Category Archives: Lifestyle

Barking Mad

After watching A Different Breed on ABC2 on Friday night, I felt reassured that – contrary to what some of my friends may think – I don’t spoil or pamper my dog. He eats dog food, he sleeps in his own bed, doesn’t wear clothes or bejewelled accessories, and I’m not training him to dance, ghost-hunt or skateboard.

Other dog owners think and do things quite differently as I discovered from this hugely entertaining British documentary. It really made me laugh. Talk about projecting human qualities, emotions and needs onto dogs!

One woman left her micro-managed and ultra-pampered dachshund in the care of a male couple, who had two dogs of their own. She left strict instructions that the dog was to have chicken for breakfast, scrambled eggs for lunch and bread and butter for dinner, and that meals were to be served up at specific times. Oh, the rumpus when she discovered that her dog had eaten a few grains of dog biscuit from one of the other dog’s bowls. His palate would be forever tainted.

Then there was Vinnie Jones, a clairvoyant dachsie with a sparkling diamante collar, who, his owners claimed, could sniff out ghosts. His owners took him out with seasoned spectre sleuth and dog communicator John Pope-de-Locksley. “He says he saw a disembodied head floating around,” said Locksley translating for Vinnie. And, get this, they went looking for a ghost called Scratching Fanny who is believed to reside in Cock Lane in London’s East End.

Airedale Ted belongs to a single woman called Lucy, who confessed she considers him as an ersatz boyfriend. So much so that Ted notices when she puts on a sexy nightdress and licks her legs. Oh dear… Lucy goes the extra mile and has tasted all Ted’s food (dog chocolate, she says, tastes like sugary congealed fat) and gives him acupuncture from a home kit to ease his bad leg. His health care routine also involves regular faecal analysis. Surely it’s only a matter of time before she carts him off for canine colonics?

Narrated by Sue MacGregor, a former BBC Radio 4 presenter, all these truth-is-stranger-than-fiction stories were delivered in a marvellously deadpan voice with just the right measure of irony. What made it even funnier is that some of the dogs ‘spoke’ their thoughts in gruff Welsh-sounding accents. Lucy’s Ted was heard to grumble as he was dragged upstairs for his acupuncture.

Over at BBC London, radio presenters Joanne and Anna present a weekly show, Barking at the Moon with the help of their dogs Matilda, an English bulldog and Molly, a miniature Bull Terrier. Theirs are the only dogs allowed in the BBC. With a mix of doggy tunes, snoring and barking from Molly and Matilda and interviews with dog enthusiasts and chat about ‘dogabilia’, the show is a runaway success and attracts over half a million listeners every week. The documentary caught up with Joanne and Anna as they tried to teach their ‘furkids’ how to skateboard. Thanks to the peanut butter smeared on the board, Matilda did seem to be getting the hang of it.

Also featured were a mother and daughter team who run an upmarket pet boutique in Chelmsford. Here you can find bespoke leads and collars, tailored clothes and more! They cater for all kinds of pets and were recently asked to create a bandana for a giant snail.

The programme ended with footage from the ‘Heelwork to Music’ competition finals at Crufts held at the Kennel Club in Coventry. The winner was dressed as a country farmer, and he and his dog danced to the Wurzels’ 1976 rendition of The Combine Harvester. If you’ve never heard of the Wurzels or their catchy ditty click on the link below. And if you do know it, happy reminiscing!

A Different Breed was just 45 minutes long and I enjoyed every minute of it with my dog Bertie snoring gently – almost purring – beside me on my sofa. As I said, I don’t spoil my dog. Apart from sometimes letting him up on the sofa…

Toodles, Poodles!

I just heard a dog bark on that big screen thing with moving images...

I just heard a dog bark on that big screen thing with moving images…

Singing Away the Blues

A couple of weeks ago a literary agent based in the States expressed interest in my book, Slowing Down in the Fast Lane: from Adventure to Zen and Everything in Between, and asked me to send the full manuscript. She seemed to love the concept and I had high hopes that she might want to represent me. On Monday morning, however, my hopes were dashed. Ouch! She emailed to let me know that she didn’t feel that the A-Z format worked “for the necessary emotional journey a reader must take with the author in a work of memoir.” A publisher in Queensland who loved my writing and humour said pretty much the same thing. It wasn’t so much the rejection that left me a bit flat but the thought, that after so much writing, re-writing, perfecting and polishing, I might have to embark on a total re-write.

But, of course, attempting to write a book and get it published is rarely a straightforward process. And it requires a great deal of patience and perseverance. On Monday I was lacking in both and ended up humming that Boomtown Rats song I don’t like Mondays ! That’s the thing about being self-employed, there’s no one to whinge to; you have to jolly yourself along. I’m mostly very good at motivating myself but nothing seemed to be flowing at the start of the week. It didn’t help that work was a bit thin on the ground in typical feast and famine freelance fashion.

Thankfully, however, Monday night is choir night. I decided to leave my hangdog day (and my beloved puppy dog) at home and throw myself into the singing. Our usual repertoire ranges from African harmonies, negro spiritual and chain gang songs to Russian ballads, Celtic folk tunes and sea shanties with a bit of contemporary stuff thrown in. But before we start signing, we loosen up with a workout for mind, body, voice and spirit which involves a series of meditative, breathing and vocal exercises followed by a bit of stretching and dancing around. How good it was this week to do the tongue sticking out routine – blahhhhhh, bluuuhhhh– and let go of the day’s frustration.

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At the end of the evening our Choir Director Richard came up to me and – quite unprompted – said: “Hello Charlotte! Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” Was he a mind reader? Did he know that I had spent the day battling book and impending big birthday blues? As in, I am halfway through my life – if not more – and, well, you know, dum de dum. What do I have to show for it? So ran my inner judge and critic on Monday. “Think about your triumphs and don’t listen to the negative chatter that comes up at three in the morning,” suggested Richard. I was about to come up with a great long list of all the non-triumphs (it’s so easy to default to that) but then realised that taking a huge leap of faith and moving to Australia nearly ten years ago has to be my biggest triumph to date.

I returned home with a deep sense of gratitude that I belong to such a wonderful choir full of like-minded, supportive and creative souls – it’s no coincidence we’re called Soul Song. And then I remembered two other huge triumphs. I took part in a solo singing workshop earlier this year and sang a Buena Vista Social Club song in Spanish to the rest of the group (amazing in itself as not so long ago I’d have almost preferred to strip naked than sing a solo), and then at our recent choir retreat, I learnt how to use a microphone and experimented with the same song – giving it my all. It really is never too late to change your life and find your voice.

Feeling the fear and doing it anyway...

Feeling the fear and doing it anyway…

As for the book, I’m going to see if I get any other bites before I change the format. I didn’t really set out to write a memoir, more a humorous anthology of life adventures… and misadventures. Perhaps I’ve been marketing it in the wrong way. I might take a straw poll and get some feedback in a future blog. Who knows, perhaps by the next zero birthday, I will be a published author.

I wannabe published...

I wannabe published…

Life Laundry and Armchair Travel No. 2

Continuing on from my last post in which I returned to Japan courtesy of clearing out my cupboards and sticking in photos from a 2009 trip, I’m now up to my second day in Kyoto.

Before travelling to Japan, I had booked a day with a Goodwill Guide through the Japanese National Tourism Organization (JNTO). It was (sadly there is no longer any mention of it on the JNTO website) an excellent scheme that offered a much more personal insight into Japan than you would get from an official tourist guide. Like many of the Goodwill Guides, Kazuko, married with two grown-up sons, was to keen to share her city and surrounds as well as to practise her English. All I had to do was cover her travel costs, museum entry fees and any meals and refreshments we had together. And best of all I didn’t have to work anything out – no maps, guidebooks, directions, ticket machines, Japanese lettering or indecipherable menus. Bliss!

My Goodwill Guide Kazuko

My Goodwill Guide Kazuko

We started by taking the train to the nearby town of Uji, home of green tea and of the oldest tea shop in Japan. After whirling round the Byodoin Temple, a UNESCO site famous for its Phoenix Hall, so-called because the building resembles a phoenix with outstretched wings, we went to a tea ceremony at the Municipal Tea House. Kazuko explained that the tea ceremony (sado) combines the ideals of Zen Buddhism with the uniquely Japanese concept of wabi (simple beauty). It’s certainly a highly ritualised and choreographed performance, one that makes sticking a tea bag in a cup, boiling the kettle and wolfing down a biscuit seem very basic.

Byodo-in Temple

Byodo-in Temple

I watched how the hostess performed each task with great precision: the boiling of the water; the folding of the napkin; the whisking of the Matcha (a very strong powdered green tea); the clockwise rotating of the bowl; and the bowing before serving the tea. Performed with grace and elegance in a simply furnished room – the flower arrangement and painted scroll change according to the season – we drank cherry blossom drop tea out of cups painted with a blossom motif and ate a sweetmeat called cherry blossom cloud.

Blossom-themed decor in the Tea House

Blossom-themed decor in the Tea House

From Uji, it was a short train ride to Kyoto’s Fushimi district, where we switched our attention from tea to something a little more fortifying at the Gekkeikan Okura Sake Museum. Highlights included western-influenced poster adverts from around 1900, the miniature ceremonial vessels produced for the Coronation of Emperor Hirohito in November 1928, and my first experience of a Japanese toilet with a heated seat. Still feeling the effects of jet-lag (readers of my last post will remember that Mrs Uemura at the guesthouse hauled me out of a deep, time zone-challenged sleep for breakfast at 8am on the dot), I took the opportunity to indulge in a micro moment of mindfulness atop the heated loo seat. It was pleasantly soothing to sit down and rest in the warmth.

Lunch – excellent terikyaki chicken – afforded another rest and, suitably refreshed, we then walked through the Fushimi Passage, a bustling arcade selling everything from bicycles, tea, pickled vegetables and second-hand clothes to Yuinou, symbolic gifts exchanged between the families of betrothed couples.

Our last stop was the Fushimi-Inari shrine. Dedicated to the gods of rice in the eighth century, a mass of orange-red Torii, pillared gateways, each bearing the inscription of a donor, snake up the mountain and through the woods. Considered as messengers of inari, the god of rice and cereal crops, stone foxes with red votive bibs carrying the key to the granary are dotted throughout the shrine grounds. Even the votive tablets are fox-shaped.

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On my last day in Kyoto, I ran around seeing more temples and shrines: Kiyomizu-Dera (lots of tourist buses and giggling school girls buying lucky charms and trinkets; Chion-In (home to the largest bell in Japan – it needs 17 monks to ring it at New Year); and Nanzen-ji with its magnificent sliding door paintings in gold leaf.

By lunchtime it was a relief to sit down in a cafe. I ordered the speciality of boiled tofu, which arrived in a bain-marie style dish. The waiter was highly amused that I didn’t understand about waiting for it to come to the boil and, instead, tried to eat it cold.

Better when cooked...

Better when cooked…

Never mind, I got the hang of it in the end and concluded my visit with another heated loo seat sojourn. This loo was even more sophisticated with options including washing, deodorising and noise muffling – the latter excellent for anyone who has ever suffered shy bladder syndrome. Could I import one back to Australia I wondered?

An all-singing, all-dancing Japanese loo

An all-singing, all-dancing Japanese loo

Then it was time to get a taxi back to the ryokan, grab my luggage and squeeze on to a rush-hour bus to the train station. I just managed to get my big case on board before the doors hissed shut. Never have I been so squashed (and I travelled regularly on the London Underground for nine years) or so very unpopular. Where otherwise I had found the Japanese unfailing polite, here the passengers frowned, stuck their elbows out, tsked and tut-tutted their annoyance. People work crazily long hours in Japan – so much so there’s even a word, karoshi, for working yourself to death. So I can imagine how infuriating it must have been when a foreign traveller with lots of luggage clogged up the aisle of the bus…

On arrival at the station, I practically fell out of the crowded bus but, this time at least, avoided ending up in an electronics store. Armed with snacks for the journey (the boiled tofu really didn’t quite hit the spot, I collapsed on the Shinkansen, destination Tokyo, just after 5pm.

Life Laundry and Armchair Travel No. 1

I’ve been doing a bit of life laundry on and off all year. It started with clearing out my study and cupboards full of bumph: newspaper articles; clippings; old diaries; travel memorabilia; birthday and other greetings cards; notes on this, that and the other – lots of scrawl in lots of notebooks – and I’ve now got to the photos.

Being an old-fashioned kind of girl, I still get my photos printed off and stick them in an album. I’m not sure who is ever going to look at them but I’ve enjoyed doing a bit of retrospective armchair travel. In April 2009, I detoured via Japan on my way back to Australia from the UK.

After an emotional goodbye to my family in England and a glorious drive to Manchester Airport over the Pennines complete with daffodils, green fields, rugged moorland and country pubs, I flew to Helsinki, where I rushed around on a brief 22-hour stopover before flying onto Osaka. On arrival in Osaka, I took the train to Kyoto where I arrived around eleven in the morning in a jet-lagged haze. Confused by the maze of escalators and exits, I found myself with all my luggage (why do I ALWAYS take so much?) in a beeping and flashing electronics store.

Zen garden at Ginjaku-Ji

Zen garden at Ginjaku-Ji

After a few more wrong turns, I finally managed to exit the station, find the right bus, haul my luggage on board and get off at the right stop for the ryokan (guest house). Ahh, a shower and lie down at last, I thought, relieved. But no. The woman smiled sweetly, got me a cup of green tea and a biscuit and told me that check-in was 3pm onwards. She smiled sweetly again – perhaps a bit too sweetly – indicating where I could leave my luggage. There was obviously no point arguing with her so I threw myself into sightseeing. I wandered along the Philosopher’s walk, a gorgeous blossom-lined meander along the canal with temples at both ends and shrines off to the sides. From Zen gardens of raked sand to mossy tree roots, confetti-like blossoms skirting across the water and, in one shrine, a single camellia flower floating on the surface of a water butt, it was the perfect antidote to jetlag.

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But by the time I collapsed in a local eaterie at 7pm with a glass of plum wine and a bowl of steaming ramen noodles, I was seriously tired and still wearing my flight clothes. But I was not too tired to chat to the owner. Well, actually, I had little option as I was the only person in there. He was a bit of a wit and on hearing I was a writer, produced a lighter. A nice bit of linguistic self piss-taking I thought. Then, teasingly, he urged me to show more enthusiasm for my meal telling me that in Japan it’s a sign of respect to slurp your soup. Hugely self-conscious (he might as well have asked me to undress), I struggled to make enough noise – it’s just so UN-English and not polite after all those years of being told to sit up straight and hold my knife and fork just so. But I did my best to schluuurp my appreciation.

Back at the ryokan, I slept quite well on my tatami mat and futon on the floor, but was so over-tired and time zone-challenged that I took a while to drop off and was fast asleep at 8am when Mrs Uemura rapped smartly on my door telling me, with thinly disguised irritation, that breakfast was served. I’d clearly transgressed a house rule. Another one. She’d already told me off the day before for wearing my outdoor shoes indoors and for wearing my indoor slippers to the loo instead of the specially provided toilet slippers. Thank Goodness she didn’t spot me mistakenly walking back to my room still wearing the toilet slippers. Too many footwear faux pas for words.

I am happy to say that the breakfast was absolutely delicious and worth dragging myself out of bed for. It started with miso soup with clams followed by rice, fish, pickled veg (delicious soft sweet aubergine) all washed down with Gen Mai Cha (toasted rice green tea). There was one other couple staying and they needed no back-up chorus from in slurping and sniffing.

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After breakfast, I snuck back up to my room thinking I might just lie down for half an hour but my bed had already been rolled up and cleared away. No peace for the wicked. I was about to whinge – like Shirley Valentine – to the walls when I heard monks in the street chanting prayer requests. There are insufficient words to describe the clarity and purity of their toning. I let the sound wash over me and set off for another day of sightseeing. Stay tuned for Life Laundry No. 2.

On Bruxism and Botox

Sometimes I fall into the trap of being too nice. It’s an old pattern driven by family and social conditioning and expectations: keep everything nice, be polite and don’t make a fuss. It’s a habit that says it’s better to keep the peace than to express emotions such as anger and frustration, for example. But it comes at a price; people who smile and bite back anger tend to be of the teeth-clenching variety. And I would know. I’ve chomped my way through a fair few dental splints in my time. Excessive grinding of the teeth goes by the fancy name of bruxism and affects up to 30% of the population. It is also sometimes referred to as TMJ disorder as in temporomandibular joint dysfunction.

TMJ - Tense Munching Jaw in my language

TMJ – Tense Munching Jaw in my language

Perhaps one way to avoid grinding your teeth into oblivion is to maintain good boundaries in your personal relationships. I reckon I’ve got better at recognising boundary breakers – you know, the type that take more than they give, that pour out all their problems, talk AT you rather than to you and see you as their new best friend on first acquaintance.

A recent situation put my boundary skills to the test. I was walking my dog Bertie in a small local park. A young boy was playing with his football and Bertie joined in – or rather took over and stole the ball. He’s no fool, my boy. Keen not to miss a classic Kodak moment, I got my camera out. “You should video it,” said a loud-voiced, larger-than-life woman rounding the corner with her two fluffy white dogs. I confessed I had no storage space left on my phone and was therefore using my camera. She professed to know the type of camera and assured me it had a video function. She grabbed it and started fiddling around with the settings. Seeing some numbers come up on the screen and some kind of symbol, I started filming. But a few minutes later, when I went to admire my handiwork there was nothing there. So she grabbed the camera again and this time – God knows how – as the camera beeps if you are about to erase all the pictures – managed to delete every picture on the memory card. OUCH! Three weeks of precious, irreplaceable puppy pictures gone in a flash.

The woman – the closest thing to a bull in a china shop – said I’d be able to retrieve them from the camera’s delete bin. Well, hello, cameras don’t function like computers. There is no second chance. Gutted, cross, disappointed and jaw seriously in clench mode by now, I put Bertie on the leash and we stormed off, me muttering: “Sorry, I’ve had it. I’ve got to go.” “I said sorry,” said the woman. “I know,” I replied, “and I am expressing my deep disappointment at losing some treasured photos. I’ll probably get over it tomorrow but right now…”

I didn’t bump into her again for a few weeks. Phew! And when I did, I decided to let bygones be bygones and uttered a cheery hello. Weirdly, she seemed to have no recollection of me or my dog, let alone the camera fiasco. But she did announce in her strange, over-familiar way that she’d bought a new belt at the market that day and couldn’t undo it. Could I help? Now, I should tell you that she is about three times my size and I didn’t fancy tussling with her fleshy waist. And just to complicate matters, Bertie decided to hump her dog at this point. So here I was confronted with my angel turned into a hip-thrusting Romeo while the woman, clearly a few-sandwiches-short-of-a-picnic, remained imprisoned in her jeans. What choice did I really have but to offer to liberate her? Summoning my inner Good Samaritan, I pulled and pulled… and pulled – her belt truly was stuck; this was no ploy to entice me to touch her – until, ping, the pin finally released. She was now free but I could feel myself gritting my teeth with the effort of it all, not to mention the weirdness.

I’ve since read an article about beating bruxism by having Botox injections into the masseter (chewing) muscles around the jaw. You’d think it might do the opposite and freeze the jaw into a permanent grimace, but apparently not as it relaxes and softens the muscles. I haven’t investigated it yet but I’m tempted. At least if I bump into the woman and her pooches, I can smile with a nice, loose jaw and then get the hell out…

Life’s too short…

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In 1975 Shirley Conran famously said, “Life is too short to stuff a mushroom.” The quote was of course about the expectations on women to be superwomen and ‘have it all’. Today, in a purely culinary context, I decided to coin a new phrase: Life is too short to make an egg white omelette. Have you ever made or eaten one? Perhaps, like tofu, egg white omelettes are simply a vehicle for carrying other flavours. But why bother dressing up a pale imitation, when you can have the real thing? It’s a bit like vegetarian sausages or soy cheese; a contradiction in terms. You really can’t have it both ways.

The only reason I cooked up an anaemic, tasteless, fluffy white concoction was because I had four egg whites left over from making a super rich pistachio ice cream at the weekend that called for egg yolks, cream, sugar, pistachios and rose water. It was rather good, if a little too sweet, and combined the floral flavours of Turkish delight with a subtle nuttiness. Never mind that my nephew thought it was brown bread ice cream!

But back to mushrooms and stuffing them. I disagree with Shirley. I used to do a stuffed mushroom dish with diced bacon, tomato, parsley, wine, breadcrumbs and cheese. It was easy an easy dish to throw together and tasted delicious. The only problem is that I lost the recipe years ago. Anyone got anything similar in their repertoire?

A Canine Cocktail Party

You could argue that I need to get out more but I’m really going to miss puppy pre-school at my local vet’s. As good as therapy, it’s hugely reassuring being able to share the highs and lows of puppy pranks, playtime and puddle-making with other parents and to seek tips from veterinary specialists. But more than that, it’s been highly amusing observing how the pups interact socially. In an upstairs room at the practice, the pre-school sessions resemble a canine cocktail party complete with canapés – no spring rolls, salmon blinis or arancini balls here, just plenty of chicken, tasty biscuits and dried kangaroo strips. OK, so the dogs sniff each other out rather than talk about what they do for a living but they do have characteristics in common with us humans.

Canapes, anyone?

Canapes, anyone?

There’s Goodie-Two Shoes Toffee,for example, a petite, caramel-coloured Cavoodle who, at just ten weeks, had mastered an impressive number of commands – sit, stay, drop etc – and was flirting with the boys. In the human world, I reckon she would be a ladder-climbing PR strategist, work out a lot, wear expensive fashion labels and have her teeth whitened. Feisty, determined and able to ‘work the room,’ she might turn out to be a Devil wears Prada Primadonna. Then there’s Bella, a bouncy, full-of-beans Groodle. Blessed with curly black hair and a big heart, she’d be a fabulous hostess; plump, big-boobed, a bon viveur, great cook and the life and soul of any party. She’d probably ‘over-egg’ the pudding and drink one too many glasses of red wine here and there, but everyone would love her.

Rambo (to my English ear, I first thought his name was Rainbow), is a cute black-coated miniature schnauzer and a bit wary of other dogs. He protects himself by barking to keep them away. In real life he might be an IT type dressed in black jeans and a black polo top with a computer bag slung across his body. A bit afraid of intimacy he hides behind his beard and keeps himself to himself. Actually, it’s his beard that’s the problem and is keeping the opposite sex at bay. It’s unkempt and straggly and he gets food and drink caught in it, making it a total passion-killer. A lovable loner, you have to persevere if you want to get to know him.

Like any working dog worth his salt, Bertie, my spaniel, has a highly developed sense of smell and cases the joint for every scrap. He’s a born hunter and opportunist and his human equivalent would always be on the lookout for new opportunities and markets. A charming entrepreneur with a twinkle in his eye, Bertie is the sort that can get away with anything. But, whoops, perhaps not! What’s that on the floor? Amid all my anthropomorphising, Bertie’s canine alter ego drops a brown deposit on the floor. As if to remind me that he’s a dog, fair and square. All right, Bertie. Point taken. But the question still remains. What WILL I do on a Tuesday night now you’ve graduated from puppy pre-school?

This mortar board is all very well but where's my next treat?

This mortar board is all very well but where’s my next treat?

The Simple Life

Every now and then – THANK GOD – I manage to step out of chop, chop, busy, busy, work, work, bang, bang mode (see my post of 18th July) and tap into a slower, more mindful rhythm. It may still be characterised by doing, but it’s less compulsive and comes from a more nurturing and softer space.

Once recent rainy Sunday, I devoted myself to domesticity without trying to do emails, admin and work all at the same time.   And I loved every minute of it even though I’m not a Yummy Mummy making her own cleaning materials from baking soda, lemon juice and vinegar, icing cup cakes and sporting a floral vintage apron. Not that I am having a dig at YMs; I could have gone that way but life took me in a different direction.

I wore my own version of a vintage apron, an oilcloth gem from the ‘80s, a freebie from my father’s employer, the then brewing company Whitbread. In black, red and gold and shaped like a trophy glass, it has lasted all this time and crossed the seas with me from the UK. Suitably attired for the kitchen, I tuned into a radio play on the BBC’s Women’s Hour (incidentally the BBC has some wonderful radio plays and dramatisations) via my tablet, made veggie soup (courgette, spinach and coconut) and date and coconut balls.

Vintage apron and date balls

Then after de-fluffing the floor under my bed and changing my sheets, I had a long, slow cup of tea and savoured one of the aforementioned date balls. They are very simple to make and use only three ingredients – pitted dates, ghee and desiccated coconut – all superfoods according to  Ayurveda, the ancient medicine of India and sister science to yoga.  (See recipe at the end of this post).

Towards the late afternoon the rain stopped and I ventured out with puppy dog for a quick trot around the block. And oh, what joy!  Making a last minute appearance, the sun burst through the clouds and brushed roof and tree tops in dazzling reddish light shot through with gold.

Later on, sitting down in front of the fire and watching my favourite Sunday night drama (did anyone else love Channel 7’s A Place to Call Home?) over dinner of sausages, roast pumpkin, tomatoes and fennel,   it felt like life couldn’t get much better – or sweeter.

Date and Coconut Balls (this recipe comes from the Mudita Institute in Queensland – ( http://www.muditainstitute.com/Home.html)

1 Cup of fresh dates (medjool), seeds removed, or 1 cup of dried dates blanched in just enough water to cover for 20 seconds then drained to give the same consistency as fresh dates.

1 cup of desiccated coconut (organic if possible)

1 level tbsp of melted organic ghee

Pan toasted desiccated coconut to cover the balls once made

Finely dice the dates and mix all the ingredients together in a bowl and work into a ball. Roll a ball to test consistency and adjust with a bit more ghee or coconut as required. They should be firm enough to hold their shape. Shape into walnut-size balls and then roll in toasted coconut to cover. Refrigerate in an air-tight container but best eaten at room temperature.

Fancy a Pigeon’s chances

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I was listening to the BBC World Service on Saturday afternoon and heard the tale of Paul the pigeon. Now Paul, identified by his ID ring as from the North East of England, had flown way off course on his cross-Channel race to France and was 483km out into the Atlantic. Presumably exhausted, he had the good fortune to land on the deck of British frigate HMS Somerset. That in itself was a stroke of luck but it gets better. On board was Leading Seaman William Hughes, an ex-pigeon fancier, who caught the peripatetic pigeon, constructed a temporary coop and fed him energy-giving breakfast cereal.  When Hughes checked ‘Paul’ over he found out that he was in fact a she. But why let a gender mix-up ruin a heart-warming tale?

On a deeper level this story is a reminder that sometimes when we lose our way, help is at hand and things are happening for good reason; we just can’t see it at the time. One of the quotes on a post-it note above my desk reads: “Don’t be in the know, be in the mystery.” Whether we’ve taken a leap of faith or somehow become de-railed, things often work out for the best – if we don’t interfere and, instead, let our lives unravel and reveal their own logic.

In January when I returned to Australia from a Christmas visit to family in Britain, I came down with flu almost the minute I stepped off the plane. With the sorest of sore throats, racking cough, sweating, vomiting and aching all over, it all felt too much to bear on top of the homesickness I always feel after visiting my native country. Lonely, weak, weary and unable to distract myself with television, reading or radio – everything hurt – I descended into a poor-me black hole. Big OUCH and Big Tears.

But being grounded and forced to STOP proved to be the biggest gift. Once I started to feel stronger, the survivor in me kicked in and I turned myself around into a more positive frame of mind. I sat in bed with a notebook and wrote out how I would like my life to look. To cut a long story short, I decided to leave an unfulfilling job and return to freelancing, to carry out some renovations to my house so I could more easily rent out a room, to get a dog and to put less effort into making things happen and experiment more with letting life come to me.

Thanks to the flu, I’m now free of a job that left me drained and despondent, I’ve reconnected with my writing, reached final design stage with my renovation plans and, best of all, Bertie dog is sitting under my desk as I write this. According to the article, Paul/Pauline has retired from racing. Sometimes, illness, accidents or other perceived dramas are just what we need to take us to the next stage of our journey.

 

Reaching fever pitch about sales pitches

I recently signed up to a free online dog training course. More fool me. There was nothing free about it. It started harmlessly enough with a couple of emails with some treat-size tips on how to stop a dog jumping up, but as the days progressed the tips and tutoring, supposedly dangled as carrots under my nose, were lost among paragraphs of waffle, sales pitch hype and endless calls to action: Exclusive offer! Sign up as a member today and receive a 60% discount! But hurry, offer limited! And, if I signed on the dotted line, I would receive three books normally valued at $100, a 30-day money back guarantee and MUCH MORE! Plus, they claimed to have some sort of copyright on the secrets to dog training; I wouldn’t find them anywhere else, not on this planet, in Outer Mongolia or in Outer Space. But I did need to sign up first. Well, forgive the pun, but I didn’t jump at it.

Affiliate marketing schemes use the same technique and lure you into reading screen after screen of repetitious copy full of impossible promises, testimonials and videos.  I once watched a clip of two dudes in expensive shades sitting by a swimming pool explaining how they had gone from rags to riches.  For ten minutes they kept telling us that they would soon tell us how they did it. There was even a stopwatch on the screen counting down to their Big Bang revelation which, of course, never came. Because you had to sign up first.  It’s like waiting for the next episode of a television drama – you know the ones that end with a tantalising scene such as a dead body or a lovers’ tiff – so you have to tune in the following week.

I’m an even grumpier old woman when it comes to telemarketing calls.  I don’t mind if they’re honest but it’s the “I’m not trying to sell you anything” that gets me. YES they are.  When one of the charities I support called me a few weeks ago, I patiently explained I was not in a position to increase my monthly contribution (I work in the sector and know they were calling to ‘upgrade’ me). They insisted it was nothing to do with money, thanked me profusely for my ongoing support and then told me about a new programme desperately in need of funds. If I could just increase my contribution by $5 a month…

However, I was nice – very nice – to the young Indian guy who came round with the (free) government-issued Smart Power Boards – the ones that turn your TV off automatically rather than leave it on stand-by. It’s a tough job knocking on doors and making sales so I was pleasant, chatty and even offered him a cup of tea. I asked him to plug my DVD into the normal socket so it would not switch off while in record mode.  Later that week, when I sat down to watch an episode of Downton Abbey (and I LOVE DOWNTON ABBEY) the screen was blank as the guy had plugged the DVD into the wrong socket. Arghhhhhhh!!  Once again, I was left hanging in suspense.