Breaking the routine

Man tends to make his life easier by decreasing the amount of effort required by daily activities and this goal is efficiently achieved by the setting up of routines. We realise how a new task, say taking medication, is in the first days something we have to put our head into, but soon becomes incorporated into the daily rota and we end up doing the thing mechanically, practically unawares. The evidence is that if we try to remember doing that particular action on a more conscious level, it’s when we start having doubts about actually performing it at the right time.

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Reverie

I expect everyone has happened sometime or other to get lost in a reverie sparkled by an external factor, but when more than one element combine, as if by wicked coincidence, to stir up long forgotten memories, one lays completely under the spell of a daydream. I was recently caught in one of these situations and the memory evoked was not just a fond one, but also conjured up by a funny set of circumstances in an unlikely place, which made the recollection particularly enjoyable to indulge in.

I was staying at a quaint fishermen's village on the Atlantic coast of Senegal. One morning I was munching a baked bean sandwich sipping ginger-spiced coffee, a typical Senegalese breakfast, sitting on a bench in the sand next to the seller's ramshackle kiosk.

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Podcasts and my world

I like listening to podcasts of foreign radio programs at different times during the day, typically when I’m walking or cycling to and from work and while I’m having lunch at the canteen. This is in my opinion incomparably more entertaining and constructive than talking business with colleagues or indulging in petty backbiting on common acquaintances. You could say I withdraw into a world of my own, but it’s a world I’m at ease and feel content with, because it gives me a wide bird’s eye view on issues that are not necessarily part of my national culture.

This reminds me of the time when I was desperate to be as aware as possible of things that make up the pop culture of the country whose language I was studying. The very attempt of identification was frustrating, being nothing but a lost battle against your personal history, armed only of your best intentions. Just think how much time and effort it takes to keep up-to-date with things going on in your own country, let alone having to follow more than one.

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The end of racism

One of my favourite podcasts is a French programme called Les pieds sur terre which tackles a different subject every day, meeting people in the street or interviewing them to let them talk about a particular initiative, or a problem, or just the lives they lead. It’s about a terribly wide variety of topics that can range from the recent Egyptian revolution, as lived by the people that made it come true, to the expulsion of badly behaved children from school, or the problematic life in the multicultural suburbs of large French cities.

Recently I listened to a programme about a free shop, Le magasin pour rien, which was started in a provincial town of Alsace, and basically consists of an exchange where people turn in the things they want to get rid of for other users to take away without any payment. The lady that set up the shop realised that most people’s houses in Europe are full to the brim of superfluous things they keep buying or receiving as presents, and eventually are dumped in a skip; and that people often discard things that are still usable, just because they’re not in fashion any longer or they’ve got fed up with them. It's sheer consumerism to an outrageous degree and devoid of the most elemental logic, that sadly coexists with the deprivation many families still experience in the very same cities. But well-meaning people can be racist and, paradoxically enough, even as they are convinced they are acting out of sublime generosity.

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Travelogues

Starting from my very first journeys, I made it a habit of keeping a diary where I recorded in a rather telegraphic form the events of the day, the itinerary covered, the noteworthy encounters and the laughable situations. The pads I wrote on were as tiny as possible, so as not to be cumbersome objects in my backpack, and it was usually pocket diaries or small notepads that doubled as travel logbooks.

Writing on miniature pages in a microscopic hand was an exertion for the hand muscles after schooldays endurance in note taking was long lost. Another challenge was the paper, because I sometimes bought this writing material in foreign countries during a trip, as a stock for the upcoming journeys. Of all exotic pages I wrote on (whose place of origin more often than not didn’t match the country I was writing about), I remember Nepalese recycled paper which could have done a better service if the producers had not only considered the good looks of it. No matter what pen I wrote with, the point would always get stuck on the coarse vegetal matter incorporated in the fabric and make me lose the thread.

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