tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post7006308248867369112..comments2023-06-28T22:58:28.247+10:00Comments on Sixth In Line: When pies were sixpence and we used to swim in damsElisabethhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comBlogger40125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-66230129424997656382011-08-15T20:48:05.466+10:002011-08-15T20:48:05.466+10:00Sorry for the late response here, TaraDharma. You...Sorry for the late response here, TaraDharma. Your mother's point of pride in no daughters with embarrassing pregnancies out of wedlock was also one of my mother's aims. <br /><br />How times have changed. She wouldn't bat an eyelid today, as long as the parents love one another. <br /><br />I wonder how much my children spare me their 'illicit' activities as I too spare my mother, and vice versa.<br /><br />Thanks, TaraDharma.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-24473145749119526332011-08-05T22:39:04.320+10:002011-08-05T22:39:04.320+10:00My mother's point of pride is that not one of ...My mother's point of pride is that not one of us 3 girls had a baby out of wedlock. No embarrassing teenage pregnancies....<br />She already knows her girls took illicit drugs and still turned out to be responsible citizens. She just prefers not to know the details...and I'll spare her my acid-trip ramblings.Taradharmahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17665801586196931603noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-38032216853005446482011-07-25T20:56:20.189+10:002011-07-25T20:56:20.189+10:00I can understand your desire to buy online, Kath. ...I can understand your desire to buy online, Kath. It must be very hard to be stuck without daily necessities.<br /><br />I haven't been busy blogging so much of late but I think of you often, you and your family living the new life in Geneva. <br /><br />It must be quite an adjustment. It seems so far away from inner city Melbourne, you and your litter collecting duties and your desires to end your daughter to the local high school. How things change.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-63088357009957737492011-07-24T22:00:39.947+10:002011-07-24T22:00:39.947+10:00The old-fashioned way of shopping still seems pret...The old-fashioned way of shopping still seems pretty common here in Geneva, Elisabeth. Supermarkets are here too, of course, but apartments tend to be small with very little storage and locals shop every day for what they need that day and like to visit the baker, the butcher, the greengrocer, the wine store.<br /><br />As for me, with no car and a long walk to the supermarket with a nanna cart I am seriously thinking about ordering my groceries online. Living on tinned tomatoes, UHF milk and potatoes makes for a heavy load.<br /><br />As for the drug issue it's a theme with my mother too. That and the fact that we all got a 'good education'.Kath Locketthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09677312773827236567noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-37947162266277636782011-07-23T09:31:24.530+10:002011-07-23T09:31:24.530+10:00How extraordinary, Olga. To not know sufficiently...How extraordinary, Olga. To not know sufficiently far ahead what you will be doing in six months time such that you cannot set a dental appointment surprises me.<br /><br />And yet if I think on it I recognize that when we make such appointments we rely heavily on things maintaining a certain stability. <br /><br />The truth is we can never be certain of what might intervene.<br /><br />Thanks Olga.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-27884901717209873492011-07-22T00:28:13.358+10:002011-07-22T00:28:13.358+10:00I had experienced so many changes in my life back...I had experienced so many changes in my life back in Russia, that I created a theory that nothing is stable, and nothing is forever. When I say to my Russian friends that my dentist appointment booked ahead of six months, they were asking - How would you know you would be available at that time?Olgahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10652566920769043373noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-61629288959806611742011-07-21T08:11:30.369+10:002011-07-21T08:11:30.369+10:00Back in the mud sounds like a wonderful place to b...Back in the mud sounds like a wonderful place to be, Young at Heart. Amazing how the cycle moves round. It reminds me of the bread making process. How it started off grainy then they took the grain out to make white refined bread then they added fibre in white bread to cater to tastes for the refined and now they go back to grains. We need more lumpy produce, I'd say. <br /><br />Thanks Young at Heart.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-29355629091296245272011-07-21T00:30:06.523+10:002011-07-21T00:30:06.523+10:00my dad....like most of my friends parents...grew l...my dad....like most of my friends parents...grew lettuces and beans and cabbages in out tiny garden when i was growing up...when I left home we none of us did any gardening let alone grow produce, we did weekly shops from large supermarkets and then we started having it delivered .....but now we're back in the mud all growing tomatoes and rocket and corriander...I myself have pots of chilli and basil and beans...hey-ho!!Young at Hearthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/07585882466695145340noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-35962800811969314382011-07-20T22:17:03.228+10:002011-07-20T22:17:03.228+10:00Nothing like a Latin quote, Rob-bear to remind us ...Nothing like a Latin quote, Rob-bear to remind us pf the passage of time. I learnt Latin at school and even for a year at university, but my ability to translate today flags. <br /><br />And yes, Bob Dylan continues to get it right - the times keep a'changin.<br /><br />Thanks Rob-bear.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-56263308419598259222011-07-20T01:23:08.421+10:002011-07-20T01:23:08.421+10:00Bob Dylan had it right: "The times they are a...Bob Dylan had it right: "The times they are a-changing."<br />Pies for sixpence and swimming in dams. The former, uneconomical; the latter, too dangerous. At least by today's standards. Sigh.<br />I remember growing up in an era of little shops. A few years ago, I was back where I had grown up. Our modest little home had been torn down and replaced by a castle. Most of the little stores I knew were gone. <br />Sic transit gloria mundi.Rob-bearhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/00171692478879522588noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-52764355191976437152011-07-19T21:35:15.437+10:002011-07-19T21:35:15.437+10:00Ah Vagabond, so our grandsons were born on the sam...Ah Vagabond, so our grandsons were born on the same day. What synchronicity. <br /><br />They will be creatures of the same generation, global cousins, even on opposite sides of the world.<br /><br />I wonder what the world will look like for them when they become men.<br /><br />Thanks, Vagabond.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-31848588864692782772011-07-19T21:32:44.173+10:002011-07-19T21:32:44.173+10:00I agree with you, Cheshire Wife, if by 'prefer...I agree with you, Cheshire Wife, if by 'preference for boys' you mean a sort of patriotism. It's still there, even in western societies post feminism, but still <br />it's shifting. <br /><br />It's lovely to see you here and thanks, Cheshire Wife.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-82499438524696812252011-07-19T21:29:57.863+10:002011-07-19T21:29:57.863+10:00And today, Aguja, the grocer's question about ...And today, Aguja, the grocer's question about whether that will be all might be interpreted as 'up-selling'. <br /><br />Yes, I agree: with each new generation, we reverberate uncomfortably to change.<br />Thanks Aguja.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-44203509886932568412011-07-19T21:27:49.510+10:002011-07-19T21:27:49.510+10:00Thanks, Claire.
I came, I saw and I voted.
I...Thanks, Claire. <br /><br />I came, I saw and I voted. <br /><br />I hope your film wins, if not that it does well. I'm sure it will. <br /><br />It's inspiring. I managed to register my vote in the nick of time.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-27050851278897679072011-07-19T20:26:52.563+10:002011-07-19T20:26:52.563+10:00I agree, Kirk, we love to categorise and to order....I agree, Kirk, we love to categorise and to order. It seems to start young. I can dstill see my youngest dughter as a three year old ordering the buttons in a friends button box into colours and size. <br /><br />As for my mother's pride at our drug free state, I agree, she must have been influenced by the sixties counter culture and, like you, I imagine that alcohol is a less serious evil than illicit substances, but there are others who would disagree.<br /><br />I still enjoy wine, so perhaps it's my way of rationalising my weakness.<br /><br />Thanks, Kirk.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-66528356095601814132011-07-19T20:18:22.683+10:002011-07-19T20:18:22.683+10:00From the time I turned forty, Anthony, I noticed t...From the time I turned forty, Anthony, I noticed this different pattern of life to which you refer. <br /><br />Before then, my interests tended to be more with the here and now. But by the time I hit forty I found myself reading the obituaries. <br /><br />Thanks, Anthony.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-88962571052209366192011-07-19T20:16:05.748+10:002011-07-19T20:16:05.748+10:00Gender and change seem to be interlinked, Steven, ...Gender and change seem to be interlinked, Steven, as you imply. Although they are both the great inexorables: change is inevitable and gender differences are a biological fact, this is not so surprising. <br /><br />It helps for these things to proceed in a fluid-like manner, though I suppose bumps and catastrophes are also inevitable, judging by the past.<br /><br />Thanks, Steven.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-78823412870529414512011-07-19T13:38:03.504+10:002011-07-19T13:38:03.504+10:00Your mother had 9 children? So you have 8 brother...Your mother had 9 children? So you have 8 brother and sisters – such a large family. I have none. I did get another grandson last Wednesday, 13 July. He is my 3rd grandson; the others are 4 and 2 years old. In May I went to France and visited my cousin. She lives about 45 minutes south of Paris. In that little town there are still butchers, bakers, bookstores, flower shops and twice a week a market on the market place. This has not changed since I was a child.Vagabondehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/10774109692564954568noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-7388553054640853722011-07-19T01:16:06.402+10:002011-07-19T01:16:06.402+10:00Thank you for visiting my blog.
It is interesting...Thank you for visiting my blog.<br /><br />It is interesting that the older generation see things differently. However, something that does not change is the preference for boys.cheshire wifehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/13944869219641386387noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-64167980668052616452011-07-18T22:36:48.250+10:002011-07-18T22:36:48.250+10:00Some of us get more open minded as we age, Marja a...Some of us get more open minded as we age, Marja and some of us more rigid. You sound like one of the more open minded soups.<br /><br />That's not surprising I suppose, given your origins. Still I find the Dutch such an odd mixture of progressive attitudes on the one hand and conservatism on the other. <br /><br />Thanks Marja.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-23202118875046883202011-07-18T22:33:47.923+10:002011-07-18T22:33:47.923+10:00I get the feeling, Jim, from your comments online ...I get the feeling, Jim, from your comments online that you might be a bit of a so-called SNAG- sensitive new age man. I dislike the term but it sometimes works to describe a gentle, thoughtful and intelligent soul who is not into all that machismo type of stuff.<br /><br />On the other hand you seem aggressive enough, on the page at least, and therefore you don't quite fit the category for me. <br /><br />I often think of Ursula Le Guin's comments on what she one described as father tongue and mother tongue. I'll quote myself and LeGuin from elsewhere here to save myself the effort of paraphrasing. Forgive me if I've said it before but to me it's important.<br /><br />'Father tongue, the language of the academies, is as Ursula Le Guin writes, the language of public discourse, the language of power, the language of the outside world. Such a voice is essential to the development of technologies, science and the humanities. It presupposes that a common language can be spoken in laboratories, in business and governments everywhere. And ‘those who don’t know it or won’t speak it are silent, or silenced, or unheard’ (LeGuin, 1992, p.148). Mother tongue, on the other hand is ‘always on the verge of silence, often on the verge of song’ (p. 153). It is ‘an excellent dialect,’ Le Guin writes. Father tongue is ‘The language of thought that seeks objectivity’ (p. 148). Our public systems, the political and legal, our education and culture depend on it. Its ‘essential gesture… is not reasoning but distancing- making a gap, a space between the subject or self and the object or other’ (p. 148). It can be ‘immensely noble and indispensably useful, this tongue, but when it claims a privileged relationship to reality, it becomes dangerous and potentially destructive’ (p. 149). It is the voice that suppresses the mother tongue. <br /><br />Mother tongue the language that greets us at birth reminds us that we are human. The mother tongue, that we unlearn in the academies, is conversational and inclusive, the language of stories, ‘inaccurate, unclear, coarse, limited’ – mother tongue breaks down dichotomy and refuses splits. ‘It flies from the mouth on the breath that is our life and is gone like the out breath, utterly gone and yet returning, repeated, the breath the same again always, everywhere, and we all know it by heart’ (p. 149). <br /><br />Mother tongue is the language of story telling, the language of children, the language of women. Mothers speak and teach it to their children as they in turn learned it from their mothers. Mother tongue is binding. It does not contradict but seeks to affirm. It repeats, it explores in its very subjectivity the nature of our lives but it is not generally an acknowledged language. It is a language reserved for playful times, chaotic times or desperate times when life cannot be taken too seriously. It is the language we meet in infancy on our mother’s lap. It is the language that migrants hold closest to their hearts, especially on arrival in a new country. <br /><br />Neither mother tongue nor father tongue alone are enough. We need to integrate both voices into what Le Guin calls our third language – ‘native tongue’, which involves ‘a marriage of the public discourse and the private experience’ (p. 155). Le Guin wrote her paper in 1986 as a plea to a group of young women from Bryn Mawr University to value their perceptions and their own voices and not to adhere to the privileging of father tongue, as it exists in literary canons. These days the English language itself tends to be privileged above all other languages, another factor which can all too easily be ignored in our efforts to deal with those from migrant backgrounds.' <br /><br />I'm interested in what you write here about your daughter's choice of partner. It reminds me of the fact that my mother's second husband was never the one I'd have chosen for her. How funny it is that the one's we love should choose partners we'd never choose.<br /><br />Thanks Jim.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-33776680187023970812011-07-18T22:24:09.460+10:002011-07-18T22:24:09.460+10:00....... and the grocer would ask such as, "Do.......... and the grocer would ask such as, "Do you neeed 'such and such' this week?" just in case it had been forgotten on the shopping list. I did enjoy that sort of shopping, but there are still some shops here that are small and family owned, so I am not totally deprived.<br /><br />Do you think that each generation, as it ages, both welcomes and is terrified by changes in life style and communication that occur?agujahttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15857809123531088629noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-35501162166803723062011-07-18T22:21:31.957+10:002011-07-18T22:21:31.957+10:00I loved the fish and chips you ate from the paper,...I loved the fish and chips you ate from the paper, River and can still see the stream blowing off the top. <br /><br />Your memories are so much like mine, very Australian in the days of pounds, shillings and pence.<br /><br />Thanks, River.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-47371702495687774092011-07-18T22:18:40.029+10:002011-07-18T22:18:40.029+10:00I'm not sure about everyone calling a spade a ...I'm not sure about everyone calling a spade a spade in the 50s and 60s, Windsmoke. Sure some things were more clear cut apparently, but I suspect there might have been other obscure things. It depended perhaps on the family you grew up in. <br /><br /> One example comes to mind from my family, where it was wrong, though we were never told as much outrightly, to utter the word pregnant. Our mother wasn't pregnant, no, she was 'expecting'. <br /><br />Euphemisms abounded as much in those days as they do today, different euphemisms perhaps but nevertheless potent. <br /><br />Thanks, Windsmoke.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-28133718.post-31394975806619295382011-07-18T22:13:36.630+10:002011-07-18T22:13:36.630+10:00Greetings to you Robert, from across the date line...Greetings to you Robert, from across the date line. <br /><br />We also had our milk and bread delivered when I was a child. There's a new service that has spring up here in Melbourne called 'Aussie Farmers' which also delivers milk and bread and much more besides to your door. It's designed to encourage the purchase of local foodstuffs. A great initiative. <br /><br />Thanks Robert.Elisabethhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04015624747225433940noreply@blogger.com