Posts
I
don’t like Pollyanna posts or blogs– you know the ones I mean. Pages and pages
of unmitigated, manicured cheer and affirmations. Those blogs with posts which
are light and bright and white and all the food has been styled, or there are pictures
of bedrooms with pristine bedspreads (organic cotton, of course), with votive
candles on the bedside table just next to a carefully-constructed stack of
books about positivity and wellness. If your blog is a constant stream of
in-your-face-Pollyanna-I’m-just-glad-glad-glad-to-be-alive images and text,
well, I don’t believe you. You’re not living - you’re constructing life and you’re
putting your constructed life out there to show others how superior your way of
(constructed) life is. As the hashtag says I’m #notbuyingit.
My
bedroom is not a restful sanctuary. Even at its tidiest, there are mismatched
sheets and covers; books on/beside/under the bed; shoes lie where I kicked them off
when I came in; cables all over the place where I charge my phone and lap-top;
cosmetics, creams, lotions and potions on all available surfaces; dust on top
of everything, because dusting? Really? who can be bothered? I bet your bedroom
looks more like my bedroom. There isn’t a single tulip flung artlessly on a
boho comforter and nary a self-help book in among the book clutter.
Now,
the Pollyannas among you will clutch your hand-knotted pearls and gasp “How
shocking! She must be desperately depressed. A bedroom should be a sanctuary of BEAUTY and REPOSE. Let’s crowdfund her a subscription to Home
& Garden, forthwith!"
But here’s
the thing: sometimes the bedroom looks like a bedroom. Sometimes it looks like
a war between books and bedding with casualties on both sides. Sometimes I’m
in an upbeat mood and all is good (and I’m a bit glad, but never quite to
Pollyanna extremes) and sometimes life sucks/blows/bites/your oral metaphor of
choice.
I
like to write about both. Because real life. Not constructed.
No edited
highlights. More the positives accentuated to distinguish them from...everything else.
So
here are the my positives:
Sunrise/Sunset
Not
the song from Fiddler on the Roof (although I do have a rather good story about
that – remind me to tell it sometime), but the actual diurnal events. As it’s
winter here, the sun is rising as I am heading to work and then setting as I am
coming home. So I’m outside, with my iPhone camera, enjoying the colours, and
the cloud patterns, and the messing around with Instagram filters to up the
drama a bit. I like the contrast of the natural and the manmade. You will see
lamp-posts, powerlines, roads, and other structures in my photos.
Planets
Once
the sun has set, and I have put my camera away, I go star-gazing and
planet-gazing. There’s a conjunction of Venus and Jupiter this evening. They
are less the 3 degrees apart in the Western sky so they will look like one big
star. Venus is about 260 million kms away from Earth and Jupiter almost double
that, so the fact that I can see them so clearly when I, say…go to put my
rubbish in the bins at the end of the day, is incredible to me.I feel a poem
coming on. (No, seriously, I do. Watch this space.). Venus is my favourite
planet because it looks so glorious in the sky; yellow-white and diamond-sparkly;
named after the goddess of wuv, twuw wuv. In reality, it has a surface
temperature of over 400C, sulphuric acid clouds, and an atmosphere so dense
that if a human were to land there, they’d be crushed to death before they had
time to be incinerated or poisoned. There is nothing Pollyanna about Venus.
Cocktails
Down-to-earth, definitely not celestial, cocktails are good at any time of year, but in the winter they
take on a new quality that has to do with coziness, that lovely heaty sensation
you get when drinking spirits, and glamour. More often than not, they are delightful to look
at. The Negroni will always be my favourite - it is a song of ice (occasionally
hand-cut) and fire (all the red and orange) in a glass. That said, my recent
experience with a Honeycomb Old Fashioned has nudged Old Fashioneds into my personal cocktail second
place. For what it’s worth, I don’t
food-style – I don’t have props or a light-box or any of the bells and
whistles. I usually push any clutter out of the way, but you may sometimes see
the corner of a menu or a beer-mat in shot and that’s fine by me. It’s the real deal, the drink I actually drank – moments after the photograph was taken, that drink was
probably gone.
So
that’s me at the moment – head in the stars, glass in my hand, mess in the
bedroom.
Gladdens
the heart. :D
No comments:
Post a Comment