Share Your World: 17 June 2019

If you were suddenly injured or died, are your bedside table drawers ready for someone else to go through them? If you care to share, what’s the most unusual item someone might find, that might be potentially embarrassing?

Ooh, great question! OK, so when I had a look in my bedside drawer I found everything was just crammed in higgledy-piggledly, so I decided to take a full inventory of exactly what was in there… oh dear!

So, top row left to right we have: three sugared almonds in net from my eldest daughter’s first wedding (18 years ago) with a UK/US plug adapter immediately underneath; an old chocolate tin now with assorted ribbons in it; an empty Fat Face enamel tin mug with plastic lid (I think it was what my old Fat Face watch came in); three old leather purses; eye drops, lip balm and Nivea hand cream; and a pair of pinking shears (I wondered where they’d got to!).

Second row comprises a small leather zipped bag with several lip balm sticks inside; an old Fossil tin (another watch came in that) now with assorted keyrings inside; three empty ring boxes kept for sentimental reasons and a boxed leather keyring given as a gift (kept safe so as not to ruin it); a small round tin that once held mint sweets from the Daily Telepgraph newspaper (from when my husband worked there selling advertising space); an old set of tarot cards wrapped in black silk; and a terracotta pot filled with spare copper change.

Third row starts off with a very old cross stitch bookmark I made in primary school; a cotton zipped purse with nail clippers, tweezers, emery boards, and a small mirrored compact inside; yet another tin with a variety of very old passport-style photographs of me inside; three small crystals (sphere, heart, oval); a blue cotton bag containing those jingly silver balls you fiddle with in your hand; a tiny heart-shaped red tin and four random marbles; a heart-shaped tweezers (gift from my youngest daughter) still with hard case and soft pouch intact; and a ceramic pot with a retractable tape measure and the key to my suitcase on a fabric lizard keyring.

And I suppose apart from the general weirdness of my baffling collection the most potentially embarrassing thing for me is probably the messy state of the drawer in the first place – I’m not exactly a neat freak at the best of times, so a small personal space hidden from view is usually the least of my tidying up worries… But at least it’s tidy now!

What keeps you going? (However you might interperet that is correct)

Sheer bloody-mindedness…

Share a photo or sentence about your favourite thing(s)?

Sorry but I can’t get Julie Andrews singing ‘My Favourite Things’ from the Sound of Music out of my head now…

At the end of the song ‘Everybody Hurts’ by REM, where do they all go?

They’ve all just walked away from the rat-race… lucky people…

What are you grateful for right now?

That my dad’s still with us two weeks after his fourth stroke in two years – his vascular dementia has got a lot worse now, and ok, so he gets really REALLY confused over his current location at any given time but thankfully in spite of his injured brain connections he still remembers who we all are ❤

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Share Your World: 27 May 2019

Are you an optimist or a pessimist?

Probably an optimistic pessimist – I always hope for the best but prepare for the worst, just incase…

Can war ever be just?

No, plain and simple.

Think about the people you love most in your life, what do you do for them?

On a practical basis, I try to give them whatever help I can within reason. On an emotional basis, I give them unconditional love no matter what ❤

Are you health conscious?

Lately I am having to become more so, as menopause and other middle-aged health problems have disrupted my previous status quo… but I remind myself daily, do not regret growing older, it is a privilege denied to many 🙂

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Share Your World: 6 May 2019

Do you believe in soul mates? If so, do you think there is only one person meant to share that bond with you, out there in the world?

Yes and no – I mean, I don’t believe soul mates come ready made, they need work to build that bond to a truly deep level. So there may be several potential soul mates across the world and over a lifetime, but only ever one at a time – to my mind soul mates are definitely always a 100% monogamous dynamic ❤

Ice cream cone, shake, or some other ice cream concoction?

Ice cream just as it comes, no cone or sticky sauces or overly-sweet bits-of-stuff additions or frilly fancy fripperies – just ice cream… Mmmm…!

What would be the hat to end all hats? What could you wear on your head that would make people stop what they are doing and stare in awe and amazement?

Um, how about the St Edwards Crown, the centrepiece of the British Crown Jewels used on and off (no pun intended) in coronations of British Monarchs since it was first made in 1661. The incongruity of the seriously blinging headgear and scruffy jeans on me would look pretty awesome, I think 🙂

What would be the worst ‘Buy one get one free’ sale of all time?

Coffins, or some kind of dodgy deal on multiple funeral services…?

Share Your World: 6 May 2019

Share Your World: 29 April 2019

If you could interview anyone from your life, living or dead, who would it be and why?

My paternal great-grandmother, who I never met – she lived in Canada, and died before I was born. In fact, I didn’t even know she WAS my great grandmother until I was grown up – I thought she was actually my great aunt, my grandmother’s older sister, but it turns out she had my grandmother out of wedlock at a young age, and then emigrated to Canada leaving my grandmother to be brought up by her biological grandparents, who never really lived down the shame of it all and treated my grandmother atrociously (as if it was her fault for being born illegitimate). Old sins may have long shadows, but they make for the most intriguing characters… 🙂

As a child, did you have a nickname? Did you carry that with you throughout life or was it only in childhood that you used it?

My parents decided to call me Ruth as it was a nice short name and no-one would be able to shorten it. So of course I went through childhood being called Ruthie. My father-in-law, mother-in-law and brother-in-law still call me Ruthie, as does my mum and sometimes my husband every now and again, but most people know me as Ruth. Funnily enough some times I get called Ruthie informally at work, and as I answer to it as readily as Ruth, it gets used interchangably, and to be honest I really don’t mind either…

Give us three words that describe you?

Mother, grandmother, introvert. I’ve been a mum since I was 18, a grandmother since I was 38, and an introvert my whole life. Although those three words have popped up first in my head, I can immediately think of a whole lot more I could add to that rather perfunctory description. I suppose I’m an accumulation of lots of descriptive words, not really one thing more than anything else, but am an oddly eclectic mix of everything I’ve ever been and ever will be, a kind of Frankenstein’s monster of hopes and dreams and hurts and healings and mass confusion… I keep thinking it will get easier when I grow up, but here I am at 55, still waiting for clarity…

Sneaking into a second movie at the theatre (if you go to a movie house) – is that wrong or just harmless fun?

When I was a kid, there was one movie screen with a huge red curtain and red velvet seats and fancy gilded decor all around and you paid once for entry and watched whatever series of stuff was on, until you got fed up and left. Now there are many-screened multiplexes showing only one movie on each screen and the cost is so extortionate I never bother to go any more. I’d rather watch stuff on TV in the comfort of my own home…

If you had a time machine, would you go back to the past of forward into the future? Why?

Well, apart from going back in time to interview my long departed great grandmother (see Q1), I firmly believe time travel should remain in the world of fiction. I mean, I remember watching HG Wells ‘The Time Machine’ as a kid (on TV, not at the movies – see Q4) and freaking out at the idea of the Eloi and the Morlocks being all we had to look forward to in the future. OK, so maybe Michael J Fox as Marty McFly had a better time in the ‘Back to the Future’ trilogy but still… I learned that messing with the past is still playing with fire. And having read (and thoroughly enjoyed) ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ where the poor guy time-hops back and fore with no warning I’m just glad that time for me moves one way only and at one steady pace, thank you very much…

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Share Your World: 22 April 2019

Was the last thing you read digital or print?

Well the very last thing I read was a digital blog post asking me these questions! But the last book I read was an old-fashioned fiction paperback 🙂

Are you more an extrovert or introvert?

Introvert through and through – I can be perfectly sociable for short periods of time but soon need my fix of quiet solitude to recharge my batteries

How is your life different than how you imagined as a younger person?

Hmmm… well I was always an anxious little thing, scared of my own shadow, and had generally assumed that once I grew up I’d automatically feel confident and secure like all other adults so would inevitably find life so much easier to deal with. Well, here I am at 55 with three kids and six grandchildren and still not feeling quite ‘there’ yet with life… but hopefully there’s still plenty time yet!

Do you think about dying? Does death scare you? Why or why not?

I have an odd relationship with the thought of death. When I was younger I used to think life would be so much easier if I was dead, but now I’m getting older and wiser (?) I feel more like I’d like to hang around for a lot longer! 🙂

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Share Your World: 22 October 2018

Name two books that have influenced you, and share how?

Hmmm… Choosing only two books out of a lifetime of voracious reading is really difficult – should I choose fiction or non-fiction? If fiction, do I choose those basic childhood reading books that originally kindled my love of independent reading in the first place, or those adult books that for a million different reasons remain most memorable to me now? And if non-fiction, do I choose history books or cookery books or self-help books, or all those extra-curricular academic text-books I read of my own volition while completing my degree? To be honest I think every book I’ve ever read has influenced me in some way or another, even if only to remind me never to read that particular author (or subject-matter) again! 🙂

In your opinion, where is the line between art and not art?

Oooh, great question! I often ponder the ‘Is photography art?’ question – or more to the point for me, ‘When is photography art?’ I suppose for me it’s when you deliberately work to create an artistic effect with your image instead of focus on making no more than a faithful visual representation…

What is something that really annoys you, but doesn’t bother most people?

The older I get, the more of a grumpy old woman I become – but I don’t suppose my grumps and gripes are that much different from anyone else’s at my age. But I honestly don’t understand why American dates are written partially backwards – I mean, either have year, month, day as a format or day, month, year – but month, day, year simply makes no sense to me at all  🙂

Share Your World: 22 October 2018

Share Your World: 15 Oct 2018

What’s the biggest screw-up in the kitchen that you were responsible for?

Um… I’m not actually a bad cook in general and tend to have an instinctive intuition about how to right things that start to go wrong along the way. But I do remember once my younger sister and I (in our early teens) deciding to make a fancy cheese and rice souffle for family and friends. It was… um… an interesting experiment, shall we say? Altogether too dense in texture, too solid, too heavy – just not anything light or souffle-like at all… but it tasted beautifully cheesy! And thankfully all the adults present smiled indulgently and stoically chewed their way through it anyway 🙂

What, in your opinion, makes people believe absurd conspiracy theories?

Hmmm… personally, I think that when the most glaringly obvious reality or truth of any particular important situation grates too far against the strongly-held belief system of someone (or a specific group of someones), they become over-agitated at the depth of the discrepancy and seek to find any alternative explanation that fits their own ‘truth’, however fantastical it may be to the rest of us.

In 40 years what will people be nostalgic for?

Privacy – I fear in the very near future it will become ‘normal’ for our every living and breathing moment to be photographed, recorded and shared either by ourselves or others, in our current personal ‘private’ as well as our social ‘public’ lives – hang on, does that maybe count as a conspiracy theory?

Is a hot dog a sandwich?

Don’t care what they’re called, hot dogs for me come under the old Crocodile Dundee ‘tastes shit, but you can live on it’ label 🙂

What made you laugh last week?

OMG last night my eldest daughter whatsapped me a trendy B&W arm’s length close-up pic of her partner on his knees sweetly kissing her 6-month baby bump. It was supposed to be all romantic and lovely but at first glance all I could see was what looked like him kissing her deliberately sticking-out butt, as if she’d just had a Brazillian butt-lift and was shoving it in his face! And after I pointed it out, once she’d seen it too apparently she couldn’t then un-see it and couldn’t stop laughing either! So there we we’re, either end of a phone 600 miles apart giggling our heads off… 🙂

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