“I’ll do that when I have time” – Day 9 project

Before

It’s 11.01 am. I am definitely getting later with my start times, though in my defence I’m still getting up at 7 am and doing chores, walks and a lot of what-on-earth-did-I-do-in-that-last-hour stuff, all probably very useful.

For this project, I have made an effort to create a comfortable environment before starting my project day. I really appreciated having done that for my spa day and the extra effort to create a good environment makes far more difference than I maybe appreciated in my BC (before coronavirus) life.

I have always enjoyed magazines, proper paper magazines, and, learned from my mum, have always written down things of interest or torn out pages for future reference. In the past few years, I don’t feel I’ve always got around to reading the magazines I’ve bought and I have this weird thing about not wanting to read them once they’ve been around for a few days, as if they were out of date thus irrelevant.

The box in the photo is full of magazines which I haven’t finished reading. I didn’t buy all of them. For example, I know there’s a barely flicked-through Harper’s Bazaar from February that was a freebie from my last overseas trip in mid-February.

So, instead of writing notes or ideas in one of my many notepads, I will summarise below things I found interesting or particularly nice or whatever.

After

It’s 7.10 pm, or thereabouts; I kept getting distracted. It surprises me to say that today’s project was overall a failure in terms of magazines read and recycled and commitment to the specific project of reading. Don’t worry, I wasn’t distracted by allowing Chris to butcher any more chunks of my hair in the name of improvement and I didn’t try to make ravioli again. I have managed to read quite a lot, but I realise that that many magazines to get through is the equivalent of a few novels. But there have been some useful revelations and snippets of information, which I will share.

1. Sleep is good for immunity as sleep = melatonin = new immune cells. So I thought it good to give in to the sleepiness caused by lying practically horizontally within a huge beanbag in the sun. My immunity has been boosted no end. I highly recommend the reading-napping pattern to increase your health and wellbeing. This is learning in action.

2. As of 2021, McDonald’s will no longer give away plastic toys in Happy Meals. In the UK alone, they amount to 3,000 tonnes of plastic. As a guide to tonnage, both kinds of elephant weigh between 2.5 and 7 tonnes, so let’s say an elephant is 4.75 tonnes. That is almost 632 elephants. I know elephants are heavy and 632 heavy grown-up Dumbos sounds like a lot so that’s about as close as I can get to comprehending 3,000 tonnes of plastic from small toys. Instead of the plastic, Happy Meals will come with a soft toy, book or paper-based toy, which I assume won’t be wrapped in plastic.

3. For the 2016 Chinese year of the monkey, Nike made limited edition trainers with the Chinese characters for “getting rich”, Fa, and “good fortune arrives”, Fu, on the heels of the trainers. Turns out Fa and Fu together means “getting fat”. I do love a good bad translation.

4. In China, digital influencers are KOLs (Key Opinion Leaders) and they are a huge industry. More than 70% of China’s Generation Z favour shopping via social media (around 44% being the global average) and posts and videos have links to shops to make the purchases. KOLs are not legally obliged to say they’ve been paid to promote a product, which doesn’t sit comfortably with me. Anyway, Becky Li, one the most famous and successful KOLs, sold 100 Mini Cooper Countryman cars (c£31,000 each) on her WeChat store in five minutes. Five minutes. I am now planning to spend a day working on my KOL potential*, so let me know if you have anything I can sell and we can all make our fortune. (*Yeah, right)

5. There is a place in the world where I would love to be right now, Casas No Areia, down the coast from Lisbon, Portugal. There are four former fishermen’s huts, House No 1 being “mine”. The living room has sand on the floor, one of those pretentious-were-I-not-smitten-by-the-idea concepts, bringing the outdoor natural environment into your living space (see, I read the blurb). Inside it’s minimalist/contemporary/architect-designed/[insert middle-class-vibe adjective of choice] and I love it. There’s a small swimming pool, the lounge sand is heated in winter and it’s in the midst of an area with flamingos, vineyards and white sandy beaches where fish are caught (and, for my purposes and enjoyment, cooked and eaten).

6. Magazine-reading requires snacks. I have particularly enjoyed the what-if-all-crisps/chocolate/sweets-were-shopped-to-extinction method of shopping in Covid-19 times, so we have been well-stocked with emergency snack rations. I have well and truly rekindled my love for fruit pastilles. Oh, and original Pom Bear crisps. Today I have topped up my immunity levels, educated myself and contributed to the development of a new happy-diet regime centred predominantly on fruit-based and potato-based nutrients. This is a good day indeed.

7. Of particular use with our current bunker-mindset, Take One Tin by Lola Milne looks like a great cookbook with a focus on – well, I probably don’t need to spell it out. I found the book online and have seen a few sample recipes and, while green lentil fritter and lentil linguine with caraway cabbage don’t sound particularly appealing to me (lentils wreak havoc with my digestive system AKA they make me fart. A lot), the recipes actually sound really tasty when you read the ingredients and method. Chickpeas, spiced carrot and tahini sounds particularly good, though my relationship with chickpeas is akin to that with lentils. My one criticism of the concept is that for none of the three recipes I’ve seen do I have all the other ingredients (and neither, incidentally, do I have tins of lentils. Ever.), eg tahini, yoghurt, a jar of peppers. I’m a sucker for book covers though and this book has a cheery, book-shelf-feature cover.

8. I had never heard of Fan Ho (1931-2016) or knowingly seen any of his beautiful photographs, all taken with the Rolleiflex 3.5 series camera he bought when he was 18. Unlike modern single lens reflex cameras, his Rolleiflex had two lenses, one to serve as the viewfinder and one to actually take the picture, a slower, more cumbersome process, but one with mechanical simplicity and surely a more satisfying result. His photos of Hong Kong, mainly in the 1950s, are absolutely fascinating, and can be seen on the Fan Ho Trust website.

9. Apparently I shouldn’t leave home (to go to Svalbard, where polar bears outnumber human residents) without, among other things, £204 Prada sunglasses, a £790 pair of “Fendi at Matches” what-look-like flared jogging bottoms or £835 Prada snow boots, all in either black, white or a bit of both. Phew, panic over, that’s my Svalbard trip’s packing sorted.

10. I feel there should be ten things but by the afternoon I felt an increased need to boost my immune system. I lost my Fitbit today, possibly through the gaps of our balcony while struggling to turn round on the beanbag (it is/was a tiny pedometer that I had not returned to its wrist band after charging, due purely to laziness, and had just put in my narrow jean pocket) or, the way of many things in small trouser pockets, down the loo. This is to highlight a lesson learned, about the perils of a day lounging around. It’s been a tough day, but all in the name of a blog post so it counts as work. (Incidentally, I feel lost not being able to add a grinning emoji. Modern times, innit)

As far as recycling of paper clutter goes, I didn’t actually make it through as many magazines as I hoped. But hey ho, the pile has now changed shape, tantamount to a room reconfiguration. Progress, that.

Final project of the initial ten, probably tomorrow so I can appreciate a day off for Good Friday (like Friday will be much different to most other days in these so-called interesting times) and I shall be getting out paints and making a mess. I’m hoping today’s new snack regime can be adapted to suit project 10 and dull the reality of my limited painting skills.