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My Grandparents Kitchen

My grandmother used to have golden syrup in her larder, hanging on the white plastic coated storage rack that was screwed to the inside of the larder door. Mostly the larder door was left propped open with an old flat iron, so you could see the Heinz ketchup and home made picallilli (she made a particularly good picallili), the Worcester sauce and the jar of pickled onions, as you sat at the kitchen table.

If you were sitting to the right of the kitchen table you could see an assortment of mismatched crockery, cups and bowls, shoe cleaning brushes, and at the back, tiny tins of baked beans and big ones of plum tomatoes,  and normal sized tins of vegetable and mushroom soup.  Underneath the little shelves that housed the tins was a blue plastic washing up bowl with a few onions, some in, some out of the yellow string bag they came home from the expensive little village supermarket in.

There was much more to the left in the awkward triangular shape under the stairs, but you couldn’t see under there from your seat at the kitchen table.  You could see the shelf above the larder door which held an ugly china teapot of graceless modern lines, gazed with metallic silver which was wearing off in places. Beside the teapot sat a serving bowl, squat and shapely with little handles, like a flattened Greek urn, in white and reddish brown with flecks of faded gilt. A plain white teapot completed the trio, a large cylindrical one with neat vertical ridges and grooves.

There were two fridges under the high shallow wooden wall cupboard.  A waist high bulbous old green one with a big handle that pulled out with a clunk, and a chest high sleek white one with a small freezer at the top with a door of its own.  On the top of the fridges were biscuit and cracker tins, big black keys, pencils and brittle yellow notepads, rubber bands and aspirin value packs and a bottle of Brufen.  There was a battered old maroon spectacle case and a whicker letter rack, letters crammed in and fanning over the top.  There was always a pile of glossy advertising pamphlets and flyers on top of the fridges, of the sort that were best put straight into the tiny pedal bin.

My grandmother never lined the pedal bin with a used plastic bag, nor with a specially designed plastic bin liner. The bin was so small that the flip top lid was often gaping, resting on a mound of cauliflower greens and soup tins.  Behind the pedal bin, but on the outer aspect of the kitchen wall, was the big black dustbin with the rubbery lid. More often than not, the lid was thrust upwards. If Thursday when the dustbin men came was several days away, you’d wish you hadn’t put those newspapers in, or those old shoes!  You stood in the softly drizzling rain in your slippers, the rubbery sheild of a lid in your left hand and the overflowing pedal bin in the other.  The contents of the pedal bin are not going to fit into the dustbin.  You sigh, put the pedal bin and the dustbin lid down, and roll up your sleeves ~ carefully, because you’ve poked your fingers into a porridge covered teabag.  You grab the sides of the protruding black sack and heave. All being well,  the contents should settle and you should have several inches more of plastic bag above the rim of the dustbin.  Unless of course it’s a poor quality plastic bag in which case your fingernail will go through and a horizontal slash will appear just below rubbish level.  Eventually you upend the pedal bin and scrape the cigarette ash covered potato peelings into the dustbin with your fingers. By now the fibres of your Shetland wool jumper are heavy with damp, just like the fuzzy split ends that curl round your pale frowning brow.  You may push back your hair with your forearm causing the moisture to bead and trickle down your face, as you turn the brass doorknob with your palm and wrist, tea leaves and cigarette ash clinging unpleasantly to your fingers.

The pedal bin needs rinsing in the kitchen sink, but the sink is full of mismatched saucepans, some new in shades of harvest gold, some battered and mishapen in stainless steel and aluminium, bits of mashed potato stuck to them like concrete pebbledash. There is a pale pink octagonally ovoid shallow serving dish and a little grey soup bowl with a handle like a miniature pottery saucepan decorated with kitcheny motifs.

The water for the coffee bubbles in a suacepan on the cream enamelled gas cooker. My grandmother never used a kettle, although I do remember a heavy flame orange one. The little pan for boiling water had a lip for easy pouring and a black plastic handle.

The steam has caused the condensation on the window over the sink to race in rivulets down to the fablon coated windowsill.  The yellow gingham curtains hang limply, the left one tucked behind the back of the cooker.

You put the pedal bin back it it’s place below the tea towel holder, and rinse your mucky fingers under the tap. The gas water heater on the wall above you roars into life just as you turn the tap off, and disappointed, subsides.

As you lean over to turn the cooker knob, the heat from the oven warms your arm. The gas oven was almost always on, the oven door open with clean tea towels and sometimes large white pants folded over it to air.

The oven wasn’t the only heat in my grandparents kitchen. There was an electric bar fire near the red formica table which used to burn your legs. The kitchen table was extended by means of a flap at each side. When I was small I wasn’t allowed to snap the hinge underneath shut as my grandmother had pinched the skin of her palm once.

The electric fire was plugged into the same socket as the radio. The radio took a minute or two to warm up when you switched it on, a bulky thing with sharp seventies edges and a reddish wood effect veneer and big knobs.  The light for my grandfathers workshop behind the garage (where he made dentures) was plugged into the same socket, which had a big heavy white three way adaptor in. The plug for the washing machine was hooked by means of a bit of string onto a nail or hook so that it didn’t fall down behing the washing machine when it wasn’t plugged in. Everything was unplugged when it wasn’t in use.  Sometimes there was a shrivelled Christmas cactus on top of the radio, but it couldn’t hide the adaptor and all those plugs.

Above the washing machine was a rhomboid wooden wall cupboard with sliding frsoted glass doors.  It was painted creamy gold, the colour of a nicotine stained pub ceiling, and held packets of Paxo stuffing and little jars of Bovril and Marmite, packets of Bisto and a jar of improbably red Maraschino cherries.

The nicotine coloured cupboard on the opposite wall had half a dozen large hooks screwed under the bottom shelf. A variety of mugs and cups hung there when they weren’t in the bowl waiting to be washed up. Those cupboard doors seemed flimsy for their size, and the thin beading on the edge of one door had come unstuck at the bottom and snapped back if you caught it with your sleeve.  The doors fastened with a little click in the centre, and the bottom of the door reverberated slightly as you yanked it open. There were always crumbs in the cupboard from the numerous packets of bisucits and crackers and there was always an Allbran packet with the top folded over to squeeze it onto the shelf. The sugar bowl was in there, sticky grains like sandpaper among the biscuit crumbs.

Half of one of the shelves was devoted to medicines: grave looking bottles of codeine linctus with no nonsense labels,  brown glass bottles with pills for rheumatism and angina.  Often you would find a large bottle, nearly full, of Brewers yeast or vitamin supplements with a dollar price tag, souvenirs of the familys last visit.  Above the medicines you’d find a faded packet of Napolitana pasta bows or a dusty packet of muesli. My grandparents never used them but she left them in the cupboard. Perhaps the dollar price tags and foreign foods reminded her of her children.

If there had been a recent visit you would see monstrous jars of Sanka and Maxwell House coffee in there too, but they always used the coffee.  They liked evaporated milk in their coffee, and used tins and tins of “evap” as they called it. They would pour it over tinned fruit, or rhubard crumble or stewed apples.

When there was just the two of them, or when I was there as well, they’d eat at the kitchen table. The table would be covered in a white embroidered cloth and the food served in mismatched serving dishes. The cutlery was large and bent, the knife handles in varying shades of bone. My grandfathers favourite fork had the tip of each prong bent in a different direction. He reckoned it was more efficient that way to spear his meat.  He often used to chew his meat and then spit it out onto the side of his plate. Not in company, of course.  I can understand why he did that, not having eaten meat myself for so long. You could chew a piece of meat for several hours and still have a stringy lump between your cheek and your teeth.

My grandfather would always have a bowl of Allbran with some Froment wheat germ for his breakfast, while reading the Daily Mail at the kitchen table.  He never worse slippers, always shoes indoors,  and always wore a tie.  He had lots of ties but always wore a plain maroon one.  His shirts were always cream and buttoned at throat and cuff, and eventually started wearing shirts without detachable collars. He wore greeny grey trousers and a cardigan of the same shade most of the time, the same colour as a damp English garden.

The same colour as the slimy green wooden clothes pegs that I threw away and replaced with mauve and fuschia pink plastic ones.  “They’re a bit bright for up the garden, aren’t they,” he said.  He was right. I should have ignored the green peg stains on the laundry.  An English garden should be shades of moss and grassy green, rich umber soil and brick red walls weighed down with an atmosphere of dense and heavy greyish white.

After Grandma died and Mop had retired (I always called him Mop, nobody knows why) at 10:00am precisely Mop would  have a cup of instant coffee with evap. At lunch, a bowl of tinned vegetable soup in his special soup bowl, and a couple of Krackawheat crackers and a lump of mature Cheddar. It was a job these days to find a tasty cheddar, he’d say.

When he was working, and he worked until well into his seventies, he took sandwiches. Every day he had the same sandwich filling: a combination of cheese, peanut butter and marmite.  It was an unusal choice for an otherwise conventional man.  He loved my grandmothers cooking, which wasn’t brilliant but was never awful. She was always generous with the cheese in cheese sauces and the meat in meat pies. She overcooked the cauliflower, but everyone did then. She made her gravy in the roasting pan, and made onion sauce, bread sauce, parsley sauce and chestnut stuffing.  She had her own version of cosmopolitan favourites, and called her quiche a quiche when everyone was still calling it egg and bacon pie. She used to like Auntie Daphne’s ratatouille, rather exotic back then, and pronounced it Ratta Twa.  She made pizza unlike any other, with shortcrust pastry smeared with tomato puree from a tube, sprinkled with oregano and great slabs of cheddar.

The roast was always overdone. “We like our meat well done” she’d say. She’d walk up the garden to get fresh mint for the mint sauce and would announce with pride “these runner beans are out of the garding”. They always grew vegetables at the top of the garden, behind the lawn and the silver birch tree.  There was always a pudding: a slice of almond tart (always with home made pastry), a crumble or stewed fruit. Topped with evap, of course.

There was something oddly off about the new store where Jerk was assigned.
It’d taken him a few weeks to start realize it, as he was trying to get accustomed to the new environment.
The more he looked, the more the feeling was getting reinforced. There was for one, this door to the other storey that was blocked by a sort of impregnable charm. Did he unwittingly blocked himself out of this place? Unlikely, as he was usually given the keys to all sorts of places.
This was definitely annoying as much as it was unusual.
It was like the neighbours, who’d seemed friendly enough, and despite that, there was something that was missing in their interactions.
A flaming giraffe for instance, he would have understood the appearance, but a slow smothering of unbridled creativity was a first.
Where did the fun go?
They’d said at the last Worldwide Wisdom (a.k.a. Woowoo) Convention that they were done with the Tranche of Truth, and now entering the Tranche of Rules.
Seems like someone was playing with the rules of the Reality Firewall, and that was not enjoyable…

That, and those cravings for granola cookies, dreams of roasted marshmallows over a firecamp and red balloons in an elevator… Where was it coming from?

“There it is” he pointed at the worn-out dusty book he’d found after turning around the whole library. “Techromancers appear at the seams between realities. They possess technologies to divine outcomes beyond conventional means of the place in which they appear — in a word, they are from the futures, always, whenever the period they were found in — a reason for which scholars have surmised they come from a unique convergence point of the infinite lines of time in a real projective space of time, hinting at the nature of an all-connected roundabout timeline. Although them popping in existence at awkward places is not unheard of, they tend to stay discrete for fear of the Timeline Riots Impeachment Police.

“T’isn’t that helpful now, is it” he said dusting a peanut from the floor before cracking the shell open. “And doesn’t tell us why Finnley is so emotional now. Or where is Roberto. If I were to worry, that would worry me more…”

In this first comment I will try and collate the information from our discussions. It will be quite rough and may not be accurate as we were just brainstorming.

You might like to use it as a resource to start comments for each character.

Intents:
FP: how not to be detached, as opposed to detaching
EP : Importance, tradition, transmission, life and death
TP : playful spontaneity
JP : I need to explore a strong base, something you can count on in your life and that will nourrish and support you

Starting point : a family member has gone missing / disappearance / mysterious inheritance
Someone turns up with a letter about mysterious inheritance?
That someone is in cold terms with the family and has been for years.
Strong possibility of a ghost. male. tied up with the inheritance mystery. Ghost is either assisting or hindering the search for the mysterious inheritance.
Location : Australia small town. Possibly called Crowshollow. Mining town
Family run a Bed and Breakfast called the Flying Fish Inn. There is room for 5 guests at any one time but it is never full. The family are short of money. Tendency in the family to develop unconventional powers, possibly witchy stuff.

MacGuffin (is this the family surname??) Oh no wait, on further study I see it is a reference to the inheritance. It could be the family surname though. they need one.
A man is riding on a train when a second gentleman gets on and sits down across from him. The first man notices the second is holding an oddly shaped package.
“What is that?” the first man asks.
“A MacGuffin, a tool used to hunt lions in the Scottish highlands.”
“But there are no lions in the Scottish highlands,” says the first man.
“Well then,” says the other, “That’s no MacGuffin”.

Family members : boy twins from jib, a girl from Eric, a matriach granny, twin girls 17, aunt Idle, father ? mother ?ghost?

mother and father have both gone missing at some stage?. Mother is called Absinthia apparently.

Tracy: The female twins are called Clove and Corrie. twins born in 2000 for easy reference, so if its concurent timeframe they are 14. Clove is frustrated with ghost town life, and is uncooperative and moody, has violent bursts of anger, but can be very focused when something attracts her interest. Does not take kindly to criticism.

Corrie on the other hand is the one who will acqueisce to keep the peace, which doesnt always do herself a favour, she often agrees to things just to be pleasing and then regrets it.
They are interested in boys, although it may be an online crush or an infatuation with a character not present. I bet they do all kind of mischiefs to elude the chaperoning of the not-so-cleveraunt.
Clove resent the parents absence, Corrie tried to buffer that resentment but is filled with curiosity about them

Eric: (Prune??) the young girl is bored, because her parents were always arguing, and she’s so smart nobody ever gets her, and she felt abandoned by her careless mother the most, so she builds that facade of carelessness. Prune is bored by the inheritance but interested by the tramp.

Tracy: Aunt Idle. Paternal Aunt. Aunt never married but many relationships
born 1970. she is very tall and thin and is prematurely grey which she wears in dreadlocks

The impending strategy and budget review was now quickly upon them.

The much questioned old new authority of the Surge Team had decided all the countries had to join for that week long first round of strategy plan and as Long Poon was too much of a reminder of work (they said, but many suspected too much of a reminder of Ed Steam’s empire), Madam Li had graciously offered to host the venue in Shangpoon, where they had managed to corner 15,000 floating piglets and her services were still probably needed.

All the thirteen chief operatives were busy setting things in order, and delegating current tasks during their business trip. Some of them were still hopelessly fumbling in spreadsheets and slides —a inane exercise in style they thought, but still…

“I can’t stand it!” Cornella almost exploded in front of her computer, now returned to decent level of cleanliness since Aqua’s return. She was sick of this old ageing alzheimering authority. Not that she missed Ed too much now. He was a pig —and gawd, this waxed mustache from another epoch… A pig they all liked because they didn’t know better at the time and his charisma covered for all the tiny slips of behaviour or even judgement. She’d seen that same feeling when the ceremony was held for his ashes spreading; most of the tears shed there had looked a bit contrived.

The mission to replace the pope with an alien-reconfigured Jesuit was a success, thanks to clever team work and her stellar delicate planning skills. A plan hatched before Ed’s demise, but that the old guys had been glad to call theirs. That was the waking call for her. If they could get rid so easily of the papacy, she would blow that budget convention from inside.
That required thorough planning though, and a bit of luck. Most of the chick would gladly be on board with this.
That’s when the mysterious vanishing dog legs cabinet came back to her attention.

January 21 ^st, 2010

About Worlds creating and dreamwalking

Has it occurred to you that your current technologies [such as social websites] are more than a little reflection of what you are doing as essence.
It is more indeed, and very useful as an analogy.
You have, for one, certainly noticed how different the “feel” of certain of these “sites” is, even when you are most of the time surrounded by the same set of friends and relationships? Yes you have.

Let us call these sites “dimensions”. Yes, it sounds familiar, doesn’t it. You all participate in some manner into these, and you all have persona of yourself in various of these. They compete for your attention, and some of them are more popular than others —these are the ones which offer you the most fulfilling experience, not necessarily the most pleasant.

In many ways, you connect as essence through these dimensions, which reveal aspects of your personalities, aspects that are not always visible or noticed in a direct interaction. When you congregate through these sites, you also start to realize, you have access to all of the others as essence, either through proxy of friends, or by direct interaction. You are all connected.

They all have different rules, or shall we say, conventions; you can do certain things, certain others you cannot (or not yet), and others, you can, but they are not well tolerated or accepted.
We let you do all the fine analogies, you mostly get the idea. The technical rules behind those sites are like your mass beliefs. They are helpful to maneuver your “avatar” —that focus of yourself inside the system— and without them, there would simply be no interest, no interaction, no experience.
Of course, these beliefs can be bent ; with applications, made by these people wanting to develop new systems plugged into the architecture, to offer new functions, or interactions with others of these sites or dimensions.

The creators of these dimensions are similar to dreamwalkers; some of them are bent on technology and development of the system at its core, but not all of them. Many in fact come with other intents, such as making the dimension a more beautiful, interactive, attractive or pleasant place. They all work together to bring the experience of the envisioned dimension to the other essences —and at some point, they also choose, themselves to interact, as a focus, fully part of their created dimension.

Having that in mind, would it not seem natural that you would integrate more functionalities to these sites, if they respond to the promises of keeping focuses interested? What you call “upgrades” are in fact a major part of the conception of these dimensions, and occur quite frequently, either driven by popular demand, or by technical need.
Such is the nature of the shift you are experiencing, which is above all a tremendous upgrade [of mass beliefs] towards a more integrated experience, without simply dropping the current dimension for another.

We would finally like you to notice also that even if the biggest of these dimensions are calling for a great part of your attention, you also are attracted daily to countless others, little sites and areas, the purpose of which is different, but not less significant to your whole self.

— “Dory?”
— “What, hon’?” a distracted Dory answered to young Becky
— “You’d better remove the magnets from the iron, or you’ll ruin another one…”
— “What are you talking about?!” Dory was perplexed, trying to find her way through the airport to Gate 57-¾, but only to find nothing but benches in between Gate 57 and 58.
— “Oh, never mind… It’s only a dream and you probably won’t remember it anyway.”

“There!” the suspicious bag lady of the Heathrow terminal had reappeared briefly just for Dory to spot her entering the restrooms.
Becky was already rolling the heavy bumper-stickers patched suitcase to follow her without question.

— “But why are you taking the suitcase to go to the bathroom, Beck’?”
— “What are you talking about Dory!” Becky was sometimes losing patience. “Can’t you see it’s the entrance for Gate 57-¾?!”
— “Uh?” A moment of clueless mystery on Dory’s face. “Oh…” Another mini-black hole on her face.

“Oh. Okay then. Let’s go…”

If there was something that her exotic life had taught Dory, it was to never question the moment. If the circumstances are here, if the impulse is there, then go for it. Explanations will follow. And in case they don’t, make them up as you roll and rock!

Becky meanwhile was rather surprised at how people, even her own step-mother, as tuned in ghostly stuff as she was, most of the time failed to see the things for what they really are. And if these big painted letters on the door “GATE 57 ¾” weren’t obvious enough, and people preferred to interpret them as restrooms, then… what else could be done? She sighed.
Later on, she would learn that it was a common, well documented trait in human consciousness; that people were sometimes psychologically (but not physically) blind to stuff outside of their current focus of attention, or simply blind to things too far off their beliefs; in other terms, it was a matter of energy reconfiguration. As long as it worked…

“Oh look at that… Yukailli Airlines counter is here! What bloody stupid idea to put a closet door at the entrance…”

After having made the departure arrangements at the counter, Dory came back to Becky who was looking outside at the planes.

— “Ain’t them beautiful?”
— “Yeah, and I suppose you’re seeing planes, aren’t you?”
— “Err, yes of course, what else, silly… Though now you ask me, they seem a bit weird… foggy or something”.

In fact, what Becky was seeing wasn’t conventional planes. It was more like “fly-boats”. Some sorts of hybrid ships made to fly with huge wings transparent and shiny like those of flies.

— “I hope they have crunchy coleslaw for meal, I’m starving” a contented and tired Dory said, when she collapsed into the comfortable seats.

“Okay,” Al started.
“At the essence of I Ching, is the notion that everything is mutable, and changes. Everything changes, except the law that says that everything changes.
“In many ways, the I Ching is like a book where the pages numbering change every time you start to read it. Not unlike our story composition.”

“I get that,” answered Tina, interested by what would come out.

“So,” Al continued, always disagreeably pondering, Tina would say. “usually, when people are drawing to read from the I Ching, they have six numbers that give an hexagram. And these numbers are carrying into them their potential change, which usually gives another hexagram to read.”
“In our stories, the entries have a fixed identity, which is given by the system; this is our starting point. For your comments, this is ’4-191-328’.
“But as everything evolves, our entries are given an order in the book; this order is changeable, and that’s what I will use for the second hexagram; in your case it’s ’2-151-223’.”
“If you say so…” Tina sighed, a bit lost.
“Oh, I’m inventing the rules as we speak,” Al said trying to reassure her somewhat.
“I don’t know if that makes me feel better” she said.

“Okay. Now, I need to create the hexagrams; hexagrams are defined by six straight or broken lines; zero or one, binary system. Here, Chinese usually use the convention that odd is straight, and even is broken… Ahaha, doesn’t seem to make sense, but odd is male, unbalanced into action, and is associated with single, straight things. Broken is paired, complete in reflection, unbalanced in passivity.”

“And I wonder when we actually start to hear something that makes sense?” whispered Tina, a bit crossly.

“Okay, the thing I see, is that I have trouble making one hexagram with seven numbers, ahaha”, Al laughed a bit embarrassed.

“Oh, then no point in wiggling like that” said Tina very sweetly, “Scrap any bit that bothers you”.

“Okay, anyway we can go deeper into them afterwards if needed; I’ll scrap the first number rather than the last, because you see, 2 and 4 are both even, and thus there is no mutation here.”

“So here we are, if we scrap the bottom one, we get…”