Mmmm, salami

So there's a lovely episode (as if there are any other kind) of Yes, Prime Minister wherein the PM comes to understand that he will never be able to use the nuclear deterrent; his opponents will never give him a reason to because they will use salami tactics.  Being "home" again as I am, I'm understanding that a little too well; Magnum is a bit of a shit-disturber when he's buzzed (which he generally is) which is supposed to be okay - I'm used to it. Why change a 34 year track record now?

The problem is that I've reached a stage of life where I'm not just critical of his choices, but I know they were bad ones, and I'm frustrated by his refusal to address them. Also, as the mother of an eight month old Godzilla I've reached a stage of life where I don't get very much sleep and my temper is rather frayed.

So when he teases me for being grumpy or snippy or whatever else - which I know I am and always have been, not only when exhausted - it's getting hard to accept the slices of salami coming off while I sit on all the nukes in my closet, and not bark out the sort of potentially devastating shit we just don't say here, like "I didn't know drunk absentee fathers who combine misogynism with being totally whipped by his much younger wife knew big words like 'truculent'."

This is the problem with the nuclear deterrent, isn't it? Either you can't use it because you're not a total fucking asshole so it's a huge waste of money, or you'd only use it because you're crazy. With exhaustion, in my case. You can't use them tactically, really. They're just big, tragic, awful dangerous things sitting there and making everybody who thinks about them depressed.

Anyways, I'm taking his son jet-skiing tomorrow, maybe that will fix it.

他妈的，汉语让我想尖叫

Back on the Chinese, for the last time - work won't pay for any more courses after this one - they've probably figured out I'm not likely to be moving to China -  and it's the last in my Asian Studies cert, and I've got no more fucking time and desire to do another, Godzilla being with us and much, much more fun.

It would be an exaggeration to say it's going well. It's going - that's all I can say for it at the moment. Made possible ONLY by the offices of Granny and Nonno shanghai-ing the boy at every opportunity during this visit. I couldn't be doing this without their help. And I don't feel too bad about it; they are cashing in a tonne of time with him. My father won't come see us in Australia; the next time they see each other, Godzilla is going to be walking, talking; a totally different person in a lot of respects. Better they bank all the baby time now since it'll be mostly over when we're next back.

I'm not doing as well with the Chinese as Godzilla is at becoming a member of broader society but the a-ha moments and established knowledge that are coming on (mostly thanks to a lovely, lovely flashcard programme called Anki) do make me wonder if this is a little like what his brain must be like - sudden connections and clarities in terms of dealing with the rest of us, that are not at all permanently established, and that get confused and ultimately frustrating when he's tired. Without the deadlines, of course, and he's not paying tuition either. Or having work pay it. And he gets a lot more kisses and cuddles. 

There is a Thing happening at the moment.

Well, it's been happening for years but I can go weeks without thinking about it while I'm abroad; when I come back here it comes into sharp relief. Heartbreaking shit. You know. The sort that involves a kid and his dad and some really poor parental decisions. It was always heartbreaking and now that I have a Godzilla it's so heartbreaking that it's actually giving me the shits, because of all that maternal instinct newly present in my bosom.

(As an aside. I'm always fascinated by the physical symptoms of stress, probably because I don't have a lot of stress so I can take an academic attitude toward it. Isn't it interesting? Hard thing to measure but the statistical negative health impacts are compelling. Makes cigarettes look like apples.  And I'm eternally grateful that I get the shits when I'm stressed, and not, say, getting the opposite. Or sleeplessness, or eczema, or whatever. I knew this one girl who would lose her hair almost in clumps around exam time.  But abstract thinking about stress and poo is probably a blog post for another time.)

So I will just trot a bit of a cri de coeur about how fucking terrible it is that parents will make their children pay for the other parent's mistakes or misdeeds, more or less on a conscious level. I mean, in degrees of blame or culpability, I know a lot of justifiable victimized feelings float around, particularly when the pregnancy was unplanned, or possibly even underhandedly planned, and with a partner who it was obviously not going to work out with. But seriously, the child is not even on the fucking continuum of blame or culpability. And yet ultimately, if you just walk away feeling bad for yourself he's the one who pays, and for the rest of his life, even if you're feeling all fucking victimized because a bunch of years ago you stuck your dick in a nasty bitch who turned out to be batshit crazy.

I take a huge amount of comfort these days looking at the F-word, and knowing that even if he really pissed me off one day and I tried to take an axe to him, there's no way he'd abandon Godzilla*. He would fight me tooth and nail in the courts and he would tolerate whatever batshit craziness to make sure that he was part of Godzilla's life; indeed, the more batshit crazy I was, he'd fight all the harder to have and maintain custody because YOU DON'T FUCKING LEAVE YOUR KID WITH A BATSHIT CRAZY PERSON, DO YOU?

* If he survived of course. I'm pretty handy with an axe.

We were all babies once

And as much as I hate to admit it, most of us were probably on the same continuum of adorable as Godzilla. What happens to us? How is it we can go from being so protected to so wounded?

Of course I know not all little babies are as protected as Godzilla even if they were adorable. I try not to think about it. It's a recipe for futile heartbreak. But sometimes you meet people who it's too brutally obvious didn't get the protection they needed. Alcohol is a helluva drug.

Coming back to Canada is always a little too psychologically over buttered. Maybe that's the real reason I stay away.

Just call me Mrs. Danvers

So you know my grandparents' home I was whining about a few posts ago? A week or so after the sale closed while the new owners were having the plumbing replaced, it burnt to the ground. 

I feel a bit like I did that with the power of my mind.

For the love of money

Using this online foreign exchange service some friends here recommended (which thankfully I did just before the Aussie dollar entered a slide that I think will be longish term) is making me miss Grandad like, frankly, nothing has since his funeral. I would love to be able to show him how to use this thing. He would be so excited about it. I would love to show him a side-by-side comparison, online, of how much the exchange would cost with a bank service and how much it would cost with the trader service; talk to him about the relative speed, rates, fees, security, etc. And then we could talk about international currencies. I would fucking love that. We would totally bond over that, like we bonded over nothing while he was around.

My Grandad would make a really good ghost. He'd just be so interested in all the things that are possible now. 

He and I are most similar in money terms which was a bit of a shame. At the point where he died I was just poised on the edge of having enough money to have money values like his, so we never intersected while he was actually around. He died when I was a little more than halfway through my job with the television company and I think I had just got used to having a salary big enough to make me feel like my appetites weren't being constrained, which means I had stopped spending my lunch hours giddily shopping my ass off and had started thinking about money as something that maybe I should work on having long term by making it do things for me.

Godzilla and I just got back from a trip to New Zealand visiting Rodelinda, BTW, and in its Land-that-Time-Forgottish way that country also reminded me of Grandad. Lots of sensible old men dressed in respectable, durable woollens they'd obviously had longer than I'd been alive. For the first time in years, I actually shopped my ass off there - buying respectable, durable woollens.

Love you, Grandad. If you're haunting us I hope you're enjoying it.

Vanity unchained

Remind me to stop looking at job ads. I have a really great job. I'm overpaid and underworked, and getting all sorts of experience that will look better and better the more I stick it out. And I have enough friends working at charities and NGOs that I should be a little harder-nosed about how attractive it might be to work at one of them myself.

Toward the end of the quarter (now) is when the really interesting bit of my job crops up, which is writing big fancy involved market/financial reports about a few different sectors and countries that have to be pleasurably readable to Anglophones and ESL types alike. I tend to act a little put-upon around this time of the quarter and think I should probably feel stressed out because while I'm generally fairly indispensable at work (my best professional advice to anybody - manouevre yourself into indispensability) THIS shit is my real bread and butter - the font of all the other blessings that come along with the job.

But I'm not stressed, actually. In fact this "stressful" period is what keeps my brain young and sharp as the undergrad on speed I once was. Researching, writing, and writing so people want to read it. Chasing that high grade, which given my utter lack of long-term professional and academic ambition (I did my masters because it was cheap and gave me something to do with my spare time while I was still wrapped up in screwing Bluebird in Paris) was always an end in itself while I was in school - cracking the professorial code and deciphering how I needed to present arguments to get a nice ego-stroking A+. In this case there's no A+, just people active on the markets you cover treating your reports like a Bible, which is even better for the ego, and much, much better on the pocketbook.

So. Basically my professional life at the moment is successful because it lets me manifest my monstrous vanity. And there's only one thing to go to from there, of course. Do the same thing for an organisation with some sort of useful social purpose. Then - oh, then, what a constant sop to my vanity performing well would be! It would go from monstrous to gargantuan, behemothish, titanic, et cetera.

Maybe that's not such a good thing. So remind me to stop looking at job ads. Until the mortgage is paid, at least. 

Winter in the city

Today was one of those days when as soon as I walked out the door, people started giving me the shits. It happens a lot in L____. Fucking full of shitful people. Halfway downtown some lady who'd just been offended at the post office stopped me on the street and told me about it so that the next time I go in there I should cut the rude lady's brain with my tongue. And you know, in the abstract I don't have a problem with that sort of thing - the approaches from crazy people, not the brain-cutting-with-tongue. It's just something I associate with living in larger cities where there are benefits to make up for such things, like restaurants where I actually want to fucking eat and shops where I actually want to shop and some sort of fucking cultural life that extends beyond discussing housing renovations over overpriced woodfired pizza whose fucking magical hippie 1000 year old sourdough base taste like an old communion hostie.

But L____ is full of people with fucked up brains, shitty buskers, and panhandlers, as if it was some sort of fucking metropolis. I guess it's because you can't freeze to death here. In Canada you have to go somewhere big enough to have shelters, or to Vancouver. And I guess meth is permanently changing the nature of country towns all over the world. Even though Australians are so fucking half-assedly lazy they actually import their meth instead of cook it themselves. Immovably inert motherfuckers. God. No wonder these xenophobic fucks are so scared of boat people. Anybody with the fucking nous to scrape together such a big pile of money and brave so much uncertainty, danger and discomfort to come to this fucking place on a leaky Indonesian fishing boat is going to be able to put this fucking snoozefest of a culture on the barbeque and eat it for brunch.

Anyways, we're going to Canada soon, and with a little elbow grease Melbourne soon after, which is the least Australian place I've seen in Australia. I'll put up and shut up. Godzilla makes things easier. It's hard to keep a hold on a pisser when he smiles, which he does most of the time.

She says I'm weak, and immature, but it's cool; I know what money's for

I know I'm getting old for a few reasons. One of them is that I'm cranky there's nothing as nice as Maxinquaye getting made anymore. There probably is, of course, and I'm just not hearing it, being old, living at the end of the world, and spending all my time - very happily - with someone whose favourite music is listening to me deedle the title music from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

BTW I'm also cranky that there's no movies that good getting made anymore. Which is rich coming from someone who has been to see a new release in the cinema once in the past three years.

Kindgartenodyssey

The efforts to find Godzilla a kindergarten in our German destination continue - trying to get onto those 24 month waiting lists . . . with moderate success. We have a built-in handicap, which is also an sort of litmus test, in that the initial approach to the schools has to be in English. Of course the forms go back in German, but if there are any exhaustive questions about the parents or child, those go back in English too, with a laughable Google translation by its side for form's sake.

We hope to be reasonably handy with the language by the time we get there, but there's no doubt that it will be immensely useful to have Godzilla in a school where the staff talking to us in English won't be seen as some sort of cultural imperialism, or as a practical impossibility. And given we're only applying to public German schools, that's apparently a challenge.

The upshot of all that is he's only on the waiting list at two schools. And one of them I'd be tempted to take him off the waiting list for, as it's a Waldorf school, which when I applied seemed like a really great thing. Then I read more about Waldorf and realized it was a cult. Seriously. And I'm not talking going to websites like Waldorfisacult.com, which I have no doubt exist, but reading books on the Steiner/Waldorf system leant to me by enthusiastic friends.

I don't have any problems with cults as such; I just can't accept them pedagogically. Education is a field full of discoveries and awesome, as is child-rearing, and if you lock your pedagogy or philosophy of child-rearing into a cult, which by their natures claim a higher knowledge of how the world works that doesn't have to bend to evidence from other fields, then you end up with a stunted pedagogy. The weaning-your-child-at-nine-months thing was the first red flag. There were others. And there is the racism thing. Sure, you say, it's not racist anymore. Alright. Then it's not fucking anthroposophy anymore, is it?

Anyways, Godzilla's still on the waiting list, particularly for the nursery, since it's a forest kindergarten. We'll see what happens. 

Isabella

The F-word and I are rewatching The Sopranos. I'm glad. Not only because I'd forgotten pretty much all of it since I was high the first time through, but because I'm seeing it in a new light now. Being high all the time had helped me not notice the plot holes, which are now apparent, and I'm no longer wrapped up in thinking this is somehow perfectly crafted story television in the traditional sense. But things that left me utterly cold enough last time to have completely forgotten in the interim, like the "Isabella" episode, now seem like pure literature.

There are probably a few reasons for this, like not being high, and having spent a few years letting my own years of psychoanalysis settle and process, and gaining a family of cautionary tale Italian descendant in-laws in the Livia vein, but in the case of "Isabella" I guess the big one is now being a mother myself. Having a different relationship with the idea of a mother as the force that drives the child, and the damage a mother can do. Also having a different relationship with the whore/madonna dichotomy, which in my case isn't so much of a dichotomy as two utterly necessary stages of life, but in a generalized sense from a male perspective I appreciate now probably has a lot more than I'd understood to do with revenge and insecurity.

What sort of man will I make Godzilla into? The question has been there since years before he was conceived, which is part of the reason I got my man-hating ass into psychoanalysis in the first place, but until we saw his whang on the ultrasound it was a fairly academic question. And the "Isabella" episode helped me get it into a somewhat more coherent form. I don't know what sort of man I'll make Godzilla into. I suppose the best I can hope for is that it's a secure one who won't hurt himself and other people too much seeking to replace me or to make up for my shortfalls or to get his own back on me when he goes looking for a partner. A man who won't have extended hallucinations while having a depressive episode about some sort of idealized trogladyte infant existence with no luxuries but with a mother who loved him and made him feel safe.

Fuck, that was a good episode.

The maybe move

Yes, so, I think we are deciding to move to Melbourne for the rest of our time in Australia. On one level it's a purely financial decision, almost a financial no-brainer, though there must be some sort of catch somewhere. Our house here in L___, which we paid relatively little for, will fetch a great deal of rent due to its location and the prevailing economic conditions here, while a house or flat appropriate to the size our family will be during our Australian stay, in a decent, well-connected suburb in Melbourne, will be almost $400 less a month to rent (though a great deal more to buy). Even after the agency and gardening fees we're still likely to be comfortably ahead.

And then, as I discovered to my disgust while we were in Melbourne last week, everything is cheaper there. Gas, food, clothes, every fucking thing.

And then on a less financial level I think the F-word and I have discovered we're not country people. We're not even suburb people. We haven't fucking gardened since Godzilla was born and if you think that'll fly on a 1200 square meter lot in the subtropics you've got another guess coming, buddy. The jungle is closing in Apocalypse Now-ishly. A large part of me is thrilled at the possibility of renting this place out just so we can get an agency to take over the garden.

Anyways, on a less getting-away-from-this-shit and a more getting-into-some-new-shit I'm a little excited. I like Melbourne. It's an ersatz Toronto, which is limited but fine, and the weather is shitty there, but a) it can't be worse than Brussels was and we won't be there as long and b) living in the subtropics has taught me the limits of the happiness-inducing qualities of good weather. Particularly in terms of insects. It turns out cockroaches loooooove good weather. And that good weather periodically involves typhoons and rainy seasons which aren't fucking good weather at all.

Also when we got back from holiday we found out that our next-door neighbour had died - a really delightful woman. Very old but quite hearty; it was a surprise. She was out in her garden all the time and very fond of Godzilla - she was the first person who wasn't medical or parental who held him. I miss her terribly. She'd have been a delightful neighbour anywhere but I really treasured her in a place like this, where people don't tend to be awfully friendly. Anyone who replaces her will be worse and I'll be sad and resentful every time I look at them.

News flash

The trip to Victoria was some sort of emotional and professional success for the F-word and he will be exhibiting there in November/December. On top of that I think we're moving there around the same time. If we have two years left in Australia I don't think I can bear to spend them here. All the natural loveliness is wasted on me since I don't surf, garden, or enjoy skin cancer. Still under deliberation though.

Abattoir blues

Went for a run this morning and things were still all Nick Cave-y. At least they're pretty here. Pretty creepy.

Literary illgrimages

Visiting Victoria, so the F-word can try to flog his paintings in galleries in Melbourne and organize an exhibition for later this year or early next (email if you'd like to see his 2012 work; it is awesome). We drove over three days, what with being loaded down with a carfull of paintings and Godzilla, which time was made less trying by me being able to work unbrokenly on the iPhone and on the computer by turning the iPhone into a little hotspot. Wow. Technology is magic - makes my life so much better.

We're staying in country Victoria and passed through Wangaratta to get here. I'm not much of a one for literary pilgrimages. I do understand how space shapes mentality which in turn shapes writing, but frankly I don't much care to see it for myself; not being a scholar or an obsessive I'm pretty much alright just enjoying the literature. I visit Anne Bronte's grave when I'm walking in that remarkably part of Scarborough by Saint Mary's, which happens every couple of years, and I've been to Haworth, which I might well have done even without her sisters, since I like Yorkshire, hiking and moors. Those sisters and Haworth are a pretty quintessential literary pilgrimage though; hard to think of a more formative environment for fevered novelists than those big skies and claustrophobic homes. There was also something very appropriate about the unchallenging beauty of Mircea Eliade's house in Cascais, though I stumbled on it purely by accident and would call The Sacred and the Profane, the only book of his that I've read, many things, but probably not literature. It is due for a reread though - have to occasionally challenge the palate with the even-a-stopped-clock-gets-it-right-twice-a-day ramblings of right-wing racialists, whose intellectual strengths are best seen in their ponderings on the mystical.

Anyways, if you accept Nick Cave as a poet Wangaratta is another quintessential and far less pretty pilgrimage than either Haworth or Cascais. . . that dump and the denuded landscape around it suddenly makes Henry's Dream sound more like tarted-up anthropology than a rocking opiate nightmare. God, country Australia is a hole on the face of creation. Don't come here. Just listen to Henry's Dream. Since the F-word is from Nick Cave country and fucked off away from it only slightly less definitively, I'm taking this literary pilgrimage for the team. 

All our friends here don't vaccinate their children and send them to private school.

Sigh.

The vaccination thing I've gone on about before, and no need to recycle that again, except to point out I've got gently aggressive about it. "Godzilla was vaccinated yesterday and slept through the night without a peep!" and "we've been following the government vaccination schedual for Godzilla and he's double his enormous birthweight at four months and smarter than your two year old", etc. Well, implicitly. I'm not into insulting other people's kids, especially when those same kids are busy fighting off the tail end of whooping cough. But I suspect I'm gently spoiling for a fight.

Some of the lifetstyle aspects of our friends here annoy me a lot. I don't have a problem with privilege, as should be obvious considering what a privileged lifestyle my family can and does enjoy on my inflated pay and the fact that 90% of my close friends have two degrees and the time to read books. Or not much of a problem. Nothing that can't be sorted out with the help of a pscyhotherapeutic professional, anyways. But I do have a problem with the abuse of privilege, which is what I consider the middle-class-anti-vaccination movement.

Oh, so you don't want to line Big Pharma's pockets with a taxpayer-subsidized vaccination programme? Great, let's all pay great stonking wads of cash out of pocket to a bunch of fucking homeo-and-naturopaths when our kids come down with whooping cough, assuming they're old enough to not get hospitalized/brain damage. I guess the poor people will find a way to manage.  That's a much fairer idea. Much more fucking equitable and transparent. Fight the man, assholes, you are fucking radical, you fucking Che Guevara of the Australian yuppie movement. Fuck.

Sorry, I guess I did just recycle that there.

Anyways, the other thing that annoys me but is a little more complicated, I understand, is how all our friends here are all over private school enrollment for their kids, which frankly makes me feel icky. It's something you just don't do in Canada unless you're buying something really awesome, in the sense of a super-equipped school with awesome facilities and jet packs and shit. It is far, far less what it is here, which is the difference between a four star and a five star hotel - pricing out the riff-raff. Which, I appreciate more and more, is at least partly code for not sending your kids to school with aboriginal people.

I detest private school on that pricing-out level. But at the same time I have to ask myself, and answer if I look into my heart "maybe yes", whether or not I would send Godzilla to private school if we stayed here. The two tiers are established now; teachers compete to get into the private schools, where troublemakers can just be kicked out and life is, understandably, much easier for them, and resources are better, and all the rest of it. I'm glad we're leaving for a country without that sort of two-tier system before I'm thrust up against that moral contradiction.

My tax burden tripling seems like a small price to pay. Example: I've got Godzilla onto a waiting list for a Waldorf kindergarten in NRW. It costs 100 euros a month, which is mostly for the food. The local Steiner school costs almost exactly 25 times that. Well tee fucking hee . . . them tax eurodollars do go somewhere.

Accidents may happen

Do you suppose it's possible to write a really terrific, nearly perfect book by accident? I always thought that Brideshead Revisited was an Ishiguro-esque masterwork in terms of a not only unreliable but downright assoholic narrative voice but I found out the other day when I was reading the preface that Waugh seems to have "meant" it. I'm not convinced though. You can't have Anthony Blanche walking on three times and saying such devastatingly skewering home truths about what jerkoffs everybody is and not have some idea what you're doing, surely? Julia is stupid, Sebastian is duplicitously weak, and Charles is ruined by charm.

I thought the whole point of the book as a "Catholic" novel was that everyone of note in it is such an utter ass, so parasitic and useless and cuntish and atomized and miserable despite being surrounded by Baroque aesthetic excesses and pots and pots of money that in the end they have nothing - certainly not even each other - except God. Not a "panegyric", surely? But according to Waugh, it was. What the fuck, I ask you.

In other news, this morning as I wiped a long trail of regurgitated breastmilk off my back, I noticed I'm getting my figure back. Running and breastfeeding will do that, I suppose. That's nice. I've also started doing a couple of hours of Pilates a week so I won't be incontinent when I grow up and that's having an effect too, round the waist.

It's interesting. I broke my knee in a jeet kune do class, oh, twelve, thirteen years ago, and that was when I first got some awareness of myself as a physical person, and started enjoying exercise. And now, after packing on 60 pounds and tearing my asshole open bringing Godzilla into the world, I have a different attitude again. Not to looking good but to having exercise as a bit of get-mummy-brain-back-in-order-time so I don't lose my shit with Godzilla (especially now; my precocious little prodigy is being precocious about teething, which is awkward since he's too young to be handy with a teething ring), and also to being as healthy as I can manage. That's down to realizing how much this munchkin depends on me, and also to Mum almost dying round the time he was conceived because of a thing that was really down to her lifestyle. No granny for Godzilla. How awful a thought. Well, fate may choose to rub me out while he still needs me and before I see his children but I don't intend to help it.

Storms and steroids and supermen, oh my

Possibly you've been hearing about all the flooding in Australia. Especially if you're English. We've noticed that the English media tends to go apeshit with Australian weather catastrophes, which I think is partly down to the English obsession with the weather and Australia being a cultural limb of England, if a withered and odd limb, which means Australian weather is fair game. I think a much bigger part of it is a conspiracy aimed at trying to persuade the English not to just move here en masse. Which, even knowing Australia as I now do, I would probably do if I was an English masse.

Anyways, we're living one of the places it's been flooding. Luckily this town is built to flood since it will flood at least once in a normal year, and we live up a hill, so it's had very little impact on life. Besides making running really, really muddy. Luckily I'm weird enough to get some sort of sensual - hmm - enjoyment isn't the word - interest out of getting muddy, soaking feet. You know, that transition to warm dry feet to cold wet feet to warm wet feet to the intense relief of stripping off the soaking sneakers and socks once you've finished up. I don't like it, but I don't mind. Especially since I'm a fatass and getting wet is better than getting overheated.

In any case it's not stopping me. I'm back up to five half-hour runs a week, which is where I'll stay until Godzilla starts eating solids instead of just boob, when I can let my fat burn off with hour-long runs, which will hopefully coincide nicely with him being old enough to sit in the jogging stroller my sister in law is giving me, and to come with me. Which will also coincide with being able to run barefoot on the sandy beaches around here again, which is a much, much more pleasant sensual experience than running in a muddy field in a pair of sneakers that badly need replacing.

Less likely than the shitty weather is that you'll have heard about all the doping scandals in Australian sport. It's the sort of thing that gets drowned out by the Lance Armstrong thing I guess, although it's coming from the same place - that sports doping has permanently outstripped any testing regimes for it and now legal and regulatory bodies have to become investigative instead of just - ah - whatever you call something that relies on testing. I guess they can try. But I wonder if the world has already reached the psychological point where we accept that's just what professional athletes do.

Fine. Fuck professional athletes. I really don't give a fuck. My concern is more for my son and anyone else who's presently young who might be into sports. If we could all just decide that we're going to be content to watch a bunch of doped-up professional future cancer patients do freaky things on television and everybody else is just going to enjoy themselves if they do sporty or exercisey things, I'm all for that. Or replace the professionals with a bunch of Blade Runner type things. That'd be great. I don't suppose that's how it works though, is it?

It's really amazing, all the things parenthood makes you give a shit about that you'd never given a shit about before.

First world problems: family house

I dreamt about Scarborough last night. I was taking the train into town with my aunt, and some cousins I think, and we passed a row of houses along the cliff front with superb design values and shiny new burgundy funiculars heading right down to the beach.

"I always thought that if I got really rich I'd buy Granny and Grandpa's old house back," I remarked to my aunt, "but maybe I'll just get one of those instead."

She smiled her approval, but even in the dream, and even though they were beautiful, I didn't mean it. I was just saying it because I knew she wanted that house gone. I knew those houses on the friable sandy bluffs would slip into the sea, maybe in a matter of mere decades. They weren't legacy houses. They weren't something my children could use with their children.

And neither will G&G's house be. I don't blame them one little bit for selling it, my aunt and my mother, and that's even before I factor in the emotional side of their lack of healthy attachment to that house. There were basically zero candidates in my generation to use it on a regular basis, aside from me, and that not for at least two years, and that only for holidays, which - England being England, that fucking deregulated dump of a country with all the inconveniences of northern Europe and few of the benefits - would be untenably expensive and difficult in insurance, maintenance, services, mold, etc. terms.

Mum did consider it until faced with the resounding indifference of my generation, some of whom are more into wilderness holidays, others of whom are more into Caribbean resorts, and others of whom just don't have the money to jaunt off across the Atlantic for a short stay in fairyland, and she worked out the sums in her head, and said if I cared to spend time there with my family she'd just rent us a holiday flat because it'd be cheaper. I won't let her do that of course, but her point was made.

But - besides Magnum, whose chip on the shoulder about G&G has become deeply ingrained over the years, and besides the littlest, whose reasons I won't speculate much on because I don't know - we did all make our final pilgrimages back before Granny died. Considering how much she disliked us I wonder if it was actually the house we were saying goodbye to. Especially as the littlest did make a pilgrimage back after she died, and was with his mother when she handed over the keys. Last night's dream and today's heavy nostalgia was sparked off by him posting pictures of the empty house on his Facebook page.

I'm spending a small fortune putting the furniture and some other odds and ends from the house in storage; in fact if the timing works out, it'll cost about the cash amount Granny left me in her will, which is serendipitous to the point that I'm half-managing to convince myself it's what Granny intended at some deeply-buried level of collective unconsciousness. And I'm glad that's waiting for us when we get back to Europe, in a way I'd have to write for a long, long time to quantify. But it's strangely gutting to remember the house. It's making this song stick in my head:


Nick Cave is at his best violent or mournful, I always think.

And I think what's pulling at my guts the most this morning is the way the house smelt. A sort of combination of Fairy washing up liquid, fabric softener, the greenness of the garden, lavender, cleanliness and a hint of the mold that one was always fighting back in the attic. And Granny, of course. It smelt inescapably like her. And as little fondness as we had for each other - I loved her, but it wasn't possible to be fond of her, and I think she was fondest of me by the time dementia had helped her forget I was her granddaughter and not someone she used to know from the bank - that combination is probably my favourite smell in the world that doesn't belong to my mother, father, old man or son.

Gone forever now, I suppose. Of course Granny being dead meant it would be gone forever anyways, house being sold or not, but when I saw the pictures of the empty house on Facebook that sort of reasoning was beyond me. Anyways, when I die, if I've been sufficiently good, I expect the afterlife to smell more or less like that. And I hope that in a couple of years if I stick my face into the wardrobes, etc., that I've had socked away, I'll still be able to sniff a bit of it out.

The other thing that's pulling at my guts is that the house was ours, as well as G&G's. A common point of reference for me and my brothers and my cousins, wrapped up in our mutual childhoods in a way no other place is, either singly or collectively. In the same way G&G were ours - a shared and difficult way that most outsiders, even those who didn't get on with their grandparents, couldn't possibly appreciate because of our very particular circumstances.

Well, as my boss (who's Buddhist in the same way I'm Catholic) told me, aging is a process of falling away and letting go. I don't think any material falling away and letting go will be quite so psychologically fraught as this one, though.

Sydney flavoured bacon

Just back from a Lunar New Year trip to Sydney. And gosh, was it nice. Cosmopolitan (ergo est enough Asians to make it feel like a real city) with a different kind of food every meal and all sorts of people hanging around doing interesting things.

The more I travel in Australia the more I have a sense that Australians aren't all bad and that it's the special cocktail of white middle-class anti-vaccination NIMBY hippies, bankrupt farmers, meth addicts and dispossessed Aborigines that makes our particular region so fucking annoying. The F-word assures me, though, that where we are is really terrific in terms of Country Australia, which cross-country car trips and stays in Shepparton, the Victorian dump the F-word hails from, both back up.

All of which is a long way to say that I'd probably like Australia better if we lived in Sydney, but if we lived in Sydney we'd need to be rich, and if we were rich we'd live in a better city somewhere else, like Singapore.

Nonetheless it was a good trip, during which we got to see a so-so exhibition of Alexander the Great crap from the Hermitage and a really nice Francis Bacon exhibition at the NSW gallery. The Bacon exhibition was just gravy. We had no idea it was there, just stumbling across it in its closing week. Not as good as the one we saw back in 2008 but still very good and it made me feel like I was part of the wider world again to just stumble across something like that and be able to see it . . . sigh . . . oh, wider world, I miss you.

The most important outcome of the trip, however, was watching Godzilla spend it being as good as gold, looking around calmly during the exhibitions, and gawking at all the skyscrapers and trains, and charming people in restaurants. He slept better in all the hotels than he does here. I know babies change every day but I can't help be hopeful he's gonna be a good traveller - heaven knows the poor mite will be doing enough of it by hook or by crook.