Looking up, looking down

"Our character is what we do when we think no one is looking. "

H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

My French professor once referred to me in a progress interview as the girl who always looked down at the ground when walking. I had not realised I did this, and although it was offered kindly and interestedly - he asked me why - there was, nevertheless, an inferred criticism there. Well not exactly a criticism but more an anxiety that something was wrong. But there really wasn't - well if there was it was nothing to do with walking around looking at the ground. I did that all the time, not just when I was unhappy. It also implied that nobody else did this. That everybody else looked up. Because he said this I have been conscious ever since of the fact that mostly I do look at the ground when walking and so I try to look up and out every now and then, because I feel I should.

I did the Eltham walk this morning and as I did I thought about what he said all those years ago - for, yes indeed, I still mostly look at the ground as I walk along. I often do think about it in fact. So why do I look at the ground?

Well I think there are two reasons. One - it's safer, and two it's interesting.

Safer - well if you are looking down at the ground you won't fall in a hole or trip over anything, you won't tread in the dog pooh, and you will see the snake before treading on it. If you are not on a smooth road - most of my walk is along tracks beside the road or along unmade roads - then there are likely to be any number of obstacles. So does this make me a craven coward or a sensible, safe and reliable companion? You do have to look up when crossing a road though.

"If you are looking down while walking it is better to walk up hill - the ground is nearer". Gertrude Stein

I'm quite prepared to admit that I am one of the world's worst cowards, although strangely, until I left primary school I was really rather the opposite. Well that's my memory of me anyway. I dared to do things that I shouldn't have and almost died a couple of times because of it. And I still looked down - I remember playing those games of avoiding the lines of the paving stones and playing hopscotch. That was enormous fun. Now this might just be the ignorance of youth of course, and I did also climb trees to sit amongst the high branches. Whatever it was, by the time I had spent a year in high school it had all gone. Now I don't dare things at all. Well except perhaps with respect to food - although even there, there are certain things I just won't try - oysters for example - but I've spoken about them before. On the whole though I embrace new food and new tastes. At least I will try them unless there is something fundamentally distasteful about them. Wichity grubs - ugh!

And looking down can be really, really interesting. There is a lot going on down there. Where we join the main road, at the top of the hill, there is a small round metal tag of some kind hammered into the ground. What is it there for? Here and there there are strange chalk markings made by surveyors and the like. What do they mean? In the city there are endless weird things to look at on the ground. Try it next time you are there. There's always rubbish of course, but I really do think there is less of it than there was. And when I see it I think about the why and the when and the how of it all.

There are pretty things too. Weeds especially seem to be the first to push up into a bare patch of ground. I saw a few small dandelions today and those pretty pink little flowers. I don't know what they are but I'm. pretty sure they are weeds. And grass, of course will always find somewhere to grow. Even through concrete.

And the leaves themselves seem to be so artfully arranged with subtle gradations of colour and shape. The tiny little moss flowers are another beautiful thing, if you can call them that - I don't know whether they are flowers or leaves or something else entirely but they are exquisitely and delicately green and lush.

Then there is evidence of other lives - the rubbish I mentioned already, the odd thing that somebody has lost - I didn't see anything today but sometimes there are little toys, a shoe even, maybe a coin, bird's feathers. And today, in the garden a scraping made by a kangaroo.

Looking down is detail - down is where the tiny things are - the ants, the dust, the grass and mosses, the water.

"It takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the extraordinary." David Bailey

Up on the other hand is big - so big that it passes our comprehension really, causing scientists to come up with extraordinary mathematical theories about it all. I do look up occasionally. Look up at the hills in the distance, though that is more looking out and forward, not up. Today the sky was a perfect blue as you can see at the top of this post, with a few fluffy and picturesque white clouds. It is awe-inspiring - well actually it makes one feel small, ant like and insignificant. Perhaps that's why I don't look up. Surely none of us want to feel insignificant or what's it all for? But up is definitely beautiful - at night perhaps even more so. Up induces a sense of wonder.

"We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." Oscar Wilde

And there it is again - the inherent implied superiority of looking up at the heavens over down at the ground. But what about looking down a microscope at the infinitely tiny, or trying to find the impossibly tiny in huge machines like the large hadron collider. It's a bit of an irony is it not that you have to build something so big to find something so small?

But this is definitely one of my ramblings rather than a musing on food. Indeed how can I connect it to food?

Well you don't look up when you are preparing food. Hardly at all. It's all detail. Although the details come together to create the whole - a dish, a meal, a festive occasion, a cuisine - life.