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...

Crusty Botches of Nature. Apologies to Shakespeare.

Nick Griffin must be rubbing his chubby belly with glee.

He came off rather well, I thought, on his interview with Jon Snow on Channel 4 tonight - making points he wanted to make without much heed to the actual questions, calling James Bethel a "Tory Toff" and referring to Jon Snow as "Peter". A pretty slick performance, but what would anyone expect?

Being slick is what Griffin is all about, surely? And leaving this pointless little roly-poly racist aside, I'm finding I am less perturbed by the BNP itself than by people's reaction to them.

The BNP have, for example, nabbed the Battle of Britain and are promoting it as a nifty little advantageous association with their own political fundament. Naturally, and rightly so, veterans and representatives of British Armed Forces are Not Happy. So there is now a video from the protest group "Nothing British About The BNP" to make their well-justified point. But I don't know. The video is strangely soft-hitting. It reminds us how horrid it is to be at war. It has an atmosphere of sorrowful resignation, and a very odd choice of sober piano running throughout. Sad and sober is wrong, all wrong. Shouldn't we all be spitting chips?

As for whether it will work, I guess that depends who it is aimed at. But who is that then?
Who still needs to be told they are a party of oddly-shaped fascist yobbos, who have all simply upgraded their bova boots to laptops? The dull berks who might vote for them, come election time, I suppose? And if that is so, will a video like this, with its carefully thought out subtleties, really work? Wouldn't it better to have Ray Winston leaning into the TV screen and jabbing a squat finger, while growling "Don't vote for them, moron; they are right little s**ts"?

To clarify, and I really have to, just in case, I am NO fan of the BNP. Of course not. It is a nasty little example of segregational thuggery which will always attract a certain amount of support, from a certain section of society. Any society. "But, like, it's not fair that they come over 'ere and take our jobs like..." mumbled an Barnsley example today on TV, with a long vacant stare, suggestive of a true Non-Thinker. But there's nothing particularly British about that - the same happens all over the world. You will always get your fatuous fascist fringes, wherever you are. In the same way that you will always find someone who thinks eating carrots is homicide.

But now the papers are all jumping on board the big Countdown To Question Time. The Church is condemning it, and various ethnic groups echo. I understand why they have to, I really do, but it just all seems like such pretty publicity for an undeserving bunch of often vicious boneheads.

Engineered properly, and Question Time could prove to be a real thorn in their ruffian side. We all know that they have a legal right to say what they want to say, whether we like it or not. And if we want to discount anyone's views properly and honestly, it is always useful to hear what they are. Given enough carefully designed rope, I'm sure the BNP could quite easily hang themselves. It could be very interesting. But I bet, on Thursday, emotion takes over. I bet it turns out to be all about the demonstrators outside. And I bet there'll be so much noise of protest that people will forget to hear what a stinking lot of sewer-bile these people really preach.

I'm not trying to be political, incidentally. Am really just thinking aloud.


(Afterthought)
I do hope they bring up the David Duke video. I do hope someone asks him what the hell he meant by that. It's available on you tube, and worth seeing for true horror, but I'm not putting it up here as I don't want those botches of nature polluting my blog.

"All Idealism Is Falsehood In The Face Of Necessity"

So finally they have negated the Cripplecock. R received a cheery message from the previously off-on-a-jaunt consultant telling him he "didn't have to worry about the really nasty thing" and that they would "really put their thinking caps on" to see what it might be.

This is very good news indeed. It's not, of course, perfect news, because there still lies something beneath. But we feel better. Much more positive at least. And even my father, a pessimist in realist's clothing, heaved a sigh of relief with us, put his black suit back in the cupboard and went off happily to Australia.

3 of us had a coffee and congratulated R while it all sank in, and then I went off and celebrated personally by getting stuck in the toilet in Debenhams.

There is something quite unadmittable about being stuck in a toilet; I just loathe the idea of having to knock pleadingly on a cubicle door hoping someone will hear and help you. You know that, firstly, they will smirk and, secondly, they will bring people along with them. So, FAR more impressively, I climbed out. It was a beautifully seamless escape and it went like this: foot on toilet seat, other foot on cistern, hook arms over flimsy partition, apologise to surprised lady in that cubicle as I loom over from above, repeat same stance but on the other side, throw leg up, wriggle over, lower self down onto the other cistern and job done. Practically a Charlie's Angel in less glamorous clothing. I was really, really proud.

Even the lady from the next cubicle, who must have originally thought I was some terrible kind of Toilet Pervert was impressed. And another hand-washing lady also complimented me. An unexpectedly good day at that point: husband cleared of nasty fatal strain, and I got to receive praise on my agility.

"You must be very fit and supple - I bet you're excellent on those army assault courses", Hand-Washing Lady was saying in all admiration, as I assumed a modest expression while also trying to create a look to suggest, yes, actually I was an assault course demon.

You see, it is indeed pathetically rubbish of me, but I have found since having the children, compliments on my physical being are few and far between. Mostly because it has grown quite immeasurably. And it pays scant lip-service to both suppleness and agility. A horribly creaky pelvis which bears the scars of being mother to a boy with R's genes, and I have ricketed around for the last 5 years like a limping geriatric. I am currently in the middle of several sporting challenges against boys much fitter than me (yes, silly) and, so far, am failing pretty miserably. So, to have someone, even a hand-washing lady I didn't know, tell me I must be fit and supple (FIT AND SUPPLE!!) was such a rare thing, and momentarily very diverting. And comforting. And anyway, I'd had a stressful week.

Pride comes, as ever, before a crashing great fall, and the gremlins were obviously rubbing their hands with glee at being able to show me up for my falsehood. And this came in the realisation that I'd left my bag on the back of the locked door. Dammit, really. And I really did not like my chances of re-performing my once-lucky climb-over feat again in front of my admiring spectators.

"Oh dear" said the ladies. "Shall we go for help?"

"No, no," I replied with my best airiness, "I'll just stand on that bin and lean over."

"Ooh, are you sure?" The ladies were worried. "It doesn't look like a very strong bin for a big girl like you".

And there you had it. Five minutes of escapism into compliments of which I was not worthy, and I was brought bang down to earth in a flash, by a genuinely observed truth.

Seconds later, I was brought bang down to earth for a second, more painful time, by the bin giving way concertina-style and throwing me across the floor, where I hit my head on the sink and ended up strangely contorted in a little grey pool of old floor water.

The fleetingly brief and undeserved image I had allowed myself to entertain of Me, Fit and Supple, dissolved in an instant.

Hand-washing lady and her friend were very concerned. They pulled me to my feet, kindly; one of them, less kindly (though doubtlessly without cruel intention), puffing the words "HEAVE-HO!" as they did it, and they got me paper towels. "Oh, there's a brown stain down the back of your coat," one said with real concern. I said it didn't matter at all, and ran.

As I rushed towards the escalator, I was thinking that I shouldn't exaggerate what had just happened. It was no very big deal to fall off a bin in a toilet with only two people I didn't even know to witness it. But before I GOT to the escalator, there came a piercing call from the end of the store.

"COOOO-EEEEEEE! LADY-WHO-JUST-FELL-OFF-THE-BIN-IN-THE-TOILET?"

I turned round and watched them hurry up and identify me to everyone else.

"You forgot your bag, dear".

But at least R doesn't have cripplecock. That's something, for sure.

GRRRRR

Lots of people have been so kind in asking how R is and what is happening, that I thought it wouldn't hurt to post an update. IS this very arrogant? I have a sneaking suspicion it might be, but it also seems such an easy way of keeping people informed. And also I'm in a bit of a selfish strop, and a bit of blogging, along with a glass of red, might readdress the balance.

So. We waited all day yesterday for these results that the consultant had promised, having waited all bloody weekend with it lurking stinkishly round the backs of our minds. Did he phone? Of course not. So we tried to phone him.

And oh, how the NHS can shine.

"'Oo?" said the brash lady on the switchboard "We 'aven't got one of 'em." I said they must have because he had been dealing with R, in hospital, just last week. The lady, who was no doubt miffed at having an enquirer phone the enquiries part of the hospital and thereby interrupt her reading of Grazia, with an enquiry, finally found that there was a Dr W, and put me through. To cardiology.

"But it's not cardiology I want" I said to the kinder lady I spoke to there "I'm sure it should be neuroscience, or some such area". The Kind Cardiology Lady suggested I ring the ward direct.

So I did. Again, they were very kind, and remembered R from last week, and expressed surprise to hear that results had been promised, but not delivered. "But Dr W is not here for a while", she said. A while? Well, a week, they said. Perhaps. So when he said he would definitely ring and tell us on Monday? Hmmm, was the response. But they did have a doctor with an idea to help. Why, she said, don't you try to get yourself re-admitted via A&E this evening, then you can be waiting on a ward for when the consultant does his rounds tomorrow? I said that A&E was surely for emergency only? She ummed and erred. I suggested it to R, who looked quietly-daggers at the phone, said a very calm No, and that was that.

Now, I don't know whether it has been the recent, pretty much constant submersion into the Mega Mindy theme tune, but at some points in your life you just get so sick of being Polite, and English, and Not-Wanting-to-Make-a-Fuss. And you want to kick some NHS-butt. So. I emailed. I left messages with secretaries. I phoned back and left more. Meanwhile R felt rubbish.

Finally, today, our consultant phoned me back. He didn't know why things had happened as they had, he said. He said, consultant-ishly, that he hoped there wouldn't be undue cause for concern, and that he personally felt there might not. So why had other people felt so differently? If the risk was so very low, why drag him in late in the evening and pump drain-cleaner into his arm? Why tell us he might be there for a few weeks, and immediate treatment was vital? The consultant said that this was very interesting. And that perhaps we could wait till Friday. Ok, I said, then why have we been treated with such superficial urgency, if we could, after all, wait till Friday? Again, apparently, it was an "interesting" point. And he couldn't speak for what other people had done. Of course.

R is calmer and more pragmatic than me. R has shrugged and gone back to the sofa, saying there's not much else we can do. He also goes along with the lines of No-News-Is-Good-News. And where I would usually believe this, I am no longer sure, with the NHS, that this is true. It seems to me that No-News is rather more to do with Someone-Hasn't-Passed-On-A-Message. Or that Someone-Has-Gone-Home-And-Taken-The-Info-With-Them. And while I agree with him that we should just wait, there is a small spoilt brat inside me who wants to scream and stamp a princessy foot.

And I DO know that there are thousands of people in so very much worse situations, both here and around the world, and I should be grateful for all we have, I really do. I KNOW we are lucky to live in a country where we have any access to healthcare, and I know that the NHS is packed full of hard-working, well-trained expertise doing a jolly good job. But I can't help it, tonight. I want to know now. And I want to ask questions. And I would really, really like some answers, very soon. I am so so tired of feeling like I'm falling. And I hate seeing R like this.

Is it really so impossible?

Gosh, I really AM a selfish cow tonight.

Wow!

Wow wow wow!!! You can never have a bad experience at The Big Picture but these pictures have been the best 5 minute break I have had in a long time...

The Berlin Reunion

(and for all the very kind enquiries after R, still no conclusive news, but thank you, thank you anyhow)

MEGA MINDY STAAT PARAAT

I like Holland. R is always vexed by how much I like Holland, but I like its towns and its hagelslag and its greater proportion of tall men. And I like Mega Mindy. She is a Dutch Super-Heroine, who goes around in pink catsuits, being all against injustice and wrong-doing, and whacking Naughty People down. And her boss (male) is the Biggest Clot she's Ever Met, something that she sings out with impunity in the main title song. Ok, so she's still as improbably proportioned as any typical cartoon totty; she is also, of course, hopelessly in love with someone who doesn't know it, but even so. She isn't fawning around a absent-but-authoritarian male boss (yeah, Charlie) who is there simply to Put Her Right, and that works for me. A better role model for girls than, shall we say, Barbie? But more from that particular soap box another day...

Anyway, today I had my own Mega Mindy moment in Addlestone. I was pulling away from a friend's house, with the theme song from Mega Mindy playing (we have reached agreement, my 3 year old and I: ONCE a journey, and that is all. Unfortunately, if the journey involves driving five minutes to pop something through a letterbox and then back in the car, this is apparently, in the cause of Mega Mindy music, two journeys. And so on...anyway, it's on rather a lot.) And I was squinting into the sun to see what was coming, while rather joyfully singing along the main chorus with J "IK BEN MEGA MINDY, MEGA MINDY..". Before I realised it, a cross portly man with no hair had got out of his car in front of me in the road and was glaring.

"OI!" he puffed at me, all fat stomach and concerted aggression "Whatcha say to me?"

"When?" I asked, not winding down my window, because these parts of Surrey can be scary, you know. We're like the hood of Weybridge over here...

"Just then! I pulled up to let you out and you mouthed somefink at me, I saw you. Whatcha say?"

Actually, the sun was so bright, I hadn't seen him, so it was jolly good he had pulled up to let me out.

"I said," I mouthed back through the glass "I SAID 'Ik ben Mega Mindy'". Because I had.

And do you know what? He turned round, ran back to his car and drove off. Just like that.

Wow. These Dutch Super-heroines really rock.

I always said Holland was better.

PS I can't talk about cripplecock at the moment, and I don't mean to be unfeeling. I just can't think about it right now. I need five minutes of being silly and pointless.