The Fish Shirt

The other day I was in the Oxfam charity shop in St. John's Wood, buying a Christmas card for my nieces, when I came across a book called "Worn Stories" by Emily Spivack. It contains a series of essays by writers including Susan Orlean, Piper Kerman, Greta Gerwig and Simon Doonan, each of whom chose a significant piece of clothing from their wardrobe and told its backstory. Each essay appears with a simple picture of the clothing in question.

Reading the book -- and subsequently buying it, for £4.99 -- made me think immediately of my fish shirt.

So here's my own Worn Story.

I bought my fish shirt in early October, 1994. Well, I say I bought it, but actually, I had it made. I was traveling through West Africa with some friends from the Peace Corps, and we'd stopped for a few days in Bobo Dioulasso, Burkina Faso. I'd been on the lookout for some colorful African cloth to get a garment made, and in the market there, I found this crazy fabric decorated with big, wild-eyed carp. I loved how silly it was. There was no pretension to good taste.

I bought a segment -- I don't remember how much cloth or what I paid -- and I took it to a tailor. He measured me and in short order produced this simple shirt, with a V-neck and two little vents at the sides. I took his picture afterwards, and promised to mail him a copy.

(Which I did, once I got back to the states and got the film developed -- but then I discarded his name and address, so I can no longer give him credit.)

In my journal at the time, I wrote:

"I got a shirt made in Bobo – it’s really HIDEOUS. It’s made from a pagne fabric with big fish all over it. I don’t know what possessed me – I can’t believe I’ll ever wear it unless I’m at the beach or something. Now I have TWO outfits I’ll never wear. I need to get a nice shirt made sometime – maybe in Ghana."

The other outfit I was sure I'd never wear was a Grand Boubou, or African robe-and-pants set, that I bought in Mali. I definitely never wore that, and wound up selling it ten years later on eBay to someone in Australia, of all places. And although I did have a "nice" shirt made in Ghana, of a streaky blue and black batik fabric, I wore it for a few years before it faded and I gave it away to Goodwill.

I still have the fish shirt, though. It's actually pretty fun to wear. I've worn it several times to barbecues or parties, like a gathering of bloggers I attended in 2008 in Washington, D.C. where we celebrated May Day with a maypole (above). I still take it out now and then and wear it when I'm walking around town on a warm summer day. It never fails to attract attention!

Foxgloves and Robert Burns

One task I completed on Sunday -- and forgot to mention in yesterday's post -- is repotting the foxgloves that a co-worker gave me in October. These are different from the ones I grew from seed, which are an apricot pink variety. These are supposedly purple, closer to the wild foxglove. They've spent all this time in a plastic seed tray, and I decided to put them in pots in the hopes that they'd grow a bit more before spring comes along.

They're much smaller than the seedlings I grew myself and repotted back in September...

...which look downright robust, don't they?

At work yesterday I spent the afternoon in a training session focused on transgenderism and trans issues -- specifically, what terminology to use with trans people, how to think about gender in terms of a spectrum rather than two binary poles, stuff like that. We considered different ways to respond to various scenarios involving trans people, from providing facilities and equal educational opportunities to dealing with colleagues who may be dismissive or insulting.

It was pretty interesting. I went in thinking I was fairly hip, but even I struggled with some tasks and discussion points. This is all pertinent because in recent years, we've had a few kids declare themselves trans at our school. We need to know more about how to support them. (Just last week, in fact, a boy started coming to my desk each day wearing eye shadow and lipstick -- I'm not sure yet what's going on there.)

In the morning I sorted old yearbooks. We had a huge stash of yearbooks in our conference room cabinets, but some of them were damaged by a staff member who used to cut out pictures to make birthday collages for students. That staff member is retired now, so I boxed up the damaged books to be shredded, and put the others back in the cabinet. (This is separate from the yearbook archive I created last year. These are just spares.)

Speaking of our conference room cabinets -- here, just for the heck of it, is a photo of an extremely old book in our library. It's a small volume of poems by Robert Burns, and my boss said it was actually on the shelf when she came to our school about ten years ago. It's since been removed from the circulating collection and relegated to a display cabinet, along with other ancient or otherwise delicate volumes.

We have other books of Burns poems in the collection, so his tim'rous beasties and crowlin ferlies are still accessible to students. (They're all online now anyway!)

As you can see, the cover is barely hanging together. In fact the entire spine is missing -- it's only got the two end boards, which have been covered in plastic library laminate. I suspect the book has been destroyed from a true bibliophile's point of view, but it's still kind of interesting. I wonder if Joseph H. Bradley (whoever he was) would be surprised to find it still in existence 161 years after he signed his name inside the back cover?

A Sleeping Emu

Another sunny Sunday, another day on the Heath. Olga and I went in late morning and spent several hours, me walking and Olga stalking...

...her usual plump and elusive prey.

As I've often said, don't worry -- plump as they are, they're wily and fast and she never catches them.

All the nets have been taken down around the cricket batting cages, and if the football goals ever had any (I can't remember), those are gone too. Maybe it's a winter thing, to take the nets down.

Have you ever wondered what a sleeping emu looks like? Well, wonder no more! The one in Golders Hill Park was snoozing when we walked past its enclosure. It even has a little ear! What a weird creature. Definitely a dinosaur.

A woman walking behind me said, "I thought it was a gray stone, until you started taking pictures of it!"

Olga and I got home around 1:30, and I was amazed it was still so early. The sun was so low and the shadows so long that it felt like 4 p.m. This time of year, we only have about eight hours between sunrise and sunset. The days are fleeting.

In the afternoon, I had a weird urge to watch "Grease," which I hadn't seen in ages -- probably ten years at least. It's a very shallow movie -- I'd forgotten how shallow -- but it's still fun. Dave, who despite his musical background (or perhaps because of it) is no fan of musical theater, declined to watch it with me. But Olga and I stretched out in his recliner and I sang all the songs. (As a middle-schooler, I owned the soundtrack album.)

Last night, as we lay in bed, we got a sudden hailstorm. It sounded like someone spraying gravel at the windows. What a racket! It only lasted a few minutes before turning to rain. Hopefully nothing in the garden sustained any damage. (Not that there's much out there at this time of year.) When the sun finally comes up, I'll be able to take a look.

The Sour Cherry

Olga and I walked up to Fortune Green yesterday, where we checked out the Christmas tree. It's nice, but like last year, it's surrounded by rather unsightly barriers. This seems a little extreme -- health and safety run amok -- but what do I know?

We also gave Olga half a scone yesterday morning. It was made with dried fruit, and I expected her to wolf it down -- and she did, except for a single sour cherry that she just could not bring herself to swallow. She'd spit it out, look at it, pick it up and bite it a few times, spit it out again. It was really funny to watch. I eventually threw it out the back door, much to her relief.

In general, Olga doesn't like pickled things, anything extremely spicy or anything lemony. I guess the sour cherry fell somewhere on that spectrum.

I've photographed this car before, but I liked the color-coordinated election sign. Too little too late, but oh well.

Otherwise, yesterday was pretty quiet. I stayed home most of the day, did laundry and vacuumed. I also made good progress in "David Copperfield," which I'm really enjoying. It's essentially a soap opera, but Dickens paints a vivid portrait of life in his time, and he is a master of character creation. I'd like to finish it before we leave for Egypt (in a week!) because it's a big ol' hardback book and I'd rather not schlep it up the Nile.

Oh, and about yesterday's post -- yes, of course, that second animal is a sheep. I don't readily know my sheep from my goats, at least not when they're carved in stone.

The Chichele Cow (and Goat)

The last time we walked through Cricklewood, Olga and I came across this building. It's now a Costa coffee shop -- part of a big chain, like Starbucks -- but surely it once was a butcher or meat market. The words say "Chichele Parade," the name of the building and the commercial strip on the ground floor. It's on the corner of Chichele Road.

I added this photo to my "Faces of Cricklewood" project gallery on Flickr. A goat's face counts, don't you think?

My off-the-cuff political analysis yesterday prompted one of you to ask if the election results change Dave's and my plans for staying here in the UK. The answer is no. I think it's going to mean more of the same, in terms of government -- after all, the Tories were in power already anyway. It's more like a missed opportunity to put the country on a better path than a divergence onto a worse one.

God only knows what drama and discomfort Brexit itself will bring. But I doubt it will get so bad that we'll have to leave. We have postponed applying for citizenship, because we wanted to see how the Brexit situation would shake out -- but we'll almost certainly move forward with that eventually.

Gwynneth from the blog "Ook?!" pointed me toward an excellent summation of the election results by a British guy now living in New Zealand. It's biting but basically true.

Anyway, election aside, life goes on around here. We got out of school at noon yesterday and we're now finished with kids until January. Dave and I have to go back on Monday and Tuesday for two days of professional development before our vacation truly begins.

Thoughts on a New Government

Yesterday was election day in Britain, with voters going to the polls (again) to choose a new government. This was Boris Johnson's gamble to break the deadlock over Brexit and move the country forward, and it seems to have worked -- the predictions coming out as I write show a decisive majority for Johnson and the Conservatives.

This makes it even more certain that Brexit will happen. In fact, in some ways, it was a second referendum on Brexit. Voters who chose to back the Tories were essentially echoing Johnson's mantra to "get Brexit done."

I think this is a horrible election result, as I'm dead-set against Brexit, but it's clearly what most people in Britain want. What they didn't want was our current Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, who is deeply unpopular and who makes even me -- a committed leftie liberal -- cringe. I'm convinced Labour would have performed much better under a different leader, and I'm surprised Corbyn has lasted as long as he has.

But even voters who are against Brexit have a degree of fatigue and, at this point, just want to get it over with.

This election result is bad news for the National Health Service, which is consistently underfunded by Tory governments, and for socialized medicine in general. We'll see to what degree the NHS is able to survive the coming changes. The people at the head of the Tory party generally want a less regulated, more free-market, lower-tax environment in Britain, and that, to me, suggests increased privatization of services like the NHS. Which means health care is likely to grow much more expensive.

This election is also bad news for the British union. Scottish voters chose to back their nationalist party even more strongly, and its leader is renewing her pledge to hold a new referendum on Scottish independence. I have a British friend who insists Parliament will never allow this to happen -- but after years of preaching devolution and self-determination, how can it say no, if that's what Scotland wants?

I'm not quite sure what the leadership changes will mean for Northern Ireland, but Brexit is definitely unsettling for the relatively peaceful recent conditions there.

In short, this is not a great outcome. If there's any positive message here, it's that we're likely to move even more quickly toward resolving Brexit -- which, admittedly, has been a nightmare and a huge drag on the country. The Tories appear to have a majority that's comfortable enough to allow the party to ignore its own extremists and get the job done.

(Photos: Street art in Soho, colorfully expressing the firm belief of some on the left that Boris is a mini-me of Donald Trump.)

A Ghost Blob and Social Media

The hydrangeas near our patio have gone the most beautiful shade of yellow, with bits of red and purple still in the flowers and in patches on the leaves. I noticed them the other day when the sun was shining. That really brought out the color.

I believe yesterday was the busiest day I've ever had in the library. The high school is on a weird schedule this week, which gives students a lot of free time -- allegedly to study and meet with teachers at the end of term, but of course many of them spend it hanging out. We also have classes coming in to select books for the upcoming break, in addition to the usual stream of kids seeking computer chargers, headphones and calculators. At around noon I joked with my co-worker: "I've been so busy I haven't even had a chance to read the paper! It's an outrage!"

I also worked an early shift, because the library was closed for an event in the afternoon. I had to go in at 7:30 a.m., which meant Olga didn't get her morning walk. I asked Dave to do it, because he was staying home for a doctor's appointment, but he texted me later saying Olga refused to go. "Olga is a moody bitch," he said. "She walked about two feet and froze. Wouldn't go any further. Neighbors laughed at me. LOL" Maybe she objected because she usually walks with me. Who knows.

Anyway, I was done with work by 3:15, so that wasn't terrible.

For dinner I managed to finish off the last of my mom's baked sweet potato recipe from Thanksgiving -- the last of our holiday leftovers, I believe. (They were in the freezer for part of the time.) We still have some frozen holiday bread but we aren't in any rush to eat that.

I was eating breakfast a few days ago when I noticed this weird reflection on the closets in the dining room. It's sunlight coming through the window (hence the grid of shadows) and then reflecting off a big Plexiglass-covered picture on the other side of the room. Looks kind of supernatural, doesn't it? No wonder our ancestors believed in ghosts and spirits, with weird things like this happening. (Of course, they didn't have Plexiglass, so maybe things exactly like this weren't happening -- but surely they saw an occasional weird reflection.)

For years now, I've been in an e-mail group maintained by the Zen Buddhist center I used to attend in New York. I haven't been to the Zendo in about a decade, but I stayed in the group just to keep up on news about the organization and people I know there. Lately, though, I've been chafing at the quantity of e-mail I get -- a lot of it inconsequential. The other day, someone sent an e-mail marked "Test," and about 20 people responded with jokes and remarks, and I thought, "You know, I no longer need this in my life." So I unsubscribed. I feel weird about it, because the Zendo was a huge part of my life in New York, but we all move on, don't we?

Social Media in general creates a kind of forced connection -- you might friend someone on Facebook because you work with them or know them slightly, and then years later you're still bonded to them, even though you've both moved on to other jobs and cities and in the natural world you'd probably never speak to them again. It's not that you dislike them -- you're just not that close. You're erstwhile acquaintances at best. And I don't know about you, but I feel weird about the prospect of unfriending people. I don't want to seem rude or mean-spirited. So I'm Facebook "friends" with maybe 100 people I barely know anymore. It's bizarre. I've told Dave I feel like I'm fated to drag these people around for the rest of my life. He thinks it's funny that I feel weighed down by this, but I do. Do you ever "prune" your social media contacts? How do you manage it?