Category Archives: Musings

July 19, 2012 · 8:51 pm

Accidents Happen

Vintage teddy bear

I am taking a short blogging break – just a few days. I had an accident, thankfully a very minor one but it still necessitated a trip to A & E (Accident & Emergency). If you put the phrases;  fingers of the right hand – not paying enough attention – lid falls off – boiled kettle, in the correct order  you will know what happened.

In the great plan of things it’s a minor travail. But some of the fingers on my right hand are well and truly swaddled in a thick white dressing, so it’s not easy to type; hence the brief blogging break.

At the hospital last night a passage from Cutting for Stone, a book by Abraham Verghese that I read some time ago floated into my mind. I cannot recall it fully but the gist is one of the characters (a famous doctor) asks a room full of medical students what is administered by ear in an emergency room. None of the students knows the answer. The answer is words of comfort.

Have a good weekend. I will be back *on air* properly on Sunday or Monday.

20 Comments

Filed under Musings

Tagged as

June 27, 2012 · 8:48 pm

Favourite Things//Five

Bonne Maman Conserve

Red Conserve: I cannot remember exactly when the French brand Bonne Maman’s jams and conserves first impinged on my consciousness but I think I would have discovered them on a visit to France back in the day when the brand wasn’t ubiquitous in supermarkets in other countries. Then the jams and conserves were a treat to be savoured with freshly baked buttery croissants while breakfasting al fresco on balmy days beneath an azure blue French sky. Now that they are so readily available they have lost some of their allure and indeed there are many jams and conserves that compare with or outshine the brand. However for me there is one conserve from the range that is totally unrivalled; I love the Berries and Cherries Converse. It’s simply divine with freshly baked and buttered hot scones.

Continue reading →

12 Comments

Filed under Favourite Things, Musings

Tagged as , , , , , ,

June 10, 2012 · 8:27 pm

Being Busy and Staying Sane



It has been another busy week. I am not complaining busy is good. But I have been operating outside of my comfort zone, furiously paddling around in the deep-end and fervently praying that I am getting most things at least approximately right.

Continue reading →

4 Comments

Filed under Musings

Tagged as , ,

June 1, 2012 · 8:47 pm

A Week. The Sea. A Poem.

Seashore

It has been a busy week; there has been very little time to think and none for blogging. So yay for soul-restoring evening seaside strolls. Where ever or when ever I hear the sound of water breaking on rock, be it as a crashing crescendo or a miniscule murmur I always think of a poem I love; “Break, Break, Break” by Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Break, break, break,
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea!
And I would that my tongue could utter
The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman’s boy,
That he shouts with his sister at play!
O, well for the sailor lad,
That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on
To their haven under the hill;
But O for the touch of a vanished hand,
And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,
At the foot of thy crags, O Sea!
But the tender grace of a day that is dead
Will never come back to me.

Happy Weekend – talk to you soon.

1 Comment

Filed under Musings

Tagged as , ,

May 11, 2012 · 10:08 pm

Packing. Panicking. Traveling



The weather today in these parts was a mix of sunshine, bouts of rain and the odd shower of hailstones. This, believe it or not, is a vast improvement on the rain-sodden mist-smudged days which have been the norm of late. However I am still very glad to be heading tomorrow, for a short break, to the warmer climes of the south-west of France.

Continue reading →

8 Comments

Filed under Musings

Tagged as ,

May 9, 2012 · 10:42 pm

Moi!



When I was setting up the Just Add Attitude I added an About page (that’s the page that tells you a little about the person writing the blog). However I was so totally thrilled that I had managed to grasp the technical necessities to get the blog up and running in the first instance, and in my haste to start scribbling away and posting posts I just added one very uninformative sentence to my About page. I have thought, many times, about updating the page but never actually got around to it – until today. It’s not really all about moi just ten random things which I hope give a flavour of who I am. Here’s what it says.

Continue reading →

4 Comments

Filed under Musings

Tagged as ,

April 28, 2012 · 9:07 pm

Paying it Forward



I cannot recall how where or even when I first heard of the notion of paying it forward. But I know it sounds like an eminently sensible and betwitchingly powerful idea. I am not even sure my hazy notion of the principle behind the concept is strictly accurate. I believe the theory is that when someone does something good for you that instead of seeking to repay them in someway you pay their kindness forward by doing something good or kind for someone else. The concept has been very much on my mind this week as I was recently on the receiving end of a random act of kindness.

Continue reading →

9 Comments

Filed under Musings, The Universe

Tagged as , ,

April 23, 2012 · 7:23 pm

Saved by Cake

Saved by Cake

I was never going to buy another cookery book. Never ever. For a start the bookshelves in my kitchen, of which incidentally I am inordinately proud of having assembled from an IKEA flat pack, are stuffed to capacity. I was especially not going to buy another cookery book with instructions for making cakes because I must already have a zillion recipes for sweet confections. And as for buying a cookery book with a saturated pink cover which has a photograph featuring a cheesecake with a lurid lime-green topping made from jelly – now that would be totally out of the question.

Continue reading →

9 Comments

Filed under Books, Cake, Musings

Tagged as , , , , , ,

April 17, 2012 · 8:35 pm

Words

Words

I cannot claim to have had a lifelong fascination with words. In the past I tended to look upon them as a collection of letters, albeit often a bewitching assemblage depending on the skill of the scribe, flitting across paper or a screen. That of course was before blogging. Once I started to write Just Add Attitude I became more conscious of the way I used words and acutely aware of how many words I simply didn’t know the meaning of and that there were, most likely, many thousands of words that I had never come across. So, I began a quest for a greater command of the language which has become a three-pronged tactic. I am aware that makes it sound like a very deliberate strategy but in truth it is just a way of trying to increase my vocabulary that has evolved in a very natural fashion.

Continue reading →

13 Comments

Filed under Musings

Tagged as , , , ,

April 1, 2012 · 8:14 pm

This Week



This week I went to my last digital photography class at the Gallery of Photography. I had enrolled for a set of four evening classes. The first two classes covered the taking of images and the last two Photoshop. I am not the brightest bunny on the block when it comes to matters technical so my mind is dizzy with concepts such as ISO, aperture size, shutter speed, metering, and stops. I think I have managed a shaky grasp of the basics of shooting images in manual mode; hopefully some practice and a little reading to revise will allow everything sink in. Photoshop is a different matter, what seemed somewhat easy to do in class has proved difficult to replicate at home even with the aid of Photoshop Elements 10 for Dummies. Aargh!

Continue reading →

7 Comments

Filed under Musings

Tagged as , , , ,