I'm Grateful for Role Models!

(Joanna Lumley)

I found a wonderful blog: "Advanced Style"  http://advancedstyle.blogspot.com/  which I want to share with you.
I see on many blogs that women of a certain age have problems with their concept of self when they get older.
Of course nobody is utterly thrilled when looking into the mirror in that awful sunlight in March, only to find that the neck is suddenly covered with tiny little wrinkles -
(By the way: here I can offer you three solutions:
1. I always carry a very little creme pot with me and put on a tiny dot every four hours - that's as long as the 'pump up' effect works
2. I sometimes wear a beautiful scarf (something I hated before, because it makes me nervous, even if Hermés or Bulgari is written on it)
3. I read Nora Ephrim's hilarious book "I feel bad about my neck", laugh and don't mind so much)
Not for me the "I-promise-you-the-fountain-of-youth"-creme for 600 Euro - I use Nivea, keep fit, brush my skin, eat not too big portions - and do all the things recommended in the wonderful book: "Look Younger - Live Longer" by Gayelord Hauser - and believe me: there is nothing new under the sun: he wrote it in 1950!
20 - 30% of the way you get older is predetermined by your genes. Of course it is a huge privilege when you had not to do too much physically hard work, have a good health (and care for it) and serenity, have never been made redundant, have a harmonious partnership and be grateful for all that.
Beside these aforementioned important things there are other secrets for staying young, (because I know a lot of women in the same social conditions who don't):
- Be curious about Life (Think: "He who lives for himself alone lives for the meanest mortal known")
- Be interesting
- Laugh (and cry)
- Be sexy (I mean the feeling - not the outward appearance - and believe me: one can tell the difference!)
- Wear colours (Yes! You can! Don't let Bobbi Brown tell you you should wear beige, brown and pastel)
- Don't stay too much in a rut or on the safe side - be bold and daring, you are as important as anybody else
- Love young people, love old people, love life - and tell people about it!
- Be grateful and forgiving
- Love!
And don't fix on your wrinkles or your age on the passport - I compare it to being 16: you thought the whole world would look at a pimple (though people had other things to care for - preferably themselves) -and  now we seem to change that fixation for the belief that everybody notices our wrinkles or muffin top...
My photographs on facebook.com/britta.huegel (except one) are not older than a year.

                                                             

No Botox, no surgery, turning silver slowly and loving it - though good illumination definitely is welcome :-)
Role models I had even when I was very young: Colette, Elisabeth Flickenschildt, Ninon de Lenclos, to name a few.
So I am utterly happy to discover that there are many, many more around:
just cast a glance at http://advancedstyle.blogspot.com/ !!

The Quickest Facelift Is A Smile

You might know my opinion about facelifts and Botox: I'm against it. Fullstop. 

But that is not the theme I want to write about today - I just thought that the headline "Haughty Faces" might not be that attractive :-) 

The older I grow the less tolerant I get to endure haughty faces. It's bad when you meet them in the street. Very often they belong to very young women, who, dressed to the nines, are unsure and fight back any possible advances that they actually want so much. 

Then there are "famous" people. Here I show you one of Germany's most famous hairdressers. 

                   

He is doing the hair of Chancellor Angela Merkel - if that is a recommendation. He has been on TV recently - but I don't know why he is looking at us like this. 

I mean: he is a hairdresser - and not the Queen of Sheba? 

And here you see the poster I see when walking past the Russian ticket office. 

This is a conductor - whom I don't know, but he might be quite famous. 

Be it as it may - if he looks at me like that I would prefer not to make his aquaintance. 

There is an American psychologist, Dr. Wayne Dyer, who suggests that, if you see such a face at the breakfast table, over the long run you will become clinically depressed. I would. 

And now let me show you the worst case: shop window dummies.    

     

What were they thinking of when they created these??? 

Do they think that I will buy anything these - well: DUMMIES - are wearing? ? 

You bet - I don't!                                         

Comments - Vanishing into Blogger's blue, blue Sky?

Jinksy said...

Blogger has just lost my comment! I shall resort to an email!!!

Oh dear, oh dear - how often in the last weeks have  I myself written that (IF there was an email-adress), or have given up after writing an (hopefully) emphatic comment - witty and pretty :-) - only to see it vanish in the haze, and that damned (sorry) sign comming up: Ooops - something happened (or words like that, I was too furious to remember them...) It started when Blogspot made new gadgets and I could not enter at all - for days - everytime they asked me for the password to my Google account - and, though knowing I was absolutely correct (having it written down) - I thought: Well, then I will change it.
A lot of correspondence went to and fro - like correspondence with -mmmh, who is the maddest madman of all times being? 
"Utterly absurd" is the nicest word I can find for it - because the damned (sorry) answering machine of course couldn't even understand the problem!
A student in Germany helped me - I changed from Chrome to Firefox - then it worked most of the time, but not always - especially risky are comments to The Hostess of the Humble Bungalow, The Idiot Gardener and Annie. If I think of it I get cunny: copy my w&p-comment and laugh triumphantly when Google starts to heave its "Ooops!" - because I can try it again, on Chrome maybe, or Firefox - whatsoever.
And now I have to read that some of you have the problem to enter comments on my blog - see dear Penny's comment above.  
I say!  
We are not amused!
Do any of you ingenious bloggers can offer an advice? What is happening? Do you have the same problem too? What shall - and can -  I do??

Trees

 When I sit on our balcony and look out, I don’t see much of the calm little street in summer – I see the top of trees. And wonder: which sort of trees they are? Their leaves definitely look like oak. But their “flowers” were so strange. I‘ll have to wait till autumn (and I hope that waiting will take a long time!) and then I might be sure.

Or maybe I get that interesting App that Janet, the Queen of Seaford, mentioned on Facebook. (I will put in a quote later, because she will write a post on that).  

Berlin has lots and lots of trees – it is a green city with many parks, meadows and alleys.

At this time of the year the car drivers are unhappy: most have to park under the trees, and especially those ‘oaks’ drop little flowery things on their cars. At the moment it is even getting dangerous for pedestrians: the city complains that an invasion of oak procession moths (Thaumetopoea processionea) entered the city, polishing off most of the leaves.

a thousand hairy savages,
sitting down to lunch,
gobble, gobble, gulp, gulp,
munch, munch, munch

(Spike Milligan) 

Yeah – that poem comes very near the truth: the caterpillars are very greedy, and very hairy. Some trees only have fifty caterpillars, other have nests with more than thousand. And they are poisonous. If you come in contact with the hairs your skin starts to itch for days – so the City magistrate sends out people who have to get rid of the nests of the caterpillars – clothed in protective suits with breathing protection masks. In Berlin they are not allowed to use insecticides – on an auto hoist they use a sort of vacuum cleaner, and to “free” a tree from that plague costs about 900 Euro – for one single tree.

Zehlendorf, Grunewald and Wannsee are hit mostly, our street in the Bavarian Quarter is still green.

In the next street they have lime trees – which I would prefer: I love their mild coloured heart-shaped leaves and the sweet scent when they are flowering – and they look so lovely!

The Germans loved that tree so much that Schubert’s Lied: “Am Brunnen vor dem Tore, da steht ein Lindenbaum” became a folk song. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJMqE17Gy1I&feature=related

At this time of the year the car drivers are unhappy: zillions of  aphids sit in the lime trees – when you walk under them, your shoes stick to the ground, it is really weird: the sugary shit of the aphids drops on the cars, too, and very quickly they are covered with a smeary sticky crust.

And then Berlin has a lot of planes (sycamore trees?). Those are especially beautiful, because the  light, falling through their leaves, makes you think you are in Paris. 

I walk along the Spree and think:

Sheer bliss! Thank you, Berlin!

The Painter Max Liebermann At The Sea

The day before yesterday we had 30°C in Berlin, today 25°. It is sizzling hot, and the Sightseeing  boats on the Spree are sparsely used.

Well: who will be in the mood to sit on the upper deck of a steamer for hours in these dog days of summer and let themselves be sprinkled by the stream of words of a tourist guide?  

No,  I know something much more refreshing.

In the Liebermann-Villa at the Wannsee there is a special exhibition till the 15^th August: “Max Liebermann At the Sea”.

Since 1872 Liebermann visited each year the Dutch North Sea Coast at Scheveningen, Noordwijk, Katvijk and Zandvoort.

I think it interesting that he painted for 20 years the life of the common farmers, but never the sea.

At the end of the 1890s the influence of the French Impressionists becomes noticeable: now Liebermann sees the Dutch landscape in a different light, he paints more out of the moment and uses much brighter colours.

He possessed a wonderful collection of modern French painters, and advised the new director  of the Berlin National Gallery Hugo von Tschudi at the acquisitions of paintings – 1896 they travelled together to Paris and they bought Manet’s “Winter Garden”. 

“At the Dutch seaside the change from Realist to Germany’s most important Impressionist was fulfilled“ they say at the exhibition. 

He painted the famous Beach scenes and discovered the open-air painting, fascinated by the play of light.  

This picture of the Bathing Boys is seen as the first real beach painting by Max Liebermann. 1875 he had painted that motif before, but there as a Naturalist – after twenty years he discovers it anew, painted the sea and created from 1899 ten pictures of bathing boys.

But nevertheless I prefer pictures like these:

By the beginning of World War I in 1914 the visits in the Netherlands end. 

Here is a link for a short tour through the exhibition (in German) bei German TV ZDF: http://www.zdf.de/ZDFmediathek/beitrag/video/1313490/Liebermann-Ausstellung-zum-Meer-eroeffnet

What You Focus On Grows

What You Focus On Grows!

This is the title of a great new song by my best English friend Stephen Russell ( the one with the jacket and pink guitar) aka Barefoot Doctor, and Leakster. You can see and hear “Get Spanky!” on Youtube, 

 

you can buy it on i-store, and you can utterly enjoy it: it’s really uplifting music that makes your heart happy, your eyes bright and your body moving!

As I have told you I “lost” my garden when we moved to Berlin - but I gained a wonderful city, so: no complaining about that, especially as our beautiful flat has a large balcony – where “Gardening in High Heels” is so much easier. :-)

We moved in the middle of November 2010, and you can imagine that I had other things to do than garnish my balcony.  But while unpacking many chests, I dreamed of spring and summer.

What you focus on grows.

At least: it hibernated.   On my balcony stood some refugees from Hamburg: five pots with roses, and   clematis, lavender, catmint and Cranesbills. In the cold, cold winter my fugitives shivered in ice and snow.  I protected them with that air-cushioned foil nervous people like to crush between their fingers – we had lots and lots of it from padding the moving chests.  

 

All winter I doodled plans of what I would plant on my balcony – till Husband reminded me gently that once in a while he wanted to sit on the balcony too, without using a machete to chop through the roses. I, sleeping beauty, refused to lend my ear.  But I threw out the over-dimensioned teak-table we had imported from our terrace in Hamburg.  I changed it by mere wishcraft:  I detected it in a shop-window of the KaDeWe: an unusual oblong white French table – “No, sorry, Love: this is not to be sold – it is decoration!”

So I focused on it – every time I passed the shop windows. And by chance (and courage and persistency) I got it: What you focus on grows!  

 

 

The first new plant on it was a pot of beautiful horned violets that Stephen bought me on the farmers market at the Winterfeldplatz. It was very early in March – but: What you focus on grows. 

 

And then the roses started to grow leaves, “Gertrude Jekyll”, “Abraham Darby”, “New Dawn” “Auguste Luise”, and a dark red Austin-rose just start to bloom!  

 

 

That proves it: What you focus on grows!

Getting Things Done

I simply LOVE organising. And, as you may guess, I love pink. Organising gives structure and makes me feel in control (haha). Everybody knows the effect of To-Do-Lists (I love to cross out a task that is done) - and I possess more than one Filofax (though I only use one now - otherwise it would get very complicated). Especially at the beginning of a new year I have the feeling to start afresh - though on a minor scale I get that virtuous feeling every Monday (not for me the song "Tell me why I do hate Mondays").
Nowadays I have my To-Do-List almost everytime in the same room where I am. Before that I had splendid ideas in the bath/kitchen or living room - and then I forgot them easily. 
A big item creating disorder are newspaper - Daily newspapers, and Good Housekeeping etc. Now I have started to read a newspaper or journal with a pen in my hand - I mark what I think is worth keeping, cut that article out AT ONCE or write the interesting web-address on an index card.
I don't know how long this system will be used by me - at the moment it works nicely.
One tip from a very old household book I really appreciate: they wrote that you should put on your make-up before starting to do housework (or paperwork).
I do - it makes me feel better ( as does making the bed in the morning) - and you never know: the postman always rings twice :-)