You're a good man, Charlie Brown

I have a couple of reasons not to be a big fan of Christmas. Key amongst them is the crass commercialism, the idea that somehow you can buy happiness, you can buy love, if only you will get into our store right now and buy, buy, buy this special Christmas gift-pack for your loved one...but if anything is going to restore a bit of genuine Christmas feeling (for me at least) it has got to be this very, very sweet clip from 1965's "A Charlie Brown Christmas". Charlie Brown - a boy after my own heart. So, as the Advent season begins, enjoy :)

The rule of threes...

A little bit of Q&A fun to round off the week...

Three jobs I have had in my life:

1. Selling tickets at an historic jail (I hasten to add the jail no longer had any inmates)

2. Teaching German history

3. Typing classified advertisements for a newspaper

Three favourite drinks:

1. Milk coffee

2. Really cold orange juice (with the orangey bits still in it)

3. Gin, soda water and elderflower cordial

Three TV shows I watch:

1. Mad Men (didn't know that, did you?)

2. Ghost Whisperer

3. Kommissar Rex

Three places I have been:

1. Vietnam

2. France

3. England

People who email me regularly:

1. My DH

2. My dear friend, Bodecea

3. Another dear friend, KB

Three favourite foods:

1. Chocolate - preferably a Mars Bar but I am not fussy :)

2. Light rye toast with peanut butter

3. Good, crunchy apples

Three things I am looking forward to:

1. Travelling next year

2. Renovating our house over the summer

3. Working out the next bit of the puzzle

Want to play along?

Small and random observations

Vintage tropical birds from www.flickr.com

A still from "300" courtesy of www.smh.com.au

Three small and random observations today. First, we are in the midst of some very tropical weather. It's humid rather than hot (only 26 degrees), there is a strange, expectant quality to the still air and I can hear the rumblings of a storm in the distance... We have certainly been on something of a magical mystery tour weather-wise here of late. I'm not sure how anyone can still be sceptical about global warming...

Certainly the dramatic weather suits the film "300". It was on tv here last night. Although there was much about it that was both comical and offensive at the same time (quite a feat) - and it is of course very violent - it also had an extraordinarily mesmerising quality to it, shot as it was in monochrome - be it black (almost blue) and white or sepia with touches of red. And I am always a sucker for tales told on a grand (and I mean grand) scale. As with Gladiator, it drew me into the Classical World about which I know so little but which transfixes me whenever I see films like this one. If anyone has seen it, what did you think? I don't know whether I loved it, hated it or should ask for the DVD for Christmas to think about it some more...

And speaking of Christmas, I know it is a perennial complaint but can I just say: IT IS STILL NOVEMBER! Already I have seen Christmas trees going up in people's front windows and the

exteriors of houses being bedecked with Christmas lights. Why do people do this? Is it a case of commercial brainwashing gone mad or is Christmas genuinely something that people really look forward to, a bright spot in the year? Perhaps you love Christmas with this sort of anticipation? Perhaps I am just an old Scrooge...

Retro Renovating

I think I may have mentioned before that we live in my grandparents' old house. Both of my grandparents have died and so it has come to us. The housing market being what it is, it's a tremendous boon since the house is closer to the city than we could afford to buy if we had just been looking on the market like everyone else. So, I am grateful indeed for that. And, of course, it is home to a lot of happy memories. But...

It. is. so. small.

Now, I am not looking to live in a mansion. And we don't have any children as yet so it is just the two of us. But it is a five room house. Five rooms. Count 'em. Five. And small rooms at that. We've lived in bigger apartments. Living room, kitchen, bathroom, bedroom, study. The study could be a second bedroom if it had to be. In fact it was when my father was still living at home with my grandparents (how they all managed here in this tiny space I don't know!). All I would really like is another two rooms - that's it. No grand extensions. Just a dedicated study/den and a second bedroom. Of late, the issue has really started to bother me. I spend a lot of my time working from home and the walls started to close in a little. "I hate it!", "Why can't we move?" etc., etc. My DH pointed out all the sensible arguments as to why there was 1. No reason to hate the house and 2. Not much would be achieved by the horror that is moving. But now I am starting to come around to a calmer way of thinking about it and this is how I've managed it (not solely from sensible arguments, I have to admit...) - I have a plan. Indeed, I have a cunning plan (sorry - irresistable urge to steal a line from Blackadder's Baldrick there). I have decided to work with the house instead of fighting against it. It was built in 1948 and the kitchen especially speaks of this. So, let's go retro. Let's celebrate the house's uniqueness. This is not to say, though, that I want to turn it into a museum. Let's improve it, update what needs to be updated (paint, fittings etc.) but let's do it with a retro eye. Because you know how I love thrifting and retro stuff in general, so why not go with that theme? First stop, then - the kitchen, which I will repaint white and pick out details (cupboard doors etc.) in red, to match the original red counter tops and my grandfather's painfully constructed red-laminex-topped kitchen table. I'll keep you posted on the great Feronia renovation of Summer '09. And that extension will come in due time...

PS Amazing how many people go with red and white when they retro-ise their kitchens! See above, courtesy of Google Images.

Random 5

(5.) Raffles Hotel, Singapore, photo courtesy of www.theodora.com

(5.) Shibuya, Tokyo, photo courtesy of me

(5.) The Black Forest, photo courtesy of www.whitewolfjourneys.com

(4.) Photo courtesy of www.tallulahbloom.wordpress.com

(3.) The Mad Men girls, photo courtesy of www.buttercuppunch.wordpress.com

(2.) Photo courtesy of www.flickr.com

(1.) The living room at 1164 Morning Glory Circle, photo courtesy of www.margaretlongdesigns.com

(1.) I would be very happy if my living room looked like this (the living room from Bewitched) or (2.) This.
(3.) I am developing a real penchant for clothes like this. Especially the full skirts. But how to wear them without looking like (a) a lunatic (b) I am in costume? The problem may be solved by the fact that my waist will never be small enough for the vintage dresses which always seem to be for sale on Etsy and the fact that I cannot sew (that well).
(4.) Gin, soda water and elderflower cordial is a very nice summer drink. And before you start to wonder where I'm going with that...chilled orange juice is also delicious :)

(5.) I need a holiday! Here beckons (as always), as does here (ditto) and also here.

How about you? What's your 'Random 5' this week?

Pretty in Pink

And while on the subject of innocence and possibility but on a slightly lighter note, I have to say that I feel much the same way about the 80s, but that could just be because I grew up then. Looking back, people wore some horrendously hideous clothes but they did so - in my view -with aplomb and joie de vivre. Hot pink ankle socks, stripy bubble skirts, big bows in their hair...and hey, that's just a selection from my 80s wardrobe! The BBC's Ashes to Ashes captures this brilliantly with Alex Drake now, in the second season, finally managing to wear her early-80s garb less like a costume and more like she considers it to be fashionable and smart.

The 80s revival that I see worn by 'the kids of today' is just not the same - as with all pop culture 'revivals', it's too studied, too knowing - and leaves out too much of the truly horrible! If The Go-Gos singing "Our Lips are Sealed" doesn't jog your memory or at least give you the gist of what I'm talking about, then you were so totally like not even there at the time :)

Possibilities

Robert Kennedy - photo courtesy of www.saddleback.edu

Pete Seeger (right) with Bob Dylan - photo courtesy of the Austin Chronicle website

Peter, Paul and Mary - photo courtesy of www.marytraversblogspot.com

Joan Baez - photo coutesy of the BBC website

We have bought the DVDs of the second season of Mad Men. Now, if you're a regular reader here, you'll know that I am pretty near obsessed with this show. And being the deep thinker (some would say over-analyser) that I am, I have been asking myself: why? Why do I love this show so much? Yes, the clothes are beautiful. Yes, the sets are mesmerising in their period detail. Yes, the plots are thoroughly engaging. But is there something else? And then I realised - yes, there is. Innocence. If you know the show, you may well laugh at this juncture. Innocence? In that hot-bed of extra-marital activity of an advertising agency, Sterling Cooper? Are you kidding? Are you even watching the right show? But what I mean is, the overall innocence of the era. Hey, I am no fool. I am well aware that people throughout time are people. They have good motivations and they have thoroughly awful motivations. Sometimes in equal measure. But when I think of the early to mid 1960s, I think of it as an era of innocence, when Western society as a whole (and that is all I can really vouch for) believed that things were possible. I'm sure there are a million holes that you could poke in that argument. This idea was informed initially by what my mother has said about the era: "People believed in things. We thought we could change things." Now, my mother was no radical and neither am I. I am notorious, in fact, for not having strong opinions on matters political. But I love the idea that people thought things were possible. Folk music of the era spoke of it especially. People like Joan Baez, Peter, Paul and Mary and Pete Seeger. Music, thanks to my Mum, that I was raised on.

Lately too, on this same theme, I have become fascinated by the story of Robert Kennedy, JFK's brother. And before I go any further, I know all about the stories of the Kennedys. The philandering, the extra-marital affairs, the apparently appalling attitude towards women. And I don't condone that for one second. But, recently, watching a documentary about Robert Kennedy, I was very interested to learn of the change he went through after his brother's assassination, how tragedy and absolute sorrow nearly broke him. But eventually, it didn't. He didn't live imbibed with hatred. His social policies, in fact, suggest the complete opposite. I love this quote of his from 1968:

"My favourite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote: "Even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God."

To me, it suggests that growth - not destruction - can come through pain and life's sometimes profound hardships. There is not always the easy fix which we sometimes seem to look for today, but solutions will come.

Do you agree with me? Do you think that more than anything we are blighted by cynicism now? Or are we, as Kennedy began to suggest, learning from all that's happened worldwide since the 1960s - as painful as much of it has been - to emerge in a better condition when all is said and done?