![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I was planning to write about my haunting - not in a ghostly sense, you understand, but in a there-every-time-I-look-out-the-window sense - by Droopy Magpie, but then I took some bread out to Droopy in the rain and was distracted by the sight of a, a, a... I want to call it a "pilly" but I suppose it's really a berry. Whatever it is, it's on my lilly pilly tree. I'm so excited by this. I bought this dwarf variety lilly pilly two years ago and so far I've been underwhelmed by it. The first year it didn't do anything; last summer it managed to produce about ten flowers, but once they finished the flower-things* that would normally become berries fell off. Obviously one managed to stay on and all these months later it has burst forth as a single, small, hard, magenta berry. So pretty. It is apparently possible to make jam from them, but I think I'll need more than one.
When I was talking to my mother this morning, I mentioned my adventures in the new supermarket the other day - about how my brain froze when confronted with a mirror image of a layout I know well so I had enormous trouble determining which way round I was going. That's par for my course, really: I have a poor sense of direction at the best of times. I wasn't expecting sympathy because my mother has a good sense of direction and finds my inability to know where I left the car frustrating, but she surprised me. It seems that during her recent trip to the UK she had the same problem. Her inner compass was thrown completely out of whack. Partly, she feels, because she was in the northern hemisphere and her brain is set for the southern hemisphere ("I mean, how are you supposed to find south when you can't see the Southern Cross?"), and partly also because she spent so much time in a coastal town where the sea is to the east rather than the south ("Where it should be.").
On reflection, she decided she didn't have much sympathy for me anyway, because getting lost in a foreign country - and a strange hemisphere - is more understandable than being confused by the location of the dairy section. It was an interesting conversation, though, revealing just how much my mother's good sense of direction depends on her inner compass pointing due south.
* Note my expert use of botanical terms. :-)
When I was talking to my mother this morning, I mentioned my adventures in the new supermarket the other day - about how my brain froze when confronted with a mirror image of a layout I know well so I had enormous trouble determining which way round I was going. That's par for my course, really: I have a poor sense of direction at the best of times. I wasn't expecting sympathy because my mother has a good sense of direction and finds my inability to know where I left the car frustrating, but she surprised me. It seems that during her recent trip to the UK she had the same problem. Her inner compass was thrown completely out of whack. Partly, she feels, because she was in the northern hemisphere and her brain is set for the southern hemisphere ("I mean, how are you supposed to find south when you can't see the Southern Cross?"), and partly also because she spent so much time in a coastal town where the sea is to the east rather than the south ("Where it should be.").
On reflection, she decided she didn't have much sympathy for me anyway, because getting lost in a foreign country - and a strange hemisphere - is more understandable than being confused by the location of the dairy section. It was an interesting conversation, though, revealing just how much my mother's good sense of direction depends on her inner compass pointing due south.
* Note my expert use of botanical terms. :-)