The last daily post

Day 31 of ‘The Daily Post’.

I’ve done it. I have published a post a day (and two yesterday) for a month.

It worked out rather differently to how I’d imagined. I love blogging and writing, so I thought I was just giving myself licence to spend a chunk of every day doing what I might otherwise have felt a bit guilty for. And that did happen, at the beginning, but as time wore on, I found (and I never thought I’d hear myself say this) that I was getting a bit fed up with it. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it became a chore, but there were certainly days when I did a quick couple of hundred words, and was glad to see the back of them. I’d put that down as a positive result. I have sometimes worried how addicted I am to blogging, and it is nice to see that I can, after all, be sated by it. Sated and ready to take a step back of my own free will.

Another positive outcome, which I had hoped for, is that I am better at writing short posts. Hurrah. I can still burble on at great length, but I have become practised at getting my thoughts organized into a smaller space. I have also become more disciplined with time – another outcome I’d hoped for. I used to spend hours writing even a short post. I’d write and rewrite, cogitate and regurgitate. Over the past month, I’ve made myself sit down, write the post straight, read it through once and make corrections, and then publish it without endless tinkering. So on the plus side, I have had the practice I wanted in writing posts that are short and to the point, and in doing them quickly (or more quickly than my previous snail-like self - it's all relative).

On the negative side, I really missed allowing decent time for comments. You’ve all been very loyal, but of course a post doesn’t get so many comments if it’s only at the top of the blog for a single day. And it’s not just the number of comments that adds to the richness of the blog. It’s the way the conversation develops, with people picking up on each other’s comments. A blog post is like a cheese or a fine wine. It needs time to mature.

Another negative is that I haven’t had the opportunity to write down some of the meatier stuff that is in my head. I have so much I still want to say about life in the US through British eyes. Guns, religion, education, friendships, buying and selling a house, some of my early impressions… The kind of things that I might string together into the book that is always lingering at the back of my mind. This month didn’t bring it any further forward. Drat. But the pressure of a daily post militates against that kind of writing. I had anticipated that with all three children at school full-time and my health returning to normal, I’d have enough hours in a day to tackle some of those subjects in longer, more thoughtful, pieces. I had reckoned without the invasion of daily life. One thing about feeling better healthwise is that you inevitably do more around the house, and outside the home. I’m happy about that, of course, but I had forgotten to factor it into the equation. I’d also reckoned without 6 days of sick children off school, and 7 days of school out for teacher training, state assessments or parent conferences (having children at two different schools means that there is twice as much of this). That’s 13 school days out of 20 or so. Hm, now I count them up, I realise it’s no wonder it’s felt like I haven’t much time to myself.

So in sum, I’m glad I did ‘The Daily Post’, and I think it was an achievement to complete it without missing a day. I don’t think I’ll do it again, and certainly not for a while. I’m all blogged out! It did make me realize what a huge undertaking it was to cook over 500 recipes and blog about them in a year, as Julie did in the movie Julie and Julia, which is where this idea all started. I've just re-read that post, and the reasons I gave for setting myself this challenge. I'd rather forgotten what I was feeling at that time. I've certainly got more sense of purpose than I had back then, more zest for life. I guess at least part of that must be due to 'The Daily Post'. It's been one part of the jigsaw falling into place.

I didn’t get much tapestry done, since one of you is bound to ask.

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Stop press

I know I've already done my daily post, but I have to share this nugget with you, oh fellow expat bloggers.

I was speaking on the phone to a fellow Brit in America, and he ended the conversation with "Good Day". I don't know this man personally: I was speaking to him in his official capacity. Do they train people to sign off "Good Day" do you think? Just to remind us expats of BBC period dramas, and make us feel nostalgic? I know you're going to ask whether I'm sure he wasn't Australian, but it was definitely "Good Day", not "G'day". And I'm not sure I didn't hear a gentle thud as he tipped his bowler hat to me.

Made my day, even if he can't help me speed up the green card application process. It was top hole talking to him.

Festivals

One of the things that is very noticeable about living in America is how much more effort they put into celebrating festivals. Houses are decorated, schools have parties, the ‘seasonal’ aisles in stores are filled with appropriate merchandise (although that happens well in advance of the festival itself, as if those aisles are in their own private time zone).

My personal theory is that we don’t need the excitement of festivals so much in Britain, as our school year is organized differently. We are never more than a few weeks away from a holiday (Christmas, Easter, summer) or half-term. If you need something to look forward to – and don’t we all? – then you have lots of scope to arrange a day out, a trip, a visit to or from relations, a holiday, something to break up the routine. Over here, there’s a 2-week Christmas holiday, a week’s Spring break, and otherwise, all the school holiday is in a great long 12-week stretch over the summer. (I know I've talked about this before so I'm sorry to be repetitive, but it really does make such a big difference to life.) There are occasional days off, but it’s just not the same as having a long week-end, or a half-term week. I mean to say, if your children returned to school on August 17th, and their only break before Christmas was 3 days holiday in late November, wouldn’t you need a few events to get excited about?

Each festival has a colour associated with it. At the time of the relevant festival, the stores have a rash of that colour dotted through them. Cupcakes have the theme colour icing, there are a couple of racks of children's clothing in it, there'll be a sprinkling of it in the adult clothing section too, homewares will sport the colour in paper plates, tableclothes, napkins, and candles, and there'll be plenty of novelty goods spattered around in that same colour too. I was thinking about this, and I reckon every feasible colour is accounted for. Here’s the list:

Valentine’s Day: red and pink
St Patrick’s Day: green
Easter: yellow (and pastel shades generally)
Memorial Day and Fourth of July: red, white and blue
Hallowe’en: orange, black and purple
Christmas: green and red.

It really only leaves brown and grey unused. They’re not very festive colours, so it’s not surprising. I suppose Labor Day could adopt them, to represent the drudgery of work. But I have a better plan for them. I’m working on a ‘British Day’ celebration when we could put them to use. It would have to be 4th January, ie the opposite to 4th July. The grey would symbolize the British weather, and the brown the British countryside, (ideally we’d want to use green for that, but that’s already taken by St Patrick and the Irish and in January, the British countryside is more brown than green anyway).

I think I’m going to have an uphill battle getting this one universally adopted, especially so soon after the Christmas season. On the other hand, those seasonal aisles are pretty purposeless in January. It’s a good six weeks till Valentine’s Day. I’m sure the major retailers would welcome a January festival. No-one will have grey and brown paraphernalia stored away in their closets, so this would present an opportunity for significant new purchasing. Perhaps I should write to Target and Wal-mart and see if I can get something started (and yes, I know I’d have to spell it ‘gray’ for their benefit).

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The ripple effect

Day 28 of 'The Daily Post'.

Do you remember about this time last year, the senior executives of General Motors went to ask Obama for a bail-out from public money, and they travelled to the meeting in private jets? Obama pointed out that this was something of a gaff, and the executives were publicly humiliated. I thought Obama did well to point it out. But what about this?

The main industry of the city I live in is aircraft manufacture. It is home to three big producers of private planes. Between them, Learjet, Cessna and Hawker make 45% of the world’s business jets. After Obama’s criticism of the GM executives, large numbers of orders were cancelled or postponed, and new orders dried up. Business travel by private jet was no longer as desirable as it had been. Last year, these three companies produced 11,500 private jets. This year, they expect to produce 7500, and next year, 6,500. Their market research suggests that they won’t be back up to 2008 demand until 2017. In the past year, 13,000 people have been laid off. Others are working reduced hours, or being given periods of compulsory furlough.

I don’t really know how to feel about this. I don’t think the world needs to add to its global warming problems by having senior business people flying around in their own, or leased, jets. Should I be pleased that orders are so severely reduced? On one level, yes, but that’s not the reason these people were made redundant. You have to feel sorry for those 13,000 people. I would feel sorry for workers made redundant from the tobacco industry, in spite of what I hoped for the future of that industry.

I feel a particular sympathy for those 13,000, though. It happened so suddenly. One news item, and their fates were sealed. It was unforeseen. Yes, you’d expect a recession to bring a reduction in orders of business planes, but this was a drop of a 35% in a single year. It must be galling that it wasn’t even a matter of government policy. The incident was symbolic not substantive, the result of an unscripted reaction from the President. Most of all, I’m sure those workers don’t appreciate the irony that GM jobs were saved by a bail-out, but there’s no public subsidy for the aircraft manufacturers.

I’m sure we all, if we’re honest, enjoyed the embarrassment we imagine those GM executives experienced. It was a time when we felt the mighty deserved to fall. It wasn’t happening, and the GM executives took on the role of scapegoat. Since they weren’t actually going to lose their jobs, then being taken down a public peg or two by the President was the next best thing. The corporate bottom was smacked. But spare a thought for those 13,000 whose lives have been turned upside down by that one incident, an incident which, because it came from the White House, caught the public imagination and gained publicity, took on a significance beyond its worth.

Siblings

Day 27 of ‘The Daily Post’ (sorry, I’ve been forgetting to count).

Talking of Charlesinparis made me reflect on siblings. I am jolly glad I had siblings, because watching my own children would be rather shocking otherwise. I would probably take seriously statements like “You’re the worst brother in the world and I’m never going to let you use any of my things ever again”. I would psycho-analyse the reasons behind the name-calling, and the choice of names. I would agonise over setting appropriate boundaries to the physical violence. As it is, having grown up as one of four, I recognize much of what I see and hear from my own childhood. In the same way that I hear myself saying things that my mother said, I hear my children saying things that I and my siblings said.

I assume that most of this stuff is nature’s way of training children in conflict resolution, weathering knocks to self-esteem, and other useful life skills, much as puppies play at fighting and racing. And please don’t think that I assume children who are brought up as only children lack these skills. I imagine they learn them in more sophisticated environments involving fewer broken toys and broken deals.

Are you an only child with multiple children of your own? Has it been a big adjustment? I’d like to know.

Anyway, I thought I’d tell you about my siblings, and in particular what this summer has brought out.

My sister has sent me books. She has always chosen just right. She thinks I am more cultured and intellectual than I am, and gives me links to highbrow literary sites or tells me about operas she has been to. It's nice she has such unwaveringly high expectations of me, in defiance of the current evidence. It's also impressive that she chooses good books for me, in spite of her aspirations for my tastes. She emails me snippets from her London office life. She faithfully prints the blog out for my mum to read.

My big brother, Charlesinparis, has phoned a lot. When he phones, the conversation runs at 100mph, and is full of puns which are either very bad, or very obscure, or both. Who else out there would tie up the name of the anti-histamine medication Benadryl with the 70’s comedian Benny Hill? I have had over 40 years' practice at getting his puns, so I can keep up, and sometimes even pre-empt. It’s very gratifying. His conversational style is like the activity of a hummingbird. He dives in to a subject at breakneck speed, sucks the sweet nectar out of it while his wings work unbelievably fast to hold him steady, then departs to the next one in a dart that you could miss if you blinked. It's one of nature's greatest wonders.

Then there’s my younger bro, in Brighton. I used to make him get into my bed so that I could warm my cold feet up on his legs, when we were little and shared a bedroom. Now he is over six foot and beanpole thin, so I expect he has cold feet himself much of the time. He has a very laid back attitude to life, which is a great antidote to the manic majority. He has often provided for me some kind of still centre where I can go to catch breath when the storm is raging. In a recent email chat with him, I asked

“How can I tell whether I am suffering from chemo-induced fatigue, or whether I am just lazy and enjoy lounging round the house surfing the internet and not doing very much?”

To which he replied

“Why do you need to tell?”

I know I said to them "you're the worst siblings in the world and I'll never let you use any of my things". I was always the snark when we played ‘hunting of the snark’ (ok, ok, they knew I secretly enjoyed it). I was humiliated in arm wrestling contests. I used to hide in the garage when I wanted to be away from them. But it all came out in the wash, as you can see.

U2. Me too.

Yesterday morning, when we woke up, Husband and I rolled over to face each other. We bared our teeth, shrugged our shoulders up to our ears, and performed a joint version of “hee-hee, hee-hee, hee-hee” in true Mutley style. Yesterday was the day we were parking our kids with friends, and heading off to a U2 concert. They were performing in Norman, Oklahoma, which (in case you’re as ignorant as I was) is the home of the University of Oklahoma, and – importantly for U2 - has a big stadium.

We booked the tickets a few weeks ago, to give us something to look forward to, in the depths of chemotherapy. Yesterday it felt weird to be going, rather than looking forward to going. The mirage in the distance had become the reality of the present moment. We had had an anxious spell earlier in the week when 12-yo, who has the constitution of an ox (an unwritten one, as all the best ones are) and is almost never ill, got ill. For 24 hours, I thought “ah, this is just one of those 24 hour things”. For the next 24 hours, I thought “this child is never ill, how can he be ill with 2 days to go before the U2 concert?” For the third 24 hours, I stood him upright, and slapped him regularly to bring the colour back to his cheeks, and that seemed to do the trick.

My relationship with U2 got off to a bad start. The guy who had the room next to mine in my second year at university was a big fan, and played their music too loud and too often. And when I say ‘their music’, I mean ‘the one track he played of their music’. So I was subjected to In the Name of Love several times a day, and as the weeks wore on, my enthusiasm for U2 waned. Over a decade later, I was reintroduced to their music, when I married Husband who had been a faithful U2 fan.

I’ve never been a rock concert kind of a gal. I did go and hear B A Robertson perform in Borehamwood (oh yes) when I was about 17, but I don’t feel that qualifies me to critique U2’s show. If you want a description and reviews, I’m sure Google can supply them. And of the Black Eyed Peas, who were supporting. I’ll just give you my perspective.

It was fabulous. What more can I say? I loved the show: the drama, the excitement, the atmosphere of the big crowd, the enthusiasm of the college town audience. I loved the music: the familiarity of the old songs, the energy of the new. And Bono. What a hero. There’s a bit of a bloggers’ debate going on about his shades, but I have to say I like those shades.

The show was designed to be accessible 360 degrees. A rock concert in the round. (Novel idea, but hang on, didn’t Shakespeare come up with something similar all those centuries ago?). The band performed in the middle of the stadium, under a huge spaceship-like structure with a wrap-around video screen. Bono described it as enabling them to be more intimate with the audience. “Intimacy on a grand scale”, he said. With 50,000 people there, I didn’t think that ‘intimacy’ was quite the right word, but then our seats were right at the top of the stands. Certainly I did feel drawn in, connected, part of the show.

I saw Bono and The Edge interviewed by Jonathan Ross a few weeks ago, promoting the tour, and one thing stuck powerfully in my mind. Bono said that much of U2’s music was about joy, and he thought people didn’t know how to respond to that, because there isn’t generally a lot of joy in rock music. So last night, I listened for the joy in the music. And I heard it. There’s anger, aggression, edginess, sadness too. But I’m glad Bono had pointed out the joy, because for me, this was an evening of celebration.

Bono said that U2 last performed in Norman, Oklahoma, 26 years ago. That would have been one year before my repetitive exposure to In the Name of Love. During that time, I have graduated, had several different jobs, married, had three children, lived in ten different homes in six different towns, started a blog… And all they’ve been doing is singing, recording and touring. Poor old U2. What a very samey time they’ve had of it.

This is not doing the evening justice, but I am tired after the long journeys and the late night (still not quite back to my full energy levels), and Husband has plied me with a glass of red wine which he misguidedly thought would help the writing flow. I’m trying to think of a clever quote from U2 lyrics to finish the post off with, but I can’t. Oh, I know. You’ll enjoy this. When I got back, I looked at the U2 website, and noticed that Paris was on the list of venues. Full of excitement, I emailed my brother who lives in Paris (long-time readers of my blog will remember he used to comment as Charlesinparis).

“You have to go to U2” I gushed. “They’re going to be at the Stade de France on September 18th. You absolutely have to get tickets. Now.”

Don’t laugh at me too hard. An evening of intimacy with Bono - it can be a disorientating experience.

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Conversation

I love conversations with five year olds. This one was prompted by me emerging from the shower.

5-yo: Mama, ladies who have had babies don’t look so good in bikinis as ladies who haven’t had babies, do they?

Me: That's true, they don't.

5-yo: Why don't they?

Me: Well, their tummies get stretched by the baby growing inside. [Pause, but 5-yo seemed to expect more] I suppose different things seem important at different stages of your life. And I suppose you have to make decisions about what you want to do. For me, having children was much more fun than looking good in a bikini [which I don't think I ever did anyway. Ed.] What do you think?

5-yo: [confidently] I’m going to do both.

Me: Well, perhaps you'll be one of the lucky ones. There are some...

But I said that to her departing back, as she was already skipping away to whatever had next caught her five year old interest.