Hermione Laake's Blog: Thoughts, page 18

Immune system? Sniff flowers

Sniffing flowers is good for the immune system.

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I read this some years ago. There may be no truth in it. However, there is no doubt the smell of flowers makes us feel good.

The daffodils are out, so no harm in trying it out.

All my love

Hermione

Spellings

Hello friends,

And thank you for taking the time to read my work and comment. Your comments are very welcome. This site is a work in progress, and I know there are occasional typos that slip through, and I am not following the American spellings either; still I appreciate your telling me off for the spelling errors, which creep in when I have to resort to writing and editing on my phone; most of my blog posts are written on my phone, as I am juggling work, usually, and fitting this work in around that. Apologies for that as I find that an unstable medium. I cannot afford a new computer at the moment, so I only use the computer when I can borrow one.

I don’t always have time to edit out errors the same week, so I appreciate your patience, as this is very much a work in progress, and sometimes I must do battle with the dreaded algorithm guessing what it is I want to say.

I am very much in favour (favor, in American English), of error free content.

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All my love,

 

Hermione

Voice – read by Hermione

‘Lost’ – read by Hermione Wilds

‘Lost’ read by Hermione Wilds

Stanislavski's Building a Character

I may have unwittingly impinged on copyright just now, by writing a review in real time, as a series of stages of reading this work page by page.

I had hit upon the idea as my MA was slow to take off this week and I wanted a challenge so I set myself one: to react to this work in real time as a way of analysing my response to it.

The writing that I typed up in the last hour has been removed. It would have been nice to have received a warning or nudge that this was my second quote and that revealing all the book's secrets might not help the copyright owners. Still Goodreads obviously do not have this technology.

Please accept my apologies, it would have been nice for me to be able to record my thoughts in this way, but I can understand why it is not suitable for this forum.

Surprise - The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry

I received a book in the post this week, wrapped in a lovely biodegradable packing. This pleased me greatly, as I am very concerned about the plastic in our environment and have been quite vocal about this to local businesses.

The book came by way of Kingston University as I am beginning an MA with them in September. This is an idea they had which has been running for a few years now and gives their university a community feel. I think it is a wonderful idea to offer every student and lecturer the same book to read as it brings you together because you have something in common to read and discuss. Instantly this creates a connection. What a marvelous idea.

The author, Rachel Joyce, will be vising the university for a QA as well in the fall, which is something to look forward to.

The book is mesmerising; I was instantly reminded of Anne Fine. I used to read her work to my children in the 1990s, and then later it reminded me of Somerset Mauham, an author that my teacher recommended to me when I was a teenager but I never really got into his writing until I was in my thirties.

This is a journey story, and would appeal to any restless soul. You are led along, almost with a hop, skip and a jump....

The light and unaffected prose is really something in this world of overwritten and over described scenery; I would much rather read about the characters as seen through, for example an over tidy garden with neat little rows of tulips, as Joyce has described a scene in the book; I think this is what is meant by show don't tell, and the author does this with integrity and steadfast intensity.

Well worth a read; I am only a fifth into the book, but I had to share this with you.

Best wishes,

Hermione

Holiday

Hello,
Thank you for taking an interest in me and my work.

I have been away on a cycling holiday. I finally got to Menorca. Really, this was more a place for swimming with mermaids.. but enough said. I was staying in Western Spain and cycled down to the coast a few times, but the cycle tracks in the region are not as dedicated as they are in Mallorca. Still, the motorists are respectful to cyclists.

It is refreshing to be ignored. In Spain, I am ignored. The women are so beautiful that I can pass by without being an object of desire, except when I enter a restaurant filled with the British.

I hope that I have not annoyed anyone. But it is interesting how personal and how much it is purely down to taste and culture as to whether we admire something and has nothing perhaps to do with beauty or ugliness.

I am very interested in this subject at the moment and have been reading a work called Ugliness which is helping me with my research on beauty.

A refreshing holiday in which I learnt a great deal.

I even discovered that the Spanish chase horses through the street and pet them as they rear, which seems very dangerous, but also is a sign that they understand how to interact with the horses. The whole affair was very civil and the elderly sat it out at the end in a church, which was cool and large, and out of the intense heat we have been experiencing.

Reading

Dear followers,
I have not been using Goodreads as much as I used to. I have been in a writing mood and reading has been confined to dipping in and out of books I began reading years ago, or books I began re-reading; I also started to read blogs by Indie writers and established writers, which has proved very enjoyable. I even wrote a response to the Paulo Coelho blog about the broken vase. (I still haven't worked out whether this is the real Paulo Coelho on Wordpress, but it doesn't matter because I enjoy reading the short posts which have deep meaning.

I am reading four books at the moment, Shapeshifters, a book about a practicing GP, which doesn't - he says - break his hippocratic oath, although I am not sure..., since it does reveal details about patient examinations; still, I am glad he wrote it; it feels literary- is beautifully written, except chapter 7, Reshaping the Heart, which to me did not ring true because I have typed probably a thousand medical letters and they were different in their delivery, more rhythmic and standardised, poetic in that sense, due to the often repetitive order of many of the opening and closing phrases, to allow for efficiency, I believe, than the letters in this book have suggested. They do not come across as real letters, but perhaps here is where the difficulty lies with regard to patient confidentiality....

I am also reading another book published in 2018 called Everybody Died so I got a Dog, a light-hearted memoir. The author has the same name as a girl I once befriended when I lived in Surrey, as a young girl; I also recognise myself as the orange squash drinking, tea and toast character she describes.... It is a homely and warm book and great reading if you grew up in the 60s and 70s; very honest and so lovely visual memories of social behaviours of that time.

Another book I picked up is The Tao of Gung Fu. I read about this book years ago (yes Gung Fu not Kung Fu), and hoped I would run into it one day, and there it was in Dorothy House in Broad Street, Bath, propped up and waiting for me last week - so far it is about the push and pull of relationships and how the best way is that of being firm and gentle; I have always aimed for this in my dealings with my children, but I have sometimes failed, and it is good to be reminded....

The final book is a book I picked up first called Ugliness A Cultural History by Gretchen E. Henderson; a stunning examination of attitudes to ugliness. I found this one in Dorothy House in Bath as well. I have written an essay called On Beauty, published on my wordpress site- http://hermionelaake.wordpress.com which has morphed into something longer and this book's subject matter compliments my research perfectly. I may refer to it later as I develop my research on beauty further in my essay.

I find I need to be in a relaxed mood to read, which is very different from that of when I am writing; I am receptive and drawing things to me when in a reading mood, whereas when writing I am putting things out that I have analysed, and sometimes that I am analysing and processing in the moment.

I tend to blog once a year on this site, so more from me in 2020.

Much love,

Hermione

Pushing past fear

Whilst on holiday in Mallorca, which apparently is sometimes referred to as Majorca and pronounced that way too, but wrongly; who decides these things?

Anyway, whilst on holiday in Mallorca, I went on an impromptu walk with my partner. We had visited an archeological site which was unexpectedly closed and found ourselves walking up and down a mountain in Alcudia. This took us over 9 hours (almost 7 of those were non-stop walking), in total including the break for lunch, water, and toilet.

The route was marked by three dotted avenues on which to walk, some which crossed over one another; the two we followed were the red dots and the blue dots.

I am blogging about this because I learnt something from this walk about persistence and fear.

At times during the walk both myself and my partner doubted our ability to find the finish line and to be on the right path.

In the instances where he wanted to wander from the track, I kept him on it, stating that if we had to call in the emergency services to rescue us we had better be on the track, and not lost, and in the instances where I wanted to go back (read give up here), he kept me moving forward.

I am truly glad that I completed this 27k walk as it has reminded me that I am capable of pushing past fear.

I do know this, as my sister once invited me to stay at her pad in New York and was unable to be with me on the 2nd day so I had to spend the day alone in New York. I am someone who finds it very easy to get lost, and so I had to do a walk right around the building and back before I went out to make sure I recognised it on my return.

Anyway, the other aspect of fear which I was enlightened about is the irrational one, the one where fear takes over to such an extent that you actually ignore people in order to preserve what is left of your rationality. I cannot speak for my partner's feelings at the time, but I must admit that at one point, a storm was whipping up and we found ourselves very close to the coast, and a small inlet; we were concerned that we would end up on a beach and stranded. Exactly at this point when we were trying to decide whether we were still on the right path and whether it would swing around in the right direction, a couple passed us (they had passed ahead of us an hour ago and now were "going back" as my partner remarked), this unnerved me; in a split second as they approached me I had to decide whether to ask them why they were going back and whether they were lost; I decided not to ask because if they were going back then I might be persuaded to follow them, and yet if I didn't know I would be more likely to trust my instincts and push forward past the fear that we had somehow lost the path because we couldn't see the next blue dot yet.

In the end the path turned, around 10 minutes later, and what a relief that was; soon we were almost back where we started. I had learnt something about fear. Although I am still not sure whether fear prevented me from speaking to the couple or rationality. Because I may have been provoked into fear by the couple who were lost or believed they were, when in fact we were not lost at all.