belgianwaffle

Prepare to waste a great deal of time


Posted in: Reading etc.

A while back Heather mentioned a word game on the internet. You guess what a word means and you donate a grain of rice. Do good while wasting time. I meant to look at it. Then I saw Yogamum said that she got a score of 48 and I went to check it out determined to beat 48 (competitive, moi?). Though I donated over a 1000 grains of rice I always hovered round the 46 mark. I could not beat Yogamum. I was very bitter. I got my husband to have a go. He was annoyingly brilliant at it but he couldn’t get beyond 50. We had a look round the site and discovered that the maximum possible was 50. You think that I was bitter earlier? All I can say is that it’s good to see that his parents are finally getting some value from the money they forked out to send him to that private fee paying school where ancient Greek was on the curriculum.

Do you want to give it a go? Try here. Please don’t tell me if you get more than 46.

NaBloPoMo – T is for Townsend, Tomalin, Tillyard, Trollope, Tyler and Trapido.

I have a fondness for Sue Townsend. I loved “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole” when I read it first. I have followed his life over the years and he has always kept me gently amused. The fact that Adrian and I are almost exactly the same age has, perhaps, whetted my interest. I think I have read most of Sue Townsend’s stuff, even the dreadful collected articles she shamelessly published as “Public Confessions of a Middle-Aged Woman aged 55 3/4“. This was essentially a series of columns she’d done for Sainsbury’s magazine or something like that. And if you ask me, she wasn’t concentrating very hard when she produced them either. Almost all of her stuff is gentle satire. A notable exception is “Ghost Children” which is about abortion and unwanted children and really quite a distressing book. I feel it is her best book after the first couple of Adrian Moles but I bet it didn’t sell particularly well.

I like Claire Tomalin’s biographies and I’ve read quite a few of them. I think she is much, much better than Antonia Fraser (I thought “Marie Antoinette” was very tedious though, I suppose, I did enjoy “Mary, Queen of Scots”). I found “Mrs. Jordan’s Profession” really interesting and it provided an excellent explanation of why Queen Victoria was so buttoned up. Her Jane Austen biography was great and I found her biography on Mary Wollstonecraft so fascinating that I, very briefly, actually contemplated reading “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”.

Stella Tillyard wrote a great book called “Aristocrats” which tells the story of four 18th century sisters who were extraordinarily well connected. It’s a great read and it uses the texts of the sisters’ letters to each other extensively. Everyone loves it. I do too.

My parents are great fans of the Barsetshire novels and they have a great devotion to Mrs. Proudie. I tried “The Warden” on the strength of this and didn’t like it much and there the matter rested until a good friend gave me “The Eustace Diamonds” for Christmas years ago. I loved it and started in on the Palliser novels. I stopped at “Phineas Redux” but I think I’ll finish them off eventually. I was distracted by his Irish novels which I thought were great though it was a little odd to have the Famine feature as a mere background detail given its weighty place in Irish history.

I got given an Anne Tyler book for my 35th birthday and I didn’t like it much. It was “The Amateur Marriage”. It was good but so dreadfully depressing. “Saint Maybe” was on sale for a euro so I bought it because I cannot resist a bargain. I liked it very much. It has its depressing side, worry not, but I think it’s better because less happens. Anne Tyler is good at small things. I bought “Digging to America” on the strength of the rave reviews all of which were entirely merited. I am thinking of trying some of her back catalogue but I’m a bit nervous. Any suggestions?

Barbara Trapido is great. Very funny, very readable, very interesting novels. I thought that she was English but she’s not she’s South African. Her latest offering “Frankie and Stankie” is semi-autobiographical and gives an alarming insight into apartheid South Africa but also, incidentally the way the world used to be. The narrator flees the regime to England. When she goes to sign up at the local police station (South Africa having been expelled from the Commonwealth) in London in 1964 the police are extremely sympathetic. Consider the extract below:

‘It’s a crying shame, nice white people like you having to register as aliens,’ says the police constable. ‘When these nig-nogs and all sorts, with names we can’t pronounce, can come swanning in here just as they please.’

It’s at time like this that Dinah feels impelled to get on her personal soapbox. She feels the same at the greengrocer’s when she refuses to buy South African fruit.

‘Quite right. I agree with you,’ the greengrocer says. ‘When you think of all those dirty black hands that go crawling all over the fruit -‘

Odd


Posted in: Princess, Reading etc.

The Princess has two sources, broadly speaking, for her spoken English, me and the stories I read to her. This makes for a slightly odd speaking style which my mother calls quaint.

She is never scared of the dark, always the darkness (she wasn’t scared of the darkness either until recently and it’s probably just a ploy to delay bedtime).

The other day, when I was on the phone, she said to me: To whom are you speaking? Yet irregular verb endings can still sometimes stump her: “I felled down”.

Today she asked that for her school trip we give her wet raisins (that’s grapes to you) in her lunch box.

In unrelated Princess news, I find myself a victim of my own success in trying to instill a love of art in my daughter. We went to the current Rubens exhibition during the week and I was quite disappointed as it doesn’t really have much beyond the very extensive collection the gallery already had on display. I moved along smartly. The Princess, however, wanted to look at everything in great detail and I only finally managed to lure her away by promising to buy her a postcard.

NaBloPoMo – S is for Saki, Seth, Shields, Saramago, Shriver, Sassoon and possibly Scott Fitzgerald.

Saki is my favourite short story writer. I first came across him in school. “The Lumber Room” and “Sredni Vashtar” were in our book of short stories, I think when I was about 12 or 13.  Despite our English teacher’s rather dauntingly detailed analysis of the text, I was taken enough with them to have a look at my parents’ copy of his collected short stories at home.  I am very glad I did.  I have read them many, many, many times since and they have never failed to entertain me.  Due to the fact that Saki is out of copyright, his works abound on the internet.  Try this one.  It is, somehow, deeply appropriate that Saki’s last words before he was shot by a sniper in the First World War were “Put out that damned cigarette”.
I loved Vikram Seth’s “A Suitable Boy”.  I read it over one summer holiday (clearly, before I had children).  There is nothing as delightful as a long book that you love.  It’s a long book.  I enjoyed “The Golden Gate” very much also.  I was deeply disappointed by “An Equal Music” but I can’t help feeling that I will rather like his story about his uncle the one handed dentist.

I read a lot of Carol Shields at one point.  When she did a brief Jane Austen biography, I nearly swooned with happiness.  I’ve gone off her though.  I bought a new one recently and plan to give it a go, if you’re curious, I’ll get back to you.

“The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis” by Jose Saramago may be the most difficult book I have ever read.  Requiring a full appreciation of Portuguese history and literature, it is not for the faint hearted.  I would never have read anything of his again had the heart surgeon not insisted that “Blindness” was brilliant.  With deep reluctance, I took it up.  It was fantastic, a creepy, realistic fable about a world where everyone goes blind. I can’t believe it hasn’t been made into a Hollywood film.  It says a lot of very clever things about the human condition in a sickening yet page turning way.

I’ve only read Lionel Shriver’s “We need to talk about Kevin”.  It is very good in a slightly daft way.  I was completely fooled by the twist in the tale.  Entertaining in a miserable way but, I feel, unconvincing.

I came across Siegfried Sassoon as a war poet and, being at an impressionable age was very taken with him, so much so that I read “Memoirs of a Fox Hunting Man”.  I don’t know quite what I was expecting, but it does what it says on the tin.  There is something curiously comforting and appealing in reading about a year where nothing much happens.  Except, I suppose for the brutal demise of a lot of foxes, if that upsets you.  If it’s any comfort, they’ve all been dead for a long time now.

I’m not sure if Scott Fitzgerald should be under S or F – somebody please put me right, it would be a great comfort to me.  I read “The Great Gatsby” in school and though I didn’t like it (I don’t like any Scott Fitzgerald I’ve tried) it has stayed with me in a disturbing way.  I think it is an exceptionally well written book and quite scary.  Maybe I read it an impressionable age but  I do find that it haunts me.  I tend to remember it in shades of white and paler white (I’m afraid that makes no sense, but there it is, it’s my blog, I can write what I want).

Refugees


Posted in: Reading etc.

In my head, I have two very distinct ideas about Iran. There is the Shah and his regime; all sophistication, both insofar as the supporters of the regime and its opponents are concerned. Then there is the current regime which seems very repressive and does not involve any shiny jewellery. I am confused. We have a handyman who comes to our house who is Iranian. He is very distinguished looking with half moon glasses, a white moustache and perfect tan. I am desperate to ask him about his position on the Shah and the axis of evil but I have, with great difficulty, restrained myself. It’s bad enough that this man whom I suspect has a number of third level degrees and whom I know speaks excellent English is reattaching my curtain rail without me torturing him for details of his homeland.

NaBloPoMo – R is for Roth and Rowling

But first, I forgot Philip Pullman under P. The “His Dark Materials” trilogy is very good. Book 2 “The Subtle Knife” is the best but Book 3 “The Amber Spyglass” is unsatisfactory in a number of ways. Anyway, I’ll probably go to the blockbuster movie at Christmas, if I can persuade my sister to come with me.

I started reading Philip Roth when I was in college. I really enjoyed “Portnoy’s Complaint” which was hopelessly, helplessly funny and the early Zuckerman novels which had something of the same spirit though I suspect he never wrote anything as good again. I found “Deception” appealing in a sort of heavy going literary kind of way. I took up “American Pastoral” recently and it nearly killed me. I am Rothed out but I still retain fond memories of earlier novels.

Who would have thought “Harry Potter” would be such a phenomenon? The publishing executive tells me that they are regretfully laying off people at Bloomsbury in the wake of book 7. I thought books 1-4 were great, 5 was tedious, 6 was fine and 7 was good once the extended and pointless camping trip ended. She should have sent them back to school, they were a set of books about boarding school.

In a related photo, would you care to inspect dinner at the Hogwarts creche?

Hostess with the leastest


Posted in: Family, Reading etc.

Mr. Waffle’s sister is here for a couple of days. She arrived on Thursday night and, once she got in, I set her cleaning and getting things ready for my bookclub. Then I sent her out to dinner with her brother and welcomed my friends but not before I discovered that my confident assertion that we “have loads of wine” was completely incorrect. G, says that she thought the half bottles of red for cooking were delightful. Also, this is the first time this has ever happened to us but we had exactly one half roll of toilet paper to see us to the weekly shop on Saturday. We have lots of wipes and tissues but it wasn’t really the same, I’m sure you’ll agree.

As I type she is watching dominoes being tipped on telly. And I see from the all knowing wikipedia that it’s a particularly disappointing domino day. Still, the tragedy makes strangely compelling watching and it must make a pleasant change from all that party going in London on a Saturday night.

Oh yeah, I forgot, she got us all tickets to go to Rufus Wainwright last night.  Make that leastest and ungrateful too.  I haven’t been to a (non-classical) concert since I saw Ben Folds in Dublin in 2002 when I was pregnant with the Princess.  All I can say is that things have changed a lot since then. He started on time, there was no support act, we sat in numbered rows and everyone else there was older than me.  Rufus is perfectly pleasant but it was fortunate that we met some friends of ours who are real fans; otherwise my sister-in-law would have been unable to analyse the set and Rufus’s performance in quite the detail she would have liked.  Rufus seems like a pleasant young man and very early in the evening he spoke extensively about playing Cork to the great delight of the (surprisingly) many Cork people in the audience.  What’s not to like?
Want to come and visit?

NaBloPoMo – Q is only for Joe Queenan who’s alright but I wouldn’t get carried away.

Freedom of Speech


Posted in: Belgium, Reading etc.

The local nasty extreme right wingers stuck a brochure through the door. I see that they are concerned that freedom of speech has disappeared. Under the liberal consensus no one can criticise Islam any more. Don’t worry they have a solution; send all those nasty people back where they came from. In the case of the very nice Muslim women who work in the boys’ creche, I think that would probably be Etterbeek.

NaBloPoMo – Are we there yet? P is for Parker, Parks and Pratchett

Parker, that’s Dorothy Parker, obviously. Do I need to say more? “If all the girls who attended the Yale prom were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised”

I have always liked the idea of Tim Parks rather more than the result. He is an English man who married an Italian woman and lives in Verona. I find his books about growing up in the midst of what is, essentially, an Italian family with a funny English father, insightful and sometimes amusing. His writing can be a bit convoluted for me. The best of his books is “A Season with Verona”. Although Verona is famous in the English speaking world for Romeo and Juliet, it is famous in Italy for being the most racist town in the country and having the roughest football fans.  He spent a season bonding with the roughest of them.  It is enlightening and surprisingly touching from time to time.

Terry Pratchett is great.  He can be a little hit and miss but as my favourite aunt who reads everything says, why get something new from the library when you know you can rely on Terry Pratchett to deliver the goods.  Mildly humourous fantasy set on a fictional planet called Discworld which resembles our own in many ways.  I have them all.

Perspective


Posted in: Belgium, Reading etc.

I am fascinated by the way the British are so cautious about some things (careful, peanut packet contains nuts!) and so utterly reckless about others (more debt, help yourself sir, no, no, don’t bother with any independent advice).

A friend of mine who is half English, half Belgian pointed out what should have been obvious to me, namely, that the issue is not one of concern but of liability. The “careful contains nuts” brigade do not have any views about the well-being or intelligence level of their customers, they are merely anxious to avoid being sued. The financial institutions are much less concerned about this as the market is famously lightly regulated and they can get away with blue murder.

My Anglo-Belgian friend points out that the Belgian banks are far more paternalistic and there are no credit cards in Belgium merely deferred debit cards; everyone must pay off in full at the end of the month. An English friend tells me that her bank in Belgium was horrified when she and her husband decided not to take a fixed rate mortgage. “But” they said, “it’s twenty years, anything could happen.” They decided to chance it on the basis that it was only variable up to a ceiling of 2% more than the fixed rate.

The Belgians are also delightfully relaxed and normal about children’s safety, something I feel is not the case in Britain and increasingly not the case in Ireland. I was reading about the Madeleine McCann case in Le Soir a couple of weeks ago. The editorial was very disapproving about England and referred to its dreadful history touching on various tragic cases of abducted children. I did have a slight feeling of ‘hang on a minute, watch out for the mote in your own eye’. But it seems to me that the real difference is that though at some level, in Britain, people know that their children are statistically very unlikely to be abducted, they don’t act that way. In Belgium, despite everything, they still do.

NaBloPoMo – O is for pretty much everything

Flann O’Brien is a genius, he also wrote as Brian O’Nolan and Myles na Gopaleen. If you have never seen a ‘Keats and Chapman’ story and you like poor puns, I can recommend an excellent Christmas present for you. If you have never heard of ‘the brother’ your life is about to get a lot happier. The catechism of cliche is a thing of wonder. There is a little background information on the great man here. When I was growing up a hard backed brown volume called “The Best of Myles” was my father’s constant companion. I would occasionally sneak off with it only to be forced to replace it promptly following a bellow from my indignant father. I was going to give you a Keats and Chapman story but they are all rather long and the goodness of the internet does not appear to extend to providing a copy of a text. I am, however, selflessly going to retype something from the catechism of cliche. If you don’t love this, you have no soul. If it reminds you of my style, you have no tact.

“Is treatment, particularly bad treatment, ever given to a person?

No. It is always meted out.

Is anything else ever meted out?

No. The only thing that is ever meted out is treatment.

And what does the meting out of treatment evoke?

The strongest protest against the treatment meted out.

Correct. Mention another particularly revolting locution.

‘The matter will fall to be dealt with by so-and-so.’

Good. Are you sufficiently astute to invent a sentence where this absurd jargon will be admissible?

Yes. ‘The incendiary bombs will fall to be dealt with by fire fighting squads.’

Very good indeed. Is that enough for wan day?

It is, be the japers.”

John O’Farrell wrote what I think is the funniest book I have ever read. It’s called “Things Can Only Get Better: Eighteen Miserable Years in the Life of a Labour Supporter” and it incapacitated me with laughter in private and, regrettably, in public. Yes, I was the hysterical woman on the tram. I read two of his other books but though perfectly acceptable, they did not live up to this brilliant, brilliant book.

I got a present of an Ardal O’Hanlon book from the, now former, publishing exec. Ardal O’Hanlon is an Irish comedian most famous for playing the gormless Fr. Dougal on the “Father Ted” series. I thought his book would be funny, it was not. I thought it would be poorly written. It wasn’t. I don’t think it sold very well either though. I’m not sure anyone expected Father Dougal to write a dark brilliant story of Irish small town life (sort of like Pat McCabe, but to my mind much better – is it coincidence that he and McCabe come from the same small town? I think not – stay safe, stay away from Monaghan). I would never have bought it in a million years but it was brilliant. I don’t think he ever wrote another and this seems to have sunk without trace which was a shame.
My husband brought a complete set of P.J. O’Rourke books to our marriage. I like him. I can’t help myself.

Do you realise that if it weren’t for Ireland and the diaspora, I would have no entries under O?