reactions to life: March 2003 Archives

Spent the weekend marching, decorating and gardening in that order, plus about 20 minutes deciding if it was worth having a barbeque. Sadly not, but hopefully soon, as it is already Spring. First really warm sunshine of the year in London, even the earth has started to warm up, we have started the annual hostilities in the garden, cutting edges to beds and setting forth the seeds from their packets into their trays. Squirrels are out and about around us and our cats decided to spend the day sunning themselves. Nice day, even with the paint fumes.

More sunny pictures, this time from Chile are here, from our trip there about a year or so ago. I'll write more about them to give them some context later in the week.

I used to live in Belfast and there the sun is such a fleeting visitor that I got used to the greyness of the light. In London the sun arrives starting around now, certainly April and it a definite presence until maybe September. So now I am increasingly noticing the lift in my mood as soon as the sun returns, I'm not claiming SAD, but I definitely feel a lot better when the sun comes back. On another bright note, takeoneonion is one month public today.

A few years ago in the UK every bookstore sold 60p books, which were usually interesting excerpts of longer novels and cookery books. We have maybe 20 to 30 of them in various rooms in the house, I noticed them tidying up today. Now you can't buy them anywhere, maybe they got too expensive to make, or the public got bored of them. On a related note, you can get copyright free books from Project Gutenberg amongst others.

Today the BBC announced some job cuts that makes three out of three for me. Each company I've worked in has made people redundant since I came to London. I can see their reasons each time, it is still sad. It is primarily voluntary for my department, but my old department, iF&L has taken the brunt of the losses.

A sad thing happened a week or so ago, I lost my penknife, which was an eighteenth birthday present from my brother. It looked a bit like the classic Swiss Army soldiers knife, except it had a saw too and once had red enamel sides.

Why is this interesting? So many things these days are disposable or replaceable. I carried the knife everywhere, it was my companion for nearly 14 years. Metal objects gain a personality through use, I don't mean to anthropomorphize it, as that would be foolish, but metal objects are durable, they gain scratches and nicks which tell a story. Mine had seen me through university, many odd jobs, various holidays to places like Chile and France and the US last year. Carefully avoiding getting it taken by airline security and making sure I didn't drop it and then I left it on a ferry from Calais to Dover.

It is only when you do not have something that you notice its absence, several times a day I'll reach for it to open a beer, or cut something or ... I'll get a leatherman to replace it, but it'll take years for it to fully replace the knife I lost, maybe, tell you in six months.