Eastern Wisdom

This picture came to the blog via the youngest member of the sorority, a certain Matilda William, who is carrying on enjoying all her todays around south east Asia. The pancakes she’s been eating for breakfast are worth a post on their own.

Enjoy your today today everybody.

‘Loving the rituals’

Palladas

To read my blog in Turkish

Please click here

I have discovered via the dashboard that someone, somewhere in the world (one imagines Turkey) has managed to work this magic via http://translate.google.com.tr

I wonder whether I can get the Hindi version?

State Hospital (Marmaris)

Since the recent holiday in Turkey, I have learned the hard way that it is a high risk country for rabies, up there with India or Afghanistan. My children were given the lecture about not touching animals whilst on holiday, but given the outcome of the lecture I now wonder if I should have taught them to be scared to death of all animals abroad, like I was as a kid. My extreme fear back in the day was partly due to watching an Information Film at school of some poor person in the last stage of rabies dying a horrible death; this horror backed up by all those X-ray skull posters they used to plaster on the stairwell walls and car decks of channel ferries in the 1970s.

Anyway, on Easter Sunday during the holiday, due to a combination of happenstance and bad luck (probability taken personally, remember) the youngest daughter was scratched by a street cat. A pretty sick looking street cat with quantities of drool hanging out of its mouth.

And so it was we visited this hospital on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday whilst away. Easter Sunday for the first rabies vaccine, the second day for reasons that are still unclear but involved a policeman carrying a gun telling us that we should return the following day. Then we went again on Tuesday because, according the UK Public Health Agency, we should be getting another rabies shot that day. It transpired that, in fact, the shot was not due until Wednesday (that is a Letter of Complaint waiting to be written).

Please note dear blog reader that I could now go into a lengthy, confusing and LOUD rap about all the shortcomings of how the UK handled this whole deal and how I have had to fight, whilst containing my ferocious temper, to get my daughter’s subsequent vaccines administered in the UK on a Sunday but I don’t think you need to know about the vagaries of days 0 and 1 in the schedule or indeed how I… Anyway, I am sparing you all that. For now.

So we became fairly closely acquainted with The State Hospital Marmaris. In Turkey there do not seem to be appointments. Everyone waits in the corridor. Then when they have had enough of that they get up and try the doors to the consulting and treatment rooms. If a door is found to be unlocked, everyone piles into the room waving their paperwork. Then everyone is shooed out again, apart from one lucky patient. It is all quite good humoured, mixed with a little resignation perhaps.

This was the tea tent. We tried to make a day of it.

Luck: probability taken personally?

Or, how I came to have two rabies vaccines in my fridge at home, be in a car accident in Marmaris (nothing to recommend that place in my view), and read a passport as valid when, in fact it was two years out of date…

That’s my opening gambit for now. I can’t quite bring myself to relate the events of the last few weeks in the usual manner. I am not a great believer in accidents or chance, but I do trust some science, a little psychology and a lot of maths. And then I also believe in other more mystical things that don’t stand up to any kind of scrutiny: they are my articles of faith if you like.

So later, and believe me I would rather do this now, I will pull out the cadaver of Lady Luck from my fridge and give her a good old dissection, but for now I have to write 3000 words on Curriculum Theory and Development (with graphs).

Holiday reading: Russell Brand & Gandhi

I was making good progress, rattling through a few ‘good’ booky wooks by the pool on holiday the other week, when I was somewhat derailed by a bit of a to-do (more of which later).

The subject matter of my holiday reading: Russell Brand and Gandhi, may not, on the face of it, appear to have much in common as reading material. But, as it turns out, both have a considerable track record of getting in a bed with more than one young woman at the same time.

There is a key difference between their nocturnal activities though, but the blog is too refined (ish) to mention it.

All quiet...

Pear-shaped

The blog is meant to be in a hotel somewhere in Sussex before getting on a flight (yes, feel the fear and do it anyway…) abroad tomorrow morning. Instead of which, in a master stroke of disorganisation, I will be at the Passport Office in Victoria at 7.45 a.m. sharp in an attempt to get the eldest’s passport renewed.

You could kind of understand it if it was a few weeks out of date, perhaps a few months. In fact, hers is a full two years out of date and, despite my checking all this a month ago, the minor detail escaped my usually gimlet eye. I can only be thankful I did notice before the check-in desk. Oh the potential for public, come fly with me, humiliation. At least I have been quietly humiliated in private. Apart from when I told my neighbour, my colleague, my mum, my sisters and a couple of dear friends…

Oh and the Post Office woman. I had to go there and queue up. Twice. I got the same post mistress on each occasion. By the second time I was slightly hysterical with laughter, but at least I had the sense to ask for a couple of forms for all the additional, and elementary, errors I am bound to make.

So, the blog may be on holiday for a while, or the blog may not. It is all slightly out of my cold, yet sweaty, hands now.

M4 Corridor

I was born around the M4 and have lived either side of my birth place, Newbury, at junctions 11 and 15 in my time. On the haul back from Devon to Essex I like to try and make it as far as Membury (just past Swindon) services before I have to stop. Years ago when I was pregnant I only made it a short way up the M5 before I had to pull over to fall asleep somewhere near Taunton. I don’t like Leigh Delamere, just past Bristol, having once spent an hour driving there to buy a jigsaw on a Sunday afternoon (prior to Sunday shop opening). They didn’t have one. I don’t like Chievely (Newbury) either because I spent a long time in the car park once waiting for the dog Rudi from the boat from Ireland, plus which you have to get involved with traffic lights which is a pain. There’s no point stopping at Reading services in my view and if I have to stop at that South Mimms on the M25 then I will have definitely lost the will to live.

I like to stop at Membury because it seems sort of equidistant and because if you are lucky you can watch the rabbits outside from the cafe. Yesterday we had the wobbliest table in the world, it was raining and there was no sign of the bunnies. On the other hand they have this mural thing at the entrance to the ladies toilets, so all was not lost.

Lal Ghat Guesthouse, Udaipur, India

I stayed at this gaff midway round my trip round Rajasthan in the late 1990s. It was the only point in the trip when I resisted the Indian drivers incessant hotel prescriptions, for which he received a commission that you could hardly begrudge him. I wanted to stay near the lake. Mahinder, the driver, recommended a hotel in another district. This is what I wrote about the Battle of Lal Ghat.

“Finally, after nine hours on the road, we reach Udaipur. Mahinder goes without consultation, as per usual, to his preferred hotel partner. It is situated up a hill, far away from the town and the lake. For the first time in six days I put my foot down and refuse to check-in. It is not so much that the rooms are shabby, which they are, it is just that I cannot bear the thought of being stuck up here away from the town, again.

Despite Mahinders disappointed expression and his warning about the area I want to go to: dirty and smelly; I hold firm. On the journey down to the town, Mahinder stops again at yet another hotel. This one is on the lake, but not in the town. The hotel is posh, but modern. I am now committed to original character and I refuse to even look at a room – very brave.

So Mahinder gives in and drives to the area in the town that I have insisted on: near the Jagdish Temple, the City Palace and on Lake Picholas shores. The dire warnings persist: this bit of the lake is man-made with fetid water that attract very many mosquitoes, many people get a fever (malaria), the streets are narrow and crowded, no vehicle can pass along them etc. etc. I say that, in that case, I will walk. Mahinder says it is up to me, he just knows whats what. He continues that the Rough Guide or whatever book I have consulted in the matter will lead me astray, listing only hotels that are now closed, or under disreputable management. And so on.

Sometimes you have to be very thick-skinned to put up with the Indian way of doing things. I walk down an alley to the Guesthouse. I feel a bit bad because I have cost the driver his commission but he can have a bigger tip at the end of the trip to compensate.”

This is what I dug my heels in so hard for.

Minding the Gap #1

In an information overload situation, such as we may find ourselves in an age where mobile phones outnumber toothbrushes two to one, catching the space between thoughts is vital to remain in balance. Seductive as thinking can be, it is also inclined to run away with one. You can’t actually switch off the internal monologue to order, but if you do happen to find a quiet moment in your mind, jump right in.

Animals can do this most effectively. Here is a Turkish dog doing just that. He is today’s guru; listen hard for the silence…