A Mass of Odds and Ends

One of the advantages of Skype is that I can use it when I’m away to apply maternal cross examining techniques, watching the teenagers turn away when I ask the question they don’t want to answer. There are therefore few surprises for me when I get back (I tutted disapprovingly to find the washing that I hung out a week ago still languishing on the line but I can’t pretend I was surprised to find it there) so it is fun to find the small intense world of our pets still functioning in its timeless way, Night still longing for Smokey to leave her alone in her dog bed, so that she can really spread herself out.

Three times a week I and other beautiful lissom young things exercise in a (mirror-free) gym run by a stoic German woman called Sabina who has survived many hardships in the last few months, a long dramatic story involving a doomed house (site of a brutal double murder four years ago - oh yes, everything happens here), rival gym instructors and the carabinieri. Another time, perhaps. Recently we noticed that the ages on our identity documents were beginning to intrude on our general flexibility and we needed some yoga. Twilight, intrigued in an offhand feline way by the idea of a species that can’t lick its navel with a leg thrown casually behind its ear, gave yoga a brief thought before shuddering with disgust at our clumsiness.

Tim likes eating alone. But it takes patience…

Night the dog wearies first…

Smokey tires quite quickly…

Finally even Twilight has had enough.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced “chicks send me high”) is a Professor of Psychology and architect of the notion of the flow of creativity (see him talking about it here). The principle is that if you become totally absorbed in an activity (be it creative, work, or sport) you can achieve a mental state of complete energized focus which enhances the success of the activity. My sons get into the flow when they play a complicated card game whilst watching their favourite comedy (despite my maternal desire that they do so whilst writing a paper on Shakespeare and playing a musical instrument) and our olive trees’ elegant forms show that Aldo is in the flow when he prunes; in contrast to the lopsided lemon trees, which are my responsibility. All around us every day the four cats are honing their relaxing skills, aiming to get into the flow, but three of them are wasting their time. Smokey is the undisputed champion.

Last week we went to a concert with Petra Magoni and Ferruccio Spinetti of Musica Nuda at Sant Elpidio del Mare. It was a full moon, the evening was hot and the music extraordinary. If you like jazz have a look at her site, www.petramagoni.

The last couple of days we’ve been in Perugia at Umbria Jazz, where the best concerts are to be enjoyed in the Giardini Carducci, with jazz from midday to midnight, people like the Allen Harris Quintet,

seen here in full flow. On returning home for a few days I’ve been surprised to find that our four cats have taken up going for walks, presumably missing my company so much that they feel they need to follow me wherever I go. 

He’s sure he put it in here earlier…

A friend of mine has a wonderful proportional equation theory about relationships which states that there is a finite quantity of anything you could choose to examine in each relationship. This explains why on hot summer afternoons I am forced into lying around on a sun lounger - because Aldo greedily uses up all the available energy in  our relationship dashing around the house and garden doing things. Here we have Tim and Twilight magnanimously accepting the resting role of the household leaving us free to work.