When I lived in Spain I used to complain about how long the holiday season lasted: it seemed to stretch all the way from the fiestas at the beginning of December until past Twelfth Night.**
Here in the UK, though, much as I was bemoaning the supermarket aisles crammed with marzipan, iced cake and mince pies back in October, Christmas seems to be a bit of a flash in the pan.
Continue reading “almost over”
It’s Christmas Eve and I really would rather be elsewhere – probably not in the local pub where there’s a karaoke evening in full swing, but perhaps in the kitchen where there’s a bottle of something suitably cheap and fizzy, half full or half empty depending on your point of view.
But I have a blog to write.
Continue reading “under duress”
I mentioned “memory” in yesterday’s blog post, which is hardly a new subject for this blog: if you search on the word, you’ll find eight pages of posts come up, or 29 pages if you search for “remember”. This compares with no instances -until now – of “forgetfulness” and just six pages of posts including the word “forget”.
Since they are two sides of the same coin, I wonder why there is such a bias. Presumably it’s the way I phrase things: I probably talk more about “not remembering” than I do about “forgetting”, but I’m not sure why.
Continue reading “shaping memories”
I don’t know when I first heard the saying “God gave us memory so that we might have roses in December”**, but it made sense to me as I was brought up in Britain and grew up thinking of the rose as the perfect symbol of English summer.
Later, I realised that I was wrong to think of the flower as typically English: I’ve seen the Rose Parade in Pasadena and elsewhere on the blog I’ve pondered the character of Spanish roses. But I still tend to associate roses with better weather.
That said, I took the above photo earlier this week.
True, the blooms are a little the worse for wear – if I was remembering a rose, I think I’d picture one in rather better condition. Frankly, though, I don’t think they should have been there at all.
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** The quote is attributed to J M Barrie, though when he used it in a rectorial address in 1922 he seems to have expected his audience to be familiar with it.
As a woman whose business falls broadly within the technology sector, I’ve been involved in a number of conversations recently that talk about “women in tech” as if there were a clear dichotomy between arts and science.
Personally, I find it hard to view the world in stark black and white like that.
Continue reading “blurred borders”
don't confuse the narrator 