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Archives for April 2008

I’ve been keeping a secret

30 April, 2008
Posted in: Belgium, Family, Ireland, Mr. Waffle, Princess

No, for the umpteenth time, I am not pregnant.

The Christmas before last I said to my husband that we had to decide whether we were going to move back to Ireland or stay in Belgium because, if we were going to stay in Belgium, we had to buy a house. A three bedroomed, second floor flat is not ideal for bringing up three small children. We decided that we would move to Dublin in September 2008. Now, obviously, it didn’t make much sense to tell anyone about this decision in December 2006, so I have been not telling employers, employees and children for a long time. It’s exhausting.

Last week, Mr. Waffle told his employers. On Friday we told the Princess that we are moving back (some of you may consider that this is a radical solution to our difficulties with L). On Monday we told our childminder and our babysitter. And today I formally told my employer and colleagues and now I am telling you.

Mr. Waffle and the Princess are in Dublin this week. In an excess of efficiency they have visited her new school (an Irish language school – please don’t ask). After hearing her father and the headmaster converse in Irish for ten minutes, she ran from the room telling her grandmother that this was “pointless and useless”. I can tell it’s going to go well. What do you think? She’s also got her school uniform, this is more pleasing. It has a tie. There will be photos.
I am very sad to be leaving this great job and my lovely colleagues. I am very sad to be leaving Belgium and my friends here. On balance though, I think we are doing the right thing. We are very fortunate in both having lovely families with whom we get on very well. We want to see more of them and so do our children. I want my children to be Irish not Belgian (though I see that the Princess is testing this enthusiasm by already adopting the nastiest of Dublin accents, she said to me on the phone this afternoon “Oi don’t want to talk to you, Oi don’t loike the phone”). One of the best things about going back was how our friends in Dubin reacted; they all seem to be genuinely delighted. Despite all its shortcomings (and oh they are many), I do like Dublin and I know I will enjoy living there.

For obvious reasons, the move has been very much in my mind since Christmas but I didn’t want to blog about it ar eagla na heagla (see how I’m taking to this Irish thing?) but I have been taking notes and now I’m putting them here. Because I can.

8 January

Ask my mother what she did with all our furniture when we moved from a large detatched Georgian House to a much smaller semi-detatched Edwardian one. Answer: Moved it all and got rid of none. My mother points out that result has been 20 odd years tripping over pieces of furniture and an attic which strikes terror into her heart. On the plus side, she says I can now have the Nelson sideboard, if I want it. Point out that I have more than enough furniture of my own for my tiny house.

9 January

Prepare first spreadsheet.

January 10

Asked the garage whether they would sell us a car with the steering wheel on the wrong side. They were reluctant. They said that it would be expensive and we would have to wait a year. In inimitable Belgian fashion, 6 (yes 6) people behind the reception desk ignored me for some considerable time but finally, to their evident regret, had to relent and pay me some attention.

January 11

Consider for the umpteenth time the amount of our stuff. My mother often says to my sister (to the latter’s intense irritation): Helen, you have too much of this world’s goods. She’s not the only one. Wonder what size is the attic in our house in Dublin. Curse myself for never even having looked in the attic when we bought the house. My sister says to me, “Mummy is delighted that you are coming home”. I am touched until she adds, “she says that maybe finally you will take all of your stuff out of her house”. My father-in-law is also anxious that we should remove all our stuff from his garage (barbecue and large outdoor heater – a wedding gift from the time when they were a sign that you were trendy rather than a sign that you are an eco-terrorist). My mother-in-law has, however, volunteered to mind our antique sewing machine until we have a house large enough to accommodate it. I suspect that my father-in-law is unaware of her kind offer.

14 January

After much humming and hawing decide to travel to Ireland for interview I am most unlikely to get on the basis that, if I did get it and the job came up in September my family would be able to eat every day rather than just every second day. This problem would mostly affect me and Mr. Waffle as the children prefer not to eat anyway.

18 January

Mr. Waffle hands in notice to the creche. The boys will be finishing there at the end of July. I will be a little sad to end our relations with our excellent creche.

21 January

Flight is delayed and arrive, Cinderella like, at friends’ house in Dublin at midnight. My friends are up awaiting my arrival with tea sympathy and advice. I love their house. It is a home from home as I used to live there. In fact, due to the many parties my husband and I held there, many people still think it is ours. Alas, it is not. I have stayed in the spare room many times and always enjoyed an excellent night’s sleep. On this occasion, I do not. Some vagary of their security system means that the overhead light flashes on every two hours and wakes me in considerable alarm. It is distressingly like being with small children.

Interview is, as expected entirely brutal. At the end, I ask about how many people they expect to appoint and they tell me that they give comprehensive feedback. I say I will look forward to that to general laughter from the board. I’d like to think that they were laughing with me but, I doubt it. [Didn’t get the job].

23 January

Princess and I go round to Glam Potter’s house and I reveal to her sum total of our likely income in Ireland for first two years. She is appalled. How will you survive? I am not comforted.

17 March

Having refused to think about or organise anything for the move in two months in the hope that, oh I don’t know, it would organise itself, I am jolted into action by a series of questions from my mother and brother who are visiting over the weekend. The heart surgeon rings from America and asks a series of hard questions as well. I am now worrying actively.

The Dutch Mama asked whom I had told about my plans to return. I explained that we was waiting until the end of April to tell our children, our employers and our employees about our plans and that I was slightly dreading this event. I was comforted her reply:

Dreading?

Sure it will be brilliant.

Employer: I’M LEAVING! (implicit, for something better, didn’t I always say you don’t pay me enough)

Employees: I’M LEAVING! (implicit, for something better, look at what an exciting international life I have)

Children: Guess what? Brilliant news. Mammy has got a great new job in Ireland, and we’re going to live in a house with a garden, and you can have a swing of your very own, and we’ll be able to see granny every single weekend. Won’t it be just great! And we’ll come back on lots of visits too. And we can invite your friends to come and play on your swing. And we’ve found you a lovely school.(I’d leave out the gaelscoil detail for now if I were you).

Life will be way easier for you in Ireland, and lots of fun.

25 April

Mr. Waffle has told work he’s leaving. I’ve told my boss informally and will hand in my notice next week. Tonight we decided to tell herself. At first, she was very excited but then as the implications sank in, she became distinctly apprehensive. “Why can’t we move to a house with a garden in Brussels; Brussels is my home”. This is true, she has never lived anywhere else and we have never given her any reason to believe that we would move somewhere else. That was, perhaps, foolish in retrospect. “Where will I go to school?” “In Dublin.” “What language will they speak in school?” If I had realised that I was going to be asked this quite so early in proceedings, I would have prepared a different answer from “Irish”*. She started to cry. She was scared, she wouldn’t understand and all her friends were here. This was the first time I really, really realised that we are definitely going and I felt like crying myself. I love Brussels. However, we perked her up as best we could and stressed the advantages which are many – well, otherwise, why wouldn’t we stay here? I am afraid for her. Mr. Waffle says, I can’t have it both ways, saying that she’ll be uprooted from all her friends one minute and agonising that she has no friends the next. Actually, he’s wrong, I can.

* There is a reason why we are sending her to an Irish language school and it’s largely and embarrassingly to do with the fact that Ireland isn’t quite the classless society it once was.

What are the odds?

29 April, 2008
Posted in: Work

Friend pointing to old school photo with about 200 children: Guess which one is me?

Group of us: Baffled.

Her: I had lots of hair.

Me: Everyone had lots of hair, look, even that boy has lots of hair.

Her: That’s not a boy, that’s me.

Weekend

29 April, 2008
Posted in: Belgium, Family, Mr. Waffle

On Sunday morning we went to Mr. Waffle’s god-daughter’s first communion.  She is half-Italian, half-Scottish but her first communion was all Italian.  It is very odd to be in Italy in Belgium.  We were all dressed up in our best clothes (suits ties, dresses, high heels, new shoes) but you always feel under-dressed beside well-dressed Italians.  The service was lovely and I did think it would be nice to go to mass in a church like this where there was a real sense of community.  I was also quite impressed by the robes the communicants wore (sort of like junior monks in white or as her mother put it, klu klux klan).  In Ireland, little girls dress up like miniature brides (as I did with great delight in my day) in expensive white dresses and I feel that it undermines the spirituality of the occasion and also leads to quite extraordinary expense (see how middle aged I am?).   We went back to the first communicant’s house for brunch after mass and I was most impressed to see that not only had her Italian grandparents come from Rome along with her aunt and uncle and three cousins aged 3,2 and 9 months but also her Scottish grandparents from Lewis which is a long way from Brussels and also pretty darn Protestant.  And it was the middle of the lambing season too (the communicant’s grandfather having spent a satisfactory career in Glasgow as a dentist retired with his wife to the island where he was brought up and bought a sheep farm – impressed?).  In our ex-pat Brussels world, we don’t often go to family celebrations as families are so scattered and there was something really lovely about this occasion.  Also, the sun shone.

In the afternoon we went to my friend A’s house.  He is a consultant by day and training to be a chef by night and was having a “mad hatter’s tea party”.  We arrived to a house filled with canapés and afternoon tea delights.  We had obeyed my friend’s instructions and turned up in costume: the king and queen of hearts, Alice and no prizes for guessing who got to be stereotyped as Tweedledum and Tweedledee.  It was all very pleasant having scones with jam and clotted cream in the sun while the children negotiated the dizzyingly dangerous excitements of a bachelor pad (spiral stairs with open banisters! kitchen appliances at just the right height for little fingers! building materials in a side passage! balcony with parapet at knee height!).

I feel our social life has reached new heights.

Reading

28 April, 2008
Posted in: Reading etc.

“When a Crocodile eats the Sun” by Peter Godwin

I read this for bookclub – it wouldn’t be my first choice of reading material, I prefer fiction myself. It’s the author’s description of his concerns about his elderly ill parents and being middle aged and squeezed by concerns about your own family and your parents and trying to balance everyone’s interests. It has the added interest that his parents live in Zimbabwe and with their decline he is also charting the decline of his home and the devastation of a country. There’s a twist as well, though this is pretty well signalled by the pictures and the blurb.

What I found interesting was that this was the typical middle-aged, I’m worried about my parents line with a whole new twist. His mother needs an artificial hip and he’s trying to smuggle one into the country. She needs a blood donation but she doesn’t have one because of the high risk that she’ll contract AIDS. She knows what she’s talking about as she worked as a doctor in Zimbabwe for 40 years.

It made me look at my passion fruit from Zimbabwe in a new light and it has made me a lot more interested in the recent elections. It made me think about AIDS. You often see articles that say something along the lines of “AIDS is a tradgedy, of course, but more lives are lost to malaria” and I would wonder why AIDS is so much more of a disaster but he spelt it out for me: it kills people like me and him, people in the middle of their lives, looking after children and parents. Other diseases target the weak; malaria kills children and the elderly, AIDS kills the strong; it leaves the children and the old people to fend together as best they can and it rips apart societies. Life expectancy today in Zimbabwe is 33. Charlotte has an excellent piece on AIDS and a South Africa charity that she is supporting, if you’d like to have a look.

“Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present” by Lisa Appignanesi

This is the best book I’ve read this year. I am not normally a big fan of large factual books but this is a fascinating book.

I’ve become interested in madness since reading Siri Hustvedt’s “What I Loved” and it was the mention of the Salpetriere asylum in the review I read of this book that made me think that I would like to read it. Have you noticed that a lot of female bloggers are mad too? No, seriously, famously Dooce but others too refer to their prescriptions and bouts of depression – it seems to be generally depression I don’t see so much reference to manic depression or monomania in blogs. So with one thing and another, I’ve become interested in madness.

This book postulates that unlike other diseases, madness is shaped by the times. You know, measles is measles is measles but hysteria is neurasthenia is post-natal depression is puerperal madness or whatever you’re having yourself.

I started off and became a bit indignant as the author was making a lot of assertions and references none of which were backed up by notes. I appreciate that there is a balance between trying to write something that reads fluidly and having infinite notes but the balance seemed to be very off. I flicked to the back of the book and there were the notes, by page. A uniquely annoying way to do footnotes, in my view, bad enough that they’re at the back of the book but you don’t know where they come on the page. Do you keep flicking to the end, to see whether you’ve missed something or do you ignore the notes altogether? Also, it’s very difficult to find the information on the illustrations. Very irritating. But overall pretty mild quibbles and something they will maybe tidy up for the paperback edition.

Also, initially, the author does a lot of work to show why her title “Mad, Bad and Sad” is a good one practically saying, this is an example of someone bad and so on, she doesn’t need to and it jars but it stops quite soon. She occasionally also has an unhappy turn of phrase. These are my criticisms – I thought I’d get them out of the way early.

This is a new field to me and I don’t really have the tools to assess how good a job the author does in detail but in general, it’s an amazing sweep over the history of madness and how it manifests itself right up to the digital age.

I’m a little curious as to who she thinks is her audience. I know nothing about the topic but she brings me along safely, so I wonder would it be a bit basic for someone who knows more than me? Then, she will say, “Jung, of course, would repeat the process with Tony Wolff, another Jewish woman, one this time who would remain his lifelong mistress and intellectual partner”. See the way, she said, yes you know this to the better informed reader and went on to tell me anyway who it was – there’s a certain amount of that going on.

The book relies on a lot of case studies and, boy, are they interesting. Well worth the price of admission. Did you know that Virginia Woolf’s father’s first wife was Thackeray’s daughter Minnie and, I quote “the very child whose birth had precipiated the older writer’s wife into puerperal madness”? Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa and her step-sister “poor, mad Laura, abnormal from birth and long incarcerated” (Minnie’s daughter) were abused by Virginia’s stepbrother, “her mother’s son by a former marriage and fourteen years older than [Virginia]”. Frankly, is it any wonder she went mad?

There are some interesting observations about the 20th century belief that madness or, at the very least misery, is essential to creativity.

The author also shows the various swings in fashion from treating mental illness with physical cures or talking therapies and how cures go in and out of fashion.

One of the best things for me was how she showed that things we accept as natural, particularly in relation to mothers and babies are really just constructed ideas from the middle of the last century.

Overall, fascinating and brilliant and I fear I haven’t at all done it justice here. I never thought I would say that I was sad to finish a 500 page work of non-fiction but I was. Very.

Penny Dreadful

I feel that I am the kind of person who should like graphic novels. I like science fiction, I am open to cartoons. I bought “Watchmen” because of the reviews printed on the back. It is one of Time Magazine’s 100 best books since 1923. I did not like it. At all. Anyone have a recommendation of something along these lines that might appeal?

“Vernon God Little” by DBC Pierre

Not for me but it does pick up in the last 100 pages. A number of reviews compare it to “The Catcher in the Rye”. I didn’t like that much either. The language is clever and inventive but a bit too clever and inventive for me, I found it a tough read as the plot was all but obscured by the language and the narrator’s obsession with underwear.

Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

I hadn’t read this in 20 years, I’d say. I was amazed how brilliant it was, I had remembered all of the plot but none of the writing. It is an extraordinary book. Mind you, it’s a bit dense, I’m not sure I could take more than a novella. I note that there is a magazine called the The Conradian in which all of the editors of the Penguin edition have been involved. I once read that Martin Amis has fans not readers. I strongly suspect Conrad is the same. A little over-extensively annotated for my taste but the cover commissioned for this new penguin edition is superb.

When I lived in Modern Times by Linda Grant

Lots of interesting ideas presented in very dull prose. This book won the Orange Prize for fiction and, if you ask me, it was unworthy. Though I found Amos Oz immensely hard going, his book “A Tale of Love and Darkness” is so much more layered and nuanced than this one that having read it, it was hard to take this book very seriously. The prose in this book is at best bland and, at times, confusing and the plot is pretty pedestrian but there are some really interesting ideas about Israel, Palestine and Britain and some superb quotes, my favourite being words to the effect (can’t actually find the quote as such): there was a time when everyone who wasn’t carrying a violin case when he came off the boat in Palestine was assumed to be a pianist.

“Airman“ by Eoin Colfer

Clever but not as good as the Artemis Fowl books.  What do you mean you don’t read children’s books?

Mean, yet funny

27 April, 2008
Posted in: Reading etc.

I read a lot of book reviews. Mostly they summarise the plot and say whether the reviewer liked it. In the LRB they also give you a lot of unnecessary information about the reviewer’s life and work.

Last weekend, Christine Dwyer Hickey wrote the most entertaining review I have read in years. A bit harsh perhaps. Unfortunately, the Irish Times is too mean to let you access it freely over the internet but perhaps I can give you some extracts so that you can get a flavour of Ms. Dwyer Hickey’s tone.

The book she reviewed is by a woman called Lorna Martin and it is called “Woman on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown: A Memoir”. I’d say Ms. Martin is a lot closer to the edge after reading this.

“… Let’s start by getting this much straight – Lorna Martin was never on the verge of anything that even comes close to a nervous breakdown […] What she did go through was a rough patch in her personal life […] She did, however, find hwerself crying a lot, often in public. The reason for all this crying? Well, a man, of course. (For this, for this did the sufragettes chain themselves to the railings.)[…]

[She went into therapy] We are not told if these professionals thought to ask if this public sobbing, or should I say public house sobbing (as this is where it usually occurred) had anything to do with alcohol or some other factor; hormones perhaps, or even a tendency to whinge when overcome with emotion. Anyway, if sobbing over a man when half-cut in a public bar constitutes clinical depression, well…

Before very long, it’s pretty clear Martin really has nothing to moan about. Her past is dipped into, the bottom of its barrel duly scraped and still nothing emerges that a good kick up the you-know-what wouldn’t cure. […] The second trauma occurred when Martin was 15 and her sister, Louise, had surgery to have a brain tumour removed. I had to read this section more than once because I couldn’t believe that Martin managed somehow to make this tragedy her own. It was as if, by comparison, her sister’s suffering meant little, her parents’ anguish even less. Martin had felt neglected, while Louise, in intensive care, had hogged all the limelight. Twenty years on she announces at a family dinner that she has forgiven them all ‘for abandoning her during this difficult time, when she was still but a child in need of love and attention’.

Throughout this memoir, Martin frequently refers to her need to be liked. yet by writing this book she has rendered herself almost impossible to like.[…]

Had this memoir been well written or in any way witty, some, if not all, of this might have been overlooked. Unfortunately, the prose style brings little pleasure in the reading and the recurrence of such eyesores as “GRRRR!” and “Arrrrrgggghhh!” is unforgiveable. Then there’s the subject. NOt a paragraph goes by that is not fully engrossed with Lorna Martin. And that’s a subject that is neither funny nor remotely interesting.”

So there. I’m probably not going to give it a go then. I’m keen to get hold of some of Christine Dwyer Hickey’s short stories though.

And from this week’s births (I know you’re holding your breath out there):

ORDINARY IRISH NAME – X and Y are pleased to announce the births of Henry Stuart and Sloane Charlotte, born at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital etc. etc.

Sloane Charlotte? To think that I once thought Chelsea was an odd name. How many other parts of London are begging to be incorporated into an innocent infant’s name?

Low cut or, gosh, the personal really is political

25 April, 2008
Posted in: Daniel, Reading etc.

The other day, I was wearing what I thought was a perfectly respectable top to go to work. Daniel stuck his hand down the front of it and, poking at a breast, said, “what’s that?” “It’s my breast,” I said. “This is Daniel breast” he said hoisting up his pyjama top.

I suppose Angela Merkel must have felt the same way after her recent trip to Norway where she stunned the world by wearing this. I am indebted to the Irish Times for the information that Ms. Merkel was “surprised but not unflattered that, considering important themes like energy, security aand the Afghanistan mission, the world had nothin better to report on than the ‘new arrangement of the Chancellor’s inventory'”.

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