Out of Office Autoreply

Thank you for visiting The Sardine Tin.

Unfortunately, I am now out of the office with little or no access to this blog while I take a much-anticipated and (hopefully) well-deserved break. As I couldn't be bothered to schedule posts or arrange guest posters, feel free to poke around in the archives if you like, or just disappear and come back in a couple of weeks.

Julie

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Quick Plug For A Good Cause

This is just a very quick post to point you in the direction of something called the "Mona Lisa Million" being worked on by Dave at Mister Good Guy. This is a project that is trying to combine Website Promotion with supporting good causes. At the moment Dave has a limited number of free spaces going for anyone that would like to link their website, so if this is something that interests you, head over to Mona Lisa to check it out, where it is all explained much better than I could do! 

The Gallery - A Novel Idea

This week's Gallery Theme by Tara over at Sticky Fingers is "A Novel Idea". To quote Tara:

"A photograph which you think represents a favourite book or novel or even children's tale."


My chosen book this week: The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett, as it was a particular favourite of mine when I was a child. 


We are lucky enough to live relatively close to Bowood House, which every year opens up its "Rhododendron Walk" for a limited period only. We went for the first time a few weeks ago, and it really did feel like a secret garden, as there were very few people there at all (we hardly saw a soul), with lots of lovely nooks and crannies - great for playing hide and seek in. 

RIP My Teenage Crush

DD1 and I were "enjoying" High School Musical over the weekend. I must confess, while I thought the film was harmless enough, it wouldn't normally be something I would choose to watch again. In some ways this surprised me a little. I'm normally a sucker for anything vaguely inappropriately too young for me. I have terrible taste in TV and films.

Don't get me wrong - I love a good documentary as much as the next pseudo-intellectual, and I do consider myself a bit of a current affairs junkie (I'm sure there's another post somewhere about my strange crush on John Humphrys, but this is not it), but I do like nothing more than watching a bit of trash that doesn't tax my mind too much.

However, I was a little sad to find that the male lead in HSM, a certain Zac Efron actually did nothing for me. I mean, look at him:

From a purely objective point of view I can see why millions of pre-pubescent girls swoon at the mere mention of his name. If I was twenty years younger I would probably be doing the same. Heck, if I were even ten years younger I would maybe secretly think he was a tad dishy.

The thing is, since having children of my own I just can't see teenage boys quite in the same way any more. I know you will tell me that most of the actors who play these sort of roles are normally considerably older than the boys they portray on screen (Efron, apparently is 22 - the actors who play some of the lead roles in Glee, for example, are also well into their mid- to late-20s).

This does concern me somewhat. Traditionally it is fair to say that I have generally gone for older men. There comes a point though, where this starts to limit the "laminated list" somewhat. After all, despite seemingly getting better with age, even George Clooney will eventually start to lose his looks, and I don't think I am quite ready to look at Mick Jagger in quite that way yet...

Sparks of Uncreativeness

I haven't been feeling very creative recently.

The blog posts have dried up a little (certainly in comparison to a couple of weeks ago!). Mainly this is down to the fact that work has been ridiculously busy and I therefore have less thinking time. However, even at work my lack of creativity has been noticeable. I have a couple of things I have needed to do that, whilst not really a full-flung artistic extravaganza, are what I would vaguely class as "more creative than normal" - i.e. involving having to think about words and images.

I happened to catch a snippet of a programme on Radio4 last week called Grayson Perry on Creativity and Imagination. Sadly for some reason this is not available as a "listen again" option on the Radio4 website, and I therefore only have the few minutes I caught to go on. It essentially seemed to be a list of what he considered myths about Creativity and the creative process. The gist of his argument seemed to be that artistic creativity was neither easy nor particularly exciting (a lot of the creative process being "dull and repetitive" once the original idea had struck).

To quote from a synopsis of the programme:

"Grayson wants to (...) show how creativity isn't a mystery, but at the same time it isn't necessarily easily accessible."

I can see the argument that says that if it was easy, there would be thousands of great works of art by millions of people. However, what I didn't agree with was the inference that you somehow had to be special to be creative.*

A lot of the joy in writing this blog is not necessarily down to the fact that I have some kind of strange idea that I am going to get discovered for my fantastic writing - I have no such delusions. I have come to terms with the fact that I am never going to be a "creative genius". I can't take a decent photograph to save my life. My work will never appear in a great gallery or library. I do believe, however, that in their own way everyone can be creative.

You only have to look at the joy with which small children scribble their way through life, drawing everyone and everything with complete abandon. Why is this something that seems to be drummed out of us as we go through life, discouraged and disillusioned by both internal and external critics?

I would loveto rediscover some of that joy of experimenting, of letting myself go with something just to see what happens. Whether real life will really let me remains to be seen.

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*Obviously I am making a big assumption that this was how the argument was going to pan out - as I said, I was unable to listen to the whole of the programme, so may well have got the wrong end of the stick. Feel free to correct me if you heard it!