From Charlotte who had it from all kinds of other places*: a chance to show just how spectacularly privileged I am. With all these opportunities, you’d think I might be the lynch pin of the nation by now, but no. Maybe my father was right, maybe we were brought up too soft.

Bold the true statements. You can explain further if you wish.

1. Father went to college.

2.Father finished college.

3.Mother went to college.

4.Mother finished college.

She gave up her PhD when the safety lab exploded taking all her notes with it..

5. Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor.

6. Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers.

Well, define class, but I suppose we were more or less all the same.

7. Had more than 50 books in your childhood home.

8. Had more than 500 books in your childhood home

My father’s great line: “books will be the ruination of this house”. So true. He kept trying to give them away to Oxfam and I kept stealing them from his giving away piles.

9. Were read children’s books by a parent.

The plagues in the Old Testament were popular favourites. When my brother was seven my mother read him all the Narnia books chapter by chapter, always stopping at an exciting point in the hope that he might pick one up himself, but no. My father hates reading aloud and never read us anything as far as I know.

10. Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18.

11.Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18.

Swimming (following an unfortunate incident at my cousin Jane’s birthday party: we were taken to her friend’s house with a swimming pool – in Cork, in the 1970s, really, the mind boggles – and all the others could swim but I had to stay paddling in the shallow end with my arm bands, I was not happy), ballet (white tights, white jumpers and black shoes for years), elocution (you think Cork people sound like this naturally?), recorder (not a success) and I think that’s it.  Oh no, I forgot Irish dancing.

12. The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively.

I’m not sure that anyone in the media has my unfortunate dress sense but I know what they mean. And yes.

13. Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18.

Though my parents paid the bill and it was only for emergencies once I started college.

14. Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs

15. Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs

Because my parents worked in the university, my fees were free. Even, if this had not been the case, they would have stumped up for them anyway. I think that, if you can afford it, this is a wonderful thing to give your children. I had a fantastic time at college and it is only now I realise how lucky I was not to have to get a job to make ends meet or to finish with a mountain of debt. I don’t think it made me less mature or less responsible than my contemporaries and it certainly made me happy. Mind you, fees are a lot cheaper in Ireland than in the US – in fact for the past 10 or 15 years it’s been free.

16. Went to a private high school

I remember saying to an English friend ‘there are no private schools in Ireland’. What, she said, your husband, your brother, your father didn’t go to private school? Which left me back pedalling slightly but it really was very unusual when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s. There were a couple of fee paying boarding schools in odd rural locations around the country and some private schools in Dublin but, in Cork, I think there were only two fee paying schools, both schools for boys (one for the old money families and one for the clever nouveau boys).

17. Went to summer camp

I went to the Gaeltacht – does that count?

18. Had a private tutor before you turned 18

Had grinds in Irish (from my hilarious cousin) and physics from one of my mother’s old college classmates who taught in my brother’s school (Cork is like that). He was quite, quite brilliant. At Easter I got a D in my mock Leaving Cert Physics and 2 months later I, very briefly, understood the entire Physics syllabus and got an A. My friend M who is very interested in science (and went on to do a PhD in Chemistry and now does hard things in research laboratories making her a joyful, positive statistic for the kind of people who measure R&D performance in Ireland) was extremely bitter about this undeserved glory. She actually had to work for her A. Our physics teacher was absolutely useless and we all got grinds, except M who, as discussed, actually had to work for her A. I am sure it stood her in better stead in the long run.

19. Family vacations involved staying at hotels

Until I was 9 we spent four weeks every summer at the West Cork Hotel in Skibbereen a heady hour’s drive from our home. It often rained but we didn’t care. Every evening, the children ate early and I had melon to start, chicken and chips and melon for dessert. The kitchen used to do us packed lunches and we would go off to the beach for the day with our wind-break (always an exciting engineering project for my father) and our picnic basket. When I was 9, my mother decided that four weeks of hotel food every year would kill my father and we started going on camping holidays in France.

20. Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18.

I got loads of hand-me-downs from cousins but most of my clothes came from my friend who was a year older than me and an only child (clothes therefore in much better nick than those from my cousins which were often threadbare). My mother also made us a lot of clothes. I don’t remember being bought many clothes (I feel that children’s clothes were much more expensive then than they are now). My father once brought me a beautiful dress from the Corte Ingles (they seem to have something similar still in stock) when I was quite little and I loved it very much, I can still remember what it was like. I really hated my mother’s favourite, the black velvet dress with the lace collar (stop sniggering at the back) and I used to chew the lace collar in the hope that it would come off but it never did.

21. Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them

Hah, you jest. It was a labour of love to persuade my father to let me learn to drive in his car. He only wanted to let me loose on it when I could fully explain the workings of the combustion engine. That brief period when I could have met his criteria (see question 18 above) was taken up with studying for my leaving cert but eventually my mother wore him down and he did let me learn. We bought our own cars though. My first car was second hand from my aunt and then sold to my sister.

22. There was original art in your house when you were a child.

Yes, most noticeably a very Victorian offering which my father loathes. It is a picture called “The Return of the Victor”. It shows a bullfighter kissing the hand of a coy senorita while her friends look on enviously. I am inexplicably fond of it.

23. You and your family lived in a single-family house.

24. Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home

My father bought my parents’ house before I was born. He had saved up for a yacht and spent the money on our house. He went out and bought it without consulting my mother. I think she was…surprised.

25. You had your own room as a child

26. You had a phone in your room before you turned 18

Alas, no. I used to spend all my time on the telephone in the hall.

27. Participated in a SAT/ACT prep course

28. Had your own TV in your room in high school.

No. We didn’t get a colour television until I was 13 and we had a measly portable until I left home. We never paid for cable so we only had RTE 1 and 2 (if you have to ask..). My sister once got my father all the way to the multi-channel shop and he said to the man behind the counter ‘is it any good?’ and the man said ‘Nah, there’s never anything on’. We gave up after that. Now, of course, they have millions of channels.

29. Owned a mutual fund or IRA in high school or college.

30. Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16.

My father served on an international committee for years and they all became good friends and he and the German delegate had daughters the same age (14) and they decided we could do a language exchange. S was diabetic so her father was a bit concerned about letting her off and entrusted her to my father’s particular charge which, I think, he found unnerving. Just as well, then, that when I came down with jaundice, which she also got, she was safely back in Berlin. After she came to us, I went to her family in Berlin. I don’t remember much about the flight though I was really looking forward to it (when I asked my father what a plane was like, he said, like a bus but with less leg room – accurate though considerably undermining the glamour), there was even a free meal (this was the early 1980s). I was, of course, very excited about going to Berlin – the wall (who would have thought that it was to go so soon), the big city glamour etc. etc. I arrived and two days after my arrival we were all packed in to the family car and driven across East Germany (actually very boring) all the way to a tiny hamlet in Bavaria (Benedictbeuern). I just looked it up and it’s so small that it doesn’t even have a home page. We went walking in the woods. Her handsome older brother did not come. I did not have the opportunity to experience gracious European apartment living in a big, romantic, glamourous city or, at least, not for very long. Still, I did get to fly to Berlin and back.

31. Went on a cruise with your family.

Really, people do that?

32. Went on more than one cruise with your family.

Apparently, they do.

33. Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up.

We spent half our time in the Cork city museum. Surely that counts. If you pushed buttons the sites of the war of independence lit up and early Christian settlements (different maps).

34. You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family

Well, not in actual figures, no but my father used to go around the house turning off lights and radiators when we weren’t using and asking us balefully whether we knew electricity cost money. He was also keen on shutting doors to keep the heat in. He was green before his time.

*The original authors of this exercise are Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, and Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. If you participate, they ask that you PLEASE acknowledge their copyright.

“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?