why is your face on your head?

That is another one of Anna’s questions, that she shouted it out from her bed at 8:30pm: I guess like a facilitator at a meeting she is asking a thought provoking question to stimulate discussion. I didn’t respond at the time, but having had time to think about it I would say that having the face on your head (rather than say, your lower back) shortens the communication lines between your brain and the rest of the universe.

Later on I popped upstairs and she was still awake. She said ‘daddy I can’t get to sleep because my dreams are too noisy’.

I’ve been reading Uncle Lubin with Andrew. I used to love that book when I was about 10. What a cool guy Uncle Lubin is. He always finds a way out of things. A huge long serpent is about to eat him, but he remembers that serpents can't resist music, so he plays his concertina for hours and hours and the serpent just gets caught up in knots and dies. Lubin's only real mistake is at the start of the book when he falls asleep looking after his nephew Peter and the wicked bag bird snatches Peter away in his beak. At the time of writing Uncle L still hasn’t managed to get Peter back, but he is working on it.

Here is a link to a guy has scanned onto his website lots of Heath Robinson’s illustrations for Uncle Lubin http://bugpowder.com/andy/e.robinson.heath_lubin.html

Andrew is really looking forward to going to the test match (England v Sri Lanka) with me and my mate Phil on May 11. He asked me if I could get a bit of card and draw a 6 on it He said ‘I will hold it up if it is a six, but if I catch it then I’ll give it to you and you can hold it up’ Visions of Freddie Flintoff hitting a massive six into the grandstand and Andrew calmly passing me his little cardboard number 6 before pouching the ball in both hands.

My other religion is the right one

I saw this graffiti on the river facing wall of the Tate Modern last week.

The sentiment really resonates with me. I remember attending a superb parenting course (http://www.familycaring.co.uk/course_parents.htm), run by local health visitors. The course had a session on spirituality and parenting. At the end I asked the course leader whether she thought it was a good idea for us as parents to introduce our children to religion and she said 'yes, and to as many religions as you can'.

Religions shouldn't have to prove themselves to be true. To me it is enough if their teachings help those who come into contact with them to express and explore their feelings at being alive at a particular point within the vastness of space and time on a planet and in a universe that are both so uniquely hospitable to us.

No wonder I couldn’t find it

Have you ever lost a boiled egg?

For the first time in my life that happened to me on Monday morning. I got up early, put the egg on to boil, and plugged in the laptop to write a blog post. I started to type about how the people that came to my training course last Friday walked over the Thames with me at lunchtime to visit the Tate Modern.

Once the egg had boiled I drained the water out, took the laptop to the table and ate a bowl of muesli. When I’d finished the muesli I went to get my boiled egg, but couldn’t find it. It wasn’t in the pan, or in the sink. I hadn’t put it back in the fridge, nor had I chucked it in the bin.

I made Tania a cup of tea, warned her about the free-ranging boiled egg and went to work. The absence of egg didn’t affect me too much, our very hospitable clients at the bank gave me a nice croissant to have with a cup of tea.

I got a text from Tania saying ‘it was in the kettle!’

Courtney Pine

Saw Courtney Pine at the Jazz Café with my dad on Saturday (I mean I went with my dad, it didn’t look like Courtney needed the help of a fellow saxophonist)

Piney was great. After an hour and a half he said to us ‘’well, our time is up now, and I guess your busy, you’ve got things to do and all that….. shame cos me and the band are just getting warmed up’’

Then when the audience made some noise he said ‘’I want you to sing along with this next one: we will do a three part harmony, yesterday they managed something special but you’re gonna do better cos you’ve got the Saturday night Camden Town Jazz café vibe, yeah?’’

So he pointed his sax at different parts of the audience, played a riff and got them to sing it back to him. And he liked our part of the audience the best cos we made the most noise at the beginning, so when another part of the audience didn’t come up to scratch he said to them ‘watch how my people can do this’ and turned back to us to do the riff. When we’d got it right he just left us to repeat it over and over again while he was off playing something else entirely.

I found it inspiring that someone at the top of his fame put so much effort, warmth and fun into his performance, into involving the audience in it, and into creating a memorable evening.

I remember seeing Tommy Smith play the sax at the Glasgow Jazz festival. He was quieter than Courtney. He played old standards, hackneyed tunes you’d heard millions of times before, with a real care and depth of heart that made them sound suddenly really touching and profound. I thought what dedication he must have to his instrument and int his art to play it that well.

My dream would be to let the passion, freedom and enjoyment shown by Pine, and the care and dedication shown by Smith , show up in my work too.

On the train back home Dad told me that the gig he played a couple of weeks ago was at The Greyhorse in Kingston: I was really impressed: they have some semi-decent bands on there.

Daddy, why do we have to protect our eyeballs when we are asleep?

Anna has just called down from her bedroom to ask me that. Funny how she comes up with these great questions when she is lying in bed trying to get to sleep.

At this time on Friday she shouted ‘mummy, why can’t you see your head?’.

Later that night she asked ‘why can you only dream when you are asleep?

February 2: National flapjack day

TFPL celebrated National Flapjack Day on Thursday, and the competion for the 'flapjack of the year' award was the closest fought many of us could remember.

The competion had everything:
- skulduggery (Carmel tipped a tub of marks and spencers flap's into a tupperware pot and expected us to believe she'd cooked it)
- heroism (Nicky and her mum drove to Beddington Asda at 1am to buy another pot of syrup after their first batch of flapjacks had charred in the oven)
- international rivalry (Belinda had told us that Anzac biscuits were better than flapjacks, and was bitterly disappointed at only getting 2 votes).
- despair (Nicky's late night vigil had looked like paying off until a late flurry of votes tore victory from her grasp)
-triumph (Clare's bold decision to make an exotic ginger and chocolate flapjack was rewarded when the last vote, from Sheetal, handed her victory by one vote)

Well done Clare!


-

Bert update

Anna pointed out to me last night that Bert knew how to say soup too.

I told Anna how I taught Bert to say cheese, how long it took me and how many pieces of cheese I ate whilst saying the word.

I told her how I smiled when he pointed at the wardrobe and said 'cheese' and how puzzled he was when on subsequent performances of the same manoeuvre I shook my head and said 'no Bert thats not cheese, I can't keep my school uniform and my P.E kit and my jeans and t-shirts in cheese, they would smell awful'.

Every day for months he would swivel his head, look at the wardrobe, point and say cheese. Every day he would look crestfallen in his teddy way when I shook my head. I tried everything. I got my parents to bring back a really pungent cheese from France so he could compare the smell to the veneer of my walnut wardrobe. Nothing worked.

Next time they crossed the channel I got them to bring back a poster of the 360 cheeses of France. I stuck it on the wardrobe. Bert pointed, said cheese, I smiled, he smiled.

Then I started to teach him about Yoghurt.

Bert

I told Anna about Bert last night, the teddy I had when I was small that only knew seven words. Each of the seven words was the name of a fruit or other type of foodstuff.

I told her how he would slowly swivel his head, then lift his arm and point to an object in my room.

Once he pointed to my wardrobe and said 'cheese'. Anna asked whether he could say 'Baby Bell' and I had to admit that he couldn't distinguish between types of cheese.

Another time he pointed at the window when my next door neighbour was walking past and said 'bannana'.

He didn't seem to have much facility for learning, but he was very entertaining: I wonder which child has him now.

Will there ever be a world flapjack day?

I've hit an obstacle: Belinda tells me that in Australia the word flapjack has nothing to do with oats: it is merely a synonym for 'pancake'.

I didn't realise how strong my cultural prejudices are. I thought the concept of oats baked with butter and syrup was so simple as to be universal (as I write this I realise that without Columbus we in England would not been missing a rather crucial ingredient).

What is the nearest French/Russian/Hungarian/Ghanaian equivelant to a flapjack? I find it hard enough to find a freshly baked flapjack in London, what chance would I have in Adelaide or Lagos?

A further blow to my preconceptions has been dealt by Martin on my left here: apparently the original application of the word flapjack is from the New England states of America, and does indeed refer to a pancakefried on a griddle. Jack was then a common workd for 'thing' and flapjack meant a thing that was flipped. Our present biscuity use of the term originated in England in the 1930s.

On discovering Korean Poetry at my hairdressers

I took my son to Boko's, our very friendly local Korean hairdressers. You'll find it on Coombe Road, opposite New Malden Station, above an Italian (or Italianish) café. I was offered a pile of books and papers to peruse while Andrew was being shorn. I never expect to read any thing decent in a hairdressers, doctors or dentist. But in amongst the pile was a book called ‘Korea’s Golden poems’: 50 poems in Korean, with English translations alongside. They were really interesting: crystal clear, painting pictures using elements of the natural world (trees, waves, raindrops) to illuminate the inner feelings of us human beings.

The poem that really grabbed me was called ‘My Mind’. In it the poet compares his mind to a lake. The lake is occasionally furrowed by a gentle wind, there are people fishing on it, or lying down and chatting beside it. The poet reminds himself to keep the lake properly in anticipation of the coming of a great swan.

The poem got me thinking: about how to wait for things constructively, actively; and about how important it is to distinguish the people and things in your life that are really important to you. The poet seemed to have no control over when the swan would come, but he does have control of the environment that the swan would visit.

I took the swan to signify anybody or anything who brings joy into your life. But of course no-one or no-thing can bring joy into your life unless you are ready to receive them and to sustain the friendship/ relationship/interest. The poet was describing a situation where there were no swans around his lake, just diverting distractions. But the poet was careful not to be consumed by the distractions, he wasn’t going to let his lake be cluttered to such an extent that there was no place for the swan when it came.

I thought about who/what the swans are in my life now ( and what the swans might be in the future). I thought about my wife and kids; the great swans in my life. And about my friend Michael who died just before Christmas and who had been a friend who really made me laugh, who got me out of my shell, and who simply made me feel happier and more alive. Friends like Michael don’t come into your life any more frequently than Halley’s Comet. He is going to be missed on my lake/life (and in many other people’s lives too).

It was my turn to get my haircut. In between my haircut and hairwash I went back to look at the book to see who wrote ‘My Mind’. But I couldn’t find it instantly and I didn’t want to linger on the book because the people in Boko's are very generous and I was worried they might offer it to me to take home. So I left not knowing who wrote it.

I searched the internet for two hours but couldn’t any mention of ‘My Mind’. But I did find a superb site at which Brother Anthony of Taize (An Sonjae) provides lots of English translations of Korean poems, as well as some information about the poets http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/KoreanPoems.htm

And I found out about an amazing poet called Ko Un, who many Koreans hoped would win the Nobel prize for literature in 2005 (our own Harold Pinter got it instead). One of the things Ko Un is attempting to do is to write a poem about everyone he has ever known. So far he’s written about 10,000 of these poems in 20 volumes and he’s still going strong.
Here is a link to ten of them, translated by Brother Anthony http://www.sogang.ac.kr/~anthony/ManinboTen.htm.
And here is some backround about Ko Un: http://levity.com/interbeing/ko.html

The book I found at Bokos hairdressers is described at http://www.hollym.co.kr/english/literature/golden_poem_ko.htm