Category Archives: Commuting Gems

Your 2012 five-a-day: December

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It’s December 1st, the first day of winter (on this side of the planet anyway) and a mere 24 sleeps from the Big Day. The temperature this week has really dropped: it was a brisk -1C when I was standing at the bus stop yesterday morning. I have some present wrapping and a little prep for next week’s work Christmas do (at the Banqueting House in Whitehall no less) on my to-do list today. And to my absolute delight, this month’s Violent Veg gives a big festive nod to one of my favourite Christmas traditions, carolling.

Seattle-A was in town on Thursday night (it was like a surprise early Christmas present when I got her text message this week) and as I made my way through Richmond train station to meet her, I saw my first set of carol singers for the season. A big group of kids, all rugged up in their vibrant winter woollies, braved the chill to fill the space with joyful tunes and I snatched a brief moment to stand on the stairs and enjoy a little of their festive spirit.

It took me back to Christmasses in Oz where opportunities to belt out a few yuletide tunes seemed to be around every corner, where the point was to join in rather than what you sounded like – probably just as well in my case. This was never about show-pony-ing (I’ve never been a Karaoke fan) but about sharing a bit of Christmas spirit with a disparate group of people who, in embracing the anonymity provided by the crowd, sang simply because they could.

I particularly remember bouts of Brownie carolling as a youngster in Brisbane in the 70s and another hot sticky evening somewhere in country Victoria in my early twenties, grown-ups and kids alike sprawled on picnic rugs under the riverside gum trees and a community band playing in the background while everyone sang their hearts out.

And in any of my excited witterings about Christmas (and particularly with Christmas Down Under in my sights), I cannot omit one of Melbourne’s most wonderful institutions, Carols by Candlelight, a televised open air concert held at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl every Christmas Eve. I watched this on telly for many years and finally found myself singing along on the grassy slopes under the stars nine years ago just before I moved to London.

These every-man-sings opportunities don’t seem to abound in the same way in Old London Town. There are many chances to sit and listen – from The Hallelujah Chorus at St Martin in the Fields and the Christmas Festival at The Albert Hall right through to a myriad of local community events but it seems that spirited audience participation is hard to come by. And as I stood amongst the swirling commuting masses on the stairs on Thursday night, watching those bright young faces, I realised that I missed this little piece of Christmas Past.

So that’s another thing to add to the festive to-do list before the fat man in the red suit comes to town. But I’ve been a good girl (no really I have) and have already ticked one thing off the list this morning…

I do so love Christmas. Only 24 sleeps to go people…I’m excited!

This post also completes Gidday from the UK’s Five A Day series for 2012: 12 posts containing both a whole range of random themes inspired by my merely turning the page each month and the laugh out loud cleverness of my Gidday Guest Stars, the vitamin-rich team from Violent Veg. The back catalogue is below for any of you that missed any…I hoped you’ve enjoyed it.

November
October
September
August
July
June
May
April
March
February
January

Just The Essentials…

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What is it about life when it delivers randomly themed events that make you wonder what on earth kind of secret desire energy you were channelling?

I went to work on Monday thinking to myself – on my early morning bus trip – that I really must do some bra shopping to support those which precede me.

I open my Springwise email – which, along with strong black coffee, is about all I can manage at that hour – to be greeted by this…


…a breast tissue screening bra that uses smart technology to detect tiny changes before cancer can grow.

What a great idea and a timely reminder to give my protuberances a preventative prod or two.

So I go to work Tuesday thinking I should do a breast check this week (again on the early morning bus ride – obviously these things germinate while I sleep).

I get to my desk, open my Springwise email to find this…

…the Joey bra complete with handy side pocket for your essentials.

Because aren’t every woman’s essentials small enough to fit in your armpit?

Commuting Gems…The Broad’s Hair

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During the first part of my commute (which a 15-20 minute trip on the bus), I often use the time to scroll through my emails, clear out the superfluous and read through the balance.

Late last week I came across a forwarded funny that made me laugh out loud…and pretty much look like a dill in front of my early morning commuting brethren.

So at the risk of completely plagiarising someone-I-don’t-know’s clever story or offending someone’s religious sensibilities (you should look away now), I have decided that I should share it.

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In a parochial school students are taught that lying is a sin. However, Instructions also advised that using a bit of imagination was OK to express the Truth differently without lying. Below is a perfect example of those teachings:

An attractive young woman on a flight from Ireland asked the Priest beside her, ‘Father, may I ask a favour?’ ‘

‘Of course child. What may I do for you?’

‘Well, I bought my mother an expensive hair dryer for her birthday. It is unopened but well over the Customs limits and I’m afraid they’ll confiscate it. Is there any way you could carry it through customs for me? Hide it under your Robes perhaps?’


                                        


‘I would love to help you, dear, but I must warn you, I will not lie.’

‘With your honest face, Father, no one will question you.’

When they got to Customs, she let the priest go first. The official asked, ‘Father, do you have anything to declare?’

‘From the top of my head down to my waist I have nothing to declare.’

The official thought this answer strange, so asked, ‘And what do you have to declare from your waist to the floor?’

‘I have a marvellous instrument designed to be used on a woman, but which is, to date, unused.’

Roaring with laughter, the official said, ‘Go ahead, Father.

Next please!’

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Hope this made you laugh out loud too.

Speechless

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In the midst of preparations for last weekend’s Gidday Soiree, I took a break and went to Sadlers Wells to see Matthew Bourne’s Play Without Words. This was both my first Bourne and even more remarkably, given my love of dance, my first visit to Sadlers Wells. And apart from it being another bonza deal unearthed during my daily travels, Sadlers Wells is an easy commute down the Northern Line from Gidday HQ so I suspect that this cultural pocket of London will feature amongst my erstwhile ramblings a little more often.

Anyhow, Play Without Words is set in London in the early Sixties and is based on Robin Maugham‘s novel, The Servant. The action starts as we see leading man, Anthony (all 3 of them) sign the lease on a swanky new pad. He hires manservant Prentice (3 of them), a maid Sheila (only 2 of these), meets up with an old friend and then hosts a party with his glacial financee Glenda (yes, 3 of these too) by his side.

Image sourced from http://www.sadlerswells.com

The trios and duos interweave to show the same character captured in three different moments in time, adding power and depth to the wordless storytelling.  There’s friction and frostiness as the relationship between Anthony and Glenda disintegrates. There’s wit and clever visual repartee as Prentice and Sheila insinuate themselves into the household. And there’s sizzle and sexual tension and lust and betrayal – and I LOVED IT!

But more than anything, it’s Bourne’s visionary eye that makes this a seamless and sensual masterpiece. I was entertained, uplifted, moved and thrilled…and determined I’d be back for more.

So as I left, I picked up the program for the rest of the year and amongst the turned-down page corners, you’ll find the San Francisco Ballet, the Rambert Dance Company, Paco Pena and…yes you guessed it, Matthew Bourne and his world premiere of Sleeping Beauty.

It might be baked beans on toast for a while should I let myself indulge in this passion.

Now where is my debit card?

If you are in London between now and August 5th, make sure you get along and see Play Without Words. I kid you not – it’s absolutely brilliant! And I even got an Editor’s Choice for my review on Weekend Notes.

ps…if you’ve been under a rock ignoring me not reading my posts all the way to the end, Birthday Number 43 is fast approaching. You are down to only 13 shopping days peeps so let’s make that a lucky 13 shall we? Don’t let a little superstition get in the way of celebrating…well…me.

 

Everybody Needs Good Neighbours…

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Another excellent deal snaffled on my commute put me in an aisle seat at the Cottesloe Theatre for Detroit tonight. Written by Lisa D’Amour and first presented by the Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago in 2010, it’s a raw and wry out take of life in the suburbs – but not quite as we know it.

Ben and Mary scratch along together in life, she as a highly-strung paralegal, he as a mortgage advisor recently made redundant. The play opens on their back patio with new neighbours Kenny and Sharon who have been invited over for a BBQ, and continues by moving back and forth between the adjoining back yards until the final scene.

I don’t want to divulge too much so I won’t talk about the plot. In any case, I went along without any knowedge of the story, just letting it all unfold in front of me and I loved it. Often when you don’t know what to expect, you can just be present to the action in front of you rather than taint it with the anticipation of what’s to follow.

Suffice to say Kenny and Sharon have an interesting past and these two unlikely couples share neuroses, dreams and philosophies on life until the whole thing goes up in smoke.

The characters are larger than life and there’s no one performance that shines brighter than the others. One minute I’d be cringing at Mary’s pedantry and nagging, the next chuckling at Kenny’s slightly skewed outlook on life (or dancing), then smiling at Sharon’s passionate neighbourliness, before wondering what sort of business Ben could possibly end up with as he interrupts his website ‘development’ activities to offer some self-help style financial mentoring for ‘them next door’.

The Cottesloe is quite a small theatre with the audience sitting right up against the performance ‘space’ so the whole time I felt like I was peering over the fence from my own back yard. It added an intimacy to the play and it felt slightly voyeuristic with every afternoon shindig and midnight tryst that played itself out before us.

The performances were electric and with no intermission, this ensemble cast maintained a cracking pace for the audience for just under 2 hours. Will, Stuart, Clare and Justine really did leave it all on stage. They were brilliant.

Alas, this production at the National Theatre on London’s Southbank closes next Friday (14th July) so you’ll have to get your skates on if you want to see this one. But it’s expected to have its off-Broadway debut in August at Playwrights Horizons and as tickets went on sale today, those of you across the pond have the opportunity to partake.

I saw a play years ago – Art written by Yasmin Reza – which is one of my all-time favourites and Detroit reminded me a little of that. Gritty, dark, passionate and not for the faint-hearted. But absolutely fantastic and not to be missed.

Commuting Gems…Recycling’s Foot Soldiers

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Sometimes inspiration come from the most unlikely places.

Tucked into my seat on the train earlier this week, flicking through The Metro with the patter of raindrops on the window in the background, I came across this…

No it’s not a version of MJ’s Bille Jean video souped up for the cyber generation. It’s actually the latest and greatest in the harvesting of natural energy sources.

Pavegen is the brainchild of Laurence Kemball-Cook, a young British entrepreneur who has combined a recycled rubber and polymer mix with a hybrid kinetic energy-harvesting system. Stepping onto the ’tile’ generates between 5 and 8 joules of electricity – a small percentage of this is used to the light the tile while the majority is either stored in a battery or powers the surrounding area.

It might sound like small potatoes but Kemball-Cook took a Pavegen dancefloor to Bestival last year where the grooves of 50,000 festival-goers charged 1,000 mobile phones. They have been installed (Pavegen that is, not the festival-goers) permanently at a school and more recently at Westfield Stratford City.

It’s extraordinary and exciting stuff. Imagine…our ‘energy output’ collected and tranformed into a unique – and boundless when you think about it – source of electricity. 

Brings a whole new meaning to the term recycling, doesn’t it?

Commuting Gems…Something To Aim For

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Being a half Dutch person so to speak, most regular Gidday-ers will know that I have a finely tuned radar for all things clever clogs. Remember last year’s excitement about Den Bosch catherdral’s modern nod to the man upstairs?

Well, I was reading The Metro on the way to work last week when I came across yet another example of Dutch pragmatism and ingenuity. Apparently the fine folk at Schipol Airport had reached the end of their tether about men…well schhh-ing everywhere but where they should be schhh-ing. In the bowl, that is.

So what do you think they did?

They etched an image of a house fly in the bowl, giving the ‘little gentlemen’ something to aim for…and thereby ‘increasing accuracy up to 80%’.

Brilliant!

And given I was in the land of the clogged just a day later, it got me thinking, I wonder what other clever things the Dutch have done? So I googled when I got home and here’s what I found (on www.socyberty.com).

Father and son team Hans & Zacharias Janssen invented the first microscope so that they could see really small things. (Could they be related to Linda of Adventures in Expatland fame? It’s a small world you know…)

Hans Lippershey invented the first telescope so he could see far away things. Given the Dutch liked to voyage, this is likely to have proved quite useful.
  
In the natural world, Jan Ingenhausz discovered the process of photosynthesis in 1779 and Anton van Leeuweenhoek was the first to observe bacteria in 1626. Not to put too finer point on it but these gents probably needed to get a life (and one of them new microscope things).

In the modern age, the compact disk appeared in Eindhoven in 1979 thanks to Dutch company Phillips and the company founded by rally driver Maurice Gatsonides developed the first ‘road-rule-enforcement-camera’ in the 1950s thus creating the concept of revenue-raising amongst local constabularies the world over.

And last but not certainly not least, the Dutch claim to have been the first to discover Australia with Willem Janszoon checking out the Gulf of Carpentaria – that’s in the north bit – in 1606. No doubt helped by Lippershey’s telescope.

In fact, did you know that Australia was called New Holland for almost 190 years? The monikker was first coined in 1644 by Dutch man-about-sea, Abel Tasman, and remained part of the lingo right up until 1837.

But interestingly it was the English who first colonised that big, brown, inhospitable land down under, landing in Sydney Cove on the 26th January, 1788.

Seems like everyone was aiming for a piece of the Lucky Country.

But the ultimate clever clogs, the piece d’resistance of going Dutch, struck me full in the face as I walked into Eindhoven airport on Wednesday afternoon…

And I am left wondering whether in fact, I grew up in the wrong lucky country!

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Part of the Post of the Month Club for June 2012

I Could Have Been Born A Turkey…

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Yesterday I was catching up on some emails and opened up Dr. Alan Zimmerman’s Tuesday Tip.

This motivational email gets delivered to my inbox every Tuesday but it’s been some time since I’ve read one. I’m not sure what made me open this email rather than deleting it like I have been recently. Maybe it had something to do with the title…

The BIG Lie About Success and the Little Secret of Happiness

Dr Zimmerman provides his own personal commentary every newsletter. It’s wedged in between adverts for his courses but there’s always a gem or two. Something to make me stop and think. Sometimes it reminds me to get back into good habits at work or refocus my energies on some simple basics. Sometimes it reminds me that people are people everywhere, wanting to be heard and make a difference, even when they appear belligerent, uncooperative and downright irritating.

Other times, like yesterday, it reminds me about the importance of being happy.

Those simple, often unexpected moments of quiet peace or contentment. The moments where I do what I love and love what I do – at work, at home, with friends and strangers. On the train, at the supermarket, in the coffee shop, walking in the park. In the midst of the familiar and in the maelstrom of the new. Everywhere and anywhere.

Not all the time. But creating the enviroment for happiness to occur is important. It’s like opportunity – if you stay open, things show up. Stay closed and what’s often right in front of you stays invisible.

The newsletter shares some tips – and I found myself nodding…

1. Learn to be happy with less

I am reminded not so much of stuff  itself but of stuff to do. Busy-ness. It’s easy to get busy in life with stuff to do that merely fills my time and does not make me happy. I want to invest more time and energy in the things I love to do – expanding my horizons at work, writing, theatre, books, music – and the people that make me feel good. The ones I know about (you know who you are) and the ones I’ve yet to meet.

2. Seek silence

Peace is an amazing discovery. It took moving across the world for me to find it. I’m not sure whether it’s connected to my physical location or my state of mind but my promise to myself is to stay in touch with what speaks to my soul, even when the route there looks scary.

3. Remind yourself things could be worse

Zimmerman shares a snippet from the cartoon series Peanuts which sums it up perfectly:

Snoopy…was lying in his dog house on Thanksgiving Day, he mumbled about being stuck with dog food while all those humans got to be inside with the turkey, gravy, and pumpkin pie. “Of course, it could have been worse,” he finally reflected. “I could have been born a turkey.”

Wise dog that.

4. Understand what you seek is spiritual not material

Zimmerman refers to this as mastering the ‘art of living’. Being able to handle anything that comes your way. I’ve heard people say that God never gives us more than we can handle. Well I don’t really do God stuff. But I have to say something always ‘turns up’. The universe always provides and I have belief that it will all turn out in the end. It just might not be the end I was expecting. But there’s often happiness there all the same.

5. Look for evidence of peace

There’s a longer list in the newsletter itself but these were my top 3 so I’m keeping an eye out for: 
  • Less interest in judging other people as to what they “should” do.
  • Less interest in the conflicts and gossip that surround me.
  • Contented feelings of connectedness with others and nature.

So here’s to making Gidday from the UK a space for happiness to occur.  Let connectedness abound and “shoulds” die a thousand deaths.

But I give you fair warning. Look out for frequent attacks of smiling.

Remember you could have been born a turkey!

The Good Book…

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Lately, the e-book has come in for a bit of schtick.

At the end of February, Stylist columnist Lucy Mangan said said ‘E-readers are representative of our mindless embrace of all that purports to be ‘progress”. Then a month later fellow blogger Russell Ward described the Kindle as ‘cold and calculating in its determination to deliver the electronic word seamlessly to you’.

Ouch!

Admittedly I was a slow convert, clinging on to both the physical and the ritual around my serious book habit. And I still love a good book shop browse. In fact last week I had an hour to kill before meeting A-used-to-be-down-the-hill and I spent it wandering through Foyles at St Pancras Station, perusing the latest dust jackets, dipping into travel guides (I’m off to Rome for a little city break soon) and flicking through the pages of Titanic-themed tomes in the special event section. Lovely stuff.

But the thought of finding more space in my already full bookshelf, packed with old theatre programs, illustrated coffee table books – for which I have no coffee table – and those volumes dubbed with ‘re-read me status’ or acquired in youthful nostalgia (my hard back Jane Austen set and the 7-book Chronicles of Narnia being a couple of these) before my Kindle conversion, holds little allure.

On the other hand my Kindle – christened Audrey for her stylish simplicity – goes everywhere with me. There is nothing cool or calculating about immersing myself in a few quick chapters while on the bus, waiting for a friend, in the boarding lounge and even before lights out at night. Audrey is always at the ready and the Kindle shop only a few clicks away. Apart from my favourites, both old and new, I’ve discovered authors I would never have come across and been able to support the burgeoning efforts of a couple of budding writers in my blogging circle – just check out 2011’s Book Nook numbers 51, 55a and 57.

Granted a Kindle is not the be all and end all. After all, there is nothing like a travel book for sitting on the plane, standing on a street corner in a new city or sipping espresso in a funky cafe, marking the places to be seen with folded corners and scribbled annotations and plotting my next adventure(s).

And I haven’t quite managed the conversion of my magazine or Saturday Times newspaper habit yet but let’s face it, the only way to conquer the Samurai Sudoku or the cryptic version of the Jumbo Crossword is curled up on my couch, pen in hand, steaming coffee at my elbow.

But villifying the Kindle and all its counterparts seems a little extreme. Like laptops, smartphones and iPods, the e-reader is just another symbol of our increasingly mobile lives and to my mind, something that encourages the consumption of the written word in every place or space. And that can only be a good thing.

Books still have their place in my life. But for me the power lies in the storytelling.

And I get to take that everywhere.

Commuting Gems…No Kidding

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Today I was flicking through my freebie copy of the Metro newspaper on my way into town for a meeting when I came across the ultimate ‘pampered pets’ story.

Some dude has decided to make his menagerie feel right at home…


Source: Metro.co.uk Image: Caters

Apparently it’s also inspired a Goats Do Roam range of vinos…

I kid you not.

Important ps:
By the way, there are only 10 sleeps to go now so enough of that sitting on the fence peeps -it’s time to make a play for the Naughty or the Nice list. Santa can’t wait forever and you know how I feel about creating your own destiny and all that…