Leave A Light On For Me...

I was browsing through my general clever clogs emails this week and came across a bit of a gem from Springwise.com.  

Placelamp is a desk lamp which changes colour according to the owner's status.

Image source: www.pixelonomics.com

You link the lamp with an app on your phone and you can program it to do all sorts of things - colour intensifies when you are closer and becomes a 'reading' lamp while at your desk. You can also set it to change to various colours according to your status eg. out of the office or even to reflect incoming emails or messages. Cool huh?

Anyway I got a bit excited and started looking at all of these other lamps and there's some pretty amazing stuff out there.

This is the Titanic lamp from Viable London...

It was designed by Charles Trevelyan in 2005 and while it doesn't seem like it's for sale any more, it was such a great design that I just had to share it.

This next one's the Martyr, a playful energy saver designed by UK design studio The Play Coalition in 2008...its sense of fun made me giggle.

And for the slightly morbid, here's Hung - he (or she?) has been created by enPieza! and will set you back about €185...gulp! Game of Hangman anyone?

At the opposite end of the spectrum I found this cute cottontail on that most excellent of inspired-gift-giving websites, not on the high street. The Bunny lamp is available from All Things Brighton Beautiful for £69.95.

I meandered further and discovered an illuminating and spirited trio.

First, I found Whoopsy from Lumisource which reminded me of that deliciously intoxicating flow from cocktail shaker to glass - available in four fab flavours colours for just $24.95.

Next it was this upcycled Beefeater London Gin lamp from AfterGlowsbyStacey. She makes all sorts of spirit brands light up but I loved the mix of vibrant colour and London tradition combined with the whole upcycling vibe best. It caught my eye on Etsy for the bargain price of £20.

And the last in this alcohol-fuelled triumvariate was San Remo, an oriental inspired shade made from a whole load of paper cocktail umbrellas. It's bottoms up from Zipper8Lighting and Etsy again for £72.34

This whole upcycling thing intrigued me so I mosey-ed around a bit further on this and got a bit excited about this recycled book lamp shade from the 'make-it-yourself' website, Instructables - you can download the instructions here for making this little beauty.

I wasn't really sure how I could do that with my Kindle though so the last one I found was absolutely perfect. The Andrew Lang NOD has a slot for Audrey (that's the Kindle for the Gidday uninitiated), a nook for my glasses and a third cranny for...well something else. It's available from Emmo Home for $220. Yikes!

Strangely enough, all of this inspiration just reminded of an old favourite. 

I saw it in a store about 18 years ago in Melbourne, the store lights glinting invitingly off the glass beads. Struck by its classically elegant shape, I paid and took it home and it stood on the table near my purple reading chair for more than seven years before I lugged it across the world, added an adapter and found it a new home.  

It is the first thing I see when I open the front door. There's a place for my bag on the table beside it and, when I turn it on, the beads tinkle gently as my hand brushes past before the room is suffused in a soft glow. 

But best of all? 

It tells me I am home. 

Midsummer Magic...

Today the Summer Solstice occurs and we in the Northern hemisphere will get our longest day of the year courtesy of the sun reaching its northernmost point in the sky. Stonehenge was awash with 37,000 worshippers at sunrise this morning and all manner of celebrations will take place throughout the world. 

Today also marks Midsummer in Sweden, a festival as important to the Swedes as Christmas is to me and mine. It's a time of family and food, dancing and drinking and the Swedish contingent at work are pretty much out of contact during this holiday period.

Which brings me to a little Midsummer moment of my own, this week's visit to Skanor med Falsterbo.

It's actually my fourth visit to this lovely little part of Sweden. Our European division holds its mid-year sales meeting here, a nod to a time when the company (or part of it anyway) was Swedish and management would leave the conference to travel to their respective holiday homes in the area for Midsummer. In any case, it's not your run-of-the-mill conference choice - and that's a good thing.

Skanor med (with) Falsterbo are twin medieval towns situated 28-30kms south of Malmo on the Falsterbo peninsula. It's a quiet place with a population of less than 7,000 and the area is filled with quaint, wonderfully kept houses and surrounded by pristine beaches and glorious stretches of sea and sky. This year we were blessed with warm mid-20s temperatures and I found a little time to take a stroll to the beach and to soak up a bit of Midsummer magic...

Like a row of quirky sentinels, tiny beach huts line the foreshore. 

Unfortunately the magic of Midsummer was not quite enough to keep Australia from departing the FIFA World Cup...in spite of this, last week still found this little Aussie more than happy with her lot.

The F Word...

This week my world has taken on something of a feminist flavour. 

Not that I am not a feminist - I am.

(I am also sure that there's a better way to deal with that double negative. Go ahead - comment away!)  

I didn't actually plan it that way but when I look back there has been a definite theme to the events I attended, the things I learnt and the conversations I had. Might be the planets aligning, might be a raising of my feminist consciousness. Might be my current musings about what my future might look like. Who knows. But over the last four days there has been a lot for me to consider about the future of women.

On Wednesday, I listened to some amazing women (and one man) explore women's roles in our modern world at the Women in European Business Conference. It featured an excellent panel discussion, an interview with the always fabulous Joanna Lumley and a fascinating 45-minute presentation from Harvard associate professor and social psychologist, Amy Cuddy on shaping who you are - literally. It was an inspiring night and it was thanks to the 'oh I've double-booked' mistake of a work colleague that I got a guernsey. And what did I take away from all of this? That there are many, many choices about my future, many potential pathways to explore and a myriad of conversations to have. Oh and a potential place on the invitation list for next year's event.

On Thursday, I listened to a lively discussion on the Pinkification of Young Girls at Selfridges as part of The Beauty Project. This was the last in a series put on in partnership with Intelligence Squared who always offer controversial topics and provocative panelists and with the future of the world's female population firmly in their sights, Alannah Weston, Tiffanie Darke, Tanya Gold and Katie Hopkins launched into a litany of opinions about the dangers (or not) of a rose coloured world and the potential of a 'princess' generation. 

It seemed to me that we came no closer to any answers and whilst it was an interesting discussion, it meandered around for a while then finished all too quickly. In the end, it did transpire that encouraging a questioning mind, a breadth of choice and a sense of confidence in our women of tomorrow were the keys - and also some of the prevailing themes from my previous evening's WEB Conference. How on earth this is going to happen, I have no idea but that the topic continues to raise in profile is generally deemed a positive thing. But is it enough?

On Friday morning I listened to a less-than-seven-minute TED talk from Dan Gilbert called The Psychology of your Future Self. (You may have noticed over the last few posts that I am having a bit of a love affair with TED talks at the moment.) Anyway, Gilbert postulates that we all under estimate how much we will change in the future and he uses some really clever ways of demonstrating that our heads really are buried in the sand when it comes to envisioning our future selves. Think about who you were, what you were doing and what was important to you ten years ago. Then think about how much you think you'll change in the next ten years. Doesn't it stand to reason that the rate of change will continue? Well, apparently reason has nothing to do with it but given my recent reflections about what might lie before me in the next 40 or so years, it seemed another fitting piece to add to my puzzle.

And finally yesterday, when I opened this week's Mental Floss newsletter, I discovered that LEGO will release a new series featuring female scientist figurines this coming August. Hurrah! (Imagine hooray in the posh, clipped syllables of the English.) The LEGO Research Institute set will show women exploring the world from three different angles - chemistry, paleantology and astronomy. 

Image source: https://ideas.lego.com/projects/15401

And not a skerrick of pinkification to be seen. Double hurrah!

The concept was submitted by Dr. Ellen Kooijman, a geochemist from Stockholm who, despite entering her concept last year, may have tapped into the zeitgeist by encapsulating the sentiments of Charlotte Benjamin, a seven-year-old girl who wrote a widely publicised letter to LEGO in January admonishing the toymaker to 'have more LEGO girl people who go on adventures and have fun.' 

So while the rate of change might seem snail-paced to those of us who are firm believers in gender equality, it appears that all it takes are the words of a seven-year-old to create a little momentum. At this rate, just imagine where she could be in ten years time.

So as I sit here on the comfy couch, tap-tap-tapping away and reflecting on the week that was, I am definitely left with some positive feelings about the whole feminist issue. But it still seems like we still have one hell of a mountain to climb and while I lean towards the side of a bright future ahead, I think that the visibility remains poor and the path ahead uncertain. Not only for the women of future generations but also for those of us struggling with how to create a world of choice and equality now. 

And it leaves me wondering just who and where I might be in all of this in ten years time.

Bears some thinking about doesn't it?

Summer's Lease...

It's the first of June so that must mean it's time for another Calendar Challenge and this month, Simon Drew offers a pictorial take on the words of the immortal Bard to kickstart our days of Summer...

To my mind, I think 'not to be' sounds rather drastic so I'm voting for the former. But in any case, this quote (from Hamlet in case you were wondering) does make me think about William Shakespeare's influence in our language. 

I took literature both at High School and then as my minor at Uni, and I remember how surprised I was at the proliferation of quotes that were already familiar to me. Just sticking with Hamlet, I had heard of both to thine own self be true and neither a borrower nor a lender be despite never actually studying the play itself. 

And while I've never gotten around to seeing As You Like It, my theatre forays here on Gidday from the UK are tagged with all the world's a stage. Imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery.

What I did study was Macbeth - three times. Not for me the dark romance of Romeo and Juliet (who was the sun) nor the comic delights of a Midsummer Night's Dream, where the course of true love never did run smooth. 

No, after wading through this tragedy as our compulsory Shakespeare in Year 11 English, taking English Literature in Year 12 found me double double toil and trouble-ing again with the teacher thinking it would be better to do something we already knew. And then I went to Uni to broaden my horizons and such-like only to find that rather than bear[ing] a charmed life, fair was foul and I was in the hurly burly...again.

Thanks goodness we did The Merchant of Venice in second semester and I got to learn all about pound[s] of flesh. And I did finagle a spate of Twelfth Night. With wonderful lines like 'Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them' it is little wonder that this remains one of my favourite plays.

I have since seen quite a few of the Bard's back catalogue here in London, most recently Measure for Measure, King Lear and Much Ado About Nothing. And I love them but I've noticed a peculiar pattern emerging. The norm is that I struggle to keep pace with the language in the first half, then google the story again in the interval to see whether I have managed to gain any sense of what's going on. The answer is almost always yes and I invariably return and just relax into the language, trusting that I will get all of the points that must be made and having a much more enjoyable time as a result. 

And speaking of enjoyment, today is the first day of Summer here in the UK. It has been sunshine-y and warm and the roses are out in force at Gidday HQ - who needs all the perfumes of Arabia [to] sweeten this little hand?

And with that, it seems to me that the only fitting end to this post lies in Shakespeare's Sonnet 18:

"Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease hath all too short a date".

Here's to a fabulous Summer!

ps...and just in case you are struggling with the translation of the pictogram...

To be or not to be - that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them. To die, to sleep--

No more

-------------------------------
Calendar Challenge 2014 - Back Catalogue
Keep Calm And Carry On
Sour Grapes
Water Water Everywhere
On The Shore
What Lies Before Me