Brazil. Nuts?

The more I hear about Brazil, the more I want to go there; that is the purely the fault of C with her amazing stories and pots of guava paste for my cheese, and P and his superbly delectable feijoada.  Quite annoying.  A year ago I could think "Brazil" and move on, but now I think "Brazil, when oh when will I EVER get there in this life of Children and Dogs and One Salary?" and start feeling disconsolate and itchy-feetish.  I really, really want to go.


Well, this has kept me going this evening.  I don't speak Portuguese but, with some clinging to Latinate familiarity, it seems to uneducated me that the point of it might be to encourage one to, er, save water?

Come on, Brazilians.  Enlighten me, please...




Shhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh...
I'm sure I shouldn't, in these times of global shortage, but I can't help a big EEK. Us English, hey. We are so VERY prissy.


(Oh, I know, I know.  Speak for yourself.  Etc...)

Too Early to Nowell?

I suppose one good thing about Christmas coming earlier each year is that in times of infant defiance, you get  longer to blackmail your children with Phone Calls To Santa.  I find that at this time of season, a simple "Hello Santa?" into my mobile is enough to blow any bottom-lipped mutiny into smithereens of Sudden Compliance.

But today we had one of those super magazine-mummy moments when calm reigned utterly. For one blissful half hour, no one smashed anyone with sofa cushions or accused anyone of being stinky.  They lay across the floor drawing pictures, said please and thank you to various things, and even the dog was smiling. (But note to self: did anyone pop in unannounced to witness this and be amazed at the wonders of my mothering?  No, they bleeding didn't. But when there's cacophonic chaos and things strewn, oh yes; then, in they flock...)

Anyway. Not being one to miss a choice opportunity, I asked what they might like Santa to bring them this year for being Really-Really-Good-Like-This-At-All-Times.

I don't object to children believing in Santa, and I was shocked recently when one eyes-a-flame mother unleashed an unsolicited jeremiad on me suggesting I should. But I do see that it is slightly double-edged. On the one hand, it is incredibly endearing; this wide-eyed, unsuspicious trust in an all-benevolent old man who sails through the skies to deliver real reward for all the Being Good they have done.  There is such an innocent charm to it that of course you don't want it dispelled; that would be proof that they are growing into harder, more cynical, thinking beings...and God forbid.  But on the other hand, when the Santa list includes "Long Haired Pig (real one)", "Totem pole like the one at Virginia Water", "Granny to Come Back Down From the Sky" and "Mega Mindy costume, dolls and Absolutely Everything Else" (when on earth will poor Santa find time to shop in Holland?), you do also need to find some clever way to prepare them for disappointment.

To distract them somewhat from the impossibilities of their hopes, I asked what Santa should bring Daddy and I.

The oldest was immediately adamant.  Daddy would need beer, some books, something for his bike, new rugby boots, a tool kit, and something to take his headache away. The youngest nodded in approval and that was that.

"And me?" I said, quite hopefully.

There was silence.  After a while, J looked at me.  "The thing is, Mummy, when it was your birthday you told Daddy the Only Thing You Wanted In The Whole Wide World was a Banjo".  (Ok, I admit it, I did say that) "And now you've got it. So there isn't anything else you'd want." (Damn me and my absolutes).  "But that doesn't matter Mummy, because you can enjoy watching everyone else open their presents." (Hrrmph)

The younger one looked up from her picture of Fairy Wars (yes, really - the head fairy wears a black helmet and does funny breathing).  "I know what Santa should bring for Mummy, " she said decidedly.  "What, darling?" I asked in hopeful anticipation.  She went back to a detailed sketch of Fairy, Shot By Arrow.

"Easy," she said.  "Make-up.  Lots and LOTS of make-up".

Right then.  There's one little girl who will be getting bath salts in her Christmas stocking....

I want one of those...

Because I thought I sounded moany in the last entry, here's a cheery one.  How FABULOUS is this?  All my friends are happily represented here! Someone please tell me how to justify buying it?!

BUENAVENTURA PRESS
What a super place!

AFTERTHOUGHT
Although I don't think I know any snipers.  At least, I do hope not.

Oh Lordy.  That'll be the next thing...

From one black hole to another...

Ok, sometimes I need to remind myself to step back and recall that there is always a bigger picture. Things that occasionally seem to matter, and really really matter, can perhaps be relegated to their rightful place entitled Pointless. It's like the dog-hairy-dust that piles together under the piano. It probably shouldn't be there, but since I'm the only one who knows, where's the harm? One day, one day, I'll bend down and move it. When I remember.

Good old Nasa, hey, for knowing when to be helpful. Their Astronomy Picture of the Day page is just the ticket when you need to come up for air. And much as some of the pictures do make me want to lie down and grip the earth I'm on, lest I slide off into all that velvet blackness, it does also cautiously whisper that in the long run, whatever certain people shriek and however shreddingly they shriek it, this incredibly unfathomable universe around us really isn't that bothered. And therefore perhaps neither should we be.

"Think of all those people in China who don't give a damn," someone said recently.

I am really trying. But I am also getting crosser too. Push me MUCH more, you, and I'll blog it. ALL of it.

Japan's Sudden Hermits

I've said it before but I love Japan for being weird and wonderful in equal measure. To me. And of course I realise it's a matter of perspective, but although I would never live in Japan again, I also know I would never be bored there. When I first started this silly blog, a friend in Japan sent me an email saying "Do NOT fill it with strange things from Japan". And I've really tried. I know there's the exercise video back in one of the first posts, but since then I have been positively swotty in my willingness to comply. And there's so MUCH gloriously weird stuff one could write about, you have to give me some credit for that, A-chan.

But recently I have been dealing with such a frightful situation of relentless, targeted abuse, (deadly meningitis on its own is just too dull - we needed something more to think about, really we did) and today it left me wanting to build a den behind the sofa and move in. I didn't do that, actually, but I did spend a few moments with the blanket drawn very firmly over my head, and in this shut-them-out moment, I remembered the hikikomori.

Going back a bit, one thing that struck me so much while I lived in Kobe was the Japanese penchant for gentle and philosophical acceptance of "syndromes". The bizarre catches on fast there. You hear of one weird person doing one weird thing and, before you know it, there are lots of weird people doing the same weird thing and bang - you have a syndrome. Oh ok, you could sometimes call it a phase, or a fad, or crazy-crazy craze, but I'm not really talking about the Lolitas, or Ganguro (girls who dye their hair white and black themselves up with fake tan - probably all moved on now but it used to freak the hell out of me...). That's all pretty bloody odd, I think, but now I mean the darker stuff. People flocking to get lost forever in the Suicide Forest of Aokigahara, the kegadol fashion (sex yourself up with bandages to look injured, anyone?) and one that struck me so much while I was there, and which came back to me tonight, hikikomori.

Hikikomori is widespread enough to be described as a sociological phenomenon, although I'm not sure if it as still as prevalent now as it was ten years ago, when the western media started gasping. Usually ascribed to teenage boys (though girls and non-teens were certainly not immune) the hikikomori can perhaps be best represented in our terms as a Sudden Hermit. Certainly, drop-out, often used for want of a real translation, cannot really cut it. These poor people isolate themselves, wholly and without warning, within one room of the house and refuse to come out. Sometimes for years. Causes are often cited along the lines of "inability to conform", " buckling under social pressure", "failure to meet academic expectation" and the good old use-for-all "bullying".

I do not, at all, mean to belittle the obviously disturbed psychological state of someone who one day comes home, walks into his bedroom and refuses to come out again. The effect that would have first on the sufferer and, perhaps more, on his family is unthinkable. But when you start reading up on the stories of those who have suffered from the syndrome, either as a hikikomori themselves or as the person who then had to ensure their survival (in most cases their mother) you do end up rather open-mouthed. I've been re-reading tonight, and you come across tales of families who built new kitchens after their hikikomori son would not allow anyone into their old one; mothers who stayed at home permanently the first moment of self-incarceration, thereby hermitising themselves as completely, so that they would always be on hand, if needed. And families who declared their child dead, rather than face the humiliation of admitting to a hikikomori teenager, and committed themselves to a life of smuggling in food.

It's tragic, but I can't help wondering. Isn't this acceptance of it all a bit, well, passive? It is after all only a door. Can't you kick it in, walk in and march them off to a psychologist? Or at least to the shower. Or am I just too brutally Victorian for words? I honestly can't believe if J or J ever shut themselves in our kitchen that R are I would say "How troublesome, we'll just have to build ourselves a new one."

And however much public and social soul-searching you do for the "cause" of such behaviour, could it not just be that, well, sometimes weird ideas just catch on? I saw one report suggesting that Japan's sakkoku, its 200 year period of total isolation, was the root cause, as it idealised a spirit of the solitary "within the blood of its citizens"...academic, I agree, but I am dubious. I'm not sure if the term has even been medicalised now, and I think it is striking that when you do scan the various research papers available online,they do often say they have difficulties finding similar cases in other parts of the world. Which doesn't mean they don't exist, but just not on such a scale.

I don't get it at all, which is not to say I am totally without sympathy. I probably am simply not far-thinking enough. Anyway, it was all interesting enough to get me out from under the Blanket of Despair.

So that's something else to thank Japan for.

PS I don't actually think hermitise IS a verb, but I rather like it...



and PPS I am SO sorry, Yumi-chan, but I couldn't resist..!

I do wish Dudamel would pop in for tea one morning.

Ok, here is something really to cheer and inspire.

You cannot beat the story of El Sistema as an example of the amazing coming out of the awful; it's a true triumph of a philanthropic dream of one man being expertly managed through all the necessary economic labyrinths into its current, breath-taking being. And since you are supposed only to be a complete human being yourself when you are able to declare something positive about any and every person, (try Stalin or Pal Pot!!) then this would, for me, be a rare tick alongside Hugo Chavez. As he, apparently, champions it.

Which is another stunning factor. El Sistema flourished for over 30 years under both leftist and rightist political administrations.

Oh you could wax on for ages.

But this I have come back to again and again over the past 10 days and I defy anyone to watch it and remain unmoved. Bearing in mind that they say 90% of these kids come from the most difficult and impoverished echelons of Venezuelan society, including Dudamel himself.





And now listen to Maestro Abreu's speech on Tedtalks. Making sense of the world in a mere 20 minutes.

Oh this is ALL so much more fun than moaning!

No more whinging

These have been strange times. My friend E from Utrecht emailed me recently in reference to a recent turn of mad events, and said "Wow, you guys haven't been spared much over the past five years". By golly, I thought, she's right. And mentioned this to R, in rather an inward-looking, Eeyore-ish way.

R thinks differently. R thinks it's all a matter of perspective. Actually, he thinks, we have been spared ALL sorts. Yes, my back gave out and I had no end of time lying around on floors looking at Helping People with a pained expression, BUT...I didn't need surgery in the end, did I? J stopped our hearts 14 times in as many months with her rather sinister twists on febrile convulsions which left her a motionless greyish-blue and us gibbering wrecks BUT...she's fine now, isn't she? R got knocked off his bike this summer in a hit-and-run in London, which imprinted his bike forlornly into the tarmac, BUT...it was only the bike, wasn't it? And the meningitis, well, that was horrid, but the dark forecasts we were given that night with relation to cryptococcus, haven't come to be. Have they? And finally, my mum. And this is the hardest bit to play Pollyanna with, but I have, and I think she'd agree - yes, she was suddenly, hastily whipped away by cancer just when J had been born, BUT. She DID get to see him. And cancer is very often far crueller in its decision to linger. That, at least, she was spared.

To borrow from Jerome, R comes out quite sensible at times.

And in any case, things, all round, are looking up. Just one crazed and vile situation blazes on in the face of all credulity, but you know? I really think the time has come to fight back and so, there may even be a chink of light at the end of this particular tunnel too.

It's all a matter of changing your perspective. As my great-grandmother used to declare, in response to any whining "Come on then lass, I'll take thee to't graveyard and see if owt will swap with thee". To be frank, sadly one doesn't need to be as drastic as the graveyard. Iraq, North Korea, Burma, Zimbabwe, Gaza et al are all equal cases in point. I really wouldn't want to swap there either.

So, you just have to spot the lucky bits when they are there, right, R? Although, really, I'd quite like things to be just a little bit boring for a while now. To catch my breath a bit, you know.

I'm sorry for my views, I must have been confused...

When common decency to other people proscribes real honesty, it's a jolly good thing that other people can say it for you.

Oh My Giddy Aunt

There's an older post here somewhere, where I was blibbering on about how I'd surprised myself, after embedding a plug in my foot, with my capacity for swear words .

But something else happened today. My 3-year-old is at the stage where she externally exudes a delightful innocence while at the same time seething internally with mischief. She has also realised that a wide-eyed, pink-cheeked expression of ingenuousness can pull the wool over most people's eyes and allow her, on those occasions, to get away with what she wants. My dad is a regular victim of this, but while he relaxes in Australia, she has been looking for new prey.

So. Today we went to meet a new music teacher (and before it sounds too Surrey for words - the idea of taking a 3-year-old to a music teacher - I must say there IS a story behind it but it's too involved to blog). Anyway. This lovely lady was all friendliness and enthusiasm and J responded in a similar way. Together they played some notes and clapped rhythms, we all smiled and everything was well.

And then I saw it - a slight flicker, in a very wide eye.

"Now duckie, " said Nice Music Teacher "We're going to sing your name. I shall sing "What-oh-what-is-YOUR-name? "(C, C, C, C, Eeeee, C) and YOU shall reply "My name is J - ". My 3 year old nodded her plaits very enthusiastically and was rewarded with the most indulgent of smiles. Which she returned, just a little bit too sweetly.

Off they went. Nice Teacher played an accompanying chord and sang her line. J lifted up her face, and sang, prettily, rhythmically, musically and all:

"My Name is Stink-Arse".

Stink-arse? STINK-ARSE?

Why, why, WHY and where, where, WHERE?! I can't blame her brother, he' s only 4. I won't blame me, not for that one. 'B*gger', yes; I do say that, but stink-arse?

I have never heard anyone say Stink-Arse.

So why, then? Why that? Why couldn't she have said Jelly-Head? Fizzy-Boots? Or Yum-Yum? Even Stink BUM would have been better, in comparison. But please not 'arse'.

It got me thinking though. Every language, every patois, every tiny geographical dialect has its share of curse words, and it's hardly a surprise that studies also show that verboten lexis globally is pretty much as easily categorised into the religious, the visceral (or scatological) and the social as in English. We swear for solidarity, or to offend, to shock, to release tension and show aggression, and these three areas hold enough taboo to make it possible. Logical all round.

However, what I have found out this afternoon is that swearing is not just a case of uncontrolled utterance. As far as our brains are concerned, expletives can be an amalgam of spontaneity and deliberation. Even in what may feel like an uncontrolled outburst of Naughty Words, we do apparently still make conscious decision on the choice of our language, after a split second assessment of the situation.

I also learnt this. While the left hemisphere of the brain is in charge of language, the right part runs emotional linguistic content. That I knew. However, apparently, the lower part of the brain manages swearing, along with instinctive emotion, and it is an activity which involves both the limbic system (behaviour, emotion and memory) and the basal ganglia (motor functions, impulse control). But this is where it gets interesting. It seems, from my very basic and interrupted reading (was also simultaneously doing a Meccano Robot, and making fishcakes for tea) that the brain stores swear words as complete lexical units, rather than singular, combinable phonemes. That I didn't know.

So my 3 year old is just repeating, I asked my Clever Former Colleague who can still sit in his office surrounded by books, by dint of having a wife who does the childcare.

"Young children will always remember illicit language, long before they truly comprehend the meaning" he assured me. "Curse words are more memorable, and studies consistently show that in any language, taboo words given in a list of randoms will be remembered first. If you write the word 'cat' in pink and ask someone to read the colour not the word, they will do it. Use a swear word, and it is more difficult. It's the way we are wired."

So if a Generation Game-type conveyor belt passes us full of words, some of them naughty, it's the latter we'll be taking home?

"It's not a very academic example, " he said politely, after a long pause "but, I think, yes." And for the first time, he didn't ask me if I was planning to return to work.

Thank goodness for that, then. My daughter was not conjuring horrid images in her head to verbalise in an attempt to shock. She was just repeating, probably uncomprehendingly, something she'd heard.

Which, however, still begs the question. WHERE had she heard that?

I have my suspicions and I shall be Miss Marple in my quest to find out...

Being more expert on Burkina Faso than the day before.

It took me an hour and a half to get round the supermarket and buy pumpkin pie ingredients for R yesterday. Mostly because I spent the main part of this time sitting on the bonnet of my car talking to the lovely man who had offered to wash it.

I always think that everyone has a story and the most fascinating tales come to you when you least expect it. He walked up to me and said "Excuse me, lady, but THAT baby needs a wash" and proceeded to pick at the great globule of windscreen bird muck with his fingernail. I shrieked with prissiness and tried to find him a wetwipe. He laughed back at me. "Lady, " he said "I am from Burkina Faso. We don't worry about such things there."

I was immediately hooked. "Burkina Faso?"

He grinned. "I bet you don't know where it is".

I have pride, even in a supermarket car park near Staines. I told him I knew exactly where it was, that it rubbed its landlocked borders with Mali and Niger, and Ghana and Togo (I swallowed that last one a bit as I wasn't sure - I always mix up Togo with Benin, ignorantly. Having looked at the map now, I can see it's both, anyway). I said it used to be called Upper Volta, had been nabbed by the French, and it's capital was Ouagadougu and I sat down on the bonnet and waited for him to be impressed.

He wasn't. He laughed again. "Not Ouagadougu," he chuckled. "OuagaDOUgu".

It did sound better when he said it. And I thought mine was close but he shook his head and said "No, no, terrible", though very amiably. But he did come and lean against the bonnet and we started talking. About Burkina Faso and what it was like. And I learnt absolutely loads.

He told me how Burkina Faso's neighbours all envy her for her organisation, palm wine and film festival. He told me Burkinabe are relaxed happy people who like to read and tell stories. He took me through the transition from independence to today's regime semi-presidentiel, (sorry, can't find acute accents in this format) and that Burkina Faso means "A Country of Honest People". He told me his favourite dish was a mix of rice, okra and peanut sauce and his Mum made it best. And that 200 000 are still homeless from the summer flooding. And that just after his grandfather had died, his apparition had appeared at his neighbour's house, floated round the dinner table wagging its ghostly finger and scolded him, in front of his family, for having had an affair. And then he sang the anthem for me. Une Seule Nuit. I'd never heard it before.

It is amazing how the most interesting moments come flying at you when you least expect them. I got pretty much the whole shop done in a wonderfully smoky daydream of Burkina Faso and without the tiniest shred of Shopper's Impatience.

One can learn much in Sainsbury's car park on Saturday afternoon. Who'd have thought it?

He also pointed me towards this. I have no idea what it's about, but I'm imagining it might be something to do with getting plastered? Odd, but vaguely compelling.



After-afterthought...
Although one more thing - how awful that so many people have lost everything in one tiny country and the thought of it has barely crept into my mind. THAT was badly done, Emma. Badly done indeed.

(Self-indulgently) thinking aloud...

My bloody head has had me up in the night again. I have pondered and mused and twisted and turned and am no closer to an answer, and I'm sure this is because there isn't one.

At what point in life do you learn to stand up for yourself? Is it something you do as a child and then learn not to do later on, out of misguided, or ill-judged, politeness? Does age bring with it a certain lily-liveredness? Or is it just me? Have I turned into a commandable chicken-heart, a hushed, dominated dotard nervously-but-deftly tiptoeing over a daily mound of other people's eggshells?

I've been thinking back to times when I have defended myself. There are not many. But there was once, in the first year at secondary school, during the time that everyone had to carve out their own particular idiosyncratic roles to carry them through; you know, ring-leader, beauty, freak, brainbox, slapper, (slightly mythomaniacal, of course, as we were, after all, only 12). There was a girl in 1B who, unhindered by any likelihood of academic prowess, had decided to craft herself as Hard and Scary Bully. "She's really hard" we would all whisper to each other in notes of awe, while giving her a wide berth in the corridors. "We mustn't mess with her", we reminded each other, as we crept cautiously and subserviently around, pretending we wanted to be friends, though she quite genuinely repelled us.

But then we had an inter-form lacrosse match and I accidentally smacked her on the fingers.

The message came back, hissed down lines of wide-eyed, horrified girls, and later scrawled onto a piece of paper and shoved into the inkwell of my desk: "YOU have had it affter school". I corrected the spelling of "after" and sent it back, inwardly quaking, but fired on by the bated-breath admiration of my slightly swotty, ne'er-do-wrong group of friends, (plaits, clean faces and girl guides on Friday) who gasped gratifyingly at my foolhardiness in taking on the hard gang of girls, (pink hairspray and Friday evenings looking sullen outside Pop-In).

After school, this particular girl was waiting. Like a scene out of Grange Hill, really, with her soon-to-be-tattoed-and-later-pregnant back up gang, grinning inanely behind her. I remember her walking towards me knocking her fist into the palm of her hand and saying "YOU are so going to get it now" (omit 't's, obviously).

I hit her first, with my clarinet case, and ran. And I was never, ever bothered by them afterwards. Yes, I got detention for "ruffian behaviour on public display" and a long, sad lecture from my Head of Year about my "disappointing behaviour which would not bring honour to the school or look good on my University application, in 7 years' time, bla bla" (but it turned out that this girl's brother had weed on our headmistresses car door handle, so I think, secretly, they were a little bit grateful). But I never ever had to deal with any attempted bullying ever again.

At least, not at school.

But now? Now is different. Over the past couple of years I have borne insults, accusations and rebarbative reproach, out of nowhere, and have merely flinched. I have had the most horrendous lies flung around about me and the furthest I've got is to tell people, who already know they aren't true, that they aren't true. I have watched situations develop which I know to be wrong-all-wrong and I have sat dumbly, not wanting to offend. In many cases, I have even become so unnerved that I have ended up, to all intents and purposes, supporting other people's horrible follies rather than risking their wrath by telling them what I really think, ever hiding behind pusillanimous protest that it is "NOT MY BUSINESS"... when I should be screeching "NO NO NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO".

When did I become so damn diluted?

And I mean this on a far wider scale than just within my tiny little life in Surrey. I've said it before, but it's just not right that Mengistu should be living on a ranch and popping to South Africa for treatment. Than Shwe is another one. In fact, one could go on for ages. But me sitting here at my kitchen table, bleating on about things in the world Not Being Fair makes no difference at all. What DO you do then? Switch off? Or choose one and become single-mindedly activist? Do you rectify your own little patch of green first, before branching out onto bigger issues? Or do you hide behind the big stuff and forget what's under your feet?

Suddenly, I feel a little bit like the Lion on the Yellow Brick Road. Somewhere and sometime, I would like someone to push upon me a whole dose of courage so, finally, I can begin to re-discover the guts to sod all the eggshells.

What horrible English I do use.



Afterthought

“To sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men.” Thank you, Lincoln. Hitting the nail on the head from beyond the grave. Clever man.

If you can bear looking at him...

I don't think this will stay up very long, but I am quite glad someone took the time to do this...