Join the chorus

I've been writing a piece on Twitter for people who aren't on Twitter. Here it is...

When I hear this summer’s tuis going squawk, rasp and whistle, it seems like Twitter has somehow taken over my garden. But when the mini-blog site was invented back in 2006 its name was merely “twttr” – a five-letter code partly inspired by the picture-sharing website, Flickr.
An American called Jack Dorsey and some friends were messing about with the idea of being able to contact small groups of friends via SMS messaging. It was only when they spotted the global potential of their idea that Twitter, the brand, came to life complete with its little bird logo.
Five years on the avian chorus is deafening, with tweets breaking out all across the virtual arena that some call the Twitterverse.
Twitter is smaller than Facebook and YouTube but is still enormous at around 100 million users. Million, schmillion… it’s just one slice of the vast social-media pie, but more and more of us are taking flight there.
Many will start out like me. You open a free account (my name there is @lindseyoutloud) at www.twitter.com, do one cautious tweet, find a few people to ‘follow’, then just sit back and watch. Once the world starts streaming in you begin to ‘get it’. Soon you too will be itching to tweet – using no more than 140 characters at a time, please. It’s interesting how inventive you can become.
Unbelievers will tell you that reading celebrity prattle is a big yawn. But tick the right ‘follow’ boxes and you’ll be well entertained. By following Vanity Fair, for instance, I can get early alerts to top story links on that magazine’s website so I can read tasty pieces way before the actual issue gets here.
I follow comedians, writers, politicians, monks, big thinkers, artists and activists – and a bunch of friends old and new. It’s great for new thoughts and ideas and video links and, as with Facebook, you can direct-message your contacts as well.
Aucklander Linda Coles, of Blue Banana Ltd, is making her living training business people in how to build relationships online. “All that stuff about what people are having for breakfast is just boring,” she says. “It’s really about letting people you want to do business with know you exist. “ Linking Twitter with business site LinkedIn, she’s constantly interacting with existing customers and new prospects and sees it as an essential business tool.
For the rest of us, it offers fleeting fun as often as you want. And here’s an unexpected upside – if you become a tweeter you’ll find yourself mostly amongst grownups – teenagers don’t like it much. One recent survey found only four percent of Twitter users are under 18. Average age: a nicely mellow 31. n
* This article appears in the Jan issue of Next magazine.

Office affairs - oh, the angst!

Lucy Kellaway is a Financial Times columnist. I first got to know her via her voice in the witty little pieces about business life that she records for the BBC.
Turns out she's a good novelist as well. I just read her In Office Hours and can highly recommend it for a holiday read. Or a curled-up-on-the- couch read. You might label it 'chick lit' if it wasn't Lucy at the helm, but she overcomes what could be a standard office-affairs theme by being really dry, witty and droll...in her inimitable manner. In Office Hours is office politics writ large, set against the backdrop of London City machinations, the GFC, and corporate and banking greed. Ironically - for she must have written it before the Gulf oil spill and the tarnishing of BP's reputation - it is set within the head office of a rapacious oil company that she tags Atlantic Energy.
She has two main characters who are (slightly annoyingly) called Stella and Bella, but you quickly get to grips with their linked but separate dramas.
Stella is the senior exec appalled to find herself having it off with a junior, many-years-younger male assistant; Bella is the struggling junior office assistant and solo mum feeling the tug of illicit excitement with her male, much-older married boss. Kellaway niftily exposes the different tensions and attitudes evoked by these unequal relationships.
It's agonising and funny, all at the same time, and accompanied by the churning of feverish emails and texts. Which is of course the modern, and often hazardous way.
It also points out how damn annoying Microsoft can be. There's Stella, struggling to write an emotionally laden email that's ripping her heart out, when up pops a smarmy on-screen message from the 'assistant' - "it looks like you're trying to write a letter. Would you like help?"

Stick it to us

The Post-it note is 30 years old this year. Can we imagine life without them? Ten years ago someone visited my office and laughed because I had yellow reminder notes to myself stuck around the edge of my monitor. "Post-it notes?" she jeered. "Use the Stickies tool on your Mac!" I do, but I still like scribbling and sticking. Newsweek magazine has a vivid collection of the crazy and vivid and political and sentimental things people have done with Post-it notes over the years.

http://www.newsweek.com/photo/2010/11/16/how-post-it-notes-have-stuck-to-our-history-and-culture.html


As a for instance, I love this Korean bridal car - a mass of flapping yellow. Apparently they started out yellow because when 3M scientists were messing about with a new adhesive they happened to have some yellow scrap paper in the office. The idea languished for a while until one of the guys, who sang in his church choir, realised a tag of the sticky paper they'd been playing with would be a great way to keep his place in the hymn book. Small idea. Big business.

The online world of pretty

The web started out as a realm for geeks. The content was all about business, computer science, numbers and graphs. But something more beguiling flooded in when artists and dreamers began to play. While hard-sell merchants are screaming their names elsewhere on the web, the appeal of pretty sites is partly due to the fact that nobody’s shouting at you.
Lovers of all things beautiful tend to hope you’re not so much interested in them as the style they espouse. Sometimes you can’t even find their real names.
Take, for instance, the mysteriously labelled Gypsy Purple, who loves all things French and can be found at http://gypsypurple.blogspot.com Her opulent blog is a bit of a gypsy tea-room, overflowing with romantic, retro and nostalgic art of all kinds. The elegant white Swedish dining room above is from her blog.
If it’s the colour grey (or ‘gray’ if you’re American) that spins your wheels, see www.aperfectgray.com, a blog full to the brim with lovely charcoal, dove and pearl-toned goodies. Its creator rhapsodises that life has “four phenomenal goodnesses; décor, art, antiques and style – and this girl’s search for that one perfect gray wall colour.”
Needlework fans should cruise http://karenruane.blogspot.com, where there are oodles of embroidery pieces to admire, mostly in white on frosty white. Karen’s gorgeously detailed pieces come with lots of helpful chat about how to be an expert with needle and thread.
No such colour blindness is exhibited by an English architect who rolls out an almost daily post of all things bright and beautiful. Blogging at http://ijeomabyijeoma.blogspot.com, she recently displayed the interiors of Kim Kardashian’s plush home (remarkably restrained for a Kardashian) and the site is always full of international interiors to die for.
At http://adiaryoflovely.blogspot.com you can find Helena, who has about 1000 “lovely people” instead of “fans”. Her blog is awash with cool clothes and design.
Some style bloggers love to pair up words to make cute, double-barrelled names for their sites. Already taken – just in case you’ve been musing on such a move – are Lilac and Grey, Velvet and Linen, Linen and Lavender, and Chi Chi and Luxe, all of them bursting with sweetness and colour.
But there are no fluffy words at www.cleverbastards.co.nz, where you can browse and buy arty stuff made right here. On show is the work of huge talents from all over New Zealand. The idea in setting up the site (say the six people who run it) was to give you a place to purchase something from a creative Kiwi and also “get an idea how it was made and what the hell made them do it in the first place”. Clever.
* This piece appears in my Webmistress column, Next magazine, Dec 2010.

A different look at going back to the future

Was just browsing around in Slideshare and came across this beguiling piece of work - setting romantic visionary images against the reality of today's world. This sort of thing is why I love the internet.

Yesterday’s future

View more presentations from Nicolás Svistoonoff.

I'd love to know more about these images, but the person who posted is from Ecuador, and being horribly monolingual I can't ask him. But the pictures speak for themselves.

Skimming the shallows

Have you noticed lately that your ability to concentrate has dropped off? I have, especially when it comes to reading. And I'm an old-school, hard-core kind of reader, so it's a bit weird. I'm finding that when I bring my customary stack of three or four books home from the library, I'm then reading only one or two of them. I have little patience for books that don't grab me instantly, or magazine stories that go on too long.

I've worked on newspapers and used to be a cover-to-cover kind of reader. These days I flip, scanning headlines, and only stop if a story looks sufficiently enticing. Trouble is, of course, most newspaper stories are already at least 12 or 24 hours old and we know the news already from a thousand other sources. Which is why, of course, newspapers are having such a hard time of it.

But according to author Nicholas Carr, there's more to it than stale news. He reckons that the internet, and all the other fast-moving media we're saturated with, is forcing us into too much multi-tasking, making us distracted and turning our brains to mush. Well, he's too cautious to put it quite like that, but it's the general thrust of his book, The Shallows: How the internet is changing the way we think, read and remember. Carr gathers lots of scholarly evidence to show that even as we're enjoying the many excellent things the web has to offer, it is rewiring our brains, flattening our brilliance, reducing our capacity for deep, meditative thought - and suppressing human empathy and compassion.

He writes, "There is no Sleepy Hollow on the Internet, no peaceful spot where contemplativeness can work its resorative magic. There is only the endless, mesmerizing buzz of the urban street."

Oops. Just as well I've taken a quiet walk by the sea today. But then I did come home to get back to my keyboard and write this blog, send three emails and post videos on two websites, all time thinking of my next media projects as well. And it's Sunday, supposedly the day of rest. Perhaps Mr Carr is right. Sigh. Time to switch off the laptop and firmly close the office door.

write your life story - the video

I'm having such fun with a cool tool called Animoto. All you do is gather some pictures and brief video clips, add some text, choose a background theme, pick some music, arrange it all in the order you want, and send it to Animoto.
In a few minutes they email you that your video is ready to view and you can do whatever you want with it - remix or edit to your heart's content, send to friends, put on your website, embed in blogs. You can make 60-second videos for free, or sign up for not much money at all to make videos up to 10 minutes long. Check out this one (just click on the yellow words below) that I just made about my upcoming 'Story of My Life" workshop, on November 21, at Eden Garden in Epsom.

write your life story

Of course, these videos would be terrific for invitations or celebrations, or post-holiday wrap-ups. I continue to be amazed by how clever internet services are becoming. I use a Mac and have made a few little iMovie videos but this is even easier than iMovie. Swoon.

Easy as falling off a blog

Amazingly, I still sometimes meet people who, with furrowed brow, say, "what is a blog anyway?" The blogosphere is the hot place to be, of course. So who’s running it? Nobody. Which is its blessing and its curse.
Obviously (because you're reading it here) you already know that blog means ‘web log’. It started when web-savvy writers began to pour out words in a journal sort of format that could be updated at will.
Now there are around 133 million (and counting) blogs out there. ‘Real’ journalists can be a bit sniffy about bloggers, dissing them as mere scribblers. But to sneer would be missing the point. Many blog writers are top names.
The world’s biggest blog, at www.huffingtonpost.com, prints the views of major commentators and now rivals venerable newspapers in terms of influence.
For the most part bloggers write for free but if they’re clever enough they can turn a buck or two. For instance, fashion ‘curator’ and professional speaker Gala Darling sells her writings as monthly chapters of an ongoing book called Love & Sequins.
“It’s my handbook on being a love letter to the universe,” coos Gala, who grew up in Wellington and moved to New York in pursuit of a more glamorous life. Like all big web personalities she is prolific – blogging madly at www.galadarling.com and other sites, and is all over Facebook and Twitter.
That’s the gorgeous Gala in the picture, which I nicked from her blog.
There is, of course, much serious blogging happening too. At www.stuff.co.nz a range of familiar names pops up – such as political reporter Colin Espiner and investment expert Bruce Sheppard.
Also included there is Christchurch librarian Moata Tamaira. Her self-described “unholy mash-up of whimsy, cynicism and wry observation” won her the best blog prize at last year’s Qantas Media Awards. She’s just written a hilarious piece about being detained overnight by Customs at Madrid Airport when she lost her passport on the inbound flight.
There are a dozen or so good writers at www.publicaddress.net. Try also www.kiwiblog.co.nz which has been “fomenting happy mischief since 2003”. It contains some 400 blogs. Some are moribund but there are heaps to get stuck into, including the prickly Cactus Kate. She’s a Hong Kong-based lawyer (and admirer of Rodney Hide) whose tagline is, “Saving the world from sanctimonious bearded men, one whisker removed at a time”.
If you’re looking for local and stylish browse www.lovelyblogs.co.nz - which collects appealing blogs from around the country. So give it a go. Set yours up right here at blogspot.com or wordpress.com or tumblr.com – all are free and simple to use.
* This article is adapted from my Webmistress column in the Nov issue of Next magazine. I’m also currently running its Facebook page – find it at Next Magazine NZ and tick the ‘Like’ box to see what’s happening there.

Women all over the web

There are some corners of the web inhabited just by women and that’s just as it should be. We did always did like gathering at the well for a chat and the web is just one big well.
One of the first off the mark was www.handbag.com, launched back in 1999 to provide a “glossy, stylish take on matters that women love, like fashion, beauty, celebrity, gossip, going out and staying in”. Then it was a pioneer. Now it’s just part of the Hearst magazine empire. Big, busy and booming, it scores 22 million “unique page views” per month.
The world’s number one women’s site is www.ivillage.com , launched in 1995 and now NBC-owned. On the day I last looked it was offering advice on how to manage sex when on “vaycay” (vacation) with the kids; and what your ice-cream preference says about your personality. A yen for vanilla, it seems, means you’re more of a risk- taker than those who like chocolate or strawberry. Oh sure.
Big sites like that can be so take-it-or-leave-it. So is there something more local, more ‘niche’, more relevant?
You bet. Try www.wisanow.co.nz, set up by Aucklanders Geraldine Meo and Raewyn Hamilton (pictured). They’re both in real estate but Wisanow is their outside-of-work baby, set up because they believe strongly that baby-boomer women can have a struggle as they enter what some call “second adulthood”. Once the mid-life stage opens up, many are searching for fresh fields, renewed purpose and meaningful goals. Meo and Hamilton are aiming for a “warm, honest and empathetic forum”.
Packed full of food, travel, health, shopping and culture pages (around 1000 at last count), it’s receiving as much interest from overseas as at home. “They tell us they like that our discussion forums are real and not just about botox and celebrities,” says Hamilton. “And we’re finding that the topics women care about here are the same all over the world.”
Another useful local site: www.womenz.co.nz, founded by Katrina Winn as a bid to “add value to women’s lives”. It also contains good, relevant material.
But it’s not easy maintaining such sites. They come and go. But check out www.heartless-bitches.com, which has been up since 1996 and is thus positively venerable. I think it’s US-based but on the web it’s hard to tell. Not quite as hard-arse as it sounds, it’s leavened with considerable humour. And “bitch” stands for Being In Total Control, Honey. As a life goal that’s hard to argue with.
*This piece is part of my Webmistress page in Next magazine, Oct issue. The mag's not online but you can 'like' it on Facebook page. Look for Next Magazine NZ

The return of the Jed

How very weird it is that one overwrought and half-baked pastor from a Florida church that has 50 in its congregation (down by half from where it was a few days ago) can nab headlines around the world with his intention to burn copies of the Koran as his very own ridiculous and inflammatory way to mark 9/11. Outraged protests from a host of world leaders is not enough to stay the hand of Pastor Jones, who is presumably revelling in the attention. Ah well, what can you expect from someone who is the spitting image of The Beverly Hillbillies' Jed Clampett? All he needs is the hat. And probably the gun.
If you're too young to remember Jed be advised that the scriptwriters of this classic '60s comedy gave him some very good lines, including this put-down of his dim-witted son, Jethro: "If brains was lard, that boy wouldn't have enough to grease a skillet." Seems like a good retort for Mr Jones.

The power of stories told by dads

As Father’s Day has rolled round this year I’ve thought not so much of my own father but of my father-in–law, Richie, because I’ve also been thinking lots about the importance of family stories.
Richie told us a story the night after his wife Hilda’s funeral. It’s interesting how funerals bring out tales of days gone by. A key gets turned in our hearts at such times, and the door opens and out flow words that need saying.
He talked about the hard times in his early life and of a morning when he was just a small boy, living on the family dairy farm on the slopes of Mt Ngongotaha. It was a dark, freezing morning, early 1920s. Richie’s dad was out with the cows, as usual, when his mother came into the room he shared with his brother. They were still in bed.
“She looked so odd,” Richie remembered when he was himself an old man. “She came in and said, ‘I’ve just come to say goodbye, boys’. And then she turned and walked out of the house.’
Little Richie knew something was very wrong. He got up and raced out to the milking shed. ‘Dad, Dad!’ he cried. ‘Mum’s gone.’
A lifetime later, he could still remember the stricken expression on his father’s face as he ran out of the shed and down the frosty hill after his wife and brought her home again.
When I heard that story I felt for her. I wondered if, desperate to escape the hard-scrabble farming life, she just had to get away. But then, where would she have gone? Was she really going to leave her boys behind? How would she have made it on her own? Divorce was a great scandal then and social welfare non-existent.
Did she simply go back with a leaden heart and get on with things, because there was just no other option? Whatever, she stayed, and between them they raised a fine family.
You start to feel the impact of stories like that in midlife, because it’s only then that we’ve been through enough of our own dramas to know that life rarely turns out as we expect it to.
Of course even though we think we’re just ordinary, all our lives are rich with drama. But most of us cover up our hot-point moments because we think they’re too private, too painful or maybe too embarrassing to share. And yet it’s so vital for us to reveal them, not just because they can help other people cope with trouble, but because unloading our old hurts can be good for us too, leaving us feeling lighter and stronger.
“I used to think I’d be able to change the world,” one friend told me with rueful smile. “Then I realised I couldn’t do that. Then I thought you could change yourself, and came to see that wasn’t possible either. The good thing about getting older is that you finally begin to figure who you are in the big picture of things. I think now that what life’s all about is just being the hero or heroine of your own story – and sharing it with other people.’
Richie’s gone now too, but thanks, Poppa, for sharing. And thanks to all dads everywhere who’ve sat down with their families sometime and told them a true-life story, straight from the heart. Not enough blokes do that. And they’re stories we need to hear.

Seeking "letters to Lindsey"

I’ve done lots of media jobs in my life but never hosted a TV show. But now I am. I figure I’m the oldest trout on the telly! Well, in this country anyway, as opposed to the United States where it seems possible to carry on forever if you’re Barbara Walters, who is 80. So at 65 I’m a mere chicken. And an increasingly wise one! It's what happens when you've been around a few years.

Anyhow, the show is Letters to Lindsey. Think of it as an agony aunt show with ‘uncles’ as well as ‘aunties’, who sit around our table and answer problems sent in by viewers. Our panellists aren’t just there because they’re good talkers but because they’re experts in their field. The weekly show is on Triangle TV in Auckland, 7pm Fridays, and on Stratos (channel 89 on Sky and 22 on Freeview) across the country, 8pm Saturdays.

Here’s a brief video promo.

We’d welcome emails about any problem that’s getting you down. We’ve been running for only a few weeks but have already canvassed a wide range of dilemmas – from drug addiction probs through teen pregnancy woes and employment and migrant issues. This weekend the programme’s all about sex and intimacy. Next week: where are the new heroes and role models for kids to look up?

The world's full of problems, of course, so if you’d care to share a burning issue (treated anonymously, of course!) my producer Deb Faith would love to hear from you. You can either send it to me or directly to her at info@tritv.co.nz

Speaking of letters (of the alphabet) is language misuse driving you nuts? Me too, sometimes. So you might enjoy www.loginisnotaverb.com, the work of a man who cannot abide how we’re messing with new words like login, carryout, lockdown, signout and checkout, not to mention that ubiquitous little verb, text, which of course used to be a mere noun.

Then there are the adjectives which have become nouns, like creative and corporate. Sigh. One's pedantic nit-picking can go on.

Nutting out great story lines

I just went to a terrific one-day seminar - Christopher Vogler's 'The Writer's Journey' Workshop. It's so great when someone is able to make things fall into place for you.
I've known for years about the work of the late Joseph Campbell, the much admired scholar/historian who wrote The Hero With a Thousand Faces. It's been sitting on my bookshelf for years and I kept looking at it thinking "I must get into that" but never did. After a few half-hearted attempts to penetrate his academic prose I put it back on the shelf. Which was fine except that I found myself, for the second time, with a novel at the 30,000 word mark and stuck on how to proceed.
Vogler, who has heaps of Hollywood script-writing and doctoring experience, demystifies Campbell with his own work. He's written a series of books which outline the essentials for every great story, whether on paper or screen. I raced home from his workshop dived into a novel with Vogler's notes in hand, analysing it at every step to see how well it conformed to Campbell's formula (which he worked out from studying ancient plays and myths going back thousands of years). Twelve hours later I was thoroughly convinced. And was intrigued to realise that in writing my first two published novels I had instinctively followed the magic pattern.
You don't need to attend a whole workshop as Vogler, bless him, has put the basics online as a free download.
It contains the text of a career-changing memo about story that he wrote to his Hollywood bosses way back in 1985. Mr Vogler is a nice guy. As we talked during a break I told him how much I enjoyed hearing his opening address. He talked about how reading Campbell's work was a huge revelation for him - so big that it was as if he felt an arrow of purpose shooting through him from 20 or 30 generations back - and that in that moment he knew exactly what he was here on Earth to do. Lucky guy - lots of us spend a whole lifetime trying to figure that out!
His breakthrough moment has been extra important to him, he said, because he's had no children, and the fact that his books are out there helping others with the secrets of good storytelling is hugely important to him in the sense of legacy. So... back I go to my manuscript...
Thanks to the great gals at the Romance Writers Association of New Zealand for bringing him to New Zealand!
See him here too

Go the girls in graphics!

With the internet so full of moving pictures it’s good that the web also hosts an older form of visual entertainment – comics and cartoons. They may be dominated by boy power (zap! kablooey! aaargh!) but cool trends are arising that are just as much for girls as for guys.
Back when Superman ruled there were female figures too, such as Wonder Woman — “beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, stronger than Hercules, and swifter than Mercury”. So far, so Grecian.
We’ve moved on. Check out http://sarahzero.com for an online graphic novel that is updated every few days. Its creator works “without elves, fairies or wizards, without pirates, ninjas or zombies, without monkeys, penguins or dinosaurs, without sad girls, cat girls or robot girls”.
A Toronto designer simply named Stef draws Sarah Zero, who is a feisty redhead “struggling to find love and validation on the internet”.
Graphic novels and comics both tell stories via sequential art, but paper comics are shorter, usually less than 30 pages, while graphic novels can go on for 600 pages – or be online for years. At www.girlgenius.org there’s a story staring another feisty heroine, Agatha Clay, that’s been running since 2002.
Its creators, Phil and Kaja Foglio, recommend it for teens and up, pointing out that it contains “lots of running around in Victorian underwear, occasional innuendo, a certain amount of violence and the occasional ‘damn!’"
Canadian cartoonist Kate Beaton has a brilliant little site at www.harkavagrant.com, chock full of comic strips that poke subversive fun at figures as famous as Jane Austen, the Wright Brothers and the Kennedys.
At www.lillicarre.com artist Lilli Carré has a quirky page full of sparse black-pen drawings that shift and vibrate, along with pages from her books to browse and enjoy.
If all of this makes you think that here’s a field in which you, too, can play, here’s a really useful blog, http://dw-wp.com, where the ‘dw-wp’ is short for Drawing Words and Writing Pictures. It’s been set up by cartoonist Jessica Abel to help others learn cartooning skills and get published. Don’t think you have to be a great artist. Some of these sites reveal that it is the possession of a sharp wit, not ace drawing ability, that makes for the most engaging comics and cartoons.
* This text is from my 'Webmistress' column in Next magazine, September issue, published Aug 16. Check out the mag's Facebook page too, at Next Magazine NZ.< .

Pudding, glorious puddings

You know how it is when the friendly waitperson offers the dessert menu – and everyone hesitates? No-one wants to be first to mutter, “Oh, go on then”, even if you are secretly hanging out for crème brulée or chocolate mud cake.
Or pudding.
Yay, pudding! Winter is the right, the only time of year to eat puddings in all their creamy, stodgy, comforting glory.
Naturally, the web is laden with them. It amazes me that cookbooks still sell in their thousands when all you have to do is Google “pudding” and a million recipes fill your screen.
Ah, but can you trust them? That’s the question. Which is why we do still want books and magazines full of recipes by our favourite cooks. And why we’ll never discard the yellowing, grease-spotted pages of our mothers’ recipe books.
My Mum’s Lemon Delicious Pudding is still my favourite, preferably scoffed with melting vanilla ice-cream. Others swoon at the thought of rice pudding, and bread-and-butter pudding. All sweet, soft and golden.
But puddings weren’t always like that. If you live in Labrador you might sometimes have a traditional ‘Jiggs Dinner’, a roast-meat Sunday feast that also includes salted beef, boiled veges and pease pudding. I had no idea what pease is and found it's hummus-like stuff made of split yellow peas, cooked with water, salt and spices and, sometimes, a bacon or ham joint.
It’s also known as Pease Pottage and there’s a Pease Pottage Village in Sussex - so-called because the locals used to feed pease pottage to convicts being transported from London to the South Coast.
Then there’s Scotland’s Red Pudding – which shows how keen the Scots are to exclude anything remotely green from their diet. You can get Red Pudding, a true artery clogger, only at chip shops. It’s a sausage-shaped lump of various ground meats, suet, spices, fat and colouring, dipped in thick batter and deed fried.
You can’t ignore Black Pudding or Blood Pudding, a sausage made from cooked blood and eaten all over the planet. And White Pudding, which is similar but contains no blood, though it may have brain matter instead. All of which is a vegetarian’s nightmare.
Turn then to a true sweet-pudding lover’s paradise – a British hotel devoted to after-dinner delights.
The Three Ways House Hotel in the Cotswolds hosts a weekly pudding club where members are expected to eat a full main course and then sample and vote on the delights of seven puddings. You can browse the club's “pudcasts”, contribute your own puddings to their “Wikipudia of Recipes”. You can even stay in one of their luxury pudding-themed rooms. The Spotted Dick and Custard Room, anyone? I'm not kidding. That's it at the top of this blog, complete with spotted bed cover.
The most famous pudding of all is the one trotted out at Christmas. If you’re keen to do a Christmas pud in the most traditional way, you can find Mrs Beeton’s recipe here at Jane Austen's World.
Actually, with all its suet and shredded carrot, it doesn’t sound too appetizing at all. I’m off to get lemons. Now, where did I put Mum’s recipe book?
This article also appears in the August issue of Next magazine, on the Webmistress page. Become a Next fan on Facebook, too. Look for Next Magazine NZ

Online evolutionaries

With great hair, perfect makeup and huge CVs, they’re the world’s new powerful females. But forget tired old feminist notions. This lot still want to change things, but differently – via conscious evolution. Not heard of it before? You will.
The movers and shakers are mostly American – hence the big hair. But they have big minds too and have been chipping away at this idea for years.
At evolve.org you can meet the maven of the movement, Barbara Marx Hubbard. “Conscious Evolution is a new worldview that is now emerging rapidly,’ she says. “It acknowledges that humankind has attained unprecedented powers to affect, control and change the evolution of life on Earth.
In simple terms, it means that we must improve our ability to use our powers ethically and effectively to achieve a positive future.”
In other words it’s about working with others to do good, rather like your local Lions Club.
But the visionary Barbara and friends are thinking big, driven by the conviction that the whole planet is royally stuffed and right now is our last chance to rescue it.
The web is quaking with sites devoted the cause. Marilyn Nyborg is pushing Women Waking The World. Kathy Eldon is heading the Creative Visions Foundation. Dr Elizabeth Debold teaches Evolutionary Enlightenment, which is about discovering the “explosive emergence of a new women's spiritual liberation”.
The Feminine Power Global Community – tinyurl.com/2cdabuq – is keen to tell us all about "the three power bases of the co-creative feminine”. The push is to reach for “the power to change your life, the power to realize your destiny and the power to transform the world.”
Whoo, heady stuff. Aspirin, anyone? There’s a tide of similarly urgent prose out there.
Jean Houston at tinyurl.com/25ve8jp says it’s about “all of us together co-creating the human and social changes needed to make a better world.”
I feel like shouting back, “Jean! Love your work, but co-creation? I can barely co-create a coffee date. The world is a tall order!”
Having been to a few of her events I know she’d come back at me sternly with her favourite saying by Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.”
For more, check out the gals at Women on the Edge of Evolution. At tinyurl.com/2dhr535 they offer hours of info for free.
And for one of my favourite takes on changing your world go to a wise bloke, influential author Peter Russell. He works with lovely images and calming words. Enjoy at tinyurl.com/2exkq99

This story (and more) is from Lindsey's Webmistress column, in the July issue of Next magazine, out now.

Arrowing contempt

I love that TV can still teach me things. I learnt (on History or Discovery or one of the more worthy channels) the origin of that universal gesture, giving people "the fingers". In the time of Henry V, hordes of men used to engage in bows-and-arrows warfare. Good archers were the secret to winning battles and each man needed two strong fingers to pull back the string of the bow. The French vowed to hack off the fingers of any archer they captured so they couldn't fight again. When the English won a battle, they would jubilantly jab up their fingers in the air so their French opponents could see they were still intact. It's the defiant "nyah-nyah, can't-beat-me" gesture still so often used today. Ain't history wonderful?

How many days have you had then?

I was a tad disconcerted recently to come across a website - www.peterrussell.com/age.php - that could calculate for me in a millisecond how many days I’ve been alive. For me, it’s more than 23 thousand days.

Terrifying thought! Of course, not all of those thousands of days have been in any way special. Life just progressed. Chores were done. I turned up at work. I cooked, showered, slept, talked, walked, shopped and drove around. All pretty darned ordinary, really, except for the miracle of being alive at all. We take that for granted usually, unless we’ve survived something that should have or could have killed us. Then life itself becomes stunningly interesting.

Russell (pictured right) has a hugely expansive worldview and is the author of some pretty profound books. I loved his "The Global Brain Awakens". He prefers of think of his life in days rather than years. “I can hold a day’s experience in mind quite easily,” he writes on his site. It’s much harder, he says, to go back and take stock of a whole year. Many incidents and discoveries are inevitably forgotten.

He also finds it more meaningful to think he’s lived through more than 20,000 days, rather than 50-plus years. “And it reframes the future. I have, probably, thousands of days still to come. Thousands new days to discover, enjoy and learn from.”

I don’t quite agree with him. I think we can go back and take stock of events many years after they’ve occurred. But I do agree that life is all about discovering, enjoying, and learning about your existence. Your life, everyone’s life, is unique. It deserves to be noticed and celebrated.

I heard Peter speak at a conference once and was amused by his pointing out of the totally obvious. He was trying to get us to think fresh, think real. He did it by getting us to consider sunset. Humans have been saying sunset (and sunrise) for gazillions of year. After all, the sun does seem to us earthbound citizens to set and rise. But it's a very long time since we've known that actually the sun doesn't go anywhere - it's just that the earth keeps on rotating. But we don't care and just keep on mis-labelling the appearance and disappearance of that bright old light in the sky. Does us good to think about things differently, I reckon.

iPhones and Passings

My friend writer Helen Brown lost her iPhone. Quel bereavement! Because she was on holiday at Byron Bay and was just about to pack up and leave, there was no chance of it turning up under a cushion as might have happened at home.
“No doubt it's jiggling about inside the shorts pocket of a virile surfie,” she wrote in her blog. http://browngentry.livejournal
But then she added, “Living without it is surprisingly liberating. Not being available every second of the day is the definition of 21st century freedom.”
How wedded we’ve become to our gadgets. I’ve just switched over from PC to Mac because everyone I know who owns a Mac just loves it. Adapting is currently doing my head in but I’m beginning to see glimmerings of how good it will be once I’m sorted. And how I will hate to ever lose the thing.
I remember once, in the midst of writing a book, how I refused to leave my laptop in my car at a secluded beach to go for a walk. I had a thousand projected-related emails in that computer and couldn’t bear to think of losing the lot to a smash-and-grab thief. “I’ve got my life on that thing,” I said to my thwarted hiking buddy. She rolled her eyes, obviously thinking how pathetic I was.
This week I was reminded that the important things in life sometimes have nothing to do with technical wizardry.
I was in a hospital emergency room, waiting for a friend to have a health problem seen to.
We chatted with a staff nurse as she set and supervised an IV drip. My friend is also a health professional, so the chat was more open than would normally be the case.
The nurse talked about a dreadful day she’d just had as one of a team working on a young patient who was dying of a sudden and massive internal bleed.
She said how hard the emergency team had worked to save the patient, and how gut-wrenching it had been to lose the life of that stranger.
“Then,” she said casually, “We blessed the room.”
I was amazed. How do you do that, I wanted to know. And how often? Oh, all the time. Do you call in a chaplain? ‘Sometimes,” she said, “if there’s one around. But often we do it ourselves .”
Quietly, without fuss, someone will sprinkle water and maybe say a small prayer to send on the soul and make the space fresh for the next sick or injured body to occupy.
Emergency care is, of course, also a matter of employing high-tech skills and gadgets. But sometimes even the best skills and gadgets can’t work miracles.
How good it is to know that at least some of those highly trained and overstretched workers will spare a moment to do what human beings have always done. That they’ll pause, pay respect and carry out a small, unseen ritual to honour the passing of a life.
We may be wedded to our gizmos in the 21st century, but our humanity still runs deep.
Sitting there, in one of the country’s busiest emergency departments, I was immensely moved.
* I’m running a ‘Story of My Life’ one-day workshop in Auckland on May 9. Your life, with all its drama, deserves to be written about. Remember, no life is ever ordinary. For more info check out www.storyofmylife.co.nz

Orcas in the pen

I saw a Shamu show in 1977. Now that’s a long way back. The place was Sea World San Diego. It was a terrific show, featuring astonishingly large animals in very small pools. The trainers were all very fit, loud and smiley and yelled things like “yee-hah!” a lot. It was like a blue-water rodeo. Our little daughters were thrilled and wanted to take home a stuffed toy Shamu as well. We enjoyed the whole sloshing, glossy, superific experience.
It makes me feel a bit squirmy now. Maybe I’ve just grown up, finally, but now you couldn’t pay me to go to such a show. Last week another Shamu (how many of them have there been, I wonder?) was in disgrace after hauling trainer Dawn Brancheau into the pool, killing her.
Since then we’ve seen people weeping at poolside as the show went on – with the trainers now safely out of reach of those big jaws. If Dawn had been a friend of mine I’ve have shed tears for her too, because it seemed she loved big, bad Shamu and all his other Shamu mates. But it’s the orcas I’m feeling most sorry for.
The UK Independent’s Michael McCarthy wrote an excellent piece (re-run by the NZ Herald) about about why orcas (which are actually big dolphins) should be left alone to run around in their huge natural playground, the world’s oceans. He wrote , “Ending up in Sea World is the orca equivalent of you and me being imprisoned by a lunatic in a cupboard under the stairs.” Right on, Michael.
But of course the sad fact is that humans make a pile of money from locking them up and making them do silly tricks. There are currently 42 in captivity around the world. I guess their presence helps experts get to know them better, so some might justify their capture on ‘scientific research’ grounds. But isn’t that what we deride the Japanese for when they kill Antarctic whales?
Orcas’ survival time, once they’re penned in, is only about four years. In the wild, they can live up to 50 or 60 years. So is it surprising if they get tetchy, stressed and bored? And the trouble is, freeing them all would be enormously expensive. It cost millions for the ‘Free Willy’ campaign, and poor Willy only lasted 18 months when finally let loose, despite lots of care and attention during the transition from pool to ocean.
But we’re all a bit strange, we humans, when it comes to being entertained by other creatures, even other humans. Once, on holiday in Peru, I was ashamed when some of my travel mates insisted that the tour bus stop so they could take pictures of peasants and their donkey ploughing a field. The Peruvians showed enormous grace in obligingly smiling for the cameras. They were given nothing for their time. Then we left them to their subsistence drudgery and rode on in comfort to our next nice lunch.
Not long after that some residents in a swanky Auckland street expressed outrage at the fact that busloads of Asian tourists were slowly cruising past their homes (how dare they!) to take photos of householders trimming roses.
If orcas can talk to each other – and I have no doubt they do, even if we can’t fathom the language – I wonder what they say about us beastly humans?

Gagging for caffeine

I had a grim week this summer. I stopped drinking coffee.
It’s the second time in my life that I’ve gone cold turkey – both times on the advice of naturopaths who told me that coffee is not my friend.
So I knew how tough it was going to be. And this time around was no different from my previous experience. I felt shivery, headachy, utterly out of sorts and yes, there were those sharp leg pains back again.
The emotional tug was worse. I had to look the other way each time I passed my favourite cafes, lest I got lured inside to worship at the espresso machine.
Before, I couldn’t start the day without a plunger of stiff black stuff with breakfast. There also had to be the mid-morning flat white and maybe an afternoon one as well if I was meeting friends. Each time a cup was placed before me I would admire its heady aroma, the richness of the crema and the dinky little pattern on top created by a caring barista.
There was the whole ceremonial ritual of playing with the spoon, stirring, skimming off a little foam, slipping it between your lips. I can't like Starbucks because of the spoon shortage there. A wooden or plastic stick is no substitute. But overall, even Starbucks will do if there's no alternative. A good coffee (or so I believed) makes everything better.
When I stopped and become an outcast, I began to realise how intensely our world is engaged in a coffee culture that did not exist a few short years ago. There’s a cafe on every corner to feed our habit. Mobile vans are on patrol for office and factory workers who can’t cope without double-shot lattes. Portable machines take centre stage at farmers’ markets. Every second person on the street is carrying a cardboard cup with plastic cap. Forests are being felled to make those cups.
We’ve gone as ga-ga over coffee as we have over bottled water.
Petrol outlets are probably making more money from caffeine (and water) than they are from fuel. The weatherbeaten guys who used to check your oil and tyres - ah, in the good old days - are now hunched over steaming machines in the BP shop, looking embarrassed about having to faff around with chocolate powder and sugar tubes.
We are so hooked.
I decided that stopping coffee was like stopping smoking. Smokers convince themselves that having a cigarette calms their nerves, when really all it calms is the desire to have another cigarette. We have to have a coffee to perk us up, when really we just need to have one to make us feel like the last time we had one. We’re addicted.
At least lattes don’t give you cancer. At least not as far as we know. But surely when it hurts to give something up, it can’t be doing you much good.
So at breakfast now, I drink green tea. But being healthy can’t last for long. I’m back onto flat whites. Just once a day. Damn, it’s good.