My father called them jollies. They’re little things, usually not expensive, quite small, amusing, useful or appropriate. They’re not presents or gifts. They are just meant to “jolly life along.”” Heaven knows we all need to be jollied along.

I have a gift drawer, several, in fact, where I keep jollies (presents, too) that I collect for people, and give away as the year progresses, not only easily to people I see regularly but also to people at a stamp’s distance. The hard part is that stamps proliferate — postage is very expensive these days. I keep remembering that Marshall McLuhan reminded us that we should be grateful that have a million dollar service at our disposal for pennies (more than that!) , a service that used to be available only to powerful or wealthy people and even then — I mean, look at Romeo and Juliet. The private mail service went horribly awry and look what happened.

So I buy really light, flat things that can fit in an envelope and travel cheap. Sometimes I stamp on a parcel to flatten it so that it will fit the slot they test it on.

That’s not what I wanted to talk about. I was talking about buying jollies and I drifted into a tangent. Well …. so…jollies. No --- prices. I went to a high end gift store. Galleries and museums have marvellous jollies, very innovative, and I’m willing to pay for an idea. But improvements or solutions to problems I have been familiar with for a long time and have long since solved in some way or the other, without great expense, no way.

I found a strawberry huller and a tomato corer. Half a century ago I had a strawberry huller, a little tin pincer that clipped the green leaves from the centre on top of the strawberry. I think it cost about a dollar (loonies were far in the future). I had it for years buf it’s gone now. I have a small knife so I don’t need another huller, certainly not like the one in the gift store, a large tool about the length of my palm with a vicious knife shaped to cut out the top and centre of a strawberry. It costs $10.95. I pass. The tomato corer was bigger, with a triangular, cone-lilke blade to cut out the core of a tomato. I think it was $14,95. Nope.

But it got me thinking, sending me off on another tangent. Strawberries and tomatoes (and other things) don’t grow the way they used to. They have deeper cores, harder centres, more stems and leaves to be removed than they used to. I don’t know what to say about that or what to do about it, but I know I’m not going to buy an expensive gadget to remove the evidence. That’s not jolly at all.

Besides, where would I put it/them?

You will probably have come across Pico Iyer (1957) in the course of your reading. He’s a British born writer and traveller, well published (NYT, New York Review of Books, Harper’s and others). I picked up his book The Art of Stillness (Simon and Schuster, 2014) because I liked the subject. The subtitle is “Adventures in Going Nowhere.” In his introduction he describes going on a retreat in the San Gabriel Mountains in California and being served by a small, shaven-headed man in his sixties, wearing a threadbare monastic robe, and whose name in the monastery was Jikan, referring to the “silence between two thoughts”. This man, formerly “an Armani-clad man of the world”, told Iyer that he had developed a passion for sitting still as the most practical way of working through his habitual confusion and terror. “Nothing touches it [sitting still], except if you’re courtin’. If you’re young, the hormonal thrust has its own excitement.”

Some twenty years later that Spartan disciple died after another recent successful world tour that brought him 10 million dollars, or so I read, after he had declared bankruptcy when a business manager reduced him to penury. “Going nowhere,” as he had described it to Iyer , " was the grand adventure that makes sense of everywhere else.” I guess Leonard Cohen had been everywhere else; where else was he going to go but up? Or down? Or nowhere.

“Going nowhere,” writes Iyer, “as Cohen had shown me, is not about austerity so much as about coming closer to one’s senses.” It probably helped the poet to write song lyrics, to which he devoted an enormous amount of time to perfect.

I hadn’t expected this little book to be an oblique resumé of Cohen’s life. Iyer picked up on the poet again when Cohen was 73, onstage during a six-year global concert tour. Later, Iyer also noted the success of “Hallelujah”, Cohen's iconic song for Canada, sung memorably by kd lang at an Olympic celebration, and covered by an astonishing number of American recording artists.

“In an age of distraction," Iyer writes, “nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.

And in an age of constant movement, nothing is more urgent than sitting still.”

He concludes: “I think the place to visit may be Nowhere.”

Fast?