Beany Brain: loving our jumping-bean brains!

Welcome to this issue of the Beany Brain! I hope today’s newsletter will bounce us up as we contemplate the upsides and challenges of being neurodivergent, a little beauty, some creativity, and just general yeehawesomeness.

Table of Contents

• Beany Brain: loving our jumping-bean brains!

  • Welcome to this issue of the Beany Brain! I hope t …

• 5-Senses Portrait of Marlow

  • A Wander and a Ponder and a Cuppa

    • Yeehawesome!

  • Wonderful Wednesday

  • Today’s Beany-full Summary:

5-Senses Portrait of Marlow

If you’re a Beany Brain regular, you probably know by now that I’m a “Happier with Gretchen Rubin” podcast fangirl. I’ve been listening for years.

One exercise that Gretchen recommends to boost your happiness is to create a 5-senses portrait (for example, of your childhood home, or where you live, or a favorite person or memory).

Basically you just use the 5 senses to notice that moment or that place or person and then you write a few things about each sense related to that topic. (Gretchen Rubin wrote a 5-senses portrait for her dog Barnaby’s 8th birthday.)

Because I deal with anxiety (a “comorbidity” with autism, ausome, thanks), one thing that definitely helps me stay rooted in the moment is to focus on what’s around me.

To notice.

And I’m a card-carrying Noticer. (Too often I’m noticing the past with regret and embarrassment, so here’s to noticing now.)

I present my 5-senses portrait of Marlow (and close surrounds).

So without further bageling, toasting, crumpeting, or waffling…

Seeing

• The stereotype of Britain used to be foggy and rainy weather, but since we’ve been here, we’ve had a majority of deep-blue-sky days. And in summer, it stays light a long time at night.

• Rows of houses, many of them very old. Metal cellar doors in the sidewalk in front of pubs where they lower down the kegs of beer into the basements for attaching to the beer hoses.

• The Thames path with loads of walkers and their dogs who dive in and out of the river and leave wet doggy footprints down the dry path.

• Very tall old trees.

• About 6 or 7 charity shops on the high street—the volunteers there take donated items and sell them to raise money for each specific charity. The Florence Nightingale Hospice charity shop has especially nice window displays.

• The gold post box on the high street. If a town has an Olympic champion, they get a gold post box, and Marlow has Sir Steve Redgrave, a rower (we actually saw him one time in High Wycombe at a movie theater when we went to see Chicken Run, so that was a few years ago now).

Hearing

• The church bells every Tuesday night (the bellringers’ practice night) and for weddings on Saturdays and church services on Sundays. We can hear them where we are 1 mile away from the church.

• Birds in the back garden and every morning starting about 4 AM in the front tree.

• The voices of little kids and parents as they walk up the hill to a primary school every morning.

• Beeps in the house: washing machine, dishwasher, etc. that are different than beeps in our house in Japan. And the landline phone ringing—also a different sound than our Japanese phone.

• The wooden clacking sound of my mother-in-law’s loom.

Smelling

• Cakes baking! I’ve made a lemon-elderflower pudding cake a few times since we got here since we have access to elderflower cordial. My mother-in-law also makes delicious cakes/puddings such as lemon and blueberry, coffee and cherry, and lemon drizzle.

• All the flowers: lavender, buddleia, roses, wisteria, lilac, etc.

• The orange squash one of our sons drinks every night with tea (tea is dinnertime sandwiches, toast, etc.).

• Fresh berries. The best.

• Dry sheets. The humidity is so low here that when we dry clothes and sheets outside, they come back inside with a special dry fresh smell.

Touching

• The smooth wooden bench in the garden.

• Rough hemp handles of the reusable shopping bag I bought at the Methodist church rummage sale that they have once a month. I use it for carrying groceries up the hill.

• The big cold grooved iron handle on the door to enter church (heavy door).

• Silken and bumpy feeling of my mother-in-law’s weavings.

• The feeling of the wooden and plastic clothespins to hang our clothes outside in the back.

• Lamb’s-ear leaves. They are sooooo soft and gentle.

Tasting

• Kedgeree—I’ve been making it a lot here! Smoked mackerel, flat-leaf parsley, lemon juice, soy cream, onions, basmati rice, boiled eggs, bay leaves from the tree in the back garden, curry powder, and more, all rolled into one dish that is definitely more-ish. (I think my mom would love it.)

• The taste of the water here—it’s different than our tap water in Japan.

• Tea and coffee—they’re both ubiquitous here in the UK, and our black tea we drink in Japan is a different brand made with different water, so it tastes different. I love the Yorkshire tea here that my in-laws buy.

• Gluten-free grainy and seedy bread—it’s hard to even find GF bread in Japan, and if I do, it’s more of a sweet and mochi-like white rice-flour bread.

• Jacket potatoes and baked beans. This is something I can always eat if we go out with friends to lunch places—it doesn’t have any milk (if I ask them to leave the butter off) and it’s a good hearty meal that they serve with a side salad (lettuce, tomato, and cucumber with no dressing, so I add a little bit of salt and pepper). The jacket potato is just a baked potato with skin on that they cut open and top with baked beans (sometimes some places say that you can pick two toppings, so then I add bacon as well).

• Mustard piccalilli! I have it every night on a sandwich with gluten-free bread and ham for tea (dinnertime).

• Stem ginger. YUM. It’s finely chopped ginger in a jar of syrup, and I love adding it to things like apricot crumble when I’m baking. (Wish I could get it in Japan.)

• Jam donuts from Gluten Freedom Bageri, a shop that has a stall at the Duck Pond farmers’ market in Marlow once or twice a month (behind Liston Court, not the main farmers’ market by the church in the Causeway).

As you can see, my tasting list was the longest. Good food is my love language, guys. There’s a lot I can’t eat so when I find food that works for me, I’m really really thankful and happy.

This was a fun exercise—anyone else want to try? If you do, send me a message and let me know how it worked (or didn’t) for you.

I’m already feeling happier.

A Wander and a Ponder and a Cuppa

2 hours by myself in London.

Following on from my 5-senses portrait of Marlow, I thought I’d share my unalloyed joy at finding myself on the loose in London.

(I love my three blokes beyond belief and I also like to just walk and not talk sometimes.)

I left my guys at the London Transport Museum in Covent Garden, where the poor blokes boiled in there with no AC. But they had fun anyway, they tell me.

It was 32 C/90 F and the heat was intensified by all the concrete and big buildings in London. That is not to say that I wasn’t happy to be there. It had been 2 years and I was ready to rock and walk!

The quirky museum housed in a shoe shop that I was heading to first actually doesn’t exist anymore—it’s just some upmarket cosmetics store now. So if you ever see Galeria Melissa as an option to visit in Covent Garden, don’t believe the old sources in Google. Melissa has left the building.

Next on my agenda was the famous travel bookshop, Stanfords. It was lovely and they had good coffee.

I realized later that I had missed out the entire basement, which has a bunch of maps. Next trip!

Around the corner was the London Graphic Centre, an art supplies shop with much scope for the imagination.

Next up was Sir John Soane’s Museum. (No L. Not Sloane.)

He was an architect from the 17th century who bought 3 houses, stuck them together, and hoarded (I mean collected) stuff from all over the world. It’s a free museum, it’s eccentric, you have to wait outside in a line (but not too long when I was there), you have to check your backpack with them and carry your purse in a clear plastic bag they give you because the hallways and walkways can be extremely narrow and they don’t want you knocking stuff over. You can buy a booklet about the displays for 3 pounds, but I opted not to. Sir John gave his house and collections to be kept as a museum, and one of his stipulations was that nothing would be labeled. He wanted it to be seen as he lived it.

A great little find.

I think the most interesting parts of the house were the kitchen and the library. The kitchen because I could imagine how hard it would be to cook in a dark basement with no modern conveniences, and the library because it was painted a beautiful red (read?) and there were loads of antique leather-bound classics behind glass.

A walk back through the covered Jubilee Market in Covent Garden reminded me that my word for the year is “jubilee” and that I haven’t done much with it yet. (And hey, this is my 50th Beany Brain newsletter! Perfect for Jubilee!)

Suggestions for my jubilee year? Let me know.

Do you choose a word for the year?

I think it helps me focus my ADHD brain, but my lack of attention to my word this year makes me feel a little sad.

There is a lot going on in the world and in our lives though, isn’t there.

Anyway, I was jubilee-ing in London.

Yeehawesome!

Yeehawesome! is a happy-brain roundup in each issue of Beany Brain. What’s happening that’s good in brain land? What’s bringing me joy?

1. The Marlow Bookshop. A great place to wander and/or buy unique cards. Evidently little Fido thinks so too; it’s his home territory.

2. I tried out the Bereavement Cafe at the church last week and they were so supportive in helping me process a friend’s suicide (20th anniversary this year) a bit more. One lady encouraged me to write about my friend, and I had also chosen our theme for the next week for our creative writing group at the library. With the theme of penumbra, I focused on my friend and her life and death. (I filched the term from the novel Miss Garnet’s Angel.) The Collins Dictionary gives this definition of penumbra:

3. Christine McGuinness, a British model, TV personality, mum to neurodivergent children, and autistic and ADHD herself, is speaking out for neurodivergent-friendly play areas for her children and all ND children.

Beany Brownie Points and Extra Bonus Funniness

Wonderful Wednesday

Wonderful Wednesday was a day once a year in college when they would suddenly and surprisingly call off all classes and we’d play all day. The cafeteria provided special fun food and we’d do stuff outside like slip ‘n slides and jello wrestling in sumo suits. This segment of Beany Brain is dedicated to that memory of silliness and fun—no words, just a photo from the week that I’ve taken or found that reminds me to let the joy in. Since Beany Brain is published on Wednesday every week (at least, Wednesday in Japan), I hope you enjoy this Wonderful Wednesday.

Today’s Beany-full Summary:

• I deal with anxiety on the regular and writing a 5-senses portrait helped me focus on some fun things around me here in Marlow while we’re here.

• 2 hours in London by myself was part of my jubilee year.

• Go forth in Beany joy. What will help you feel yeehawesome this week?

Thank you for reading this installment of Beany Brain! You’re very welcome to hop on by any old time.

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