Organic-Ally

Everything in the house belongs to 'Mum and Dad'. But the car is 'Daddy's car'. Somehow I can never think of the car as 'our car'. It's long, it's wide, it's a gas guzzler. It also sits on our front drive for most of the week doing precious little. There's the weekly shop and the airport run for our hordes of visiting relatives ... well they do seem to visit all at the same time. When son was in a push-chair, I pushed him everywhere. Then he started school and I found myself driving everywhere, and putting on weight, and feeling a lot less fit. So I've started walking every where again. I feel much fitter and I get to meet more people, talking and chatting with my neighbours, etc. I hate 'Daddy's car' and avoid driving it as much as possible. I have not driven it through a width restriction as I am almost certain that I would bash the mirror in. Being rather short, I have the seat pushed up right to the front to reach the peda...

Husband and I went to see our accountant last week to sort out our tax. I'm a bit of what Singaporeans would call 'sua-ku', meaning 'mountain tortoise' with a very limited view of what life is all about. I don't often travel on the Tube now. (I used to have to Tube and bus to and from work. Tedium.) The thing that struck me was the sheer number of people, especially young people, walking about with their ears glued to a mobile phone. OK, a mobile phone glued to their ears, maybe. 'How soon,' I asked,'would we have babies born with mobile phones stuck to their ears?' 'Don't be silly,' said husband. 'You know that is never going to happen. What might happen is that they would be born with ears modified to fit with the shape of the phone.' 'Ha-ha,' and a few minutes later, 'What about babies born with elbows crooked to keep their phones in place?' People do not sit and wait any more. As soon as they sit down, out ...

After my last post I realized that some readers might think that I am really old-fashioned. What do you expect but for 13-year-old girls to be rowdy? I don't know about that. I wrote this next section in my son's school newsletter recently: ======= As I mentioned books for mothers last week, I should also mention a very good book for both mothers and fathers: Raising Boys by Steve Biddulph. Biddulph divides boyhood into three parts. Age zero to six: the boy ‘belongs’ to the mother; age six to thirteen: their father becomes the ‘hero’; from thirteen onwards, with the second surge in testosterone, boys wish to ‘declare their independence’ and look for influences outside the home. This division makes a lot of sense to me as a social anthropologist. We know in many ‘pre-modern’ societies, boys reaching puberty are taken away to undergo special tutelage by their fathers (and often mothers’ brothers). They go through a stage of ‘liminality’, of feeling ‘between and betwixt’. Then, w...

Been feeling a bit down with the cold. Husband has been working the weekends. Son has got a golf lesson to attend. So we decided to eat at the restaurant where the golf lesson was taking place. For the first half hour we could not hear ourselves think, let alone talk. A few metres from us were a group of 14 to 16 young girls at a birthday celebration. They were talking so loudly -- you would think it was a hen night party -- with the birthday girl's brother and parents looking on. Shrieks, screams, loud raucous laughter. Noise. The parents looked on and even joined in conversation, sometimes shouting across the table. I stared and caught the attention of one young girl, but she pretended that she didn't see me. Then I caught the eye of another diner and he shook his head in disgust. Our meal at this otherwise good restaurant was ruined. Girl's father came back with a bin liner of birthday presents. Girl opened the presents in turn. I saw a card which declared that it was he...

Finally, the new structure is 'sorted' and put in place. I hope customers are happy with this. I have 'agonized' over this for some time as you can see here . Occasionally I still get the odd combination of purchases that make the postage unfair to either the customer or myself. Thankfully, these are few and far between. Back to Organic-Ally .

The past few weeks went by in a bit of a whirl. I spent a lot of time looking through someone's doctoral thesis. His PhD and career depended on my input, so I felt I needed to give it some attention. Which meant a lot of other work could not be done. Including setting up the new P&P system for the Organic-Ally website. Never mind, things are 'slowing down' a little. It is less of a 'blur' now. Back to Organic-Ally .