Rain, Rain, Go Away, Come Again Another Day...oh...er...okay....

So I have not written for a while. The reasons are clear. I have been preoccupied by the following:

• My new obsession with Postcrossing (a sort of postcard/international pen-pal club (http://www.postcrossing.com/). I have gone a bit mad and found myself corresponding with 14 people worldwide from Finland to Malaysia. I now get about 3 postcards a week from people all over the world. My husband thinks the postman might start charging to come to our door and deliver the mail. 'They will think you are crazy!' he mutters.
• My new obsession with making envelopes. I just cannot get enough of envelope making. And the many types of paper you can use. I am seriously looking at all paper in a new way now. (can I used it to make an envelope? Will Royal Mail accept it? Is it weird to make an envelope out of the paper my takeaway kebab has been wrapped in?)
• Work. Pah! Pesky old work was taking up valuable time and energy! But more on that in a different post another time when I feel like explaining what I do. 
• Cooking. Yes, I have been trying my hand at cooking! Two days ago I made a lamb stew and a rhubarb and banana crumble. My husband was the lucky recipient of a homemade breakfast in bed yesterday, consisting of cinnamon french-toast with maple syrup, blueberries and crème fraiche. Oh, and the obligatory cup of English Breakfast tea.
• House of Cards Season 2 - which was rather ironically released on Netflix on Valentine's Day. Probably the most unromantic TV series ever. But compulsive and obsessive viewing none-the-less. Damn Netflix and their way of showing you one episode immediately one after another! This means you can go through four straight hours of TV watching without fully realising what has happened and suddenly find that the sun has set, you are desperate for the toilet and your stomach is rumbling due to a lack of sustenance. I am sure people have lost whole days to this hypnotising website.
• The Truly SHIT Weather of England in February 2014 - yep, it is officially the wettest winter in Britain for 250 years (250 years ago - which was the pretty uneventful year of 1764, unless you come form St. Louis, which was founded in Feb of that year). I heard this fact revealed with relish by a DJ on Classic FM last week as I was preparing to depart the house on a work trip into the City to visit an asset management company. Asset management is kind of boring at the best of times. It is even less interesting when you are dripping all over the floor because you got caught in yet another torrential downpour that your umbrella was too feeble to defend you against. Is it just me or all umbrellas sold in England too feeble to cope with the English weather? Yep, we live in a land of a thousand shades of grey (no erotic novel jokes please). Grey skies, grey clouds, grey rain, grey puddles, grey icy slush, grey hail, grey mud, grey flood waters (for some very unlucky towns in the UK. Pretty much everywhere actually as this warning map shows - http://www.environment-agency.gov.uk/homeandleisure/floods/142151.aspx), lots of swollen fast-moving grey rivers and grey crashing waves on our grey beaches. This winter has been one long shade of grey. 

This of course reminds me of the rhyme: 'Rain, Rain, Go Away, Come Again, Another Day! Which has so far been proved to be some sort of depressing prophecy since the rain just comes and comes and comes. My husband, who went to university in Lancaster, once told me that during his first term on campus as a fresh-faced 18 year old, it rained every day, all day for an entire month. All he could do was study. And drink beer. And play video games. Indoors. The international students who lived on campus and who presumably came from countries where the weather was better (in other words: pretty much ANY OTHER country in the world), grew so depressed that a few of them even jumped off the tall residential tower block next door to the student pub. The dorm became known as the suicide block. Leaving home when you are 18 years old is hard. Leaving home in ongoing torrential rain when you are 18 years old seems a little cruel.

But it is not all doom and gloom! Yes, we British are hardened to our shit weather. We don't let it get us down. We may grumble, we may moan. But we do that anyway. Moaning is what makes us British. It helps us connect with each other and feel as if we are connected through common miserable experience. It is the way we 'bond.' The rain is actually also a great equaliser. It rains on the rich as it does on the poor. The rich probably have better umbrellas and chauffeur driven cars, but they must get wet sometimes. The weather breaks down our class system...sort of...in a wet, rather chilly way. In fact our weather has been so typically stormy for so long now that companies have started using it to advertise their products. It is as if Britain has been re-branded as the famous 'stormy sceptred isle.' We are not going to hibernate, no! We are going to get out there in the rain and the wind! We are going to: 'hibernot' as LandRover UK puts it so enthusiastically in their new TV advert:

For those of you on a mobile device (you know the drill!): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5qmMo9mDgOs

Supposedly, according to the old myth of 'Borrowed Days' we have somehow borrowed all the crappy weather of March and experienced it in February instead, so March should be lovely and Spring-like and rain-free. Don't ask me how this works, I just heard it repeated at a concert recently. The lady who insisted on this story being true was standing on stage, holding a tambourine and drinking beer and I don't think she held a degree in meteorology, but she drew such a riotous response from the audience that people raised their glasses to drink to beginning of Spring and cheered loudly.

The beginning of Spring....well.....I WILL drink to THAT!

Happy New Year!

Witty British graffiti from someone who knows our weather well

Happy New Year everyone! And what a new year it has been! Different Year, Same Weather. Yes, that is correct, the rainy wet and dark stormy weather that plagued us all Christmas has followed us into 2014. Ah, well, I suppose it is sort of comforting that some things remain the same despite the passage of time.

I did not let the stormy and dark night get me down yesterday and celebrated the New Year with some close friends and a bowl of warm spicy chili con carne. One of my friends has a little baby, so I actually spent most of the evening pleasantly making a 4 month year old smile and gurgle. There is nothing as sweet as a baby's freely given smile. After consuming a glass of celebratory champagne and engaging in a long conversation on what makes good TV scifi, my friends left to bravely travel home in the rain and I passed out around 3am.

I woke this morning to an onslaught of new rain. And more rain and still more rain. The wind has raged around our little attic flat for over 2 weeks now and so I was not surprised to see that a New Year's Day walk was out of the question. As the storm lashed against our windows and pummeled the pavement outside, I settled on my New Year's Resolutions for 2014:

1. Write more
2. Read more
3. See my friends and parents more
4. Worry less
5. Get more exercise
6. Concentrate seriously on my photography

Out of all of the above, obviously the hardest one for me is to exercise more (I am lazy) and then perhaps worry less (I am very cerebral). But I figure that the two resolutions might cancel each other out. If I exercise more, the endorphins and physical exertion might lead me to worry less. I immediately started off my resolutions with reading 2 chapters of a Bill Bryson book and then emailing 3 of my friends to arrange meeting up in the next month. Feeling very satisfied with myself but not so much so with the weather outside, I suggested to my husband that we see a movie. When the weather is this bad in the UK, visiting museums or going to the movies or even going back to bed, are the only reasonable options open to a person. My husband opted for the movies and we booked to see The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug at our local cinema.

Off we popped in the wind and rain to catch a bus to the cinema, brandishing our umbrella like a weapon. I was really looking forward to seeing this film for several reasons, but mainly because I loved the first Hobbit film and was curious to see how the story would continue under Peter Jackson's magical direction. I can't actually say I am much of a fan of Tolkien myself, I never enjoyed his books that much, mostly because I was forced to read a few of them for English class in school and if there is one thing that will put you off a piece of literature, it is obsessively studying it in detail for 8 weeks. But I loved the Hobbit and the Lord of The Rings movies for a few simple reasons:

• The Special Effects - when I first saw The Fellowship of The Ring movie, I was in my first year of university. My friends from my dorm and I went to the cinema on lazy Sunday night. I was blown away my the visual effects and scenery. I felt like I was flying in some scenes and going deep underground in others. It was exhilarating. The movie broke visual boundaries and we could not stop excitedly babbling about it for hours afterwards.
• The Soundtrack - all of the Lord of The Rings films (and The Hobbit too) have the most wonderful music composed by Howard Shore. The hobbit themes that accompanies the scenes set in the Shire especially reminds me of England and it's rolling green hills.
• The stories are about lots of short people - dwarves, hobbits, short-arsed humans - as a short person myself, I like stories about short people who are brave and kick ass while being short.
• The films contain strong women - Peter Jackson was wise in adding women to an otherwise male dominated bunch of stories and he embellishes the female characters that do appear in the books. I prefer the female characters in the films and I think that it is appropriate, in this modern day and age, that the films should exhibit more gender equality than Tolkien's novels (which are one sided with mostly male characters).
• The Scenery of New Zealand - Peter Jackson must have done more for the New Zealand tourist industry than anyone else, since his films contain the most breathtaking shots of his home country. Mountains? Check! Grass plains? Check! Snow? Check! Vast lakes? Check! Leafy forests? Check! Great cliffs and waterfalls? Check! Get me on plane to New Zealand pronto! I want to take my camera and go Orc hunting!

Martin Freeman acting his socks off as plucky heroic hobbit, Bilbo Baggins

So you can imagine that this afternoon, I was all geared up for The Hobbit Part 2. I did enjoy it, but it was a lot of action and fight scenes and chases and death-defying stunts and not much dialogue. The scenery was gorgeous as always, Martin Freeman was as charming as Bilbo Baggins as he was last time and there was the nice added inclusion of Benedict Cumberbatch as Smaug the Dragon. He did a great job of hissing out Smaug's greed, pride and villainy through some well written speeches. I couldn't really imagine a dragon talking but Mr Cumberbatch really brought him alive.

Smaug's creepy dragon eye that he fixes upon Bilbo

I did feel a little tense after almost three hours of watching some Orcs pursue and terrorise some Dwarves, who then ended up fleeing a giant fire-breathing dragon. As I watched Bilbo scrabble about in the Mines of Erebor, some doubting thoughts once again surfaced in my mind:

• Why do people always insist on making stories about good vs evil? Surely life is not that simple? Why in these stories are the evil people completely evil, with no trace of any redeeming character traits at all? And why do they look evil? (ie. missing an eye, sharp teeth, hook for a hand, bad hair, disturbingly gravelly voice). Has anyone not heard of a really good looking person being evil? Surely we have examples even in real life of very attractive individuals with good dental care and immaculate haircuts who are complete moral abysses inside.
• What do the evil characters actually get out of being so evil? I understand that Sauron wants to rule the world with the ONE RING and cloak Middle Earth in DARKNESS, but WHY? So that he can eat more chocolate? So he can make everyone do line dancing? What does he plan to do once he has killed all the little Hobbits and built Orcs their own private playground? And how frightened can you be of wizard who is basically just one giant eye?!
• How are the Orcs even alive? Do they have Orc mothers? Orc weddings and Orc baby showers? What do the Orcs get out of following the commands of the evil master, except maybe a pretty ugly death at the hands of Legolas or Gandalf. Are they paid some sort of remuneration for their dastardly deeds? Do they have a union? I have the same problem with Star Wars. The good people are pretty, with nice plaited hair and the evil people are dressed like Storm Troopers or have lots of wrinkles and facial scars. The Dark Side does not seem to be built on anything concrete. Why be Dark? What do you gain from it? These epic battles between good and evil just seem so one dimensional.
• I am sure you are now thinking: Just get a grip Clara! It is only scifi! It does not need to make much sense, just enjoy it! So, I let my doubts go and then another thought arises as I watch the movie: Why do the people of Middle Earth never put safety railings on their incredibly high walkways? What's to stop a drunk elf or a sleepy dwarf from accidentally toppling to their death? For examples, see below:

Careful! Don't trip! There is waterfall beneath you and no railing to hold on to...

Gandalf, you are asking for trouble, that bridge is pretty narrow and there is a demon on it with you....

Even entering the Elf community is fraught with danger, since they neglected to add walls to their little round bridge.

Oh I give up! I will just sit back and enjoy the scenery. 

So anyway now I am back home, the rain has died down, dinner has been cooked and consumed, 1 more chapter of my book has been read, my blog has been written, I tried to do some sit ups and I failed...what next?

I am about to put my feet up, grab a yogurt and some leftover Xmas chocolate and watch Sherlock on BBCIplayer. Martin Freeman and Benedict Cumberbatch twice in one day? I am a lucky girl! Now, Sherlock is a TV show that is sort of rooted in reality? Right? It is set in contemporary London and the hero lives on Baker Street. Right near where I work.....except....Baker Street in the show does not actually look like Baker Street in real life.....oh dear...here I go again!

Is Anyone Awake?

So Christmas is over. All that build up: the parties, the shopping, the decorating, the cooking, the cleaning, the visits to friends, the duty-bound family visits, the seasonal tv guide ringed with programmes to watch, the heating turned up full blast, the oven turned on and mulled wine steaming, the radio blaring out carols for 48 hours non-stop and of course the incense-filled-candle-lit church ceremony at midnight. Phew! Does anyone feel like they need a break? Is anyone actually awake right now? 

In that weird limbo period between Christmas and the start of a New Year, people all around the city have descended into The Christmas Coma. Actually probably not just in London but all over the UK too. Of course some people went back to work on Boxing Day. Those who work in retail or in the emergency services probably worked all through the Christmas period and may have only got one or two days off. For the rest of us who used up the carefully saved annual leave to take off at this seasonal time of year, a Christmas Coma brought on by over-eating and the first feeling of relaxation in about a month of craziness is in full swing.

I have barely been able to stay awake during the whole holiday period. My husband has also been groggy. It started on Christmas eve when we went to Midnight Mass at our local church. We are not religious people and I suppose it is a bit hypocritical of us to attend a church service in an Anglican church when one of us was a raised a Catholic (my husband) and the other is not sure that god even exists (me). But we like the tradition and since we live in a free country and everyone at the church seems pleased to see us, we go every year. The church is a big old drafty building that was built in 1808. But during Midnight Mass, the whole church is lit with hundreds of candles and so it actually gets quite warm. It is considered 'high church' so the vicar sings some of the Bible and she has high clear beautiful voice. The choir is sometimes out of tune, but they are charming and the organ player does occasionally sound like he has been drinking alcohol before he plays the massive organ. Members and staff of the church wear long white robes and carry holy objects around during the ceremony and one guy who is bearded and deeply serious swings the incense around in a small metal ball attached to a metal chain. Sometimes he gets so serious with his incense ball that he swings it high above his head and I fear for the foreheads of the congregation in the pews in the front of church in case he miscalculates the trajectory of his tool and brains them with an enthusiastic swing. 

We love it, we love the rituals, the singing, the lights, the prayers said over a baby in a crib, the hands we shake when we wish peace to our neighbors, the blessing the vicar bestows on your forehead, the big belting carols like 'Oh Come All Ye Faithful' that leave you breathless and gasping and the vicar's timely and wise sermon. This year her sermon was about taking time out of the Christmas rush to reflect and enjoy sitting still just so you can think. A very good message to us all in this time-pressured and hectic modern world we live in. Ironically the Queen' speech (a long standing British tradition is to watch the speech our monarch gives on Christmas Day) contained exactly the same message. In fact I cannot help but suspect that the royal speech writers may have plagiarised our local vicar! 

I do wonder though if it is not a little wrong of me to attend a church service every Christmas when I am not sure of my own spiritual beliefs. I do not think I will ever believe in Christianity a hundred percent, but I do like some of the messages that most religions preach, such as forgiveness and kindness and I can't help but love the rituals involved and the music and art that is made in the name of religion. Who doesn't like Handel's Messiah after all?

But I digress...back to The Coma. The problem with Midnight Mass is that it ends at 12.30am and then we end up back home at 1am, so we aren't sleeping until after 1.15am at the earliest. Then the next day we often have to travel a fair distance to see family and so end up waking up early on Christmas morning. So this leads to a lack of sleep. Add a big Christmas Day meal like the one in the photo above and you have all the ingredients for a blackout: a sleep deprived individual with a full belly. Plus the said individual has just been working hard up until a day or two before Christmas and is only just starting to relax. I have this problem with this almost every holiday I take, I am often so exhausted from working hard before the break and then after a day or two I am so relaxed that I end up feeling intensely sleepy every time I sit down. As I currently write this my husband is on the point of losing consciousness on to the pages of his book on the sofa. The problem with the Christmas Coma is that I feel as if I am actually missing out on valuable free time because I spend so much time snoozing. Most of my friends and family love sleeping. I am sure some of them would spend all day in bed if they could. I know for a fact that my friend Foo, who has recently become a mother and is therefore naturally sleep deprived, would happily give the contents of her bank account of a full night's uninterrupted-by-fretful-baby sleep.

I don't feel that way about the Land of Nod. Don't get me wrong, I have no problem sleeping, not just at the annual Christmas Coma-time but also during the average midweek night. I fall asleep like a toddler or those cute kittens you see in videos on Youtube: immediately and usually flat on to my face. One moment I will be talking about politics or the meaning of life and the next I am out like a light and snoring. It drives my husband mad, mostly because he never gets to actually hear my finished thought on what I believe the meaning of life is. I could sleep all day if we did not own an alarm clock or if didn't have a small bladder to empty. But sleeping just feels like such a waste of time. I know sleep is incredibly important to help repair our bodies and without it we would probably go brain-crazy, but I feel the same way about eating custard and apple crumble. Sure I could do without custard, but I would be pretty miserable if I never got to eat it again in the future. Or listening to Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring or drawing a wrinkly apple with charcoal or baking Chocolate Guinness Cake or taking a really good photograph with a digital SLR camera. My time on this planet is not infinite and I will probably spend a total of 26 years of it sleeping! What a waste! I could be photographing Guinness cakes and listening to inspiring classical music at 2am! People who don't need that much sleep must get a lot more done. Think of Margaret Thatcher, apparently she only had to sleep 4 hours a night. No wonder she became Prime Minister and destroyed most of Britain's rail network and stole my free state-sponsored daily milk in nursery school. She probably snatched it when I was busy sleeping! And on a more risque note, if we all slept less, we could all have more sex! And I am sure everyone would agree with me, that there is NOTHING wrong with THAT idea.

Ah well, since I need at least 7 to 8 hours of sleep a night to function as a walking talking responsible human being, I don't have much choice. I need the sleep. I need the Christmas Coma too, as much as I am loathed to admit it. I need the time to stop, as the vicar preached at Midnight Mass. I need to calm down the frenetic pace of life, to reflect, to lie about and to snooze. And is that not what holidays are for?

On another note don't get me even started on the 46,800hrs of housework that the average woman does in her lifetime! Given the choice of cracking out the hoover or lying in a state of dreamy doziness, I will grab a pillow and chose my bed every time!

Looking down from on High...

Today was the first day of pre-Christmas food shopping at the supermarket next to my home. As it was last year, Chaos reigned. Children cried. Motorists drove badly. Horns were honked. Mince pies sold out. Tiny Sausages were compulsively bought in their thousands. Shoppers yelled at each other and sprouts littered the floor. I watched calmly from the window of my flat.

I guess my feelings of smugness could be called schadenfreude.....

Warmed by Disney's Frozen

Well, it has been a long looong time since I last wrote in this blog. Funnily enough I have been busy (I made my own photo Christmas cards!- I missed the last postal dates for international post - shit! I ate quite a lot of cake! I cleaned the kitchen, I held my best friend's new baby - don't drop her! don't drop her!, I made two deserts for a dinner party and cooked chocolate sea-salt fudge and finished my Christmas shopping!), but I have also felt a little blue in the last few months and a low mood tends to make me lazy when it comes to writing.

I can't explain the reason for feeling melancholy. Sometimes it just comes over me. A little wave of sadness and I am low for a while. I still go to work and see friends and eat dinner, but everything feels a bit muted as if I am doing it all through steamed goggles. Once I come out of my funk (and usually do quite quickly), everything looks sharper and brighter and my creative juices start flowing again. It is the same with photography. I stopped taking photos in November because life got just a bit too stressful. And then I was ill. I must have a very crap immune system since I catch everything that comes along. I was sick for a whole week of my holiday and then sniffled and snuffled my way into work the week after.

But now it is one week before Christmas, I am about to embark on a seasonal break from work until early January and of course the idea of eating, sleeping, reading and watching Christmas movies fills me with a calm sort of joy. The first seasonal thing I did was decorate Christmas cookies at a cookie decorating party. Below are some of creative efforts (I was going for a tartan theme):

Woah! That's a lot of gingerbread....and food colouring.

Once I was into decorating the cookies, I was then in full blown Christmas mode and I started decorating the flat. Unfortunately my track record with Christmas trees is pretty bad - ie. they die. Then they lie around dead for three weeks after New Year until the council comes and picks them up - which is rather disturbing. Imagine a residential street strewn with piles of dead fir trees, lit only by faded yellow street lamps. I half fancy they are going to shuttle jerkily to life and descend upon London like an apocalypse of tree zombies.

But...more to the point Christmas trees are very expensive in my neck of the woods (eg, urban city area with no actual 'natural' woods), so I popped off to Waitrose and bought some fake berry branches. I was not going to let a little thing like a lack of tree stop me. With the help of my mother (an expert at all things Christmassy), we came up with a beautiful, yet beguiling table decoration:

I name it 'The ClaraJean Berry Tree' - with added origami birds.

After decorating the house, attending a cookie party, five Christmas parties and events at work (one of which ended with the whole room smelling of alcohol and my colleagues doing the Macarena at 8pm - much to early in the evening for such cheesy music) and a visit to Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park (complete with rum laced mulled wine and currywurst), I decided it was time to force my husband to sit through one of my favourite Christmas traditions - the obligatory Disney movie! This year I chose Frozen. It seemed appropriate. The heating in our flat has long been dysfunctional and this year two heaters gave up the ghost completely. Kaput. No warmth or interest from landlord to fix the situation. We migrate from room to room dragging our oil radiator on wheels behind us like sad pilgrims. We have blown the yearly-thermal-long-underwear budget and I routinely wear four to five layers of clothes, even in bed. Luckily my husband and I are now used to this state, having lived without heating on and off for more than three years.Someday we will be able to afford our place and fill it with insulation and heat it like the Bahamas whenever we want. Until that day, we visit the local multiplex regularly to indulge in their utterly environmentally-unfriendly habit of roasting a movie audience.

Frozen is a great Disney movie. It has all the classic elements of what you wish for in an animated production from Disney - a love story, family values, a plucky heroine, a sarcastic hero, some pleasing musical numbers, beautiful animation and a talking snowman. Who doesn't love a talking snowman? I also really enjoyed the design of the world the movie portrays, which appeared to be both Swedish and Norwegian. Even my husband, who professes to be not interested in children's films, yet eyeballs them with gusto whenever I persuade him to watch one with me, loved it. The whole experience was made all the more charming by a little girl in the front of the cinema who giggled hilariously whenever the talking snowman, Olaf, appeared on screen (see! I told you! Everyone likes a talking snowman!). Before long, my husband and I were giggling at the little girl giggling. One of my favourite scenes of the movie was this one.

For those of you watching on a mobile device: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lpzvS0ATxB4

I have a Swedish colleague at work and she even finds this funny. 'He's Swedish!' she exclaimed when I showed it to her! I spent the rest of the day going 'Yoohoo' at her, which she seemed to enjoy, until I was finally silenced by a mince pie.
But of course one of the main parts of a Disney movie is the music. I can sing from memory many of the Disney songs I heard as a child, including from films such as Bambi and Dumbo (which I must have seen when I was four or five). The big number from Frozen was 'Let It Go' performed by Idina Menzel (famous for her role in Wicked, the Musical and Glee). Idina has a pretty powerful voice and I felt that she fitted the character of the Snow Queen Elsa perfectly.

For those of you on a mobile advice, you can access the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=moSFlvxnbgk

I loved the visual effects on the big cinema screen during this scene. Several people in the audience swayed back and forth during this song and I was sure someone was going to spring up and pounce around the aisle to this musical number. I also loved how this story was set in the same universe as the Disney film Tangled. What can I say? I love continuity in films! In November there was some controversy surrounding the design of the female characters in Frozen. Feminists objected to their large doe-like eyes and their tiny waists. I suppose they thought it would give little girls an unrealistic idea of what a female body should look like. I can see the point they were making, but since it is animation, most of what is in the film is exaggerated anyway and unrealistic. There is a talking snowman for god's sake! It is a cartoon and designed to be fun. I think if we want start a dialogue on bad female body-image then I think we should look at the front covers of women's magazines and the amount of photo-shopping that is done to produce those images. The female characters in Frozen were the stars of the show. They were brave heroines and they took charge of their destinies in a far more liberated way than Cinderella or Snow White ever did in previous Disney adaptations.

All can say is Well Done Disney! I will be singing 'Let it Go' in the shower tomorrow!

Mid-Week Video

Oh, it is that time of the week when you need a pick me up. How about a cat dressed as a shark on a roomba? Yep. Job done.

For those of you reading this on a mobile device: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tLt5rBfNucc

November Photo Challenge Day 3: Sunday Breakfast

Here it is! Day 3 of my photo challenge and the theme was Sunday Breakfast. This breakfast was made and delivered to me in bed by my lovely husband.. Peanut butter and honey on toast. Yum!