Distraction therapy: stress management (London)

When I’m stressed out about something, my mind dwells on the source of the stress, thinking about it over and over all day and all night, tossing and turning in bed.  

The mental anguish is bad enough, but when it starts messing up my biological system as well (bad tummy is the most common), I have to find a strategy for not suffering a breakdown, physical and/or mental.

Switch your focus:  onto other people

Some people do meditation.  I cannot sit still, so I go out instead: 

*to do people’s gardening, 

*to shop and cook for old ladies, 

*to massage bad backs/shoulders and migraines (for free).

Before I know it, another day has gone: that is another depression-free day, another day of not thinking about my stress.

Switch your focus:  onto a pleasurable activity

When I have to stay at home, I will do crossword puzzles, being the knowledge nerd that I am.  

They say that we shouldn’t stimulate the brain before bedtime.  

For a knowledge nerd like me, doing crossword puzzles is such an enjoyable thing — taking me into a completely different world, shutting out the outside world, learning things — that it relaxes me totally.

Switch your focus:  onto an external input

I leave BBC Radio 4 on all the time I’m home.  

It covers a wide and interesting range of topics — all very well-researched, reported / presented.  Some of them are so funny and clever (e.g., Just A Minute; The News Quiz; The Unbelievable Truth — just to name three off the top of my head) that I’m actually laughing out loud.

Distraction aside, the knowledge nerd in me gets a huge sense of achievement tapping into their work: weeks, if not months, of research, all potted up into (mostly) half-hour offerings.  Saves me a lot of time, as I’m a slow reader.

Radio 4 becomes World Service at 1am, so I can carry on being distracted throughout the night.  I place the radio by my pillow and have the volume at a level just loud enough to keep my brain distracted, but not so loud as to stop me from falling asleep (very often, if not always, within a few minutes).

   

What comes out of the set shuts out everything else in my brain.  I can even fall asleep in the middle of a fun programme like a quiz game.

I used to wake up in the middle of the night and immediately feel a sense of despair, feeling terribly alone in this world.  Waking up to a World Service programme distracts my brain enough so that it doesn’t even get a chance to be overcome by despondency.  I sometimes listen to it, which means I glean news and developments — political, cultural, scientific.  Often, though, I fall asleep again within no time at all.  

So it’s a very effective baby-sitter for my stressed-out brain, not only pushing out the horrible thoughts, but topping it up with knowledge too.  

More than two birds with the one stone, I’d say.

(London, 1996–present)

Mishearing things (UK)

A while ago, one of BBC Radio 4’s programmes talked about people mishearing song lyrics, with hilarious results.  Some of them even made more sense than the original.

This reminds me of two cases of people I knew who were involved in mishearing messages.

The first one happened at British Monomarks where I’d worked as a part-time telex operator throughout my first degree.  

Subscribers would ring in and dictate their telexes to us.  

One of them was a shoe company:  they had contracted a factory in Taiwan to make the shoes, which they would sell in the UK.  

On this particular occasion, the sender of the telex was placing an order for a batch of shoes, ending the message with a reminder to the factory to “make sure the shoes sit properly” (which was what my colleague heard down the phone line, and duly typed up and sent out).  

The people at the Taiwan end must’ve wondered about the way the British cultural perspective works:  getting their shoes to “sit properly”, whatever that means.  

Manager John Haste couldn’t get over it.  He went round saying and chuckling, for a number of days after that, “Make sure the shoes SIT properly!  Make sure the shoes SIT properly!”

The second story neatly confirms how easy it is indeed to get “s” and “f” wrong when heard down the phone line.

It had happened to an English chap doing Japanese during my first degree days at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London).

He’d originally got into Oxford University to do zoology.  He’d done his end-of-first-year exams.  That was the practice in those days:  if you can’t even pass the first year exams, you’re deemed to be unable to get through the rest of the next few years of the course.  

The telegram from his mother arrived in Greece where he was having his summer holiday.  It said: SAILED ALL SUBJECTS.  He happily carried on with his holiday.  

He got home and found out that it was meant to be:  FAILED ALL SUBJECTS.

(UK, late 1970s)

* For those who might need help: to sail through = to succeed easily

See also: https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2020/12/thinking-outside-box-london.html 

How much spookier can it get? (London)

Whenever I’m early for an appointment (e.g., teaching), I’d kill time by diving into the nearest charity shop and almost invariably emerge with an armful of books.  

One of those is Collected Ghost Stories by M.R. James (published 1931, and with stories set in the 1800s even).  It then got left sitting around for ages (like all such purchases) — easily ten years, I’d say.

I recently returned to my reading habit, in an effort to de-clutter my flat.  

First thing I saw on the front cover picture of the Ghost Stories book is a moonlit path winding through a forest, with a female figure on it, a bit like an illustration out of Red Riding Hood.  It looked just like the route I used to take from Pymble station back to my ex-schoolmate Wilson’s house in Sydney when I was visiting in 2002.  The female figure could well have been me.

Opened to the first story, and it was set near Auch (date: 1883).  Auch is this little town 6km from the French farm that I’d been going to since 1996.  Most French people, even those from the southern half of France, have not heard of Auch.

I finished reading the book in November last year.

BBC’s Radio 4 has a long-running soap opera, The Archers, broadcast since 1 January 1951, set in a farming community somewhere in the Midlands, England.  

In the episodes running up to Christmas just gone, one of the story lines included the character Jim Lloyd, a retired academic, being asked to put on a series of ghost-story telling performances in the attic of this grand manor house hotel as a form of Xmas entertainment, to earn some income for the hotel.  We're not actually treated to the full performances.

Three of those story-telling sessions ended up being used as separate 15-minute slots (not just in the soap opera) on Radio 4, at 6pm on Monday 30 Dec, Tuesday 31 Dec, and Wednesday 1 Jan.  I’d missed the Monday one — not that I was particularly trying to catch them.  

Was home before 6pm on Tuesday, New Year’s Eve, so decided to tune in.  Within the first two lines, I had identified it as one of the stories in that Collected Ghost Stories book.  The end credits confirmed this.  The Monday and Wednesday ones were not by the same author, by the way.  

What are the odds of that, I ask you!!  

Of the three recitals on offer, I had to go and choose the Tuesday one which featured a story I'd read.  

Of all the ghost stories published out there, one of the three (which is a very narrow range) in those separate slots had to come from a book that I’d bought at random in a charity shop a decade ago and only decided to read a month before the broadcast.  What had prompted me to read that one and not some other book?!

Another thing:  it was a book published in 1931, which is generally too ancient to be still floating around in the market.  

My hair stood on end, not because of the ghost element but all the spookiness of the coincidences raised by this one book alone!  

(London, 2019)