Inapropriate Helpfulness

Tonight, whilst watching the Boy Wonder play, a couple got up from the sofa near us and I noticed that the woman had left her jumper behind. I was about half a second away from snatching it up and chasing after her when I realised that they were just at the bar getting more drinks and I was a little disappointed that I wouldn't get to be the kind of helpful soul cliché that restores people's faith in humanity. This left me even more convinced that one of the main motivators for acts of kindness towards strangers (at least on my part) is the warm fuzzy feeling of helping your fellow humans.

In part, I suspect this was fuelled by last night's feel good opportunities: the Boy Wonder was playing at a venue in London which was only accessible by a road which had been blocked off due to roadworks. It became clear that prior to the roadworks it was possible to get through to somewhere else, so after watching a couple of people walk all the way down and then turn back when they realised they couldn't get through I started helpfully pointing out to people that they couldn't get anywhere. They were all grateful for the knowledge which allowed them to save a few seconds and not look like a pillock and I felt like a good Samaritan for helping them out. It didn't really matter that the time it took me to explain to them was around the same length of time it took most people to work it out for themselves, because instead of a neutral observer, I was a helpful contributor which I found satisfying.

Presumably most people who are motivated to help others gain at least some gratification from doing so, in which case can they really be considered truly altruistic acts? Is it still even vaguely altruistic if you start to feel vaguely resentful to people who turn out not to need your help when you were already prepared for the feeling of doing a good thing? I'm pretty sure that I'm not a terrible person, even that I am more helpful than most, but is it really appropriate to begin to have secretly resentful feelings for a girl who just left her cardy on a sofa when she went to get a drink?

A (presumably) never ending series of notebooks

I always have a notebook in my bag, largely because the way my brain works seems to churn up thoughts that I feel should be memorialised at moments when I am otherwise ill-equipped to capture them, but also because otherwise I will write on whatever comes to hand (including, indeed, my hands) regardless of the appropriateness or otherwise of the medium.

Were I to only be struck by the urge to write down brilliant ideas, moving lines or intriguing questions that occur to me, these would probably be relatively interesting documents, but as it stands they often include shopping lists, reminders to look up song lyrics that I can't remember and notes to myself written when drunk. Such as:

Why do we use @? It's not that much shorter than the word 'at' to either read or write.

Godfrey from Dad's Army IS George from Rainbow

Ben and Jerry - hee hee

Meta Television

The on-screen guide for our TV is organized into half hour segments, meaning that if a show's title is too long, it merges into the next one. The resulting hybrid shows often sound a lot better than what's really on and failure to pay close attention has resulted in disappointment on more than one occasion. Some of my favourites are:

Dickins, George and Heartbeat

European Coke Soldiers

Antiques Enemy

It's me or the Airline

Johnny Cash in the Attic
My name is Filth

Liza and Huey's Pet Crash Test

Perry Mason: Mega Piranha

Hitler's Home Shopping

Misunderstood sayings

Although the number of names and classifications for this kind of phenomenon grows at about the same rate as the internet, I'm not sure if there is a word for the mingling of two sayings into one hideously confusing phrase. Some of my favourites are:

Too many chefs, not enough Indians

The sky's my oyster

Bite the bull by the horns

It's not brain science

Knitting

Four days ago I took up knitting - I watched a video of a lady showing you how to do it, and I managed a fairly passable bit of knitting. I then knitted the next day and the day after, finding it at once compulsively enjoyable and incredibly satisfying and this morning I woke up with a constant pain in my right hand which seems to have developed as a combination of my extensive weekend knitting session and my tendency to sleep with my hand scrunched up under my chin.

I'm quite annoyed about this - not only was I enjoying my knitting, but I distinctly remember both my grandmothers knitting almost constantly well into their later years apparently without ever suffering.

Admittedly, they had both been knitting for years, so I obviously need to build up some stamina before I can even begin to compete on their expert level. In fact, my paternal grandmother lived in what appeared to my juvenile mind at least to be an entirely knitted house. She could knit almost anything, but mostly chose to use those skills to produce bizarrely coloured, excessively huge woollen extravaganzas which were apparently designed for children of much more unusual limb configurations than my brother and I.

So, although I am a mere beginner and clearly should expect some discomfort in the muscles that apparently I only use for knitting (presumably these were in a state of near atrophy until four days ago), I am a little aggrieved. What I thought would be a foray into the world of 'stitch and bitch' where people without grandchildren reclaim the art of knitting in a terribly trendy way has actually turned into a rather nubbly rectangle of knitting and a pain in my hand which makes me feel like I should be paying more attention to cod liver oil adverts and trying to include bran in my diet.

My guilty pleasure

One of the reasons that I used to like helping my Mum with the family grocery shopping is because it gave me an opportunity to indulge my guilty pleasure of touching food. Not in a perverted way, although I'm guessing Freud would have plenty to say about it, but just in an inappropriate way for food which I have no intention of buying. The first memory I have of enjoying touching food was when I was little and I used to beg to be in charge of getting the mushrooms. I never actually liked mushrooms as a child but I really liked the feel of them and enjoyed ferreting out the littlest ones, even though my Mum always tried to encourage me not to.

Since then, the variety of foods that I like to touch has broadened and now includes things like Scotch eggs, vacuum packed meats, bread, pies and cheeses. Pre-packed snacks are also a treat as they are generally soft and pliable and something about pressing them makes me happy. I know it's wrong - I wouldn't necessarily want to eat something that someone else had poked, although I always poke through wrappers, never with my naked finger - but I don't even care because I'm just going to carry on doing it whenever the urge takes me.

Lovely Mum Ladies

Some women manage to make me feel as though they are like someone's lovely Mum -the lady at Budgens who always calls us 'Darling', Linda Robson and Alison Steadman. Something about lovely Mum ladies makes me feel that all is right with the world.

The Good Life

When I was growing up, a combination of constant Radio 4 and a limit on what we were allowed to watch on television left me with a peculiar lack of exposure to pop culture and the 'in' things in entertainment, but has left me with a lasting affection for certain shows which were probably incongruous with my age and other interests.

While the sound of the shipping forecast makes me feel like I've been hypnotised and Allen Bennet's voice reminds me strongly of times spent in the airing cupboard recording my own books on tape, The Good Life still holds a vaguely titillating thrill for me which is at once comforting and risque. As a child, I was allowed to watch The Good Life because it was a relatively harmless comedy, but as a programme clearly written for adults (what else could possibly explain the fervour with which Felicity Kendal's bum has been admired ever since it was first seen in dirty work trousers?) it also contained occasional oblique references to adult themes. Off the cuff remarks about the pill, the state of other people's marriages and vague references to extra marital affection still make my inner child say 'Ummmm!', and I think the fact that both couples were child free made for an exciting departure from the lives of my parents and their friends, all of which seemed very glamorous and exotic when I was younger.

Whenever I see repeats of the Good Life I find myself compelled to watch, enjoying the magnificent outfits sported by Margot, the reassuring contentment of Tom and Barbara and the exemplary use of the word 'bombastic' by Margot when being shaken by the elbows. As feel-good comedies go, The Good Life really does the job and I only hope they continue to show it on UK Gold forever.

The best days of your life...

The only way in which my school days were the best of my life is in the opportunity they afforded me for purchasing, storing and using stationery. I now have to feed this habit by obsessively dividing things into plastic folders and secretly dreaming of owning a filing cabinet.

Cereal dreams

I have always loved cereal. When I was younger, I didn't even give any other breakfast food a look in, always preferring a bowl of cereal and on one memorable occasion eating 12 Weetabix in a row at the age of around 7. A couple of years ago, my doctor recommended that I stop eating breakfast (on the grounds that I was throwing it straight back up almost every morning), which I did despite having it ingrained in my consciousness that I was relinquishing the most important meal of the day.

However, our return from the country where eggs seem only to occur in threes combined with a new working regime means that I am now firmly back in the camp of breakfast and the last delivery of shopping I received fulfilled a dream I had been having since deciding to revert back to my well trusted cereal lifestyle - a wall of cereal. That's not a metaphor - I literally had a recurring dream over the course of around 5 nights in which I owned a seemingly limitless supply of all kinds of cereal. Given the uplifting nature of this dream, I decided to make it a reality and I now have that wall of cereal adorning the top of the fridge which makes me happy just to see it.

I am a little saddened that Grape Nuts have bowed under the pressure of the modern world of breakfast snacks and instead of a small opening in the cardboard on the side of the box, they have now fallen in line with an inner bag and top opening system, but they taste just how I remember them so I can overlook their transgression. The other bonus is that cereal is a good way to up my calcium intake - I have never been able to drink milk neat, but my reignited love of cereal might also be the thing that stops be from crumbling from the insides like an ancient scroll when I reach the golden age at which these things start to happen.

Little did I realise that a wall of cereal could make me so happy, but clearly I am either a lot deeper or a lot more shallow than I ever realised.

May Bugs

I am generally quite a fan of bugs - I'm not in love with them (as the Boy Wonder seems to think) but I don't have a particular problem with them and I find quite a lot of them actively interesting. The only ones I actively dislike are Daddy Longlegses and that's because I'm always really scared that in the process of trying to catch them to release them into freedom I will trap one of their teeny weeny legs and pull it off, or otherwise damage their ridiculously fragile little bodies. My favourite kind of bug was, until today, the caterpillar, and although physically it still is, name-wise it has been overshadowed by the fact that I discovered today that another name for the may bugs is a cockchafer. There is no amount of maturity that will make that cease to be funny to me, and quite frankly if there was I would hope not to reach it - life's too short not to be entertained by the word cockchafer.

The tragedy of disappearing food - update

My last post on this topic inspired me to embark on another of my periodical and depressing searches for two of my favourite snacks - rice paper and unflavoured/salted Pepperidge Farm Goldfish. Technically the main problem with the Goldfish is that not one of availability so much as location. I am personally aware of several shops where I could theoretically purchase as many bags of Goldfish as I want, they're just all in the US. Rice paper is quite another matter - I know that if it is available, I should be able to get it in this country. So a quick search of EBay revealed not only a distributor of Goldfish, but also some angel who has stocks of rice paper! No sooner had I lamented the lack of these items than a solution is found! Like a flash, I e-mailed the links to the Boy Wonder who had been badgering me for Christmas present ideas, and lo and behold, Christmas day came around and I was presented with a large box containing all the rice paper and goldfish I could ask for! The rice paper was interesting - instead of the normal four coloured packs (featuring orange, pink, yellow and white) these were two coloured packs including such unexplored colours as green and blue and, more importantly, printed with Euro note markings so it's like eating money. I have had monetary rice paper before, but it wasn't quite right as it always had too much flavouring and I am a big fan of the bland. I could tell these ones were different, but the proof was in the tasting, which proved that they are indeed made to the same exacting standards as the stuff I am used to. The only slight downside is the tenacious nature of the ink, which I won't explain further, but even this downside has an upside as it means that I can only eat a limited amount at a time, thus rationing my provisions and avoiding the gluttony I have exhibited in the past. The stuff doesn't even have a 'Nutritional Information' sticker telling me how bad they are for me, but what they lack in substance they certainly make up for in potato starch and colourings, so I think my insides will benefit from a more restricted intake. The Goldfish have only been broken out today - in a display of inhuman strength of will, I have managed to keep them untouched for two weeks, mostly by keeping them upstairs and keeping a range of other easily available snacks within reaching distance to avoid temptation. But today, in the absence of anything more suitable for a work snack, I brought one in and although I resisted their lure until around 10.30 once I opened the bag, there was (almost) no stopping me. They are just as delicious as I remember and I can't believe I have lived without them for so long. Things are going to have to change - either we need to have more holidays when a person can reasonably request hard to come-by snack foods as a gift, or we will have to find a house in between Pepperidge Farm and the press where they print the paper money...

5 books I love (part 5)

This is a tricky one - having already committed myself to four books (or rather 11 books in total if you don't count 'Three Men on the Bummel'), choosing only one for the last spot feels as though I am rejecting every other book in the world, despite the fact that I purposefully chose a non-exclusionary description for these books. However, I think I am going to have to go with an author rather than a specific book as all her books are good in the same way whilst all being very different. 5. Kate Atkinson I really like her books, not only because they have intricate plots which are somehow constructed in a way which doesn't leave you confused and flipping through the earlier pages to try and remind yourself of what's going on. There is just enough character development that you engage with them, but not so much that you end up reading entire pages where nothing actually happens except the discovery of the underlying reason behind why someone did something that you read about ten pages ago. The first of Kate Atkinson's books is 'Behind the Scenes at the Museum' which is set across three generations of the same family, and although there is an element of a mystery, you don't spend the whole book trying to work it out - it's an engrossing read but you don't really realise that there's a discovery to be made, making the moment of discovery even more enjoyable because the plot wasn't entirely propped up by the need to know a certain piece of information in order for the rest of the plot to make sense. I think my favourite of her books is Emotionally Weird, which makes me feel drunk to read it, such is the demeanour of so many of the characters that it feels a bit like the kind of memory you have when you wake up and you can't be sure whether you are recalling events of the previous day or a dream you had whilst sleeping it all off. Kate Atkinson has managed to perfect a writing style which is funny, intriguing, thought-provoking and completely engrossing - I love her and have just found out that she's got a new book out. Something for the Christmas list I think...!