Things are not quite how you might remember them in the 100 Acre Wood for Christopher Robin, Pooh Bear and their friends…

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

Jane Jago

Namaste you wonderful, desirable and aspiring individual! This bijou blog is here to help you achieve your best ever ‘you’ in this new year. Here, I offer my help and assistance in reshaping your shape and doctoring your decor internally and externally, to bring your lifestyle into line with your aspirations.

Eating

Eating is a profound experience. It is about bringing the nourishment from the outside world and drawing it deep within your own body to provide yourself with the nutrients and energy that enable you to live as your best ever you.
There will be many places you can read about what you should and should not eat and why, but this blog is not concerned with the basics of nutrition. it is not for me to tell you what you should and should not allow to pass down the sacred descent into the temple of your digestive system.
But there is much need to consider and very little ever spoken about the best way to consume your chosen food.
For most of us, any adventure away from the standard stainless steel cutlery sets of our youth, might begin by mastering – or failing to master – the use of chopsticks. This is, indeed, a step in the right direction.
Why?
Because you are not putting metal in your mouth.
Metal is a wonderful substance for making external items such as rings and pendants, anklets and bangles – but it is not something that should ever be introduced within the body except under extreme medical necessity. The healthy body should be, and remain, metal free at all times.
And that means avoiding metal in all your food preparation as well as the eating of it. The metal will not resonate well with the meal and can cause all kinds of issues.
The transition may be a difficult one for many and I would seriously consider a stage in which you resort to wooden spoons for eating before you achieve the final, fantastic, liberation of eating as natures always intended we should – with our fingers.
Please be aware that once you have adopted this lifestyle change you will notice the impact on your social life immediately. You will come to discern who are your true friends and who are simply lingering at your side in the hope of basking in a little of your glory. Cast aside those who cast you off and ignore their tweets about how disgusting you are to have as a dinner guest. You know you are living your best life and that is what matters.

Namaste!
Lucida the Lambent Lifestyle Coach

Telling an entire story in just one hundred words…

Susan had never really understood all this tech stuff – smart this and smart that. It was all too smart for her. So she was the only person in her town who didn’t have a fully connected house. She couldn’t even get emails except at the library.

But as time went on she began to wonder if she was indeed being old-fashioned and even stubborn about it.

Until the day every smart meter and speaker, smart fridge and smartphone was taken over by the aliens.

As her neighbours were all forced to obey their new overlords, Susan felt smugly justified.

E.M. Swift-Hook

A selection of rhymes by Jane Jago, made age appropriate for those for whom their second childhood is just around the corner…

Freda and Bill

Freda and Bill went up the hill
To the shop at the end of the street
They bought syrup for chills
Viagra pills
And corn pads for Freda’s sore feet.

You can find this, and other whimsical takes of life in On The Throne? a little book of contemplation from Jane Jago.

There’s a hole in my lung now
Where the smoke demons played
There’s a song to be sung now
Of my young careless days
But I’ve no breath for singing
Though the cancer is gone
Watch my summer swallows winging
How this winter will feel long

©️jj 2024

Sometimes we walk the edges of realty…

“So what has this to do with anything?” Jessica asked at last, when the small talk dried up over their beer.
“Your dream,” Roald told her, “the one you keep having about a glowing necklace of strange pearls.”
Jess nodded, she had told him of it when he asked her if she ever remembered her dreams.
“I’m not sure they were pearls, just the kind of odd light they gave off made them seem like it. They were pearls shaped in ridged spirals.”
In the dream, she had seen something glowing under her uniform blouse, shining and everyone staring until she had run away and been standing on a cliff edge, then ripping open her blouse to see the strange necklace lying there on her naked breasts. The image came into her mind clear as a photograph and she heard Roald draw a small, sharp breath, which brought her back to the pub.
“Uh, yeah,” he said, his expression slipping into an odd smile, “that’s the one.”
For some reason, she felt uncomfortable and looked out of the window to escape the moment.
“It’s only been since the – the accident,” I’ve never had that kind of dream before.”
Standing naked on the cliff-edge, her hair so long it ran the full length of her back and blew out around her, sparking with energy, and feeling so whole, so complete – so powerful.
“I know.”
The way he said it, made her blush. She started pulling herself to her feet, leaning on the crutches.
“I need to get back – I promised I’d take my aunt to the talk on astrology. She loves all that kind of stuff.’
Roald rose too.
“And you don’t?”
“I never used to,” she admitted, as he helped her ease back into her coat.
“And now?”
She tried to shrug, but it was not so easy with the crutches.
“Maybe, believing in fate helps make this all seem less meaningless. Maybe it helps make sense of the senseless. Even if all I’m doing is seeing patterns in the stars by joining the dots with random lines.”
He stopped on the way back up the hill to the car. Asking her to wait as he dived into a tourist shop, full of costlier craft items. She studied the window but could not see what had caught his eye. When he came out he pushed a small flat box into her hand.
“Just something to remember today by,” he said. The leaned forward to kiss her, lightly, one hand running up over the curve of her breast, lingering as he whispered: “You look beautiful naked.”
She had been so stunned that she had frozen, her whole body stiff, paralysed. Just as it had been when she woke up to find herself in hospital. So she had not said a word as he turned his broad back away and strode off into the crowds of tourists, lost to sight the moment he did so.
Sitting drinking coffee poured from her aunt’s ceramic samovar, it seemed a lifetime ago.
 “You know the young man I mean, don’t you pet? He came to one of my rune workshops? You went out with him a couple of months ago – he seemed such a nice young man.”
“I don’t think they got along, Susan,” her uncle said, frowning.
“No. We didn’t have much in common,” Jessica said quickly.
“Oh that’s such a shame,” her aunt sounded almost as if she really meant it. “He was at the workshop again yesterday, I told him he should be the one teaching it, he’s very good. I invited him over for dinner.”
Jessica felt her hands lose all their strength and the tiny coffee cup slipped through her fingers to shatter on the polished wood of the floor. It was suddenly hard to breathe, as if something was stifling her. Then her uncle was there, helping her up, helping her to escape to the sanctuary of her own room, knowing what she needed, so leaving her alone after a brief hug.
“Don’t fuss over the girl so much, Dave. She’s not a piece of china. And get something to clear that up, good thing it was mostly empty. I’d never get the stains out of the curtains…”
Her aunt’s voice receded as the door to the lounge closed.
She sat there for a moment then started to pack. Slowly, because movements were awkward and not easy still. She had tried to slip unnoticed through the kitchen, but her uncle was there starting on making the usual sandwiches they had for lunch, thick cut ham with pickle for Aunt Susan, and Marmite salad for himself and Jessica. She saw him take in her appearance as he looked up from his work and he wiped his hands on a tea-towel, before reaching into his pocket.
 “Take this, lass.” He pushed a wad of notes into her hand. “No arguments. Come back when you can. “

Part 3 of Maybe by Jane Jago and E.M. Swift-Hook will be here next week…

Things that make us go poop…

Granny and the ‘ladies’ darts team of The Dog and Trumpet alphabetically collate their collective contempt for the inhabitants of the twenty-first century.

J is for Just Say It although this might be better titled ‘how to get away with being an old bat’ or ‘things you can say in your ninth decade without being arrested’.

There are absolutely no circumstances under which I am prepared to divulge my precise age but I’ll give you a clue. When I was a girl a ‘glory hole’ was a cupboard into which one crammed everything that didn’t belong anywhere else, and there were twenty shillings in a pound, and people with orange skin would be either ridiculed or hospitalised.

But I digress. Today is not for reminiscence. No. This week’s lesson concerns the things you can get away with under the umbrella of being old and a bit odd. Me and the girls at the Dog and Trumpet can vouch for every one of these having tried them all.

You can:

• Make constant reference to your age as if it were an achievement. As in…
  “I’m eighty-five, you know.” (Those of us who are only too aware that your state of decrepitude is actually down to seventy-one years and a lot of spliffs will, of course, adhere to the crumbly code and not contradict you.)
• Go to the supermarket in your slippers and a large red hat.
• Spend your pension on fags, alcohol and Belgian chocolate.
• Eat the whole of a big bar of milk chocolate/bag of doughnuts/family pack of cheese and onion crisps/whatever. When asked why you are so gluttonous you merely have to say you are old and there may not be a tomorrow.
• Flirt with twenty-year-old builders.
• Ignore all ‘authority figures’. Never be unpleasant though. Vague, slightly tearful and full of reminiscences of the war works for me. 
• Call your doctor ‘kiddo’ and refuse all forms of advice.

If a person with a clipboard approaches you in a public place it is perfectly in order to do one of the following:

• Develop strategic deafness 
• Shout for help and claim to have been sexually propositioned 
• Answer all their questions as randomly as possible
• Grasp them firmly by the wrist and drag them to a cafe with outdoor tables where you can keep them talking for at least an hour and wrangle them into buying coffee and cake.

And finally. It’s at last okay to air your opinions. You can say the prime minister/president/crown prince/chairman of the board/whoever is a nasty, ignorant, grabby little bar steward. That the latest fashionable television ‘presenter’ is incomprehensible and about as funny as herpes. That quinoa is just middle class rice. And so on. Be the person who says what everyone else is too polite to mention… 

Things are not quite how you might remember them in the 100 Acre Wood for Christopher Robin, Pooh Bear and their friends…

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

Jane Jago

Namaste you wonderful, desirable and aspiring individual! This bijou blog is here to help you achieve your best ever ‘you’ in this new year. Here, I offer my help and assistance in reshaping your shape and doctoring your decor internally and externally, to bring your lifestyle into line with your aspirations.

Colours

Colour – or color for those blessed individuals who dwell in the land of eggplants and zucchinis – is not just something surface and insignificant. It is the electromagnetic radiation of a certain range of wavelengths visible to the human eye. A form of radiation that affects you visually. And as we all know radiation can be very dangerous if it is not handled carefully.
The first step is to find your keynote colour – that which resonates with your very soul. The colour that will make you the very best you simply by surrounding yourself with it, and bathing in its ethereal radiance.
A simple task, you might think. But such soul-deep searching is seldom simple. Your true soul colour is not going to be what you might imagine, or even what you might wish.
Everyone knows that we are all drawn to that which is bad for us. We crave the things we are allergic to and yearn for those that make us fat and ugly. The same is true with your colour choice.
You love blue so you wear blue and have blue furnishings. Oh please no! Do not do that to yourself! My heart is breaking here just thinking of the harm you are wreaking upon the most delicate corners of your pure essence with such behaviour.
Your soul colour, the one you need to bathe in to balance and restore your precious inner being, is the one colour you most loathe and despise. The one frequency your conscious mind is seeking to deny and deprive you of so as to entrap you in its coils of materialism! Each time you give in to the urge for your favourite hue, you are allowing a little more poison to seep in.
You must stop.
Now.
Reverse the process before it is too late.
Throw out everything in your wardrobe that is your favourite shade and replace completely with the one you have heretofore not recognised as being the most benign and beneficial. And the brighter the better. If you despise pink, then salmon, carnation, flamingo and fuschia are your future! If you spurn yellow, then let beige, ochre, mustard and lemon fill your life!
And don’t stop with your wardrobe – revamp your entire life from wallpaper to desktop. Let everywhere you go and everything you see be of that hue you believe you hate!
Before you know it you will be vibrant and glowing with the powerful, colourful, radiation you are absorbing.

Namaste!
Lucida the Luscious Lifestyle Coach

Telling an entire story in just one hundred words…

A family picnic in the orchard with parasols, white dresses and a tartan rug. Jean-Paul proposed over caviar and champagne, she’d accepted. He said he’d have the ring resized, but by ill-fortune it’d fallen from her finger as they packed away.

The ring was lost for so long, Elise forgot about it.

Children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren with their children, came for her hundredth birthday – a picnic in the orchard with parasols and champagne.

Through serendipity, her favourite great-grandson found the ring and Elise wept tears of joy. Then and there, with Elise’s delighted blessing, he proposed to his true love.

E.M. Swift-Hook