June L

Literature, Quotations

Literary Quotation of the Week

March 25, 2023March 24, 2023 June L

“There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea”

(Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady)

Humour

Don’t mess with the woodpigeons.

March 23, 2023August 18, 2023 June L

My furboy (who has his first birthday next week) is constantly barking at the woodpigeons who are regular visitors to our garden. Indeed, there is a nest in our wisteria which I think they are sussing out for this year’s brood. Nothing energises my furboy more than launching himself out of the patio doors in the direction of any fence which bears a woodpigeon and barking, barking, barking (amazingly my neighbours are very tolerant).

The other week, he took his favourite blue ball outside to play. When he came back indoors, he left it on the lawn. He is not good at bringing his toys back in again and, as it was snowing, I decided I would wait and collect the ball later in the afternoon before it got dark.

Then the ball went missing. My husband and I went out to look for it, and it had literally vanished. Mystifying.

Furboy has missed his blue ball, but we have managed to keep him occupied with his yellow and green squeaky toy balls instead. Then, today, I happened to look up at one of my neighbour’s gutters and saw…….. the blue ball! It looks like one of the birds (probably a woodpigeon as we have so many of them) has swooped into the garden, taken the ball, and dropped in in the gutter of our neighbour’s house, out of furboy’s reach. I reckon it is revenge on furboy for all the barking he does at them – even though the birds just sit and look at him (they probably think “what a stupid dog!”). These neighbours have not long moved in and we haven’t met them yet, so I feel I can’t go and ask them to get it for me.

So, I think blue ball is a loss. We may have to get him a new one for his birthday.

General

I need a little (me) time…..

March 23, 2023August 18, 2023 June L

Daily writing prompt

What do you wish you could do more every day?

View all responses

I sit here writing this blog after having spent the past six hours typing up copious volumes of notes for a section of my PhD chapter. There are workmen bashing away upstairs fitting our new bathroom, and the dogs are going spare at them passing the glass living room door on their way in and out of the corridor. I am thinking of the tutees I have to teach this evening and am trying to make up revision schedules for them. I also have to help get the house ready for selling (almost there now), and sort out the garden. I also have to plan dinner, cancel my wisdom tooth removal consultation…..again….. and carry out a series of niggly little jobs which all add up to minutes and hours in my daily schedule.

What I wish I could do more every day is……….enjoy some more ‘me time’.

My ‘me time’ is very precious to me and I get grumpy if I am deprived of it. That 30 – 60 minutes each day to chill, read, do some sewing, play the piano, notch up a few more kilometres on the rowing machine, or watch Netflix seems so elusive. Other things like to jostle their way into my daily life so that, by the time I eventually collapse onto the sofa at 10pm (after I finish tutoring) I am lucky if I stay awake. I got a new cross-stitch project in the post today (I’m so excited to do it!) and as I gaze at the lovely picture of Lake Como I wonder when I will get the time to do it. I have about 30 more projects in my craft cupboard waiting in my to-do queue. I know I should *make* time for these things, but that isn’t always easy; besides, if I do sit down to enjoy a few minutes to myself, I feel guilty for not doing other things, so my ‘me time’ is abandoned. “I’ll make sure I take an hour tomorrow”, I tell myself. And that never happens. One could argue that, in the time I am writing this blog, I could be enjoying some ‘me time’, but I consider spilling words onto a screen as a good form of therapy (even if nobody reads them, which is totally fine by me!). Plus, at this particular moment in time, it is hard to relax with workmen about and dogs barking continuously (now where are my noise-cancelling headphones?).

I have now deleted Facebook and Twitter off my phone – I rarely use Twitter anyway and will be deleting it soon – but have kept Instagram and Pinterest. I have also made it hard for myself to look at social media on my laptop too. Hours scrolling through other peoples’ posts is time wasted – I want to use this time more productively for my own benefit. I kind of feel that I’m a bit old for social media now anyway, to be honest, and am actually a Luddite when it comes to online communication. I’d rather send cards/letters to friends or phone them for a chat. More about my increasingly antagonistic relationship with social media in another blog in due course. And don’t get me started on Chat GPT (I’ll blog about my thoughts on this on Tuesday).

I think I need to be stricter with my daily routines. I don’t like planners – they are too rigid and I like to live life as it happens. Maybe if I determined that on such-and-such an afternoon, I will do this/that, then I shouldn’t allow other things to elbow their ways ahead of my ‘afternoon off’ and postpone them instead. I do tend to put other people’s demands above my own which is probably part of the problem.

When I was a research nurse, I had a picture beside my desk in my office which bore the slogan “Sometimes I just sits and thinks and sometimes I just sits”. I need to make more time to “just sits”, chill, or do something I enjoy doing. As a very young child, I would spend hours sitting on my house staircase just looking out of the Velux window at the white clouds drifting past in the blue sky. I need to be very young me again. Maybe this could be my “Spring Resolution”.