reading – Page 25 – twenty-one words

Why I drink tea, not coffee

August 11, 2016May 15, 2022Posted in anxiety, favourite quotes, health, Other people's words about ..., reading, rituals, solace, staying humble, staying true, UncategorizedTagged mental health, solace5 Comments

Other people’s words about … tea

The MOTH (the Man of the House) thinks the world’s drowning in a tsunami of expensive [cappuccino] froth. He’s fighting the trend single-handedly. He drinks tea made from tea leaves. He doesn’t like ‘gift’ teas that arrive with house guests and distant cousins …

Every morning and most evenings, the MOTH makes tea following the rules set down by his mother. Bring a kettle of water to a ‘rolling’ boil. Warm the teapot. Put in a generous measure of loose tea. Fill the pot with boiling water, replace the lid and wait patiently. In the meantime, put out china cups and saucers, teaspoons, the sugar bowl and a jug of milk. Hot buttered toast and a jar of homemade marmalade will do nicely as well.

From ‘Tea and Sympathy’ by Pat McDermott
featured in
The Australian Women’s Weekly, July 2016

Old-time readers of this blog will know of my love for tea by now. I would rather give up wine, chocolate or cheese than give up my daily pot(s) of tea.

Many years ago, I attempted to become a coffee drinker. I was working as a student barista in a cafe in Port Adelaide at the time, and the coffees I made for my customers smelt enticing. There is nothing better than the smell of freshly brewed coffee.

But. I soon discovered that I am extremely sensitive to caffeine. Give me a cappuccino at nine o’clock in the morning, and I will be jittery and fidgety and twitchy all day. I won’t sleep. I’ll still be awake the next morning, heart hammering away, eyes dry and wide. And don’t even get me started on that sense of the walls of the room caving in on me …

My grandmother drank tea, and I remember her making me cups when I was a child: the ritual of it, the alluring whiff of mysterious adulthood that came with it. Still, for years after I’d begun reacting to coffee, I avoided drinking tea because I knew it also had caffeine in it, though in a smaller dose. Eventually, though, I became close to someone who was an inveterate tea-drinker, and I felt tempted again. Eventually, tea wooed me back in just the way that coffee had once done.

Maybe it’s the smaller amount of caffeine. Maybe it’s psychological. Maybe it’s the ritual of tea-making: my grandmother’s Royal Worcester china, the pot, the brewing, the accompaniment of sourdough toast spread with a (thick!) layer of my mother’s grapefruit marmalade or my father’s quince jam. Whatever it is, I have found that I can handle the caffeine in tea.

I read recently in The Australian Healthy Food Guide (p. 14) that Lord Twining, of Twinings Tea fame, has been known to state that anything less than nine cups of tea per day is a totally unsatisfying tea-drinking day. Clearly, Lord Twining may have vested interests in making statements like this … but I can’t help admiring such a line of thinking, all the same.

And so … let the tea-drinking continue!

Inner world

August 4, 2016August 3, 2016Posted in a thought, anxiety, books, favourite quotes, reading, resilience, solace, staying humble, staying trueTagged adolescence, books, mental health, reading, resilience4 Comments

Other people’s words about … resilience

I think maybe [my father] liked the worlds in his head better than the real one. As far as I ever knew, he didn’t have any close friends … Once, when I was about nine or ten, I told him I wasn’t very popular at school. He told me that friends were overrated, because the only person you could ever really count on was yourself. Weirdly, that actually made me feel better.

from ‘Thanks for the Trouble‘
by Tommy Wallach

I am, I suppose, what most people would describe as introverted. There are other words that go along with this kind of description: shy, quiet, aloof, disengaged, uncertain, insecure, antisocial. Those are mostly negative words, I see. Perhaps they are coined by extroverts.

The year that we lived in England, I was at my most introverted: I had no friends at all. (Here’s a question: do you end up without friends because you are introverted, or do you become introverted because you have no friends?) I was fourteen, and I wandered those long school corridors with the white polished floors alone. I wore the wrong clothes, and I had the wrong accent, and I lived life at the wrong pace and the wrong volume. At lunch I sat in one of the stalls in the girls’ toilets, waiting the hour out. I listened to girls coming in and out, the cubicle doors swinging, the toilets flushing. My breath caught on the sweet spray of perfume they doused themselves with as they stood before the mirrors. I listened to their chatter, high and loud and lipsticked. And then I listened to the door to the girls’ room banging shut again, their footsteps receding down the white-floored corridors as they went back to wherever they had come from.

After the first few weeks, one of the school teachers took pity on me, and introduced me to a couple of girls in my class.

‘Go and sit with them at lunchtime,’ he said, with a look on his face that was half-pity and half-exasperation. He was small and balding and chipper. ‘They’re nice girls. They’ll look after you.’

Such well-meaning, misguided intentions! I looked at the two girls and they looked back at me. I could see they were as horrified at the prospect of me spending lunchtime with them as I was. And yet we all did what he said. They took me back to their lunchtime bench, and I sat with them and their friends — that day and the day after and the day after that. For months, in fact, I ate my sandwich with them silently; I sat with them silently; I watched them silently; I listened to them silently. They took to ignoring me, in the end. They went on with their lives — their parties and their gossip and their drinking and their shopping and their boyfriends — while I sat mute beside them, in what seems to me now almost a parody of introversion.

I have often thought back to that year in high school. I’ve thought about how, at night, I lay in the darkness of my bedroom, the one with the wallpaper with pretty sprigs of flowers dotted over it, and longed for popularity and friendship, for someone my own age to count on. I’ve thought about how I believed that I must be faulty in some way — weak, or cowardly, or defective — because I couldn’t do what other people my own age did instinctively: talk. Make connections. Relax. Laugh.

So it astonishes me now, to look back and see a different possibility, a different narrative, from the one I’ve just told. I don’t believe that friends are ‘overrated’, to use Wallach’s word. Still, I wonder: what if I had learned to trust myself during that year? What if I had learned that I was my own friend? What if I had allowed myself to like the world in my head at least as much as the real one? More broadly, what if we could teach all young people to count on themselves in this way? What, then?

I am not sure. But I think it’s important to listen to alternative narratives like the one in the words above: to retell our life-stories to ourselves, to seek out new plots, new endings. I think it’s important to trust your own inner world: to learn to turn to it in times of need, or in times of loneliness. Introversion, in this context, is irrelevant. What’s relevant is resilience. Resilience is all that matters.

Resilience, you will note, is not a negative word.

It’s not always about speed. Or winning.

July 21, 2016May 15, 2022Posted in anxiety, books, favourite quotes, health, Other people's words about ..., reading, Running, staying humble, staying true, UncategorizedTagged anxiety, mental health, running1 Comment

Other people’s words about … running (slowly)

I didn’t fight my way across the finishing line — nor did I float. The significance of that marathon didn’t lie in speed or in pain, but in the exchange between my body and the city. I didn’t need a personal best trophy; I could prize the run on its own terms. After many years of early morning runs and all kinds of races, running is to me a way of being, not a way of testing myself against invisible antagonists and not a competition with my peers. I had nothing to vanquish but my doubts, and now — in ways I could never have predicted — running has brought me into a rich communion with the world. It still surprises me. I’m careful not to slip on dirt tracks, and I pay more attention to warnings about overstraining my knees than I used to. I want to avoid injury. I don’t want a show-stopping finish line moment. I want to keep running.

From ‘The Long Run‘
by Catriona Menzies-Pike

When I (briefly, as it turned out, at least for now) took up running again last year, it wasn’t the thought of speed, or competition, or races, or personal bests, that appealed to me. Nor, God forbid, was it the thought of getting super-fit and toned. Lone beast that I am, it wasn’t the thought of companionship, either: of joining a running team, or running with new friends. I know these are the things that runners often find joy in, but they weren’t drawcards for me.

No, what drew me back to running was what I remembered from the period in my twenties when I ran: how meditative running can make you feel. There is the beat of your heart, the rhythm of your feet, the taking-in and letting-out of your breath. There is the simplicity of moving your feet over the ground, taking you there (wherever ‘there’ is) and back again. There is the joy, afterwards, of feeling reawakened. And alive.

I'm careful not to slip on dirt tracks — I’m careful not to slip on dirt tracks

I suspect that Catriona Menzies-Pike is a kindred spirit. Her whole book, if you care to read it, is an eloquent essay on how running helped to heal the grief she felt for her parents’ untimely death when she was still a child. It is also an exploration of the joys of running slowly — and making the choice to do so. Imagine running, but not forcing yourself to race. Imagine running, but allowing yourself to enjoy the moment rather than the end-result. Imagine running, with no particular aim in mind other than to take the time it takes.

Imagine.

We talk big about fitness these days. We talk about heart-rate and VO2 and pace and gait. We talk about sub-four-hour marathons and heel-striking and foam rollers. We have instruments and apps to help us talk this talk — Garmins and GPS trackers and Apple Watches and the like. (Wait, maybe those instruments created the talk. Have you ever thought that?) So choosing to run slowly, in a world full of talk like this, is tantamount to an act of anti-consumerist, anti-conformist rebellion.

I don’t want a show-stopping finish line moment. Those words apply equally well to life as they do to running, don’t they? There’s another metaphor in the quote above, too. Running, Menzies-Pike says, still surprises me. I get that. I do.

Because life still surprises me. I hope it always will.

The one true story

July 14, 2016July 7, 2016Posted in anxiety, books, favourite quotes, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, solace, staying humble, staying true, UncategorizedTagged blogging, despair, mental health, writers, writingLeave a comment

Other people’s words on … writing

He said, ‘What is your job as a writer of fiction?’ And she said that her job as a writer of fiction was to report on the human condition, to tell us who we are and what we think and what we do.

from ‘My name is Lucy Barton‘
by Elizabeth Strout

When I first began this blog, I was adamant that, though I am a published writer, my blog would not be about writing. A writer can blog about things other than writing, right? A writer isn’t just a writer: a writer is a person; a writer has a life. That’s what I wanted to blog about.

Besides, it seemed to me that blogging about writing would be, in my case, an inexcusably audacious act. My thinking went like this: I have published only two books. I haven’t published anything since 2010. My books have gone out of print. What can I tell anyone about writing? Who would want to read what I had the temerity to say?

I don’t much like the word ‘writer’. Perhaps it’s because I haven’t published much and don’t make a living from my writing, but I feel pretentious and arrogant when I call myself one. I think of myself instead as someone who has written two books, and would like to write another one, but is struggling to do so.

That’s another word I don’t like: ‘struggle’. When I first began writing stories and fiction, the writing was an act of joy. It was a process of humble discovery. Each word that I wrote, each sentence, each chapter, was a journey. I was learning to do something new. I was learning to do something I loved. I was learning.

Writing is a learning process — Lessons in writing: all part of the learning process

So when I first read the words I’ve quoted above from Elizabeth Strout, I thought: Yes! Writing fiction, for me, has always been about opening myself up to sorrow, and to joy, and to humility, and to discovery. It’s about expressing those things, however afraid I am to do so. It’s about making sense of my life. It’s about trying to make something beautiful. It’s about having the temerity — the audacity, the arrogance — to share my words with other people: people who, like me, love reading.

Most of all, writing fiction, like blogging, is about sharing.

And so that’s the reason I’m posting these words about writing today. Call it pretension; call it temerity. Call it audacity; call it arrogance. Call it learning; call it sorrow; call it joy.

Elizabeth Strout again (from the same book):

You will have only one story … You’ll write your one story many ways. Don’t ever worry about story. You have only one.

Maybe this is the only story I have to share, but that doesn’t mean it’s not worth sharing.

The butterfly bush

July 7, 2016May 15, 2022Posted in books, favourite quotes, nature, on writing, Other people's words about ..., reading, summer, Uncategorized4 Comments

Other people’s words about … English gardens

The garden was in a jungle state of desuetude: weeds were everywhere. The top lawn descended to a second, where was a tangled rose garden and sun-dial: thence further descent, past more noble trees to a third lawn in the middle of which was a pond, or miniature lake. It had an off-centre well-scaped island, containing one weeping willow and some iris out of flower. Pigeons flew heavily out of bushes like people leaving a play of which they disapproved. Rabbits cavorted and then escaped their attention just in time. A huge old buddleia was spattered with either tortoise-shell or Painted Lady butterflies. Arabella seemed delighted by the whole thing.

from ‘Odd Girl Out‘
by Elizabeth Jane Howard

When I was fourteen years old, my family spent a year away from Australia, living in England. My whole family, on both sides, comes from the UK; my sister and I were born there, too. We migrated to Australia when I was three.

So the year back in England was a homecoming of sorts, for my parents, at least. We lived in an old stone coach house, in Oxfordshire. As I remember it, the coach house stood on stilts in the gardens of a much grander house, also built of stone. There were brambles, and two black cats — one bold and prowling, the other timid and long-haired and neurotic — and several peacocks strutted the spreading lawns, letting out frightening, ghoulish shrieks beneath our windows. That year, the winter in England was unusually severe, and drifts of snow built up in the garden and in the country lanes leading to our house. My bedroom in that cold house was tiny, with room only for a single bed, a chest of drawers, and the hot-water boiler. Because of the presence of the boiler, though, I remember my room as being always cosy and warm. It had cheerful Laura Ashley wallpaper with sprigs of tiny green flowers dotted all over it.

My grandparents on my mother’s side had retired to live in Dorset, and we spent many weekends there. My grandfather loved to garden; he had a small allotment on the fringe of the village, where he grew runner beans and potatoes and lettuce and — that most English of vegetables — spring greens. Their own backyard was small, with a stone wall at the end, beyond which cows grazed in a field.

Near the house grew a bush with beautiful purple flowers. Memory is a strange thing — I remember this bush as a buddleia bush; I remember my grandfather telling me that’s what it was; and I remember the butterflies that visited it in the spring, drinking nectar from the flowers, their wings warmed by the sun as they clustered on the blossoms. Now, years later, my mother tells me the bush wasn’t a buddleia at all: it couldn’t have been, because my grandmother considered buddleias weeds. It was, in fact, a lilac tree.

However faulty my memory is, I know that it was in my grandfather’s garden that I learned to distinguish between tortoiseshells and painted ladies and swallowtails and cabbage whites. Though we returned to Australia a year later, I retained my love for butterflies. The butterflies here are different, and I delight in them just as much, so much so that my house is cluttered with butterfly ornaments and trinkets and gifts from friends.

How do I remember England and our time there? That’s another memory for another time. Lest anyone wonder, this post isn’t intended to be a commentary, condemnatory or otherwise, about the recent Brexit. The timing of this post is purely coincidental. Still, what I love about the words from Elizabeth Jane Howard in the quote above is how, in just a few sentences, they capture an English summer in all its Englishness … at least as I remember it.

Some books say

June 30, 2016June 13, 2016Posted in books, favourite quotes, life, on writing, Other people's words about ..., readingTagged books, readingLeave a comment

Other people’s words about … self-help

Sometimes I am guilty of believing that if I can just read the ‘right’ book, I will know how to change my life. If I can just follow the right advice (and adhere to it), I will know how to live.

That’s the appeal of self-help books, right? You don’t have to think for yourself anymore. You just have to do what the author says, and you’ll find happiness. Success. Wealth. Health. Glory. Inner peace.

Then again …

Some books say start a garden, sing to your plants. Some books say join a book club, take music lessons, start a stamp collection, get a pet. Some books say brew your own beer. Some books say try paintball, enter a local trivia competition, take dance lessons, learn to rumba. Some books say listen to James Brown. Some books say give yourself a hug. Some books say when someone hugs you, let them be the first to let go. Some books say let a dog lick your face. Some books say swim naked. Some books say kiss a stranger. Some books say climb a mountain. Some books say overcome a phobia. some books say change begins with pain. Some books say get busy living or get busy dying. Some books say never say the word try. Some books say there’s nothing you can’t do. Some books say accept your limitations. Some books say don’t take no for an answer. Some books say buy a karaoke machine and invite friends over. Some books say learn a new language. Some books say leave no regrets. Some books say beware a person who has nothing to lose. Some books say do no harm. Some books say never cut what can be untied. Some books say admit your mistakes. Some books say you are not your mistakes. Some books say forgive everyone everything. Some books say never criticise what can’t be changed. Some book say don’t be afraid to say I don’t know. Some books say don’t bore people with your problems. Some books say when someone asks you how you feel, say terrific, never better. Some books say ask questions. Some books say don’t ask too many questions. Some books say carry someone. Some books say let yourself be carried. Some books say there’s nothing to fear. Some books say it’s okay to be afraid. Some books say whistle in the dark. Some books say give more than you take. Some books say God never gives you more than you can take. Some books say God never blinks. Some books say God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference. Some books say read the Psalms. Some books say if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. Some books say choose your life partner carefully. Some books say tape-record your spouse’s laughter. Some books say that if you live with a partner, one usually dies first. Some books say surrender. Some books say do not go gently. Some books say recognise that you are lost. Some books say put yourself back together piece by piece. Some books say it’s never too late. Some books say it’s not unusual to live to ninety. Some books say you will probably be old for a long time. Some books say you can’t kiss your own ear. Some books say it’s nice to meet someone after a long absence. Some books say reunion is a type of heaven. Some books sat there’s no good in goodbye. Some books say never say goodbye, better to say see you later, see you soon, see you someday, until we meet again.

from The Book of Why
by Nicholas Montemarano

Maybe it’s time for us (me?) to remember that there is no single, right way to live: that for every piece of truth someone offers you, there is another, opposite truth.

But maybe there is comfort in that plurality. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe it’s all about acceptance, and making peace with that acceptance.

And maybe — just maybe — that’s part of the adventure …

Roll and thunder and hiss

June 23, 2016May 15, 2022Posted in favourite quotes, Other people's words about ..., reading, the seaTagged books, sea8 Comments

Other people’s words about … the sea (again)

I could see the sea from the terrace, and the lawns. It looked grey and uninviting, great rollers sweeping in to the bay past the beacon on the headland. I pictured them surging into the little cove and breaking with a roar upon the rocks, then running swift and strong to the shelving beach. If I stood on the terrace and listened I could hear the murmur of the sea below me, low and sullen. A dull, persistent sound that never ceased. And the gulls flew inland too, driven by the weather. They hovered above the house in circles, wheeling and crying, flapping their spread wings. I began to understand why some people could not bear the clamour of the sea. It has a mournful harping noise sometimes, and the very persistence of it, that eternal roll and thunder and hiss, plays a jagged tune upon the nerves.

From Rebecca
by Daphne du Maurier

Rebecca is one of my favourite books. The unnamed narrator’s character — shy, very English, young, terribly lacking in confidence — is exquisitely drawn. The plot is an absolute cracker. And if you want to find out how to use short sentences to build suspense (and I mean short! sentences), read the last half of the book. I have never seen them used so effectively. Stop reading at your peril.

And then there is the sea. It’s almost a character in itself in Rebecca. Here in this quote, and elsewhere, the sea is a dark, brooding presence. We’re not talking sunshine and sun tans and happy childhood memories here. This is a sea that threatens and menaces, that fills the reader with a terrible sense of foreboding.

You know me by now. These won’t be the last words I quote about the sea. But honestly? I think they will always be, for me, up there with the best.

The third year

June 16, 2016June 13, 2016Posted in a thought, books, favourite quotes, gratitude, on writing, reading, solace, staying humble, staying trueTagged books, conversation, reading, writing5 Comments

Beautiful words

I love reading.
I love words.
Maybe you’d noticed?
After all, reading and writing have been two of my core themes on this blog, right from the start.
So.
This year — my third year of blogging (yes, really! twenty-one words has been around for over two years now) — that will be my main focus.
Other people’s words.

Each week, I’ll be posting a quote from something I’ve read and loved,
either recently or long ago.
(Some writers’ words stay in your mind forever.)
Sometimes I’ll post a photo to accompany the quote,
sometimes I’ll post a comment instead.

A cup of tea to accompany reading makes it even better ... — A cup of tea to accompany reading makes it even better …

I hope you’ll find some words here, in the next year, that tickle your fancy;
that make you think;
that make you laugh,
or smile,
or cry;
that make you go to your library and read those other people’s words for yourself.
For me, that’s what reading’s all about.

Note
For readers wondering about my original theme — twenty-one words, after which this blog is named — fear not. ‘Twenty-one’ will still be a theme around here. Watch this space to find out how.

The circle of life

May 26, 2016April 21, 2016Posted in anxiety, books, favourite quotes, life, reading, solace, staying humble, staying trueTagged books, conversation, despair2 Comments

I can’t resist coming back to Kim Leine’s ‘The Prophets of Eternal Fjorde’ today to post a couple more quotes. This time, we are not focusing on intestinal discomfort. (Enough already!)

My constitution would seem to be better than I would have thought, for I have survived two attacks upon my life this winter and may thereby once more look forward to further prolongation of my futile destiny.
(p. 406)

Morten Falck, a Danish missionary, struggles with his own fleshly weakness, with his desires and cravings, and with the despair that comes from leading a life whose purpose is not entirely clear to him.

I cannot go back … I can only go forward, in a ceaseless circle, and my only hope is that when the circle is complete and the motion halts I shall have arrived at the place that is best for me …
(p. 505)

Life as a ceaseless circle:
Don’t you, too, sometimes feel you are pushing forward blindly, hoping — hoping — that you will one day arrive at a place that makes sense?

The flesh is weak

May 19, 2016April 21, 2016Posted in books, favourite quotes, reading, solace, staying humble, staying true, UncategorizedTagged health, reading, solace4 Comments

Other people’s words about … well, elimination

Writers don’t often describe bodily functions in literature (other than sex). After all, reading is about escapism, right?

But in ‘The Prophets of Eternal Fjord’, Kim Leine describes the main character’s afflictions with — ahem — a sensitive colon so evocatively that his physical suffering becomes embedded into the story.

His intestines are in an uproar. He senses the ominous ripple of diarrhoea in the bowel, the quivering alarm of the sphincter.
(p. 114)

Morten Falck is an eighteenth-century missionary in the Danish colony of Greenland.

His bowels emit a series of shrill tones of varying intensity. He grimaces, then collects himself.
(p. 127)

This is a story of suffering, weakness, morality, intestinal discomfort and (perhaps) redemption.

It gushes from him the moment he pulls up his cassock and sits down on the privy seat, a mud-like mass, almost without smell, an inexhaustible landslide of brown. His intestines writhe in agony, and yet there is a considerable element of joy at being able to release, to discharge this spray of filth and empty the bowels. He groans, bites his hand and chuckles. His sphincter blares and squelches, and then there is silence. He feels more is to come and shifts his weight from side to side, bent double, his head between his bony knees, his hands massaging his stomach, but nothing is forthcoming. It is as if something is stuck inside him, a thick log of excrement blocking his passage. But most likely a fold of the intestine, he considers. He recalls images of the corpses he dissected and drew as a young man, and he sees now his own colon in his mind’s eye and the blockage that has occurred. He imagines its slow release and the sudden slop that comes with it. The thought of it helps. A new deluge is evacuated and his anus trumpets a fanfare.
(p. 151)

Seriously, how can you not admire such a vivid description of intestinal torture?
Come on, admit it — we’ve all been there at some time!