three (or four) recent noticings

Noticed Thing #1: I overheard two girls in Tesco the other week debating what kind of crisps to buy for their movie night in. Girl One was balancing a 2 litre bottle of Coke on her hip like a baby. Girl Two seemed more interested in picking off the last of her pastel green nail varnish than anything else. 

GIRL ONE: [tilting her head back to look at all the crisp packets on the shelf] "So... Pringles Cheese and Chive? Or Sensations Thai Sweet Chilli?"  

GIRL TWO: [shrugging, not looking up] "I dunno. I’m not a big fan of those ‘Sensations’, though."

GIRL ONE: [swivelling round to look her friend in the eye] "Aye, you say that now – but you didn’t say anything when you were fair tuckin’ into mine last week."

Ha!

Noticed Thing #2: We bought a particularly delicious batch of nectarines towards the start of September (a bundle of nectarines? A bunch of nectarines? A bevy? A bouquet? A brood? I’m not sure of the right collective noun). They were juicy and sweet, and I ate quite a lot of them (sometimes in a row). 

One day, after consuming my second nectarine of the morning, I hopped through to my brother’s bedroom to try and encourage him to try one also. Only, once I got there, I couldn’t for the life of me remember the word: ‘nectarine’. It had completely vanished – poof! – from my head. So I ended up standing awkwardly in his doorway, mouthing fruit names – "apricot, peach, pear, plumb" – until – "pineapple, tangerine, nectarine – yes!" – I found the word I was looking for.

I’m finding this happening quite a lot recently. Words hide from me in the middle of sentences, causing me to falter and then fumble about with synonyms or vague descriptions or hand gestures to try and get my point across. The words I need appear a little-too-late in my mind. Strange.

Noticed Thing #3: Yesterday, while I was in the library writing notes on Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (amazing, amazing book), I saw a man walk in through the front door carrying a yellow banana in his hand, and a toddler in his back-pack. They were as bald as each other, with the same wide-eyed expression, and the two of them made me think, smilingly, of monkeys. 

...which then, in turn, reminded me of this poem by Carol Ann Duffy (see below) which has always made me laugh. It comes from her collection of poems, The World’s Wife, where she looks anew at famous male figures throughout history, literature, etc and retells something of their story through the eyes of the women associated with them, women who have typically been forgotten about.

Mrs Darwin 

7^th April 1852

Went to the Zoo.
I said to Him–
Something about that Chimpanzee over there reminds me of you.

(These pictures, I think, could count as a Noticed Thing #4. They were all taken fairly recently on my phone while on various commutes to work and Glasgow and back.)

♥

like, like, like

Too too true. (Picture from Marc John's blog ). I despair at my own overuse of this irritating word (the linguistic equivalent of a bluebottle). I'm not quite sure how to stop saying it so much, though. It just slips out, without permission, making everything I say sound quite tentative and teenager-y. 

(On a similar note, watch: this.)

the things we carry.

All of that stuff down there was rumbling inside my handbag until about 3pm this afternoon. I had to tidy it out. It was becoming a bit of an ordeal trying to find my car keys in there after work. 

Among other things, I found: 

...at least two hundred and seven pens ~ two small forests worth of Random Bits of Paper ~ about six used-up order pads for work ~ various drafts of short stories I’ve been working on ~ two tickets for a recent heavy metal gig I went to (quite an experience...) ~ two tea bags ~ £6.86 in spare change ~ a name-tag from my brief stint as a poetry conference steward ~ my work tie ~ and two pretty good books (‘Consider the Lobster’ – a collection of essays by David Foster Wallace – and Carol Shields’ short stories. Having only two books is unusual for me, actually. I normally carry about a mini-library). 

No wonder my shoulder’s been kind of sore recently. I should do a clean out more often.

♥

(p.s. in case you're wondering... those pandas are my socks. Cute, eh?)

I get words all day through...

Most days when I’m at work, I have some song or other playing on a loop in the back of my head. Maybe it’s the last song I heard on the radio before I left the car, or maybe it’s a lyric triggered by some phrase I’ve heard during the day. (Example: me asking a customer ‘How would you like your eggs?’ will invariably lead to the song ‘How do ya like your eggs in the morning?’ wedging itself into my brain for the next eight hours or so.)

I’m guessing this is fairly typical of most people, right? This is a ‘thing’. It’s not too uncommon.

Well, recently when I’ve been in work (and I’ve been in work a lot recently) I’ve noticed that, as well as having songs stuck in my head, I’ve also started getting words stuck in there too.

‘Scrupulous. Exodus. Arabesque.’ (For example).

These words, unbidden, will just randomly appear – ‘hello!’ – in the middle of my wiping tables, or serving customers, and I’ll find myself turning them over, almost unconsciously, as I go about the motions of laying cutlery and scraping plates.

‘Vehement, vehemently, vehemence.’ ‘Scrupulous. Dwindle. Umpire.’

It’s like they’ve escaped from the dictionary – like penguins from a zoo – and have waddled into my head just, y’know, for something to do. I quite enjoy to find them – these stray words, with their crispy, satisfying little syllables, milling about in the back of my head. But it’s also quite strange. Because more often than not they’re pretty obscure. And words I wasn’t even aware I knew. Like: ‘incursion, machinations, and rambunctious.’ Odd.

I get the feeling this is slightly less common than the song thing, right? Probably the tired mind of a writerly English graduate trying to amuse itself during very long, very repetitive days of cafe work... I think I probably need a holiday quite soon.

♥

Pictures by: Daniela Strijleva

Title of this post taken from 'Show Me' from My Fair Lady (... which is, of course, now stuck in my head.)