Herself has insisted that she clear any references I make to her here. Good job that she doesn’t know about the archives yet.
Archives for June 2011
Reading
“The Hare with the Amber Eyes” by Edward De Waal
A bit of a slow start. Lots of art history, and I like art history but there is only so much of Paris in the late 19th century that I can take. “Persist until he gets to Vienna,” said my friends. I persisted. The story follows the history of small carved Japanese figures called netsuke from when they came into his family in the 1870s. This device is used to tell the story of his family, the Ephrussis, an extremely rich banking family of Russian, Jewish extraction. Vienna works better for a range of reasons. Paris is too long ago and the author’s link is too indirect. His grandmother grew up in the Viennese family and it is much more immediate and, of course, over this fin de siecle Viennese tale hangs the reader’s and the author’s knowledge of what happens to European Jews over the following 50 years. It’s fascinating and very direct and moving. Also, I now really want to visit Odessa.
The author was in Dublin a couple of weeks ago and I went to hear him speak but he only spoke of pots. Alas. He is a famous potter as well as an author.
“I Feel Bad about my Neck” by Nora Ephron
This book is sinful. The publishers and the author pulled together a couple of slight, previously published essays from a variety of sources, added a couple of new ones and foisted them on an unsuspecting public. Or maybe I’m just bitter because I have only three years before my neck collapses. Very mildly funny in places.
“The Tiger in the Well” by Philip Pullman
For my money the best of the Sally Lockhart novels. The author is still concerned about women’s rights but this time he’s showing how married women had a very raw time when they fell out with their husbands. But it’s a bit more complicated than that. And also quite exciting in spots.
“The Tin Princess” by Philip Pullman [New Year’s Resolution]
Slightly tedious fable set in a doomed statelet in Mittel Europa with the now familiar cast of Lockhartian characters (Jim’s turn to star). All action but it never really leads anywhere. The conclusion is feeble and gives the impression that the author just ran out of energy and couldn’t be bothered tying up the loose ends.
“Georgette Heyer’s Regency World” by Jennifer Kloester [New Year’s Resolution]
This was a present and one which I might have been imagined to like but I found it very tedious until about three quarters of the way through when I stopped trying to read it as a kind of narrative and started reading it like a dictionary. I finally know what “boxing the watch” really means.
“Memoirs of a Geisha” by Arthur Golden [New Year’s Resolution]
Can’t see what the fuss was about really. I suppose, culturally, a bit interesting though hard to know how accurate it is. I met the only Irish person I know who speaks fluent Japanese for lunch today and asked her whether it was true and she said, as far as she knew, yes and also, it’s pronounced gaysha not geysha [this information is free to you, I had to buy her lunch]. Also, I had to explain to my daughter what a geisha was, as she saw the book around the house. And in the same breath, she said, “And what’s a lesbian?” Parenting is very tiring.
The Arts
God, this is going to sound like something Fintan O’Toole would say. But, why are we always so down on the arts?
We always want engineers and doctors and lawyers and accountants but nobody points out how much we need artists and actors and potters and all the people who make places worth living in, in the first place [except Fintan O’Toole, of course].
Why is studying maths in school taken so much more seriously than art? I mean, to do the arts well, like, say, a good play, don’t you need to be very disciplined? Don’t you need all the skills that employers are apparently crying out for in the workplace like creativity and teamwork and communication? Why do I feel though that if employers are given a choice between a candidate who got an A in maths and one who starred in the school play, they’ll always go for the maths guy. Is that unfair?
Have a poem by Wendy Cope which is not quite on message but does also juxtapose the arts and hard science.
Engineers’ Corner
Why isn’t there an Engineers’ Corner in Westminster Abbey? In Britain we’ve always made more fuss of a ballad than a blueprint … How many schoolchildren dream of becoming great engineers?
Advertisement placed in The Times by the Engineering Council
We make more fuss of ballads than of blueprints —
That’s why so many poets ends up rich,
While engineers scrape by in cheerless garrets.
Who needs a bridge or dam? Who needs a ditch?
Whereas the person who can write a sonnet
Has got it made. It’s always been the way,
For everybody knows that we need poems
And everybody reads them every day.
Yes, life is hard if you choose engineering —
You’re sure to need another job as well;
You’ll have to plan your projects in the evenings
Instead of going out. It must be hell.
While well-heeled poets ride around in Daimlers,
You’ll burn the midnight oil to earn a crust,
With no hope of a statue in the Abbey,
With no hope, even, of a modest bust.
No wonder small boys dream of writing couplets
And spurn the bike, the lorry and the train.
There’s far too much encouragement for poets —
That’s why the country’s going down the drain.
Dragging the Devil by the Tail or A Sad Litany of Failure
OK, this happened months ago but the pain is still fresh. I appreciate the post is stale.
12.00 – Go to meeting.
17.00 – Meeting ends. Return to office to find all kinds of urgent messages. Urgent, urgent, urgent matter must be attended to. Ring husband to say I will be late home. Find text message from him that he is in a meeting and can I be home to relieve the babysitter. Tackle urgent matter at great speed.
18.00 – Urgent matter dispatched in record time while eating lunch. Go multi-tasking [faintly Bridget Jonesish] me.
18.05 – Hop on Dublin bike.
18.20 – 18.45 Cycle around looking for a rack to park my bike. Fail to find one.
18.50 – Arrive home. Stash bicycle in the back garden. Husband is there before me, face like thunder.
19.00 – Announce I will cancel dinner out. Am told not to. Slink out in disgrace.
23.00 – Decide not to drive around city looking for place to stash Dublin bike.
9.00 – Regret previous evening’s decision on discovering that charges for keeping the bike overnight are astronomical. Alas.
A Broad Church
Our local church has an annual trip to a outdoor play area for children and their parents. It was held yesterday and, as we sat there in the drizzle, getting sunburnt (welcome to the Irish summer), I was chatting to another mother about what secondary schools our children might go to – a topic that fills me with gloom and dread as I continue to do nothing about it.
Her: What about school x?
Me: Mmm, not sure.
Her: You’re probably too late anyhow, unless you’re Church of Ireland?
Me: For heaven’s sake, of course I’m not C of I, we’re on the [catholic] church outing.
Her: Actually, I am C of I.
Me: But you go to mass every Sunday.
Her: Yes. Well, it’s a trek to a C of I church.
Me: And your daughter’s an altar girl.
Her: Yes.
Me: In fact, I thought you were a particularly devout Catholic.
Her: Well, I am devout, I’m just not picky.
What’s it like when you get home from work?
I steel myself slightly as I walk in the door. The troops are always delighted to see me as each has been storing up grievances since earlier in the day which he or she would like to share, ideally, before I take off my coat.
The children accost me from all sides with competing tales of their activities. If I am first home, I try to hear from the childminder how the day went but it is always “fine”. I am, in any event, constantly interrupted by the clamour of children demanding to tell me their news and physically pinioning me to the couch. The boys have no sense of timing and always choose this moment to ask for a story or that I superglue some broken toy. Often there are offerings of colourings or drawings. The fight for my attention sometimes breaks down into open warfare. I know what Oliver James would say about this but I am humming with my fingers in my ears.
If Mr. Waffle is home before me, the childminder has gone (good) and he is in the kitchen making dinner (also good). Homework has to be done after we return from work and is invariably tedious and takes a great deal longer than might reasonably be expected due to resistance from the staff side.
Dinner follows. This exercise invariably depresses both parents as, pretty much regardless of what is served up, the boys will refuse to eat it. Consequently, I suppose, the boys desire to sit at the dinner table is somewhere around nil. Much of dinner is spent saying “Please sit down” through gritted teeth.
After the children clear the table and receive a biscuit reward, we begin the long slow slide to bedtime. Teeth, toilet, pyjamas, smiley face [elaborate and probably over-generous reward system for good behaviour] for the boys. And then, my favourite part of the evening with them, reading a story. I am reading “The Folk of the Faraway Tree” by Enid Blyton at the moment. My mother said that this is the book that taught me to read as she simply couldn’t face reading it aloud. I am finding it delightfully nostalgic though I can perceive dimly why she might have been nauseated by the cast of pixies, brownies, elves and cute little bunnies. And the boys enjoy it so much. Michael is agog with excitement. One night, I went upstairs at 10 and he was still awake staring at the bottom of the upper bunk. “Why are you still awake?” I asked. “I’m thinking about Connie and hoping she gets back to the Faraway Tree.”
And then smiley face for herself, and then upstairs with her to see her into bed. She is always slightly hysterical in the bathroom; I assume from exhaustion. Then she hops into bed with her book and I retreat warily downstairs. The boys then have to be supplied with cuddles and hot water bottles.
On a good night, nobody comes downstairs and our work is done by the nine o’clock news and we sit in front of it with tea and feel middle aged. On a bad night, one or two children come down. Daniel, very virtuously, never comes down. Michael often comes down to allege violence. The other night he arrived down weeping because he had dropped a €2 coin in his eye. He now has a crescent shaped bruise on his eyelid.
At 10 o’clock, having seen to the laundry, Mr. Waffle often retires. He believes that, if he left the laundry to me, we would never have a clean stitch. I like to believe that this isn’t true. Sometimes I sit up late into the night playing on the internet.
Everything is better on Wednesdays as I don’t work on Wednesday afternoons and the house is tidy, homework is done and dinner is ready at 6.30 [which is when we usually get home]. Unfortunate but there it is. I am [Americans please look away] taking 2 months off this summer between holidays and parental leave [unpaid, but my husband has promised to keep me] and it starts at the end of this week on July 1. Rejoice with me, if you can stand to. I feel it will make for a much more serene home life. And the children won’t have to go to course after course, a less than satisfactory solution to school holidays employed in the past. I wouldn’t describe my colleagues as ecstatic about this development but they are resigned.
And now tell me, what do you do of an evening?
