Was there life before?

I just came back from The Old Foodie and after having read "...a pounde or a halfe of suger, and myngle all those together over the fyre, till thyme they seethe, and then set it to cole...." Iwas reminded of how young I am. Thank god we have spelling checks these days.

However, I do have a history. And I would like to share it with you. Look at this :




Yes they are old aren't they? So old that it's verging on hilarity. These were/are my collection of recipes that I have kept for an unsaid number of years.

Just in case you were wondering : No, I'm not fraying around the edges nor do I look as helpless as those there things. But they are mine nevertheless. They are my precious hard-copies, touchable and age-able, of recipes that I had collected just for the sake of collecting. May I add too that I'm not particularly careful with my property so they actually age before their time. Snigger. So in no way should you equate from the way my property looks to the way I look. Really. Jokes aside. I insist. Swear to god.

That was life before blogging. That was life before friends and people were invisible and untouchable. That was life before, when the skills of typing were limited to typists or secretaries only. That was life at a time when you attended typing school while waiting for your A level results just in case you didn't make it beyond that point, deliberately or otherwise.

Most of the recipes that were collected were cut out from newspapers and women's magazines like Her World and Female or Wanita and so on and so forth. It was a preoccupation that did not necessarily include cooking. it was just the basic act of cutting, or copying in longhand and/or pasting with gum or sticky-tape that made the activity worthwhile and queerly satisfying. Most of the time I would be flipping those pages and admiring the collection that I had amassed and occasionally I would try out a recipe or two.

Apart from the cookery books that I also collected, of which some are as horrifyingly old as my children, cutting and pasting scraps of recipes was a normal preoccupation of us medieval women who had an interest in cooking or baking. Tips and recipes were also gleaned from friends, acquaintances and old folks. What I mean is, from actual and visibly embodied people, whom you could touch, see, smell and irritate where the only way of deleting them from your life was by deleting theirs.

But, thanks to the internet and blogging, things have changed. Incredibly so. There are people now to whom I talk, joke and laugh with but whom I have not met and have not compared heights/weights/figure/clothes/shoes(age of shoes) or meals with. It is incredible. It is phenomenal. Unfortunately there are also people whom I used to joke, talk, laugh and eat with but whom I don't meet, talk, joke or laugh with anymore. It is disgusting and shameful. The act I mean. The act of not meeting I mean.

But let not my aghast at technological advancement disturb you. I have advanced along with it more than comfortably so and bloggerin' on to such a stage that it would take a crane, Hulk Hogan, Arnold Swazzernager or a chain saw to pry me away from the laptop/keyboard/mouse and all other paraphernalia associated with blogging. It has gotten to such a stage that my children despise me, that I would claw at the keyboard if it was taken away from me,that I would wail and moan and rant if the computer broke down or was just excruciatingly s-l-o-w.

So I wonder now whether this is all worth my time and energy or what's left of it. Is it worth growing roots and getting attached to this here dining chair in the name of blogging? Is it worth being permanently disabled with an act that eats up your brains 24/7 and losing the sight of sun and moon? Is it worth the threat of blindness, back pain and an expanding bottom over blogging?

I can't quite decide yet. I'm in the midst of searching for the answers to my life and the worth of it. I'm in the midst of blogging. But when I get them I'll let you know. In the meantime I'll put away those dinosaur-recipe collection and carry on living in my impalpable, virtual world.