Things I’ve been doing recently

Knitting hats

I’ve been practicing using double-pointed needles (dpns) and made another hat. This one also turned out smaller than I expected, but now I’ve realised that I had measured my head wrongly and it is actually much bigger than I thought it was. Haha. So this hat too has gone to a child of my acquaintance. The pattern is Meret, by Woolly Wormhead.

Going to exhibitions

Well, an exhibition. We went to see the Ansel Adams exhibition at the National Maritime Museum last Saturday. It was very good. I didn’t really know anything about Ansel Adams before, other than that he was famous photographer, so it was good to learn more about him as well as seeing lots of his photos of water (unsurprisingly, given the location, the theme of the exhibition is “Photography from the Mountains to the Sea”). Going to the exhibition made me feel a bit better about my own photography. I’ve never been quite sure whether it is OK to edit photos after you’ve taken them, or whether this is really ‘cheating’; but Ansel Adams did this as a matter of course. He would, apparently, spend hours in the darkroom developing lots of different prints of the same picture, changing aspects of it until he was happy with the outcome. Obviously editing pictures in a darkroom takes a lot more skill than doing it on a computer, but Ansel Adams was enthusiastic about the possibilities of using computers in photography – there was a film clip at the exhibition of him talking about it. He didn’t live to see the ‘digital photography revolution’ (he died in 1984), but I think he would have been quite excited by it.

Rose at the National Maritime Museum, November 2011

Avoiding snow

We’ve had snow here again this weekend. While we haven’t had such awful weather as in other parts of the country, it is still annoying. I’m fed up with the cold and the grey and the damp…as I expect most other people in the country are. The daffodils have come up, and are struggling bravely on  - they must be quite hardy as they keep bouncing back, when the snow allows!

Having Mr C’s friend to stay for a week

One of Mr C’s childhood friends from Malaysia has been to stay for a week. He just left this morning. It was good to see him again, and I think Mr C enjoyed catching up with him and another friend from Malaysia who actually lives in London but who he hadn’t seen for a long time. Mr C’s friend was quite intrepid, and braved the railways on his own – with varying degrees of success! He brought some Malaysian food over with him, so I’m looking forward to eating lots of noodles soon…

Noodles!

Watching things grow

Despite the continuing cold weather things are starting to grow and blossom (see e.g. daffodils, above). The orchid has also decided to flower this year, after taking a break from flowering last year, which is nice. I was worried it wouldn’t flower ever again, but I was wrong.

Phoneography Challenge: My Neighbourhood

I went out this morning to take these photos for the Phoneography Challenge. After a lovely, sunny weekend last week, the weather has turned cold and grey again, so my neighbourhood isn’t really looking at its best. The filters/effects I’ve used probably haven’t really help it look any better, but I think I was inspired by the grey day!

I’m in two minds about photo editing. Sometimes its worth doing, particularly if you need to correct something, but sometimes I feel like I do it for the sake of it, just because I like messing about with pictures and trying out all the effects. It’s fun, but I could probably spend my time more productively.

The park is lovely – I love living near so much green and being able to look out across the river. The town we live in has a bit of a bad reputation; but where we live is pleasant, near to the shops and the station, and we have great neighbours. There’s a nice community feel to our road, because people actually know one-another’s names (not everyone, admittedly), and stop and chat, and we all follow the adventures of the neighbourhood cats, of which there are a few. People help each other out by mowing their neighbours’ front lawns, gritting their paths in winter and lending them things…the neighbourhood is definitely friendlier than it looks in these photos!

Avenue of trees.

The war memorial.

Looking over the river. It was very misty and rather grey this morning.

Such violent-looking carving, despite the words. It just makes me think of anger – hence the framing.

The (slight) hill, looking from the park.

In the park. I love living near so much green space.

The pictures were taken on an HTC Desire C, and edited using Pixlr Express.

Related articles

• Phoneography Challenge: My Neighborhood – Nature at her Best (rolbos.wordpress.com)
• Phoneography Challenge: My Neighborhood (iamontherun.wordpress.com)

+ve-ity (or not)

As anyone who knows me in real life (or has been a reader of this blog for more than five minutes) will know, I have a very slight tendency towards negativity. I see problems everywhere, I have little confidence in my own abilities, I tend towards melancholy and I am a pessimist. Yes, one of those.

The problem for me, and others like me, is that in society in general, and the workplace in particular, it seems that it’s not acceptable to be negative, even when the negative thing is the true thing. For example, the other week, we were evaluating something at work. We’d had quite a few negative comments from staff, which we wanted to put into the report because we felt it was important people had the chance to have their say about the situation. But one person in our group said we should leave them out because they were too negative. But they were people’s opinions – why should they not be entitled to have their voices heard just because their feedback wasn’t positive? (We put it in the report in the end as the majority of us thought it should go in.)

Anyhow, one of my (two) new year’s resolutions was to try and be more positive, so I have decided to actually do something about this. I usually enjoy reading Oliver Burkeman’s columns in The Guardian weekend magazine, so when I saw he’d written a book called The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking, I decided I would read it. Happily, I was able to download it as an e-book from the public library. [I'm still slightly over-excited about the fact that one can borrow e-books from the public library - perhaps I should write a blog post about this and get it out of my system.] I enjoyed the book, and I think it’s worth reading, particularly if the usual run of self-help books just makes you feel worse than you felt to begin with. For starters, the book describes just what a waste of time positive thinking (aka pretending everything is alright when it’s not) can be. Hooray! I felt better already.

I was going to summarise the main points of the book here, but (a) it’s probably better if you read it for yourself, and (b) this post would be too long if I did, so instead I will share the quotations used at the head of each chapter, which are a sort of summary in themselves:

Try to post for yourself this task: not to think of a polar bear, and you will see that the cursed thing will come to mind every minute.

- Fyodor Dostoevsky - Winter Notes on Summer Impressions

Pessimism, when you get used to it, is just as agreeable as optimism.

- Arnold Bennett, Things  That Have Interested Me

You want it to be one way. But it’s the other way.

- Marlo Stanfield in The Wire

Future, n. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends and true and our happiness is assured.

- Ambrose Pierce, The Devil’s Dictionary

Why are you unhappy? Because 99.9 per cent of everything you think, and of everything you do, is for yourself – and there isn’t one.

- Wei Wu Wei, Ask the Awakened

Security is a kind of death, I think.

- Tennessee Williams, ‘The Catastrophe of Success‘

You can’t turn a sow’s ear into a Veal Orloff. But you can do something very good with a sow’s ear.

- Julia Child

If I had my life over I should form the habit of nightly composing myself to thoughts of death. I would practice, as it were, the remembrance of death…without an ever-present sense of death, life is insipid. You might as well live on the whites of eggs.

- Inspector Mortimer in Muriel Spark‘s Momento Mori

One of the most helpful ideas I got from the book was the idea of, when worrying about something, to think about what the worst-case scenario could really be. In most situations the worse-case scenario is probably not really going to be as bad as we might think it is, and even if it is bad, it is unlikely to be something that we really can’t cope with in some way. Also, being a brilliant procrastinator, I found the idea of procrastination being a result of  feeling that we can’t do something rather than us really, literally, not being able to do it an interesting one that I hadn’t thought of before. E.g.,  I might feel that  I’m unable to do some Hebrew exercises, but really, I am literally (physically) able to do them, I just don’t feel like it. So, the answer to procrastination is to just get on and do things.

I was also interested to learn that the expression “X  [person] is a failure” and the idea of people being “failures” only came into being during the growth of capitalism in the late 1800s when people started to get credit ratings, and bad credit ratings came to determine a person’s “moral worth” as well as their financial status.  Also, there is a particularly intriguing chapter on the evils of goal setting that should be read by all managers, IMHO.

In general, Burkeman advises embracing such ‘negative’ things as failure and uncertainty, because seeking after success and security are likely to make us more unhappy. None of this is news, but, when you look around at society and at the workplace in particular you would be forgiven for thinking that it was. I suspect that most people secretly (or not so secretly) know that trying to be perfect is going to do us harm, that setting goals is not the way to get the best out of people, that it’s OK to fail, and that we need to think about death a bit more (in a good way), but ‘society’ and the way we’ve been taught to live tell us the opposite. We spend a lot of time deluding ourselves, in various ways, about a myriad of things, when, actually, if we could just see and accept reality we might just be a bit happier. 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Forward

On the bus going forward to Canterbury

A look into The Lion’s World

My mum gave me The Lion’s World: A Journey into the Heart of Narnia, by Rowan Williams, for Christmas. As some of my friends will tell you, I’m a big Rowan Williams fan. There was the time we followed him round Canterbury, when he was taking part in the St Nicholas’ Day parade:

Is that really the Archbishop of Canterbury (as was)?

Yes, it is!

And here he is again!

I also had the pleasure and privilege of attending one of his Holy Week lectures on the aspects of the Chronicles of Narnia last year. The Lion’s World is partly an expansion of these talks.

Probably unsurprisingly, given that I’m an admirer of both the Narnia books and Dr Williams, I enjoyed the book. I’ve read quite a lot about C.S. Lewis and the Narnia stories in recent years, but The Lion’s World  made me think about aspects of the stories, and about Lewis himself, that I hadn’t properly considered before, as well as valuable points I’d just missed entirely. The book has a lot to say about Lewis and Narnia, of course, not all of which is entirely complimentary – thankfully, Williams is not beyond seeing Lewis’s flaws as a human being or as a writer, despite the obvious affection and admiration he has for him. However, what I found most valuable about The Lion’s World was not the factual information or opinion, interesting though these are, but the fresh (to me)  interpretation of parts of the stories.

For example, I was particularly struck by the lessons Williams draws from the scenes in chapter 10 of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Lucy finds the book of spells. In this chapter, Lucy resists the temptation to cast a spell that will make her beautiful (she wants to be more beautiful than her sister, Susan – in the film version of the story she gives in to temptation, casts the spell and actually becomes Susan) – she wants something other than what actually is, but Aslan helps her to resist the temptation. However, she then goes on to cast a different spell to help her hear what her friends say about her when she’s not there. She hears things she would rather not have heard, and although Aslan steps in to help her, the damage to the friendship has already been done. Williams interprets the scene in this way:

…Lucy [...] recognizes just in time the spiritually suicidal nature of wanting to replace one’s own given reality with another identity, but still seeks to replace the given challenges and uncertainties of human intimacy – including the constantly threatening doubt as to whether I really know or am known by the other – with some kind of guarantee, some kind of magical access to the truth [...It is] the refusal to let ordinary human exchange count as reality…

As Williams says in his previous paragraph, the only answers to the kinds of ‘questions’ Lucy is asking are “to be found in the exercise of love (or in Lucy’s case, friendship)”.

I’m not a child (at least not in age, it’s my 35th birthday tomorrow – just thought I’d throw that in ), but, like Lucy, I still worry about what people think of me and whether they really like me (or love me) and I still wish I was prettier or more like [insert name here] or more cheerful or cleverer and I still want to know that I’m known and not feel like an alien and I still, occasionally, want to ”really know” people, to have those  ”intimacies” that Lewis considers, I now think rightly, unnecessary for true friendship (Williams talks about this elsewhere in the book). [Update: Someone said they didn't really understand this last bit about "intimacies". I was already a bit worried I wasn't being very clear, so, to try to clarify; basically what I mean is that I used to think that you had to know all about a person in order to be friends with them, but I don't think this anymore.] Insecurity is a great conduit for sin (or selfishness, if you want to use a less theologically loaded word).

There’s quite a lot more I could say about The Lion’s World, but I think it’s probably better for anyone who’s interested just to read the book itself. As I’ve said, it’s fairly short, as these things go, and it even has pictures – it’s also, I found, quite a nice size for reading on public transport!

 

Knitting in the age of the Internet

If it wasn’t for the Internet, I wouldn’t have got very far with my knitting. I still count myself as a novice knitter, but without the Internet I wouldn’t have got much beyond casting on. Most of what I’ve learnt about knitting has been learned from the Internet – from blogs, Twitter and particularly YouTube. I know there are lots of books about knitting, but they tend to be relatively expensive, and, being somewhat lacking in coordination and (I have discovered) the ability to decipher diagrams of yarn and needles, I find it much easier to learn to knit by watching someone else actually doing something than by looking at a 2D image or trying to follow written instructions.

I suspect that a lot of people learning to knit now have the same experience – using the Internet where previously we would have asked our parents/aunts/uncles/grandparents. I’m sure many people are still taught how to knit by their parents, particularly, but for a lot of people this is no longer as practical as it would have been in the past where people tended to stay living close to family for most, if not all, of their lives.

It could be said that the learning of knitting skills is an example of a microcosm of  how society and particularly learning have changed over the past twenty years or so.

Hat: take 2

I made the hat again, using 4mm needles and casting on 108 stitches instead of 90, and this version is a much more realistic size. I managed the double pointed needles OK once I’d practiced a bit, and it was much easier to do the decreasing rounds, and it looks a bit better too, I think. It is a very green hat, but my mum has bravely volunteered to wear it, as she has a green scarf it will go with. Here is the hat in repose:

It’s quite difficult to take a photo of the back of one’s own head, and I apologise for the weirdness of this photo:

The colours are a bit odd in these pictures – I used my phone camera which always produces slightly strange colours, for some reason. The hat is much greener than it appears, and my hair is not that colour at all!