Catching Up (again)

I seem to spend far too much of my time apologising for not having blogged for a while. I've started various entries, made notes on others, but never quite got round to writing a full-blown entry. So I'm going to stop apologising. It's repetitive and non-productive and I should be writing more interesting things.

Such that today, I'm going to post more of a collection of short-but-sweet views, largely inspired by the news.

Firstly, I was saddened to see that Stephen Sutton has died. Hardly a surprise, but sad nonetheless. It must be (a very) little consolation to his family and loved ones that he achieved so much more in nineteen brief years than many of us manage in our three score and ten. Perhaps he will have inspired a few more people to get off their backsides and do something useful. RIP, young man. You deserved a better shot at life.

Other young people still in the news who also deserve a better shot at life are the girls in Nigeria, held prisoner by the Boko Haram terrorists. I get the impression that the Nigerian authorities were at their wits' end trying to deal with the group, and that in some ways, the mass abduction will turn out to have been a good thing because it will have drawn the rest of the world's attention to what is going on there, getting other countries involved and possibly putting an end to such treatment. I realise that this is a bit like saying the sinking of the Titanic was a good thing because it improved maritime safety; I'm mostly trying to find a silver lining to this particularly dark cloud. Fingers crossed that the girls are freed soon.

At the other end of life (almost), I tried watching a couple of episodes of 'Vicious', starring Sir Ian McKellen and Sir Derek Jacobi. Both are fabulous actors and it should have been a joy to watch, but the script is so laboured and unfunny that even its stars struggle to salvage it. I see that voters on IMDB have given it ratings in the low 8s but I can't see myself bothering to watch the second series that is about to start. A real waste of talent.

That's it for this week. If no-one complains, I may make this the style of future blog entries!

Happy birthday! or, Reasons to be Cheerful, part one.

I don't normally shout about the fact it's my birthday, but this time I will. Not the birthday bit, specifically, as I've written before about how the number associated with it seems less and less believable as the years go by, but this time the happy bit.

Lots of people reassess their lives on key dates - New Year's Day springs to mind - and for me that date is my birthday. Here are some of the reasons why I'm happy this year:

I have a wonderful family and superb friends. (I've already had some lovely presents and over 50 birthday wishes via Facebook.)

Notwithstanding the as-yet-unknown result of a recent blood test, I'm actually pretty healthy. I'm fitter than I've been for nearly forty years and I weigh less now than I have done for over twenty years.

My first novel, Moses in Chains, may not have won any prizes but it's out there and the first draft of the second novel is nearly finished.

I've found a new direction for my poetry that is still quite challenging but also satisfying.

I'm going to be doing some more directing next year. I've missed that!

I'm feeling brave enough to consider some more solo singing this year. (The supportive friends definitely help with this.)

I may have added some more destinations to my bucket list but I'm lucky enough that we can still attempt to work our way through it.

I have a job I enjoy; my dad always said the secret to happiness was to find something you enjoyed doing so much you'd do it for nothing, and then to do it so well that someone paid you to do it. Tick!

I recognise that the little irritations each day are just that - little, and irritations. Nothing more. The problems that some other people face, now they're problems!

I read somewhere recently that happy people focus on the positive things in their lives, whereas depressed people dwell on the negative. During the depths of winter, I certainly found it harder to find things to be happy about, but today the sun is shining, the daffodils are heavy on their stems and I'm off to sunnier/warmer climes shortly. I'm being positive!

How often do you make a list of your reasons to be cheerful?

Giving for the right reason

There are so many charitable causes out there these days, how do you decide which one or ones to support? I suppose it depends on your beliefs initially. Some people would rather support the NSPCC rather than the RSPCA because 'people before animals', or vice versa, 'because they can't speak for themselves'. There's no denying that both charities and causes are worthy ones, but most of us have very finite resources and can't give to everyone who asks. So what's your reason for giving?

I am aware of at least one person who donates on a standing order because he wanted to talk to the pretty girl asking people in the street to sign up. Perhaps that was partly why she was picked for the job? Other donors might have more personal reasons; the vast majority of the runners doing the Race for Life for Cancer Research are doing it in part because they know someone affected by cancer.

Launton Village Players raise a lot of money each year with the pantomime; this year over £5000 will be donated to a variety of charities, some local, some national. Performers have a say in the recipients and can nominate their favourites. This year, in addition to our local schools, money will be sent to Diabetes UK, the Samaritans, Air Ambulance, ROSY and Bicester Food Bank, amongst others. (If you come to next year's pantomime, there will be a full list in the programme. And then you will be contributing to the next group. See how it works? ;-) ) All, I am sure you will agree, worthy causes, and all raised while at same time having fun. I suspect some people do the pantomime or attend it purely for the enjoyment factor...

Personally, I support a child in Guatemala through Plan UK via a monthly payment, in addition to donations to DEC appeals and the like. My reason for choosing Plan UK was partly to abate my empty nest syndrome once my own children had moved out, and Plan UK specifically had no religious affiliations. My donation supports not only a particular child but also her community, assisting with things like clean water and access to education. I'm very happy to support this worthy cause.

What I'm not happy to do, however, is be treated like some kind of cash-cow. We are all quite rightly scathing of the scammers who, having discovered a kindly soul prepared to send their cheque to unlock the winnings of the Nigerian lottery or similar, then sell the name and address on and inundate this poor (or soon-to-be poor) credulous person with other requests for money. A news story this morning mentioned an unfortunate gentleman who had lost £100,000 via this route. But are charities who inundate their supporters with requests for additional money so very different from these scammers? I gather from someone who has worked for a charity that the cost of these begging mailshots and phone calls yields enough money to be worth it. I wonder if they have considered the negative image that is generated, however. Is that worth it? Money given through guilt may buy the same benefits as money freely given but it's unlikely to be repeated often, I suspect. And at some point, the pool of potential donors will be exhausted.

F#####G CENSORED!

The right to freedom of speech of one of those inalienable ones, until someone says something we disagree with, for whatever reason. Americans have it as their First Amendment, for all we seem to hear more about the Second one. The ability to speak one's mind without fear of punishment is something that many of us in the UK and the US take for granted, I suspect. Every now and then there will be a news story from China or similar that makes us draw a sharp breath in shock, though usually this particular right is one we don't even think about. But do we really have that right?

Some censorship may make sense. Child pornography, for example, should be censored out of existence, along with its disseminators. The protection of military secrets rather depends on your view of the need for a military. Other censorship, such as that described as 'political correctness', seems overly nanny-like. And don't get me started on groups such as the American 'Focus on the Family'.
                                                   

The real trouble with censorship is that half the time, you probably don't know whether what you're seeing/reading/hearing has been censored. I don't mean just the self-censorship, the 'I probably shouldn't say that about my boss because I still need my job' type comments. It's the stuff the government thinks we can't bear to know or won't understand or will misinterpret (thanks for that vote of confidence in our intelligence, by the way). It's the super-injunctions, when various celebrities persuade the courts not only to keep their identities and court-cases secret, but also to keep the secret a secret. It's the decision by someone *higher up* that certain reading matter is subversive and therefore should not be circulated ('higher up' being a relative term here, not a mystical one).

Before the printing press, subversive material was limited in quantity but it didn't stop its existence. Subversion leads to discontent which leads to either rebellion and/or censorship. Socrates was made to drink hemlock because he had promoted philosophies that the ruling class of the day disliked, and that was some considerable time ago. Once Europe got its hands on that movable type, there was no stopping the pesky subversives - so the Catholic Church came up with an Index of Forbidden Books. Pope Alexander VI (the Borgia Pope) had tried to prevent unlicensed books being published back in 1501 but it wasn't until 1559 that the Index was first created, under the auspices of Pope Paul IV, the driving force behind the Roman equivalent of the Spanish Inquisition. (A stubborn man, he only accepted the papacy in 1555 because the Holy Roman Emperor Charles didn't want him to - or so we are told.)  Although the Index was refined later by the Council of Trent, authors could still be put on it simply because their views were deemed 'heretical', even if the subject matter of the book was not. Kepler, Kant and Newton were all forbidden in the Papal States and many Catholic countries courtesy of the Index.
                                                        

Official censorship via the Index was finally ended in 1966 by Pope Paul VI although the man in charge of the Holy Office (formerly 'The Sacred Congregation of the Index') at the time, one Cardinal Ratzinger, said, "The Index retains its moral force despite its dissolution." Yeah, him.

Michelangelo had no reason to like Paul IV - practically his first act as pope was to cancel Michelangelo's pension - but I suspect his outspoken manner would have also turned him against a man who was keen on censorship to the point of burning offenders at the stake. At least we don't burn people at the stake anymore for abusing their right to a freedom of speech. Or do we?....

Organised myself - check!

A short while ago, I read a blog (apologies, I forget whose - maybe Helen Hollick, maybe someone else - or possibly even a comment Helen made on someone else's blog!) who commented that they carried round a notebook to jot down all those ideas they had when not near their PC, because otherwise they just forgot them. A problem in the shower, which is where all my bestselling ideas occur, but the principle was sound. I have plenty of notebooks, I thought, I should do that. (Yes, I know, I should *already* have been doing that, but cut me some slack.)

Then, as part of my continuing effort to lose weight (and to encourage the other members of the household without sabotaging my own efforts, let's be honest!) I started planning menus. Too often I had found that mealtimes would come round again, the fridge would have only half the ingredients for a sensible meal and we'd end up eating pizza. Or chinese. Or fish and chips. (Never all three.) By planning one proper meal a day, and ensuring that I had not only the ingredients for that but also a few things for small meals and snacks for the rest of the week, some of the stress was taken out of it, as well as quite a lot of the calories. Apart from anything else, many of the recipes I've done are 'serves four', so it helps with the old portion control too.

In addition to all this planning, I had often scribbled on a piece of paper the more urgent things that I really needed to get done that day, whether it was checking online for planning permission information for our community newsletter, working out what I was doing with my pupils that week at school or remembering to collect a parcel from the post office - and then with joy I could cross things off the list as I did them. Or transfer them to a new list the following day.

My kitchen table was beginning to look like the result of an explosion in a paper factory. Bits of paper everywhere, all with essential information, perhaps. I needed a system.

Now, way way back in the dark ages, last century, people used something called a 'diary'. They would jot down things like appointments and birthdays in them, a little aide-memoire. In fact, when I was based in New York and working with the fabulous Penny England, she was super-organised and would spend the first few minutes of each working day building up the list in the office diary of what needed to be done, always transferring over the few things from the previous day that hadn't happened (it was off-off-Broadway theatre, there were always things cropping up that meant the usual stuff didn't get done).

You're probably thinking here, 'There's an app for all that.' Well, I have tried. I really have. I use the calendar app in my phone and have linked it to my gmail calendar. I use the reminders app. I use the notebook app. I even paid for a couple of To-Do-List type apps, one of which, Clear, is really clear and easy to use. (Business Insider has it down as one of the 7 Best Apps to organise yourself with.) But the trouble with all of these apps is, you have to use all of them. You have to go to each of them and open each of them and then do the stuff in each of them! I know, it's not really a hardship, but it's too easy *not* to do it. Plus, I suspect I have over-cluttered Clear with lists of plants to buy - eventually - for the garden. The biggest problem I have is that it's easier to write something with a pen (or pencil) than it is to type it in on an iphone keyboard.

It's a bit late in the year to buy a diary for 2013, so I've redirected one of my many notebooks, written the dates for the next couple of weeks at the top of each page, and started including *all* the stuff I need to know in that. And I've bought a proper diary already for next year, an A5 lined page to a day. I will still use the calendar app on my phone, and the reminders. But I now have several ideas for blog entries jotted down at the back of my notebook - you could even say I've got a little list! - and I can also cross off one of today's 'things to do'. Now to tackle the next one - cooking lunch.

The Joy of Jam-Making

Last weekend I made jam for the first time *ever*.

This will doubtless seem to some a shocking revelation, while others will be totally unsurprised. I am, after all, hardly a Domestic Goddess. I have just discovered the new nomenclature of 'outsourcing the catering' when having friends over for dinner (aka getting in a takeaway, preferably one that is delivered). But the lady round the corner had phoned in desperation: could I take some plums off her hands, as her trees had gone into overdrive. I'm not the world's biggest plum fan, having endured a surfeit of them as a child, but I had seen a recipe for plum clafoutis that looked quite straightforward and was marked 'easy' in the margin. Yes, I said, I can take a few.

My next mistake was letting the OH go round to collect them. He, of course, did not endure a surfeit of plums as a child and was therefore not shocked when the plum-grower filled a carrier bag (admittedly, a small one) for him with a fraction of her produce.

I shouldn't be eating puddings. I certainly shouldn't be eating plum clafoutis day after day after day, especially when it's made with double cream. What else could I do with it? A vague memory of a jam setting on my breadmaker popped into my head. Would that solve my problem? Fortunately the recipe was extremely easy: 500 grammes plums, halved, peeled and stoned; a cup and a half of granulated sugar; 2-3 tablespoons of lemon juice; some pectin. I can't remember how much pectin because in the end, despite my OH locating some, I didn't use it. There should be enough naturally occurring pectin in the fruit for the jam to set, I reasoned, happy to agree with several in the online fora.

I don't know if you've ever tried peeling plums. You can't use an ordinary peeler as you would for apples or potatoes. And trying to get the stones out of them wasn't always easy either. I was lucky that the halves were supposed to be chopped roughly before putting in the machine. After that, it was easy enough. Switch it on to the correct program, sit back for a few minutes before sterilising the jars (which in my case involved washing in hot soapy water, rinsing and then baking in the oven, as per the breadmaker's instructions; no boiling jars and fingers for me!). Everything went to plan and I have in fact made a second batch, following the same instructions. The jam hasn't set brilliantly but then we bought some jam in the Azores earlier in the year that wasn't set - still tasted amazing. The second batch is darker in colour as I didn't peel most of the plums, hoping that there will be more pectin in the skin.

But what surprised me most was the reaction from my friends. 'You'll have such fun,' they told me. Really? I haven't had the heart to tell them (until now) that I've done it using a breadmaker in case that has taken the fun out of it all. But having to boil away sticky stuff on the hob, testing the temperature at regular intervals, trying to decant the bubbling gloop from a large saucepan into a small jar without spilling it all over the worktop - I fail to see where the fun is. Perhaps I should have taken greater pleasure from having my fingers stained plum-colour for several days afterwards. Suffice to say, the next jam I make (and yes, there is satisfaction in making one's own jam, especially from produce that was free, rather than buying jars of it from the supermarket) will be done in the breadmaker. And I will have great fun sitting reading a book while it cooks.

Birthdays, happy or otherwise.

Birthdays may not yield the post office or Clintons quite as much money as they used to, but it seems everyone needs to know about when your birthday is. Most forms of social media not only ask for your date of birth, they seem obsessed with telling all your friends when your birthday is - purely so you can be wished happy birthday, of course. You can always thwart this tendency by putting in a false date of birth (as quite a number of under-teens do on Facebook, for example) though it must be hard for those few whose birthday really *is* January 1st.

Some people would rather not celebrate their birthdays. One significant birthday (you know, those that end in a zero), I got positively grumpy, despite being offered a party to celebrate it. The OH did then try to offer a party the week before to celebrate the fact that the first digit still hadn't changed, but I was too stuck in my grumpy rut by then.

The next significant birthday, I made up for it. Massive party. And it was really good fun. Somehow, the digit at the front no longer mattered. I have since taken to celebrating the fact that I generally don't look my age (just don't look too closely at giveaway areas like my hands or neck) and delight in surprising people who hadn't realised. Yes, I really am *that* old. And no, I'm not going to say here how old I am. It might be different by the time you read it... I have finally realised that age is relative and it's mostly in your head. Your chronological age is pretty unimportant.

Alternatively, you can follow the example of other cultures. A Polish friend, for example, tells me that birthdays are quite low key but your Name Day, on the other hand, is another matter completely.  Happy Name Day, all you Sabinas out there, today being St Sabina's Day, according to the Catholic calendar.

It also occurred to me, while writing 'happy birthday' in Spanish for a friend, that some of it is in the wording. Harking back each year to our birth when mentioning birth-day is guaranteed to make us feel old, whereas the Spanish 'feliz cumpleanos' would appear to my vague recollections of Latin, to be celebrating the number of years you have completed, a more satisfying approach. Yay, finished another one, pass the sangria!

One of my brothers-in-law has a theory that people who set themselves a (usually totally unrealistic) lifeplan that is not achieved by the time they are 30 find crossing that particular threshold awkward, as if they have somehow failed. There are two potential solutions to this: one is to set yourself realistic goals rather than attempting to be e.g. president of Uruguay or a multiple billionaire by the time you're thirty - very few people manage this, if any; the other is pack so much into your life that by the time you're thirty you have a lot to look back on. My brother-in-law, a busy chap in his quiet moments, enjoyed his thirtieth birthday.

I suspect this is an approach that can be applied throughout the years, whatever targets you set yourself and is quite well summed up by the popular current acronym YOLO - You Only Live Once. Happy whatever you're celebrating today, just make sure you don't let it slip by without doing something to remember!