If I Open My Fingers A Little Bit More

*

When I was a child I loved the poems of AA Milne.

The stories were fine, though very few of them seemed to go anywhere, but the poems were just wonderful. Almost half-a-century later I can still quote huge chunks of The King’s Breakfast and almost all of Teddy Bear (“A bear, however hard he tries, grows tubby without exercise”).

I can recite every single word of Vespers, the story of Christopher Robin saying his prayers.

The reason that I mention this today is not to show off (to mention I can recite the complete libretto of Cosi Fan Tutte would be showing off, and also completely untrue) but because tonight is the second night of my Mindfulness Course and I am starting to feel that Christopher Robin and I are related.

In the poem Christopher Robin is saying his prayers and his mind wanders in all directions (“wasn’t it fun in the bath tonight?”, “I can see nanny’s dressing-gown on the door”, “and I close my eyes and I curl up small and nobody knows that I’m there at all”).

Last week we were given a CD and asked to perform a Body Scan each day, where the voice on the tape asks us to become aware of our bodies, part by part. I am not doing well so far.

A typical (mental) conversion between the voice and me goes like this:

Voice: “Start by bringing awareness to your feet, how they feel, perhaps they are warm or cold…”

Tinman: “They are quite cold, I should probably still be wearing woollen socks. Still, it’s bloody May now, when the hell is it going to start getting warm, Global Warming my arse…”

Voice: “… now bringing awareness to the lower legs..”

Tinman: “Damn, missed the feet bit, still, I’m concentrating now -”

Voice: “…. to the hardness of the shin bones…”

Tinman: “I’ve seven episodes of Bones recorded now, I’ll never get to watch them. I’m stopping getting into crime series’ from now on.”

Voice: “… and to the …”

Tinman: “Well, apart from Castle, because Detective Beckett is gorgeous.”

Voice: “… and bringing awareness to the fingers, now at rest..”

Tinman: “Yes, and they do so much work during the day, typing and stuff, oh God, I haven’t done my blog yet, what the hell am I going to write about. Bugger, I’m getting nowhere with the awareness, I wonder if being aware of that counts, I might ask her at the class tonight, or actually hopefully someone else will, I don’t want to look like a gobshite. Anyway, come on Tinman, big effort, you can do this -”

Voice: “… and that concludes the Body Scan Meditation Exercise.”

Tinman: “What? No, wait, all I’ve been aware of so far is that the ceiling needs painting, that you didn’t ask us to bring awareness to any of our naughty bits and that, while the jumper I’m wearing is a beautiful blue, it hasn’t a hood, whereas my hoodie has.”

I am trying, and I’m hoping it will get better, though at the moment I feel related not just to Christopher Robin but also to Pooh.

Who, after all, was a Bear of Very Little Brain.

Waltzing With Tilda Again

HOTDOG are back.

tHe irish lOngiTudinal stuDy On aGeing (TILDA to themselves, HOTDOG to this blog, and I’m really hoping that one day one of their researchers says “everyone seems to think we’re called HOTDOG and we can’t find out why”) called again on Monday. Two years ago ago they selected a numbers of houses at random and asked people over 50 would they tart in a major long-term study during which they would call every two years to monitor how our health, lifestyle and financial situation have changed or otherwise, using to data collected to influence Government thinking, as they put it, “towards making Ireland the best place in the world to grow old”.

I am at lower end of their target age-spread (since the spouses of the over-50s are asked to participate too Mrs Tin is even lower, now taking part for the second time while still not having reached the age of 50). There will be people more than 30 years older than me taking part, so I can understand why they read out three words and got me to call them back, asked did I feel out of breath after climbing one flight of stairs and do I dress myself (I answered yes in the belief that they were asking did I put on my own clothes, though if they actually meant “have you ever heard the phrase ‘you’re not going in that, are you?’” then I may have given them false information).

In a section where we’d to rate statements on a scale of five from Strongly Agree to Strongly Disagree one of the statements was “I am better than most people, and I know it”. I’m sorry, but                                                                                     they asked for honesty.

I felt that there was a sense of sadness in the overall tone of the questioning, though. I was asked whether I ever feel anxious, or stressed, or depressed and ok, they’ve got me there. But they asked do I ever feel worthless, or fearful of walking alone, or that I would be better off dead, and obviously these are questions that they need to know the answers to.

But I thought that there were too many of these. They gave the impression that I am marching year by year towards the town of Oldie, and that it a bleak, depressing, soul-destroying place. But I have a dad and friends (many of them here) who seem to embrace and love the age at which they are, and lead rich and interesting lives, and the tone of questioning did not seem to allow for that possibility.

They never seem to have heard of this poem, which reflects the way I intend to behave (I already have a purple polo-shirt that I wear to work).

I wasn’t asked do I ever laugh. Are we not supposed to?

Without Words

*

At last week’s Writers Centre workshop one of the guys brought along a number of prompts, and we ended up with the broken plate. As we were leaving I picked another one and folded it way without looking at it. This is where I ended up…

It wasn’t a day he liked.

It was yet another day that re-inforced just how unpopular he was. Before his school days his parents had showered him with admiration for his intelligence, for his keen interest in how things worked and for his preference for David Attenborough over David Beckham.

They had told him that his glasses looked cool.

School taught him, as it should, though it taught him a lesson that it shouldn’t. It taught him that people who didn’t watch South Park were weird, that people who knew what the EU was were weird and that people who could point out the scientific impossibilities in the plotlines of Doctor Who were Geeks. In fact, if Geek were a country he’d have been King.

It also taught him that glasses were not cool. Since Crocs, plastic shoes with holes in them, were seemingly the height of cool then he felt that somehow he was winning that round, thought he had learnt not to say that for a second time.

Primary School gave way to Secondary School, boyhood gave way to puberty and unblemished skin gave way to a face like a pizza. The mockery gave way to mockery. The boys still slagged his taste in books (mainly the fact that he read them), his ignorance as to who Lionel Messi was, and his glasses. The girls ignored him, which was somehow worse.

And never was his isolation more keenly felt than on this day. A classmate would brag of receiving five cards, another would top it with a claim of six. He knew that this was just rubbish. The same boys used to boast back when they were all eight that they had eaten ten pancakes on Shrove Tuesday, and he knew that it was impossible to eat more than five without throwing up.

He had proven this to himself by the empirical method.

But the fact is that they had all received some cards, and he had received none. Well, one, but he knew it was from his mum.

Today was the annual reminder that in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is laughed at.

He went into the class with the words “bet it’s from Natalie, she’s really into me” and “I think I got one from each of the twins” ringing in his ears. He told himself he didn’t care, but he knew deep down that he did.

He opened the lid of his school-desk to take out his book for the first class and saw the card inside. He opened it gingerly, half expecting it to loudly play the Laughing Policeman at him. It didn’t.

Inside was a fairly good caricature of himself and a short poem. The first two lines were the usual reference to botanical colouring, the last two said “I like Science and so do you”.

He looked around the class in astonishment. Nicola was blushing furiously. They were friends, or as near to a friend that he could have, they had been paired for a chemistry experiment and had proven that a particular mix of chemicals could produce a small explosion, though this was not what they’d been trying to prove.

He smiled over at her and she smiled shyly back.

They walked home together after school, her card in his bag, his card (hastily made during French) in hers. They talked about To Kill a Mocking Bird. She told him who Zac Efron was, he told her who Lionel Messi was (he’d known all along, the boys had just assumed that he wouldn’t).

They didn’t hold hands or anything (it would take many weeks before he would work up the courage to do that), but they talked, and laughed and at times just walked in comfortable silence, at ease with each other, and that would do for today, a day that he no longer hated.

And the prompt? Oh, it was “write about Valentine’s Day without mentioning these words: Valentine’s Day, Roses, Love, Flower, Heart, February, Cupid”.

Mindfulness Course – Week 1

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On Thursday I mindfully ate a raisin.

As I report on my Mindfulness Course over the coming weeks it may appear that I am making fun of it. This is not what I will be doing, I think already that the course is fascinating and I have real hopes that it will make a difference to my life, especially my mental one.

I will, however, be making fun of my attempts to fulfil its demands.

So anyway, on Thursday we were each given a raisin and told that we were going to eat it mindfully. We were to look at it, be mindful of its shape and colour, then smell it, then very slowly eat it, being aware of all of the tastes, sensations, memories that this might provoke.

Unfortunately back at step one I looked at the shape and colour of the raisin and found that it reminded me of a dried snot. This was then what my mind was full of during the rest of the exercise.

I have a long way to go.

Amanda Huggenkiss

Sidey’s Weekend Theme is “a hug or a kiss”….

***************************************************************

The Prince leaned over the bed and kissed Sleeping Beauty on the lips. Her eyes fluttered open.

“Oh, my Sweet Prince,” she said (she knew he was a prince because he was tall, blonde and looked a lot like Freddy from Scooby Doo), “thank you, you have broken the spell of the wicked witch. How can I repay you?”

“To thee, my sweet pure lady, I beg leave to plight my eternal troth.”

“Pardon?” said Sleeping Beauty.

“Er, I thought we could go out together,” said the Prince.

“I see,” said Sleeping Beauty. “well, you have done me a great service -”

Yes, I have, thought the Prince, so why isn’t there more applause? He looked around the court.

“They’re all still asleep!” he gasped.

“Of course,” said Sleeping Beauty, “they were all placed under a spell too.”

“But I thought that when I broke the spell for you it would break it for everyone,” said the Prince.

“Based, I suppose, on the ‘if-you-squeeze-one-blackhead-it-will-cure-all-your-zits’ theory?”

“Nice analogy,” said the Prince, “but what do I do now?”

“There’s nothing for it,” said Sleeping Beauty, “you’ll have to kiss all of them.”

“All of them?” said the Prince. “Even that old boot in the corner?”

“That’s my mother,” said Sleeping Beauty icily.

“Er, sorry,” said the Prince. He looked around the room. Some of the sleepers were pretty, some not so much. Some were men. One was a knight with his visor pulled down. One was the royal cat.

None of them had cleaned their teeth for over a hundred years.

The Prince took a deep breath, and plunged in.

Being a Princess, Sleeping Beauty had been trained from birth to be courteous should she suddenly find herself kissed awake, as falling under evil spells is pretty much part of the job. The others were not so well prepared, and suddenly jolting awake to find a stranger’s face backing away from them provoked a variety of reactions. Some screamed. Some slapped his face. The knight recoiled so quickly that his visor fell back down, pinching the Prince’s nose. The cat scratched his cheek.

Sleeping Beauty’s mother winked at him and, as he bent over the next person, squeezed his bum.

He yelped and fell on top of the sleeper, his arms going around her to prevent her hitting the floor. She opened her eyes and looked at him.

He turned to Sleeping Beauty in surprise. “Oh, it works if you just hug them instead,” she said.

“Why didn’t you mention that before?”

“Because you said you said you wanted someone sweet and pure. Well, I’m sure you’ve heard we princesses have to attend many balls, though you probably thought that meant we went to a lot of dances. I may not be quite as pure as you’d hoped.

“However,” she continued, “you’ve just kissed eighty-two women, sixty-seven men and a cat.”

She took his hand and smiled. “I think I’m pure enough for you now.”

Mindful Of My Health

I am going to a Mindfulness Course this evening, as the latest sortie in my battle against derealisation. I’m hoping that it’s going to be the classrooom equivalent of the Inner Peace found by Po in Kung Fu Panda 2 (I’m sorry, I actually sat down last Sunday morning to watch something else, but that came on and next thing I was hooked).

 It’s on for the next six Thursdays and one all-day Sunday, though I’m not sure that my mind is as big as they think it is. This means that I am missing several Euro 2012 football matches and one semi-final of the Eurovision Song Contest, so it had better be good.

The blurb claims that the course will aid anyone prone to stress, depression, rumination and low or anxious moods, or who struggles to experience calm and psychological well-being.

They should have just called it the Tinman course.

Damsel in Distress

Princess Vanessa could not understand it.

She had had such faith in chivalry. She had thought that she would simply have had to send out word of her plight and hundreds of knights would have fought each other for the honour of aiding her.

She had even hoped that some of them might try to woo her. She was not exactly sure what “woo” meant, but what she thought it might mean made her blush and think “woo!” so she felt that she was probably right.

Yet no aid arrived. Days came and went, but knights did not.

Chastened (and indeed still chaste), she had offered instead a reward to anyone prepared to assist her in her hour of distress. Still she received no aid, and still she remained trapped, like a Rapunzel in a tower.

Or at least like a Rapunzel with twenty million dollars.

The year was 2012, and Princess Vanessa was a Nigerian Princess.

She was trying to escape the clutches of her wicked brother. She had secured a flight out of the country under a false name, but could not carry out her fortune in cash because of Ryanair’s limit on the size of the luggage that you can bring. She had tried filling a bag of the permitted dimensions, and had managed to fit forty-two dollars into it.

That was when she had had the idea of finding some decent man abroad, transferring the money to his account and redeeming it once she had escaped. All she would need were his bank details.

She looked on Facebook and soon found a likely candidate. Garry looked trustworthy and he had twenty-two friends, far more than she had, since handmaidens, eunuchs and the court jester didn’t count.

She asked to be his friend too and was accepted remarkably quickly, as Garry reckoned that 23 friends was a bigger number than 22. She then received regular emails (very regular, all on the first day in fact) informing her that Garry had uploaded photos of his skiing holiday, had been at his niece’s birthday party, had altered his status to “single” (she felt for him, since she now felt that she genuinely was his friend).

She emailed him, explained her problem, and outlined her solution.

He did not reply. Not only that, but he unfriended her. Vanessa, Princess of the Makowi tribe, had been dissed by a mere commoner with a penchant for posting pictures of himself having fallen over in the snow.

She tried someone else. And then someone else.

She lowered her standards. She picked people whose Facebook photos consistently showed them passed out at parties. She picked people who weren’t on Facebook at all, getting an email list of subscribers to UFO Weekly. She joined Online Dating Agencies (“girl, 19, likes tiaras, rubies and elephant-hunting, WLTM anybody at all with a bank account for ten per cent of my fortune and maybe more”).

Nothing happened. It seemed nobody wanted two million dollars.

Then one day she got an email herself. It was from a Nigerian Princess, seeking bank account details so that she could transfer her fortune away from her wicked brother.

Vanessa had never heard of her. She began to suspect what her problem might be.

She Googled “Nigerian Princesses” and was shocked at the fact that she and her like had become a byword for dishonesty (she was also pretty pissed at the fact that she, a real Nigerian Princess, did not even seem to have a Wikipedia page devoted to her).

It seemed that no-one would help her. Her brother was going to win, would have her money forever.

She thought. Then she replied to the email and gave over her bank details. As she expected, her account was emptied. The twenty million dollars was moved elsewhere, outside Nigeria.

And Princess Vanessa, a girl with an IQ of 140 and a Doctorate in Computer Science, caught her flight, hacked into the scammer’s emails and passwords and emptied his account in reply. Of two hundred and two million dollars.

Princesses are made of sterner stuff these days.

In Short

I am five feet five inches tall.

Actually, I’d always believed that I was five feet five-and-a-half until HOTDOG (they’ve been in touch, they’ll be back to see me again soon) cut me down to size, but the point is that I’m not the tallest person on the planet.

I have never been selected for the second-row of the Irish rugby team, never forged a career in basketball (though in fairness, most days I can’t hit a waste-paper basket at ground level from two feet, so my height may not have been the only issue here) and would not be on the short-list (sorry about that) if any film-maker was casting for the role of Goliath.

(Goliath was, of course, defeated by the much smaller David, but I think people miss the point here. David did not beat him at unarmed combat, he hit him from distance using a catapult, the biblical equivalent of a sniper rifle).

Let’s face it. I am short.

And I do face it. I don’t mind being called short, or small, or titchy, or a short-arse (though I don’t see the sense of that last one, there’s nothing short about my actual arse, it’s just not very far off the ground).

What I am not is Vertically Challenged.

I have a couple of issues with this phrase. The second word implies that Verticality has thrown down the gauntlet to me, or slapped me across the face with a glove (he wouldn’t have done that if I’d been bigger), and that I could in fact be taller if only I’d choose to meet this challenge.

How I might do this is unclear. What works with plants (standing them in soil and watering that soil regularly) would mean that I’d drown by osmosis. Swinging out of a bar will simply give me arms that trail along the ground. Stretching myself upon a rack would surely stretch only my arms (again) and my legs, so that I would end up looking like a stilt-walker, with arms that trail along the ground.

The optical illusion employed in the 1970s, that of massive platform shoes, is a phase of my life that I do not look back upon with sartorial pride.

The other problem that I have with the euphemism is that it’s saying “ok, he’s really short, but let’s not mention that, in case he hasn’t noticed”.

What it is effectively saying is that not only am I short, but I am thick as well.

Shattered

The Irish Writers Centre was closed for the long weekend, but some of us from the weekly writing workshop decided to meet anyway. Someone brought a list of prompts from from a website, we drew out one at random, and for 30 minutes we’d  write about “How does a broken plate feel?”….

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He missed his family.

Mum and Dad, the big dinner plates. His brothers and sisters, his fellow side plates. He even missed his little nieces and nephews, the saucers.

He didn’t miss his cousins, the cups. They looked down on his family, quite literally n the case of his nieces and nephews.

He had been injured before, of course. He had a chip out of one side from banging himself against a sideboard. His faced had been scarred and scratched by over-enthusiastic Brillo Pads. His daily bath in the dishwasher had removed the “Made in Taiwan” tattoo from his bottom.

But this injury had been too bad. He had been placed too close to the side of a tabled teetered and wobbled for a moment and then had slipped off. He had hung in mid-air for a split-second like Wile E Coyote in the cartoons, and then gravity had taken over.

Wile E Coyote usually left a hole in his own shape  in the ground, but he had simply broken into four pieces.

He had heard of distant, very distant relatives from places like Wedgewood and Ming who upon receiving such injuries would be painstakingly restored to continue their existences, permanently high from the smell of the glue that now held them together.

Ordinary working-class plates like him were not treated as well, since a two-tier Health System also applied to crockery. He had been swept onto a strange flt plastic shovel, the lid of the kitchen-bin had jolted open at astonishing speed, and he had been slid inside.

That’s where he was now, along with a banana-skin, a sock who had lost its twin and, by supreme irony, a retired Brillo Pad.

The Brillo Pad saw him and had grace to blush, feat which it achieved by squeezing some its pink goo briefly to its surface.

“No hard feelings?” it said.

The Pads attentions had used to make him feel as if he was being kissed by someone with stubble, but what was the point of complainig about that now. They were headed together, he knew, for some place called Recycling, so what was the point of re-cycling old grudges.

“I suppose not,” he replied.

*******************************************

That’s as far as I got, though I don’t think there’s much further I could have gone. Oh, and I read it out again. I’m getting braver.

On The Fringe

I’ve written here before that for my 99th post I mentioned my crush, when I was young, on Agent 99 from the original TV Series of Get Smart.

Since these were the days before SOFA and FIFA I published this picture

which I think it’s OK to publish here again since Google Images directed me to my own original post.

I’ve also written before that every week several people come here having searched for “Agent 99″ or for “Agent 99 Get Smart”. I’m sure that they leave quite disappointed.

Though probably not as disappointed as the person who came here this week after typing “get smart hairstyle”.