Thursday 28 June 2018

Tiling, plumbing, Buddhism, Art Pass and a mattress

Mango tiled walls behind the sink and hob

Not very interesting stuff to report today. I realise I haven't yet displayed the full glory of the tiled walls, which I am very pleased with. The tiler was a complete perfectionist, which might have grated on another soul but made me rather happy.

The plumber was on site at the same time. His key personality trait was at all costs not to ask me for my opinion. As well as replacing the faulty stop valve he decided to fashion a false back to the cupboard which makes the real stopcock even harder to access. When I discovered this I was so fed up that I told him I didn't want to use the shelves and sent him away without letting him cut the shelves down so they would fit in the new, shallower cupboard. I regret this hasty action less than I rejoice at getting rid of him. What is it with plumbers? I haven't yet found one who is both competent and congenial.

We've had a guest speaker at the Buddhist group for a few weeks where we've been discussing a couple of ancient poems. He is an excellent speaker and writer, having written several notable books with a Buddhist slant, and I'm reading his latest work and enjoying it. He also led the study weekend I attended in Shrewsbury in April. It feels a bit like hosting a celebrity, albeit a very minor one.

Two events combined on Tuesday. Lola II and Mr M gave me a three-month trial of the National Art Pass, which gives free and discounted admission to various museums, galleries and exhibitions around the country. Lola II has also made some disparaging comments about the state of my 25-year-old sofabed mattress. The manufacturer is still in business, allowing me to order a replacement mattress despite the original sofabed design being long discontinued. The mattress was not cheap, but on top of that they quoted an extortionate amount for delivery so we agreed that I would collect it. Rather than make quite a long journey just for this one purpose, I found that Aston Hall is on the way and offering free admission as part of the Art Pass scheme.

View of the hall from the gardens

Aston Hall is a Jacobean mansion that has survived remarkably well over 400 years - obviously not everything is original but there's plenty to impress. Admission is only allowed with a tour, but there were only three of us visitors and a very knowledgeable volunteer guide who didn't particularly hurry us through. I stopped for a picnic lunch - the gardens weren't great, but the weather was wonderful. Then I picked up the mattress, spent a very small amount of time looking at washing machines, and came home. It will be another trip to the launderette tomorrow. I'm finding it rather difficult to buy a replacement, mostly because I find it incredibly tedious.

BMI - no change this week. This always happens - good weight loss that just stops for no reason. I'm trying hard to maintain motivation and continue.

White tiles and blue mosaic strip behind the utility room sink

Tuesday 19 June 2018

Updates

Pond with waterlilies
Adhisthana, June 2018
Pub update - the news is not good. My local councillor replied very promptly, forwarding a message from the Licensing Team Leader. The Deregulation Act 2015 states that:
"Live amplified music is deregulated between 08:00 and 23:00 up to a maximum of 500 people on a premises authorised to sell alcohol for the consumption on the premises."
It was also clarified that the definition of the premises in the license plan extends to the garden outside as well, so I don't have any options unless I wish to make a noise complaint. There is a local 'night noise service' which runs from 9pm to 1am on Friday and Saturday nights and seemingly will come and 'witness the noise and disruption levels first hand'. But I don't want to fall out with my neighbour, and I certainly don't want anything in writing that may affect the sale of my house in future times. And anyway, the music wasn't repeated last Friday.

Bathroom scales update - my BMI this morning was 24.3 kg/m² so still going in the right direction, despite the colleague's leaving do on Friday followed by the weekend's excess. Actually, the family party at the weekend was quite modest and I managed to get the guests to take away most of the leftovers. The best thing about it, apart from seeing my lovely family and enjoying their approval of the LTRP, is that leading up to the event I cleaned the house more thoroughly than I think I ever have before, which I continue to enjoy.

Badminton update - I ended up having to go to the League EGM because the two people in the club more qualified than I came up with much better excuses not to attend than I could think of on the spot. I didn't really know why the EGM had been called except that the new Chair of the League thinks that badminton is in a fatal decline and wants to halt it using various measures which are regularly defeated when proposed at the AGM. So the reason for the EGM was to come up with a different, 'fairer' voting regime for meetings so that 'progress' could be made, and it was all over in only 90 minutes which I consider to be a good outcome. In case you're interested (but why would you be?) the new voting regime gives each team in the league one vote up to a maximum of four votes per club, with a voting majority of two thirds.

LTRP update - the lovely tiler is on site as I type, and the plumber has just departed having reinstated the fancy stopcock device and repainted the skirting with one coat. If I am lucky this will represent the final work on the kitchen and it will be complete, except I suppose for the dead washing machine which I have made no progress towards replacing.

Tuesday 12 June 2018

On retreat

Shrine with Buddha, flowers and candles
Adhisthana, June 2018
I had to spend more than a week without WiFi in the end. It's back now, but I have yet to knuckle down and replace the washing machine, which is officially dead.

During this period offline I finally reached a point where I had to take notice of what the bathroom scales were telling me. It's been quite easy to see the numbers creeping upward and do nothing about it, although it's been seven years since my main weight loss event took place so less than a kilogram gained each year isn't too bad. But on Tuesday I couldn't ignore it any longer, and I have embarked on a serious weight loss plan. I have written it all down, and unlike all my recent half-hearted attempts I'm telling everyone. My Tuesday BMI was 25.6 kg/m², and I'm aiming for a BMI of 23.5 kg/m² which requires 5 kg reduction. After one week I had reached 24.9 kg/m² which is excellent, but I don't imagine every week will produce this sort of improvement.

There's been quite a lot of Buddhism recently, which has also helped my resolution in the dietary department with its vegan approach and emphasis on managing the mind. Because it's all about the mind. After just a week on the new diet regime I had stopped craving something sweet after supper, and if the craving is gone it's much easier to stick to the plan.

I went to the Birmingham Buddhist Centre for Buddha day and did some meditating and chatting with interesting people, including a few who I'm starting to get to know. I avoided the formal ceremonial stuff which I don't enjoy but happens at the end so it's easy to leave early. Then the following weekend I went on my first weekend residential Buddhist retreat, at a centre in the Herefordshire countryside. It's where the founder of the particular Buddhist movement that I've become involved with still lives at the age of over ninety, but also contains a number of residential houses for longer stays as well as the rooms let out for weekends. It's a beautiful setting, which is handy because I'd just run out of pictures for this blog.

Meals were vegan, the timetable included meditation, discussion and free time, some of it in silence which suits me very well. People on my more commercial holidays accuse me of being 'anti-social' if I don't want to join in their alcohol-fuelled evening activities, but here you are expected to spend time with your own thoughts. Many of us went for a lovely walk in the glorious weather on Saturday afternoon and I got the chance to chat to the leader of our Tuesday group. There isn't much time for chat on a Tuesday.

Morning meditation was a revelation - 50 minutes starting at 7 a.m., followed by a 10 minute break and then another 30 minutes. I thought I'd have a go at the long one, thinking I could always duck out and skip the following session. Being away from everything with no pressure and nothing to do made it so much easier than trying to silence all the chatter in my mind at home. I sat for the whole 90 minutes both mornings without difficulty.

The theme for study was a tale about a rich man and his wayward son, who represented 'the enlightened mind' and our ordinary minds. We didn't spend overmuch time in study, but I couldn't avoid the formal ceremonial stuff this time. Sitting through it again hasn't changed my mind about it. Altogether the retreat wasn't the transformational experience that others have reported, but I'm planning to do it again. At some point I'll have a go at a week rather than a weekend.

Back home, there's bad news about neighbourly relations with the Pub Next Door. For the first time in the 16 years I have lived here I've had to consult the terms of the pub license. The only thing I've objected to in all that time has been music in the beer garden, and up until Friday there has never been a problem. But they put on a live band, and although the music was good and it only lasted two hours there wasn't a room in my house where it couldn't be heard very clearly. I spoke to the landlord who told me that he was planning to do this every Friday night through the summer. So I have asked our local councillor to clarify some of the terms of the licence, spoken to a couple of the other neighbours, and will decide what to do when the position is clearer.

Some good news though - the new lawnmower blade arrived, I fitted it without a problem and it works a whole lot better than the previous blunt stick of metal.

Tuesday 5 June 2018

What I've been reading

Image of the book cover

Writing Down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within
by Natalie Goldberg
"Writing practice, as she calls it, is no different from other forms of Zen practice — it is backed by two thousand years of studying the mind."
This is the book recommended to me by the writer I met at the Buddhist weekend. It is clear why she puts it at the top of her list - it sets writing in the context of Buddhism, which is not quite where I see it. Still, there are some interesting ideas, although it does feel a little like procrastination to read about writing rather than just getting on with it. But I don't yet know what I want to write, and I've only recently made time for daily meditation, so I'm not sure where the time will come from for writing as well.


Image of the book cover

Breakfast at Tiffany's
by Truman Capote
"With her tousled blond hair and upturned nose, dark glasses and chic black dresses, she is top notch in style and a sensation wherever she goes. Yet Holly never loses sight of her ultimate goal - to find a real life place like Tiffany's that makes her feel at home."
This little book actually contains three other short stories alongside the titular one, which only slightly resembles the Hollywood movie. He can certainly write well, and I am intrigued at the subjects he chooses. I suspect there is an element of autobiography, but the one about the prison break - surely that is imagined?


Image of the book cover

A Prayer for Owen Meany
by John Irving

narrated by Joe Barrett
"In the summer of 1953, two 11-year-old boys — best friends — are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy's mother."
I enjoyed this book very much. I've got a feeling I once tried to read it before, but Owen Meany's dialogue is set in capitals and I couldn't get on with it, whereas when narrated it is much easier to deal with. I have been paying more attention to how different authors write ever since I started thinking more about writing something more substantial than a blog. In this book he does a really good job of skipping back and forth in time without you losing a sense of where you are or what has already happened and what is still to come.


Image of the book cover

Cakes and Ale
by W. Somerset Maugham

narrated by James Saxon
"Social climber Alroy Kear is flattered when he is selected by Edward Driffield's wife to pen the official biography of her novelist husband, and determined to write a bestseller. But then Kear discovers the great novelist's voluptuous muse (and unlikely first wife), Rosie."
Without doing it intentionally, this is the second fictional book about writers and their writing that I've read recently - the first being Capote's above, and the third is Byatt's below. I can't say it engaged me very much. It was set firmly in the Victorian era when pony and trap was giving way to the motor car, and society seemed to be rapidly changing its views on marriage, divorce and unmarried love. Apparently the author was proud of this work, which has an autobiographical component, but he doesn't present me with a heart-warming tale. Not all stories are happy and positive, but I prefer the ones that are.


Image of the book cover

A Far Cry From Kensington
by Muriel Spark

narrated by Juliet Stevenson
"In postwar London, as a fat and much admired young war widow, Mrs Hawkins spent her days working for a mad, near-bankrupt publisher and her nights dispensing advice at her small South Kensington rooming house. At work and at home Mrs. Hawkins soon uncovered evil: shady literary doings and a deadly enemy; anonymous letters, blackmail, and suicide."
An OK book with a good enough plot, spoiled slightly by the running theme of the narrator's dislike of one of the characters. He does turn out to be a thoroughly bad sort, but the author doesn't really take this where I felt it needed to go. But she does write well most of the time, and you can't fault the gorgeous narration.


Image of the book cover

Possession
by A. S. Byatt
"Together with Roland Michell, a fellow academic and accidental sleuth, Maud Bailey discovers a love affair between the two Victorian writers the pair has dedicated their lives to studying: Randolph Ash, a literary great long assumed to be a devoted and faithful husband, and Christabel La Motte, a lesser-known 'fairy poetess' and chaste spinster."
So this is a Booker prizewinning book, and if it were a pie I would describe it as having a good deal of indigestible gristle among the meat. I'm not fond of poetry, so perhaps a book focussing on two Victorian poets wasn't the best choice, but I chewed my way through the poetry nevertheless. There was nothing wrong with the plot in between the interminable verses, but I can imagine using the same plot in a much more entertaining book about two architects, or two cleaners, and finding that much more palatable.


Image of the book cover

The Daughter of Time
by Josephine Tey

narrated by Derek Jacobi
"The search for the truth about the murder of the Princes in the Tower. Was the hunchback, Richard III, the monster that Shakespeare and the history books have made him out to be?"
It was my fault that I didn't get much out of this book, because I don't have the background knowledge of the personalities of the time. If I were a history nut who knew all the characters and their relationships I'm sure this would be fascinating - as it was, it was quite a slog. The answer, of course, is that Richard III wasn't the monster, it was probably Henry VII. So now you know.

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