My Word

The veracious Helen Cottee wrote a great blog this morning about reinventing the whole New Year's Resolutions malarky. She has decided that rather than defining January 2-13 by a torturous list of joyless to-dos, she will pick just one word to live by. I, like Helen, am a big fan of writing improving to-do lists on January 1st that often get discarded by the 2nd week in, not for want of trying, but I become aware that I can't do everything on that list and get a degree and have a life and be a normal person, so I throw in the towel and just deal with the ring of fat around my middle and my addiction to caffeinated drinks and guess what, I still have a great year.

I wrote two things down this year, but I wouldn't call them resolutions. That seems too final, too demanding, too unforgiving. No, the things I wrote down are more like long-term aspirations that I have chosen to focus on this year. One is related to my physical health and the other to my spiritual wellbeing. I am serious about them and they are not completely unachievable, still I like the idea of having a word. It's all encompassing, malleable and above all, easy to remember.

My word is ADVENTURE. I've been feeling very unadventurous over the past couple of weeks, all I've wanted to do is snuggle into the bosom of my family, slug around the house and watch terrible things on TV like The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I even rebooked my flight back to Germany from today to Tuesday because my brain is so fried and my body so exhausted that the thought of returning to my loveless apartment on the side of the Autobahn just filled me with dread. I was almost starting to wonder whether my lust for adventure had finally been satiated until I started to really reflect on the world adventure and what it actually entails. First things first: an adventurer cannot embark on the next adventure when they are still recovering from the first. Preparation is essential. I need to build myself up with good food, good company and a comfortable home before I pull away from the next for another eight months. 

The start of this year is going to involve a lot of travelling and a lot of aimless wandering. I want to soak in the spaces and experiences I encounter and to find adventure in the mundane. I want to push myself when things start to get hard and my two old friends, homesickness and self-pity, start popping round a little too often.

Adventure means making things fun, it means finding the romance in things that go wrong, it requires flexibility and a love of the spontaneous, it means opening my eyes and arms and heart wide to anything and anyone that comes into my path. It means learning how to live with yourself and how to turn loneliness into a satisfied solitude, it requires vulnerability, perseverance  enthusiasm and gumption. Most of all, it requires you to carry its spirit around with you always, to bring adventure back home with you and to involve it in your sensible plans for the future. 

In 2013 I want to live for and with adventure, using this blog to document the consequences.

What is your word for 2013?

The Dinner Party

Shauna Neiquist talks a lot about food in her books and how food brings people together. She talks about it A LOT and I  find that I often become impatient with the prose and want  to scream I KNOW I GET IT to the lines up on lines of neat black and white type. However, she's right.  There's something magical and profound about having a dinner party, especially one that's littered with imperfections.

On New Year's Eve, Louis and I threw a semi-spontaneous dinner party for a bunch of random, misfitting friends that ended up complimenting each other perfectly. It started on a wet and windy afternoon in Bristol where the weary travellers were taken upstairs to the sitting room of Chapel House. Awaiting them was a large Christmas tree, a roaring fire, numerous slouchy and cosy sitting options, copious amounts of tea and lots of yummy cake. Here we sat and connected and re-connected. Conversation flowed as freely ast eh hot brown brew and faces were glowing from the light of the fire and the comfort of the proceeding.

Then the cooking began with a last minute change of ingredients (Sainsbury's had run out of Trout) Two cooking goddesses met each other for the first time, donned their evening wear and rustled up a beautiful array of colourful dishes, displaying an incredible act of teamwork and ability to stir in heels.

As the others got dressed for dinner, I became in charge of atmosphere. I grabbed some foliage from the Clifton florist to dress the table, stuck candles in milk bottles, ramekins and leftover jam-jars, then gathered any dried flowers I could find and placed them in the empty fire place. With the decorations finished Fiona and I scrambled around for any dainty glasses or teacups we could find for wine and champagne and placed the starters on the sewing table by the door, then made the chalkboard in the hallway festive.

Then it began. My first ever dinner party, people gathered around a table covered with an old curtain, a couple of twigs and some mismatching plates. They dipped their freshly baked bread in olive oil and salt and ate homemade cheese straws to accompany the wine in their teacups. Soon the table started to fill up with stuffed trout, wild rice risotto, warm bean salad and a chopping board full of lemons. Pudding saw the fish and rice replaced by sweet potato pie, vanilla cheesecake and flour-less chocolate cake. Their was laughter and joy and serious conversations and silly conversations and compliments on the food and the house. We ate and ate until we couldn't move, then crashed upstairs in the sitting room listening to folk music and eating Laura's homemade truffles.

Despite the mixture of friendship groups and personalities, it flet like a group of old friends that sat round that fire writing resolutions for each other. It felt like a family that walked the uphill climb to stand huddles on the suspension bridge clasping bottles of champagne and Wilkinson's party poppers to greet in the New Year. It was a family that squealed with wide-eyed delight at the fireworks and chinese lanterns that popped and floated across the Bristol skyline. It was a family that skipped back to the cosy house, to throw on pyjamas  wrap our hands around mugs of tea and settle down to watch Notting Hill and fall asleep.

People need to be fed, appreciated, listened to and have the chance to connect with others. A small humble dinner party can accomodate all these things: it brings us together and creates a shared experience that can be recollected for years to come. I'm so glad I spent my New Year's Eve with friends around a dinner table and huddles on a bridge. It was magical and cosy, fun and fulfilling and possibly my best New Year's Eve to date.

The New Project: NO CLOTHES FOR A YEAR

So many clothes yet nothing to wear: the mantra of the fashionista. Did you know that, on average, women only wear 20% of the wardrobe 80% of the time?! It's RIDICULOUS. After getting ride of 1/3 of my wardrobe over the Summer and STILL not having enough room to store all my clothes, I have decided to be ruthless with myself. Inspired by my friend Gemma and this lovely lady's blog (who pretty much sums up the reason why I want to do this!) I have decided not to buy ANY clothes for a WHOLE year. There are, however, a few rules/exceptions:

1. I can buy underwear and tights. But only on a NEED rather than WANT basis.

2. If I get a job which requires a certain style of clothing or a uniform of sorts (eg. suit/black smart stuff) I may purchase items but ONLY from charity shops or ethical companies.

3. If going to a posh 'do' and none of the dresses in my wardrobe feel appropriate, I may purchase an outfit, but again ONLY from charity shops and ONLY after having raided my friends' wardrobes.

4. I can make clothes with a sewing machine and knitting needles.

To prove to myself and to the blogging world that I have enough clothes in my wardrobe to create outfits for an ENTIRE year, I propose to do AT LEAST one outfit post a week. This will hopefully get me out of my style rut and wearing some of those items of clothing that I can't bear to part with and yet never seem to don. Wish me luck!

New Year: Find A Balance

Yes, I, like millions of other social networkers, am about to jump on the resolutions bandwagon, albeit rather tardily. I am a self-professed bandwagon sceptic, but I think coming up with achievable resolutions is actually a very healthy activity. I still maintain that it is never to late for a new start, so I might be amending these in April, June and even December! Nevertheless I have waded through my wishy-washy aspirations for 2012 and come up with a simple, rather skeletal plan of action. Firstly, I identified my concerns for the year, which were: my spiritual health, my physical health and, in a sense, my academic health. I find the success of these three aspects of my life determine my mood and comfort, I then thought of 4 attainable targets to make life a little easier and more focused.

1. Tithe. I can be REALLY lazy with this and it's time I stepped it up. I believe that regular giving will change my heart attitude and make me more generous with and thankful for what I have. It will also force me to regularly assess my financial situation and help me save for my year abroad and other little adventures.

2. Drink less caffeine (notice I didn't specify!) I have recognised in myself a rather anxious disposition and a little shaky monster that starts jamming in my veins after a couple of cups of coffee. So I have decided to limit my intake to 2-3 cups a day. That might be 3 cups of caff tea and 1 cup of decaff coffee, or 1 cup of coffee and two cups of tea. I'll, of course, let myself off for special occasions like essay deadlines and late night chats, when caffeine is naturally required. I hope this will make me less shaky and less annoying to everyone.

3. Keep the Sabbath. It's one of the 10 commandments and yet I ignore it completely. I have decided that I will no longer do any uni work on a Sunday. This eradicates the last minute panic before a Monday morning, enables me to go for lunch with church people and allows me the chance to enjoy rehearsing without the nagging pressure of academic work. It means I'm going to have to sacrifice certain things and be a little more organised, but it will help me feel a lot more rested before the crazy working week ensues.

4. Learn 20 new words a week. I am DETERMINED. The 5 words a day rule I made in September was a bit too much to ask, but I think I could definitely commit to learning 20 new words in German and Italian a week. I find that when I get into learning vocab I just want to learn more and more, so hopefully by starting small and manageable I might be able to eventually increase my intake without having to make a new rule. Wooopah! This will inevitably help me improve my fluency and knowledge of the languages I love so much. It will make things A LOT easier.

Another thing, which isn't much of a resolution because it's hard to measure; I want to change my attitude towards life in general. I don't want to wish this year away, I don't want to store up all my hope and excitement on holidays, reading weeks and weekends, I want to enjoy and appreciate every working day. I want to relish every second, but at the same time not heap unnecessary expectation on to each and every single moment. Basically, I need to stop being so highly strung and realise that not everything has to be in routine. MUST EMBRACE SPONTANEITY. I guess this year is all about finding the balance, God willing.