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My friend, I am not what I seem. Seeming is but a garment I wear – a care-woven garment that protects me from thy questionings and thee from my negligence.

… and as they pass, turn back and laugh at me.

We should, of course, never waste time – it’s very foolish.

 But there sometimes are tiny moments – just a minute or two… occasionally – when our focus, dedication and drive ebb ever so slightly, our attention wanders a little…

These are a few places I’ve landed on such occasions:

Bookworm – a hugely addictive online game but I like to think it at least productive in sparking brain cells into life rather than killing them off.

If you fail to find words of greater than three letters burning tiles appear. This fire spreads and unless you use the burning tiles quickly, the whole ‘library’ burns down and you lose the game.

The worm also suggests words (“tut” in this snapshot) and gives a bonus score if this word is found…

… it’s massively, massively addictive.

Swedish Furniture Name Generator – totally childish, unproductive and pointless. But it made me laugh.

There are also Ninja names (I’m ‘Kichijiro Uehara-san’), viking (‘Sandie Wartooth’), a band name generator (‘Shooting Sandie & The Eclipse’, hurrah – fame is merely a tune away!), hippie (‘Peace Juniper’) and… ugh, ugh, ugh… a slushy valentine’s day name generator (Mousie Bunnybaps…???!)

Okay, enough silliness. Back to the serious time-wasting…

The wonderful Delphic Oracle.

Bliss. It answers all of Life’s questions with ineffable wisdom… vague, unhelpful even, and yet somehow soothing and quite beautiful for that.

As for George Villiers – whose little ditty titles this blog post – the man was most definitely not a time waster. Indeed, it seems he was probably a keen multi-tasker as, according to his wiki entry, he was taught geometry by Thomas Hobbes, during which lessons he reportedly...

… well, you’ll have to look it up yourselves – next time you have a few minutes to waste.

I don’t like alarm clocks. Waking to manic beeping or ringing is, apropos our primitive selves, surely a sign we are waking to Trouble? Even the name – alarm – is wrong, wrong, wrong…

And so mine is set to radio. Formerly, this was R4 until I realised James Naughtie arguing with politicians (or, if I overslept, the platitudes of Thought for the Day) creeping into my dreams was no better a start than beep, beep, beeeeeeeep. It made me argumentative.

Now I wake to R3 but it’s hit and miss. My preference is for piano, with my least favourite the noisy brass band hammering out a rabble-rousing number.

This morning it was Elgar’s Salut d’amour which has surpassed all wake-up numbers to date – luring me from sleep kindly, willingly and with a smile.

In fact, I’d happily tolerate waking to this beautiful piece every day… make it so, schedulers, make it so!

Inanimate things, that is – and in no particular order.  

Kangaroo – my great-uncle made this and I used to play with it as a kid when we visited. It hops down sloping surfaces and, unlike any toys owned by my own children at a similar age, the kangaroo still works – and will continue working, probably forever! My great-uncle is long dead but my great-aunt Ellen, my grandma’s older sister, will be 101 this spring.  

Not much changed there then. 

… nature hath framed strange fellows in her time.

Hurrah… it’s almost my favourite time of year!

The Romans moved the start of the new year to January in 153BC – a month named after Janus, the god of gates, doorways, beginnings, endings and time, who is generally depicted with two heads: one to look back on the past, the other forward into the future.

They believed Janus would, at midnight on 31st December, simultaneously look at both the old and the new years. It became customary to exchange good luck offerings at this time and in an early example of how quickly commercialism evolves around human habit, simple offerings of branches from sacred trees progressed into gifts of coins bearing Janus’s two heads, presumably in the hope of evoking prosperity for the coming year.

This practice of looking back, like Janus, on what’s gone – learning from it and moving forward with enthusiasm – is a human endeavour I’ve always found very cathartic. Essential, for me, in fact. But this year I’m deviating from it. I’ve spent the whole of 2010 in backward glance, gaining me nothing and costing me plenty, and so I shall forego the annual melancholy twixt-Christmas-and-New-Year navel gaze and skip straight into the optimism of another new beginning… a fresh start… a blank and promising page.

I wish a Happy, Prosperous, Optimistic and Productive New Year – when it comes – for you all!

Oh, and here, have an olive branch…

xxx

Okay, the title is misleading – and merely to test the poetry knowledge of anyone reading this post. The subject isn’t my old lover’s ghost, but more a general observation that Shrewsbury seems to be a seriously haunted town.

I’d noticed a while back how my ordinarily efficient smart phone played up in certain shops and areas of the town. On one occasion it went completely barmy, flashing on and off and refusing to respond to any button pressing. A few minutes later, when trying to pay for some items, the shop till also went odd and wouldn’t work. The sales assistant apologised and I made some jokey comment about my phone being of a similar mind and perhaps the shop was haunted.

At this point he leaned forward and told me, in conspiratorial tone – presumably not wanting to get in trouble for potentially scaring off clients – that the place was, indeed, haunted. He recounted several strange recurring incidents – malfunctioning equipment, lights, and changing room doors which lock themselves after hours – and said staff were convinced the shop was riddled with ghosts.

It, along with many other shops, is built on the site of the old castle walls and I’ve since noticed that all along that stretch my phone is knocked out of working order every time I go into a building.

I’m sure some dry, sensible geologist type, or architect, or whatever, will be able to explain rationally why certain areas of Shrewsbury interfere with mobile phones, despite the rest of the town offering glorious network coverage (the likes of which I was denied during six years of rural living, hence the gushing). But I don’t want to hear those rational explanations. I like the thought that this beautiful old medieval town is rampant with mischievous ghosts.

The sales assistant in the haunted shop said he’d been on the Guided Haunted Walk and how fantastic this tour is. I’ve yet to do it myself, but am looking forward to it. Shrewsbury at night is even more gorgeous than in the daytime and, with or without ghosts, many of the tiny cobbled alleyways are so evocative of their past, it’s like stepping back in time just to walk down them and imagine what life (and death) they’ve seen over the centuries.

The poem, incidentally, is beautiful and called Love’s Deity, by John Donne. Today just before I got into the hairdresser’s, a rather unkind email arrived on my phone. The hairdresser’s is built upon the old castle walls and one of those mischievous ghosts decided – wisely, I thought, on reflection – to erase that email from my phone. So, I dedicate the poem to that thoughtful spirit and thank him/her for not interfering with the scissors during my haircut.

I’m sitting here in almost-darkness, with a house that’s cooling rapidly – our third power cut this week, each lasting several hours. Power failure is supposed to be one of those rural pastimes we gave up when we moved to town.

I do usually enjoy power cuts. Being isolated from the virtual world, for one thing, can be very restful. And I love sitting by candlelight in front of the fire, in silent contemplation – in fact I can happily daydream hours away watching flames.  

But it’s Sunday evening. There are school uniforms to be ironed, children to be bathed, their hair needs washing… I need washing! And I have work to do, for which I need a laptop on mains supply and not its ludicrously ineffective battery back up.

Added to this is the fact that we’ve run out of logs and can’t get a car out of the driveway to replenish the stock because the gate is electric with no manual override. So… no cosy fire, only one candle left, laptop battery almost dead, work stacking up and children dishevelled and grubby for school tomorrow. It’s not good.

Power cuts in town are different too. Not as seemingly expansive or silent as those in the country. When we lived just outside a village, I’d look out of the window and see absolutely nothing. There was something lovely and soothing about that. Here, I look across the river and see that the town centre is lit up (a sensible person might just grab her purse, in fact, and head to the nearest warm wine bar). And in the country, a power cut meant silence – but here, house alarms are triggered (a lot of them!) which in turn sets off the neighbourhood dogs and none of that noise stops until the power comes back on.

So, no. Power cuts in town are Not A Good Thing.

Think I’ll throw my smelly children into bed and head for the wine bar…

Thanks to Charlotte Castle for a Facebook link to the PostSecret website – a glorious find.

People send anonymous secrets on postcards and these are collated into books (available via the website). The display on the website itself changes daily, but there’s an archive too.

Some are poignant, some funny, some discomforting – all are stories in miniature; tiny graphic flash fiction. They’re quite beautiful.

C S Lewis said, miracles are a retelling in small letters of the very same story which is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see. These postcards – their tiny summations of big stories – perfectly illustrate this. We hear, see and read details about other people and their lives constantly. Swamped with information, impact can be lost and it takes something simple to hit home and make us think.

One of today’s offerings was hand-written on a postcard showing a black and white movie clip of two men in suits pointing handguns. It read: She lied, I NEVER Raped her. So simple, so poignant and behind those six words, an event – a story – the impact of which doubtless spreads beyond the two people directly involved.

The fiction writer is forever seeking these small nuggets – shrinking down the noise of all we see, hear and understand about people to find these simple core notes. Once we’ve found them, and have our pitch, we expand them again. But for us, the trick is expanding into a more controlled noise, so that this essential nugget isn’t lost as it often is in life.

The postcard at the top of this blog I thought intriguing. It triggers a thousand stories.

The one on the left just resonated personally… I know. Pathetic, isn’t it?

Having recently moved to the delightful town of Shrewsbury, I am a Townie again and it’s Grand.

Silence, broken periodically by the thunder of a milk-tanker passing the house at 80mph or a nearby cow in labour pain, has been replaced with the glorious revelry of Friday night drunks. Just now a party of hens has staggered by, singing badly but with commendable enthusiasm – an exultant symbol of Life (though I wouldn’t want their heads in the morning).

We can walk everywhere – river, park, shops, restaurants, theatre, school… in fact the latter is so close to the house that once I’ve taught my country bumpkin children a bit of traffic sense so they can see themselves over the road, I shan’t even need to get dressed until it’s time to nip to the Deli for elevensies.

I was, towards the end of our rural life, going quietly insane. Whilst village life and a small school were quite brilliant when the children were small, we’d all pretty much outgrown the Good Life and the negatives were beginning to niggle. I was utterly sick of the sight of green fields (I know, I know, it’s an awful admission) and the sound of silence, and it was a royal pain in the bum to have to get in the car just to buy bread.

We miss our lovely friends – though we’re not far away and they all have an open invitation – and the dogs miss the rats. But other than that, life here is just Grand. Of course, there is a potential downside: a person can’t spend much money in a shopless village, but in a town full of designer shops… Well. So far I’m being very good.

But last week I saw this gorgeous coat in a little boutique…