Friday, January 31
true gritI was wondering how long it would be before I heard the phrase 'Spirit of the Blitz' used in connection with the recent snow-induced road chaos. This fabled Spirit invariably attends British catastrophes of any magnitude, whether manmade or visited upon us by God. Apparently it surfaced among motorists stranded throughout the night on the M11 (Cambridge-London) and other motorways following a snowfall that most Canadians would probably consider to be a heavy frost , only they'd be too polite to say so. Hand in hand with the invocation of the Spirit of the Blitz goes the urgent impulse to blame someone - in this case local councils who, despite week-long weather warnings, failed to mobilise the gritters, so that the roads turned into ice rinks in a matter of hours. One of Jack's colleagues, who lives in Letchworth, normally (I think) about an hour's drive away, finally arrived home at midday today having left work yesterday at 5:30. I only hope that when he got there his electricity had been restored. It took one of my workmates 8 hours to get home to Ely, about 20 miles away (she travels by bus and train). Said colleague is about 4 months pregnant, and currently eating like a woman possessed - she sits opposite me pushing chocolate bars into her mouth one after another like logs into a woodchipper. Fairly impressive given she's about five three and even now maybe eight stone. Where does it all go? What's she growing in there? And who knows what being trapped in public transport for eight hours without access to chocolate bars would have done to her, or it?
'We don't need to worry about weapons of mass destruction. If terrorists ever find a way of making it snow, that'll obviously enough to bring Britain to a standstill.'
Source
Friday, January 24
Speaking of short stories that contain a lot, a colleague of mine, a Scotsman in (I guess) his late fifties, told me this one today: Scotsman's father served in the Second World War, and one evening, when he was home on leave, he and his wife, Scotsman's mother, went to local dance. A number of American servicemen were also there, and one of them, a young black guy, came up and asked Scotsman's mother for a dance. So she got up and danced with him, but when the dance ended and she took her seat again, she and her husband were approached by another American soldier - a white guy. 'I don't know what you do around here,' he began, 'but where I come from, nice girls don't dance with n*****s.' At which point Scotsman's mum ripped several varieties of shit out of this guy, pointing out that if the young black guy was good enough to wear a uniform and possibly get blown to bits for his country, he was good enough to dance with her, thank you very much.I guess that counts as a happy ending.
Thursday, January 23
I've just come across this - a short story by Australian writer Henry Lawson. Lawson (1867-1922) led an eventful, itinerant, often dissipated life, and was frequently out of work and homeless. He spent a couple of years in NZ, and apparently used to sleep on park benches in Wellington. I like this piece - like all good short stories it makes a little go a long way.Tuesday, January 21
waily-wailyCrossing the Cam by the Green Dragon this morning, I heard frantic barking from under the footbridge. Peered down into the beer garden below: at the water's edge was a group of three bemused-looking swans, and on the bank, a grubby Westie, running from swan to swan and back again, barking at each one in turn. I'm not sure what it was trying to do, but it looked very determined. Equally determined, the swans, sticking to the edge of their river, were facing him down, drawing back their necks as far as they could and staring down their beaks at him. Don't know who won because I had to get to work.
I like walking to work, especially the bucolic bit in the middle. You can stop and look at things. And it's great to have my spine back in walking order again.
If that's all a bit Pollyanna-ish for a Tuesday lunchtime, here's some remedial nastiness from the LRB on the relationship between celebrity and suffering
Monday, January 20
Utopian feminists fill the halls of the United Nations, where they examine everything through the lens of the “gender perspective” in study after unreadable study. (My personal favorites: “Gender Perspectives on Landmines” and “Gender Perspectives on Weapons of Mass Destruction,” whose conclusion is that landmines and WMDs are bad for women.) Source
Saturday, January 11
mother's little helpersStarted the New Year with the usual half-baked batch of good intentions about gettin' healthy and refraining from drinking myself to death. Last Sunday, a mere four days in, I throw my back into a huge spasm (while getting out of BED, for fuck's sake) and end up face down on the floor and completely unable to move. I then spend some minutes prostrated in this fashion saying no, I'm perfectly happy here, honest, please don't touch me OH GOD OWWWWW. In the end Jack manages to haul me onto the bed by my arms (good thing we have a futon) where I lie like a beetle pinned to a card because even thinking about moving makes my back spasm in a most unpleasant and immobilising way. After about half an hour of this we decide an ambulance is probably in order. Much to our surprise it arrives pretty quickly, and once I've sucked down about half a tank of nitrous oxide, the nice ambulance men are able to manhandle me off the bed and into their vehicle, still in my dressing gown. As I leave the house I can see a small figure, its face alight with curious wonderment, legging it up the street towards us, yelling 'What's happening, mister?' It's ten-year-old Tony, who lives in the block of flats at the end of the close, and who prides himself on knowing everything that's going on in Markham Close and its environs. (Tony was a particularly useful source of information while Della, our psychotic ex-neighbour, was still living in what was then known as the Trog Pit.)
Off we set for Casualty, where I spend about an hour slumped in a wheelchair in the waiting room and another three on a trolley in a cubicle. (Having worked in various health systems, including the NHS, I consider this an average, not to say reasonably brief, waiting period, and fortunately Jack has brought along a copy of Lord of the Rings.) The staff are very sweet, despite being overworked. I lie there listening to the resus calls and eavesdropping on the public/private traumas going on in adjacent cubicles and glimpsing people in greens rushing past the brightly-patterned curtains of my own cubicle (on which Great Architectural Works of the World are depicted in bilious yellows and greens - I identify the Sagrada Familia, The Sacré Coeur, the Houses of Parliament at Westminster, the Kremlin and assorted pagodas and things). Eventually the nice doctor comes back and tells me that I've sprained my back and that she's going to prescribe some nice strong painkillers. She sends me off home with a sack of industrial strength drugs, including a version of Valium called Diazepam. I always thought Diazepam was an antidepressant: turns out it's also a muscle relaxant. So for the past week I've been feeling calm. Very calm. Unnaturally calm. I have never been this calm. I would be freaked about it if I weren't so calm. Not that it's an especially positive type of calm - more a dumbed-down, muffled, can't-be-arsed sort of calm. It's also been turning my brain to custard - it's been hard to concentrate and I've been decidedly harder of thinking that usual. I can see why people on antidepressants always seem so keen to get off them. Anyway I took the last one yesterday so I can now revert to being slightly neurotic and obsessive. My pyschological comfort zone.
Friday, January 3
New Year's Eve was lovely - a pot luck dinner with a small group of mates. I made jiaozi (won tons) which are labour intensive in a fun way and are also a traditional dish eaten on Chinese New Year. (Served them with soy and chilli dipping sauces and they were hoovered up in a most gratifying way.) The evening was a hodge podge of traditions - our host Mariana had prepared enormous amounts of Mexican food and had also set out dishes of grapes - twelve per person for the countdown to midnight. This was a new one on me: in Spain and Mexico, as the clock strikes twelve, you eat a grape on each of the strokes. It's more graceful than it sounds, honest. And not to neglect the finest of British tradition, we played charades, which was not at all graceful, especially after several bottles of champagne. (We drew the clues out of a hat, which may explain why one participant managed to guess 'The Hudsucker Proxy' after 'Film ... three words ... first word ... 'The'. Humph.)
please god, don't let me be a housewifeAfter eight days of rank sloth and indolence (now THAT should be the true meaning of Christmas) I returned to work yesterday, cycling to work in freezing rain as the invisible sun hauled its sorry arse reluctantly over the horizon. Jack had a further two days off but got up at 7 AM, as he usually does on schooldays to bring me coffee and breakfast and to send me off with a packed lunch. Why he does this I've never quite worked out (on a purely clinical level, its because if he didn't I would simply never wake up, and would remain in a vegetative state for the rest of my life) but it always amazes me. And while I envied him his two extra days off, having a temporary house husband has been a revealing experience - I can see the appeal in going to work and coming home to a casserole in the oven, slippers on the hearth and a warm spouse. As a result, 'Nineteen-fifties husband' has now replaced 'Scourge' as my ultimate career aspiration.
