Small Talk for Beginners

This is the festive season, the time when you are invited to lots of gatherings, the office party and the department get-together.  Most of the time it's fun but:  Have you ever sat next to someone at a dinner party and found that  you couldn't strike up a conversation with them?  No matter what you said, they always came back with a syllable or a short sentence and never provided an opening of any sort for the next bit of conversation.  And the person on your other side is so engrossed with his/her neighbour that you can't escape that way!   It goes a bit like this:
 "Isn't this soup delicious?" (OK not a Booker Prize question but you're trying)
Answer from non-small talker:  "Yes, it's good."
Silence.
"Have you seen that film XYZ, everyone seems to be talking about it?".
Answer:  "No".
Silence.
And so the whole meal progresses with everybody else - apparently - enjoying scintillating conversation with their neighbour.  In the past I have always felt that I must be boring, dull, a torture to to have to endure my company for a three-course meal.  Not any more, though.  Now I still try to talk to my neighbour at dinner, but if I don't get much of a response, I simply wait and see if they try to be sociable and if not, well the food is usually worth concentrating on!

Do you know people who are able to engage with total strangers?  They are worth their weight in diamonds, rubies and gold!  They hold forth about anything and nothing - usually some story from their day, some little contretemps which has everyone laughing as they tell it. And everyone feels included.  These are the people you gravitate towards at parties where everyone else has formed into little groups of those who know each other and you are left holding onto your wine glass as if it would save you from drowning.

Small talk is an art, there is no doubt about that.  Small talk means having a ready store of little anecdotes which make people smile.  Not everyone has the knack.  There are those who think it is being superficial.  I reckon it is being a life-saver.  But making conversation with the person sitting next to you is a necessary part of a dinner party, however shy you are and however hard it is to break the ice.  It requires practice, of course.  But a good tip is to watch those who slip easily into conversation with strangers.  Yes, it means a bit of hard work to be entertaining but as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it "good manners are made up of small sacrifices".

Glorious Food

Since the beginning of December I have been seeing TV and magazine advertising intended to make us all buy, buy, buy for the Christmas festival up ahead.  Food so temptingly displayed my stomach rumbles.  And those lovely families where everyone is in complete harmony and everyone gets the right present and no one thinks "geesh, I am knackered after all that cooking and Aunt Katherine has left half the food on her plate again..."  And outside it is snowing, perfect snowflakes falling into perfect gardens and not a traffic jam in sight.   Fairy tale world.

This weekend there were two supplements with my Sunday newspaper, one was from a supermarket chain and one from the paper's publishers.  I browsed through the tips and recipes and put both magazines on one side because I just might try those ideas for roast potatoes some time.  Of course I will not be at home for Christmas.  I will spend it with my daughter and her family and I don't have to do any cooking whatsoever.  Admittedly I will spend New Year's Eve at home and a friend of mine is staying over so I am having two people to New Year's Day lunch.  I love cooking for friends, I must admit, I even enjoy experimenting with recipes just for myself, even if it means eating a warmed up version for most of the week.  So you never know, I might serve up roast potatoes for New Year's Day lunch or then again...

All of which reminded me of when I was undergoing chemotherapy and I stayed up at night because it wasn't worth going to bed and having to race to the bathroom every couple of hours for the first few days following each treatment.  I do believe that I have never seen so many food programmes on TV as I did at that time.  I still associate the hiss of frying steak with the nightmarish chemo feeling.   Even last month when I was nursing a septic throat and watching daytime TV I didn't have to flick the remote past more than three channels to discover some famous chef or other doing remarkable things in his/her kitchen.  It made me wonder how many people actually sit through these programmes and nod their heads sagely, muttering "ah yes, that extra bit of sea salt coupled with the dash of red wine will make all the difference".

No, I am not a domestic goddess. I like simple, fool-proof tips and plenty of instance sauce packets. I gave up baking when my children were grown up.  Mainly because although my efforts tasted great -  according to the other mums brave enough to try them  -, the cakes themselves always crumbled somewhat and looked like mice had been at them.  But hey, you can't be good at everything, I tell myself.

Christmas is coming

 I hope all my US readers had a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Next Sunday is the first Sunday in Advent.  This was always a special time when I lived in Germany.  The first candle on the Advent wreath was lit, a colourful plate of cookies: spekulatius, gingerbread and cinammon stars together with a few red apples and clementines, was placed on the coffee table which itself was decked out in an Advent tablecloth.   In church we sang "Wir sagen Euch an, den ersten Advent" which, roughly translated, means "we announce the first of Advent to you."  The weather was sometimes mild and wet and other times cold and frosty but the light from the first candle always made you look forward to the blaze of light from the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve.
I just loved it all.  Every town had a Weihnachtsmarkt, ours held their market on the first Sunday of Advent.  Local clubs, the Scouts and the churches all had stalls selling mulled wine, gluehwein, and you met up with people you hadn't seen for a while as you walked around admiring the various handicrafts on display.  You could get all your Christmas decorations here if you so wished.  My feet always felt like blocks of ice and my face would be frozen but it was all part of that magical feeling.  The mulled wine tasted twice as good in the cold evening air!   
Frankfurt, of course, has several markets, starting from 25th November right up until 22nd December.  The old part of the city, the Roemberberg looks like something out of a fairytale, my children just loved coming here.  I will arrive just too late to visit this year, unfortunately.



http://www.weihnachtsmarkt-frankfurt.com/

Despite the best attempts of the commercial world to sell Christmas on the back of food and alcohol, I think that for many people it still has not lost all its magic.  What we need to do in this troubled old world of ours is to stand still and take in the candlelight and be a child again on Christmas Eve.
I wish all my readers a peaceful, joyful Adventszeit

The Lure of Travel

I wonder why we all like to travel so much?  For us here in Ireland I expect it is the prospect of a week or two of sunshine, our summers being somewhat unpredictable.  The whole procedure of getting our bodies  from home to Sunny Destination X has become so routine that many of us don't give it a second thought.  The journey to the airport, checking in, finding the departure gate, doing a bit of shopping at the duty free, we do it all as a matter of course.
I must admit I am a fidgety traveller, always afraid something will go wrong and I'll miss my flight.  I can only relax once I have sunk down on one of those hard plastic seats at the departure gate with my boarding pass clutched in my sweaty palm.
Which is why my recent coach trip to Northern Ireland was a welcome change. We toured Belfast, including the Titanic Interpretation Centre and drove all along the coast to visit The Giant's Causeway (breathtaking), the Glens of Antrim (equally gob-smacking), Doagh famine village, Malin Head (the most northerly point in Ireland), the city of Derry and the Cathedral in Armagh.  An unforgettable trip. I went with a ladies' club of which I am a member and everything was organised.  What bliss.  I didn't have to rummage in my bag for a single thing nor study a map nor negotiate narrow roads!  And we had glorious weather so that half the time we were wandering about in warm sunshine!   We stayed at a different hotel every night, our coach awaited us straight after breakfast and off we went to see the sights.  Northern Ireland is a beautiful part of the world.   Barbara Ferguson our guide and proprietor of  Guided Tours Ireland 
 did a truly wonderful job in helping us understand and enjoy the places we visited. I won't go into detail of the trip because guide books and tour guides like Barbara do a much better job to make it all come alive.
Here are a few photos though - my camera is a very simple one so no majestic panoramas.

This is a view from Malin Head. We had glorious weather for the entire trip.

This is the view from Doagh Island famine village.  We didn't have time to explore that long golden strand.  The visit to the famine village centre was one of the highlights of the trip. 

I think we all fell in love with the city of Derry - here is a view of the Peace Bridge.
 
All in all a wonderful experience.

Finding Things

 I like to visit the city when I've been away for a while.  My first stop is usually the Franciscan church where I visit a side altar devoted to St. Anthony, the finder of lost things.  I usually make a small donation here as a thank you for the safe return of one or other of my daughter's cats, one of which has a propensity to wander off and not be seen for a week or more.  Call me naive or superstitious if you like, but I always pray to St. Anthony when something gets lost and I - or he - usually find it again.
 I like wandering round the stores when I'm not actually looking for anything specific.  Charity shops with their huge selection of books are first on my list.  It's amazing what you can find.  It reminds me of a story called The Book Bag by Somerset Maugham - see a review here.  Set in the old colonial days of the British, it is related by a traveller who, having learned his lesson once while imprisoned by illness in a hill-town in Java without enough to read,  now carries a giant laundry bag of books with him everywhere in his travels through colonial outposts. Without that book bag, he says, he would "never had heard the singular history of Olive Hardy."  Maugham's stories are fascinating for the glimpse of life on remote jungle stations which they give.

A few months ago I wrote that I was looking for something to hold a set of kitchen utensils which I'd received as a Christmas present.  I had very definite ideas but after exhaustive research in all the stores I still couldn't find what I was searching for.  So I did what every sensible person has done in similar circumstances, I adopted the motto:  if you can't get what you want, then want what you can get. So I found this inexpensive solution:

This is an exclusive picture of my not-very-modern-kitchen worktop complete with tea caddy and chopping boards.
Do I admire this utensil holder when I'm working in the kitchen?  To be honest I don't even see it.  It serves a purpose, I'm glad I've got it, and that's the end of the story.

The Instant Fix Myth or why do I fall for (some) advertisers' promises

'Have you got some kind of skin disease?'  The nurse in a German hospital had a voice like a buzz-saw and an attitude to match.  My guess is that although the hospital was in Frankfurt, most of the law-makers in the Bundestag in Berlin some 600 kms away heard her.  She was about to give me an injection and had just noticed the skin on my legs.  At that time I had no idea what these peculiar round patches on my legs and thighs were so I couldn't give her an instant course in harmless skin conditions even if I'd wanted to, which I didn't. 

Last Sunday while glancing through the Beauty page of The Sunday Times I came across an article entitled Back to Beauty School with the sub-title How to Get Smooth Skin  (Page 18, Sunday Times Supplement from 20th September 2015). The first sentence grabbed me :  The medical term is keratosis pilaris; the simple term is permanent goose bumps or back-of-the-arm spots.  That's it!  yelled my inner I-want-to-have-smooth-skin-on-my-legs Muse.  There has to be a cure, a fool-proof remedy.  There isn't, as it turns out.  The only advice was not to scrub the area, to look for lactic acid in product ingredients and not to use soap bars.  Two products were recommended but as I have not tried them - yet - I won't mention them here.
When you want a better answer what do you do?  I turned to the fount of knowledge, i.e. Google.  Again, I came up with a no-remedy result.  Apparently lots of people, there was mention of that mysterious 30%, have this perfectly harmless condition.  So join the club -is there a club somewhere out there in cyber darkness?  The keratosis pilaris club? 

That little episode got me thinking that we are always looking for quick fixes and very often not getting them.  I had a bad head cold last week and the final stages of it are a ticklish cough which wakes me up at night.  So I researched cough mixtures for dry coughs and found two (from the same manufacturer) which said on the packaging that they were a powerful and instant relief.  One variety was the non-drowsy one and the other the won't-make-you-sleepy version.  I chose the latter but as for the effectiveness, I can only say that it doesn't appear to have done much good and I'm on the third day of dosage.  I had sort of expected that it would give "instant relief".  No quick fix, then.  As my mother used to say "nature must take its course".  I'll buy that, at least as far as the common cold is concerned.

So, I've still got a cough (although it is improving with or without the aid of a cough mixture) and I've still got my keratosis pilaris.  I'm getting the like that last name. Next time I'm stuck for conversation I'll find a way to bring it into the conversation. 

 

Holidays and failed holiday pics

I'm just back from Germany where I had some quality time with my daughter and two grandchildren. We spent a week in a holiday park in the Eifel.  There is an extinct volcano here and the country is rich in thickly wooded forests and deep valleys.  It is very pastoral.  Here's an impression from my not-very-technical camera:

This was taken at a small wildlife park and those dots you can see are in fact big fat turkeys.  There were goats as well - loads of them - who came up to the enclosure looking for snacks (which you could buy from the shop, all healthy stuff).

We visited a falconry and watched the eagles, kestrels and owls being fed and learned a bit about them.  We drove through another park and had to negotiate scores of deer and wild pigs and a few donkeys as well.
Here's a picture of the falconry but as usual I missed the action bit where the eagles were taking off but maybe you get a feel for the atmosphere?

There were some lovely picturesque towns in the neighbourhood.  My favourite was Bad Muenstereifel where we spent the best part of a day.  It is a walled town and the old part - overlooked by a castle which  appears to be a restaurant nowadays -  is a pedestrian zone. It was a very hot day.  We sat next to this little stream and had our lunch.  The castle can just be seen at the top of the picture.

 Here's another shot of the town. 

All in all it was a very enjoyable week.  Ladal Holiday Park is Dutch-owned.  It is situated on the border of Luxembourg and Belgium so had a real international flair.  Very comfortable accommodation and very efficiently run with plenty for the kids to do.

Now I am back to grey reality - literally.  Today it is raining, it rained yesterday, and it is slowly getting chilly.  Which all means that I will not put my nose outside the door today.  Instead I will knuckle down to writing the second novel in my Sergeant Alan Murray crime series.  I'm about halfway through the first draft - in other words there is a load of work to be done.  I usually revise about five times before I feel I can publish.  If you like a cozy crime novel to while away the evenings, you could try the first novel in the series:  Death in a lonely Place:  Here's the U.S. link http://www.amazon.com/Death-Lonely-Place-P-B-Barry-ebook/dp/B00LSP1I2U  and the Amazon UK one:  http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B00LSP1I2U/
I write under the pen name P.B. Barry to distinguish from my other novels.

I'm off to make a cup of tea and then I really will get down to some writing.  I'll just have another look at my not-quite-perfect holidays pictures first, just to remind myself that two short weeks ago I was sweating in a hot sun with a blue sky overhead in the company of my daughter and two very lively grandkids.  Ahhh!