Life Less Literary

Some very vivid dreams this morning. Of course, I’ve forgotten a lot of it over the last couple of hours… open up the leisure centre, get everything ready in the café for when the customers arrive… have to kill my dad, very sad really but necessary… go swimming with the kids… etc etc.

What I do remember though is the dragonfly. It was purple, in the same way that dragonflies are usually green or blue, irridescent bright purple. And it was huge. Fucking huge. I mean, whenever I see a dragonfly, I am often amazed at how big those things are, but they all pale next to this one. I was just saying to someone sat next to me “Fuck! Did you see that dragonfly over there, it was the size of a cat”, when the dragonfly usefully came and landed just outside the window so that we could accurately check its size. Even more usefully, I turned to the right and noticed that there was a cat stuck on the next window, claws extended and somehow hanging on to the glass. The conclusion was that the cat did perhaps have a little more bulk, but they were certainly very closely matched and the dragonfly was perhaps a little longer, even though it was much stubbier than most dragonflies. Another interesting thing, from that close we could see that it was clearly made of purple silk, with some kind of feathery bits at the end of its tail. Very strange.

54% of bloggers don’t know their audience well. I do. Hi Guy, Phil, Jan, Niina, Naomi, Scot, Alex, Suz, Zali, Zaid. Nik, you still out there?

Did I miss anyone?

Who woulda thought it? Channel 4 are going to show that ad on TV!

Walking home from school with Lola the other day, she was talking about the “kaftering lady”. Took me a couple of seconds to register what she was talking about. Like most small kids, Lola tends to miss the beginning from long words or phrases. So “beginning” becomes “ginning”, “behave” becomes “have”, and “look after” becomes “kafter”. And of course, there’s no such thing as “looking after”: it’s “kaftering”. So the “kaftering lady” is the lady who looks after Lola.

Just seen the outtakes from Channel 4’s current ad campaign. I’ve a feeling they’re not going to be broadcasting this one in the near future.

Most of it feels fairly tame but… there’s something about Judy Finnegan saying “fuck” which is beyond shocking.

I think Lola’s been spending too much time with Rowan.

She just came back from shopping with Gill, clutching a new Barbie comic. I heard her saying, in a Rowanesque manner, “Mum, this is really coo-ool”.

She then sat down behind my desk to read it. With every new page she piped up “Cool. Cool cool. Cool cool cool.” And she wouldn’t let me continue with my work until I’d turned around to see just how cool. Each page seemed to be cooler than the previous, as inidicated by her rising tone.

Today is the day! It’s here again! Spring is in the air.

I can tell, y’see, because the central heating has kicked in, yet it’s very clearly not needed, yet there’s such freshness in the air that the heating feels really nice anyway without getting all stuffy.

I went for a meditate at the Sheffield Buddhist Centre today. We did the Metta Bhavana - incredibly powerful meditation that! Just before the new year, I started writing “Dan’s little self-help guide” which I was going to post here, but I never finished it. See, I was very much up then, and although I wouldn’t exactly say I’ve been down since, I’ve certainly lost some inertia this last month. This little half-hour of meditation brought me right back up there, slowed down my mind, reminded me to spare time for others, and made me happier and, ultimately, more effective (because less scatter-brained) as a result.

Memo to self: go to meditation every week. (Tomorrow night I’m hoping to go for a longer session).

This was originally a comment on Niina’s site in response to her comments on peppermint tea. But as I seem to have put some thought into it… I might as well re-post here:

I seem to have unintentionally totally abandoned coffee over the last six months or so. I have the odd cup, when somebody offers me it, but otherwise I can quite happily go without. My addiction to tea, however, fluctuates, and most days I have a cup or ten (usually over-stewed English Breakfast or something similarly hearty).

Herb teas are an acquired taste. (And fruit teas are the downmarket alternative for people who want to try something healthy but think that herb teas are tasteless [of course, peppermint is different from most other herb teas in that its taste is pretty readily apparent]). Actually, I guess tea and coffee are acquired tastes too, just that we tend to acquire them very young.

I remember when my dad started drinking peppermint tea every morning, the smell alone made me retch, but now I love the stuff. And Gill got some rasberry leaf tea when she was pregnant, which again just seemed like, err, leaves boiled, pretty nothingy, but after drinking quite a bit of it I now love its pungent undertones.

Recently I’ve been drinking Dr Stuart’s organic teas, which claim to be “pharmacoeipal grade”, whatever that means. They certainly seem to have a little more zing than other brands. There’s one in particular, called Detox Tea, which practically fizzes if you hold your nose just above it as its brewing. Lovely chewing-gummy taste of liquorice sticks mixed with dandelion & burdock, and hints of mint and ginger. Mmmm.

Hey! Lookie what Gill just won me on EBay! Some nice 60s kitchen tiles. To form a part of the new worksurface she’s making for our new kitchen.

I have never seen anything quite so well packaged. First I ripped off the parcel paper, then cut through the tape to open the box underneath, riffled through the scrunched up newspaper to find a bubble-wrap bundle (large bubbles) inside. Ripped that off to find more bubble wrap, this time with small bubbles. Inside that were eight individual bubble-wrap packages, each containing a tile wrapped around several times with tissue paper. Would have made for a good game of pass-the-parcel.

There’s a great thread here on Kuro5hin.org about “What Books have Influenced Your Life?” - and strangely for something of this nature, there’s some interesting reasoning going on (i.e. it’s not just the BBC’s Big Read). I only wish I had time to read it all.

For what it’s worth, here’s my little addition to the mix (feel free to comment/add your own here and/or at Kuro5hin):

• Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R Hofstadter was an optional book on my university psychology reading list. I’m so glad I took the trouble to borrow it from the library and work my way through it’s spiralling arguments and diversions. It fundamentally changed my view of the world, from a fairly wishy-washy neo-pagan god-is-something-somewhere kind of unfocussed mysticism to a strong (devout?) atheistic rationalism. This book more than any other made me what I am today (and a bit of subsequent Richard Dawkins didn’t go amiss).
• Viriconium Nights by M John Harrison (now published as part of the Viriconium collection by Fantasy Masterworks). Having ploughed through The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings in early childhood, then spent an adolescence sucking up reams fantasy and sci-fi regardless of its merits, I picked this book up almost by accident. I was seventeen, at Kings Cross station on my way to Amsterdam for a week of indulgence, my first holiday without parents. I read through the book’s short stories as I lazed in tents, coffee shops and squats around Amsterdam, and somehow the timeless locationless city of the title came into phase with the Amsterdam I was inhabiting. But more than that: it was a rite of passage into more adult literature. Most of the stories had no obvious point, and seemed to end without reaching a conclusion, but despite that they were beautiful, and more compelling than most the fantasy pulp I was used to. They made me realise that real life is rarely made up of well-defined quests, full of hardship but ultimately ending in a happy ever after. They taught me that god is in the details.
• The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman by
  Angela Carter blew my brain wide open and made me realise that literature can be a mind-altering drug.

Of course, there are many more that I’ve read and enjoyed very, very much, but I think these three (and perhaps a few others I can’t call to mind right now) have had the biggest affect on my life.