beckblog

Sasha knows what sex he or she is

2012-02-10T14:30:00.002Z

Hmm, I have a feeling that it's a bit pointless continuing to make this blog keep the secret. Anyway, if you've been reading and not known whether Sasha is a boy or a girl, skip this post.
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Yes, of COURSE Sasha knows he's a boy. How could he fail to notice that he's got a willy? We have never concealed from him what sex he was. That would be silly. Plus, he's got a willy so how could you even attampt it?

The thing we don't push is GENDER. That is different. We don't say "Ooh, he's a typical boy" or " Don't run like a girl" or "You sound like an old woman" or "Big boys don't cry". We don't say that only girls are interested in dolls and colours and what they look like; we tell him he's beautiful. We don't assume that he likes diggers and lego because he's a boy; I like diggers and lego, and I'm a woman. Mummy has a toolbox; Daddy does the cooking. We try not to restrict Sasha's options based on generalisations about gender. On the other hand, we do restrict his options based on good taste and our own opinions, which can border on sheer bloodymindedness. Barbie is banned (except for jumble sale bargains) because she is BORING and Disney is banned because their Princess crap is too yukky and they over-merchandise, and because I have never forgiven them for ruining two of my favourite books, Alice in Wonderland and Winnie-the Pooh.

What things do you ban, as a parent?

The truth about Sasha, the ‘gender-neutral’ five-year-old

2012-01-25T12:34:00.004Z

Here's what I'm telling everyone now I've had a chance to write something down:

The truth about Sasha, the ‘gender-neutral’ five-year-old

When Sasha was born, we'd asked the midwives not to tell us whether the baby was a boy or a girl. For about half an hour, we just held the baby and got to know it. When we announced Sasha's birth by email to all our friends, we just said "It's a baby!"

I tried not saying what sex Sasha was when I went to local postnatal classes, but quickly realised that people only ask because they're trying to be nice and because there's nothing else you can ask about a baby except its weight. Sasha had been a November baby and as soon as the weather got warm enough was frolicking around the garden with no clothes on anyway. So everyone in our village who knows us knows what sex Sasha is.

But I did write a blog about my experiences of pregnancy, childbirth and parenting (and lots of other things). Because I am a writer and editor by trade, with accessibility as a key criterion, and because writing non-sexist language is part of making copy accessible, I decided to see if it was possible to write about Sasha without using sex-specific terms. To date, I have never revealed Sasha's sex online, in my blog. Some people have got the Internet muddled up with Real Life.

We can't think of any way we could have "brought up little Sasha as gender-neutral" - what would that mean? What we have done is try to give our child a gender-rich environment, with toys some people might say are girls' toys alongside those they might call boy's toys. We've also tried to make sure that dolls, for example, have different skin tones so Sasha doesn't think the world is white (Nana (grandmother) being Anglo-Indian probably helps with that too!). Kieran has a son and daughter from a previous relationship who live with us some of the time, and we have a dressing-up basket with magic wands and cutlasses, capes and and shawls, fairy wings and tiger suits, and tutus for everyone.

We also try not to assume that Sasha will be just like us, so we try not to assume that our child will be musical (as we are) or will go to university (as we did) - we don't want to set expectations that Sash might not be able to fulfil.

All we're doing is what most parents do - trying to do our very best for our child.

Beck and A

Is your child musical? Is mine?

2012-01-16T19:50:00.000Z

Gosh, it's all happening today. I got my flute out a while ago meaning to see if I could still produce any sound at all, and while we were waiting for cakes to bake (a subconscious impulse as I'd completely forgotten that I need them for I Fagiolini tomorrow!) Anyway, there's a tuning fork in the case and Sasha was playing with it, so I played an A and asked if Sash could sing it. Sash didn't want to. (I wonder if the pitch was too high? When we were singing this morning, I was asking for higher notes but Sash seemed only able to use chest voice.)

Anyway, then I played an A on the flute, asked Sasha which note was higher and which lower, thinking as I did that I've never had a very acute ear and I couldn't actually tell myself. But small confident person said without hesitation "That one", pointing to either the flute or the fork, I can't remember which - anyway we tried a few more times and Sash did the same each time, giving the answer as though it was *really* easy. And you'll have spotted, of course, that I had no way of I telling whether the answers were right or wrong as I didn't know! When I went from zero to grade eight flute in eighteen months in 1979 to 1981, tuning it was the only bit I was rubbish at. You can imagine what my violin playing sounded like.

Anyway, it's a funny little miniature tuning fork I bought in Switzerland, and Sash was having trouble getting it to sound, so I went and got the full-size one. That was bought in the same shop, and I'd always wondered whether the titchy one might be a bit gimmicky and not actually in tune, so I sounded them both at once and asked Sash which was higher and which was lower. And lo... Sash said something about silly mummies - "They're both the same sound."

Then pointing at the smaller one - "I can't hear that one." I think that meant the two notes were so blended you couldn't tell the difference. So maybe that interference thingy you're meant to be able to hear when two notes are different (and that's the thing I've never been able to hear, so no wonder I can sing so flat without noticing) wasn't there and so there was no way of distinguishing the two sounds.

I'd love to hear what other musicians think. Have you tried this on your kids? Have you found any other fun things to try?

Oh, and the other big question: now that we know (unless that's changed?) that it's caused by early proximity to a keyboard instrument and isn't inherent, are you going to make an effort to give your child, or an effort to not give your child, perfect pitch?

Magazine in a muddle

2012-01-16T13:22:00.003Z

Well, that seemed to go well. Celia Back was very nice though of course, like policemen, she was much younger than I expected. (Which only really means that I'm much older than I expected. Golly, I *love* being middle-aged and confident and clever - I must tell you later about explaining the physics of frost and snow to Sasha this morning on the way to school.) It really helped being an ex-journalist and an amateur magazine editor now: when she said things like "So, did Sasha ever go round with a [can't tell you what the anti-stereotype toy is or I'll give away whether Sash is a boy or a girl which though known elsewhere is still a secret on this blog]?" I was able to say "No, I'm afraid not - ooh! But we did once have a great game with something else..." and know why she'd asked, because she needed some strong things to build the story around, and what might do instead. I hope. She seemed very interested in the principles behind it all, and that was very encouraging.

So now I'm off to the supermarket to buy a magazine to see what that column is about and check what Woman is actually like these days. (That really is them, btw - very strange URL but I suppose the obvious one was always going to have been taken.) Now and again I pull a Good Housekeeping or YOU or Elle magazine out of a skip (or someone else's recycling - is that a social faux pas? It's much more meaningful recycling than having them pulped and made into new magazines) and have a look to see what nonsense is being peddled to my sisters. Things have got a lot worse, though possibly still not as bad as the copy of US Cosmo that Mike brought back from a visit to the States for me in the early 1990s. The message of that was "You're a strong smart glamorous working woman who needs to buy buy buy a lot of make-up and perfume and things to stop you smelling nasty because you feel so utterly shit about yourself". Let's see whether Woman has got it a bit better than that.

My life in magazines

2012-01-16T12:00:00.000Z

So, I'm pretty excited that I'm going to be talking to Woman magazine at midday - I might nip down to Budgens and buy a copy so I can check that they're with the good guys: their journalist certainly sounds nice but as I keep telling Sasha, you can't always tell the ones that are EVIL just by their spooky red eyes.

One of A's many endearing characteristics when he first moved in with me was that he'd often turn up carrying a copy of Woman that he'd bought to read on the train. Loved that he as secure enough in his own skin not to feel he had to mind other people's daft stereotypes or prejudices. That's what both of us want for our children.

I was thinking about how you can map your life through magazines. I was born in 1965, so mine went something like...

Pippin... Bunty... Jackie... Punch... Cosmopolitan... Spare Rib... The Socialist Standard....

the I went to Cambridge and even the Alternative bookshop in Gwydir Street didn't get the SS. I expect I just read Stop Press, which had been Varsity and later switched back.... Punch was an odd one - my dad bought me a subscription as birthday presents, in my early teens, I think. I started by reading quite a lot of it, but by the end it was just the cartoons and that Hunter Davies column called 'Father's Day' which must have been quite groundbreaking at the time.

Then I subscribed to Private Eye for years until I realised it was actually making me a bit depressed. Oh lord - just remembered I moved to Sawston and subscribed to Country Living. I'd forgotten the incidental ones. I subscribed to Uncut for ages but never got round to reading it - oh, and I read Q for a while because I worked in music magazines. And I used to look out for launch issues - I still have the pile upstairs if anyone would like them for posterity. Does anyone remember Minx magazine? It was really, really, good - got the content and the tone spot on: sensible info given in a cheeky tone.

My first magazine job was on Home & Studio Recording, whose wonderful editor Dan Goldstein taught me everything I know about compound hyphenation. Then a great time with Sam Molineaux (now called Graham, tut tut) on Keyboard Review, her editor and me production editor then deputy editor. I did some great interviews - bought a floppy disk reader specially to upload them here but it's still the box five years later.... When Music Maker got taken over by Future I got made redundant and spent rather a sad year as a sub on Sound on Sound, out in the wasteland that was Bar Hill then. Then I got made redundant from there... I'll have to check my professional blog... Oh, I'd forgotten my first job, on BBC English magazine in Saffron Walden. I Facebooked about the horrors of superscripted ordinals and Microsoft's hideous predilection for them recently and an old colleague from there, Donna Sharp, found me, which was lovely. That lasted three months, mostly spent struggling with Ventura, a user-hostile early DTP programme - just as I was getting the hang of the bloody thing the bailiffs arrived to tell us the company had gone bankrupt. So I got made - no! the suspense! - redundant.

After Sound on Sound I moved back into information design. Applied for dozens of magazine jobs but just didn't get anywhere - I remember going to Hanover house for a sub job on House and Garden, and meeting some Voguey girl in the lift who was wearing a miniskirt and black tights who looked me up and down, and I knew I wasn't going to get it. Then the editor said she was working on an anniversary issue and someone had mentioned that the magazine was in a song - had I ever heard of it? I was so gobsmacked that she didn't know the Flanders & Swann number (on YouTube at 6.00 in) that I expect it may have shown. I was right, didn't get near it. Which magazine, that was a bugger - hours and hours of research, interviews and writing tests, it was more work than a bloody O level, then I got a standard rejection letter that didn't even get the facts right – "We regret that you have not been selected for interview" – oh do you, best hold those tears just for a moment; and they appointed an internal candidate so that was a week of my life wasted. I think it was after that I just gave up. I got a job as a freelance sub on Internet magazine, which was fun, then as freelance production ed on some business telecomms titles whose names were so odd I can't even remember them - bet there are copies in the attic. But the staff were lovely - always have been, everywhere I've worked. Do people who care about words by definition care about people?

Boys and girls and Lego and Barbie

2012-01-15T10:52:00.005Z

Great to see the Lego magazine debacle provoking so much comment - and so much of it witty and well argued: I feel no real need to contribute anything more than this.

Our three (11, 9 and 5, mixed sexes) were playing some kind of mash-up of Star Wars, Ninjago, Pirates of the Caribbean and Creator which often seems to involve everyone being in a classroom where the teacher keeps swearing but this is represented by saying "BLEEP!". Anyway, the catchphrase for this is uttered in a sort of sinister slightly lecherous tone and goes:

"Hi... I'm Anakin Deweddawend... Nice to [sniff] *smell* you..."

The sniff is a real sniff and you have to sniff the other person at that point - Sasha tells me. I'm not sure whether it's a skit on the fact that I like to take deep breaths inhaling Sasha's scent (back of the neck is lovely) - Sash has got used to it but we're all rightly treating it as a bit of parental eccentricity - or just a fart joke.

The older kids are one of each sex and so got both copies of the magazine and saw immediately what had happened. I'm told there were shrieks of outrage. In our house there are all sorts of toys for all sorts of children to play with. (Barbie is banned, but when someone brought back a few from a jumble sale recently, I didn't make much fuss. The eldest used to make a big thing of chasing me with a pretend Barbie -"Grrr.... I've got a Barbie! Beck doesn't like Barbie! Watch out, Beck, here comes Barbie!" which was a cute way of subverting the whole thing. With not much encouragement, the kids are extremely good at subverting such things as dubious marketing tropes, and songs you get taught at Sunday School.) In fact, I'm being interviewed for Woman magazine tomorrow about it all, and it sounds as though they've got a positive and sensible take on things, so fingers crossed that we can make some progress here! (And that I do make it into print.)

On that subject, I've also been interviewed by Emma Higginbotham for the Cambridge News about that thing I did of not telling anyone whether Sasha was a boy or a girl - and I completely forgot to tell her about this blog, where I tried to go on writing about Sash without ever mentioning it - a good chance to combine my political views with my writing and editing principles, which have always included gender-free writing. (The only time anyone has ever been annoyed was over my use of 'Chair' rather than Chairman or Chairwoman in Sawston Scene, but I've had some good discussions over the years.) This will be a feature but not online, so I'll post here when I know which issue it will be in - Emma reckons Thursday or Friday this week. Though I've just realised that this blog never revealed the secret, but if I say any more about the article it will, so I'll stop there. They should have some nice stereotype-subverting photographs of Sash and me too! (One thing that doesn't seem to have changed is that nobody's has expressed any interest in talking to Sasha's father - the kind of thing we were trying to fix at the Fatherhood Institute, where I worked for a year (before being made redundant, to continue that them! My sixth and most recent time.)_ And yes, as their web editor I did try to persuade them that you can't update a website once a month. Let me know (becklaxton, the at sign, gmail, a dot, com) if they say anything about this - I would so love them to run with it.

Peter Grimes as a paedophile

2009-10-16T09:21:00.004Z

So I imagine you can tell that I've finally had a hiatus in the hurly-burly. I've properly started my new job, and the flipside is that I finally feel that I've got some real time off. I'm still learning the music for tomorrow's concert, but hey. The new I Fagiolini website is almost there, I'm done with NCT projects (wish I'd seen my Baby Show banners - I've never designed anything two metres wide before!), and at this very moment I can't remember anything else I'm meant to be doing.

So, then. I went to see Peter Grimes at English National Opera back in May - May! Good grief. There's a good review of it here to refresh your memory. My memories are that the sets were very ugly and some of the costumes ludicrous - Auntie and the nieces came off particularly badly - but that the music was just sublime (and at least First Niece was allowed to be standing when she sang her top C). There were moments in the score I'd never heard before, and my favourite parts - 'Mister Hobson, where's your cart? I'm ready'; 'What harbour shelters peace?'; 'Who can turn skies back and begin again?' - made me cry in a way that opera very rarely does (I'm normally dry-eyed while darling A sobs next to me). However, this is all digression as the point of this post was to discuss what seemed to be a throw-away remark by the director, David Alden, in his programme notes. He was discussing Grimes's character, and how dark he can be painted, I think.

"I'd like to see a production where he's played as a straight paedophile," he said (I'm paraphrasing from memory), "though I wouldn't want to direct it." And my question is - what the heck is he talking about? Is there some weird operatic convention that Grimes a paedeophilic? Because I can't see any evidence in the libretto or the action. As I understand it, paedophilia means literally 'liking for children' and is used to mean that you have a specifically sexual interest in them. It's not a term to bandy around lightly.

Firstly, then, I think you'd have to push it to show that Grimes is interested in sex at all. It's a rare production that shows him any closer to Ellen than the touch of hands that's required by the libretto. I should think even a clumsy hug might be pushing it. When Grimes sings about her, he focuses on the respectability that she's going to bring him. That's his goal: social acceptance. In this production I really noticed that passion with which he sings about money. When he dreams about fishing the seas dry, it's so that he can earn money, always money. "They listen to money, only to money!" so money can silence the gossip, he fantasises. I reckon a sexual analysis would get less out of all this than a Marxist one.

Secondly, you'd have to show that Grimes is interested in children, and there again I think you'd be struggling. His whole problem is that he's using the apprentices as orphans because they're cheap - money again - without considering that they're children. He's blind to their physical needs, continually demanding too much of them, refusing time off.

Yes, he's abusive - he's violent, he shouts, he pushes them around - but that has nothing to do with paedophilia that I can see, except for being another kind of child abuse. He's rough and unthinking. He seems in fact to be someone who's almost abnormally uninterested in children. He just wants to get the job done. He's a workaholic, if you like.

The use of the term seemed to me careless. And this isn't something to be careless about. I suspect the term is often bandied around when Britten is discussed, partly because there's an equally careless association of paedophilia with homosexuality which so far as I can see has no justification at all (if male homosexuals fancy little boys, shouldn't male heterosexuals fancy little girls?). There's an interesting flipside to the current paranoia about paedophilia, I think. If anyone (well, anyone male) who wants to be with children must be showing they have an unhealthy sexual interest in them, isn't that asking why on earth anyone would be interested in children otherwise? Isn't that saying there's nothing interesting about children? Do we really believe that?

How to be a freelance writer for the web

2009-10-16T09:10:00.002Z

A work colleague asked if I'd help out a friend of hers who's looking for work as a freelance writer but hasn't been getting anywhere. She's got experience of writing for television, but that's all. I was trying to analyse what's worked for me, although my working life has now been so long and complicated that I'm not sure I'm a good eaxmple. But here's what I said - I'd be interested to hear your feedback, especially if you're a writer yourself (Ruth, Phil, Clare; Iona, Nadia?).

I think there a few things to consider. You need to demonstrate your ability; make sure you have the core skills; develop specialities; make professional connections; give it time; and keep your standards high.

One is simply how you show that you're any good. Do you have samples of work? Can you point to a website and say what bits you wrote? Have you got your own site? I set myself up with WordPress and it was dead easy and got into search rankings very quickly. (By the way, how are you at search optimisation for copy? Do you know your stuff there? You will need to.) It's here becklaxton.wordpress.com if you want to look - I didn't really get it finished, but got a few pieces of work up there.

Can you get involved in any projects that would give you a chance to show off? Again, I've done two quick and easy sites for friends; I can't code at all so used iWeb on the Mac. They're not great examples, as they wrote their copy and I just edited it, but I did help them work out what they wanted to say, and can be a part of the job too. These are robertrice.co.uk and tangotechnique.com.

And I also run a music festival and wrote the site for that:sawstonmusicfestival.co.uk - an interesting example (argh, it's so out of date) as it has lots of complicated info that needs to be put in sensible order: every concert has to have a time, a place, tickets prices, contact details. This is more about information design - is that an area you're interested in? Do you think you're better at writing instructional copy, or marketing material? Can you think of snappy headlines for banners? I think it's probably about defining your strengths, but also knowing the basics - search optimisation, or SEO, is vital, as is knowing how online copy is different from printed copy: have you read Jakob Nielsen? Steve Krug?

Think about subjects you know about, and companies who might need people to write about them. For example, I've done lots of stuff for financial services, and sometimes if I've applied for an ISA online or something similar, if there's a space to comment I'll tell the company how bad the copy was - if I was looking for work I'd take that further.

The other thing is to make connections. Use Facebook and tell all your friends what kind of work you're looking for. And join LinkedIn and fill in all your details there too. There are lots of people advertising work there. You could try signing up for mailing lists too - both lists of online writers and editors, and mailing lists of job vacancies. Researching all this is part of the kind of thing that writers often have to do - you'll often just get a bare description, say for a Microsoft site, and have to go and dig out enough info to be able to say something meaningful, so you need to be good at finding stuff online.

My other advice is to give it a bit of time. I got made redundant in March, did all the things I've described, and got my first freelance work though an ex-colleague in July. There's a definite timelag.

Lastly, I'd say, be really scrupulous all the time. All the writers and editors I know have hugely high standards, and I think freelances have to be really professional. Typos in emails - even just emails to someone like me - will be a real turn-off. (NOTE that this was of course a dangerous thing to say, as naturally there was a typo in my email to her - though of course she wasn't a potential referee or employer...) As a writer you're on duty all the time. For example, I went back and changed my first sentence to make it a summary of the content here, as it's such a long email. If I was really keen, I'd put in subheadings. You've got to show you know what you're doing.

Oh, and just a usability thing - it would be better to have an email address that matches your name, so if someone wants you they can find you really easily. Yours is a lot to type!

That was it. Having written it, I'm struck by how specialised online copy-writing has got - you need to know quite a lot about how websites work to write really good copy. In fact, I'm now working with a group of people who are immensely articulate and literate, but their writing is absolutely 'offline': copy for emails that runs to two or three pages. Not that brevity is *my* strong point, I hasten to add. But then I am writing this for fun. So there!

First blog since May

2009-07-10T13:15:00.005Z

Well, I think you can see the point at which the music festival took over my life. Four of us do absolutely everything, and there's just so much. I got to the stage of tear-filled frustration more than once, especially when I realised how many notes I had to learn in the Mozart. But at least I could wake up every morning and thank heaven (figuratively, of course) that I wasn't singing the 'Et incarnatus est'. Frankly, I just wouldn't have made it. Even the second sop part (as it's traditionally done) covers more than two octaves and quite a few semi-quavers, I can assure you. According to our resident expert, Dr Maunder, the usual split of responsibilities isn't at all authentic - Constanze would have bagged both big solos, and they'd have got a castrato in to sing the duet, trio and quartet. I wasn't sure any of the sops I know would fancy this role, though...

Anywa, I'm not going to ramble on about soloist's paranoias, for once (I've done that every other year....) - I've been mentally writing a post about Peter Grimes as a paedophile since I saw the ENO production (and read the programme notes), and I really want to write it before I forget it all. What's a non-cliché that means the same as 'Watch this space'?

Eye tracking is evil

2009-05-07T09:02:00.003Z

Someone on LinkedIn says:
"I was at a public discussion with Jared Spool last week (and about 100 participants in SF at the IxDA discussion). the topic was... when usability is evil. The consensus on eye tracking... everyone hates it, no one seems to trust the results. In the end... and from what i understand as results from the consensus: eye tracking is evil. There were persons who championed eye tracking... (I think there was one), but... just some random data for your study from a room full of UX's. anyone who was there is welcome to chime in here."

You can't say usability is evil, but I would certainly agree that eye-tracking is at worst evil and at best pants. In my opinion, any user testing method that requires such long-winded and dreary analysis, in real time, afterwards, by an expert, is a bummer. If you've got a roomful of users, about the dullest thing you can do is point a camera at them. Go in! Watch! Take notes! Talk to them! *Then* you'll find out stuff. When do you ever learn about people just by watching their eyes? You'd only do it if there was no possibility of talking to them.

Perhaps some of the software available is good stuff if you use it a lot, but everything I've seen seemed to have quite a steep learning curve and be prone to disastrous errors - recording three days of video with no audio, to cite an example from one of my team, who traipsed all the way to the US to capture a lot of data that turned out to be unusable. Instead of faffing about with tracking nonsense, invest some time before your test sessions in writing really good questions and tasks, and talking to the client to make sure you're going to find out everything that they're going to want to know afterwards.

Rugged

2009-05-07T08:53:00.004Z

Gosh, I have been quiet. I had meant to boast about carrying Sasha back from Whittlesford station the other night, but needed to gather statistics - we don't have scales in the house. We finally visited a well-equipped friend and I discovered that my very solid child weighs 16kg. (You have to remember that children are always much heavier when they're asleep, but then the differential increases with their age.) According to Google the distance is 1.7 miles. I had a sling, and tried to arrange Sash to be vaguely symmetrical, as it's asymmetry that does your back in. It was partly that I didn't want to pay for a taxi, partly that it was after 10pm when all the Sawston taxi drivers go to bed anyway, and partly sheer bloody-mindedness to know whether I could do it. It wasn't too bad at all, in fact, and of course I felt gloriously rugged too. Self-reliance is very satisfactory. But is it universally so, I wonder, or do some people just not find it to be so? Is there also pleasure in being a parasite - well, that's a little harsh: does it feel good to be a wuss?

Last week I was at the Church Hall, about four minutes' walk away, and asked a woman with a baby of about six months old if she'd like to come back to my house for a cup of tea. She wasn't sure, because she'd parked her car somewhere else and didn't have her pram with her. I stood there and just nodded because it took me about five minutes to work out what she was saying - she couldn't carry a tiny baby a few yards. But in any case, words would have failed me.

Weird week

2009-03-11T21:36:00.003Z

Well, it has all been rather odd. I went to have a tooth taken out yesterday, for the first time ever. Ate a hearty breakfast as I didn't know when my next meal would be. Tooth out; left with gaping hole which was rather bigger than I was expecting. The dentist assured me that nobody really needs more than twenty teeth, but I feel that my chewing power has been drastically reduced. I schlepped around Cambridge with Sash for the rest of the day and then headed home, but as usual hadn't left enough time for dinner before the Parish Council meeting, so A and I had to make a dash for it. As usual, also, we were so cross afterwards that we came home and knocked back a couple of bottles of wine. We forgot to have any dinner. I think I may have eaten a piece of cheese and finished the pickled onions. Ugh.

I dreamed I was singing evensong, with my top half in a bath towel as of course I'd forgotten my clothes - dreams in which I've remembered to put my clothes on being a minority (honestly, you'd think I'd got a complex about it or something) - and the choir director mouthing the words of the first hymn for us as nobody knew it. For some reason we had to rush over to another chapel to sing the responses, and then my mobile phone alarm went off... at which point I discovered that it was 0645 and I had twenty-five minutes to get out of the house with Sasha. Normally I have ten, but have got everything ready the night before - but this time I'd spent it getting hammered. Boy, did I feel terrible.

Then I went to work and got made redundant. Actually, I think still having half my brain worrying about naked evensong probably helped in not making it too traumatic. But I had been with the company ten years - but then who gives a damn about companies: they don't exist. People are the thing worth caring about. Everyone was very sweet, especially considering tha I was one of about 35 people to get the push so was expecting sympathy to have run out rather.

So, time for bed. Is it true that hearing about other people's dreams is suprememly dull? Does anyone know that really nasty James Thurber story about a man who marries someone who interrupts him all the time to correct everything he says, and he starts talking about his dreams in desperation because they're the only private experiences he has, and slowly goes crazy? Thurber is brilliant - a short-story writer and cartoonist (his most well known is possibly "Well, If I called The Wrong Number, Why Did You Answer The Phone?", which was on my third-year exam on Comedy. A brilliant paper - though I was the only person in the exam hall who laughed out loud.)

Doctor Atomic

2009-02-26T11:12:00.003Z

A really splendid first night of John Adams (the Nixon in China man)'s new opera, Doctor Atomic. Fabulous singing, especially from the glorious Gerald Finley. The first-half closer was a solo setting for him of Donne's sonnet 'Batter my heart, three-person'd God', and it was a show-stopper. Donne is a devil to set as it's such twisty, complex stuff: I've never heard a convincing setting, and often you just wish you could get rid of the music. But this was stunning music.

There had been a lull in the middle of the first half, as the bedroom scene with the Oppenhemers didn't work terribly well. The libretto was so abstruse that you couldn't take it seriously as a conversation, and it wasn't clear what anyone was talking about. Beautiful singing, though, from Finley again - god, he's good - and Sasha Cooke as Kitty Oppenheimer. One member of the cast was a last-minute substitution, and I didn't catch who, but it was impossible to tell. Everyone's diction was lovely, and they got the accents spot on, I thought. Good naturalistic pronunciation, too - none of that 'pronounce the words as they are spelt, not how a normal person would say them' rubbish, except from the alto Meredith Arwady, resolutely enunciating 'moun-TAYNS' when everyone else sang 'mountins'. Her part was a bit of a drag, to be honest: she was a sort of ethnic voice of conscience.

The second half - all one and half hours of it - hardly flagged. Adams really built up the tension, but he used touches of humour to release it as effectively as Shakespeare does: they were very nicely judged. Almost at the end, there were two minutes of near silence: brilliant. The final moments had the perfect focus on individual anguish. After the end, there was a silence you could almost feel - until the inevitable over-eager idiot felt they had to start clapping: a great pity.

The chorus work was very effective: for once having everyone in their own little box seemed appropriate to the subject matter. The choruses were all, I think, all homophonic - no: what's it called when everyone sings different notes but at the same time? - which made a few ragged edges obvious. Mostly excellent, though. The staging worked very well, with the bomb dangling ahead for much of the time, and the weather effects were good too. As in Candide, the touches of video and graphics were beautifully judged, eschewing gimmickry.

The whole thing was surprisingly affecting: I cried for the first time ever at an opera, having sat dry-eyed through Madame Butterfly, Tosca, and so on. It's really not at all an odd subject for an opera when you consider it.

Top marks all round - do go and see it! Day seats in the balcony are only £10 and you just phone the box office after 1230 to get one.

The sticking place

2009-02-20T20:16:00.003Z

Recently, I scrunched up my courage and posted the stuff I'd been writing about Clare Wilkinson, who is a rather fabulous mezzo who sings with I Fagiolini. Unfortunately, Blogspot stuck up the post under the date when I'd started to write it, rather than when I'd finished it, so it's got a bit buried. Do please go and have a look at it - I'd be interested to know what you think (and also grateful if anyone knows how to pronounce 'paean' - A and I don't, we realised).

I had a good conversation with a work colleague a while ago about postivity and negativity, and how your mental attititude colours the world around you to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It reminded me of something someone told me when I was a journalist, which was that to write a positive review of something is much more of a risk than writing a negative one: you really stick your neck out when you praise something. It's always easier to criticise: partly, humour comes more easily when you're being rude. Writing with a positive slant feels slightly naff.

We've been pondering the nature of fandom, too. There was a funny story in the press about a woman who'd sat outside the gate of Prince's estate for several weeks. When he heard about it, he went and asked her to come in and talk to him - at which point she got up and left. It made me think of medieval courtly love, where the adoration is the whole point and consummation would ruin the whole thing. And Petrarch, writing all his poems about Laura after she was dead. Great art, but lousy sex.

Our fandom remains at the point where what we dream about is introducing Russell T Davies to Joss Whedon at a dinner party, and getting the discussion started with some suitably geeky topics. But at least the evening would have a purpose: the problem when you admire people is that all there is to do is gush. If you get that far - when A and I were in the same room as Clare at a post-concert drink session, we stood in the corner staring at our toes and twiddling our glasses. But then you can't really stride up to someone and say baldly "You're wonderful!" - can you?

PS After being so rude about Janet Baker, I was wurgling around on YouTube and found some videos of her. Oops. She's, um, rather good, isn't she? I guess I just didn't like trained voices in the days when I didn't have one...

Poncey

2009-01-04T00:25:00.003Z

My goodness. A is reading volume 3 of the collected letters of Benjamin Britten, and I'm reading volume 2 of Dorothy L Sayers' correspondence. Get us.

Sayers is very impressive, though - so clear-thinking and intelligent, and so professional in her work. She's very good on feminism: often with a lovely quizzical air about why anyone should be so silly as to think differently. I wish I could manage that, rather than always getting indignant straight away. And I must read The Man Who Would be King, as it sounds wonderful. She does always make me feel a little sad, though, that I have never really found a proper career. I suppose at least I know what I'm good at, and have always known that I wasn't in the least creative. And I've been very lucky in the jobs I've found, and the people I've worked with (the companies who've paid my salary have generally been nothing special, but there's capitalism for you). But Sayers makes me feel that I should have been more serious about having a profession. I'll have to ponder this, and not at half-past midnight when I've just watched four episodes of The Sarah Jane Adventures. Too much melodrama, but I was pleased to suddenly realise that the theme music is based on Erlkoenig - perfect! Ooh, someone's clever.

Books, glorious books

2009-01-03T01:06:00.002Z

I have been having a lovely Christmas binge. I re-read What Katy Did, What Katy Did at School, and What Katy Did Next - the last of these a hilarious account of her European tour with a widowed friend and her daughter, all of them rather disliking foreigners. England is so soggy that they don't stay long - but then of course they don't like the French much either, and as for Italians.... Great stuff. I've always wondered whether the word game that the SSUC attempt is playable: it seems unlikely that many people can produce poetry to order.

Also William Mayne's A Swarm in May, which is a very odd book, and a lot of it about choir-school politics, very much from the boys' point of view. Oh, and I also read Eleanor Farjeon's story '...And a Pearl in the Myddes', which I doubt anyone has heard of unless they're an Antonia Forest fan (Patrick asks Nicola if she's read it when they visit Wade Minster). It was a perfect Christmas story, wonderfully atmospheric and incomprehensible.

Last night I grabbed a random Iris Murdoch: The Flight From The Enchanter. I like Murdoch more as I get older, and suspect I read a lot of it when I was far too young to know what was happening, though I do think the ones where really posh people fall in and out of love with each other in endless combinations are rather silly. (A Severed Head is my favourite of these, with all its delicious kerfuffle over who gets which of the d'Aubusson prints - or is that the name of the carpet? (Of course as soon as I started typing it the word left my head.) And I do like The Italian Girl, which has similar shenanigans. Nobody ever seems to have to earn a living.) My overall favourite, though, is still her first novel, Under the Net (come to think of it, I've never worked out what the title means), which is about a lovely group of bohemians. The politics are more overt and the relationships simpler, and it has huge youthful joie de vivre and some vividly memorable set-pieces: I love the part where the narrator trails someone through a French park but loses her when he stops to pick up the shoes she's hidden in a tree.

Tonight I read Claire Tomalin's biography of Hardy. Another fine work: I really appreciate how non-judgemental Tomalin is, and how carefully she draws her conclusions. I also had no idea of how many bad novels Hardy had written in between his barnstormers: I think I'd vaguely assumed that titles like The Trumpet Major were early works rather than mid-stream duds. I'm not a huge fan of his, since I like to get immersed in books and don't like to be reminded that the heavy hand of the author is dropping misfortunes on his characters from a great height. I found Jude the Obscure disgusting. But I think I'd like to read more of his poetry.

Oh yes we have

2008-12-15T10:37:00.003Z

To the pantomime on Saturday: a family outing thanks to Grandma Pam (thank you, Grandma Pam!). We were surprised to see the place not at all packed (it was Jack and the Beanstalk at the Arts Theatre): it was a bit lame in places, but really not bad at all. Their only mistake, I thought, was always to aim for comedy and forget that a story needs drama. The scene in the ogre's castle went for nothing, because it just wasn't scary.

Anyway, we had ice-creams in the interval and everything. When we were packing up to leave, Sasha started crawling around, collecting the empty tubs together and picking up the spoons. When I picked up the child to go, there was a bit of scene that ended with a huge wail of "But Mummy, I want to TIDY UP!"

Truly, we have created a monster.

A paean

2008-12-04T22:16:00.006Z

Over at La Maison Verte in September, I had a slightly silly dinner conversation with Robert Hollingworth. I'd been listening to Emma Kirkby on an old tape of Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen and got talking to Berty (ooh, do go and have another look at his site - I've made all the improvements that were suggested, and would love to know what you think) about her, and what it is about her voice that makes it so distinctive. She is one of the only classical singers I can reliably identify, and I love the clarity of her tone, and the way you can always hear the sweetness of her personality coming through. I saw her give a masterclass at Clare College once, and she was, I thought, terribly nice. Not in a soppy way: an essential sweetness of nature. Just as you'd expect from her voice.

Anyway, I got at cross purposes with Robert while trying to ask him the same question (which Berty, unless I've forgotten his answer because I was pissed, didn't have a very definite answer to), because he thought I was talking about Clare Wilkinson. Which was pretty logical, because he knows that A and I (do I need to carry on calling him A? I'm not going to get internationally syndicated at this stage, am I?) are huge fans.

So. Hands up if you don't know who Clare Wilkinson is. Okay. She is a mezzo-soprano. We first encountered her in I Fagiolini - I think I saw her first in The Birds, and then the first time we saw The Full Monteverdi we were sat, thrillingly, next to her. She also sings with the Dunedin Consort, and with Alamire, and probably with other groups I'm too slow to know about yet.

There is something really arresting about her stage presence, and there is something truly fabulous about her singing. I think the essence is that she has wonderful technique coupled with cast-iron musicianship (a funny word, that: do we use it simply to mean good taste?).

Anyway. She's got a huge range, and all of it sounds gorgeous, and you can't hear the joins. She's got amazing breath control, but she never sings through lines in that very Cambridge way that shouts 'Listen to me not taking a breath!'. She doesn't over-enunciate, but somehow her diction is crystal clear. Her tone is beautiful, but she never seems to wallow in it - and it's not bland; it has texture, and it's totally distinctive: she's always identifiable. Which is what made me realise that actually I love her voice for many of the same reasons that I love Kirkby's: I can always identify it, and I feel that it conveys what she's like.

I guess it's partly that all the stuff I've said tells you that her ego is always sublimated to the music. But there's also something really tangible about the sweetness of her tone. Is there a better word? Sweetness sounds cloying, and she isn't a bit.

Being able to hear the person, and the personality, is definitely a personal preference of mine: it's why I generally prefer amateur voices to professional ones. I've always loathed that really 'trained' classical sound with the mouth full of plums. The archetype of this, for me, is a recording I've got of the Faure Requiem with Janet Baker singing the 'Pie Jesu'. The vowels are all so rounded and dark she sounds as though she's about to throw up. Horrible.

Another thing about Clare is that her face expresses the emotions of the music, not the difficulty of the singing. I don't think your face should tell the audience that singing is hard - those sopranos who sing with their eyebrows permanently raised make me feel tired.

Anyway, enough of me wurbling away: go and listen to Clare (go to her website and click on Listen), and come back and tell me whether what I've said makes any sense at all. Actually, I think most of the singers in I Fagiolini are pretty special, and the group itself is quite remarkable, but Clare really does stand out.

This posting has been sitting about for a long time: I made the mistake of writing it in my head but not getting it onto paper (you know what I mean) soon enough. Then A read it and didn't really like it. My theory is that this is because it's unusual to write unreserved praise for anything, especially a person. Being English, we are embarrassed by the very notion. But I also think that one tends to assume that anyone who's really good, and reasonably well known, knows that they are and gets told so frequently, and in fact that's not the case at all.

Life in pink

2008-12-04T21:58:00.003Z

I went to see Piaf at the Vaudeville Theatre (transferred from the Donmar (btw did you know that the 'Mar' bit is from Margot Fonteyn, who started the place with someone whose name I can't remember (but they contributed the 'Don')?)) last night. Just as all the reviews had said, the play itself was a bit flaky but Elena Rogers was amazing - and in what seemed rather a Piaf-like way, too: that tiny, fragile frame, emitting a HUGE noise. But I wonder why writers find it so hard to tell Paif's story? Perhaps there's just too much to tell? The film - La Vie En Rose - was really incoherent: I do hate narratives that mess with the chronology purely for the sake of novelty.

I'm thinking a lot about story-telling as I've a third of the way through Russell T Davies' The Writer's Tale - a splendid book. I've been thinking about how gut-wrenching the end of series four was, with Donna Noble saving the world then having to have her memory wiped. I love the way Davies portrayed that as what it really was: a kind of death, real and tragic. One of the mailing lists I'm on had a discussion a while back about what a swizz the '... and it was all a dream' ending is, or even worse the 'and they forgot everything that had happened'. There's a John Masefield that does it, and I know it made my heart sink when I read it. We couldn't remember whether Dan and Una forget everything at the end of Rewards and Fairies. But what's the point of those two whole books, if they do? Oh, and the chap at the end of Silver on the Tree who asks someone else to decide whether he'll remember that his wife was on the dark side, and the supposedly wise old person decides to wipe his mind. Gah!

It made me think: is there anything in my past that's so awful that I'd want to erase it? (Now we've moved on to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - and wasn't that just absolutely the greatest movie title ever? And I love the sci-fi fan who commented that it could well have been called We can forget it for you retail (you'd have to be reasonably geeky to get the reference, I think - can I do a quick straw poll of all the, er, two or three people reading this (hello Mum!) and ask if you do?)) Anyway, I digress. I couldn't think of anything. The events that haunt me aren't the big emotional moments - I wouldn't lose a second of those, however much they hurt at the time - but the small snarly moments of acute social embarrassment, when I said something really tactless. Embarrassment is such a strong emotion, I think - you really feel it physically, in the pit of your stomach. The memories are so tangible: they take decades to fade. But even so, I'd keep them. I want to be reminded not to say something quite that stupid ever again.

(Anyone spot a running theme of nested parentheses in this posting? What's that all about? (Just my butterfly mind, I suppose))

Sublime and ridiculous

2008-11-23T11:06:00.003Z

We spent the day working on Britten's Sacred and Profane. Boy, they were hard: after five or six hours' work, we'd got three out of the eight to the stage where we could risk singing them in public. What I find with Britten is that it just doesn't stick, and I don't know whether it's him or me. I think it's mostly that my taste is for a melodic line, and I'm not very harmonically sophisticated, so all that dissonance that you're supposed to understand and turn into consonance just doesn't quite work for me.

At least all five of us seemed to be in the same boat. But it was a frustrating day. If terribly character building.

Thank goodness for the Guardian

2008-11-18T10:03:00.004Z

There's been some very intelligent writing in the Guardian (as always) about the death of Baby P. I'm not going to write about the details at all, since like many parents I've found that having a child yourself makes it physically painful to think about cases like this. The point the Guardian made was that villifying the social workers involved saves the media the real horror, which is thinking about parents and guardians who kill.

It's actually not that difficult to imagine how horribly difficult a social worker's task might be in terms of visiting these families, working out what's really happening, and knowing when to make a call on it. What is almost impossible to imagine is the mind of someone who is able to damage a child so tiny, or to watch while someone else does. And when it's their own child? My brain simply crashes into the barriers: I don't know how to contemplate the idea. At the deepest level, this is simply, bleakly, literally, inhuman. And this is why we look for the easier targets and the simpler explanations: what lies beneath is too obscene to contemplate.

Polka dots?

2008-11-04T14:47:00.003Z

Cigarettes are blinking in the dark
and making polka dots around the baseball park...

Lovely, isn't it? It sounds like Joni Mitchell, but it's not at *all*. Any of you clever people recognise it? (I know it, but I was surprised it couldn't be googled.)

Idiots

2008-10-24T11:35:00.002Z

Oh, I am so sick of seeing moronic things like this:

By registering on Brand Republic, Haymarket Publishing will automatically provide you with information relating to Brand Republic and other related Haymarket products and services via email, direct mail or telephone.
[ ] Please tick here if you would like to receive carefully screened work-related emails from third parties.
[ ] Please tick here if you do not want to receive relevant work-related direct mail from carefully selected third parties.

Just who thinks this is a clever way of doing things? The blethering bloody idiots. I've had clients argue about this kind of thing in the past because under the Data Protection Act there are now things you have to have an opt-in for, but still some things you only need an opt-out for. But what kind of twerp thinks it makes sense to mix the two together? It's stupid, and it's sad - what it invariably says to me is that anyone who's that desperate to send me spam doesn't have anything worthwhile to tell me, and anyone whose thinking is that muddled wouldn't be able to string a coherent sentence together even if they had. Oh, and they don't care about usability. I cross them off my Christmas card list. Hah!

Way to go, girls

2008-10-23T09:31:00.003Z

I was reading a copy of Cosmopolitan that I retrieved from a skip - I don't acquire women's magazines any other way, these days - and they had a little reader survey. Apparently, 58% of Cosmo readers said they would marry a millionaire whether they loved him or not.

Disgust doesn't even begin to cover my reaction to this. My first thought is that feminism in any meaningful form seems to be dead. My next is that any guy with serious money shouldn't even consider marriage, given that it seems to be inevitable that he'll be stalked by gold-diggers. Presumably the idea in their flimsy little minds is that they'll put up with it for a bit and then screw him in the divorce settlement. Frankly, if that's the way it's going to work, he might as well pay for a sex on a formal basis with real professionals and know exactly where he stands. Given what divorce settlements are like these days, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the hourly rate worked out a lot more competitive that way too.

But urgh. Doesn't it make you feel queasy? And this from a magazine that used to advocate feminism? Not in its most meaningful form, sure - but at least it made an attempt to marry an idea of equality with its capitalist agenda (Be the boss but still wear lipstick!). Now it's just another glossy hymn to self-obsession. Gack.

Parenthesis

2008-10-03T13:09:00.004Z

(A has just emailed me to say that I had a breach of blog anonymity and inadvertently named him - I don't know: is it actually worth being secretive? I have a feeling I decided on it when I was in that frame of mind that assumes that all blogs get picked up for international syndication and then turned into best-selling novels. (This alternates with days when you know that only your Mum reads it.)

I think it was also that I could write about A's children, without their being identifiable (hmm - and does anyone but me use possessives with the gerund any more? Does anyone know what the question means? I'll bet more than one of my gentle readers does, actually).)

Total miscellanea

2008-10-02T15:31:00.010Z

Lawks, I feel as though I haven't stopped scudding around for a fortnight. I really, really have to write about our fabulous musical week at La Maison Verte, but I've got behind myself. To the Globe last night for A Midsummer Night's Dream - I was sorry to miss Timon of Athens, but we couldn't find a babysitter so A went alone - and found it surprisingly pertinent. Dream was great fun, though boy it's long - a solid three hours. As ever with Shakespeare, packed with quotations. "In maiden meditation, fancy-free" I'm sure is quoted in Alcott somewhere. Now I'll have to reread everything. Oooh.

I've been reading a shortened version of Pepys's Diary, and loving it. He's only 28 at the point I've got to, but so thoughtful and entertaining. I really need the unabridged version, with footnotes, though - the editor of this one rather charmingly says that they decided to have fewer notes so as to have 'more Pepys'. The mixture of history - at the pace it actually happens, not the speeded-up version of history books - and domesticity and trivia is uttterly beguiling. And everyone is so cultured: always popping down to the pub to sing part-songs, or staying up late playing the lute. I suppose that's because nobody below a certain level of income is involved. It's obvious what a tough time the servants have: the amount of physical punishment they get is notable.

I'm pleased I read Tomalin's wonderful biography first, to get an overview. I'll have the fun of reading it again afterwards, too!

I also read a biography of Jaqueline Kennedy, as fallout from a brief obsession with the JFK assasination: I remembered one evening that I'd meant to look up the Zapruder video on YouTube as I hadn't ever seen it. About five hours later I looked emerged from the internet, pallid and slightly paranoid. Actually, Wikipedia, the wonderful thing, had a perfectly cogent analysis of the best current thinking. Anyway, Jackie. Gosh, she was a boring woman. There's a photo of her as a stunningly arrogant six-year-old, then as an airily arrogant teenager. Then she marries JFK - for the money and prestige, it seems (they didn't seem to talk to each other much) - finds her vocation and becomes a calmly arrogant clothes horse. Then she marries Onassis for money. What's to like? The biographer obviously loved her, but even so couldn't come up with any reason anyone else should. I dipped in and out and then put it on the Oxfam pile.

I was going to say something about Berty, so I could put in a link to his site, which I built recently using iWeb (free Mac software, pretty results but I suspect rubbish with screen readers as the code must be a dog's breakfast, and you can't reliably increase the font size, which is pants). If anyone knows of something better - maybe a simple CMS system - do let me know: the Fagiolini site is in desperate need of an overhaul, but neither A nor I is any good at building websites, dammit. Have a look at Berty's site and tell me what you think - it needs more visitors as it's not showing up on Google yet.

I should be so lucky

2008-08-19T22:21:00.003Z

I had an unexpected Sash-free evening in London last week, and discovered that 'Merry Wives' was on at the Globe, and had got a rave review in the Guardian. I checked the Globe's website the evening before, and there were at least seven tickets left for the yard (that's where you stand, in the middle: it only costs a fiver and gives a real taste of what it would have been like to be a groundling, I think - it's certainly a unique experience). Next morning I was at work and forgot to phone the damn box office until 1130. They had no tickets left except five for the Yard, which someone on the website was dithering over - call back in 20 minutes, they said. I thought it couldn't take that long, so I called back in five. Sorry, sold out, they said. What about the website, I said - any that anyone's dithering over? Ooh yes, they said. Two left. So I got the last-but-one ticket in the whole theatre. Remarkable luck.

Later that day, a old work colleague of mine came into the office. She had a baby about a year after I did. She had a tough pregnancy: swollen ankles from month one, that kind of thing. And she had terrible problems with her hips - has been in and out of hospital ever since. The kind of thing that's so gruesome you forget the details, deliberately. She was still limping six months later. And she must be at least ten years younger than I am. How on earth did I get off so easily?

So I'm lucky in the big things, and lucky in the small things. It freaks me out rather, if I think about it at all.

'The Merry Wives of Windsor' was really good, too. Aaaargh.

It was quite broad, but never descended into caricature, so when Ford found redemption, it was not only believable but very affecting. Well, I cried, anyway - as usual. One of the things I like most about A, you know - I do call him A, don't I? - is that he cries as often as I do. The scene in the Archers between Ed and Emma had us both wiping tears away afterwards. I don't really feel apologetic about it as I can't see any way in which it's a bad thing - it would be more worrying not to be affected by art, if I may call it that. The Archers is very well written these days.

I've just spent a lovely day with a woman who would be my sister-in-law, if I was married to A and she was married to his brother, and neither of us is. Should I eschew the labels that reflect such tired conventions, or adopt them, as another kind of rebellion? Answers on a postcard would only work if you had very small handwriting.

Proud mother

2008-08-04T17:20:00.004Z

I'd forgotten to say that Sasha is now beginning to put words together, which is fascinating to hear. The sibs have been keen to teach Sash the word 'bum', causing much giggling in the back of the car. Then last week the child farted, looked at me, and said "Noise. Bum." What a prodigy. I thought that was quite conceptually sophisticated, but I may have suddenly morphed into Competitive Parent.

Timewasters

2008-08-03T13:35:00.002Z

Much kudos to Russell T for resolving his cliffhanger in the first twenty seconds of the next episode. That man has style. The conclusion was a real stonker - A and I were both in tears as the doctor left an uncomprehending Donna behind. It all reminded me of a recent mailing list discussion -- probably on the Diana Wynne Jones list, which is by far the nicest list I've ever been on, consisting soley of intelligent, witty, people writing beautifully about relevant subjects and being nice to each other - on the nastiness of the device whereby everyone's memory is wiped at the end of the adventure. The consensus was that it renders the whole story pointless if the characters remember nothing, and it thereby insults the emotional investment you've made as a reader. We didn't agree with that chap in Susan Cooper's The Silver Tree who (SPOILER SPACE) has his memory wiped for him as an act of kindness, either. Anyway, I thought Russell T very adequately demonstrated why it's such a bad thing: the death of the character, in fact.

I've been wasting time online. I can't remember how, but I've stumbled on a lovely blog that dissects some of the very silly comic strips in US papers. Partly I just love his writing style; but the fascination is also in the sheer weirdness of the strips themselves. The blog is Comics Curmudgeon; to see the strips, you can build your own page at the Houston Chronicle's site. From Comics Curmudgeon, I found myself at Judge a book by its cover, a collection of truly dreadful cover art including my all-time favourite cock-up. From there I ended up wasting most of a day at Photoshop disasters: hynotically awful.

The stolen earth - and Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen

2008-06-28T22:39:00.004Z

Oh no! Please don't let David Tennant regenerate... Russell, you bastard... I thought he'd signed up for three specials, anyway - and he's taking a year off to play Hamlet, so he doesn't need to regenerate. Aaargh.

We've been glued to iPlayer again. So cool. Thank you, kindly BBC.

Still recuperating from the music festival. It all went pretty well. Bit of a thin audience for our young artists on the Friday, and Saturday, which was meant to be our jazz picnic, was the one gloomy day this month so we had to picnic inside, but Sunday was all we could have wanted, apart from my mother tripping over the pushchair halfway through my big solo, which made Sasha shriek in sympathy - which made me wonder if I was an unnatural mother, trilling away on my semiquavers while my poor child was carried out screaming "Mummmeee! Mummmmeee!" But then lots of people were around to comfort the poor lamb, whereas only I could sing the cantata. In the event, it was my mum who needed the most care, having taken all the skin off her elbow and gathered some impressive bruises, stone floors being essentially unforgiving.

Gosh, I am tired. I'm going to bid you all goodnight and toddle off to bed. Remind me to tell you about New York some time.

Nothing important

2008-06-17T08:59:00.003Z

Gosh, my mobile phone has returned to life. Sasha had it in the bath, and by the time I got to it it had been thoroughly dunked and was vibrating away in a panic. I took it to bits and left it out in the sun for a day (this was during the last heatwave). The screen dried out quite remarkably - you could see the water inside disappearing - and it ended up looking normal, but when I powered it up none of the buttons worked. I left it to live in the airing cupboard, and it's been there for a month or two. Turned it on again just for the hell of it, and ta-da! It lives!

In a way, it's a pity, as I hated the operating system so much I was quite glad to see the back of it. But of course as soon as I tried other phones I hated them more. And Windows Mobile - what can you say except Aaaaaarrrrgggghhhhh?

Did you know that the motto for the Boys' Brigade is 'Sure and Steadfast', but the motto for the Girls' Brigade (proud owners of one of the most hideous logos you will ever see) is 'Seek Serve & Follow'? The aims for the two sexes are polarised too. Remarkable.

I've been quiet since we came back from New York. Partly because there's been so much to do, with the music festival and work and The Voice (Cambridge NCT magazine) and all, and partly because I meant to write up New York before doing anything else, which was of course hopeless. But also because I've discovered iPlayer. And Doctor Who. It's so perfect for those who don't own televisions: your favourite programmes and no licence fee to pay! I started with the usual crush on David Tennant - sooo cute, and the lovely Scottish accent when he's off duty adds a frisson - but have transferred my affections to Russell T Davies (yes, I'm aware of the very obvious drawback here), who is of course the brains behind the revival but is also lots and lots of fun. A Welsh Joss Whedon. He shoots to the top of our dream dinner-party guest list, possibly even ousting Stephen Fry, who (whom?) I seriously believe to be vastly over-rated.

All this time and I don't have *anything* momentous to say?

The gesture of love

2008-03-02T23:50:00.004Z

So, here's a question for you: which product has the tagline 'the gesture of love you can trust'? So many, many answers. But I'll bet any amount you won't guess.

I've been writing this dratted blog in my head for some time but not actually getting as far as typing it. Life has been hectic: lots of work on, switching days and pitching for new business, and the Cambridge NCT magazine to lay out again. Fifty-six pages, which takes a fair amount of time. It's quite fun, but I'm beginning to wonder...

A friend emailed to ask if I was going to review the BBC Ballet Shoes. Which was rather flattering, as is the fact that someone actually reads this stuff! There's glory for you. We're both Streatfeild fans - and Jill, I still have your copy of Saplings... I missed the broadcast but saw it all on iPlayer, which had launched shortly before. I also found an article by the person who'd written the adaptation, in which she avowed that she'd adored the book as a child and had been determined to secure the job so as not to change a thing and prevent anyone else changing it.

Given all that protestation, it was a bit of a shock to find Garnie apparently dying of TB and falling for a dashing Mr Simpson -- Mrs Simpson having been done away with. But then Mrs Simpson always gets written out, not having enough lines to make the actress worth the money.

The real problems, I thought, were actually the ones you get through knowing a book too well (and not being properly edited). Things didn't get properly explained: why is Sylvia called Garnie half the time, and what does GUM mean (I don't think he was ever referred to as Great Uncle Matthew)? (And by the way, does anyone believe that Richard Griffiths would be capable of walking any distance to find a fossil? He seems barely mobile these days.) On the larger scale, though, because the focus was on incident not on daily life, there was so sense of the Fossils actually practising: in the book, it's the relentless grind of their daily lives that's emphasised. 'The Fossils became some of the busiest children in London.' They work.

On the other hand, there was also the odd lapse of comprehension. I'm with everyone who thought Victoria Wood's wig was just ghastly, but part of the reason was that it was so unsuitable for the character. Nana is nothing if not pragmatic. Is she really going to have a hairstyle that requires her to thread clips all the way through the stuff every night, and then spend all day flicking the ends out of her eyes? I don't think so. The smart outfits seemed all wrong, too, especially those high-heeled lace-ups. Remember Pauline asking,
' "Have you pretty feet, Nana?" She looked down at Nana's square-toed black shoes which she always wore.' Nana is not glamorous.

The bit that made me really squawk, though, was Petrova washing Mr Simpson's car in her Mustard-seed costume. Remember the hoo-hah when Pauline gets above herself acting Alice in Wonderland? What precipitates the showdown is Pauline going off-stage without her wrap. The wrap is an overall that you wear so that your stage costume is protected every moment you're not on stage in it. My goodness, you wouldn't be allowed to go outdoors in it, let alone picking up an oily rag and polishing a car bonnet. That was a very odd lapse.

The biggest blank, I think, was that I didn't get any sense of the dedication of the girls: Pauline's vocation for acting, or Posy's virtuosity. Petrova's boredom and frustration they could do, but they really missed the commitment, the work, the gaining of professionalism: which is what made, and continues to make, the book special. It's not about daydreams and fantasies: it's about hard graft. All the Angelina Ballerina drivel that's about now entirely ignores the fact that nobody, nobody attains proficiency in this kind of thing without a lot of bloody hard work.

And finally.... bet you didn't guess. The picture showed someone in bed with a cat. The ad was for Frontline, which is a catflea repellent that's semi-permanent: you dot liquid of the back of the cat's neck. But the gesture of love you can trust? I can't think of any explanation except real, deranged weirdness.

Bath time

2008-02-19T16:56:00.004Z

I've been spending every waking sunny hour in the garden, digging up nettles before they get going -- most years they're eight feet high before you can blink. We've managed to clear two squares of (potential) vegetable patch and our prospective asparagus bed, so that's rather fine. The sun has now gone in again, so I'm working on the Cambridge NCT magazine -- fifty pages every quarter, which I design in Quark XPress. It's been fun up till now, but just today feels a bit of a slog.

Anyway, I've been meaning for ages to write about our weekend in Bath, back in January. We booked the train tickets and the hotel online. Both sites gave confirmation screens; neither actually put through the purchase. Rotten usability. Luckily I was suspicious that thetrainline.com hadn't emailed me, so I phoned them. And fortuitously, the hotel had a small room that was obviously kept for emergencies, so we weren't thrown onto the streets.

We had a few interesting meals. First was lunch in the Hole in the Wall, which according to A has been around for ever. This was pretty good but not stunning. the service was odd: it seemed to be communal, with everyone in charge of everything, which in practice meant nobody noticed if you'd been sitting with the menu for twenty minutes. In contrast, the Olive Tree had a rigid hierarchy, with one person in charge of lots of powerless minions, some of whom didn't speak English. She was rushed off her feet, so the end effect was much the same. Fabulous food, though, even the trad Sunday roast -- and it's unusual to get a special Sunday lunch menu.

For dinner, we'd tried the trendy new Marlborough Arms but couldn't get in, though they were very nice about this: none of the nuances of tone that some people can get into the question "Have you booked?". So we ended up at Bistro Papillon, which was delightful. Very French, so the food was robustly lovely, the wine was excellent and the staff were completely charming: everyone with complete autonomy to be nice to you -- and they were really sweet to Sasha. I meant to write a glowing review of the food there but by now only have the haziest memories.

Oh -- and take no notice of the woman in Tourist Information who thinks it's only seven miles along the towpath to the next village. She is sooo wrong. We walked for hours, and it was lovely but eventually dark and cold. Still, we got that immensely smug feeling particular to an English climate that we'd made the most of a sunny day and didn't have to mind the next day being vile.

True love

2008-02-11T23:01:00.000Z

"Lawyers haven't been this popular since

Robespierre slaughtered half of France."

Oh my: I love Joni Mitchell.

What a nice chap!

2008-01-09T22:21:00.000Z

He handed Sasha back to me on the train back from London tonight as the infant was zapping off through the carriage. Then he got off at Whittlesford,and offered to help me carry the pushchair over the bridge -- I'd already picked it up and started, so I said I was fine and explained how it's sometimes harder with two people (the baby tends to get tipped out, which is really A Bad Thing). Then I set off for Sawston and about five minutes later he passed me in his car and pulled in to see if I wanted a lift. He said something like "I feel so sorry for you!" so I had to explain that my partner had offered me a lift but I'd turned him down, because I wanted to walk. It was a beautiful night, with lots of stars visible, and Sasha needed to wind down after a busy day in London anyway. But it did seem a little sad that someone couldn't quite believe that I'd want to walk a couple of miles on a nice night. And, conversely, very cheering that people are so helpful and concerned. Having a baby definitely lets you see some of the best of human nature.

One small step for a baby...

2008-01-09T16:54:00.001Z

... was made in front of witnesses yesterday. Turned out all the child needed as an incentive was a room full of people: five mothers and babies at my NCT morning, all applauding. Later that day we walked and kicked a Laphraoig tin (that's the tin the bottle comes in) around the room.

Any ideas for creative uses of a Laphraoig tin once the infant tires of it? Have used them in the past to store knitting needles (but that was a short phase as I don't like activities that prevent me reading) and bicycle spokes (but I never break them, so it was pointless). They seem so potentially useful, but perhaps it's entirely illusory.

The pushchair, which I've been Facebooking about (oh the strain of a multimedia existence) is a triumph. I got it on eBay. It's a very functional thing indeed: an American three-wheeler that's about ten years old: a chassis, three wheels and a canvas sling to put the baby in. I've made a cosytoes (I think this really is a word, you know - it's the name of the thing that keeps the baby warm) out of the raincover, which was missing its frame, and a baby sleeping bag; and a luggage carrier out of an old metal supermarket basket strapped on with some bits from an old rucksack. Lots of fun. And it works!

Flat-out baby

2008-01-07T11:19:00.001Z

We tried an experiment yesterday and got Sasha to bed at 6pm. We'd all gone swimming -- the big kids too -- and everyone was usefully worn out. Sash had a bottle and went to sleep in the car, and was then carefully conveyed to the cot when we got back. Didn't seem to wake up any earlier than usual. We got up at nine, had a bath and played for an hour or so, then had breakfast. Sasha then downed two whole Weetabixes in the time it's taken me to eat a piece of toast, but has now konked out, snoring with head on table. Hmm, interesting.

A has been requesting a new blog entry as he's got me on his home page -- awww -- which means he gets the Ken Dodd song on the brain every morning [after seeing the title, which was 'the greatest gift that I possess']. As is the usual way of things, as soon as I'd posted about being so happy, I got onto a downward slide; partly Christmas, I think: it always seems to be an anti-climax. Perhaps it's because you remember the excitement from childhood, and can never match it as an adult? Oh well. I seem to be better now. Anyway, I was reflecting that 'If you're happy and you know it isn't such a daft summary after all, since knowing you're happy is the essence of the thing: it's all about definitions after all.

The sun is shining and the baby is asleep: I'm going to go and dig up nettles. Huzzah!

The greatest gift that I possess

2007-12-19T14:31:00.000Z

Bonus points (as ever) to anyone who can identify the header (it sounds oddly Christmassy, somehow; but isn't). I've been meaning to write about the nature of happiness for sometime, but have actually been handicapped by not being able to get that bloody song out of my head every time I so much as thought of the word. Arrrgh!

Several different ideas milling around in my head. One is that I've always made a point of giving an honest answer when people ask me how I am. So not necessarily (ha! but pretty inevitably) giving all the gory details, but if they say "How are you?" I say "Crap!" if it's crap; I only say "Fine!" if I am fine. But conversely, if I'm blissfully happy, I say "Blissfully happy." One of the only things in the whole world that so much as faintly annoys me about A is that when I ask how his day has been, he'll often say "Not too bad." Even when I'm fairly sure it has actually been pretty good. And I really dislike the cynicism of that (most kinds of cynicism I'm fine with, obviously; just not that one). I suppose my view is based on honesty: I dislike communication by rote. I don't like it when words lose their literal meaning: I think it's dangerous when you start saying things without thinking about what they really mean. That was one of the things that put me off religion: all that insincere chanting of liturgies.

But I digress. It seems to me to be so grudging to refuse to say that you are fine, you are well, you are happy. doesn't it also rather insult the people with real problems? Another example: In his notes on the musical episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 'Once more with feeling', Joss Whedon (yes, I am about to blaspheme against my god) says, to conclude his introduction, "Very occasionally, if you really pay attention, life doesn’t suck." This really quite offended me, in a way I don't expect Joss ever to. Why? Well, here is a guy who loves writing,who gets to write all day, who has been sucessful, even lauded, for his writing skills. So he's respected in a field in which he wants to be respected. And he's making money. And he's living in an affluent, civilised society, and what's more he's near the top layer of it socially. What the heck has he got to complain about? To put it brutally, what right has he to be grumpy?

I feel the same about myself. Here I am, in a well-paid job, with interesting hobbies, in a nice house, with a nice man, a nice baby, and a nice cat. Oooh, and lots of lovely secondhand paperbacks. I might be me but with health problems. I might be me with not enough money and horrible credit card debts. I might be me with A dead in a car accident, or Sasha with health problems. But that's only the tip of the iceberg: I might be still in this lovely civilised society, but with debts or illness or a dead-end job. I could be in lots of places in the world where being left-wing and outspoken would have got me shot by now. I could be in a country, or at a time, when a 41-year-old having a baby would have very little chance of surviving it. I'm sure you can see where I'm going. We have such privilege that we can barely remember what it might feel like not to have it. And we're not even just -- just!!! -- well-fed and well-housed. We have centuries of literature and music at our fingertips. We have it all!

I keep remembering a lovely column by Andrew Brown, who writes a very interesting blog (I've linked to the blog, not to the article, which was aeons ago). The gist of it was: he was at home, sitting by the fire, with a very nice book and a glass of rather good red wine, thinking how splendid this was. But also relecting that he might have been in much the same situation a hundred, two hundred, even three hundred years ago. Good book, good wine, good fire: these things have been constants. The difference was that three hundred years ago, those pleasures would have been yours only at the very top end of society. Now they're actually pretty modest; easily attainable. It's the old old story: we'd be so happy if only our aspirations didn't always increase to match our achievements.

So, I've been thinking about how wonderful everything is. But I've also been thinking: if I'm so happy,why don't I feel it more? Because things are pretty damn blissful: why aren't I higher than a hawk? Or deeper than a well? I began to wonder whether I was somehow failing to engage with reality: whether I'd somehow detached myself. But the more I've thought about it, the happier I've been feeling; a glow of content has started to permeate me; and so I wonder: are we afraid to be happy? Do we just hate to admit to it? Does it make us seem smug? Is it naff? Are we afraid that if we tell someone we have it all, they'll want to take something away? Maybe it's an English thing, not to gloat. But it's odd, isn't it?

Fritter

2007-11-29T16:01:00.000Z

Well, I've been dissipating my creative energies on Facebook, as everyone warned me I would. But like everyone else, I'm finding that the initial thrill wears off pretty quickly, and you're left constantly infuriated that Scrabulous only succeeds in loading once in twenty attempts.

So much I meant to write about... Most recent first. We went to see The Turn of the Screw at ENO. The balcony seats were smaller than I remembered, and I realised that the price of day seats has quadrupled since I started going -- weren't they £3 not very long ago? The opera was splendidly sung: Rebecca Evans as the governess was terrific, and the boy playing Miles (sorry not to remember his name) was astonishing. It was all rather gloomy -- dark sets, black clothes, lots of fretting, and things didn't (I don't suppose this counts as a spoiler) turn out well. But then there aren't that many cheerful operas.

But life has been hectic: I'm now back at work two days a week, and one of them in London. And this week Sasha has had a bronchial infection which led to an alarmingly high temperature and a lot of wheezing, plus a cough that woke all of us up through the night. Then there was last week's carol concert, which went really well -- even my debut as a conductor -- but was a huge amount of work. And photocopying (legal copies only - Company of Musicians policy!). So I am shattered. But it's good to be busy and doing stuff. I haven't had time to look at Facebook.

That lovely weekend

2007-11-01T16:28:00.000Z

My wonderful baby is sitting happily shoving a plastic toy around, and has been for the last hour or so. Some of that time was spent holding up lego bricks and cooing to them. That was so lovely I positively choked up. I'm so glad Sasha is self-reliant: it's a great gift, I think, to be happy in your own company.

A lovely birthday weekend. I went to Little Quavers with all three children -- the big kids have learned the songs from me: they can pretty much memorise anything on a single hearing. Actually, all the women at the groups seem to learn things with very little trouble: I suspect it's only classical musicians who get so used to the dots that they can't do without them. (Come to think of it, one of the many very impressive things about I Fagiolini is that they can sing huge pieces -- not just (just!!) Monteverdi madrigals but weird contemporary pieces -- from memory.) Anyway, we all walked back from Stapleford, which was just the right distance (though I'd forgotten to double the time to allow for dawdling, sniffing flowers, etc), to lunch with all the women from my NCT morning. Seven mothers and babies all stuffed into our living room, occasionally all crying at the same time. It was a riot. Luckily, A volunteered to make the spag bol as otherwise it would have been pretty hectic.

Close friends for dinner, and A made his famed pea and garlic soup, which I keep promising to post the recipe for here -- but I want to write about the Naming Day too. Then next day our Elgar workshop, with Berty. This had been a delight to fix, so for once I wasn't too grumpy. The music was a revelation: we went from opus 18 to opus 72, and covered a huge range of styles, from faux folk ballad (My love dwelt in a northern land) to fervent godliness (Go, song of mine) to a weird mock-Russian thing (Death on the hills). We all had the tunes on the brain for the next few days. Good stuff. Sunday was late breakfasts and pub lunches and a nice time with the kids.

Also got quite animated because I was asked if I'd like to organise an Advent and Christmas evening in the church. We decide we could do half-and-half Company of Musicians and Come and sing, with me directing the first and A the second, thus usefully dividing the childcare. I'm really enjoying putting a programme together. Partly because I don't seem to have sung at Christmas for a few years, and the music is so fab: Britten's Hymn to the Virgin, Howells' A Spotless Rose, Byrd's Laetentur coeli --- oooh, yummy yummy...

Knocked up

2007-10-31T23:07:00.000Z

Went to see this movie last week as it got a stunning review in the Guardian. It wasn't quite as good as all that, I thought, but I couldn't quite put my finger on what was wrong with it. It did manage to avoid a lot of cliches, but actually I don't think it replaced them with anything, so remained rather hollow.

I can see why the reviewer thought it was sweet, but the sweetness needed a little more substance. There really wasn't anything (minor spoilers here) to show why the female character would decide to make a go of it with the geeky guy. If we'd seen some evidence that she'd had a hard time with a couple of smart-alecky media guys, say, it might have made more sense for her to go for someone she perceived as sweet but dorky. But I suppose I did like the way that his sweetness wasn't overplayed.

The sexual stereotyping seemed to slightly patronise both sides, as it often does (yes, I know that's a split infinitive, and I see no reason to avoid them -- if you disagree, tell me why). It seemed odd that neither female character had any other female friends. But that explained why the sister in particular was jealous of her partner's relationship with other men, though what wasn't clear was why the writer seemed to think this was reasonable of her. Ooh, she was horrible. Is it really all right for someone to love you so much that they want you to be with them all the time, and regard time spent with other people or even time spent on your own as a betrayal? If this had all been the other way round, she'd have been demanding 'me time' (loathsome phrase) and that would have been just fine, wouldn't it?

It was certainly thought-provoking in a way one doesn't expect a slushy romcom to be. And that has to be the most realistic childbirth scene I've seen. Ouch.

Good places to eat in London and, er, Pampisford

2007-10-16T12:53:00.000Z

Fellow fenlanders might like to try out the Chequers, in Pampisford: quite a nice walk from Sawston. They've revamped their menu, and it's pretty darn good. A had the sausage and mash, which was okay but lacked onions. I had a jacket potato with smoked bacon, mushrooms and gruyere. Just the right degree of ponciness, and they didn't skimp on the cheese. Excellent stuff. And a good range of beers. Much better than the Red Lion in Ickleton, where we went a week or two ago because it had been recommended: definitely over-poncified, and our home-made burgers were really quite nasty.

In London next to Farringdon tube, and nipped into a new place called St Germain. Turned out to be pretty packed, but they said they'd see what they could do. When I said apologetically that we also had a pushchair, they were all smiles. I was waiting a minute or two for the manager and three different members of staff came over to say he wouldn't be long... gosh. The manager himself managed not to make "You haven't booked?" sound like a snub, and was as helpful as a human being could be. We also saw that they have a set menu at two courses for £14, three for £17, which they do *all the time*. We will be back! (89-90 Turnmill Street, EC1M 5QU)

As we couldn't get a table there, though, we set off for Exmouth Market. Everywhere was either packed to bursting, or completely empty. Then at number 55 was a place that looked good. Again, super-friendly staff, pushchair no problem. In fact,this time the manager came over with a lime and a cork for Sasha to play with. And the guy at the next table spent ages talking to Sash. And the food was *fab*. The starters we chose were foie gras parfait, mmmmmm, which they recommended a glass of dessert wine with, and it was an especially gorgeous one. And scallops, which were cooked to perfection -- tricky, as they take less than a minute -- with fennel, which was beautiful. Main courses of beef something, lovely again, with polenta to die for (no idea how they made it so tasty), and a fantastic puree they said was parsley, though I don't usually like parsley and this was yummy. And a red wine risotto with goats' cheese and beetroot that was pure genius, and possibly the only time that a vegetarian option has actually competed with the carnivorous stuff. Puddings were a divinely squidgy chocolate pudding with marmalade ice cream, yum yum, and a very tasty cheese selection. All that, and every person in there -- customers and staff -- was lovely. Starters were £5-8, mains £8-14 or so. Do go: The Ambassador, 55 Exmouth Market, EC1R 4QL.

Under attack

2007-10-16T12:49:00.000Z

As well as eating my shirts in the loft, the mice have also chewed through our phone cable (they're trying to cut us off!!). The moles in the garden have dug another hole in the lawn. And the moths in the clothes room have nibbled another two of my favourite jumpers, despite there being so many mothballs scattered around that a recent guest refused to sleep in there.

It's been that kind of week. For the last fortnight.

Hurrah (again) for Libby Purves

2007-10-10T23:24:00.000Z

I've just been re-reading Libby Purves' Holy Smoke, subtitled Religion and Roots: A Personal Memoir. A wonderful book: very affecting. I suppose in essence it's a defence of religion, and in particular Catholicism, but it's so very well written. I think it's partly that Purves is intellectual, so there's nothing sloppy about it: she knows her doctrine and her CS Lewis. But she's also not afraid to have, and to declare, moral standards, and rigorous ones at one. It impressed me, and made me cry.

The bits of autobiography in it made me realise that Love Songs and Lies has quite a lot of her own life in it, and I think that may be why it doesn't quite come off as a novel: the first-person narrator doesn't quite convince, being a mixture of fact and fiction. Given the amount of thought I've now devoted to this novel, though, I have to admit that it made a strong impression. In comparison, the last Joanna Trollope I read, Second Honeymoon, I looked at the spine of a couple of days later and found I couldn't recall a thing about it: not characters, not plot, not nothing.

Libby Purves has always cheered me up. Even when I had no intention of having children, I would read How Not To Have A Perfect Child just to be cheered by its good sense and decency: it restored my faith in human nature. Later, it made me realise that bringing up children might be more interesting -- in an intellectual sense, I suppose -- than I'd ever thought.

Holy Smoke is a really convincing defence of religion. It makes me feel that it would be a lovely thing to be a Christian and do it properly: it would make life both simpler (in terms of moral choices) and more rich, and be rewarding; a source of comfort. A counsellor once told me that her happiest patients were Christians, and that seemed perfectly logical.

I could never overcome my Darwinist principles enough to truly believe, but if I can't accept Christianity intellectually, I think I can understand it emotionally. Having been a Catholic helps, of course, but mostly it's the music, and the words. Some hymns still choke me up. (Singing on Sunday with a not very musical congregation and an effortful organ, I still choked up at the lines 'A thousand ages in thy sight/Are like an evening gone.' I like the grandeur of those sentiments. The modern liturgy seems to have somewhat neglected grandeur. Possibly in favour of Relevance, which is almost always A Bad Thing.)

It's time to go to bed. I've been stacking all my books into alphabetical piles, but there are still lots of them. Maybe double-shelving them is the answer. As it took me two years in this house just to get them all out of the boxes, I don't know that shelves are going to happen any time soon. How long, how long?

Baby vampire

2007-10-10T21:11:00.000Z

Sasha has more teeth! But instead of two top front ones, the ones outside those have come in. So our little one is going to look like a vampire. What fun! And how very suitable... I've been trying to catch a demonic grin on camera, but I really need an assistant to jump around.

Why I like shagging

2007-10-09T23:52:00.001Z

It's just such a good word for it. In my opinion. But not in everyone else's...

"Think of the transitive verbs for sex ... screw, hump, ball, dick, bonk, bang, shag, pork, shtup," says Steven Pinker in his new book. "They're not very nice, are they?"

Well, much as I love Steven, I have to disagree. I think some of them are much nicer than others, to the point of being -- well, pretty nice, actually. The f-word (first in his list, but edited out to make this more respectable) is a horrible word for the act. It's more useful as a swear word than anything else. (I am trying to give it up or at least cut down, since A said he thought it might be Sasha's first word. Oh dear.) But 'bonk' -- well, that's sweet, isn't it? And slightly crazy: associations with 'bonkers'. And I like the onomatopeia (gosh, that's hard to spell -- I'm not going to double-check, it's 1am here). 'Shag' is definitely my favourite, though, and A's. But a friend recently objected to my use of the term here, and as she's reserved but definitely not prudish I was startled, and gave it some thought.

First of all, to me, it sounds much less like something that somebody does to someone else than words like 'poke'. (I Speak As One who, as a feminist undergraduate, used the term 'make love with' to avoid such connotations.) Secondly, it's self-deprecating. It implies fun and slight naffness. I think the associations are with 'shaggy' (and therefore Scooby-Doo, if you're the right age) and 'shag pile'.

Because of this implicit humour, it makes the act sound fun, which is to be commended. 'Bonk' sounds fun too, but I suppose it has a suggestion of force, which we don't want. Not very much, though. Perhaps it also sounds just a bit too silly, whereas 'shag' has the hint of smut that's needed. 'Shag' also somehow connotes relaxation, casualness. You can say 'Fancy a shag?' in a very unthreatening way, and none of the others quite works like that.

Actually, looking at the list again, is 'dick' really a euphemism for sex? I thought it meant willy. Interesting how many words for sex and the make organ end in '-ck'. And 'shtup' ( why shtup when it's schmaltz not shmaltz and so on -- or isn't it Yiddish?) is too hard to say.... Imagine trying to ask "Fancy a schtup?" when drunk, as you almost invariably would be.

My favourite Steven Pinker joke: A linguist is giving a lecture. The linguist says, "Although there are many examples of the double negative in many languages, there are no examples in any language of a double positive." A rival linguist at the back of the hall says "Yeah, yeah."

Joss, oh Joss

2007-10-09T22:55:00.001Z

I've just discovered that number one on Joss Whedon's desert island book list is A Little Princess -- how sweet is that? I would love to ask him why he thinks the recent movie changed the ending. SPOILER if you think you're going to read this Victorian children's classic by Frances Hodgson Burnett... in the movie, Sarah's father is lost but comes back to be reunited with her. In the book, she suffers through adversity but triumphs; he dies and stays dead. Someone apparently couldn't cope with the whole death thing. Isn't it rather the point of the book? Sarah survives by imagining things are different, but I don't think she ever conjures up her father. Gosh, it's more interesting than I thought...

Next bit is for kidlit fans only. I've just checked the spelling of Burnett on Wikipedia, and discovered that Sara Crewe (1888) was rewritten as A Little Princess (1905). I've always been puzzled by the bit in Antonia Forest where Nicky finds a book called Sara Crewe: it looks as though this explains it. It's the one where Marie Dobson dies, isn't it.... and Nicola has won the form prize but may have to leave Kingscote... aha, must be Attic Term?

I've just joined Facebook. I seem to be the last person to arrive at the party.

PS Joss's list:
"Assuming they're books I've already read: 1) A Little Princess 2) Dombey and Son 3) Dune 4) Hitchcock by Truffaut 5) Pride and Prejudice." Joss Whedon IS eclectic!

First person singular

2007-10-08T09:59:00.000Z

I was thinking about the Libby Purves novel again and realised that the real problem with it for me is that the first-person narrator is so self-conscious. This only works, I think, if there's an explanation for the first-person narration. If it's unexplained, too much intrusion from the narrative voice can destroy the whole illusion -- after all, a first-person narrative is intrinsically artificial. ("Odsbobs! I hear him just coming in at the Door. You see I write in the present Tense," as Fielding says in Shamela. There is nothing new under the sun...)

What I'd have done -- and this may only make sense if you've read the book -- is address the whole novel to the daughter, so that the story is the mother's explanation. That would also avoid the problem that if it was real -- which you are by implication being asked to believe while you're reading it -- there's no way the daughter would let it be published.

I read Espedair Street again, to compare it. What I like most about it is the physical sense you get of the protagonist: Banks is very consistent about it, and I like that. Purves's narrator was a bit too generic, in comparison. Hmmm. Need a close textual analysis, really. I'll stop there. Oh, but yes, I have read The Business: I've read all Banks's fiction, but not all the science fiction, which I think it's fair to say is more variable. I started one that was purely about robots and was obviously a bit of an experiment, and it didn't really grab me. My favourite, which I suspect I share with a lot of people, is The Player of Games. Also re-read Complicity. It was nastier than I'd remembered. I wonder if Banks's politics are going to make the books date really badly?

Lies and Love Songs

2007-10-04T10:26:00.000Z

I read Libby Purves' latest novel last night. Love Songs and Lies: an interesting one (and wouldn't Lies and Love Songs have been more mellifluous?). I think it's the first of hers with a first-person narrator, and it's quite awkwardly done: the first twenty or so pages were so self-reflective that I almost gave up. She's an interesting author: some of the novels, particularly More Lives Than One, are obviously written with a particular issue in mind, but they're often none the worse for that. I should be able to make an intelligent comparison of Purves with Joanna Trollope, but it's tricky (I am rubbish at analysing novels -- wish I'd realised this before I did an English degree...).

They both focus very much on families, which presumably is what gets them pigeonholed as 'for women's'. This one was, in fact, partly a chick version of Espedair Street. (By Iain Banks, and terrific stuff if you don't mind a large does of his usual wish-fulfilment: it's only really bothered me in Dead Air, where it seemed to take the story beyond the bounds of reasonable possibility -- perhaps because it affected both the narrator's job, and his love life.) The idea that you could write pop lyrics by paraphrasing great literature must be one that occurs to lots of English graduates -- I'm reminded of the narrator in Martin Amis's The Rachel Papers writing a letter persuading a girlfriend to sleep with him, based line by line on Marvell's To His Coy Mistress. But it was nicely done here.

As usual, some sloppy sub-editing: possibly not at all, of course. What is, for instance, 'a Burne-Jones Ophelia'? Is she thinking of Millais or Waterhouse? (Or is there a Burne-Jones I don't know about? I can't think of any Shakespearean subjects in his stuff.) And why does she think that Durufle's motet Ubi caritas starts with upper voices, when in fact it begins with divided altos and no sopranos? And, oh dear, on the penultimate page it suddenly goes horribly rhetorical. I'd have been getting out the red pen as soon as I saw "Life!". But I'm nitpicking. I enjoyed it.

Also read Anne Tyler's Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant for our book group. Really liked this -- the narrative voice was so unobtrusive and understated. It seemed to me a sign of great confidence to write so subtly: in my experience it's the worst writers who feel the need to over-describe. Nothing conventional about the story or the plot, either. I'd only previously read The Accidental Tourist, so I'll definitely be reading more of her work.

Hurrah for Blogger's automatic draft saving: I managed to press some combination of keys that shut down the PC. Very fat fingers indeed.

It's that time of year again...

2007-10-04T10:20:00.000Z

... and my mum has given me a flamethrower for my birthday.

It's a little more tame than I was envisaging. I'd thought I'd be striding through the vegetable patch in my combats torching our eight-foot nettles, but, sadly, it's more like making a crème brulée. There are lots of fun-busting instructions on the packaging about how you don't need to incinerate the weeds, just warm them up enough to damage the cell walls. Bah. Having followed all this to the letter, though, I notice that the clumps of grass on our drive seem largely unaffected by the stipulated light toasting. I figure that gives me licence to be more vicious next time.

Oh-oh

2007-09-26T00:11:00.000Z

Or however you spell it -- I know how you say it. Spellings for some of those vocalisations are very weird: I was quite old before I connected 'tut tut' and the tongue-clicking sound, or 'ahem' with throat-clearing. Presumably, the way these end up written is by some kind of implicit consensus.

(Anyway: oh-oh. Sasha has discovered the compost bin as a handy source of tasty, partially decomposed snacks. I turn away for thirty seconds and the child will be sitting in a heap of yesterday's cold pilau rice, ancient banana skins, and week-old peelings, tucking in with gusto. I prised a tiny hand off a cold tea-bag as it approached the ever-gaping maw. Bleargh. How d'you spell that?)

There's glory for you!

2007-09-13T16:27:00.000Z

Glory be. Sasha has finally started having an afternoon nap, just as normal babies do. For two days it was twelve-thirty to two-thirty, then just as I was getting complacent it was summarily changed to one-thirty to two-thirty plus half an hour of screaming. Today, it's been an hour since four-thirty. So not exactly Gina Ford, but fab nonetheless. Finally I can type with both hands and have semi-coherent thoughts.

I have finally repaired the bathroom door handle so that the door can be firmly shut. This is so that certain people cannot have the fun of dropping things down the toilet, including brand-new toilet rolls (docked from future pocket money! You have been warned!!) and their sister's toothbrush (rinsed and replaced -- she'll never know...)

Forgot to add to my book list a novel by Lynne Truss, Tennyson's Gift. Like her other two novels (and incidentally I do wish that people would stop writing 'as with' in that formulation -- it's no less wrong (or informal, I should say) than 'like' is, but it sounds stupid), Going Loco and With One Lousy Free Packet of Seed, this was a comic romp that teetered of the verge of being very silly indeed but was redeemed by thoughtful characterisation. Golly, that sounded poncey. The other two had plots that got really preposterous, and then there was a twist that made sense of it all -- cleverly done. TG was also stuffed full of quotations from Alice, which is always a good thing. I read some crummy piece of journalism the other day (I've had some free subscriptions to women's magazines, and boy there's some dross out there) by some idiot woman who thought the White Queen went around saying "Off with his head!". Not only the wrong character -- it's the wrong bloody book. Gah! And where was the sub-editor? Double gah!

Truss also had an interesting take on Dodgson (that's Charles Lutwidge, who translated his first two names into Latin and switched them around to make his pen-name, Lewis Carroll), which I much appreciated. While depicting him as extremely eccentric, and his relations with little girls as rather peculiar, she didn't have him pegged as an outright paedophile. I was pleased about this, as it seems to me to be an essentially modern interpretation of his behaviour, and one that doesn't allow for the notion of innocence, or of a strict morality that would know just what boundaries could not be crossed. I also think that some people are genuinely asexual. And that Dodgson was one of them.

Bother -- screams from above. Unless it's someone else's baby, in the High Street. Many books say that the Mother can recognise her Own Child. They are wrong. Sometimes I can't even tell whether it's Sasha or the cat.

Oh, nuts!

2007-09-10T14:21:00.001Z

So much for a diet diary. So far, my circumference before breakfast has not once been as little it was on the day I started eating less. Bah! A plague on slimming. I have even eaten some of my midget gems, so there. A didn't believe I could distinguish one from another, so we did a blind tasting test and he has had to eat his words. It took me one gem to attune my palate, and then I was almost infallible. Green ones are the easiest.

Hot news on the Sasha front -- we have babbling! We went for our eight-month checkup last week and as the doctor pointed out, not going till you're ten months old is a good way to pass. But then she asked if Sasha was saying dadada and bababa and I had to say that the only sound the child makes (excluding screams, of course) is "Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah". Fabulous breath control, but you couldn't call it babbling. Then yesterday we had an "App....rrrrr" (that's the first bit of 'apple' followed by a raspberry) and suddenly we're babble central. Lots of silly noises too -- it's a shame English doesn't have raspberries in, really.

We are also very concerned about our hair. We fuss with it while we're breastfeeding, to make sure it's tidy. then this morning we got a lot of butter on our mitts and tried a bit of styling. We've chosen the mad professor look.

Diet

2007-09-03T17:16:00.000Z

Very well, then. I have grown out of all but my two most elasticated pairs of trousers, so it really is time to lose some girth (I can't lose weight as there aren't any scales here). My friend N told me very firmly that I was Not To Diet while I was breastfeeding, so this will just be an attempt to eat more healthily and get more exercise. Perhaps I should keep a food diary? Would that be too dull? Would it stop me eating the odd handful of midget gems? (Such a pain that I have just discovered the perfect gems: Woolworth's budget brand -- only 39p a packet! -- have lovely chemicals and a perfect consistency, bother it.)

Am already poleaxed by torpor. I can't possibly type in every meal: that would be sooo dull. Anyway, had healthy lunch of bowl of sweetcorn: have discovered that tinned stuff is much better than frozen as not all mushy. Plus needs only two minutes in microwave. Only 68p a tin, too. Why does mere thought of dieting force one to write like Bridget Jones? Aaargh.

Camp fun

2007-09-03T16:52:00.000Z

Gosh, time has galloped by. We went to Sizewell last week, camping with all three children. The weather was wonderful -- it only rained at night, just as in Camelot. It's all thanks to Grandma Pam, who gave us money for a family holiday a couple of years ago which we invested in the kit. I was used to the technical stuff -- lightweight thermarest, down sleeping bag, and all that, but for family camping in summer with a car, the cheap kit is amazingly effective. A's top tip was to get a six-person tent even though there were four of us. Since the manufacturers expect you to pack in like sardines, this has worked out well. Those red and blue inflatable mattresses are very comfortable too. The sleeping bags are a bit flimsy, but as they are £20 for two we've just bought another pair (they make cheap cushions for the garden loungers). We got it all from Argos.

I spent two years dithering about a gas hob for my kitchen, and during that time we cooked on a meths stove -- eventually upgrading to two meths stoves. So getting them out again is all very nostalgic. My top recipe for camping is corned beef hash. In its simplest form, you can just put a standard sized tin of baked beans (other brands don't seem to be as good as Heinz) and a half-sized tin of corned beef (otherwise there's too much beef) into a pan and stir them till they turn to sludge. (A half-sized tin of corned beef is almost the same price as the full size, but there's no point keeping a half tin in the fridge because you won't eat it, will you?). That will feed two people; for four it's easier, of course: two tins of baked beans and one tin of corned beef. A dash of Worcestershire sauce makes it even nicer. Or you can grate cheese over the top. For the poncey version, start by frying an onion: A uses olive oil but I prefer butter. Is there a more glorious smell in the world than onions frying in butter? Anyway, there you have it: a spendid dinner or a really fabulous breakfast.

Other top tips: wherever you go on holiday, whatever you're doing, take a headtorch. It's as useful as a swiss army knife. By the way, I got mine as a present when I did a concert in Switzerland, from Mr Victor Inox himself. I always thought it was a brand name, but it's not.

I read an Agatha Christie, The Seven Dials Mystery, which was really rather silly. Also read recently: Swallowdale, the sequel to Swallows and Amazons. Really lovely, and so wholesome I felt cleansed by the experience. Also Wolf Wing by Tanith Lee, which was pretty inconsequential: a series that seems to have run out of steam, especially when the novelty of the diary format has worn off to leave it just plain irritating. Steaming on with Lois McMaster Bujold, I read Memory, which was a stonking tome and immensely enjoyable. Also a story called 'Winterfair Gifts' in an anthology called (can't remember, I'll fill it in later). I'm sure an Amazon review said it wasn't worth bothering with, but after Komarr and A Civil Campaign I loved having this to tie things up. I also read Diplomatic Immunity, which was a nice uncomplicated detective mystery in space.

Nine months in, nine months out

2007-08-13T15:30:00.000Z

Oh dear, it's been ages. Ah well. Sasha is now nine months old, which is nicely symmetrical. Our little prodigy has now been introduced to Shakespeare: we went to see Othello at the Globe last week. Slightly fraught, as you really can't prevent the occasional squawk and it's really quite a quiet, domestic play: lots of scenes with only two or three people in. [Info added much later - you can take babes in arms to the Globe, which is brill and authentic of them, so I took Sash in a sling. Which did, after a bit, hurt. Quite a lot. But it was worth it.]

Very good, I thought: I was interested in seeing Tim McInnerny as Iago as I only know him from Blackadder. He was certainly a change from the simmeringly evil Iagos you sometimes see: very obviously making it up as he went along rather than having some fiendish masterplan, which makes perfect sense when it's pure luck that he gets his hands on the handkerchief. As ever, the strangulation scene was absolutely vile, though not quite as awful as a Cheek by Jowl production I saw years ago in Cambridge, where Othello was really huge and Desdemona tiny, and he lifted her right off her feet. Urgh. I don't think I'd quite clocked before just how far Othello falls: he actually tries to protest his innocence to Aemilia after she's found him with Desdemona's corpse. At that point he really has lost every ounce of his integrity. A nasty, nasty play: A and I were both in tears afterwards.

I really must try to write about things while there's still time to encourage you to go and see them, though.

A few bits and pieces I've been meaning to post... If you're interested in creative writing, and particularly if you're writing spec scripts for TV (no, I've never met anyone who is, either), check out Jane Espenson's blog. She's a writer for Buffy (yes, and I found the link to her site reading footnote number 62 of the Wikipedia article on Buffy, so how sad am I? (Very, very sad, I know, what the hey.) She's very sweet and very funny, and a lot of what she says is interesting even if you're not writing spec scripts.

Also an article in The Onion which I think may be my second favourite of all time. Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does. It's so bloody true. "Shopping for shoes has emerged as a powerful means by which women assert their autonomy," says an expert... If you've never come across the Onion, do give it a try: It's very American, and very funny: really cynical, and very well written. Oooh, look! They still have my favourite article of all time. Isn't the internet jolly? This one is possibly the most over-the-top bit of prose I've ever encountered. Love it to bits. It's called This New Toilet Paper Is So Soft And Absorbent! Don't read it if you have an aversion to toilet humour is all I can say. Sample line: errr, actually, it's just too disgusting to quote, and the cumulative effect is a large part of it. Still I can assume you're not easily offended if you've read my birth story, right?

Contrasts

2007-07-12T13:20:00.000Z

Two interesting articles in last weekend's Guardian (the weekend before, now I'm finally finishing this). One is by a woman who got amicably divorced and found that all her friends expected her to be rather more devastated than she was. "Someone writes [to me]: 'There are no words for a catastrophe of this magnitude. I am thinking of you.' And it begins to seem as if my husband has, in fact, not moved five minutes away but died." In many ways she's enjoying her newfound freedom, and is coping just fine, but people just won't accept this. "At no other point in my life have so many people tried so hard to convince me of how miserable I am," she says.

The other is by a woman who gave birth to a stillborn baby. Gut-wrenching. But in stark contrast, she found that her friends were mostly embarrassed, and desperate for her to 'get over it' and get back to normal. They advised her to take anti-depressants, but she wasn't depressed: she was grieving. I wonder why that's something that's not allowed any more?

Maybe we can cope with divorce because it's comprehensible: anyone who's even been dumped can empathise to a certain extent. We all know about rejection. But death is the great mystery, and getting more mysterious all the time. I watched both my father and my grandmother die, in their own homes. It wasn't terrifying in any of the ways you might think, and both of them had huge reserves of courage and dignity. Especially with my father, who I'd been very close to, I really believe that seeing it happen made it easier to cope with. If I hadn't been there, I'd have found it difficult to believe that it had really happened; that he'd really gone. But the number of people allowed to die at home must be getting less and less. I proselytise for home birth whenever I can, but I begin to think we need a campaign for home death too. Maybe if death was closer, and in a familiar place, we'd cope with it better?

Si ch'io vorrei morire

2007-07-10T15:33:00.000Z

To London yesterday evening, feeling very odd without a baby anywhere on my person. We went to see the last UK performance of The Full Monteverdi by I Fagiolini, and had the pleasure of taking along a friend who didn't know what was going to happen.

Everyone is sitting at little tables, with drinks and nibbles, talking amongst themselves, some more earnestly than others. There's no stage or obvious area where anyone can perform. So you sit down, chat amongst yourselves. Then someone starts to sing. Someone sitting next to you joins in... soon there are five or six voices weaving in and out of each other. It gets louder and more passionate... someone stands up, and you see that each singer has a partner, and six miniature dramas are enacted. The music, from Monteverdi's fourth book of madrigals, is sublime, and the harmonies unbelievably dissonant at times.

As a friend said, the singing would be pretty stupendous if they were reading from music standing on a concert stage. In fact, they're singing from memory while acting out a scene that's designed to follow an emotional arc within the music, over the course of an hour or so. It's amazingly intense. I was almost in tears at some points, and A definitely was. The singers are just fabulous (we both have a crush on the mezzo, who's got the sexiest low notes you've ever heard). They've just finished recording a DVD of it, which will be out "in time for Christmas". From the trailer, it looks fascinating -- a long way from just a live recording of the show. There's a trailer if you're interested. And if you ever get the chance to go -- I think they're doing three performances in New York, which may be the last ever -- then go, and take all your friends.

Do have a look at the Fag's website, too: other people have written about this far more poetically than I can.

Sumer was icumen in

2007-07-09T11:37:00.000Z

This is odd: I though this blog couldn't show pictures. Now I spot a huge button to add a picture. Duh and double-duh. Anyway, here's a reminder of the glorious summer we had back in spring -- and a touching cross-species relationship too...

How pleasant to know Dr Greer

2007-07-03T16:14:00.000Z

Oooh, ooh, I am starstruck. I just met Germaine Greer in Budgen's. Actually, I passed her in the High Street and took too long to recognise her, then dithered for five minutes before going in, running her to earth next to the cat food, and introducing myself. She was extremely nice, cosidering how weird it is to be accosted by a stranger (I know this because I occasionally meet someone who knows me because they've seen me sing, so I don't know them.): friendly to Sasha and quite chatty. She was buying a Guardian because she's got an article in today about the Australian Aborigines, which sounded suitably polemical.

I just wanted to tell her that if there was one book that changed my life, it was The Female Eunuch, which I read when I was about fourteen. If nothing else, it makes other feminist writing pale into the shadows, being both logically argued, fiercely polemical and in places very funny. I stopped buying Spare Rib (yes, cast your mind back to the eighties...) when it started carping about Victoria Wood not being radical enough and I realised that they had missed the point. Which is that humour is a far better tool for changing people's minds than aggression can ever be. Proven, in fact, by comparing the longevity of the magazine, and Wood, who seems to be turning into a female version of Michael Palin and therefore quite a national institution.

Anyway, we talked about The Thorn Birds , as she is writing about it, she said. It has interesting comparisons with Gone with the Wind, which -- in my opinion -- has interesting comparisons with Vanity Fair. Dr Greer (except I bet I'm years out of date and she's Professor Greer by now, isn't she? Rats) said she's never been able to get through Thackeray, which surprised me as I think compared with, say, Dickens, he's easy to read. And Vanity Fair is a fabulous novel: Thackeray has a wonderful narrative voice, generous but cynical, and there isn't a two-dimensional character in the book. And it has one of the most devastatingly written deaths in literature. And of course Becky Sharp is an incredible creation.

I haven't read any of his other books, mind you. Someone once told me that the others are more populist, since he felt that VF didn't make him enough money. I'll have to try one day, though.

I wonder if there are any phrases in Bunyan that haven't been used? Could you have a magazine called Slough of Despond? I suppose not...

Sasha is wrestling with a banana skin and now has a facepack of brown slime. The child seems to get rather more fun from the skin from the banana, but hey, this is a household that eschews petty convention, no? A recent visitor warned me solemnly that banana skins are poisonous. It's odd how people will do that.

And larger conventions too, of course. Apparently some people *did* object to my breast-feeding at a parish council meeting. The comment was (I'm told): "Who is that woman? And is she married?" Priceless. I told my informant I hoped he'd let them know that I most certainly was not...

Requiem for a concert

2007-06-27T15:53:00.000Z

Phew. It's taken me three days to recover enough from our local music festival to write about it. We ended the festival with a performance of the Brahms Requiem in a transcription he did himself for piano duet -- we used two pianos, as we hadn't been sure which it was meant to be and the hire charges turned out to be almost the same. It should have been one -- or was at the first performance in 1871 (done because the venue wasn't big enough for an orchestra) -- but the editor of the score had made suggestions for extra octaves if you had the luxury of two.

I left choosing an outfit till an hour before the start time so as to have something to panic about other than my solo. I'm back to how overweight I was before I got pregnant, which is as much as I've ever been. As I buy all my clothes second hand and aren't too bothered about a snug fit, I generally have a range of sizes, and so it proved. A quite liked the look of the one I had to pour myself into, but my mother pointed out that the zip was straining and sanity prevailed. Sequins have amazingly little give, you know. I didn't want anything hampering my lung capacity -- that opening phrase demands every ounce of oxygen if you're not to snatch a breath in the middle (it's a sublime tune, 'Ihr habt nun Traurigkeit'). Anyway, it was all worth it, because I Did It In One. I was really quite pleased, as I didn't even always manage it in rehearsal. What with thinking about breathing, mood, a wide domey shape in my mouth (Berty speak), relaxing my tongue and not sticking my chin out, I fear that once again singing it in tune may have been pushed out by lack of memory capacity, but the people I asked who I expected to be candid said it hadn't been flat. In a week or so, when the buzz has worn off, we'll listen to the recording. I'm still not sure I woulnd't rather have the warm cosy glow of a memory happily distorted by the adrenalin rush, though.

An excellent group of singers, too: it's so lovely to listen to the exposed entries and not cringe. One needs all those choral society memories of fuzzy basses, histrionic tenors, wispy altos and strangled sopranos in order to appreciate really good singers. We did it with thirteen -- three to a part, plus an extra soprano to spare my blood pressure. They really were rather fabulous.

What can we do next year, though? Does anyone know of any good stuff that can legitimately be sung with piano or two-piano accompaniment, or have we exhausted that category? (We've done the Rossini Petite Messe Solenelle (piano and harmonium) and Carmina Burana (two pianos and percussion).) I guess we'll have to start thinking about a small orchestra, whether modern or baroque. Oh lord, it's going to be hell to organise. Ah. And there is one other requirement: if I'm going to fix the thing, it would be nice if it had a soprano solo. Wouldn't it? (Sniff.)

You read it first here! (errr... probably)

2007-06-27T15:45:00.000Z

Baby-lead weaning has hit the media by the looks of it: there's an article about it in last Saturday's Times. As well as saying that purees are a waste of time, there's a new tide saying that the advice not to give solids at all until six months is wrong: it's based on research with third-world babies, which grow more slowly as they're less well nourished than ours.

All the women I know have started weaning before six months because it was clear that the babies wanted solid food. But health vistors are still laying down the law about it. I wonder why? I don't quite see why one has to look for governmental guidance in these matters anyway.

But then I've always had a low tolerance of food experts' advice: I've been eating butter steadily since the fashion for margarines -- and early lab experiments such as Outline, YEUCH! -- right through until they realised that maybe all those mad-scientist chemicals weren't such a good idea after all.

I'm going to write about BLW for the next issue of the Cambridge NCT magazine, anyway, and have been taking pics of Sasha reducing broccoli to its component molecules with which to illustrate it. Hurrah!

Oh, bloody hell

2007-06-22T21:45:00.000Z

Oh lord, I so hate fixing concerts. Well.... certainly at this point of maximum stress when you get to the end of your list and you still haven't got enough singers and the date is getting closer and closer and you send out increasingly desperate emails to increasingly distantly known people and some of them still just don't answer at all and and and. It must be grim to do it professionally, where you do all the organising and don't even get to perform -- which at least you do, when you're an amateur, and fixing things you can sing in yourself. At which point it does at last seem worthwhile. Thank goodness.

Professional music really does sound like a dog's life a lot of the time. Well, I suppose in essence the perks aren't much better than those you get as an amateur, and the cons are very large cons -- the endless travelling, the constant pressure, the scrimped rehearsal time, the uncertainty... Yuck. Anyway. One of our tenors -- and we only have three, because of only having three each of everything -- has gone down with this week's nasty throat bug. What a bugger. Actually, it's probably worse for him: when you look forward to these things for ages, it often turns out that you get six months in peachy health and then some disgusting lurgy strikes just as throat-related fun was on the horizon. Yah, and boo, and sucks.

I've got behind with my book listings: it's actually quite hard work to write down everything I read. If I simply zap through a children's book in an hour or so, I don't mention it here, but I suppose, actually, a reading diary would be illuminating as a food diary if I didn't mind finding out what an addict I am. I'm currently reading a book online, which is wretchedly inconvenient: it's by the unwieldily named Lois McMaster Bujold, who seems to be recommended by most of the other people on the couple of mailing lists I'm on. Going well so far, but I'll post when I'm done. A couple of weeks ago I read Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, which had some fancy reviews. It's essentially a fairly stream-of-consciousness account of how she felt when her long-term partner died suddenly of a heart attack (this is on the cover blurb and therefore Doesn't Count as a spoiler). It was honest and candid and all that, but not, to be brutal, terribly interesting. Maybe I don't bottle up my own feelings enough to admire someone else for unbottling theirs. The fact that struck me most -- callow youth that I am -- was that she'd named her daughter 'Quintana'.

I've just reread Scoop for the umpteenth time, having recommended it to our reading group. It's one of the funniest books I know, and doesn't pall with re-reading. Amazingly, the satire has dated very little. It has a lot more heart than earlier works of Waugh's such as Decline and Fall and Vile Bodies, I think: Boot's relationship with -- have I got this right? -- Katryn is really rather poignant. But the sheer number of things the novel takes digs at is really pretty remarkable. It's in my list of my top ten books, which admittedly has never managed to shrink below fifteen and currently stands at twenty or so, but there you are. If you want to give Waugh a try, I'd also recommend A Handful of Dust, which has the distinction of being both very funny and one of the saddest stories I know (I'm deliberately quoting from Ford Madox Brown's The Good Soldier, which touts inself as 'the saddest story I know' and rather overplays its hand, I thought -- it's rather fusty, and never worked at all for me.).

I can't remember whether I said: we solved the last-minute alto crisis by going back to the top of the list and starting again. Genius. That was A's suggestion, of course: I was in too much of a flap to think straight. What's especially unhelpful, you know, is that it's never the same voice part twice. I've had a soprano crisis, an alto crisis, a tenor crisis and a bass crisis, at different times. Aaaargh. Imagine fixing a whole orchestra. (No, actually, I can't. Or mustn't. It makes me hyperventilate.)

And the third bowl was just right...

2007-06-21T07:55:00.000Z

I'm sitting here shovelling porridge into the gaping maw of the infant as quickly as is physically possible -- feeling very much like a tiny sparrow slaving over a cuckoo. Sasha is pebbledashed with porridge from eyebrow to ankle, and the adhesion of the stuff is impressive. We have bypassed fancy-pants baby porridge and only-for-wimps Ready Brek and gone straight to hardcore porridge oats (which coincidentally is about a tenth of the price). Funnily enough, changing from finger foods to spoon feeding doesn't seem to be a problem: Sash is grabbing the spoon out of my hand and shoving it in, then removing the contents with a hearty suck. We were sharing a bowl, and I swear I got less of it to eat.

Just getting into full panic mode for Sunday's concert of the Brahms German Requiem, not helped by someone pulling out a week before, which meant lots of running around. Unfortunately she was singing in Tuesday's concert too, which was extremely awkward -- I just didn't know what to say, so said nothing, which was interpreted as conveying extreme hostility. (I obviously don't do neutrality, but am as ever hampered by not knowing what my face looks like: that's why I'm such a rotten actor.)

The amateur singers' code of conduct is a very simple one, which for most of us actually reduces possible stress: you don't chuck in something you've said you'd do, even if something better comes along. I assume that pros go by the same rules. I wonder if other fields are similar too, or if, say, in sports it's okay to chuck a match if someone more impressive challenges you? The event has really soured this week for me, though -- and the person who did it was a very good friend, so I'm not sure how we retrieve things. Possibly by never referring to it again. Which will be tricky.

Sasha is doing that thing where they get up onto hands and knees but can't work out how to move forwards, so just rock forwards and backwards, as though revving up to go. Reversing is on the menu, as is going round in circles, and rolling over, particularly on scary restricted areas such as the changing mat (suspended above a cast-iron bath, so not a good platform from which to nose-dive). We feel that crawling is imminent, and have been thoughtfully providing mats and rugs as there's only one carpeted room in the house and the downstairs floors are all tiles and bricks and hard on knees and elbows.

It's time to cook some more porridge...

To patronise or not to patronise

2007-06-08T14:24:00.000Z

I was just wondering... My comment about the 'O' level was essentially saying 'Look, I'm only quoting this because I happen to know it, not because I'm frightfully intellectual'. Is this terribly patronising? I'm never quite sure whether it's worse to assume that people do know things, or assume that they don't. People on the Dorothy L Sayers mailing list sometimes get very worked up about DLS putting chunks of French into the novels untranslated, and even having a short story that hinges on one knowing one's genders -- and of course you miss one whole vital denouement if you don't know Latin. Is this patronising? If it's assuming greater knowledge than readers actually possess, then presumably it's the opposite.

I've been re-reading the sequence Strong Poison, Have His Carcase, Gaudy Night, Busman's Honeymoon, which ends the Lord Peter Wimsey saga with the Wimsey-Vane relationship. It's rather beautifully done, and the last of these is particularly satisfying in taking things on much further than one ever hopes for. I did wonder whether Gaudy Night doesn't flag a little in the first two thirds in which Wimsey hardly appears, but in fact I think on reflection it jogs along nicely but then accelerates when he turns up: the romance and the mystery gather pace in tandem. The whole love story is immensely satisfying. It does seem to me that DLs must be unleashing her own fantasies, but she controls them beautifully.

Most of my copies are a 1970s edition by the New English Library, with just a few typos, but rather jolly cover illustrations (except one that I think if you studied it closely would actually give away the plot), but I have two books in a new reprint, also NEL (except, now, of course, it's in lower case (welcome to the noughties)) which is apparently Hodder & Stoughton. They've been reset incredibly badly, with laughable typos that an infant could spot (double commas; words that even Microsoft's spellchecker would know were wrong) and some real idiocies (a Latin telegram that someone has obviously thought was meant to be in English). They've also got a truly ghastly introduction by someone called Elizabeth George, who obviously thinks she's the bees' knees and is prepared to patronise DLS in order to prove it.

Ooh, I've come around in an elegant circle. That doesn't often happen. In fact, I loathe the way it's almost ubiquitous now as a journalistic technique. It's rare to read an article, or at least a light-hearted one, that doesn't feebly hark back to its opening paragraph. I can see why it's a useful technique, but not every time. Please.

A rose by any other name

2007-06-08T13:47:00.000Z

Mmm -- presumably the novel The Name of The Rose gets its title from this quotation (which is from Romeo and Juliet, for those of you who didn't do it for 'O' level. (I went to a Catholic school and had a delightfully fusty English teacher, and still remember with pleasure his protestations that this was a sweetly romantic play without a trace of smut. I'd look at lines such as 'The bawdy hand of the dial/Is now upon the very prick of noon' and think, "Well, I don't know why it sounds rude," (yup, I was a very late developer) "but it definitely does."))

Anyway, my point is that I've been meaning to put a link here to a very nicely written article in the Guardian recently, which says pretty much everything I want to say about changing one's surname and giving surnames to children, without ever getting as horribly strident as I do when I have the discussion. I only know one other woman in the world who has, as I have, given her child her own surname, and I find that odd. When I put the list of new members into the Cambridge NCT (National Childbirth Trust) newsletter, I always look to see how many couples have different names. Considering that this is an 'intellectual' town, terribly middle class, and full of bolshy women (unless it just happens that those are the ones I know), it's usually amazingly few. Most disappointing. Actually, the really daft thing seems to me to be when the woman takes on the man's surname as well as her own. So they still have different names, the kid still gets his name, and she's lumbered with a whole pile. Seems ker-azy to me. If you're going to have both, why doesn't the chap have both too? But there, I'm starting to rant, and the whole point of this was to avoid that.

A said he was surprised at the whole thing too, but he was proud to be a torch-bearer. What a sweetheart. I never quite know whether the other chaps feel it's a challenge to their masculinity if a woman doesn't want to subsume a part of her identity in him (yes, inflammatory language, I know, I know, but honestly, your name is your identity and I don't see how you could dispute that), or if it's some kind of weird girl thing that the women want to, and as incomprehensible to me as a whole load of other weird girl things. I think at the root of this whole feminism thing for me is the fact that I'm really not more than 50% feminine...

BLW -- it's, like, totally the new trendy thing

2007-05-29T17:54:00.000Z

No, honestly, look at me in there with a hot new trend. Unbelievable. Well, at least on the cusp. Look, anything's better than finding out five years after everyone else has got over it, all right? Are you looking at me?

Ahem. So, yes, for those of you who aren't totally hipped up daddy-o, BLW is baby-led weaning (some of you may want to turn off now, obviously). It's a new thing that's really an old thing, of course, but hey -- and (this is the good part) it is LESS WORK. Hear those cheers. Put out more flags. So instead of all that Karmelling around pureeing food into a gruesome mush, then spooning it into outsize ice-cube trays so as to defrost it in little bowls later, then in a few weeks doing special puree-with-lumps-in to get the infant used to textures, you simply bypass the whole process and give the baby things it can hold in its hands and put into its mouth. Anything it can't chew off with its gums, it can't eat. Simple, huh?

I found an excellent website with loads of info -- and wittily written too, which was nice. We started straight away. Banana would be the perfect food if only it didn't somehow spread itself over a baby from top of head to ankle (including the insides of ears, backs of knees and so on) and then set like concrete. I couldn't believe the first two bibs I pulled out of the washing machine still caked with the stuff. We've now dispensed with dainty little bibs and use old tea-towels fastened with a clothes peg at the back of the neck, and Sash still manages to get banana on any bit of ankle that might peep through.

It does wonders for their hand-eye co-ordination, too. And it is *such* fun to watch. Sash eating a banana is part porn, part slapstick, part gross-out. And it's great fun giving them new things: the first taste always prompts a huge pantomime-strength grimace, then by the third suck they've decided they love it. We've tried pineapple, mangetout, buttered toast, French beans, strawberries, Weetabix, unsalted bread sticks -- anything you can nibble a chunk of, really.

[Footnote - I wrote a huge article about it for Cambridge NCT magazine, if you'd like a copy.]

It finally happened (happened)

2007-05-29T17:38:00.000Z

You remember that a friend told me that everyone drops their baby on its head at some stage? Eek! It finally happened. Poor Sasha was on the sofa and I was playing the piano with B, working out the tricky bit in 'Doe, a deer' (crossed-over fingers and everything -- by the way, does anyone remember that competition in The Independent to find a better line than 'La, a note to follow So'? Apparently on the grounds that if that lyric wasn't so feeble it would be the best song ever. The winning entry was 'La, it's Arabic for "No" '.) but completely forgot that I'd left Sash on the sofa, propped up between cushins - this is our fancy pancey new sofa, which is brown leather and not terribly infant-friendly. Next thing I know, there's a horrible clonk and the baby is on its back on our brick floor. Ohmygodohmygodohmygod but actually, the screams weren't even as loud as last night's NoIamNOTgoingtosleepEVEREVEREVER (full-throated, dial-turned-to-eleven yells and shrieks), so it was pretty obvious that no damage was done. It was a useful reminder, though, that my multitasking capacity is absolutely zero. I can barely walk at the same time as carrying a cup of tea.

Now I've typed my subject header I've got the rest of the song running through my head. (At least it'll get 'Do-re-me' out of there). My favourite line is 'I'm one wave short of a shipwreck'. Do you like Queen? I do, lots: I have a feeling they probably appeal to classical musicians. If you are one, give them a try. I played an organist friend of mine a few videos (she turned around wide-eyed after a few minutes of Freddie cavorting in a sequinned leotard and asked "Is that rock music, then?" -- so sweet) and then bought her the first greatest hits album for her birthday, and she got really into it.

A nasty taste in the mouth

2007-05-19T14:21:00.001Z

Have you ever read a book that lurks unpleasantly at the back of your mind through the next day, so that you feel grubby? The book was Wideacre, by Philippa Gregory. She seems to be quite a varied author: I've read a post-modern, feminist-slanted Mills & Boonish one of hers called Perfectly Correct; a thriller that didn't grab me at all; and several historical novels that seemd very well researched. The first was The Other Boleyn Girl, then The Queen's Fool, then The Virgin's Lover and The Constant Princess -- they seem to be coming thicker and faster, which does make me wonder whether they're as carefully researched as they seem to be. Anyway, last night's was a great doorstop of a thing: 622 pages of rollocking eighteenth-century nastiness.

The heroine wanted to go on living in her childhood home, and was prepared to do pretty much anything to achieve that. It just went on getting nastier and nastier. I read it in a single sitting, which I think compounded the effect, and it was also a first-person narrative, which I think made me feel more implicated. But it really was horrid. Fairly well written, too, which made me wonder why, with that sort of talent, you'd want to do this kind of thing. Anyway, yuck. I finished it at about four this morning, delibeately not looking at the time so I wouldn't know exactly how silly I'd been. Sasha was suitable confused by being woken up by Mummy instead of the other way round.

I knew I'd do something daft while A was away: staying up all night reading was rather predictable....He's in the US for a week, and set off last Tuesday (I think) at an ungodly hour, and did the half-hour walk to the railway station as getting the car somewhere it could be left for a week was just too horribly complicated. Sasha and I went along to help with the luggage and have a nice walk. This is the kind of thing that it simply wouldn't have occurred to me to do a few years ago. In fact, it's exactly the kind of thing A does: he seems to be just naturally nice. It's even rubbed off a bit: I feel he has upped my game. This is a real cherry on top of the icing on top of the chocolate of the relationship...

The other book I've read in the last few days (I don't list re-reads, as sitting here typing all the names would cut down on valuable reading time) is March, by Geraldine Brooks. This is so clever -- it's the bit missing from Little Women: what happens to the father while he's away at the war. I thought she did a splendid job of making it provocative and dramatic without contradicting anything in Alcott. I remember some outcry on the mailing list I'm on for people keen on children's books, but I don't really think it was warranted. There aren't any cosy little references for real fans of Alcott, but on the other hand it's a lovely complement to the books.

Ooh la la

2007-05-09T14:05:00.000Z

We're just back from four days in Paris -- what fun. A had fallen off his bike (trying to carry two rucksacks and then braking one-handed: if your one hand is on the front brake, you might just as well cut out the middle bit and hurl yourself over the handlebars...) so manoeuvring (what a pig to spell) the pushchair around was fun. Luckily I'd already just about mastered it, having traversed London solo. Going down the escalators isn't too bad, but going up requires a deep breath and a will of steel. The three Londoners who grabbed the bottom of the pushchair to help me up and down starcases were all black, intriguingly; including one teenager in a hoodie. Just goes to show there's no point whatsoever in making assumptions about people based on generalisations.

Paris was a little frustrating, through no real fault of its own. I made the mistake of letting A look up the weather forecast, which showed four blazing suns and promised daily temperatures of 24-25 degrees. Left to myself, I'd have taken my usual layers, but bamboozled by the confidence of this prediction, I packed linen trousers and flimsy tops and deck shoes. It was cold and rainy. What is the point of forecasts? And golly, I do *hate* to be uncomfortable because of wearing the wrong thing. The up side was that the worst weather was the most spectacular: an amazing thunderstorm that left us trapped in the Orangerie. Monet's Nympheas was spectacular, though I think it'd be worth seeing them in natural light (we got there too late for that).

The other mistake was not taking a guide book: I just plain forgot. My old Paupers' Paris was revised rather charmlessly in 1997 but by now is almost completely out of date: the only place we found that was still going was Polidor, at 41 rue Monsieur-le-Prince, 6e. They still do a Monday to Friday three-course menu at 12 Euro: unbleivable. We went on a Saturday, when it was still pretty economical, and not bad at all: carpaccio of beef, a very fine white lentil soup, slightly stodgy boeuf bourgignon and - actually, the other main course I can't remember. Hmm. The best meal, recommended in the Time Out guide, was a place called Le Petit Marche whose address I'll add later, where the daily menu was 14E for two courses plus 7E for a third, and really stunning stuff: a salad of green beans and parmesan with a delectable dressing, very rare beef with a wonderful teriyaki-style sauce and the most luscious mashed potato you can imagine, then caramel ice cream drizzled with chocolate. Yum and double yum. But we really need a good guide book: the Time Out one is oddly uninspiring, and the Rough Guide always seems to be out of date when we go (the current edition is 2005). And WHY, since the Mini Rough Guide is available on Amazon, does no branch of Smith's at Waterloo sell the thing? Hasn't it occurred to anyone that next to the Eurostar platfrom might be -- duh! -- a good place to sell Paris guidebooks?

Typing the subject header reminded me that it's a common exclamation of A's six-year-old: heaven knows where he picked it up from, but it's most endearing. He last uttered it while wearing a golden crown and a long strand of pearls twined flapper-style around his chest, plus a pink tutu. There are no petty gender distinctions in this household: tutus all round, for them as wants 'em.

The shackles of religion

2007-05-01T11:56:00.000Z

Well, well, who'd have thought it? I'd been grouching a bit to A about how I'm permanently slighty grumpy about never getting much done. Life is a long round of breastfeeding and laundry, now punctuated by bouts of banana-mashing. But I also spend a fair amount of time in front of the computer, so it's not as though the time isn't there.... Anyway, A wrote me a very sweet email, partly telling me I was doing a great job -- it's funny that however confident you are, this makes a HUGE difference -- but also suggesting that, as a time-management solution, I try to think of childcare as my primary task and other stuff as secondary, rather than the childcare being something that gets in the way of what I should be achieving. He also suggested only attempting one secondary thing per day.

Now, I thought I was doing this all before -- all the books and websites say not to be be too ambitious and not to be too hard on yourself, after all. Also, because I'm naturally very lazy, I've always thought that it's only guilt about being such a slob that motivates me. (It's a Catholic trait, they say.) But I was wrong. It turns out that it was guilt that incapacitated me. I'd get up late, then spend the rest of the day mentally berating myself for having made a bad start, and get too glum about it to feel energised to do anything. Now I'm still getting up late, because I'm tired, but free of the guilt, I'm achieving huge amounts -- windows cleaned, people phoned, emails sent. Gosh, it's terrific. What a genius my lovely man is.

Scavenging

2007-04-30T14:46:00.000Z

I ran five miles yesterday. Coo, it didn't half hurt. At least I could walk home afterwards: today I'm mostly shuffling. It was the annual Sawston Fun Run, a very jolly village event: someone's designed a course that winds round all the streets -- so you get to know the village -- and everyone comes out to cheer -- so you see all the people you know. Every year I swear I'll do some training, and every year the only training I've done is the previous year's Fun Run. Oh well. The only sour note this year was that the police had refused to police the roads, so some consultants had to be paid several thousand pounds to do it instead. Which doesn't really reflect terribly well on the police, or the consultants, or the sort of society where it seems to be almost a crime to prevent cars going anywhere. Pedestrianise the high street, I say -- get rid of the buggers!

Mysterious Voice of Doom Chainsaw Person turned out to be a friend who does a lot of woodworking with other scary tools. He has certainly put the fear of god into me: I haven't yet got the beast out of its box. Shudder. It has huge pointy teeth.

Re-read The Eyre Affair for our book groups -- A's choice. It was fun, if a little inconsequential. But a lovely book for book-lovers. (I remember going dowstairs to read a friend the bit about the audience-participation Richard III, and she loved it.) Or so I thought: in fact, a few people didn't like it at all, and for the first time ever I was one of the highest markers; I gave it 7.5 out of 10. It's hard to remember what else I've been reading. A little bit of trash: I cruised by the skips for recycling magazines behind our local supermarket, and liberated a few copies of Sunday magazines, plus two In Styles and a Tatler. At least one friend thinks this is truly eccentric behaviour; but it seems to me that if nothing else, it's much more in the spirit of true recycling than sending the things to be pulped after a single reading. Presumably the law against reselling magazines exists purely to bolster publishers' profits?

Also went delving at the jumble sale -- there's one almost every week here. Possibly the only event that lets you entertain a four-year-old and a six-year-old for a total cost of 20p. Well, pretty much the only place where you can buy something worth having for tenpence. Though of course C has an unerring ability to find the single most revolting object on the toy stall and come home with that. We've had a feather and sequin-encrusted mobile phone holder; we've had a very large and very nasty My Little Pony, in pink. This time round I found some gorgeous bean-filled dolls with lovely hair and cute expressions, then sorted through everything to find a few clothes for them. "Are they a collector's item?" the stallholder asked. Good grief, can't you buy anything just because you like it? I just think dolls are fun for kids to play with, and I like anything that isn't bloody Barbie, the gormless overglanded dork. Oh, and there was one with dark skin, and one was a boy. It's pretty damning that otherwise the only male dolls you can buy are muscle-garlanded actionmen, some of which come with their weapons welded to their hands (and no willies -- it's all Terribly Significant, really).

Sasha is still experimenting with sounds: the results make me laugh surprisingly often. I think I underestimated the entertainment value of children.

Mystery caller

2007-04-24T15:36:00.000Z

Oooh, a comment -- and from an anonymous caller. (See below.) How very odd. Surely somebody with strong opinions about chainsaw use hasn't just stumbled upon my humble blog by chance? What could you have been looking for to end up here? Or is it a shy friend? Come along, say hello!

Well, as my dear wacky ex-neighbour said recently, we are after all WORLD FAMOUS now we're out in the blogosphere. Except that of course everyone else is world famous too.

We're just back from a gorgeous weekend in Aldeburgh. Highlights of conversations included a rumination of A's during which he concluded that I was not, in fact, a control freak; I just look as though I might be. Is it pathetic of me to be extremely flattered by this compliment? Actually, my favourite thing about A (oh no, hang on -- my favourite PG-rated thing about A) is that he takes the piss out of me in exactly the way I take the piss out of myself. Perhaps it's all to do with having a very similar sense of humour. Although I watched the end of an episode of Ricky Gervais's Extras the other evening and realised that that's where we part company. That continual cringing that that kind of writing elicits from the viewer doesn't denote comedy, for me -- I find it too uncomfortable. And actually, I find it rather monotonous too: it seems to me it's the same joke made over and over again. In different colours, perhaps; but essentially the same joke.

Postscript

2007-04-16T17:21:00.000Z

The only downside to all this fun: Sasha hasn't realised that eating solids means you're supposed to breastfeed less. I could be spending all day mashing bananas and pushing root vegetables through sieves, and still get sucked dry every two hours. Sigh.

Oh what fun to be in England

2007-04-16T13:35:00.000Z

My mum has bought me a chainsaw for my birthday. I am quite excited about this, and keep thinking of things I might chop up. Rrrrrrrrr! I suppose it's not the kind of tool one should just rampage around the garden with, looking for stuff to dismember... I shall start with our three years' worth of dead Christmas trees. Last year's one doesn't seem to have lost a single needle. I hate to think what they did to it.

We've started solids. I'd been dithering over reference books, poring over weaning spoons, delving into Annabel Karmel's extensive oeuvre, and generally procrastinating, and then we went to a friend's house. Her baby is three months older than Sasha, which is really useful, as she's enough ahead of me to know the stuff but not so far that she's already forgotten it and moved on to the next thing. She had a vegetable soup that both of them were having for lunch, so we tried it out on Sash, who pretty much grabbed the spoon out of my hand to shovel the stuff in. We then had pear for tea, and a bit of baby rice, and have since tried potato, and some plums from the garden, frozen last year. And I'm sitting here covered on mashed banana. The two fun parts are: squirting your breast milk into the bowl to mix with the baby rice (much more fun than using a pump), and then shovelling it into the infant, who hasn't yet learned to swallow.

Sasha gets more appealing by the minute. I am besotted with my baby. But I think this is very much because, as babies go, ours seems especially charming: good-tempered, cute-looking, smily and gurgly and generally fun. And they definitely get more appealing as they get older and therefore more interesting. I really don't think anyone should agonise over not having an instant bond when they're born. I certainly didn't. I was glad to have produced something, but after nine months of building it and five hours of labour, I was just glad it had come out: I'd have been perfectly happy with a litter of kittens. But I didn't feel my life had changed, and I didn't feel a surge of affection. Mild interest, combined with slight shock at how *very* ugly the baby was.

It's been quite hard to write much in the last couple of months. Stuff has happened, but I just haven't felt the urge. I seem to have been mildly depressed -- or perhaps I'm still feeling the shock of the after-birth euphoria wearing off. I was high as a kite for about a month, so coming back to 'normal' feels very flat indeed. And a side-effect of euphoria is that it makes me creative: I'm full of ideas and plans and stories, and digress all the time because the thoughts just pile up and spill out. I think a counsellor has identified exactly this problem in the past: because you've had the highs, normality doesn't feel neutral: it actually feels a bit of a low (until you have a real low and remember just how low those are). I don't even have anything approaching 'real', clinical depression: mine's based on circumstance (and I usually feel down because I'm bored at work). In many ways it feels quite valuable to get an insight into a condition that for some people is completely incapacitating.

A gorgeous week with A's kids last week (should I stop using aliases? It seems a bit silly. It was based on the premise that this was in the public domain, but seems a bit unnecessary when only my mum reads it.). There's nothing like an English spring, which absolutely requires to be preceded by the sort of English winter that makes you feel it'll never be warm again. Glorious. That reminds me of how much I loved Margaret Forster's biography of Elizabeth Barratt Browning. Which presumably inspired Lady's Maid -- a wonderful, radical book about Barratt Browning's maid: do read it. I've finished lots of Claire Tomalin's biographies, now, too: Dora Jordan, Nelly Ternan, and Jane Austen, which I acquired after getting the Pepys one and living it to bits. It's such a a good way to learn history, getting thrown into the context of someone's daily life. In my 'O' level history lessons, all we did was copy down what the teacher wrote on the blackboard. Re-reading The Eyre Affair this week, for our local book group. It's great fun but doesn't thrill me with its novelty so much on a secodn read, which I suppose is inevitable.

Oh, I also read Francis Spufford's The child that books built, which I've been waiting to pick up secondhand for ages. I got very excited when he name-checked Diana Wynne Jones (and acknowledged her genius) early on, but he never actually referred to any of her books except indirectly. There was good stuff about the Narnia books, but not enough about any others. I suppose I really wanted it to be about the books that built the child.

How kind of you to let me come

2007-04-05T08:20:00.000Z

We've started to get woken up in the mornings by the child doing elocution practice. This is in fact quite charming, consisting of long-drawn-out diphthongs followed by cheeky smiles. But Sash also makes a nappy-filling sound which is very similar, consisting of a sort of roaring grunt, and I think has realised that this could also be integrated into the conversation. Which means I can't tell whether a nappy is being filled or not. It's also a little disturbing to wake up to growling. (My reply to all this, by the way, is to enunciate "How now, brown cow" at appropriate moments.)

Glorious, glorious weather: there's nothing quite like an English spring, eh? Especially -- or perhaps only -- when it follows an English autumn and winter. The forsythia is blazing and the buds are bursting forth. And we still haven't sent out our thank-you cards. They have become a great, looming, invisible elephant in my life: always at the back of my mind as something that needs to be done. I can't even think 'We must send them soon or it will be Silly". It's already silly.

We had to read A Short Histoy of Tractors in Ukranian for our book group. I really dislike novels that are named as though they're non-fiction: there's just something bollocksy about it. (The only other example I can think of is The Girl's Guide to Hunting and Fishing, or something similar.) Didn't like it much at all - how did it get such glowing reviews? It seemed terribly mediocre: predictable plot, stereotyped characters, hackneyed ethnic 'charm'. Ho very hum.I return to my endless rereads of Noel Streatfeild. (I still remember the shock when I realised how her name was spelt - I must have spent a decde assuming it was Streatfield. Half her books on eBay still have the wrong version.) Looking forward to getting Francis Spufford's The Child That Books Built (now that's a lovely title) through from eBay: it's so rare to see anything interesting written about children's books, unless they're new publications. Apart from sodding Harry Potter, of course, but who wants to read about that?

Total trivia

2007-03-30T12:49:00.000Z

Did you know that Lalla Ward was introduced to Richard Dawkins (whom she's now been married to for quite some time) by Douglas Adams? Cool.

Home Chat

2007-03-14T14:52:00.000Z

Oh what bliss. I’m sitting here in blazing sunshine, editing copy on a laptop, with the cat stretched out on the table next to me, clean washing undulating gently on the line, and Sasha in a pushchair gurgling and squawking happily and pushing brightly coloured toys back and forth (the pink and turquoise Tinylove monkey is a creature of nightmare, I feel, but presumably they tested it and found that babies didn’t mind it).

We’re just back from a long weekend in Italy, where the weather was just as good but it wasn’t home… the only blots on the horizon, almost literally, are the seven enormous molehills in the lawn -- and the two audacious ones in the herb garden. These aren’t tiny picturesque mounds left by the black velvet gentlemen -- they’re gigantic, almost frightening. They are also working their way steadily towards the house. If they’d only go in the opposite direction, they’d be in the grounds of Sawston Hall (yes, we abut a stately home) and nobody would give them any bother. Not that I’ve done much more than jump up and down impotently raging. Bastards.

I’ve just finished reading ‘The Time Traveler’s Wife’. Thoroughly enjoyed it -- it was actually very pleasant to read a book that simply set up a situation and then followed it through. I thought there might be a tiresome twist in the tale that would end by making the whole thing less credible. This may be because I’ve just reread a novel by Christopher Priest, ‘The Glamour’, which has exactly one of those tricksy mucking-about-with-the-narrative-voice denouements. In Priest’s case, though, I haven’t read a single one of his books that doesn’t do exactly the same. He likes to switch back and forth until he reckons he’s got you confused. The snag is, I often feel that he’s more confused than I am -- or at least, I’m never convinced that he’s kept track of things: I suspect that he cheats by simply making a mess. ‘A Dream of Wessex’ does this, and so does ‘A Quiet Woman’ and ‘The Extremes’. After those I got bored and gave up, so I haven’t tried the more recent ones. ‘The Glamour’ has a more interesting premise -- it’s another take on invisibility -- and the mess isn’t quite so messy as in some of the books. I must see what Amazon readers have to say about him. I have a feeling that he was once the Great White Hope of British science fiction, but I’d be surprised if people hadn’t been disappointed.

Audrey Niffenegger, eh? What fabulous names some Americans have. Actually, Audrey is a bit tame for a first name. Gates. DeForest. Imagine!

Random thoughts, from home

2007-03-07T00:06:00.000Z

Good grief, it's been a whole month. I've just finished typesetting the NCT newsletter -- a misnomer as it's more like a magazine: forty-eight pages of ads and editorial, and I did the lot. It was fun, in that obsessive way that page layout is, for me at least. My poor baby has had very little attention these last six days. I also got a brand-new PowerBook delivered this morning at 10am, and haven't even opened the parcel yet. My darling A was suitably gobsmacked by my ability to delay gratification waaaay beyond what he would find feasible or certainly humane.

We had a very good weekend with all the family, including the usual compulsory Healthy Walk on Sunday. The kids always whinge hugely at being dragged outdoors, however glorious the weather, and then of course make just as much fuss about being dragged home again. Golly, but it was cold. I was walking around the green behind the new health centre with the pushchair while A and the kids went on the swings, and felt all nostalgic as I followed the same route when nine months pregnant and trying to get the baby out. I'd made a very new friend, Philippa-from-down-the-road, and we went out with her dog, a completely deranged pug that ran along at tremendous speed looking like a mechanical toy. I'm sure it was laughing so much that got me started. Philippa moved house just before Christmas, and I do miss her: I never pass her old house without a pang. She wrote to me recently saying what long words I used in my blog... It's nice to know someone's reading it, anyway. Hello world! Hi, Philippa!

Sasha gets ever more smily and gurgly and flirtatious. Also occasionally squeaks very high, like a dolphin -- or at any rate like Daryl Hannah in Splash when she demonstrates fish language and shatters all the televeision screens. The exemplary child has been dozing while I did last corrections and is still obligingly snoozing as I write this.

I have joined the Parish Council. A sign of incipient middle age, surely. We leafleted the village and trounced the opposition. Tonight I had my first meeting: the cemetry committee. To the victor the spoils! One can only hope that the election campaign won't turn out to have been the most exciting part.

We (meaning me and the infant) have taken to walking to the next village whenever we go to Cambridge, to save £1.90 on the bus fare. A thinks I'm deranged; I think it's a good example of how stinginess engenders good habits, as if by accident. One of the reasons I'm fairly fit is because of the amount of time I spend walking to save bus and tube fairs. Last time we went it was a glorious day, crisp and sunny, with views for miles. I do like the fens. If you're going to do flat -- and I don't see why you shouldn't -- it might as well be truly, absolutely flat. Actually, this is the first relationship I've had since 1991 that isn't with someone who pines for mountains all the time. This is good.

I have discovered Green & Black's Organic Chocolate with Butterscotch. It's the first time I've ever got really obsessive about chocolate: I have to ration my intake and might easily finish a packet in a single sitting if feeling sufficiently sorry for myself, I feel (for whatever reason -- or perhaps I'd invent one...). Is this how other (normal, feminine) women feel all the time? The stuff is ruinously expensive. And I am, I suspect (there are no scales in the house) not losing any weight. I don't really want to have to give up all the jolly pairs of trousers I've collected. But I've discovered that any attempt to modify what I eat just makes me blazingly cross. I'm not one of nature's dieters, obviously. It's somewhat chastening to realise that my former slenderness was based absolutely on good luck and not at all on strength of character. Bah!

Urgle burgle

2007-02-05T17:02:00.000Z

So people keep asking if I feel completely different, and I don't -- I feel just like me, but with a baby. So much so that I quite often forget I've got one and am slightly paranoid about leaving it on the bus... The main part of my life that's changed is not having to schlep to London four days a week to do a job that I really should have left three or four years ago, when the company got taken over and the clients got bigger and the projects got ever duller. I was paralysed by ennui. Dear oh dear.

My gorgeous baby is currently lying on the bathroom changing mat gurgling with delight at goodness knows what -- oohs and ahs and little squeals echo from the room. We had the first smile a couple of weeks ago, and it's true what they tell you: their whole face suddenly lights up. Amazingly rewarding. The gurgling sounds so close to speech that it seems odd to think that proper talking is going to take so long, but I suppose it is *quite* tricky...

I think I'm suffering not so much a low as a post-high: the memory of that elation is still so clear that everything feels very flat now. I was so full of confidence, too: stopped worrying about money, stopped worrying about work; even stopped worrying about singing.

The gurgles have subtly changed to complaints -- time to go!

Red and yellow and pink and green, purple and orange and blue...

2007-01-16T11:42:00.000Z

We've been going to post-natal classes. At which I have discovered that our child is a non-conformist: when surrounded by screaming babies, stays silent; when all is quiet, starts to yell. Of course, I quite like this trait.

The health visitor running the thing asked for our top tip. I repeated a Useful Thing that a friend had said to me many weeks ago: "Remember that everyone drops their baby on its head at least once." Luckily nobody was horrified. Actually, my own top tip would be for night-time breastfeeding: for handy low-level, easy-access light, use your mobile phone. It also means that you can check the time. I've got so used now to feeding the infant without really waking up at all that I don't really know, come the morning, whether it woke up and ate at all, or how many times. When people ask you if your baby is sleeping through the night yet, they somehow don't expect the answer "I don't know"...

All the babies at the post-natal are boys except Sasha, whose sex we declined to reveal as part of our ongoing experiment. A thinks they'll all have me pegged as a kook, but I like to think we're just charmingly eccentric. When the babies got weighed we got a lot of attention as they all had to be stripped. However, they all seemed to HATE it, so it seemed to me a bit pointless: I'm not obsessing about the child's weight, so why make it miserable by stripping it? We bucked the system and got weighed fully clothed. He he. Apparently a full nappy could weigh about a pound. Oh well. I don't know what I weight either.

I can't decide whether I'm overweight at the moment, or just a bit blubbery. My stomach went down impressively quickly, but has stayed a smallish paunch, squidgy to the touch. Fingers crossed that the answer *isn't* pull-ups. I do hope I'm not just fat. I've discovered in later life that denying myself any food at all makes me enormously cross: presumably the result of a lifetime of not dieting and never having to worry about my weight. Or it may mean that self-denial simply isn't of any interest...

A's aunt asked me to take the child along to the nursery she works at, to show it to the children. This was fun. There were about ten kids there, all very bright and appealing. All the girls except one had long fine hair that kept falling in their eyes. All but two were dressed in pink. At least one was in tights and a mini-skirt. A's aunt was saying that it made quite a difference to the group when there were more boys. But I was thinking that it's just too easy for people's observations to match their preconceptions. If all the children had sensible short hair and practical clothes and pink and blue were banned, you wouldn't know instantly which were girls and which were boys. Would you be able to tell by their behaviour? I'd like to try this. I would bet that actually, it's like horoscopes: you notice the bits the confirm the stereotypes and ignore what doesn't.

So the problem with the sexist clothing is that it lets people confirm their stereotypical expectations. But it's also wretchedly impractical, which gives you a vicious circle: the girls can't see past their trailing locks, can't climb because their skirts hide their feet, and are struggling with the ever-descending crotches of their tights, and footwear that's chosen for prettiness rather than functionality. No wonder they're less good at physical activities than people who are allowed short hair, flat shoes, and trousers.

The boys lose out too. They're practical, but they're so *dull*. Blue is often the brightest colour they're allowed to wear. Brown, grey, black, beige: it's a monochrome world if you've got a willy. No flowers, no frills, no fun. Who decides that all this would threaten their fragile masculinity? Who decides that the girls need to be swathed in pink impracticality? Most children seem to have their clothes chosen by their mothers. But their mothers have benefited hugely from feminism and are mostly - in the circles in which we move - competent middle-class professionals. So what are they up to?

To talk of many things

2007-01-04T15:38:00.000Z

Hmm... it's easy to get out of the habit. But I only write when I'm feeling cheerful, and the last few weeks have been a bit gloomy. I'm not really very fond of Christmas, and having a four-year-old and a six-year-old around really emphasises the vacuous materialism of it all. Actually, it was interesting watching them opening presents: they nagged for along time beforehand, but when they got their way, the focus was much more on ripping off the paper than on finding what was inside. And they certainly aren't interested in who gave them what: I got so jaded I never actually wrapped what I'd bought for them, and they didn't notice. I suppose I'll produce the stuff when there's a lull later in the year. But does this mean you could give them a satsuma beautifully girft-wrapped and produce the same thrills?

The infant has also been a lot less good-tempered. Frustratingly, it's not at all obvious why. A always says wind; I normally try feeding, with the disadvantage that the child seems perenially ready to eat more. My nipples have been hurting for the first time in seven weeks of breast-feeding, and I'm getting sucked so dry I never seem to know which side to start on - they both feel empty. Heck. It's the rhythm of the screaming that's so horrible, and how penetrating it is - oh, and the technique whereby they scream themselves hoarse so as to sound even more pathetic. Aaargh! During the day we don't get much of it, but somehow nights are much much worse. Why should this be? I suppose sheerbloodymindedness *could* be heritable...

The best Christmas card I saw said 'Baa...' and had a picture of a sheep, then at the bottom said 'humbug'. Ho ho ho.

We've started watching Angel, the Buffy spin-off. The first two episodes were rather lacklustre, and the tone is all over the place. Still, when you think how bad 'Encounter at Farpoint' is... I also found a fab interview with Joss Whedon on The Onion, of all places. He really is a lovely man. It's in two parts: one and two.

Another find, which I don't think I posted: someone has written a cross-over between Bertie Wooster and Lord Peter Wimsey which is really very good - just a few lapses in idiom, which are interesting in themselves in illustrating the differnces between US and UK English. Good stuff. I see that the author also likes Diana Wynne Jones, which means she must be a Thoroughly Good Egg. If anyone reading this is a DWJ fan, do read her autobiography, which is hilarious. If you haven't come across her, she's the thinking person's J K Rowling but can actually write. My favourite book is Fire and Hemlock, but to start with I'd try, ooh, Dogsbody, which is half about what it's like to be a dog and half about what it's like to be a star, or Cart and Cwidder, or Eight Days of Luke (which when I read it was out of print and had to be ordered from the US. At least now she's in print, even if she's not nearly as famous as she ought to be).

At about quarter to twelve on New Year's Eve, A started a conversation about what we'd achieved (or at least done) in the year, which was sweet. We've been a bit useless about holidays, but we've seen lots of plays and operas, read quite a few books, and of course watched the whole of Buffy. And had a baby. And had a few other firsts he said he was glad I hadn't mentioned here, which I suppose means that I have to continue to not mention them. (Yup, I know that's a split infinitive. I have never ever heard a convincing reason why they should be avoided.) This year's big first is A once again starting his diet. This may well be an annual event, but hey. His technique is to eat dry bread while I'm wolfing curry, until I feel guilty and stop reminding him that he said he'd lose some weight. As strategies go, it's pretty effective, really.

In the midst of life

2006-12-19T14:33:00.000Z

Having got all evangelical about home birth, I want to do the same about home death. Whenever I talk to someone about the death of someone close to them, I'm reminded how unusual it is that the two deaths I've experienced - my father and my grandmother, my father's mother - were both at home, not in hospital. Both of them I saw die; and I'm sure that if I hadn't seen my father die it would have taken me a long time to really believe that it had happened. He also made an incredibly brave death - something I'm not sure anyone has the option of in a hospital.

I do want to read The American Way of Death: I suspect that nothing much has changed since Nancy Mitford wrote it. I particularly hate people who extract money from you by hushing you into embarrassment, and I'm fairly sure that funeral directors come into that category.

What also sticks in my mind from my father's death are the florist who got quite pushy when my mother said she just wanted red roses to put on the coffin - obviously, a beautiful gesture can't be a beautiful gesture unless it costs more - and the local vicar, who after half an hour of talking about my father was still failing to get his name right. This turned out to be a good thing, as we decided we didn't want someone like him involved with the funeral, so we ran it ourselves.

It was lovely - as lots of people said afterwards, and then wondered if they should have. We chose poems and asked different people to read them: I read 'Fear no more the heat of the sun' and my Welsh partner of the time read 'And death shall have no dominion'. And we asked people my Dad had worked with and members of societies he's been in to just stand up and talk about him. It worked so well that someone we hadn't asked felt able to stand up and talk too, which was wonderful.

But in a way the situation was very simple. Last year a very good friend of mine died, and as he was in his mid-fifties and a lovely, lovely man, he had loads of friends as well as dozens of relations. He'd worked for the university too, so there was a huge memorial service in one of the colleges. There were two problems for me: one was that it felt odd to claim him as a close friend (he'd been one of my two best friends for some years) when so many other people had claims on him. I felt almost a fraud. But the other was a more general problem: the huge memorial service was to celebrate his life, but it took place not that long after he'd died, and his illness had been quite a sudden one. And I didn't want to celebrate his life: I wanted to mourn his death.

It almost seems as though you're not quite allowed to do that any more. I suppose there's a difference between funerals and memorial services, but even funerals seem obliged to have a positive slant. If you're genuinely Christian they probably ought to be anyway, but hardly anyone I know is. Though I suppose if you're going to believe anything, that's when it'll be - and why as an atheist I take particular care not to cop out at that point.

I suppose the sanitisation of death, removed to hospitals and controlled by other people, is related to the hygienic nature of funerals and their lack of outright emotion. Perhaps the latter is an English thing, though? I can't imagine Italians, for instance, dabbing with hankies instead of sobbing over the coffin, but perhaps I'm just thinking in cliches.

I suppose, also, that I don't like personal, domestic events to be taken over by church and state (and doctors). Ha! That ties up a preference for homebirth with being anti-marriage very neatly...

Five weeks old

2006-12-15T23:13:00.000Z

So today it's five weeks since I gave birth. It seems like ages. The child is getting huge, and is currently insatiable - feeding every hour or so this evening. (At least I've worked out how to boot up obne-handed: it turns out that the key marked alt gr does the same as alt. What on earth can the gr mean, though?) My body's pretty much back to normal and has been for quite a while, except that I still have that weird brown line down my middle - linea negra, it's called, although mine also has dots on either side and so looks, yuckily, like an operation scar - and my pelvic floor isn't quite so super as I thought: twice this week I've realised I needed to go to the loo, an have dashed there and not quite made it. I blame this on my fabulous bladder capacity, which is such that even at nine months pregnant, I was only needing to pee two or three times a day. A, not pregnant at all, seems to go five or six times at least. [Digression: I love the vagary (can that be singular?) of the English language which makes it correct to say nine months pregnant but five years' experience and two weeks' notice (unless you're a semi-literate film company that doesn't employ sub-editors).]

FOUR WEEKS AGO TODAY
So, um, five weeks go I had a baby. Four weeks ago we had sex for the first time after the birth. This was something of a revelation as all the books seem to say six weeks and that's a long time to go without a shag... But then someone said to me yesterday, fancy my being up and about, and I thought that odd as I had been the next day, five weeks ago. Perhaps it just proves the uselessness of generalisations when applied to individuals. Argh. Infant now sceaming too much to ignore so I'll continue later.

An accident

2006-12-12T18:35:00.000Z

A bleak day today. On Friday night we went out to sing carols with a friend of ours. On Saturday, we found out that, later that night, her 24-year-old son had been in a car accident. There was no more news yesterday except that he was in intensive care, in one of the best units in the country for this kind of injury. This morning, he was slightly worse. Tonight, she's waiting to turn off his life-support machine.

It was a string of cliches: he was driving, there was ice, he was going too fast, he'd had a couple of pints, he wasn't wearing a seatbelt. The two friends with him had seatbelts on; they walked away with scratches. He'd been in an accident before when he wasn't wearing a seatbelt; it didn't convince him. He went through the windscreen and hit the road. His injuries sounded horrible. Why on earth did he think he was invincible? What a stupid, stupid waste.

A relation of his told me she felt she wanted to work in road safety, to try to say something to people his age that would make a difference. I went to a film a year or two ago before which, for some reason, all the ads they showed were the ones that target drunk driving. They scared the shit out of me. They were really horrible - graphic and shocking. I don't know what else anyone can do. And meanwhile, someone who was only 24 is pointlessly, stupidly dead.

Book!

2006-12-07T21:41:00.000Z

Met a friend of mine for lunch who's a don - I think: it's quite an odd term, isn't it? - at Newnham. She gave me a book that she said she'd read while breastfeeding. It's one of those 1960s Pelicans with the blue spine, and it's called Patterns of Infant Care in an Urban Community. Cool! It's actually very readable and interesting, too, quite apart from the cool factor.

A is in the bath with the infant, who seems to like water, which is good as it's taken me decades not to flinch when it goes anywhere near my face. The child needed a wash, as it was dressed by the health visitor, who didn't apparently understand the point of the nappy wrap, which is to contain. She hadn't done up the leg poppers, which meant *leakage* , which meant that the poor child was wet to its heels. It hadn't complained, of course - it's been peacefully asleep for most of the afternoon, presumably building up stamina for a night of insomnia. Last night was hell. It screamed and screamed - some the sort of shrieks that make you convinced you must have somehow stuck a pin in it. Surely it can't be wind when it hardly gets wind during the day? Anyway, I fed it and fed it until I was drained dry, a mere husk. We have lost our copy of Stop Your Baby Crying, which might have helped.

We schlepped all the way to the surgery this afternoon, tempest toss'd (or is it tost?* Probably either), because the health visitor thought the child looked yellow. It does, but so do I - it's having an anglo-Indian mother that does it. It also depends on the lightbulb. The doctor said at great length that they might do a blood test, or then again they mightn't: my decision. I eventually decided that we weren't going to have any paranoia this early on, so we'll leave it until our next appointment in two weeks. And home we came.

* Yes, it is. I looked up the Robertson Davies novel, as that was quicker. Robertson Davies is wonderful, this trilogy especially. Well, I've read his second trilogy, also brilliant and rather more serious, I suppose, but not the third, which I've consciously been saving up to have as a treat (partly because after that there isn't much more, really). There's something about his tone that appeals to me, I think - his sense of humour, his use of words, the sly allusions: it's all very attractive. I also believe what he tells me, which may be one of the ways I recognise a good writer. I recently read Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, and found myself reflecting again on how little I trust Rowling: I don't think her characters are properly realised - she just doesn't seem to *see* them - and I don't think she's going to be able to knit together all the holes in her plots. And none of that would matter so much if she wasn't such a *dull* writer. I return to Diana Wynne Jones with relief: superficially similar, but worlds apart in terms of humour, convincingness, and sheer style. If I ever have a dog, I'll call it Sirius.

From here to maternity...

2006-12-05T20:48:00.000Z

More shrieking today; then I put the infant into a very naff vibrating chair, which it decided it liked. Oh no - what if it grows up to have *really terrible* taste??

I'm getting behind myself, and the birth is seeming increasingly distant, so it's time to play catch-up.

FOUR WEEKS AGO TODAY
So we went to see the omniscient Mr Lim, and lo and behold... well, he didn't exactly see through the baby's head, but *something* happened, because suddenly my uterus was free of placenta, and a home birth presented no more risk than it would to the next person. Callooh! Callay! I went shopping to celebrate, and bought many more tiny garments in the charity shops of Mill Road. Also a fishing basket - I like baskety things to put toys in, and this one can also be sat upon.

Spookily, as though my body had just been waiting for the okay from an expert, my waters broke the next morning. Unfortunately, nothing else happened. I'd persuaded A to swap haircut appointments with me - we share the same hairdresser, which is handy - so as there was no action I headed into town to be snipped. Did a whole lot of Christmas shopping - in Halfords, glamorously - and came home. Drank raspberry leaf tea, then went out to a gospel concert and joined in the choruses, but nothing seemed to be getting going. The amniotic fluid went on leaking - it's an endless supply, the books said. I was yomping through maternity pads until A reminded me that we had a house full of nappies, so I road-tested a few terries.

By the next day, we were beginning to worry slightly, as you only have a certain amount of time after your waters break before they want to induce you - which, surprise, means ending up in hospital after all. NOOOOOOOOOO! So we started working our way down the list: eat a pineapple, drink more bloody raspberry leaf tea (filthy stuff), have a shag, have a curry, go for longish walk with friend and hyperactive pug. Also struck by cleaning urge and nearly asphyxiated myself spraying some vile orange kitchen cleaner into the under-sink cupboard then sticking my head into it. Coughing for ten minutes didn't start anything. Curses! And so to bed... we've read that the prostoglandins in semen that are supposed to get labour going are even more effective taken orally, and A has spruced himself up accordingly, but as it happens we're too knackered for any hanky-panky and pass out as our tiny heads hit the pillows.

I wake up at six the next morning, again, and wander downstairs to finish the rationalisation of the under-sink cupboard. Information design segues neatly into domestic ergonomics, and I'm trying to find the perfect location for a nappy bucket. At about half-past seven I decide I can't be botherered to have breakfast, and it might be a good idea to get some more sleep. So I go back to bed. And then not very much later, there's a funny kind of feeling that's sort of in my front and mostly in my back. And fifteen minutes later, another one. A is beginning to stir, and has done this twice before, so I ask him if he thinks it might be a contraction. He says yes. Oooooohhh...

And so they continue. They don't feel like anything contracting: the most localised pain is at the base of my spine. An hour or so later, they're getting closer together and rather more painful. And then suddenly quite a lot more painful, and nasty because you can feel the pain approaching and know it's goinbg to hurt, but also that nothing you can do will stop it. The only thing you can do is shout "Noooo, please..." and crouch over the sofa. At about nine-fifteen it seemed like time to call the midwife, and time to see if getting into the bath might help the pain. It's a big cast-iron rolltop which I habitually spend hours steeping in, next to a pile of snacks and paperbacks, but of course not ideal... we'd thought about a birthing pool (you can buy them on eBay, naturally), but then there'd been the possibility of a Caesarean, or at best a hospital birth. And bugger, we hadn't written our birth plan yet, either. I'd been pretty sure I'd be early - I've got a fast metabolism, and my menstrual cycle is only 24 days, so I reckon my body generally doesn't hang about - but hadn't, of course, acted on this assumption....

So by quarter to ten it hurts quite a lot, and I'm shouting "Where's that bloody midwife?" (Answer: trekking over from Cambridge) and "Get that bloody bubblewrap down!" (We have a brick floor, and I'm only prepared to take authenticity so far.) By about ten o'clock I've had enough of the bath, and want to be ON all fours, IN the living room, ON the bubble wrap, so I do that. I see what they mean about things being very clear when you're in labour. The midwife arrives with a great clattering of metal things - cylinders of gas and air, I discover later, which we never actually use. There isn't really time for introductions. "I don't suppose I could get you to lie down so that I can do an examination?" she says. "No," I agree. Being examined isn't high on my list of priorities at that moment.

We're apparently in second stage already. My blurred memories include lots of people's mobile bloody phones going off, and idiotic conversations - there's no reception in our house unless you stand in the garden. Surely there ought to be some situations in which you simply don't answer the phone? Thank heaven I'm not in a hospital room full of bleeping instruments: I need to concentrate and I don't multi-task at all well. An assistant midwife arrives and starts filling in a form with a very scratchy pen. I ask her if she could please not, and it comes out much more polite than it is in my head, weirdly. Our ante-natal teacher had warned us that language inhibitions might be loosened, and A was worried that my language might be even more - erm, colourful? than usual, but oddly there's no urge to swear, and I yell inarticulately instead. My throat hurts for days.

This bit hurts less because you can feel the purpose. But it's not as obvious as it could be: there's one huge urge to push, but after you've taken it as far as you can - like singing a very long phrase in music - you have to decide how far back to come and how much to breathe in before pushing again, and this time there's no involuntary urge to help you. I get frustrated because I can feel that there must be some trick to it: if I could only get the breathing right, it would all be easy... For much of the time, it really does feel as if you're doing a very big, hard pooh: so much of the pressure is on your perineum, and that's right next to your bum, so there doesn't seem much difference. And you push and push, and then *have* to give up for a bit and relax, and you feel everything going back inside again. Hell! At some point the midwife says I can feel the baby's head, so I reach underneath: it's warm, but squishier than you'd think. After that we don't seem to get anywhere for ages: I grit my teeth and push when the urge comes, and the midwife says "Excellent!" and I have to ask her to be more specific - "Push!" or "Don't push!" because I don't know if excellent means nearly there or go on. But she's good: she doesn't say too much, but what she says is worthwhile: she suggests shifting my weight from foot to foot (this shifts the baby about in your pelvis so it can find the best way through); later she suggests turning the other way around. I've been leaning back against A, who's sitting on the piano stool - who'd have thought *that* would be a useful birth accessory? - but turn and grip his ample waist instead. He is perfect: I mostly ignore him but know he's completely solid and reliable, and what's more know that being ignored won't upset him: he's left his ego behind for this one. Wonderful man.

Eventually, when I feel as though I really need to just give up - and I'm fairly fit and healthy, so how does anyone who's not get through it? - we get to a different place and the midwife says to stop pushing just for a moment while she does something, and then a baby comes out. Head-first onto the bubble-wrap, A says later. It's 1221 - nicely palindromic. Goodness knows why or how, but I remember our lack of birth plan and manage to gasp that we don't want to know what sex it is, we want to find out for ourselves, so the midwives wrap it up in a towel and hand it over.

Yuck, it's horrible. Its head is really pointy and its nose has a Bajoran-style fold in it, quite apart from the waxy covering. Oh well. We sit down and look at it anyway. It feels like ten minutes, but is actually about an hour, just recovering and meeting the baby, and giving it its first feed, which seems quite straightforward. My most coherent thought is that it has no eyelashes so is probably a girl, since boys always seem to have long fluttering ones and therefore it's desirable for girls, with the typical perversity of sexism. The midwives come back now and again and say "Haven't you looked yet?" and eventually "We can't fill in our forms until we know..." We've had a change of assistant and the new second midwife is the one we met at the NHS classes we started the week before to supplement our NCT classes, in the hope that we'd meet some new parents both more local and less spookily from an identical social demographic. It's she who points out that - damn and blast it! - we still have the third stage to do.

There's nothing in the whole world I want to do less than push again. My first try is pathetic. For the second one, I try a bit harder and eureka! There it is! But wait. I have in fact passed a blood clot much the size of a placenta. Yuck and double yuck. In fact there is quite a lot of blood around by now, as the second midwife calmly points out. Give it one more try, she says, and then she strongly recommends the syntometrin injection, which is the one that speeds up the delivery of the placenta. Having had a totally drug-free birth up to now, I'm strongly tempted to get fetishistic about refusing this, but luckily sanity prevails. And anyway, the third contraction never happens. We have to cut the cord so she can use it to pull the placenta out. Nobody has mentioned that A has done this twice before, so when it's presented to him it's not quite the Big Moment that seems to be expected. Ah well. The injection in my thigh is stupidly painful - how the hell can THAT hurt? But thankfully, the wretched placenta comes out and is complete. My original midwife had a horrible tale of a woman who had a normal home birth, then couldn't deliver the placenta, so got taken to hospital, where it turned out to be attached to her uterus, so she had to have a Caesarean to get it out. Labour and a C-section - how crap is that?

Around now I lie down on our handy divan thing, and look out of the window at the glorious autumn day - which begins to fade alarmingly, and the light to yellow, and I think I'm going to die, after finding the perfect man and having the perfect baby... It's the blood loss, but the fade to black is just how they show death in the movies, and for a few moments I stare death in the face. And then I remember to say something, and am told to get my head down, and call for food - I missed breakfast to rationalise the cupboard, and lunch to give birth - and start stuffing food into my mouth. A little while later, the first midwife suggests taking a bath, but not standing up, and so I crawl across the ceramic-tiled floor of the hall to get there, feeling suitably penitential.

The bath is lovely. I shall stop in there for the moment. To be continued...

Bloody amateurs

2006-12-03T21:41:00.000Z

Great Scott, it's like Little Shop of Horrors here - the bit where the plant is getting bigger and begger and yelling FEEEEED MEEEEEE! Except that the infant doesn't articulate it - it screams very loud, and then it screams even louder. Then it knaws its tiny fists to show that it is STARVING and you are CRUEL... This is while you're running through all the other things it could be - wind? boredom? nappy change? - because it's only *half an hour* since the last feed and you really can't believe that the child can be hungry again. And all it can do is convince you by sheer volume. WAAAAAAAAH!

The midwife said this might happen, and that it might betoken a growth spurt. So now it's going to be a Giant Baby, too? Eek!

Otherwise, life is slightly lacking in anticipation, as we watched the final episodes of Buffy on Friday night. It did not disappoint - what a fabulous series, and a fitting ending. In all seven seasons, there was only one episode that we both thought was under par. Astonishing. Joss Whedon is our god. We've been telling people we're going to watch them all again from the beginning and watch Angel concurrently. They think we're joking.

A lovely poncey afternoon yesterday: we got together five singers (well, three plus A and me) to do the Britten 'Hymn to St Cecilia' as a slightly belated celebration of her day on 22 November (she's the patron saint of music, and the day was also Britten's birthday). Last year we did a workshop on it which involved quite a lot of analysis of the text, and some of it made sense for the first time. The year before, I got together a group of singers at the very last moment (eventually phoning every bass in Cambridgeshire); two of them are now dead, including the tenor who was one of my two best friends in the whole world. So now I want to try to sing the piece every year and remember previous occasions.

We worked our way through the Oxford Book of English Madrigals, too, and once again managed to find one we'd never sung before. This seems to happen however many years you've been using the book for. This time it was 'Adieu, ye city-prisoning towers' by Tomkins: the words seemed a heartfelt farewell to city life, something with which I felt a great deal of sympathy, having just finished seven years of commuting.

One of the singers was complaining about some group that had chucked him out, which seemed a bit rich as he's a member of a group that's recently chucked me out... Amateur singing is mostly fantastically rewarding - especially when you realise what a dog's life a professional singer has (I'm thinking about rank-and-file consort singers, not the tiny proportion of mega-stars) - but when there's back-biting it can't half get nasty. The most successful groups I've been in - well, maybe there's only been one, in fact - are those that stay very clear about the fact that if you were a pro you'd be doing it for the money, but if you're an amateur you're doing it for the FUN, and so if it's not fun, you've got it wrong. Almost all groups at some stage seem to get ideas above their station and either start wanting to be terribly terribly good - which would be okay, except that it invariably means aiming beyond the abilities of the group, which makes it all a horrible fag, which means it stops being fun, and kapow, you've blown it - or get completely sidetracked. Almost every choral society I've been in has had some ongoing saga whereby *somebody* wants the women to wear something 'to make us look more professional'. It's never the men - they stay in their DJs and nobody messes with them. No, it's always the lay-dees, and it may be scarves, or little jerkins, or some ghastly frock or robe or sash or... aargh. Hours and hours of committee meetings. Like vampire slaying, music-making can have only one leader. Wasn't it Shaw who said the best form of government was a benevolent dictatorship?

I seem to have got rather earnest. It's because I've been sucked dry and left an empty husk. The child is whickering again now. Wasn't there something like this in The Midwich Cuckoos?

Shake it all about

2006-12-01T18:30:00.000Z

So you know when there's a bit too much to be done as well as all the breastfeeding, because instead of looking to see which breast you pinned your little hairclip on to tell you which you were going to use for the next feed, you just glance to find out which breast is still sticking out after the last feed, pack it away and drag out the other one... I know it won't be long before I walk down the high street exposing myself involuntarily. The question is, I suppose, will I care? Ooh - anyone remember that 'Not the Nine O'Clock News' sketch in which the woman arrives home with one breast exposed (it wasn't Pamela Stephenson in this one, for I suppose an obvious reason)? The husband, approaching along the hallway, looks at her, looks at it, looks at her... She looks down, sees the breast, and says "Oh my god! I left the baby on the bus!"

Off for our hearing test today, which we passed with full marks. It's just the start of a life full of tests and assessments, I fear - welcome to Blair's Britain, otherwise known as World of Statistics [TM].

My stomach has now assumed pre-pregnancy beergut proportions, which seems pretty good when today is only three weeks since giving birth. Presumably it all just depends what kind of stomach you have - it's certainly not through any special activity on my part. How do you do pull-ups, anyway?

The child has caught its father's stinking cold, which is a pain - lots of snuffling and grumpiness, poor mite. Even when their noses aren't blocked, you wonder how they can breathe while breastfeeding. Add snorts and snuffles and it seems even less likely.

I see I'm having random thoughts. Oh well.

Full-throated ease

2006-11-30T14:29:00.000Z

Oh lord: inexplicable screaming for the last half an hour - the kind where the baby consists only of a gaping red maw issuing uninhibited yells with the dial set at 11. We've just eaten - in the bath, which worked well - and been winded, and put on dry clothes, so what can it be? Adoring Grandma has gone home and Daddy is back at work, so is it that poor old Mum is already deemed insufficiently entertaining? The sound of unfettered screams is amazingly distressing, and I've already (bad mother) resorted to shouting - "What the hell is wrong, and WHERE'S MY OTHER BLOODY SHOE?" Oh *god*.

And then, as always, it's all over. Turns out darling creature was hungry again although we only ate - oh well, I suppose by now it is actually an hour ago. I've been footling around on eBay, wondering what the heck size I am now. In charity shops - where I buy most of my clothes - I can hold something up and tell if it's my size, and I'm not that fussy about a perfect fit, but buying online is trickier. I'm back to wearing the larger of my pre-pregnancy clothes, but I've also got these BREASTS, and where that leaves me on the size 10 to 12 to 14 thing I don't really know. I've always tended to buy things I like if they fit approximately anyway, and ignore the size labels. Other women seem to be terribly specific about it.

Time to start my retrospective, if I'm ever to catch up with myself. Or something - watch out for temporal paradoxes...

FOUR WEEKS AGO TODAY
We'd had a scan at 20 weeks that showed a low-lying placenta (mine), and another at 32 weeks ditto, so they'd told us to come back at 36 weeks. Everyone had trouble seeing much, as the - foetus? baby? - had its head stuffed right down into my pelvis and wasn't budging for anyone. This time (Thursday 2 November) the radiographer said she could see the child's hair waving in the amniotic fluid - which A and I found a little freaky - but she still couldn't really see much around the cervix: she thought there was about 3cm clear. This was an improvement on the previous scan, when the placenta had been 'abutting' the cervix, but wasn't enough to let us off a possible Caesarean or at best a hospital birth. The more we'd found out about even our very nice local maternity unit, the more we'd thought home sounded a really good idea. Hospitals are, after all, for sick people. Anyway, after the scan we waited to see the consultant. And waited. And waited. A deeply patronising nurse eventually ushered us into a tiny cell and took my blood pressure. Then she asked for a urine sample, at which point I said I'd wee on a stick if it would get us to the consultant, but did she realise we hadn't actually come for a check-up? We'd come to see the consultant... We waited some more. I propped the door open, in case they forgot we were there and all went home.

The consultant when she came was, inevitably, harassed, apologetic, friendly and extremely competent. The verdict was still that a home birth might mean dying in a pool of a blood and was therefore not to be recommended. But why not come in again on Tuesday and see Mr L, who was very senior? I didn't see how even a very senior radiographer would be able to see through a baby's head if nobody else could, but hey ho. We wended our weary way homeward, pausing only to eat in a pub, bid and win a baby sling on eBay (hurrah for other people's WiFi), and take in our first NHS ante-natal class. We'd already done the NCT course, but were hoping to meet a few more people nearer our area and not quite so precisely the same social demographic at this one. The first class covered what to pack in your hospital bag, which was a useful reminder that we hadn't done this yet. Or written our birth plan. Bother. Didn't seem much point when we didn't know the location for the birth or the exit point for the infant.

We spent the weekend, daringly (I was 37 weeks pregnant by now) in Leeds, where the revamped Grand Theatre was opening with a new production of Peter Grimes. A is a Britten nut and I once played Second Tart, so we were keen to try it. Unfortunately, it was one of those productions where someone is keen to Make Their Mark rather than let the music speak for itself. Enjoyed the gratuitous nudity though - you don't often get to see Peter's bum. Sadly, though, this Peter wasn't the usual rangy type with wayward hair (and fairly pert buttocks, one generally assumes), but a fairly portly tenor who didn't look his best in the bright yellow oilskin dungarees supplied. Oh well: a joke's a joke (and fun is fun).

If tickets cost a pound apiece...

2006-11-29T22:19:00.000Z

Our first breastfeed on a bus today. All the jiggling around was quite useful, as the child does tend to latch on with verve, suck with great enthusiasm for five minutes, and then drop contentedly off to sleep - which isn't quite the point. Minor disturbance - gambolling toddlers, text messages sent behind its head, Beethoven symphonies, water scooped around in the bath - helps to keep its attention focused on the matter in hand.

I've almost perfected the art of the discreet feed, as well. Not so much from any desire not to offend (if you know me, you'll know that this would be uncharacteristic) as from the wish not to give any perves out there an unwarranted thrill. Which is assuming a lot from one little flash of nipple, I suppose. The only problem is that I've got so many layers of clothes on in this weather, and every cunningly designed nursing garment has a different system, so - especially if I'm wearing two at once, say - there's a lot of tugging and swearing to get inside, made all the more stressful if the spookily patient baby has finally decided it really is HUNGRY.

Caught up this morning with several back issues (if one can use an offline term) of the Money-Saving Expert emails. Good stuff. Red-hot tip this month is that Computer Shopper magazine has a cover CD or DVD with a free copy of Quark XPress 5 on it - this is for PC not Mac, but still well worth having. I didn't even know that there was a PC version, but then my job (building large dull websites for large dull companies) had been steadily turning me into a Luddite. (Even apart from that, though, I'd challenge anyone to tell me of a Word feature they use that wasn't in version 5.1. Most people I know don't even use the styles properly. Oh, don't get me started...)

It seems odd that the fields for all my favourite stuff in the Biog section don't include one for websites. Written by someone wearing an old media hat, perhaps. Anyway, I've only ever read two other blogs. One was by someone called truepenny, who wrote some fabulous stuff on Dorothy L Sayers' Lord Peter Wimsey books. I read all these in one huge binge earlier this year and loved them to bits. If you're fond of the subtle quotation, they are a joy. And the last of them, in particular (Busman's Honeymoon), has some *very* interesting things to say about relationships. The other is by Andrew Brown, who writes for the Guardian, and is excellent on religion and politics but also good on life. His is called Helmintholog (I still don't know why). One tiny comment of his has stuck in my mind: he once said that he'd spent an evening at home in front of the fire, with a good book and a glass of very nice red wine, and it had struck him (I'm paraphrasing and possibly re-writing, of course) that two hundred years ago, such an activity would only be possible for the very privileged, whereas now there couldn't be many people who wouldn't be able to do the same if they wanted to. It really made me think about the small pleasures of life and how lovely they are - and how much, in every age, and at every age, we take them for granted. Oh, and he can also be very funny. And of course he's an excellent writer.

The time is out of joint

2006-11-28T14:57:00.000Z

The child woke and fed at six-thirty this morning, then slept until half-past noon. Bugger! We've got an infant not yet three weeks old that *would* sleep through the night *if* we could get its internal clock in sync with real time.

The midwife had a theory (well, it may in fact have been scientifically proven) that babies don't like to sleep at night-time because it's too quiet - they're used to all the mother's internal gurglings, you see. And it's true that ours went to sleep just as the traffic noise started this morning. Heck. Ah well. We had a very nice bath that was curtailed only by the production of an explosive poo that reached every corner (yes, I know baths don't have corners - at the round bath's imagin'd corners, then) in five seconds flat.

We still haven't worked out the cause of night-time screaming - the child does genuinely seem less happy at night than during the day. Or maybe it's really us, and we don't get so bothered by day-time screaming, or don't even notice it so much? Anyway, A's catch-all diagnosis is wind, or colic: I'm increasingly thinking that any shriek is a demand for food. Especially as having fed at one-thirty after the bath, we did it again at a quarter-past two. The nice thing about demand feeding is that I don't feel obliged to keep track of the timetable - but it's certainly an erratic one.

A book in this morning's post - not yet opened. One of the best things about internet shoppping is that you finally get some interesting post after years of marketing circulars and loan offers. Btw, my favourite tip for revenge on the offerers of unsolicited loans: tear all the forms and the envelope it came in into tiny pieces (this in itself is therapeutic), then pack them into the reply-paid envelope. And post them back. Nothing to throw away, and whoever wasted your time pays the postage. Neat, huh? Anyone know any other urban revenges of this type? (If anyone's reading this - I'm not sure that even A is...)

Is this just fantasy?

2006-11-27T21:14:00.000Z

A weird day yesterday. One of those days when you have a lingering sense of sadness. And then you keep remembering it's because of something you've seen on television. In my case, Buffy, five episodes from the end, took a nasty turn and it looks as though (a SPOILER coming up for anyone who's watching Buffy but hasn't finished season seven yet) poor old Xander has had his eye poked out. Yuck and double yuck. There is something particularly horrid about eyes - hence the yuckiness of "Out, vile jelly" and similar. Feeling queasy just typing it. Hmm, maybe that's why my contact lenses are mildly painful today. It's empathy, man.

That season of all natures

2006-11-25T09:03:00.000Z

Bleargh. So we went to bed about midnight after watching another stonking episode of Buffy. [Pause for digression: this is Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and it's what's described as a 'cult show' in the US. I'd heard it was good, and bought the vidoes of the first series when I found them in a charity shop. It wasn't good; it was BLOODY BRILLIANT. Really well written, fantastic characterisation, and a fully fleshed out universe. We bought all seven seasons on eBay (hurrah for DVDs, and people selling off their video collections - we find videos less irritating anyway, as you can carry on where you left off without having to stumble through some over-graphical interface) and have been watching them in strict chronological order (cos we're like that). We're now only six episodes from the final one, but it's just getting better and better - the writers have pulled out every stop. Whereas earlier on we'd binge (and that's the joy of videos over live television (which we don't have anyway)), watching six episodes in a row and going to bed at 4am, now we're just watching one episode at a time to give its fabulousness a chance to sink in. The writing is just fabulous. Last night's episode was Lies my parents told me (btw the BBC site for Buffy has great reviews and trivia). The discussion about Spike's chip, soul and trigger was just priceless. Could any other show be this classy? We're going to call our baby after a character on the show...] Oh my god! We've got a baby!

Yes, that's still how I feel, just about - surprised and delighted, but perfectly capable of leaving the thing on the bus, actually, because it just hasn't all sunk in yet.

Just realised I've been saying 'we' without introducing the other inhabitant of the pronoun. That would be the chap I'm going to call A, my partner of nearly two years. He's 38 years old, no, hang on, 39, and the father of the infant. Lives here with me in the county of Cambridgeshire. Wonderful, wonderful man. Ahem - did I say I'd try not to be smug?

Anyway, better get back to the baby bit (this blog was originally going to be called babycrap...). I fed the infant (we are of course breastfeeding - and using cloth nappies - being in that particular social demographic (and more on all that later, of course)), then remembered - oh bugger - that we'd agreed we'd try to change the child's nappy a bit more often. Apparently they don't actually mind sitting in warm wee, but eventually their bottoms get a bit sore and then you feel guilty. I bought a lovely book secondhand called Stop Your Baby's Crying, apparently by the TV guru of its day (published 1996), one Nanny Smith, who says:
One reason a new baby won't be crying
"I have met people who, when their brand new baby cried, said 'Oh dear, I expect he wants his nappy changing'. Babies really and truly wouldn't care if
their nappy was changed or not. Of course they would care if they got a sore botty, but a dirty nappy doesn't worry babies - both urine and faeces are warm and comforting. People do change babies' nappies far more than they used to. No doubt it keeps the nappy manufacturers happy."

I applaud her cynicism! I also read somewhere-or-other about a study in which they (the omnipotent they) took a hundred babies (I picture it all happening in a large hall, but I'm sure the reality was much duller), waited until they cried (must have been fun), and then changed them. BUT half they changed into clean nappies, and half just put the old ones back on. And lo, the proportion of babies who stopped crying was the same in both groups.

However, we've really been leaving it too long, we think, so decided we'd try to do three changes a day, which if we change in the morning gives us roughly 8am, 4pm and midnight. This I remembered at 1am this morning. Oh, as I said, bugger. A had just gone to sleep and wasn't to be roused. So I did it, and it wasn't too bad - cloth nappies are actually a cinch, and I'll explain all about them another time - in the meantime, the nappy lady can tell you everything - fantastic site.

Anyway, the baby then slept till 0330, then woke up and fed for 20 minutes (this is good as previous feeds were more like five to ten minutes, and we got a bit panicky), til I plucked my nipple from its boneless gums. [Digression: The Scottish play is horribly apposite for breastfeeders, as you keep thinking of "I have given suck, and know how tender 'tis/To love the babe that milks me..." and then you remember what comes next, and try not to. Also all the bits about murdered sleep, and how sleep would (if you could get enough) knit up the ravell'd sleeve of care, seem all too true.] I'm definitely lacking that season of all natures right now. Because after that feed the baby just didn't seem happy. It wasn't full-throated screams: just whimpering, but all the more pathetic for that. A said colic, and wind, and after *he'd* tried everything too, and it was 5am, we caved in and gave the infant a dose of Infacol. Which seemed to work. [I love thinking about those branding meetings, with all the callow young men in suits brain-storming to come up with names, and being *really pleased* that they thought of Infacol. Ho ho.]

After all that drama, I got to sleep until 0800 or so, when A's children started to wake up. They're from his previous relationship, so their privacy is pretty important: I'm going to call them B (aged six) and C (aged four), but may not say much about them. We have them every Wednesday night, and every other weekend, so we've got them today, and we also had them the weekend I gave birth, which was interesting. Again, I'll write about that another time. And now it's time to stop typing and eat some porridge, I think. TTFN.

A very good place to start

2006-11-24T18:22:00.000Z

Good evening! My name is Beck, I'm 41 years old, and I live in the south of England, in the county of Cambridgeshire.

I'm an information designer by trade, and two weeks ago I had a baby. I had a really straightforward conception, pregnancy, and birth - despite my advanced age - and the whole experience has left me high as a kite. So given the amount of trepidation I felt beforehand, not to mention all the scary stuff about that kind of thing on the net, I thought it might be good to write about my positive experience. Trying not to sound too smug, naturally...

I also want to write about all the stuff I could't find out beforehand, such as what really happens to your Private Parts when you give birth and whether sex really is the same afterwards (news from Smugsville: it's *better*, woo woo, but more on all that later), and suchlike. My aim is to be frank but not explicit (don't really want to give any of the many, many pervs out there too much of a thrill), but we'll find out whether that's possible or not...

So. I'm starting this on Friday 24 November, exactly two weeks after the baby was born, writing in real time; then I'll go back and fill in the previous stuff from my notes.

Oh, I forgot: the other reason for doing this is that I love writing, but for the last seven years, almost the only writing I've done (for the company I shall refer to as CompanyIworkfor) is corporate crap for Big Nasty Companies. Not nice, and not fun. I can't write novels or poems or stuff because I don't have anything to say - no stories to tell. But I once worked on a keyboard magazine you won't have heard of (almost nobody had, and even fewer people bought it), and the editor who gave me the job offered me the chance to write features and interviews, and I found that if I had something to write about, I could do it. Keeping a diary seems to work in the same way.

Not a very exciting beginning, but hey: I'm new to this, and besides, the Infant is now shrieking, so it's feeding time at the zoo. More tomorrow.