Yes, but what IS shabby chic?

"Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow- pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house?"

Jerome K Jerome, Three Men in a Boat (1889)

I'm far too tired to think much today but I was slightly diverted by driving past a Posh Shop in a Posh Village nearby which had a blackboard loitering casually outside with the words "We Can Make Your Furniture Shabby".

Really? And for how much?  Some questions burn into your brain if they go unasked, so at the risk of Being Late For Everything today, I popped in.

The woman behind the counter appraised me, decided, rightfully, that I was not an Interiors' Savante with a Hedgefund Hubby and went back to reading Psychologies.

So I looked around the shop.  The emphasis was delightfully odd.  "Vintage Jelly Mould - Once Owned!" shrieked one sign. "Genuine 1970 tea-towels" gushed another, sitting above a pile of white tea-towels emblazoned with the word GLASSCLOTH, just like they used in the church hall when I was a kid.  But oh, very prettily tied up with a ribbon, and, er equally prettily priced.  And then, my absolute FAVOURITE - "Vintage garden string!".  Which was a ball of, yes, string in a dusty looking wooden box, labelled (sit down) £15.00.

Now.  What's going on?  What DOES "Vintage Jelly Mould - Once owned!" actually mean?  Because to my un-designer ears, it sounds rather akin to "Second Hand."  Which is fine.  But when the price tag has been increased five-fold due to its terribly fashionable "Once Owned" status, I rather feel that, somewhere around, there struts a rather chilly and gullible Emperor.

"Erm, your sign" I asked frosty shop lady who didn't answer.  I dared further; "What do you MEAN exactly?"
She breathed audibly at me.  "We re-allocate style to a piece of furniture in line with the recent trends" she said.
"Which are...?" I ventured
"Glorious," she replied, and added "IF you understand style", while writing £25 in beautiful itallics on a creased brownpaper package label, probably destined for a genuine 1970s retro HB pencil, Used By A Real Child...

Glorious indeed.  And since I have recently found myself rather more in need of cash than before, I think I too should, shall we say, make more of an effort to, well, understand style.

And with this in mind, I've come over all entreprenneurial. Firstly, I plan to speak to my Dad about starting a shop in his loft.  There is plenty of Genuinely Used Vintage stuff up there, and in REAL 1970's dust too. And secondly, I will be painting my own sign, offering to "Make Your Furniture Shabby".  Trust me, this is going to be cracking deal: you won't even have to do any moving.  All I will do is lend you my children, my dog and their friends for a weekend, and Bob's Your Uncle:  genuine shabbiness, for a price we can decide when I've worked out your household income.

She was right, you know, the woman in her shop.  It IS glorious, WHEN you understand.

And it IS odd to find yourself re-living something originally written by Harry Enfield...

PS If I HAVE offended anyone with my ignorance of interior design fashions, may I apologise and smooth the waters by pointing you to these 12 "weathered terracotta pots" sold on the Jamie Oliver site.  They are DOWN from 75 whole pounds to only 37.50! That's HALF price!!!  But if you get there too late, don't be overly disappointed; they do also sell them in the antique shop around the corner from here for 50p a pop...

Blog Critic, welcome back to you...

My Blog Critic has been quiet for a while but today he was back, with the air of one falsely aghast.  "I've been avoiding your blog since you were talking about dead chickens," he lied (and correction: hypnotised chickens, not dead - the proof is here) "but yesterday I braved myself, yes, BRAVED myself, to come back on and what do I get?  Shrunken heads. Horrific.  I was eating tea; a jacket potato actually.  About the size of a shrunken head.  So I couldn't eat it.  YOU spoiled my tea."

Blog Critic does enjoy his tea so I was momentarily apologetic.  I explained I wanted to write about something completely different to the weirdness of recent circumstance.

He launched into his well-rehearsed impersonation of Blog Critic, Outraged.

"YES, and about that!  All that wiffling about being tired and things being strange. I was bored! Get over it!  Blogs shouldn't be for sharing your soul - they should be informative, educational and exciting. I TOLD you that at the beginning. What on earth could be happening that would warrant other people wanting to read about your life?  Moan, moan, moan - that's what everyone does on a blog. I TOLD you" he added, with gleeful triumph "I TOLD you that you'd slide down the slippery slope into self-obsession..."

So I cut in and explained, briefly, what has happened over the past few days.  At the end of it, his phone got cut off.  Blog Critic has a busy life: he needs to watch his fish, and potter about a bit, and complain about my blog and he doesn't have time for charging mobiles.  But I did get a text.

"Bloody hell!" it read. "You should blog that..."

NOT in need of a shrink after all...

I just read that Knut Haugland had died and so in today's dog-walking reverie I was thrown back to the Kontiki and Thor Heyerdahl's absorbing account of the entire adventure.  I love the Kontiki Expedition,  although you know the outcome before you even start to read, and I always pretend that I would have jumped at the chance to be on board (this is a sham-thought, because even an Easyjet hop scares me into drink).

But there was one passage which particularly stays with me, and that is the brief reference, before they set off, to the jungle head shrinkers.  Thor and Herman are in Ecuaduor, looking for balsa for the raft, if I recall correctly; their Spanish guide warns them of the headshrinkers still lurking in the jungles they want to pass through, and tells them how his own friend had had his head shrunk.  I know it's a grisly subject but can you really not smile at this bit?

"One day this friend was killed in the jungle.  Jorge tracked down the murderer and threatened to shoot him.  Now the murderer was one of those who were suspected of selling shrunken human heads and Jorge promised to spare his life if he handed over the head at once.  The murderer at once produced the head of Jorge's friend, now as small as a man's fist.  Jorge was quite upset when he saw his friend again, for he was quite unchanged, except that he had become so very small.  Much moved, he took the little head home to his wife.  She fainted when she saw it and Jorge had to hide his friend in a trunk. But it was so damp in the jungle that clusters of green mould formed on the head so that Jorge had to take it out now and then and dry it in the sun.  It hung very nicely by the hair on a clothes line, and Jorge's wife fainted everytime she caught sight of it."

Thor Heyerdahl - The Kontiki Expedition,  (Flamingo 1992) p47

Of course, head shrinking really did go on. Heads were scraped out and filled with hot stones to reduce the fat.  Hot sand was poured into the hard-to-reach crevices, and so the head would shrink while maintaining all it's characteristics.  It really does turn you into a mini-you. Although it was originally done to ensure the soul of the enemy would remain in abyss and not be narked at you from the grave, it became quite a business once they realised tourists would pay money for these little heads of victims and take them home for, well, the mantlepiece, one assumes.

And guess what?  National Geographic have "genuine footage" of the head shrinking process, that you can watch, right now, from your kitchen table!   I'm not putting the actual film here because although I'm thinking about this today, I don't plan to think of it tomorrow, as, surely, to think about such a subject regularly would be very strange indeed.

However, back to the video, now I was beginning to worry.  I can think of someone who, currently, would quite possibly be rather partial to my head, shrunk, and it is not too comforting to see there are videos showing how to do it.   I was reassured to see, however, that they DO add a warning that this should not be tried at home. In this litigious world, I guess that is important.


If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...

Rudyard Kipling

Oh how true.

AFTERTHOUGHT
If I do disappear and turn up, petite, in a fleamarket, please do buy me. I want pride of place on a mantlepiece somewhere.

Just when you think it's safe to go back into the water...

...you find it isn't.

It's been a long, long day.  I think I probably will get round to talking about what has just happened, at some point and in some regard, but tonight I am shattered.  A different shattered to where I was when meningitis was in full swing, I must say, because I have concentrated on the idea of keeping perspective in a wider picture, and it does actually work. We are fine.  The kids are fine. The dog is fine.

But it has been a day to teach you that things you quietly bank on having can - CAN -  suddenly be taken away by, well, shall we say Nasty-Gnomes?  That some people honestly, seriously, wish you ill.  And that the ill that they wish upon you can be completely unexplained and undeserved.  And and AND... that there is not a jot you can do about it.

And does it matter? In our case, no, probably not, actually. We are not, after all in Haiti.

Sometimes I crave the stabilising effect of a certain piece of music but tonight Jerome K Jerome has come rushing to aid.  Now if there was EVER a ghost to have a pint with in the pub, for me, it would be him.  With George and Harris and a canine-ghost of Montmorency at our feet.

We had this read at our wedding.  And today I think it has waxed more relevant than ever before.

For those of you I've bumped into today, I Am SO sorry for looking grumpy.


"George said:‘You know we are on the wrong track altogether. We must not think of the things we could do with, but only of the things that we can’t do without.’

"George comes out really quite sensible at times. You’d be surprised. I call that downright wisdom, not merely as regards the present case, but with reference to our trip up the river of life generally. How many people, on that voyage, load up the boat till it is ever in danger of swamping with a store of foolish things which they think essential to the pleasure and comfort of the trip, but which are really only useless lumber.

"How they pile the poor little craft mast-high with fine clothes and big houses; with useless servants, and a host of swell friends that do not care twopence for them, and that they do not care three ha’pence for; with expensive entertainments that nobody enjoys, with formalities and fashions, with pretence and ostentation, and with—oh, heaviest, maddest lumber of all!—the dread of what will my neighbour think, with luxuries that only cloy, with pleasures that bore, with empty show that, like the criminal’s iron crown of yore, makes to bleed and swoon the aching head that wears it!

"It is lumber, man—all lumber! Throw it overboard. It makes the boat so heavy to pull, you nearly faint at the oars. It makes it so cumbersome and dangerous to manage, you never know a moment’s freedom from anxiety and care, never gain a moment’s rest for dreamy laziness—no time to watch the windy shadows skimming lightly o’er the shallows, or the glittering sunbeams flitting in and out among the ripples, or the great trees by the margin looking down at their own image, or the woods all green and golden, or the lilies white and yellow, or the sombrewaving rushes, or the sedges, or the orchis, or the blue forget- me-nots.

"Throw the lumber over, man! Let your boat of life be light, packed with only what you need—a homely home and simple pleasures, one or two friends, worth the name, someone to love and someone to love you, a cat, a dog, and a pipe or two, enough to eat and enough to wear, and a little more than enough to drink; for thirst is a dangerous thing.
Three Men in a Boat - Jerome K Jerome


Thirst IS a dangerous thing indeed.  Now, whose idea was it to have a dry January? Dramatic sigh. 

The hills are alive, with the sound of tutting...

See?  SEE?  Music will always ALWAYS make you feel better!

I have just stumbled on the phenomenon of the Complaints Choir. And it's a fascinating thing.  It seems that all you have to do is get together with a few tra-la-la-ing friends, a piano (or accordion if you are east of Prague), find a bit of space in a street, on a roof top, in a theatre and so on...and then you all sing heartily about things that annoy you.

I have found quite a bit of diversion this evening in looking around the performances of international complaints choirs, and discovering what's bugging them.  The Germans are annoyed by a road and complex tax calculations. The Russians about queues and salaries, the Finns about trees being chopped down for loo paper (when there STILL isn't enough loo paper, they warble) and the Chicagoans about all the single men being insane.  The Hungarians seem to me to be having the most fun with their rousing recitals about the annoyingness of Hungary (and why us foreignors use the word goulash. Well, hold on a moment here,  I thought it was Hungarian; it sounds Hungarian...maybe I'll write a song about sneaky words which sound Hungarian and aren't, and sing it right back atcha...) but that the Hungarians would have the most fun is no surprise, as I have long been of the suspicion that the Hungarians ALWAYS have a lot more fun than us (and that's another post).

Of COURSE we have one here and of course it's in Birmingham.  I wondered at first whether that might be in Alabama, but no, the first line of Sung-Brummy makes it very clear where they are... They don't seem to be enjoying themselves - Birmingham's changed, you know, and they don't get paid enough, they sing-  but I hope they are having some fun really, as the whole thing strikes me as a splendid idea.

So much is being said recently about the physical and psychological benefits of singing, and herewith a triple whammy.  You get together with a whole lot of other people (check), get to sing your head off with no real requirement for Talent Proper (check) and you get to let a few moans out into the open (check).

All I need now is for a Proper Psychologist to say it's a great thing, and I'd try and get one going myself.  Why does my milkman sometimes come at 9am when it's too late for cereal and coffee?  Why does he sometimes come at 5am and clash around and  make the dog bark?  Why do people get prosecuted for fighting off burglars in their own homes?  We didn't vote for Gordon, why is he there?  Why does the place round the corner think it can charge 4 quid for two foul tomatoes stuffed with a lump of feta and doused in tabasco?  And so on and so on...

Am off to the piano to compose.

I haven't had a minute to Blog Properly and I risk repeating myself here with this link, but I can't help it. The whole El Sistema story has rather inhabited my distracted mind of late.


Do you ever have the feeling your brain is reaching for something and you just can't quite get there? I do hope I work it out soon. This, then, is a very pointless post indeed, for after all, whoever wants to hear someone else thinking aloud in such a pithy fashion?

This film, however, looks like being the complete opposite of pointless. If I could only find somewhere that sold it.

Now you see me, now you kind of don't...

Every now and then, when everything is getting too shouty, I do hide behind the curtains in the front room in the hope of Five Seconds Peace (when you're an adult, people rarely look for you behind curtains) but now I've seen Liu Bo Lin's artwork I think I may have been getting it wrong.  What I NEED to do, actually, on occasions of necessary crypsis, is to carefully paint myself into a crafty camoflauge with my surroundings.

To be honest, from looking round me at the moment, all I'd have to do is cover myself in sketches of discarded toys, socks and dog hair, and I'd pretty much be there.

But anyway, Liu Bo Lin's utterly mind-boggling artwork had me sitting in open-mouthed wonder for a good few minutes today and surely that IS worth a post?!!

Liu Bo Lin: Beijing camouflage artist

Do do doooo check him out on google images - it's superbly diverting!

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..!