Category
Family
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01.01.03Packing By ProxyThese last few days have seen me throw away (or give to Oxfam) boxes and boxes of stuff - clothes, books, bits of paper, stuff I've been holding onto for years, for no reason except empty sentiment...Feels good to chuck it away. I'm purging. I've been doing a lot of clearing out by proxy, too - my sister is at the family homestead at the mo, preparing the house for an incoming lessor. No-one lives there at the moment, or has done for the last few years at least - my mum is up in Iona, my sister is wherever ...
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01.01.03On TheftI'd been in Bolivia for almost a year, and I knew how to handle myself. I wasn't a tourist, and I wasn't a local - I was something in between, something infinitely more nebulous and difficult. Lots of things had happened - lots of good and lots of bad - but I hadn't once got angry or upset. I'd picked myself up, mentally dusted myself down and said "right, what can I learn from this?". Pragmatic to a fault, even after being attacked, even after the riots, even after being beaten. I was living out in the countryside, but I rented ...
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01.01.03On StuffPacking while moving house. We love it. Sample conversation with my mum, knee deep in packing tissues and cardboard boxes:Me: Oh, what's this long thin piece of material I've just found tucked away in a box in the attic?Mum: That's the hem off those curtains we used to have in the spare room in St Quintin Avenue, you know the ones - they were a bit too long so I had to take them up.Me: Oh right. Where are the curtains then?Mum: Goodness knows. No idea. I think we gave them away when we moved from that house, must have ...
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12.23.02Where’s your head at?I envy Santa, you know. I could have really done with a team of flying reindeer and a sleigh tonight, to shift me from London to Glasgow. Instead, I had a plane, and a not-very-co-operative one, at that. Three and a half hours of waiting at the gate, three hours of waiting, taxiing, waiting, returning to the stand, waiting some more in the plane and then one hour of flying. We arrived four and a half hours late.I could have herded some reindeer and trained them to fly in the time it took to get to Glasgow.So, in summary:I spent ...
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12.16.02Say CheeseI saw a photo the other day in which I was snapped while on the phone to my sister. My eyes are closed, and I am gesticulating. Caught in mid speech, I look scarily like my mother. My mum cannot have her picture taken without talking, or waving her arms about. I think it's a nerves thing. As soon as you point a camera in her direction, she starts speaking and gesticulating, saying, "oh, what do you want me to do?" or "ok, I'm waiting," or "oh no, I feel silly, just hurry up and take it." Consequently, in every photo ...
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12.16.02We Shall Not Be MovedI've alluded to my peacenik upbringing before - to the way that my parents (earnest and shabby in the sixties, ex-pat academics in the seventies, woolly intellectuals in the eighties) dragged the childhood version of me on all sorts of protest marches, for things, against things, you name it. I've told you how I exploited the protest mentality for my own aims and how sometimes protesting got me into trouble. I don't think I've yet mentioned how, in a life-changingly important interview for college in 1990, I was asked if I considered myself politically active. I answered earnestly "yes," and ...
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12.16.02No ParkingI love this story: Woman, 62, carved swear words on cars. Basically, a pensioner was arrested recently, on suspicion of carving the F-Word (incidentally, I love it when the police and teachers and other people of institutional authority refer to 'four letter words' - like 'neck' and 'tone' and 'home' and 'bowl' presumably. God, we're so fucking prudish sometimes) on cars in her neighbourhood in Caldicot, Gwent. Police had spent six months searching for the vandal - they'd automatically assumed it was a juvenile delinquent, and were shocked to discover strong evidence pointing to the OAP.I love this story because ...
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12.08.02Hide and SeekDid you ever play hide and seek? Which did you prefer to do? I'm sure the childhood preference speaks volumes about a person's developing personality or sexual appetite or something. I was always a hider. I didn't mind seeking too much, but patience in game-playing has never been my strong point (see also my ongoing exasperation with 20 questions) and so I didn't really enjoy stalking around a house in search of people who were deliberately trying to make themselves impossible to find. But hiding... Now that was a task I could apply myself to with relish. The house we lived in ...
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12.08.02On HayfeverWithout wanting to sound smug, I've never suffered from hayfever. Sorry.Every year throughout my childhood, my father, sister and brother would be seasonally struck down with red eyes, runny noses, sneezing, drowsiness, all the classic symptoms, while my mum and I would look on, healthy and vaguely bemused. The weirdest thing would be seeing how anti-histamine affected them so differently. Anna, my sister, would pass out almost instantly, while it would turn my big brother David into a speed freak, whizzing around the house like a mad thing. However your deal with it, hayfever sucks royally, and my heart goes ...
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12.08.02On Dusting and Other Domestic DilemmasYesterday we flung open all the windows and gave the house a proper spring (well, summer) clean. Dull but necessary once in a while. It's so easy to depend on maintenance cleaning and tidying; picking up as you go along and keeping the place relatively ordered and hygienic, but rarely getting around to hoovering the top of the doorframe. You know the kind of tasks I mean. I have a friend who swears by having a "woman who does" - someone to come over a couple of times a week and hoover, scrub the shower, clean the oven and dust everything. ...
recent posts
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- Being a list of songs relating to the switching on of the LHC
- A moment’s pause
- In search of a simple sandwich
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Looking for the Anti-Valentines?
