Caught in time

A couple of days ago I had to go to the far side of town – just me, no kids – and what with roadworks at Haymarket and my convalescent car, I chose to do it this way: car, train, taxi – taxi, train car. All done at a rush to try and be back in time to support BSD collecting children from school. Once upon a time I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but it felt like quite an adventure.

When I left the commuting life to have children I felt – as many women do – that I had lost a lot of personal freedom and that I was no longer in control of my own space and time. What struck me on my journey day was that I didn’t feel any sense of freedom, but I did feel that I still wasn’t in control of my own space and time. I was at the whim of train-drivers, taxis drivers, recalcitrant ticket machines and temporary traffic lights. The only difference was that I was out of the house, and given the recent rain, that was no blessing.

How much of our understanding of ‘being stuck at home with a baby’ is perception, rather than reality?

Now if I’d actually had the space time (and weather) to go somewhere of my own choosing, without the constant awareness that someone was filling in for me back at home – now *that* might have felt like real freedom!

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The Bus is Cumming!

Sometimes adverts work, and sometimes they don’t.

I guess adverts on the back of buses are meant primarily for drivers in cars behind. But some of them have text so small that you can’t read them from a bonnet’s length away. While adverts on the sides of buses are meant primarily for pedestrians, who will be ablle to read them as the bus lingers near the pavement (but rarely in the layby designed to let other traffic past – that’s too much trouble for many bus drivers).

As a car driver, adverts on the sides of buses flash past me. If it’s a good, well-designed advert it will catch my attention, and I’ll catch its drift. There’s an advert used at the moment that has both succeeded and failed spectacularly at the same time. It’s got a great dark, gritty photo portrait of a gaunt-faced man, with a between-the-wars flop of hair over his face. It’s advertising an exhibition at the National Muums of Scotland called ‘The Salt of the Earth’ – and from the picture and the exhibition title, I’ve taken it to be about the history of coal mining in Scotland – just the sort of thing that NMS does.

At the same time, I’ve been amused by how much this long-ago miner looks like the Scottish actor Alan Cumming – although he isn’t known for being gritty and brooding, and is usually shown with an enormous grin on his face. In fact, that was what I was going to blog about – the dichotomy of resemblance. But when I went on the NMS website I discovered – ta daa! That it is Alan Cumming in the photo and that ‘The Salt of the Earth’ is a photo exhibition of famous people with Scottish roots.

 So:

·         Attention-grabbing photo – check

·         Inspired to visit website – check

·         Informative title – uh-oh

·         Clear message – uh-oh

The photo has, I feel, been let down by the clever-clever advertisers – or am I on a tangent to the rest of the Lothians residents?

Alan Cumming © Craig Mackay

More lists

I’m trying to make a list of the books which E has had for bedtime reading.

 

One of the purposes for this blog was to capture memories like these, but the hiatus has been so big, that a huge chunk of reading has fallen through the hole in the middle.

 

I shall make a list, I’ll ask BSD to make a list and I’ll see how many E can remember.

 

However the next few days are likely to be so hectic that there be little time for nostalgia.

 

Got to get the house ready for a very particular visitor, do a full-day nearly new sale, support E on getting through a backlog of homework, get her to a Poppy Day Service… oh and cooking and cleaning and shopping and mending and finding and who knows what else besides.

 

Get on with it you lazy woman.

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The Lists by Which I Live

I deal with a lot of books. Whether it’s for studying, family history, crafts, books as gifts, books which Bookshelfdad might like, books for B, books and books and books for E or – a very small category this – books I might get time to read for my own pleasure, that’s a lot of books.

I keep track of them with lists – I’m a lists sort of a person. There’s one of E’s booklists on this site right now, but it’s a good 18 months out of date. But my main holding place for booklists is…  my phone. I’ve found that having a phone with a decent, easy-to-use note-taking facility was perfect for hurried name-grabbing in bookshops, for listing books which wouldn’t fit into our bulging library allocations, for late-night memos from bedside books. And a phone, in theory, isn’t so likely to get lost or go through the washing machine in a trousers pocket.

In theory.

Alas, I have become infamous for setting Orange against Hotpoint, for washing trousers with the phone still in pocket. There are few sounds more disheartening than the clunk of a mobile rattling round in a sud-filled drum. Sometimes quick application of a radiator does the trick but one awful week in the summer I saw my car, my phone and very nearly the washing machine all falling apart before my eyes. And the two phones that Bookshelfdad – bless him – found for me as alternates just made me all the more aware of how I missed my lovely familiar stylus phone.

But Christmas has come early in the Bookshelf Household, because BSD has managed, through the wonders of Ebay to get his hands on a duplicate phone to replace the one which was killed, not by kindness, but by Comfort. My sim survived the sudsing, but my lists have been lost. Now, however I can start again with a clean – no pun intened – sheet.

But dear goodness, may I never put it through the wash again. I think I’d rather emigrate than have to tell that to BSD.

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Pheasant Road

Here’s the posting I would have liked to have written a few days ago, but life got in the way. I’m up early because the list in my head of tasks to be tackled is so scary it’s keeping me awake. Nothing like a bit of procrastination, then.

 

This morning I shall head out to the supermarket along what I shall now always think of as ‘Pheasant Road’ – it’s a little – nearly single track – country lane which allows me to avoid joining the A road at a tough junction. I like going along Pheasant Road. I see hares there sometimes as well.

 

By a happy bit of chance, E’s last read-to-her bedtime story was Danny, Champion of the World by Roald Dahl. I’m not actually a big Dahl fan (that’s a slightly heretical thing to say, but not as bad as admitting to… Potter Hatred.)  I find him now (and I found him as a child) a bit too gruesome, chaotic and grotesque. Reports saying that children like these characteristics never rang true with me.

 

But I remembered enjoying Danny when it was read by Mr Berry to my class of Second Year Juniors (8-9) and when E picked it up in the library I nabbed it. The happy chance comes in because the book is set around the September-October coming up to pheasant-hunting season, and this was exactly when we were reading the book, so the descriptions of autumn colour were perfectly matched by the trees around about. And up Pheasant Road it was very easy to see… pheasants. Pottering about along the roadside, standing on fenceposts and haybales like prints in an olde worlde pub, picking across the fields in flocks. It really helped to set the book in a context for E and to make it come alive. She got her first glasses at the same time, so she saw things  really vividly as well.

 

I say “we were reading” but actually Bookshelfdad was reading this one, after a long stint on other books by me. He remembered the book fondly as well, but it’s a book about a father and it was utterly right to have it shared between Dad and child.

 

All in all a very satisfactory conjunction of circumstances to bring the best out of a book.

 

 

Incidentally, the illustration here is the first edition cover – the one I remember from school. I think Quentin Blake’s art can be utterly charming: lively, witty, effortless. But just because it suits some Dahl doesn’t mean it suits all Dahl – I didn’t feel it worked with Danny which is so much less anarchic that much of Dahl’s work.

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WTWTA II

Now, where was I?

Oh yes:  there’s a film of Wild Things out – I have no interest in going to see this, which seems choc full of schmaltzy movie-angst and besides, why try to add to something which is absolutely perfect in wording, illustration and layout, and has 46 years of such perfection already chalked up?

I love WTWTA. I never tire of reading it. However, unlike the children of the clamorous parents commenting on the Guardian article, both of my kids have stages were they find the book ‘too much’. But I don’t want to ban it, remove it from the shelves or wrap it in brown paper. Books are patient. Books will wait until you’re ready for them.

WTWTA is uttering satisfying. Max is always in control of the Wild Things: the decisions are all his. If he misbehaves, there are consequences; if he repents there is warmth and forgiveness. But to a small child, living ‘in the now’ the Wild Things are monstrous, and a child cannot always hold onto the thought that the over-arching story is safe and positive. So I don’t mind if there are times when they find some books more than they can cope with. It shows they have the capacity to lose themselves in books. Heck, there are books that I find ‘a bit much’.

But how interesting were the occasional nuggets sown amongst the Guardian comments. I’m ashamed to say I’d never noticed how the pictures grow in size from the beginning of the book till they dominate the text for the Wild Rumpus, then shrink back down – what a clever effect. And I loved the various comments about how parents cope with those wordless central pages when reading aloud, how they and their children recreate the Wild Rumpus, with no clues from the author.

That’s typical of what I know about Sendak. He makes few concessions to his audience – you stretch yourself to tackle his books. They have (in Lucy M Boston’s excellent phrase) a “nip of otherness” in every field.         

Long posting. Sssh – that’s a bit more than seven minutes. Got to rush now!

Where the Wild Things Are

First attempt to attach a picture using Posterous, and the computer is on such a go-slow that most of my seven minutes has gone already.

Maybe I’d better just attach the picture and one of the press links and hope I get the chance to talk about it tomorrow.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/oct/20/maurice-sendak-wild-things-hell

Picture copyright Maurice Sendak

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Holiday reading

We’ve been away for a long weekend – quite a good holiday length: Thursday to Monday. Long enough that it didn’t have the rushed, only-just-settled-in-and-it’s-time-to-go feeling of a weekend away, but without taking up the whole of the half-term (doing homework on holiday never feels right). Anyway, for the few nights we were away, the girls had bedtime story together instead of age-appropriate stories together. Luckily the place where we go has a wealth of enticing books, and the girls enjoy sharing.

The big hit of the trip was ‘Raining Cats and Dogs’ – a collection of feline and canine poems by Jane Yolen, arranged as a back-to-front, flip-over book: one side cats, one side dogs, meeting with linked poems in the very middle. The combination of this quirk, and the fact that the girls often play at beings cats or dogs meant that the book really caught their imagination.

I never enjoyed books of children’s poetry in my day. Wonder why? The slight feeling of worthiness, I think, that somehow it was meant to be good for you. And I never could lose myself in a poem. Short ones were too short. Long ones were too long.

Jane Yolen’s verse is great for reading aloud, though. Sharing makes a difference.

Seven minutes up.

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Testing posterous

I’m testing posterous as a way to do these seven-minute blog postings. What a week to try restarting the blog.

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Walt or Charles

There’s a big colour advert in the Radio Times with a picture of Scrooge and repeated references to “Disney’s A Christmas Carol” – golly: you’d almost think they’d written it themselves…