Finding the Faraway Tree

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This week a friend and I managed to find a last minute booking for what was described as a “quaint, rustic cottage” next to a lake in Bridgetown.  We jumped at the chance and headed off for a few days of sorely needed downtime at the end of a very busy term. The plan was to rest, but also do some writing, photography, drawing and (most importantly) chatting.

I’d been itching to try out my new camera since my birthday, so as soon as we were settled in our distinctly rustic abode I set out to walk around the lake and find something photo-worthy. I soon came across a derelict footbridge (snap), a rose arbour that had fallen into disrepair (no snap, too sad), a very orderly row of fairly young gum trees side by side with a lone fig tree (snap, snap), and a rather palatial kid’s cubby house (snap). All of these were interesting, but none of them stirred me more than superficially.

Then I saw it – a huge river red gum, standing head and shoulders above all the other trees. It was glorious and immediately evocative of a much loved childhood story. Indeed, the first thing sprang to mind as I gazed up at it was ‘It’s the Faraway Tree!’ I could easily imagine Moonface, Silky, the Saucepan Man, Dame Washalot and the rest of characters that paraded through my highly imaginative early childhood hiding somewhere in its branches.

Bridgetown Faraway Tree

Bridgetown Faraway Tree

Our host had placed a bench under the tree and from that vantage point I could gaze up at the enormous trunk as I reminisced. I remembered wishing that I had a tree with a slippery slide built into it so that I could whizz down on a tasselled cushion. What fun that would be!

I found I couldn’t quite stop myself from glancing up at the top of the tree as I thought about the lands that drifted across the top of the Faraway Tree, just in case… Like the storybook version, this is a tree that cries out to be climbed, for children to adventure into, for artists to photograph and paint, and for arboriculturists to conserve. It’s quite magnificent and the childhood memories that it stirred up made me smile each time I looked across the lake at it over the next few days.

Although I’d remembered the names of all the magical characters in the Faraway Tree books, my memory referenced the human characters generically as the children. Out of curiosity, I looked it up as soon as a Wifi connection was to hand and the second or third ‘hit’ I got was a link to the Enid Blyton Society. This provided me with a plethora of information on all things Blyton, including the names of the children in the series (Jo, Fanny, Bessie) and some examples of the lovely illustrations and cover art from the early print runs.

I spent ages pouring over the covers and jumping between examples of some of my favourite early reading matter. Much to my delight I found a listing for the Five Find-Outers Mystery Series. I read these books with alacrity at much the same time as the Faraway Tree series, but subsequently never found the books again. In the intervening years I’ve asked numerous people whether they’ve read them, but no one I know had even heard of the series. Most people went so far as to ask whether I meant the Famous Five, Adventurous Four or even the Secret Seven! So the sense of vindication was actually quite ridiculously strong and decidedly childlike when I discovered that the Finder-Outers and little Buster the dog really do exist in Blyton-land and that I hadn’t made them up.

The combination of the real and imagined trees, the photographs I took and the information and images on the website has been like catching glimpses of a kaleidoscope of my childhood, of a fragmented land that seems to move further away each year. It’s brought them closer together and has made me want to climb more trees and to hunt for adventures – or perhaps it was simply relaxing for a few days that did that.

From The Enchanted Wood, by Enid Blyton. Illustration by Dorothy M. Wheeler, taken from the first edition.

From The Mystery of the Burnt Cottage, by Enid Blyton. Illustration by Joseph Abbey, taken from the first edition.

The eye of the beholder

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I was recently in a group of people asked to name the most unusual item in our respective kitchens (ingredient, implement, other – as long as it was a bit quirky). The tricky thing with this question is that I, like most others there, consider my own kitchen to be fairly ordinary. This is a room that’s been equipped to be functional and, in many cases, designed to be attractive. So coming up with ‘the most unusual item’ in amongst the mundane actually equates to figuring out which item someone else might plausibly consider unusual.

Bringing up a mental map of my kitchen and gazing around it, I was hard pressed to see anything out of the ordinary. The butcher’s block, crates, appliances – they all fit in and work in their context. Condiments and tins – perhaps far too many of each – have been stocked with some sort of goal in mind. Cutlery, crockery and so on have accumulated over time and, whilst they may not be my ideal Homes & Garden version of same, they serve their purpose. Certainly nothing unusual in any of those.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

I have a small collection of teapots on the kitchen window ledge. I wondered if they counted as unusual? They’re fairly brightly coloured, but – when you come down to it – they’re just teapots. In the dishwasher I have a little clean/dirty sign, to let people know the status of the current load – but we think that’s pretty normal. Perhaps the handmade mosaic trivet on my bench top? hmm…

Then I remembered the yellow Tonka Toy lurking on top of the kitchen cupboards. It’s one of the classic road graders, a remnant of my son’s childhood. When he moved out, he made a pile of his Lego, Meccano, toy cars and so forth and asked me to donate them to a good cause. Most went to charity shops or friend’s children without a second thought, but the grader was harder for me to part with. I had (and have) so many fond memories of the roads we built with it in the sandpit and the games that followed.

But what does one do with a discarded toy truck or, indeed, any discarded – yet beloved – toy? In this instance I perched a pair of discarded dinosaurs on it (a diplodocus and a triceratops, I’m told) and there they’ve remained ever since, our watchful kitchen deities. They keep track of everyone and everything that happens in this crazy central space in our home, where people congregate and culinary experiments happen.

My dino-truck combo definitely counted as an unusual kitchen item in most people’s books on the day and, try as they might, no-one could trump it. Since then I’ve looked more closely at people’s kitchens when I visit, keeping an eye out for their version of quirky. To my surprise, most kitchens actually do contain at least one oddity – but the dino-truck still rules 🙂OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Musical Adventures

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We attended our first ever house concert this weekend – and what a joy it was! Mikaela and Stephen Castledine hosted a very enthusiastic crowd of over 50 people, who filled their house with laughter and song on Friday evening.

sparrow house concert

The draw card was Sparrow – a delightful progressive acoustic Celtic quartet. Supporting them was Darling, a local ten-piece all-girl acappella group.

So what exactly is a house concert? More than anything else it’s an opportunity to enjoy music in an intimate setting, usually in someone’s home or garden. It’s an informal and very sociable event, with most people being friends or acquaintances of the hosts.

For an event of this nature to work, there are any number of logistics to consider, ranging from the capacity of the house to the selection of musicians and what their fee might be. Then there’s whether or not to have a lead-in act, how to publicize the concert, how and where to sell tickets and the complicated juggling act involved in getting the crowd seated in time to start the music.

The Castledines managed all of this with panache. Although house concerts often don’t provide much in the way of sound systems, thanks to a family friend this one was completely plugged in. There was only one very brief power outage, but Sparrow had been warned that this might happen and simply carried on ‘un-plugged’ without breaking stride, much to the delight of all. Most people took along food/drink to share, which added to the sociability of the evening, as did the very generous catering and outgoing manner of the hosts.

Seeing just how much work they put into preparing for the concert, it would be easy to wonder why they would even consider hosting such an event. The answer was there on the night, however. The happiness quotient in the room was very high, both on the part of the (very interactive) audience and the musicians. It was a pleasure to listen to Darling, who will undoubtedly go on to greater things. Fiona Rea, Charlie McCarthy and Jon Edwards from Sparrow seemed delighted with the response that they received from the crowd. Apparently we (the audience) have lovely ‘fronts of heads’ – this from Fiona, who said that they often play in pubs and mostly to the backs of people’s heads, which are not nearly as responsive 🙂

I could blather on ad nauseum about the wonders of finding a bouzouki player in a Celtic band, about the extraordinary fiddle playing of Charlie McCarthy and the joy of Fiona’s vocals, but instead I’ll just say that I take my hat off to the hosts and the performers – and can’t wait for the next one!

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Meeting madness

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Over the past few weeks I’ve reviewed constitutions, typed up minutes and attended the committee  and/or annual general meetings of a number of organisations. The meetings have been particularly tedious as most have tended towards unduly long discussions that don’t reach conclusions, poorly informed decision making and uneven participation – and some even devolved into bun fights (sustained, overblown arguments about a trivial point, sometimes of a personal nature and not relevant to the point under discussion).  Surely this is a self-defeating and pointless way to run any meeting?

If I were to hazard a guess as to why it happens, I’d say that a key reason might be that such meetings are so ubiquitous that most people don’t think that there’s very much to them. My experience has been that it’s generally assumed that the Chair will know what to do, whether or not this is actually the case, and that s/he will keep things on track. Indeed, I’d lay odds that the majority of voluntary committee members are rarely inclined to put much time into researching how to run a meeting or – more particularly – how to participate in one effectively.

Researching alternative meeting styles as possible solutions to the meeting dilemma, I came across something called collaborative governance, also known as the Sociocratic Method. This, if implemented effectively, is supposed to equally empower all participants, allow everyone to voice their concerns and/or objections, and to encourage participants to contribute information. Key to the process is the group’s shared sense of purpose and desire for collaborative decision making. Group members take turns to be the meeting facilitator, so that meetings are not always run by the same person. Each person present is given the opportunity to speak in turn (rounds), although they can choose to pass. Discussion topics each have two or three rounds of comment dedicated to them, so that clarity, consensus and consent can be achieved.

I’ve no doubt that, with practise, patience and commitment, this meeting style could work very effectively. Certainly, taking the time to listen to individual focused views on each topic from each person is a laudable objective. Ideally this would result in quieter members gaining a voice and feeling empowered. The downside is that this process is a time-hungry one, particularly for ‘new players.’ Since the issue of long meetings generally discourages meeting participation, I feel this is self defeating and may well result in difficulties filling key committee positions. Sadly, I personally have neither the time nor the patience for long meetings any more, so this wouldn’t work for me.

Broadly speaking, the success of any meeting actually appears to hinge on a combination of pre-planning, clear goals, and effective and focused chairing. Whilst this is a combination that is trickier to find than one might think, there are strategies that groups can implement to move their meetings in the right direction. Circulating a clearly prioritised agenda in advance of the meeting, followed by a quick overview by the chair at the start of each meeting, an effective hand at the helm to keep the meeting on track (in terms of decision making and time keeping) and an inclusive and cooperative manner would go a long way towards improving meeting outcomes. Following this up with clear meeting minutes, circulated in good time after the meeting, would round things off nicely.

I do wonder, however, whether combining an aspect of sociocracy at the start of meetings might prove useful. Perhaps introducing a round in which each person is given the opportunity to articulate what is uppermost in their mind in relation to the meeting up front might settle the group and encourage more active participation. It may also reduce the likelihood of additional items being added to the agenda at the last minute – one of my particular pet peeves.

I’ll give this some thought later. For now I’m completely meeting-ed out. Time to pat a kitten and have a cup of tea!

Prism adventuring_19mar15

Imposed realities

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I was at an outdoor event recently, a lovely afternoon concert in the park. Just in front of where we were sitting was a group that included two young girls, of perhaps four and six years of age. They’d been dressed in identical flimsy, embroidered, Chinese-style tunics and their mother went to great lengths to pose the girls together, arm in arm, smiling, for snap after snap. It made me wonder whether, in years to come, those girls will remember how much they disliked the posing and how they tried to escape, without success, from their mother’s determination to record the happy events. I wondered if any of the pictures where one or both were pulling faces and squirming with irritation and a need to be somewhere else would survive the culling process. I wondered how many times I’d done that to my children, unthinking.

This  in turn led me to reflect on whether our family album contained only ‘happy snaps’, or if it provides a range of different moods and expressions, situations and contexts that more accurately reflects our lives. These thoughts sent me scurrying off to find a picture that I’ve always thought portrays something of who I was in my early twenties. The girl in the photo is the person I’ve tended not to show, because she doesn’t fit the persona that the people around me are familiar with. But she’s as real now as she was then.

The photograph was taken at my father’s wedding reception, which took place in the family home less than a year after my mum had died. I was angry and lost and bereft, but had tried my best throughout to behave in a manner appropriate to the proceedings and to make June feel welcome in our family. The inevitable flurry of photographs had been endured, with various people snapping away indiscriminately all afternoon until my face ached from smiling and my heart from trying to behave in a civil manner. The cameras kept pointing my way, at the allegedly happy daughter of the beaming groom. Eventually one of my brothers took the brunt of my displeasure, his camera the last straw. I broke ranks, bared my teeth and growled at him (apparently quite ferociously), after which I was let off the hook and felt a lot better.

When the prints were collected, there I was – growl and all. I kept the photo, even though it’s not pretty, because it portrayed my feelings far more clearly than words can describe and more truly than any other photos taken on the day. Looking at it again today made me think about the kinds of images that tend to be included in family albums. By and large they appear to be the sort that allow people to re-imagine their lives as full of smiles and sunshine, no clouds, no sulks, no bared teeth.

dadswedding_1979

What makes us weed out the sad and bad pictures and keep only the happy smiley ones? Is it social pressure that leads us to believe that our life must be seen and remembered in this way? Do we ever come to a time and place when we can say – ‘hey, hello, there’s more to me, more to my life’?

I recognised that girl when I looked at the photo today. I see her every day when I brush my hair. We’ve come to an accommodation over the years – l don’t hide her away so much and she hardly ever growls anymore. I’m rather glad I didn’t edit her out of my life.