Here, I guess …
There’s a trick to the ‘graceful exit’. It begins with the vision to recognize when a job, a life stage, or a relationship is over and let it go. It means leaving what’s over without denying its validity or its past importance to our lives. It involves a sense of future, a belief that every exit line is an entry, that we are moving up, rather than out.
[Ellen Goodman]
Jilly over at jillysheep has prompted me to think about what I might want to achieve in 2010. This is not something I normally do, as I have always been content to drift with the tide and see what washes up.
But in 2010 I would like to:
That list was a joke! Yes, I would like to do all those things but the chances of achieving them are at best 1 in 14 million (ie. the chance of winning the lottery at any one attempt. If I win the lottery (odds over the year probably 300 in 14 million) all except #2, #3 and #10 become relatively easy.
OK, so let’s be realistic. What do I stand some chance of achieving?
And if I actually manage to achieve half of that lot I should be satisfied.
I don’t make New Year’s Resolutions – that’s just setting oneself up to fail, because they are always so unrealistic – so I’m not going to start this year and I’m not even going to commit to trying to achieve any of the above. They are what I would like to achieve. It’s a “wants list”, not a “must achieve or else list”. One reason I took early retirement was to get away from the incessant round of unachievable “must achieve or else” objectives. That way come madness and depression. 2010 is about relaxing and finding a life again.
Happy New Year to everyone!
Please don’t go out celebrating and get frostbite. 🙂
When something can be read without effort, great effort has gone into its writing.
[Enrique Jardiel Poncela, Spanish playwright and novelist, 1901-1952]
By courtesy of quoteland.com.
Today, 21 December, is Yule, the Germanic peoples’ mid-winter festival held on the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year – and doesn’t it feel like it this year with snow falling, as I type, across much of the UK. Wikipedia has a reasonable summary of the origins of Yule – there are others here and here – so I won’t repeat them except to say that like most pre-Christian festivals it was a time of feasting – indeed in many traditions it was the major feast of the year. And like many such events it was also a health and fertility rite which has descended to us in the form of Wassail, only on this occasion it is predicated around rebirth – the rebirth of the sun from it’s winter retreat and thus hope for the year to come.
Most religions have their mid-winter festival of rebirth and or light. Light to lighten the darkness of winter and celebrate the rebirth of the sun, the giver of life. Hence the bonfire traditions, the burning of the Yule log (yes, originally a big log, not a chocolate cake!), the Scandinavian feast of St Lucia, etc. So the old pre-Christian Yule has become assimilated by the Christian church, along with the Roman Saturnalia, St Lucia and New Year to make their feast of Christmas.
So in concelebration with our wise, pagan forebears I wish you all
Find a guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot,
who calls you back when you hang up on him,
who will lie under the stars and listen to your heartbeat,
or will stay awake just to watch you sleep …
wait for the boy who kisses your forehead,
who wants to show you off to the world when you are in sweats,
who holds your hand in front of his friends,
who thinks you’re just as pretty without makeup on.
One who is constantly reminding you of how much he cares
and how lucky his is to have you …
The one who turns to his friends and says, ‘that’s her.’[Author unknown]
These ambiguities, redundances, and deficiences recall those attributed by Dr Franz Kuhn to a certain Chinese encyclopedia entitled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge. On those remote pages it is written that animals are divided into
(a) those that belong to the Emperor,
(b) embalmed ones,
(c) those that are trained,
(d) suckling pigs,
(e) mermaids,
(f) fabulous ones,
(g) stray dogs,
(h) those that are included in this classification,
(i) those that tremble as if they were mad,
(j) innumerable ones,
(k) those drawn with a very fine camel’s hair brush,
(l) et cetera,
(m) those that have just broken a flower vase,
(n) those that resemble flies from a distance.[Jorge Luis Borges in his essay “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”. Quoted in Finding Moonshine by Marcus du Sautoy]
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
[HL Mencken]
Somehow this has a worry ring of veracity in these trying times.
H/T Julian Allason
This week’s Flickr meme was an alphabet meme … a word for each letter of the alphabet (but we were allowed to drop one letter to make a 5×5 square. Of course yours truly has to do it all — and put a different (I hope) slant on it by doing the English comic alphabet as first produced by the variety duo Clapham and Dwyer in the 1930s. So I give you the not entirely original …
A for ‘Orses
B for Mutton
C for Yourself
D for Dumb
E for Brick
F for Vescent
G for Police
H for a Beer
I for Novello
J for Oranges
K for Restaurant
L for Leather
M for Sis’
N for Lope
O for a Pee
P for Relief
Q for a Bus
R for Askey
S for Teeda
T for Two
U for Me
V for La France
W for a Bob
X for Breakfast
Y for Husband
Z for Breezes
The two centre images are the first and last Greek letters, Alpha and Omega, so beloved of Christian symbolism.
As always the photographs are not mine so please click on individual links below to see each artist/photostream. This mosaic is for a group called My Meme, where each week there is a different theme and normally 12 questions to send you out on a hunt to discover photos to fit your meme. It gives you a chance to see and admire other great photographers’ work out there on Flickr.
1. Horse Eating Hay, 2. Assorted Beef & Mutton satay, 3. The day the little rocket hit a tiny little planet, 4. Pennsylvania Institution for the Deaf and Dumb, 5. Heaved bricks, Glencoe between Reading Way and Kings Way, 6. Sweet and Bubbly, 7. Chief of POlice, 8. Felix having a beer., 9. Ivor Novello Plaque, 10. Jaffa Oranges, 11. Caff, 12. Gerald Tobin Hells Angel Funeral , 13. Tiny? Bite me! (101/365), 14. A (alpha), 15. Omega, 16. embroidery envelope 1, 17. Mannekin Pis, Brussels, Belgium, 18. Cafe Achteck (Pissoir) am Chamissoplatz, 19. Bus Queue, 20. British Film Icons, 21. Ferula asa-foetida, 22. ~Tea for two~, 23. 365 day one hundred & fourty-nine: will you for me, 24. vive la france, 25. 100708_Shilling_1955, 26. Egg for breakfast on pain complet in France., 27. husband and wife, 28. zephyr
Created with fd’s Flickr Toys
More amusing snippets from recent online BBC News items. If you wrote most of these in a nvel you would be accused of being unreasonably inventive.
11 June
Gabonese have turned out to see the body of the late President Omar Bongo arrive back home from Spain, where he died on Monday (8 June).
11 June
The Rubble Club has been set up to help architects through the “trauma” of seeing one of their creations demolished in their own lifetime.
11 June
A man with a fetish for Ugg boots has admitted using the internet to harass a group of schoolgirls.
11 June
Acer chairman JT Wang strenuously denied any suggestion Acer was copying someone else’s invention. “We are not copying,” he said in an interview at … “Innovation is improving on a competitor’s product. That is still innovation for consumers’ value.”
12 June
A burned-out ice-cream van is among 100 works Banksy has installed at Bristol’s museum. “This is the first show I’ve ever done where taxpayers’ money is being used to hang my pictures up rather than scrape them off … many people will say: ‘You should have gone to Specsavers'”, Banksy added.
14 June
As I went closer, I realised with delight that while they had got the tune off pat, the words were just slightly off the mark. Standing tall and proud, the children were calling on the Almighty to “sieve the Queen and her setter, Victoria.” … A French friend of mine, preparing a few snacks to hand round at an English drinks party, implored her guests to help themselves to nipples.
18 June
“Man who catch fly with chopstick accomplish anything.”