Organic-Ally

One of the mums from my toddler group came in some time with a box full of popular magazines she rescued from the bin at her office. There was quite a scramble as mums tried to pick a magazine either for themselves or for their children. I got myself one on home decor. Me, home decor? Ha! Before we got married I made it quite clear to my husband-to-be I am not the proud house-owner type (ie: don't expect me to keep the house spotless, etc, etc.) Thankfully he was of the view that it is no fun living in a showroom. We can boast of living in a very 'lived in' house. Toys everywhere? That's only because my son had not tidied up. I do not go tidying up after him. Anyway, I spotted this section on covering up an 'open cupboard' (ie open shelves) with a patchwork curtain: "Sew together fabrics until you have a piece one and a half times the length of your worktop. Stitch a narrow casing at the top and hem the bottom. Thread curtain wire through the casing and fix...

Take ironing for example. As a young child one of the first tasks I was allowed to do was sorting the clean clothes, folding them up neatly, and putting them away. Then I graduated to being able to 'moisten' the clothes that needed ironing. This entailed getting an enamel jug of water and sprinkling water all over the clothes with some deft wristwork and rolling them up. I've often wondered why we didn't just iron the clothes while still wet, rather than wait for them to dry and I had to wet them again. These were then bundled up in a large piece of cloth for a few minutes. Then Mum would do the ironing. She would have a bowl of water with her and would sprinkle the clothes with water when she saw fit. That was 'steam ironing'. Later I watched for the first time my sister-in-law use a steam iron and I thought how marvellous the steam iron was. In my married life -- just coming up to ten years -- I cannot remember how many steam irons we'd gone through. The h...

I went ballistic yesterday. Then I was tearful. Then I felt a part of me died. My elder brother told me that he had just -- last week -- thrown away my Brownie uniform. This was all the more difficult to bear because I had just told a sister to look after it for me because on my next trip I would be collecting that item from her flat. You see, my son has just joined Cub Scouts and has really taken a fancy to the challenge of badge-collecting. This is a little boy who is so shy and finds it difficult to get out of his comfort zone. He joined the Cubs, asked to be enrolled and has now set sights pretty high. Many years ago I was just like that. I worked very hard to pass all the tests I needed to become a full-fledged Brownie. The Golden Hand, the Golden Bar, etc and became the Sixer of the 'Fairies'. I turned 12 before I could complete all the tests I needed to get me my Golden Wings. One could only get those Wings if one passed a series of tests before one turned twelve. The po...

Sadly I only learned about this programme a few hours before the first episode was aired, and so did not have time to flag this up on my other websites. What can I say? The factory scenes brought back vivid memories of my own stints in garment factories. Between my O and A Levels I found a 'finishing' job in a garment factory. That made me the lowest of the low in the hierarchy, short of the tea lady. So when the tea lady was not around, the supervisor made me serve tea to visitors. The rest of my time was spent cutting the loose ends of thread, ironing the finished products, folding, packing, and so on. My most painful memory at this factory was the tea lady hovering around the office, refusing to go home, waiting for the boss to come back to the factory to hand out that week's wages. The boss had left the factory earlier on for a meeting. She didn't come back that evening and we never got paid. The tea lady moaned that she didn't have the money to pay her children...

This happened a few weeks ago but I never got round to blog this. I discovered a hole in a shoe. It's not really a shoe, but a 'mule', I suppose you could call it that. It's Marks/Sparks Footglove. I showed my son the shoe, "Guess how long Mum has had this pair of shoes." "Hmm. Seven years?" "No, had these much longer than you've been around." "Longer than you've been married?" "Yes." "Ten years?" "At least." More like eleven, I think. I remember using those when I was doing my PhD fieldwork in a city "up north". I remember my 90-something neighbour (then only 80-something) saying how comfortable she found those shoes. She had a similar pair in black. Mine were an adventurous beige. I remember spilling tea on my nearly-new mules and tried very hard to rid them of the stains. No luck. Ah, well. No one's going to notice. These shoes/mules/whatever stayed with me, tramped all over S...

As the writer of Ecclesiates says, "There is nothing new under the sun." Years ago as a full-time Christian worker with university students I had to read up on "New Age". I could not, for a long time, understand why it was called "New Age". What is so new about this "New Age", I kept asking myself. So much of it sounds like old hat to me. Then it tweaked. I'd been living the New Age for as long as I could remember: New Age was "Old Age" as far as the oriental person is concerned. "New Age" is new only to the person who has to learn a new non-western philosophy as the basis of his worldview. Having grown up Chinese, there was nothing very new in it for me. Sorted. Second week back at school and I still find myself sewing name labels. It has not been easy trying to procure organic cotton trousers for my son. Finally they arrived this morning at seven-thirty on a Saturday morning. Typical. Because son suffers from eczema, I d...

Out of the blue a former classmate emailed to say my year group at secondary school has started an online group, please join. So I dutifully did. First I read the posts and was tickled pink by several posts. Us 'old girls' have a great sense of humour indeed. Nostalgia struck as some of us recalled happy and less-than-happy events, but boy! it makes me feel old. But the good thing about the year group is, of course, everyone knows exactly how old you are, and there is no need to pretend to be anything else. It was the Singlish that surprised me. We were in the 'premier school' in Singapore. We were taught to speak 'proper'. And now this bunch of old girls -- 'housewives', teachers, doctors, accountants, etc. -- are speaking/writing a language that we were not allowed to speak. I'm sure these old girls don't speak to their children and business associates like this either. How interesting is that? So I have already been chastised for writing too ...