3. Pickles
It's February 3rd and we have the heating on in our house, but it's too hot so I have the window open in my room. I wake up early wriggling around as it's too hot when the heating comes on at 6.30am. I have conversations with people about flowers emerging too soon - lots of snowdrops are out, will they know to retreat back underground again if it goes back to the normal cold temperatures that it should be in February?
Two swallows flew over us while we played tennis on Sunday, which also means it's Spring already doesn't it? I'm never totally sure when each flower is meant to emerge, so I say it kind of hazily and wait for someone else more knowledgeable to confirm it for me, and then they don't realise that I didn't really know in the first place because they're busy confirming it for me. I do this with a lot of things - mention them in passing with just enough vague detail to look like I know what I just said is true, but if I had to go to court and be cross examined, it would fall to pieces quite quickly. Even tennis players, and I really should know who they are as I play a lot of tennis - right now I could only identify a handful of them but I pretend that I know who they all are.
Another thing that happened today is I emailed a friend of a friend who was interested in volunteering at the school I had taught at in India ten years ago. She said the volunteer reviews on the website hadn't been updated since 2012 and she wondered if the school was still going. I replied that I presumed it was, and that maybe the last review on the website was mine, and that made me reminisce about the time I had had there. I think at least 2 of the top ten days of my life happened in those six months in India, maybe even 3. We were there for Tibetan Uprising Day, in February - our friend Khagya painted Tibetan flags on our faces and we all marched (quietly and non violently) with Tibetan flags waving, from Lower Dharamsala to Upper Dharamsala slowly throughout the day. What seemed to be a million butter lanterns were lit as it grew dark, and Tibetan horns were played from the roof of the main temple in McLeod Ganj where Tibet has its government in exile and the Dalai Lama lives. The sounds of the horns was so deep that your stomach reverberated and your mind thought in a different way for a time. It was magical in so many ways, the conversations and the solidarity and community and the scenery.
I went to a data conference the other day for work. When I picked up my badge on the way in, the girl at the desk said oh I love your name. I said - me too. She laughed. I laughed too. It's not funny really, but I think laughter is a symptom of having had a connection with a person. In the introduction to counselling course that I'm doing, the teacher said that if you are a counsellor and your client laughs, you shouldn't laugh too - often the client is laughing because they are withholding something, or there is something that is too difficult to talk about underneath what they're talking about. If you laugh, then you are colluding with them and that won't help them to get to the thing they're hiding. In the role plays we do on the course, I find it hard not to laugh when someone is laughing, you have to suppress your natural instinct to connect with them.
I was thinking on the way home today that pickling things is a process of preserving things, and also shrinking them - or at least I thought it was about shrinking them. I thought a gherkin was a pickled cucumber, so I thought that pickling really did shrink things a lot. Somebody said it's actually just a small cucumber a gherkin, so it hasn't shrunk from being a normal sized cucumber. Whilst disappointing, I have come to terms with this. I like that this blog is called pickles pickles things because there are so many little nuggets of things that happen every day that I can now try to preserve in this blog. I had many things in my mind on the cycle home that I wanted to write about (how recently I have felt like a rhomboid or oval (a little squashed out of my natural shape), bikini waxes, the conversations that we have in our lives and how they are all repetitious and neverending but we forget in between so we don't realise we are repeating ourselves; and mainly that I had got yesterday's blog post wrong about the palindromic dates, and the next one will actually be 03/02/2030 not 31/12/2113 - so we will get to experience it again).
Two swallows flew over us while we played tennis on Sunday, which also means it's Spring already doesn't it? I'm never totally sure when each flower is meant to emerge, so I say it kind of hazily and wait for someone else more knowledgeable to confirm it for me, and then they don't realise that I didn't really know in the first place because they're busy confirming it for me. I do this with a lot of things - mention them in passing with just enough vague detail to look like I know what I just said is true, but if I had to go to court and be cross examined, it would fall to pieces quite quickly. Even tennis players, and I really should know who they are as I play a lot of tennis - right now I could only identify a handful of them but I pretend that I know who they all are.
Another thing that happened today is I emailed a friend of a friend who was interested in volunteering at the school I had taught at in India ten years ago. She said the volunteer reviews on the website hadn't been updated since 2012 and she wondered if the school was still going. I replied that I presumed it was, and that maybe the last review on the website was mine, and that made me reminisce about the time I had had there. I think at least 2 of the top ten days of my life happened in those six months in India, maybe even 3. We were there for Tibetan Uprising Day, in February - our friend Khagya painted Tibetan flags on our faces and we all marched (quietly and non violently) with Tibetan flags waving, from Lower Dharamsala to Upper Dharamsala slowly throughout the day. What seemed to be a million butter lanterns were lit as it grew dark, and Tibetan horns were played from the roof of the main temple in McLeod Ganj where Tibet has its government in exile and the Dalai Lama lives. The sounds of the horns was so deep that your stomach reverberated and your mind thought in a different way for a time. It was magical in so many ways, the conversations and the solidarity and community and the scenery.
I went to a data conference the other day for work. When I picked up my badge on the way in, the girl at the desk said oh I love your name. I said - me too. She laughed. I laughed too. It's not funny really, but I think laughter is a symptom of having had a connection with a person. In the introduction to counselling course that I'm doing, the teacher said that if you are a counsellor and your client laughs, you shouldn't laugh too - often the client is laughing because they are withholding something, or there is something that is too difficult to talk about underneath what they're talking about. If you laugh, then you are colluding with them and that won't help them to get to the thing they're hiding. In the role plays we do on the course, I find it hard not to laugh when someone is laughing, you have to suppress your natural instinct to connect with them.
I was thinking on the way home today that pickling things is a process of preserving things, and also shrinking them - or at least I thought it was about shrinking them. I thought a gherkin was a pickled cucumber, so I thought that pickling really did shrink things a lot. Somebody said it's actually just a small cucumber a gherkin, so it hasn't shrunk from being a normal sized cucumber. Whilst disappointing, I have come to terms with this. I like that this blog is called pickles pickles things because there are so many little nuggets of things that happen every day that I can now try to preserve in this blog. I had many things in my mind on the cycle home that I wanted to write about (how recently I have felt like a rhomboid or oval (a little squashed out of my natural shape), bikini waxes, the conversations that we have in our lives and how they are all repetitious and neverending but we forget in between so we don't realise we are repeating ourselves; and mainly that I had got yesterday's blog post wrong about the palindromic dates, and the next one will actually be 03/02/2030 not 31/12/2113 - so we will get to experience it again).
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