"Huh?!?" conversations: 04 (UK)

 

I met a Vietnamese-born Chinese woman on a Longevitology energy adjustment course in 2023, and found that she had an allotment in Woodford in east London (near Stratford, the site of the 2012 London Summer Olympics), so I started to help out there, just doing the weeding and watering.  I say to people, "I'm only good enough to be the skivvy, not the chef."

    For those who might not know what an allotment or a skivvy is:

(From googling)

Quote

allotment: (British English) a small area of land in a town that a person can rent in order to grow fruit and vegetables on it.

skivvy: (British English, informal) a servant, in the past usually female, who does all the dirty or boring jobs in a house.

Unquote

    The Woodford allotment site is huge, with 176 plots. (Standard size of plots: 5 rods / 125 square metres, or 10 rods / 250 square metres).

    Since then, I've met two more lots of tenants (a Portuguese / Brazilian couple in 2023; and Donald, a Jamaican-born chap last summer) whose plots I help out on, on a regular basis.

    Gardening is one of my Distraction Therapy tools (in addition to teaching and healing). It gets me out of the house and into the fresh air, so it's good exercise. When I'm watering the plants and weeding, I'm totally focused on the tasks to be done, which stops me from thinking about horrible things and horrible people. Perfect distraction for an ostrich.

    Next to Donald's plot is a Bangladeshi couple, with whom I've crossed paths on and off since summer last year.

    With the weather getting warmer and the growing season having started, I've been going more often, arranging with Donald to stagger our presence, so that he won't have to go that often. This means that I'm practically always there on my own.

    The Bangladeshi woman told me last week that she had pain in her hands, making it difficult for her to do much on the plot, so I offered to give her a massage on site. We then arranged for me to go to her house to work on her bad back, legs and knees.

    After the massage yesterday, the husband said to me, referring to Donald, "The man in the plot next to mine: do you know him?"

    I guess it's not that usual for an Oriental woman to team up with a dark-skinned man, especially on a platonic basis -- the Oriental/White combination is more common. Or at least in this particular Bangladeshi man's experience anyway, being from a culture where it doesn't happen (much, if at all), and being Muslim to boot.

    There's also always the possibility of his not expressing his meaning properly in English (even though he's been here for over 30 years, if not longer). He might've meant, "Are you friends?"

    Given my perverse sense of humour, I was very tempted to say, "No, I just have the habit of sneaking into people's plots when they're not there, pulling up their weeds and watering their plants."

(London, 2026)

Disrupting the nasty-dream circuit

 

I've just heard about someone waking up in the morning with psychotic thoughts following some disturbing dream in the night.

    Now, I'm no doctor, so these are just my personal wild ideas, which must already have been considered and employed by the specialists.

    One path to explore might be to expose the person to pleasant things (aural or visual, e.g., soothing music or sounds of natural phenomena like wind, water and waves; paintings, Chinese calligraphy or art visuals) last thing before sleep, imbuing him with nice sounds and therefore nice dreams. Sort of re-wiring his dream feeds / paths, which might then result in pleasant dreams, and therefore pleasant thoughts upon waking, or at least no psychotic thoughts.

    I say the above having in mind what happened in my BA.4 [final] year at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies).

    The Japanese teacher (who was also the head of the Japanese Section) made us do a vocabulary test every Friday morning: 25 kanji (Chinese characters / 漢字 / Hànzì) each week, cumulative.

    Background to Japanese kanji:  each one has a minimum of two readings (a Chinese reading and a Japanese reading).  More if they’re also used as verbs, e.g., with different endings (past tense, transitive or intransitive, etc.).  So it’s 25 characters (minimum two readings) in Week.1, 50 characters (minimum two readings) in Week.2, etc.

    I asked to be excused from this test since Japanese was my Special Subject, not my major, but Prof. O’Neill said, “You can do it, you don't need to spend much time learning them, you won’t have any trouble!”

    It’d be disrespectful, after what he’d said, not to turn up, so on Thursday nights I’d learn them last thing before sleeping.

    I got full marks every Friday morning, so Prof. O’Neill said, “See?  I told you!”

    A couple of decades later, I read somewhere that when we’re asleep, the brain is then filing (/ sorting out) what we’ve experienced (/ seen, heard) during the day, starting with the latest (/ last seen or heard).  So maybe that’s why my learning the Japanese kanji last thing before sleep was so effective.

    So, I wonder if the same might help for the person waking up with psychotic thoughts after some horrible dream the night before. If my exposing my brain to kanji readings and meanings last thing before sleeping helped net me full marks for those tests the next day, then exposing the person to pleasant things last thing before his bedtime might let his brain file pleasant things during his sleep, which might then become pleasant-dream memories when he wakes up, instead of psychotic thoughts. Break the nasty-dream after-effect / circuit before it can carry on into the next day in the form of psychotic thoughts.

    Or, if it’s not easy to set it up as a pre-slumber routine, then do it as a during-slumber one: playing pleasant sounds (music, natural phenomena [wind, waves, water]) to him during his sleep. This might stop the nasty dreams from entering, leaving the brain waking up with only pleasant vibes, or at least nothing nasty.

    I say the above because I listen (in rotation) to a couple of YouTube story-telling channels to help me sleep. Most of the stories are set in ancient China, with a lot of them featuring humans saving some animal that then comes back later to repay its debt, which is nice content. I usually fall asleep within the first couple of lines.

    If I don’t fall asleep that quickly, I spend the time listening out for things that I can use in my teaching (the stories are narrated in Mandarin), which is another distraction factor — stops my mind from thinking about horrible people and horrible things. I call it Distraction Therapy, with gardening, healing and teaching being my usual Distraction Therapy tools.

Breaking the (attention) circuit (London)

A friend’s spouse is going through a psychotic phase.  I suggested that the spouse be given a blog of mine that she had read before and enjoyed when it first came out, as a distraction.

    It worked a bit, in the sense that the spouse remembered the episode featured in the blog, and laughed about it, which probably kept her happy for a little while, distracting her from her psychotic state.  Like my distraction therapy for myself (https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2025/05/chinese-sayings-38.html).

    This suggestion of mine (that the friend should get the spouse to read my blog which she’d enjoyed the first time round) came from an episode one summer’s day on Highbury Fields in north London.

    A child was walking along, a part-eaten apple in hand, crying her heart out.  Maybe she’d seen the ice cream van but was told by the adults that she couldn't have one (ice cream, not van).

    She was bawling and bawling, then she noticed the part-eaten apple in her hand.  She stopped crying, took a bite out of the apple, chewed the mouthful of apple, swallowed it, then went back to bawling.

    It got me thinking at the time, “So, that heart-rending sound [the crying] was for effect then, to get what she wanted, or what?”

    Whatever, she was still distracted long enough by the apple to put her grief (whatever it was over) on hold until she’d had another bite at it.

(London, 1980s)

Chinese sayings: 38 (樂以忘憂 / 乐以忘忧 lè yǐ wàng yōu)

樂以忘憂 / 乐以忘忧

lè yǐ wàng yōu

“happy in-order-to forget worry”

I have my own term for it:  distraction therapy.

    I go for activities which give me a lot of pleasure and joy, such as healing (giving people massage and Longevitology energy adjustment to relieve aches and pains, and to improve well-being), gardening (weeding and watering the plants on a vegetable allotment), foraging (wild garlic, wild leek, wild spinach, nettle, dandelion).

    These activities get me out of the house, help take my mind off the horrible and stressful things (and people) in life, and I get a great sense of satisfaction in having made people’s lives easier in some way.  Living a useful life, as I call it.

longevitology.org.uk