Notebooks

Saturday 7.10pm

For years now, on and off, I have kept notebooks. Less formal or demanding than a diary they are a place to put things. What things? Anything and everything in fact - ideas, appointments, shopping lists, sketches, handwriting practice, my thoughts on life and the answers to those quizzes and questionaires you find in self help books.

Like dream catchers they allow me to put things down in writing before I forget, and the very act of writing encourages and helps my ideas become more organised, more real. The ones from the past become little snapshots of what I was doing and how I felt at the time. Like music, reading one will take me back to a particular time and I can feel what I felt like then, what I was doing, even what my hopes and aspirations were. A couple of posts ago I listed what makes me happy and one particular notebook has the same thing written years ago  along with my wishes for the future. Written on the edge of a hillside in the Scottish Borders, long before I met Nicola, I find the entry particularly poignent because reading it I can feel exactly how I felt then and you know most of what I wished for has come true. (the rest I am still working on).

I have three notebooks on the go at the moment, one for work, one to keep track of money and my newest one above, is for everything else. Well four actually - my computer is also a notebook - I am writing this on it now, but the the paper ones will always be there as well.

Notebooks. Everyone should have one.

It's all in the details

Sunday 8.52pm

I've never quite got jazz. Some of it I enjoy but then, especially with the more modern stuff it goes somewhere and leaves me behind. The musicians obviously hear something I cannot. And so it is with experts in any field. At some point they become so deeply involved in their subject that they move beyond what us mere mortals can see or understand. I see glimpses of this in my own specialities. I can diagnose the cause of your toothache just by talking to you, sometimes even by just looking at you. The difference between me as the dentist, and you as the patient is that I see the whole picture. I see the cause, what led up to it, the immediate and long term treatment options along with the risks and benefits of each, and more importantly what needs to be done to prevent it happening again. And yet still people complain about my consultation fee because in their words I "did not do anything". They just don't see what I see.

Not everybody will get to that level in their chosen field of course, that stage where you do not have to think things through - you just feel the answer, you just know. Nicola has it in computing, she sees things that I just don't, and like jazz probably never will. 

We all see things differently, something

that is easy to forget. For example I took

the picture above, I wrote the words,

chose the typeface and put the two

things together. But what really makes it work for me is the way I have got the flower petals to sit around the "s" in soup, linking the two paragraphs and tying the words and picture together. Just this one detail makes all the difference.

Life is never dull when you can look at it through anothers eyes.

(That typeface is a condensed Gill Sans, by the way - if you click on the top picture you'll see it better).

The tree of happiness

Tuesday 7.20am

Nicola has tagged me with this meme - "The tree of happiness" I have to list six things that make me happy. So, in reverse order here they come.

6. Cats. If you know me at all you'll know that I love everything about cats, even the furballs. I'd quite like to be a cat.

5. The Clangers. Computer animation is all very well, but these are shows that have a soul. And a beautifully innocent one at that.

4. Rain. There is nothing better than sitting by the fire or lying in bed listening to the sound of the rain falling outside. And talking of outside, between working inside, being inside at home and driving between them I don't spend much time there. It is great just to walk outside and get wet for a change.

3. You'll have to look had to find this one, buried as it is under a deep layer of grumpiness but it is my family. Having lived the single life for more than thirty years, family life is actually pretty cool.

2. But this one is very much on the surface, it's Nicola of course, who makes things happen.

1. Birdsong. Especially the dawn and evening chorus. Hearing this brings on such a peacefull happiness that it is almost worth getting up at six o'clock in the morning just to hear it.

Of course as I now have two blogs Nicola has tagged me twice the food inspired set are here.

And . . . . I get to nominate the next person, so it is Swallowtail who always seems happy with the world around her. Better go and tell her now . . . .

And on my other blog it is Jo who gets the short straw.