Be the Woman... Inner Circle

[Excerpt from Guru Kaur's blog on the Be the Woman... Private Online Community for women...]

One of my great delights is having a bicycle. I've had one all my life and when I lived in Anandpur Sahib I organised to get one within 24 hours of moving there. With a large, wicker English-style basket on the front - all very Memsahib, Merchant Ivory - it became the way for me to go that bit further afield than I could go on foot. Almost every morning, just as the sun was beginning to wake up, I would bicycle out of the village up to a little Gurdwara. This met with much resistance: you never know what might happen to you. Apparently I was vulnerable to loins (sic) which roamed wild in the area, although I'm quite sure that such beast, if ever they were here below the foothills, were trophies on some Sahib's home counties wall long ago, leading to their extinction in the area. There is a joy of the freedom, of balancing on wheels which seem to defy logic, where momentum takes you forward, where brakes put you back on course, of going beyond the boundaries created by walking.

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[Excerpt from Guru Kaur's blog on the Be the Woman... Private Online Community for women...]

This theme of insecurity and anxiety now being the backdrop to our lives is rippling through society. There's an article in today's Times called: Children's Fears May Be Fuelled By Parents. A parent's role is to give a child a sense of its own inner security, well-being, trustworthiness and self-esteem. This comes from the parent not succumbing to fear, and having a solution to how to deal with it which is coherent and easily explained to a child.

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[Excerpt from Guru Kaur's blog on the Be the Woman... Private Online Community for women...]

Any of you reading this who are based in the UK will know that we're in the midst of a public outcry about morals, manners, standards and style. The fuse which has ignited this is a phone call made by two well known radio presenters on Radio 2 (which is publicly funded) to a retired actor in a prank call about his granddaughter.

Any of you old enough to remember the famous Hello Boys Wonderbra advertising campaign? I remember sitting in a presentation on changing trends in the media when I learned how just one image can change a whole psyche. 

 

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[Excerpt from Guru Kaur's blog on the Be the Woman... Private Online Community for women...]

A very dear friend of mine just sent me one of those round-robin friendship letters. Normally, I would not open nor read them. This one though is different: the title is about a man called Fleming, which is my husband's family surname. "His name was Fleming, and he was a poor Scottish farmer. One day, while trying to make a living for his family, he heard a cry for help coming from a nearby bog. He dropped his tools and ran to the bog. There, mired to his waist in black muck, was a terrified boy, screaming and struggling to free himself. 

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[Excerpt from Guru Kaur's blog on the Be the Woman... Private Online Community for women...]

One of the recurring themes on our guests on the Regally Graceful™ Podcasts is that enjoyment is a vital part of life's equation. Do what you do love, enjoy what you do and the rest will sort it out. And what drives success? That enjoyment. This summer there were two Olympians in the Water Cube in Beijing who in different interviews echoed these sentiments. First up, is our Rebecca Adlington, who broke world records and won hearts.  

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[Excerpt from Guru Kaur's blog on the Be the Woman... Private Online Community for women...]

How you feel about yourself, how secure you are, how happy and healthy you are is important to all of us. We are only as strong as the weakest link in the chain. This is a fundamental principle which underlies a lot of government policy. If you're reading this in the UK, you'll know that we're all being encouraged to eat five portions of fruit and veg a day. 

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Do you remember where you were and what you were doing when you first heard that the Twin Towers were coming down? Do you remember that day as the news unfolded that there were other planes out there, with suicidal terrorists on them who would stop at nothing to fulfil their deadly mission? Do you remember how the cold arms of fear hugged you tight, so tight that it almost stopped you breathing? Do you remember how afraid you were that the world was coming to an end? How long did that fear last in you? And what about in our global society as a whole? A war on terror began. A war on an emotion: how do you do that? Do you take out your sword and cut it to pieces and say "nah-na-na-nah-nah, I'm not afraid of you so you can go away"? Did you walk tall having decided that if you succumbed to feel the fear that pervaded the globe then the terrorists had won? 

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India Knight's dissection of Mr and Mrs Guy Ritchie's marriage in the paper this weekend included this cautionary paragraph: "Horses aside, what it boils down to, if you believe the rumours – which I do, because some of them come from close to the source – is that Madonna, and Madonna’s needs and Madonna’s desires, had an emasculating effect on her husband; that she noticed, didn’t find it especially attractive and agreed that enough was enough." I've lost count of how many women I know who have, usually inadvertently and unconsciously, done the same thing to their husband, men that they've worked with, or lived with. 

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[Excerpt from Guru Kaur's blog on the Be the Woman... Private Online Community for women...]

There we were on the Laughing Hens stand at the Knitting and Stitching Show when I noticed that up on the wall was the finished sample of the cardigan which I am currently knitting. It's got these big blousey Old English Roses knitted into it. The sample one is in a camel-coloured felted tweed whereas I've chosen to do it in a wool/cotton cream. That though was not what struck me most.

I turned to Vladka to point out how perfectly the one on the stand looks. "Look, the inside looks as good as the outside, and every stitch, whatever its colour, looks the same, as if the roses were painted on and the colour sunk deep into the wool". From this you can guess that my roses don't look like that. If you've never done Intarsia, knitting with lots of different colour wools, then you won't yet know that it is like trying to serve spaghetti in neat rows. It's an arcane experience in unravelling never ending tangles of wool, a meditation in patience and self-forgiveness.. 

 

 

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[Excerpt from Guru Kaur's blog on the Be the Woman... Private Online Community for women...]

Yes, that is Nick, my husband in the new Microsoft advert, the cool guy with the beard. So if you haven't seen it on the Tele, then you can see it here: And then watch the Video Response Hari Karam produced about Nick here: Spread the word, and please rate the response :) with love, blessings, gratitude gracefully Guru Kaur

 

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Remember the film "Some Like It Hot?" with that scene of Marilyn Monroe walking down the train platform? In real life she and one of co-stars, Tony Curtis, were having an affair. In a recent interview Tony revealed this about her: "One of his first affairs in Hollywood was with the young Marilyn Monroe.

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[Excerpt from Guru Kaur's blog on the Be the Woman... Private Online Community for women...]

Several years ago I went to stay with one of my best friends from school in the beautiful home she has made for her family, husband and two children. As we sat all snug in their sitting room, her husband asked me about what his wife was like at school. "She hasn't changed at all, she's always been this wonderful woman", I replied. "I'm sure, but what I really want to know is why is she so obsessed with having cushions and pillows everywhere. 

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A few months ago here at Club 15CC we were talking about people who've changed the world, films, you know the sort of things which are good to chat about over lunch. I mentioned Paul Newman, not least for the extraordinarily diverse range of roles that he had played, from the guy in A Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Hari Karam was surprised: "you mean the guy who makes the Salad Dressing, was he really that famous an actor?". I realised then what a great legacy that Paul Newman would leave. Depending on which generation you were part of, Paul was film star, culinary purveyor, or philanthropist. 

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Rugby's been a blurry backdrop since I stood on the touch lines at school while Nick played Full Back in the school 1st XV. During these last 30 years I've been to Twickenham a couple of times and watched countless matches as Nick has screamed "pass the ball" at the TV, imagining that they could hear him. Several of the boys he played Rugby with at his Prep School went on to play for Scotland. 

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"Fashion imposes an identity": it was one of the key tenets of our Regally Graceful™ Clothing and Consultancy business. As I explored clothing and all its accessories, researching how clothing influences us and how we can experience other aspects of ourselves through what we wear - you are what you wear - I discovered that there was a whole relationship on a society level between clothing and the way women portray themselves. 

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[Excerpt from Guru Kaur's blog on the Be the Woman... Private Online Community for women...]

Madame Benneton is a lady, I really cannot call her a woman, whom I met as a child in Paris. She was stick thin, with healthy skin, of a certain age, as the French so delicately say, with perfectly coiffured hair and hoirzontal hems on her immaculate suits of the softest wool which draped around her frame like a breeze on a tree. She was certainly in her early 80s from the way she spoke. Her story was that as the only child (French go in for small families) she took over the family business which had since inception by her father, or was it grandfather, been in the shop on the opposite side of the Boulevard from my parents' flat. It was one of those places where time and manners had stood still with more than a mild fragrance of that haughty dignity which the French upper-classes exude.  

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Last weekend Millie-Pup and I went to visit my mother in the (NHS) rehab home she's currently staying in. It was whole new experience for Millie-Pup. The building is a low rise block, of three storeys, probably built in the early 1970s and given a somewhat cursory slap of paint in the 80s when pale apricot and sloppy stencils were all the rage. It's got a dishevelled air of an almost derelict campus in a now defunct polytechnic, an unwashed, uncared for exterior which goes with transient occupants whose lives and thoughts are elsewhere. It's a staging post in life. 

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[Excerpt from Guru Kaur's blog on the Be the Woman... Private Online Community for women...]

Gurmit's got a great discussion going on the forum about Moving On, where we've discussed mortality, and Simona's got a discussion on dealing with Other People's Opinions. Here at Club 15CC, Nick is currently preparing for a talk he's giving, fervently reading Sikh History books (including the redoubtable Macauliffe). Hari Karam picked up a volume and found this story about moving on from other people's opinions. 

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OK, so there's been a lot of very hot bodies on the box during these Olympics and if you were wondering what they get up to when their competitions are over you can read more in a very informative article in the Times called Sex in the Olympic City. And here's the interesting part: "Before we get to that, however, it is worth noting an intriguing dichotomy between the sexes in respect of all this coupling. 

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[Excerpt from Guru Kaur's blog on the Be the Woman... Private Online Community for women...]

We've been watching the Olympics here. A lot. I mean who hasn't? It's such a celebration of human achievement and inspiration. When a group of souls come together for any large event like this (or the Kumbh Mela) it does have a shift on the collective psyche of the planet. It has to. They are embodying something beyond just winning for the sake of winning. They are embodying the fine tuning of human potential. And what's amazing is that in this state so many world records get broken. Ninety Three people successfully pushed the boundaries of what humankind is capable of. That rubs off on us all. 

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