Okra shortages; mantras and beads; grapes

Ruth and I went up to the marina on Saturday afternoon to give Ray a hand painting his boat. It wasn't great painting weather but we managed to fit in an hour or so. A start has been made on applying the green top coats. We then barbecued some sausages and spent a pleasant evening sitting around his darling new little wood-/coal-burning stove.

In a fit of attempting to support local traders, I strode out along the Oxford Road (see 3 June post) on Sunday morning, stopping first at Super Foods, one of many Asian supermarkets in the locality but with one of the nicest selections of vegetables. Bought half a dozen or so small aubergines and a substantial pile of okra, which Waitrose appear to have stopped selling. Have been vaguely intending to take issue with them over this but haven’t got around to it as yet. Rather shockingly, my mother informed me on the phone that she can’t find okra in her local Waitrose either, but did find some in Tesco. Feel as though all is topsy-turvy with the world. Anyway, after purchase of veg, proceeded further out to the recently-opened Sari Sari Oriental supermarket to re-stock with Shin Ramyun. County Delicacies in St Mary’s Butts are no longer reliable stockists of this, and I don’t always feel like trekking up the hill to the Oriental supermarket at the University, the only other known source in Reading.

On Wednesday evening I went along to a meditation class at RISC courtesy of Meditation UK. The meditation classes I’ve done before have been of the silent ‘focus on the breath’ type so I had been naively assuming that this class would be the same and was unprepared for the hour of mantra-chanting and bead-fondling that awaited me. The first hour of the class was evidently intended as an introduction for novices; we worked through a couple of mantra meditations, starting with ‘Gauranga’, uttered slowly on an out-breath, and then up-skilling ourselves rapidly to move on to ‘Gopala Govinda Rama Madana-Mohana’, said quite quickly while threading beads through our fingers. On learning that the second hour of the class was due to involve musical instruments, I beat a hasty retreat during the brief comfort break, as did one other chap, muttering darkly about how it wasn’t what he’d been led to believe on the phone.

The young woman who led the class was very smiley and friendly but a little ditsy (came out with some gem roughly along the lines of “this will help you if you want to do spiritual things, like, you know, spiritually”) and did make some seemingly ill-informed comments about ‘silent’ approaches to meditation and their unsuitability for the modern age. Still, Meditation UK’s website claims, in grandiose fashion, that the classes will involve ‘understanding your true identity and the goal of life’.


My main experience of meditation previously was some classes hosted at the University of Essex’ Multi-Faith Chaplaincy Centre, led by a bruiser of a man with a Scottish accent who introduced himself as Amogrivajra – I remember smirking at some other class members before realising that this wasn’t supposed to be funny. Assume he’d been re-birthed at some point.

Attaching a photo of our now-white garage, with now-ripened grapes. They look pretty but I haven’t tried eating them. Probably should do something creative with them like trampling them into wine, but can’t be arsed really.