Perceptions! Ideas! Ways of doing things!

No village chaos this morning. Or at any rate, no more than normal chaos. I ran round and through the village at the time when people were taking their children to school. Even though the village itself is quite small, a large number of people still take their children to school by car. I suppose some of them live in more outlying places and others have jobs to go to and need to drop the children off quickly and make a fast getaway. Even so, there seem to be an awful lot of cars making their way from the school and through the village centre at around nine in the morning. All it needs to slow everything down is a delivery van outside the co-op, like this morning. Nowhere near as large as the truck that got stuck yesterday, it was still big enough to reduce the traffic to one lane. Faster on foot! 

I got home just in time to avoid the torrential rain that fell later. It hasn't kept that up all day but it has been rather dull and gloomy. It's probably a good job that some people over-decorate their houses with Christmas baubles. I was thinking about this as we were on the bus this afternoon, going past all the decorated houses. I can remember around 15 years ago, travelling to Southport by car to visit the family over there. We had the eldest, at that time the only, grandchild with us, then aged two and a half. We made a game of who could spot the next Christmas tree or set of Christmas lights. Now you would have to do the reverse and see who could spot a dark patch! 

It has to be said, though, that it makes the gloom more cheerful. I write this as a person who has put my Christmas ear-rings in today. Phil spotted them as we stood at the bus stop and harrumphed! The girl at the supermarket checkout loved them. I always used to wear them for the last week of term when I was teaching. I see no reason to change old habits if they raise a smile. Sharing a bit of pleasure is never a bad thing. 

Oversharing is a different matter. This is a new term I have come across for putting unnecessary details of your life on Facebook. You know the sort of thing: "Cleaned the toilet - boy was it horrid!" As if cleaning the toilet was such an unusual thing that you have to crow about it to all your virtual friends. Better to say nothing.

Scan pictures of a 12 week foetus almost classify as oversharing but I suppose it's not a bad way of letting your friends know you are expecting a happy event. And nowadays hospitals give a print of the first scan automatically (baby's first photo!) whereas in the past you were lucky if they let you look at the screen. How things change! 

Another thing that is changing, according to something I read recently, is the attitude towards underarm hair. Showing that you had hair in your armpits used to be pretty much universally frowned upon. Only really fierce women's libbers didn't get rid of it. Now it seems that the latest weird fashion fad is to have your head hair dyed an unusual colour, green, turquoise, pink or similar, and then to have your armpit hair dyed to match. Now I am a believer in being colour coordinated but that seems to me to be a step too far! Another kind of oversharing, in my opinion! 

Here's something else. George Monbiot, whom I enjoy reading as he usually makes a lot of sense, is trying to persuade us to change our meat-eating habits. He maintains that if we are to be able to feed everyone in the world, we should revert to the habits of yesteryear when people only ate meat about once a month. It would almost certainly be very difficult to persuade most people to do this. His suggested solution? School children should be taken, as part of the curriculum, on visits to factory farms - of all kind, not just chickens - and abattoirs to see what goes on. This would provide them with a reality to set against the storybook world of the kind of farms that hardly exists any more with a farmer caring for a range of animals, all of which he calls by name. 

It might work, at least to some extent. Our daughter is one of a quite large number of people I know who will not eat fish if it looks like fish. A nice anonymous fillet is one thing. A fish served up with its head and tail, looking at you and implying it might like to swim away, is something else again! 

In the meantime, Christmas approaches and I, for one, plan to cook that turkey and tuck into some fine sausages. Pigs in bacon, that's what our grandchildren will expect to see as well on the table. Now, there's a good gruesome name for a food item, if ever there was one!