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

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

Hippie Frannie

Hippie Frannie somebody’s granny
How does your garden grow?
With poppy seeds and ganja weeds
And hookah pipes all in a row, row, row,
And hookah pipes all in a row.

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

January explodes upon the world
With fireworks and cheers
And auld lang syne.
Then creeps she neath her soft blankets
Of snow and mist
Within her house walled with ice
And roofed with frost
And on the casement panes
She prints star patterns,
Draws icicles on eave and gable,
Paints the lawn from green to white
And with bony fingers reaches
Like the leafless trees
To caress the greyness of the sky.

Eleanor Swift-Hook

Sometimes we walk the edges of realty…

CHAPTER ONE: JESSICA

           “Well, you know what they say, don’t you pet? What don’t kill you, will make you stronger.”
            Jessica felt her teeth dig into her tongue with the effort of not snapping back. It was one of those glib sayings people trotted out every time they realised there was harm done they couldn’t heal. She wanted to snarl that what didn’t kill you could just as easily leave you broken and bloody, weakened and vulnerable and much less strong than you were before. It could also leave you changed as well as damaged, struggling to know who this stranger was that you had become – the one who jumped at shadows and whose heart started racing when a car engine started up. 
            It was not a good look for a woman who had once been decorated for valour.
            She forced a smile and did not cringe at the hand pat that went with the words of wisdom, delivered from the place of someone whose worst nightmares were about being caught on Scarborough seafront without her make-up on.
            “Your aunt means well, Jess.”
            The voice came from the door of the lounge, which was being pushed open. There was a smell of fresh coffee as Uncle David carried in a tray with a samovar and tiny cups.
            “Oh don’t be so daft, Dave. She knows I mean well, don’t you pet?”
            Jessica nodded and managed a half-smile, then busied herself moving the newspaper, and a couple of magazines about horoscopes and tarot cards, from the table in front of the paisley-patterned settee. Her uncle set the tray down with care then served the coffee as he always did – strong, black and sweet.
            His eyes were not patronising when he looked at her. But then he had fought at Goose Green and brought home his own ghosts to roost in the rafters of the perfect life his wife devised for them both. No children of their own, but then they had Jess.
            “So are you off to Whitby again to see that young man?” Aunt Susan peered over both the top of her cup and her bifocals.
            For a moment, just hearing someone naming the place sent a shiver through Jessica’s spine, and her imagination bridged the miles to place her on top of the cliffs, screaming gulls wheeling overhead, the wind that never slept and Roald, the image of a modern-day viking, hair blowing over his face, shoulders half-hunched in a fleece, face animated, telling her the history of the ruined abbey as if he had been there at the time.

            “It was all started by a woman – Hild. She was an amazing woman and not one you would want to cross. A princess of sorts. And for all she was an abbess eventually, she didn’t decide to become a nun until she was  in her thirties and she’d done one heck of a lot of living by then.” He paused and made a really broad gesture with one arm as if including the ruins and all the headland where they stood. “She loved this place. Would stand up on the cliffs, by the beacon that was here then and look out over the sea, and unbraid her hair so the wind could play with it. And, you know, when she established that first abbey it was nothing like you would think of a monastery today. It was more like a community – both men and women.”
            It was easy to picture Hilda in her Saxon dress, facing out over the waves. Jessica thought of that actress she’d seen playing Rowena in ‘Ivanhoe’.
            “No,” Roald sounded almost angry, “Hild was of Anglic blood – not Saxon. The ones Pope Gregory famously spoke about when he saw some being sold as slaves: ‘Non Angli, sed angeli’.
            Jessica looked at him her mouth very slightly agape. He did that a lot. It was very unsettling.
            “Non angerlee – what?”
            Roald grinned and gave an exaggerated mock wince, as if her pronunciation caused him pain.
            “Non Angli, sed angeli – ‘These are not Angles, they are angels.’ “

Part 2 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.

I is for Invented Languages.

Before anyone gets all hypercritical on me, yes, all language is invented.

But.

We have quite a few world languages already. Roughly 6,500 according to Mister Google. So why do people keep on trying to add more?

This is certainly not a new phenomenon, my researches have found Lingua Ignota which was first seen in twelfth-century documents.

Then we can gloss over a few centuries to the genesis of Esperanto – which was going to resolve all the world’s communication problems.
Did that happen?
Nope.
All it did was add another nail to the coffin of linguistic simplicity.

To explain my irritation further; a number of invented languages are referred to by the intelligentsia as being a posteriori – that is to say that they came about backwards. I groped around with this concept for a while before deciding that it means a book/film/television series has, as part of its storytelling, a race or species that probably speaks a language of its own. Which is fair enough.
Until. Some person with too much time on their hands invents a language for the aliens/ape men/insects/unicorns.
That’s where it just gets weird.
Can we stop it.
Please.

This is one of those areas in life where being able to do a thing doesn’t make doing the thing sensible.

Remember the term a posteriori is taken from logic and refers to reasoning that determines cause by its effects. Which can lead to some interesting conclusions. As an example, the fact that sunrise often follows the crowing of cockerels could be extrapolated to mean that cock crow causes the sun to rise. Equally, then the ‘fact’ that Johnny Alien probably doesn’t actually speak American English could be extrapolated to mean that somebody needs to study Johnny Alien’s native tongue – except, of course, that Johnny Alien is fictional…

I rest my case and I am now going out into the rainy garden to smoke 20 Gauloises and drink a litre of Pernod – so that one could reason in an a posteriori manner that I only wrote this because I was wet, drunk, and smoke dried.

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.

Names

When you think about it your name is more than just the specific noise that someone makes to attract your attention. It is also the most intimate aspect of your public self. The core of your essence summed up in a single word. It stands to reason that your name should be the summation of your aspirations – it should express to the world the way in which you wish to be seen.
This means that the first step to the new, glorious, bountiferous and amazing YOU has to be setting that goal and reorienting your whole being towards it by making that name change.
You must, of course, meditate deeply and dwell on the matter in the consensual sanctity of your own unclouded consciousness, but here are some suggestions to show how this works:

Pianoforte – this, you might think, is a name for one for whom music is central to their lives, but on the contrary it is a name for one who strives for balance and harmony, who seeks to show how the dark and light of life’s path can be combined into an upright, a grand – or at least baby-grand – lifestyle.

Avocado – once upon a time this beautiful green shade was the height of fashion for bathroom suites and as such the name is a wonderful reminder of the importance of history – and good plumbing – in our lives. Avocado is someone who wants to show they have strong connections with their roots and is seeking to live an ever greener lifestyle.

Serendipity – the perfect name for one who wants to let go of trying to organise their life, keep a good job, maintain relationships and have a tidy house. Instead they will allow blind faith in good fortune to determine their life, and let the world know that they have abandoned such old-fashioned notions as personal responsibility. Serendipity is a child of the universe and floating free on the breeze of random happenstance.

Prosecco – no, not a name for a wine lover, but for someone who seeks to bring cheer, laughter and bubbles to all around them. After all, who does not love Prosecco? Just to have your name on their guest list will bring a smile to someone’s face.

Lucida – and no, you may not take this one as it is all my own, chosen to express my fluid and fluent ability to communicate the essentials of improving your lifestyle and decorated with a charming letter ‘a’ to show that I am an A lister in my art.

So once you have made your new name choice, how do you tell the world that you have made this momentous step?
The best way is of course to have a reveal party and invite all your family and friends.
Picture the scene, you are all gathered around a pinata shaped to resemble you, and all your favourite people beat that old you with sticks until it bursts open and frees a rain of multicoloured cards each with your new name inscribed in a flourish of expensive calligraphy!
Could there be a more magical moment?
And once you have your new, motivational, name, you are ready to take on the challenge of changing your lifestyle to become the you that you always wanted to be!

Namaste!
Lucida the Lateral Lifestyle Coach