Never goes without saying

It's not the cover you're judging a book on any more

2011-12-05T14:21:00.007Z

Last month at bookswap, Sophie Hannah made a passing-ish comment that really stayed with me. 'Look at all the books that really work', she said. 'They've all got Ronseal titles'.

If you grew up pre-Ronseal, what that means is a title which exactly sums up what the book delivers. In my first in-house publishing job that's exactly what we called book titles, and it's stuck with me ever since.

I've been thinking about this again this week. Is there a correlation between book sales and titles that tell you exactly what they're about without giving it away? A quick browse at any BookScan list (or media bestseller list, usually fed by the same data) will tell you it probably is. Sister. Room. The Help. Have a think.

So the more interesting question is: why? Is it to do with our link-hitting, button-pressing age, where we memorise nothing because 'I'll google it if I need to know'? Is it more prevalent now than it was in the 1950s, for example? Is it because, in this world of the Hollywood pitch, a publisher is more likely to invest more strongly in publicising a book that's easily described? Very possibly, surely, it's a mixture of both.

More and more, books are coming up with titles that sell them to us in our lightning-quick decision-making world. And people are buying them, in their droves. Something to think about before you name your putative bestseller after an obscure 16th-century Latvian poet.

Life on the other side of the fishbowl

2011-11-14T14:33:00.005Z

Alex James is telling me about a six year old whose dad had just died of cancer. The mother and daughter had returned to the Hospice of St Francis, where Alex runs a bereavement support programme for children aged 2-19. They had viewed the body and were filling out the death certificate, everyone very hushed and still. The little girl pulled Alex to one side and whispered, ‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Of course’ said Alex.

‘How do they know my dad’s definitely dead?’

‘Well, his heart stopped beating’

‘Yes, but how do they know that? What if it hasn’t really?’

Rather than reassuring the child with platitudes, Alex did something that had never before been tried at the hospice. Along with a nurse, she took the little girl back to her father’s body and placed the stethoscope in the child’s ears. They stayed like that for an hour, the child listening intently and asking very pragmatic questions about what, exactly, she could hear, until the little girl was satisfied that her daddy really was dead. ‘She’d been worrying about it for ages’, Alex said, ‘and hadn’t wanted to upset her mum by asking her, so we helped her to understand it’.

I went to visit the hospice as part of this year’s Children In Need campaign, to find out about the work done by the children’s grief support team at St Francis. Children In Need kickstarted the programme by funding a social worker, its inaugural member, three years ago. As the anecdote above demonstrates, the work carried out by the team is amazingly unsentimental. ‘These families are drowning’, Alex explains, ‘and you have to let them drown; you can’t be there for them forever. But what we try to do is to lift them up from time to time and show them dry land’.

The idea of leaving a kid to be upset is heartbreaking for most adults. But a dead mum or dad is upsetting. There probably shouldn't be anything more upsetting to a child than losing a parent; it would almost be disingenuous to try and 'solve' their grief. Instead, each member of her team works one-on-one with a family until the day that the family realises they don’t need help any more.

Alex's team offers support to up to fifty children at a time. Unusually for such programmes, they offer pre-bereavement support (they’re very careful not to call it counselling) as well as post-bereavement support. ‘Children will really open up to us after the parent has died if they feel like we actually knew mum or dad,’ Alex explains. ‘They can trust us when they talk about them. A lot of the work they do is about helping the remaining parent and child to find ways to communicate their grief to each other; to understand that every feeling is valid’.

Kids who connect with their support worker before the parent has died, Alex tells me, do much better, typically, in terms of dealing with their grief and are often ready to go it alone by about twelve weeks after the death of a relative. In striking contrast, children who gain access to the service only post-bereavement find it much harder to come to terms with and are often still seeing their key worker a year later. ‘The other thing’, she reminds me ‘is that grief isn’t linear and kids change as they grow up. So just because Dad died at five and you understood everything then doesn’t mean you won’t have questions when you’re eight and you understand a lot more.’ Children are encouraged to call back to the service whenever they feel the need.

Although we probably imagine children to be utterly bereft when a parent dies, Alex reminds me that this might not always be the case. ‘Some of these adults have been ill for a big chunk of the child’s life, and they’re relieved when it’s over and they can get on with their lives. ‘ She tells me of a teenager who confessed to relief that her motor-neurone-sufferer mother had died before the university term began, so that she could start her course along with her peers and not have to take an (expensive) gap year; of a nine-year-old boy who admitted he was ‘glad’ his father had entered the hospice ‘because now the bathroom has stopped smelling funny’. This is the side of death we don’t like to look at; the terrible truths that actually, life stopping for three years when you’re fifteen can have a huge impact. The team at St Francis help the children to understand that it’s OK to feel like this, that they’re not required to have a Disneyfied reaction to grief.

Sometimes, true emotion comes out elliptically. Not long ago, Alex visited a family whose mother had recently died. The family – three children aged fifteen and down – were sitting formally in the lounge, chatting apparently freely. ‘Everything’s fine’ was the message coming through.

Then Alex looked across at the fish tank. The fish had belonged to their mother, the tank a distraction from the endless days of dying.

‘How are the fish doing, do you think?’ she asked the family.

‘What do you mean?’ the little one asked.

‘Well’, Alex said, ‘we’ve been looking at the room from this side, looking into the fish tank. How d’you think the room looks from their side? What do they see since Mum’s died?’

The kids thought about it.

‘The room’s darker’ said the eldest girl.

‘Yes, and it’s quieter’, said the middle one, ‘Mum used to love to always have music on. There’s no music now’.

Then the little one piped up again. ‘And Daddy often forgets to feed the fish now because he’s drinking more. Mummy never forgot’.

Just like that, Alex said, the floodgates opened. The children were done talking about their grief to well-meaning adults; had honed the platitudes over their mum’s long illness. But turn the subject onto the fish, and what the fish might be thinking of the experience, and suddenly they were brimful of stories and emotions that they needed to share with Alex.

I left wishing the impossible; that none of these kids had had to suffer a parent dying. But the other big thing I thought was: thank goodness for someone like Alex, who really gets it. She's not trying to be their best friend; she's not trying to fix things. She's utterly caring without being cloyingly sentimental; she's calling death by its name when these kids have often had months of side-stepping from adults around them; and she's providing a neutral ear. It's the sort of thing children could probably often do with regardless of bereavement. To be able to provide it so compassionately and yet simultaneously dispassionately is all kinds of amazing.

Self publishing doesn't mean the end of the world for seeing your name in print

2011-11-08T10:27:00.005Z

Catherine Ryan Howard has made quite a name for herself- deservedly - in Ireland and beyond with her success at self publishing. But here she's banging the drum for good, old fashioned, hard work and a little bit of luck.

Right now, the self-publishing evangelists would have you believe that it’s easier to get struck by lightning in the jaws of a shark while holding a winning lottery ticket than it is to get published, and statistically, they’re probably right. But as I’ve said before, the statistics take into account all of the books and all of the writers. If you’re a good or great writer, and you write a good or great book, and you write that book at the right time and the book ends up in the right place, then your chances are significantly improved. Then, instead of a pie in the sky dream of publication, your chances of seeing your book on the shelves becomes not only possible, but likely.

I say it often and I'll say it again here: you can make your luck, to a certain extent. And that's what Maria Duffy has done here:

I first met her in person at an Inkwell “Getting Published” workshop soon afterwards, where Maria spoke of her novels and her hope – her dream, really – that she would one day be published. The next time I saw her was at another Dublin writerly event, this time at Irish PEN, where she whispered her exciting news to me: she’d got an agent. And not just any agent, but one who has had phenomenal success with a dizzying array of Irish women writers, many of them household names. Then, a few months later, the big news came: Maria had signed a two-book deal with Hachette Ireland and her debut novel, Any Dream Will Do, would be released in November.

Look how hard Maria worked at that. Workshops, PEN Ireland meetings - and many, many hours (snatched around the care for her four children) - of just sitting down and writing it. And it's all paid off. Congratulations, Maria. And thanks to Catherine for a fabulous, level headed post.

Falling, soaring

2011-11-07T14:10:00.003Z

Leaves like jewels come down to greet you, floating to the floor or whacking you in the face by way of hello. It’s hard not to feel like a 1950s bride, ducking through the lych gate to a veil-full of confetti as the colours flutter and twirl all around you.

I was driving home from Portland, Oregon in October 2003 when a black cloud of starling burst into the sky above the car. Dropping all at once from the telegraph wire, they looked just like they were practising being falling leaves, hurling themselves towards the nearest pile. Much like this:

I think we’ve all felt like that some days. At least, I hope so.

In defence of the Emerald Isle

2010-11-22T21:57:00.007Z

We'd been in Ireland about a month when someone (the lovely MD of Penguin Ireland, to give him full credit), told me the truest thing I ever learned about Ireland. 'The thing is', he said,'the Irish feel a far greater sense of kinship to the English than the English do in reverse'.

Three years living in Ireland taught me nothing more useful.The Irish have generations-worth of layers of familiarity with Britain, be it involuntary or (a consequence of emigration) voluntary. The Irish husband of an American friend told me that, in his primary school in the Eighties, his class of 30 were asked to put up their hands if anyone had an aunt or uncle living in the UK or the USA. Every hand in the room shot up. This would have been an unthinkable phenomenon in Eighties Britain.

How this familiarity translates into everyday life is as follows. Many Irishmen (and women) actively support Premier League teams (though I've yet to meet any Vauxhall Conference die-hards). BBC programmes are watched interchangeably, if not more frequently, than RTE ones - when we were in Dublin, there was genuine outrage and consternation about the migration of the BBC to an all-digital service, which would mean that the Irish would have to start paying for the BBC rather than picking it up via the English transmitters.
Everybody you meet has been to England, usually to visit relatives/close friends and often for a few years. The Guardian was cheaper for me to buy in Ireland than in England (go figure) - and available everywhere the Irish Times was sold.

At the same time, Ireland's got its own thing going on. It most definitely isn't an outpost of England (when I commented once that, with all the consumption of British media, it was as if we were standing on the edge of Ireland leaning towards the UK, an Irish friend said, 'just don't start referring to Britain as 'the mainland'. Noted).

I said it when we lived there, and, eight months out, I stand by it; Ireland's an amazing place for a holiday, but as a place to live, you really need to be Irish. In many ways, and oddly for a country with such deep roots, it's still finding its feet, and the Celtic Tiger mess is that of a teenager let loose with a credit card.
Religion, despite a generation that claims to be beyond it, is still pervasive (just try getting your unchristened kid into school, even Protestant school). Family ties are strong in an utterly exemplary way; but that makes it harder to belong if you're not part of an Irish family.
Then there's the preventative layer of the language; both Gaelige, which still sounds like someone talking through a mouthful of Jameson's however long I twist and turn with it, and the Hiberno-English vernacular, which is glorious, but takes a while to come to terms with. 'The day that's in it'; 'the guts of a week'; 'messages' and 'press' and the difference between 'your man', 'your one' and 'yer wan' - don't try and emulate it if you're an outsider. You won't get it right.

I left Dublin before things got truly bad and for entirely personal reasons; simply put, our roots are in England, and a sum total of seven years abroad felt like enough. Given our utter lack of regret at leaving Ireland, I've been taken aback at just how protective I feel of the view of the Irish as reported in the British media currently. The English just don't care about the myriad differences between themselves and their country cousins. If they think of them at all, it's in cliches.

Still; all the front pages depicting Ballymun slums and piebald ponies; the co-opting of Michael Flatley as spokesperson for Question Time (not yet, but surely only a matter of time); the fundamental indignation that Britain's helping to bail out Ireland, a Eurozone country; it all speaks to one, slightly sad, truth.
Namely: though a strong percentage of the Irish people could take Britain as a Chosen Specialised Subject on 'Mastermind' and ace it, the odds are that the average punter in any English town wouldn't know the name of the Taoiseach if you stopped them in the street. It's peculiar, and it wouldn't have occurred to me as odd before the years spent in Dublin, but now it makes me angry at my fellow Englishmen. I know Britain's far bigger than Ireland, but still. The USA is bigger than them both, and the Americans, even on the Scandinavian-dominated West Coast, all seemed to know heaps more about Ireland than the British do.

These people fought in our wars, they helped to rebuild our towns, and they have their own country and culture. Let's let them keep some dignity, at least, and acknowledge that.

What words are worth

2010-10-07T21:45:00.003+01:00

I went to a wedding once where the lead singer of EMF was a guest (it was a Forest of Dean wedding, natch. Everyone's related there, via sheep). After the wedding breakfast, he took the mic and informed the assembled crowd, 'Tonight I'm going to sing some songs about trains'.

Uh...OK?

And then, he did. I can't remember a single one of them (see again: Forest of Dean wedding. There were many old friends, and much booze), but I remember his set being (a) surprisingly great and (b) full of trains.

******

I've been overdosing on This American Life podcasts this month thanks to all the sodding running I'm doing. I'm sure there's a train of thought that says you shouldn't listen to something that makes you slow down in the driveway when you're training for a race, but I'm all about the endurance part of endurance running, and far less about speed. Hmm. Not at all about speed, that should probably read.

Anyway, This American Life has a little story before the main deal which sort of introduces the topic, but somewhat tangentially. And apparently the genius of Ira Glass has woven itself into my brain (if only), because that's what the wedding story is. A tangential introduction.

*****

All of which to say; tonight I'm going to tell you some stories about poems. Well, just the one, really; but 'a story' rather than 'stories' would have knocked out the rhythm.

I got lucky at college. My first term in, I made friends who have, with very few shake-downs, been with me ever since. Theo (he of the flowers) and I were pretty much inseparable in those days, and for years after. We fought more or less constantly; huge, incensed arguments about the supremacy of language over science; huger, still more incensed arguments about whether it was OK for him to eat my food whilst I was still eating it too (Theo's point was that he always ended up finishing my meals every day, so he may as well eat it whilst hot rather than wait for it to be congealed). Theo was family from the outset; whatever we were bickering about at the time, the fact that we were friends always seemed obvious; irrevocable.

At the end of the first term, we met to exchange gifts - the vogue was for those hideous carved candles of naked people embracing that you could buy for a fiver in the market. In an Emperor's New Clothes way, everyone thought were unbelievably sophisticated (they were unbelievably ugly, more like). So I was expecting wax, and was pleasantly surprised when Theo gave me two envelopes. One was a Christmas card.

I opened the other one. That was a Christmas card too.

(To understand Theo, you have to think back to early episodes of Friends and imagine Joey mixed with Chandler in proportions of about 70:30. Right at this moment, he was all Joey).

Theo grinned at me. 'Read it!'

It was a poem. I don't remember much of it, though I still have it somewhere; congenital pack-rattage combined with a commitment to never discard other people's emotions means we have an entire sea-chest upstairs filled with randomata.

What made it so utterly brilliant, though, was the dedication that preceded the poem:

'Saz - I wrote this for X (whichever the latest of Theo's conquests had been)but she ditched me so I thought you'd like it'.

He was right; I did. And I especially liked that he knew me well enough, after only eight weeks, to understand that a poem written for me would've felt unbearable and inappropriate; but a poem written by Theo and given to me (proof that language wins! Ha! Except that we continued the language/science argument for at least another ten years) was a beautiful and touching present. And at least it wasn't a sodding candle.

*****

There are lots of things I think I could usefully change about myself. I could be less verbose. Less twitchy. Less hopelessly optimistic in the face of life. But what I absolutely love about being me is that, for some reason, my male friends (never my female friends, and never romantic entanglements) have always felt comfortable giving me their poems to read. I think poetry's amazing, and I think my friends are amazing, so they know it's a safe bet. But it's still a total act of trust, and it blows me away every time.

Happy National Poetry Day.

I had to cut this post short to go and do a little light dusting

2010-09-20T22:06:00.004+01:00

Jonah was on the phone to my Mum, on loudspeaker.

'Yeah, nice weekend...Daddy is doing the gardening and Mummy is doing the cleaning'

I choked on my muesli and had to resist grabbing the phone away from him. I could hear Mum, on the other end, howling with laughter. '

Jonah, bless him, is only saying what he sees. Most of my life, personal or professional, is spent working with the premise of 'show, don't tell', and it would appear that when it comes to giving children role models, the traditional ones are what's being served up. So it is that, with two small boys in the house, I'm being more to active feminism than at any other point in my life.

Thinking back, I was lucky. I didn't ever ponder feminism too much (or 'boys vs girls' when I was too small to give it such a multi-syllabic name) because there was no need. I was one of two sisters with sports-loving parents; weekends were just as likely to be spent by the side of a minor-league rugby pitch or helping to mix cement as they were doing the grocery shopping. We had a Scalectrix, and tools; and anyway, books very quickly usurped anything remotely gender-specific for me (unless you're going to claim that reading is inherently female, which is a whole other issue). 'As soon as you learned to read everything else stopped' my Mum has been known to remember wistfully.

I went to an all-girls' secondary school, where CDT and woodwork were taught alongside ceramics and jewellery. When I reached sixth form, one of my general studies classes involved donning overalls and learning how to change the oil and a tyre in our car mechanics class. We were also taught the far-more-useful skill of hotwiring; probably something not being taught to the boys down the road.

I was lucky, too; whilst I had a terrific group of girlfriends at school, my out-of-school friends were predominantly boys (with two key exceptions). And again, I honestly don't think I ever felt that I couldn't do anything the lads were doing. Sometimes there were things I wished I wasn't doing, like abseiling down a disused quarry or leaping off a bridge attached only to a piece of rope (and there was nothing 'professional' about this; it was just an idea cooked up in the pub).

If I'd abstained, nobody would have cared; some of the gang just didn't fancy some of the activities. But there was never an assumption that I would or wouldn't do something based on gender.

I suppose it could be said that I was the ultimate beneficiary of the generation before me, who burned bridges (and bras) so I didn't have to. Honestly, though, I think it was more down to a matter of luck and attitude. I never actively engaged in fighting for feminism not because I didn't care, but because I didn't have to. If I wanted to do something; great, get on with it.

Having boys has made it an issue, though. Maybe having children would do that anyway, in the way they make you reexamine your stance on, say, TV or jaywalking. But as the sole female representative in a house of men, I'm at the diametric opposite end of where I grew up. So we try to ensure the boys know two things:it's possible for them to aspire to anything they like; and secondly: that would be also be true even if they were girls. My boys love to cook (although, as with reading, I fail to see why that should be gender-biased; cooking's a basic human skill set, for crying out loud). They love to play rugby. They love to read endless books, and they love to climb trees. For the most part, I think we're doing OK. All I need to do is figure out how to persuade them that Mummy doesn't clean...

Croeso, boyo

2010-08-20T15:08:00.004+01:00

I was going to show you pretty pictures, but Blogger has other ideas. Oh, the joys. So you'll have to make do with a mental image instead.

Imagine yourself crossing the 'big bridge', as they always put it in Gavin and Stacey (imagine yourself too, if you like, loving Gavin and Stacey for its frequent mentions of the A48, then you'll be in the right mood). Search in your pocket for the ridiculous quantity of change now required to entering the principality. Find the manned toll booth ('always use the one with the person in it' as my lovely pal Alex says, 'because that way you're keeping someone in a job').

And as you put your foot down on the accelerator and head towards the wingspan of the bridge, sing this as hard as you possibly, possibly, can:

Age shall, of course, wither us, but we'll continue in denial

2010-08-11T21:15:00.003+01:00

I was at a wedding earlier this month with some of my favourite people, one of whom was (duh) getting married.
It was everything it needed to be. The wedding itself was gorgeous; sincere and lovely and just so HAPPY but loads of fun too (Depeche Mode to come back down the aisle to, anyone?).
Three-line-whip get-togethers of the whole gang are relatively rare nowadays, so there was a Mexican wave of a cheer every time the next familiar face arrived. And - maybe significantly in the context - the various offspring had all been left at home, so we were in utter party mode, and also, for twenty-four hours, able to pretend to be the irresponsible yoofs we'd once been.

***

I was in the car today and looked up at the date, and thought, 'blimey, Tim's birthday tomorrow - is he 41 or 42 now?'. And then I remembered that, whilst I'll almost certainly associate the Glorious Twelfth with Tim, he's not around to have any more birthdays. It seems impossible, just impossible; perhaps all the more so because he was someone I didn't see much of recently, so I don't notice his absence on a daily basis the way I know others do.

***

Whilst I was thinking about this, and almost resenting the fact that we can be old enough to have friends who've died (and I know that I've just been extraordinarily lucky, really, to get to this age without bad shit happening before) I remembered something that one of our gang had said at the wedding. We'd been doing the usual, 'what's the next excuse for a party?'. Since most of us are married at this point (and happily, so second weddings aren't in the offing as the festivity-provider), it's likely to be the rash of fortieth birthdays that start for us next spring.

'Forty?' said K.; blonde, beautiful and several years younger than us (married into the clan, and we're very glad of her). 'None of us are old enough for that to be happening. Forty's what...grown-ups....do'.

I don't know whether this is related to the one semi-coherent point Tony Parsons made, in Man and Boy, when he observed that our post-war generation hasn't had to work at anything so it doesn't know how to do anything but live in perpetual youth. Maybe that's part of it, but we looked around. Amongst the dozen or so of us, we'd experienced what's probably the normal amount of life stuff; serious illnesses, a couple of football-teams' worth of kids, redundancy, fertility issues. None of those things was tackled lightly, or could be anything other than adult in nature.

But K. was right. We still don't feel old enough.

These are my trees: Didn't fall far

2010-07-19T21:57:00.006+01:00

We went into Jonah's pre-school last week for his pre-Big School 'report'. He's lovely, they said. We know that, we said, but thank you; it's still good to hear from others.

My other favourite part of the report? Jonah's been taking part in a 10-week project called Forest School. Once a week, he and his classmates have spent the 'classroom' session outside, literally, in a forest, messing around with trees, learning to cook around a fire, making pictures with 'treasures' they find. At four I'd have adored it; at nearly 40, I think it's more or less compulsory for the soul.

In preparing the report, Jonah's teachers asked him what he'd liked best about Forest School.

'The trees', he said.

That's my boy.

That's me in the corner

2010-07-12T21:21:00.003+01:00

Through happy chance, I've spoken to four of our Seattle friends in the last week. The time difference is a total bugger to negotiate, so it was particularly lovely to get to manage it so often.
The close proximity of the calls made me realise something, though, that I might not have noticed over a more separated period. I don't know how to speak American any more. The once-learned automatic cadences and re-accenting ('gar-arshhh' rather than 'garridge' for 'garage', 'fosset' rather than 'fawcet' for 'faucet' - and come to that, 'faucet' rather than 'tap') are gradually slipping away under first Irish and now British reassertion of dominance. Maybe I was always this inarticulate in the US and I've just sugar-coated my memories the way time allows, but I found myself tripping up on the absolute daftest of things; what the Americans say for 'ring road' ('arterial', I think; but I haven't looked it up so God only knows); whether it's a two-by-four or a four-by-two (and it's certainly not a 4X4, which is an SUV and thus something else altogether). It felt a bit like losing my religion. How could I not know how to speak anymore, for Christ's sake?

I've always been astonished by how little room in my brain there seems to be for vocabulary, especially for someone who loves talking so much. I learned Spanish for six months, and that was all it took for my 13 years of German (including two years living auf deutsch, um Gottes Willen) to be supplanted by those sneaky sibilant 's's and perkily phonetic phrases.

The exception to this (and why yes, I have spent a long time thinking about this; why do you ask?) is for words that I particularly attach to a given situation. 'Carafe' in French, because all wine is in jugs so you're forever asking for jugs. 'Strassenbahn' (or worse, the colloquial 'Binnen') for tram in we-will-rule-everything-on-little-electric-trains Germany. 'Remolque' in Spanish, mostly because I learned Spanish with Ol (yeah, this is what we did for fun. I know.) and the phrase 'Tienes uno remolque?' ('do you have a tow truck?') struck as the most ridiculously un-useful phrase ever from car-less central London. The 'learned it here first' rule also holds good for English, it seems; I was able to chat diapers and strollers with lovely Kim without the need of a translator.

Anyway, I hadn't thought about one of our forms of English drowning out the others. I'd assumed, if I considered it at all, that we'd switch effortlessly from one to the other the way we drive on the left or the right (or the middle, in Ireland, where the roads are so tiny and twisty) according to cultural dictat. But no. It would appear that even the mother tongue is situational.

Queue here for the pink bricks

2010-06-20T21:02:00.002+01:00

We spent today at LegoLand. It was Fathers' Day, and it seemed like an apt place to spend it, with one Lego-crazed boy and two Lego-crazed wannabees (when they can just figure out how to put it all together...). It was a great day, and we had a blast, but that's not what I'm here to talk about.

Before we got there, I'd taken the concept of LegoLand pretty literally. I thought it was going to be a centre of tiny (and not so tiny) Lego models, and maybe a few places where you got to put together your own pale imitations instead. But no...LegoLand, as anyone who actually bothers to read about where they're going before they go would have known, is essentially a mini theme park. There's Lego galore, bien sur; but there are also log flumes and pirate ships and dinosaur rides and Vikings and diggers and car tracks and....

....and absolutely nothing that seems aimed towards girls. I'm not advocating gender-based play; to be honest, having grown up in a two-daughter household with toy garages and Scalectrix, and having bought our boys a toy kitchen for Christmas two years ago, I actually think it doesn't really occur to me. But you see the evidence around enough to know that gender-based play does exist: that for every Captain Hook walking the plank there must be a mermaid combing her hair; for every bumper car there's a hospital with a nurse in attendance; for every dinosaur there's a...a what? Betty Flintstone? Buggered if I know.

Anyway, it just struck me as curious. The conclusion we came to was that Lego's self-selecting; whether meaning to or not, it appeals more to boys, thus the activities were centered around more typical 'boy' interests, too. I've got no idea whether this is actually true or not, but it was weird to be presented with such a strong gender-based theme park. Who knew those even existed? Or are theme parks, by their very nature, more 'male'? And no, I'm not bringing Dollywood into this.

And, of course, there's Camus...

2010-06-12T21:09:00.003+01:00

I was all set to write about Martin Amis tonight, but the footie's on in the background, and my mind keeps filling with that instead.

I could give a damn about formations and the offside rule and all that technical nonsense; but I've always loved football for that huge sense of people joining together and willing something to happen. I suppose it's not the game itself I love - if you could get the same effect from a tiddlywinks championship, I'd be all over that instead, I'm sure - but the way it connects people's brains. And of course, in my brain, it makes me think of writers. Two in particular.

The first is, of course, Nick Hornby. I devoured Fever Pitch when it first came out and in those early days, before the onslaught of earnest contemporary male writers, the book was astonishing for showing you the world through the prism of the fanatic. As a non-fanatic with a great love of communication and my mates, there's a segment near the beginning that I remember any time there's a major match on. Arsenal have won some significant championship (she says vaguely; half our books are in storage at the mo and I'm pretty sure Fever Pitch is not one of the chosen few hundred currently on the shelves). Hornby describes coming home and his answer phone (this being pre-mobiles) is flashing like a streaker at a cricket match, full of messages from ex-girlfriends and distant relatives and his Mum; all these people who saw the result at the end of the news and were moved to call the biggest fan they knew.

I *love* that sport can bring connection like that. And Hornby, of course, put it beautifully; which is why the book went on to be such a huge success.

***

The second is Roddy Doyle, who wrote an essay about Ireland's participation in the 1990 World Cup for an anthology, The Beautiful Game. The whole thing is lovely, but then near the end, he's describing David O'Leary taking a penalty kick:

'We had to score our last one....David O'Leary, a great player and a nice man...No one spoke. He placed the ball. It took him ages...the ball hit the net in a way that was gorgeous...I cried.'

Doyle goes on to ponder, wistfully, that there's nothing in his profession that captures that same emotion. Apparently O'Leary's wife, at home in Ireland, had been unable to watch her husband's penalty, so she'd gone out into the garden and their son had come running out to tell her the result. I'm paraphrasing here, but Doyle's point is, imagine that happening at the end of a novel:

'Ma, Ma! Da's after finishing the book!'

Say what?

2010-06-04T20:39:00.003+01:00

Nearly three months have passed since we set sail* from the Emerald Isle; enough time to start to figure out what we've exported from our three years there. I've written before about wanting to hold onto our American positivity; with Ireland, what seems to have lasted is the language. Jonah, the only one of us to have ever truly passed as a native (despite his brother being the actual born-and-bred Gael), is starting to lose his Dub accent, which is both a shame and also a relief; it means he's hanging out with new buddies and absorbing their accents. A shame to be losing the accent, but a relief that he's not all alone in a corner of the classroom mourning his lost pals of the West.

Still, although an Irish accent isn't part of our family any more, it seems that certain words have crept in and are here to stay. I took the kids to buy new school shoes and runners last week; despite our best efforts, it's impossible to call the damn things 'trainers' when 'runners' is by far a more appropriate term for the footwear of a small boy.

Earlier this week, I had cause to teach Jonah when to use 'lashing' and when to use 'drizzling'; a distinction that made me giggle, because of course you'd need to know the word for a bloody great downpour in Ireland and a polite sniffle of rain in England. We're still inclined, as a family, to ask, 'Will I bring (the boys with me to the shop)?' rather than 'shall I take (the boys with me to the shop)?' Incremental differences, but they make me smile when I hear them. We seem to have slotted back into life in England with relatively few seams showing; but if you listen closely, the time overseas is there, embedded in our lexicon. Grand, so.

*oh, OK, it was RyanAir, but who the hell wants them in an opening sentence?

Don't need a ticket for my destination any more

2010-05-22T07:46:00.005+01:00

Earlier in the month, I met up with a bunch of old friends. Because we live largely all over the place these days, there hadn't been a proper chance for everyone to get together for, as the Irish would say, the guts of six years.

The gang, it's probably worth pointing out, is all blokes (with a couple of exceptions) and I've never been treated in any other way than as one of the boys.Within three minutes of arriving in the bar, I'd been asked if I threw bigger tantrums than the kids; when I was going to 'do more pointless books', and teased about living in a place called The Old Shoe Shop: 'trust you, with your romanticised view of the countryside...'

Maybe there's something warped about being away for a long time and then meeting up again, but far from making me want to throw one of the tantrums they remembered so well, the whole evening had me grinning for a week.

These particular mates can say whatever they like; they've earned it. As unmarried, childless males they've bought books on parenting issues (and read them) because my name's in there. Several of them have talked me off a number of hysterical ledges. Others have travelled thousands of miles so that we can sit and chat. They remember my birthday; and when I got married, they threw me a stag party. There were shots, there was cross-dressing, and there was a lot of banter. It was ace. My point is, it's the sort of collective friendship that ends up being like a family. Slandered and libelled; it's part of what makes it great to be back home.

(This one is sort of in response to two memes. Alice asked me a while ago what my five favourite songs were, and even further ago than that, Laura tagged me for my favourite-ever song.)

Things I learned when out running last night

2010-05-13T21:47:00.002+01:00

1. Eating a pork chop the size of your head an hour before you head out to your new running group isn't necessarily the best idea in the world. Even if it's from the local butcher. That lack of chemicals probably makes the protein harder to digest.

2. Iowever much I try to deny it, I'm obnoxiously competitive (yeah, yeah; cue amused shaking of heads from the rest of you who knew this already. Slow learner here). It's a GROUP RUN, Sarah. That doesn't mean you need to win. There is no 'winning'.

(This is the first time in 13 years of regular running that I've joined a running group; partly because we're new here, and it's an obvious way to get to know people/good routes; and partly because I've applied to run the London Marathon next year and so I'll damn well need to keep at it...)

3. If you have the build and pace of a Shetland pony, you should not try to overtake the racehorses. Or even the Shire horses. Muppet.

Vote, Vote, Vote for Nigel Barton

2010-05-05T21:49:00.005+01:00

The last election I got really involved in was in 2004: the Kerry:Bush US Presidential campaign. After four years of (at best) accidental, (at worst) stolen Republican rule, everyone and anyone with a blue-beating heart was desperate for change. These were the pre-Obama days (although this was the campaign that first got him noticed nationally) and change wasn't as talismanic then as it became in 2008. Change back then just meant, 'not Bush'.

My fabulously hippy, island-dwelling, Bug-driving boss gave us all Election Day off on condition that we would spend it canvassing. This being the US, he was very carefully to be non-partisan in this suggestion; this being an independent publishing house in Seattle, it was an absolute shoo-in that every single one of us was off to fight for the Dems.

Being a foreigner in a desperate election is simultaneously liberating and disenfranchising. Liberating, in the way that many things about being the foreigner are liberating, you have a certain amount of emotional distance from the situation. But if you're living as a 'native' rather than a 'tourist', by which I mean, hanging out with the locals (rather than in some peculiar expat enclave); working; paying taxes; it's incredibly frustrating to want change and not be able to tangibly effect change. And yes, I mean 'effect', not 'affect', grammar nerds.

So I did what I could, and I did it as sincerely and as desperately as it could be done. I went to Nordstrom and bought the VOTE!!! t-shirt in case being confronted with my boobs was likely to sway anyone to the polls (this is pre-kids; said boobs were not unimpressive, if I say so myself). I called our local branch of the Democrat Party and offered my services. And I spent election day in the local office in a sterile office park, dialing my way through a list of numbers and asking each person if they'd voted today and who they'd voted for (none of the British squeamishness about this being 'too personal' a question).

It was a strange feeling; a sense of utter urgency, and a need to be DOING something, dammit. Americans, I think, are inherently more politicised than the British. Whether that has to do with British disinclination to talk about such things, or the American democracy (with a small d); but it was actually really energising to be around.

Everyone (well; everyone in our uber-liberal gang of pals in uber-liberal West Coast Seattle) was so desperate for a Democrat win that you could feel the vote being pulled there, inch by inch.
It was like a tug-of-war with a really stupid, but far-bigger-than-you person on the other side. And, to be honest, Kerry was never the best candidate for the Dems; he was essentially a spoiled rich kid just like Bush, and a bit dull. But he was the best of a mediocre bunch, and so we got behind him and we fought.

All of which brings me to how utterly, nerve-wrenchingly thrilling it is to be back in Britain for the first decent election it feels like we've had since (in my voting time, at least) 1997; and in reality, for absolutely ever. It does feel a bit like that 2004 campaign, in the sense that neither poor beleagured Gordy (though as the girl who always falls for the drummer in the band, he does have a certain appeal) or Slick Nick Clegg really have the Obama-appeal. The real emphasis for voting here is 'anyone but Cameron'. But that vitality, that sense of unity, the urgency of it all, and the huge amount of sheer energy it's bringing to the country, is really, really interesting. And it's good to be home for it, where I have a vote.

Now: fingers crossed, and off to the polls we go.

PS Nigel Barton is, in essence, Dennis Potter's alter ego. I know, I know; any excuse to slip in a reference to the Forest...

Games that are rough, that swallow you up

2010-04-27T22:00:00.003+01:00

Lots of firsts this week, especially for the boys. Jonah went off for his first day at 'big school' yesterday. Well, the pre-school attached to 'big school', more accurately; but he went off in uniform, grey knee socks and the rest of it.

What is it about uniform that makes every child look like an evacuee? If I'd taken a picture in black and white, it would have looked straight out of the 1940s. Maybe it's something to do with the timelessness of it all, pulling us back through the wormhole.

Jonah went off without a backward glance, quite literally, but I found myself metaphorically looking through the railings and thinking of Roger McGough:

I wish I could remember my name
Mummy said it would come in useful.
Like wellies. When there's puddles.
Yellowwellies. I wish she was here.
I think my name is sewn on somewhere
Perhaps the teacher will read it for me.
Tea-cher. The one who makes the tea.

(from his glorious First Day at School. Gotta love me some Roger McGough).

Critical masses, land masses, and bringing home the ash(es)*

2010-04-22T21:38:00.003+01:00

Last week was Week Three of living in Our New Life™. Because nothing's fun unless it comes with a bucket full of irony, Dave was back in Dublin for the first four days of the week. And because, hey, why have a bucket of irony when you can have an Irish Sea full of the damn stuff?, he ended up stranded there thanks to the unpronounceable volcano and its inexplicable stalling effect on jet engines.

Dave wasn't stuck for long, arriving home on Friday night, which is barely a blip compared with some of the stories out there. But what I found the whole thing notable for (since clearly, the ash is all about me me me) was how it highlighted that being back here feels right. It's a weird thing to articulate, maybe, but whenever we've lived overseas, I've always felt quite solitary when Dave's been away. It might have something to do with having lived on the edges of maps - Seattle's all the way up there on the furthermost part of the continental United States, and Dublin is perched right on the very curve of the coast. There's nothing like being alone in a foreign country to feel, well, alone in a foreign country. And I say this despite some of our closest friends being in those countries.

This time, we were a matter of days in a new place; no routines sorted out yet, no little mates for the boys to hang out with; not even all our things around us since some are still in storage. But rather than having that slightly panicked feeling of 'What if something happened and I needed to get back to England?', I thought, well, at least we're all in the right place (bar Dave, clearly).

It's a bit like this. Say I'm a green pin. I've been trying out the blue map, and the red map, and now I'm back on the green map. It makes no particular odds superficially, but at the very core of things, it's what makes all the difference. Ashes to ashes, and all that.

*Apologies to any cricket fans who got their hopes up there. I just liked the scansion.

Life in the pale

2010-04-13T15:48:00.002+01:00

I've got about a million posts brewing, and now the boxes are unpacked and I've stopped waking up wondering where we're living now, there's hope of getting to them soon. But in the meantime, here's Louis MacNeice describing my relationship with Dublin better than I ever could myself:


This never was my town,
I was not born or bred
Nor schooled here and she will not
Have me alive or dead
But yet she holds my mind
With her seedy elegance,
With her gentle veils of rain
And all her ghosts that walk
And all that hide behind
Her Georgian facades -
The catcalls and the pain,
The glamour of her squalor,
The bravado of her talk.

The rest of it's here if you don't know it - beautiful.

Foreign object(ive)s

2010-03-24T21:36:00.003Z

Three weeks before we left Seattle, we went away for the weekend with great mates. They, like us, were British, but, unlike us, were committed to staying in the US forevah. At the end of a bottle or few, someone asked what we'd be taking with us back to Europe.

It was an easy enough answer, actually. 'That sense of possibility', I said. 'The way, if you say you're going to try something new, everything gets really enthused. It's lovely to live around and it gives me way more confidence'.

*************

There are many things I love about Ireland; the dips and curls in the language, the colour in the expressions, the friends that come pre-packaged with a healthy dose of 'stealth evil'. But over the years, I came to learn that where the US is known (and often derided) for its insistence on a 'can-do culture', sodding Ireland can quite often be guilty of a 'can't-do culture'. There are a million historical and sociological reasons for this; but as a damn foreigner, it can be wearing, in the same way as living amongst someone's ingrained optimism is oddly liberating.

****************

When we first mentioned that we were moving back to England, our Irish friends would often say to us, 'but you seemed so happy here'. And I guess that's the point; this is where what we brought back from Seattle comes into play. We were happy in Ireland. We have fabulous friends; a really nice, comfortable lifestyle; the boys were thriving. But at the backs of our minds was the ultimate in American doctrines: the pursuit of happiness. And sure, we were happy. But was that a reason not to make a change? Maybe it's because we're contrary to the point of obnoxiousness sometimes, but for us that seemed almost to be the reason to consider a move. Were the essential things that were missing in our lives (close family access; friends who'd known us since the year dot; a sense of belonging to a country) going to be things that would make enough of a difference?

We don't know the answer to this, of course. And I'm guessing that repatriation is going to take just as long to get used to as living outside the country did. But because of our time in the US, we felt that just giving it a go is going to give us something. Mal sehen, as the Germans put it.

Fattening up for the long journey home: what the Irish have in common with Jewish grandmothers

2010-03-18T20:59:00.002Z

We're in our last week in Ireland, and our friends, misreading the parable, have decided to fatten us up as if they were expecting the prodigal son, not getting rid of us. And yes, I realise that I've ended up as the cow in that particular mangled image. Let us move swiftly on.

It's incredibly lovely. Our next-door-neighbours, who've been surrogate parents during our time here (down to nagging about buying a house but stopping short of telling me I can't go out looking like that) came round last night with fish pie and creme brulees. And wine, of course. Lots of wine. This is Ireland; the booze is assumed.
Tomorrow and Saturday are dinners out with other, equally lovely, groups of pals; and on Sunday our neighbour-friends and 'co-parents' are hosting a farewell brunch with a gang of our local mates with kids. I'm anticipating bagels, bubbly, and chaos. And lots of tears - mine, at least.

When it comes to emotions, the Irish are more like the English than the Americans. They'll keep it to themselves; people don't want to see that kind of mess. But this revolving platter of meals that's coming our way is showing us what we knew without words. For our Irish friends, we're part of the family here; and when family comes round, you cook. You show them you care. Then you drink way more than you're capable of and start a fight. Think we'll leave the latter to the kids - this time, anyway.

***

Relatedly, I've been thinking recently about Irish words and phrases that I'm going to miss. There's all the usual stuff, that makes you feel like you're in a Hollywood version of a set-in-Ireland movie; the 'your man's and the 'that's grand, so's. But there's also a wealth of sayings that make me giggle every time I hear them. And here, in a terrible segue, are my two favourite food-related ones:

1) If you want to say that something took you about a week, or that you haven't seen someone for most of the week, you describe that time as 'the guts of a week' ('Sure, I haven't seen your man for the guts of a week, so')

2) If you want to describe someone as skinny, you'd say, 'Sure, there's not a pick on you'.

The latter especially always reminds me of Hansel and Gretel and I get a picture of all these Irish folk poking out sticks rather than fingers to be considered svelte. I'm relatively certain that, after this week of being fed for the long trip to the new country, 'there's not a pick on you' will be the last phrase I'm hearing. But in the guts of a week, we'll be gone. And excited though I am to be going home, it'll be sad to leave this crazy country behind.

This one goes out to the ones I left behind

2010-03-11T20:27:00.003Z

There are three invites on our mantelpiece right now. One's to a friend's book launch here in Dublin. One is to brunch in honour of lovely Kim, who's pregnant...and in San Francisco. The third is to the wedding of one of my dearest college friends, in Manchester (England, not NH).

The mantelpiece sums up the thing I hate most about overseas living. Sure, I don't exactly miss the residual homesickness that kept me company the whole time we were in Seattle, and I think I'll probably be able to cope without Dublin's insane cost of living; but making lifelong friends who are all scattered is a total bitch.

I've never really believed in going overseas and living as an expat, all Pictionary leagues* and Guy Fawkes nights. Apart from anything else, the latter'd get you shot in Ireland, and rightly so. This probably stems back to my first two year-long stints abroad, in Austria and Germany. In those instances, I was there for the explicit purpose of learning the language and immersing in the respective cultures of the country, so that later I could pass an exam.

Apparently, being a total nerd, the fear of failing the exam persists, so I've always thought that if you're living in a foreign country, the only option is to 'go native'. Not least when there's no foreign language to act as a barrier.

And we've been really lucky. We've made some incredible friends in both the US and Ireland; friends who are still in the fabric of our lives even though we're not hanging out regularly any more. These are people we've spent Christmas with; friends (in both countries) who got me through endless months of sleep deprivation and terror-of-the-tiny-newborn; friends who've drunk cocktails with us in Hawaii; friends who've sung 'Fairytale of New York' with me at the tops of their voices and bottom of their glasses.

I'm not at the stage yet of missing my Irish friends because, with two-ish weeks to go, it's all about trying to see as much of them as possible in the hopes that, like perfume, the more intense the experience the longer it'll linger. And because Ireland is so much closer to England than Seattle is, it'll be easier to get back, for people to come over. But, like a sheep in dipping season, I can see it's coming. And I'm not looking forward to it one little bit.

I don't think there's an easy answer to this. Don't go abroad in the first place? Well, fine, but then we wouldn't have met the people or had the experiences. Go abroad but keep it light, don't get attached? Maybe possible if you're going for such a short length of time that it's almost an extended holiday; but work somewhere, have kids, and you're going to form attachments. I don't have the answer yet, except to try my hardest to make it to as many events as possible, something that's growing easier as the twinkles get bigger. And to put effort into those friendships, because they matter, dammit.

And to be grateful, of course, that I even have this problem. Friends are magnificent, even if they don't all live in the same street any more.

*A friend of mine who spent a year in Caracas said that this was the height of expat entertainment. I can't even sodding draw; I'd have been screwed.

Read on for a mental image you really, really didn't want

2010-03-05T10:29:00.002Z

A few weeks ago, in a fit of enthusiasm fuelled by Twitter telling me that what I needed for maximum mileage was power ballads, I bought a CD of running songs. Once it arrived, I remembered that I don't, in fact, ever listen to music whilst running. It's one of the things I like most about it, actually; the solitude. OK, so I may belt out 'Footloose' whilst stumbling towards the coastline, but I could do without Kenny Loggins turning it into a duet.

Still, all is not lost: power ballads are great in the car, where I can turn them up loud and pretend I'm still driving a convertible Beetle rather than a 'mummy machine'.

When I collected the kids from daycare on Tuesday, I was halfway through 'Wake me up before you go go', and reluctant to swap back to the nine-millionth rendition of Jack and the Beanstalk.

'Let me finish this one, then you can choose' I said.

As Julia Roberts put it in Pretty Woman: Big mistake. Big. Huge. The next twenty minutes were given over to a deconstruction of 'Wake me up' that would've put even George Michael to sleep:

'But how is he singing when he is asleep?'

'Is the singing man wearing pyjamas to sing or is he naked?'

'Are they spiderman pyjamas?'

'Why is he sleeping at dance time?'

The next morning, back in the car for the drop-offs, Lucas 'delighted' Dave with yells of, 'NO Jack Beestalk! Me wan' Wike me GOGO'.

Dave turned to me in horror. 'What have you done to them?'

It's all better today. We've moved on to the next song on the CD; Billy Idol's 'Rebel Yell'. Jonah has this one down pat: 'It's about a man who's doing naughty shouting, Daddy'. The Confederates would be proud.

Fish might fly

2010-02-25T20:40:00.002Z

I was lying awake last night worrying about a goldfish. Yeah, I know that counting sheep might have been more restful, but yesterday's sleep nemesis was a fish called Nemo.

We're five weeks away from moving country, and chin-deep in lists. Lists about making lists; lists of things we've done; lists of things to do; you name it, we've put it on a list.

The variety of job-choice is endless, ranging from the banal: scrub away all evidence of DestructoToddler from the walls of our Dublin home; to the critical: enrol Jonah in school for September. But am I doing any of these things? Am I buggery. Instead, I'm Googling "transporting fish 250 miles" and calculating how many plastic bags might be necessary to prevent leakage during an eight-hour car ride.

Yeah, yeah, I know: just flush the damn fish already and buy a new one in England. Christ knows, this isn't the first move we've had that involved fish-rehousing. When we left London for Seattle, one of our final duties before the Pickfords van showed up was to lug an industrial dustbin full of appropriately-algaed fish water (and accompanying bin bag of tropical fish) to Oxford Circus. Strangely, we were able to say goodbye to the little floaters without too many tears.

This time, of course, it's not about us. It's about the kids, and more specifically Jonah. Jonah picked out Nemo for his third birthday present. Well, OK, so technically he picked out a different fish, but when that one died after a couple of months, we went back for another one, and this one, he has lived. I guess the first one was the aquatic equivalent of a starter marriage, teaching us to love and nurture this little fishy until death us do part.

Or ....250 miles, followed by death.

Jonah loves this fish. Jonah's closing in on four-and-a-half, so Nemo has been in Jonah's life almost as long as Lucas has; and on some days, it's a close call which one he prefers. He comes down in the morning and chats to Nemo, and when we're away, Jonah phones his BFF, little Finn across the road, with strict instructions on fish care.

And, well, we're about to change most other aspects of Jonah's life, so flushing the fish just doesn't seem reasonable. Moving back to the UK is, in part, a way of knitting the boys more closely to their extended family and showing them the value of roots. It's not exactly practising what I preach if the first casualty of the "closer family" move is one of Jonah's favourite family members, albeit a (virtually) spineless one, is it?

I know, too, that focusing on the fish is just a way of putting my fingers in my ears and ignoring everything else that needs to happen. Denial? Yeah, and?

Anyway, if you'll excuse me, I've got "transporting fish" to Google again....

A whole different kind of Olympics

2010-02-16T13:42:00.004Z

I don't normally pay much attention to the Winter Olympics, but Vancouver still feels "just up the road" even four years after leaving Seattle, and there's something just so damn wholesome about the Canadians that gets me rooting for them. And seriously, anywhere that has a road called the Sea-to-Sky-Highway is going to do it for me. I mean, c'mon. Why call something the N11, for example when you could be calling it Hillocks-to-Hellholes? (sorry, Ireland. I do love bits of you, but your roads aren't those bits).

I read this post last week and wanted to say: Kristin, don't worry: that pang you describe? That's exactly how Vancouver feels to visitors, even to relatively frequent visitors like me. I dunno how often you'd have to go there before it stopped being one of the coolest places in the world; one of the places I wish I'd been born (I love where I was born; we all know that ad nauseum; but I do have a list of alterna-birthplaces. What? You don't? Weirdo).

I'm having real trouble, though, envisioning Whistler as a place filled with bustling Olympians, all perfectly-honed and highly-toned, because the last time we were there, we were the opposite of either of those things.

Jonah was just under a year old and we'd decided we wanted a family holiday that involved just the three of us. We'd already been across the Atlantic four times with the poor little sod by this point, so somewhere that didn't involve a plane ride was pretty enticing.

So we went to Whistler, and rented a cute little apartment with a flight of toddler-defying stone steps which I'm sure were ideal for rugged boarding types to beat all the crap off their boots, but just signalled DEATH TRAP! to us and PLAYSPACE! to Jonah. Hmmm.

We went in September, pre-snow. The hiking was great, and we figured that we weren't likely to get any snow time anyway, so why make life miserable for ourselves?

Unfortunately, the not-making-life-miserable thing didn't stretch as far as anything sensible like, oh, sleeping. We all know we can make really, really stupid rookie mistakes when we're fresh-out-the-gates parents. So that you don't do as we did, here's my PSA: Do not regard a holiday as the ideal time to sleep-train your child.

I know, I know. But the point was, we didn't know (conflicted, much?). The logic was sound: lots of daytime for napping, lots of gorgeous scenery to take our minds off the pain of not sleeping, return home with child who magically sleeps 14 hours a night and wakes us up with breakfast in bed.

Yeah, about that.

So watching the Olympics, whilst thrilling and all that, is bringing out a Pavlovian reaction in me. Any time someone swoops down a hill, or there's a filler shot of the little town, I think of those sleepless nights and yawn. And somewhere in my subconscious, a baby yells in indignation.

Sometimes it might be better not said with flowers. Or said at all, really

2010-02-09T21:37:00.006Z

Since it's Valentine's Day at the end of the week, here are three moments with blooms. Yeah, just don't expect chemical romance. Or any romance, really.

1. Be my (sweaty) Valentine

It's early 1999. I'm in Australia for a conference, sent 10,000 miles for a 2-hour presentation, my remit to be perky and convince people to promote our books better than others. I arrive on Valentine's Day and, since my slot isn't until the next day, I figure I'll go for a run and try and re-ignite the Pollyanna bounce that's won me this gig in the first place. I've been travelling for what feels like a couple of years, so I dig out my running gear and head off into the Hunter Valley. It's gorgeous; February is the height of summer, so the neighbourhood gardens are full of flowers and mad-looking birds dive around. I run a couple of miles out to a boardwalk landing pier and stop to take in the craziness of being out here, in the middle of nowhere, barely a day and a half after commuter-crazy London.

On my way back to the hotel, a young-ish guy is hanging over one of the garden gates. When he sees me slogging sweatily past, he waves for me to stop. Because I am genetically predisposed to (a) talk to anyone and (b) always trust strangers (I know, I know), I stop. He hands me a beautiful pink rose, cut from the garden.

"I saw you go past" he says, channeling Jason Donovan rather than Heath Ledger, more's the pity, "and just wanted to say Happy Valentine's Day".

********

2. I wouldn't touch her with yours, pal

It's New Year's Eve 1996 (?). I'm in Paris with the boys, visiting our pal Ol, he of the boundary-less phone calls. We end up in some very un-chic divey bar; sawdust on the floor, cheesy music, the works. It's minus WhatNow?! outside and we're all together again for a few days, so we don't care.
A few minutes after midnight, one of those rose-sellers arrives in the bar. I'm huddled in a corner with Ol, putting the world to rights as we were wont to do. The flower guy comes over and waves a rose in my general direction. Ol and I wave back at him, in dismissal, but he's persistent.
"A rose for the beautiful lady?" he asks, in French.

Quick pause for an editorial note here: Ol's bilingual, and though it's not like we speak French together, I was studying it for the first four years we knew each other, so he knows I'll understand him.

Oli looks at the guy, then at me. Then he leans towards the flower seller and said, gesticulating in disgust,

"Look at her! Honestly - would you buy her a rose? C'mon, mate, don't be crazy. I'm not wasting my money like that"

I'm not in the slightest bit upset - this is our MO, and Ol knew that he'd get plenty of grief from me in return. The poor flower seller, though, had no idea what to do. Panicking, he thrusts an armful of roses at me, and with a muttered - "Here - happy New Year" - flees into the night.

*********

3. Heaven knows I'm miserable now

I'm 19, and in my second term at college. I come back to the room after a long day of trying not to feel sorry for myself (nothing wrong beyond the usual late-teenage angst which seems so insurmountable at the time) and trip into the hugest pile of flowers I've ever seen, before or since. And by pile, I mean pile. There are close on 30 bunches of blooms, of all sorts - roses, irises, carnations, early daffodils (always the worst when you're homesick for the green, green grass of home).

Each room door in halls has a pinboard on it, where you leave a piece of paper for your mates to write notes on should they happen round in your absence (oh, the random rituals we had before the joys of texting). I clear a path through the Amsterdam Flower Gardens that now consitutes my hallway and read the message scrawled on the board. It's from Theo, one of my best mates and sort of substitute brother (not that I've ever had a brother, but if I did, I imagine our relationship to be like mine and Theo's; lots of fighting and utter reliance).

"Saz-
I went to the market at the end of the day and told the flower guy he'd never seen anyone as pathetic and sad as you, so he gave me all these for a fiver. Hope these make your Thursday better. Theeee "

Bet Blanche Dubois would've done the same if she'd been stuck at High St. Ken...

2010-02-02T20:32:00.006Z

I'm 26, just finishing a late night's work in London. I set the office alarm, slam the door, walk the 10 minutes to the tube station...and realise I've left my wallet, my house keys, my tube pass and my reason at my desk. No way back into the office tonight, and this being the pre-mobilithic era, no cell phone to call for help. Home is 6 miles away.

I do what I always do - I find someone to talk to about the situation. It's the compulsive habit formed by a small-town upbringing and, not for the first time, I'm glad of it. I look as small and pathetic as I can (yeah, yeah, not difficult even under the best of circumstances) and approach the station guard (is that what they're called? The men in the luminous jackets who hang out at the Tube snarling at tourists).

At first, the conversation goes as you would expect:

"I don't have my ticket"

"Buy a new one"

"I don't have my wallet"

"How are you going to get home, then?"

but then something changes. Maybe the station guard thinks I'm actually going to cry on him. I'm shaking, sure, but that's because I'd last eaten at midday and now it was 9:30 at night.File under: jobs I'm dead glad I no longer do. Also: stupidity of youth.

"Perhaps you could let me through without a ticket, just this once?" I ask in my nicest poor-idiotic-overwhelmed-no-threat-to-anyone guise.

The station guard ponders it. My heart lifts, and I start mentally calculating whether my housemate will have left me supper in the oven (for though I was ridiculous at 26, I had the kindest roommate ever. He'd probably still leave my dinner in the oven now if he thought I needed it).

"That wouldn't work" the guard says, breaking into my reverie of what said oven-waiting supper might possibly be (shepherd's pie, probably. We ate a lot of shepherd's pie in those days. Young, fetterless, and living in London: staying in and cooking shepherd's pie. We knew how to live. Um...).

My lip quivers, perhaps.

"There are automatic gates at Wimbledon" he reminds me. Clearly whilst I've been dreaming of lamb mince and carrots, the guard has been running through his mental rolodex of exit apparatus on the District Line. And I thought I had an exciting life.

Then he does something that I imagine would have got him fired had his bosses noticed, London Underground not being known for their bendiness of either trains nor rules: he reaches into his pocket and hands me the exact change for the tube fare.

"Here," he says. "You look like you need to get home before you fall over".

The next morning, flush with cash lent to me by my long-suffering-but-still-saintly housemate, I seek out the guard on my way into the office and press the loaned money back into his hand. He refuses it. "Buy yourself something nice for breakfast" he says.

So every time it snows I think of Kurt Cobain; and every time I eat a raisin Danish, I think of the tube station at High Street Kensington.

The devil may wear Prada, but the vicar wears a Leinster shirt

2010-01-25T21:09:00.005Z

The vicar called round unexpectedly last Thursday afternoon. The vicar was never going to call round expectedly to this house, since we're not in the habit of expecting vicars here. And anyway, in uber-Catholic Ireland, a protestant minister at the door is only slightly less unlikely than a vampire at the door (and that's only because we all know vampires come in through the windows. D'oh).

Anyway, imagine the scene. The vicar rings the doorbell. A man answers the door.

"Is this the Franklin household?" asks the vicar.

"Yes", says the man, clearly at home here. "I'm not a Franklin, though. Sarah's upstairs showering"

Sarah (why yes, I am in third person this evening; does my bum look big in it?) isn't quite in the shower yet, so she belts down the stairs to see who's in the hallway. She is dishevelled (OK, even more than usual) and panting, her hair plastered becomingly to her cheeks with a winning mixture of sweat and rain.

(I'd been out running, OK? And our neighbour friend was watching the kids as part of our weekly swap. Honestly).

"Hello, vicar," she says, trying to look as if this sort of thing happens every day.

" ..... "

This would be the point where a normal person would offer the vicar a cup of tea and a selection of nice homemade biscuits, but we don't need to tell you that that didn't happen, do we? Nah, thought not.

**************

So yeah, the vicar is sitting in our rocking chair, cup-of-tea-less, chatting brightly with me as he, essentially, vetted our godliness in order to assess whether or not to award Jonah a place in the local school. The kids, all three of them (Jonah's BFF Finn was here too) kept barreling in to see the exciting new person in the front room. Lucas, who at 2 is a mixture of Cartman and Father Jack , was particularly taken by this new audience to admire his sofa-diving technique.

After I'd rescued Lucas from his third landing (upside down jammed behind the baking hot radiator) whilst simultaneously trying to focus on nodding in a suitably pious-looking manner, I suggested to Lucas that he go and read a book with Jonah, Finn, and the longsuffering neighbour friend.

Lucas had a better idea. He disappeared for a couple of moments. We heard some middle-distance thuds, as if blunt objects were falling off high shelves. (They were). Then he reappeared, triumphant, bearing his bodyweight in Hairy McClary and I Love You, Little Monkey tomes.

"Mama read book me" he beamed.

"Yes, darling. I'll read to you after I've finished talking to the nice man"

Lucas didn't hesitate (maybe I'm selling him short in that description above. He has a decent whack of Jason Bourne in there too).

"NO!" he corrected me, dropping the books and whipping, ninja-like, to the vicar's side. "BAD man!" And then, should the vicar be in any doubt as to the toddler's opinion, he whirled his leg back and kicked him as viciously as he could manage.

We're all going straight to hell.

*********

There was one tiny, beautifully ironic, redeeming part of the whole visit. Jonah happened to be wearing his Irish rugby top (for matters of laundry rather than team affiliation). The vicar, delighted, confided to me that he was going to be missing church on Sunday because he was off to Twickenham to watch his team, Leinster, play London Irish. So Jonah and the deliquent vicar bonded over rugby. One soul, at least, may be saved.

Radio Gaga

2010-01-18T21:05:00.004Z

I had a post in my head which requires wrestling to the ground in the right words to be remotely worth telling, but I'm too keen to go and watch Gavin and Stacey (can't link to it yet for fear of giving away the ending to myself, but it's glorious). So whilst I'm off adoring the Welsh, here are my three favourite moments from Irish radio, or, more specifically, from RTE Radio 1 (which is the equivalent of NPR or BBC Radio 4 for those of you playing along at home):

1. The interview with the medium who helped the police with their inquiries. The medium was pretty average as these things go: full of beautifully vague claims such as, "I'm sensing a ....man...in your past" (y'think?). She was neither aided nor remotely abetted by the presenter: when, aiming to set a mystic mood over the airwaves, she asked him, "Doesn't it feel colder in the studio suddenly? That must be a presence from The Other Side". The presenter entirely missed the cue and said, "No, but I'm wearing one extra sweater than you".

The reason I love this one so much, though, is in the first line. Here it is again, slowly:

She.helps.the.police.with.their.inquiries.

Do what now? I have spent many an hour pondering how this would work, but that's another post for another day.

2. The 15-minute segment on Morning Ireland, the flagship morning show, about the possibility of Ireland's motorways being finished in the next two years and the form the resulting service stations (rest stops) might take. Presumably somewhere else in the world, something was actually happening (oh, you know; international financial collapse; humanitarian crises; Obama's election). All that could wait, however. Now was the time for a lengthy discussion of hypothetical service stations on a hypothetical motorway. Several experts were called upon to give florid descriptions of rest stops they'd known and loved elsewhere in the world. Sadly, they they missed the opportunity to call in the medium for an estimated completion date).

3. The breathless (and endless) coverage of the National Ploughing Championships. I feel like I must have talked about these before, because they're just so glorious. The coverage is broadcast with much the same awed anticipation as the Oscars, and you get to hear from such stars as the breeder of last year's Finest Filly. A bit like talking to Keira Knightley's mum, but with more of a brogue and discussion of fattening up.

Road trips, snow, and Kurt Cobain

2010-01-13T21:21:00.004Z

All this snow has got me thinking about Kurt Cobain again.

Back in the misty days of 2003, Dave and I took a road trip to Santa Barbara to meet up with my favourite cousin and his family. Andrew had promised to come and see us in the US when we moved to Seattle, and true to his word (as he always is), he did. Trouble is, Andrew and I have both inherited our clan's optimistic streak, so he flew into LA, since Seattle seemed "a bit rainy", and I was sure that it'd be no trouble to meet them "somewhere in the middle". Yeah, right. A 2,500 mile round-trip "middle"

Anyway, it was worth it to see the Forest contingent, even if we only had two nights with them before turning round to head the 3 days back. We stopped off to celebrate New Year's Eve in a hot tub in wine country before banging up the I5 motorway all the way home (note to self: I5 or motorway? Pick one). Well, that was the theory.

Because we were total newbies, in the US only eight months, we hadn't paid any attention to the sporadic radio reports warning of "heavy snow" on the border between California and Oregon. We were in an all-wheel drive SUV (hey, this was America) and travelling on the motorway. What possible concern could we have?

Um, yeah. That's right, we're idiots. We got snowed off the road not once, but twice. The first time was just before the mountain pass in the incredibly inaptly-named Yreka (or maybe that's the point: it really ISN'T a Eureka moment, it's a Why?reka moment). At this point, I was still caught up in the romance of the road trip (you'd have thought 1,500 miles in a car would've solved this particular sentimental nonsense, pero no). "Hooray" I thought (and maybe even said, at which point Dave should have just pushed me into the nearest snow drift and legged it). "We can do the proper road trip thing & eat nasty take-out in a dodgy motel".

We were on our way the next morning, my ThingsToDoInAmerica list one item shorter, and despite the quickly-acquired snow chains battering the living crap out of the car, we made it through the mountain. In a blizzard. At 30 miles an hour. With nothing in sight (not even other cars; Christ knows where they went). In reality, I don't think it was *actually* dangerous, bar our extreme stupidity. We had no spare blankets, no flares, no *spade*; our Seattle-area mobile phones didn't get coverage in that region; we had nothing, really, to help us out of a problem. We did, however, have our bodyweight in books and some Ghiradelli chocolate, so I suppose we'd have been well-fed and well-read, if moronic.

Later that day, we came off the road at a freeway onramp in our haste to leave a rest stop manned by over-excited Christians (burgers and bibles. Another thing off my list, then). We stood there examining our car, listing in the snow with a burst tyre, and decided that the only thing to do was to convince the Christians that God's Will was to mend our car. Fortunately they were quite sturdy Christians, appropriately dressed in snow gear (did we have our snow gear in the car, despite having gone snowboarding a week previously? Did we bollocks) and got us on the road in good time. We were a bit late for the next stop, but no matter - we'd just do a big day the next day and get home already.

Except, no! Driving merrily through a picturesque bit of lower Washington state, Oregon gladly behind us at this point (no offence Oregon), bam - more blizzards. Let me tell you, snow falling on cedars might make for an evocative book title but it's a bastard to drive in. These were little forest roads with no sign of either gritters or Christians, so there was nothing for it but to stay in the nearest town, the call-it-like-you-see-it South Bend (and yes, there's a North Bend. Dunno about East or West though).

By this stage the whole quaintness of motels and Friends reruns was wearing a bit thin. We made it out the next day by the judicious move of following the gritter through the forest, and followed the road to the most depressing small town we'd seen yet, which was saying something. And then we saw the sign for it. Aberdeen. The hometown, as anyone living in Seattle is civically required to know, to Kurt Cobain.

"Jesus" said Dave, who'd been pretty stoic until then. "No wonder the poor bastard topped himself.

Anyway, any time we see decent snow here, I think of our first, idiotic road trip, and Kurt Cobain. I'm sure he'd be horrified to be linked with snowballs and mayhem, but he'd certainly get why being snowed into South Bend was such a hideous prospect.

Next she'll have her own YouTube channel

2010-01-05T21:21:00.004Z

Comments from my 82-year-old grandmother:

"Sarah, are you on Facebook? Because C (cousin living abroad) has just been in touch with J (cousin living elsewhere abroad) about meeting up next year and they want to know when you're home."

(to my techie husband): "oh good, I've been waiting for you. I need you to set up my DS. I got playing DS at Christmas and so I went online and found one for myself."

*****

The Christmas season was great to us this year. I hesitate to post such a straightforwardly pleased sentence because I fear what Dan Savage calls the "irony graph". If I'm happy about something, something awful will happen to counterbalance it. "Just as Sarah was praising herself for a wonderful Christmas, the Santa decoration fell from the chimney and crushed her to death". That kind of thing.

Still, it was all kinds of fun. Small children, large gifts, far more wine than whining and belly laughs as well as laughably full bellies. And one of my favourite memories is my Nan, arriving for supper with her pink DS carefully packed in a ziploc bag, harrassing Dave to set it up so that she could beat the crap out of us all at Brain Training. Here's hoping I've got those genes...

God Rest ye, Merry Gentlemen. Actually, scrap the God bit.

2009-12-28T20:52:00.004Z

My favourite illustration of secular, liberal, anything-you-want-is-valid Seattle has to be Christmas Eve 2004. Dave and I, along with friends, attended a fantastic nighttime carol service in the ecumenical cathedral up on Capitol Hill , where (carol lyrics aside) there was absolutely no mention of, you know, God. We had dinner first in one of our favourite places and then toddled up the hill for the singing.

At a minute to midnight, the choir struck up "O Come, All Ye Faithful" and those non-believers amongst the carolers filed out as the more-worshipful congregation filed in, everyone singing and wishing each other well. It was a brilliant phenomenon and one of those Only In America moments: celebrate Christmas in a cathedral without acknowledging the birth of Christ.

The carol service was full of ceremony and anticipation. There were no mutters of "damn tourist Christians" from the true-believers because they weren't there whilst we were belting out the carols; and then those of us who were primarily there for the singing were safely out of the way for the "proper" religious bits.

Spending this Christmas in Ireland, where you opt out of religion rather than opting in, it struck me again how cool that cathedral service had been. All the sense of community with nobody pretending.

Like drinking mojitos in Cuba, but more festive, and with way more swearing

2009-12-23T21:42:00.006Z

One of the random benefits of all this accidental expat living is that, from time to time, you get to experience the kind of thing that seems like it must have been made up for tourists, except that no tourists are within a 15-mile radius. At a trade fair in Anchorage one February (ever want to see the ocean frozen over? Alaska in February's a decent bet for that), I became entranced by an old man in a coat made from a bear he'd shot and killed himself. The man wasn't that entrancing, nor is the fact that he'd shot the bear, per se. It was more that, you know, how often in your life are you ever going to meet a bear hunter, let alone one dressed for the sub-zero temperatures in a little number he'd skinned himself? I couldn't stop stroking it (the COAT, you filthy people), much to the appalled amusement of lovely Austin, my coworker and beloved pal.

Last Friday I had a similar experience. It didn't involve culturally-appropriate clothing - no cloaks of finest peat for the Irish - but it was one of those things that had extra significance for happening in Ireland. As I put it on Twitter, I discovered that the actual Irish national anthem is, in fact, this song:

I was in a cheesy club with some of my favourite people on this tiny island. It was the early hours and, as they say here in a gloriously euphemistic manner, there had been drink taken. In other words, the entire place was full of rat-arsed Irishfolk holding each other up as they brought the place down. Right towards the end of the night, on came the Pogues (not literally, though that would have been an even better story). Every. Single. Person. in the room suddenly pulled themselves together, stood upright as if at Mass, and burst into pitch-perfect, declamatory, Shane-McGowan-style-swaying song. It made me beam, and beam, and beam some more. OK, so most people know some part of this song, but to be in an entire room of locals all belting it out as though Christmas depended on it; that was something I had no idea would happen.

It gives me goosebumps and makes me giggle every time I think about it, and we've had the song on permanent repeat at home this week to make sure our resident Irish toddler is word-perfect before he's found out as an imposter.

It's beginning to feel a lot like Christmas

2009-12-16T21:15:00.000Z

A picture today. I popped out yesterday afternoon to the hairdresser, and when I walked home, dusk was settling in. I came through the gate to our driveway and saw Christmas waiting for me. Dave and the boys had put our tree up in the bay window. It wasn't decorated yet; they were waiting for me to return; but it was there, standing sentry, telling me "hurry, hurry" (I just mistyped that twice as "hurray, hurray", which is about right too).

As I drew closer, I could see Dave at the piano, playing Christmas carols. Jonah was standing next to him singing his little heart out - that's how I knew they were carols. Lucas was dancing in the middle of the room, spinning around. Every now and again he toppled over, giggling, then bounced back up. During one of these bounces he spotted me at the window and barged into the tree to get closer and wave. His little face lit up just like the tree would be a few minutes later and I could hear "Mama! Mama!" over the top of the carols and the caterwauling.

It was one of those moments of total happiness, and it felt utterly timeless, too. Families are the best.

*******************

Jonah topped off the full sentiment of the season by flinging the door open, assessing my coiffure, and saying "Mummy! I LOVE your Santa hair!". Ho bloody ho.

Far better than a kick in the two front teeth

2009-12-08T21:09:00.007Z

I'm borrowing (huh! copying) this one from Emma at Belgian Waffling, who got it from Katyboo. Both their lists are glorious. I started to comment chez Emma and then figured I'd better just bring it over here and give the damn thing some space.

So here, in no particular order, is my fantasy Christmas list:

1. For someone to invent chocolate that works along the same lines as celery. No, not stringy and tasteless, that would be awful. What I'm after is chocolate that causes you to lose weight, in the way that celery does (allegedly) if you eat enough of it. I'm never, ever, going to try with celery but chocolate? I'd be right there.

2. A switch (probably just under my right ear) that would deactivate the "faff" mode in my brain. Sweet Jesus, I would be a millionaire, a Pullitzer-winning author and a prize athlete by June if that switch just existed. Thing is, it doesn't.

3. Perspective. I'd kill for the ability to stand back from my life and see that everything makes sense, even when it doesn't, rather than living with my nose pressed up to the glass the whole time.
There's a quote by Jose Ortega y Gasset which basically points out that looking into the distance and looking at what's in front of you are mutually exclusive, to which I say: bollocks. Surely Santa, if not Jim, can fix it for me?
This seems to be a perennial end-of-decade wish for me - even at 8, I was such a nerdy kid I probably wanted perspective. Really I think it's about being nosy and wanting to know how things turn out, as well as needing reassurance.

4. Bravery. Not the saving-babies-from-burning-buildings kind, but the common-or-garden, stop-being-careful-about-what-you-wish-for-and-go-out-and-there-and-do-it-dammit, kind. I'm so pathetically risk-averse that I can't even steal a teaspoon without replacing it with one from home (true story). There's an awful lot of room between "A teaspoon will land me in jail" and "I will rescue this child..." etc, and next year, I intend to inch my way along the gap. As long as we're not perched up in the air.

We'll see. Some of them, at least, I ought to be able to find. And they won't require wrapping, which is great because I bloody hate wrapping (it requires the same genes as baking; the patience and order genes, and I possess neither).

Friendships are way better than cookies. But cookies are pretty damn good.

2009-11-23T20:57:00.009Z

I was reunited with a tin on Friday. Yeah, if I was organised I'd get off the sofa, take a picture of the tin, and show you, not tell you, but bollocks to that. It's a small, round tin with a Thomas Kincade picture on the front, and this is my seventh reunion with it. We're quite fond of each other by now, this tin and I.

********

This probably isn't a very cool thing to say, but I love tradition.

I'm not talking about church weddings or fish-on-Fridays here, although I've had some great times with both of those (you can tell I live in a Catholic country when the only outdated traditions that spring to mind are religious). It's the ritualised, people-centric part of traditions that do it for me. Meeting up with old college friends and falling straight back into rows about how to pronounce garlic bread (emphasis on the "garlic" or the "bread"? It's kept us bickering for nearly 20 years now). Gatherings of my extended family where the first question from the clan is always "crash the car on the way here, Sarah?" thanks to the time I arrived at a christening having wrapped the A3 round a telegraph pole at a glorious 1mph. You get the idea. Especially since living overseas for a chunk of time again, anything that pulls me towards the people I care about is worth having.

*******

So, the tin. The tin is a gift from a dear, dear friend. Karen has done so many things that make me think "When I grow up, I want to be like her". She moved alone to Paris (from Arizona; not from, y'know, Fontainebleau or somewhere) in her late thirties because she'd always wanted to do it so thought she'd better get on with it. She published her first book last year. The first time I went to her home, she fed me with home-made madeleines, because she'd been reading Proust and felt inspired. Karen just lives her life properly somehow - and she's brilliant, brilliant company for someone scrappy like me.

The first year we were in Seattle, Karen was telling me about a "holiday season" cookie exchange she'd been to - one of those "we should all do this all year round" American ideas which essentially ends in a shedload of cookies for all concerned. It sounded great, but I was entirely unlikely to manage one cookie, let alone a batch for sharing. Cooking, I'm sorted. Baking...yeah, not so much. It requires precision and patience, and typically I try to possess neither.

So Karen, expecting nothing (and receiving nothing too, it must be confessed), brought me round a tin of these incredible 1,000-calorie cookies for Christmas. It was our first Christmas in Seattle, and those cookies were a tiny sign that perhaps, just perhaps, we were starting to be rooted there. It was a new ritual, but one that involved little round biscuits and one of the most interesting people I knew. What's not to like?

Each year, usually about April when I remembered, I'd return the tin to Karen, and each year around Thanksgiving, sometimes more like Christmas, she'd re-gift it to me, full again of the same amazing cookies. It made us laugh, and it made me feel connected in a land where lots of the other rituals were still quite odd. And then we moved to Dublin, and I thought, oh, well, that was nice whilst it lasted. But no! We've been here for three Christmases now ) and the tin has found its way to us each year - sometimes hand-delivered, sometimes in the mail.

It makes me cry a bit now, that tin, when I see it, because it's a really tangible symbol of a friendship that's almost all virtual at the moment. I can think of Karen baking the cookies in her gorgeous house with the view of "our" lake, and I know the trip the cookies have taken. And each time I open the tin for a cookie, I think of Karen and grin. It's a great excuse for sampling often - this year, they didn't even make it home before I had to eat the first one.

That extra weight really suits you*: the best backhanded compliments I've ever received

2009-11-22T21:58:00.010Z

A good while ago now, Antonia put up a post about the nicest things anyone's ever said to her. Antonia comes across as the sort of person it'd be pretty easy to say cool things about, and the list was as you'd expect - articulate, and funny, and pretty moving in parts.

It got me thinking, as I suppose in part it was intended to, about the nicest things anyone's ever said to me. The more I thought, the fewer I could think of - the reverse of that "think of a carrot" thing. See, now whatever else you try to focus on, a carrot's floating there like an unasked-for mental episode of Bugs Bunny, isn't it?

What I did come up with made me giggle. Nothing as straightforward as praise. Mine are the nicest backhanded compliments anyone has ever paid me:

"You do the motorway driving, because you drive like you don't care"

In September of the year 2000, Alex and I went to Italy for a week. We've been friends literally since I was born, but we hadn't been away together for years, and this was a post-apocalyptic holiday for us both in different ways. My manifestation of the end of the world was best demonstrated by driving like a maniac on the roads, which in Italy largely went unnoticed. Which is why, when it came to driving, Alex very logically divided our duties. She took the cities.

"You've got the biggest knockers I know - help me out here, would you?"

Ol is part of my college gang and one of my closest friends - the type who's seen you at your very worst from every possible angle, and doesn't give a shit. There are a few people in my life for whom "boundary" is an utterly irrelevant word - we'll be honest about anything, any time, if the question is asked. Ol's one of them (no shit).
Back in 2001 we were both living in London and kicking around a lot together. I was in John Lewis one Saturday afternoon (I remember this because I hate shopping) when my phone rang. Ol, with a vital question, requiring knowledge he assumed I'd have. Apparently friendships can indeed be no holds barred - including asking for a quick 0898 impression in the middle of the cookware section. Nigella would have been proud.

"You? Seriously? I didn't know you went to Cambridge"

I last heard this one about a month ago, out for dinner with a group of friends I've known for a couple of years now. I'm always ridiculously pleased by it. Not that I have anything against my "Cambridge' tag. I made some everlasting friends there (yes, even the ones who phone with random questions in the middle of John Lewis) and got to read books for four years in one of the most beautiful settings you could ask for. For someone like me who aspired to live largely in dreamland, it was a great place, and my particular college wasn't too pretentious or full of those over-corrected public school types you'd see in their house scarves earnestly selling the Socialist Worker outside the arts block before jumping into Mummy's Merc to get to their "place" in the country for the weekend.

It's not like, these days, where I (one) studied exactly takes up much room in conversation either, let's face it. Still, I'm always pleased when people are surprised by this because I've always most felt I belong, as we are all sick of hearing about on this blog, is the forest. Oxbridge and the Forest of Dean aren't by any stretch mutually exclusive - look at Dennis Potter, for starters - but they aren't the most intuitive jump, either. And I'm prouder of my origins than any transitional seat of learning, so I'm glad that, essentially, that's what shows through first. Sure, if I need to, I can whip out the Ivy-league cred, but that's not what informs me for the most part.

*I've never heard this one personally, but it's still one of my all-time favourite "What now?"s.

Now I lay me down to - oh, bugger it. Time for the headlamp and something to read.

2009-11-17T20:35:00.003Z

I'm a chronic insomniac. Not all the time; that would be exhausting (ha ha) but often enough. It's a consequence, as far as I can tell, of having one of those twitchy minds that doesn't ever properly switch off. There was an Observer article last year which pretty much summed up how it feels, although "lively minded" is probably a pretty generous way of phrasing it in my case.

Fortunately we're a house of book lovers, and when everything else has failed, and believe me, it fails -"good" insomniacs are able to override sleeping pills with their concern about not being able to sleep, which is just as fucked up as it sounds - I turn to my insomnia shelf. It's the first bit of any bedroom that gets assembled (because the absence of the insomnia shelf is in itself enough to drive me to a sleepless night, and yes, it's as pathetic as it sounds). The key to insomnia shelf books is to find things that are soothing in their familiarity but not gripping enough to keep me awake at night (oh, the joys). Often, for that reason, it's collections of essays and things with a finite end to them, or something with chapters which aren't so gripping as to make me lunge for the next one.

My three current favourite can't sleep-won't-sleep books:

Dan Savage's The Kid and The Commitment - but mostly The Kid. Dan Savage writes beautifully about adopting a kid with his boyfriend and, then, later, their debate over whether or not to get married (the kid was all against it). I bought The Kid when I was pregnant with Jonah and ridiculously insatiable about reading anything baby-related. I knew of Dan Savage - everyone in Seattle knows Dan Savage and, in fact, my lovely friend Kim once mistook him for a waiter at his own naked sushi party, so I was especially on the look out for him- but this book was still a revelation. It's soft and sweet, and irrevent and hilarious, and unbelievably moving.

Primary Colors by Anonymous (well, not Anonymous any more, but he is still according to my book cover). I just love this book so much that it has big soothing ability. Henry, and Daisy, and especially Richard Jemmons, make me all giggle, and sit up a bit straighter because they're smarter than me and they're FICTIONAL, dammit! And I love the world that they live in, so that's comforting too. The first night I ever spent in my little flat in Kentish Town, my first ever own home, I watched the film of Primary Colors on my little portable, eating Chinese takeaway with a plastic fork because I had no idea where my cutlery was, and lying on the futon mattress that was my bed that night until I figured out how to assemble my bed. When the movie was over, I dug out the book from my pile of boxes and curled back up on the futon. That tiny little flat, piled high with random paraphenalia, felt like home right away.

Relatedly, The West Wing scripts - seasons 1 & 2. I took these on the plane with me when I moved to Seattle. Mum and Dad dropped me off at the airport with suitcases that weighed more than I did, and Dave was meeting me at the other end, so I just needed something to occupy me for 9 hours that wasn't going to let me get all sniffy about leaving everything behind, and would keep me excited about everything that lay ahead. Script books are perfect for calming down excited minds - you get all the action in your head because you read them in "real time" - and if having Aaron Sorkin's mind going on in your head isn't enough to exhaust you enough for sleeping, I don't know what is.

Hmm. So, books that help me to sleep that have obviously also, now I think about it, helped me to calm down under all sorts of other circumstances. Memo to self: Calm Down Already (not a chance).

I haven't even been near a sodding lift for months and still just thinking about this gives me the heeby jeebies

2009-11-09T21:27:00.006Z

I will do anything I can to avoid lifts, particularly those afterthought-type lifts you get in shops that are really about the showy staircases highlighting the storeys full of consumables you're supposed to be coveting.
Said lifts are invariably tucked away in the far reaches of the store, where not even the delivery boy thinks to go for a crafty fag. They're about the size of the inside of a postbox (and no, I will never voluntarily be trapped in a postbox either, but then, who would? Surely I'm not alone in this) and, my particular worst fear, they have those fucking doors that pause before opening.

You reach your chosen floor, the tinny upright coffin containing you clunks into place, and then the doors metaphorically wander off for a coffee and a gentle browse through the review section of the paper before strolling back in a while later, slinging their jacket on the back of a chair and thinking: "What was it I was going to do before? Oh yeah, open. That's it". By which point, I'm a gibbering wreck. I've calculated how many weeks my bottle of water will last me (and yes, I do keep one with me at all times just in case), rootled through my pockets for random pre-masticated cereal bars and other discarded kiddie foodstuffs that might help me for a day or two, obsessively checked my phone coverage (non-existent) and established that there's no way I could reach to climb out the roof of the lift, to say nothing of the fact that this would mean CERTAIN DEATH, Speed style.

I know why, at least, I'm such a pathetic specimen when it comes to confined spaces.
When I was about seven, and my kid sister about five, we were playing upstairs in our gran's house when we knocked over the wardrobe. God knows what we were doing in the wardrobe; I don't think Narnia was in our bloodstreams at that point. It must've just seemed like a good place to play.

With the wardrobe firmly front-forwards on the floor, there was no way out for us. We yelled and screamed and banged, but our family was used to us playing "actively" (read: like screeching banshees) so nobody paid any attention. Quite possibly they were all at the end of the garden hoeing beans or something (it was that kind of a garden); equally possibly, we were in there for five minutes rather than the several days it felt like.

It was an empty wardrobe, fortunately - well, full of my sister and I, but no clothes to suffocate us or anything grim like that. Maybe more sanguine kids would've found the whole thing quite interesting - in fact, I don't remember my sister being particularly concerned - but sanguine is a word I can spell far better than I can embody. I was freaked out by it then, and I'm freaked out by it now. Trapped, in the dark, with no way of getting out and no proof that anyone knows we were in trouble. Lovely.

Why I'll always fall for the drummer in the band

2009-11-04T21:17:00.007Z

Dave and I were watching {500} Days of Summer a couple of weeks ago. There's a scene where the cute geeky guy is taking the piss out of the Zooey Deschanel character for her love of Ringo Starr. It's something like this - I can't remember the exact quote but you get the gist:

Tom: But he's the drummer! Nobody falls for the drummer in the band.
Summer: Exactly. That's why I did.

Dave poked me, and I grinned back. It's always, always, been my point. Why would you go for the lead singer? Firstly, everyone's going to fall for the lead singer, and dude, unless you've got the brains of Mo Mowlem and the body of Britney, you're screwed. On a bad day I have the body of Mo Mowlem and the brains of Britney, so I'm doubly screwed. Secondly, what's interesting about the lead singer? He hasn't learned to do anything much; he just warbles a bit and looks tortured. As for the guitarists; they're just wannabee leads with too much of an acne (or attitude) problem.

Whereas the drummer: he has all sorts of mental hand-eye coordination shit going on; plus, he has to enhance a tune, but tunelessly (well, percussively). And most to the point: who the hell chooses to be a drummer? Back there behind the kit with their brushes and sticks and pedals, where nobody can see or hear you? Bound to be the most interesting people to be around.

*****

Last Sunday, we were up at the coffee shop reading the paper in blissful silence (gotta love the neighbour-kid-swap thing) when I suddenly leapt out of the sofa squawking.

"What?"
"The "guess where I am" quiz - it's the Forest" "

Dave looked at me with a gaze best described as benign bewilderment mixed with a healthy dose of "here we go again with the sodding Forest of Dean". So I tried to explain why I am so relentlessly in love with the place of my birth, that tiny, chippy, loyal place that was the perfect place to grow up tiny, chippy and loyal. Look, Dennis Potter explained it better than me (no shit) in that final interview he gave with Melvyn Bragg:

my Forest of Dean childhood, well ... it is a strange and beautiful place, with a people who were as warm as anywhere else, but they seemed warmer to me, and the accent is almost so strong, it's almost like a dialect.

In wittering on (at one point I said, to Dave, Dave who grew up in Oxford, for God's sake, "surely you see that, objectively, the Forest is the most beautiful place in the world?"),I realised that I have pick-the-drummer syndrome. The Forest of Dean is the ultimate hidden-behind-its-louder-mates, quirky, curious place. To stretch the metaphor tighter than a drumskin (sorry); from the outset it looks all dodgy haircuts and bits of wood, and sure, it is exactly that - but there's something incredibly compelling about just doing what the fuck you like but doing it with passion and vigour. Not all, but most of the people I know who are simultaneously the most driven and the most optimistic (sickening, right?) come from the same 10-mile patch of old oak and cedar. It can't just be the homemade scrumpy that brought this out.

Anyway, so that's that. I have pick-the-drummer syndrome for all sorts of aspects of my life. I think it's why I loved Seattle so much. If you're living in London and think of moving to the US, you pretty much think New York or possibly, possibly, San Francisco. Seattle isn't even the bass player in this particular band - most people, let's face it, think it's in Canada so it's not even in the same damn band.

It's why, when picking our kids' names, we deliberately printed off the Top 10 and automatically discarded them.

And it's certainly why I married a man who, when looking at a guidebook to Sicily, said, "Let's go west - the book says everyone goes to the east". Now all I need to do is find him a pair of drumsticks.

In which I realise I fell in with a good crowd far too early in life and entirely neglected to properly misspend my youth

2009-10-27T20:52:00.003Z

So it's been nearly two months, and Electric Picnic is still buzzing round in my head and making me smile every time it pauses at the "thought" doorway. (Electric Picnic is kind of Burning Man in an Irish field, or, as the British political journalist Jon Snow put it, Glastonbury crossed with the Hay Literary Festival.)

I’d had really mixed feelings about going. I mean, I like music, but not necessarily enough to spend time in a field coated in mud listening to it, or sacrificing the opportunity for two nights’ decent, kid-free sleep. Yeah, yeah, I’m whining, it’s true. I just wondered whether this was one of those things, like reading The Catcher in the Rye or watching The Outsiders, that you have to do within a certain time frame or you’re screwed. And an unwanted by-product of an overactive imagination is the ability to run through pretty much every scenario in your (OK, my) mind and see exactly how bad things could become.

It's also because I'm terrible - terrible- at doing things outside of my comfort zone, and my comfort zone is pretty narrow. Give me a pen and paper, or better still, a good book, and I'm sorted. It's anti-social to a degree, but it's always worked for me. I couldn't exactly see how a music festival was going to be my idea of fun. But...part of the thing I'm working on for the next 18 months is to not feel so small and scared at things outside of my absolute preferred option. And I love Dave, and Dave loves music, and sometimes life really is that simple.

And I’m sure, if we'd picked a different event, my worst fears might have been just the starting point. But - and this is a HUGE but - this festival that seemed to have been put together by people listening to little voices in my head. I actually can’t think of a better way of spending two days. For starters, I got to hang out with Dave without (literally) knee-high mini-versions of him in tow asking for ice cream or sliding into the mud or beating the living shit out of each other (and knowing that they were having their own personal version of a festival with their grandparents meant no associated guilt, either).

And then, look! Here's the stuff going on in my head:

Sitting under a tree eating pie and chips, watching a rainbow fade over a manor house whilst listening to Zero 7*

Watching Dave dance and seeing that part of him which these days is buried under the day-to-day of kid-raising and career-having. Watching the man you married letting loose at one of the things he likes to do most is worth any amount of sleeping in a field in Ireland in September. Even if he did offload his bag to me for better dancing.

Dancing like loons to Just Jack at three in the afternoon, perfectly straight and gloriously happy, in the middle of a huge crowd. We’d wandered in to see him on the strength of one song, which can make me cry on a bad (good?) day, and came out beaming those beams that don’t switch off. I am always going to be in love with scruffy, unassuming blokes who can both rhyme and scan, so really it was a foregone conclusion. Makes me happy happy happy.

Watching a little boy, maybe 4 or 5 years old, playing tag in the trees dressed in combat trousers and fairy wings.

The waiter at the Burlesque Cafe, dressed for the occasion in fuschia lycra accessorised with a matching boa, who wandered up to us and asked, "Would you like to see some photos of Victorian porn?" Better still, he'd got Jon Snow, the political journalist mentioned above, to sign the copy. OK then.

Hanging out in the spoken word tent whilst Dave was off doing his dance thing somewhere and getting to hear top Northern Irish performance poets Scream Blue Murmur do a cover version of Leonard Cohen's "Bird on a Wire" as sung by the Proclaimers. Entirely nutso and absolutely brilliant.

Soaking in a giant melamine tea cup/hot tub at 10pm on a Saturday night with random Irish "personalities" wandering past and men eating fire 7 feet away.

If I hadn't already resolved to be braver, I'd resolve to be braver. Totally, totally worth it.

*We’ve seen Zero 7 play now in Ireland, Seattle and London, at festivals, bigger gigs, and small venues, and much as we love them at home (hence our persistence), the official pronouncement is that they're still shit live. Sad but true.

I'm sure I stand still when I'm saying inappropriate things

2009-10-20T21:13:00.005+01:00

Everyone needs a friend like Kim. My first real friend in Seattle, and still one of my truest friends even if we've lived in different cities for years now, I knew she was a keeper the day we went wedding dress shopping. I was a bit nervous; I've never really been much good at the uber-girly stuff and the idea of spending a whole day with a virtual stranger (we'd known each other about a month then, maybe) - a beautiful, blonde stranger at that- having to be polite about her bridal choices and pretending to care about her opinion of mine sounded both intimidating and exhausting.

But then Kim started talking to the Keepers of the Gowns, these insanely coiffeured shop-women with spray-on faces and expressions as fake as their tans. "We're looking for two entirely different dresses" she'd start. "I'm getting married on a beach in Mexico and Sarah is getting married in a castle in England, so she needs something that will coordinate with her husband's green tights - he'll be dressed as Robin Hood".

The first time she did it I opened my mouth to correct her (for all I know, maybe that's what she thought the Brits did at weddings - hats for the women, cross-dressing for the men) and caught just the tiniest fraction of a head-shake. The boutiquistas would stop, look, try to rally, stare at us both again, and then direct us hopelessly to the racks of bouffy meringues to search for ourselves. Victory to Kim.

After a while, this got predictable, so Kim upped the game a little. Entering a dressing area which felt more like backstage at the Milan shows (as if I'd know), we were bidden to remove all footwear. Kim didn't miss a beat. "Has that foot fungus cleared up yet, Sarah?" she asked in her most bell-like tones.

Kim was the first evidence that life in this new country was going to be OK - that we would be able to settle in and find our tribe, because our tribe did, after all exist. And in the end, it was more than OK, and lovely Kimberly is lovelier than ever.

Last week Kim sent me this quote, Jamie Oliver's description of his mother apparently, with a "remind you of anyone?" alongside it. It made me laugh out loud - and realise that it could be me, or it could be her, but it's probably both of us. And it made me happy:

"(...) hilarious. A hundred-miles-an-hour avalanche of energy. She’s superbright and fairly encyclopedic about stuff, but at the same time she’s a complete liability. She just worries and flusters and runs around the place, saying inappropriate things."

So apparently life's all about childrens' books and the second world war, with a quick visit to the West Wing.

2009-10-17T21:38:00.003+01:00

...and it's all because of a woman who writes about Vancouver the way I feel about Seattle. I've been reading Kate's blog for a while now, and her thoughts about her parcelled-up past life in Vancouver always make me nod and think "yeah, that's it".

Anyway, Kate's written a kids' book which has its own website, and she posted this meme which looked like fun and, in fact, is. It's resulted in a glorious night of red wine and YouTube rabbit holes of The Great Escape. Yeah, yeah, I know I have 3 versions of the damn film on the shelf next door, but why would I move from the muppet chair (our favourite chair of all time, made from, as our neighbour pal put it, several skinned muppets).

The meme was about books, and films, and booksandfilms, but as you'll see, for me it was mostly about the war and small children, with a dose of Clinton politics, oddly. Not nearly as miserable as it sounds, honest, and probably a fair representation of what you'd see if you split me open like an oak and counted the rings of interest.

(the bold bits are Kate's original questions, the other stuff, obviously enough, are my answers).

(and yeah, some of the numbers are missing; if an answer didn't spring to mind, I chose not to trust it. It's my version. Bugger off).

1) You are facing an epic journey. You may choose one companion, one tool and one vehicle from any book or film to accompany you. Or just one of the three. It's up to you. What do you choose? Josh from The West Wing, because he’s made history before and he’d be bloody good company.

2) You can escape to the insides of any book. Where do you go, and why?
I’m a chronic insomniac, so it’d be something from my “insomnia shelf” – books familiar enough to soothe me but engaging enough to make me forget whichever pointless woe is keeping me awake. Usually it’s Dan Savage’s The Kid: I read it whilst pregnant with Jonah and it takes me back to that time so quickly. Plus, he reminds me of Seattle and that always calms me down.

3) You can bring one literary character into your current life. Who do you choose, and why?
Mr. Tom from Michelle Magrorian’s classic Goodnight Mr Tom. I can remember the first time I read this book – it startled me beyond belief. Everyone needs a Mr Tom and he’s always reminded me of my “Uncle Bob”, my Dad’s best friend. Despite the fact that John Thaw portrayed him in the film, when I go back to the book, it’s Uncle Bob’s face I see. He died just at the beginning of my pregnancy with Jonah (hmm, unexpected theme here much?) and I’m always sorry that he didn’t know I was pregnant.

4) Primary Colors, by “Anonymous” (really, Joe Klein) is my go-to book. I could read that book fifty-seven times in a row without a break for food or a pee and not be remotely bored. In fact I’ve already done that but it wasn’t fifty-seven times. It was sixty-four.

5) Of all the literary or film characters that made an impression on you as a kid, who was the most enviable? I’m answering this one at a bit of a slant. More, the ones who’ve stuck with me and made me wish I could read them forever (or write like that): Probably Mr Tom (see above) – or the dad in Danny, Champion of the World.

6) Of all the literary or film characters that made an impression on you as a kid, who was the most frightening? I was (am) such a scaredy-cat I’m not sure I’d ever watch something that terrified me. The saddest thing I ever watched as a kid – and which I rewatch, and rewatch, and rewatch – is the forger, played by Donald Pleasance, in The Great Escape, during the moments he realizes he’s going blind and will neither be able to help others to escape nor escape himself (yes, yes, I KNOW he does, but that comes later). I can’t bear the fucking irony of the thing and it deadens my day every time – that and the scene where poor, poor Danny, the claustrophobic “Tunnel King”, loses the plot at the eleventh hour. Shit, that film just makes me weep.

7) Every time I read _________________, I see something in it that I haven’t seen before. I’m only just through the first reading, but I believe my answer here will always, and forever, be David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The fucking thing is a genius of a book.

10) After all these years, the first section of The Collector, by John Fowles still manages to give me the queebs when I think about it in retrospect. SO not the book to read on a Greek beach, folks (I’m telling you this so you never make the same mistake I did) .

11) After all these years, the scene in Flambards (KM Peyton) where Christina and Will get together still manages to give me a thrill.

12) If I could corner the poet Roger McGough here’s what I’d say to them one minute or less about his book (anthology), Poetry Please: Thank you for making poetry for me as a kid, for bringing me into colour and rhyme when I was perfectly ready to think I needed stories to be only prose. Even if it did result in a fuckload of bad verse from me for a while. That's my fault though, not yours.

13) The coolest non-fiction book I’ve ever read is How We Lived Then, by Norman Longmate, as raved about in my previous post. Every time I flip through it, it makes me want to – well, it makes me want to do everything, really. Live during the Second World War. Write like that. Live my life in the book without coming out for air.

Oh, screw it. These are a few of my favourite things

2009-10-15T21:07:00.004+01:00

I had a lovely long post planned for today about my anti-gloom plan, Project 40, but then I decided to sulk instead and now it's too late for such a post, to say nothing of me feeling way too stroppy to want to write it. Which is ludicrous since nobody reads this anyway, so clearly I'm just being pointless.

Anyway, amid my myriad faults, the one that drives me the maddest (as opposed to the one/s that drive my nearest & dearest the maddest) is my unquenchable fucking optimism. Occasionally, just occasionally, it would be nice to wallow. But no, every time there is a problem I have to find a bright side. My legs just got stuck in a manhole? Excellent! Now nobody will know how short I really am/my arms will become really strong and sinewy in compensation/I'll meet loads of really interesting people whilst I'm stuck here.

That kind of thing. See? Really sodding annoying.

So, this post is brought to you by Insufferable Pollyanna, who would like to be having a thoroughly entrenched sulk about bugger all right now, but is instead compelled to think about the nice things that have happened over the last couple of days:

(a) Fish and chips by the water's edge last night, with glorious Dave, for date night. A clear October evening, sitting on some random statue (see, the Irish. Statues bloody everywhere) overlooking Dalkey Island, which reputedly has its own King despite being the size of a cow pat. We could hear howling from the island, so presumably the King is dead (Long Live the King!), devoured by wolves, OR practising some howling of his own.

(b) Jonah telling me yesterday, "Look, Mummy! This is how we play Batman in the garden at school" then sticking his coat hood over his head and whizzing around, arms outstretched. How fab is it, exactly, that the very things you (well, I) remember from childhood come back through playground muscle memory? Of course, Jonah is convinced he and his pals invented this, so we are both delighted, albeit for slightly conflicting reasons.

(c) The arrival in the post today of How We Lived Then, one of those books that changed the way I thought about things when I was 14 and has stuck with me ever since. Some people had Star Wars or Duran Duran; I had a brick-sized explanation of the home front in the UK during the second world war. It was as exciting to see the book today as it was when I first found it on the top left-hand bookstack of our local library 20-odd years ago.

And on that note, I'm off to read about turnips for pineapples and pubs in Anderson shelters.

Not so much a chip off the old block as a leaf off the slightly-knackered-but-still-giggling tree

2009-10-08T21:18:00.005+01:00

It's hardly a secret, my love for trees. My love for wood. My love for forests. Ah, bugger it - my love for anything to do with those dank, rustly walkways through curvy avenues and secret hidey-holes. I mean, what's not to love?

I know as parents we're supposed to be looking after the big things pertaining to our kids. And sure, we make sure they're fed, and shod, and shooed to bed at a reasonable time (as much for our sakes as for theirs). This year, though, I'm getting to teach them one of my favourite little things, too. They're both properly vertical and belting around this year (last autumn, Lucas was still at the crawl-and-shuffle stage, which whilst cute maybe, isn't all that useful for walking in the woods).

So, any chance we get, the boys and I are seeking out huge piles of fallen leaves and kicking them around with gusto, glee, and grim determination. After a foray into a pavement's worth of fallen lovelies, it occurred to me that Dublin road sweepers were probably cursing us for destroying an afternoon's work with a leaf blower in 3 minutes, so we've taken to the hills.

Killiney Hill, to be precise, where the woods ease out onto cliffs and a view of the sea, and there are sticks to throw for passing dogs, and hot chocolate to be had in the little stone folly next to the statue of Dedalus (never underestimate the predilection of the Irish to throw in a cultural reference - or bronze statue - when you're least expecting it. Last year, the Irish ferries posters were quoting Beckett and Wilde. The comparative concept of Brittany Ferries using, say, Roger McGough and Shakespeare was glorious but totally unrealistic).

It's one of those things they never tell you in What to Expect and those other tomes, but my god, leaf-kicking is WAY better when you're doing it with your wee ones.

The three best bits of advice about relocating anyone ever gave me

2009-10-01T21:24:00.002+01:00

Accept every invitation for the first six months; you never know where it might lead.

You’ll always miss every place you’ve enjoyed living; that doesn't mean the move isn't the right thing to do.

You’ll never recreate the other places you’ve lived; everywhere will have some things that are better and some that are worse.

Each of these came from a friend who'd been there, done that, and in each case, these particular pals are people I'd put right up there on my "friends to save from a burning building" list (OK, so I'd save all my friends from a burning building if I could, otherwise why be friends with them? but you know what I mean).

Collectively, the advice has served me pretty well over 5 different countries and fuck knows how many new homes.

I'd probably customise the top one now the kids are involved and accepting-every-invitation is sometimes not logistically not possible. When we moved to Dublin, my new motto was:

"you don't meet people stuck indoors".

So even though the rain threatened to create an extension of the Irish Sea right there under the wheels of the buggy, and even though I was crippled by homesickness and brand-new nostalgia for a life we'd left behind (to say nothing of heavily pregnant and intrinsically inclined to melodrama), Jonah and I went out every single day, smiled when we could, and eventually, it felt like we lived here. That's the condensed version, but you get my point.

And round and round and round it goes, although I'm not sure that's quite what he meant by "revolution"

2009-09-22T21:17:00.005+01:00

I was in town for a meeting a couple of weeks ago and nipped into a coffee shop loo on my way back to the car. The bathroom was downstairs and vaguely scuzzy without being unclean.

Something about the lock on the door – one of those puny bolts that never quite seems screwed in properly – combined with its generalized seediness jolted forwards a muscle memory of the loos in the Elliott Bay Book Company, where I spent a lot of time (the bookshop, not the loos).

Their graffiti, and there was much of it, was often somewhat self-consciously literary. Ah, bollocks to it. It was pretty much always straightforwardly pretentious. To add to the tone of one-upmanship (because obviously that's what you're aiming for in a toilet), there was also a fair amount of cross-referencing and call-and-response going on within the graffitti myself.

And yeah, I may mock, but I *loved* reading the graffitti there (takes one straightforwardly pretentious nerd to know one, right?). One of my favourites there, years ago now, had started off innocuously - and somewhat pointelessly- enough, with the famous Gil Scott Heron song/poem:

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”.

Underneath it, someone had scrawled,

"...but you can watch it on YouTube"

And in a nice flourish of irony, the poem itself is now on YouTube.

It's either Dorothy Wordsworth or Elastigirl

2009-08-24T20:54:00.003+01:00

I've never really been any good at that girly-girl stuff - not least because I can't imagine life without pockets. Where would you put all the usual nonsense that needs touting around?

Add two little boys into the equation and pockets are promoted from useful to necessary. They're repositories for way more than my needs - let's face it, I've never actually claimed to need a stone, a dollop of pre-masticated toast or a really long, really green bogey (especially one that didn't originate from my nose).

But I've been feeling vicariously cool these last few days, and it's thanks to Jonah and my pockets. Jonah, you see, is in his superhero phase. I'm assuming it's a phase, anyway. It popped up out of nowhere, much like a superhero, and will doubtless vanish with a huge KAPOW!! when its work here is done, earthling.

Anyway, superheroes have capes, and therefore so does Jonah. It's a bit of a hassle, though, it turns out, to have to carry a damn cape everywhere - but fortunately, this superhero has a mother. And not just that, but a mother with pockets, for easy cape-stashing.

This sounds like the punchline to an extremely old joke, but keeping a cape in my pocket makes me giggle (and yes, I'm sure everyone's very pleased to see me). It also makes me wonder about all these orphaned superheroes and how the hell they managed their capes - is that what the sidekicks were really for, do you reckon?

It also, even though the subject matter is entirely different, keeps reminding me of the poem by Lynn Peters, Why Dorothy Wordsworth Is Not As Famous As Her Brother.

The first verse:

" I wandered lonely as a...
They're in the top drawer, William,
Under your socks--
I wandered lonely as a --
No not that drawer, the top one.
I wandered lonely by myself --
Well wear the ones you can find,
No, don't get overwrought my dear,
I'm coming."

is just like living with little boys. Bet Dorothy Wordsworth would've had way more fun if William had entrusted her with his superhero's cape instead of his quill and parchment.

Does quite a bit more than it says on the tin

2009-08-21T20:41:00.005+01:00

Autumn's always been my favourite season even though, as I just remarked to a friend, in Ireland it's the difference between rain-with-boots-and-socks and rain-with-sandals. This year, autumn's giving me extra cause for "oh thank GOD"ness because it means the end of a very particular type of Infinite Summer.

Since June 21st, Dave and I have been reading David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (cult status in the US; "who???" status over here) alongside an online reading group. This isn't the post where I talk about the content of the book, not least because of the thousand (s?) of people reading it, I am (al)most certainly nowhere near the most coherent 10% in terms of discussing meta-anything, and it strikes me that to properly discuss Infinite Jest you'd need to meta yourself onto a whole new planet, Janet.

But reading the same book all summer is a bit like running laps. After a while, the muscles start to pump round by themselves and you get some time to ponder the activity within the wider context of your life.

An aside (me? never....): For me, the stated reason for running is to get some damn exercise already and offset the nightly helping of small-boy-supper I manage to consume in the name of "checking it's OK for them". But the side-effects, which are to an extent unintentional but are in fact equally huge benefits, include stuff like: I get 30 minutes, three times a week, to let my brain spin off on its own wee axis and see what's brewing in there (today's special: mixed metaphors, apparently). I convert my usual nervy energy into something a bit more useful, a bit like cow pats for fuel. Because we live on the edge of some gorgeous views, I get my nature fix without needing to make it a thing of its own - which is, after all, how I most like nature to be.

ANYway. Enough of a tangent, much? Here are the things that, in 780+ pages of reading, I'm realising I'm enjoying almost as much as the actual book itself, which, let's face it, has been bloody hard work at times.

Let's start with the two in the paragraph above, shall we?

1) I sometimes think I live my entire life as a tangent, and this book is so full of them it makes me feel like the die-straightest arrow ever to set point in a quiver. I've never minded the distractible-ness of myself, or my inability to function in a straight line; but it's still always nice to have company. Even though, of course, the book is fictional and the author had a plan, or at least found a way to make it make enough sense to keep going. Hmm. Let's hope I have one of those too.

2) I've never meant to do this, but I sometimes surprise people by not living up to their first impressions. So from time to time someone will announce that they'd thought I was going to be really quiet and shy (because I'm small and unprepossessing, I suppose). Or - given my background in literature & now publishing - that I will have wildly erudite reading habits, when it turns out that reading foreign literature to degree level left me with some pretty open-jawed gaps in the English canon. All of which to say that I don't read "hard stuff" as much as I could or should. I haven't commuted on public transport for 6+ years, so there's been no tube-reading; and by the time the kids are zonked, it's the least I can do to pick up anything, let alone a work of genius.
But being committed to reading IJ, if only in my head, actually*, means that I'm treating it almost like homework and achieving my allotted page count regardless of how much it makes my head spin to read such dense thinking at the end of the day or in 2-minute bursts, which is barely time enough for the average DFW sentence. And reading "real" books, after 4 years of pregnancy/tiny kids, is adding unfuring one more petal within my budding sense (sorry) of regaining parts of myself now the kids are old enough to be themselves.

The other, unexpected but really cool, thing, that I'm enjoying from this whole experience is reading the book alongside Dave. It's one thing to recommend a book to one's husband/wife/whatever and insist they love it, then have lengthy "wasn't that ace?" discussions thereafter. It's quite another, really, to take on the same heinously long-winded book-at-bedtime, simultaneously. It's a bit like co-parenting but with four-paragraph-long descriptions of bodily fluids in the place of real ones.

Anyway, 200 pages to go and if I'm going to finish the damn thing by deadline like the nerd I still am, I'd better sod off and read it rather than faff around here pontificating about it.

* (I'm still a bit nervous of being kicked out of online forums for laughing inappropriately or telling a long and involved story at the wrong moment - moi? Surely not)

Not such a glorious twelfth

2009-08-12T21:00:00.009+01:00

I wrote most of this last year, but today would be an old friend's birthday, and it seems time to post it:

On Thursday, a group of my old friends will be meeting a few miles from where I grew up, in my (and their) beloved Forest of Dean. There will be pints, and stories, and more pints, and more stories. There will probably be laughs, and there will almost certainly be tears. Because before the pints, there will be a funeral. A funeral for our friend Tim, who, two days after his thirty-ninth birthday, set fire to his car with himself in it.

We’d been in touch recently, when Tim sent a change-of-address email. Although it was a good 5 years since we'd last met up, it was brilliant to hear from Tim, the way it often can be with people you've just run out of space to keep in your lives without meaning to lose touch. So when his birthday came around, I rattled off the “happy birthday” email with the standard blasé “thirty-nine forever” gag. Four days later, the phone call came. Nobody could really believe it.

I’ve been struggling for weeks now about whether or not to fly over for the funeral. In the end, the noes are winning, largely because of the English reserve thing. It seems entirely over the top to be swooping in from overseas when, in practice, I haven’t – shit, hadn’t – seen Tim in the last, what, six years? And so although it'll be in my mind all day, it seems better to stay put.

This group of friends has remained essentially bonded for 30 years that I’ve been witness to and several more before. And they were a huge, huge part of my formative years.

This is the struggle in terms of whether or not to attend the funeral. I may not have seen Tim – seen any of them – very much recently, but they meant the world to me at a time when my world was just starting to expand. I learned liking for liking's sake, and I learned fun, and I learned not to take myself so fucking seriously. Clearly that’s not a message that sank in very deeply, but hey.

Because of the less-intense-contact more recently, all my memories of Tim are from about 20 years ago. Just out of his teens, dancing to the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry”: head down, arms at his side, all the rhythm coming from shoulders. If I ever hear the song on the radio, I dance like Tim – can’t help it. Tim Watson, with the fabulous, freakish memory for trivia.

Tim, who stepped off the cliff the day we went home-made abseiling, only to find the brake wasn’t on the rope. A roar went up from those of us lying flat on our fronts on the surrounding cliffs, a plea to the “anchor guy” at the bottom: “BRAKE!!!!!!” And Neil, steady as ever, leaned into the ropes or did whatever the hell it was he needed to do, and Tim’s speedy descent came to an abrupt halt.

Tim, coming up with the rest of the gang to visit me in Cambridge, penniless, but with a wealth of one-liners that conned us into buying him the pints all the same.

And to go along with the memories my mind streams a photo, taken in 1989 at a friend’s 18th birthday party, when we were all invincible .Tim channeling James Dean: on a step, cigarette drooping from mouth. Leather jacket, long dark hair…and a pair of sneakers on his knees for reasons that escape us. Who knew it would become a way to remember him, 20 years later?

Happy 40th, Tim Watson. Wish you were here for it.

Must have been the way I was queuing patiently on my own that gave it away

2009-08-05T20:54:00.002+01:00

Even before we left for the US and what has turned into 6+ years of living overseas, I'd never considered myself particularly English. Maybe it's because I'm not; with Welsh roots from Mum and English ones from Dad, but growing up in a place that (proudly) considers itself neither one nor the other, at most I'm British.

Let me clarify; obviously, for census purposes and all that good stuff, I'm British. But I've never really been into wandering around Benidorm with knotted hanky demanding 10 pints of lager and a full English. Nor am I a Sebastian Flyte type, much as I wished I could be during my pretentious phase in my early twenties (and I mean my really pretentious phase, not the half-arsed version I drag out sometimes these days).

And yeah, obviously what's wrong with those comparisons is, as much as anything else, that I'm not male, I suppose - but the only female examples of insta-Brit I could think of were the Queen (for Christ's sake) and, I dunno, the Jade Goody, and they're even less edifying.

When we were in France in June, we spent a morning in a tiny little town in the middle of nowhere. We weren't in the overrun-by-the-English part of the country and had, in fact, seen no other foreigners all week - probably as much accident as design, but still.

We were walking back to the car after a great lunch of galettes and idle chat whilst the kids raced around the walled garden knocking each other over. On our way back, I paused to wait for Dave and Jonah, and crossed paths with two blokes, each with a pushchair and a small child waiting for their wives and slightly bigger children. Just like me, really. I smiled in acknowledgement of our mutual circumstances and the guy closer to me nodded and said, by way of greeting, "hiya".

After several years now in varying English-speaking countries, getting used to the vagaries of the English language as spoken by people who also claim it as their mother tongue, "hiya" jumped out at me as quintessentially English. It's halfway colloquial, it pretty much sets the parameters of a demographic, and it wouldn't be used by a non-British person, let alone a non-English speaker. So the assumption had been that I, too, was British.

Which is true, of course. But what interests me (since clearly life is all about me) is that, without speaking (and "revealing" my accent), wearing no clothes purchased in Britain, and in a country that isn't Britain, I'm still somehow identifiably English. I'm sure there's a blindingly obvious reason for this, and it's not like I think I've somehow become American or Irish (or, indeed, German or Austrian, if we want to take all my non-British homes into account). In a way, I find it pretty comforting. A true case of "you can take the girl out of the country...".

And now, if you'll excuse me, I'm off to eat my Findus crispy pancakes in front of Fawlty Towers repeats....

Seeing the forest for the Lars Von Triers

2009-07-29T20:50:00.006+01:00

We left the kids with our neighbour-friends on Sunday morning and escaped for a glorious hour or so of reading the paper. It's a strange sensation, getting through the whole review section without small noses poking over the top of it and demanding “More!” (Lucas, and it doesn’t really matter what the “more” is – he’s always demanding more of something) or to asking to trace over the letters (Jonah. We always give him the sports section since it’s the least-read bit for us, so Jonah’s going to grow up with a vast array of vocabulary gleaned from the sports pages. Dead useful, I’m sure).

Anyway, the review section contained was an article on Lars Von Trier’s latest film, Antichrist. There's been lots of discussion as to whether the violence in the film is was integral to the art or just entirely gratuitous and a shock-factor=column-inches gambit (and let's face it; if it's the latter, it's definitely paid off). I haven’t seen the film yet, and whilst I'm not necessarily leaping to grab my coat and go and watch female genitial mutilation, it certainly sounds intriguing enough as a whole to get me to the coat rack. But amidst the description of extreme grief, depression, and their violent manifestations, there was one detail that did startle me off the page and question whether I'd be able to sit through the film. I say this entirely tongue in cheek, and mostly because I am an oversentimental lunatic when it comes to matter of woodlands.

The review explained that we glean from an address on an envelope near the beginning of the film that it’s set somewhere in the Pacific Northwest. It went on to mention as a tangent that the film was actually shot on location in Germany, in Nordrhein-Westfalen.

I looked up from the paper, eyes wide.

“We can’t go and see it after all”

“Why’s that?”

“The trees are all wrong! It will ruin the movie”.

Setting something amongst the wrong trees? Just not possible. I know the trees of the Pacific Northwest – not as well as I know my home forest, obviously, but for four glorious years, these cedars and pines were my home trees. They were just like the US itself when we first got there – massive and unknowable and way wilder than anything we’d experienced to date. Look:

These trees, they helped me in so many ways when everything in my life was unknown. This might sound nuts to anyone who grew up in a city, but being back within easy access of the total randomness of nature that a forest provides (because really, beyond the years-ago first planting, these things are doing whatever the hell they like and creating their own mini worlds) was like coming home. And home matters to me, as we've established by now, a hell of a lot.

Despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary in this post, I’m not stupid, just ridiculously sentimental. I know that films are shot on location – there’s just a part of me that wishes that, just this once, those trees could be my trees. It seems a bit like getting a Christmas card from your parents and the enclosed photo being of two other random, similarly-aged people. The thought is nice but the implementation? Just weird. Although one of the best Christmas cards we ever received was from friends who did exactly that...but that's a different story, for a different day.

Three conversations that prove you should never, ever hire us as trend spotters

2009-07-20T21:33:00.003+01:00

1. early 1995, me to an old friend:

There's this new American comedy show about these twenty-somethings and they're all friends. You should look out for it - I dunno if it's going to catch on but it's good for the time being.

2. Thursday, May 3rd, 2007, Dave to me in an email:

....he says property in Dublin is very expensive and he thinks there might be a bubble.

(so that'd be before house prices started screaming downhill, then)

3. mid-2007, Dave and I in conversation:

this Twitter thing is so NOT mainstream. You just think that because we live in a tech bubble

(again with the bubbles! Who did we think we were, Michael Jackson?)

The punch line that reads like a punch line to a whole different story

2009-07-08T13:50:00.006+01:00

When we were in France last month, we made a visit to the local farmers' market. Rather than a quaint, outdoors version of Waitrose for the Guardian-reading liberals to saunter through in their MBTs hunting for their organic, hand-rolled muesli, this was a proper market for farmers. From the kids' point of view, this was bliss. In the place of Fair Trade t-shirts with ironic slogans and "arty" photos of the view down the road, there were animals, noise, and chaos.

Everything needed to be admired. Chickens piled cereal-box high in their tiny crates, in as many varieties as a Kelloggs multipack. Tiny, weeny, terrified-looking chicks.

"Pretty bunnies" as Jonah called them; lank, sweaty, cloud-eyed lapins plumped up for the pot but, juiciness aside, looking like they'd come straight from auditions for the evil rabbits in Watership Down. Jonah stopped to stroke them all, the toothless farmer opening the cage for him with a crooked grin. Somehow the French term, "caresse", seemed deeply inappropriate for these field-pests destined for the cleaver, but a market is a market and a rabbit, it seemed, is a rabbit, when you're three years old.

We moved on. We sampled goats cheeses. Lucas, versed neither in French nor much English, let's face it, signalled his preferences by spitting out his un-favoured flavours into the face of the cheese-maker. Apparently "pah pah pah" is Toddler for "what are you trying to *do*; poison me??" .

Finally, we came to the salami stall. This was a holiday, after all, and the urge to live mostly on pork products, chocolate, and wine was not to be ignored.

Jonah decidee he'll help me to select, so we moved down the stall with the salami maker, me translating, because obviously a degree in French equipped me for salami identification (yeah, yeah, I see that gag. And that one).

"Blue cheese salami?"

"Yuck" said my resident gourmand, and I was inclined to agree - sounds a bit like an entire meal in one truncheon-sized piece of meet.

"Cepes salami? it's a kind of mushroom"

"We don't eat mushrooms, Mummy" Well, fair do's. One of us doesn't, it's true, and apparently that was enough.

There is a jolt, a stutter in our proceedings.

"Encore une fois?" I asked the stall owner. Bollocks - I'd heard right the first time. Reluctantly, I told Jonah the name of the next salami. As I'd feared, his eyes lit up.

"That one!"

"No, really - let's hear what the next one is"

"No, Mummy, I want that one"

I tried again, just in case Jonah changed his mind. Yeah, right.

"Which one, poppet?"

"That one, Mummy. I want donkey salami"

Stealth evil, or proof, yet again, that this child is ours

2009-07-01T20:38:00.006+01:00

We’ve been gradually weaning Lucas off his beloved dodie, in the hopes that this will eventually lead to currently-unfeasible hours of blissful unconsciousness rather than endless holy-crap-it's-WHAT- o'clock? summonses to help the small child find the smaller soother in the dark hours. Simultaneously, although presumably not related (the sodding soother isn't THAT big), he's been upping the talking, or the attempts at talking, which go something like this:

Scene: the park, Sunday afternoon. Jonah and Lucas have wrestled the family ice cream cones from us gullible parents, are sitting on the grass with vanilla drool cascading down their t-shirts. Lucas finishes his ice cream.

L: hands upturned to show emptiness, eyebrows raised, signifying astonishment at this unforeseen development: All gone!

Lucas turns to his brother, notices Jonah has been unable to match L’s consumption speed, still has some ice cream left.

L points frantically at Jonah: More! More! MORE!!

J ignores him

L enlisting parental help, pointing frantically: More! MORE!!

S: explain to Jonah what you’re asking for, poppet – that might help.

L earnestly, to Jonah; pointing at Jonah’s ice cream: yumyumMORE! Babba MORE!

You get the picture. It’s quick and dirty, but his needs, they are met.

Jonah, threats to ice cream ownership notwithstanding, is delighted by this new walky-talky version of the brother who, for most of his first year, was just an irritation crawling in between him fun. Consequently, he spends much of his time teaching Lucas new words, which veer in typical 3-year-old style from the scatological “say poo, Lucas’ to the surreal “say sandwich filling, Lucas”. Last week Jonah hit upon a new game.
“Say dodie, Lucas” he commanded.

Lucas beamed, knowing the word well.

“Doodoo” he complied.

“Doodoo” he added thoughtfully.

“Doodoo?” – enquiringly, looking around himself.

“Doodoo?Doodoo!Doodoo!! DOODOO!’ he yelled, realizing one was not forthcoming and in desperate need of a dodie now that the sacred object had been mentioned.

Cue toddler in tears and much wailing and beating of tiny fists on the floor. Jonah, by this point in the proceedings, was howling with laughter. And we, secretly proud of the streak of mischief it takes to come up with this, are definitely not winning any parenting awards by letting it continue. Ah well – isn’t this what siblings are for?

Comment se dire: What the f***? en francais?

2009-06-24T21:11:00.002+01:00

We were in France last week and oh, the crazy French, ze mek mee laff.

My two favourite hunnh? moments:

A pharmacy window display with, as its centerpiece, a bride’s head in a bowl. It was surrounded by tanning products, so I can only assume that she was decapitated for not appearing at the altar the requisite shade of Tango orange. Either that or, this being France, she had committed the fatal flaw of fake beautifying (rather than effortless elegance) and the John the Baptist-esque scene was intended as a dire warning to the remaining residents of the town (and to passing nosy tourists).

A box of mouse poison. I suppose, in English, we call this rat poison rather than mouse poison (why? Do we not kill dinky little mice, or does “rat poison” just sound more substantial somehow, in the same way that a rat is undeniably more of a rodent than the mere mouse?).

Anyway, for the joy of this anecdote to work, you also need to know that the French word for mouse is “souris”.

The name of the poison? “Souricide”. Brilliant. The packaging featured a picture of a mouse in its death throes just in case we were in any doubt.

And then a hunnh moment we delivered in reverse on the way back to Dooobleen:

A hipster on the plane home engaged in conversation with Lucas (20 months) as we disembarked. I’d seen said hipster in front of us in the queue for the plane. He stood out by dint of travelling alone, notably without the array of small wailing children clinging to all other passengers. He’d been carrying just a small bag, which he checked, and an indeterminate bundle in a black bin bag, which I’d naturally assumed was some kind of bomb.

Lucas was admiring the Quiksilver logo on hipster’s t-shirt (ie, poking at it and burbling) so hipster explained to him that it was a surfing brand and “I’ve got a wetsuit in this bag, actually”. Ah, so not a bomb then – god, my powers of deduction are brilliant.

“Ooh”

said I, speaking for Lucas who was clearly not going to have the vocabulary for this particular exchange,

“Lucas has a wetsuit too”

Hipster looked at Lucas with sceptism, then back at me.

“Not a real one though, right?”

“Well, it’s pretty real. It’s a Billabong suit, and it has instructions for how to wash it post-surf”

Hipster surveyed Lucas again, this time with a renewed respect. His brain, you could almost see it hurting from the attempts at processing. I understood. It was a hipster version of Bridie the Baptist.

My own personal pathetic fallacy (better than my own personal Jesus, although less tuneful)

2009-06-10T21:06:00.004+01:00

For most of my twenties, I lived in London. I lived pretty much everywhere in London – in eight years I moved eight times – so I got to know it, if not all over, then pretty well. London is busy (genius award coming up, Sarah) and chaotic (genius award confirmed), and I was busy and chaotic, and it suited me perfectly. Life is so fluid in your twenties (at least, my life was so fluid in my twenties) and London was the perfect place for that. It was grimy and noisy and constantly shape-shifting and, yep, so was I for the most part.

By the end of my twenties, though, I was getting a bit sick of the constant motion of the big city. I’d slowed down and my not-so-hidden inner country girl was getting more of a chance to speak. And in came Seattle. OK, OK, so it wasn’t exactly that straightforward, but my point is that just when I was craving nature, along came nature. Big nature. Scarily easy access to far more wild animals than I’d ever like to encounter (cougars in the hills above the city; bears in the university district, for God’s sake). Seattle is, was, forevermore shalt be, a fab place to spend a decent chunk of my thirties. There was cocktail-drinking, sure, but there was also a LOT of the outdoors. Friday night drinking sessions were replaced by Friday nights sailing on Puget Sound, watching the sunset across the Olympics whilst knocking back the odd gin or tonic with some of our favourite Americans.

Anyway, my point. I spent this afternoon in our garden, here by the sea a few miles outside Dublin. And I am small, and due to a great need for everyone to like me, mostly friendly. So, following the city, my life has moved from random underground bars; it’s moved from the mountains and the lakes. It's moved, quite literally, to our backyard.

The wee ones and I were joined by our regular Tuesday pals – five “ladies”, as Jonah calls us, and eleven under-sixes. The trees were full of blossom, and full of foam rockets being shot into the branches, and not so full of small boys falling off said branches trying to retrieve the rockets. Toddlers were tackling the too-big swing set. Everyone was belting around; there were fights over the pull-along Dalmatian; tears were shed. It was great.

These days a lot of time is spent like yesterday. Hanging out with my pals (and the little boys’ pals) in someone’s garden, or hanging out in our garden. Sure, it’s great from time to time to visit an old life, but right now, this is the right life. And yeah, I know it isn’t as hugely-coincidental as I’ve just made it sound, and I know, too, that people have all these sorts of lives in all these sorts of places. But bugger it. I just liked the pathetic fallacy of it, that's all.

Trees: Tops

2009-06-03T20:29:00.007+01:00

I’ve always loved trees. Well, more accurately I suppose, I’ve always loved woods. Apparently in Japanese, there's a particular symbol for "tree", and the word for "wood" is the same symbol, clustered together several times. I know no Japanese so have no idea if this is true or just entirely made up, but I hope it's true because it just seems eminently cool.

For me, one tree on its own is like a single pea: you assume it must be there by mistake and start casting round for a few more. What I really like about woodland is the whole kit and caboodle.

There's that satisfying crunch underfoot that makes you feel vaguely intrepid. Even in evergreen forests, with fewer actual leaves, there’s always something falling from the trees (pine needles; old bark; chipmunks). That feeling of hiding from the outside world – in a decent forest, you’ll probably be sheltered from the worst (and the best) of the weather. And yeah, the trees themselves aren’t bad. So old! So big! Hmmm, so articulate, Sarah.

We visited a great new wood last month, and have just returned from my favourite forest in the world. It's got me thinking about woods I have loved, or at least, woods that hold memories for me. And sure, a list of favourite forests should *really* be filed under "cures for insomniacs", but hey, I'm one of those too, and if this ends up curing my insomnia too, so much the better.

So: without further verbal faffing, here's the first one:

1. Royal Forest of Dean, summer 1989

Starting with the oldest and best of forests - the one I've always known just as "the forest". This seems a timely one to be choosing, too, since it's A-levels/Leaving Cert time and this whole memory has that edge-of-adulthood, end-of-reason flavour.

I was eighteen, and just finished with A-levels and thus with (high) school forever. I’d grown up on the edges of the forest (pretty much literally, if the copse at the end of the drive counts) and didn’t need distance from it to know how gorgeous it was. Bluebell woods; babbling brooks; tiny little ponds accessed by twisting, made-up lanes and appearing out of nowhere through the oaks.

That last summer before leaving home is, of course, framed with nostalgia and a lot of the more dubious or just-plain-tedious details erased, and what I remember is this: Blazing hot days; picnics by the stream; fashioning hula skirts out of more random debris and just kicking back with that endless feeling of freedom. Bottle upon bottle of The Dreaded Red. The Blues Brothers soundtrack; Squeeze; local bands with such glorious songs as "Sheep on Drugs" ("fair blows my mind"). One particularly brilliant evening of partying in the forest; cookouts; music from the car stereo; lying back on the undergrowth and counting the stars. Driving through the woods at dawn and coming across a stray sheep (not unusual in this land of sheep badgers) , so putting it in the boot to give it a lift to its rightful patch.

Still, and always, my favourite forest; still, and always, one of my favourite eras. If you could wear memories on your jeans like patches, this one would kelly-green and blazing blue for the sky, and on my left knee, where I'd catch sight of it daily and grin a bit.

Tongue, twisted

2009-05-26T20:47:00.005+01:00

When people ask what nationalities the kids are, I sometimes say that Jonah is English by parentage, American by birthright and Irish by idiom. Friday seemed to prove that. I was drying him off after swimming. He pushed his head out from under the towel and beamed at me.

“What’s the craic, Sarah?”

Apparently our firstborn is now officially assimilated, a true Irish twinkle. I love this, and it confuses me entirely, too. If your children are learning a “real” foreign language – by which I basically mean, a language not your own - the boundaries between (your) mother tongue and the other one are relatively clear, and relatively uncontroversial. Mummy says potato, Daddy says patate, let’s call the whole thing polyglot. There's a right way and a wrong way for each language, and as a parent you help your child navigate the nuances and speak plain sense, if not plain English, as often as possible. Our kids, though, are going to grow up speaking several shades of the same language. We left Seattle before Americanisms had really ever had a chance to grab hold of Jonah’s toddler psyche, so although in weak moments Dave and I may still refer to a “diaper bag” and the “stroller”, Jonah has absolutely no idea what we’re banging on about.

I imagine the same thing would happen to Lucas if we were to suddenly up sticks to Siberia. Right now he may call plaintively for a “deedoo” whenever he wants his “dodie” - which we, his doting parents, would know as, first, a dummy (British English), and secondly, a pacifier (American English, where we learned our baby vocabulary). But give him a month or so and he’d be barking at us in clipped military tones and demanding whatever colloquial Soviet term he could muster. Still, of the three versions of the English language available to us in this family, we’re still finding it interesting to figure out how to deal with the two in usage. If Jonah says, for example, “Will I hang Lucas out of the window?”, do we “correct” him to the British English? – “Shall I hang Lucas out of the window, darling” (or “NO, for god’s sake”).

Or, since he’s being brought up in Ireland, and thus learning what we should apparently refer to as Hibernian English, should we let it go?

After all, if he were speaking German, or another language with different grammatical structure, it wouldn’t occur to us to change his verb formations to better suit our delicate ears. And he’s not speaking “my” English – he’s speaking his own English, the English, paradoxically, of the Gaels. What we really don't want to do is dilute Jonah's own command of the language too badly so that he's relentlessly teased at school for his weird British pronounciations - that would be a cruel, cruel fate. It's only really the grammar that makes us twitchy - Jonah's choice of Irish vocabulary seems cute rather than feeling odd. I think this is because, as a parent, you become used to helping your child to navigate the vagaries of the (English) language - or, to be precise, its grammar - yes, Jonah, you "put on" your trousers but you don't "put them off". So learning to leave well alone feels both dichotomous and confusing (a bit like that sentence, doubtless).

We wouldn’t dream of meddling with his accent, which is acquiring the full Dublin lilt even to our relatively neophyte ears (who knew that "green" had 3 syllables to it?). And as for his question on Friday? Well, I had to consult with my Irish pals here, but I'm fully versed in the answer now. To "what's the craic, Sarah?" my only answer can be, "I'm grand, so". We're all getting there, slowly but (to be) surely.

One these things is not like the other one

2009-05-17T21:02:00.002+01:00

Drive from work to daycare, Seattle-style: look up to see two bald eagles circling overhead.

Drive from work to creche, Dublin-style: pause at zebra crossing to let past a nun in running shoes.

Of course, neither of these would have happened in London because you'd never drive to work (and I didn't have kids the years I lived there, so I definitely wasn't driving to daycare) - but I did once encounter a guy with a gun on the tube. Does that count? In case anyone had wondered whether we were truly English, my friend and I, rather than running screaming off the tube, just inched our way gently down the crowded carriage. Our theory was that by putting distance between us and the gun, we wouldn't get too splattered when the inevitable bloodshed occurred. Yes, this sounds as ridiculous to me now as it seemed intrinsically logical then.

Who, Sir? Me, Sir? - Yep, me, apparently

2009-05-14T21:18:00.003+01:00

I’ve always maintained that a huge chunk of my personality is that of a pre-adolescent boy. There’s the inclination to dress primarily in jeans and trainers; the love of bad action movies (not for nothing did we go to see “Wolverine” the evening of my birthday). Yeah, sure, OK; but that could define most of the population at some point or another, I suppose. There's always been some other, random element of small boys (but not small girls, who seem so much more knowing) that seems so familiar to me.

A couple of weeks ago I stumbled back across one of my favourite-ever kids’ books. It was turned into a TV series too, I think, but beyond my time, so I don’t have any associations of that side of thing; mine are all with the written word (story of my life, really). The linked version seems to be some kind of teaching copy; the battered old edition I have says it was printed in 1983, which seems about right.

Anyway, two pages into re-reading it I came across this description, and it struck such a chord that I belted down the stairs, book in hand, screeching, “look, it’s me!”. Substitute the "Hoomey" for "Sarah" and it entirely sums up the 12-year-old-boy-ness I've been trying to articulate all these years:

"Hoomey, a transparently innocent, completely unmalicious, undersized, earnest child was given to state unpleasant truths out of pure honesty. He was sensitive, vulnerable, amazed when his honest truths gave offence".

I’m guessing this post would be hideously narcissistic if I wasn’t relating to a fictional 12-year-old boy – or maybe that just makes it worse….

It's just a jump to the left...

2009-05-05T20:42:00.002+01:00

I just spent twenty-four hours in a time warp. From the time I rang the entry bell to Nick’s flat, it felt like I’d gone through the door at the back of the wardrobe. Instead of Narnia, though, I’d arrived in my past, more or less as I remembered it from 10 years ago. Same flatmate, give or take a few years; same workmates; same far-more-play-than-work-mates; same book fair - nerd's paradise for someone like me.

I've never been nonchalant about working with and around books; I'd be far cooler if I were, but then that's true of most of my life. "Achingly hip" isn't exactly the phrase used to describe me: "Ridiculously enthusiastic" is probably a more accurate description. And it plays out in every aspect of my life; always has, always will, I dare say, at this point.

The details of the trip play out in my head over and again. Paused at traffic lights, I make list upon list of the sheer number of old pals I bumped into or sought out. I pass myself in a mirror and find I’m beaming like a belisha beacon at the memory of phrases repeated, grooves remembered, faces flickering from confusion to recognition (“You’re back from Canada!” came the frequent exclamation. Well, yes, and no. Never went to Canada; not exactly “back”). . It felt entirely surreal after six years out of England to be back in situ, and exactly right at the same time.

A hangar full of books. A room full of people who, for a few brilliant years, were my people and, it turns out, still are. A chocolate cake the size of my head and my old partner in crime to share it with. Whatever the opposite of a hangover is, I’ve just had one.

Bubbly

2009-04-29T20:44:00.003+01:00

I'm boarding the plane on my own for the first time since Jonah was born three and a half years ago. No little hand clasping mine, no voice at knee-height asking “are we on the hairplan yet Mummy?”. No Top-Gun style signalled conversations with Dave, still at ground level folding up the buggy with Lucas wriggling for freedom. Just me, a copy of the Observer to read in glorious silence, and a bottle of Veuve Clicquot. It’s astonishing how quiet it is. And how speedy. Children are as notable by their absence as their presence, it turns out.

Dublin has been sun-washed today, its normal pallour replaced by a rosy glow. I pull out my phone and dial. “Home” flashes up on the screen. My boys, big and little, are out in the garden, starting the barbecue as requested by Jonah. Everyone is happy; there has been a trip to the park, and ice creams all round, and now there will be charcoaled sausages, and foil-wrapped bananas with molten chocolate chips. I visualise them as I speak to everyone in turn and realize something that is ridiculously obvious and incredibly good for me. These are my people, this is my family. There’s a place for me in it that’s unlike any other landing slot in my life.

I’ve always been terrible at getting on with things. It takes me an hour to get from the sofa to bed at night, distracted raccooning from one pretty-shiny thing to another before making it up the stairs. Which is why it’s taken me 3 ½ years to go away on a work trip. And it’s definitely time. I’ve been holding on too tightly, standing too closely to my life, worrying that things will disintegrate without me there (delusions of self-importance, much?). And, of course, this all can only get in the way of enjoying it properly. Twenty four hours away is a chance to step off the roundabout and admire the view before leaping back on.

Signalling

2009-04-15T21:37:00.007+01:00

It’s been six years now since we last lived the UK – a fact that I keep wanting to hold out at arm’s length like Yorick’s skull and gaze at quizzically. Just doesn’t seem possible, that one.

Prolonged absence is supposed to soften the needles of homesickness, but the trouble with needles is that they’re small and pointy and can interfere just when you’re least expecting it.

Every day I drop the kids off at nursery and drive the 20 minutes to work. I’ve got used to the huh??? qualities of Irish radio and have settled into its rhythms, knowing as I look at the clock after the daycare drop whether I’m going to be settling in to the hurling coverage (hurling involving men with sticks rather than booze and toilets) or whether we’ll have moved on to the National Ploughing Championships* .

About a month ago a new needle poked through. As I crest the brow of a particular hill, it turns out that the radio picks up a satellite in Prestatyn or something and British radio comes crackling into force. I’d never considered myself particularly nationalistic - madly in love with my birthplace, sure, but not brayingly English by any stretch. Nevertheless, there was something so heady about hearing traffic reports on roads that sounded familiar rather than trying to decipher where in the hell Sallynoggin might be and whether I should care.

At first, it was just Radio 1, which made me feel old relatively often, since the last time I regularly listened to Radio 1 was back in the 1980s. Then, oh blissful day, I hit upon Radio 4, which sometimes feels to me like the original NPR, but with distinctly more attitude. Very hard to be pissed off about being caught in traffic and late for work when what it gets you is Sebastian Faulks talking on Desert Island Discs about the inherent conflict between the interior mind of women (constantly “in a state of audit”, as he put it) and men (“intermittent”).

I can only get British radio for about 5 minutes, as I coast down the hill towards the sea (reasons to not hate my drive to work #2: I see the sea, for God’s sake! For a split second every day it’s like going to Devon when I was little and being on hyper-alert for that first glimpse of the water).

Five minutes of British radio does two things: it’s just short enough for me to get the slightly-sick feeling that comes with being far away and still feeling 12 years old, and it’s just long enough for me to want to start shouting at the radio. Good times.

*My favourite ever quote from the National Ploughing Championships came from an interview with a young farmer who’d made it through to the final of Freestyle Farrowing (I think I’ve made that up but it’s entirely possible that it’s a real category). The interviewer, fresh from the Lisbon Treaty, asked the farmer what it took to make it through to the final. “A tractor and a plough” came the reply. The interviewer, clearly realizing he’d have to use his piercing journalstic skills to get to the bottom of this, dug deeper (as it were): “No, what sort of qualities does it take?” The young farmer thought for a moment. “A really good tractor” came back the response. Game over.

Proof that living in this land of pervasive religiosity is rubbing off on me

2009-04-07T21:46:00.003+01:00

This morning, I mistook the Tyrannosaurus Rex on the kitchen counter:

for the Virgin Mary:

What? You mean your toaster isn't nestling up next to holy statues/plastic dinosaurs?

There's bound to be a pun on "unbearable" here but I can't quite get at it. Must try harder.

2009-03-20T16:31:00.004Z

It’s bedtime. I’m wrestling Lucas into his pyjamas and Jonah is beside us on the duvet, sorting out which of his teddies get to share the pillow tonight.
“I take Ciara…and Elizabeth Franklin…and James”

James? I didn’t know there was a James in the family, even the stuffed-animal branch of it. I look across to see which toy has been newly honoured both with a name and a place on the bed. All I see are the roll-called Ciara and “Elizabeth Franklin”, along with my ancient, beloved, orange bear. Must be a case of mistaken names, I think.

“That’s not James, honey” I point out, stuffing Lucas’ leg back into the stripes he seems determined not to wear. “That’s Jeremy”

“No, Mummy” retorts my elder son. “It’s James”

I turn to fully face Jonah. Lucas, sensing his opportunity, discards his pyjama top and scuttles away to the toybox where, he thinks, he will hide and thus escape going to bed (ever). Ah, toddler logic.

“Jonah”. I speak firmly but calmly, the voice I try to use when explaining why it really isn’t a great idea to plunge sticks of spaghetti into the electrical outlet. “This bear is my bear, and he’s called Jeremy”

Jonah gives me a look of great pity and not a little sympathy. “No, Mummy” he explains. “He’s my bear now, and he’s called James”.

Three years after the birth of our firstborn, we’ve got used to the weird tipping-round of life that makes a weekly night out seem as exceptional as a weekly night in did three years prior to Jonah’s arrival. We’re used to bathroom doors being flung open mid-ablution, to the potty-training-induced fascination with everyone’s bodily functions, resulting in such invitations as “Mummy has huge poo in big potty – come and see it!. I wanted – want- my children deeply, keenly, and felt that, as much as you can, we went into it with our eyes prised open in a facsimile of the sleep-deprivation to come. Being somewhere in the middle of our group of friends when it came to the procreation game, there were plenty of show-and-tell moments from the already-parenting within our gang, leaving us in relatively little doubt as to the pleasure: pain ratio we should anticipate in the very early years.
And I'm happy about it. This is what the present day should look like to me now I’ve accepted being part of the middle generation. And,vague though it may be right now, this is what the future should be too. What hadn’t occurred to me ahead of having kids was that the past, too, might be surrendered to them.

I loved that bear. Jeremy, brother-bear to my sister’s Edward, prompting one of my Irish pals to ask if all English stuffed toys were given equally stuff, formal names. (answer: I dunno, but it would seem so, yes). Jeremy was probably the same size as me when I first had him to look after, and I toted him hither and thither with trenchant toddler devotion.
When my parents flew from the UK to our home in Seattle to meet two-week-old Jonah, Jeremy traveled in Dad’s hand luggage. “We thought he’d need a bear” explained the doting grandparents, overlooking the fact that at fourteen days, Jonah already had already seen more bears than he had sunsets. They were right, too. Apparently he didn’t need any old bear – he needed my old bear.

And now, of course, he’s ensured that Jeremy remains his by, quite literally, turning him into a second-generation teddy, complete with a name for the twenty-first century. I grit my teeth and turn to him, my little blondie beaming at me with the inherited stubbornness shining through. “You’re right, lovely” I say. “This is James. And now it’s time to get you both into bed”.

Things I never thought I'd hear from an Irish builder

2008-09-04T21:02:00.006+01:00

"I'll have one of them frothy coffee lattes. Make it decaf though"

The legacy of the Celtic Tiger will live on in its navvies, it seems...

Another year older? Halle-bloody-lujah

2008-08-28T21:20:00.006+01:00

One of Jonah's little pals is about to turn two, so I asked him what we should buy her for a present.

"Bob the Builder tractors". No surprises there, then, from our resident Bob worshipper.

The present obviously sparked thoughts of the whole birthday shebang, though.

"Wait, Mummy. I find birthday card" came the command, yelled over his shoulder as Jonah rocketed from the room at Toddler Force 9. Seconds later, he was back, proudly displaying said "birthday card": a Guardian supplement of Leonard Cohen lyrics. (I particularly like this rendition for Mr. Cohen's fantastic grumpiness - just what Jonah had in mind, presumably).

It would seem nihilism is all the rage with the toddler set these days...

Maybe this is why they call it a coffin surfboard

2008-08-20T20:27:00.012+01:00

I've said it before, and I'm sure I'll be saying it again: The absolutely casual, absolutely integrated approach to religion in Ireland really strikes me after our years in Seattle, which apparently has fewer churches per capita than any other city in the good ol' US of A.

Today's God-is-everywhere classic is brought to you by the schedulers of Ocean FM, up on the North West coast of Ireland, whose description of their Saturday morning programming runs like this:

Easy listening/obituary notices/surf report

Or, in the style of a tabloid subeditor (my secret dream job):

Beach Boys/beached boys/to the beach, boys!

In this instance, it's mostly the order in which the schedulers chose to detail the show's offerings that has me cocking my head to one side with a "hunh???" Imagine being in that programming meeting - the topics up on a whiteboard whilst everyone argued about which order made the most sense. Quite how they came up with this one is a mystery, but I'm glad they did because it made me laugh out loud, and then it made me think.

Death is especially on my mind this week, much as I wish it wasn't. And as coincidence would have it, the image this programming line-up evokes - a few bars of Good Vibrations, a moment of silence in respect of the dead, then off out to catch a wave - seems as appropriate a tribute to this particular death (of an old friend) than any I could have conjured up on my own. As the Wilson brothers put it:

Well I've been thinking 'bout

All the places we've surfed and danced and

All the faces we've missed so let's get

Back together and do it again

I wish we could, mate - I wish we could.

One of those combinations as clearly wrong and yet indefinably logical as a pickled egg in a packet of crisps

2008-08-11T20:23:00.007+01:00

You may think, as so many of us with ageing ovaries and romantic notions of best-friend siblings seem to, that it would be a fantastic idea to have kids close in age; say, 2 or so years between the little lovelies.

And so it will come to pass that just as Little Angel #1 will be mastering the vagaries of potty training, so Little Angel#2 will be (quite literally) flexing his crawling muscles. And you will spend the majority of your waking hours vigorously directing one small child towards the potty and the other small child vigorously away from said potty. The joys know no bounds.

As for the pickled egg: When I was about 17, Sunday evenings were often spent with my BFF Alex, my favourite cousin, and his mates learning to play pool in a little pub in a forest, next to the river (that sounds like some kind of Brothers Grimm tale for teenagers, but you get the gist).

The Designated Snack of the evening was a pickled,hard-boiled-egg presented (I use the word lightly) in a packet of crisps - usually salt-n-vinegar flavour. The sharpness of the crisps perfectly offsets the blandness of the egg, and the beer washes it all down gloriously. Fuck knows how this became any kind of habitual bar snack, but it was tops. And of course now, twenty years on (Christ, we're getting old), on the rare-ish occasions I play pool, I think of Andrew, his gang, and the pickled eggs.

Because if someone had done this to me last year, it would have made my day bright like a shiny, shiny star

2008-07-24T13:59:00.007+01:00

I was out meandering with the kids last week. We'd just made it up past the first (of seven) castles and second (of Christ only knows how many) churches in the village when a woman hailed us from across the street. We waited, and she approached us with kids that looked much the same ages as Jonah and Lucas, although girl-flavoured.

It turns out she'd bought the same pushchair as us (the Phil&Teds e-3, pop pickers) and had a question about folding it. Because I am an idiot, I got halfway to demonstrating how to manipulate the damn thing ("and then you twizzle the little knobs and ta-da! the seat hinges and collapses on top of the other seat") when I remembered that I had two small boys occupying said seat(s). Brightest button in the box award going to me today, for sure.

Anyway, during the course of the conversation it emerged that this woman and her family moved here 2 days ago from overseas. We said goodbye, I pointed in the vague direction of our house in case she had any future pushchair-related problems and sauntered off with the wee ones towards the greengrocer to irritate the Maeve-Binchy-novel-made-real ladies of the village as we jammed the behemoth that is the Phil&Teds into the ankle-width aisle.

As we shopped, I was struck with a remembrance of last year, when we moved here from the US. We didn't know a soul, and Jonah and I were both quite quickly in urgent need of company beside each other. It rained the entire sodding summer, putting the kibosh on our "it's easier to move in summer because you get to meet people out and about" plan, and in fact most plans, really. I made an awful lot of horribly bold-feeling overtures to friendly-seeming mothers at library story times, playgrounds, and, yup, outside the greengrocer.

Making friends as an adult is in no way less cringe-inducing and nerve-wracking than as a teenager, except you don't have the self-handicap of the bad fashion mistakes and the bubble perm. What spurred me on, what was worse than rejection, was the idea of spending the next god-knows-how-many years with no social contact.

A year on, my "I am new - please be my friend" neon sign has faded somewhat. Life is liable to be too busy these days rather than too quiet and a few of those cold-call type approaches have morphed, bit by bit, into solid, funny, cool, happy friendships. Still, somewhere between the bananas and the grapes, it occurred to me way too late that I could have/should have given P&T Woman my number. Being the one always having to make the effort can be an exhausting part of a relocation and, God knows, a relocation is exhausting to begin with. But of course, at this point, she was nowhere in sight (and if she HAD popped out in between the Chiquitas and the White Seedless, I'd have thought she was an absolute nutter and second-guessed the number-giving, doubtless).

We finished up our various errands (messages, as the Irish call them) and were trundling our way to the local indie coffee shop. Jonah, like the good Seattle-born kid he is, had requested a coffee stop and who am I to deny him? As we rounded the corner towards Mugs, we saw P&T Woman again. So we stopped, and, reminding myself that I was aiming for Friendly Neighbour mode rather than Random Stalker, I suggested that we swap numbers.

There's no Hollywood ending to this. Neither she nor I called the next day, discovered that we had more in common than if we were identical twins separated at birth, and have spent every moment since exclaiming that we don't know how we got on in life without the other. This is one of those stories that doesn't round off neatly with a "and then they all lived happily ever after". But, y'know, that wasn't really the point anyway. I dunno, so many people have been genuinely, without prompting, just plain nice to us over the last few years (and the last few moves) that I couldn't see any harm in overcoming the Great English Reserve (bloody English, huh) and offering the contact. And it made me happy for a good while, too, so there's that. And that, my friends, will have to be enough.

Not ready for the poker circuit just yet, then

2008-07-21T20:51:00.003+01:00

Jonah: Mummy Mummy, Lucas sad!

Me: Is he, darling?

Jonah (nodding vigorously): Ya. It crying.

Me: Poor Lucas - what's up with him?

Jonah: I hit it. I push it ohh-ver.

Well, I suppose we want him to be honest...

Any minute now, I'll be complaining that the policemen look so young, and then I'll just totter off to Cliche Corner

2008-07-18T14:02:00.006+01:00

We went up to Belfast last month to a ball* with Abs and Jamie. Abs and I have known each other pretty much half our lives at this point and reckon the last time we went to a ball together must have been back at college, in 1991**. As we were "admiring" our pouffy taffeta ballgowns and pouffy hair in the photos that Abs, inexplicably, hadn't burned, it occurred to us to ask the babysitter what age she would have been in 1991.

"Oh, I wasn't born yet"

O-kay then. Next stop, demanding that the neighbour kids turn down that damn music...

* unlike the balls of our past, this one didn't, as our friend Ilona so succinctly put it, involve pints of vodka and random snogging of random blokes in random corners of marquees.

** I feel obliged somehow to make the point that I haven't exactly been whooping

it up in marquees

in between, either.

Just in case you were suddenly imagining me with a rack of gowns.

Yeah, right.

(what is it about the word "rack" that always makes me want to snigger?

Apparently I am actually a 14-year-old boy...))

Knickers to it

2008-07-09T21:00:00.006+01:00

Hmmm. Now the baby is sleeping "through the night" (as long as your definition of "night" means "until the first glimmer of dawn"), all excuses for avoiding exercise and counting chocolate as a core food group are officially void. Bugger. Continuing my personal quest to ensure that the soundtrack of my life is World's Cheesiest Songs, my current default tune is a line from Paul Simon's "You can call me Al" -

"Why am I so soft in the middle when the rest of my life is so hard?"

Not that my life is hard, per se - it's just full. But hey.

Anyway. I was beginning to bore myself with the excuses for not actually doing something about it, but somehow fitting in a run even twice a week just doesn't compute when you're a quarter of a family of four. Partly because I just really like hanging out with the boys, big and little, and am loathe to give up weekend time. And as a chronic insomniac, running in the evenings is pretty much out - it'd be like knocking back a triple espresso at midnight then wondering why I couldn't sleep.

So I hit upon the idea of getting up at 6am every other morning (Dave and I alternate getting up with the kids and so this would be my "off" morning) and going for a run then. In theory this would make me instantly glamorous, fit, and chirpy. Actually, I suspect I'd need a frontal lobotomy and a total personality transplant to become instantly glamorous, but I probably need those anyway for contemplating sunrise runs.

In practice, here's how it played out:

Day 1, 6am: Dave and I wake up after a (for us) colossal 8-hour sleep to the gentle chirruping of the boys in their respective bedrooms. Grin, yawn, cuddle. I remember I've left my running gear in Lucas' room and clearly it would be a heinous crime to disturb him. Run foiled.

Day 2, 5:45am: Lucas wakes us up burbling to himself. I leap out of bed and selflessly (hmm) offer to get up with him so that Dave (who has been doing morning wake-ups for 8 months at this stage whilst I did nights) can sleep in. What this actually means for me is that I can snuggle with a dozy baby rather than having to face any exercise, but still feel virtuous about it. Yay.

I had a blinding realisation halfway through the morning that thinking about going running wasn't actually the same as having gone running. Genius, that's me. The rest of my life is not actually so hard, but my middle? Still soft.

However, there's a solution: Support knickers.

Sexy, huh? And do you know just how much of a cliche you feel running into Marks and Sparks after work to buy control knickers before legging it to nursery to collect your two small children? Ooh, that would be a HUGE one.

The control knickers worked like a Walk of Shame, though - the very sight of them was enough to make me determined to bloody run already lest I have to wear the damn things. So...

Day 3: 5:45am: Lucas awakens. The baby monitor springs into life, as does Dave. I lie in a pleasantly dazed state until BAM, into my head pops the picture of the evil support knickers. Enough! cries my conscience. Alright, alright. I'm getting up, just stop threatening me with those monstrosities.

So I stumble into my running gear and fall out of the door. And once I'm out, it's fab. Well, the run itself wasn't exactly my finest moment in a pair of trainers.

I was wheezing like a charlady on 80 a day,

my boobs were giving me two black eyes, and the whole circuit was an exercise in internal plea bargaining ("run just five more minutes and you can eat all of Jonah's Maltesers for breakfast").

But - and here's the thing, and this is what I remembered from running and what will get me back out the door when the threat of the Support Knickers fades. It was just so cool to be out there in the waking-up day. Barely anyone else about, save a few other early-morning masochists and their dogs. And the run took me past the Martello Tower that serves as a James Joyce museum:

and along the coast. The sun was just rising. The ships were leaving Dublin and heading off to new lands (well, pretty well-known lands, but bear with me). The day just seemed full of possibility.

And then I arrived back home and found Dave and the little boys all cosied up on the sofa with their milks and "cuppateas", as Jonah calls it. Gorgeous. So even if it's a heinous idea tomorrow, I'm going to remember the good points and get back out there. Support knickers, I may avoid you yet.

Nun better

2008-07-01T14:03:00.010+01:00

After secular Seattle, it's funny being in a culture where religion is so all-pervasive. Sometimes, too, it seeps through in ways that crack me up. Like this, on a radio phone-in:

Local Dublin kid, praising a nun for free tuition ("grinds") which got her through her exams:

"Big up Sister Margaret - she's a bleedin' hero"

Somewhere out there there has to be a nun giggling into her habit...

User error

2008-06-25T13:58:00.005+01:00

Just how ridiculous is it that I keep checking my blog for new posts? Um, hello there. It doesn't quite happen like that...

Brown paper packages tied up with string

2008-06-18T18:44:00.004+01:00

A year ago today, we were packing up our Seattle lives ready to move back to Europe.

Jonah was of course oblivious to the broader implications of leaving behind everything and everyone he'd ever known (melodramatic, moi?). So as far as he was concerned, this was just a fantastic day of mess. Things to crinkle! Things to hide in! Things to roll around in!

I was sorely tempted to join him but figured the removal guys would be less tolerant of a noisy pregnant Brit than they were of a noisy (non-pregnant, clearly) toddler. And hey, Jonah's American by birth, so he's supposed to be noisy.

We had substantially more gear to move back than we'd moved over with four years ago. The toddler, for starters. And wedding rings, deep and lasting friendships, a gaggle (giggle?) of memories...Oh yeah, and a serious coffee house habit. I mean, c'mon! A coffee shop with a "laptop bar"! Hard not to love.

When we'd moved to Seattle, our giddy Londoner-selves hadn't owned enough to fill a sea container, so our stuff had shared space with other traveling randomata. And man, the randomata that some people choose to travel with is staggering. Our bits and pieces got mixed up at customs with some of the other passengers' stuff (presumably when it was opened to make sure none of us was smuggling Class A drugs or small mammals, or possibly one inside the other...anyway...). Who travels with a self-portrait of their own (male) nipples? Not us, although we now possess said photo (mmm, lucky us). We assumed it was a self-portrait from the angle of the shot.

But on the way back? Oh yeah, we were American now. We had consumed. Unsurprisingly, we qualified for a container of our own. Not quite Virginia Woolf, but we loved it just the same. It harboured our worldly goods - each and every lovingly wrapped-and-packed carton. All 235 of them.

That's great, it starts with an earthquake

2008-06-17T21:23:00.010+01:00

This time last year, I kept thinking in terms of pop lyrics - easier than actually articulating how it felt to be leaving this place that had seeped so much into our psyches. I couldn't stop warbling the lyrics to "Leaving on a Jet Plane", alternated with "It's the end of the world as we know it". Classy, that's me. Thank the lord I'm not a radio station.

The latter always seemed the more apt in my parting-is-anything-but-sweet-sorrow brain, partly due to seeing REM here at Bumbershoot in 2003, partly because they, like us, apparently love Marco's Supperclub,and partly for the David Belisle connection to my publishing pals here. Amazing how you can start to think you're Michael Stipe if you try hard enough.

But in the end, the thing that always made me cry when thinking of leaving Seattle was this daft board book we'd bought for Jonah for the last night there, Good Night America. It's taken almost a year to be able to read it without drifting off into nostalgia and even now the penultimate pages, with the bald eagles nestled (and nested) alongside the white mountain peaks, make me swallow hard.