Life is like a...Teaspoon. Yes it is!

I’ve been doing some writing exercises the last few days[1], in a bitty way.  Fluffhead hasn’t been transforming into the scary and baneful Tetchyhead…he just hasn’t been sleeping much at any point.  Filled with exuberance and joy and wakefulness and pointy fingers.  So not much time to think and plot and waffle for here.

I keep idling instead, in my snatched twenty minutes’s.  I idle with thoughts of, Life Is Like A…

Bookshelf – things get taken in and out; go in and out of favour; you give some things away and they don’t come back.  Sometimes there are big gaping holes where some familiar section used to be.

Hiking boot – you’re forever cleaning it off from the last expedition, when its about to get filthy again, so it feels a bit pointless…plus, its not really that comfortable, so heavy; but once you’re going, you forget its there and forget everything, you just take in the sights and think how glorious the world is.

Cracked CD case – it keeps the magic music safe, even though it’s no longer pretty.  People forget to look inside and check the disc; one look at the case and they have lost interest.  It’s a shallow society we live in.

Little plastic model of a Dalek – there’s lots of noise about world domination, but when you come down to it, you have a tiny plunger stuck to your front, and your daughter’s fluffy purplepink unicorn is bigger than you…just proving the point about large dreams versus science fiction and progress…

A lime – the excitement of that true green; the promise of tang and enlivenment…then the realization that without sugar, it’s all a bit much and you feel a bit overwhelmed by it.

A hung up slightly creased shirt waiting to be ironed – technically, it will do as it is; but you always want to make it better, smarter, more professional looking.

Promised holiday – it’s all in the planning, the dreaming, the waiting; then when you’re there, a mild and unexplained disappointment – possibly the weather, but more something in your own mind.  A small idea that wherever you go, dissatisfaction will follow, no matter what you do.

House brick – makes sense in a pattern with other things, holding up a structure, or as a makeshift bookcase – on its own: useless except for violence or art.

Cricket ball – its effectiveness all depends on the thrower; aim and speed are everything; aim wrong and you will either miss or really hurt someone; go too slow, and you’ve missed all the chances.

Beret – you think it looks cute, until you have it on and realise neither does it keep your ears warm, or look fashionable.  You are a relic, you have missed the bus; the millinery of the past lingers on you, telling everyone what a Francophile you are, how un-at-home in your own life you are.  You are not a happy English Trilby, or a jaunty work cap.  You are a pretension.  It’s all a bit sad, ‘specially for a Sunday afternoon, when it’s already raining.

Tea cosy – your sole function is to protect something else; you have no value other than that.  But in that capacity, you are vital – it will all be ruined if someone forgets to employ you.  You have an importance, a place in the procedure, the ceremony of things.

Tea spoon – you measure, you decide what salt or sugar goes where; you mete out, with great delicacy, your tid-bits.  You are placed carefully at the side of china cups when finished; your owner cranes her powdered face to hear what Mrs Ramsey says.  You are the gossip, you are the bearer of sugar; the spiller of salt.  Fates depend upon you.  It is such a small town.

Oddly, it all says far more about me than any of the nice neat little analogies I was making!  I used to do Freewrites when at work, when not answering the phones (all in Word of course, and bulleted to look like a terribly important actual document), and I found this one about the word ‘Mother’:

What a time and place to think of such a thing, in this place of business that is so far removed from nurturing and family, though there are elements of that here.  Elements like in the kettle which used to whistle and almost scream, or that’s what it felt like, falling far short of the cheery whistle you can imagine in a kettle in Stanley's mother’s jam-making house, all old fashioned and reassuring.  Mother here, is a concept reduced to pictures of your kids, and emails sent when you should be working.  Mother here, is almost a dirty word; as it’s not tough enough.  Funnily enough, Father is word used often – the male directors and managers showing their pictures around the place, and telling their anecdotes designed to make them seem more human and rounded; which is weird considering when we do the same it shows us as weak, or smothery.

But mother – the concept, the warmth of the hug, the fierceness of the protection, the selflessness of the defending, the idea of this mother.  The stretching of the green boughs all over the earth, closeting her creatures; on a summer’s day all this seems true.  On a harsh winter’s morning though, it feels like she has withdrawn deep into the earth, and cares little, and one of the angry sky gods covers us all with snow to blot us out, as we have upset her.

I actually managed to make a point there, about women and work.  At the time I missed it.  I do actually have a point I want to make today.  About Things That Annoy Me.  It’s even slightly relevant to what I’ve said here.  I’d better go off and start to try and make it, or all you’ll have had  today will be this bitty little thing, thinking aloud about nothing in particular.  That would be so unsatisfying, and you'll think me self indulgent and nonsensical!  I will make coffee, and try and ramble to a point.  Back soon, hopefully today…

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[1] These ones came direct from one of the best if you have tiny snippets of time available: Margret Geraghty’s Five Minute Writer, How To Books, (2^nd edition) 2009.