Joke

A man walks into a bar, and says "Ouch".

Tagged!

I’ve been tagged. Now, it’s very naughty of Reluctant Memsahib to tag me, as she knows full well that I’m on blogging sabbatical. I don’t really like tags, but this one got me thinking, and once I get thinking, wittering is only a small step further on. The tag invites me to witter on about what I’ve been reading, listening to, watching and surfing in the past few days, and I couldn't resist it.

Reading: I’m in a book club, and we’re doing Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Haven’t finished it yet, and can’t decide whether I like it or not. I can see that it is funny and well-written, but you need to have chemistry with a book, as with a person, and I'm not sure it and I have exchanged glances across a crowded room yet. I have also read Just for you, Blue Kangaroo every day, and sometimes more than once a day, since Christmas. It’s just as well I like the story, as 3-yo does, obviously. A lot. A big lot. Considerably more than me, actually. Pity there isn't another one in the series called Enough is enough, Blue Kangaroo.

Listening to: Alas, I hardly listen to anything these days (no Radio 4, you see) apart from the cd of choice in the car, which at the moment is some ghastly Winnie the Pooh compilation. I only ever hear the first track, at the end of which 3-yo insists “that one again, that one again”. On the school run, I claim that it is the boys’ turn, and then we have Radio Disney which is a mind-numbing experience, but I have to take my respite where I can. 'Listening to' is not where it is happening for me in this particular chapter of life.

Watching: I have to confess to watching almost no American tv at all, and because I don’t want to sound smug and superior, 'not wrong, just different' being my philosophy and all, I’d better not go on about it, but really, it isn’t good. I’m sorry, I’m not going to pretend. The only show that Husband and I do enjoy is Family Guy, which is like a ruder and darker version of The Simpsons. Hilarious. On BBC America, I watch Matt Frei giving an hour of news at 9.00pm (it’s like having the old Nine O’Clock News back again – oh joy). I am particularly enjoying the fact that the journalist they’ve sent off to Antarctica to track the Japanese whaling fleet is called Jonah Fisher. Marvellous BBC humour. No-one has made any reference to it, but it's just there as a shared joke. When I think of what I miss from Britain, it all tends to be the lovely gentleness and understatement of the place, like that joke for example. Or leafy green lanes, the fountain-like chatter of ladies meeting in tea shops, the soft colours of bluebells and cow parsely, the fine art of conversing without saying what you mean. Intriguingly, the programmes I enjoy most on BBC America are Top Gear and Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares. But that probably says more about the selection on offer than my homeward yearnings.

Last, but not least, surfing: Well, there are the blogs, of course. I love you all. Then there’s Weatherbug.com, which I like at times of the year when we have extreme weather. Just how hot/cold is it today? In the last week, we’ve had temperatures down to -13 celsius. This actually makes very little difference to life, as buildings and cars are well heated, and you only ever have to walk between them for 30 seconds. Most people wouldn’t actually bother with a coat if they were going to the supermarket. Nonetheless, I like to think that when we return to Britain, and people are complaining of the cold, I’ll be able to be reverse-smug and say “oh yes, well of course we got used to temperatures of -13 celsius when we lived in America.”.

Then there are the news pages, which keep me in touch with world news when I’ve missed Matt Frei at 9 o’clock, or deserted him for recorded Jeremy Clarkson or Gordon Ramsey (sorry, Matt, don’t take it personally). I watched a lot of BBC news online after the BA flight from Beijing crash landed at Heathrow. Plane crashes are always gruesomely fascinating, but I followed the aftermath of this one with particular interest, as I was at primary school with Peter Berkhill, the pilot. I emailed a friend, to ask if it was indeed him, and she confirmed that it was. We pondered together how the names of primary school co-pupils are forever etched on one’s memory (and I know I’ve spelt his name wrong – just don't want to turn up in too many google searches). The story is a little tarnished by the fact that I got excited when I watched the flight crew arrive at the press conference in BA’s headquarters amidst cheering ranks of BA staff, thinking to myself “yes, yes, I recognize him, that’s him, that’s Peter Berkhill, definitely him”, only to discover when they were introduced, that I’d been looking at senior first officer Tom Coward.

I'm passing the tag on to Laurie, Elsie Button, Dumdad and Ms Wiz.

The dangers of blogging

You think this is going to be about addiction. You have spotted the fact that I am technically on blogging sabbatical, but seemingly can’t actually stop. But ha! It’s not. I can walk away any time. I can. No, this is a little story that I hope will act as a New Year cautionary tale about the interface between real life and the life of the blog. This is an area that bloggers give much thought to, especially as they start out. What if I’m rude about my next door neighbor, and I’m not quite as anonymous as I believe? What if I tell a hilarious story about the school principal’s pants falling down (trousers to you, although pants would be funnier), and he turns out to be a secret lurker on my site? Should I tell my family and friends about the blog, and then have to be polite about them for ever more? What if I use my artistic licence and make up a few things, and get caught out? Is a blog fact or fiction? What if I say it was a grey and miserable Saturday afternoon on the beach, and people use the comments box to say “no it wasn’t, I was there and the sun was shining brightly all day long”? You know the kind of thing. But for all the care and caution with which the blogger attends to such issues, there is always the wild card out there waiting to be played. This is my wild card story.

I have a friend - let’s call her Josephine. We were at school together. In recent years, we have had pregnancy, motherhood and an email addiction as shared experiences. Our paths have run slightly less closely since I moved here, since she has been lured from email by Facebook and I by blogging. I do log on to see how her virtual Renault Twingo is doing and how many people have given her little pictures of chocolate cake (I’m sorry, but I can’t really get into Facebook, I know this is my loss because clearly so many other people love it, but there we are …), and she reads my blog. And we do still email a bit regarding essential matters such as how to go about buying girl clothes when you’ve only had boys so far, the latest trends in baby names, whether the grass is really greener over the other side of the fence and what can be done about it, and the teasing of a mutual friend who has a crush on her GP.

Anyway, Josephine had a baby in September. He’s called Joshua. He looks lovely in the pictures. Not long after he was born, Josephine emailed me saying “we think you should be Joshua’s blogmother”. I was thrilled. I emailed back at great wittering length. Several times. You may find this hard to believe... or you may not... but when I get going, I am something of a witterer. I’ve never sought treatment as, personally, I don’t see it as a medical condition, and I know several fellow witterers (leading politicians among them) who share my opinion. I can witter on at impressive length about pretty much nothing at all, so wittering on about being asked to be godmother turned me into Mrs Wittering of No 1, Witter Avenue, Great Wittering, Wittershire. Believe me. I wittered on about how I love having godchildren. I made jokes about furry godmothers. I mentioned that baby Joshua almost shares a birthday with another of my godsons (clearly a fact of huge interest to a mother in the throes of managing a new baby). I reminisced about how she had lent me a pretty white Vertbaudet summer dress (puffed sleeves, Peter Pan collar) for my daughter’s christening that had been her daughter’s, but how I didn’t think it would do for Joshua. I wrote volumes about how we always regretted not having asked her to be godmother to one of ours (always a tricky area), and that I’d once suggested to Husband that we should have a fourth child so that we could rectify the situation, but had had to concur with his opinion that that wasn’t a very strong reason for further procreation. Wittering, much wittering.

And then there was silence. I heard nothing, which didn’t really surprise me. New babies don’t allow much email time, Josephine’s husband has to be away for work for weeks at a time, no allowances made for a new arrival, her daughter had just started school… But then, after two weeks, with all that witter in the Sent Items folder looking lonely and increasingly uneasy, like the woman under the clock with a red carnation in her hand, I sent an email saying “Feeling a bit shifty here. You didn’t really mean it about the godmother thing did you? It was just a pun wasn’t it? Um. Don’t know what else to say.”

Josephine came clean. “Truth will out”, she said. “We hadn’t really got round to thinking about godparents. But we really really really like the idea, so please do be Josh’s godmother. Or blogmother.”

If you reach out and touch your computer screen at this point, you can still feel the warmth generated by my embarrassment, even after 3 months and all those miles between us. Try it.

The story ends well, though. There was a bit more emailing between us. I said I was resigning and they could reconsider at leisure, and I wouldn’t be at all offended. Josephine said no, don’t resign, we do really want you to do this.

Husband is always very good in these over-wittering situations, and he suggested that really, we should all start operating a new system for appointing godparents. Henceforward it should always be done, following my excellent lead, on a volunteer basis. That way, you’d guarantee motivated godparents, and save parents a whole lot of angst about the choice. He pointed out that it was a win-win situation. I love being a godmother and can go and choose little baby clothes in the shops; Baby Joshua gets an additional Christmas and birthday present every year, and extra prayers offered up for his well-being. Can’t be bad. And Josephine? Well, she gets a laugh every time she thinks of my woeful over-enthusaism (I tell you, I’ve been in America too long), and hey, we’re still mates. In fact, she is such a good mate that she doesn’t use the comments box to accuse me of plagiarism every time I say ‘hey’ followed by a comma, or ‘as eny ful no’ or ‘aaaaargh!’ or ‘it’s not easy being me’ or any of her other trademark expressions that I have shamelessly nicked. And speaking of the comments box, I want you all to tread softly in it (as if you ever do anything other…). Remember this is a real life story you’re dealing with. And in case you were wondering, yes, she is happy for it to be a blog post – in fact, she suggested it.

Oh, and on the question of my blogging sabbatical, of course I'm still on it. I'm looking on the last half dozen posts as an extended one-off Christmas special. What do you mean, it’s January 20th...?

Visit of the Snow Queen

Here is a guest blog by my sister, who spent Christmas and New Year with us. We had a large fall of snow just before she arrived, which was topped up a few days later and then stayed for the duration of her visit, melting away the day after she left. Hence the name she acquired while here.

I bribed her to write the post with the promise that she'd get nice comments from all my bloggy friends, so please don't disappoint.

"I had never been to America before, and had no idea what the Midwest would be like. Most of the television I watch is American, but none of it is filmed anywhere near Iotaville. If I were to go to New York, I would have an idea about what it would look like as I watch Friends and Sex and the City avidly. Ditto Seattle as I watch Frasier and Miami as I watch CSI. But, with the Midwest, I had no preconceived notions as to what the place would look like.

I had assumed, in a very superior manner, that there would be no history and no culture. The first assumption was completely correct, but I was very favourably impressed by the two museums I saw. They were imaginatively done and fun (especially if accompanied by a small child who dances round the glass cases shouting 'pooperscooper, pooperscooper, pooperscooper' in a loud voice).

What I found difficult to take on board was the sheer size of America. I was thinking that if you lived anywhere in the South of England and wanted to see, for example, Ian McKellen as King Lear, then you could travel up (or down) and see it. This is simply not possible in America, due to the vast distances. Of course, what you should be comparing it with is not England, but Europe. I wouldn’t travel to see any play if it was in Portugal, and this is what the comparison should be.

What also struck me was the confidence and positive outlook that everyone exudes, which I couldn’t decide whether I liked or not. In some ways it was a nice change after all our British negativity, but I did wonder how kind it was to tell children that they could be anything they wanted. “Never give up your dream” seems a very American thing to say. On the one hand, to tell people they will succeed if they keep trying is admirable, but it is totally unrealistic to tell a little girl she can be a top ballerina if she has no talent. Hard work and determination can get you far, but cannot cut everything. Enthusiasm, I decided, is great if it is genuine, and both cultures have something to learn about pitching it at the right level.

I did love the food. Being possessed of the sweetest tooth in the whole world meant that I was in my element with Philadelphia cheese with added brown sugar and treacle (did I imagine this?); ice cream with caramel, butterscotch and chocolate poured on top; and sugar cookies with extra icing. It was probably just as well for both teeth and waistline that I was only there for a couple of weeks. I often think about the Wal-mart shelves, groaning with Krispy Kreme doughnuts, little mince pies with real cream piped on top; and too many cakes to count. I am reaching for the jelly babies as we speak.

Now I am back, I do find I go around saying 'awesome' and 'good jarb' to people. I am certainly going to visit America again."

Enthusiasm: Part II

Where was I? Ah yes. Lost and alone on a sea of unembarrassed enthusiasm, without the raft of irony to cling onto... Doesn't sound good - I'd better not leave me there too long.

When one is shipwrecked, one has to make use of the scarce resources to hand, and thus it was that I began to investigate enthusiasm, to see if I could put it to any useful purpose. I noticed that my children came home from school with teachers’ comments reading “woo-hoo, 10-yo, this is AWESOME work!”, or “6-yo, I am so PROUD of how hard you tried on this - way to go!”, and seeing their faces light up with pride. I began to wonder how they would cope with a return to the “good effort” or “nice work” crumbs that they would be thrown by British teachers.

Then I noticed that even adults dealing with adults feel able to say things about themselves and each other that are affirming and positive and, well, rather, um, uncomfortable and embarrassing and, let’s face it, jolly unBritish. Then after a while, since you can get used to pretty much anything, I began to feel that this is actually quite nice (in a reserved kind of repressed way). The zenith came when I got together with 3 other women to form a book club. We had a great evening, partly discussing the book, mostly discussing life, and the next morning, there was a little flurry of emailing. It was effusive. There were superlatives. I was told I was “adorable”. Email, of course, is very forgiving, and in the privacy of my own home, I was able to shuffle about in my chair, look at the ceiling, breathe deeply and recite the words of God save the Queen to restore my equilibrium. I wrote a reply, matching their effusive excitement: “Thanks so much for your emails. It wasn’t a bad evening at all, was it?”

Maybe I’ve just been here too long, but you know, I can’t help feeling that the Americans might have got hold of something. I wonder what it is like in the other direction. How on earth does it feel to an American moving to England? Dour, cynical, repressed, gloomy? To them I say, you should try living in Scotland. No, no, I'm only joking.

You see, here in Home on the Range, there's a line that goes 'seldom is heard a discouraging word'. You get to Britain, and it's the brutal opposite. The newspapers are discouraging, the discussion in the office is discouraging, the chat at the school gate is discouraging. We don’t see it like that. We see it as self-consciously amusing, wittily detached. We think Oscar Wilde, Jonathan Ross, Private Eye. We look on the Americans as a nation of adults who’ve never quite grown out of childhood, but I’m beginning to wonder if the British are a nation of adults who haven’t entirely left their teenage years behind. We’re so keen (in a totally uninterested way, of course) to be cool, to be unimpressed. Perhaps it’s not as clever as we think.

I find myself in the uncomfortable position of sitting on the fence with a foot in each camp. Fundamentally I am a Brit. My Brit foot is a size 6, and it’s a laconic foot in a painfully elegant cashmere sock, draped languidly over the fence in a self-deprecating gesture, an ironic reference to post-modernist foothood.

But my Yank foot, a size 8½, is learning to wiggle its toes in an unembarrassed manner. I dread to look, as I think it might be clad in one of those socks with individual toes, in bright stripes or spots. It might even be in team colours. It's enjoying itself, and it isn't going to apologise for that. It's pursuing happiness, and that's its right. Nothing to be ashamed of there. I’ve just thought of something else. Oh no. It probably understands the offside rule, and if not held in check, will soon start offering to explain it to other feet.

Hm. Time to do the patent Iota litmus test of enthusiasm. Close my eyes, picture an old friend of mine who used to render a roomful of the rest of us helpless with laughter by his description of an 'enthyoosiast'. Re-run in my memory that perfectly honed timing and pronounciation. Yup. Still has me rolling around in my imaginary seat. Phew. Still on the right side of the fence then. That’s a relief. Though nothing to get too excited about, of course.

Enthusiasm: Part I

Enthusiasm. I’ve thought a lot about enthusiasm over the past year. That’s because there’s a lot of it about over here. Americans are so unembarrassed about it, and you know what? I’ve come to admire that. I know, I know, it’s all very unBritish, and don’t think I can’t see you, over the Atlantic, wincing a little and gripping your shoulder blades together, and thinking “oh Iota, no, please not”.

It’s not cool, is it? Enthusiasm. It means celebrating your kids’ achievements publicly (dreadful), or being proud of what and who you are (ghastly), or telling people all about your favourite occupation and why you enjoy it (anorak). I have to say, however, that having experienced rather more of it in the past year than I am used to, I can see it does have a lot of upside.

My study of the enthusiasm phenomenon started when I went to 10-yo’s first soccer match of the season. I was horrified. All those parents cheering the team on, and seeming to mind very much how they did. I mean really mind. Not just showing up and being supportive in a generally parental way. I mean running up and down the sidelines and shouting encouragement. I guess this happens in Britain too. We hadn’t quite reached that stage before we left, so I asked my brother in Sussex, who has soccer-playing children. He said “yes, I’m afraid people do get rather keen, but just shout “go deep” every now and again, and you’ll be fine”. Yet in spite of his advice and this evidence of the existence of enthusiasm on the south coast of England, I couldn’t help feeling that somehow this unapologetic eagerness and commitment was something of a different animal in America.

I tested out another mum, by making a conspiratorial comment about not understanding the offside rule. Now, women do not understand the offside rule. That is just how it is, as any self-respecting member of the sex will tell you. They are not biologically designed to. It’s to do with hunting and gathering, or staying in the cave, and superior non-understanding DNA being passed into the gene pool. It’s been scientifically proved. So imagine my horror when the other mum said “oh don’t worry, you just have to see it in operation a few times, and then you’ll get it, but actually FIFA have just brought in a new ruling which has nuanced it a little”. Now that really wasn’t cricket at all. Here I was, having left family and home to start a new chapter in another continent, and I couldn’t even make a connection using the most fundamental of womanly bonds. I diagnosed a case of over-enthusiasm, but worse was to come.

There was another mother there who said she had been at the soccer field on Saturday AND Sunday. When I joked about “beyond the call of duty”, she said, straight-faced, “I wouldn’t miss it for the world”. That was the moment I realized I was adrift. Lost and alone on a sea of unembarrassed enthusiasm, without the raft of irony to cling onto. That was a bad moment.

To be continued…

Top tips for a crafty Christmas

I might have been a preschool teacher in another life. Trouble is, it involves too many preschoolers in close proximity for too many hours of the day, and these days, too much filling in of forms and assessing which child has mastered which skill and when. Don’t get me started. But the little hint that gives me away is this: I love pottering about doing crafty-type things with small children. Actually, I love doing them without small children, but I didn’t know that until I had small children. Now I have small children, they are the props which make it possible for me to fiddle around with cotton wool, foam shapes and glue, without feeling silly. Of course now I’m in America, I could take up scrapbooking, which would probably fill the need, nurture the talent, help me express whatever creativity lurks behind the enjoyment of glue, shapes, googly eyes and pom-poms, but I can’t quite see the point of scrapbooking (sorry, all you dedicated scrapbookers out there), and I do have at least a few years left of small children before I have to turn my pottering about into something more credible. Maybe by then the phase will have passed.

Now don’t build me up into some kind of craft supermum here (I know you were about to…) I don’t hover round the kitchen table, sticky backed plastic in hand and clever ideas from the internet in head. My house isn’t filled with cute and kitsch home-made items that are both attractive and useful. It’s not a frequently-indulged pleasure, and when it is indulged, the result is some mournful object that hangs around on the side somewhere, until I judge that no-one except me will notice or be sad if it transferred to the trash.

Christmas is the perfect opportunity to indulge myself. I have a couple of books of beautiful craft projects for the season, so I flick through those. I always get put off by the words 'oven baked clay' though. Do people really know how to handle oven baked clay? I don’t. Sounds difficult. No. Trust me. There are only two things you need for Christmas crafts. Glitter and enthusiasm. That’s it. Simple, you see. Glitter and enthusiasm.

The glitter is easy. These days you can buy it in glue, which means it’s less messy. That, in my opinion, defeats half the purpose. I like the old stuff, in tubes, which you sprinkle daintily over your glue patterns, until the lid insert falls out and the whole tube empties in a great pile. You won’t be vacuuming glitter out of your carpet till September if you use the glitter glue, which would mean you missed half the fun. For me, glitter and sparkle has always been inseparably part of Christmas, but having a daughter has been a challenge to that. The inevitable pink that invades one’s life – the hospital pretty much delivers it along with the baby - is all too often accompanied by sparkle. ‘Pink and sparkly’ have become a classic duo, similar to ‘warm and cosy’, ‘hale and hearty’, ‘safe and sound’, ‘gin and tonic’. I’m not sure what you can do about that, really, except just use ever more copious amounts of glitter at Christmas time, and add it to the list of parental ‘when I was a child’ laments, along with out of season strawberries and having to eat up your food even if you didn’t like it.

You have to dig a bit deeper for the enthusiasm, but we all have a little Joyce Grenfell in us somewhere. You just need to brush up a bit of vocabulary. In America, this is easy, because (as well as the trusty ‘good jahb’), you can use ‘ahsome’ for every eventuality. For emphasis, you can say ‘totally ahsome’, but usually just good old ‘ahsome’ will do, especially if you add a bit of extra ‘aah’ to it. In England, we say ‘spiffing’ a lot at this time of year, supported by ‘splendid’ and ‘top notch’ (British readers, what ho, back me up on this one).

The other failsafe enthusiasm-generator is the Christmas CD. I’m not talking carols from King’s College Cambridge, or pop classics by the original artists. I’m talking Jingle Bell Rock or Fifty Festive Favourites. It’ll have unadventurous bass lines and a relentlessly annoying drum beat, it’ll have children singing out of tune and twee breathy whispered Christmas greetings, it’ll contain irritating mistakes (ours has “deck the halls with bows of holly”), but you know you’ll love it deep down.

The rest is easy. You just cut out shapes, and put lots of glitter on them. You can do snowflakes (white paper, easy), or reindeer (brown paper, might need a bit of advance shopping, or rummaging through the trash for an old brown envelope), or Santa (red paper, cotton wool), or a stocking (come now, even the most creatively challenged of us can cut out a stocking shape). See, it’s easy. You just have to remember that this is not an occasion when less is more. More glitter is more.

The final stage is to put up the decorations. Now there are some people whose artistic sensibilities may be offended at this point. If your house looks like something out of Country Living magazine, you may want to debate this suggestion, but come on, it’s only 12 days, and what are you afraid of? Even if the neighbours come round, what are they doing to say? At best, nothing, and at worst something along the lines of “oh, these are very… um… festive, aren’t they?” You may even enjoy watching them pause and struggle for the right word (should have thought the whole sentence out before beginning it). No-one is going to remark “your children don’t have very good fine motor skills do they?” or “what a pity your creative urges weren’t adequately satisfied by three experiences of childbirth”. You have nothing to fear in polite society, and you will make your children happy. What more could you want?