Overdue

Will the real Emily Carter please stand up?

2012-02-13T21:11:00.001Z

Someone once describedme as a ‘mild-mannered megalomaniac’, which I thought was something of anoverstatement until this week, when I got my latest Uni results and completelyFLIPPED OUT because I missed the mark I wanted in one of my modules by 1%. Yes. ONE percent. Babes will testifyto the level of flippage that ensued. Icried. I wailed. I cursed the English department. I scoured my essay searching for 1% shaped hole. I ate a lot of chocolate.

Finally Babes gave mea metaphorical slap round the chops and told me to get a grip. I whimpered a bit, ate some more chocolate,and decided to suck it up and get over myself.

But the whole episodehas been somewhat illuminating, psychologically speaking. I’ve been in the library every day since,determined this catastrophe will NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN. Apparently I AM a mild-manneredmegalomaniac. Who knew?

Maybe I should startpaying attention to the things people tell me about myself that I habituallybrush off. For example, maybe Babes isright that I have low self confidence. Maybemy friend is right that I should be a stand-up comedian (seriously, someonesaid that to me). Maybe I CAN cook! Maybe I’m NOT fat! Maybe my hair ISN’T a disaster!

On the other hand, maybemy mother is right that someday I’ll regret not having mountains of children. Maybe my dad’s right that I should reallyhave a pension at my age. Maybe I AM aterrible driver. Maybe I DID spend myteenage years looking like a homeless person (thanks Sis).

What a week. There’s been a lot to think about.

Can't Hug Every Cat

2012-02-06T21:35:00.000Z

Some people (one person) complained about my wild generalisations regarding cat lovers last week. Well, I’ve done some research and it turns out cat people aren’t all anti-social (who knew). In fact there are cat loving socialites so desperate for human company they make dating videos such as this one.

I wonder if she got a lot of dates? This has had 14 MILLION views. Surely someone…

No?

This is theoriginal. Which in many ways is evenfunnier.

I can has bookz plz?

2012-01-30T19:30:00.004Z

There’s a new girl working at my library. She has cats.

There are people whohave a cat. And there are people who 'have cats'. Never ask the people who havecats about their cats. You know you were just being polite andthat a succinct, "His name is Crunchy, he’s ginger," will suffice. Theythink you really really want to know the hilarious events that led to theiracquiring Crunchy (invariably beginning with a neighbour heading for the riverwith a wriggling brown sack, and ending with a trip to the vet to get Crunchyneutered, only to find out he was a she! Oh, the laughs we had), how old Crunchy is, the food she turns her nose up at even when you hide it at the bottomof the bowl, how she wakes you up in the morning at 6.03 precisely, her recentbattle with debilitating fur balls, the live mouse shebrought home yesterday, and how devastated they will be when sheeventually goes to the big litter tray in the sky (and repeat for the other 4cats).

These people arealways single. Why, if you are single andlooking for company, would you choose the most solitary, antisocial animals onthe planet with which to share your home? Rather than say, a puppy, who will literally pee themselves with joy atthe sound of your key in the lock, instead of looking to see if you happen to becarrying any dead fish before slinking off into the shadows.

My guess is that the decision to remainsingle and/or childless and the decision to own cats have their roots in thesame personality feature. These aresolitary, antisocial people and while they like to occasionally have somethingwarm to purr at them while they watch telly, they don’t really want to bebothered with anything that shows the least dependence on them. I know because I am one of these people,except I'm worse because the idea of having to remember to feed something makesme feel claustrophobic, which is why I refuse to own even a cat, and I marrieda man who can cook.

I've encountered quitea few cat people in my library travels. I love librarians. I feel at homewith them. I've met kindred spirits aplenty. But I’ll be the first to admit, they’re strange beings. I bet if you did some kind of personalitystudy you’d find librarians are big on the introversion scale. They’re bookish. And that doesn't always meanintellectual. Sometimes it just meansthey prefer to hide behind a shield that also tells them stories. They don’t have the greatest peopleskills.

They don’t bond well even withother librarians. Sure, they like tochat about what they’re reading (and what they’re feeding their cats) withtheir co-workers, but they don’t socialise with them. In my library there were two librarians, oneof whom, when another member of staff was leaving, refused to hug him because she‘doesn’t do hugs’ and the other said, with a worried frown, "You’re not goingto cry are you?"

We never ever had aChristmas party.

It also strikes me asa particularly antisocial trait that these cat people seem to have no empathywith their cats, despite being of similarly taciturn dispositions. I read in The Guardian about how cats areextremely territorial loners and that, while their owners like to imagine their pets are living in some sort of harmonious and blissful cat commune, a house of 3 or4 cats is your basic war zone. It wouldbe like 4 librarians having to share a house. It’s only a matter of time before someone’s taking an Austen to the backof the head.

The Sense of a Good Beginning

2012-01-19T09:00:00.000Z

I’ve had a fantastic start to the reading yearwith The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. I like a book that’s full of interesting ideas as well as a good storyand this has all that in spades.

It’s avery eloquent meditation on the nature of memory and subjectivity, andmeanwhile a mystery is unfolding which, becauseof the subjective nature of memory, is both intriguing and impossible to drawconclusions about. We only have thenarrator’s viewpoint, and he keeps pointing out that it’s flawed.

It’s pretty short, but I think if it werethree times the length I’d have kept reading. I actually did work out the mystery about half way through but I reallydidn’t care, that didn’t seem to be the point. The point was the lovely writing and the journey of the narrator. The story and themes all seem quite simple inretrospect, but I

suppose that’s what a good writer does: makes the simpleamazing.

In conclusion: thumbs up, and I'm full of optimism for the coming reading year. Also I’d be interested to read more of Julian Barnes' stuff. This was my first so if you’ve any recommendations for what to read next please let me know.

It's A Wonderful Life...isn't it?

2012-01-10T08:30:00.000Z

Every Christmas Babes and I settle down with avat of mulled wine, a box of crackers and about 200 kinds of cheese and watchJimmy Stewart being a thoroughly nice guy for two hours in It’s a WonderfulLife.

I absolutely adore thismovie. I HATE that Potter guy, I tear upwhen George tells his Dad he’s a great guy, I laugh out loud when Clarencetells George he’s his guardian angel and George says, "I wouldn’t be a bitsurprised" and I weep unashamedly when the town collects money to save him fromprison.

It’s a Wonderful Movie, yes, but I have asneaking suspicion that I wouldn’t trade places with George Bailey. Have we just become horribly selfish andcynical or does the movie seem a tiny bit like it’s saying ‘dreams arepointless, settle for what you’ve got’?

These days women are always being told not to give up their own lives evenfor their kids. It’s not healthy, you’llmake your kids miserable etc etc. Youhave to make time for what you wanttoo. But George doesn’t. He doesn’t get any of the things heoriginally wants. He may end up with abunch of stuff he didn’t know hewanted, but still…

On the other hand, maybe George wouldn't havebeen much good at ‘building cities’. Maybe he had a lucky escape from abject failure and his dreams surviveintact, if unfulfilled. Is that sensibleor defeatist? These days we’re all aboutthe ‘try again, fail again, fail better’* but maybe the road to happiness is not paved with grand dreams, butlowered expectations. (*Beckett. And he knew all about happiness.)

Maybe I’m biased because a ‘fixer-upper’, a 9to 5, and four kids is my idea of hell, but I always feel a bit sorry forGeorge, even in the end when he finds out how much he’s done for otherpeople. In terms of making your lifemeaningful, doing things for others is great, but it might not be ALL you wereborn to do.

I’m still undecided. I suppose in the end the point is that we are all George Baileys anyway. I have a mortgageand a job and I haven’t abandoned my home/family/husband to run off and dosomething crazy (though that may be more to do with fear thanaltruism). I have a whole bunch of sillydreams that remain unreached and unreachable.

And yes,if asked, I’d say my life’s pretty wonderful too.

p.s. my absolute favourite bit of the movie iswhere George begs Clarence to tell him what’s become of his wife, Mary, nowthat he’s never been born. Clarence isreluctant, he says "You don’t want to know, George", but George shakes the truth out ofhim and Clarence eventually screams, to crashingly dramatic music:

"She’s just about to close up the library!!!"

NOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!

Fetch the Ferreros, Mr Depp

2011-12-21T08:30:00.000Z

Other than JohnnyDepp, what would you most like to find in your stocking on Christmas Day?

For me, it’ll be anyof the following:

The Laxdaela Saga. I read this earlier this year and was completely hooked. I want to take it on a camping holiday and read it to Babes round a campfire.

The Bees - Carol Ann Duffy. She's the Bees Knees.

I love you Marilynne! Making the essay gorgeous again.

To go with my Laxdaela Saga. Hey, I'm practically living in Scandinavia, weather wise, I might as well get into the spirit.

I loved Ragtime and I've been looking forward to reading another one. This is about the son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were executed in the 50s for allegedly giving nuclear secrets to the Russians.

Someone said this was beautifully written, and basically that's all you need to say.

Again, they had me at 'beautifully written'.

Most fun I've had in the cinema since I got too old to snog unashamedly in the back row. This isn't actually out until February but I can't wait. And Santa can do ANYTHING, right?

Big pyramid of Ferrero Rochers on a silver tray presented by a butler. Maybe Johnny Depp dressed as a butler? Hey, a girl can dream.

More interestingly,what are you really hoping you DON'T get? And socks don’t count. No onewants them, but you gotta keep your toes warm.

P.S. MERRY CHRISTMAS BLOGGERS!

If you don't ask, you don't get

2011-12-12T08:30:00.000Z

Dear Weather,

I fear that your exalted position as our soleservice provider has somewhat gone to your head. In contrast to the consistently excellentservice I remember from my own childhood (long hot summers, crisp autumns, whathappened to those?) I feel that your performance over the last few years hasbeen gradually slipping.

I have overlooked whatever errors in judgementfrom within your organisation may have resulted in the several extremely wetsummers recently, not to mention last year’s flooding of my kitchen, becauseeveryone makes mistakes and I assumed that you would soon have some sort ofmanagement shake up and get your act together. But, as we slide towards another winter and my ‘winter colour’ plantsbegin to drown in their pots, I feel I must speak up.

When was the last time you did some marketresearch? I’m fairly certain that in themodern world the desire for dull, chilly summers has long been out of fashion (skirtlengths being what they are), and as for frosty mornings, have you seen theheight of women’s heels these days? I’mnot in favour of cold-calling market researchers as a rule, but I’d make anexception for a cold-weather caller, since frankly I think the industry is indire need of some consumer input.

I realise that some attempt has been made tomitigate the horror that is midwinter by the placing of Christmas festivitiesslap bang in the middle, but I must say whoever spearheaded this initiative hasdone a slapdash job of it. Despite the proliferationof enticingly cheery Christmas cards featuring snowmen, robins in the snow,bobble hated children throwing snowballs, reindeer on snowy rooftops, snow,snow and some more snow, what we in fact get on Christmas morning (and I think,if you check, your archives department can only support this) is mizzling rainand grey cloud.

Christmas patently does NOT do what it says onthe Fox’s Festive Biscuit Tin. This canonly be described as false advertising. It’sonly a matter of time before you get sued by an irate parent who has thrown agravel-ball at their 4 year old with disastrous consequences.

What is your research and development departmentdoing with its time? Why has no one comeup with the obvious solution of turning the thermostat down in December and thenup to more comfortable levels in January to compensate? And surely a similarly simple arrangementcould be reached with regard to rain. Why not have it only at night, for example? Economy-7 have done something similar withheat and it seems to prove cost effective.

If this sort of shoddy service continues Ifear you will begin to suffer reprisals. People will start taking matters into their own hands. I for one intend to put all my appliances on‘standby’ in the hope that it will speed up global warming.

I apologise if this letter seems unduly irate,but it has been a long time coming and the stressful effects of several summer holidaysspent on beaches in the rain have built up behind it.

Yours Faithfully,

Mrs. I. M. Chilly

What Ho, Jeeves

2011-11-28T08:30:00.000Z

A while back I askedpeople to suggest some good resources for writers, which they did, and the one I'menjoying most is definitely the Paris Review Interviews, suggested by Scott.

Instead of random websurfing I now spend my free time reading amazing interviews with the mostfantastic writers. And there are LOADSof them, I've barely skimmed the surface. Maya Angelou, MarilynneRobinson, Seamus Heaney, Ernest Hemingway, Woody Allen, Margaret Atwood, KenKesey, Ted Hughes, Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, RebbeccaWest, William Trevor, Tennessee Williams, it goes on and on and on. You name it, they’re in there. And if they’re not, you probably weren’t thatinterested in them in the first place.

And besides theveritable downpour of pearls of wisdom, they’re often really entertaining. My current favourite quote (whichmade me laugh out loud) was from PG Wodehouse, interviewed at the age of 91 (91and a half, he corrected theinterviewer), who had just finished another novel and whose current working schedulewas to get up at 7.30, do some exercises and then write 1000 words. 7 days a week. He reckoned a book took between 3 and 6 months and he apologised for having slowed down a lot inrecent years.

My favourite bit wasthis:

INTERVIEWER

Did you always know you would be a writer?

WODEHOUSE

Yes, always. I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don’t rememberwhat I did before that. Just loafed, I suppose.

Now, there’s a workethic.

Life Up North

2011-11-21T08:00:00.000Z

You can only stay indenial for so long. I’ve been avoidingthe realisation but…I'm back at work, the central heating’s back on, my chilliplants are shrivelling up in despair, and I’ve started to go ‘Oooh’ at knitwearin shop windows. It’s winter, and I'mjust going to have to face it.

Which isn’t to say I'mnot going to be defiant about it. Rightnow I'm sitting in my back garden. OK,I'm wearing knee socks and a fleece, but the important thing is I'm here.

I’ve been reading someof the Viking Sagas recently (another group of unfortunate northerners) andthey would have a pagan ceremony (being pagans) to mark the end of summer andthe beginning of winter. It’sinteresting that they didn’t acknowledge the existence of spring or autumn. I’ve always maintained that autumn doesn’texist, it’s mere propaganda. Maybe inmore temperate regions summer slides gracefully and subtly away, but up hereyou just wake up one morning shivering (I'm shivering right now, despite the kneesocks).

Living so far north,the difference between the seasons is sometimes physically shocking.

I love summer. 11pm and it’s still lightenough outside to read a book. Thebirds get confused and start singing when you're going to bed, I'm not even kidding. The sunwill rise before 5. I like darkness, butin winter it’s a thing that hangs around the edges of your day, never quite outof sight, while in summer it’s is something magical and special, something you have to wake especially in theearly hours to catch.

Pretty soon I’ll bewatching the sun rise on my way to work on the bus, and it’s already settinglong before I start for home. Apparentlyin this part of the world we have to get our entire yearly supply of Vitamin D(the happy vitamin) in summer because in winter, even when thesun does shine, it’s not strong enough for us to get any D-rays from it. And you wonder why the Irish drink alot. You’ve got to get your YaYassomewhere.

The change in myselfwill be as striking as that in the weather, and that’s what I'm least lookingforward to. In the summer I dostuff. I feel productive and bouncy (forme). In winter I go into hibernationmode. I do the routine stuff, routinely,and my brain never quite seems to kick in properly. Which is unfortunate, since that’s the timeof year I have to write huge big essays. Perhaps I'm Kryptonian! Wasn’tSuperman powered by the sun or something? If he’d crash landed in Ireland he’d never have known he wasn’thuman. In fact he probably would havehad his lunch money stolen at school. Poor Supes.

Basically, my chilliesnever stood a chance. Even as I plantedthem I could hear Mother Nature guffawing. ‘Chillies! For you lot! You wish. Get back to growing turnips you presumptuous upstarts!’

NaScWriMo

2011-11-07T09:00:00.000Z

So I guess everyone isholed up writing their 2000 words a day for NaNoWriMo? Good for you. I was planning to do it, honestly, but at thetime I thought I wasn’t going to be going to Uni. As it is I'm writing most days anyway for myclass (which is awesome btw) so I don’t feel guilty about not having a go. Maybe next year.

I did have a fabulousidea though. Part of my class is aboutscriptwriting, which I have never even considered trying before, and basically Ihaven’t a clue where to start, so I thought, as a way to launch myself into it,I'd maybe turn NaNo into some sort of scriptwriting event. NaScWriMo?

How long is a script usually? 100pages? I could aim for that in amonth.

The hard part iscoming up with a subject. Anyideas? Please?

The Real Housewives of The Emerald Isle

2011-10-27T15:48:00.002+01:00

I have a ton ofcoursework looming so, predictably, I’ve become addicted to The Real Housewivesof New York City. If you haven’t seenit, it’s a fabulous reality show about a group of women who are all going straightto hell.

Seriously, the promqueen at your school who tortured you every day of your life for 7 years whilegiggling and tossing her hair would be squashed like a bug by these women. I saw the title and thought ‘Oooh! New York!’ I'm slightly obsessed with the place so obviously I want to know whothese New York women are. What have theygot that I don’t? How come they’rehaving fabulous lives in the coolest place on earth while I live in Boresville,Ireland? They must be fantastic! How can I be more like them?

Well, I’ll tell youwho they are. They are unequivocally themeanest, most manipulative, nastiest bunch of people I’ve ever seen, and theypull it all off with such a fantastic air of smugness, self congratulation andcomplete self delusion it leaves you breathless. They don’t just rip apart the antelope; they dissectit carefully so it stays alive and feels as much pain as possible for as longas possible, and then they skin it and wear it as a coat. And yet they honestly believe they’re nicepeople.

I wouldn’t watch it,for the same reason I don’t like watching kids get shot in the head, if it weren’tfor the fact that they’re all as bad as each other and frankly it’s hard tocare which one of them is have their hearts torn out now. If they could bottle the drama in one episodethey could power Broadway for a year.

And because they’reall so disgustingly rich (despite never seeming to go to work) they don’t doall this biting and scratching in the local pub, they do it on private planesto St Barts (wherever that is) and at catered parties and restaurants that areso posh probably even the waiters are having TV shows made about them.

And despite having EVERYTHING a person could ever want, all they do is whine! You'd think they had actual problems. Not one of them seems to have a happy relationship. Actually that's not fair, one of them had managed to stay with the same man for a whole 17 years and this was such a huge deal they had to renew their vows (not in a simple token ceremony, you understand, this was the full wedding works).

17 years! 'Pah!' I scoffed. My parents were together 10 years before they even got married! 17 years is still the honeymoon period here! I've been with Babes for 17 years for God's sake! That's NOTHING! You kind of get the feeling they've decided they might as well blow the Golden Wedding Anniversary party budget now because, well...

People here are sort of bemused by Americans generally. We think they're a bit odd. And that's not the Americans' faults, it's all us. There are just things Americans do that we NEVER do. Such as speak at an audible volume, say nice things about ourselves, possess self confidence, believe we deserve stuff. We're depressingly self-effacing and we bristle at people who have the nerve to talk themselves up. So when presented with the Uber-American, loud, tacky, throwing money around, shouting their (wrong) opinions and not listening to anyone else, our jaws hit the floor. That's why these shows do so well here.

I'm not giving up onNew York, because I assume the normal people (are there normal people in NewYork?) are not like this, but I will no longer be heartbroken if I never get tolive on the Upper East Side.

These are ugly, uglywomen (in the Dorian Gray sense – they’re all botoxed to the hilt). I watch it because it’s funny, it’s shocking,and mainly because it makes me feel good about my friends, who are nicepeople. They don’t take me to five starrestaurants, they don’t give me diamonds on my birthday, and they don’t haveprivate planes. But I like that whenthey buy me a pint in the pub I can be fairly certain it’s not laced witharsenic.

Writers' Resources

2011-10-25T09:51:00.004+01:00

I'm starting a tag forwriters. And no, unlike most tags, thisisn’t a time-wasting exercise designed to help you avoid doing some actual work(don’t get me wrong, I love these) and will not ask you to list your favouritecolour/photo/things beginning with E etc. This one is useful, I promise.

I'd like everyone toshare their top 3 favourite writers' resources (magazines, forums, websites,books, whatever gets your pen moving) and then tag a few more writers to sharetheirs.

What inspires you to sit downand write?

To get the ballrolling I'm tagging a whole bunch of people. I tried to narrow it down but these are all great blogs so check them out:

Four Corners Writer's Group

I had to stop there, but feel free toconsider yourself tagged if you’d also like to join in.

My top 3 resourcesthat are well worth a morning’s dithering over are:

Mslexia

This is a quarterly writingmagazine for women (hence the clever title – see what they did there?) and it’s awesome. I’ve tried a few magazines but I like mslexiabecause:

It focuses on moreliterary fiction
The contributors andguest judges are always top quality, well known writers.
It has 2 free to enter‘new writing’ sections per year, as well as a short story competition and apoetry competition with big prizes every year.
It’s well thought ofin the industry
It has a huge list ofcompetitions and events at the back of every issue
The website has aplethora of useful stuff such as workshops, interviews and competitions that you don’t have to be a subscriber to use, so gocheck it out and if you like it I think it’s well worth a subscription (Babesrenews mine every year as a Christmas present)

Youwriteon.com

This is a website fundedby the English Arts Council where you can post a short story or the first 7000words of a novel and send it out into the world to be critiqued by othermembers while you critique theirs in return.

It’s totally free. You get a‘credit’ for every critique you do and then you attach your credit to yourstory and it’s sent randomly to another member to be critiqued. You get star ratings for various aspects suchas dialogue, pace, themes etc, plus a comment section.

Once you have 8reviews your piece goes into the Youwriteon charts! If you’re in the top 10 at the end of themonth you get a free critique from industry professionals at Random House andOrion.

The downside is thatyou have to plough through a lot of rubbish and try to say constructive thingsabout it. But actually even that can behelpful because you learn to see what’s wrong with a story and, because youhave to suggest ways to improve it, you really have to think about how to writebetter. This can only be good for yourown writing.

You get good reviewsand bad reviews and you have to develop a thick skin. But then that’s true of the writing world ingeneral and what better way to do it than from behind your computer screen,where no one can see you biting your nails and crying like a little girl? Plus, if enough people say the same thingabout your work you can maybe take that as a hint.

On the plus side, I’vehad some really useful comments and as you address these, your writing does becomebetter. It’s great to havehonest feedback on your work but it’s very scary to ask for it so I find doingit anonymously is a great idea. Plus youknow that, unlike your mum, people aren’t just trying to be nice.

Paris Review Interviews

And last but not leastis my new favourite resource (suggested last week by Scott), the Paris Reviewinterviews with authors. These are allonline and free and go right back to the 1950s! (Truman Capote, Isak Dinesen, Hemingway, Faulkner? They’re all there).

I love reading interviews with writers andfor some reason it always inspires me to get back to work myself so thisfabulous little site could keep me going for years.

So what else is outthere? I'm sure there is a lot of greatstuff and I'd love to hear about it and if we all share our top 3 we couldcreate a really good pool of inspiration. I know Nanowrimo is coming up and we're all cutting off the phone lines and bracing ourselves, but please join in with a comment, a tag, a post, or whatever youlike! Thanks in advance!

Writing about writing

2011-10-17T08:30:00.000+01:00

I’ve been surfing alot of writing blogs recently and I’ve noticed there’s a big discussion goingon about whether or not writers should blog about writing. The argument seems to be that you should betrying to attract new readers for your fabulous new novel and that posts aboutwriting technique and your latest word count are not going to interest them.

Maybe I'm biasedbecause I’ve always been completely fascinated by anything a writer has to sayabout writing (anything. By any writer), but I disagree. And I don’t think marketing is what blogs areabout.

I know writers have todo an amazing amount of self promoting, and that you’d be an idiot not toharness the awesome power of internets, but I’ve always thought of blogging asbeing primarily about community. I liveon a very small island and I know practically NO other writers. I see blogs like The Literary Lab and First Novels Club and drool with envy. Theidea of being able to say, "Babes, I'm just going out to meet my critiquegroup," sends me into paroxysms of fantasy pleasure.

Imagine not having asingle friend who shares your main interest in life (I retaliate by not lettingthem talk about their kids). It’s prettydepressing. I've joined a writing classat Uni and I'm sort of tentatively making friends with a girl there, andsuddenly I have Glenn Close in my head going, ‘New writing friend! Yes! Finally! This is it! She’s the ONE! I’ll invite her to go on a writers retreat andwe’ll read each other’s work by candlelight late into the night and swear toedit each other’s stuff forever and ever and ever…Who’s she talking to? That bitch!’ *runs off to buy rabbit*

And then I go home andbecome Bridget Jones again, (Allllll byyyyymyyyyy seeeeellllllfffffff….)

Heartbreaking stuff.

Well I'd kill for myvery own critique group of perfectly like-minded BFFs, but it ain’t gonnahappen, so I’ve turned to the web for solace, which is the reason I was surfingall those writers’ blogs in the first place.

Jody Hedlund, just oneof the bloggers writing about this topic sums it up: “Since weoften can’t share the ups and downs of our unique writing journeys with reallife friends, blogging provides an outlet for talking about writing andpublication. Besides, we have a lot to learn from one another.”

And Anne R Allen saysthat the statistics required to actually boost your sales are completely ridiculousand if you’re blogging to make money you should forget it.

To be fair, I don’thave a fabulous new novel to plug (yet! - ever the optimist) but even if when (see) I do, I think I’ll still blogabout writing.

And to all you properwriters out there, PLEASE don’t be put off! PLEASE keep blogging about writing. At least one person out there (me) does want to know your deepestfeelings about the merits of the semicolon over the colon, and how you’re aboutto slit your wrists because you need to change the entire novel from third tofirst person. I CARE!

So feel free to wax lyrical about yourwriter’s block. Go on, you know you wantto…

Tell me something I don't know

2011-10-03T21:32:00.000+01:00

I’ve found someawesomely useful stuff on YouTube (who knew! There’s more than just cute cats on there).

I found a whole seriesof Yale lecture courses. Actual Yale Universitylectures, filmed for you to watch, digest, and not have to do the homework for,right from the comfort of your own living room.

I like to watch themwhile I do my hair because there is nothing more boring thancurling/straightening your hair.

I was just Googlingrandom stuff about Marilynne Robinson (my literary hero) and I found a wholelecture about my fav book, Housekeeping. And then I discovered there are masses of these lectures, on everythingfrom Psychology to English to Genetics to Philosophy. Some of my fav titles include:

Mixed strategies in baseball,dating and paying your taxes

What Motivates Us: Sex

Queer Theory and Gender Performativity

How to live given the certainty of death

Poetry and Virginity

I'm gonna be a genius! It’s official, I am ageek and there really is nothing I like better than sitting in a lecture hallhaving smart people tell me stuff I didn’t know.

And now I can do it in my jammies!

Part Time Lover

2011-09-27T09:00:00.000+01:00

Re last week’s existentialist meltdown:

Luckily the part-time/full-time decision has been effectively taken out of my hands (apparently I have absolutely no desire to take responsibility for my own destiny). It turns out the part time course is much (much) cheaper. But that’s not the only reason I'm opting for that.Your comments also put things in perspective somewhat. Helen (Thank you, Helen!) said “Don't look upon an English degree as potentially useless - it is something you should enjoy and which should enrich you personally (and if it doesn't then you shouldn't be studying it)!”

The reason I started studying English was because I thought "Oooh, that sounds like fun," and the reason I'm continuing was because by the end of my first year I'd gone from being a casual user to making Kate Moss look like she could ‘take it or leave it’. I never missed a class (not one, people). I was sad that my 4 hour lectures weren’t longer.

I realised this is not primarily about getting lots of shiny qualifications for my CV; it’s pure hedonism. And I’ve done a degree before and the thing I remember about it is that everything was done in a rush. You never really got to learn as much as you wanted to about the interesting things because the next essay was always due. I don’t want to do that this time. I want to get as much as I possibly can out of this course, so I'm going to take my time over it.

Also, one thing I know about myself is that I need to have time to write, even if it’s just a blog/diary/shopping lists in the form of acrostics.One of the reasons I quit the library was that finding time to write became so rare that when I actually got to do it the overwhelming joy was fairly noticeable. I’m class representative in my course and one of the students asked me to write a letter to the head of the department. I leapt at it. I spent an entire afternoon hunched over a notebook, drafting and redrafting. It was a letter, people! It wasn’t even an interesting letter.

If something makes you that happy, you have to do it. I’ve always loved writing but I’ve never put it high on my list of priorities because:

It doesn’t earn me money/kudos/grades
I’m not as good as Margaret Atwood.
It’s not a proper job and will not lead to a proper job.

Well, stuff that. Who decided that things are only worthwhile if they’re lucrative and you’re a genius at them? What if they just make you smile on a daily basis?

I say go for it.

So I've polished my shoes and sharpened my pencils and it's back to school for me. I'm signed up and ready to rock (watch this space for next week’s panic attack).

Educating Emily

2011-09-19T09:00:00.000+01:00

Due to the extortionate level of University fees (pause while the Americans scoff. Yeah, OK, but we’re used to free education) I'd decided to do my English degree part time because it was cheaper. It now turns out that it may not be cheaper at all and I might as well do it full time and get it done quicker (and then I can get on with doing my Masters, PhD and general World Domination a lot faster).

But if I'm a full time student I won’t be able to work as many hours and will basically be paying out far too much money for something that will be potentially completely useless. So I don’t know what to do. It feels like one of those crossroads moments, which always make me nervous.

I actually sat down and wrote a pros and cons list, because I'm that anal.

Option 1: Do degree, masters and PhD full time, get job in university writing erudite yet entertaining academic papers before I'm 40, maybe teach creative writing on the side.

Pros:

I'd be done in 5-6 years.
If I can live on beans for those 5-6years, I'd eventually be mega rich beyond my wildest dreams

Cons:

Living on beans.
I'd be tied to living in Ireland for like, EVER.
I'd have to teach university students.
My academic papers might turn out to be not be that erudite or entertaining.

Option 2: forget Uni, focus on writing fiction, get published and become mega famous author, teach creative writing, do some independent study on the side and write an entertaining yet informative nonfiction bestseller, get honorary doctorate from Uni for being so megafab.

Pros:

This is my idea of heaven

Cons:

It’s very very (very) unlikely

Option 3: forget Uni, never get any qualifications, fail miserably at writing and have to find alternative career (possibly as a yoga instructor) at age 50.

Pros:

Having money to spend on holidays and toast for my beans.
Would probably have committed suicide before I reached 50, so wouldn’t have to worry about alternative career.

Cons:

See ‘Pros’

I think we can rule out ‘Option 3’ as a life goal.

Bearing in mind that it took me EIGHT YEARS to decide on a colour for my bedroom,

WHAT SHOULD I DO??????

Stress and Suburbia

2011-09-13T09:07:00.001+01:00

The reason for last week's anti-child rant is that our lovely elderly deaf neighbour has recently moved out and been replaced by one of the families from Supernanny. They’ve managed to stuff 3 kids in the house, which is separated from ours by a sheet of plywood.

The older boys spend all day torturing the little girl, who screams when they do and screams when they don’t. The middle child throws tantrums that last hours and involve yelling at the parents, who yell back. Their favourite activity is kicking footballs into my garden and then yelling over the fence to get them back, and all three of them stay up later at night than I do.

It’s been a long summer.

I miss my elderly deaf neighbour. I read somewhere that the human brain is programmed to find the sound of a crying baby the most stressful sound it can hear (so we’ll pick it up and shove something in its gob, presumably), but I beg to differ. The sound of "Can we have our ball back?" is the one that’s currently making me want to rip chunks of my own hair out.

I suppose they’ll grow up eventually. And start getting into dance music.

If only my house was made of gingerbread...

2011-09-06T14:26:00.002+01:00

I was reading an interview with AS Byatt, about her novel The Children’s Book, which I haven’t read yet but intend to, and she was talking about how often children’s writers turn out to be terrible parents. Not just ‘OMG is that my Dad dancing over there’ terrible, but actually beating their kids with tiny psychological hammers terrible.

She lists Kenneth Grahame (The Wind in the Willows), Alison Uttley, and JM Barrie as examples of children’s writers whose own children committed suicide in adulthood. (JM Barrie didn’t have children of his own but had the care of the orphaned Llewellyn-Davies boys, two of whom killed themselves.)

Hans Christian Anderson is another one who really wasn’t fond of kids at all, but at least he had the decency not to produce any.

And then there’s Emily Carter, aspiring YA author and anti-child campaigner.
OK, I don’t HATE them. Much. But I don’t want any of my own, I find teenagers intensely annoying at close range, and I just about tolerate children if they are blood relations, but not otherwise.

I am not discouraged by this. I don’t think the best children’s books are written by adults who like children, I think they’re written by adults who still ARE children. The ones who never quite grew up and at heart are still that 5/10/15 year old, writing the books they still want to read.

I think it was Michael Morpurgo who said you should identify the period of your life that meant most to you and that you remember most vividly and write about that. I barely remember being a child but adolescence is burned on my brain. I’ve developed no distance from it, it’s still wrapped up in ambivalence for me, and I couldn’t honestly identify a point when it ended. Which means it hasn’t. Inside I'm still a teenager.

And, when you think about it, what’s the defining characteristic of teenagers? I'd say it’s that they find EVERYONE intensely annoying. Including each other.

The upshot being, no, I do not feel guilty for yelling at my neighbours’ kids today. They were annoying me. They were lucky I didn’t stick worms down their t-shirts.

Summer Time...and the writing ain't easy.

2011-08-30T09:06:00.000+01:00

I don’t have a daily word count target. I'm just trying to force myself to sit and work until I feel I’ve produced something. Which might be 1000 words, or just a good idea.

Writers go on and on about how hard it is to sit down and write and you’d think, ‘why do you do it if you seem to hate it so much,’ but I completely understand. When you have something in your head that you’re dying to get down on paper, life is joy unconfined. But when you’re in the middle of a long project then it’s more likely that:

It needs boring plot glue bits to hold the interesting bits together
You’ve hit a plot problem and don’t know how to solve it
You’re having a crisis because it’s suddenly occurred to you that everything you’ve written so far is a) in the wrong tense, or b) from the wrong point of view, or c) going to mess up the ending, or d) just plain rubbish. All 56,000 words of it.
You’re so sick of looking at it you’ve lost all sense of objectivity and want to cry.
You’ve been writing scenes in no particular order and now unravelling it will also involve unravelling your sanity.
You’re desperate to just go to the pub and forget it ever happened. Novel? What novel?

At this point, sitting down to a blank screen can feel like Japanese water torture.
So that’s why we complain.

During term time I'm used to running out of the house first thing in the morning with no breakfast and not getting back until late. I long for the summer, when I have absolutely nowhere to be every day. But when it gets here it feels very weird. I find myself wondering where I can go today. Maybe Ikea? Tescos? We’re bound to need more orange juice. I wash my hair in the afternoons just for something to do.

But I’ve developed some tricks for making sure I do something productive every day. I took Hanif Kureishi’s advice and now I spend the first 10 minutes of every day doing free association writing. You just write down whatever comes into your head. Which means that even if you haven’t a clue what you want to add to your WP that day, you’ve broken the mental 'turning-on-the-computer' barrier and got started.

Then I take the laptop out to the garden and write until the battery runs out (which is about an hour these days. It needs a new battery) and then I'm allowed a break for a cup of tea. Hopefully by that time I’ve started something and it’s not so hard to sit down at my desk. When I get itchy feet I go back to the garden or make more tea or read a couple of blogs (though this is a slippery slope and only for the super disciplined).

When I feel like I’ve made some progress I go and do something else. Maybe work on a short story or read Mslexia (love Mslexia) or do some housework or just watch telly and refuse to feel guilty, because I’ve achieved something today.

And it’s working quite well. Most days I'm pleased with my progress and I think I have a fair chance of finishing this draft by the end of summer, which is incentive in itself because I’ve never got that far before and I'm dying to see what it feels like.

Tall, Dark and Homicidal

2011-08-25T09:07:00.002+01:00

Twilight, True Love and You: Seven Secret Steps to Finding Your Edward or Jacob by Louise Deacon

I haven’t read this but I love that it exists. Psychologist, Louise Deacon, has written it to explain to Twilight fans why they love Edward/Jacob, why that’s not a good idea, and why all their boyfriends now look a bit crap.

She points out, among other things, that what Twilight has done to men, is exactly what women complain men are doing to them.

“In a way, this is what modern men have done in their fantasies of women; they fantasise about women who do not bear much relation to reality. Surgical enhancements, botox and airbrushing have created an ideal that isn’t attainable.”

(wouldn't it be awesome if they started doing plastic surgery to make men sparkle in the sun!)

She also talks about the fact that what you watch on TV can affect your beliefs and therefore your behaviour. It’s why men didn’t want their wives and daughters reading Lady Chatterley, and why huge numbers of (crazy) people stopped eating pork after seeing the movie, Babe. It’s also why we have age-ratings on movies with sexually explicit content. Most people are in agreement about this fact of human psychology. But what about movies with explicit romantic content, says Deacon. What about movies that tell impressionable teenagers that psycho-killers deserve love too? She jokes that maybe Twilight should have a 45H rating, meaning it’s safe for 45-year-olds to watch this film, if accompanied by their husband, and suggests that the book should have a ‘Warning’ attached reading:

“This book contains messages which may be hazardous to your love life. Please bear in mind the following:

Love will not change him.
Love will not gentle him.
A violent man is not a nice guy underneath.
Just because a man loves a woman it doesn’t make up for his violent behaviour.
Love can’t make an unhappy man into a happy one.
Your love can’t cure him of his personal difficulties.
Love cannot make incompatible people compatible.
Love does not conquer all.
Don’t give too much to a man, because he won’t value you for it.
Don’t try to please a man too much, he won’t respect you for it.”

I'm as big a Twilight fan as the next girl (well, except for 17 year old, Casey, mentioned in Deacon’s book, who “makes a point of reading extracts from the Twilight books every day, as if they were from the Bible….She calls herself a Cullenist. She wants to go on a pilgrimage to Forks for her eighteenth birthday. She believes Stephenie Meyer is a prophet, and that the Cullen family is real.” I'm maybe not that bad, I just think he’s kinda cute) and I'm not the book censoring type by any means, but even as I was reading these books I found myself thinking, ‘Yes, but who’s going to tell them this is a load of b*llocks?’

Give it to a 40 year old, married woman and it’s just nice literary junk food. A bit of a treat on a Friday night when she's too tired to think about anything complicated. It’s a bit of escapism and she can spot the (laughably) unrealistic qualities in the main characters a mile off. It's Mills and Boon with a flashy cover. But in the hands of a 16 year old girl who’s never had a proper boyfriend? You’ll be lucky if all they do is refuse to go out with boys who don’t drive silver Volvos.

And I'm not even saying that they’ll all go looking for the nearest violent bad-boy. More likely they’ll simply turn down a dozen Mike/Tyler/Eric perfectly nice boys and dump the potential loves of their lives because they don’t sparkle in the sun. It took me long enough to realise Babes was the superhuman he is and I didn’t have Edward to compare him to. My problem (and yes, I am ashamed of my utter stupidity) is that he was too nice to me. The b*stard. Girls really don’t need any help in the ‘stupid’ department when it comes to boys.

By all means, buy your daughter/niece the Twilight saga. But buy them this too. And maybe buy it for your son as well, so he at least knows why he can’t get a date.

Talking books

2011-08-23T09:15:00.002+01:00

Do you discuss your Work in Progress with people as you’re writing it? Or, at what point do you start discussing it? I haven’t told anyone what my current WP is about, not even Babes. I think I'm afraid that if I tell him the whole story I’ll lose interest in writing it. I mean, why bother, when you know how it’s going to end and have already answered all your own questions about it? I want to hold on to the urge to tell the story, because maybe once you’ve told it once, you lose it. Also, I'm highly suspicious of people who love nothing more than to tell you exactly what their next WP will be about and why it's so brilliant. These tend to almost never get written.

But on the other hand, not talking about it means you get absolutely no feedback about it. What if I write the whole thing and then tell him about it and he says, “that sounds really stupid.” Not that Babes would say that, but I could tell if he was thinking it.

And maybe he’d have some really good ideas that would help me write it. in fact I'm sure he would since he is super intelligent and creative. But then, you don’t want to be over influenced by someone else’s ideas because you’ll probably write better if they are your own.

Now that the end of my first draft is in sight I'm sort of tempted to talk about it. It’s been part of my life for a couple of years and I’ve had no one to talk to about it, which is hard. Babes comes home from work and tells me all about all the important things he’s done that day and I say, “Well, I wrote a bit. And I hoovered. And I yelled at the kids next door. That was about it.” He’s going to leave me because I'm so dull!

I know he’d be interested to hear about my WP, but I'm just not sure it’s a good idea yet.
What do you think?

Mad Women

2011-08-15T09:00:00.003+01:00

I’ve started watching Mad Men, which is awesome. For the first few episodes I was completely torn between enjoying the story and wanting to punch the nearest man, but when you get used to the kind of casual misogyny that makes you want to pull out your own fingernails in frustration, it’s really good!

At least women were allowed to be chubby back then. I could give Joan a run for her money in the enormous ass department.

At the moment I'm completely identifying with Betty Draper. I'm working in a school, which means no work over the summer. So I sit at home all day. I do a bit of housework (not as much as Betty Draper but no one’s caught cholera yet). I push my little trolley round Tescos. I have lunch with any one of a range of friends on maternity leave. I watch a soap or two. Bit of light gardening. And then Babes comes home and says "How was your day, dear?" and I am tempted to make shit up just to have something to talk about.

My day was dull, darling. Nothing happened. Unless you want to hear about the new leaf on my broad bean plant and the exciting incident when the neighbour’s kid kicked a ball into our driveway. Oh! And I broke in a new dishcloth!

No wonder Betty is in the garden with a shotgun. I'm just stunned she isn’t also 30 stone.
It’s nice to have free time, especially when you’re going from 3 jobs to zero all of a sudden. But if I had to do it forever I might start drinking in the afternoons. And we all know where that leads. Everyone likes Drunk Emily, especially Drunk Babes, but when pouring wine on your cereal instead of milk just seems like a time saver, it’s time to go back to work.

Dinner was overcooked, you say?

Do or Do Not. There is No Try.

2011-08-11T10:54:00.003+01:00

I'm noticing a spate of films recently that smack of ‘Hollywood director gets bored, sees an indie film and says, hey I can do that! And mine will be way cooler cos I’ll add CGI and a few explosions!’ Ditto indie directors doing the opposite and trying to go mainstream.

I saw ‘Beginners’ at the weekend. I wanted to like it, and I did to a certain extent. I thought the actors were great (especially Plummer) and I really liked the story (which all the reviews tend to agree on) but something about it just didn’t quite work.

It was an odd mixture of Hollywood and indie. But it was like they’d slotted the indie bits in to make it more interesting, not because they actually went with the film. There were lots of bits like this; like when the doctor says the dad has a cancerous mass in his lung the size of a quarter and suddenly we’re looking at a black screen with a quarter in the middle. And then some nickels. And then 25 pennies. Yeah, we get it. And then later the screen goes completely pink, then red, then orange, etc as Ewan gives us a history lesson on what the colours of gay pride mean, and all the way along there are these montages of still images from the 30s and 50s, with Ewan saying “This is what the sun looked like in 1955”, and the stars, and president, and happy people, and sad people, and cars, and cheeseburgers, etc, etc.

It wasn’t that these bits were terrible, it was just that they tended to pop up randomly after a good half hour of perfectly mainstream film, as if the director suddenly forgot he was supposed to be making a mainstream film today. It was jarring. Even the bits where the dog ‘talks’ to Ewan (via subtitles), though cute, weren’t a major enough part of the film to really work. If you’re going to stylize a film you have to be consistent about it.

On the plus side, all the stuff with McGregor and Plummer was great. And it was mainstream without being too schmaltzy. If they’d just stuck with that they could have made a great film about a 75 year old man who comes out of the closet, and his stunned son trying to deal with it. This was all based on Mike Mills’ own father and it’s a fascinating story, done very well.

I felt the same about Emilio Estevez’s ‘The Way’. It was an OK film, but it felt like Emilio had decided to have a go at an indie think piece, but just couldn’t resist adding a lot of schmaltz and twee-ness. (And that first scene with James Nesbitt? Just shoot me in the head please). Something just didn’t quite gel.

Beginners is the opposite. Mike Mills is a director associated with indie/quirkiness who has said he hates those labels and is going after big audiences with this film. But if talking dogs and stills of 1950s photos aren’t quirky I don’t know what is.
I suppose you have to let people experiment with styles, but if your reason for experimenting is simply ‘to get a big audience’ you should probably stick to what you do best.

It’s like everyone’s dabbling, and making substandard films that only get played in major cinemas because of the names attached to them, while less famous writers, directors and actors, who have been making incredible works of arts for years on a fraction of the budget, are still only getting the ‘art house’ cinemas. I'm kind of insulted for those guys.

The film did have some very funny moments but actually the bit that made me laugh out loud was the last scene, when the couple have got back together and they’re sitting on the bed, half awkward, half content, saying, “So, what next?” and then the film ends, and I thought someone should call ‘The Graduate’ author, Charles Webb, and say, “Hey, someone’s nicked the end of your book!”

Closure

2011-08-08T09:00:00.001+01:00

At last count I have:

* 2 adult novels,
* 4 YA novels,
* and several short stories on the go, in various stages of development.

Can I finish a single one? Apparently not.

It doesn’t help that I lack any sense of focus. I keep flitting between them like some kind of Microsoft Word floozy, adding a paragraph here, flirting with an idea there...

It’s not the most productive way to work. For a start, every time you open a different project you have to completely re-familiarize yourself with it. So I spend at least 50% of my ‘writing’ time rereading what I’ve written. This does help a bit because it’s a kind of quality control. The stuff you can bear to read again is OK. The stuff you skim over with your eyes closed should probably be deleted.

But mostly it’s a big waste of time. So why do I do this? I have a horrible suspicion it’s because I’m not actually capable of finishing anything and that this tactic is intended to delay that revelation.

The interesting thing is, I’ve spotted a pattern.

I begin each new project with the kind of enthusiasm you feel in the first few months of a really promising new relationship. I dream about it. I wake up thinking about it. When I'm not writing I idly surf the web for ideas, or pictures that look like my characters. I have to resist boring Babes to death talking about it. The ideas come thick and fast and I risk RSI from typing so much.

And then things slow down a little. I start to notice the little flaws in my perfect new project. I start re-writing. Instead of coming up with new stuff I start going over and over what I've done and tinkering with it. It begins to annoy me. I begin to annoy it.

I spend months doing this. Occasionally I add a new paragraph and tell myself things are back on track, but without making a dent in the bigger chunks I know are missing. I decide I need some ‘me time.’ Some perspective.
"No, I’m not writing anything else," I assure my project, "I just need some space."

So I read a lot, I go out with friends. I tell myself it’s all contributing to my creative flow in a subconscious sort of a way.

And then one day it happens. You’re having coffee, maybe waiting for a friend who’s late, and you find yourself doodling a few sentences on a napkin. About a new character. A new story.

Before you know it you’re seeing other projects. But it’s OK, because this is The One. This time it can’t possibly fizzle out. This time it’s love.

(repeat ad infinitum).

This always happens at the same point.
I’m a commitment-phobe. I run away when things get too deep. I have the story sorted, the characters drawn, the climax planned and the jokes all in place, but invariably I look at my story and think, "This has no heart." I know what its emotional depth should be, but when it comes to trying to write it, I balk.

I think it’s that ‘write what you know’ thing. I’m quite grateful to say I’ve had very little in the way of emotional trauma in my life and so when I try to write about a character’s problems I can’t help this niggling voice that says, "What would you know about that?"

The emotion is the most important part. You have to get it right. And that’s tough. And it’s so much easier to just go and have a fling with some fun random sentences.

But I can’t do this forever. At some point I’m going to have to settle down and go through something real with one of my creations. God help them.

So this summer I’ve chosen a project (a YA novel, 30,000 words in) and dammit, I am going to finish the first draft by the time I go back to uni!

And now I’ve declared as much online I’ll have to actually do it.

Only 7 weeks till school starts!

It was a dark and stormy blog...

2011-08-01T09:00:00.002+01:00

The always hilarious Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest 2011 results were published last week. These are awards for the worst first lines of (invented) novels, inspired by the Victorian novelist Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, who began an actual novel with “It was a dark and stormy night.”

This year’s winner was Sue Frondrie with:

'Cheryl’s mind turned like the vanes of a wind-powered turbine, chopping her sparrow-like thoughts into bloody pieces that fell onto a growing pile of forgotten memories.'

Nice. Although I actually preferred the runner up, Rodney Reed’s:

'As I stood among the ransacked ruin that had been my home, surveying the aftermath of the senseless horrors and atrocities that had been perpetrated on my family and everything I hold dear, I swore to myself that no matter where I had to go, no matter what I had to do or endure, I would find the man who did this . . . and when I did, when I did, oh, there would be words.'

Other category winners, runners up and dishonourable mentions included these gems with which I will brighten your Monday:

'Veronica, two months pregnant and attempting to get her boyfriend to notice, and Ricky, who wanted to end things with his expansive girlfriend, sat at a table-for-two around lunchtime at the Olive Garden in Columbus, Ohio, eying the bottle of house rosé which, unbeknownst to them, doubled as the portal key to Khrysandelt: The land where everything glitters slightly more than normal.' - Andrew Allingham

'As his small boat scudded before a brisk breeze under a sapphire sky dappled with cerulean clouds with indigo bases, through cobalt seas that deepened to navy nearer the boat and faded to azure at the horizon, Ian was at a loss as to why he felt blue.' - Mike Pedersen

'Like a bird gliding over the surface of a Wyoming river rippled by a gentle Spring breeze, his hand passed over her stretch marks.' - Patty Liverance

This was the Romance category winner, which I loved (although I suspect I’ve read worse published romance – snob alert!):

'As the dark and mysterious stranger approached, Angela bit her lip anxiously, hoping with every nerve, cell, and fiber of her being that this would be the one man who would understand—who would take her away from all this—and who would not just squeeze her boob and make a loud honking noise, as all the others had.' - Ali Kawashima

'As the young officer studied the oak door, he was reminded of his girlfriend -- for she was also slightly unhinged, occasionally sticky, and responded well to being stripped and given a light oiling.' - Ian Fishlock

If you don’t have a smile on your face now, there’s something wrong with you. Fellow writers, be comforted, you could be worse.

You can read more of the winners here. Enjoy! (And if you think of any good ones yourself, please do brighten my day with them.)

Bad Dobby!

2011-07-28T12:30:00.000+01:00

Very much looking forward to the new Harry Potter film. I'm sure you’ve all seen it already but I’ve had to spend two weeks forcing Babes to watch all 7 previous movies so that he won’t spent the whole film whispering, “Who’s she?” “Why did he say that?” “What’s a horcrux?” Which he will anyway, despite having also read the book.

He doesn’t even like the HP movies. He hates the early ones because they’re too childish (it’s a CHILDREN’S book) and he hates the later ones because “real kids don’t talk like that.” There is no pleasing some people. Real kids also don’t go around fighting dark wizards with magic sticks.

But his biggest HP peeve is Dobby. He cheered when Dobby died. I have to say that usually I'm in full support of his policy of hating computer generated characters who’ve been given overly large eyes and poor grammar in an attempt to make them cute. But I kinda liked Dobby. He was cute.

I'm also sort of reluctant to go see the movie. It feels like the end of an era. What will we look forward to next year? I suppose there’s always Twilight. Though I don’t suppose they’ll introduce a small, computer generated, large eyed, lisping vampire for us to…Oh, no wait…

I wish I got to write essays about the Beatles instead of Brecht

2011-07-27T09:00:00.000+01:00

I've never been a non-fiction reader. Perhaps I associated it with school, while fiction was ‘for fun’. Non fiction was merely ‘true stuff’ and what could be more boring than that? But lately when I go to the library I’ve been going straight to the non fiction section and ignoring the fiction. This may be a subconscious desire not to add to my TBR pile (which is getting ridiculous), but I’ve discovered that I really enjoy books of essays, mostly by fiction writers.

Perhaps because they’re by people whose day job is to entertain rather than instruct, written “for someone in a deck chair rather than at a desk”, as Hanif Kureishi says in my latest find, these tend not to be overly academic and they’re fun to read. They also tend to be about subjects I'm interested in, such as books, movies, music, writing, and autobiographical pieces about small, random topics that aren't big enough for novels or intellectual enough for serious journalism. A bit like blog posts really.

If you’re interested, I’d recommend The Complete Polysyllabic Spree and 31 Songs by Nick Hornby. Zadie Smith’s, Changing My Mind was also excellent.

My latest is Hanif Kureishi’s Collected Essays. The essays are split into 4 sections: Politics and Culture, Films, Writing, and Domestic.

Perfect.

There’s a lot about growing up as a Muslim in 60s Britain, including your average racist Brit (a disturbingly contemporary figure), class boundaries, and a lot about pop music, and being taught by the Beatles to aspire to more than your local comprehensive school has in store for you. And this is all interspersed with essays about Muslim strippers who humiliate and physically assault their audiences, travel pieces, book and film introductions, and the highs and lows of the writing life.

Predictably, I was drawn to the ‘Writing’ section. I’ll read anything a writer has to say about writing and Kureishi has plenty, including discussions of creative writing classes, p*ssing off your family, and the very practical matter of actually earning enough money to get the boiler fixed.

There seem to be a lot ‘collected essays’ about recently, (or have they always been there and I haven’t noticed?) Kureishi talks about how all his writer friends are having to write essays, articles, film and TV scripts, or teach just to make a bit of money and I wondered if all these ‘collected essays’ books are a symptom of that.

He pulls no punches about writing. It’s tough and you won’t earn a living, and if you plan on having kids, bills or a social life, forget it, (although Kureishi apparently has all three). He quotes Cyril Connolly, who said “there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hallway,” (and Cyril was talking about male writers).

He also quotes Robert Louis Stevenson’s An Apology for Idlers, which says, (and this is my new motto and answer to all Babes’ housework related enquiries):

“Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.”

I might adapt that to “perpetual devotion to what a woman calls her business, is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of what a man calls her business.”

But he also teaches writing himself and seems genuinely interested in encouraging students. You get the feeling he’s been there. He’s had the rejections and the inescapable obsession and he knows all about self doubt. I think it’s a worthwhile read for anyone interested in writing, if only because sometimes, in the endless silence that is a writing day, you need to hear someone say, "God, I know!"

My favourite line (pay attention to this one, Babes) is:

“It might appear to acquaintances of the author that he’s doing little but lying on the sofa staring into the distance, or going on long walks,” [around the shops] but “a book is a thousand inspirations rather than one big one - and the guilt of fertile indolence has to be borne.”

Oh, well all right then...

I’ve been Gok-ed!

2011-07-26T09:26:00.005+01:00

What do you think?

This is all thanks to Babes, who can’t resist a computer related challenge. All I said was, ‘Can you change the layout on this?’ Next thing you know, I'm in the makeover scene from Miss Congeniality.

I did help a bit. Well, I made the tea.

So thanks, Babes. I'm a little intimidated actually because such a seriously grown up blog will require some serious posts. It was all a bit more ‘jeans and sweats’ before.

To that end, I'm off to read some serious literature, so I can talk about it tomorrow.

(For the Americans: 'Gok-ed' refers to Gok Wan, who hosts the UK version of How to Look Good Naked, THE best show ever! Seriously, I cry every week when they no longer think they're fat. Plus I love it when he says 'bangers.' Babes doesn't watch it. But he does love Miss Congeniality. He really is gay isn't he.)

At least I didn't buy a sports car

2011-07-21T10:45:00.001+01:00

(Flings herself at you like a woman holding a cardboard sign at Heathrow Arrivals):

I’ve missed you!

And I have. It’s been AGES. And much has changed. But I've taken a deep breath, I have a full jar of Nutella and a teaspoon by my side, and I'm ready to fill you in.

Is there such as thing as a mid-blog crisis? If not, I may have invented it. It’s like a midlife crisis except instead of buying a sports car you start looking at Wordpress.

One minute life seems totally fine, you’re content with your blogging world, and the next you start to question your very identity. Who am I, and what the hell am I blathering on about? This was all triggered by the fact that I was having an actual identity crisis brought on by leaving my job at the library. I am no longer ‘Emily Carter, 31 year old librarian,’ and I felt bereft.

They say winners never quit and quitters never win, but I'd like to add a caveat. Quitters also never get stomach ulcers or alopecia. I quit the library because I had far too much going on (see previous panic ridden posts). Quitting definitely solved that problem, leaving me with lots of free time in which to obsess about my lack of direction. Yay!

But it also felt like everything had changed, and it was too weird to sit down and blog like nothing had happened. I found myself wanting to run out on my nice, stable, reliable but mildly unexciting blog and get a new, faster, sleeker blog. Maybe with stripes down the side and a spoiler.

A new blog would mean a whole new identity, which is what all this blog window shopping was really about. I am no longer a librarian, and I have to find something else to call myself. For the first time this might involve actually making some decisions, something I’ve been far too (conveniently) busy to do lately. Scary.

But as with all midlife crises, I realised it would only last about 6 months before I caught sight of myself in my new flashy blog with the top down and realised I looked like a twat, and would have to beg my old blog to take me back. “I don’t know what happened; I just went kind of crazy!”

I’ve always envied people who can say, “I'm a doctor/lawyer/mother/book reviewer/dancer/chef/whatever,” like they’re all neatly summed up and only have one thing to focus on in life. But that’s rubbish. Everyone’s life is complicated. And if I have to use at least 10 labels to describe myself that only means I'm a varied and interesting person, right? OK, flighty and flaky, but I can live with that.

So, this is now the blog of Emily Carter, reader, writer, blogger, queen of random temporary jobs, yoga freak, volunteer, reluctant musician, wife, daughter, gardener, student, and 31 year old ex-librarian.

Yay! It’s nice to be back.

Librarians rarely get twenties stuffed in their bras...

2010-11-08T20:11:00.003Z

OK OK I’m a moaney cow. Time to stop moaning and actually do something proactive about it, (out of character as that may be).

I may have to leave the library. (Gasp!)

I’ve really been trying to avoid this. And not because I’ll miss my friends there, not because I like the work, not because of the money (believe me), but because when people ask me what I do I’ll no longer be able to say ‘I’m a librarian.’

I’ve had a lot of job titles in my time and it’s the only one I’ve ever been really proud of. (Apart from ‘Bellydancer’ which in certain circles was pretty cool. And in others, really wasn’t).

‘Librarian’ sounds like a proper job. Like I’m a proper person with career prospects. I really really don’t want to give that up (not the career prospects, just the label. I’m that shallow).

How can I have a blog called ‘Overdue’ if I’m not a librarian? What will I do with all my unattractive knitwear? Should I cancel the spectacles chain I ordered on eBay? It’s like a whole identity crisis, an image overhaul, and it frightens me. But the bottom line is, my other job pays better, treats me better, and gives me school holidays. And that’s a pretty nice bottom line. (My other job isn’t ‘Bellydancer’ btw. I gave that up.)

It’s one of those crossroads type moments people are always having in films and which you wish you could have cos you’re bored, but actually aren’t that much fun.

OMG! I’m going to have to start paying fines again!

Working 9 to 5...(I wish)

2010-10-25T08:00:00.002+01:00

Here’s the situation.

I currently have two part time jobs, a volunteer job, and a part time degree to do. Not to mention a house to clean, a blog to write, a husband, and parents who are starting to forget what I look like. If I get two minutes to myself I try to give Babes a look in. He’s being very patient (mainly because he gets to play a lot more X-Box) but eventually he’s going to get tired of the fact that all our conversations now take place via email. Thank God I don’t have children. Or pets. Or a social life.

You know that Friday afternoon feeling, where you feel like a limp dishrag? I wake up feeling like that on Monday mornings, and it just gets worse from there. I work, I read text books, and I sleep (badly) and that’s it. That's my life. I’m working evenings, I’m working weekends. The two nights a week I get in the house I spend slumped in front of Desperate Housewives or Ugly Betty because my brain can’t cope with anything more demanding.

Basically, I can’t keep this up.

It struck home the other day when an unexpected hour of free time and a flash of inspiration coincided and I did some writing. I felt so happy I wanted to cry. I realised one hour of happiness every 4 weeks is not enough.

Why is it that when something’s gotta give, it’s always you? The stuff you care about most? The stuff that makes you actually want to get up in the morning? The stuff that makes you you? And you turn into this walking corpse with bags under your eyes and the personal mantra ‘12 hours till bedtime…11 hours till bedtime…’

I’ve turned into one of those people who do nothing but complain how tired they are. And I’m not even sure why I’m doing all this. My multiple jobs aren’t exactly earning me millions, the library treats me so badly I can’t get a 3 hour shift off to work on my essay, I’m going mental over said essay because the really annoying guy in my class might get higher marks than me (and I cannot have that), yet if I wrote a list of the supposed priorities in my life, these three things wouldn’t even make the top ten.

I’ve always felt like I must be a lazy person because I’m not ambitious career-wise and I’d always rather work fewer hours so I can spend more time on the things I enjoy. But I’ve realised I’m not a lazy person. I work very hard on the things I care about, and it’s just my bad luck that none of those things will ever earn me a penny. So instead I sacrifice the things I care about for money. And that leaves me feeling slightly grubby. Soiled and soulless. The alternative being financial dependence, so either way I’m going to hate myself.

I know this isn’t exactly a unique or original problem, and there are very few people who get to spend their day doing what they love, but I just needed a rant. Feel free to join in.

Or give me some advice, even if it’s just ‘get over yourself.’

The Name-Dropping Name Thief

2010-09-21T22:03:00.005+01:00

I know, I know, but I’ve been suffering Post New York Malaise.

I thought getting back to my English class this month would cheer me up. Unfortunately we have a new student this year who is so irritating he makes Alan, the Freudian-obsessed king of all things inappropriate, look like a charming dinner companion.

I don’t know why he’s doing an English class since he already knows EVERYTHING. Not that we have to take his word for it. In our first class he delighted us by quoting Nietzsche (I had to look up how to spell Nietzsche), Marx, Zhou Enlai, and Dostoyevsky among many (many) others, filled us in on the history of ancient Greece, spat on 'chick lit', informed us that post modernism doesn’t exist, and told us about his absolute fav book ever, Ulysses.

Actually, I do know why he's doing an English class. It's because he's run out of people who'll listen to him. Get a blog, buddy, like the rest of us!

The tutor, in between looking scared, actually had to ask him to wait a minute and let her finish her sentence at one point.

There’s nothing like an over-read name dropper to make you feel utterly inadequate. And somewhat murderous.

But the absolute worst thing about him is…he has the SAME NAME as Babes! Not ‘Babes’, obviously, but Babes’ other, less well known name. He doesn’t DESERVE Babes’ name! I hate him for having Babes’ name!

Perhaps that’s irrational. Perhaps it’s unfair. But, as Confucius once said, “You can stick it up your Dostoyevsky.”

Post New York Blues

2010-08-24T10:28:00.002+01:00

You’d think I’d been away for a year. I’m having actual culture shocks. Here are some of the things I’ve found myself thinking since we got back from New York:

God, it’s so quiet here.
Wow, my garden is HUGE.
Should I wear the blue one or the black one? Who cares?
What do you mean you don’t have the exact brand of mayo I want?
And no herbal teas at ALL?
Where can I get breakfast today? Oh…right…the kitchen. Bummer.
Are the emergency services having a night off?
I’m cold.
Why hasn’t my bed been made today? Oh, yeah…
Shouldn’t there have been 30 ad breaks in this show by now?
I’m bored.
Could you speak up? Maybe shout at me?
Look, there’s a parking space!
There’s another one!
You want me to walk to the other end of town!!! Um, OK, see you in 5.
Mmm, this chocolate is GOOOOD. (Sorry America but your chocolate sucks)

But mainly I've been thinking: ‘When can we go back?’

Well we did the Staten Island Ferry

2010-08-23T08:47:00.003+01:00

As recommended by Lennon/Ono, on Saturday (our last day) we got the Staten Island Ferry, oohed and ahhed at the Statue of Liberty, and went to the Botanical Gardens on Staten Island, which were beautiful. I’d really recommend them if you want an afternoon away from the madness that is Manhattan. I think if I lived in New York I’d feel calmer just knowing they exist.

Then we went to the Angelica Café for lunch in the East Village. Babes wanted to try a vegetarian restaurant (we don’t have those here. There are 163 in Manhattan alone).

You’d think a couple of veggies like us would be in our element in a vegetarian café but I must say it was my least favourite meal all week. The trouble was it wasn’t just vegetarian. It was vegan, wheat free, dairy free, fat free, health food. And to me a meal without bread and/or cheese is just pointless. This must be how normal people feel about meat.

Babes had veggie sushi, which normally he likes, but he was underwhelmed. I had salad and the apple was mushy. I don’t think it was fresh. At home we’d probably have raved about how great the place was: big menu, stuff we didn’t even recognise on it. But after a week of amazing meals it was disappointing.

I was much more excited by the Frozen Yogurt bar we went to later. You just pick a tub, dispense the yogurt yourself and then go to the toppings bar and go crazy! I got cookie dough, chocolate chips, Reese's Pieces, Pistachios, and gummy bears. Apparently I am 6 years old. It was so much fun.

In the airport our flight was delayed so we continued the holiday spirit by propping ourselves up in an ‘Irish’ bar (no Irish barman was ever that polite), and watched baseball on the TV. We tried to figure out the rules just by watching what was going on but we didn’t get very far. I think you have to hit the ball with the stick, but frankly I’m not sure.

And now we're home.

:(

Coney Island Baby

2010-08-21T11:59:00.001+01:00

Last night we went to Coney Island so Babes could face his fear of Ferris Wheels. He was very brave. I was not so brave and didn’t go on the wooden roller coaster (it’s wooden!).

Then we had Arepas (some sort of corn thing with mozzarella, v nice) on the boardwalk. There’s a place called Nathan’s Famous where they have a hot dog eating competition every year. The winners names are up on huge board outside. Over 400,000 people come to watch and they put it on TV too.

The current title holder is Joey Chestnut (what a cool name) who ate 207 hot dogs and buns in 10 minutes. That’s 20.7 per minute! That’s insane! I’m not sure I could manage 1 in 10 minutes.

It’s quite amazing the things you can be famous for in America. We don’t really do eating competitions. But then the food here isn’t great. “Wow, you ate 200 boiled potatoes in 10 minutes! Why?”

Then we watched the fantastic fireworks. They have fireworks every Friday night, just for no reason at all.

I love New York.

New York City Boys

2010-08-20T22:00:00.002+01:00

Today we went to the Cooper Hewitt National Museum, which is a gallery of modern design. Because Babes is all into that and because it’s in Andrew Carnegie’s house! The father of libraries! Kinda.

It’s a gorgeous house with a beautiful garden you can sit in. It’s very strange to be surrounded by wooden panelling and parquet floors and old fireplaces and be looking at these space age gadgets for solving climate change. I was very impressed with a design for a cruise ship that used no diesel at all but was entirely wind, water and solar powered, until Babes said, "a wind powered boat? How very innovative."

Oh. Right.

It was all quite eco-focused, which I suppose is inevitable. Our major concern today is the environment so design has to reflect that, just as the major concern in the 60s was hideous furniture and they had to invent the Bubble Chair.

We had lunch in Yura on Madison. Highly recommend this cafe. Very good food. We got talking to a woman who had lived in New York all her life and didn’t seem too crazy (see, it is possible). She told us New Yorkers aren’t rude, they’re just in a hurry to get no place.

She said my accent was thicker than Babes! The cheek! But I think it’s only because he was putting on his ‘I’m talking to a foreigner’ voice. I can’t do any accent other than my own. I try, but I just can’t. Babes can do any accent on earth. When he’s talking to a foreigner he puts on his ‘I’m a newsreader’ voice, which is the same accent but a bit posher and more clearly enunciated.

Then we went to the High Line Park, as recommended by Thomas. It was really beautiful (thank you Thomas). They’ve made an old railway line that runs like a bridge over the streets into a public park! I suppose when you have such limited space you have to be very creative in what you do with it. We saw a couple getting their wedding pictures taken there.

Today's New York song is New York City Boys by the Pet Shop Boys because I’ve been chatted up by 3 different guys so far! One in the Met, one in Washington Square and one in a drug store. At home it usually takes a guy 6 years of knowing you plus a note from your friend to say you really like him before he'll get up the nerve to ask you out. The New York way seems much more efficient.

I don't suppose the Boys the Pet Shop Boys had in mind would have been too interested in me though.

Actually, given my dating history, you never know.

An Irishman in New York

2010-08-20T13:00:00.001+01:00

You know how some people seem to have ‘BLOG FODDER’ emblazoned on their foreheads? Babes is one such person. In the space of 4 days he has:

Gone on holiday with no shorts
Lost his work’s mobile phone
Lost his bag
Lost a library book
Gone out without his hotel key
Gone out with no money

And it's not jet lag. He has a history of losing things. And they tend to be expensive or irreplaceable things. Such as:

His ipod
His mobile
His house keys
His wedding ring
The car stereo

He also has a history of carelessness that borders on the death-defying. Such as:

Leaving the iron on all day
Leaving the front door unlocked all night
Leaving the back door unlocked all night
Leaving the front door OPEN all night

Or expensive:

Leaving the freezer open
Not returning DVDs until we can no longer go to our local rental place because we’d have to remortgage our house to pay the fines

Or embarrassing:

Going to work in odd shoes. I'm not even kidding. One was white, one was brown.

I just wanted to put it all in one place, kind of like an intervention. Sort yourself out Babes!

We was all ridin right on the subway train

2010-08-19T23:00:00.001+01:00

After going to the Top of the Rock so we could lean over the edge and yell, "Look, no hands!" we went to the New York Public Library. The mother ship.

I guess it’s a little bigger than my library. With a few more priceless works of art. But it’s unfair to compare them really because my library has been recently done up and has lovely rubber floors and metal shelves. How could the New York Public Library compete? Basically I was unimpressed, as my dumb silence will testify.

Then we went to FAO Shwartz, which is were good people go when they die. And also the home of the floor piano from the movie ‘Big’. There was a queue of kids waiting to go on the piano so I didn’t embarrass myself by joining them but I was dying to skid the length of it.

FAO has a stuffed elephant that’s a good couple of feet taller than me for $1000!!! Where the hell would you put it?

Today we made the mistake of getting the subway at rush hour, hence today's New York song, Subway Train by the New York Dolls. We had to wait for 3 trains to go by because they were too full but there were still people trying to get on.

One guy squeezed half his body on and then the doors kept opening and closing on his arse and holding the train up. And everyone inside was telling him (none too politely) to get out but he refused. We just watched in amazement until he finally got himself on board and they whizzed off down the tunnel. I bet that was a fun ride for him.

It wasn’t like he was some obnoxious teen either, he was in a suit and carrying a briefcase. But people here don't get embarrassed. They have no shame whatsoever. Whereas at home we have shame for breakfast. And lunch. And dinner. Probably that’s too much shame.

They Say the Neon Lights are Bright on Broadway

2010-08-19T05:00:00.000+01:00

This evening we went to see Chicago in the Ambassador. It was fantastic. I love that a city as cynical as New York pretty much worships the Musical.

Irish people have a fear of musicals. We’re terrified of the kind of emotional intensity that would cause a person to spontaneously burst into song. "There won’t be audience participation will there?" was Babes main concern. I promised we’d sit in the balcony, just in case.

PS my feet are KILLING me! How do people live here? Do they all have bionic feet? Even my ankles hurt! I've never walked so much in my life. The trouble is, every time I think, "right that's it, I'm sitting down right now, I can't walk another step!" another part of my brain is already thinking, "Ooh, what's that over there!" and I'm off again.

Standing on the Corner, Just Me and Yoko Ono

2010-08-18T21:00:00.001+01:00

Today's New York Song is 'New York City' by Lennon/Ono because I’ve just been to Strawberry Fields, the Lennon memorial in Central Park, right opposite the Dakota building where he was shot and where Yoko still lives. I don't know what I was expecting but it's just a mosaic on the ground that says 'Imagine'. Maybe you're supposed to imagine something a bit more impressive.

There are no Strawberries. Neither are there strawberries in Strawberry Fields in England, which wasn’t a field at all but an orphanage where John Lennon used to hang out as a child. I was told all this by the Mayor of Strawberry Fields, a bearded, tie-dyed ancient hippie who seems to preside over the area, whether officially or unofficially, I don't know.

I also went to Bloomingdale's because Sis would never have forgiven me if I hadn't. You pretty much have to run through Bloomingdale's and Macy's to stop people putting makeup on you and squirting perfume at you. Not that I'm averse to either, but frankly I have better things to do with my day right now. Only 3 days left!

Babes was fairly hungover this morning (serves him right, spicy beer indeed) but went off to work anyway. I suppose you can’t phone in sick when they’ve sent you 3000 miles to go to work.

Down and Out in New York City

2010-08-18T05:00:00.002+01:00

This evening we went to Mole (as in the Mexican food, not the animal.) Where Babes had spicy beer (!) We were having a great time till Babes realised he’d forgotten to bring any cash with him and our cards refused to work in the ATM (hence tonight's NY song). Genius. I dreamed about getting a job in New York, but I hadn’t thought it would be washing dishes. Luckily the waiter was very nice and took our Amex card even though they didn’t officially take Amex.

Then we went to a smoking bar where you could get cigars. How do you get a licence for a smoking bar these days? Wasn’t the whole point that passive smoking is bad for the bar staff? Although, in this place the barman was smoking a cigar like it was the last one on earth. He looked positively orgasmic about it.

Then we went to the White Horse Tavern, the bar where Dylan Thomas had his last drink. Or last 18 straight whiskeys, to be more accurate. Then he went home and died. Unsurprisingly.

It’s a bit of a dive bar, and, we discovered, you’re not allowed to order drinks inside and then take them outside to drink. Something to do with table service. Americans have some weird laws.

I also, very bravely, used the loo. It was clean, but if the men’s loo seat is as worn as the ladies', it may also have been the last loo seat Dylan ever sat on.

Up to Lexington 125

2010-08-17T21:00:00.001+01:00

Today’s New York Song is 'I’m Waiting for My Man' by The Velvet Underground. I’m waiting for Babes to finish work. The lyrics ‘He’s never early, he’s always late’ are particularly relevant. It’s not a work thing, he’s just always late. For everything.

Today I went to the Met. Unfrickinbelievable. I’m just speechless. One of the museum guards asked if I was a painter because I was staring so hard at everything. I think I just couldn't believe it was real. It must be quite interesting to be a museum guard. When you get bored of the paintings you can people-watch.

I also walked around the Upper East Side pretending I was a Park Avenue Princess. I saw tiny dogs, I saw botox. I saw designer handbags, doormen, plastic surgeons, and buildings that would make your eyes water. I can’t believe people really live there. And it’s totally different to downtown. The pavements are wider. It’s calmer. Even the traffic is better behaved.

Midtown is just mental. Too many people. I like downtown very much but I find the streets confusing. Uptown is more grid-like so you can’t get lost. If I had a few mill to spare I might buy an apartment there. But I'd go downtown to drink!

Fairy Tale Of New York

2010-08-16T22:00:00.001+01:00

Today I went to Kate’s Paperie. As a self confessed notebook-aholic this was like mecca for me.
I also stopped at a second hand book store and bought a book of poetry by Sharon Olds, New York’s poet laureate. It was $7.50 plus tax. I keep forgetting to add the tax onto things. We don’t have that at home. I mean, we have tax, lots of it, but we just hide it in the price of things.

This afternoon I went to Washington Square and watched the dog walkers while I ate a sandwich. I’m assuming they’re paid dog walkers because if you own an apartment big enough to house two Labradors, lets face it, you’re not wandering round Washington Square in shorts on a Monday afternoon; you’re in Wall Street earning money to buy designer dog food and pay dog walkers. But I did see a husky with it’s owner. They had very similar hair.

I found the most fantastic second hand bookshop. It’s called the Housing Works Bookstore Café. It’s a charity that supports people with HIV/AIDS in the city. It’s a gorgeous little bookstore, all wooden shelves, ladders and balconies, with a nice café in the back. And it’s all staffed by volunteers. In fact the café has a sign that says ‘our café is staffed by volunteers. That’s why we can’t find the vanilla syrup.’ I didn’t go for anything as complicated as vanilla syrup but I ordered a cheese scone and, sure enough, was given some sort of cherry confection. Which was nice, so I didn’t say anything. The girl was quite excited by my hot chocolate request because she got to use the steamed milk machine and I think that just took over her brain for a second and I didn’t want to bring her down to earth with a bump.

I bought Altered States by Anita Brookner, Strange Pilgrims by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Farewell to Arms by Hemingway, and some short stories by Isak Dinesen (aka Karen Blixen). Very reasonable prices. If I lived in New York, I’d definitely volunteer here.

I Know It's Crazy, But It's True

2010-08-16T04:00:00.003+01:00

Renoir and Degas and Braque, oh my!

Today we went to MOMA. It was amazing. I particularly like the early 20th Century stuff. We saw The Starry Night, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, The Red Studio, and countless others. Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse, Miro, Gaugin, Van Gogh, Seurat…they were all there. Just stunning. It’s like going to the Oscars, if the Oscars had not only today’s famous people but every famous person you’ve ever heard of. Pretty damn cool.

I am totally stunned by breakfasts in New York. I know it’s kind of silly to be standing beside the Empire State Building yelling, ‘Wow! French Toast!’ but it’s really quite impressive. You can get ANYTHING. ANYWHERE. I’m going to have something different for breakfast every day.

I don’t eat breakfast at home and I always thought it was because I’m not hungry in the mornings, but maybe it’s just because I got bored with it. Toast. Every day. Maybe some jam to spice things up once in a while. If you make the effort to go out for breakfast you can get a bagel with a smidgen of cream cheese or some toasted wheaten bread. And that’s it. They’d look at you like you were crazy if you asked for pancakes and fruit salad or dared to specify how you’d like your eggs cooked (there are 32 kinds of eggs!) In my local café at home I’ve gotten used to ordering and then wondering what I’ll get. It’s become sort of a fun game.

Today I had orange juice with ‘no pulp’. As opposed to ‘lots of pulp’ or ‘some pulp’. Presumably you can specify the percentage of pulp you want. I also had pancakes and eggs. I managed about half before I gave up in despair. If I lived here I’d be 20 stone.

Today's New York Song is Arthur's Theme, because I've seen a lot of crazy people already. I’ve seen a lot of people singing. On the subway. To themselves. And arguing. Across subway station platforms, park paths and pavements. And crying. In restaurants. And collapsing in the street (he was ok). And one woman gestured at me across a restaurant and said very loudly to her companion, ‘I’ve never seen anyone eat ice-cream with a fork before.’ (I prefer forks).

I suppose if you’re going to wait for a quiet private place to have a conversation/argument you’ll be waiting forever so people just go for it in public. It’s quite strange. At home we just don’t do that. And we’re fairly quietly spoken. I don’t think anyone here can physically hear me.

The absolute craziest guy though was the one who stopped and asked me who does my hair. Who does my hair??!!! WTF? I immediately thought "OMG he’s never seen such bad hair in his life and he just had to ask." Babes said, "maybe he just liked your hair." I maintain he was crazy.

New York State of Mind

2010-08-15T11:46:00.002+01:00

Having been almost killed by our taxi driver and deafened by two people yelling at each other in the street (very creative usage of four letter words) before we even got to our hotel yesterday, I feel New York has welcomed us like we were its own.

Though I must say, U.S. passport control are miserable b*stards. I noticed that I’ve developed a fear of anyone in an American uniform, which I never used to have. I used to be scared of British police and soldiers (understandably) but thought American ‘cops’ were friendly people who helped you find your mum when you got lost. Now they’re just incredibly intimidating. I sort of assume they’ll be aggressive and won’t listen to me if I have a problem. I felt a bit like I was sailing to Ellis Island in a headscarf, hoping they’d let me in.

It must be a depressingly boring job though – "right hand 4 fingers. Thumb. Left hand 4 fingers. Thumb. Purpose of visit." No wonder the woman looked unfriendly. It’s not like you’d risk a bit of banter with them. "Yeah, I know my suitcase is heavy, but you just can’t buy explosives in small packets these days. No, just kidding, but seriously…"

So far we’ve been to Macy's and Bryant Park. Macy’s I find confusing. There are no windows and I get disorientated on escalators (you have to go round and round and round) so I clung to Babes like a limpet in case I got lost and couldn’t find our hotel and had to live in the subway for the rest of my life. It turns out neither of our phones work here so this was actually a not unrealistic fear.

And why were a self confessed shopaphobic and her embolism-inducing shopping partner in Macy's in the first place? Because the brilliant Babes managed to forget to pack his shorts. 35 degree heat. No shorts.

We managed to buy some without killing each other and then headed for the Bryant Park Café. Which was fab. (Try the Quesadilla. Yum.) Being Irish we seemed to have unconsciously homed in on the only green space in the vicinity, but it was just gorgeous to watch the skyscrapers through waving trees and drink cold beers while we giggled like maniacs about the fact that neither of us was wearing a jumper.

"I’m like not even cold!!!"
"Me neither!!!"
"Look, no goosebumps!!!"

We may have been a bit drunk. Blame the jetlag.
So Day 1 has been proclaimed an official success! Bring on Day 2!

P.S. the movies on the plane were rubbish! I read Ragtime by E.L. Doctorow instead since it’s set in New York (I like to theme my holiday reading). It’s very good, but being belted into a chair for a precisely measured period of time has demonstrated conclusively what a pathetically slow reader I am. 100 pages in 6 hours? That’s RUBBISH!!!

PPS – they asked if we were bringing any food in to the country and I said no but it was a lie!!!! There was a mars bar in my bag and I’ve smuggled it in! There’s caffeine in that too so they could probably have me for drug smuggling. Babes said he wouldn’t visit me in prison.

PPPS – sorry about the excessive use of exclamation marks in this post, it’s my I’M IN NEW YORK!!!! syndrome.

Start Spreadin The News...

2010-07-13T10:28:00.005+01:00

(this is how happy I am)

When they introduced fingerprinting at American airports Babes swore he would never set foot on US soil again. (He says he’s protesting but I reckon he’s on the lam). I gazed wistfully at my Empire State Building postcard and sighed. I watched the new Sex and the City movie and wept (and not just because it was so appallingly bad).

Protest Schmotest, I wanted to go to New York! I wanted to wander round Bloomingdales knowing I can’t afford anything. I wanted to go to the Met and MOMA and the Guggenheim. Little Italy. Chinatown. Carnegie Hall. The New York Public Library. Barnes and Noble. Broadway. Time Square. I thought I was destined to die a New York Virgin.

And then it happened. Someone with more influence over Babes than me (his boss) said, "Babes (he didn’t call him Babes, I’m paraphrasing. At least I hope he didn’t), you’re going to New York to smooth talk some customers. Protest on your own time."

Now, obviously it would be remiss of me as the dutiful wife I am, to let my husband go off on his lonesome to the big city. He could get mugged. Shot at. Forget to buy me a present. These are chances I can’t take. So I self-sacrificingly offered to tag along. Y’know, in case he needs someone to iron his shirts, file his paperwork, do lots of sightseeing, that kind of thing.

The upshot being: I’M GOING TO NEW YORK!!!!!!!

So come on Americans and other worldly travellers, I need insider tips for what to do when I’m there. When I’ve stopped bouncing up and down in Times Square yelling ‘I’M IN NEW YORK’, that is.

You'd think they invented the game...

2010-06-28T08:00:00.004+01:00

Ok, they’re the closest thing we have to a World Cup entry, and nationality in Ireland is, well flexible to say the least, but I’m happy to consider myself a citizen of the world and support Germany if it means the whinging ponces get thoroughly trashed.

I feel a tiny bit bad for not supporting England. My Granda would have supported them. And my Granny had a tea towel commemorating the 1966 World Cup. But it’s the fact that they haven’t stopped going on (and on and on) about the 1966 World Cup ever since that has turned me against them.

Ok, you won it once - I once won a cup for my GCSEs, I don’t still go on and on and on about it. (It was for English Lit :) )

When Ireland feature in a major sporting event we go in saying ‘Gosh weren’t we lucky to get in’ and we go out (maybe 2nd or 3rd or even last) saying, ‘Gosh, didn’t we do well. Good on you lads, lets hit the pub!’ England think they shouldn’t even have to qualify. Like they have a God given right to be in the final of every major sporting event ever.

I’m the kind of person who always cheers for the underdog, but even when they haven’t won the thing for over 40 years, they’re so bloody arrogant about it they never really come across as the underdog. They somehow believe they're the hot favourites every year. And even if they win they still spend the next 3 months moaning about every tiny mistake they made and slagging off the referee.

And God help the players if they dare lose! They were horrible to Tim Henman because he (only) managed to come 2nd in Wimbledon. That’s 2nd. In Wimbledon. They’re never bloody happy. You sort of can't help picturing the players being ritually flogged in the changing rooms, or having to watch their pets being tortured as part of the post-match 'inquiry' (they actually called it that. As far as I could see, no one was murdered).

And wait till you hear them about the disallowed goal against Germany yesterday! We’ll literally never hear the end of it.

At one point the commentator tried to invoke ‘that famous English spirit’. As far as I know the only thing the English are internationally famous for is turning up unannounced and outstaying their welcome. And complaining.

If only there was a world cup in moaning.

So no, I wasn’t cheering for England yesterday. I may even have gone so far as cackling in a very unladylike manner when Germany scored their 4th.

Ah well, they still have 1966…

Stuff it, I'm going indoors to listen to Elgar

2010-06-16T15:02:00.002+01:00

Ah, the sounds of summer. Such as:

Davy, don’t you dare kick that ball at your sister!
Mum, I can’t find the barbeque sauce!
You’re going to break something, put it away!
It's in the fridge!
Mum, look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me!
Don’t put the sausages on yet, it’s not hot enough!
Look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me!
It is not, it isn’t even smoking!
Put that down this instant, you don’t know where it’s been!
Stacy bring me the kitchen roll, he’s been sick again!
Is that petrol! Are you crazy!
Stop eating those sweets your dinner will be ready in a minute!
Oh my god, that stupid dog’s dug up all my pansys again!
Look at the state of you!
No
No!
I said no!
Look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me!
Look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me!
Look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me!
Look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me!
Look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me!
Look at me look at me look at me look at me look at me!
Yes very nice, now go and wash your hands
Mum, he hit me!
Well just cook them on the grill then!
Did you hit her!
If that ball hits that window I swear…!
Where’s the suncream!
Not now, sweetheart, mummy’s relaxing.

Can you buy soundproof fences?

Tomato Theatre

2010-06-07T08:00:00.004+01:00

Last week Simon at Stuck in a Book issued a challenge to post a photo that represents your taste in books.

These are my first homegrown tomatoes (which I immediately graffitied and took a photo of for Babes' desktop. Anything to get a laugh).
It represents my reading tastes because I love gardening and books about nature (as well as reading outdoors), I love Shakespeare, and I can't resist utterly stupid humour.

Failing by Degrees

2010-06-01T08:00:00.004+01:00

My cousin is trying to choose what degree to do at university. He loves art. His parents think he should do medicine. He’s good at everything, poor kid.

Have you ever met an 18 year old who knew what they wanted to do with their lives? Actually I have, but I didn’t like them much. Precocious know it alls.

But most of them haven’t a clue. Your parents tell you to do a ‘proper’ subject so you can get a job (comfortably, if erroneously, in possession of a 1960s belief in the power of the almighty degree to get you employment). And they feel deeply suspicious of anything woolly sounding, such as ‘sociology’ or ‘anthropology’.

And heaven forbid you show artistic leanings. You say ‘music’, they think ‘busker’. You say ‘art’ they think ‘pavement artist’. You say ‘drama’, they think ‘porn star’. You say ‘English’, they think ‘dear God, no.’

And, fair enough, in most cases they’re probably right. I wanted to do an English degree but chose psychology because I thought I’d be more likely to get a job out of it. Except I got to the end of the degree and thought, ‘Well, that was great, but I don’t actually want to work in this area.’ And immediately went off and found a job in a bookshop.

And here I am 10 years later, a walking financial cautionary tale, working in a library and doing a literature degree! And my English class is full of people in exactly the same style of decidedly leaky boat.

The heart wants what it wants. It’s like Final Destination. You can run but you can’t hide. Fate will catch up with you. So I say go for it. If you lie awake at night dreaming of a degree in philosophy with a minor in ethnomusicology, just do it. You probably won’t get a job you like, but you’ll have more chance than you will if you do a degree in business studies, in which case you definitely won’t get a job you like.

Unless you’re one of those lucky people who knew at the age of 5 that they wanted to be a vet/archaeologist/ballet dancer, chances are you’ll end up in admin, like the rest of us. But at least you can fill your 3 university years with interesting classes and wonderful, if futile, dreams. Then you can go buy your first pin-striped pencil skirt and join the real world.

Booker Schmooker

2010-05-24T19:29:00.003+01:00

Well, I finished ‘The Sea’ by John Banville. I didn’t love it. I thought the main character was self obsessed, self indulgent, arrogant and patronising. And I think it’s perfectly possible to have an unlikeable character in a book and still make the reader sympathise with him, but I had no sympathy for this guy at all.

And I didn’t like the kids in it either. I don’t think they were believable as children and I don’t think the story even hinted at why any of them acted the way they did, so their behaviour didn’t ring true. I like to have a sort of psychological map of a character that explains their actions. I thought the only interesting story in the book was Rose and she didn’t get much of a look in.

But I did think some of the writing was really good. The parts about his wife dying were touching and chilling. But it was more his descriptions of death and dying itself than their actual relationship that were particularly effective.

I think anything was going to disappoint after Housekeeping so maybe I’m being unfair. It did win the Booker after all.

By some miracle, I’m still employed (for now) so I can’t see me getting through A Book A Day, (I suppose you can’t moan about not being unemployed) but I’m still determined to make a huge dent in my TBR pile. In fact I’ve made two TBR shelves, comprising 53 books! This has got to stop. I refuse to bring home any more strays until I’ve demolished that lot. Second hand book shops will be my financial ruin.

I was moaning that I’m running out of space for books in my house and someone suggested giving them away! I have subsequently cut this person out of my life and heart. Some people just don’t understand.

Anyway it’s not practical. It’s not just that the house would look empty; my books are part of the furniture. Stuff would actually fall down without them.

But I will come to grips with the TBR shelves. 3 down, 50 to go.

My kind of Housekeeping

2010-05-17T08:00:00.001+01:00

Thanks for all the great suggestions! (Her Fearful Symmetry is definitely on my list.)

Well, I kicked off my summer reading last week with Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.

I really enjoyed both of them. In fact, Housekeeping is one of the best books I’ve read in a long long time. I loved Gilead, but this was just as good if not better. So the summer is off to a great start!

Except now I’ve started The Sea by John Banville, and I suspect it’s pretty good but it’s never going to be as good as Housekeeping so I’m just constantly comparing it and being disappointed. Plus I don’t like the main character.

Have you ever really loved a book but disliked the main character? I can’t think of any examples but there must be some.

Summertime, and the reading is easy

2010-05-05T07:43:00.003+01:00

After a hectic, coursework and exam filled month I am finally FREE!!! My English class is done for the year and the summer starts HERE!

My project for today is to make my summer reading list. Any suggestions? The big question is What do I Start With?

The first book of the summer is very important. It sets the tone for the whole season. Do I go with something light and fun (And Another Thing by Eoin Colfer?), something meatier (Italo Calvino?), a classic (The Woodlanders? War and Peace?), something more contemporary (A Mercy by Toni Morrison? Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger?)

It's a tough decision. Any thoughts? (Don't say War and Peace)

Fear and Loathing in Las Top Shop

2010-04-07T18:53:00.002+01:00

God, I loathe shopping. I know I moan about what a terrible shopper Babes is, but I’m almost as bad.

I hate that you have to try stuff on. I hate that the sales rails are such a mess. I hate that the music’s so loud. I hate that you’re a size 8 in one shop and a 14 in the next. I hate that everything has shoulder pads at the moment. I hate that miniskirts won’t go away.

I hate that you never see anything you like when you have money. I hate that you instantly hate everything you’ve bought the second you get it home.

I hate that they’ll only let you take 6 things into the changing room when you desperately need to take in 7. I hate that you have to take 3 different sizes of everything you want to try on into the changing room, and that you still have to emerge in your socks to ask the girl to get you another one.

I hate that the girl isn’t there, and then you have to walk across the shop in your socks to get the other size, all the while wondering if the person in the next cubicle is stealing your handbag. I hate that the other size isn’t there.

I hate that nothing washes well these days. I hate that you arrive feeling psyched up and hopeful and trudge home feeling weepy and fat. With sore feet. I hate that shoe-shopping wears out the only pair of shoes you have left.

I hate that the one new thing you manage to buy makes all your other clothes look old and tatty. I hate that the sales girls ask if they can help you in a tone of voice that clearly implies ‘you need help’.

I hate the queues and the crowds and the sales and the whole damn miserable process.

Actually I’m worse than Babes, aren’t I.

Stars of the silver and blue screen

2010-04-02T12:08:00.002+01:00

I recently saw this YouTube video showing how much of Hollywood movies and TV shows are filmed using blue screens.

I think it’s supposed to be impressive and make you go ‘Oooh aren’t those computer boffins clever,’ which undoubtedly they are, but I have to say I found it totally depressing. It’s not that I really believed Ugly Betty was swanning around Manhattan going to Mode parties, but I liked to imagine the scenery was real.

You can’t live vicariously through a blue screen. ‘Gosh, I wish I could pretend to walk across a pretend street holding a pretend Starbucks, pass some pretend people and bump into a pretend bus stop…’ Sigh.

Ah well, at least Avatar was all real. It must have cost them a fortune to hire all those aliens.

We know you all fantasize about knit-wear...

2010-03-24T10:45:00.005Z

Babes just discovered this fantastic embroidery transfer...

It's called 'Sexy Librarians' and somehow I never thought I'd find the words 'sexy', 'librarian' and 'embroidery' in the same webpage but there you go.

While I agree it's the coolest thing ever, and almost enough to make me consider some sort of granny craft effort (before swiftly knocking back another vodka and coming to my senses), I have to wonder what Babes was searching for when he found this.

'Sexy librarians'? But he has one at home!

'Embroidery'? More likely, and further evidence on the My Husband is Clearly Gay front.

Good work, Babes. Nice to see all that money they pay you to sit in front of a computer isn't being wasted.

Saints and Shamrocks

2010-03-17T09:26:00.005Z

Happy St Patrick’s day to you all! We know you’re all out there, dying your rivers green right now. Because everyone celebrates St Patrick’s day. You’re all from here. Everyone on earth is in some way distantly and ancestrally connected to Ireland. Americans, Australians, Africans, you name it. And you know why that is? Because your ancestors couldn’t wait to ditch this dump and move somewhere nice.

The further away from Ireland you are the more you celebrate. The only people who shouldn’t be celebrating are the Irish, whose ancestors didn’t have the cojones to get on the boat.

St Pat took away the snakes. And that was very useful I’m sure (I for one am not a big snake fan), but probably if he’d organised some sort of country-wide vote, they’d have asked him, since he was in the mood, to get rid of the rain instead. Maybe add a few palm trees and up the temperature a notch. Then all you lot might be growing up in Dublin instead of Arizona, and being forced to read Ulysses instead of Hemmingway.

I’m not trying to be negative. There are lots of nice things about Ireland. But it rains on all of them. Tonight there’ll probably be fireworks in Dublin. And the outlook’s not good.

Ah well, happy St Patrick’s Day!

To get you in the mood, here is a video of the St Patrick’s day parade in Dublin 2008. Featuring a giant St Patrick on a three wheeler motorbike. No, I don’t know why.

There are also some American high school marching bands. There are no actual Irish people in the parade. They’re all in the pub. Presumably the Irish high schools wouldn’t be seen dead twirling flags and looking patriotic. But Americans just relish the opportunity to be patriotic. Doesn’t matter what country. They just like to support things.

The marching bands are very organised aren’t they? If that was Irish kids they’d be stopping to boke in their tubas every few steps.

It says a lot that the only coverage of the parade I could find was two guys being sarcastic and telling us how rubbish everything is. It’s no coincidence that the UK hires an Irish guy to do the Eurovision Song Contest commentary every year. Its the only reason people watch it. Frankly we don’t feel it’s worth opening our mouths unless it’s to slag something off.

I love that some poor Greek has written Tiocfaidh ar la in the youtube comments and someone’s immediately replied ‘do you even know what that means?’ We’re very easily offended when people don’t understand the subtle intricacies of our political, cultural and social situation and every detail of our history over the last 200 years. Doesn’t matter that most people live in countries with capital cities bigger than our entire country, how dare they not know this stuff!

And here’s a comedian talking about Irish accents. No one outside Cork understands the Cork accent. Possibly they don’t understand it either but everyone’s too embarrassed to say.

Will Read for Food

2010-03-09T10:55:00.003Z

Unemployment is not going to be fun. Damn credit crunch. But I’m trying to put a positive spin on it. If winning the lottery can ruin your life (and I believe it can) then there have to be benefits to being skint. Like psychological clarity. Sitting in the dark eating cold baked beans from the can and sleeping on the sofa because you’ve spent all day warming it, how could you not get in touch with yourself? I’ll have new and better priorities. I’ll be wise and deep instead of superficial and fashionably dressed.

I may have to circulate some posters to the local bookshops though :

Do Not Sell Books To This Woman!

There should be some sort of welfare benefit for book addicts. It’s not for us, it’s so our families don’t have to go without food and shoes in the winter. Thank God for libraries. Oh no wait…my library is CLOSING! Which is why I will be UNEMPLOYED and can’t afford to get the bus to another library! Why are you doing this to me! Don’t make me write to Oprah!

C'est tres tres annoying

2010-03-01T14:06:00.003Z

Another day, another essay. That’s what if feels like anyway. This is another reason I don’t have enough time to read. I’m too busy reading!

I really don’t mind doing all the critical reading, I like reading essays, although if it’s for a specific purpose (ie an essay) it can get frustrating and monotonous. But it’s lovely when all the reading’s done and you finally know what you’re talking about and what you want to say, and you can just sit down and write. I love that. It’s like having all your ingredients measured out in little white bowls and reaching the part where you get to throw them all in a great big bowl and stir vigorously! Not that I cook, but I imagine that’s the fun part.

What does annoy, nay infuriate, me about reading critical essays, is when they use quotes in foreign languages, or suddenly put their own words in Latin or something, and DON’T TRANSLATE IT!

I mean, why! Is it a test?
"If you don’t understand this just put the book down and walk away now, you're too stupid to be here."
Most people haven’t even read Dante, never mind read it in Italian!

These guys aren’t stupid, they know we’re not going to understand it. And they also know they’re not excluding anyone by doing it. All we have to do is Google the damn quote, but why put us to that trouble? Does it make them feel smart? Are they feeling superior and giggling in French at us? I don’t speak French. I chose to focus on the English, thank you very much, and it was difficult enough.

And what about the critics writing before the advent of Google? You’d have to go to a library for a foreign language dictionary! That’s just mean!

Come on, would a footnote kill you guys?!

The Unemployed Reader

2010-02-21T17:59:00.005Z

Yesterday there was snow and I mentally curled into a ball and wished for death, but today the sun is out and I am ready to forgive the universe. Summer will come. That is my mantra.

This summer there’s a fair chance I will be unemployed. How is that possible, I hear you cry. Who wouldn’t want me? But the government in its infinite stupidity has decided that reading is less important than things like speed cameras and buying themselves extortionate lunches and, as a result, a whole bunch of libraries will be closing. Staff will be moved, staff will be axed. As a relative newbie, and temporary worker, I imagine I will find myself in the latter category.

Luckily my wages are so pathetically negligible we won’t miss them. We’ll just have to cut down on buying salt or stamps or something. But all is not lost; I still have my other job, though it only exists in school term time.

Which brings me back to the summer! A summer that, for me, may be deliciously devoid of work! And, while obviously feeling horribly guilty for not only failing to bring home the bacon*, but probably burning the bacon Babes brings home, I am determined to make the most of it.

I’m always moaning I haven’t enough time to read, so I’m considering setting myself the challenge of reading a book a day in the summer. 60 books in 60 days should put a bite in my TBR pile (not a huge bite, mind you).

This is a significant challenge for me because I am a slooooow reader. I like to think this is because I care about and enjoy reading. I don’t just read a book. I examine the cover and the blurb and the dedications before I start. I re-read and memorize sentences I like, and think about why I like them. I try to guess what’s going to happen. I stop and close my eyes for 10 minutes every now and then and put myself in the character’s place, trying to imagine exactly what they’re feeling. I make a lot of toast. If it’s a real page turner I force myself to slow down, just to make it last.

By contrast, I am not in the slightest bit interested in food, and I generally eat at the speed of light, usually watching telly and not noticing what I’m eating, so I can get back to my book as soon as possible. Come to think of it, a lot of my income goes on Rennies.

But I linger over books. I luxuriate in them. And a book a day is going to be tough. But I can’t allow myself to keep buying them if I can’t keep up with the reading. So no, Babes, despite appearances I will not be lazing about the garden like a waster reading books and enjoying myself, I will be engaged in a task of epic proportions, involving military-like self discipline and the working hours of a med student. And if I burn the damn bacon I don’t want to hear about it!

* - Fake bacon, we're veggie.

Love From XXXXX

2010-02-14T08:00:00.004Z

It’s that time of year again. Don't forget to update your score on the Valentine's Day Hall of Lame.

Babes gets a bit of a blog bashing occasionally but he is actually the nicest guy you could ever meet, and I don’t deserve him. Or, as one of my friends once said to me, "So, you can’t cook, you don’t do housework, and you barely earn enough to feed yourself…wow, you must be really good in bed."

We all have our talents.

So, in honour of Valentines Day, here are 14 reasons why Babes is Husband of the Year!

1. He warms my side of the bed up with a hairdryer on cold nights.

2. He dreams about me every night. Not like super romantic dreams, (he dreams about being a spy quite a lot). But I think it’s nice that, even when he’s turned up at work naked and without his homework, I’m there too.

3. He is the co-inventor of Dirty Scrabble. Dirty Scrabble is a game we invented on holiday once and it’s exactly what it sounds like. It’s just scrabble but all the words have to be rude. You can even make words up as long as they sound a bit rude. Babes is excellent at Dirty Scrabble.

4. He’ll quite happily humiliate himself to make me laugh, for example, when he does ‘The Dance.’ The Dance is just him wiggling and jumping about until his gardening trousers fall down. Now that’s comedy.

5. When I’m sad he hugs me and says “Precious, you are so loved.”

6. He is a super sexy guitar playing rock god when the mood takes him.

7. I once asked him to make me a mix tape, thinking he’d throw a few nice songs on a CD for me. He worked for weeks compiling a CD of songs so the lyrics told the story of our relationship from day one until the present. And he never knows the lyrics to anything so he must have had to re-listen to every song he’s ever heard. I cried.

8. The last song on the CD was ‘Je T'aime’ by Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg. I laughed.

9. Although not exactly supportive of my Counting Crows addiction, he’s hasn’t actually tried to burn my CDs yet.

10. When we shared a computer he let me put James Spader on the desktop

11. He doesn’t even pretend he only watches chick flicks to keep me happy.

12. He’d kill to grow a beard, but he keeps himself stubble free just for me.

13. He drives my friends home from the pub. Even the one who punches him every time she sees him.

And finally...

14. He lets me blog about him! Thanks Babes. Happy Valentine's Day. Mwah!

Auntie Em, Auntie Em!

2010-02-09T08:00:00.001Z

Sis is pregnant! I don’t know whether to be annoyed that another of my drinking buddies has bitten the dust or be relieved, since now the very distinguished line of nobodies from which I hail will continue, with or without my help, and the pressure is officially off. On one side anyway; Babes’s mum has no grandchildren in this country and sighs every time I accept a glass of wine from her, poor woman.

I am determined to be a fantastic Aunt. I’ve already bought a teddy bear and a music box, and suggested a wealth of brilliant names, such as 'Clementina' and 'Garfunkel'.

No?

The slightly disquieting thing is that Sis is 5 years younger than me, and now for the first time she’ll be doing things I never have. Things I can’t give her advice on. I won’t be able to say, in that annoyingly patronising older sister way, “Well, when I did that…”

I have no idea what it’s like to be pregnant. I’ve never suffered sleep deprivation for anything less fun than a music festival, I don’t know what a breast pump does (sounds kinky), and I won’t be able to tell her what to do when little Garfunkel comes home with his first packet of cigarettes hidden in his lunchbox. It breaks my heart, but you’re on your own, Sis.

Is it the fact that I’m used to being able to help her or the fact that I like knowing more than everyone else that bothers me? I can feel myself getting more and more out of my depth in conversations, not just with her but with all my stretch-mark and pre-school obsessed friends. I feel like the kid in a room full of proper adults.

And they’re all so mature now! I told Sis about my brilliant scheme for restoring VW Campervans and she actually laughed and said it would never work! The nerve! She hadn’t even heard the details. And it's exactly the kind of harebrained scheme she would have been instantly enraptured by a year ago. But now she has a nursery to paint and tiny socks to buy so she doesn’t need harebrained schemes anymore. I feel bereft.

Oh well, it had to happen sometime. Actually I’m very happy for her and I’m dying to babysit (Me! I know!).

Plus I get to be the skinny sister for at least 9 months! Whoo!

Things to do in Ireland when you're cold

2010-02-02T08:00:00.001Z

I vote for renaming winter ‘book season’. It would be just as cold and miserable but it would sound nicer, and it would be more accurate since you spend most of your time cowering behind the biggest tome you can find.

The ideal winter book should be fun, a real page turner, and warm as hot chocolate. So here are my recommendations for keeping your toes (and your brain) frost free this February.

Fingersmith by Sarah Waters – you will be gripped and breathless from beginning to end. Victorian London is another world in every possible way, and Sarah Waters puts you slap bang in the middle of it, and you won’t want to leave. It’s a page turner if ever there was one, as well as being beautifully written.

The Time Travellers Wife by Audrey Niffenegger – Don’t get me started. I will cry.

A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly – A crossover YA novel about trying to get an education when you’re an 18 year old girl in the early 20th Century Adirondack Mountains. (Published as ‘A Northern Light’ in America).

The Commitments by Roddy Doyle – A must if you've ever wanted to be in a band. But be warned, you’ll end up reading the whole Barrytown Trilogy. They’re hilarious.

The Woman in White by Wilkie Collins – brilliant mystery. I remember reading this at 3am and being terrified but unable to put it down.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood – also gripping. And I don’t need to tell you it’s fantastically written.

Anything by PG Wodehouse - What ho!

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant – the biblical story of Jacob but from the point of view of his wives and daughters. Totally epic, like Ben Hur for girls.

Regeneration by Pat Barker – cos you thought you were having a bad time of it. Seriously, this is one of my favourite books. It’s about the WWI shellshock patients, including Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, at Craiglockhart hospital in Scotland.
Owen and Sassoon met there and the novel centres on the psychiatrist, Dr Rivers, who treated Sassoon, among others. It’s all based on fact and it’s absolutely fascinating as well as being a brilliant read.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte – because it’s wonderful.

I’m sure there are millions more but this is my off-the-top-of-my-head top ten. Go fill your hot water bottles, we can make it till March!

She's flirty, turned thirty...

2010-01-30T19:00:00.003Z

Today I turned 30, amid a storm of indifference. Even I didn’t really care. I did get 2 cakes though.

I think you expect something to change, for the universe to notice. A thunderstorm at the very least. But it just rained as usual. The universe wasn’t bothered it seems.

What will happen to me in my 30s? What does happen to people past 30? They have children and they get promoted. That’s about it I think. Neither of these things apply to me. But if nothing at all happens I shall die of boredom.

I have a superstitious avoidance of saying I’m bored, (I can’t help picturing Fate rubbing his hands with glee and giggling), but I suppose there’s no point hoping nothing will happen because bad things always do. It’s an absolute certainty. So at least if lots of things happen there’s the possibility that some of them will be good.

An ambulance has just gone screaming by the window. Someone’s telling me to shut up.

Babes, as ever, has saved the (birth)day. I'm very much enjoying the evening of my birthday after a busy, busy day. Work, visiting family, shopping, traffic. Now I'm calm and listening to a CD he knew I'd love and enjoying the smell of a dinner he's cooking, and reading poetry he bought secretly while I was browsing Waterstones a month ago.

I have a nice little niche here. This is why people have to grow up and move out. Because until then you're living in someone else's carefully created niche. It's a very personal fit. This one fits me like a glove. Or like the pretty top he bought me, and not at all like the belt someone else bought me that was too small, or the t-shirt I was given which was too big. People are nice but it's so wonderful to have someone who knows. Knows you, the exact shape and size and fit of you, inside and out.

But enough of this mills and boonery. I also got a voucher for a beauty salon. (Oooooh!) Just have to decide which bit of me is in most urgent need of beautification. It's a close call.

The Secret Diary of Emily Carter, Aged 29 and a bit

2010-01-26T09:57:00.007Z

I've been keeping a diary since I was 15, because I thought I was getting really old and if I hadn't done something important with my life by the time I was 16 I might as well just die. The diary was supposed to record all the important things I would do. Mainly it's 'what I had for tea' and 'God, I wish everyone would leave me alone!'
There's also a small section on 'I quite fancy that guy in my physics class. Maybe I'll marry him and call him Babes.' Awww.

Anyway I still keep a diary so I was really interested in this documentary that was on TV recently on famous diarists. I never read published diaries. I think you have to be completely self obsessed to keep a diary, and reading someone else's just wouldn't interest you. Unless it was one you found in a locked box under their bed, and then the effort of resisting would probably kill me.

Of all the ones featured on the program it was really the women's I found most interesting. And they tended to write about themselves and details of their lives rather than world events. Apart from Edwina Currie, and I think I'd rather die than read hers, ("John looked really sexy today in his grey suit. I wonder if he takes his glasses off in bed"). Ugh.

It was interesting how methodical all these diarists were. Daily entries in identical A4 leather books, all neat and detailed. Pepys wrote all his in code.
I've ranged from 3 entries a day to 3 entries a month and I write them on any piece of paper that comes to hand. So I can have 6 different notebooks going at once and the entries are interspersed with shopping lists and To Do lists. It would take some serious sorting to put them in order. And I tend to use it as a vent, so if you were to read it you'd think I was miserable all the time (I'm really not).

So, being a notebook addict, I thought this was the perfect opportunity to do some shopping and sort out my diary life. Basically I'd love a large leather journal, maybe with a lock. If I had a lock and wrote in shorthand I might be more honest. Not that I lie, but I do edit the details. I think my biggest fear as a teenager was someone reading my diary. Imagine if they'd all known what I had for tea! Or that I fancied that geek from physics. The horror.

Has anyone ever read your diary? Have you bequeathed it to anyone in the event of your death? Have they been instructed to burn it, or can they read it? Babes knows he can read mine if I’m dead. I figure it’ll give him a laugh.

Why do we feel compelled to write down what we hope no one will ever know? I think it’s because writing and talking are two different languages, and I discovered long ago that talking is not my first language. I’m rubbish at talking to people. What I really want to say only comes out right when I have a pen in my hand.

Anyway, the crux of the issue is I CANNOT find the perfect journal. You’d think it would be easy. Go to Google, type in ‘A4 leather lockable journal’ and a dozen options should pop up for you. Not one. Does anyone know where I can get a good one?

Emily just stuffed a few too many peppers in Cafe World!

2010-01-18T08:00:00.002Z

So it turns out everyone hates facebook. So why are there so many people on it? And Thomas is right, I think a lot of them are just desperate to have the highest ‘friend’ count ever. How sad is that. 2643 people clicked the ‘confirm’ button for you. Now do you feel loved?

I think it could be a useful thing for keeping in touch with people you don’t see a lot (although, isn’t that what email’s for). But it’s a really horrible site, user-friendliness-wise. And why should they make it any better, everyone uses it anyway.

It’s the people who use it every 2 minutes who really annoy me, because everything they do comes up on my home page.

Kris is eating a bun

Sheila (32, NOT 6) has bought a cow for her pretend (what!?) farm

Abbie has over-ordered tulips for her pretend florists

Tara joined the group 'Soldiers ARE Heroes and screw everyone else who thinks otherwise' (I'm not even kidding)

Mark’s horoscope says today he will annoy an old friend…

I don’t care! If you’re pregnant, engaged, emigrating, dying, having major surgery, or inviting me to a party, please feel free to share. Otherwise, I don’t want to know. You’re taking up space in my head. And there isn’t a lot to go round. The other day I had to phone in sick to work because I just forgot to go in! And I NEVER phone in sick. I’m blaming exam pressure but it is possible my terminal absentmindedness is getting worse, and it’s probably all facebook’s fault.

Um...What were we talking about?

Emily and the Little People

2010-01-13T15:11:00.005Z

Woe is me, for I am at Centre Parcs. On a family holiday. I have polite small talk echoing in my dreams. It's all very 'Kellermans'. Without Patrick Swayze. The same 'family' entertainment (ie the kind that suits no one), but with wood panelling and French restaurants. Which aren't wood or French at all. Everything's veneer.

The shop fronts are pretending to blend into the forest, the lake is pretending to be natural rather than man-made and 3 inches deep so toddlers can't drown in it, the animals are pretending to be wild, the swimming pool is pretending to be a tropical paradise complete with plastic palm trees and plastic rocks, the staff are pretending to be happy to serve you and the guests are pretending to be having the holiday of a lifetime instead of a week in the only place on earth that will not only put up with, but cater for, their screaming, messy, hyper, demanding, overtired, can't-be-more-than-5-minutes-from-a-toilet, brats.

Even I am shocked at the sheer number of 'family holidays' going on. 100% at last count. I thought it was a holiday resort that was family friendly. It's not; it's a toddlers resort that will allow adults in if they promise not to complain about the kids.

Every single person here is with children. Which only suggests that it's the sole reason for coming. They have free baby food and more high chairs than normal chairs in every restaurant. And classes for 3-7 year olds. How many 3-7 year old students could there be? Hundreds apparently. I could spit on 6 from where I'm sitting. It's Munchkin Land without the yellow brick road.

You can see all the parents connecting on some spiritual level. Holding doors elaborately open for other people's buggies, moving their chairs to let pregnant women and pushchairs by. Just radiating an air of 'I understand that your life is nothing but a series of difficulties, hassles and frustrations because, my friend, I share that life myself. We're in this hell together and we must stand united against the heartless majority who would park too close together and not have a myriad of fluffy distracting toys at hand in all situations. Here in this little corner of the world reserved specifically for us we will regroup, gather strength, remember that we're not alone, before venturing forth into the squealy-wheeled fray once more'

On Saturday I was in bed by 11. I did have a lovely back massage and meal out, but it's not exactly party town. I think there may have been one 'club' with thumping music from the 80s and first time parents reliving a youth they barely remember since they've been losing braincells at a startling rate due to the influence of The Tweenies and a mind-numbing devotion to the latest baby care Haynes manual and its 'never deviate from the routine' philosophy. I can only assume the point of said routine is to bore your baby into a state of abject submission that will last a good 18 years if you're lucky.

So here I am, contemplating jumping into a swimming pool full of splashy kids, dazed parents and, lets face it, probably a fairly concentrated solution of pee. At this point I'm sure I don't want kids. Seeing it at close range is eye-opening.

I don't think I’ve seen a parent enjoying their kids at all. Scolding, yes. Chiding and running after and pulling back and entertaining and cleaning and wiping, yes. But not enjoying. Everyone’s walking around saying how great everything is, but no one appears to be having a particularly wonderful time. You get the feeling they're just gritting their teeth and waiting for the first 16 years to pass. I really don't see the appeal.

The irony is I’m only here because it’s a family holiday thing with my relatives from England, and they’re all busting for me to get pregnant. Shot yourselves in the foot with that one, guys.

6 terrifying degrees of separation

2010-01-04T09:18:00.002Z

So I finally joined facebook. I didn’t want to, I was forced. But I thought, what the hell, everyone else is doing it, I don’t know why I’m even resisting. It’s like when I refused to own a mobile phone and then someone bought me one for a present (! Who does that! I’d made a stand! I felt like they’d bought me a puppy I never wanted and now I had all this responsibility) but then it turned out to be really useful and now I cry if I forget to bring it to work.

So I chose my profile picture, I spent literally 2 hours uploading about 20 pictures no one wants to see, and I tentatively asked my very nearest and dearest (about 3 people) to be my ‘friends’, thus triggering a multitude of repressed primary school memories and neuroses. When I’d finished rolling around on the floor weeping about the 6 year old cow (I forget her name) who did not want to be my friend and had her own colouring book, thank you very much, I went to check my profile.

It had been precisely 17 minutes and I had no less than 8 friend requests from people whose names triggered another spasm of repressed memories, this time from high school. ‘Ah’ I suddenly recalled, ‘that’s why I didn’t want to join.’

How did they find me! Who sent you! I haven’t seen these people for a hundred years and some of them I’m not sure I ever spoke to in the 7 years we shared a classroom. Others I wish I’d never spoken to.

Do I have to accept? Will they know if I refuse? Can I fake my own death?

Damn you internet, damn you!

You're right, I DO rock!

2009-12-18T09:30:00.004Z

Thanks for all the comments about my essay by the way! I very much enjoyed basking in all the praise.

I did tell my parents all about it. As predicted, Mum said "What essay?" and Dad said, "You're doing a degree?"

"Yes Dad, in English Literature"

Nods sagely, "So when you've finished it are you going to be a teacher?"

"I really hope not."

'Twas the week before Christmas...

2009-12-14T09:00:00.000Z

One of my jobs finished today until after Christmas and I’m taking next week off so I have very little to do from now until new years (besides essay writing). This is my first day sitting in the house with nowhere to go in MONTHS. I keep looking at the clock and thinking ‘I’m late!’ and then remembering. And smiling.

I love this time of year. Being at home all day everyday for a few weeks is a strange experience. I don’t know whether to enjoy the luxury of being able to eat popcorn and watch chick-flicks all day or be ultra productive since I have the time. So I’ve just been sitting in a beam of sunlight and remembering what it is to be still.

You can see how people eventually go stir crazy though. At some point a cup of tea becomes an event, warranting a saucer and cake. No wonder people get fat. And you renew your acquaintance with daytime TV and you email everyone you know about the littlest things, all the while congratulating yourself on procuring some ‘alone time’. All I need is an addiction to shopping and a couple of kids and hey presto – desperate housewife.

Not that I’m complaining.

I’ve lit the Christmas tree lights even though it’s our daily half hour of daylight and I can’t see them. You have to enter into the spirit of the thing.
Merry Christmas!

I kicked Lady Chatterley's ass!

2009-12-08T22:54:00.006Z

I got my essay back! The lecturer said, and I quote, “it was wonderful”. I rock!

I grinned all the way home, all excited about telling Babes (he had to proof read it 4 times, God love him) but now I’ve told him and I’m still all excited and there’s no one else to tell. No one who’d be interested anyway.

My family love me to bits but they’re not the most academic. My mum still thinks people do ‘O levels’ and my dad thinks if you get a degree you’re guaranteed a job.

I was the first person in my family to go to Uni. Somewhere in the middle of third year my dad said, “So, what is it you’re studying?” It was like one of those situations where you’ve met someone and been told their name but then completely forgotten it, but then you keep meeting them and the name thing never comes up and by the time you really need to know their name you’ve known them so long it would be really embarrassing to have to ask, so you just keep avoiding calling them anything and hoping someone else will say it, but no one does and then one day you have to introduce them to someone new and you finally just have to smile apologetically and say “Sorry, what was your name again?”

It was like that. He probably remembered that it was something I had an A level in but beyond that he had no idea, and by third year he still hadn’t figured it out so he just had to ask.

“Psychology, dad.”
“Oh yes, of course. Well that’ll be useful.”
It sure wasn’t.

They came to my graduation but they weren’t entirely sure what a ‘2.1’ was.
“It’s like a B”
“Oh, very good! What does Hons mean?”

And they thought all the speeches were a bit unnecessary. So did I actually.

So if I phone to tell them I got a great mark in my essay they’ll say “Very good, what are you getting your sister for Christmas?”
The standard response hasn’t changed much since the first time I brought home a finger painting. And my finger painting was rubbish.

Actually that’s not true; first they’ll say “What essay?”

I suppose you could look at it two ways. Either they haven’t the slightest interest in my academic progress, or they’ll be equally pleased and love me just the same no matter what I do. Which is kind of nice really.
But not much use when you just want to gloat about your essay mark. Which is why I’m telling you lot instead.

I Vant to be Alone...

2009-12-01T09:46:00.002Z

My essay is finished! And only slightly over the word limit. Now I have to get used to leaving the house again.

Being in the house all the time is bad for me because I really really like it. The result of all this essay writing is that I’ve stopped answering the phone. It wasn’t a conscious decision, but when it rings I find myself just sitting still and watching it until it stops. I make tentative guesses at who might be calling, but it’s never likely to be someone telling me I’ve won a million squids, and there’s no one else I particularly want to talk to.

Talking requires effort. It’s even more of an effort when I’ve spent the morning getting used to the silence in my nice empty house. I don’t watch TV. I don’t even listen to music. I LIKE the silence. When the phone rings I have to resist the urge to curl up in a ball and hiss at it. It’s a very intrusive noise. I’m tempted to get one of those type-talk phones deaf people have that just flash a light at you. Then you could just close your eyes.

I think the thing that separates people more than anything is the introversion/extroversion divide. What defines an introvert is that they find people stressful and being alone relaxing. What defines an extrovert is that they find people relaxing and being alone stressful. There’s just no overlap there.

My family consists of mainly extroverts. And they just don’t get it that I’d rather be alone than shop, have coffee, go to the pub, or talk on the phone. Which is fine. Cos I can do all those things when I have to. Or I could. Except now I’ve stopped answering the phone! What’s next? Complete hermitville? 3 more essays to go. I’ve always suspected I would make an excellent recluse.

Getting to Carnegie Hall

2009-11-23T09:57:00.002Z

In his book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell explains the world’s biggest success stories using the 10000 hour rule.

Basically Bill Gates, The Beatles and Mozart among others, all had to put in 10000 hours of practice before they produced anything good, and it’s only a combination of luck, in terms of where, when and to whom you were born, and the 10000 hours of practice that makes a so called ‘genius’.

I don’t know if that’s encouraging or devastating. I started writing maybe 15 years ago and I’ve had periods of intense frenzy and (longer) periods of intense apathy, but if you average it out I’d say I’ve maybe managed 3 hours a week over that 15 years. So that’s (God, it’s too early for maths) 2340 hours. So at that rate I need another 49 years of practice. Then I can start my novel. When I’m 78.

The good news is, if I up my productivity to 4 hours a week I’ll be done in 37 years. And if I quit my job and do 8 hours a DAY, I’ll be Margaret Atwood in a mere 3.6 years. Alert the publishers.

It was actually surprisingly difficult (and depressing) to estimate how long I spend writing. Do you include time spent staring at the screen in despair? Or surfing the web for ‘inspiration’.

On one of these ‘inspiration’ tangents, I discovered a handy (and free) program called Slife that counts exactly how much time you spend on every program on your computer. And then gives you a little histogram so you can see in horrifying detail how much time you spent on twitter compared to how much you spent on Word. It also allows you to set goals and notifies you when you’ve reached them.

I’m not sure I have the nerve. Although, presumably it only counts how long you have Word open, and doesn’t detract all that time you spent staring at the screen in despair. Anyway, let me know if any of you have the guts to try it. I think I’d rather maintain my own personal self-delusion, ‘I’m really knackered, therefore I must be working very hard.’

P.S. I spent 18 minutes writing this post, can I count that?

2500 words in 11 days

2009-11-19T10:36:00.001Z

Our lights are fixed (yay) which only means I have no excuse for not doing my essay on Lady Chatterley. I haven’t written an essay in about 10 years. I vaguely remember having to do one a week at uni and breezing through them in the space of an afternoon. Now the thought of doing one is quite terrifying.

I’ve raided every library in town for books and journals and I’ve done nothing but read about DH Lawrence for about 3 weeks now, but I haven’t actually written a word yet. And it’s due in less than 2 weeks.

Holy crap.

Someone help me. Or shoot me.

Somehow I never realised quite how far north we live

2009-11-16T21:05:00.001Z

It’s dark.

It rained so hard our electricity box exploded in a pretty shower of sparks and we have no lights.

We got up for work and it was dark, so we brushed our teeth by candlelight and watched the sunrise from the top deck of the bus.

When we got home from work it was dark. We lit more candles and made sandwiches. It seemed wrong to talk loudly so we whispered.

The sun set just after 4pm. We’ve turned the laptop on to light our game of scrabble.

The halogen heater sends a fiery eye across the room and back, over and over. Soon we’ll turn it off. And the laptop battery will die.

And then we’ll tiptoe through the darkness up to bed.

And I don’t mind at all. It seems right and peaceful to be in the dark at this time of year. As if we’ve been stubbornly trying to hold back a tide and now that we’ve lost the battle, we can relax and enjoy the waves.

At some point you have to accept the fact that you’re only 1000 miles from Scandinavia.

The Domestic Slob-ess

2009-11-09T08:00:00.001Z

In Emily-Ville public enemy number one is Her Domestic Goddessness, Ms Nigella Lawson.
We hate her because she’s voluptuous in a sexy way (and not just ‘fat’ like the rest of us). We hate her because she only uses Italian flour. We hate her because her children’s birthday parties are filled with homemade cupcakes and homemade lemonade. We hate her because she can cook.

And we hate her because Babes quite fancies her.

Oh, he pretends he respects a woman who refused to learn to sew/knit/clean/cook or darn at her mother’s knee because she was too busy reading Jane Austen. But, deep inside, his inner bourgeois caveman is salivating at the image of Ms Lawson sucking freshly whipped cream off one perfectly manicured finger, wearing nothing but an apron as she serves him the home-cooked meal she’s spent her entire day on.

I can’t cook. And that’s different, and worse, than ‘I won’t cook’. I might, if I could, but I just plain suck at it. And what’s more, I have not the slightest interest in food. If the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach I’m seriously screwed. It’s only a matter of time before he runs off with a chef.

I have tried. But it turns out owning a hundred cookery books does not count. Especially if most of them are by Nigella, (Babes actually bought me the 'Domestic Goddess' book. Subtle.) because her recipes do not work for mere mortals. I think she does this on purpose to make the rest of us look bad.

But, however evil Nigella may be, there’s really no excuse for the state of my fridge this week. It was so bad I took a photo.

The sad thing is this is nothing new. It normally looks like this or worse, and I admit to throwing out about half the contents of this picture because they were off.

So, after a soul destroying 2 hours in Sainsburys, it now it looks like this!

Eat my flour dust, Nigella, you 1950’s throwback!

Actually it's not much better, is it? But look closely, there's SALAD in there. I am the uber domestic goddess, thank you very much.

Pimp my Pumpkin

2009-11-03T09:01:00.002Z

I’ve been a bit absent on the blogosphere recently, but autumn is always a really busy time for me. At the moment I have two part time jobs, I’m doing two courses, I’m out 4 nights a week, and I’m working Saturdays. And something had to give.

Actually several things have ‘given’ and I’m beginning to think it’s not worth it. When your time and energy become really limited you start to see where your priorities lie. So far the things I’ve ditched in favour of fitting in a few more hours at work include blogging, writing, reading for pleasure, seeing my friends, seeing my family, seeing my husband, cooking, eating, housework, carving a pumpkin for Halloween, exercising, food shopping, gardening, watching re-runs of House, and ironing my clothes.

Some of these things I can live without. A little time pressure can be good for weaning you off watching too much TV. And I’m a terrible cook anyway. But when I realised I couldn’t even be bothered getting a Halloween pumpkin I knew things had gone too far.

So I rushed out and got one and carved it on Saturday. Well, I tried anyway. He’s not so much ‘terrifying’ as ‘harmless village idiot’ but it was the best I could do. My brother in law carved about 12 brilliant ones with a scalpel. They were very professional. But then his dog ate 3 of them and threw up in the middle of the party.
How was your Halloween?

The Nightmare Before Christmas

2009-10-28T08:01:00.001Z

My blog is officially 1 year old! I looked back at the first few posts and it really doesn’t feel like a year ago all that stuff happened. How time does fly.

And now we’re back to the pathetic-ness that is Halloween, Ireland style. How does America manage to do 3 major holidays in the space of 2 months and do each of them bigger than us, when we can just about manage to work up a sweat over Christmas? For Halloween we stick a paper witch up in the office and try to pretend it isn’t happening.

Did you know the whole pumpkin thing came from Ireland. And was originally a turnip cos we’re not allowed colourful vegetables. And we haven’t moved on much. I remember turnip lanterns when I was wee. Try carving one of those. It’s like granite. And doesn’t taste much better.

Pumpkins are much nicer. Though my Granny would have had nothing to do with them. She might even have called them ‘newfangled’. And I do feel like a bit of a traitor using pumpkins instead of turnips. Or I would if I had any national pride. But I do hate admitting that America is in fact better at everything.

Oh well, I’m off to disembowel my pumpkin with an ice-cream scoop. What a way to go.

Anyone know any good ghost stories?

First Wives Club

2009-10-26T08:24:00.005Z

On Saturday the library staff chucked the toddlers out, locked the shutters and decided we needed a drink. So off we went into town to get hammered. There was dancing and flirting, there were margaritas and falling over. And in the midst of it all, as usual, there was a good old bitch about the men (or lack thereof) in our respective lives.

This is standard practice for a girls’ night out and it would be extremely bad form not to join in wholeheartedly. And I did try. But it occurred to me that, in terms of men trouble, I’ve got nothing on these girls. I looked around me and did a mental summary of all the marriages represented. It looked like this:

Anne – widowed at 34
Fiona – husband left her with two young children. In process of getting divorced.
Judith – see ‘Fiona’
Sharon – Husband left ‘for some space’ and was seen last week with another woman
May – husband left when second child was 2 weeks old
Teri – had a fight with her husband before coming out and spent the night looking for someone to have an affair with in between yelling at him on her mobile
Maddie – on husband number 2. We don’t talk about husband number 1.
Sarah – widowed at 45.
Kate – stuck in a country she hates because she had a child with an Irish man, who she left when he hit her.
Roisin – see ‘Kate’ except he didn’t hit her, he just left her.
Tara – husband left 7 years ago for another woman and is in the process of trying to take Tara’s house.
Jocelyn – on husband number 2. He’s a manic depressive, 20 years older than her, with severe OCD. I dread to think what husband number 1 was like.
Amy – has a boyfriend she seems to like. But she’s only 20, give her time.

I don’t know whether to be grateful that I’m, apparently against all odds, happily married, or terrified that this is the unavoidable future of all married women. Is it just a librarian thing? Either way I’m screwed.

It’s not even the fact that people split up that I find so awful. These things happen, people fall out of love or fall for other people, and that’s bad enough, but it’s the fact that they seem to turn into absolute b*stards in the process.

This person was once the love of your life, and that may not be true anymore, but how do you go from that to the lies, bitching, underhanded tactics, using the kids as weapons and generally unbelievably hurtful and inconsiderate behaviour that seems to characterise all divorces? You wouldn’t treat a vague acquaintance so badly.

I’m looking at Babes and trying to imagine a future where the man who rushes to the kitchen if I so much as look thirsty could abandon me with a newborn or sleep with someone not much older behind my back. How could you be so horrible to anyone, never mind the person you’ve spent a huge part of your life with? What turns perfectly average husbands into such cruel arseholes? Is it just a midlife crisis thing? Cos if it is, buy a sports car! Don’t hit/abandon/publicly humiliate your wife!

I really find this quite depressing. How do you divorce/affair proof your marriage. Are there any successful marriages left?

Anarchy in the Stacks

2009-10-19T18:46:00.003+01:00

I WANT THIS T-SHIRT!

Babes found it here.

It says on the site

"In the librarian rap battle of the century , one would be left standing, the rest would be dewey decimated, and there was only one rule of the stacks:

Anarchy.

May book befoulers be kept looking over their shoulders. Every time they go to underline, highlight, dog-ear, or let a young child handle a book shortly after eating something with jelly, may they remember that some librarians don't believe in law."

I might get a tie to tie round my head too.

Sometimes once is quite enough

2009-10-15T09:02:00.006+01:00

Reading James Joyce is like having sex in the bath. (No really, it is.)

The best thing about having sex in the bath is being able to say you've had sex in the bath. The worst thing about having sex in the bath, is having sex in the bath.

So I am at last able to say (rather smugly) I have read Portrait of the Artist. But it was not a fun experience. And I have no intention of following it up with the Ulysses Jacuzzi version.

Dentally Unbalanced

2009-10-13T11:39:00.002+01:00

Apparently dentists earn 6 figure salaries these days. But the statistics are skewed since a good 4 of those figures come from me. The only reason I haven’t been conditioned into a fever pitch of horror at the sight of a tray of sharp silver implements wielded by a man in a mask, is because I face it so often I’m immune. It would be like being scared of crossing the street. You either get over it or you never leave the house.

I visit the dentist with a sense of impending doom rather than fear. And I leave in fresh waves of depression. The news is always bad. At its very best the news is "We can fix it but it’ll cost you 2000 squids". Why, of course you can have perfect teeth, and what’s more they’ll stay perfect because you won’t be able to afford to eat!

Today’s nugget of wisdom from the people who brought you mercury fillings was "you’re grinding your teeth in your sleep. You must be stressed. You should calm down or all your teeth will fall out."

Thanks.

So I’ll be drinking pure lavender oil before bed tonight, since even in my sleep I’m self destructive. Why can’t I be like Babes and do harmless things in my sleep? Babes sings in his sleep. It’s quite amusing. He says he doesn’t like the Spice Girls…

Literature Class - Part 2

2009-10-07T11:24:00.005+01:00

Why is there always one guy in your english class who thinks everything is about sex. It's like he's possessed by the soul of Sigmund and he likes to demonstrate how liberated he is by casually using words like penis and orgasm. In every sentence.

You'd think he was a psych graduate, except that if he'd ever actually studied psychology he'd know Freud was full of crap. Obviously he's just heard of psychoanalytic literary criticism and he's determined to apply it to everything. (And btw I do not get psychoanalytic criticism. How is a theory that every psychologist in the last hundred years has basically debunked going to help you understand anything? There are better theories. Much better. Freud is not the be all and end all of psychology. Let's move on, people.)

It's not that I'm a prude (or not any more prudish than your average Irish librarian anyway), I just think maybe sometimes it's not about oral fixation and fantasising about your Ma. No one in Hemmingway even has a Ma! I've literally started to wince everytime this guy opens his mouth. And he does that a lot.

So you can imagine my horror on scanning the reading list, only to discover that in a few weeks we'll be doing Lady Chatterley.

That'll be fun.

Literature Class - Part 1

2009-10-06T12:16:00.004+01:00

Cancel my Passport and call me a traitor, but, Irish or not,

I HATE James Effing Joyce!

What do you mean, 'Enid who?' !!!

2009-09-30T09:45:00.004+01:00

Babes works in an industry that is brand spanking new. And completely male dominated. When he comes to the library he finds it very odd that, as he put it, “Wow, there are girls in your work!”

And that there are old people. Whereas he’s completely surrounded by boys whose voices have just about broken. At 30 he’s one of the oldest in his company. And every year when the new intake of students arrives he feels even older. He’s due for a midlife crisis any day now.

I’m in completely the opposite situation. I work in an industry that’s been around since Egyptian times, or, as some of my colleagues refer to them, “the good old days.”

Did you know there was an ancient Athenian library and the only piece of it left is a slab of stone on which is carved the words “The photocopier is self service.”

OK, actually it says “It is forbidden to take works out of the library.”

There’s also a dictionary from the seventh century B.C. which includes this prayer:
“May Ishtar bless the reader who will not alter this tablet nor place it elsewhere in the library, and may She denounce in anger he who dares withdraw it from this building.”

Ishtar HATES when you mess with the Dewey system.

Most of my coworkers are bordering on retirement. In my work I’m the young, energetic, un-jaded newbie who knows all about the mystical box that keeps bleeping angrily at them and asking for Drive C. I’ve heard of Stephenie Meyer and I can reach the top and bottoms shelves without injury. They have a tendency to adopt me and bring me sweets. It’s nice. And it makes me feel young.

And then Amy arrived. Amy is 20. Yesterday she asked me who Enid Blyton was. And then educated me in the ways of someone called ‘Iggle Piggle’, who’d I’d never heard of. He’s blue, dontchaknow.

I came home hearing new creaks in my joints and thinking, ‘Gosh, I’d love a cup of tea and a sit down.’ This morning I have 2 grey hairs and a new wrinkle. I might have to join Babes in the midlife crisis.

In conclusion, age is all relative. Go hang out with some old people.

Weekends aren't what they used to be

2009-09-28T08:27:00.005+01:00

I know it’s unfair and terribly irrational but I’m really furious at all my friends for having babies. Didn’t we all swear at the age of 10 that we would NEVER get married and NEVER have stinky babies? They’re totally welshing on the deal!

OK, I got married, but I don’t let it interfere with my social life. In fact it enhances my social life because he gives me lifts to the pub. Babies on the other hand mean that suddenly you’re spending Saturday nights in a mall because it has (extortionately priced) underground parking, and it’s all under one roof so there’s no wasting time pub crawling and you can get home to the babysitter earlier.

I thought pub crawling was the point of Saturday nights. Instead we’re eating dinner at 6pm in a fluorescent lit shopping centre restaurant with ketchup bottles shaped like tomatoes on the table, and you can’t help but feel like you’re at Chucky Cheese, even though, not being American, you’ve never been in a Chucky Cheese.

And then you have to book tickets for the early show of the movie (also in the mall), which you miss the start of because the babysitter didn’t show, making the parents half an hour late for Chucky Cheese.

And the annoying thing is this is the girl who, a year ago, would’ve turned her nose up at a quiet night in the pub or take-out food. It was all funky night clubs and fancy restaurants or she made you feel like a social loser. Now they’re eating cardboard pizza and telling you how great it is and you just have to go along with it because it’s taken 2 months to organise this night out and if you didn’t you’d never see them at all.

The sad fact is they’re just so delighted to both be eating an uninterrupted meal at a proper table, and at the same time for the first time in 6 months, they could be at a drive through and they'd love it. If having a baby’s so crap, why did you bother in the first place? You’re smart people, did you honestly think it was going to be fun? And why am I being forced to spend 50 squids on a crap night out as a result? It’s not my kid.

And this is just the start of it. They’re dropping like flies. Unless I start grinding contraceptive pills into their food, every one of them is going down sooner or later. It’ll be just me and Babes left, childless and friendless, or surrounded by people talking about nappies and pre-schools. I’ve never been so depressed about the prospect of getting older.

When someone tells me they’re pregnant I do the whole ‘wow, congratulations’ thing but I must admit, inside I’m thinking, ‘crap, another one bites the dust. You poor thing.’ And I spend the next few years waiting for them to admit they’ve made a huge mistake. Which they never do, obviously, but I can’t help believing they’re just hiding the misery. How could it not be a huge mistake? I really, honestly don’t get it. I feel like there must be some big secret I haven’t been let in on. Does the baby come with a Swiss bank account or something? Someone please tell me what the attraction is, because the big eyes and the tiny fingers just aren’t worth giving up your life for.

Dude, where's my Van?

2009-09-16T11:12:00.003+01:00

Since I was 15 years old my main ambition in life has been to own an orange VW Campervan. A proper 1960s one. I want to go On The Road. Dodge The Draft. Damn The Man. And other clichéd 60’s adventures. I want to wear flowers in my hair and bells on my toes and dance naked on the beach. Actually no, our beaches are cold and filthy and you’d end up with used condoms between your toes. But I definitely want the Campervan.

To date, I’ve never even been in a VW Campervan (clearly no one loves me enough to buy me one), but all that’s about to change. Babes has solemnly promised (right hand on the X-Box) that next year we’ll hire a Campervan and go travelling for a couple of weeks! I’ve already started saving (in a money box shaped like a Campervan that my lovely mum bought me). I have £8.63 so far. They cost about £500 a week. I might have to cut out some luxuries. Like food and water. But it’s all gonna be worth it.

Peace Out

I read dead people...

2009-09-14T10:07:00.003+01:00

I’ve enrolled in a literature class!

I’ve put library school on hold for a while for the sake of my sanity. People think librarians are boring. And they are, but they didn’t start out boring, they were slowly ground down to a boring pulp by library school. When you’re so far gone you think copyright policy is fascinating, they give you your diploma. And your little gold glasses-chain to put round your neck. Well, they can brainwash me later, I’m going to have some fun first.

The literature class is part of a university course but you can drop in and out and do whatever modules you like. This one’s all modern literature so I’m hoping it’ll be like a slightly intellectual book club. I just hope when they say ‘modern’ they aren’t thinking in archaeological terms. In which case modern could mean anything post-Beowulf. God help us.

Surely you have to still be alive to count as modern? Or have died tragically young in the last 50 years. In which case I may have found the only literature course on earth that won’t force me to resolve my ongoing battle with Middlemarch. They haven’t sent me a reading list yet so I’ve no idea.

It starts next week, wish me luck.

This is why Cosmopolitan is also a cocktail

2009-09-09T08:00:00.002+01:00

I have a cold. I thought it might be swine flu but, as Babes pointed out, I have almost none of the symptoms on the swine flu list, and the curly tail was probably coincidental.

There’s a general rule that on the same day you get your period, haven’t washed your hair, have 2 zits, eat a king size Mars Bar for breakfast, notice a hole in your favourite (and only decent) pair of jeans, go overdrawn, weigh yourself, and have swine flu - the postman insists on delivering the latest issue of Cosmo.

Just when you’re feeling your Ugly Bettiest, you get to peruse all the glossy photos of the beautiful stick insects with their sunkissed skin in their sunkissed locations wearing their designer bikinis. Then you look in the mirror and scream before realising that’s you staring blearily back.

Really I can’t be assed listening to Leona with her brand new nose going on about how it doesn’t matter what you look like. I suppose the four hours she spent in makeup was just for fun.

Maybe that’s why people read gossip mags. At least 99% of the general population can feel superior to the sort of ‘celebs’ they like to torture in OK and Heat. If they’re not fat/addicted/divorcing/pregnant or cheating, at least they can be relied upon to have cellulite.

In conclusion: magazines suck.

Summer Lovin'

2009-09-07T08:00:00.001+01:00

Summer is officially over. I keep getting halfway through attaching the rope to the light fixture and having to remind myself that it will come round again.

I HATE winter. Loathe it. Abhor it. Despise its grey wet ass. And I consider anything that isn’t June, July or August as “Winter”. Autumn is mere government propaganda. It doesn’t really exist. There is no discernible difference between the rain we get in April and rain we get in October. It’s wet, cold, and fairly constant. In Autumn it rains on the fallen leaves. At Christmas it rains on the Christmas decorations. In Spring it rains on the new buds. But it always rains.

So you can’t blame me for feeling suicidal on the 1st of September every year, when 9 months of winter stretches ahead of me.

This year I’m trying to be positive. There are good things about winter. There must be.

Such as:

• The awful kids from the library are back at school.
• Fairy lights
• Cosy nights hugging the radiator
• Hot chocolate
• Christmas
• Hot water bottles
• Wondering if it’ll snow for Christmas (it won’t, it never does, but we live in hope)
• I now drive to work so I don’t have to get the bus in the rain and spend all day in wet jeans
• Open fires
• Woolly jumpers
• Mulled wine
• OK, it’s dark 75% of the day but that’s just means you don’t need to wear as much makeup.
• You spend less money going out because it would involve leaving the house. (But you also spend a fortune on heating oil)
• Everyone looks pasty and sad, it’s not just you.

I’m struggling now. But that’s better than nothing, right? I can make it 9 months, can’t I? 40 weeks. 280 days.

Sob…

The Booker Really Really Long List

2009-09-01T08:00:00.000+01:00

It's my birthday! I am 100 posts old!

How prolific am I! Everyone celebrates their 100th post so, in true librarian style, I'm celebrating by posting a list of 100 great books. Or 100 I've enjoyed anyway. I'll probably think of about 50 more brilliant ones after I've done this but these are pretty good anyway.

How many have you read?

1. Anne of green gables - Lucy Maud Montgomery
2. Frankenstein - Mary Shelley
3. The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
4. Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood
5. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
6. The Colour Purple - Alice Walker
7. Atonement - Ian McEwan
8. She’s Come Undone - Wally Lamb
9. Regeneration - Pat Barker
10. Jude The Obscure - Thomas Hardy
11. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
12. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
13. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
14. I Capture The Castle - Dodie Smith
15. The Finn Family Moomintroll - Tove Jansson
16. The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing - MT Anderson
17. Fingersmith - Sarah Waters
18. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
19. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
20. Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
21. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
22. Adrian Mole - Sue Townsend
23. The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison
24. Breathing Lessons - Anne Tyler
25. A Gathering Light - Jennifer Donnelly
26. The Red Tent - Anita Diamant
27. The Graduate - Charles Webb
28. This is Not a Novel - Jennifer Johnston
29. The Poisonwood Bible - Barbara Kingsolver
30. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day - Winnifred Watson
31. Angela’s Ashes - Frank McCourt
32. Firmin - Sam Savage
33. Old School - Tobias Wolfe
34. Love in the Time of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
35. Close Range – Annie Proulx
36. Property – Valerie Martin
37. Miss Garnet’s Angel – Salley Vickers
38. The Awakening – Kate Chopin
39. Anna Karenina – Tolstoy
40. The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
41. The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
42. The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
43. A Short History of Tractors in Ukranian – Marina Lewycka
44. Goodnight Mr Tom – Michelle Magorian
45. A Complicated Kindness – Miriam Toews
46. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou
47. The Bloody Chamber - Angela Carter
48. Dancer - Colm McCann
49. Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
50. The Colour of Magic - Terry Pratchett
51. The Post Office Girl - Stefan Zweig
52. The Little Stranger - Sarah Waters
53. The Christmas Mystery - Jostein Gaarder
54. The Story of Lucy Gault - William Trevor
55. My Side of the Story - Will Davis
56. Ophelia - Lisa Klein
57. Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams
58. Mothers and Sons - Colm Toibin
59. Their Eyes Were Watching God - Zora Neale Hurston
60. The Reader - Bernhard Schlink
61. The Hours - Michael Cunningham
62. Unless - Carol Sheilds
63. The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne - Brian Moore
64. A Room of One’s Own - Virginia Woolf
65. Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
66. Stiff Upper Lip Jeeves - PG Wodehouse
67. Bad Behaviour - Mary Gaitskill
68. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
69. The Book of Lost Things - John Connolly
70. The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint-Exupery
71. Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
72. Trainspotting - Irvine Welsh
73. What I Was - Meg Rosof
74. The Graveyard Book - Neil Gaiman
75. Wicked - Gregory Maguire
76. The Outcast - Sadie Jones
77. Tom’s Midnight Garden - Phillipa Pearce
78. The Age of Innocence - Edith Wharton
79. Ethan Frome - Edith Wharton
80. The Blind Assassin - Margaret Atwood
81. Beloved - Toni Morrison
82. Dracula - Bram Stoker
83. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
84. On Chesil Beach - Ian McEwan
85. Harry Potter - JK Rowling
86. A Series of Unfortunate Events - Lemony Snicket
87. Hotel du Lac - Anita Brookner
88. The Woman Who Waited - Andrei Makine
89. Testament of Youth - Vera Brittain
90. Embers - Sandor Marai
91. March - Geraldine Brooks
92. Without Feathers - Woody Allen
93. Runaway - Alice Munro
94. What We Talk About When We Talk About Love - Raymond Carver
95. Girl with a Pearl Earring - Tracy Chevalier
96. Love in a Cold Climate - Nancy Mitford
97. The American Boy - Andrew Taylor
98. The Complete Calvin and Hobbes - Bill Watterson
99. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
100. Romeo and Juliet - William Shakespeare

Freudian Trip

2009-08-27T08:00:00.002+01:00

I did the Clary Sage dream experiment.

I dreamed that Babes tried to throw out my book of fairy tales that I’ve had since I was a baby, and I was absolutely furious at him. In the dream he said, ‘Do you think I haven’t lost stuff?’ and I asked him to name one thing and he said he couldn’t but only because he has a terrible memory (which is true), and then I said, ‘Real fairy tales are darker than you can imagine, but they can still have happy endings.’

And then I woke up.

Analyse that, people!

Sweet dreams are made of this

2009-08-25T08:00:00.000+01:00

So we were talking about dreams.

I happen to know a great trick for having interesting dreams. All you do is get some Clary Sage essential oil, put a few drops in a base massage oil and get a gorgeous guy to give you a massage with it before bed. Failing that, get your husband to do it, (or just do it yourself).

I guarantee you’ll have strange dreams. For me they’re always very vivid, detailed and long, and I remember them when I wake up. I’m going to try it tonight so I’ll let you know what I dreamed tomorrow. Dare you all to have a go. But don't drink or drive after the Clary Sage, it's practically a narcotic.

My recurring dreams include whales, water and smoking. Not at the same time. Water means life, as I was telling Lee in my last post, and I dream of nice clear water when I'm happy, murky water when I'm sad, and not being in the water when I'm bored.

I'm also a lucid dreamer so I can quite often do whatever the hell I want in dreams. My favourite is to go to the top of skyscrapers and jump off. I'm not suicidal or anything, it's just an amazing feeling and I know I can't get hurt. It's not like imagining it, it feels absolutely 100% real. Apparently you can learn to lucid dream but I'm not sure how.

Let me know if you try the Clary Sage thing.

And you were there...and you, and you, and...

2009-08-19T10:12:00.001+01:00

I’m a lucid dreamer and a psychology graduate so I’m absolutely fascinated by dreams, mine and other people’s.

Last night I dreamed I was sitting by the river with a bunch of people I didn’t recognise and someone said, ‘So do you all know each other?’ and someone else said, ‘No, I think we’re all bloggers here.’

And I realised all the people were all the authors of the blogs I read, and all the people who read my blogs! So, you lot, basically. Weird. It was really nice to meet you all btw.

What’s the best/worst/weirdest dream you’ve ever had? Is anyone else a lucid dreamer? It's so much fun!

Save the Librarians!

2009-08-17T10:00:00.002+01:00

OK, sorry for being such a moan last week. Turns out I had PMT. I worked it out when Babes started feeding me bits of chocolate on the end of a long stick. All better now. So what if my life is meaningless? As Mother Theresa once said, ‘Meaning is overrated’. OK, she never said that, but I bet she would have if she hadn’t been so busy tending to the poor.

Me? I get to tend to the wee b*stards at the library.
The kids are driving me crazy. They’re off school, they’re hyper, and they don’t read. They just like to torture the librarians. The library is not in a good area and the kids are kind of off the rails. But you can’t do anything about it because the parents are even scarier than their kids.

Last week a 5 year old boy came in and asked, quite politely actually, would we mind his hammer for him till he came back.
‘Yes, Matt,’ (tugging my sleeves down over my hands cos I’m not getting my prints on that thing), ‘just...(slowly)...give...me...the hammer.’
He hands it over. Everyone sighs with relief.
‘Does your dad know you have this, Matt?’
‘No.’
‘I thought not.’
‘But my mum does.’ Then he skips out the door. We add the hammer to the rusty saw we confiscated when they used it to hack a limb off a tree so they could burn it, and the empty bottles of vodka, Baileys and Sambuca that littered our car park this morning.

Our Monday morning window count this week revealed 9 cracked panes, 2 smashed, and one spattered with mud. It’s like target practice. But at least the doors were still on their hinges this time.

Today we also found a book one of them had scribbled on in crayon. It said ‘I hate the library.’ And I wouldn’t have minded in the slightest if they’d spelled ANY of the words correctly.

On the plus side, I’ve found something good about winter. They’re back at school!

Aww, Shucks...

2009-08-12T08:00:00.003+01:00

I got an award! It's a Heartfelt Award from Vanessa at Pen, Paper and Cake and it goes to blogs that make you feel all warm and cosy inside. Thank you, I feel so special! Well, I wanted something to happen, and this was a very nice happening indeed.

So now I'll pass it on, like a school sports trophy you only get to keep for one year (not that I ever won one of those). I'm probably not allowed to give it back to Vanessa but if I could I would.

I'd also like to award it to The Archduchess at Les Chaussettes de l'Archiduchesse who not only makes me laugh and cry on an almost daily basis, but is also the most fantastic writer. Seriously, how is this blog not world famous by now? Check it out.

Yeah, but you've got your own TV show to keep you busy...

2009-08-10T08:00:00.001+01:00

As a great man (Dr Phil) once said, ‘Bored people are boring people.’

I have always totally agreed with that. But here I am, 29 years old, house sorted, man sorted, job semi sorted, too many hobbies to keep up with, and I am BORED. The kind of bored where you don’t even want to do anything. You just want something to happen. Which is always a dangerous wish, and whenever I feel like that I always have this image of Fate rubbing his (or her) hands in glee and giggling at the foolish human.

But I’m married, I’ve finished school, I don’t want kids and I have no desire to move house. Maybe nothing will ever happen to me again. Nothing good anyway. Maybe I’ll still be sitting here when I’m 60, in exactly the same house/job/mood. That thought really depresses me. There seems no point at all to a life like that.

Does anyone else feel like that, or is it just me? Should I phone the men in white coats now?

OK, last one, I promise. (Let's hope Stephenie also promises)

2009-08-06T07:59:00.005+01:00

I finally finished Breaking Dawn. It was highly entertaining. Not only hugely addictive, but also completely ridiculous. How they're going to make the movie I have no idea. It kind of started to descend into farce around the end of book 2. Sequels are rarely a good idea.

Did I learn anything from Twilight? Well, I've come to the conclusion that being a vampire would be pointless. For example, you can read super fast, but then you're going to live forever so really you have no need to do anything super fast. You can crush ice in your hand, but you can't drink Mojitos. So what's the point?

Also I think it may have created an entire generation of Drama Queen teenage girls who now think that's what adult relationships are like. They're going to be so disappointed the first time they have to have a conversation about paint charts and getting the boiler fixed. On the one hand, if you can't be idealistic when you're 16, when can you be, but on the other, I'm not sure it's entirely responsible to portray this kind of co-dependent, highly charged, destructive, anti-feminist sort of relationship as the real deal. Life's not like that, girls. Men aren't like that. Thank God.

Ah well, it's over now. I can get on with my life again.

What shall I read now? Nothing with a sequel, please.

Too much information

2009-07-29T08:00:00.001+01:00

Although it’s been occasionally frustrating trying to find info on my family tree, I can’t help but feel that future generations will be denied the thrill of the hunt.

Frankly, there’s far too much information about people today. Hundreds of years from now your descendants will be able, at the click of a button, to find out not only your date of birth, death, and marriages, but every CD you ever bought, every pill you ever popped, your shoe size, favourite colour, and all the dodgy stuff you bought at Ann Summers. Then they can watch CCTV footage of you and read your blog.

They won’t be fascinated by us, they’ll be bored to death of us. Let’s retain some mystique, people. Ok, everyone think of a number, right now. And Never Ever Ever tell anyone it. Then no one will ever know. Years from now they’ll speculate, they’ll put hours into research, they’ll write novels about what might have happened. But no one will ever really know the truth and it’ll drive them crazy. HA!

The sad thing is we've gone UP in the world...

2009-07-27T08:00:00.005+01:00

Me and Sis are researching our family tree. At the minute it’s more of a shrub but it’s quite addictive so I reckon it could grow substantially. Unfortunately our surname is common as muck so we’re having to do a lot of sifting.

All this is the direct result of watching countless episodes of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’, the TV program where they research the family trees of celebrities. But on TV they have experts ranging from Public Record Archivists to God working for them, and they always find these amazing ancestors who single-handedly beat the Nazis or built Buckingham Palace or invented shoes or something.

So far the most prominent feature of my ancestors’ lives is extreme poverty. They were depressingly poor and lost a depressing number of children, probably as a result. They had big families, lived in 2 room houses, and worked in Mills and Ship Yards. Some of them could read and write, some couldn’t. And this wasn’t hundreds of years ago, my dad remembers some of these people.

And yet they were an enterprising bunch. My great great granny couldn’t read but she owned her own shop. My great uncle wanted to join the navy but he was too young so he lied about his age, and eventually deserted somewhere in Canada. Some of them emigrated to America. Some of them helped build the Titanic (it probably wasn't their fault). One of them learned to fly a plane before he’d ever been a paying passenger on one.

Details like that make me proud of them. But I imagine their lives weren’t easy and I wish they could have had the same advantages I have. I’d love to know all the little details you don’t get from census records and marriage certificates. I’d kill to read my great great granny’s blog.

“pregnant again. But at least the girls are 8 now so they’ll be leaving school in time to help out with the baby. It’ll have to sleep in the sink. Edward Jr wants his first pair of shoes. Kids are spoiled rotten these days. He’ll have to wait till he’s 16 like the rest of them. I only did 20 loads of washing today, I feel so lazy. Well, I have to go mash up dinner for Lady Muck (aka The Mother In Law), crotchety old bag. Then I’m going down the road to find out who’s been blocking up the street’s communal loo, and when I do they’re in trouble...”

I’ll never complain about my life again.

Unless I’m really pissed off.