playing tag around the world

so I dished out the letters for noel. . .

. . .seemed appropriate, and all the letters are in!!

N

O

E

L

a big thank you to Vicus, Mel, Shot and Dinahmow. . . and thank you Z, I really enjoyed this!

kind of a Tag

but not really

I begged to be included in the fun at Z's razorblade of life. . .

I quote: "You write about ten things you love that begin with your assigned letter, and post it on your blog.Then people leave comments on your post and you assign them letters and the cycle begins once more." (you know I didn't write that - too much punctuation!)

.

the lovely Z gave me the letter T. . .
.

let me think, ten things. . . (see, I've done three already) (four!) (I'm kidding); ok, in no particular order. . .
.

1. tea
as in a cup of

it's how I start my day
(first thing, every morning, before the coffee)

2. Twinings. . .
. . .English Breakfast with three sugars, please

3. toast

I like white bread toast or brown malted seeded bread toast hot and crispy straight out of the toaster and dripping with butter (sorry for the reminder, Mel)

. . .and toast art is kind of fun too!

4. toast (a different kind)

my favourite EVER clothing catalogue

AND the clothes in it. . .

AND the catalogue is a treat in itself. . .

AND they even make their own jam and marmalade. . .
(not difficult, if I can do it, but kinda cute that they go that far)

5. tangerines

like satsumas, they remind me of a crisp and cold Christmas morning, waking up as a child all excited and finding my stocking at the end of the bed - lumpy with chestnuts and a satsuma; of course tangerines are slightly more tricky to peel than satsumas - but I like them anyhow; and the word is kind of cool, TAN-GER-INE, and it's a great colour. . .

6. totem poles

I find totem poles fascinating,
and they also remind me of
one of my favourite places in the world -
the Vigeland Sculpture Park
in Oslo, Norway

















7. trees

I find trees fascinating too - spring, summer, autumn and winter - they have really cool bark and things like acorns. . .

8. truly
as in Truly, Madly, Deeply

not as in Truly Scrumptious Sally Ann Howes *shudder* should really have not been cast for that role - it ought to have been Julie Andrews IMHO. . .

which bring us nicely to
the von Trapp children:
.

I was brought up in a house with a book written by Maria vT herveryself about life with the children and the Captain. . . I own that book now (scary, huh)
.

9. tunes
I don't need to add to that, do I?

.
10. universal translators

I love the idea of a Babel Fish and just wish I had one that I could stick in my ear when I needed to. . .

and, while we're on science fiction. . .

The Tardis
(explanation here for the uninitiated!)

Time And Relative Dimension(s) In Space. . .
.
. . .and Time Lords,
my favourite of whom has to be the current one. . .
David Tennant
*swoon*
(and oh! yet another T)

.
and I'll finish with

11. the things written in between the lines. . .

. . .cos there are lots
and they appear often,
but they are almost invisible
so you probably don't notice them. . .

the power of ten

you have ten minutes to describe what rocks your boat

I turn all the lights off and shine a torch thru a stream of water than I am pouring from a bottle into a wide glass dish

the bottle contains "mineral water" from a lake I once swam in in Norway. . .


the torch is a wind-up torch, based on the wind-up radio designed by a man I met in my early twenties. . .


I talk about kissing and gut-reaction, my nervousness at public speaking. . .

. . .it doesn't take ten minutes

. . .on the desk in front of me are the thoughts that took me on the journey that has taken me to my destination. . .

my internal process, if you will

ten to the power of ten = 91

I have ten shoeboxes with lids, nine covered/lined, inside and out, in a wrapping paper, a poster, or collages of images that I like (taken from newspapers and magazines), and one in brown paper (I like ordinary brown packing paper):

one has ten items from my childhood: a little knitted rabbit thing that I now keep safe in my knicker drawer, a Rubik's cube(my little brother was on the radio, at the age of nine, as he was one of the fastest children in London at solving the cube at the time) (I could never get beyond the first layer), two of my favourite childhood books

(one Ladybird book - as above - and a picture story - as below),
.
a strip of satin ribbon (I used to have a "blankie" with a ribboned edge and I'd go to sleep cuddling it and rubbing the soft shiny ribbon on my upper lip), a Sherbert Dip-Dab
.
(or possibly a Sherbert Fountain) (or maybe a packet of Love Hearts), a typed up Shakespeare sonnet (number 18), one of the badges I used to wear on my school blazer, a small wooden sheep with well worn edges, a postcard of a dandelion clock

one has ten photos of places I've been and loved, from my holiday/travel albums and scrap-books



one is filled with ten large biscuits: animal shaped - I have some great biscuit cutters in the shapes of animals, based on Noah's Ark (I like the idea of the ark), made to a recipe of my mother's, Norwegian, called "pepperkaka" (quite spicy: nutmeg and cinnamon and ginger; very crunchy) which people can take out and eat

(yes, I have a polar bear cookie cutter!); or - alternatively ten cupcakes, each with a different Love Heart stuck on the icing (I've been doing these for over ten years, but they seem to be all the rage now, so perhaps I've gone with the animal biscuits after all)


one contains ten small plain notebooks that I've made/bound myself (that people could take if they wanted)


one contains ten small bottles/containers/items comprising my favourite smells/tastes: vanilla (essence - the sort bottled sort that you buy for cooking), coconut (in the form of Hawaiian Tropic sun tan oil!), lemon, freshly ground coffee, a proper French baguette, rosemary (fresh) (or maybe basil?), lavender (flowers), cob-nuts, a pomegranate, a bar of soap (my current favourite being UMI's mulberry and pink pepper)

one contains CDs of ten pieces of music I like (I don't have my vinyl anymore, more's the pity) - it includes versions of the first three 7" singles I ever bought and also the Penguin Cafe Orchestra's Bean Fields (my best piece of "cheering up" music) and also Cat Steven's The Boy With The Moon and Star

one contains ten ripped strips of plain paper with words describing ten things that made me sad. . .

one contains ten items with textures that I enjoy: lichen on tree bark, velvet, coarse linen, the insides of a passion fruit, ordinary packing string, a well worn wooden letterpress letter, barnacles on a mussel shell, sand from my favourite Irish beach (it's the kind made from shards of shells, and the container also includes some shells and pieces of coral from the same beach),
.
regular earth (from a well dug garden), a bunch of feathers tied together with some linen thread, and some rusty metal
.

one contain tens of my favorite postcards from my collection of images (a Hepworth image being my current favourite) one is empty (I like space, and "holes" - especially when an absence shows one what is present) (this box is the brown paper box) but when you lift the lid a mobile would appear (it's attached to the inside of the lid)


I pass the boxes around, with a clip from Rimsky-Korsakov's Sheherazade playing in the background, everyone has a chance to look in at least a couple of the boxes or perhaps more, and I talk about how nervous I am at talking (have had training, in my corporate days, and understand the theory, from my university days, but still dislike public speaking), read from a book I once made about being nervous about making mistakes, talk briefly about the importance of kissing and "gut reaction". . .

and I do not worry about finishing before the allotted time is up. . .