Total trivia

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

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

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

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...

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

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

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...