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Archives for May 2009

My children’s very different personalities

27 May, 2009
Posted in: Boys, Daniel, Michael, Princess

The other evening they sat down to draw for me.

Daniel drew a soldier:


Michael drew a picture of me:


The Princess wrote out a passage from the bible:


Look, cut her some slack, she’s left handed, it reads “God says let my people go or I will make the rivers run with blood.” She’s very taken with the gore of the Old Testament. My mother gave her a bible for children for her birthday. It is quite sanatised and, in fact, says rather blandly of the first plague “God made the water undrinkable”. When the Princess read this out to me I was initially confused and then after a moment’s reflection said “Oh the rivers of blood.” This has taken a very strong hold on her imagination is all I can say.

Domestic Games

26 May, 2009
Posted in: Boys, Cork, Daniel, Dublin, Ireland, Michael, Princess

Recently, on Saturday mornings, we have been taking the children to football and hurling training. The boys love it. The Princess stays on the sidelines, solidly (and very annoyingly) refusing to take part. To their enormous delight we dress the boys up in their FC Barcelona and Lions 09 kit (a Christmas present from their uncle) to go to training. And very fetching they looked too.



I did have mild qualms about introducing kit from foreign games but all that is in the past now and I noted that the very patient man training the four year old boys in football was wearing an Irish rugby jersey. After limbering up and working on their ball skills, the four year olds started a match. I was a bit concerned about this as my children had never played a match before. “Never mind” reassured the trainer “wait until you see it, it’s like a flock of sheep milling around a ball.” So indeed, it proved.

The hurling, however, was a different matter. The trainer was from Cork and he took it all very seriously. Ah, well do I remember my primary school days when year after year the hurling team won the All-Irealnd. They would tour the schools, show us the McCarthy cup, and give us all a half day (they won three in a row between 76 and 78 – formative years, I was 7, 8 and 9 and very grateful for the half day). The trainer clearly remembered that too and he was taking no prisoners. Having equipped his 30 four year old with helmets and hurleys, he went down the line “clashing the ash” (essentially walloping their hurleys with his) and he made them all get in the ready position and roar (something that works well for the NZ rugby team). There was some confusion with his instructions. “Is the ready position holding the hurley on our heads?” roared the trainer. Some of the young men thought it was and held their hurleys over their heads. The match itself was more like a real match than I had at all anticipated following the football. Poor Daniel came trailing over to me saying that no one was giving him the ball and I explained to him that he had to go and get it. I then had to wade on to the pitch and separate him out from another little boy who had taken the ball from him. Aside from this minor off the ball incident and despite the fact that 30 little boys were given sticks and told to swing them, there were no injuries.

In encouraging the Princess to play (in vain), I picked up a hurley myself for the first time in my life. My previous experience had only been in hockey and a hurley has a much bigger head, so it is much easier to dribble the ball. I was delighted with myself as I zoomed around the little markers until I heard an English accented voice say “that looks like a back stick to me.” These migrants are clearly mingling well. After confirming that I was indeed playing a different game (with his hurley as it turned out), he encouraged me to go again. I was happily zooming round the obstacles (the Princess lolling disinterestedly by the fence) when a six year old came up and with a sweeping wallop of her hurley took the ball out from under me. This is indeed a very different game, maybe I should stick to what I know.

When relating all of this to my mother-in-law the next day, she told me that her father-in-law, my children’s great-grandfather, had played senior hurling for Tipperary. This is information which was hitherto unknown to me and very impressive indeed, trumping the information I already had that my father-in-law had played minor football for Dublin. I see a great future for my children, particularly, if I ever succeed in actually getting the Princess on the pitch.

Equality

25 May, 2009
Posted in: Ireland, Reading etc.

I have a friend whose father regularly says “there’s no point in sending women to college as they always give up working”. This is an immense source of annoyance to my friend who has always been in (very gainful) employment since leaving college twenty years ago and, given the state of her company’s pension fund, looks likely to continue to do so until she is seventy. On the other hand she talked about another friend who had recently attended a twenty year school reunion. At the ten year reunion, all of her former classmates had been running the world; at this reunion, it was all “you have children and you still have to work, how dreadful for you”.

We then talked about all the women we knew who were the main breadwinners in their households (including both of us though, I’m hoping that, in my case, that is only temporary). Off the top of our heads, we came up with 10. Isn’t that interesting? Brave new world, people. Now, if only we could close that persistent salary gap.

I could buy one book

24 May, 2009
Posted in: Reading etc.

Town Mouse encourages readers to buy a book from a small independent publisher that is finding it difficult to keep its head above water.

I have purchased this which I hope should be a further exploration of my interest in women and psychiatry (first inspired by the really excellent Siri Hustvedt). Having (alas, subsequent to purchase) read a short extract, I am not altogether convinced. However, you will be more discriminating should you choose to purchase, I am sure.

Tattoos

23 May, 2009
Posted in: Reading etc.

Just when I thought we could sink no further, this has come to my attention.

Reading

22 May, 2009
Posted in: Reading etc.

“Gone with the Windsors” by Laurie Graham

This is a dreadfully dull book unless you have a particular interest in Wallis Simpson. I haven’t.

“A Traveller in Time” by Alison Uttley

My godson bought me this as a birthday present. I thought that his childish hand had been guided by his father but his father, when asked, said, “No, he chose it because he liked the cover”. In fact, as we all know, you can usually judge a book by its cover and he made an excellent choice. This is a children’s book about a house and a place. The heroine slips between early 20th century England and 16th century England. In the 16th century she is involved in the Babington plot to free Mary Queen of Scots. This is really quite unimportant when compared with the wonderful sense of place. My mother always says (a little gloomily as this is a problem of hers as well as of mine), “never fall in love with bricks and mortar”. The author is passionately in love with this house. The house, which is the lynchpin of the story is a real house. I am indebted to Wikipedia for alerting me to its existence and I was charmed to see that it is now a B&B. Maybe, I will be whisked off there for a wedding anniversary at some point (tum, ti tum, ti tum, just thinking aloud really). I loved this book and am only sorry that I didn’t first encounter it at 10 rather than at 40. But better late than never.

“The Reluctant Widow” by Georgette Heyer

I reread a lot of books. I don’t normally cover books I’m re-reading here (I like to give you all new material) but I thought I would give this a quick mention. It was one of the first grown-up books I read. My parents had brought it on holidays with us when I was 12 or 13 and I remember reading it while pumping up air mattresses and sneaking around to the back of the tent to peruse it in the ditch where I wouldn’t be disturbed and asked to do any of the many tasks which seemed to me to be doled out with displeasing frequency. I still remember my surprise when the hero proposed to the heroine and she accepted him. “She hated him”. It was my first encounter with romantic fiction. It’s perhaps not one of Georgette Heyer’s best works but I have a fondness for it. As I picked it up for the umpteenth time since that first reading, I knew that there would be no surprises in the plot and very few new insights in the text but it was warmly reassuring and held my interest sufficiently to make me sit on the stairs at one in the morning to finish it off [this often happens to me – Mr. Waffle does not approve of reading in bed after 11 – he is a morning person; so I come up from downstairs determined to go to bed and I read my book as I wash my teeth in the bathroom and convince myself that I will shortly put it down – I keep reading as I walk up the stairs and can’t bear to put down my book so I sit on the top step, hot water bottle at my feet, book in hand and polish it off before I go to bed]. When I see my little girl sitting up in bed reading, as she has lately started to do, I feel a distinct thrill. I read her three chapters of the first secret seven short story (they wear buttons with SS sewn on them – really in 1948 what was Enid Blyton thinking?) and she was so curious she read the rest of it on her own. My parents maintain that Enid Blyton helped me to read with fluency because they couldn’t bear to read her aloud. By way of riposte I would say two things: 1. My father never read anything to us anyway as he detests reading aloud and 2. As someone who thoroughly enjoyed “The Girls of the Veldt Farm” which is so out of print that I can’t find a reference to it on the internet, my mother is in no position to be superior.

“Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman” and “The Royal Game” by Stefan Zweig

My friend D recommended these two novellas which are sold together. I distrust my friend D’s recommendation as she likes hard books. She is a big fan of “Austerlitz” by Sebald, for example. She read a biography of Hildegard of Bingen. For fun. She continues to maintain that it was a fascinating read.

“Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman” confirmed my worst fears. It is an Edwardian melodrama by an, until recently out of print, Austrian author who, with his wife, died in Brazil in an “apparent double suicide”. You can see why I might be nervous. I didn’t like it much. It’s about a middle aged woman who has a “coup de foudre” when she meets a young gambler. Underwhelming and overwrought.

Under these circumstances, you can readily imagine, the low levels of enthusiasm with which I started the second novella but I very much enjoyed “The Royal Game”. I note that the novellas were translated by different people and I wonder if that made a difference. Whereas I found the first pretty dull, the second was very, very exciting and I was completely engaged by the plot and the story from the very beginning. It was clever and it was interesting. It’s about chess, which I have only the haziest idea how to play; my ignorance was no barrier to enjoyment. Perhaps I will attempt some more Mr. Zweig.

“Skulduggery Pleasant: Playing with Fire” and “Skulduggery Pleasant: The Faceless Ones” by Derek Landy

Yes, I read a lot of books for children. Your point? These are not as good as the Artemis Fowl books, their natural comparator but they are entertaining. It is also great to see contemporary Dublin in this kind of novel. Very good. Volume 4 next year, apparently.

“The Other Hand” by Chris Cleave

This is a book about two women written by a man. A man who is a Guardian columnist to boot. While it at no point plummets the depths of Tony Parson’s “Man and Boy” (what could, we ask ourselves), there is, it seems to me, something similar in the smug, all-knowing authorial tone that hovers over both texts.

He is annoyed about how refugees are treated and he uses his book to explore this fictionally. I found the two female characters unconvincing. At first I thought it was because they were written by a man (what kind of a woman asks whether her tights match her shoes, seriously?) but then I encountered his male character Lawrence and found him unconvincing too. I think it may be because he is using them to make a point about the system rather than treating them as real people. Sarah is from Surrey and this is pretty much all we get on her background and we are to assume that she is a typical product of a happy marriage in the home counties but no one is like that and that kind of shorthand is lazy and undermines any appreciation of who the character is. Andrew, her husband, is Irish or of Irish extraction, it’s never really made clear and you might say it doesn’t matter but I think it does. The most successful character is Sarah’s little boy, Charlie. I did find him believeable. I looked on the author’s website and he says that he drew Charlie from his own little boy. He spent a week at home noting down what his son said and it shows. The engaging vitality of this little character highlights the lack of depth of the others.

The story trots along at a brisk pace and it is, on the whole, a very readable book. There are, however, long passages where, if you ask me, he lets himself get a bit carried away and loses momentum. Here is one of our heroines describing what oil taken from Africa is used for in the West:

“The heaviest fraction, the wisdom of our grandparents, was used to tar your roads. The middle fractions, the careful savings of our mothers from the small coins they put aside after the harvest time, these were used to power your cars. And the lightest fraction of all – the fantastical dreams of us children in the stillest hours of full-moon nights, – well, that came off as a gas that you bottled and stored for winter.”

If these little aperçus appeal to you, then this is the book for you. For me they struck a false note in the character (insofar as she is coherent and not a cipher used to exemplify the author’s – worthy – concerns) and slowed up the pace for a very contrived literary effect.

In my view, the problem of conscience and how to deal with plenty in a world of want is addressed far more more successfully in Nick Hornby’s “How to be Good.”

“Death of a Celebrity” by M.C. Beaton

My sister gave me this to read on the train. It’s that kind of book. A somewhat twee detective story set in a small Scottish village. By far the most startling thing about it was the fact that it had been turned into a television series where Robert Carlyle starred as Hamish Macbeth the local mild mannered policeman. Cast against type, I must say. It makes me think, though, that the television series must have been a lot better than the book as Robert Carlyle is good in everything.

“Dracula” by Bram Stoker

I am very susceptible to the power of advertising. If I see an ad for honey roasted ham at the bus stop, then I will not rest nor will the sword sleep in my hand until I have consumed some honey roasted ham. The disappointment is always huge, of course, when honey roasted ham, or whatever it is, turns out not to be the nectar of the gods.

In April, Dublin City Council runs an initiative called “One City, One Book”. The idea is to encourage everyone in Dublin to read the same book which is connected to the city in some way. “Dracula” was the chosen book for this year and every flag and leaflet in the city encouraged the citizenry to read it. Inevitably, I succumbed. Although the author is from Dublin, it does not feature in the text although St. Michan’s crypt (which the Princess and I recently graced with our presence before going to see justice dispensed in the Four Courts – it was a very educational day) apparently inspired the crypt where our anti hero lies during the hours of daylight.

I found the novel slow going at the start: lots of scenery in the Carpathian mountains and that. For a modern reader, the problem is that much of the suspense is removed. What might have been shocking in Gothic in 1897 is pretty well known to everyone today. Dracula’s eyes are red, he becomes alarming at the sight of blood, he has no reflection: these may well have been exciting new tricks 110 years ago but hardly now.

However, from about 100 pages in and the arrival of Dracula’s nemesis Van Helsing (who does not speak like a Dutchman – had the author ever even met a Dutchman we ask ourselves), things start to pick up. Nevertheless, I scare easy and I can say that this book is not scary. The writing style is hilarious and, if you were told it was pastiche, you would accept it willingly. The men are manly, the women are womanly and the vampires are, well, vampirely. And male vampires only go for females and vice versa though children are fair game for anyone. Harmless but dated and, I suspect, saved from oblivion by the fickle hand of Hollywood.

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