Today, for me, has been about sound. It has been an underlying theme, and I like this. Underlying themes are good. They get double ticks in the margin and a few extra marks on the final grade. So I approve of them. And to find them running along nicely in my own life is somehow very gratifying, as though my existence is itself a Proust novel or a Mansfield story without me knowing it. Just think: I'm running around, teaching, writing, having meetings, and all the time, the theme of sound is bubbling underneath like a mountain stream, a forest brook, the gentle fall of a fountain in the market square, a burn in a Scottish landscape.

Ah, what crap I give out.

Let me tell you the facts. The theme can speak for its flipping self. I'm fed up of it now.

1. The sound of the answerphone.

A few days ago, one of my daughters left a message on our answerphone. 'Oh, never mind, it's OK,' it went. 'I'll try your mobile.' I couldn't work out which daughter it was. I texted the younger one. 'Hi, is everything OK?' She came back. 'Yeah, fine, just eating a peanut butter sandwich. Why?' (This can be roughly translated as: Not my paranoid mother AGAIN! Can't a person eat junk food for dinner in peace?') I texted again. 'Did you call home?' She texted back. 'No, why?' (Indeed. Why call home? They're only my parents, blood relatives, closest kith and kin, who conceived, gave birth and cared constantly for me for 18 years, after all.) So it wasn't her, then.

I texted the older one. 'Did you call home?' No text arrived back. So, I guessed that meant 'no', roughly translated as 'Stop trying to pretend you think I called home just as an excuse to contact me and ask me for a minute-by-minute run-through of my day, feelings and inner motivations.'

So, I'd puzzled about this message for days.

Then, today, (oh yes, you think, you were telling us about today about half an hour ago ...) I listened again to the answerphone.

Then I realised. It was me.

I'd rung Husband from work that day to see if he was in. It had taken only the hour between my ringing and my arriving home for me to forget that I'd called.

Very, very worrying.

2. The sound of breaking glass.

7pm tonight. We've had dinner. I'm marking Steinbeck essays. Husband is undergoing a procedure he calls washing up but which I call 'far too much fuss with rinsing and washing and rinsing again and drying and wiping and not letting things drain naturally'. I keep out of it. I'm in the other room, with the door shut. I can hear him rinsing and it makes me want to call a solicitor.

Then, there's a massive crash and that splinter-splinter-splinter sound that goes on for eternity and foretells a long, long session with the vacuum cleaner. In the ominous seconds of silence which follow, I manage to make two acerbic comments about someone's lack of punctuation. Then, the plaintive cry: 'Can you come and help? I'm in here in my socks.'

This is one of those sentences which needs a pragmatic interpretation. What he really means is, 'I'm BEHIND the broken dishes in my socks' which is, of course, quite a dilemma. I pad through, also in socks, and we both stand there, in socks, having a cosy 'oh, we're both in socks' moment, before I spring into action like a ... like a ... spring ... and hand him his shoes from the hallway, and a broom. Then I go back to my marking. At least, for a while, I'm not having to listen to the rinsing. Even the sweeping of broken glass (which we only bought on Saturday) is an improvement on that.

3. The sound of live music - and envy.

7.30pm. Sister texts. (Thank goodness my phone flashes, 'This is your SISTER texting, DUMBO' or something similar, because I could have mistaken her for anyone the way things are going.) 'We're in the pub listening to live music,' she writes. I text back. 'I'm marking Steinbeck essays and listening to live smashing of casserole dishes, live cries of despair and live vacuum cleaner noises. You think you've got it good?' That's the thing about jealousy. It makes your voice oily with sarcasm, and on a text, it sounds even worse. When she got the text, I bet I sounded really bitter and twisted. Texting is very bad on intonation. You can text, 'I love you' and someone can read it as 'You spineless dork, don't ever come near me again'. Anyway, she texts back with, 'Enjoy!' which I think is Textish for 'Whoops! Bad time to let you know I'm having a great time!'


So, as you see, it's all been about sound today. Now, if I were a good English student, and not just an English teacher who doesn't have to actually DO the stuff any more, just teach it, I would be able to link all these underlying but sadly disconnected themes together and force them artificially into some kind of intelligent conclusion about life.

But all I can think of is: 'So, my conclusion is that all these underlying themes of sound mean that my day was all about sound.'

Which wouldn't get me a double tick.

http://beingmiss.blogspot.com/2009/05/reasons-not-to-over-analyse-events.html

Which would you rather be, a spoon or a pastry? Or, more to the point, which better describes how you feel when you're lying with that special someone? That magic intimate time (for what else than magic is it when, no matter what their size, people lying together in bed are somehow exactly the same height as each other?) that we Brits, and Americans too it seems, and maybe others, call spooning.

Close to closing time our group were chatting personal, squiffily teasing our giblets with talk of the intimate acts we occasionally enjoy. So to spooning, but a term that meant nothing it seemed to the group’s Hungarian contingent. It wasn’t, as we were briefly shocked to consider, that they were bereft of intimacy in eastern Europe (probably no more than the rest of us anyway) but that the humble spoon had little to do with it. Reassured our that our snuggle time wasn’t just some British perversion, we asked our utensil-less friend if there was a Hungarian equivalent for the term spooning? She thought on it, and the closest she could hit upon was kifli.

Kifli http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kifli (KEEF-LEE) are traditional Hungarian pastries, often croissant-shaped, that can be served either sweet or savoury. Imagine two doughy bodies, Kifli Major and Kifli Minor, lying together, sweet right? Or savoury, depending on your taste.

The act is the same, though which would you rather be: a cold spoon in a dark drawer, or a small warm pastry on a plate? Put like that most would agree that their love is made not of alloy in Sheffield, but of flour and sugar in an oven (though, in a concession to those from the steel-working capital of England's industrial heyday, the love ovens burn in Sheffield too, I'm sure. Lovens. Tee hee). Even the word kifli sounds better than spooning, the former suggesting some cute, cosy afternoon activity, while the latter has the potential for being some heated invasive act that requires an implement. ‘God you’re looking good tonight, when I get you home I’m going to give you such a spooning’. Also, calling someone a ‘spoon’ was something not very nice we did in the playground, so there’s that too.

Unfortunately Kifli don't appear to be widely available in the UK, so it would be difficult to adopt the term as replacement for spoons. Instead couples here would need to agree on a mutually understood and comparable patisserie reference.

'Darling, lets call in sick today. We can spend the day in bed, just like when we were first together'.

'Oh you, you're a bad influence on me. The whole day? What did you have in mind for us to do, hmm?'

'Well...you want to make croissants?'

'Make your own damn breakfast', your sweetheart would say, their romantic hopes dashed. Leaving you alone, looking a spoon and hungry to boot.

Spoons then.

http://www.paulmacauley.net/

After a while, "spotting" autistics in the street, or among friends and colleagues, or on the television, becomes a kind of obsession in itself, a party game similar to the "who is a Jew" game I once read about. (It's not as sinister as it sounds: the writer was a Jewish-descended journalist who, on meeting other Jewish-descended journalists, liked to swap notes on celebrities whose Jewish background was mostly unknown. At the root of this ethnic Top Trumps was a kind of implicit community pride: see how our tribe has achieved so much that even we don't know the half of it).
Fictional characters are even better: since they can't be conclusively tested or diagnosed, the possibilities are limitless. My list includes Stephen Dedalus, Prez in The Wire, Alan Partridge and The Incredible Hulk (for his limited language skills, poor eye contact and raging tantrums).
As Paul Collins notes in his perceptive book Not Even Wrong, which I recommend to Autistic Dads (and Mums) everywhere, the names at the top of most people's lists are Isaac Newton and Einstein. Not far behind come the likes of Mozart, Vincent van Gogh and Andy Warhol. It's often the first thing you hear when you breach the subject of your child's condition: a sincere, well-meaning comment along the lines of "oh, but Mozart was autistic - you've probably got a genius on your hands." Yet as well-intentioned as this kind of statement is, it betrays two conceits: firstly, that exceptional talent, rather than happiness or social aptitude, is the highest ideal that parents can aspire to for their children; and secondly, that developmental disorders such as autism, or mental illness, can be offset against individual genius: that there is some consolation in genius, since it's the quality that is most likely to endure after death.
It's a hangover, though people would be horrified to acknowledge it, from the old Victorian Bedlam attitude to mental disorders. Display a "savant" ability and you would be indulged, often over-indulged, often at the cost of your own personal well-being; show none, and you were condemned to a life in the madhouse. Just consider the statistical implications and you soon realise that even among the autistic population, geniuses of world renown make up only a tiny proportion of the whole. Autism, by and large, has meant isolation, loneliness, a high chance of mental illness and, until recently, widespread institutionalisation. And let's not forget what being one of these feted genius entailed: Mozart drove himself into an early grave at 35, his obsessive work schedule at odds with his fragile health; Van Gogh suffered from paranoia and depression, and eventually shot himself, and Warhol's private and public demons are well documented.
I will leave the last word to Paul Collins: "There are Newtons of refridgerator parts, Newtons of painted light bulbs, Newtons of train schedules, Newtons of bits of string. Isaac Newton happened to be the Newton of Newtonian physics, and you cannot have him without having the others, too."

http://superwomanblog.wordpress.com/2009/02/09/the-state-of-our-floors/ 

I don't have any photos of the monsoon yet. When I do I'll be sure to post them up. But for those of you who read my blog last week about the difficulties often presented by the pavement, I thought this photo provided a good example of this. This little boy has just stopped and is thinking what I often think when we come to a similar 'drop': what now??! The answer is, of course, go on the road. But now you see why pushchairs are just not an option here.

But back to the monsoon...I've lost count of the number of times we've been caught out by it recently. The other day Andy found Maya, Lily and I dripping wet under a tree after a hasty exodus from the park. I was in mid-spiel to Maya at the time, telling her how I really must stop talking about getting an umbrella and actually get one. It is very, very good that the monsoon seems to be finally kicking in. It's good news for the farmers, good news for the reservoirs and good news for the parched earth. It's also good news for the umbrella sellers, but these elusive people are much like buses: you wait for an eternity for one to turn up and then two come at the same time. I just couldn't find an umbrella when I needed it but then came across a street in which there were several sellers.

Maya put in a request for a pink one, but the only colour they came in was black. She was most unimpressed. But I want a pink one! she hollered. I eyed the strengthening rain and she was overruled, much to her disdain. However, once back outside Maya decided that any umbrella was quite a fun novelty. Have you ever walked behind a small child dwarfed under a huge umbrella, zig-zagging precariously along? Well, that is what Maya was doing yesterday, but throw the above 'pavement-pause' scenario into the equation and let's just say that it's not the safest journey in the world. If you look at the photo again and this time imagine that the little boy is staring down at a huge black umbrella which has got itself lodged in the pavement gap and a little curly-haired child is shouting back up 'Oops! Mummy! Can you get me out?' If your powers of imagination have served you well then you can imagine my concern at Maya walking along under the umbrella! She was not happy when I took the umbrella off her and hoisted her hood up instead (mental note to myself: must keep her raincoat on us at all times) but as much as she'd probably disagree, I'd rather she got wet than did a vanishing act into the pavement.

http://adventuringmaya.blogspot.com/2009/07/muddling-through-in-monsoon.html

My daughter, who is 21, brought her best friend Jane home from university today.  It’s a big step up from a play date because we’re all adults. We drank masala tea and ate BLT sandwiches (mine was just an  LT because I’m a veggie) and did the Activia challenge straight after we’d eaten our Mr Kipling apple pie.

When the girls went upstairs to raid my wardrobe and toiletries cupboard I answered the front door and stood a while chatting to a neighbour. Left alone in the kitchen our dog got hold of Jane’s very large handbag and shook it around so violently that the contents spilled out all over the  floor. And there in the middle of her stuff,’ make up, filofax, keys, phone  -  was my salt cellar.

The girls came into the kitchen to find me on my hands and knees surrounded by the contents of  Jane’s handbag. From their expressions I could see they thought I, not the dog, had been rummaging through it. I hastily tried to explain. Our visitor was flummoxed and at a loss to explain how my salt cellar had got into her handbag.

We were all recovering from this incident when my husband came home from work and saw my daughter’s hand which she had cut last week on a piece of glass. He said “Oh God, you have a huge gash”. Now you probably have to be under 20 to know that the word gash has a double meaning. He and I were clueless but the three girls (my youngest daughter joined in) collapsed into helpless laughter at his  remark.

So, we had the dog mugging, the salt cellar and the gash to get past which we managed to do with more tea and biscuits and then I dropped the girls to the tube station. I got out of the car and hugged and kissed my daughter - she always lets go first – and then I went to give Jane a friendly farewell ‘air’ kiss. Inexplicably we ended up kissing full on the lips.  

I’m drained, and I fear they won’t want to bring their friends home any more. And I found my salt cellar in the cupboard. Her friend had an identical one in her bag. Cue some twilight zone music.

http://www.annamaymangan.co.uk/2009/02/dogs-bags-kisses/

My beloved virtual flatmate has found us a new virtual flat. In the absence of a Victorian glasshouse, or rather, on having failed to convince the Botanics to allow us to move beds and desks into their cooler climate greenhouses, we have discovered a real house with large enough windows to let folk stuck mainly indoors and ill get enough sunlight for sanity! And hard-floored outdoor space attached for that smooth transition into the joy of fresh air. Huge patio doors, open plan zooming room, pillars - and sunshine!

http://www.espc.com/Buying/277706.html

We will be holding salons and 'at homes' twice a week to all interesting creative types who wish to entertain us or join in with the household. This may include strip scrabble and stiltwalking, goth tapdancing, tea dances and prewar jazz, pottery and pole dancing, string quartets and sewing bees, the welding of steampunk hovercraft (we're back to beach access again...) international bonfire cuisine and crosswords, fencing, and building stocks for litterbugs. We may just lie in the sunshine planning world solutions, being pedantic and blowing bubbles while someone plays the theme to Red Dwarf on the piano and reads us rude bedtime stories. Looking at the specs, the house is large enough to do all at once. A workshop and spacious gardens! I suspect we'll need more than one shed in the garden for overnight guests and supplementary geek projects though. And out own greenhouse, maybe even a Victorian one. We will have the best window boxes on the leeward side of the city, that's for sure.

Full indoor and outdoor wheelchair access, huge beams of sunlight, covered and floored outdoor space surrounded by plants, corners for company in every room and domestic freedom all for a starting bid of merely £400,000 (double it, this is Edinburgh) Should any lottery winner fancy sponsoring us, we will pay them in handmade rocket fuel truffles and freshly grown salad. Hey, its a bargain.

In the meantime our virtual 'at homes' start here. Full evening dress please, there's no naturism on a Monday. 

http://velocity-m.blogspot.com

subtle fractures, hidden structures

"As the variety of the environment magnifies in both time and space and the structures that were thought to describe the operation of the world become progressively more unworkable, other concepts of organization must become current" - Brian Eno

"One story just isn't enough... I think I'll keep going until every sentence is a different story" - Michael Cunningham

What makes a novel, a novel? How disparate can a work's elements be for it still to be considered “one thing”? A scene has been quietly developing: works published as novels that may be collections of stories in disguise. It could be traced back to David Mitchell's Ghostwritten, back in '99. Published to great acclaim as a novel, the connections between each chapter are minimal. In Tessa Hadley's Accidents In The Home, published in 2002, the fault lines are much more subtle - the chapters involve the same characters, but in different times in their lives, far away from each other. Michael Cunningham took this further in Specimen Days, published in 2005: it features the same set of characters in the same city ( New York), but in three completely different times (the past, the present and the future), and in different incarnations of themselves (human, android, alien). In 2006, David Mitchell published Black Swan Green, which he described as thirteen stand-alone stories that happened to be a novel. Michael Chabon, in a precise and cogent essay entitled "Trickster In A Suit Of Lights," references Lewis Hyde's notion of the Trickster, the maverick creative spirit that resides in the borders between genres; the intersections of the known forms of writing. "The Trickster goes where the action is," writes Chabon, "and the action is in the borders between things." The Trickster dwells at the threshold, the crossroads, the places where new directions take form. Chabon urges writers to uncover "the secret shelves between the sections in the bookstore." There are underlying, hidden structures, felt rather than seen, that can allow a diverse collection to be considered "one thing." It seems as though we need a new philosophical landscape for the novel; we need to move, as Brian Eno describes, from definitions that are fixed, to definitions that are "multiple, shifting, blurred, experimental and adaptive." Theories are stories, theorists are storytellers, and existing hierarchies are comfortable fictions. It seems that it's just a story we tell ourselves at this point in time, that this is a novel, and that is a short story collection. We can tell new and different stories about what we consider to be novels. As Chuck Palahniuk has said, "any long story, any novel, is just a collection of short stories." Once you explore beneath what Michel Faber calls the "narrative exteriors," any number of wonderful things might be happening. We can avoid one linear definition: we can move to quantum states of multiple ideas coexisting in the same space; novels evolving in fluid motion over time, into newer forms.

http://dreamingbetweenthelines.blogspot.com

01/07/09 – 11 am.

There has been some "egg-citement" in chicken land this morning, resulting in much anxious clucking and wing flapping. Only one of the speckled hens now sits on the nest; with the original mother hen claiming everything for herself. At the first opportunity, the pretender to the throne ran flapping and screeching out of the master chicken shed. Domesticity and motherhood are obviously not on her long term agenda. However, we must pose the question, we know that she “scrambled”, but did she jump, or was she pushed?

What evidence is there of "fowl" play? Last night there were two nests, each containing at least six eggs. This morning as the photographs illustrate, there is one nest, containing fourteen eggs! "Detec-chicks" who have been "combing" the area, have so far "laid" out two theories.

1. Did the original mother hen "hatch" a plot to steal her sister’s eggs, and then get her to help her to move them from one nest to the other, perhaps by offering to share the sitting process? Once the pretender had been duped, did she then mercilessly exile her from the nesting box? We can't say for certain, but there was a lot of evidence dropped on the shed floor, that smelt of fear. This theory is possibly "clucking" at straws a bit, unless we are dealing with a very sophisticated "henemy".

2. The popular theory is that "egg-hausted" by her sisters late night rant  and raving, when she was moved in to the nesting box yesterday evening, and not "egg-sactly" enamoured with having to share her deluxe apartment, she gave her fellow chicken a “roasting” before "chucking" her out of the domicile, and  then cruelly stole her eggs.

The one thing that is still puzzling the "egg-sperts” is how can a chicken move six eggs a distance of two feet, and position them perfectly in her nest. Perhaps in the future we should consider "el-egg-tronic" surveillance. There is however real confusion over the future egg hatching dates, but on the up side, the Chicken Ladies lackey, doesn't have to build another nesting box.

More from Chicken Land as it happens!

I’ve been out of work (or, to be more precise, full-time employment) for almost a year now. I wasn’t a victim of the recession, of company down-sizing or a small business owner who failed to secure credit: I walked out of a comfortable, well-paid job in local government because I could not stand the tedium and pointlessness of it anymore.

What has surprised and dispirited me is how practically everyone I know has reacted to my decision: to put it bluntly, most think I’m unhinged. The huge financial sacrifice aside – trying to earn enough money to survive in casual jobs and as a freelance is hard work – what mystifies most people is how I’m able to cope outside the structuring environment of a regular job. How do I find the motivation to get up at a reasonable hour, isn’t it depressing to spend so much time at home each day, etc?

Judging from the latest figures on the impact of work on mental health, I should be more concerned about them. According to a British Social Attitudes Survey, six in ten British workers are unhappy in their jobs, with a majority reporting feelings of insecurity, stress, pointlessness and exhaustion. The Samaritans have found work to be the single biggest cause of stress and a likely (and largely unreported) factor in many suicides.

Strangely, politicians continue to insist that work is good for you. Unemployment is a threat to one’s well-being, the rhetoric goes; worklessness, to use the current phraseology, is the beginning of a downward spiral leading to low self-esteem, a sense of worthlessness, and eventual societal breakdown. The unemployed are depicted as idle and feckless in the media when they should be congratulated for refusing to make rich people richer and, in their own small way, rebelling against our obsessively materialistic society.

Only a few decades ago, scientists were predicting the end of work as technology advanced in leaps and bounds. Sadly, their predictions were wrong. We work harder than ever because we live in an economic system that artificially creates scarcity and shortages in order to perpetuate gross inequalities. Technological advances have been used to impoverish workers rather than free them from work.

Shouldn’t we be asking why we work at all when modern societies could meet our material needs with ease? There is no logical reason to spend our time working on factory assembly lines, creating pointless public sector forms, or administering needlessly complex grant and taxation systems. Haven’t we got better things to do?

Unfortunately, like the prisoner released on parole after a lifetime in jail, most of us have lost the necessary mental tools to deal with freedom. Perhaps it was this psychological stumbling block that Oscar Wilde had in mind when he quipped that doing nothing was the hardest work of all.

When people ask what I do all day, I smile and say something bland about the kids keeping me busy and they usually laugh and reply with something equally bland about what hard work young children are. You always see in their eyes what they really think about stay-at-home mums though. They are wrong to think that about mothers. They are right to think that about me.

In truth the kids do not keep me so busy, I put the television on, give them food, put them down for naps, and steal time back for myself. What I do with myself is lie on the bed and think of the men I love.

I am happily married. When I almost died I was so grateful my husband was the face I saw as I blacked in and out of this reality. But (there is always a but) he doesn’t hold me at night. When our skin touches underneath the covers all I can think about is how frail our bodies are, how one day we will all rot away unseen. He tells me he doesn’t know if he will love me forever, he says how can he guarantee an unknown future, he says that things with me aren’t how he thought they’d be, that he has had to make too many compromises.

So I have lovers. I am no longer sure if I have lovers because of the fissures in my marriage or if the fissures in my marriage are because of my lovers. I wonder if I am naturally a faithless slut, if that is what my genes/upbringing/hormones/God made me. I wonder if there is any man I could entirely belong to. I believe there is. I believe there is a man I love like they do in all the stories that resolve with the hero and heroine marrying. I could spend my life kneeling at his feet meeting his every whim. But he is not meant for me. He is not suited to me at all, but I would let everything that is me dissolve into the wife he would want. That is how I love him.

He is not the one I think of when I close my eyes though. I cannot think about him too much as it makes me cry. When I want to escape from my world, pretend I have not read all the headlines of small men trying to pretend they’re not insignificant and shouting how they know all the answers for the rest of us, of angry men doing things that go beyond humanity, and women who make themselves famous by revealing their starved plastic bodies, when I want to escape my day I think of another man. A big man who is not my husband nor the man I love, but he puts his big arms around me and I curl up on his big chest and it feels like peace, it feels like forever, even if in the end it is just another day.