the best crème brûlée! My one was very creamy while the Wing Commander’s one was very crispy on top. He decided the crispy caramelisation led to a better product and I have to say he had a point. However, that creamy consistency won it for me.

Many, many years ago, on holiday in Brussels, the Wing Commander had a crème brûlée which he declared was the best one ever. For a long time after he didn’t order one as he felt it could never live up to that special one. I think he may have found, if not a better brûlée then at least one to match!

I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend Bouillon Racine and hope to be able to try out some of the others in Paris on a future visit.

Getting Up and Getting Old.

My mother always said ‘Old age never comes alone’. She lamented that after the age of 60 and a life of hard work she was not as ‘swack’* as she used to be. She continued to work hard in her garden and helping others until the end of her days at 88 years old but she found the aches, pains and other age-related limitations a challenge to her patience.

As a young thing I was proud that I could sleep till the last minute and still be on time after washing, dressing, breakfasting and getting out the door. It was a speed game but I could do it. Now I have to add extra time into the routine to allow for everything to get done. Interupted sleep due to the nightly toilet run is one humbug that I could do without but the morning routine is also getting longer and more complicated.

For a while it took just a few seconds to take the necessary medication; a couple of tablets, a puff of the inhaler and a couple of skooshes of a nasal spray. More recently I added hearing aids which need to be popped in each ear and checked that they have connected to the ubiquitous app. Today I have included attaching a granny chain for my glasses which spend as much time off my nose as on it. At this rate I will have to stay up after the mid-nightly wee to fit it all in before breakfast! A small price to pay to be able to continue enjoying my pensionista years.

*Swack is an Orkney dialect word meaning agile or flexible

Music: the food of life.

I love music. I love many genres of music to the point of eclecticity and possibly eccentricity. (I am aware I made up the first of these words before someone calls the grammar and language police). My old CD collection has classical, country, folk, rock, pop, jazz, soul, blues. Infact if there is a musical style I am likely to have it in my collection. Well, the gansta rap is so thin on the ground as to be invisible but most other genres are covered.

In pre-pandemic days, when I was at home on my own and the Wing Commander had an alloted office space to occupy elsewhere beyond the domestic paradise, I would play my music on the ancient Hi-Fidelity system or more recently through my Sonos speaker. However, I became aware that when the breadwinner came home he would turn the volume down or even, if grumpy, turn it off. Therefore, when his takeover and occupation of my office became permanent in the new ‘Work From Home’ era. I was solicitous enough not to subject him to nightclub levels of decibels while he wrestled with the Project Planning and Cost of Important Things.

In this period of musical dearth I was relegated to using miPod with, at first, shonky old headphones, and more recently, with state of the art (or so I was led to believe) ear buds. These earbuds, state of the art or otherwise, are, however, entirely unsuitable for a newly prescribed hearing-aid-wearing pensionista and so I have been hankering after some decent headphones. The Wing Commander came through at Christmas with a spiffy set of Bose headphones in a fetching gray colour. My joy was overed.

On the downside, if there is a downside to noise-cancelling headphones, I am totally unaware of conversations he is trying to have with me (even more so than the pre-hearing aid era) and, as I discovered today, he is, on the other hand, very aware when I decide to sing along to, in today’s case, Adele. I received a visit. I was telt, as we say in Scotland. More care needed in future. But I love my new headphones. Music, play on!

Moving on

My plan to delete certain social media sites is still ongoing but two out of the three have now gone and I must say, while I thought it would be difficult, it has been surprisingly easy to achieve. Also surprising is that I am reading more, and in more depth. I was finding that I, increasingly, read only headlines and first couple of paragraphs of articles/news reports etc with the pressure to continually scroll to find more content. That pressure has been lifted and I can take my time over important issues that interest and inspire me.

I am still finding my way on Bluesky, which has grown quickly in the last few weeks. I do seem to be attracting follows from people, well men, who only post photos of themselves and, often, claim to be in the military or the occasional over-exposed women. However, there are growing numbers of interesting and educational news sources, businesses, people and organisations to follow and engage with.

I am also experiencing the freedom to enjoy a wider range of interests and hobbies now that I have escaped the doom-scrolling that is such a feature of social media. I found I was constantly wasting time flipping from one site to the next to try to find … well Im not sure what now. Life so far without these sites seems much more reasoned and calm. I wouldn’t have thought of myself as an addict but I guess to some degree I was.

I am reigniting my interest in sites such as Longreads (https://longreads.com/), Guernica (https://www.guernicamag.com/) and Open Culture (https://www.openculture.com/) to name a few. Any content creator that I particularly want to follow who has a Youtube channel I am also subscribing to or to specific websites. It is a great way to maintain contact. I do regret the potential loss of contact with the friends I have made over the years on social media sites but I hope we can stay in touch through other means.

All in all I recommend taking the leap out of the social media trap. You never know what is on the other side!

Birthday Cake!

It is always a pleasure to be able to spend time with my Little Explosions and especially so when it is their birthday. Storm Eowyn died down in time for our drive north and we had a problem free journey, arriving in time for lunch. As the sun came out, though still chilly, we wrapped up warm and went for a walk along the beach. Little Explosion decided to emulate Rousay dog who likes digging in the sand. I guess those mittens are going for the wash!

LE also remembered that the last time I took her for a walk on the beach we made some art by arranging stones into a pattern. On this occasion we left some very modern instalations for other beach walkers to admire and interpret. She was less impressed with my ‘treasure’ find, a red pebble with white dots on it, and I had to chase her to get it back before it was to be thrown into the sea! Apparently, big stones = make art, pebbles = throw in sea.

In the evening we went to a local hostelry for dinner which consisted of some delicious small plates with local produce – the black pudding and scallop wellingtons were excedingly yum – although the plat du jour for 3-year olds was chips followed by large helpings of chocolate cake. Always have a small friend to share chips and chocolate cake with, even when the menu has so many delicious choices! Happy Third Birthday from Baba.

Social Media, Farewell (ish)

It is a truth, universally acknowledged by the snarky, that social media is not an airport and, therefore, one doesn’t need to announce one’s departure. And yet I feel I need to acknowledge that departure, not least because it has been a difficult, if inevitable, decision to leave.

I was slow to the social media bandwagon, joining Facebook in 2006/07ish. I enjoyed finding friends, old and new, and I wasted a lot of time on those little games that were so prevalent in the early days! While those games were a great way to fritter away time and procrastinate they were also instrumental in making many new friends, some of whom I have managed to meet ‘in real life’ and others who have remained friends despite the disappearance of the games and because we share common interests.

For nearly 20 years I have both enjoyed and disliked Facebook. More recently it has become a junkyard of adverts and irrelevant posts. It is increasingly difficult to see posts from friends and is not a pleasure to use. However, it is a point of easy contact with people, especially friends, and I have made many good friends, online.

I tried Instagram about the same time I joined Facebook and then deleted my account only to reinvigorate it some years later and for a while it suited my social media needs – I liked that I could use a photograph to introduce or tell a story about aspects of my life – I didn’t aspire to be an ‘influencer’. I merely enjoyed sharing snippets of my daily existance. I managed to accumulate some ‘followers’ and I, in return, followed content I found interesting but I didn’t make friends with many as I had on Facebook. Not that that was the goal. Insta was different and complimentary to my interactions on Facebook.

If it took a while for me to get onto the previous sites it was even longer before I got myself onto Twitter. It was a different experience to the others and I really wasn’t wanting to spend a lot of time debating, or more likely, arguing with people who could not be moved by reason and whose tolerance of debate was minimal. I had even less interst in fending off rage commentary on my own posts. It was much too combative for my taste but I did find interesting, informative, thoughtful, fun content … until it wasn’t.

I left Twitter fairly soon after it was taken over and joined Threads, which I have to say, I have found more enjoyable. There is some great content and despite some issues (so many porn bots!) I found several worthwhile content creators to follow even though my own input was minimal.

All of the above are owned by a tech bro who has now capitulated to the felon in the white house (no capitals intentional), as have the billionaires in charge of other enterprises. It strikes me as a form of collaborationism that I am bound to resist. I have spent a lifetime boycotting apartheid in South Africa, and Israel. I try not to support businesses with poor working conditions or practices or to visit countries with poor human rights positions or repressive governments. I cannot, in good conscience now continue to use products from companies so quick to bend the knee to a felonious oligarch.

To support Meta, Amazon, Apple and others right now is not morally possible, at least for me personally. I do not evangelise my Boycott, Divest, Sanction principles but I am trying to learn how to keep my friends and followers from various social media sites while I negotiate my way out of the grip of certain tech and social media domination. It is a work in progress to disentangle my life from them but I am searching for ways to make it happen, while retaining contact with friends whose only connection is through the aforementioned sites.

I will, therefore be moving my social media output to this blog. I have read various opinions on whether to stay with social media or to leave and the most convincing to me was to leave and produce content on one’s own website. I have always said I have a life, not a lifestyle, and my content creation is probably of limited interest to others. I do this mainly for myself and those who may find it mildly amusing or curiously diverting. Please join me here if you feel like the occasional contact with me. Alternatively I am currently trying Bluesky under the name CapnDarcy if that is more to your taste.

I am not immediately closing my social media as I have yet to work out the best way to close that door but I will be working towards that goal in the next few weeks/months. Here’s to new beginings and continued friendships.

The Punch

Books are awesome. We all know this. Books transport us, enlighten us, encourage us and so much more. Every now and then books can give a real punch to the gut that can leave the reader reeling, such as reading something unexpectedly pertinent to this moment.

While I deeply and sincerely hope the Palestine-Israeli ceasefire holds and moves forward to a peaceful and equitable solution, today I read about the Hebron shoemaker who put a tiny bit of Palestinian soil into the shoes he made so that his customers – refugees, the deported and departed, and those denied return ‘can always stand on a tiny piece of their land.’ (James Crawford, The Edge of the Plain: How borders make and break our world. 2022, Edinburgh, Cannongate) pp. 160-61.

I can only hopelessly and helplessly try to imagine the only contact I have with my country is a piece of soil in my shoe, forever divorced from the land from which it came. There, but for circumstances beyond our control, go all of us.

A Year of Swedish Death Cleaning.

I’m not sure if, at the age of 63, I am early or late to the Art of Swedish Death Cleaning. The hyper-organised will have been doing it all their lives while the cluttered collectors among us will likely continue to look the other way. I have decided to embrace it and have begun the process slowly.

In a nutshell, for those uninitiated into the practice, Swedish Death Cleaning is the process of decluttering life of old and unnecessary items. It can be clothing, souvenirs, books, photographs, anything that you have collected over the years but now has no meaning to you or has served its function and is taking up space. Unlike other organisational methods, Death Cleaning is ultimately about saving our loved ones the task of clearing out our belongings after we die. Having had to clear out my parents’ home it is part sorrowful honour and part dreadful chore, part grief-wrenching and part joyous memory-bringing but mostly it is constantly yelling into the void, ‘What the hell do you want me to do with this?’ It is something I would like to spare my loved ones when I pop off in my viking burial ship. (That’s a whole other post).

When I mention my plan to others there is a certain horrified look that comes across their faces so I will say here that I have not been informed of a life-limiting condition and neither do I have an intention of shuffling off this mortal coil any time soon. If I do die during or shortly after my Year of Swedish Death Cleaning know that I have no premonition of my demise and I forbid anyone suggesting I did! Thankfully, we are mostly unaware of when Death will visit and in the meantime I will enjoy every minute I have while also, hopefully, making it easier for those I love the most.

So far, several boxes and bags of clothing and books have made their way to charity shops. Clothes that I have been saving for ‘when they will fit again’ (never) and books that moved from the TBR (to be read) pile to the DNF (did not finish) pile. Having been a life-long ‘I must finish every book I start’, I am a recent and happy convert to the ‘Nope, not reading more of this’ bibliophile. Another liberation of old(er) age, perhaps.

However, Death Cleaning is not only about getting rid of things. I have recently completed a catalogue of all our DVDs, Blurays and CDs. Older technology that I still want to keep around but in the event of my death will be easier to find, sort, and chuck/take/give to new home. Photographs have all been labelled, too. People we know and love will not necessarily be familiar to younger generations and once we are gone so too is the ability to know what our friends and ancestors looked like. If only one task is performed in the process of cleaning, let it be labelling photographs for the next generation. You never know which one of our descendents will become interested in the family tree.

I will also be able to leave notes about items that mean something to me and why. A silly souvenir from a holiday will mean nothing to anyone cleaning up after me but in this way they will at least know why it is there, what it meant, perhaps giving a tiny insight into my life of which they may have been unaware. It doesn’t mean they have to preserve it but they will understand why it has been left.

Swedish Death Cleaning may not be to everyone’s taste and that is absolutely fine. However, I do urge everyone to at least make a will. Grief at the passing of a loved one does not need a companion in despair of doing the ‘right thing’ or second guessing what you really want to happen.

Besides, How would I have wiled away an hour finding out about how the internet worked in 2000!