Day To Day: Calm Conversations with a Friend

#4 Seasonal Contrasts and Shadow Puppets

• Jacquie Joy • Season 1 • Episode 4

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What if you could find beauty and warmth even in the stark contrasts of seasons? This episode journey's through tales of friendship and nature's wonders. The charm of a uniquely shaped tree evokes childhood memories of shadow puppetry, while a trip to Cockle Creek takes us to the edge of Australia, where stunning ocean vistas and a statue celebrating the southern right whale await. Jacquie discusses the invigorating world of daily routines and creative pursuits that bring joy and rejuvenation.  As the day draws to a close, she reconnects with Tilly over a shared love for spring and succulents, reminiscing about a family orchid house. These cherished moments remind us of the simple joys in life, as we prepare for another day of discovery and warmth.

Jacquie:

Welcome to the Day-to-Day Podcast, calm Conversations with a Friend, spoken by Jacquie Joy, and you're listening to Episode 4. You decide to check your messages. One new voicemail it's from one of your friends. You decide it's time to sit down, make yourself comfortable and have a listen. Hey, thank you so much for your holiday update and especially for all of your photos.

Jacquie:

Some of these scenes are just breathtaking. I absolutely love all the textures and the colors in the landscapes that you've been seeing and just thinking that the air must be so fresh to breathe in. And I can understand now why you're walking so much and having such long days because you want to make the most of it while you're in a magical place like that. It is lucky that you did get some new boots to help with your walking, because if you'd taken your broken ones you wouldn't have got too far. So I hope they're wearing in well and you're not needing too many band-aids to get through the initial blister period. I buy shoes half to one size too big for me before I go on a holiday where I'm doing a lot of walking, not a lot of working, and that worked out well for me. When we went to the UK, because it was cold. We went in there winter and we definitely needed a lot of sock layers to keep warm. Anyway, it sounds like you're having a great adventure.

Jacquie:

So I started looking a bit more closely at a few of the photos you sent. I started looking a bit more closely at a few of the photos you sent and I really loved the picture of the tree that had a fairly unique shape. That was in front of the water and it reminded me of one of those hand shadow puppets that we used to make when we were kids. You know, when you got a desk lamp and shone it onto a wall and put your hand between the lamp and the wall, started making shapes with your hand and you'd come up with some crazy usually animal shapes on the wall. So that brought back a few memories and I looked up a few videos on YouTube to try and work out what animal that tree reminded me of. I also learned that the art of these shadow puppets or shadow graphs is called , which is a word I've never heard of and I had to look up the pronunciation of that. I found a couple of good videos on shadow puppetry and I learned a few new moves. I wish we had these YouTube videos back when we were trying to learn different animals, because my repertoire was very limited. I think everyone knew how to do the dog shape. The tree reminded me of a cross between the dog, the deer and maybe a rabbit.

Jacquie:

I do love the beautiful tree colours in the Northern Hemisphere in fall the yellows, oranges, the reds and greens that are in your photos. We call fall autumn here In the north part of Australia. Here it's quite warm, so we don't have that beautiful colourful leaf display that's usually associated with fall. The leaves don't change colour, but often you do find the leaves may fall off. We have an interesting tree in the backyard that we call the old man tree. It may be a ghost gum tree, and I think I pointed it out in the party photo recently. We lit it up with a big red stage light, which looked incredible because this tree has a lot of branches. It's very tall, probably about at least a story and a half tall, and it has no leaves on it, and the light just accentuated every little texture branch, every little texture branch line of this tree, as if it was a fine line drawing. It really gave it personality. Funny looking at that tree. Now, though it's fully covered in leaves, it's green and it looks like a totally different tree. We are now in spring here. We have opposite seasons to you, and that's just one of those few differences we have living down here. One other difference I discovered a few years ago came about when I went to purchase a Magnetico sleep pad for Abed, and we went to order it but couldn't order the stock standard model. We had to order a southern hemisphere model, which meant that the magnets were placed in reversed polarity, so that was unexpected.

Jacquie:

One of the other photos you sent has a vast blue ocean with viewing scopes. It looks like some type of viewing platform. I'm wondering what you're looking at there. Were there any sea creatures, us to spot any whales? It reminds me of a place we went to down in Tasmania last year and we drove to the most southernmost point of Australia, to a place called Cockle Creek. The drive was a bit rocky and bumpy. It took about an hour on the dirt road and our hire car certainly rattled around a little bit but survived the drive. And we got to the viewing platform and there was a huge bronze statue of a southern right whale there. Huge bronze statue of a southern right whale there. So apparently, if you were there at the right time of year, you can see whales frolicking in the extremely cold waters. Next to this outlook, I took a photo of an inscription that was on a rock near the whale's statue, so I'll read it out to you. I do have it here on a photograph A celebration of the southern right whale Conception, birth and nurture. Far beyond our human scale, this three-month calf begins a southern ocean journey to feed, to play, to live, a yearly cycle begun five million years ago. This rhythm of leviathans we witness now as these tender, tactile animals return to our waters every year.

Jacquie:

Anyway, health-wise, I'm keeping up with my ice baths almost every day and just got out of one then. It was a little lower in temperature than I expected because overnight the bath stayed quite cool and was still 14 degrees. We only have a cooling unit, unfortunately, so I couldn't heat it, but after consideration I decided I would try to get in, and I did. I immersed myself very quickly down to the long sitting position and the water just stayed above my belly button. So it was a pretty good effort and I stayed in there for about 10-15 minutes and it wasn't too bad. My body must be acclimatising.

Jacquie:

Of course, this coldness is not for everyone, and I know you definitely prefer to be in a sauna, which is something I do prefer personally as well, but we don't have a sauna here, so my choices are limited. I wonder if you have tried putting your face in cold water in the mornings. That's something that I find so helpful and it's not as dramatic as getting into an ice or cold bath or having a cold shower, which I find very hard to do. So when my face is feeling a little puffy in the mornings, I'll just get a metal bowl or it can be any bowl pop some water in and then just some ice cubes and I will dunk my face in the bowl, obviously have to hold my breath for a few seconds, lift it out and do that a few times, and if that's too much for me in the mornings, I'll just splash the ice water over my face, which still feels amazing, and I find that so invigorating. It is so easy to do, and speaking about this just reminds me that I should be doing it every morning. It makes me feel like I'm having a facelift every time I do it, and it's free and it's quick, perfect beauty hack and also I think it's an amazing well-being and energy hack. It's something simple that you could try at home, so let me know if you do try it and how it feels.

Jacquie:

I finally went to the hairdresser yesterday and I think it's been nearly three months, so I was very happy to get a colour redo. I haven't been for a while because my appointment kept getting bumped because my lovely hairdresser hurt her knee on an e-bike. However, she's a lot better now and she was just starting work again yesterday and called me in to be her test client. So she did pretty well and was able to finish my whole head of blonde colour. So I usually have a few hours while that's processing to be able to do something with my downtime, and I decided to research some sounds for a TV brief that I got given.

Jacquie:

It was a gritty electronic track that I had to write for a show and I researched the sound sets, got home last night and wrote the thing in a night and submitted it this morning. So I have been busy doing things like that as well as planning the live music set, and so we've got the eight songs now, and all of the songs were made famous by female artists. We'd done a couple of the 1990s by Linda Perry, and this track has almost 1 billion Spotify plays, so you would be familiar with it. It's called what's Up and it was done when she was with her band. I was surprised to hear that she wrote let's Get the Party Started by Pink and produced that with her as well. She's a very talented lady. We also decided to add in a track that was made famous by a 16 year old at the time, in 2013. It's called Royals by Lorde, which you definitely would have heard of. The surprise track for me was Betty Davis Eyes by Kim Carnes, and that was an older track, made famous in 1981, but since then it's been played and performed live in a lot of concerts by people such as Taylor Swift and Kylie Minogue, so I found it a very fun song to sing as well, especially acoustically. We also did a Miley Cyrus song and decided to do the song Flowers and also added Rolling in the Deep by Adele onto the list, and I didn't realize, but Rolling in the deep means when someone has your back, so that was her second most popular song, apparently second to Someone Like you. So that's our set and I'll let you know how it goes.

Jacquie:

I caught up with Tilly earlier in the week. We had another pulled pork to deliver over there for her and we got our amazing fresh, tasty coleslaw in return. She was talking to me about how she loves spring, the longer days, increasing humidity, and she showed me her succulents, one of which is very much like one of our jade plants, just a little smaller but looking very green and happy. And the other plant she had there was an aeonium or something called a tree houseleek, which is a fairly popular succulent here, and it has a central base of leaves and sort of spreads out. It looks like a flower arrangement of green leaves and that was looking very happy and pretty. She had also just been given two pot plants with orchids in them. One was fairly well developed but the other one was a cutting, so it was going to take a little bit of TLC, tender, loving care to get that one growing and sprouting like the other one.

Jacquie:

Do you have orchids there? They are one of the most popular and most most beautiful plants here. My dad has an orchid house and used to take us to orchid shows at the local planetarium. He would grow and donate plants for the orchid Club and they would sell them just for a profit to keep the Orchid Club in business, and my mum would make sandwiches and refreshments for the visitors at the show. I'll take some photos of their collection when I visit next and send them through to you. I think you'll be surprised by the variety of colours and sizes and types of orchids they have on display. Anyway, it's time for me to sign off. I'm going to have an earlier night tonight as I've got to get up a little earlier tomorrow morning, but I hope you enjoy the rest of your happy adventures. I'm looking forward to seeing more photographs. Take care and bye for now. You.