Six Seconds of Sanity

2010-06-16T14:27:00.000+01:00

Us Brits are not supposed to be jolly about Nap Bonaparte - we are better trained, when hearing his name, to suck air through our lips as though sucking lemon and assume a disapproving face. But he is credited with a lot of terribly clever quotations. And one I came across recently suggested that if someone attacked you, the only fair thing to do is fight back.

Hmm. I LIKE that, you know.

Anyone who knows the mad lines in which we have recently lived will also know I have not been adept at this fighting back thing; more at Turning T'other Cheek until my head spins on its axis. However. However. Someone told me recently (and I KNOW this is dodgy ground, this "she said that she said" thing that goes on, but even so, bear with me...) that it had been suggested that I "never got anything finished". Because I am "disorganised".

Pause for growling yowl of anger.

I am perhaps more paranoid than is normal, having been at the receiving end of accusatory rubbish for some time, BUT if ANYONE is to call me disorganised, in the same way that if anyone is to call my dog stupid, then only I, and I alone, shall be the one to say it.

It's not that it isn't true. I am terribly disorganised. Perhaps because I like to cloak myself in so many tasks that eventual drowning in them is the only option. So this led to me thinking of what I have achieved in the last 24 hours. And at the risk of bragging (this is after all my blog, so why not) I think it's actually rather a lot. And so I'm blogging it. Because since it's only me who reads this, I might like to look back at this in a month or so and think "oh golly, quite a lot did get done after all and what a pat on the back for me". Horrid conceit and all.

So. In the last 24 hours I have:

1. Prepared very interesting (yes it IS) 2 hour session on prosody and meta-language in modern British English.

2. Contacted 3 old friends in Japan with long newsy and chatty emails after several years delay.
3. Organised team of 12 for dragonboat regatta.
4. Organised training session for the same, though that is meant to be a secret.
5. Created proof-type mock up of school cookbook.
6. Weeded school garden, planted mini orchard, 6 pumpkins and 12 tomatoes.
7. Taken dog on 2 x 5 mile runs
8. Made fish-and-preserved lemon tagine
9. Made Tom Yum from scratch
10. Learnt words to Brigitte Bardot's Moi Je Joue after request from 4 year old, omitting inappropriate "oooh plus fort!" bit at end.
11. Taken 2 children through Baa Baa Black Sheep Using Both Hands on piano, 4 times.
12. Cleansed dog of foxy faeces.
13. Cleansed hall carpet of same.
14. Learned 4 phrases in Thai as part of dastardly plan to surprise cousin at wedding next month.
15. Learned Deutchland Deutschland on accordion in response to request from friend who wants it next week.
16. Washed and dried 4 lifejackets
17. Scolded slugs lurking in greenhouse and removed to next door.
18. Amused builders with unexpected witticism.
19. Gone through final proof of website belonging to soon-to-be-launched business.
20. Applied for RHS funding for school garden.
21. Rescued abused frog from clutches of dog.
22. Looked up precise role of Chuchi Gangdruk in response to request from 5 year old who couldn't find Tibet on globe.
23. Sourced clay and clay oven building plans for Father's Day present this Sunday. (Dad, if you're reading, don't worry - it's not for you - it's from the kids to R. You're getting a book)
24. Cut sleeves off winter shirts in attempt to create summer wardrobe without having to shop.
25. Marked 5 papers of varying ability on Latinate forms in formal English.
26. And finally...created International Music Library on CDS for nursery

Forget washing, cooking and the rest. Who says I never get anything done?
Raspberries INDEED!

Afterthought

And no, of COURSE I haven't washed my kitchen floor. Because when I could have been doing THAT, I wrote this instead. Everyone needs a bit of pointless timewasting after all...

Where have all the ridiculous things gone?

2010-05-14T13:01:00.000+01:00

The problem with living fairly permanently in the firing line of someone else's hatred (actually, undeserved hatred - I can say that, can't I? It IS undeserved...) is that eventually it all begins to seep in. And this can make you very tired indeed.

I miss irrepressible joy.

And since I am unlikely to be near my beautifully escapist boogie board for a while, I think perhaps to answer is to try and seek out the ridiculous, because it seems to me that when you feel like this, it stops finding YOU.

This is an old one, but it works every time. Every time.

I couldn't resist it...

2010-05-09T22:04:00.001+01:00

Bringing back a positive note to the blog, after my slight diversion into diatribe...

It will also be a test as to whether R really does read my blog or not.

If he does, we will soon have A Conversation on Unnecessary Purchases Towards the End of the Month...

And if he doesn't, I shall just pop it up on the wall one day this week and say "What? That old thing?"

I think I deserve it.

Keep Calm Gallery. Lots of fun to be had.

Stop. Please just stop.

2010-05-07T13:06:00.001+01:00

The time has come, the walrus said...But not the walrus, actually. Me. The time has come, I think, to respond.

Years of constant abuse, harassment, lies, conjecture, tears, hysterics and yep, occasional violence (didn't you try to kick my back door down?) and what have I EVER done? Nothing. I have NEVER responded. I have never answered back. You have had nothing but my silence and my willingness to have you back in my life, time and time again, whenever YOU have decided that equilibrium can be restored. I have never, not once, demanded apology, qualification or explanation. And do you know how hard that is? After everything you have said and done? No. Of course you don't. Why would you ever know that?

But you must now allow me some brief response.

I have a file on my computer called HORRID. That is where I store all your emails of poison and accusation. I know they are there and just seeing the file makes me bilious. But I have never answered any of them.

But hey, lets look through them. Lets look at what you have accused me of. Lies, conceit, viciousness and self-serving cruelty seems to be the common theme, and yet - oh - there are no actual examples to back these up. Sluttishness, sloth, avarice and gluttony also crop up with amazing regularity. And attempted murder, once. You remind me with startling regularity how my friends hate me, how my family despair of me, how my husband fears and detests me and, oh delightfully, how my late mother would have been so very ashamed of me. Again and again and again.

However, what strikes me now, is that you have never, ever accused me of stupidity.

Why is that? Why have you never thought to call me stupid? Are you put off by my languages, my instruments, my ability to cook and garden, the nature of my job? The fact that I am not fazed by the states of America or the geographical location of Bhutan? Is it because you actually think that I am NOT stupid?

Because here I do not agree with you. Naturally I refute all the other accusations (with the perhaps exception of sluttishness around the house, but I am SORRY - I will not give my life over to housework). But - look! - there is a gaping hole. You SHOULD add stupidity to the list. Can you not see it?

I have been so glaringly stupid. Stupid in my failure to answer back, in my being so utterly mistaken in thinking respect for others is more important than defending myself. And most of all, MOST of all, prodigious, unmitigated stupidity in the hours of my life I have given over to worrying whether ANY of the vitriolic imputations you have launched my way could in any way be true.

To have allowed you into my mind? THERE is the real stupidity.

And so now you are calling my friends to inform them - (no WARN them, wasn't that what you said?) - of my perfidious, nasty, lowliving nature. My lack of integrity. My odious cruelty. My ever-corroding mental state. And to regale them with a host of things you insist I have done but which we both KNOW have never been my actions, but yours. We could of course label this as blatant defamation, but lets leave that as a technicality for now.

What do you not understand? They are my FRIENDS. They are not going to be influenced with a rambling anihilation of my character . They know me as I AM, and not as you so dearly wish I could be.

So here is an idea. Don't waste your time with all of that. Instead, tell them this. Tell them I am indeed stupid. Really, truly, indubitably STUPID. Tell them I have put up with you and your incessant bullying for years. Tell them I have kept much of it a secret because I believed you could not help it, and perhaps were not quite in control. That I have clung to the failing shreds of sympathy that no one could be in their right mind to do what you do. Tell them how often I have turned my back on what I have KNOWN to be right, merely to keep YOU from flying into one of your campaigns of persecution, because they are so horrendous for everyone.

So indeed I have been stupid. Rip up the old list because it is so full of falsification, and begin anew. I've even given you a start now.

AND NOW WILL YOU PLEASE LEAVE ME ALONE?

How many languages do you want that in? (I have five.)

"I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.” (Churchill)

2010-05-04T21:42:00.001+01:00

I was part of a rather coxcombical conversation recently where everyone urged everyone else to Take Pleasure in The Moment, to Digest the Here and Now and to See Joy in Small Things. Etc. You can find happiness, gratification and comfort when you least expect it, went the general theme. It was, to be very truthful, not massively my kind of conversation, but - fain to deny it - there is within its cliche a point worth the making.

In view of this, then, I can hardly describe the excessive happiness-gratification-comfort I found in one small moment this morning, on the school run, in the sight of the local recycling collectors in a knee-bent struggle with my friends' recycling box. "Heave HO" one puffed, delightfully for me, as they staggered, weaving under it's clinking and clanking weight in a desperate zig-zag towards the truck, where the crashing cascade of a week's worth of wine bottles resonated up the lane behind me and my mirth.

There was certainly happiness to be found in the spectacle, but even this was outdone by waves of gratification. Gratification that other people as well spend a fortune they probably haven't got on wine. And yep, comfort too. Comfort in the idea that when my pickled-pink liver and I shuffle sheepishly towards a frowning St Peter at my end (my premature end, as this government would no doubt remind me, while wagging a nannyish finger towards its haloed guideline of 14 units a week), then at least I should have a boozy buddy or two to meet me there.

So. Thank you to my supportively intemperate friends for jolly good 30 minute chuckle, which took me all through the stacking of the dishwasher and into a good ten minutes of Women's Hour. Lovely.

(Cartoon from the rather super Jackie Fleming. Always worth a look)

"The dog is a gentleman: I hope to go to his heaven, not man's" (Twain)

2010-04-29T21:32:00.004+01:00

Some years back, an vehemently vigorous boxer came from the RSPCA to live with my parents, ostensibly as Housedog but more realistically as Houseguest, and a highly pampered one at that.

The reason for her arrival was justified, somewhat weakly, (my parents had always had dogs, after all, and were merely trying to be sensible by not getting another one) by the fact that some revolting little toe-scum had just burgled their house. With this in mind, the main job description of the dog was then, in actual fact, defence. The dog herself however was not troubled by such contractual detail and within hours of arrival had changed her duties to Lying Around and being Excessively Petted.

She ingrained herself into the very heart of the family without real effort, sealing our affections with a tongue that wouldn't quite fit into her mouth. We were all pretty much devoted. Indeed one of my Japanese friends once noted, with unchecked horror, "You and R both walked in, fell on the floor with the dog and rolled around hugging her before you'd even greeted your parents!". True, and I don't think any of us had found this unusual.

Anyway, after a while, my mother, who had pretty much turned a blind eye to this dog's mickey-taking on House Rules (which, frankly, would have had the souls of our other, more toeing-the-line pets spinning affrontedly in their graves) decided that the least this loafing canine could do to earn her keep would be to bark when the doorbell rang. The dog disagreed with my mother on this, in the same way as she had successfully disagreed that Dogs Should Not be Allowed On the Sofa in the Dining Room. She would certainly shoulder-charge her 7 stone frame to the door and invariably get there first. But then she would merely stand, wagging her entirety with irrepressible boxer-delight at thoughts of visitors, thick streams of excited saliva swinging from each grinning jowl. But bark she would not.

However, my mother stayed very firm. Thieving Scum Burglar types who rang the doorbell were to be left in no doubt - inside prowled a huge, gruff and not-to-be-irked dog. So she decided to implement her own Door Training with the dog. This meant, for some months, whenever you knocked, you had to wait. What you could hear, from the outside, was the skidding scuffle of joy as the dog headbutted the door to greet you, followed by the more sedate footsteps of my mother. There would be a brief silence, then an "oooh" of exertion, as my mother would bend to be at dog eye level. There then followed a whole array of my mother's woof-woofs- from insistent descant yelps, to low threatening growls, all interspersed with cajouling - "come on", and "like that", - which became increasingly more irritated until finally "oh I give up" would signal the end of the recital. Then sounds of my mother pulling herself up again, and at this point the door would open, and polite words of welcome would be completely drowned out by the throaty WAAAAHHHH of the dog's grateful greeting as she leapt delightedly with paws splayed towards your head, the slimy, splattering tentacles of spit gripping firmly to your face. My friend L once said it could, quite possibly, put one off calling at all. Fortunately, it was around that time that they invented Skype.

I'm not sure the point ever did get through, and whether this was down to pure obstinance on the part of the dog or simply the fact that she (the dog again) was not hindered by trainable wit, I don't know. In the end, we all kind of just let her off because she was the daftest, most amusingly faithful company you could ask for.

As to why this particular memory has accompanied me on my journey around the dishwasher-washingmachine-and-tumble-drier track today, it's simply because I came across (or more truthfully, R showed me) this. I think this Australian gentleman actually puts my mother's efforts to shame. And I have even just showed my current dog, the very comfortable viszla, for her reaction. But she has just looked at me and gone back to sleep (on the expensive beanbag we actually bought for the kids).

Since we're all talking about planes...

2010-04-19T23:28:00.001+01:00

I am not a fan of aeroplanes, though I do like the bit where they get you to somewhere else. It's the part in the sky I don't like. I have a couple of friends who are pilots, and one of them is especially enterprising in finding clever ways to chuckle at me and my irrational fear. As a military-turned-commercial pilot himself, he naturally doesn't share my freakish nambiness about planes,( although a rather fun scenario if he did, surely: "Cabin crew prepare for take off, wooooooooo-aaahhhhhhhhh ... ". He should fake this, on his last day.) I once phoned him in a blue funk just before boarding for a longhaul, and got told, with audible relish, "Hmmm, it WILL probably be fine - the only really dangerous bit is take off. And landing." Anyway, last summer, we sat over several bottles as he regaled me with stories of "really scary flightpaths". With full knowledge that I have to fly there every February if I want to ski, he went sly and decided the Scariest of them all was Definitely Innsbruck. "It's a bit tricky to find a clear path through the mountains," he said, eyes alight with faked awe "Even the pilots who are specially trained to do it just close their eyes and hope."

Now. Of course I know this isn't true. But this year, as we screeched up through some vicious winds and skidded over the Alps on our way back home, his words replayed again in my head. I haven't told him yet, as I'm sure he would merely be wickedly delighted.

On this particularly horrible occasion, the captain came over the intercom and said "Ooh, it might be a bit bumpy!" and that is not what I want when flying out of Innsbruck. I don't want a surprised sounding, young pilot using words like "oooh" and "bumpy". I want a relaxed-yet-serious pilot of almost fifty, whose voice reassures you of blue eyes and grey hair and a weekend tennis habit. He needs to be called James. And he needs to use clever sounding adjectives, suggesting top level education and a well-read personality. I think this pilot said his name was Steve, and I'm sorry to all the Steves I know, but for me, that is absolutely No Good At All. (I mustn't even think about women pilots. I still try to cling to the shreds of my former feminist fervency, and they would not survive any admission that I would probably get off the plane ...). All in all, I need to know the guy at the front in the slidy seat firstly fits my stereotype ideal, secondly really knows what he is doing and finally isn't going to do loops for a bit of a laugh.

You see, I can't be sure that all pilots wouldn't. I'm not convinced that pilots don't have a very distinct naughty streak. The ones I know certainly do. And on long flights there must surely be a lot of time for sitting back and scheming up japish pranks. I've heard tales of a captain called Alistair who decided to announce himself more gutturally as Ali after 9/11 for "extra frisson". I know a pilot who sauntered out into the main cabin to pull up a bit of carpet and see whether the wheels were down, and then, after one of those brace-brace-brace landings (the ones they warn you of on those cards with the odd drawings of smiling people about to crash) he said he thought the passengers who'd talked to the press about their near-death horror flight must have been a "bit drippy". So either pilots are cut from much sterner stuff than us, or they are genuinely just rattling with loosened screws.

In any case, I can imagine my devilish pilot-friend-in-the-north doing something like this. You know who you are.

Clever mouse.

2010-04-14T21:46:00.003+01:00

Dammit, I let Blog Critic get between me and my blog. And the Easter Holidays too. But it was mostly Blog Critic. He caught me off-guard with a bit of slick sardonicism about the Manicured Promotion of Oneself via Blog, and I suddenly lost the urge. I don't know why, because he's been saying it since it started, but anyway - somehow he caught me in an over-sensitive, overly introspective moment, brought on by who knows what. Well, we all know what, but it can't be blogged and hohum to that. On top of that, it IS difficult to think about anything at all when you are hiding eggs, gooing over lambs, building dens and refereeing squabbles; not to say that these aren't terribly valid acitivities, it's just that for a few weeks now, me and my blog have been ships that passed. Which doesn't matter at all, at all, at all - it was only ever supposed to be for, er, letting off steam that may have collected in Other Areas, and indeed as soon as I stopped, I found I have missed forcing myself to think. It's certainly a way of, shall we say, controlling the demons.

It's funny when the thoughts strike though. Yesterday, R was all in indignation. A particularly devious mouse, it appeared, has been sneaking into the greenhouse and nicking the seeds out of his newly planted pots without leaving any trace of the crime. This last point, I think, is what gets R's gander most. He can understand that our wildliving friends will garden alongside us, but he doesn't like to be tricked by what is vermin. Poor mouse is for it now. The greenhouse is awash with lurking traps and hidden poison. I can't bring myself to go in, as to be confronted by the squirming remains of an ex-mouse doesn't strike me as very Eastery and, in consequence, the poor seedlings are now victims of both trickery and drought.

There is a thought-link from all this however. Slightly a tenuous one but still a link of sorts. Because it brought me back to Mao's Sparrow Cull. I am always intrigued by the bizarrer parts of Mao's grip on poor China, and I do wonder whether his campaign against the four pests was perhaps the Crown Stealer of them all. I once met an elderly gentleman on a train in Hunan who once told me he had taken part in the Great Sparrow Cull and had been smacked for not killing enough. He even demonstrated the smack for me - a great ringing clap across his cheek. I was fairly stunned and so we drank beer together. Anyway, in brief: Mao decided early on in the Great Leap Forward that there were four pests in China which were being especially naughty; rats, flies, sparrows and mozzies. Indeed, the sparrows in particular were showing real capitalist roader instincts by sitting around all day eating the workers' crops. So, the whole country was sent out to Kill the Sparrows, which they did with guns, catapults and generally the banging of saucepans under trees until the poor things crashed down in exhaustion. People then paraded their little feathery corpses to the town hall and were publically praised for a good killing (Good Communist!) and denounced for a poor show (Possible Capitalist or Imperialist Bastard!) The upshot of which was, of course, that the locusts sat back and rubbed their little locust feet with glee before Feasting Unpecked with pesty relish on all the crops; at which point everyone said "Whoops" and began to starve. Except Mao, natch.

And, what do you know, of COURSE footage of this is on youtube!

Sure, it's not funny, not in any sense, but it is mesmerising and definitely worth seeing. Maybe I'll show it in the garden too. Bit of a warning. That sort of thing...

Mr Khil Kills Me.

2010-03-17T11:25:00.002Z

Ok, I know I'm behind the times, and The Times, so slow have I been to catch on to this. Annoyingly, R put it on Otterzen last week, which means I am also laying myself open to some very satisfied comments on, for example, my willingness to follow his lead.

But I can't help it. It's so, so funny.

I was chatting with a Slovakian gentlemen this week, who was of the firm and tearful opinion that that damn perestroika was the beginning of the end for the Eastern Bloc. The Soviets weren't perfect, he said, but they were better than this lot (reference to current Slovakian government, about which I know absolutely nothing) and we had a lot more fun. Since one does not often hear Soviet-style communism credited with fun (at least, for those outside of the joint-jumping Kremlin), I was surprised.

But now I'm not. If they had people like Eduard Khil lololling across their screens every night, I too would have spent the Cold War in absolute stitches.

According to The Times, Mr Khil has been pleasantly surprised by his new-found fame and is certain that the "rich orchestral arrangement" (which they'd used to distract from a complete lack of lyrics, this being the easiest way to get things past state censors) is the secret of its success.

Hmmm. I'm not entirely sure I noticed the rich arrangement at all. But in any case, it IS good to know it wasn't all doom and gloom behind the Iron Curtain, isn't it?

I defy you not to laugh.

Natsukashiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiii

2010-03-16T21:05:00.001Z

A friend of mine, who doesn't own a huge ginger mastiff, recently brought one round for supper. We were chatting hard enough not to notice that it had wandered upstairs and had eventually found its way into the bathroom, where R had absolutely not been expecting it. The memory of his yell has kept me going in uncontrollable chuckling for weeks.

However, when I was still giggling into the fifth week, someone gently reprimanded me for my "puerile English humour".

I'm not sure that English humour can be described as a single concept, nor whether it be truly fair to call it puerile. But if it is, then we are in good company with the Japanese.

What price occasional puerility at the end of a day?! I miss Japan.

Mothering Sunday: what a super idea.

2010-03-15T16:10:00.003Z

Who says it's wrong to be smug?

I was delightfully spoiled for Mothering Sunday yesterday: by ten o'clock I was perfectly Eggs-Benedicted up and sitting in the school church to see the oldest sing at the Mothering Sunday service. It was a beautiful spring morning and the pews were full of the beatific smiles of mothers who hadn't had to cook breakfast.

The children had been busy; they had firstly learnt a song which went "Don't be grumpy, Don't you spoil the fun" to a jolly, rhythmic little tune, which does stay in your head (though I've heard it quite a bit this week- the youngest has been singing it with casual pointedness after any remonstration). But anyway, looking at them lined up in their uniforms, faces creased with determination to remember the words and sing their best, it was a perfect song and you really couldn't imagine being grumpy with them ever again.

But sometimes, you can't help it; the tiniest dash of wry cynicism can come nipping into any occasion.

"Thank you God for Mummies..." it began and the congregation heaved a collective Ahhhh. Really very sweet. But the next verse made my eyebrows sit up a little. "Thank you God for Nannies..." it went on.

Hmmm...

"They do mean grandmas" my pew neighbour reassured me in a whisper.

I'm sure they did. You never know though. This is Surrey, after all...

"Ugly goes clean to the bone"

2010-03-12T18:44:00.009Z

No object is so beautiful that, under certain conditions, it will not look ugly. Oscar Wilde

I am spitting proverbial chips.

We have in our little friendly town a healthclub. The constant push for new members displayed on banners outside is testament to the fact that healthclubs and recessions are not the best bedfellows; indeed, it seems to have met the economic downturn in the fashion of Oops-We're-Getting-A-Bit-Grotty. Still, the posters insist all is, apparently, Better Now. The swimming pool has had a lick of paint. They've removed the lacerating tiles from the showers. That sort of thing. Lovely.

However.

I was given, for my birthday, a voucher to use in the spa. Now, it is not the useful kind of spa, where you can have fun in mud and plunge daringly into icy pools, but a beauty spa. Where they paint your nails and rip your hair out and stuff. I am not really a beauty spa kind of person, surprising at that might seem to those of you who know me for my dedication to glamorous grooming (lets be clear - I write this in jeans and welly socks, with compost streaks across my hands and no doubt under my nails too and it genuinely doesn't bother me that much, really). And my beauty-spa-reluctance is not not just for financial reasons (how MUCH to rub salt into me?) but also because I find it somewhat eerie to spend an hour to the soundtrack of something panpipey. On top of that, you know, they actually do scare me a bit, these places. So I find I approach them with the same trepidation that I approach mechanics; knowing with dread that they are going to ask me something I absolutely don't understand and roll their eyes, ever so faintly, at my ignorance.

But finally, (I shouldn't say it, I know, but I can't resist) in the case of this particular spa, I baulk somewhat at putting my appearance into the hands of "experts" who squint blankly at you from behind orangey skintones and clumpy eyelashes and tappy nails. As a composite whole, it does not, I feel, bode well. A bit akin to a restaurant trying to attract custom by advertising rotten food. Or me trying to encourage my students by speaking to them in, say, Turkish. Miaow, I know, and, before anyone says it, since my nails are now having a gleeful and unexpected outing, it's almost a shame they are not manicured. But, anyway, I digress.

I received a voucher for my birthday for said spa and I DID have every intention of using it. After all, it would be something a bit different and for every panpipe moment you are in there, it is a moment you are not being shrieked upon and that, in itself, should make for a rather super hour.

I dug out said voucher today and noticed, horror of horrors, that it expired yesterday. I thought it was 6 months from my birthday but no. Yesterday. "Don't worry," R said "You're a member who's spent a small fortune in there over the past 6 years. They'll understand. It's only a day."

Of course they would, I thought, sensibly and gave them a call.

I got a receptionist. She sighed. "It's past its date, " she said. "It's expired, like."

I was polite. "It only expired yesterday and to be honest, we've had a few tricky months. And I am a member. Is there anything you can do?"

I got sighed at again. And then silence. I waited.

She eventually said, after another sigh, that she'd Ask the Spa Directly. She Asked the Spa Directly and came back to tell me the Spa Said No, Directly. I said, still politely, that I'd rather like to Ask the Spa Directly too, and received my 4th sigh.

But she did at least put me through. Where I got puffing sigh number 5.

"It's past its date," said Spa Manager, after I'd explained that it was, er, past its date.

"I understand that, but I thought it was six months from my birthday so..."

"It's past its date." (How does one write accent in Roman? "Spast its dai'" Like that, anyhow)

"Well only by a day. Is there nothing you can do?"

Sigh. Tut.

"What's the reference number?"

I checked. "There isn't one. It's been left blank."

"SO 'ow do I know when it's been bought then? If you 'aven't got a reference?"

"Sorry, do you mean it's ME that should have written a reference on this voucher when I, er, received it as a present? A reference for your records?"

Tut. And huff. And another sigh

Patient Voice. "Look. It's past its date. If you take a voucher up Tescos and its past its date, you wouldn't get anyfink so why should we give you it?"

I pointed out that I do not actually pay Tesco 50 pounds a month; that I have not spent a small fortune over the past 6 years on creche and coffees, personal training and swimming lessons. I have not recommended friends to spend THEIR money in Tesco and I am not someone Tesco should be keen to hang on to, while they sweat out a period of time when people really have no cash for their particular luxury.

"All right, Debenhams then."

I'm sorry?

I could go on here, but there's no point - the rest of the conversation continued in the same vein, with Spa lady being rigidly unhelpful and me scratching my head trying to understand WHY anyone would treat any customer with such blatant, basic derision.

Because it WASN'T the words she used or her bizarre comparisons to Tesco/Debenhams that made me so spikey under the collar.

It was the tone of sneering boredom. The agressive choice of "Look" as a sentence adverbial. The tuts. The sighs. The slowing of speech in implication of my thickness. The fact that she made no apology for inflexibility and not one jot of effort to be friendly. And, with my own tone of somewhat dumbstruck politeness maintained throughout, I hadn't even been rude. Grrr to the woman. Really.

I know we are not, as a nation, famed for our customer service, although granted, that depends on where you come from: I have American friends who despair of our unhelpfulness and Turkmen friends who profess themselves delighted by our eagerness to please. (Note to self - ask Turkmen friends where on earth they go shopping and go there myself) But on a personal level at least, shouldn't one be ashamed to be so, well, bloody horrible?

"If we did it for you, we 'ave to do it for everyone" was her final unconsidered response.

Dear girl. I urge you. DO, please do. Do to everyone what you did to me. Speak to all your customers like that. Treat them all as committed cretins on the scrounge for a free deal. Huff and puff and tut and sigh at them, as you have just done to me.

Because there's a lovely little place in Virginia Water called TOTAL BLISS. (2 The Parade
Trumpsgreen Rd, Virginia Water GU25 4EH 01344 842643) They are terribly nice in there, they don't sigh at you and I've never yet heard a panpipe.

You would, I'm sure, be doing them a great favour. And it's good to be kind to people. ISN'T it?

Afterthought
GOOD Golly. Fancy ME recommending a Beauty Salon. Who'd have thought.

Manslaughter, mental damage, slovenliness and hypocrisy...all before bedtime.

2010-03-01T22:09:00.001Z

All hell broke loose in the bathroom tonight. I had nipped out of the bathroom oh-so-briefly to hang school uniform on the radiator in a newly aquired smug-habit of Readiness for Tomorrow, when my ears were split by a hollerscreech of fear, closely followed by the sound of scrabbling and splashing and the arrival of two wet, terrifed children, and one wet, astonished dog.

It turns out that there had been a spider in the bath. But, as the two battled desperately for sanctuary space on my lap, I was made to understand - NO ordinary spider had he been. He had, apparently, been a spider of "the very worst sort, Mummy", a spider who used our skiing break last week to go on exercise in our bathtub, with the sole intention of the perfect attack. How it had lurked, sniggering, behind the shower head and waited until they were both engrossed with their rubber shark game and how it had dropped, "cackling a witch laugh" into the water where it had "torpedoed, Mummy,torpedoed along the bottom of the bath", - yes, there's more - "with jaws snapping and fangs gnashing and arms waving like a wild beasty thing" (this was all coming from the 5 year old - the 3 year old merely hiccuped and sobbed and nodded insistently along, with saucer-eyes of doom). It had then leapt with a roar onto to knee of the older one, "dug in its nails to heave itself out of the water to chomp them in THEIR THROATS..."

I stopped it here, and went to rescue the poor little creature. And while it wriggled resignedly and drew its final spider breath in the shampoo cap lifeboat that had arrived too late, I explained that, here, in England, we don't have to be scared of spiders. That, I told them, is for people like J and B, in Australia. Here, spiders are Our Friends.

The dog sighed at me. She always thinks she knows better in these situations.

"But Mummy, " came the response "it WASN'T an English spider. It must have been SENT, Mummy, by the Taliban, or North Korea or Germany."

It's an interesting point. How on earth does my 5 year old know enough about this big bad world to have registered the Taliban and the North Koreans as a vague threat to his safety, and why, WHY, lob them in with the poor Germans?

I asked him, casually, what he thought the Taliban, and North Korea were. North Korea, he told me, is a horrible place where you can't get away and it has a (hushed voice) SECRET police. Pretty spot on, and probably my fault. (Blog Critic has already accused me of an "unhealthy interest" in the DPRK and I may well have talked about it in the range of small twitching ears, especially with the delicious arrival of my new Barbara Demick book on the same, just this morning, but more on that later). The Taliban, he said after a while, are baddies from...he wasn't sure.

France, insisted the 3 year old, the Taliban are from France and France has some good people like her nursery teacher but the rest are Taliban. They sing a song about it at nursery; that's how she knows.*

*NB I probably won't follow this up. She told me once she'd learnt an"Engleesh pig dogs" song from nursery school, but it turned out, thankfully, to be the influence of Horrible Histories instead)

The 5 year old scoffed. The Taliban do not live in France, he was sure of that - they live in Talibanistan and they are bad because they want to steal all the flowers.

Hmm. Poppy fields? I don't know. But I was worried. They surely shouldn't be fretting about such things at their age - at THEIR age, they should be stressing about ghouls behind the bedroom door, and monsters under the bed.

Stupidly, I said as much. They stared.

"There are m-m-m-m-monsters? Under my BED?!" the eldest wailed before dissolving again. "And GHOSTS-behind my DOOR?" the youngest followed suit and clung to the dog, who gave me a Look to say she would not have been so daft herself.

It took a long time to settle them tonight. And I had to crawl under both beds, twice, with the French policeman's truncheon that we have lying around, for precisely these monster-hunting moments, it now seems.

And HECK, there's a lot of dust under those beds. So today, I have once again failed gloriously on all fronts, it seems: motherhood, housekeeping and spider rescue.

And I didn't even get to ask them about Germany.

AFTERTHOUGHT

I have also been a bit of a fraud. Because as I insisted, somewhat impatiently, that to be scared of spiders was actually rather silly, and that they would just have to learn to deal with it, (I know, I know, but they had swung the lead way past their bedtime and my serenity had expired along with the faceful of dust) I had to remember how, only yesterday, I had practically sumo-wrestled a valium tablet from A on the tarmac at Innsbruck airport. If anyone had told me then that my fear was a bit "silly" and I should just learn to deal with it, I probably would have punched them.

Oh well, they may know about the Taliban but it'll be a long time till they'll understand the word hypocrite. One hopes.

Yes, but what IS shabby chic?

2010-01-26T22:50:00.013Z

"Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow- pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?"

Jerome K Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (1889)

I'm far too tired to think much today but I was slightly diverted by driving past a Posh Shop in a Posh Village nearby which had a blackboard loitering casually outside with the words "We Can Make Your Furniture Shabby".

Really? And for how much? Some questions burn into your brain if they go unasked, so at the risk of Being Late For Everything today, I popped in.

The woman behind the counter appraised me, decided, rightfully, that I was not an Interiors' Savante with a Hedgefund Hubby and went back to reading Psychologies.

So I looked around the shop. The emphasis was delightfully odd. "Vintage Jelly Mould - Once Owned!" shrieked one sign. "Genuine 1970 tea-towels" gushed another, sitting above a pile of white tea-towels emblazoned with the word GLASSCLOTH, just like they used in the church hall when I was a kid. But oh, very prettily tied up with a ribbon, and, er equally prettily priced. And then, my absolute FAVOURITE - "Vintage garden string!". Which was a ball of, yes, string in a dusty looking wooden box, labelled (sit down) £15.00.

Now. What's going on? What DOES "Vintage Jelly Mould - Once owned!" actually mean? Because to my un-designer ears, it sounds rather akin to "Second Hand." Which is fine. But when the price tag has been increased five-fold due to its terribly fashionable "Once Owned" status, I rather feel that, somewhere around, there struts a rather chilly and gullible Emperor.

"Erm, your sign" I asked frosty shop lady who didn't answer. I dared further; "What do you MEAN exactly?"
She breathed audibly at me. "We re-allocate style to a piece of furniture in line with the recent trends" she said.
"Which are...?" I ventured
"Glorious," she replied, and added "IF you understand style", while writing £25 in beautiful itallics on a creased brownpaper package label, probably destined for a genuine 1970s retro HB pencil, Used By A Real Child...

Glorious indeed. And since I have recently found myself rather more in need of cash than before, I think I too should, shall we say, make more of an effort to, well, understand style.

And with this in mind, I've come over all entreprenneurial. Firstly, I plan to speak to my Dad about starting a shop in his loft. There is plenty of Genuinely Used Vintage stuff up there, and in REAL 1970's dust too. And secondly, I will be painting my own sign, offering to "Make Your Furniture Shabby". Trust me, this is going to be cracking deal: you won't even have to do any moving. All I will do is lend you my children, my dog and their friends for a weekend, and Bob's Your Uncle: genuine shabbiness, for a price we can decide when I've worked out your household income.

She was right, you know, the woman in her shop. It IS glorious, WHEN you understand.

And it IS odd to find yourself re-living something originally written by Harry Enfield...

PS If I HAVE offended anyone with my ignorance of interior design fashions, may I apologise and smooth the waters by pointing you to these 12 "weathered terracotta pots" sold on the Jamie Oliver site. They are DOWN from 75 whole pounds to only 37.50! That's HALF price!!! But if you get there too late, don't be overly disappointed; they do also sell them in the antique shop around the corner from here for 50p a pop...

Blog Critic, welcome back to you...

2010-01-19T21:59:00.000Z

My Blog Critic has been quiet for a while but today he was back, with the air of one falsely aghast. "I've been avoiding your blog since you were talking about dead chickens," he lied (and correction: hypnotised chickens, not dead - the proof is here) "but yesterday I braved myself, yes, BRAVED myself, to come back on and what do I get? Shrunken heads. Horrific. I was eating tea; a jacket potato actually. About the size of a shrunken head. So I couldn't eat it. YOU spoiled my tea."

Blog Critic does enjoy his tea so I was momentarily apologetic. I explained I wanted to write about something completely different to the weirdness of recent circumstance.

He launched into his well-rehearsed impersonation of Blog Critic, Outraged.

"YES, and about that! All that wiffling about being tired and things being strange. I was bored! Get over it! Blogs shouldn't be for sharing your soul - they should be informative, educational and exciting. I TOLD you that at the beginning. What on earth could be happening that would warrant other people wanting to read about your life? Moan, moan, moan - that's what everyone does on a blog. I TOLD you" he added, with gleeful triumph "I TOLD you that you'd slide down the slippery slope into self-obsession..."

So I cut in and explained, briefly, what has happened over the past few days. At the end of it, his phone got cut off. Blog Critic has a busy life: he needs to watch his fish, and potter about a bit, and complain about my blog and he doesn't have time for charging mobiles. But I did get a text.

"Bloody hell!" it read. "You should blog that..."

NOT in need of a shrink after all...

2010-01-18T17:26:00.007Z

I just read that Knut Haugland had died and so in today's dog-walking reverie I was thrown back to the Kontiki and Thor Heyerdahl's absorbing account of the entire adventure. I love the Kontiki Expedition, although you know the outcome before you even start to read, and I always pretend that I would have jumped at the chance to be on board (this is a sham-thought, because even an Easyjet hop scares me into drink).

But there was one passage which particularly stays with me, and that is the brief reference, before they set off, to the jungle head shrinkers. Thor and Herman are in Ecuaduor, looking for balsa for the raft, if I recall correctly; their Spanish guide warns them of the headshrinkers still lurking in the jungles they want to pass through, and tells them how his own friend had had his head shrunk. I know it's a grisly subject but can you really not smile at this bit?

"One day this friend was killed in the jungle. Jorge tracked down the murderer and threatened to shoot him. Now the murderer was one of those who were suspected of selling shrunken human heads and Jorge promised to spare his life if he handed over the head at once. The murderer at once produced the head of Jorge's friend, now as small as a man's fist. Jorge was quite upset when he saw his friend again, for he was quite unchanged, except that he had become so very small. Much moved, he took the little head home to his wife. She fainted when she saw it and Jorge had to hide his friend in a trunk. But it was so damp in the jungle that clusters of green mould formed on the head so that Jorge had to take it out now and then and dry it in the sun. It hung very nicely by the hair on a clothes line, and Jorge's wife fainted everytime she caught sight of it."

Thor Heyerdahl - The Kontiki Expedition, (Flamingo 1992) p47

Of course, head shrinking really did go on. Heads were scraped out and filled with hot stones to reduce the fat. Hot sand was poured into the hard-to-reach crevices, and so the head would shrink while maintaining all it's characteristics. It really does turn you into a mini-you. Although it was originally done to ensure the soul of the enemy would remain in abyss and not be narked at you from the grave, it became quite a business once they realised tourists would pay money for these little heads of victims and take them home for, well, the mantlepiece, one assumes.

And guess what? National Geographic have "genuine footage" of the head shrinking process, that you can watch, right now, from your kitchen table! I'm not putting the actual film here because although I'm thinking about this today, I don't plan to think of it tomorrow, as, surely, to think about such a subject regularly would be very strange indeed.

However, back to the video, now I was beginning to worry. I can think of someone who, currently, would quite possibly be rather partial to my head, shrunk, and it is not too comforting to see there are videos showing how to do it. I was reassured to see, however, that they DO add a warning that this should not be tried at home. In this litigious world, I guess that is important.

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...

Rudyard Kipling

Oh how true.

AFTERTHOUGHT
If I do disappear and turn up, petite, in a fleamarket, please do buy me. I want pride of place on a mantlepiece somewhere.

Just when you think it's safe to go back into the water...

2010-01-15T23:23:00.001Z

...you find it isn't.

It's been a long, long day. I think I probably will get round to talking about what has just happened, at some point and in some regard, but tonight I am shattered. A different shattered to where I was when meningitis was in full swing, I must say, because I have concentrated on the idea of keeping perspective in a wider picture, and it does actually work. We are fine. The kids are fine. The dog is fine.

But it has been a day to teach you that things you quietly bank on having can - CAN - suddenly be taken away by, well, shall we say Nasty-Gnomes? That some people honestly, seriously, wish you ill. And that the ill that they wish upon you can be completely unexplained and undeserved. And and AND... that there is not a jot you can do about it.

And does it matter? In our case, no, probably not, actually. We are not, after all in Haiti.

Sometimes I crave the stabilising effect of a certain piece of music but tonight Jerome K Jerome has come rushing to aid. Now if there was EVER a ghost to have a pint with in the pub, for me, it would be him. With George and Harris and a canine-ghost of Montmorency at our feet.

We had this read at our wedding. And today I think it has waxed more relevant than ever before.

For those of you I've bumped into today, I Am SO sorry for looking grumpy.

"George said:‘You know we are on the wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without.’

"George comes out really quite sensible at times. You’d be surprised. I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.

"How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha’pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with—oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all!—the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal’s iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!

"It is lumber, man—all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment’s freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment’s rest for dreamy laziness—no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o’er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombrewaving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the blue forget- me-nots.

"Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.
Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K Jerome

Thirst IS a dangerous thing indeed. Now, whose idea was it to have a dry January? Dramatic sigh.

The hills are alive, with the sound of tutting...

2010-01-11T20:32:00.001Z

See? SEE? Music will always ALWAYS make you feel better!

I have just stumbled on the phenomenon of the Complaints Choir. And it's a fascinating thing. It seems that all you have to do is get together with a few tra-la-la-ing friends, a piano (or accordion if you are east of Prague), find a bit of space in a street, on a roof top, in a theatre and so on...and then you all sing heartily about things that annoy you.

I have found quite a bit of diversion this evening in looking around the performances of international complaints choirs, and discovering what's bugging them. The Germans are annoyed by a road and complex tax calculations. The Russians about queues and salaries, the Finns about trees being chopped down for loo paper (when there STILL isn't enough loo paper, they warble) and the Chicagoans about all the single men being insane. The Hungarians seem to me to be having the most fun with their rousing recitals about the annoyingness of Hungary (and why us foreignors use the word goulash. Well, hold on a moment here, I thought it was Hungarian; it sounds Hungarian...maybe I'll write a song about sneaky words which sound Hungarian and aren't, and sing it right back atcha...) but that the Hungarians would have the most fun is no surprise, as I have long been of the suspicion that the Hungarians ALWAYS have a lot more fun than us (and that's another post).

Of COURSE we have one here and of course it's in Birmingham. I wondered at first whether that might be in Alabama, but no, the first line of Sung-Brummy makes it very clear where they are... They don't seem to be enjoying themselves - Birmingham's changed, you know, and they don't get paid enough, they sing- but I hope they are having some fun really, as the whole thing strikes me as a splendid idea.

So much is being said recently about the physical and psychological benefits of singing, and herewith a triple whammy. You get together with a whole lot of other people (check), get to sing your head off with no real requirement for Talent Proper (check) and you get to let a few moans out into the open (check).

All I need now is for a Proper Psychologist to say it's a great thing, and I'd try and get one going myself. Why does my milkman sometimes come at 9am when it's too late for cereal and coffee? Why does he sometimes come at 5am and clash around and make the dog bark? Why do people get prosecuted for fighting off burglars in their own homes? We didn't vote for Gordon, why is he there? Why does the place round the corner think it can charge 4 quid for two foul tomatoes stuffed with a lump of feta and doused in tabasco? And so on and so on...

Am off to the piano to compose.

2010-01-09T23:27:00.000Z

I haven't had a minute to Blog Properly and I risk repeating myself here with this link, but I can't help it. The whole El Sistema story has rather inhabited my distracted mind of late.

Do you ever have the feeling your brain is reaching for something and you just can't quite get there? I do hope I work it out soon. This, then, is a very pointless post indeed, for after all, whoever wants to hear someone else thinking aloud in such a pithy fashion?

This film, however, looks like being the complete opposite of pointless. If I could only find somewhere that sold it.

Now you see me, now you kind of don't...

2009-12-02T23:41:00.004Z

Every now and then, when everything is getting too shouty, I do hide behind the curtains in the front room in the hope of Five Seconds Peace (when you're an adult, people rarely look for you behind curtains) but now I've seen Liu Bo Lin's artwork I think I may have been getting it wrong. What I NEED to do, actually, on occasions of necessary crypsis, is to carefully paint myself into a crafty camoflauge with my surroundings.

To be honest, from looking round me at the moment, all I'd have to do is cover myself in sketches of discarded toys, socks and dog hair, and I'd pretty much be there.

But anyway, Liu Bo Lin's utterly mind-boggling artwork had me sitting in open-mouthed wonder for a good few minutes today and surely that IS worth a post?!!

Liu Bo Lin: Beijing camouflage artist

Do do doooo check him out on google images - it's superbly diverting!

Brazil. Nuts?

2009-12-01T20:11:00.004Z

The more I hear about Brazil, the more I want to go there; that is the purely the fault of C with her amazing stories and pots of guava paste for my cheese, and P and his superbly delectable feijoada. Quite annoying. A year ago I could think "Brazil" and move on, but now I think "Brazil, when oh when will I EVER get there in this life of Children and Dogs and One Salary?" and start feeling disconsolate and itchy-feetish. I really, really want to go.

Well, this has kept me going this evening. I don't speak Portuguese but, with some clinging to Latinate familiarity, it seems to uneducated me that the point of it might be to encourage one to, er, save water?

Come on, Brazilians. Enlighten me, please...

Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...
I'm sure I shouldn't, in these times of global shortage, but I can't help a big EEK. Us English, hey. We are so VERY prissy.

(Oh, I know, I know. Speak for yourself. Etc...)

Too Early to Nowell?

2009-11-26T00:28:00.006Z

I suppose one good thing about Christmas coming earlier each year is that in times of infant defiance, you get longer to blackmail your children with Phone Calls To Santa. I find that at this time of season, a simple "Hello Santa?" into my mobile is enough to blow any bottom-lipped mutiny into smithereens of Sudden Compliance.

But today we had one of those super magazine-mummy moments when calm reigned utterly. For one blissful half hour, no one smashed anyone with sofa cushions or accused anyone of being stinky. They lay across the floor drawing pictures, said please and thank you to various things, and even the dog was smiling. (But note to self: did anyone pop in unannounced to witness this and be amazed at the wonders of my mothering? No, they bleeding didn't. But when there's cacophonic chaos and things strewn, oh yes; then, in they flock...)

Anyway. Not being one to miss a choice opportunity, I asked what they might like Santa to bring them this year for being Really-Really-Good-Like-This-At-All-Times.

I don't object to children believing in Santa, and I was shocked recently when one eyes-a-flame mother unleashed an unsolicited jeremiad on me suggesting I should. But I do see that it is slightly double-edged. On the one hand, it is incredibly endearing; this wide-eyed, unsuspicious trust in an all-benevolent old man who sails through the skies to deliver real reward for all the Being Good they have done. There is such an innocent charm to it that of course you don't want it dispelled; that would be proof that they are growing into harder, more cynical, thinking beings...and God forbid. But on the other hand, when the Santa list includes "Long Haired Pig (real one)", "Totem pole like the one at Virginia Water", "Granny to Come Back Down From the Sky" and "Mega Mindy costume, dolls and Absolutely Everything Else" (when on earth will poor Santa find time to shop in Holland?), you do also need to find some clever way to prepare them for disappointment.

To distract them somewhat from the impossibilities of their hopes, I asked what Santa should bring Daddy and I.

The oldest was immediately adamant. Daddy would need beer, some books, something for his bike, new rugby boots, a tool kit, and something to take his headache away. The youngest nodded in approval and that was that.

"And me?" I said, quite hopefully.

There was silence. After a while, J looked at me. "The thing is, Mummy, when it was your birthday you told Daddy the Only Thing You Wanted In The Whole Wide World was a Banjo". (Ok, I admit it, I did say that) "And now you've got it. So there isn't anything else you'd want." (Damn me and my absolutes). "But that doesn't matter Mummy, because you can enjoy watching everyone else open their presents." (Hrrmph)

The younger one looked up from her picture of Fairy Wars (yes, really - the head fairy wears a black helmet and does funny breathing). "I know what Santa should bring for Mummy, " she said decidedly. "What, darling?" I asked in hopeful anticipation. She went back to a detailed sketch of Fairy, Shot By Arrow.

"Easy," she said. "Make-up. Lots and LOTS of make-up".

Right then. There's one little girl who will be getting bath salts in her Christmas stocking....

I want one of those...

2009-11-23T22:36:00.006Z

Because I thought I sounded moany in the last entry, here's a cheery one. How FABULOUS is this? All my friends are happily represented here! Someone please tell me how to justify buying it?!

BUENAVENTURA PRESS
What a super place!

AFTERTHOUGHT
Although I don't think I know any snipers. At least, I do hope not.

Oh Lordy. That'll be the next thing...

From one black hole to another...

2009-11-23T19:51:00.005Z

Ok, sometimes I need to remind myself to step back and recall that there is always a bigger picture. Things that occasionally seem to matter, and really really matter, can perhaps be relegated to their rightful place entitled Pointless. It's like the dog-hairy-dust that piles together under the piano. It probably shouldn't be there, but since I'm the only one who knows, where's the harm? One day, one day, I'll bend down and move it. When I remember.

Good old Nasa, hey, for knowing when to be helpful. Their Astronomy Picture of the Day page is just the ticket when you need to come up for air. And much as some of the pictures do make me want to lie down and grip the earth I'm on, lest I slide off into all that velvet blackness, it does also cautiously whisper that in the long run, whatever certain people shriek and however shreddingly they shriek it, this incredibly unfathomable universe around us really isn't that bothered. And therefore perhaps neither should we be.

"Think of all those people in China who don't give a damn," someone said recently.

I am really trying. But I am also getting crosser too. Push me MUCH more, you, and I'll blog it. ALL of it.

Japan's Sudden Hermits

2009-11-19T20:58:00.013Z

I've said it before but I love Japan for being weird and wonderful in equal measure. To me. And of course I realise it's a matter of perspective, but although I would never live in Japan again, I also know I would never be bored there. When I first started this silly blog, a friend in Japan sent me an email saying "Do NOT fill it with strange things from Japan". And I've really tried. I know there's the exercise video back in one of the first posts, but since then I have been positively swotty in my willingness to comply. And there's so MUCH gloriously weird stuff one could write about, you have to give me some credit for that, A-chan.

But recently I have been dealing with such a frightful situation of relentless, targeted abuse, (deadly meningitis on its own is just too dull - we needed something more to think about, really we did) and today it left me wanting to build a den behind the sofa and move in. I didn't do that, actually, but I did spend a few moments with the blanket drawn very firmly over my head, and in this shut-them-out moment, I remembered the hikikomori.

Going back a bit, one thing that struck me so much while I lived in Kobe was the Japanese penchant for gentle and philosophical acceptance of "syndromes". The bizarre catches on fast there. You hear of one weird person doing one weird thing and, before you know it, there are lots of weird people doing the same weird thing and bang - you have a syndrome. Oh ok, you could sometimes call it a phase, or a fad, or crazy-crazy craze, but I'm not really talking about the Lolitas, or Ganguro (girls who dye their hair white and black themselves up with fake tan - probably all moved on now but it used to freak the hell out of me...). That's all pretty bloody odd, I think, but now I mean the darker stuff. People flocking to get lost forever in the Suicide Forest of Aokigahara, the kegadol fashion (sex yourself up with bandages to look injured, anyone?) and one that struck me so much while I was there, and which came back to me tonight, hikikomori.

Hikikomori is widespread enough to be described as a sociological phenomenon, although I'm not sure if it as still as prevalent now as it was ten years ago, when the western media started gasping. Usually ascribed to teenage boys (though girls and non-teens were certainly not immune) the hikikomori can perhaps be best represented in our terms as a Sudden Hermit. Certainly, drop-out, often used for want of a real translation, cannot really cut it. These poor people isolate themselves, wholly and without warning, within one room of the house and refuse to come out. Sometimes for years. Causes are often cited along the lines of "inability to conform", " buckling under social pressure", "failure to meet academic expectation" and the good old use-for-all "bullying".

I do not, at all, mean to belittle the obviously disturbed psychological state of someone who one day comes home, walks into his bedroom and refuses to come out again. The effect that would have first on the sufferer and, perhaps more, on his family is unthinkable. But when you start reading up on the stories of those who have suffered from the syndrome, either as a hikikomori themselves or as the person who then had to ensure their survival (in most cases their mother) you do end up rather open-mouthed. I've been re-reading tonight, and you come across tales of families who built new kitchens after their hikikomori son would not allow anyone into their old one; mothers who stayed at home permanently the first moment of self-incarceration, thereby hermitising themselves as completely, so that they would always be on hand, if needed. And families who declared their child dead, rather than face the humiliation of admitting to a hikikomori teenager, and committed themselves to a life of smuggling in food.

It's tragic, but I can't help wondering. Isn't this acceptance of it all a bit, well, passive? It is after all only a door. Can't you kick it in, walk in and march them off to a psychologist? Or at least to the shower. Or am I just too brutally Victorian for words? I honestly can't believe if J or J ever shut themselves in our kitchen that R are I would say "How troublesome, we'll just have to build ourselves a new one."

And however much public and social soul-searching you do for the "cause" of such behaviour, could it not just be that, well, sometimes weird ideas just catch on? I saw one report suggesting that Japan's sakkoku, its 200 year period of total isolation, was the root cause, as it idealised a spirit of the solitary "within the blood of its citizens"...academic, I agree, but I am dubious. I'm not sure if the term has even been medicalised now, and I think it is striking that when you do scan the various research papers available online,they do often say they have difficulties finding similar cases in other parts of the world. Which doesn't mean they don't exist, but just not on such a scale.

I don't get it at all, which is not to say I am totally without sympathy. I probably am simply not far-thinking enough. Anyway, it was all interesting enough to get me out from under the Blanket of Despair.

So that's something else to thank Japan for.

PS I don't actually think hermitise IS a verb, but I rather like it...

and PPS I am SO sorry, Yumi-chan, but I couldn't resist..!

I do wish Dudamel would pop in for tea one morning.

2009-11-10T14:38:00.002Z

Ok, here is something really to cheer and inspire.

You cannot beat the story of El Sistema as an example of the amazing coming out of the awful; it's a true triumph of a philanthropic dream of one man being expertly managed through all the necessary economic labyrinths into its current, breath-taking being. And since you are supposed only to be a complete human being yourself when you are able to declare something positive about any and every person, (try Stalin or Pal Pot!!) then this would, for me, be a rare tick alongside Hugo Chavez. As he, apparently, champions it.

Which is another stunning factor. El Sistema flourished for over 30 years under both leftist and rightist political administrations.

Oh you could wax on for ages.

But this I have come back to again and again over the past 10 days and I defy anyone to watch it and remain unmoved. Bearing in mind that they say 90% of these kids come from the most difficult and impoverished echelons of Venezuelan society, including Dudamel himself.

And now listen to Maestro Abreu's speech on Tedtalks. Making sense of the world in a mere 20 minutes.

Oh this is ALL so much more fun than moaning!

No more whinging

2009-11-10T13:28:00.007Z

These have been strange times. My friend E from Utrecht emailed me recently in reference to a recent turn of mad events, and said "Wow, you guys haven't been spared much over the past five years". By golly, I thought, she's right. And mentioned this to R, in rather an inward-looking, Eeyore-ish way.

R thinks differently. R thinks it's all a matter of perspective. Actually, he thinks, we have been spared ALL sorts. Yes, my back gave out and I had no end of time lying around on floors looking at Helping People with a pained expression, BUT...I didn't need surgery in the end, did I? J stopped our hearts 14 times in as many months with her rather sinister twists on febrile convulsions which left her a motionless greyish-blue and us gibbering wrecks BUT...she's fine now, isn't she? R got knocked off his bike this summer in a hit-and-run in London, which imprinted his bike forlornly into the tarmac, BUT...it was only the bike, wasn't it? And the meningitis, well, that was horrid, but the dark forecasts we were given that night with relation to cryptococcus, haven't come to be. Have they? And finally, my mum. And this is the hardest bit to play Pollyanna with, but I have, and I think she'd agree - yes, she was suddenly, hastily whipped away by cancer just when J had been born, BUT. She DID get to see him. And cancer is very often far crueller in its decision to linger. That, at least, she was spared.

To borrow from Jerome, R comes out quite sensible at times.

And in any case, things, all round, are looking up. Just one crazed and vile situation blazes on in the face of all credulity, but you know? I really think the time has come to fight back and so, there may even be a chink of light at the end of this particular tunnel too.

It's all a matter of changing your perspective. As my great-grandmother used to declare, in response to any whining "Come on then lass, I'll take thee to't graveyard and see if owt will swap with thee". To be frank, sadly one doesn't need to be as drastic as the graveyard. Iraq, North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe, Gaza et al are all equal cases in point. I really wouldn't want to swap there either.

So, you just have to spot the lucky bits when they are there, right, R? Although, really, I'd quite like things to be just a little bit boring for a while now. To catch my breath a bit, you know.

I'm sorry for my views, I must have been confused...

2009-11-04T12:12:00.002Z

When common decency to other people proscribes real honesty, it's a jolly good thing that other people can say it for you.

Oh My Giddy Aunt

2009-11-03T21:13:00.010Z

There's an older post here somewhere, where I was blibbering on about how I'd surprised myself, after embedding a plug in my foot, with my capacity for swear words .

But something else happened today. My 3-year-old is at the stage where she externally exudes a delightful innocence while at the same time seething internally with mischief. She has also realised that a wide-eyed, pink-cheeked expression of ingenuousness can pull the wool over most people's eyes and allow her, on those occasions, to get away with what she wants. My dad is a regular victim of this, but while he relaxes in Australia, she has been looking for new prey.

So. Today we went to meet a new music teacher (and before it sounds too Surrey for words - the idea of taking a 3-year-old to a music teacher - I must say there IS a story behind it but it's too involved to blog). Anyway. This lovely lady was all friendliness and enthusiasm and J responded in a similar way. Together they played some notes and clapped rhythms, we all smiled and everything was well.

And then I saw it - a slight flicker, in a very wide eye.

"Now duckie, " said Nice Music Teacher "We're going to sing your name. I shall sing "What-oh-what-is-YOUR-name? "(C, C, C, C, Eeeee, C) and YOU shall reply "My name is J - ". My 3 year old nodded her plaits very enthusiastically and was rewarded with the most indulgent of smiles. Which she returned, just a little bit too sweetly.

Off they went. Nice Teacher played an accompanying chord and sang her line. J lifted up her face, and sang, prettily, rhythmically, musically and all:

"My Name is Stink-Arse".

Stink-arse? STINK-ARSE?

Why, why, WHY and where, where, WHERE?! I can't blame her brother, he' s only 4. I won't blame me, not for that one. 'B*gger', yes; I do say that, but stink-arse?

I have never heard anyone say Stink-Arse.

So why, then? Why that? Why couldn't she have said Jelly-Head? Fizzy-Boots? Or Yum-Yum? Even Stink BUM would have been better, in comparison. But please not 'arse'.

It got me thinking though. Every language, every patois, every tiny geographical dialect has its share of curse words, and it's hardly a surprise that studies also show that verboten lexis globally is pretty much as easily categorised into the religious, the visceral (or scatological) and the social as in English. We swear for solidarity, or to offend, to shock, to release tension and show aggression, and these three areas hold enough taboo to make it possible. Logical all round.

However, what I have found out this afternoon is that swearing is not just a case of uncontrolled utterance. As far as our brains are concerned, expletives can be an amalgam of spontaneity and deliberation. Even in what may feel like an uncontrolled outburst of Naughty Words, we do apparently still make conscious decision on the choice of our language, after a split second assessment of the situation.

I also learnt this. While the left hemisphere of the brain is in charge of language, the right part runs emotional linguistic content. That I knew. However, apparently, the lower part of the brain manages swearing, along with instinctive emotion, and it is an activity which involves both the limbic system (behaviour, emotion and memory) and the basal ganglia (motor functions, impulse control). But this is where it gets interesting. It seems, from my very basic and interrupted reading (was also simultaneously doing a Meccano Robot, and making fishcakes for tea) that the brain stores swear words as complete lexical units, rather than singular, combinable phonemes. That I didn't know.

So my 3 year old is just repeating, I asked my Clever Former Colleague who can still sit in his office surrounded by books, by dint of having a wife who does the childcare.

"Young children will always remember illicit language, long before they truly comprehend the meaning" he assured me. "Curse words are more memorable, and studies consistently show that in any language, taboo words given in a list of randoms will be remembered first. If you write the word 'cat' in pink and ask someone to read the colour not the word, they will do it. Use a swear word, and it is more difficult. It's the way we are wired."

So if a Generation Game-type conveyor belt passes us full of words, some of them naughty, it's the latter we'll be taking home?

"It's not a very academic example, " he said politely, after a long pause "but, I think, yes." And for the first time, he didn't ask me if I was planning to return to work.

Thank goodness for that, then. My daughter was not conjuring horrid images in her head to verbalise in an attempt to shock. She was just repeating, probably uncomprehendingly, something she'd heard.

Which, however, still begs the question. WHERE had she heard that?

I have my suspicions and I shall be Miss Marple in my quest to find out...

Being more expert on Burkina Faso than the day before.

2009-11-01T07:57:00.013Z

It took me an hour and a half to get round the supermarket and buy pumpkin pie ingredients for R yesterday. Mostly because I spent the main part of this time sitting on the bonnet of my car talking to the lovely man who had offered to wash it.

I always think that everyone has a story and the most fascinating tales come to you when you least expect it. He walked up to me and said "Excuse me, lady, but THAT baby needs a wash" and proceeded to pick at the great globule of windscreen bird muck with his fingernail. I shrieked with prissiness and tried to find him a wetwipe. He laughed back at me. "Lady, " he said "I am from Burkina Faso. We don't worry about such things there."

I was immediately hooked. "Burkina Faso?"

He grinned. "I bet you don't know where it is".

I have pride, even in a supermarket car park near Staines. I told him I knew exactly where it was, that it rubbed its landlocked borders with Mali and Niger, and Ghana and Togo (I swallowed that last one a bit as I wasn't sure - I always mix up Togo with Benin, ignorantly. Having looked at the map now, I can see it's both, anyway). I said it used to be called Upper Volta, had been nabbed by the French, and it's capital was Ouagadougu and I sat down on the bonnet and waited for him to be impressed.

He wasn't. He laughed again. "Not Ouagadougu," he chuckled. "OuagaDOUgu".

It did sound better when he said it. And I thought mine was close but he shook his head and said "No, no, terrible", though very amiably. But he did come and lean against the bonnet and we started talking. About Burkina Faso and what it was like. And I learnt absolutely loads.

He told me how Burkina Faso's neighbours all envy her for her organisation, palm wine and film festival. He told me Burkinabe are relaxed happy people who like to read and tell stories. He took me through the transition from independence to today's regime semi-presidentiel, (sorry, can't find acute accents in this format) and that Burkina Faso means "A Country of Honest People". He told me his favourite dish was a mix of rice, okra and peanut sauce and his Mum made it best. And that 200 000 are still homeless from the summer flooding. And that just after his grandfather had died, his apparition had appeared at his neighbour's house, floated round the dinner table wagging its ghostly finger and scolded him, in front of his family, for having had an affair. And then he sang the anthem for me. Une Seule Nuit. I'd never heard it before.

It is amazing how the most interesting moments come flying at you when you least expect them. I got pretty much the whole shop done in a wonderfully smoky daydream of Burkina Faso and without the tiniest shred of Shopper's Impatience.

One can learn much in Sainsbury's car park on Saturday afternoon. Who'd have thought it?

He also pointed me towards this. I have no idea what it's about, but I'm imagining it might be something to do with getting plastered? Odd, but vaguely compelling.

After-afterthought...
Although one more thing - how awful that so many people have lost everything in one tiny country and the thought of it has barely crept into my mind. THAT was badly done, Emma. Badly done indeed.

(Self-indulgently) thinking aloud...

2009-10-31T08:47:00.011Z

My bloody head has had me up in the night again. I have pondered and mused and twisted and turned and am no closer to an answer, and I'm sure this is because there isn't one.

At what point in life do you learn to stand up for yourself? Is it something you do as a child and then learn not to do later on, out of misguided, or ill-judged, politeness? Does age bring with it a certain lily-liveredness? Or is it just me? Have I turned into a commandable chicken-heart, a hushed, dominated dotard nervously-but-deftly tiptoeing over a daily mound of other people's eggshells?

I've been thinking back to times when I have defended myself. There are not many. But there was once, in the first year at secondary school, during the time that everyone had to carve out their own particular idiosyncratic roles to carry them through; you know, ring-leader, beauty, freak, brainbox, slapper, (slightly mythomaniacal, of course, as we were, after all, only 12). There was a girl in 1B who, unhindered by any likelihood of academic prowess, had decided to craft herself as Hard and Scary Bully. "She's really hard" we would all whisper to each other in notes of awe, while giving her a wide berth in the corridors. "We mustn't mess with her", we reminded each other, as we crept cautiously and subserviently around, pretending we wanted to be friends, though she quite genuinely repelled us.

But then we had an inter-form lacrosse match and I accidentally smacked her on the fingers.

The message came back, hissed down lines of wide-eyed, horrified girls, and later scrawled onto a piece of paper and shoved into the inkwell of my desk: "YOU have had it affter school". I corrected the spelling of "after" and sent it back, inwardly quaking, but fired on by the bated-breath admiration of my slightly swotty, ne'er-do-wrong group of friends, (plaits, clean faces and girl guides on Friday) who gasped gratifyingly at my foolhardiness in taking on the hard gang of girls, (pink hairspray and Friday evenings looking sullen outside Pop-In).

After school, this particular girl was waiting. Like a scene out of Grange Hill, really, with her soon-to-be-tattoed-and-later-pregnant back up gang, grinning inanely behind her. I remember her walking towards me knocking her fist into the palm of her hand and saying "YOU are so going to get it now" (omit 't's, obviously).

I hit her first, with my clarinet case, and ran. And I was never, ever bothered by them afterwards. Yes, I got detention for "ruffian behaviour on public display" and a long, sad lecture from my Head of Year about my "disappointing behaviour which would not bring honour to the school or look good on my University application, in 7 years' time, bla bla" (but it turned out that this girl's brother had weed on our headmistresses car door handle, so I think, secretly, they were a little bit grateful). But I never ever had to deal with any attempted bullying ever again.

At least, not at school.

But now? Now is different. Over the past couple of years I have borne insults, accusations and rebarbative reproach, out of nowhere, and have merely flinched. I have had the most horrendous lies flung around about me and the furthest I've got is to tell people, who already know they aren't true, that they aren't true. I have watched situations develop which I know to be wrong-all-wrong and I have sat dumbly, not wanting to offend. In many cases, I have even become so unnerved that I have ended up, to all intents and purposes, supporting other people's horrible follies rather than risking their wrath by telling them what I really think, ever hiding behind pusillanimous protest that it is "NOT MY BUSINESS"... when I should be screeching "NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO".

When did I become so damn diluted?

And I mean this on a far wider scale than just within my tiny little life in Surrey. I've said it before, but it's just not right that Mengistu should be living on a ranch and popping to South Africa for treatment. Than Shwe is another one. In fact, one could go on for ages. But me sitting here at my kitchen table, bleating on about things in the world Not Being Fair makes no difference at all. What DO you do then? Switch off? Or choose one and become single-mindedly activist? Do you rectify your own little patch of green first, before branching out onto bigger issues? Or do you hide behind the big stuff and forget what's under your feet?

Suddenly, I feel a little bit like the Lion on the Yellow Brick Road. Somewhere and sometime, I would like someone to push upon me a whole dose of courage so, finally, I can begin to re-discover the guts to sod all the eggshells.

What horrible English I do use.

Afterthought

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” Thank you, Lincoln. Hitting the nail on the head from beyond the grave. Clever man.

If you can bear looking at him...

2009-10-26T22:36:00.003Z

I don't think this will stay up very long, but I am quite glad someone took the time to do this...

Crusty Botches of Nature. Apologies to Shakespeare.

2009-10-20T21:44:00.007+01:00

Nick Griffin must be rubbing his chubby belly with glee.

He came off rather well, I thought, on his interview with Jon Snow on Channel 4 tonight - making points he wanted to make without much heed to the actual questions, calling James Bethel a "Tory Toff" and referring to Jon Snow as "Peter". A pretty slick performance, but what would anyone expect?

Being slick is what Griffin is all about, surely? And leaving this pointless little roly-poly racist aside, I'm finding I am less perturbed by the BNP itself than by people's reaction to them.

The BNP have, for example, nabbed the Battle of Britain and are promoting it as a nifty little advantageous association with their own political fundament. Naturally, and rightly so, veterans and representatives of British Armed Forces are Not Happy. So there is now a video from the protest group "Nothing British About The BNP" to make their well-justified point. But I don't know. The video is strangely soft-hitting. It reminds us how horrid it is to be at war. It has an atmosphere of sorrowful resignation, and a very odd choice of sober piano running throughout. Sad and sober is wrong, all wrong. Shouldn't we all be spitting chips?

As for whether it will work, I guess that depends who it is aimed at. But who is that then?
Who still needs to be told they are a party of oddly-shaped fascist yobbos, who have all simply upgraded their bova boots to laptops? The dull berks who might vote for them, come election time, I suppose? And if that is so, will a video like this, with its carefully thought out subtleties, really work? Wouldn't it better to have Ray Winston leaning into the TV screen and jabbing a squat finger, while growling "Don't vote for them, moron; they are right little s**ts"?

To clarify, and I really have to, just in case, I am NO fan of the BNP. Of course not. It is a nasty little example of segregational thuggery which will always attract a certain amount of support, from a certain section of society. Any society. "But, like, it's not fair that they come over 'ere and take our jobs like..." mumbled an Barnsley example today on TV, with a long vacant stare, suggestive of a true Non-Thinker. But there's nothing particularly British about that - the same happens all over the world. You will always get your fatuous fascist fringes, wherever you are. In the same way that you will always find someone who thinks eating carrots is homicide.

But now the papers are all jumping on board the big Countdown To Question Time. The Church is condemning it, and various ethnic groups echo. I understand why they have to, I really do, but it just all seems like such pretty publicity for an undeserving bunch of often vicious boneheads.

Engineered properly, and Question Time could prove to be a real thorn in their ruffian side. We all know that they have a legal right to say what they want to say, whether we like it or not. And if we want to discount anyone's views properly and honestly, it is always useful to hear what they are. Given enough carefully designed rope, I'm sure the BNP could quite easily hang themselves. It could be very interesting. But I bet, on Thursday, emotion takes over. I bet it turns out to be all about the demonstrators outside. And I bet there'll be so much noise of protest that people will forget to hear what a stinking lot of sewer-bile these people really preach.

I'm not trying to be political, incidentally. Am really just thinking aloud.

(Afterthought)
I do hope they bring up the David Duke video. I do hope someone asks him what the hell he meant by that. It's available on you tube, and worth seeing for true horror, but I'm not putting it up here as I don't want those botches of nature polluting my blog.

"All Idealism Is Falsehood In The Face Of Necessity"

2009-10-19T23:10:00.012+01:00

So finally they have negated the Cripplecock. R received a cheery message from the previously off-on-a-jaunt consultant telling him he "didn't have to worry about the really nasty thing" and that they would "really put their thinking caps on" to see what it might be.

This is very good news indeed. It's not, of course, perfect news, because there still lies something beneath. But we feel better. Much more positive at least. And even my father, a pessimist in realist's clothing, heaved a sigh of relief with us, put his black suit back in the cupboard and went off happily to Australia.

3 of us had a coffee and congratulated R while it all sank in, and then I went off and celebrated personally by getting stuck in the toilet in Debenhams.

There is something quite unadmittable about being stuck in a toilet; I just loathe the idea of having to knock pleadingly on a cubicle door hoping someone will hear and help you. You know that, firstly, they will smirk and, secondly, they will bring people along with them. So, FAR more impressively, I climbed out. It was a beautifully seamless escape and it went like this: foot on toilet seat, other foot on cistern, hook arms over flimsy partition, apologise to surprised lady in that cubicle as I loom over from above, repeat same stance but on the other side, throw leg up, wriggle over, lower self down onto the other cistern and job done. Practically a Charlie's Angel in less glamorous clothing. I was really, really proud.

Even the lady from the next cubicle, who must have originally thought I was some terrible kind of Toilet Pervert was impressed. And another hand-washing lady also complimented me. An unexpectedly good day at that point: husband cleared of nasty fatal strain, and I got to receive praise on my agility.

"You must be very fit and supple - I bet you're excellent on those army assault courses", Hand-Washing Lady was saying in all admiration, as I assumed a modest expression while also trying to create a look to suggest, yes, actually I was an assault course demon.

You see, it is indeed pathetically rubbish of me, but I have found since having the children, compliments on my physical being are few and far between. Mostly because it has grown quite immeasurably. And it pays scant lip-service to both suppleness and agility. A horribly creaky pelvis which bears the scars of being mother to a boy with R's genes, and I have ricketed around for the last 5 years like a limping geriatric. I am currently in the middle of several sporting challenges against boys much fitter than me (yes, silly) and, so far, am failing pretty miserably. So, to have someone, even a hand-washing lady I didn't know, tell me I must be fit and supple (FIT AND SUPPLE!!) was such a rare thing, and momentarily very diverting. And comforting. And anyway, I'd had a stressful week.

Pride comes, as ever, before a crashing great fall, and the gremlins were obviously rubbing their hands with glee at being able to show me up for my falsehood. And this came in the realisation that I'd left my bag on the back of the locked door. Dammit, really. And I really did not like my chances of re-performing my once-lucky climb-over feat again in front of my admiring spectators.

"Oh dear" said the ladies. "Shall we go for help?"

"No, no," I replied with my best airiness, "I'll just stand on that bin and lean over."

"Ooh, are you sure?" The ladies were worried. "It doesn't look like a very strong bin for a big girl like you".

And there you had it. Five minutes of escapism into compliments of which I was not worthy, and I was brought bang down to earth in a flash, by a genuinely observed truth.

Seconds later, I was brought bang down to earth for a second, more painful time, by the bin giving way concertina-style and throwing me across the floor, where I hit my head on the sink and ended up strangely contorted in a little grey pool of old floor water.

The fleetingly brief and undeserved image I had allowed myself to entertain of Me, Fit and Supple, dissolved in an instant.

Hand-washing lady and her friend were very concerned. They pulled me to my feet, kindly; one of them, less kindly (though doubtlessly without cruel intention), puffing the words "HEAVE-HO!" as they did it, and they got me paper towels. "Oh, there's a brown stain down the back of your coat," one said with real concern. I said it didn't matter at all, and ran.

As I rushed towards the escalator, I was thinking that I shouldn't exaggerate what had just happened. It was no very big deal to fall off a bin in a toilet with only two people I didn't even know to witness it. But before I GOT to the escalator, there came a piercing call from the end of the store.

"COOOO-EEEEEEE! LADY-WHO-JUST-FELL-OFF-THE-BIN-IN-THE-TOILET?"

I turned round and watched them hurry up and identify me to everyone else.

"You forgot your bag, dear".

But at least R doesn't have cripplecock. That's something, for sure.

GRRRRR

2009-10-13T20:30:00.008+01:00

Lots of people have been so kind in asking how R is and what is happening, that I thought it wouldn't hurt to post an update. IS this very arrogant? I have a sneaking suspicion it might be, but it also seems such an easy way of keeping people informed. And also I'm in a bit of a selfish strop, and a bit of blogging, along with a glass of red, might readdress the balance.

So. We waited all day yesterday for these results that the consultant had promised, having waited all bloody weekend with it lurking stinkishly round the backs of our minds. Did he phone? Of course not. So we tried to phone him.

And oh, how the NHS can shine.

"'Oo?" said the brash lady on the switchboard "We 'aven't got one of 'em." I said they must have because he had been dealing with R, in hospital, just last week. The lady, who was no doubt miffed at having an enquirer phone the enquiries part of the hospital and thereby interrupt her reading of Grazia, with an enquiry, finally found that there was a Dr W, and put me through. To cardiology.

"But it's not cardiology I want" I said to the kinder lady I spoke to there "I'm sure it should be neuroscience, or some such area". The Kind Cardiology Lady suggested I ring the ward direct.

So I did. Again, they were very kind, and remembered R from last week, and expressed surprise to hear that results had been promised, but not delivered. "But Dr W is not here for a while", she said. A while? Well, a week, they said. Perhaps. So when he said he would definitely ring and tell us on Monday? Hmmm, was the response. But they did have a doctor with an idea to help. Why, she said, don't you try to get yourself re-admitted via A&E this evening, then you can be waiting on a ward for when the consultant does his rounds tomorrow? I said that A&E was surely for emergency only? She ummed and erred. I suggested it to R, who looked quietly-daggers at the phone, said a very calm No, and that was that.

Now, I don't know whether it has been the recent, pretty much constant submersion into the Mega Mindy theme tune, but at some points in your life you just get so sick of being Polite, and English, and Not-Wanting-to-Make-a-Fuss. And you want to kick some NHS-butt. So. I emailed. I left messages with secretaries. I phoned back and left more. Meanwhile R felt rubbish.

Finally, today, our consultant phoned me back. He didn't know why things had happened as they had, he said. He said, consultant-ishly, that he hoped there wouldn't be undue cause for concern, and that he personally felt there might not. So why had other people felt so differently? If the risk was so very low, why drag him in late in the evening and pump drain-cleaner into his arm? Why tell us he might be there for a few weeks, and immediate treatment was vital? The consultant said that this was very interesting. And that perhaps we could wait till Friday. Ok, I said, then why have we been treated with such superficial urgency, if we could, after all, wait till Friday? Again, apparently, it was an "interesting" point. And he couldn't speak for what other people had done. Of course.

R is calmer and more pragmatic than me. R has shrugged and gone back to the sofa, saying there's not much else we can do. He also goes along with the lines of No-News-Is-Good-News. And where I would usually believe this, I am no longer sure, with the NHS, that this is true. It seems to me that No-News is rather more to do with Someone-Hasn't-Passed-On-A-Message. Or that Someone-Has-Gone-Home-And-Taken-The-Info-With-Them. And while I agree with him that we should just wait, there is a small spoilt brat inside me who wants to scream and stamp a princessy foot.

And I DO know that there are thousands of people in so very much worse situations, both here and around the world, and I should be grateful for all we have, I really do. I KNOW we are lucky to live in a country where we have any access to healthcare, and I know that the NHS is packed full of hard-working, well-trained expertise doing a jolly good job. But I can't help it, tonight. I want to know now. And I want to ask questions. And I would really, really like some answers, very soon. I am so so tired of feeling like I'm falling. And I hate seeing R like this.

Is it really so impossible?

Gosh, I really AM a selfish cow tonight.

Wow!

2009-10-13T10:24:00.005+01:00

Wow wow wow!!! You can never have a bad experience at The Big Picture but these pictures have been the best 5 minute break I have had in a long time...

The Berlin Reunion

(and for all the very kind enquiries after R, still no conclusive news, but thank you, thank you anyhow)

MEGA MINDY STAAT PARAAT

2009-10-09T00:11:00.007+01:00

I like Holland. R is always vexed by how much I like Holland, but I like its towns and its hagelslag and its greater proportion of tall men. And I like Mega Mindy. She is a Dutch Super-Heroine, who goes around in pink catsuits, being all against injustice and wrong-doing, and whacking Naughty People down. And her boss (male) is the Biggest Clot she's Ever Met, something that she sings out with impunity in the main title song. Ok, so she's still as improbably proportioned as any typical cartoon totty; she is also, of course, hopelessly in love with someone who doesn't know it, but even so. She isn't fawning around a absent-but-authoritarian male boss (yeah, Charlie) who is there simply to Put Her Right, and that works for me. A better role model for girls than, shall we say, Barbie? But more from that particular soap box another day...

Anyway, today I had my own Mega Mindy moment in Addlestone. I was pulling away from a friend's house, with the theme song from Mega Mindy playing (we have reached agreement, my 3 year old and I: ONCE a journey, and that is all. Unfortunately, if the journey involves driving five minutes to pop something through a letterbox and then back in the car, this is apparently, in the cause of Mega Mindy music, two journeys. And so on...anyway, it's on rather a lot.) And I was squinting into the sun to see what was coming, while rather joyfully singing along the main chorus with J "IK BEN MEGA MINDY, MEGA MINDY..". Before I realised it, a cross portly man with no hair had got out of his car in front of me in the road and was glaring.

"OI!" he puffed at me, all fat stomach and concerted aggression "Whatcha say to me?"

"When?" I asked, not winding down my window, because these parts of Surrey can be scary, you know. We're like the hood of Weybridge over here...

"Just then! I pulled up to let you out and you mouthed somefink at me, I saw you. Whatcha say?"

Actually, the sun was so bright, I hadn't seen him, so it was jolly good he had pulled up to let me out.

"I said," I mouthed back through the glass "I SAID 'Ik ben Mega Mindy'". Because I had.

And do you know what? He turned round, ran back to his car and drove off. Just like that.

Wow. These Dutch Super-heroines really rock.

I always said Holland was better.

PS I can't talk about cripplecock at the moment, and I don't mean to be unfeeling. I just can't think about it right now. I need five minutes of being silly and pointless.

Hmmmm...

2009-10-07T16:49:00.015+01:00

We are all in uproar, as Mrs Bennett says.

Last night, I'd left R in a hospital bed surrounded by Concerned-Doctor Looks and hushed whispers of cryptococcal (hereafter known as cripplecock) meningitis. But today? Well, another day, another doctor.

R tells me he had not had a good night. And the thought of staying there for another 8-at-least was not particularly warming his cockles. He mentioned this to the consultant and the consultant suggested that perhaps he might like to go home instead.

Really? But what about the 8 days connected to a drip? But what about the cripplecock? "Ah yes, that" came the answer.

"You see, cryptococcal meningitis is very rare, especially in previously healthy cases such as yourself. Now there is certainly some presence, but had it actually taken hold, I think you'd be dead." said the consultant. "And you're not". R says he could only agree - he had already noticed this himself.

So, what about the fact that we'd been told he'd be there for Over A Week At Least? Hmmm, responded the consultant. What about the fact that they'd rushed him back in on a cripplecock likelihood and scared the living daylights out of us? What about the fact that someone didn't read the instructions on the cripplecock antibiotic fluid and unleashed a whole dose of something into his arm, which sent him into a full-body reaction, until he told them to stop? Hmmm, again, said the consultant, before adding as an afterthought that he would Say Something Stern about that last bit. So what is wrong? "I don't know", was the reply "Something is, but I don't know what. We're sending off for more tests and we'll let you know in - er - a couple of weeks?"

Right then.

So, R found himself blinking in the daylight on his surprise way back home for the second time in 24 hours. Still with the cracking headache of , ooh, 6 months now? And whereas yesterday they had discharged him on a Wait-and-See, and then called him back in on pain of death, today they have seemingly discharged him for Being Not Dead.

My friend K, who is of greater wit than I, very swiftly pointed out to R that Being Not Dead is a somewhat medieval diagnosis. But I feel inspired. Last night, I felt helplessly lost - shut out from the medical world by a gaping lack of knowledge and understanding. But today, I feel slightly more hopeful. Even though I haven't touched a science since O level, I too can make a medical diagnosis. And I could even have beaten our consultant to it. If Being Not Dead is all they had really needed to know, I could have told them myself.

Now, I don't mean to dig at our NHS because the staff, for us, have always been wonderful. I'm sure they'd forgive me though for saying the system is occasionally farcical. Two days before my Mum died in hospital, she was left on a wire frame bed with no mattress in a corridor for 7 hours because "there was nowhere else for her to go". And at the beginning of this week, they wouldn't let R leave his bed, which he didn't actually need, because then he'd lose his place in a queue for an MRI, which he didn't actually get.

You could go on for hours on this, but there is little point.

But just one little thing. Our experience most recently has not been very encouraging, it's true. But even LESS encouraging is the huge poster that you pass on the way to the Brain Injury Unit with the words " Putting MAX at the heart of everything we do" emblazoned beneath a picture of a grinningly smug Max Clifford. Horrors. I don't mean to be nasty, as I'm sure he made a big and needed donation to be on such a poster, but I'm not sure I am particularly warmed by the idea of any organisation putting Max Clifford at the heart of what they do. Especially one now entrusted with the well being of my husband and future. It makes me wonder if they might sew mouse ears to his back and then Mr Clifford would pop up on his rounds to persuade him to sell his story. Or something. Maybe it's just me. Anyway, some things within the Health Service you just can't help, but some things you can: and massive great photos of Max Clifford leering at people who are already in a heightened state of nerves, is one of those things.

Anyhow. We are now 4 months down the line from the initial hospitalisation, and whereas this time last night I was sitting contemplating all sorts of doom, tonight we are again contemplating all sorts of Don't Know. I almost feel ...well, cheated. R is a bit cross with me - he thinks this sounds as though I would prefer him to have cripplecock so that my pangs of anxiety throughout last night were more justified. Or because we had so many lovely messages and offers for help from so many friends who'd heard about the cripplecock and our panic, that I almost feel we'd be letting them down IF he hasn't got it after all.

And I made all those rash promises. Which, incidentally, I now need to keep. So not only has the NHS rather messed us around of late, it has now also got me promising to clean out that kitchen belch cupboard and to be more domestically competent, among other things, and that - that - is unforgivable.

Ah well, so ends this particular saga until the test results come through. But as ever, there are always occasions for a chuckle. Firstly, my 3 year old was delighted when she woke up to find a friend had very kindly stayed over last night for company etc.

"When my Daddy goes to hospital all night, B's Daddy comes to sleep here instead", she announced to a neighbour today, thus labelling me Morally Defunct Street Hussy.

And then my Dad. "My black suit," he complained today on the phone "I've got it out of the wardrobe, I've put it back in. Out again, and in again. DO I need to get it cleaned or not?"

Oh, you can't beat it.

PS
On a serious note, however, thank you, thank you everyone for all your support and offers of help. We were utterly moved and it helped a lot.
Just one more thing though - R suggested he might play rugby by next weekend. Please send insults, or punch him.

2009-10-07T00:17:00.007+01:00

It is 1 am in the morning and I am up bargaining with God.

I am not sure that God will treat any of my offered bargains with much sincerity now though - I have offered them before, when the youngest was in various hospitalised states over her first two years, and I'm pretty sure that as she raced towards each full recovery, my side of whichever bargain I might have promised raced to the back of my mind just as quickly. Were I God, I would probably feel somewhat narked by all this too. My track record, in the eyes of Them Up There must be rather flawed.

But tonight. Tonight, it seems R has managed to develop cryptococcal meningitis. He got back from hospital at 6 and was called back in at 7. "Bollocks" he said to the doctor on the phone. "Bugger." came a bit later. And then "Really?". We are still at the "Really?" stage now. It seems that a rash case of viral meningitis was not enough for R, and he has spent the last 4 months of his own recovery sneakily building a secondary fungal infection which could, in essence, do for him. It seems that his consultant will now have to Eat His Hat after all. As for me, I am just stunned. I do not want to put tents up on my own. I have only just found out where the bonnet handle is. I cannot, CANNOT, contemplate any of the horrendous realities which might be in store and why the hell I am up now putting this all onto my blog I Do Not Know. Perhaps to ellicit some kind of comprehension out of my stupidly befuddled mind. And perhaps because this is the first properly honest thing I've ever put here. But probably most of all, is because it's only my friends who read this and it saves me having to explain out loud and risk the Unspeakable Humiliation of Tears in Public.

But where do you start? How helpless do you feel when your life as you know is handed over to a registrar you have only just met? Do they know what they are doing? DO they? Because I remember the medics at Uni and they were a hardcore party lot and I never saw them study much and I lived with five of them (ok, so they were vets but they used the same building). That has never bothered me until now. After all, I have given lectures in my own particular subject for years and there are still academic swathes of which I am still blissfully ignorant. (Oh, if any readers happen to be former students, please disregard this last bit). Do they really know their stuff? And how will I ever be able to check? When I read up on medical science online, my own complete lack of knowledge condemns me to read terminal illness in everything. Jerome K Jerome once said the only thing you can ever be sure of NOT having, once you peruse the medical journals, is Housemaids Knee and 130 years later it's still the same thing.

But I do know the worse thing you can do at one o clock in the morning is to ponder the what ifs. The best thing you can do is go to sleep and prepare yourself for tomorrow. But I am not sensible tonight and I am up pondering the what ifs. And bargaining with God.

How do these offers sound?

If everything can be ok, I will do my best to raise funds for a shelterbox to go t0 those poor, poor people in Indonesia.

If everything can be ok, I will get over my fear of flying and not leave R to sit with the kids while I grip onto someone else's shoulder having first relieved the departure lounge of all its Bloody Mary.

If everything can be ok, I will try really hard to Be Sweet to one particular person who does not at all deserve it.

If everything can be ok, I will organise a group of singers to visit the Old People's Home to sing carols, like I promise to every year and never get round to.

And if everything can be ok, I will never again bemoan the size of our house and garden. I will never shout swear words at the kitchen cupboard (the one which belches all its contents at you as soon as you open it), but I will keep it ordered and lovely. I will keep the dog bathed. I will iron as soon as it is needed and remember to hoover the stairs. I will even think about having decent nails and wearing gardening gloves. I will not roll my eyes at people who make grammar mistakes nor sniff when they spell "definitely" with an "a".

But most of all, I will be far more grateful for the mundanity that I am sometimes so rude about.

I wonder if such a public declaration of all this lends any gravitas to my promises?

PS
I realise much of this is flippant, but I have always found flippancy SUCH a comforting antidote.

But at least this had made me laugh...

2009-09-29T22:04:00.010+01:00

Thank goodness for other people to make things seem less mad, purely by way of their own insanity. Today I popped into, shall we say, A Shop to pick up a few basic store cupboard items, the absence of which had been brought to light by a recent cooking session with a friend from Bangalore.

The lady cashier looked at me. "Ooh, lots of spices," she said with interest. "Er, yes" I responded in my best Polite Shopping Wife voice, there not being much one could have added to that. "Indian?" she asked. "Well, some of them, yes, "I replied "but I think lemon grass is more often linked to South East Asia."

The woman looked at me oddly. "Not your shopping," she said, as though I was on the simple side "YOU, I meant. Are YOU Indian?"

Now here's the thing. I don't think I could ever be described as Looking Indian. I have faded, slightly dishwater hair which used to be rudely ginger, and all the other non-super traits which go with that colouring, like pale skin and freckles, which have now maliciously ganged up in places to give me a more blotchy brown-patch look. Over the years, I have often been told I look "soooooo English" and I say this without ego, as I am sure it cannot be a compliment. Once, a black cab driver told me I looked "just like Fergie". Can you imagine? I was so cross that I got out early in protest, (before realising that having then to walk over Waterloo Bridge in the rain was a perfect exemplification of Cutting Off One's Nose to Spite One's Face, while also not bothering the cab driver one jot). But honestly. Fergie, indeed; that is just being beastly.

Anyway, back to the shop. "Er, no," I said "Er, I'm not Indian. Why would you think that?"

"Because," she said, all raised eyebrows and slightly amused looks "you're buying all this Indian stuff and so I thought you might be Indian."

I told her again I wasn't Indian. I said I was English. Very English.

She looked at me for a while and then put on a gentle-warning voice.
"There's nothing wrong with being Indian," she said, slowly. "Not everyone thinks that being English is the Be All. I bet there are lots of people who are really proud of being Indian. You should remember that really".

It was like I'd been teleported into an episode of Goodness Gracious Me. I stood there, completely at a loss. It seemed I was actually being reprimanded for not being proud of being Indian.

"I'm not saying I don't want to be Indian, " I tried "I'm only saying I'm not, in fact, Indian. And therefore I can't be proud of being it. Can I?"

She gave me a long look. "Well," she said "I'm just saying that there must be PLENTY who are actually very happy to be Indian and therefore don't deny it".

HOW is one supposed to react to such utter barminess? "I know that," I said "and I'm not denying being Indian and would have no problem with being Indian, only I am not and that's hardly my fault. Are YOU Indian?"

"No", she said "I'm from Norfolk".

Oh, well, then....

Rumi

2009-09-24T21:44:00.006+01:00

Reading Rumi reminds me of how inefficiently I think. It reminds me that I am not a scholar, and that I don't truly understand Sufism, although occasionally, just very occasionally, I think I do. At any rate, I'd like to be a Whirling Dervish once, just to see.

But anyway, with a nod to dependence on translation, I did think this was rather super.

Lets hope so, Rumi, hey.

"One day you will look back and laugh at yourself.

You’ll say, “ I can’t believe I was so asleep!

How did I ever forget the truth?

How ridiculous to believe that sadness and sickness

Are anything other than bad dreams.”

Someone put some coffee on, please. It's time to wake up.

We are very dull, Eliza...

2009-09-22T21:39:00.006+01:00

I feel utterly stifled - silenced even - by these past couple of days, and so I am deliberately Not Doing Any Proper Thinking for a while. Sometimes you have to be the one to nurture your own sanity, or at least be able to define its limits. Diversion is so much cheaper than psychiatry.

And with that in mind, here's a pointlessly random thought. What price the effort of learning Arabic if you could use it like this?

I'd forgotten about Souad Massi, until I found her while looking for Richard Bona. Tut.

Oh, Sunday uproars and Richard Bona...

2009-09-20T23:07:00.007+01:00

Actually, it's a rotten shame, but you can't be truly honest on blogs because it means revealing the Issues of Other People and they are bound to get miffed. Much better the old system of the diary hidden in a bedside drawer, hunted down only sneaking siblings... whatever they read, these naughty easvesdroppers-by-text, they DESERVE! Isn't that what we are told?

But I have to say it's been exhaustingly eventful recently, (in a pathetically unimportant way, in the grand scheme of things, natch) and more so this Sunday evening. Soredomo, in the present lull of serenity, thank GOODNESS for a sudden flash back to this song. What on earth was I thinking, forgetting about Richard Bona and Suninga?

I can't write more because I've had too much red wine. How awful is that, on a Sunday? No wonder I am completely without wit.

I could explain, but I had absolutely better not...

Back to something a bit more normal...

2009-09-07T22:41:00.007+01:00

I'm already a bit embarrassed by that last post. Just in case anyone should actually read it. But I'm going to leave it up because this blogging lark is all about stepping outside your comfort zone, surely?

But to redress the balance slightly, I can't go to sleep on just that. SO. I must just jot down something I didn't know before and do now. Papal Bulls, such that came whizzing over from Roma to tell Henry VIII to get back in his regal box, for example, were named after BULLAE (Lat noun pl), which were, apparently, a type of clay or metal seal used in such highly protected communications. Because this type of seal was pretty much tamper-proof.

Interesting. I always wondered why they were so-named. Must remember to tell Best Friend From School, who believed through much of our A level history that the chosen papal messenger in Tudor times was, actually, a long-travelling pet bull from the pope's own herd. Oh, and who also expressed great admiration for the "terribly clever" gorillas who had once "driven themselves" into Mexico City. And who once managed to get the words "masturbation" and "menstruation" into school prayers after becoming distracted by "how budgies feed each other". And who, in her proudest moment, accepted a waggish dare to lock our moody lacrosse teacher into the stick cupboard so we might avoid a lost-match shouty post mortem lecture, and managed it brilliantly, BUT with herself also on the wrong side of the door. Wonderful, wonderful.

I am now giggling into my tea like a schoolgirl-that-was and am no longer feeling quite so spooked.

Much better.

I'm not sure for how long I can admit to this in public but...

2009-09-07T20:55:00.009+01:00

Someone recently pointed out, without too much intention of being helpful, that a blog which remains dormant is of "little interest" to the blog reading community. I take the dark hint, indeed - but 2 things. I don't think my blog is of interest to any community, for a start, and secondly, I have to claim school holidays as a Difficult Time for Blogging. I have been fully immersed into an idyllic summer existence of tee pees and campfires and beach trips and country shows and all sorts. And yes, before it sounds too horribly fake, a good deal of bleeping about Having No Time To Myself and general, mind-numbing exhaustion and sneakily early bedtimes. Plus, I couldn't think of anything to blog about.

But now I can. And it's only because I'm reasonably confident that no one is going to read this any more after its long state of dormancy, that I am happy to write it. R will tut and sigh and hrumph but I actually think, self-indulgently as ever, airing this may be a cathartic action to take. Perhaps, when it's all written down, I will look at it and say "What rot!", delete it, roll eyes at self and continue as before.

So this is it anyhow: I think, or at least, I think that I think that I think that I am beginning to get some kind of sixth sense. And I call it that, only because I have no other way to describe it. Some kind of intuition maybe. Something weird is in the water and I don't quite know what to do with it.

I THINK I am beginning to see something, some kind of company, which I have to describe as a ghost because I have no other word, or description for it. And it's not "seeing" as such. More like a sensation. A very acute smell, and a physical response. I suddenly hear what I can only describe as a pop, right behind my ear. I have felt myself shaken, and I have had moments when the air around me is suddenly pervaded by an intense odour. Sometimes perfumey, if this is an adjective, sometimes smokey and cold. And it's not just happening in those bleary night time moments of semi-consciousness. It's happening in the middle of the broad damn daylight and I have no rational explanation with which I can shoo it all away.

Now. I can at this stage tut and sigh along with everyone else and put this down to tiredness, an active imagination, and expectation of what I might already suspect, or, more, want to suspect. Or better, some kind of strange psychological response to something I will not understand because I waftily studied languages ( the year abroad, of course) and not sensible, practical scientific subjects...I don't know. But I do know that I am not mad, and I do know that it is not just me who is "getting" all this.

My beautiful Hungarian hunting dog, who I have often derided for her lack of sense, seems to be getting it too. She reacts to the same things I am sensing, and at the same time. I hear a pop and she growls. I get a funny smell and she puts her head up and starts sniffing curiously. I get an odd sense of company and she stares intently at one place in the room, her hackles ever so slightly flicking up her back. If it weren't for her, I would happily write it all off as mental or hormonal instability, but unless this sort of thing is a virus prone to cross-species contamination, I can't.

And one thing I do have to bear in mind is that it has happened before, years ago when we were in Japan. And R saw it at the same time, although now he does rather huff and sigh if you remind him of it. (you do, R, you do). I almost wish you hadn't. You see, other people saying "Oooh that IS weird", or dogs suddenly frowning and staring at a something just over your shoulder, is a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's great comfort to know you are not a ditsy air-brain with an over-active imagination. Or at least, if you are, there are two of you. On the other, you end up with unanswered questions, which can be unsettling.

Another interesting thing, people are beginning to bring their own smells. Someone was lying to me the other day, and I could SMELL it. Really. I knew the truth was being fabricated and I could smell it, like burnt rubber. Another recent occasion of being thrown into the company of someone I really can't abide (but shhhhhhh) and this person STANK of wet potato peelings left in a carrier bag. Rotten, disgusting potato peelings. Conversely, all the lovely people I have seen lately haven't smelt at all; one might have expected them to bring with them the air of a fresh daisy field, but no. It seems to be only the bad stenches that come through.

What's going on? What is my brain doing to me? Is it all self-made? Am I jumping at a theoretical version of my own shadow? Or is there something unexplained which will remain unexplained enough for me to stamp my own interpretation onto it? Or has R managed to play to most elaborate practical joke yet on me and persuaded the dog to be in on it?

And since this now seems to be nothing but a list of questions, here are some more. Where the hell do you go to ask? What can anybody say? My experience is that you either get amused, smirky-but- sympathetic looks from confident non-believers who think you've turned the corner to Doolally, and always find a way of expressing their politest surprise that you - "of all people, really" - would be "into that sort of thing". OR you get people who say "My auntie sees ghosts and talks to them in 'er parlour with 'er cats". OR you end up forcing a reaction from your uncomfortable friends who do their best either to muster polite interest, with curious sidelong glances at each other when they think you're not looking, OR who shriek "Yikes! WITCHY!" and cancel coffee unless it "can be somewhere else rather than at yours cos it sounds a bit spooky there" (you know who you are...).

Do you ask vicars or doctors about this? Can anyone tell you? Is there a trustworthy book? Is the best thing just to shut up about the whole hoojimaflip and hope it goes away? Or do you think "Ooh, interesting!" and embrace it? And if so, how?

Because what worries me most of all, is that accepting it would inevitably mean I would have to find a reason for why this is all happening now. Is it a subconscious expression of some snippet of dread, which perhaps itself comes from nothing more than the general hazard of having young children and reading the news about the Big Bad World? Is it because recent events have conspired to leave me missing my mum so much that I am prepared to invent a whole new para-world as a safety net over ultimate loss? Have I just alerted my mind to the possibility and now it's trying to find all sorts of examples to back it up? Or am I simply imagining it all as an excuse to blog instead of cleaning that tenacious sauce off the difficult bit of the hob?

I am nearly 39 years old and I am writing about what I think may be ghosts, and looking over my shoulder at my empty room. Turns you didn't expect your life to take.

Thank goodness the dog is asleep.

Answers, please. Any at all.

2009-08-03T09:57:00.003+01:00

I have had a couple of unsatisfactory conversations recently where I have had the very sneaking suspicion that my responder has, from the outset, imagined he knew what I was going to say next and, worse, could suppose my reasons for saying it.

The fault was no doubt mine, for expressing myself ineloquently.

But this, in turn, has made me quite envious of Rebecca West. I saw this quote in last week's THE WEEK, and it matches my Monday morning mood exactly today. Oh, to be articulate.

"I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute."
Rebecca West

A dead 'ard 'ousewife wha' I am

2009-07-31T20:45:00.018+01:00

I have been chastised for not keeping up the daily blog, and thus failing in the "six seconds a day" idea that I began with. Well, that was an idea always to be ambitious, and my computer is so dinosauric (I have to confess to not knowing that was a legitimate adjective before now) that it takes a good 15 minutes of bleeping and churning for me to get to where I want anyway.

I do do DOOOO aim to write something about the beguinages, about the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, and about the middle movement of a John Field piano concerto I heard recently - all things that have fascinated me over the mountain of my post-camping laundry this week (and yes, Blog Critic, I do mean "fascinated ME" - this blogging is all self-indulgent and I've already said that, my sweet...)

But.

Yesterday, I took a leap over a pile of said laundry and landed, flat-foot, right on top of an upturned hoover plug. Which most successfully embedded itself firmly in my left foot. I cannot even recount the pain of it, but today it doesn't seem to have gone down much. I have raided the private painkiller stash of He-With-Meningitis, and only now, mixed with red wine, it seems to be retreating. Even R, who would call decapitation a "flesh wound" and once told me during childbirth, with some indignation, that "he knew what it felt like because he played rugby", said it looked "quite nasty". So I really am, by Surrey Housewife standards, injured.

My friend S, who was here at the time, said, somewhat approvingly, as she crawled around on the floor with wet wipes picking up blood "You did SO well not to swear". But she didn't realise that I had fallen forward onto the bed and every single vile and stenchy word was screeched into the muffling sanctuary of the duvet.

And this is it - I really did learn one thing from the whole horrid experience.

I had NO idea I could be such a Posh Lady Dirty Mouth. I really do know a lot of bad expressions. Awfully despicable ones. And I can use them all in a variety of ways to invent some startlingly revolting collocations. Where do they all come from? Does everyone have a dark-brooding dictionary of Astonishingly Naughty lexis lurking around in the subconscious, waiting for such situations, in order to jostle out of your mouth and shock you and the world about you? Are we all just a hoover-plug away from some level of Tourettes? Or do I just have a Really Filthy Mouth?

I almost don't know whether to feel ashamed or impressed. I am certainly looking at myself differently.

Hey!

Perhaps I am not as suburbanly boring as I thought. Maybe...I'm a Housewife Wiv Attitude. Maybe I'm just that little bit more street, and other housewives will now have to give me a bi' ov respec'. Maybe I need to drop the RP along with my Ts and Hs and start peppering my speech with "geeza'" and "know wha' I mean, like?" and "phat!".

No, it's no good. Even in jest, I can't do it. And it is not helped by the fact that I am acutely aware, as I write all this rubbish, that I have a pan of chutney bubbling gently on my hob, from the courgettes off my allotment, and a snoring pedigree dog (she had a defective white nose splash so we got her for free, but still...) at my feet. And I'm listening to the afore-mentioned Field concerto. There is not the least little thing "street" about me, and it's rather a shame.

It was a fun illusion for the seconds it lasted, but there's no escaping it. A Surrey Housewife I now am, and that I shall no doubt stay, for a while. Apart from when hoover plugs get stuck in my foot.

This Armstrong and Miller sketch rather illustrates it - like I said before, sometimes one just has to accept one is bloody ridiculous.

Which reminds me. I still haven't hypnotised that chicken.

Actually...

2009-07-19T23:03:00.003+01:00

It's very bad to go to bed in a down-mouth mood. I need something inane, random and very damn silly to sleep on...

Dramatic Chipmunk. 5 seconds that never fails me...

Swine flu without the flu

2009-07-19T21:40:00.007+01:00

Today has not gone well. I found myself once again in A and E, this time with my 4 year old. He currently holds the family record for The Fewest Trips To Hospital (the 3 year old vies with R for first place, pitting some heavy-duty febrile convulsions against his colourful array of rugby injuries) but today necessitated a visit. Yesterday, he had been jousting on the spare bed with a friend and had fallen from his horse, right on to the floor via the radiator. With a wallop. There then followed a night of all the things you are supposed to watch out for after a blow to the head. So ...skipping forward...there we end up. When we arrive in the car park, he is grey and not wanting to walk, and I have that momentary cold-squeeze of parental horror that something could actually be very amiss indeed.

I walk in carrying my yellow-faced, feverish, vomiting boy and I am met by an oh-so-young nurse. I am overly polite and apologetic for disturbing their day by bringing a live child to the A and E and I can't help it - it is the English in me. She is accusing and wants to know why on earth I am here. I tell her I was worried about the possibility of concussion as he had been listless and floppy and complaining of "fuzzy eyes" and "nasty head". "Does he have a headache?" she demands. I say yes, because he banged it - hard. Does he have fever? Yes. Vomiting? Yes.

Young nurse turns to the desk and shrieks "That's four boxes ticked! Swine flu masks!". We are immediately rugby-tackled into a far-flung cubicle and the curtains pulled resolutely shut. They open an inch a second later for two masks to be thrown in. Then shut again. Then open a slit. Young nurse's eye peers at me from the other side. "I might say, "she begins, lecturing to the Idiot "if you thought he had swine flu, why you decided it was a good idea to bring him in here". She tuts and flounces off.

Hmm. Well, I didn't think he had swine flu. I thought he may have a bug, because everyone else seems to have one, and I thought he might have light concussion. And because he was delirious and vomiting and complaining of blurred vision, I thought, and NHS Direct thought, that A and E might be a good place to drop by.

Thanks to my 3 year old, I am very familiar with our paediatric A and E department, and have visited them, unannounced, on many occasion, often in my pyjamas and usually with a child who has become stubborn about breathing. They have always been welcoming and efficient and very good at persuading said child that breathing is good.

But today, they did not want us.

"Gosh," says an older, braver nurse, who's come to do his obs. "He doesn't look well at all."

"Erm, no" I say and we all peer at each other over our masks.

After a few hours and some anti-viral drugs, some rehydration salts and some pain relief, my 4 year old, and I, are returning to normal. So the lovely, kind and patient doctor comes to discharge us.

"I THINK", she says "he has concussion from the bang to the head AND some kind of bug, which you say has been round your friends and his sister." She pauses uncomfortably. "My problem IS that these two things together means he ticks four of the boxes on the Swine Flu Symptom list. So I have to ask you if you want me to prescribe Tamiflu."

I ask if she thinks he has swine flu. She says no, but has no way of telling for sure, because they are not allowed to test for it any more. SO it's probably just a bug? Yes. Like they get off each other all the time? Yes. And concussion? Probably. So why are we talking about swine flu, I ask? "Because", she explains "we have a checklist and if four or more symptoms are ticked off, that's what we have to say it is."

I'm not sure I get this. By this rationale, I think I, and rather a few of my friends, have had swine flu nearly every Saturday morning in memory. R must have swine flu with his meningitis. The children bring it back from nursery on a termly basis. It doesn't add up. Swine flu seems a vicious and potentially dangerous virus, as many strains of flu can apparently be for those at higher risk. But they are saying, our papers, in exaggerated horror, things like "a third of the population could get it!" Well, by what I've seen today, I'm sure they could. Is it any wonder that swine flu is reaching its pandemic proportions, if this is how diagnoses are made and how the statistics are formed? Or is it just round here they are doing it thus?

In any case, I am convinced that sweating pig death, as R likes to call it, has not knocked here. I told the doctor it seemed odd to prescribe him drugs for something she did not feel he had, and she agreed with me with tangible relief. After a few hours, we could go home.

But that nurse.

I know nurses do a wonderful job on very little and I usually cannot fault them at all. And I am not confrontational by nature - far the opposite. But today my gander was up about being spoken to like an uncomprehending nitwit in front of my little boy.

"Excuse me, "I say. She glares. "I didn't think he had swine flu. I thought he had concussion and a bug. And the doctor agrees with me. YOU said swine flu. NOT me."

It was no witty riposte. And I couldn't bring myself to tut-n- flounce either. But I felt as though my honour had been slightly defended. For me, that was a big step and I initially felt pleased...BUT.... but now I think the poor girl had probably just been up all night...

Anyway. And so to bed. I have had enough today.

2009-07-15T22:53:00.010+01:00

Blog Critic has been on the phone during a break in the Ashes. He has decided to stop pretending not to read my blog, and is now pretending that he Only Does It to Stave Away The Boredom of Rain Stops Play.

But anyway, it seems my carnivorous friend is now a self-proclaimed lover of chickens and was upset by the picture in the last post. "It's a dead chicken and the suspicion will be that you've killed it" was his complaint. "I was sad. So will lots of people be. It's macabre to put pictures of dead things up and invite people to laugh about them. I felt all chilled and nervous afterwards."

I explained, knowing his professed sadness is to be taken with a Dead Sea of salt, that it was not exactly what I had done. That the chicken was HYPNOTISED, not dead, nor was it one belonging to my neighbours, but one that I'd (ok, naughty naughty) got off an Australian chook hypnosis site (of which, interestingly, there are rather a lot. J and B, my lovelies of Oz. DO explain this when you get a sec, won't you, favourite flaming gallahs? )

"That," was the reply "is a dead chicken. It 'as", he added with a fake accent and the triumph of one with a well-plotted conversation "Shuffled of this mortal coil. It is an ex-chicken". He left me for the cricket with a satisfied chuckle and the sound of him patting his own back.

But hours later I get a text. "SERIOUSLY IF PEOPLE THINK U HATE CHICKENS ANIMAL LIBBERS MIGHT PAINT U..."

So just in case. The photo on the last blog was, er, borrowed. It was not proof of a failed hypnosis experiment with P and G's chickens. Honestly. And I don't hate chickens at all, I rather like them, both as chickens and as chicken...

I texted back to say I would post to clarify.

The reply whistled back:

"DON'T."

"WHY?" I asked in frustration. I SAID I didn't know about blog etiquette, right from the start...

"GOING ON ABOUT CHICKENS MAKES U LOOK IN NEED OF THE RAPIST."

WHAT? What, what, what?

Then later, "SORRY, THERAPIST. TEXT ERROR. GOOD CRICKET".

AFTERTHOUGHT - For anyone who hasn't seen the Dead Parrot Sketch, much beloved by my Blog Critic, here it is. I am trying to ensure myself a compliment from him by putting it up . Just to see if I can.

2009-07-11T19:55:00.019+01:00

“People who count their chickens before they are hatched, act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that it is impossible to count them accurately” Oscar Wilde

It's quite bad to spend your Saturday evening writing about what you have just done (why oh why, my Blog Critic would sniff, if he weren't currently pretending not to be reading my blog, would you imagine anyone to be interested, Cocky Girl?) But anyway. If this ever forms some kind of diary for me, and thereby prevents me from forgetting the past couple of hours, then all jolly good. Sometimes, you just have to accept that you are ridiculous.

This is all because at some point today I saw a clip on kiddie TV about hypnotising a chicken and have been rather carried away with the idea. Please see previous blog.

Anyway, I was thinking it would have been one of those strange little twists of life - you know, rather unproductive day because of feeling so bleurgh and hungover, but - hey! - not THAT unproductive after all because I learnt to hypnotise a chicken. That was the broad plan of it, anyhow.

The first thing I did was utterly humiliate myself in front of a friendly neighbour who we happened to run into on the way to the chickens' house.

Friendly neighbour (jovially): Ah, you're on animal duty this weekend, are you?

Me: Yes, yes, just off to collect the eggs and feed the chickens.

4 Year old (conspiratorially): But this time, we're not just going to FEED the chickens, are we Mummy?

Friendly Neighbour (slightly curious): NO? What are you doing then?

Me: Oh, you know, feed them and things.

4 year old: No we're not, Mummy, we're going to do er..er.. that thing to them tonight. You said so. What are we doing to them?

Me: Did I say so? Oh, no, just feed them and perhaps let them out for a wander...

4 year old (wide-eyed and aggrieved) : But you PROMISED we could do that...that thing to the chickens and take photos and that's why we've got the camera and you said you'd never done it before and you didn't know that it would work and we had to be quiet while you looked on the computer for how to do it...

Friendly neighbour: (quizzical silence bordering on something more aghast). Looks at camera.

Me (seeing nothing for it - friendly neighbour could, after all, be imagining all sorts of grotty things by now): Oh! You mean, er, hypnotise! Ah yes, we're just going to hypnotise them as well, I'd forgotten...

Friendly Neighbour (long look): You're going to hypnotise P's chickens?

Me: Well, no all of them, just one probably, and only if they don't mind, you know...

3 year old: Because if we snap their heads off they would run around in circles even though they are dead.

FN: (Silence and utterly stunned look.)

Me: Yes, well, we're not going to snap their heads off. Just feed them, and you know...hypnotise them. A bit.

3 year old: We like chicken noodles, don't we Mummy?

FN: (Eyebrows hitting the clouds) Silence.

Me: Well, we're not going to use them for chicken noodles, we're just going to feed and ...er... hypnotise one, and oooh look at the time, they must be hungry, come on...

FN: Do you know how to hypnotise a chicken?

Me (just squirming in shame by now): Ohhhh YES! Nothing to it! There are, erm, lots of different ways but erm we're going to use chalk tonight. Anyway, must dash...

4 year old: You don't, Mummy, you just saw it on TV today and you made us be really quiet while you watched it and then YOU SAID it was really lucky that we're looking after the chickens this weekend cos we could go and try to do it...

Me (bright red attempt at airy, all-is-normal laugh): NO, no that was Daddy, darling, don't you remember? Mummy's very good at hypnotising chickens...well, anyway, must dash...

FN: Erm....well, good luck. Er, yes, good luck. (Long look and very obvious mental note not to ask me to let his dog out again)

3 year old (high pitched yell for whole street): CHICKENS! WE'RE COMING! MUMMY GOING TO GET YOU AND HIPPO-SIZE YOU.

So, that was the start. And it didn't get much better.

I should probably say straight out that these chickens were not receptive to the idea of being hypnotised and this made it tricky from the off. "Keep your chicken calm and quiet and use soothing and encouraging tones to send her into a state of deep relaxation", the blurb on hypnotising chickens told me. "Encourage her towards you and show her kindness and love in the process".

Hmm.

So I put my soothing and encouraging face on and went to the coop. The chickens swayed gently and gave me beady, sidelong looks.

"Hello, darlings" I tried. This felt so silly. "Hello, ladies" was a little better, and I was sure I was feeling a thaw in the hen hostility when my youngest threw herself at the wire and screeched, "Oi, chickens, we going to HIPPO-SIZE you".

Chickens obviously do not like shouty 3 year old banshees making them jump and descended at once into a chorus of indignant, feathery squawking. And when they calmed down, they had retreated firmly to the far side of their den and lined up in solidarity, glaring.

"Go on, Mummy, hippo-size them now!" the eldest said, all wide eyes and anticipation.

"I think we're going to have to let them out for a little run, first" I said, to his utmost joy. Usually I say NOT to regular request that we "let them out just for a little bit pleeeaaassssee", scared by visions of mad chickenly dashes for freedom on my watch, and the bushes full of lurking, camouflaged foxes, and P and G coming home to No Chickens At All and it being All My Fault etc etc. But today, with my hypnosis plans afoot, I said yes.

I had no idea chickens could run so fast. Within seconds they were up the garden path and out of sight.

"They know you're going to hippo-size them, Mummy, and they are running away for ever" the eldest informed me as we hell-for-leathered after them. "We'll just catch them first" I reassured him.

Thirty minutes later and we were still Just Catching Them. I now know that chickens can run, jump, hide, squash behind obstacles and position themselves right under the centre of the trampoline, where it is impossible to catch them without commando-crawling through wet grass. They also know to wait until you are at your most indisposed under the trampoline before they gallop gleefully off to the safety of Somewhere Else. I also now think that chickens can chuckle, and if they can't, they can produce a near-as-dammit sound at the most opportune moments. 45 bloody minutes it took to catch those chickens. During which time, I slid in fox poo, got grass stains over my shirt, scratched my forehead on the trampoline strings, sat on an egg and called them "buggers" in front of both my children.

"OH, Mummy, just CATCH them, will you?"

It was one of THOSE moments, which I think we all have, rather often. I used to work for a big Japanese newspaper and have a wardrobe and a salary. And NOW? Now I roll around in wet, pooey grass being outsmarted by feathery escapologists, and get reprimanded by very short people. For free.

"When will we do the hippo-sizing Mummy?" J asked when they were all finally back in their coop and looking happy and refreshed for a spot of exercise.

I told him that I felt tonight wasn't the right time after all, and that I was tired, and I thought we should try again tomorrow and he responded that I'd SAID that I was GOOD at hippo-sizing chickens and he'd been looking FORWARD to it and it wasn't FAIR. So I said the chickens were not in a good mood and did he WANT us to get bitten to death (meaning mozzies - there were swarms of them)? I marched both cross children back out of the house, straight back into (oh joy) my Friendly Neighbour and Another Friendly Neighbour who did that thing of being deep in conversation, seeing me coming and suddenly going quiet.

FN: How did it go?

Me: Oh yes, fine fine.

4 Year Old: Actually, that's a lie because Mummy didn't do it, because they escaped and she couldn't catch them. And Mummy said if we stayed the chickens would all come out again and and bite us until we die.

3 Year old: They were buggers, those chickens.

FNs: (Long pause and slight I-told-you-so look from one to the other) Right. Erm, good.

So the long and short of it is, I still don't know whether I can hypnotise a chicken. But it's only Saturday. Lets see. I do however know that I can freak the wits out of my neighbours.

It's all the fault of CITV. I knew I should never have broken the CBBC ONLY rule.

Oops, I've done it again... and hypnotising a chicken

2009-07-11T17:14:00.006+01:00

And now my "Cold Omelette" posting has upset. I seem to be getting terribly good at inadvertently Offending-People-By-Blog.

I think what it comes down to is that the "cold omelette" comment was actually made by more than one person, and they ALL now think I was referring to THEM as a "Grump". I wasn't. The post was a tongue-in-cheek reference to a dear friend, who, happily, got the joke. To anyone else who may have also called A's tortilla a "Cold omelette" (still naughty though), and who now feels to have come under a personal blog-attack, please don't.

I was only trying to be funny, m'Lud.

Anyway, am bored of cold omelette now. Changing the subject, I happened to walk in on a kids' TV programme earlier today, (in my fuzzy-headed state of hangover which comes of having a lovely mix of Hungarian, Swedish and Pakistani friends for dinner last night - by which I mean, they were at my table, not on my plate), and they were showing the viewers how to hypnotise a chicken with a piece of chalk drawn along the ground. This is very interesting indeed. And as luck would have it, I am on chicken-sitting duty this very day, as our neighbours have left their feathery-fowl in my now-hopefully-hypnotic care for a while. So that's what I'm off to do now. I DID text them first to ask permission (seems a bit impolite to hypnotise your neighbours chickens without asking first), and got two texts back - one saying "ha ha ha go for it" and the other saying "Hands Off My Chickens Loon". I shall register the first and ignore the second, since this is conflicting.

And anyway, who will ever know? Chickens are at a disadvantage, I imagine, when it comes to reporting unwanted hypnosis. I suppose they could do it via the medium of mime, but I don't much like their chances of getting their exact meaning across.

Anyway, so I am off NOW to try to hypnotise my first chicken.

Sometimes in life you find yourself saying things you never thought you would.

2009-07-09T12:05:00.000+01:00

Oh, some things just put you in a good mood... Nothing more to say.

Cold Omelette? B*gger oeuf...

2009-06-29T23:02:00.018+01:00

This is very naughty of me but picture the situation. A dear friend has spent the night before her birthday carefully and excellently preparing Spanish tortillas, (half of them plain, half flavoured) for around 200 parent-type people and their happy summer-party offspring. 199 people smile and say "how lovely" and move happily down the queue towards the salad and condiments. One doesn't.

One is unable to be positive. This could be genetic, or it could be linked in with an acutely developed competitive spirit which apparently often seems to materialise within PTAs. (Check The Times this weekend, page something or other) Anyway, if this was indeed the case, then an evening so well-organised by Other People was, no doubt, wince-making to some degree. However, the Spanish tortillas and the accompanying grown-by-the-children salad (now just feel the Sunday Times perfection in that!) were really very good.

I'd like to pretend I had had a hand in making them, but in reality I drank wine and lolled against the kitchen sink and chatted, whisk motionless in hand. No credit here, all credit to A.

What I can do now, perhaps to make up slightly for my uselessness that night, is at least stand up for her culinary creations. They were delicious. Utterly delicious.

What they weren't was a "Cold Omelette".

There are many things I allow to slip by me, blaming a lack of time for what really is apathy. But this one? No. A Spanish Tortilla is not a Cold Omelette. And this Grump had no right to insult my friend by saying it is.

There are similarities. If you scout round the net for a while you will find several reference suggesting the origins of both the omelette and the Spanish Tortilla can be found in ancient Persia. So far, so good. (Some also say China, but for the purpose of simplicity, lets go with Persia, since China can claim pasta and annoy Italy and that's enough to be going on with, surely?)

But the etymology differs straight away. Omelette apparently goes back to the Latin lamella, meaning "flat plate", whereas tortilla derives from torta, meaning "flat cake". See? Different.

And then, an omelette should be cooked in a fine layer, and gently folded over its filling, if indeed a filling is required (for many purists say it isn't). A tortilla has its filling mixed in and is much thicker in texture, being cooked from both sides. And yes, this can also be called a fritatta and I don't know what the difference is, so have decided that this is beside the point.

But there's one more thing. Tortilla sounds good. Tortilla made with feta cheese and freshly picked courgettes and herbs sounds even better. Culinary, enticing and even vaguely romantic, reminiscent of sultry Spain to a Rodriguez soundtrack. Cold Omelette sounds like something you find hoiched up in an Aeroflot toilet after a bad spot of turbulence.

So, although it can take a lot to stir me to protest, especially at so late a time in the evening, this time I DO. They were lovely, fabulous tortillas and it was a darn beastly thing to say in earshot of the person who'd worked so hard to make them.

Madam, what were you thinking?

May your omelettes always be cold.

Just quickly...

2009-06-29T22:02:00.010+01:00

"I think Iranian women have become canaries of the mind. If you want to gauge a society and how free it is, you go to its women." Azar Nafisi

You can't escape Iran at the moment and I have always been more than mildly fascinated since a student gave me a book called Imam Khomeini, which I didn't really understand. It wasn't the writing that baffled me so much, but Mehdi's devotion to a figure which to me had always seemed, at best, incomprehensible and, if I am to be more honest, quite scary. It was a book that unearthed far more questions than it answered and I never had the chance to ask my student, who had left it with a beautifully kind note on my desk and skipped back to Shiraz without giving me the chance to ask and ask, (not fair, Mehdi, not fair!)

From the unfinished business of that rather difficult read, I went on to the brilliant Ryszard Kapuscinksi and his Shah of Shahs, and finally to Azar Nafisi where I found myself utterly locked into Reading Lolita in Tehran.

So I had more than a passing interest in this interview I happened upon on Al Jazeera (if you can ever "happen upon" Al Jazeera?) which I think has more clarity than much that has been in the British Press on the subject of late.

Now R is kicking the meningitis, I am finding thought-space to return to my housewifely musing and two of her comments have diverted me especially. The first is quoted above, on how women are the true gauge of the freedom of society. And the second is her suggestion that the Iranian ruling elite is suddenly realising it doesn't have the handle on their people the way it once did, and how the once-repressive-but-now-reformist Mousavi has adjusted to go with it.

How much time does it take to go from "harsh" to "kind", in a political sense? Doesn't it usually happen the other way round? Does that change depend on circumstance, interpretation, hindsight or merely an ability not to be too precious about what you want to be seen as your beliefs?

Anyway, the interview. A great one-coffee read with time left over for pondering. Brief pondering, that's true, but it has been so very hot today.
http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2009/06/2009613181040285185.html

Helpless Hausfrau Interrupted

2009-06-17T11:10:00.009+01:00

Sanity has been a long way off recently; blog-time becomes scarce when ones husband contrives to get a nasty case of meningitis and thereby scares the wits out of us all. As ever, there is always some humour to be found lurking around the blackest of situations, and this time it came in the form of a lovely nurse, originally I think from the Philippines, who, at the height of his headachy, post-lumber-puncture pain, patted his leg kindly and left with the words "Now You Just Rest In Peace".

Giggling over, (that sort of mad near-hysteria you get when you really don't know what the next few hours hold for you) I ended up for a while sitting somewhat disconsolately around in the hospital cafe listing all the things I Don't Do Myself If R Is Around To Do It For Me. Put up a shelf, for instance - I don't know how to use the drill. Put up wallpaper. Check the tyre pressure on my cars - I lie to R and say I can do this, but always, always get someone to do it for me. Or don't do it at all. And so on. I really am pretty much a caricature of my own stereotype. I am a helpless hausfrau. How the hell did that happen?

As it is, it looks like R will be rejoining health proper in couple of months, and therefore will no doubt be able to carry on with such tiresome tasks.

But there is really no excuse for me. I am more rubbish than I previously realised. What is the point in keeping up the pretence of Modern Female if one is actually as man-dependent as any pretty-little-thing of a Georgian parlour?

So, I pledge, to myself, that I will:

Learn to check the tyre pressure on my car. And the oil. Etc
Put up wallpaper
Drill holes

It's not entirely my fault. If we take the drill thing, there have been occasions where I have stubbed my toe again on the huge great mirror that has been sitting on our bedroom floor for over a year (yes, it has, R, a YEAR) waiting for He Who Drills to put it up, and, in fury, have phoned and demanded "How do I use that drill then?" The answer is always the same; suddenly alert, slightly panicked "Leave it to me, I'll do it as SOON as I get back. I will. I will." And then "There's something a bit wrong with it at the moment. I need to look at the, er, transform-rotatory-2-bit-bar...it, er, it was looking a bit, er...electrocuting. Could be really dangerous. Best let me look first. There was something in the paper the other day about an entire household being wiped out by this faulty drill, which is just the same one as mine...Don't touch it, please don't. For your OWN good, you know" and so on.

I can see his point; he knows I'll get cross and have to prove myself with a drill I know nothing about and our lovely walls will be sitting ducks.

But it does make me think. There are lots of things I need to learn to do for myself now, and not because I've been shocked into thinking I might have to, but because a show of helplessness concealing, badly, the resident laziness beneath is not something I would generally want to see in myself.

If you pay someone to do these jobs though, that's different surely.

Thank goodness - a way out...(but how shameful).

A légpárnás hajóm tele van angolnákka

2009-06-10T10:41:00.019+01:00

I like Hungary, and for no particularly clever reason. I was reminded of this last week when one of my students told me about a undergraduate loans system there, which, in brief, appears to be run along the lines of allowing students to borrow, and then giving them rebates dependent on how good their grades are. The better you do, the less you pay. Brilliant, I think. Of course, here, someone would bleat "But that's elitist..." and the very idea would be shelved with glares and tuts of Unfairness. But I think it would work very well and surely it's no different from the idea of, er, putting in more effort for a better salary? However, I mustn't get started on plentiful examples of English dumbness at the moment - this morning, as I mop my rotten floor, I am thinking about Hungary.

I think I have always been intrigued by Hungary and its Hungarians since I read Sir Nicolas' warning to his wife regarding her idea for dramatic party capers in super, super Saki's A Touch Of Realism:

'Sir Nicholas was not so enthusiastic. "Are you quite sure, my dear, that you're wise in doing this thing?" he said to his wife when they were alone together. "It might do very well at the Mathesons, where they had rather a staid, elderly house-party, but here it will be a different matter. .. there is Cyril Skatterly; he has madness on one side of his family and a Hungarian grandmother on the other...you don't know what Skatterly's Hungarian imagination mightn't read into the part; it would be small satisfaction to say to him afterwards: 'You've behaved as no Bull of Bashan would have behaved."

"Oh, you're an alarmist," said Lady Blonze; I particularly want to have this idea carried out. It will be sure to be talked about a lot."

"That is quite possible," said Sir Nicholas.'

I never supposed Saki meant it as an insult, but rather an implication that to be a mixture of Madness and Magyar was to be Very Sharp Indeed. Add to this the a rather venerable English adage, which tells of how Hungarians are the only people who go into a revolving door behind you, and come out of it in front and the fact that this is often quoted in low-voiced tones of grudging respect, and you can't help a small sense of awe. Throw in the indisputable truth that Hungarian salami is the best in the world, and the fact that they can claim the sheer brilliance of Franz Liszt, and there you have it.

I have a new geographical crush. Hungary is smashing.

Sajnos nem beszélek magyarul

I also like the fact that Hungary sits surrounded by Indo-European language-speaking neighbours and yet manages to keep for itself itself a beautifully original tongue which (they tell me, my Hungarian friends, with some satisfaction) is far too hard for any non-Hungarian to learn.

It certainly does seem to be a dastardly language. It belongs to the Ugric group (though some say Turkic and I am not schooled enough to argue) and the reason why we generally say "oooh, it's just like Finnish" is because if you go back up the tree, you find Finnish under the Baltic-Finnic language grouping, and both Ugric and Baltic-Finnic come under the further heading of the Uralic languages... Fascinating but one could go on for hours, which I don't have.

Apparently though, and I hope kind-hearted Magyars will forgive me if I'm wrong, (since I am - not very academically - only repeating what I think I have understood), Hungarian departs in several ways from what us simple English speakers would consider the linguistic norm. For example, you cannot express grammatical gender through articles or determiners. There are no male or female possessive adjectives. You do not have a verb to have. There are no prepositions as we know them and only one past tense. One word can grow according to grammatical placing, as preposition, possibility, negativity and so on are all attached to the requisite word. And so on and so on. Surely this is convolutedly confusing?

It certainly all suggests if a Hungarian can deal with all of this on a daily communicative basis, then beating us out of revolving doors must be a doddle.

Pah! Pah! Pah!

It's quite rubbish of me, but I've only been there once, in 1991, when going into Eastern Europe still felt quite le Carre-ish and daring. It was fabulous and Christmas and people kept giving us painted eggs. A tall man dressed up as a rabbit tried to sell us tickets to some kind of strip bar and we were introduced to Unicum. But what stays with me most clearly is the elderly lady we were lodging with me. She was keen to chat, but with no language in common it was all done through the medium of intense, wild-eyed charade. The first thing she told us was Never, Ever to touch a Hungarian on the back because we might accidentally communicate a plan to murder him. At least, I think this is what she said and I have never tested it.

But then our landlady also treated us to a very vivid performance of the 1956 uprising and her interpretation of Hungary's national mood at the end of it. She placed two cushions on different chairs: one was, we came to understand, through gesture and quickly sketched flags, an WWII occupying Nazi soldier. The other was an invading Soviet. The Nazi soldier she scowled at and shouted at and and shook her fist at, but eventually, this cushion was offered a cup of tea. The Soviet cushion however, fared nowhere near as well. Our landlady eyed us gravely, approached the cushion and launched into a screaming "Pah! Pah! Pah!" attack with a book, her feet and the butter knife. Her intention was perfectly clear and soon the cushion, defenceless in a way that the Soviets in Hungary had never been, lay in pummelled defeat, flat on the floor. The Iron Curtain was down by this point, and I doubt any loitering Russian would have felt unduly threatened, but the depth of passion of a seemingly quiet Little-Old-Lady was striking.

There is no doubt a lot more that can be said about Hungary and I wish someone would tell me. I imagine it full of thrilling, enthralling stories, set against the beautiful backdrop of the Carpathian Basin to a soundtrack of Liszt and clever people sailing to effortless success and victory through revolving doors. I'm sure it has its fair share of things nasty and corrupt, things that don't work and things that appall, like everywhere. But today I don't want to know about them.

Today is my I Love Hungary day.

Happy 40th Birthday, KG! I thought you'd enjoy this:

Afterthought
My dog is, unwittingly, Hungarian. I doubted she even appreciated all the dashing talent that must be coursing through her veins. There certainly doesn't seem to be much of the dastardly about her. She can't push doors open and this morning was totally outsmarted by a baby rabbit.

However, lets think a little. She lives entirely at our expense. She has commandeered an expensive beanbag for her personal use in direct contravention of our stated wishes. She sits on R's chest every night, even though we proclaim ourselves to be Against Dogs On Furniture. Just one wistful, peckish look gets us running to fill up her bowl.

It's not a bad life for a viszla. All in all, she is probably much more dastardly than we actually have imagined.

I think I can hear her chuckling. In Hungarian.

Giving up on serious thinking for an evening...

2009-06-03T21:56:00.002+01:00

For some reason this always, always makes me laugh...

I Am Not Popular

2009-06-03T13:08:00.009+01:00

Whoops, it seems that I have offended. Apparently, somewhere I have written that I am doing a blog because I needed to do something BECAUSE (here it comes) I had got to the point where I was beginning to think I needed to have manicures. I don't know where I wrote it, but I think it all the time, so no doubt it's gone down somewhere.

This comment has ruffled someone's feathers. SO, please let me explain.

I am not against having manicures per se. Indeed, had I time and money and a lifestyle which didn't involve a daily hand-plunge into compost and manure, I might well enjoy the occasional trip to the manicurist. Nor do I think that people who DO "look after their nails properly" (yep, I'm quoting) are in anyway lesser mortals than "lazy, scruffy people" (like me, I presume?). I do not think having a manicure shows any nonexistence of intellect. Manicurists themselves are often talented, creative souls and I could never match their attention to detail.

My point was that MY mind was rotting to the extent that I was beginning to think I SHOULD have them. I was losing touch with what I would normally value with a half hour to spare and £20 to spend in it. I was metamorphosising into some kind of Surrey housewife-via-Stepford. THAT'S what I was worried about, and I was only talking about myself.

To contest your assertion just gently, I don't think there is any problem with taking pride in your appearance. People have done it since time's dawn, and, stopping short of the point where it turns into an internal or external obsession, I can't see what harm is done. And you are no doubt right, I should do it more myself. But I DO think it's terribly queer to spend inequal amounts of time and energy on how you look and what you are. Especially when one dries up far sooner than the other. And of COURSE it applies to me too. I may have days where I think what a frightful state I look, but I am also troubled by how much I don't know about everything, and I'm sure my comment came out on such a day.

However, I do feel strongly on this: since we have this society that, for the most part, allows (even encourages) us to learn what we want, read what we wish and discuss whatever we like, then SURELY we should make the most of it? I don't want to hark back to North Korea or Burma or Zimbabwe, but since one of the first tricks of the despotic controller is to take away people's opportunity to Read and Discuss, surely we should be welcoming our intellectual freedom with Very Open Arms? And doing lots of it?

I think what I meant to say was that I felt I had caught myself mid-slither down into the murky points of non-thinking domestication and I wanted to do something about it. That was all.

It wasn't intended as a veiled insult. At all.

Too Highbrow!

2009-06-01T23:10:00.009+01:00

"Too Highbrow!" my self-appointed blog critic now tells me of this blog, belying the fact that he does read it, even though he says he doesn't. "If we want facts and things, we can read the press. You've GOT to be more interesting than that. Be funnier please".

Funnier? How do you do "funnier"? I would love to be a Funny Person but it never seems to work. My friend C is properly funny and people say things like "ohhhh gooodie" and rub their hands in expectation of jolliness when they hear he is coming to dinner. But for me, well, the only time, for example, that R finds me truly funny is when I have absolutely not intended to be so.

I stand accidentally on the end of a garden rake and smack myself in the face. That, he tells me, is definitely funny. Mentioning that it made my nose actually bleed and left a rake handle shaped mark on my forehead apparently scores me even more Funny points. Being caught short at our allotment and having to go amongst the blackcurrants in full view of any passing strollers was "only moderately funny" but when I fell backwards onto an indignant patch of nettles which fought back with all their stinging enthusiasm, I had, R assured me, through his snorts and my wails, dramatically increased the level of funniness.

It's not just my husband. Once, years back, I stood at the end of a Routemaster bus in High Holborn with my boss and took a great jump to the pavement, to clear a puddle. I had been wearing a long woollen dress with lots of buttons up the front (it was a while ago, fashionistas) My boss had, unbeknown to me, inadvertently put his sodding great foot on the bottom of it, so as I leapt off, my dress and my boss stayed together on the bus. I therefore found myself in High Holborn at noon in my pants. The cold-looking Evening Standard sellers, cross van and taxi drivers, and the unsmiling bus conductor all rediscovered their humour most efficiently and simultaneously, and triumphed this with whoops and hollers and enthusiastic blasting of horns. The no-longer dour conductor even sprinted merrily down the bus to bash the window of the driver in order to share the joy. My boss, however, was stupefied. As the bus moved off the road taking him and my dress with it, he implored, in a loud voice which I think suggested to gawping onlookers that flashing was rather a habit, "No, no K-san, PLEASE to not take off dress in street."

You see, I look back on this now and can see, somewhat ruefully, some sense of slapstick here, but the point is, I wasn't trying to get a laugh. Were that the case, I would certainly find other ways which didn't involve charging around London in my underwear and jumping off buses.

If I try to get a laugh, I generally get a polite one, which tells me the listener has, some time ago, actually switched off. Or, they look at me in silence for a second, realise I have made a joke, and in an attempt to cover up any lack of comprehension, throw themselves into a ham demonstration of mock hilarity which quite clearly can stop as quickly as canned laughter, as soon as my back is turned.

I'm not asking for sympathy, I just would like to be funnier. But what is to be done? How does one become a Funny Person? Do I lurk around town in front of a placed banana skin and hope for friends to pass? Do I pull the chair away from under my own backside at the dinner table? Or do I continue to throw myself into physically painful or personally mortifying situations, all for the sake of other's mirth?

Ok, Blog Critic, I really will try. Funny Things to Think of While Houseworking. I'm onto it.

Are we all a bit quiet on the Eastern Front?

2009-06-01T21:34:00.012+01:00

I know I am laying myself open to mockery now by referring to another (pseudo? please?) dictatorship, but I DO think, in the run up to June 4th, that everyone's been rather quiet on Tiananmen. I don't mean the media, actually, since there have been all sorts of articles saying what's been said before (what more is there to say, really?) but people round here, in general. It has not been mentioned in the Mother's Queue (ahem!). I don't think I've even really discussed it with R. Which is a bit odd, because I do sometimes think that the silence of the people on the ground, so to speak, is probably more alarming than any enforced silence of the press.

I haven't put this particularly articulately. But I've been chatting to former student who was there on June 4th 1989 and now chooses not to live in China. We were talking about the Tiananmen Mothers' Organization, set up by two mothers bereaved of their sons during the flare-ups at the end of the protest. The strength of the now elderly ladies to keep going is astounding. Living under virtual house arrest, one of the founders of the organisation, now in her seventies, was kicked out of Beijing for the entire Olympics and still has State Security Bureau officers sitting on her doorstep whenever there is a ceremony or memorial they prefer her not to attend. You'd think the image of a frail old lady in mourning for her murdered son being bullied by the Big Bad Boys in Green would be a PR disaster. But, in China, evidently not.

JXM tells me that Ding Zi-Lin, the founder of The Tinanmen Mothers' Organisation, once said she had been energised by her pain at losing her son and that gave her the will to continue fighting. "There are plenty of people who feel strongly about this, " he always says, "but not everyone has an easy platform to say it". We talked of one class we had together, along with 5 or 6 younger Chinese students, when the matter had come up. The younger ones were wide-eyed with surprise to hear what had happened. I was wide-eyed to hear they didn't already know. JXM rolled his eyes and went off for coffee, not seeming to mind too much. He has, he reckons, learnt when it is not worth being bothered.

Back to the Tiananmen Mothers' Organisation. I wanted to see if there was any direct translation of their mandate and came across 2 interesting things in the process. Firstly, a petition on Amnesty's website. I don't usually do these (you could end up a full time devotee to Petitioning of Many Causes) but this one specifically urges that the rights of the Tiananmen Mothers be respected and thus grabbed me, somewhat.

http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/info/ASA17/023/2008/en

"Using this petition, signatories can express their concern over the ongoing failure of the Chinese authorities to address the serious and widespread human rights violations committed in the military crackdown on the 1989 pro-democracy movement. Signatories urge the Chinese administration to stop all harassment of the Tiananmen Mothers and other such activists and end all policies of censorship to allow full public debate about the events on 3-4 June 1989."

And secondly, a rather magnificient letter written by a Professor at the Beijing Film Academy.
She may well be talking about one specific event and its consequences in one context, but what she says has a poignancy on many levels. The afterglow of the post-reading ponder took me through unpacking the dishwasher, cleaning the floor and making supper. Brilliant.

http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2009/05/cui-weiping-why-do-we-need-to-talk-about-june-4th/

Afterthought:

1. This has reminded me that I've been meaning to learn more about Las Madres De Plaza De Mayo in Argentina. And still haven't. Must try harder etc.

Decayed Gentlewomen

2009-05-29T14:39:00.003+01:00

Being half term, there has been little Time Uninterrupted to sit at the computer and even less time for Proper Thinking. But I did wander into our local museum yesterday, having palmed the children off on an unsuspecting husband given to believing my excuses of "work" (though not for much longer now, I should imagine). Our museum is a lovely quiet little place full of mind-inspiring gems, but manages to look quite dull on the first impression. Hence, it's usually empty.

Yesterday, there was a room dedicated to Women of Runnymede. Such exhibitions always attract me. I like to read of women past who have achieved far more than I have, as I find it (fleetingly) inspirational. But one lady, Anna Maria Hall, a novelist and writer and a Victorian of ever extending charitable might, it seems, especially struck me. In the midst of 19th century Surrey, she put her heart and soul into setting up a home for "Decayed Gentlewomen" in Engelfield Green.

Decayed Gentlewomen. What and who were they then? I have no real idea what it entailed to be a Decayed Gentlewoman, although I imagine I might have made a good one, the way I feel much of the time.

I am fairly sure Forster makes a reference to this section of female society in Room With A View, (a book vastly improved by a mental image of a young Rupert Graves). But who were they? Were they widows fallen from grace and power, thanks to inheritance law or newer-younger wife-replacements? Or were they morally decayed and thus shunned? And if so, by whose standards?

A quick six second surf round the net shows that decayed women of the 19th centuries were not just factors of British society, but were also bustling around America, with endless organisations over there being set up to assist. I'm sure the reality was every bit as bitter and desperate as it sounds; to have no form of financial support and be thrown upon the mercies of charitable trusts, especially if you had previously known a Respectable Life must have felt like the height of degradation. I found one reference to an "old story", which spoke of a decayed gentlewoman forced to cry "muffins" for mere survival, but always, always hoping she wouldn't be heard. Even if this is purely allegorical, I still think it is heartbreaking, and utterly.

But in the light of today's terminology, a Home For Decayed Gentlewomen sounds as though it might have been rather interesting. When I am poor and spent, and my husband has found a newer, less cynical model, I shall wrap myself up in black taffeta and set up my own hangout precisely for the purpose of becoming Decayed in all sorts of ways. And I will invite any of my like-minded friends to join me. After all, as non-Victorians, us women have the comparable luxury of knowing that should our husbands ever decide to discard us onto the streets, they will then have to pay for us when we are there.

It is unlikely to happen, of course. But as a passing nod to these poor women who had no benefit of the legal safeguards that we now (yes, quite rightly) enjoy, I think it's all worth digesting, just for a second.

My Faithful Friend, Who Thinks I'm Crap

2009-05-20T10:43:00.008+01:00

Apparently I have got this web lark all wrong. I have a friend who prides himself on Speaking His Mind, and though I occasionally wonder whether this famed candour is not sometimes just a way of making himself feel better at someone else's expense (I shall pay for this later) it can be useful.

When I tell him I am going to start a blog, he heaves a great mock-sorrow sigh. "Not YOU as well," he groans, eyes rolling "there are too many people spouting self-centred drivel and expecting other people to be interested." I tell him I realised it was indulgent but I needed something to stop myself careering into mental vacuity. I tell him it is for ME, not them.

"Read a book" he suggests.

I do read books; these days, I can sometimes reach the end of a page before I fall asleep. I then have to re-read it the next night, and so it continues, nights and nights on the same chapter, with me wondering why I fail to be gripped before I give it all up and go for some inane women's magazine instead and read a pointless article on decluttering, which I finish.

"And anyway," he continues "everyone knows what your blog will be about. It'll be all dictators and recipes." Pause. "And Dutch idioms. And you'll do that wide-eyed thing about it all being massively fascinating, and it won't be. You'll expect people to know random stuff about nothing important and you'll pay no heed to the fact that they might not. SO, no one will read it. And then in a few weeks, it will just be something you do which you think no one appreciates , and that will remind you of all the other unappreciated bits of your life that make you fed up, you'll get p'd off and you'll wish you'd never done it. I'm only saying this, "he adds, in his soft, shoulder-patting tone he uses when he is about to tell you, for your own good, that you dress funny, or that all your best friends have regular meet-ups without you (ok, none of these were to me, but they have been said) "to be helpful. And" - the familiar trump card - "you know no one else will be honest with you".

So, I tell him to have a look, which he says he will do. He rings back almost immediately. His unrestrained sense of glee is unmissable.

"See? You are SO predictable" he chuckles, glowingly proud of his insights into what I find interesting. "It IS all dictators and recipes. And you've got a link to a Dutch blog, which is practically what I said about you blathering on about the glorious Dutch. You're perverse. Think about normal things like everyone else, and they might read it. "

I am offended. And I am now worried. Am I perverse? I do find totalitarian regimes interesting. I do love Dutch. Does this make me odd? Am I now not just a boring Surrey housewife but also one of strangely singular interests? Is this why some mothers don't talk to me in the nursery queue?

I have the presence of mind to stop myself. I will not be led into self-flagellation by a Bad Friend who can't tell the difference being blunt and being beastly.

I ask him what he thought. He pauses.

"Welllllll, " he says "I didn't read any of the girly shit, about you moaning on about being a housewife and how you're so bored, because I've heard it, bla bla bla bla. And that WINOS thing sounds utterly frightful. Unless" he checks himself, thoughtfully "any of your friends are fit. But I was right. You expect people to know random crap, and if they don't, you lose them. For instance, I don't know what the Dergue was. I didn't know who Mengistu was, until you made me google him, which actually I didn't have time to do. And I still don't know what Sky Burial is."

We finish our conversation pretty much here, after he has scored an invitation to supper, "when your Elderflower Champagne is ready."

I have chewed over his response and I, for once, remain unmoved.

However, I feel I do owe him for his ingenuousness. So here it is. This is for you.

ONE
The DERGUE was a communist junta headed by Mengistu which grabbed power in Ethiopia after the ousting of President Haille Selassie in 1974. It is now blamed for directly causing Civil War. It copied the Mao's lamented land reforms by nationalising all tenanted land and put peasants in charge of running the show, resulting in widesperead mismanagement and corruption, and leading to the horrendous famines of the 1980s, which you no doubt remember Bob Geldorf singing about.
Like most power-crazed juntas, the Dergue relied on vicious repression of citizens, and kept them in line with widespread assassination, mass murder, enforced resettlement, torture and plenty of locking people away without trial.
Mengistu, along with about 70 others, has been convicted in absentia for genocide and is safely ensconced in Zimbabwe. He has occasinonally nipped over to South Africa for medical treatments, but the Saffers, bizarrely, have never seen fit to extradite him. He has also apparently abandoned his communist beliefs, which, considering his life on a private estate surrounded by starving millions, couldn't be more convenient.

TWO
Sky Burial is a funerary practice which used to be common in Tibet and surrounding areas, where a body is cut in specific places and left exposed to the elements on the top of a hillside, so it may decompose naturally or be taken by the birds.

See? Now you have something to think about while you do your housework this morning. And when I tell you I'm writing about you, YOU will no doubt read my blog. Ha! Victory!

Sky Burial

2009-05-18T11:55:00.006+01:00

A Chinese friend emailed me this morning to say how he and his wife liked to think of a group of English people sitting around making momos. And if I were about to develop a renewed interest in Tibet, did I know you can now "watch traditional sky burials on youtube"?

Because X-M is quite capable of living life with his tongue placed firmly in his cheek, I don't for a minute imagine he expects me to watch any burials, Tibetan or otherwise. But I couldn't resist seeing if it were true. And it really is. I didn't go further than that - without meaning to sound pompous and disapproving, it feels like mawkish rubbernecking of the worst kind, and even if the footage is of events well past, I'm sure it would still feel like an intrusion into someone else's grief.

There does however seem to be quite a fascination over here with the idea of this burial practice. A Tibetan student once pointed out how it made perfect sense, as much of Tibet is high enough above the trees to make Western style cremation impractical, and the ground too rocky for easy interment. And in any case, is the practice any more grisly than sending someone into flames? I actually don't think I find it that horrific. I know the Chinese government decided to ban it for while from some kind of moral stand point, but am fairly sure the ban has since been lifted.

My student also went on emphasise that there are a million other things to talk about, Tibet-wise, and so why did it all just come back to sky burial and throat singing? He has a point, and I'm guilty as charged. Look at me doing it right now.

Some time back, I was delightfully lost for a couple of nights in Xin Ran's Sky Burial. Emerging from a dazed reverie at the end of it, I promised myself that I must learn a lot more about Tibet. I still know very little and there's no excuse.

Tibetan momos

2009-05-17T22:20:00.009+01:00

I can't go to bed musing about Bad Men Who Get Away With Beastly Things, so I'm going to think instead about the super day we had yesterday making Tibetan momos. D and T arrived with baskets of vegetables and pastry and set to grating and chopping and finally crafting these little dumplings, which makes them the most excellent type of visitor indeed.

D, being Tibetan, is evidently imbued with natural momo-making super-skill, and while the others seem to get the hang of it, mine ended up like pastry road-kill and then split, wilfully spewing their contents over the steamer. It was all darn tricky, which might be why the recipe linked to above suggests that you "pleat if capable"... (it also recommends yak, which I think might be a step too far, even for our butcher) Well, I evidently wasn't capable, but I will try them again. For one thing, what a dastardly way of sneaking mushrooms into the unsuspecting children.

Perhaps the best thing about it was the hour of the five of us sitting around preparing them. I think some of the most interesting conversations happen either over a cooking pot or a bucket of manure. In preparation, they are very similar to Japanese gyoza, only in a slightly different shape, which I think I like even better.

It also reminded me to complete something I started a while ago, namely going through all the children's books with maps, in search of any accidental or pro-China omission, and filling in the outline of Tibet. For someone whose life these days is so suburbanly housewifely, such a task feels almost like activism.

Not so very daring though, is it? Not really. Well, this is Surrey after all.

Anyway, it's taken my mind off the old men dictators a bit.

But It's Not Fair

2009-05-17T21:24:00.005+01:00

Why is Mengistu living on a private ranch in Zimbabwe? Of course, I know why - Mugabe lets him and nobody can get him out, despite the Officially Conviction of Genocide. But isn't it bizarre how - just sometimes - somebody can do something so atrocious and get to live on a private ranch at the end of it?

I had a Ethiopian student once who told me he and his family had "suffered a lot" at the hands of Mengistu's Dergue, though didn't go further than that. By coincidence, in the same group there was a Ugandan who hadn't been much liked by Amin and a Turkmeni, formerly from Ashgabat, who had got himself roughed up for accidentally misquoting from the RUHMANA in a business meeting. It had been a grammatical mistake rather than one which changed any sense of meaning, but even so, it got him into a bit of a jam, he said.

None of them elaborated further on what had happened, and I never found it quite right to ask, but after that conversation there was a tangible sense of understanding between the three. And all of them, when I knew them, held calm and convinced religious beliefs. When you consider Amin's death in a Saudi hospital, Niyazov's heart attack while still happily in power and Mengistu now strumming away on his ranch, I supposed faith in some ultimate come-uppance must be your only refuge against self-destroying bitterness.

J and J were outraged with me earlier when I said no to them getting out of bed and randomly eating ice cream, even though the prince in tonight's bedtime story had done it, and treated me to a properly enraged and indignant bellow of "BUT IT'S NOT FAIR". To which I responded, tired and snappish and conscious of my evening time being hijacked, with the stock-pile answer that "Life Is Not Fair".

With them finally off into their aggrieved sleep, it occured to me while cleaning up the muck of a million wellingtons that I don't think that they, or I, ever spoke a truer word.

There's nothing new in that. But what I want to know is - how old do they have to be before you start trying to get that across?

Shocking Abberation of Housewifely Solidarity

2009-05-14T23:33:00.010+01:00

"A true friend stabs you in the front."
- Oscar Wilde

I have a very disloyal friend. Not long ago, on a rare child-free outing, I popped in to visit on the spur of the moment and without the slightest hint of forewarning. This is an important detail, because it means she had No Idea At All that I was coming.

As I arrived at her door, I could see her SITTING COMFORTABLY ON THE SOFA READING THE TIMES with an air of the utterly relaxed.

And it gets worse. She greeted me in the most delightful breeze of happy calm, and as I stepped into her kitchen, I immediately noticed three things.

Firstly, the house was utterly spotless and in gaspingly beautiful order. Secondly, it smelt of fresh bread. And thirdly, the children were Playing Quietly together upstairs.

No, no, nooooooooo! Bad, bad friend.

Since my entry into the world of mothers, I have seen various perplexing manifestations of people's ideas of "friendship", but I really do feel this breaks EVERY rule of female (and in particular housewifely) solidarity.

In future, lovely girl (and you know who you are) I expect mess. And not just any old mess, but fetid, reeking goblin mess, suggesting days of blatant sluttish neglect. I want you stressed and impatient, struggling in an important phone call with a finger jabbed in your free ear. I want the dog gnashing to go out and the children shrieking for biscuits, and all of them wiling away the wait by fighting voiciferously right at your feet, while you wildly gesticulate death threats, which they ignore. And finally, I do NOT want to smell fresh baking.

I wouldn't mind if I thought you'd faked it. But I can't believe that YOU, of all people, had craftily set the scene of carefully engineered perfection in the hope out-housewifing any unannounced callers. I just can't see YOU lying prettily arranged on the couch all morning, like frightful Lucetta waiting for Farfrae (am I right here? The Mayor Of Casterbridge was a long time ago) just to trump me in the housewife stakes. No, I think you were simply in a wonderful state of order and were genuinely enjoying a peaceful sit down in a gloriously clean, bread-smelling house.

It was a shoddy thing to do. Please be more careful as we are meant to be friends.

Mad Japan (apologies to I, Y and T)

2009-05-13T11:42:00.004+01:00

I do love Japan, and nearly everything about it, and the fact that J and J have Japanese godparents is surely good testament to some wonderful Anglo-Japanese friendships we have collected over the years. I and Y in Tokyo are going to roll their eyes now though. Y once remarked, in response to one of R’s many gleeful emails sending links to yet more examples of Nippon nuttiness always to be found on the web, that we must spend our days LOOKING for weird stuff to send to THEM, stuff which no one over there would ever come across, or even recognise as “Japanese”. Sorry, Y-chan, but it IS fun. And I know you are going to sigh at me posting this link, but COME ON! How WEIRD is this?! I agree pretty much whole-heartedly with the argument for practical language training taking an emotional rather than academic approach, but this?

Mad Japanese language training video

It must be tongue-in-cheek, surely?

PS
Y and I, you are welcome to hit back and publish any examples of British lunacy. Our hapless PM might be a good place to start.

Starting off with North Korea

2009-05-12T23:14:00.001+01:00

It's odd. Having waxed on about how having a blog was going to be my metaphorical window into the big, fascinating world AWAY from my housewifish life, the only thing I've written about so far IS about precisely that. And at rambling length too.

No more!

Would it be too strange, in this search for interesting things, to start with North Korea? (I've just asked R, who has responded, overly-patiently, "It's your blog, do what the hell you want.").

So, North Korea it is. I have been both intrigued and horrified by the little I know of this bizarre totalitarian state for some time. One can only imagine what it must be like to live under such massive daily constriction and golly, there are so many things I would dearly love to know. You hear so much about starvation, natural disasters, disasters through industrial accident and desperate economic mismanagement, that it's nigh on impossible to form any kind of picture at all.

During our years in Japan, there was constantly simmering hype about the place (unsurprisingly when one considers the North Koreans are not adverse to lobbing a few missiles over Japan for practice): for instance, we were often urged to be alert near the Weatern coast line because "North Korean's whizz across the Sea of Japan in magic submarines and snatch you back to spy". It is indeed no truer joke than it need be, as cases of kidnapped Japanese being forced into NK espionage are well-doucmented. However, I was never quite sure about the magic submarines.

Anyway, these photos by Eric Lafforque are indescribably fascinating. I now want to meet Mr Lafforque and bombard HIM with my uninformed questions, and even more, I want to go myself. When you follow the scant yet horrific reports which come out of North Korea, and try to create your own images, you cannot fail to be struck by the vibrancy or the beauty of these photos.

If anyone can tell me anything more about this country, I would be massively eager to listen. I would also like a North Korean friend but I imagine that might be harder to organise.

AFTERTHOUGHT
I was living in Japan when Kim Il Sung died in '94 and was utterly confounded by the endless footage of small children, young soldiers and middle aged workes alike, all howling hysterically and banging their heads in what seemed inconceivable outpouring of public grief. Let alone the newscasters sobbing through their broadcasts announcements.

Ok, it's not actually a giggle to watch but I DO think it's worth seeing, if only to digest, for a sobering second, how different other people' s lives can be. Fascinating and frightening at the same time.

The Making of WINOS

2009-05-12T22:57:00.003+01:00

WINOS – HERE WE GO...

THE BACKGROUND

A couple of months back, I got this "Motivational Traing for Women" speaker to come and talk to us. A friend had taken one of her courses and raved eyes-a-shiningly about it. Secretly, of course, I hoped it would also be My Key to a new inspired life, leading to actual fulfilment of all those good intentions paving my road to hell... I emailed around; if anyone else had been feeling a tad lethargic recently, then come along, half-expecting either to amuse or inadvertently insult. Surprisingly, hoards emailed back, straight away, saying that’s exactly how they felt and they would be there.

It was a surprise, first, and a relief, second. “You are not alone” and all that.

The evening was...odd. I’ve always been beastily superior about self-help (without, of course, any personal experience and therefore any right at all to deride) and for me at least, the evening met all my worst expectations. Our speaker was strangely dressed, overly sing-song and her all-us-girls-together style was distinctly chafing. The details of what turned out to be a blatant two hour sales-pitch do not merit recording, but at one point the she gave us all paper bags and a conspiratorial wink, and told us to write down on lots of little pieces of paper “all the lovely things we thought about ourselves”.

Hey? Surely the whole POINT of being a housewifing mother with a few births behind you, AND at the far end of your thirties, is that you now have the right NOT to think anything lovely about yourself at all?

Most of us sat and looked and giggled and wrote nothing. It was a very awkward five minutes. And at the end of it, our speaker said, with evident self-congratulation “And NOW ladies, put this in your bag and carry it everywhere. Everywhere! You... now... all... have... (pause for imaginary drum roll…) Bags Of Confidence!”

We must have all looked a bit dumbfounded because she certainly let irritation slip through her wink-wink joviality. Change to especially patient voice. “What you DO, ladies, is use that bag to give you a bit of a boost when you’re feeling a little bit low. You get it out and read it and then” (hissed near-menacingly) "You WILL feel BETTER".

Hmm. This kind of stuff doesn’t work for me but, to be polite, I am sure is a very valid exercise for some and therefore I don’t mean to disparage unnecessarily. In any case, the single bit of paper I’d manage, after much internal wrangling said “Good at piano” to which I had then added “quite” and a question mark. Which wouldn’t give me a boost at all, because were I to follow this practice, my reaction would then be “And you can’t even play the piano any more, you dull lunk.”

SO ENTER WINOS

But we did all go to the pub. And that’s when it all became fun. We had already, by our attendance, tacitly admitted to a mutual lack of motivation. But we decided, straight out, that we were not going to pay several hundred pounds each for a Strange Lady and an evening writing on little slips of paper.

However, there it was: there are a lot of us around, mothers, working or not, all with very little time to ourselves at the end of the day. And something seems to have slipped. We couldn't put our collective finger on it that night but we’re all feeling a little bit, well, flimsy. Apathetic, maybe? Tired, definitely. A little bit lacking in SOMETHING. None of us there were unhappy with our lot, and we are all REALLY grateful for where we are. BUT something definitely lacks. L says that her mojo has mosied and I’m inclined to feel the same. Have we morphed into an extension of our families, just a little bit? And why this sudden lack of self-confidence?

So, this is our attempt at a comeback. Every month or so, we will get together in a very non self-help way, and DO something; even, LEARN something. Something that we wouldn’t otherwise do, something, most importantly unrelated to kids and houses and husbands. Something that will force some of the stunning talents hanging around to be dusted down and put to use again.

It is not intended to be, in any twee sense, a little night out for the ladies. Nor must it be one of the horrific socials for women whose idea of female solidarity is to shriek along to I Will Survive after bottles of chardonnay. We can all sense, I think, that there is much irony in the mere idea, but that can surely be part of the fun. And if this all sounds far too joyful and WI for words, well, that’s probably because it’s exactly what it is, with less Jerusalem.

As for what we can do, I think the floor is open. Suggestions so far have included sword fighting, cookery, African dance, and laugh-yoga. Or we might just sit in the pub. But at least, we'll be doing something.

C, who is very sharp and very funny (and very beautiful and should have had her little paper bag over-flowing that night, but I BET she came over all self-deprecating and wrote nothing), came up with the name.

WINOS. Women In Need….Of Something. Its dainty link to another of our self-proclaimed favourite past times is purely a happy and poetic coincidence. What's more, the use of the word “something” means, delightfully, we don’t have to analyse ourselves any further and decide just what the hell it is we want. And that we can be as serious or as tongue-in-cheek about it as we like. Clever, C, you really are.

So. KH (fortified with the confidence of the truly talented; just check out www.thissideupcartoons.com ) is running our first one: an evening on how to sketch. Fabulous! Personally speaking, I have never sketched anything in my life and can't draw for the proverbial toffee but who knows where this might lead?

It ain' t housework and that's good enough for me.

New WINOS members always welcome if any of the above attracts.

Why it's Hard to be a Housewife

2009-05-12T22:01:00.004+01:00

'You sometimes see a woman who would have made a Joan of Arc in another century and climate, threshing herself to pieces over all the mean worry of housekeeping.'
Rudyard Kipling Plain Tales of the Hills (1888)

So, I am officially a housewife and a very underachieving one. My mess is a house, constantly littered with gleeful examples of my imperfections. Even after four years of doing this mostly Full Time, I can’t help but approach housework with vicious, resentful snootiness and there are some absolute common basics that I can’t quite seem to grasp. Like the fact that what you do does NOT remain 'done' for ages. All this time in and I still feel genuine insult when things need doing again the next day.

My mum, having fashioned her craft in the perfect homeliness of the 1950s, was excellent at it all and could have taught me lots if I hadn’t been too busy making a smirkingly overconfident point of Not Needing To Listen. (It has occurred to me that another of the very many sad points about her not being here any more is that she was deprived of the chance to tell me how She HAD Tried and I WOULDN’T Listen, which I think she would have, quite rightfully, rather enjoyed.)

My housewifing friends (delightful, kindred souls, the lot of them) and I talked it over recently, on one rare and spontaneous evening in the pub. This is, I think, pretty much what we have decided:

Once upon a time, the idea of ever becoming a “housewife”, of shunning career and financial independence and of concentrating on Children and Chores was completely, utterly unthinkable. I think we all get that much of this was down to the naivety of youth (at the same stage we were all going to become High Court Judges). But if anyone had told us, ambitious teenagers as we were, that we would, in the future, become stay-at-home mothers who would do all the housework, we would have sprinted.

The Housewife Ideal, for us, was something firmly padlocked into an ethereal era of aprons and patience for husbands – which, now I think about it, can’t have been in the least bit real, can it? Anyway, it was a Concept Gone By, something we never ever thought would come back to trouble us. None of our teachers, sensibly no doubt, ever even attempted to prepare us To Keep House, and I can't believe we would have reacted in any kind of seriousness if they had. And if our Mums ever mentioned it, we switched off and enthusiastically filled in UCCA forms with plans of female greatness that did not include mops.

Moreover, there was all that 1980s assertive power-woman-big-shoulders thing going on, which was actually strangely compelling, (and more convincing than the whole girl-power thing a decade later, which seemed to mean little more than wearing hotpants and doing scary kicks all over the place). And probably most importantly, we all went through our Beauvoir phase with a dutiful dabbling in feminist literature which inspired a trusting belief in gender egalitarianism, at the very least.

Put all this together, we decided that evening in the pub, and it really did leave us with a developed , if unjustifiable, sense of disdain for Her-at-Home. And, even if we have all chosen to be just that, this mean old sense of disdain has proved rather tricky to dissolve. So is it any wonder we approach all life as a housewife with a certain disinclination?

'My second favorite household chore is ironing. My first being hitting my head on the top bunk bed until I faint.'
Erma Bombeck

We agree on this: we all made the decision, we all appreciate having the choice to make in the first place, and we all had absolutely no idea what we were letting ourselves in for. It’s not that it’s particularly hard, especially in comparison to how some people have to live their lives. It’s also not that we fail to appreciate that we were fortunate to have a choice in the first place. If you try and talk about this honestly, it’s very easy to sound ungrateful and we aren’t. But I think it’s more that we had all, deep-down, expected that doing the stay-at-home mother thing to be a bit of a doddle which we would sail through with perfection. And now we’re all rather surprised that a) it’s not and b) we don’t.

I wonder, for rather a lot of the time, if those of us at home with small children don’t feel like we are going ever-so-quietly, ever-so-slightly mad.

'Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing.'
Phyllis Diller, Phyllis Diller's Housekeeping Hints, 1966

I shouldn’t speak for the others, but, for my part, I didn’t make the transition from Working to Stay-At-Home particularly seemlessly. Firstly, I was totally unprepared for Housewifery and stunningly incompetent at managing the basics. At first, I really did try. I scrubbed and folded and used Ironing Water, and dedicated time to Fresh Baking Smells for Visitors. Of course it didn't work at all, and at the end of a day of it, I was truly knackered and totally disenchanted. What’s more, come 7pm, I also found myself with a growing Pavlovian response to that nightly CBEEBIES warble (the one about how the time has come to say good night, if you know it), and this was an unruly reflex which sent me whizzing off for wine by the second line of the song. The Japanese have a phrase “kitchen drinker” to refer to bored housewives who turn to drink, and, although I stop short of alcoholism, (surely?!) I can kind of see their point.

The first and biggest problem was (is) reconciling all of the above with what I had been doing before. Namely, studying and working. It’s horribly hard to switch off the picture of yourself, however vaulted, as ”independent” and “successful” and just Clean That Floor Again. Moreover, for myself at least, to be completely sewn in to the necessary but unrelenting timetables of 2 babies and a dog, felt, in selfish moments, almost like a personal affront. There comes a time where you realise how long you have spent tidying the laundry and you don’t, and can’t, recognise yourself. "Why on earth did I study to do THIS?" is a question which has presented itself, petulantly, many, many times.

Going back to our chat in the pub though, one thing we have all found hard has been reappraising our fundamental idea of equality. Yes, of course, it does make absolute sense that part of your daily agenda as the one who Stays At Home also means getting a meal on the table for the family and doing the laundry – and I think we all accept that, I really do - but this can easily translate, in the midst of a bored, bad and belligerent mood, as Cooking His Bloody Supper And Washing His Sodding Socks. We found that the chasm that then appears between your life and that of your beloved husband (which pretty much continues as before, whatever you say, R) is very hard not to resent. On this, we decided – it’s not so much that we weren’t prepared for all this, it’s more that we had spent a lot of time being very deliberately NOT prepared to do any of it. We were, and are, happily and fundamentally conditioned against it all. How to break through that?

As far as I was concerned, it just took a while to realise that the central problem of my bad housewife skills was not actually latent inability – it was a failure to understand that a Perfect House would never be the summit of my daily ambition. Learning to live withmy glaring imperfections was all part of the battle. Now I oscillate somewhere between the two extremes, without minding very much any more, although, ok, batey moments still remain. And it does get easier, though whether that is down to better household management or caring less I couldn’t honestly say.

'Housework is something you do that nobody notices until you don't do it.'
Anon

And finally. I feel quite guilty saying it, buuutttttt…when your main task is to run a house and care for the inmates, your head is full of things to remember but your BRAIN actually has very little to do. I feel like my own brain, over the past four years, has been emptying in a drip-drip-drip fashion. And I know I’m not alone in this. In fact, we're actually specifically doing something about this in the formation of WINOS, more on which here later I'm sure...Golly, though, it does help to know other people have been flailing as wildly as I have. Thank goodness for the veritas of pub vino, hey.

PS
1. Yikes! This is FAR too long for a post, I am sure. I look back, and gosh, I really have been blathering on. The self-indulgence I have avowed to avoid is already creeping in... But, seriously though , since all of this has been simmering away somewhat chaotically for rather a while, it's been rather cathartic having to sort it out in words. I doubt it will make sense to anyone but me, and probably by tomorrow it won't make sense to me either, but, as I said, I do feel better.
Shall I have a glass of wine? No. It's Tuesday. Bugger.

!

2009-05-12T21:58:00.000+01:00

Hmm. I'm not very au fait with this blogging lark and appear to have joined my own blog.
I imagine that is Not Very Cool. But I don't know how to undo it. Hohum.

How on earth do you start a blog?

2009-05-12T21:32:00.001+01:00

How on earth do you start a blog? I've been defiantly procrastinating for weeks and getting nowhere. I think I’m finding it difficult to be honest about why I really want this blog project, and R has assured me if I’m not going to be honest, there’s little point in doing it at all. (And I have to trust him, as Web Geek to my ignorance).

Soooooo, taking the proverbial bull by the horns, I’m doing it because I’m a bit bored. (If this were a self-help group, people would clap now…) I’m just a bit bored. Mentally, not time-wise. Time-wise, I’m utterly flat-out busy, most of the time, but my brain, like much of me these days, is rather under-exercised, and dulled by repetitive housewifely chores and the general mayhem of multitasking motherhood.

I really need to give it something to think about. I need to force it to ponder things other than Small Children And Housework becaaauuussse… if I don’t , my brain and I are going to spiral into the very pits of housewifely vacuity and in a few months time I’ll be smiling blandly and not knowing where Venezuela is.* We may speak of Nappy Brain in mock-horror tones, and as a concept it might very well sound amusing, but I’ve been doing this for four years and, for me, it is a real and present menace lurking just around the corner.

Hence all this. R has been very good in his assaults on my procrastination. Probably the biggest reason for my nerves is simply that I am pretty sure I have little of interest to say. But then, as he pointed out, with unusually kind reassurance, this could be a way of forcing myself to rectify that, in my own mind at least. I suppose, in any case, lots of people have Nothing To Say, but still manage to say it with surprising loquacity. My second worry was that it could all be just a bit self-indulgent, a mere extension of vanity publishing, which again he has deftly rebutted with refreshingly male “So bloody what?”. I do suppose, then, if you’re not actually forcing anyone to read your blog, it doesn’t really matter. But it’s taken a while to get here.

So why else then? Well, I really do worry that motherhood (much as I have honestly come to love it) is making me a bit thick. And while I can sulkily reconcile myself with the fact that I going to get older, fatter, wrinklier, whatever, I do NOT want to get thicker, not ever.

Therefore, for me, trying to maintain a blog is all about reclaiming the tiniest bit of sanity as I used to know it.; about some kind of regular cerebral stimulation in the very few minutes of quiet anyone can hope for when living with perpetual-motion pre-schoolers. And maybe this will propel me towards some of all the fascinating stuff out there which I always seem to put after the daily mundanity and then never look at.

So. Six Seconds Of Sanity. Lets see, shall we?

* Note to R: before you get gleeful, I DO know where Venezuela is, thank you, I do have an opinion on Chavez and I could even give a good stab at its GDP, at the moment - I’m just talking about what MIGHT happen, soon. Just as an example. I know what you were thinking…