More Spain, we should be having more Spain, don’t you think?

So here’s the lads sketching in a church. I gave them books through which I, of course, wanted to encourage the obsessive transcription of every moment of every day.

Just this morning a friend and I were having coffee and reflecting that even with still-young children you look around and think, ‘But that’s not what I wanted to teach you…I haven’t taught you the things you need to know yet…don’t be nine, we haven’t finished with eight’.

But if you leave the space, you get your compensations, don’t you? It never occurred to me that they might like sketching.

From spain

And here’s the lads, map in hand, finding the way to our hotel in Burgos. Moments to make your heart sing indeed.

From spain

And you can never have enough Mortadelo y Filemon. A worthy use of your allowance even if you can’t understand a word of it.

From spain

Also, you see that chair in the window. At the end of the day (quite late in mid-summer, I think getting close to eleven o’clock), you can sit in that chair with a glass of Spanish red and watch the colours change over the sea.

From spain

And now I am going to sew a frock

I was re-reading my post on happiness, and as I was reading, it occurred to me that I have never been unhappy before.

Not like this. Not the way I am now.

I have had times of sadness and grief. I have been dissatisfied, unsatisfied, I have yearned. I’ve been stressed, I’ve been lonely, I’ve been scared. But I have never been unhappy. There is not a period in my life that I look back on and think, ‘Those were unhappy times’.

From which line of thinking, I have thought two thinks:
one, I’m bloody lucky;
two, I’m extraordinarily stupid if I don’t do something about the situation I currently find myself in. Why would anyone be unhappy if they didn’t need to be? And I don’t need to be – I am not a woman of unlimited means, but I certainly have middle class choices.

So then I made some decisions – some of which were simple, some of which were hard, some of which are selfish, some of which are selfless – and I feel much better now.

I would get eight hours sleep

Time would expand so that I am able, within the space of just one day, to dazzle my boys with cultural experiences which ignite lifelong passions; and laze on the lounge cuddling with them and stroking their still-soft skin as we take turns reading aloud from our well-thumbed books (we are now reading fluently in French, having mastered Spanish last summer and Arabic this term); and still have time to write in my journal and do two good hours on my new manuscript; and whip up a lasagne from scratch (including freshly made pasta sheets).

At the same time, I would have less need for this time, for the words would run from my pen, revealing perfectly formed sentences which linked one after another, to create, without revision, a lucid and riveting plot.

Advice dispensed freely

In an effort to reclaim the self-discipline I’m sure I must once have had, I have been doing that thing where you set your timer and just work at your assigned task until the timer rings.

And this is what I have learned:

the secret to making the trick with the timer work is not so much setting the timer for periods of work, but re-setting it for breaks.

Eid Mubarak

For the last month it has been the holy month of Ramadan. Now it is Eid al fitr. Eid started today. Ramadan and Eid, like Easter, start and end according to the cycle of the moon.

There is a moon sighting committee which met last night to determine that the Shawwal moon has been sighted and to declare the end of Ramadan and the beginning of Eid.

There are public holidays for Eid, but it has not been possible to set the exact days of the public holiday. If the committee did not sight the moon last night then Ramadan would have continued for another twenty four hours.

This article explains it better than I have done.

And you know what Australians are like when it comes to public holidays.