Category: Ruminations

The Joy of the Tomboy

I would follow my brother and his friends around, like a
puppy. I didn’t know how to make friends. I was like a magpie in
that way, trying to acquire something I hadn’t earned. If friends
are real and have integrity and honesty, they are a lot more
precious than what the magpie sees shining out the corner of his
eye, and thinks, can I have a share in that?
I had followed my brother when he had gone to meet one
of his friends. I must have been about seven or eight. My brother
was a year older than me.
We sat cross-legged in a circle, triangle really, on a
grass verge. The friend said, as if I wasn’t there, ‘Why is she here?
Why can’t she stop following us? Why can’t she get her own
friends?’ That kind of thing.
I was a very quiet, shy sort of follower and I just clung to
them like a limpet, yet my brothers friend must have thought, and
rightly so, that I was cramping their style. I shouldn’t be there!

It didn’t start off that way, but it got tiring for them after a while,
quite understandably, ending up in a general
dissatisfaction with the status quo. I theorise, even at that early
age, my brother allowed it, dare I say, encouraged my trailing
along because he enjoyed the idolisation. Some older brothers
may gladly forgo all the intimacies of boyhood friendship, if the
baby sister becomes a public and ardent admirer.
I completely bought into that tomboy thing, whether it was
through sheer desperation to be accepted and belong to a group or
maybe I genuinely enjoyed playing football. Perhaps I’ll never
know but I loved getting covered in mud and grass and didn’t
mind cuts and bruises.
I do remember being a dirty tackler. My methods were
questionable. I must have been aware that I was female on some
level and could get away with some things, tackling wise, that the
others couldn’t, thus making any game I was in, unfair, but it was
generally just kicking around. During one kick around, I
remember I was at some friends/neighbours house and they had a
sprawling overgrown garden, with what seemed like dense
vegetation and a wild wood at the end, probably grossly over
exaggerated by an overactive and childish imagination.
At one point during the game, the ball went into the
overgrowth. I went in immediately to retrieve it and was pulled
back by one of the boys in the game. He looked at me in horror.
‘You can’t go in there.’ he said. ‘You’re a girl.’
This was a defining moment for me. I felt a myriad of
emotions all at once. I was afraid. I couldn’t work it out. Next
moment, I was arrogantly amused. I knew something he didn’t.
He was misinformed. Next moment, I was indignant, singed by
his prepubescent sexism, shocked and confused by his youthful
chauvinism.
Next moment, I felt disappointment, then bitter dismay
and lastly an inexplicable sadness. My life flashed before my eyes
in that instant. Limitation and femaleness seemed to suddenly be
inexorably linked. I knew I could have got that ball without any
harm or injury and I can’t remember whether I rebelled and went
in, or hung back, temporarily weakened by the fact that I was
someone who couldn’t go into a few bits of weeds and bushes to
retrieve a football.
Many years later, the event crossed my mind, but now all I
saw was concern in sincere and honest eyes.
He was looking out for me…maybe, maybe not. After all, he didn’t know me enough to genuinely care about me. It was probably all about social mores, either a natural protective instinct on his part or something he’d digested culturally in his young and tender years. He was genuinely alarmed at the idea that I should go and get that ball from the dense and thorny
undergrowth. I hadn’t met him before that day and I haven’t met
him since. He was just a kid and so was I.

The Joy of Nostalgia

Is the Joy of Nostalgia

Just a clean white curtain

On a dirty window

And if you were back there again

Would you hate it

With a bigger passion

Then the first time round

Or maybe it really was as good as it seemed

And the world got worse

And not better

And nostalgia is all

Some people will have

To keep them warm at night

But in the experiences of today

We can make the memories of tomorrow

And the Joy of Nostalgia

All over again.

You Can’t Go Home Again

You can’t go home again

To whispered words

Or bitter accusations

To sibling fights of old

Either killing each other

Or playing hard until the sun goes down

They said it would all end in tears

But cuddles always stopped the crying

And then, sometimes

Parents in tennis matches

Bickering with the umpire

Getting caught in the net

Another day, of making ends meet

Ends either not quite touching

Or too far apart to be tied together

You can’t go home again

To things said or done

Or not said or done

To what could have been

But now, will never be

You can’t go home again

To the silence

And the cacophony

To the contradictory

And the hypocrital

To the elephant in the room

To the realisations you made

To the understanding you came to

You can’t come home again

To the wisdom that is now

It’s another time and place

Home is where you are

Right Now.

The Joy of Books (Part Four)

So, as a child reading children’s books, I came across a lot of food and drink stains in the pages and other assorted debris.

I call them U.B.O’s, unidentified book objects

As an adult reading second hand books, things got a bit more savoury within the pages and I’m not talking about the authors viewpoint.

In this final part of The Joy of Books, I’d like to talk about hairgate.

I’ve had a couple of memorable instances regarding dubious looking hairs in books. When it happened the second time, it triggered me because it was almost an exact replica of the first time it happened, about twenty five years ago. The U.B.O’s both had a similar pattern of regularity with similar content.

I was reading a second hand book, of a sci fi genre, an omnibus, consisting of five books. It was a tome of a book and from the get go, quite frequently, between the pages, in the crease, was a long, thick, crinkly, wiry black hair. More hairs of exact colour and texture appeared throughout the book. I tried to ignore them at first and made sure that said hair did not slip out of the book onto my lap.

By the time I got to the third book in the omnibus, I was getting more and more repulsed but the hairs kept coming, and soon, after a bombardment of (what felt like) extreme porportions, I snapped, closed the book and slung it in the bin. Problem solved.

I didn’t want to put someone else through the same experience. I didn’t want to pass the book on as it was, yet, I also didn’t want to go through each page indvidually and somehow extract and dispose of said hairs because I was repulsed just by looking at them. Also, they were distracting. I was reading about iconic characters from a famous sci fi T.V series and all I can see are these hairs.

Had the book been in an orgy? What the hell had it been up to, to get so many hairs in it? My love for star Trek books wasn’t strong enough to endure the U.B.O’s.

I have had one other instance of this with an interlude of about 25 years. So, I think it’s quite an unusual occurence. I have read many second hand books, thus increasing the risk of more foreign objects inside, so the fact that I’ve only had two with a hair infestation is actually not that bad odds.

Illustration by Steve Young

The Joy of Books (Part Three)

The look of books

Aesthetics

Cover, size, look of print,size of print, font type

Light, medium or dark print

Colour and page environment

White page, off white, slightly yellowed, very yellowed

Dirty, mouldy, unidentified stains

Food, liquid, grease, sweat, other.

The cover of books?

I’ll let someone else cover the cover.

Books are meant to be shared

An old, well used paperback or hardback

is good as long as it’s clean

The odd elusive grease stain is acceptable

Can be ignored easily

But then, when we get into food stains

of the third kind

of the oily, damp, highly coloured

sticky kind

the ones that graduate to 3D status

by that, I mean actual food stuffs

Then, my will to ignore

becomes weak.

When I was growing up

the Childrens Library was the absolute worst

for undesirable and unidentifable stains in books.

The stains were mostly food and liquids

the ones I couldn’t stomach

were the green ones

They seemed to appear regularly on the pages

Maybe it was just once

and it traumatized me enough to think

it was just snot all the way

a terrible distraction from whatever I was reading

I had a slight germ phobia

so the children’s book, story and author

had less of an impact than those

slightly alien 3D luminous green things.

The bottom line is, I thought things would get better when I graduated to The Adult Library.

Then I discovered that books for adults were a whole other ball game. Quite literally.

The Joy of Books (Part Two)

The feel of books

Hard back or soft back?

Both please, depending on mood and accessibility.

The hardback is in it for the long haul

Something to hold onto

When all the world is falling apart

When we are falling apart

The hardback can be gripped more fiercely

than any paperback

Without it withering or bending

under the stress of our fingers

to give us the sense that

the world

or ourselves

are not spinning wildly

out

of

control

Hold onto that hardback

For as its name suggests

It is hard

It is a back

And when someone says

they have got your back

It’s good.

Ever read a book with a traumatised spine?

Once a spine goes in a book

it really doesn’t take too long for it to fall apart

a bit like people

Paperbacks bend well

Sometimes circling in on themselves

like a willow in the wind

I love a good bendy paperback

a contortionist of a paperback

Unyeilding paperbacks have their place

but give me a double jointed paperback any day.

Well used paperbacks that have been through the mill

worn and tired and weary

still have the same amount of reading in them

perhaps more so

because of what they’ve been through

You can feel their years on the earth

the emotions that have passed through them

from all those hungry eyes and minds and hearts

fingers clutching or gripping the cover

or gently holding or caressing

Books are inanimate objects

But they were my friends growing up

still are

Like pets, they give unconditional love

they do not judge

and they impart wisdom.

The Joy of Books (Part One)

The smell of books

The scent of print and paper

Some of them like the best cologne in the world

Some spanking new and clinical

Some sharp and gluey

Some sweet and elusive

Some deeply inky

Some second hand,

old, papery, leathery, musty,

earthy, damp, sour

Some impregnated with cigarette smoke

Some experienced worldy books

The ones they call dog eared, well thumbed

The ones that have lived a full, rich life

The wise old ones

that have the stains

the yellowed pages

And the strange odours to prove it

All the hands that have held them

Turned their pages

In daylight, or lamplight, or candle

All the eyes that have gazed upon their pages

Riveted, bored, entertained, comforted

All the rooms they have lived in

All the bookshelves they have marinated in

All the drawers they have got bored in

All the charity shops they have ended up in.

The Joy of Subtitles

I used to think the joy of subtitles could only be enjoyed by three types of people

Those who are hard of hearing

Those who have varying degrees of audio processing disorder

And those who like French film noir

I discovered not many other people like them, unless it’s through necessity while watching foreign language movies but also because they distract from the movie they’re watching. I’ve always liked them and have very fond memories of them. Sometimes they stand out in my mind’s eye in favourite films more than the visuals. For me, it adds to the visuals immensely (not just because I’m hard of hearing and have a degree of audio dyslexia) but writing this, I’ve learned that I’m not alone in that thinking.

Lots of people like subtitles nowadays because a lot of actors mumble and you don’t have to be hard of hearing not to catch their words.

The very best thing about subtitles is, if you choose the hard of hearing option specifically on your DVD menu, rather than any other subtitle option, any song playing in the background, no matter if it’s below normal human hearing, will come up in the subtitles. Also whispers come up. So it’s also handy for people who have good, sharp hearing.

Also, any other noises will show up in the subtitles. Scoffing for instance. Scoffing always comes up in Netflix subtitles. He scoffed, she scoffed, they scoffed. I think that’s why I unsubscribed.

So the bottom line is, you tend to have a heads up, if you want a heads up, on everyone else who is watching the movie, in terms of knowledge, details, songs, whispers, scoffing, certainly more info, than if you don’t have subtitles. You never know, it might add more depth to the film. On the other hand, it might give you more knowledge than you desire and you may just want to watch the film without all that palaver.

The Joy of Muscle Rub

The joy of muscle rub is sometimes in the rubbing
And sometimes in the topical painkiller
And sometimes in the smell
And always in the heat
The killjoy of muscle rub is often in the neglect to wash
hands
after using, before touching sensitive parts of the body.