Wanting to go out and play…
Posted: February 4, 2012 Filed under: Home & Neighbourhood, Just me, London | Tags: fun, london, play, postaday, postaweek2012, snow, weather, winter Leave a commentThere are not many times in my life when I wish there was a child around, but right now I do. Or a flatmate. Or even a dog. You see, it’s been snowing all evening here in North London and I want to go out and play.
If I had access to a child (of course, I don’t want one of my own!), a flatmate or a dog, I would have an excuse to go out and enjoy the snow. As a single, 30-year-old woman, it might seem a bit odd if I pop out in my PJs and start making a snowman next to my front door. But oh do I want to!
Actually, what I’d love to do is lie in the middle of my road and make a snow angel. I’ve never made a snow angel before, and that snow out there is so virgin white, it would be perfect. Of course, I’d need someone to take a photo of it though, else I’d just be a crazy woman lying in the road.
It’s sad that I have to worry about how people would perceive me if I did decide to go out and play on my own. It’s also sad that, being close to midnight, I would have to worry about my safety, too. As I am all wrapped up in my PJs, playing in the snow probably isn’t an option tonight. I’ll have to settle for a quick step out my front door instead…
I hope it’s still there in the morning… 🙂
Look forward to your tenacious days ahead…
Posted: January 29, 2012 Filed under: London, Shopping, Words & Language | Tags: it's nice that, language, london, postaday, postaweek2012, selfridges, tenacious, words Leave a comment
Tenacious. To be honest, it’s not a word I’ve ever used in a sentence except perhaps for when talking about the band, Tenacious D. To be even more honest, I wasn’t even sure how to use it.
You’re probably wondering how I came to be in possession of a card with such an odd fortune on it. Well, it came in a plastic ball…
And I got it from Selfridges.
Selfridges is not a place I normally shop in, but when I passed by the other night I had to stop and go in. In the window there was a huge wooden rollercoaster and what appeared to be a ball-pool full of coloured balls containing words.
This Word-A-Coaster is a project intended to celebrate the English language. It’s Nice That: Words Words Words has taken over the UltraLounge on the Lower Ground floor of Selfridges until March 1st, and this amazing Word-A-Coaster will be in the window for that period, too.
Here’s a bit of an explanation from the It’s Nice That website:
For the showpiece corner window of Oxford Street and Orchard Street, we have collaborated with interactive designer Stewdio to create ‘The Word-A-Coaster’ a playful fortune telling machine. The 14 foot high hand-built wooden rollercoaster (constructed by model makers Atom) is surrounded by a sea of 30,000 brightly coloured balls filled with 30,000 unique fortunes that can be picked up in store for free.
Inside the balls, shoppers will find a small card emblazoned with a uniquely numbered adjective, generated by a clever computer programme that leaves each individual with their own personal, playful prediction for 2012.
When I went to Selfridges the Word-A-Coaster was unfortunately broken, but I was allowed to reach over and pick up a word anyway. I got “tenacious”, and have been puzzling over it ever since. At first I thought it was a word with a negative meaning, but I then realised that it could also be positive. If I am to have “tenacious days ahead” this year, I think that means I will have to stick to my guns and be a bit stubborn about the things I want to achieve. So, losing weight and saving money it is!
For more information about Words Words Words, please visit the Selfridges website.
The story of the little plum kettle
Posted: January 24, 2012 Filed under: Money & saving, Shopping | Tags: broken, kettle, money, postaday, postaweek2012, returning, saving, Shopping 2 CommentsOnce upon a time there was a girl who really liked to drink tea and eat toast. When the girl moved into a lovely new flat, she decided to treat herself to a special kettle. The kettle, which was a special as the flat itself, was plum-coloured. Liking the look of the kettle so much, the girl decided to buy a matching toaster.
They all lived happily together, and the girl enjoyed a few months of delicious hot tea and buttery toast.
One Sunday (last Sunday, in fact), it was late, and the girl decided to make a cup of hot chocolate before bed. She filled the little plum kettle and flicked on the switch, but the blue light didn’t come on.
She looked at the kettle, sitting next to the toaster, and sat down with a sigh. “No hot chocolate for me tonight then,” she thought. Try as she might, she couldn’t get the kettle to work. It appeared to have died.
That night, the girl went to bed with a heavy heart and a luke-warm hot water bottle. You see, she had bought the little plum kettle in September, and it was January now… and she hadn’t kept the receipt.
Two days later, having dug through her bank statements in an effort to prove that she had bought the kettle where and when she said she had, she picked up the little plum kettle and took it all the way into town.
The toaster sat lonely in the kitchen for a whole day, sad without its matching friend.
Arriving in town bright and early, the girl took the little plum kettle straight to the shop it had come from.
“Excuse me,” she said.
“Yes?” said the shop keeper.
“I bought this kettle here in September, but two days ago it simply stopped working. The thing is though, I don’t have my receipt. What can I do?”
“That’s ok,” said the shop keeper with a cursory glance at the girl’s bank statement. “Here, have another one!”
And with that, the shop keeper climbed up a ladder and fetched a brand new little plum kettle for the girl.
The girl beamed all day, and was so happy to finally go home and unpack the brand new little plum kettle. Placing it next to the toaster, her kitchen was complete again.
And they all lived happily ever after.
The end.
[The moral of this story is, when something breaks, remember your consumer rights. Once upon a time I would have simply cursed the cheaply made kettle, chucked it out, and bought a new one. Today, I learnt that I have the right to return it and get a new one, even if I don’t have my receipt!]
Not taking the biscuit
Posted: January 23, 2012 Filed under: Dieting & Health, Food & Drink, Words & Language | Tags: biscuit, cake, diet, food, idiom, language, lose weight, postaday, postaweek2012, to take the biscuit 2 CommentsIt’s one thing to repeatedly tell yourself year after year that you need to lose a bit of weight, but it’s something else entirely to be told by a doctor.
I’m not obese. In fact, most people I know genuinely don’t think I need to lose much weight. I ‘m tall and I carry it pretty well, plus I know how to dress for my size. Most people would probably call me curvy or, shudder, cuddly.
But today I sat up and faced facts. I need to lose three stone, so I will. It’s not going to be as easy as that though, I know. Take today for example: my lovely colleague offered to make me tea (which I drink with sugar) a number of times. I politely declined, made myself a chamomile tea and drank loads of water. I was feeling very peckish in the afternoon, and I was offered some amazing smelling Fortnum and Mason biscuits which we had in the office. I wanted one, I really wanted one, so in the end I let myself have a tiny broken corner of one, smaller than a 5p piece. It was really good.
Serious willpower is what I need to accomplish my goal. I’m not going to sit here and say I won’t eat any more chocolate, biscuits or cake this year. We all know that’s not going to happen. I’ve abandoned my Marshmallow Experiment because it was simply too tempting to have chocolate sitting there in the fridge. So, I’m going to try not to buy any calorific food, and allow myself a few treats when I’m out. Let’s see how I do…
Incidentally, the phrase “to take the biscuit” (used in a situation where something is particularly bad or objectionable) is British English and our friends across the pond actually say “to take the cake”. Well, language differences aside, I won’t be taking any cakes or biscuits for quite a while, I think! 😉
Time before “online”
Posted: January 19, 2012 Filed under: Computers & Technology, Reading & Books | Tags: Books, internet, libraries, online, pipa, postaday, postaweek2012, sopa, technology, wikipedia 6 CommentsAn interesting thing happened to me at work today. A colleague asked me to search for some information about an event we held around the year 2000 and, knowing that our current website didn’t got back any further than 2002, I searched for the answer on the remnants of our old website. Unfortunately, the information wasn’t there either. In fact, there was no information dated before 2002.
This got me thinking about the time before “online”, and I found it really hard to think back to a time when I didn’t just grab the nearest device with Internet access to find the answers to my questions. These days, without even thinking of alternative methods, we just ask Google all of our questions.
I thought back to the late 90s and early “noughties”, and tried to remember what I was doing back then. I remember emailing people and having a certain amount of Internet access, but I also remember going to the library and looking things up in books.
What a different world we live in today! I honestly can’t remember the last time I went to a library to research something, and that makes me a little bit sad. The thing is though, the information held in libraries becomes outdated so quickly now, whereas the information online can be kept up-to-date, amended and corrected, in mere moments. Just look at Wikipedia.
The SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (Protect Intellectual Property Act) protests have been in the news this week, and many of us witnessed the Wikipedia blackout in which content was blocked for 24 hours in protest at proposed anti-piracy legislation in the US. Wikipedia asked, “Could you imagine a world without free knowledge“, but haven’t we always had access to free information through public and institutional libraries?
As much as I wholeheartedly support the protest, I do also wonder if people have forgotten the “good old days”. I realised that I almost had, and that was quite a scary realisation.
As for the information I was searching for at work, we may never find the answer. I don’t know if the organisation I work for even had a website before 2002 but, if they did, there doesn’t seem to be any record of it. There may be printed papers somewhere, but they will most likely be lost in the sands of time by now.
Free grazing…
Posted: January 18, 2012 Filed under: Food & Drink, London, Money & saving, Reading & Books | Tags: economist, evening standard, food, freebie, graze, healthy food, london, metro, postaday, postaweek2012, shortlist, stylist 1 CommentAs I’ve mentioned before, this is my year of being frugal and trying to get as many freebies as possible. So, you can imagine my sheer happiness when I came across a voucher to get a free box of nibbles!
Graze is a funky little company which delivers slender boxes of yumminess right through your door, as often as you want them. Each box costs £3.49, but I got my first one for free. Here it is:
On their website, you can go through all of the different items they offer and rate them. If there’s something you don’t like, you simply mark it “bin” and they won’t send it to you. If you mark something as “like” or “love” you should get it more often.
Along with the little packs of food, there’s also a leaflet telling you the nutritional information (and calorie count) of everything, and also the ingredients. The boxes are delivered by Royal Mail, and they fit through your door, so you don’t even have to be home to receive them (although I did enjoy receiving mine at work today and having something to nibble on in the afternoon).
This is without a doubt one of the best freebies I’ve ever received. The only down-side is that now I’m tempted not to cancel my membership but to continue getting the boxes. For £3.49 a week I can enjoy a little surprise and something yummy, which has to be better than wasting my money on chocolate biscuits at the supermarket and eating them all in one go (not that I’d ever do that…).
Anyway, I have a special deal which means I get the next one half price (£1.75) and with £1 off (£0.75), so I think I might stay signed up for a while longer.
Oh, I also got a free copy of The Economist today. That’s in addition to my daily Metro and Evening Standard newspapers, and weekly Stylist and Shortlist magazine. Living in London, I certainly don’t need to buy any reading material! 😉
The marshmallow experiment, part 2
Posted: January 11, 2012 Filed under: Education & Studying, Money & saving | Tags: degree, education, MA, money, postaday, postaweek2012, saving, studying, university Leave a commentLook >>>>
There it is. My chocolate bar. If I wait, I can really enjoy it, instead of simply receiving instant gratification followed by the disappointment that it’s gone and I can’t afford another one.
I’m trying the marshmallow experiment with spending money too. I’ve always been something of an impulsive shopper, but I’m trying to change that.
The one big “purchase” I would like to be considering right now is signing up to a new Japanese course (to improve my Japanese and learn more about the history and culture). I have various options, but I believe the most satisfying one will be saving up for an MA. I’ve looked into various evening classes and, while I’m sure they would be fun, I want to feel like I’m working towards something. (Actually, if I’m really honest, I want to do this course, but it’s an undergraduate degree and I don’t think I could ever afford it.)
Looking at the state of my savings account right now, saving up for an MA feels a little bit like starting to climb mount fuji right from the bottom. The mountain looms before me, and I have no idea how I will make it to the top in time for sunrise.
This MA course costs £2,826 (per year, for two years part-time) right now but fees are going up this autumn. Still, going by the current price, if I wanted to save up the total cost in advance I would need £5,652. If I wanted to have that amount within two years, I would need to save up £235.50 per month. Which, frankly, is entirely impossible on my salary. Over three years, it would be £157 per month – still impossible.
So I have a choice. Do I save up anyway, hoping to gain extra money along the way somehow to speed things up? Or do I go with the (still expensive) instant gratification of signing up to an evening class? Or, a final option, do I continue trying to convince myself that I can study by myself? I do have all the textbooks…
The marshmallow experiment…
Posted: January 11, 2012 Filed under: Dieting & Health, Food & Drink, Goals, Life, Money & saving | Tags: diet, food, goals, marshmallow experiment, money, postaday, postaweek2012, psychology, saving, stylist magazine Leave a commentDespite all the baking programmes I’ve been watching of late, and the picture below, this is not actually a post about cooking. There will, perhaps, be cake related posts on this blog in the future though.
Today I’m thinking about an interesting article I read on the way home in London’s free weekly magazine, Stylist. The article, “Just. One. More. Bite.” was encouraging readers to try investing in willpower instead of making New Year’s resolutions that will be abandoned before the end of January.
Personally, I’ve tried not to make specific resolutions this year. To be honest, they’re always the same anyway:
- Lose weight
- Save money
- Write more
The third, writing more, seems to be in hand. The other two seem to be horribly intertwined and unapproachable, like a drawer full of old necklaces that you’d like to wear but abandoned long ago because the effort of untangling them will just be too much.
But just think, if you did untangle all those old necklaces, you’d have loads more jewellery you could wear. Pretty, shiny jewellery. (Guys, if you’re reading this, think cables. Pretty, shiny cables that you keep in a drawer, even though you have no idea what they’re for.)
But what’s all this got to do with marshmallows? Well, according to the article, in 1972 (Stylist says ’68, but Wiki says ’72) a bloke called Walter Mischel of Stanford University conducted a test which is known as the Marshmallow Experiment. The test subjects were children (aged 4-6), and each child was taken into a room in which there was a plate with a single marshmallow on it. They were told that they could eat the marshmallow if they wanted to, but that if they waited 15 minutes they could have two. The child was then left alone to decide what to do. Some children simply ate the one marshmallow they were given, but some waited patiently (perhaps covering their eyes so they weren’t tempted or, according to Wiki, “stroking the marshmallow as if it were a tiny stuffed animal“).
The kids who waited got two marshmallows and learnt the lesson of delayed gratification. Follow-up research showed that those who had learnt the lesson went on to have higher academic achievement, and those who didn’t were more likely to have behavioural problems and trouble paying attention in class.
The Stylist article emphasised the importance of willpower; that rather than just denying ourselves the things we want (which will only make us want them more), we should learn to exercise our willpower a bit more, and resist the temptation of instant gratification. That doesn’t mean you can’t have your cake and eat it too, it just means you ought to wait a while between the buying and eating (if you’re baking, I’m not sure where “licking the bowl” fits in to this test, but I’m pretty sure it’s ok).
I need to give myself a marshmallow test. As I mentioned in a previous post, this is my year of being frugal and learning to save up for the things that I want. It’s the first time I’ve ever really tried to save up, and I’m finding it hard already.
Losing weight and saving money may seem like two separate goals, but when I start trying to untangle that twisted mess of chains it becomes quite clear that they have huge impacts on each other. I tend to run in viscous circles: I try to go on a diet, but then I get hungry or something else stresses me out, so I ignore the fact that I have a whole bunch of tasty (not cheap!) fruit and other snacks at home and go on a Sainsbury’s rampage for chocolate and other naughties. I have a night of over-indulgence, spend too much and eat too much, and feel bad about it all in the morning.
If I planned out delicious, nutritious meals with a light sprinkling of yummy but healthy snacks, I could save money and, most likely, lose weight too.
So, how’s my marshmallow test going to work? Right now there is no chocolate in my house (except Options hot chocolate, which really doesn’t count). Next time I go to the supermarket for groceries (not mid-week in a crazy fit of hunger, but for a weekly shop with a sensibly prepared list), I shall buy one, reasonably priced bar of chocolate. The chocolate will sit in my fridge, where I will occasionally stroke it as if it were a tiny, hard, cold animal. Eventually, I will eat it – when I really, really want it.
I won’t cheat by buying extra chocolate along the way. That would bust my diet and budget in one swift punch.
Let’s see if this experiment works…
The locks of love…
Posted: January 8, 2012 Filed under: Love & Relationships, Movies, Travel & Tourism, TV | Tags: bridge, brookley bridge, couples, Federico Moccia, italy, love, new york, ponte milvio, postaday, postaweek2012, relationships, romance, satc, sex and the city 4 CommentsOn my recent visit to New York I was very keen to visit Brooklyn Bridge, mainly because I had seen it featured in Sex and the City, and wanted to see the view of Manhattan from Brooklyn. One particular scene from Sex and the City had stuck in my mind, and that was the one in the first movie, where Steve and Miranda meet on Brooklyn Bridge to show that they are willing to forget the past and continue with their marriage.
But I hadn’t realised that Brooklyn Bridge was such a popular place for romance. Apparently Brooklyn Bridge has become the place for couples to declare their eternal love to each other by attaching a padlock to the bridge.
Scores of locks have been lovingly left on the bridge, some with messages, names or dates written on them, others plain. Despite the fact that it is actually illegal to attach anything to the bridge, there are these handy little loops all over the place, which people have cleverly made use of.
The tradition dates back to a book by Italian novelist Federico Moccia, which became popular when it was turned into a film, “Tre Metri Sopra il Cielo” (“Three Steps Over Heaven“), in 2004. Following the popularity of the movie, couples began declaring their love on the Ponte Milvio in Italy. Sometime later, perhaps around 2007, the tradition made its way over the Atlantic to the US, and people began to attach their love locks to the Brooklyn Bridge.
As I said, it is illegal to leave these locks on the bridge, but no one seems to be doing anything about removing them. And, really, what harm are they doing?
I wonder now if that scene in Sex and the City was inspired by this tradition of declaring one’s love on Brooklyn Bridge, although Miranda and Steve don’t actually leave a lock.
What do you think? Is leaving a lock on a bridge a good way for a couple to declare their eternal love? Would you do it?
Being a tourist…
Posted: January 7, 2012 Filed under: Just me, London, Photography, Travel & Tourism | Tags: city, london, photography, postaday, postaweek2012, tourist Leave a commentOne of the things I loved about living abroad was that I could be a tourist all the time. It didn’t seem strange to whip out my camera every five minutes and take photos of buildings that locals just walked by. It was perfectly acceptable to spend my day off in the museum, or visiting the nearby tourist spots.
When I returned to England, one of my biggest fears was that I would lose that spirit of “being a tourist”. One of my good friends reminded me how important it was not to lose that quality, and so I decided to start my daily photo blog, Picturing England.
It was more difficult to keep inspired when I first came back to England and was living back in my hometown, but now that I am living in London I’m finding that all I have to do is hang my camera around my neck and step out with my tourist head on.
I can be anyone I want to be in London. I can be a tourist, I can be an art student, I can be Ali, and it’s ok. London is such a diverse melting-pot of people, and you often can’t tell by looking at someone if they are a tourist or not.
Today I was a tourist/art student as I wandered about my city. I went on hunts for famous graffiti, aided by Internet searches and the GPS on my phone, and I visited the British Museum. I’m lucky to live in London where there is so much free stuff to do. Most museums and galleries are free (except for special exhibitions), and there are interesting things to be found if you look up at the roofs or down at the corners of buildings, if you’re in the right part of town.
So, wherever you live, if you’re starting to feel bored, just grab your camera and get out of the house. Go to where the tourists are, or wander around the back streets. You’ll be surprised what’s been under your nose all this time.
AliMuskett.com 