Prepared

I’ve written here before about how I resist the pressure to begin thinking about Christmas as soon as the Summer holidays are over, so you can imagine how I smiled when my friend Dorothy posted this to her FB page last week.  Nevertheless, there comes a time when it’s no good maintaining the denial any longer.  Things need to be done and preparations have to be made, especially with a week of gallivanting ahead of me.

I went to the Farmers’ Market on Saturday morning, then, with the intention of getting myself into the mindset.  You know, getting a bit of a jingle on and trying to motivate myself to begin.  It’s not that I don’t like Christmas – quite the reverse.  That’s why I try to keep it to December and savour the delights!

One of the first projects of the season is always to make our Christmas cards.  Since we were first married, I’ve always made them myself and each year I can’t quite settle until I’ve decided what to do.  With a small seasonal glimmer from the market, then, I got out the stuff and set to work.  They’re not quite finished, but the messy bit is done

Mindful of the fact that we’ll need to take Edward and Amy’s Christmas cake to London with us this week, I had already put the dried fruit to soak in rum whilst shopping for all the other ingredients.   With everything to hand, I had no further excuses for exercising my right arm and a wooden spoon to get it all mixed and into the oven.

Four and a half hours later and the kitchen was filled with that unmistakeable aroma.  What better way to get into the spirit of the season?  I sat down last evening and felt I’d accomplished a fair bit this weekend, then, and made a good start.

Except.

It dawned on me this morning that it really will soon be Advent.

I’d better get that one sorted too, then.

November 21st today.  I think this must be a record.

Hooked again

About ten years ago, my Mum and I were perusing stuff we might watch on TV together and stumbled upon The Gilmore Girls on DVD (or it might even have been VHS?)  In no time at all, we were hooked, though my Mum had trouble following some of the time.

They do talk awfully fast.

But the quirky characters and the storylines hit all the right spots and the series became a firm favourite with my hero and I too.  We watched avidly until the end of the final series, feeling sad that it had come to an end, whilst appreciating that it really couldn’t last forever.

Somewhere in there, we learned that Mary was a fan as well and before long, Gilmore Girls references were making their way into our conversations; so Mary would ask if the place we stayed was anything like The Cheshire Cat Inn or giggle if we mentioned Friday Night Dinner.

But with the show coming to a sad end with the infamous Season 7, Lorelai and Rory faded from our lives and we moved onto other favourites.  Borgen won its way to our hearts, we watched House of Cards in its American setting and during our road trip TV binges, grew to love Modern Family.  Then we discovered The Good Wife and suddenly, a familiar face pops up.

Hey, wasn’t he Rory’s boyfriend?   I googled and discovered that yes, Matt Czuchry, who plays Cary Agos did indeed play Logan Huntzberger.  Oh, how we still missed the Gilmore Girls, we said, as on more than one occasion, I suggested it might be time to begin to watch from the beginning again, on DVD.  After all, we had the full set somewhere, alongside the box sets of ‘Allo ‘Allo, The Golden Girls, The West Wing and Northern Exposure.

But in the meantime, Netflix had come along.  BBC iPlayer and Sky catch up services  meant that we no longer missed any of our favourite shows and an upgrade to our broadband made streaming TV a realistic alternative. 

And look what appeared on Netflix earlier this year!  Suddenly, we are invited to return to Stars Hollow and pretend season 7 never happened.  The original writers are back on track and four extended episodes will draw the show to a proper conclusion, once and for all, this November.

Well, it seems as though we (and Mary) are not the only ones who have been missing Stars Hollow, for a plethora of websites have popped up and the trailer has created yet more excitement.  Googling any aspect of the show – Stars Hollow, for example - leads to a wealth of information, a Gilmore Girls Instagram feed offered some insider jokes, there are countless fansites and a few coffee shops turned into Luke’s for the day.

And how have my hero and I been preparing?  By going right back to the beginning and watching an episode on Netflix each night!  Somehow, we just couldn’t bring ourselves to binge watch all seven series, so we have been taking our time and rediscovering Stars Hollow all over again.  I’m not sure we’re going to get to the end in time for the new episodes on the 25th November, but we’ll give it a good try.  We are currently coming to the (uncomfortable) end of Series Five, having watched the penultimate episode last evening.

So please.  Bear with us.  We have 45 episodes to fit into the next 25 days!

No time to go shopping for ephemera, but how funny was it when this dropped into my inbox the other day?!

Love it!

Not me

It happens almost every time I go to take a look at what’s happening on Pinterest.

As my eyes scan the page they fall on that name.

Gillian Boyd.

As soon as I came across her, I simply had to click “follow”.  Fortunately, she pins some rather interesting pages and it’s clear that we share some common interests.

Recently, though, she’s been pinning country cottages just like those down our lane.  I can’t get excited about those!

I’d like to know more about her, so I find myself looking at her other boards, wondering about her interest in fashion, her age and lifestyle.  I’m a bit spooked by her, to be honest.  Because for the first 27 years of my life, I was Gillian Boyd.

It’s a fairly unusual name, I thought; well, at least, I’d never come across another until now.  Growing up in Hull in the late 1950s/early60s,  I don’t think I even met another Gillian, let alone a Boyd I wasn’t related to.  I think the first clue that I wasn’t unique was when I received my first driving licence and noticed I wasn’t xxxx-01 but xxxx-09 or something. 

We get attached to our names though, don’t we?  Gillian Boyd still trips off my tongue easily, even though I have not been generally known by either name since we’ve been married.  But my attention is immediately caught by the sound of “Gillian!”, spoken in that same tone as my Mum would use all those years ago.  Because somewhere, underneath the layers of identity I’ve acquired along the way, beneath Gill and Gillie, Mrs Thomas and Miss Boyd, the original Gillian Boyd is still there, just the same as she always was.

But it’s not me.

I realise I could google her.  I think I have identified which Gillian Boyd has created the pinterest board I follow, because needless to say, there are at least half a dozen others out there.  But somehow, it’s sufficient to settle into an easy peace, secure in the knowledge that she’s fine; that she has no more of a monopoly on the name than I ever had and that she’s using the name well.  Because it’s a fine name, after all.  I don’t think I shall want to use it again regularly, so I don’t mind that she does.  It’d be a shame to waste it.

I’ll still do a little double take when I come across it, though.

When we were last in Valparaiso

(one way to begin a story!) we came across something fascinating in the Vina del Mar museum

I listened to our guide tell us a little about this polynesian seafarers’ chart as we passed swiftly through the museum, returning to take a closer look and to think about it.  I commented on my blog that day how such non-verbal interpretations really do pique my interest and added a few notes to my journal together with my intention to find out more.  As is the way of things, however, over a period of weeks travelling, the list of subjects to investigate further gets increasingly longer and some things just get overlooked.

Until…

My hero was sitting reading last evening. 

I know.

But turning the page, look what he came across:

An article about those stick charts!

Now one of the challenges in finding out more about them was my inability to read the caption in the museum and the scant information I had at the time.  Now, I could google “Marshall Island Stick Charts” and find out all I wish to know.

There’s a whole new language for me to learn: rilib, kaelib and bungdockerik swells and there are mattang, meddo and rebbelib charts.  I look forward to sitting and reading more, to following up one or two links and extending my knowledge of such things.  I may be inspired to create something along these lines for myself, just to see how it could work.

What gently intrigues me is the description of the concept in one of the many online articles as “lost knowledge”.  Just how much knowledge have we lost along the way?  

A child of the Autumn

Arriving home after a couple of weeks away, we were greeted by the usual pile of post.  Most of it went straight in the recycling but one envelope caught my eye and I hung onto it.

With an October birthday, Autumn is “my” time of the year, but during one of those wardrobe colour sessions with a very talented counsellor, I think I was heard to say that if I turned out to be an Autumn kind of person in terms of colour, I’d give up.  Googling images of Autumn just now produced the usual selection – all traditional leafy pictures in a range of orange, browns and yellows.

You see my primary school uniform was brown and primrose yellow and I hated it from the moment I saw it.  I was a Brownie too, so even when I wasn’t in my school uniform, I still couldn’t get away from those awful colours.  On going to grammar school, I was glad to leave it behind but it was only a slight improvement, for that school uniform was maroon.  Why couldn’t we have navy blue or bottle green like everyone else?

Back to the National Trust Autumn catalogue which was in the pile of post, though.  Rather different from the cliched countryside images I’d expect to see on their publications, isn’t it?  Not a speck of brown and yellow in sight.  Following through to their website, with “designs inspired by untamed heathlands and moody landscapes”, I found several things I quite liked.  Bravo National Trust for catching my eye with something a little different from the norm – or did I just fall for their device to capture a new audience?

 

Anyway, my eye was attuned to this alternative Autumn palette as I caught up with a few favourite blogs, including Lia Griffiths whose palette of plum and saffron also appealed to me.  Well, students of colour theory would immediately identify the complementary colour scheme going on there and wouldn’t be surprised that it works so well.  But yay!  no orange!

The BBC website had a section on Autumn poetry, illustrated with photographs including the one above.  Most were the usual leafy landscapes, but this one appealed to me, in spite of the yellows and oranges because they are offset by the navy blue.

Perhaps I’m finding that I am an Autumn girl after all?

Because although I still wouldn’t wear sunshine yellow or marmalade orange, I do wear citrine and purple and perhaps this year, I could be tempted by that deep teal blue?

How interesting is it to observe these colour trends change?   And having noticed it, I find it fascinating to see how it all falls into place.