On tools and clean-up: a couple of years ago, my paternal grandmother decided to downsize following my grandfather's death, and the family pitched in to clean up my grandad's shed and claim what was worth claiming. I claimed a fairly complete set of basic tools, which I cleaned and occasionally use.
A few months later, my dad was visiting and I asked him to help me fix something too complicated for me. He asked if I had a wire brush, and I triumphantly produced one that had belonged to his dad. He said, "There is life after death."
A few months after that, my maternal grandfather died, and I had to pitch in with another clean-up. He was a fellow writer and book-lover, so I claimed many useful and pretty things, but the thing that stands out is the microwave cookbook, which I claimed purely as the tangible tie to a very specific memory.
A mug with a picture of a ladybird and the name I used to answer to, which I used to think was magic because I dropped it on the path and it didn't break.
My Swiss army knife, bought in Geneva in 2000. I misplaced it the other day, and the intensity of my panic took me by surprise.
My programmes and tickets, which help jog my memory of all the matches I've been to. When we had the fire, I was a season ticket holder at Scunthorpe United, and the season ticket was the first thing I took out of the smoke-damaged house after the fire.
The Hoarder's Patchwork: sentimental fabric scraps plus six years and counting of hard work.
Attempts at communication:
I'd just moved to Germany and I still didn't feel at home with the language. I did all my shopping at supermarkets, but one evening I left it too late to walk all the way to the nearest one. There was a greengrocer just across the road from my flat, so I decided to give it a go.
From the layout of the shop, I couldn't immediately work out whether it was self-service or whether I needed to ask for what I wanted. I cheerfully asked the man at the counter, "Sprechen Sie Englisch?" only for my heart to plummet when he responded, "Nein." Somehow, I stumbled through a query about whether I should serve myself, and understood his response that I could do whatever suited me. I picked out a few things, took them to the counter and paid. As I was turning to leave, he said (in German), "I don't know why you wanted to speak English; you speak perfectly good German."
And another language story, specifically inspired by #154:
When I moved into that German flat, I spent an evening chatting with my prospective flatmates to make sure I was a good fit. The flatmates were happy for most of the discussion to be in English, with just a few German phrases here and there.
One thing I had in common with one of the flatmates was that we'd both studied in France, so naturally we talked about that. He switched to French, and I can only assume that baffled me beyond help, because when he said "Grenoble - dans les Alpes?" I replied, "Ja."
Intangibly, I'm in the final stages of making a book, and honing my deadline-meeting skills by producing a column once a fortnight. I'm also suffering from fiction withdrawals, which I may have to ease with some Left Behind fanfic.
All my tangible projects involve using up the things other people might throw away. I'm turning newspaper clippings, tickets and recipes off product labels into scrapbooks, attempting to use up an enormous surplus of glass jars by making jams and chutneys out of everything I can find, and I'm turning all my worn-out clothes into the Hoarder's Patchwork.
Books of which you read a dozen even-numbered pages over your neighbour's shoulder on a coach and then had to buy to find out what happened next.
#290: He does throw mime artists in the scorpion pit.
Wow, that's the first time I've actually witnessed a disemvowelling. I usually miss all the fun. (Sorry, I lurk lots but never have anything as interesting to say as the people who post.)
This reminds me of a conversation I had with my aunt the last time I was looking for work. I said something about making sure I could still get everything done in a worst-case scenario, and she said that there was no point planning because the scenario you get is never one of the ones you planned for. Which may be true, but I couldn't convince her that making a plan with plenty of redundancy and fail-safes was more likely to bring a reasonable outcome than winging it with absolutely no plan.
Thing is, once you have a car, you use it.
This is why I resist every suggestion that my life would be easier
with a car (and given the sad state of public transport in small-town
Lincolnshire maybe it would). I enjoy travelling by train, meeting
interesting people and getting to know new stations along the way. But
if I was running a car, I wouldn't be able to justify train journeys
and I'd miss them.
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| 2008 | 10 |
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