Little Iota

Here is Iota. This is me, aged 5 or 6. In my blue stripey school uniform summer dress. I remember this photo being taken. I remember squinting into the sun, and I remember not liking that bunch of flowers. Does it show? It must have been in the days before the great industry that is school portrait photography had got started. I remember the teacher Miss Nunnerly taking the photograph, and bringing an envelope to school with money for her for the prints. Enterprising Miss Nunnerly!

We lived about a mile from that school, and in summer we would walk home, taking a short cut across the orchards you can see in the background. Those orchards were all cut down, a few years after this was taken, victims of the ‘Common Market’, and the way it favoured imported French apples over homegrown English ones. That was how I understood it at the time, but my guess is that it was less to do with the market price of the apples, and more to do with the subsidies available to farmers for change of land use. I remember the sound of the chain saws, and how sad we all were. I still miss those orchards, when I’m at my mother’s house, the same house I lived in as the little girl in this photo, and take the dog for a walk over the open fields which replace them.

What else can I tell you about Iota, aged 6? I was good at reading, and I loved spelling tests because I always found them so easy. I was a slow runner, the slowest in the class, and hated any sport or game which showed this up. I was the youngest in the year. My best friends were Catherine and Sophie, and at playtime, we would teach each other ballet and gymnastics from the classes we went to. I always felt my ballet class was rather superior to Sophie’s (Catherine was the gymnast), as we wore BLUE leotards. Sophie’s ballet class wore pink, and even in those days, I rebelled against ubiquitous girly pink. I thought pink leotards were just too insipid and twee for words. What's more, my blue one had a SKIRT. Another point which made it clearly superior.

When I was 8, fate and the school dealt me a cruel blow. They divided the year in half alphabetically, and Catherine and Sophie were in the other class to me. I thought I’d be unhappy for the whole year. I think perhaps I was. I hated my surname with loathing, and then felt guilty for doing so. I missed my friends in class terribly, but I knew it was tactless to berate my parents for the name they had bestowed on me. Loyalty to friends battling it out with family honour. It's the stuff of tragedy.

There was another girl at that school, in Chesham, Bucks. She was two years younger than me, and in all honesty, I can’t remember her at school. I know a lot more about her life now than I did then, though we haven’t met since those early childhood days. I’ll tell you who she is in my next post…

Postscript: 9-yo tells me that this picture looks like 5-yo.

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Photo meme

I’ve been tagged by Heather, at Notes from Lapland (and you think you've got lots of snow in England?), to show you my favourite photograph, and tell you why it’s my favourite. I’m going to have to cheat a little here, because I don’t think I have a favourite photograph, per se. I love the ones that sit on my desk here, but I’m not going to post them because I don’t want photos of my kids on the internet. And of course they are of my kids. I’m so predictable. So I’m not going to show them to you, but I will describe them for you.

One is a headshot of 5-yo, taken in Colorado two years ago. It’s not a terribly good photograph. There are telegraph poles and wires in the background, and she is half in shadow, half in sun. She’s wearing a baseball cap belonging to one of her brothers, and that black curly mass just below her chin is her father’s head – she’s sitting on his shoulders. But here’s why I love it. I emailed it to a friend and she said “what a great photo – when you look into her eyes, you can see into her soul”, and that’s exactly right. It’s one of those rare photos where the subject is looking into the camera, but somehow their awareness of the camera doesn’t get in the way of what the camera sees. So yes, I love her wispy blond hair, her little button nose, her smile. And yes, I love the memory of the moment I took that picture, on a sunny day in the mountains. But most of all, I love looking into her 3 year old soul. She has a beautiful soul. Yesterday she was telling me how she had had to pretend she believed in Santa, because although SHE knows the secret about it, Grandad doesn't, and she hadn't wanted to spoil it for him.

The other photo is of the two boys and me. They are 4 and 1, (I wish I had written dates on the backs of photos, and could be more precise). I’m sitting on our bed, and I have one boy on each leg. You can tell from the awkward angles of my arms and hands that it was quite a feat to keep them there. They are naked (legs are positioned to preserve modesty), and I know it is just after their bath-time, because there is a towel draped over the bedrail (which means that the younger one was sleeping in our bed at the time the photo was taken – although that bedrail probably stayed there for a while afterwards, as these things do). We are all grinning. The photo perfectly captures those fun bathtime and bedtime moments. We used to bath them together, and then put on music and let them dance around on our bed (dance, not bounce, before you throw up your hands in horror), before putting on their pyjamas and reading them stories. I can hear now in my head, as I type, the cd of Scottish Folk Music that we often put on, which I was given as something of a joke, I think, when we moved to Scotland, but which grew on me and became a favourite. It was either that, or the Gypsy Kings, or Something Fischy, or nursery rhymes, or jolly Christmas tunes.

The boys have a strong resemblance in the photo, which has faded over the years. Their bodies both have that lovely soft pudgy small-child look about them. The 1 year old has those rolls of chubb on his arms and legs, and a big tummy. He is skinny as a whip today. We all look so relaxed and happy. The photo was posed, but it captured one moment that could have been a moment from any number of evenings. The boys are looking at the camera, but you can see they’re not going to sit still for long. They are ready to get off my lap and on with the dancing. I wonder what music we were playing that night?

I am going to tag

Paradise Lost in Translation, who always has an interesting angle on things, photographically or otherwise, and who might post a photo of herself wearing a dress with a gecko embroidered on the back - or might not,

Reluctant Memsahib, who definitely knows how to post a great photo (are you still blogging out there, Reluctant Memsahib?),

Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, because there should be more people who post pictures of tuna costumes, and

Elsie Button, for no particular reason. Oh, except for that memorable photograph of a malteser which she once posted.

And in case you are cross with me for not actually displaying a photograph, I will do so in my next post - promise.

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The Great Outdoors

Do you ever start writing a comment on a blog, and before you know it, you've rambled on so much that you've pretty much written a blog post on the subject?

I've just done that on Nappy Valley Girl's blog. I'm enjoying reading her blog, because she's just moved from Clapham Common to Long Island, and it's full of her early impressions of American life. I can hardly read a post without exclaiming in her comments box "oh yes, I remember that feeling so well!". It also makes me realise how far I've dug in, in three years. Things that strike her as unusual are just part of life for me now, and it takes someone else to point them out for me to notice. She surprised local American friends recently by offering them milk in their tea. I remember doing that. Now I don't, and what's more, I don't even think about it. These things become second nature.

Anyhoo, Nappy Valley Girl was cogitating today on why Americans don't seem to go outside when it's snowy, or even cold. When you're bringing up small children, it seems an essential part of a day to take them out into the fresh air, come hell, high water, or bad weather. But only if you're British.

I was commenting along my usual lines of "oh, I've wondered the same thing!" and found I'd written so much on the subject that, if I just added a tiny bit more, I could repeat it all on my own blog and call it a post. Which is what I've done.

I started off by saying I thought it was just a cultural thing. We Brits have a deep-seated feeling that fresh air is good for children, and that going outside at some point in the day is essential. The Americans don't. Simple as that.

But then I decided that actually, there's more to it than that. I think it's a reflection of a deep cultural difference between the adults. We Brits love our outdoors. We are a nation of gardeners. We like a sunny day because then we can be "out". If we go on holiday, we like to see the scenery of where we are. Our own countryside is sacrosanct.

It's just not the same here. I once tried to explain to a woman who asked me what I missed about the UK, that I missed walking down a street, walking the kids to school, going out and about at the week-ends... that it made me feel disconnected from the "real" world. I said "For example, you could easily live a life here where you literally NEVER went outside some kind of built environment. You leave the house by car from your integral garage. You can run your errands at drive-thrus. Everywhere here has convenient parking lots, so you don’t have to walk to get anywhere. Indeed you physically can’t do that. You could live without ever seeing the outdoors except for the parking lots you walk across."

She looked at me as if I was on another planet, and said "What's wrong with that?"

My guess is that this is one reason why the fear of climate change tugs at the emotions of Brits more than a lot of Americans. We would really mind if our countryside changed. For most people round here, it's a rather remote problem. If the planet warms up a little, your air-conditioning bill will be a bit higher, but it won’t significantly affect your life. No big deal.

I don’t want to get pious here, but I can’t help feeling that it’s important for us humans to be conscious that we belong to the natural world, and not the other way round. There’s a big wide world out there, and we are very small in it. How do your kids learn that, how do they come to feel that, if you don’t take them outside?