Yesterday was a travelling day and it took energy away from my brain to cope with the exigencies involved in moving my body through time and space. So a day without a blog is a day without a clear thought, I guess. You have to put your mind on hold and simply deal with immediate needs, like coffee, comfort, and the WC. Do you say WC? It's short for Water Closet, if I remember. The feminist novelist, Marilyn French, titled her best-selling novel, The Women's Room, with a slash through an earlier word, "Ladies'". The nomenclature is irrelevant now because there are icons indicating the men's and the women's toilets, no words required. The icons, of course, are obsolete. The icon for the woman is a silhouette in a skirt. These days you see very few women wearing skirts in airports or anywhere else, for that matter. I'm still thinking about bathrooms, also called wash rooms. Brits used to call it the Loo, dating from perhaps Norman Conquest times when a lot of French was spoken in England and people shouted "Gardez l'eau" when they threw the contents of the night chamber pot into the street below. Watch out for the water is a euphemism. Younger people, I notice, avoid evasions like that. They usually say, "I have to pee." I have always had difficulty saying "pee" because my mother thought it was vulgar. (Her younger sister got around it by saying "piddle".) Lousy, that's another one. I mean, I wasn't allowed to say "lousy" either. Like most gently reared women of my vintage, I grew up with euphemisms. I didn't know the correct technical words for any private parts. I was surprised when my first-born and very young granddaughter referred casually to her vagina. But I wasn't shocked; pleased, rather. I was very young, maybe five years old, when I attended a birthday party of a contemporary, not a close friend but a schoolmate at private school. (I was going to a private school because I was reading and my parents didn't know what to do with me; also there was no kindergarten in those prehistoric days.) The hostess told me where the lavatory was. I didn't know that word. I knew laboratory, oddly enough, and wondered why she was suggesting I do some scientific experiments at a party. All these fragments of information most of it skewed and inaccurate, drift like jetsam (not flotsam) in the free-wheeling space in our minds. No wonder I'm tired afar a day of travelling.

It's kind of like Black Friday and it's getting worse all the time. Retail stores started Boxing Day Sales several weeks ago, more and more. Whatever happened to Buy Nothing Day? Well, I don't want to drain the economy, or put anyone who still has a job out of a job. Nor do I want to sound very OLD, tutting away at extravagant spending, thoughtless consumption and irresponsible waste, but stop a moment and consider. Years ago now I took my husband's aunt shopping and feared for her as she experienced sticker shock. She sounded positively asthmatic as she gasped and caught her breath at the price of things she remembered as costing much much less. A box of writing paper that used to cost maybe $2.95 was up to 12 dollars. Nowadays, I buy 12 hasti-notes for $17.95, if Im lucky, reduced from $22.95. When I married, a loaf of bread was 7 cents. Designer loaves now cost upwards of 5 dollars. In my first year of cooking I learned about London Broil, a way to cook flank steak, which was very inexpensive, around 70 cents a pound. Now it's priced right up there with other steak, except T-bones and filet mignon which are astronomical. If I don't remember the names correctly, it's because I never buy them. I was given a pressure cooker and despite my fear of it exploding, I cooked cheap cuts of meat in it, oxtails, for example, which cost 8 or 9 cents a pound. Ah, well, nostalgia like this is no comfort. We are compensated with variety, all the vegetables that didn't exist when I began to cook. When did you first hear of edamame? Whatever your age, try making a small list of food you didn't grow up with or never heard of. This could grow into a longer discussion but people have come into the room so we must have coffee by the fire, a great pleasure.