universal truths

Let it be agreed: the loveliest men are the bald men. It is a great pity for the men that are not bald, to always know they are not the loveliest. But it is the way of things, and they will simply have to get over it.

If you are unlucky enough not to have one of these lovely specimens in your life, you may not know the following fact: every bald man secretly, deep deep down, wishes this were him:

This is Harry Manx, and if he is not the coolest cat that ever existed in the history of the entire planet, then he is at the very least in the top, say, three.

Note the Hat.

The reason the bald men want to be Harry Manx is because this Hat is the way to rock bald like nobody ever rocked bald before.

If, as a bald man, you were to wear the Harry Manx Hat, you would be at least 25% cooler. It would confer upon you the aura of one who feels, thinks and kisses more deeply than other men; one who is sexier, more skilful and more imaginative; and one who might be about to hunker down with any one of about fourteen different instruments and oh-so-casually do something way cooler than anyone in a four hundred mile radius could hope to do even if he were trying really, really, hard and had a head start and the wind in his favour.

You can imagine, then, the combination of bald man plus Harry Manx Hat, would be a pretty freaking magnificent fortress of lovelitude. Beautiful ladies would almost certainly do things for that fortress. (The rest of us would, too, but the fortress would not need to look any farther than the beautiful ones).

So, if you are a person who does have a lovely bald man around somewhere in the recesses of your life, you should probably do him a solid and start looking into providing him with The Hat.

The first step to bringing the Hat into being, is observing the Actual Original Hat. It looks quite like it is made of felt, which is a problem in itself, because felting a hat – never mind The Hat – is a serious business that involves one of those head-shaped busts and is very, very easy to bugger up spectacularly. Felting slippers is one thing; you wear them on your feet and nobody really looks and it doesn’t much matter if they are a bit creative, but a hat is out there before everyone and it would be deeply unfair to make a man wear a crap hat, especially if he is supposed to be wearing The Hat and getting all its attendant benefits, viz., the fortress, the beautiful ladies etc.

But on closer inspection – that is, at a discreet distance of about eight or nine feet, because even I draw the line at approaching Harry Manx post-gig and saying “nice music, dude, but I really came to check out your Hat” – it’s definitely sorta stretchier than felt (a relief) but also has a bit of structure to it. Like it’s got a top and sides, rather than being more of a stocking cap affair.

That is awkward, because tops of hats are round, and knitting round things is hard.

Cue a yarn shop trip, Harry Manx album covers and bald man story in hand, and three of us figuring out a conglomeration of bits of three patterns, plus my usual hefty dose of making it up.

As with so many things, when you are told what something will measure in inches, you should remain sceptical until the thing you’re told will measure a certain number of inches is actually in your hands. The yarn lied and lied and lied to me, and the upshot was one false start that was too big, one that was too small, and finally, a baby bear one that was just on the small side of right. The Prototype Hat was born:

The Hat was not earmarked for the Aged Parent, but look: even the Aged P looks cool in the Hat. It’s infallible. (Also, hands up who else thinks Harry Manx might look like my dad when he grows up?)

It's not a bad start, but I learnt a lot from the first go and the Hat now requires some modifications. It will be evolving into a more accurate representation over the coming weeks. Bald (or not-bald) men and those who love them, you'd better start emailing me with your Hat requirements (address up there at top left; replace the AT and the DOT with symbols). You don't want to miss out. Your fortress might depend upon it.

Song the Third

And why this especial video, with all the quality of someone’s cameraphone quite literally pointed at their telly?

For God so loved the Mandolin, that She gave it unto the handsomest Boy upon the Earth, and said unto him, play thou upon it, and thou shalt be a Fisher of Women.

How to Make Gravy (Paul Kelly)

(Get this to see it properly. And go here for the legit downloads and stuff.)

dear singers

If there’s one thing I absolutely. Freaking. Hate in a singer, it’s a mid-Atlantic accent.

I hate “I”s that become “Ah”s, “like”s that become “lahke”s, people who ordinarily enunciate a ‘t’ making it into a ‘d’ – making something “better” into something “bedder”.

If you are not from North America, in the name of sanity, stop doing this when you sing. You do not sound like yourself. You just sound weird. Long live the Sara Storers and Kate Rusbys of the world, for they know how it should be done.

snowmageddon

Gripped by a Deadly Storm!! The ploughs are doing their best, but the wind is whistling round like a film sound effect and the drifts are building (another new thing encountered recently: snow fencing. Temporary fences rolled out across open land alongside roads, so the snow drifts against the fence instead of on the highway.)

Some people, who are clearly mad as a bag of snakes, are actually still making their way out in it – including, bless them, the post office vans. The people walking by my window all look like Shackleton. I say, unless you are on your way to hospital with major organ failure – or on your way to hospital to perform surgery on someone having major organ failure – today, you stay indoors.

Song the Second

No, it's not the solstice yet.



But I have not seen the sun in over a week, and I don't know about you, but it's starting to get me right down. Unpleasantness and malfeasance lurk in this Dark.



Take yourselves hither at once:


Solstice Bells (Jethro Tull)

Feel better? I do.

youth and age

At the doctor’s office this morning, two girls sitting next to me, with mobile phones, reading their messages.

GIRL 1: Omigoooodddd, Melanie and Josh totally got engaged.
GIRL 2: Gross!!!
GIRL 1: Claire. Is going. To FREAK.
GIRL 2: I’m going to text her right now!!
GIRL 1: You’re such a bitch.
GIRL 2: I know.

Then, a man of about seventy walked in, and all the chairs were full. So I got up to give him my seat, but he said no. And then I felt kind of weird. What’s the right thing to do there?

Because to be sure, today’s men of seventy are nothing like seventy-year-old men of, say, the seventies, when being old was actually old. Today’s men of eighty aren’t even as old as yesterday’s men of seventy. You know? God. Nobody even gets half going till they’re sixty now. Compounded with, men of seventy are also of the generation who would give up their seat for a woman, regardless of whether she were older or younger. So maybe he was kind of pissed off with what I was implying by offering him my seat.

The young and the old are a mystery to me.

In other news, I did this last week, with hand-spun Saskatchewan alpaca:

But I fear I may be too late with my talk about what happens when two socks love each other very, very much, because then this happened:

By the way, I absolutely agree that socks is a crap gift for a soon-to-be-four-year-old, but let it be announced here that he specifically requested socks be made for him. Weird kid. But I am an obliging aunty, so here we are.

Song the First

No, you're quite right...I can't figure out 'embed' (that is, putting in a wee video thing so you can watch it right here instead of going somewhere else to watch it. You know)?

So now I have to send you somewhere else.

Click the link and be off with you, but you might as well check in your cynicism and leave it here before you go.

Song for a Winter's Night (Gordon Lightfoot)

*waits*

Told you.

This is the song that makes me homesick for Canada...even when I am in Canada.

once more in Canadian

Welcome back, language barrier. It's been a while. I've missed you.

1. Apparently, North Americans don’t ‘reckon’. I ‘reckon’ things all the time. I ask people what they ‘reckon’. I did it the other day. And everyone fell about. Apparently, the only North Americans who ‘reckon’ things are people who might ‘reckon’ they’ll go outside and skin them a small amphibian from the swamp for breakfast before cracking open their first morning beer with their teeth, or something. Brits and Kiwis reckon things; Canadians Do Not.

2. The only correct response to ‘thank you’ is ‘you’re welcome.’ It is not ‘not at all.’ This is a very hard thing for me to learn. When I am on the phone to a library, either performing or having performed some useful service such as finding them a book, they say thank you, because library people are nice like that. And I say, “not at all.” It’s automatic. I have tried changing it to ‘you’re welcome’ and tripped over it. But they don’t get ‘not at all’. There’s always a suspicious pause at the other end of the line, during which time they are plainly Not Getting It. Then they uncertainly go, “um, okay then, so...never mind,” and hang up.

memos

To: My Ability to Write
From: Amber


You seem to have gone missing. In fact I become more and more convinced that you were never here in the first place. Please send news of your whereabouts, if you do in fact exist.

Yours sincerely,
Amber


To: People Who Read News
From: Amber

I apologise for the drop in quality of certain news articles you may chance to read this week. They will be factually accurate, but that’s about all I can give you. This is despite excellent source material, cf. the Australian Plague Locust Commission’s monthly locust bulletins, which I have been reading with great interest.

You may be returned to your regularly scheduled standard of news articles next week. Also, you may not.

Yours sincerely,
Amber

unification

Aotearoa New Zealand Herald, Sydney, January 2nd 2109

Today celebrations were held throughout Aotearoa New Zealand to mark the centennial Union Day.

Geopolitical events preceding the annexation of West Island created a favourable climate that engendered a high level of national confidence among New Zealanders at the time. The Rugby League World Cup final of November 22nd 2008 had resulted in a 34-20 win for the New Zealand side, beating the clear favourites (known at the time as the “Kangaroos”) who had won every one of the two teams’ last 13 World Cup meetings. Protests from the Kangaroos’ supporters, that largely took the form of “hardly call a bunch of Queenslanders the national team, mate; weren’t even trying,” fell upon deaf ears.

Historians remain divided on whether the World Cup defeat was evidence of Australia’s general weakened state, as admitted by the country’s Defence Minister on November 18th 2008. In fact, his decision to give the entire Australian Navy two months off over the Christmas period went largely unnoticed worldwide at the time due to other more important international events: a general election in the Maldives, the coronation of a new King of Bhutan, and the recent creation of a new children’s book prize in the UK. However, when Wellington intelligence officials were later asked how they uncovered this vital military information about their nearest neighbour and enemy, they were reported as saying “Yeah, we totally just read it in the paper one morning.”

The slip-up of simply telling everyone Australia would be undefended from November to January because Santa was coming, history suggests, could have been the fatal mistake that sealed the then-country’s fate.

The invasion was swift and bloodless. The most effective and efficient weapon proved to be a combination of red and blue Textas, used to convert the Australian flag instantly into that of the victorious nation simply by colouring it in.

flag of the former Australia

The most important institutions and mouthpieces were targeted and taken over immediately, including the parliament in Canberra, the Cadbury chocolate factory in Victoria, and John Nutting’s Saturday Night Country show on the former ABC (now a part of the ANZBC).

The unification of Aotearoa New Zealand to include West Island was formally ratified and announced on January 2nd 2009.

it's beginning to look a lot like...

I truly suck at taking photos. I was going for the pretty copse of trees here, because they're all fetchingly snowed up one side like in a picture book. But then I got all taken with the valley and the farmland and the watery early morning sunshine.

Anyway, rural Ontario this last week has put me in mind of when Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet go searching for a Woozle, following their own footprints in the snow. It all looks so astonishingly nonexistent-British-countryside-of-your-fictional-youth.

This is set to change over the next two nights though, as according to the Weather Network we are expecting a Significant Snow Event. They used the word 'colossal'. I live in the Snow Belt, it now transpires. (in the same way as I learnt the last move was into the Rain Belt, and the one before that was in the Minus Forty-Two Is Apparently A Real Temperature Belt. I'm all about the learning-by-doing).

I bet by the end of winter I'll have learnt to take a decent photo of snow. Looks as if I am about to get a lot of practice.

Movember

Boys, you're growing one, right?

Girls, you're paying 'em, right?

Right?

If you live under a rock or not in Australia or New Zealand, Movember is all about

prostate cancer research and men's mental health programmes.

Well, we like our men happy and healthy, both in the brains and the pants arenas.

And Canada is joining in, so if you are not as keen on Men Down Under as I am,

you can keep your love (and your cash) in the Great White North if you prefer.

If you don't mind keeping Aussie blokes in the pink, get thee hither and

send your bucks to Team Moh Errols.

Good on ya.

48 shades of love

So over at Pants at Large we’ve been talking about Nick Earls’s smashing book 48 Shades of Brown. Pants and I are in disagreement over the character Naomi. Naomi’s the girl that both main characters in the book are in love with. Pants maintains she is unconvinced by Naomi being the curly-headed blonde who is kooky and spacey and adorable in every way but doesn’t know that everyone’s in love with her kooky spacey loveableness because, as Pants says, those girls always know. And cultivate the kookiness etc on purpose because they just like to make boys lose it.

I, on the other hand, am a bit in love with Naomi. She is, after all, blonde and spacey and kooky and oblivious, and that is very adorable. (Pants does not like that girl). Nick Earls has created a very intelligent main character who is quite wordy and clever with language, but when it comes to Naomi, he’s somehow a little simpler with language, as if he can’t quite articulate what it is about her. It is a disarmingly straightforward way to talk. He loves “the ways she finds of understanding things, the things she finds to like.”

So. So. My point. Is. I think I am mostly in love with Naomi because of how the narrator talks about her.

And then, the song I was going on about the other day, Richard Thompson’s Beeswing (as sung only by Roy Bailey. Remember?) Here’s another wild and wilful lass, with whom the narrator (singer, I guess) is utterly smitten, a factory girl who belongs free on the moors and by the sea. She was a lost child, she was running wild, she said, ‘as long as there’s no price on love I’ll stay, and you wouldn’t want me any other way.’ Well, so the poor lad gets a bit keen to tie her down, and off she runs, and he hears of her every now and again, getting worn down and worse for wear as the price of refusing his ‘chains’, until finally he just wishes he could have any of her at all; better whatever little she can give than nothing.

Now, in this case, here’s a story that tells you more about the one singing it than the lass to whom he sings. You know? I’m not loving the girl he’s talking about, but falling in love with him for the way he’s talking about her.

The narrator that makes you fall in love with the object of his love, or the narrator you fall in love with because what he says about her reveals more about him? Which do you like best?

a rare thing, fine as a beeswing

I said that we should settle down
And get a few acres dug
A fire burning in the hearth and babies on the rug.
She said, young man, you’re a foolish man
That surely sounds like hell,
You might be lord of half the world but you’ll not own me as well…

Beeswing, Richard Thompson

Seems a group of designers in Denmark, and some engineering whizz at MIT, might’ve come up with the solution for all those who are ‘so fine a breath of wind might blow ’em away’. The Walking House is essentially a 21st-century Romany caravan – grass-powered horse replaced by solar-powered cells, and lo – your house gets up and walks wheresoever the whim might take you.

It’s a hexagonal tube thing of 3.5 metres diameter, on six individually moving, electrically-powered legs. Doesn't it look like a giant version of those walking robots on Robot Wars that always got the crap beaten out of them by the whizzy engine-powered things with spinning blades? For the die-hard romantics - and in a bit of a weird contradiction of the environmental aspect - the walking house even has a wood stove, though, in an even nicer bit of bizarre, it also has a ‘mainframe computer’ to control the legs.

This whole idea is really interesting to me, as someone who can’t be said to have really ‘settled’ anywhere or anyhow. I guess we’re all about ownership in modern society – getting our few acres dug, more or less – which is the whole reason why the 21st century is so hostile to travellers in general. There’s no place for ‘em. What’re you going to do, make your way between Caravan Club Certified Locations?

But really, as the world becomes an ever-smaller place and we all move about a lot more than our parents and grandparents ever did, I reckon the walking house’s time could’ve come. We’re not tied to our people by location any more. Conversely, it’s 21st-century technology that enables that, of course – free internet phoning, webcams and all that keeping us close to our people without physically being near them.

Incidentally, the only place you should listen to the song Beeswing is on this record (if you click on the track, you can hear the teeniest of snippets). Roy Bailey, for my money, is one of only two men on the planet whose voice could do justice to a song this beautiful. (And the other one isn’t Richard Thompson. It is truth absolute that he is one of the most brilliant and inspired and inspiring songwriters there is, but it cannot be only me that wants to reach up into his throat and pull his voice down from up his nose.)

I digress.

And I heard she even married one time,
A man named Romany Brown
But even a gypsy caravan was too much settling down…

Well. There’ll always be some of us who you’ll never get to commit even to the walking house – and we wouldn’t want them any other way. Me? I might start saving…

lessons learnt

Upon rocking Halloween-at-work dressed as a zombie (undead-icated to serving your library community. Ha ha), the following truths:

1. Coworkers’ children aged 3 and under – not fazed in the slightest by the undead. Even ones that are bleeding from the eyes (hey, go big or go home, I say). More confused by the foreign accent. Will accept candy without batting an eyelid.

2. Coworkers’ children aged 4 and up – totally freaked the frack out by the undead. Will be brought to tears. Not even candy will undo the damage. Nor will parents’ insistence that the zombie is in fact ‘not real’ (never mind the existential questions this causes in the mind of the zombie herself).

3. If you are committed to the blackened fingernails of the undead, but are someone who has never used nail polish ever in your life, there is a time to realise that the purchase of such a substance should also be accompanied by nail polish remover. There is a point at which this realisation is too late. But then, have you ever heard me say “let’s think this through to its logical conclusion”?

4. Black face paint does an excellent job, but you might as well just tattoo your eye sockets, because once it’s on? That stuff ain’t going nowhere.

in which Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld hold a sock

Me: Let’s go to Toronto to hear some Authors!
Librarian Friends Ess and Dee: That’s awfully far, and we'll be up way past our usual bedtime.
Me: It is Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld.
Ess and Dee: Road trip!

In Toronto. We advance menacingly three-abreast on the Authors.

Me: *Hear myself say* I loved this awesome monkey knife fighting fairy mangosteen book you wrote. My favourite bit was the bobsled accident. It was tremendously funny and clever. I think you should also write one about the main characterʼs little sister. She was great.
Me: *apparently actually say* We brought you biscuits. They are the Australian Arnott’s biscuits I get from our local British/NZ/ Oz shop when I am homesick. However, it seems to me there are very few Australians/ Kiwis here because the Australian/ Kiwi stuff is all really old. I suspect these of being at the very least stale and possibly poisonous.
Justine Larbalestier: Um, thanks.
Dee: *gets out enormous pile of Scott Westerfeld’s books for him to sign. Cackles*. I’ve got forty three thousand books, and she brought biscuits. All we need is for Ess to ask you to pull her finger.
Ess: *faints with mortification at her two compatriots* I am a very shy person. Please don’t think I am anything like these two yahoos.
Scott Westerfeld: *sees that there are Advance Reading Copies in Dee’s enormous pile of books she has brought for him to sign* Hey, where did you get these?
We chorus: We’re librarians. We choose books for libraries. We bought your books for many libraries.
Justine Larbalestier and Scott Westerfeld: We generally like librarians.
Scott Westerfeld *to Ess, who also has ARCs*: Who should I sign these to (or 'to whom should I sign these'; I don’t want to put grammatically incorrect words in his mouth)?
Ess: *fainting in shyness* Ohhh…no…it’s ok – I am too shy to tell you my name. You could just sign them. No name.
Scott Westerfeld: *gives Ess the stink-eye* I strongly suspect you of going off to sell these on eBay.
Ess: *drops dead*

There was also a bit with a sock, which I won’t go into, because thanks to my camera battery going dead, there’s no evidence. But you can tell a lot about someone if they are willing to hold your sock-in-progress for a photo. It is an indication of their soundness, some would say, that they are willing to engage with you on a sock-holding level, especially if they already suspect you of going off to make gobs of cash from their signed ARCs.

A, Ess and Dee *being shepherded out by security*: Result. Now, when does Jaclyn Moriarty next come to Canada? I bet we can totally freak her the frack out.

nobody likes a tall poppy

According to a new initiative, Sydney’s no longer just the place to go for big to-dos such as the Olympics. The new events/tourism calendar will apparently tout the city as the place to be and to do things, absolutely all the time. Don’t miss a second. Get there. Be there. Stay there. It’s not just for one-offs, but for long-term, extended event-enjoyment. All Sydney, all the time.

In fact: "Sydney will own January," said the chairman of Events NSW.

Forgive me.

Sydney will own January?

Who is this guy??

Doesn't this sound like the sort of thing you hear from a huge League forward trying to monster the other side under? Is Adelaide going to have to request written permission from Sydney for January to exist there as well? Are Melbourne and Perth going to be kicking each other’s shins over who gets to own the dregs of October and March? Will Tasmania end up patching together the bits left over, so it at least gets to say it owns Augtember?

Perhaps Sydney has plans for long-range gains over the other months as well, at which point it will begin loaning them out to other cities on a time-share basis.

Sydney will own January. I ask you.

most dinosaur fun

I'm trawling through the new publishers' catalogues once more.

I don’t know about you, but when I read that a novel ‘plumbs the depths of human depravity’, it just makes me feel a bit like laying my head down on a cool surface and going ‘o, please, not again’.

Are people really approaching booksellers going “The one you recommended last week was pretty depraved, but have you got anything, you know, depraved-er? I just wish there was something out there that really plumbed the depths, you know?”

And at the other end of the spectrum, comes “The Most Dinosaur Fun…Ever!!”

There’s clearly a scale in effect here. How much dinosaur fun is the most dinosaur fun?

It's got to be quite a considerable amount of fun. But it’s a qualified ‘most’ – that is, it might be the most dinosaur fun, but what if amphibian fun, or invertebrate fun, is funner than dinosaur fun? Maybe, once you've experienced invertebrate fun, there's just no going back to dinosaur fun. By limiting yourself to dinosaur fun, you might be missing out.

meanwhile, south of the border

Dear Bigsister,

Your newly-acquired citizenship is brought to you by the letters U, S and A.

Congratulations.

Love, A.

xxx

Lake Ontario a teapot tonight!

Canada Votes.

I'll be over here, dumping my tea into the lake.

The rest of you, go do your thing. Those of us suffering taxation without representation are counting on you.

how are 'you'?

Yesterday, I was one of those lonely people. Now you’re lying next to me, making love to me.

Well, clearly you’re not. Not the last time I checked, anyway.

But: if you doubt what’s in my heart, you can break it open – but be careful when you do, ‘cause inside there’s a girl who looks like you. Or: You are my sweetest downfall. I loved you first. Or even: Today, I thought I saw you standing on the corner. I was just about to call your name.

My thoroughly scientific methodology of flipping through some records shows at least a 2/3 to 1/3 mix of ‘songs that are addressed to you’ compared with songs that aren’t. And this includes quite a lot of folk songs, which, given their generally higher content related to ploughing, highwaymen, and hats trimmed with green willow, you would expect to skew the results against the ‘you’ bracket considerably. (Incidentally, I feel bound to pass on to you that my research reveals all Hawksley Workman needs is you and the candles, which is nice; that Paul Kelly will be your lover now, a concept worth investigating at least; and that Hem know you’ll bury someone for them, which is nothing if not disturbing).

I digress.

Common in songwriting, and we all accept it.

So. Why not books? I’m counting on the fingers of, well, two fingers, how many books I can think of that do the same.

We could discount that subset of songs addressed to a named person, while still using ‘you’ to address them; I guess we quite easily buy into ‘overhearing’ someone addressing someone else as ‘you’ while not thinking it’s ‘us’. The ‘you’ who is Regina Spektor’s sweetest downfall is Samson. The ‘you’ to whom the Muttonbirds reckon they’re not lying is Ngaire; the ‘you’ they said they’d take dancing is Jackie; the ‘you’ with whom they used to be the best of friends is Esther. (Busy blokes).

So let's call books in which two characters write letters to each other the same sort of thing as songs-addressed-to-a-named-‘you’: again, we know the ‘you’ isn’t ‘us’. (This also means, thankfully, that we can discount Clarissa, the fifteen zillion pages of which I finally left behind at the last emigration, conceding that still being approximately one-ninth into it after almost eleven freaking years is an indication that there isn’t enough time in all the world to get through the whole thing).

If on a winter’s night a traveler is one book that really throws the kitchen sink at it, and it’s a whole kitchen sink of weird, actually telling you want you’re doing and narrating your movements to you, without your permission. The only other I can think of is After Summer (or After January, depending on your hemisphere), which has as I recall two passages addressed to ‘you’. And it’s sort of the same as a love song, the main character addressing another character in the story and trying to put into words why he liiiikes her. The first time it happens in the narrative I always find it jarring for about a sentence, and then just go along with it.

Could you read a book done that way, the whole way through, d’you reckon? A whole novel addressed by one character to another, using ‘you’? Or can all that sort of thing just come to nothing good in the end?

the joy of flatting

Moving back home today. Forced out while cheerful workmen knocked out the walls, bathroom and kitchen, put up new walls, and put back the same bathroom and kitchen. A week in a strange flat with lousy water pressure and a persistent smell of dead cat. In the time between leaving and coming back, the heating in my building has very much been switched on. Canadian landlords seem of the opinion that their apartments should be hotter than the surface of the sun to compensate for winter.

There is, in theory, a means of avoiding all these attendant weirdnesses of flatting your whole life. I understand some people go so far as to pick one country to live in, and stay in it. But, oh...

A: *casts sidelong glance at Australia*
Australia: *winks sexily*
A: *is undone*

So many countries, so little time.

hearing a story

Last night, listening to some music. Unremarkable, undistinguished, a mixture of songs and singers with which I am unfamiliar. They sounded a lot the same.

Then, out of nowhere, the line: I'm too old for the girl I love, but she doesn't know it yet.

Can't shift it out of my head, now.

pain/paean

For I am Publishers Weekly, and lo, I am bored:

'...a pleasant, if shallow interlude'. '...too much of which isn't especially insightful or funny.' 'Clearly, subtlety is not the order of the day. Sadly, neither is quality storytelling.' 'The narrative is preachy and bland.'

How. Could. You. Stand. It??? How could you stand to write a book and worrit and hope and pray and fearfully open up the hallowed PW pages, or not open them but have someone else open them for you, only to find your blood, sweat and tears boiled down to being 'not enough to buoy a routine plot'?

Weird, reviews of stuff. Regular folks just don't have to deal with such things. Why, I almost never read of myself in the library journal, "her dialogue with publishers is predictable and weak,' or 'while her copy-editing is incisive, the actual figures are very routine, which detracts from the pace', or even, "her selection of YA books for our collection is interesting and creative, but she has failed again to avoid the heavy-handed Kiwi-isms that tend to lace her decisions.'

Creative people. How are you not always sobbing into your tea and bourbon? Because everyone is never going to like your book. I mean, PW does like some books, as well as being so fearfully bored with others. But does one reviewer's 'skilful, nuanced mosaic' cancel out another's 'disorganised plot and one-dimensional characters'?

O God. A 'routine plot'. The cold sweats and the vapours.

Dear new baby...

Dear New Baby Sarah Madeline,

Please find enclosed “Baby Jacket To Fit 0-3 Months”.

I dunno, little dude. It looks awfully wee to me. I mean, I know you’re pretty new and everything, and I understand that people your age are usually on the small side. But I’m not convinced. Now I’ve finished making it, it seems to me this would fit a relatively well-built guinea-pig.

In 15 years’ time, your mum will be sorting through a houseful of crap and she’ll come across all the tiny things you wore right now, and will marvel at how someone so little and perfect morphed into this thing that tramples her dreams and hates her and leaves hair straighteners about the house on a daily basis. I just want you to pass on a note to her, that when she pulls out this jacket, she can reassure herself that you actually probably never were small enough to fit into it.

Still and all. I haven’t had a lot to do with people like you, so maybe it’ll work out all right. I mean, I do know one incontrovertible fact – that whatever age you are when this thing fits you, it will only continue to fit you for approximately two weeks. You guys grow fast.

It’s a good thing, because another thing you need to know is that your mother is firmly against dressing you in any sort of pastel, baby-coloured garments. The trouble is, the kind of wool they make in those colours is specially made to be thrown in the washing machine on numerous baby-vomit occasions and survive. Once you move away from baby-related colours, the type of wool that will still kiss your baby-skin with the softness of a thousand fairywings is mostly also the type of wool that has to be handwashed.

I know! No parents of a weeks-old baby will have the time or presence of mind to do that, right?

So what I suggest is, wear this for the one week you’re still tiny enough to fit into it, puke on it, and then instruct your parents to throw it away immediately. It’s the best solution for all of us.

Welcome to the world, kiddo. We’re glad you could join us.

Love, A.

what is it then?

I wore my New Zealand Book Month shirt to work on Friday. Because even when you're not in New Zealand, well, it's still New Zealand Book Month, so you have to show willing, and display your logo with adopted-kiwi pride.

Here is every single conversation I had on Friday:

COLLEAGUE: *looks suspicious at the sort of allegiance I am electing to display in a work environment*

ME: It's not weed.

COLLEAGUE: What is it then?

ME: It's a book.

COLLEAGUE:...

ME: It's a book.

COLLEAGUE: Is it a book about weed?

ME: *facepalm*

balancing the hemispheres

Recent local tourism activities indicate the following proof:

Universal equilibrium. QED.

deny the legitimacy of difference, Murray!

I’m reliably informed by the one careful owner of a three-year-old daughter that a well-known brightly-shirted children's entertainment group has done a cover of the tune “Old Dan Tucker” on their latest release. The three-year-old cites it as ‘her favourite song’, which is saying something, because that one about fruit salad is surely hard to top.

Wikipedia tells us:

‘Old Dan Tucker entered American folklore soon after it was written. Its simple and malleable nature means that singers may begin or end it at any point or invent new verses on the spot. In fact, hundreds of folk verses have been recorded. These folk versions can be quite ribald. This one, recalled by a man from his boyhood in Benton County, Arkansas, in the 1910s, is one example:

'Old Dan Tucker was a fine old soul,
Buckskin belly and a rubber ass-hole,
Swallowed a barrel of cider down
And then he shit all over town.'

Tucker is an animalistic character, driven by sex, violence, and strong drink. He is ugly, unrefined, and unintelligent, even infantilized. As a stranger in town, his devil-may-care actions show his problems with or ambivalence to adapting to local mores. More broadly, Tucker's disdain for social norms allows the song to send up respectable middle class American society…’

It's unconfirmed, but rumour has it the group's next album will be a Kevin Bloody Wilson cover.

Aw, now. As we all quite well know, KBW is about "the denial of the legitimacy of difference" and "the politics of identity...in the context of the current 'culture wars' debate". Constructing the politics of identity; it's what all the college kids are calling it these days.

I wonder what Old Dan Tucker would have to say about that?

lunch with the literati

The Sunshine Coast Festival of the Written Arts, held in British Columbia last week, has a quite brilliant comedy twist (I mean, other than calling itself the Sunshine Coast Festival when it’s in B.C. Good one). On the last night of the festival, the authors and other bigwigs gather aprons, teatowels and implements of destruction and serve up a salmon barbecue to attendees. There are photos as proof, and everyone looks remarkably jolly, given they’re being reminded of effectively what they might well be doing as a job if the whole writing thing hadn’t worked out. Is this a scheme to take writerly egos down a peg, d’you think?

Either way, this scene must forthwith be replicated at literary festivals and conferences and awards shindigs the world over. Could the Booker nominees be persuaded to come up with a casserole for the judges? What about the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize Potluck? The Montana Awards Strawberry Tea Social? Pasta Night at the Sydney Writers’ Festival!

The culinary expectations would focus the authors’ minds far more than the usual acceptance speeches, Q & As and panel discussions. Going home after a successful keynote address knowing they’ve got to knock up a batch of raisin buns for tomorrow’s coffee morning, and that someone can be relied upon to comment “I don’t care if she did win the Governor-General’s Award, her pastry’s like lead,” would radically up the performance anxiety.

Husband-and-wife team Yann Martel and Alice Kuipers could co-ordinate the teacups. Stephenie Meyer, who got such a rough deal recently from teenagers the world over for not writing the book they expected, might be happy spearing cheese and pineapple cubes on cocktail sticks. I hear Nick Earls does a good line in pesto. And the sandwich production line could have Lloyd Jones digging into the economy-sized pail of mayonnaise and Salman Rushdie cutting off crusts.

Who’d you have in your literary lunch lineup?

fair go, though

There may never be a time when there is too much Tim Winton in the world, and we can keep track of the latest here with the handy Tim Winton Watch fe-yature. In general, we do seem to be all a bit surprised that Breath didn’t get on the Booker list; I suspect it’s because it fails in the 'ah, but could you use it as a doorstop, or stand on it to reach very high things?' category.

Anyway the reviewer in the NZ Herald appeared to concur on overall brilliance etc etc, but she still couldn't resist a stab at the ‘heavy-handed Australianisms’.

All those bloody Aussies going about talking like Australians all the time and doing Australian things. In Australia. Flat out like lizards drinking. With pocketfuls of Anzac biscuits smeared in Vegemite. Heavy-handedly. Tch indeed.

worst week of the week award

When you look back and take stock of the last five working days, and it turns out that the most successful part of it was when you accidentally performed minor hand surgery on yourself with a box cutter, well, then you know it’s been a winner of a week.

merry-making

There's been a distinct lack of merriment about the place lately, and although I haven't really had the time to find sources to add merriment, it has been my duty to eliminate some of the causes of the lack of it.

On the right, a swift (the big umbrella thing that, in a Harry Potter-style moving photo, would be spinning madly). To the left, a ball-winder. The whole setup is engineered to enable you to wind skeins of yarn into balls of yarn without getting it all tangled up until you collapse in a sobbing heap. It's the ultimate anti-stress device.

Wrapped around the swift? It's the green blanket. Here's what it looks like now:

Ready and waiting to be turned into something that doesn't have me donning the shroud of woe and despair every time I pick up the needles. I love this about knitting. Almost never is there a point where it can't be undone and made better. Suddenly, a piece of misery becomes a heap of potential. Let the merriment be forthcoming.

you couldn't make it up

Thorndale, Ontario, I love you.

It's only a rumour at the moment, but I hear the liquor store on Temperance Street is soon to be bulldozed to make way for the Irony Bypass.

it's a big storm. Or, a storm that is big

Here's an inter-island ferry attempting to get itself out of Wellington harbour. This sort of thing is exactly why I’ve spent a Very Long Time sitting in Rotorua airport, comatose and cracked out on Gravol, waiting for Wellington airport to open long enough for the actual landing of one or two planes. Welly is a weather blackspot, and to have any sort of transportation therein or thereout, besides walking, is a ridiculous proposal. The ferry and the planes are cancelled more than they run. The attitude of the pilot towards our flight there, in the end, was more or less ‘let’s give it a whirl and see what happens, and if we end up in Palmerston North, well, them’s the breaks. Hold tight!’

I just finished reading a book, and I think I was disappointed by the editing. There was one place with pointless repetition that didn’t appear intentional, didn’t help, and just felt sloppy and annoying and as if it should’ve been caught by someone before it got to print. A childhood ‘rite of initiation’ is described. It becomes an ‘unwritten rule’ in a game. Then, the rite of initiation is described. It’s mentioned that it became, so to speak, an unwritten rule. And then we’re told that it was a rite of initiation.

I suppose, in 90,000 words or so, we’d all have a tendency to repeat ourselves. Or, to put it another way, in writing a book of approximately 90,000 words, we might tend towards repetition. But isn’t that a crackerjack good reason for having an editor? Isn’t it her job to don the ruthless cardigan of clarity and mention that you appear to have left in your final draft the two different versions of the same bit, of which you were intending to delete one and forgot? I’d go so far as to call that something of an unwritten rule.

It’s not a big deal. But if I were the author, I’d be annoyed with myself and my editor for not picking it up, and for me as a reader, it stood out enough from the rest of the otherwise jolly good story that it broke up the flow of reading and made me feel sort of cross and impatient.

How about you? Ever read a book you thought would’ve benefitted from the editor not working on it at the end of a long week while sitting in front of The Rich List?

...and then two come along at once

I know, right? You wait a year for a folk festival, and... Last weekend, the Womad-esque Sunfest; this, the Home County Folk Festival, which is very like Sidmouth was before it got so pleased with itself. Needless to say, full beard code was strictly enforced. (the Folk–vs.–Womad beard ratio is about two to one, and Home County is right on schedule for fulfilling its quota).

I fear, without intervention, I could easily become a mandolin-whore. There was much top-class mandolin action. James and his buddy Darrin even very kindly answered a number of my spectacularly ill-explained questions and set me further on the road to getting to grips with the thing.

Mandolin haiku

O mandolin men
F5 or A5, you are
The hottest folkies.

(Incidentally, I got the best answer out of these guys on the F5-or-A5 question. The F5 mandolin is, apparently, “way cooler”).

In non-folk news, I have so utterly screwed up this:

that it will take me approximately the rest of my life to rectify it. This is not by any means my first screw-up on this one. I wonder, now, why I would bother to persevere and try to fix this. After all, there’s always a point of no return in something – knitting, transplant surgery, marriage – when a girl just has to recognise she’s no good at it, and move on. For example, if you’re twice-divorced, there’s got to be a moment sometime before you’re on one knee holding out a third diamond, when you think to yourself, wait a minute: I truly suck at this. Time I stopped and took up something else.

Well, I am more than twice-divorced from this project. I am bad at it, and I should really be dividing up the assets and thinking about casually seeing other knitting. And yet. I keep trying to fix it. There’s a point at which perseverance becomes stupidity, and I think I am there.

at a folk festival, no-one can hear you scream...

Parental advisory: the following scene contains violence, language, and folk musicians.

Coming to a theatre near you, the summer action blockbuster everyone’s talking about. Skirmishes, silver dagger ballads, and sex, only not really any sex, because come on, who are we kidding?; but if there’s one movie you must see this summer it’s..

FOLK HARD: WITH A MANDOLIN*
*with thanks to First-Eyes Leslie Bee for creative input

Four ancient and bearded men playing assorted instruments are illuminated on a stage beneath a mysterious pergola. At least two of them have their fingers in one ear, enabling them to sing out of tune with themselves. The camera pans back to reveal the raptly attentive faces and strongly individual fashion sense of assorted hippies and academics in the audience, drenched in rain. The last strains of the ninety-third verse of whatever tedious epic the ancient bearded ones were singing die down. The folk festival-goers clap enthusiastically.

THE CHARISMATIC EMCEE: And that was the Neverending Shirtless Barbecue Party Choir with the classic Ballad Of The Buxom Wench Who Was Much Younger Than Me, And What I Did With Her. Next up, Kate Rusby, with…

It is becoming increasingly difficult to hear him over the sounds of approaching helicopters. There is an almighty crash as suddenly the marquee roof is smashed by balaclava-d men in black rappelling from the choppers, carrying assorted firearms.

THE BAND: scattering, yet managing to pick up their beers on the way Eeek!
CHARISMATIC EMCEE: Wha…?
THE MEN IN BLACK: Ha ha! Shoot the motherf***ers, etc.
THE CROWD: Run, run for your lives!
EMCEE: Again, wha…?
THE MEN IN BLACK: We are from the local council, and we are sick and tired of your clogs and your ceilidhs, your tattoos and your tie-dye, your dobros and your didjeridus. We cannot stand by while your unwashed hordes descend upon our nice town and make a lot of noise for a week every year. Folkies out!!

They shoot indiscriminately into the crowd. There is much bloodshed. A grenade is thrown. Plastic cups of beer are spilt upon children. Hippies try to run, but they are wearing flip flops, so they can't, and are gunned down in a merciless rain of bullets. A unicycle wheel rolls forlornly through the confusion.

THE GRENADE: F**k y'all and this mandolin stand! BOOOOOOOOOM!!!!!!!!
BEDLAM: ensues
WOMAN IN FLORAL SKIRT AND FADED TIE-DYE SHIRT, FROM THE CROWD: I’m a teacher! I’m a respectable member of the community and I have been coming here for years to shed my sensible exterior for one stinking week of the summer, wear brightly-coloured leather sandals and sing with my fingers in my ear! I will not be…

She is shot in the face. The camera follows the blood dripping onto her hand-made sandals.

THE MEN FROM THE COUNCIL: surveying the carnage Hurrah! Our town is our own again!

The camera pans across to reveal a cloud of dust approaching from the direction of the pub. We can make out ghostly figures advancing through the haze. Gradually, the figures become clear.

MORRIS DANCERS stride through the bloodbath in bell-pads and slo-mo
THE MEN FROM THE COUNCIL quake in fear
MORRIS DANCERS: chant menacingly One can whistle, two can play, we can dance a Shepherd's Hay! Charge!

The MORRIS DANCERS pitch well-aimed sticks into the vital organs of THE MEN FROM THE COUNCIL, spraying blood and gore over the Neverending Shirtless Barbecue Party Choir's bassist. Some MORRIS DANCERS caper threateningly toward THE MEN waving hankies, and attack Thuggee-style, breaking their necks and leaving THE MEN in crumpled heaps.

KATE RUSBY: Suck my working-class Northern accent, council men!

She winds up and pitches a deadly pair of Northwest clogs, taking out an enormous bunch of THE MEN, who fall backwards into each other in spectacular and bloody fashion. They pile up in a broken heap against a VW camper with a raised-tent roof.

MORRIS DANCERS: regrouping into foot-up formation and singing Oh dear, mother, what a fool I be! Six young men have come a-courting me! Five were blind and the other couldn't see! Oh dear, mother, what a fool I be!

They bring out a set of rapper swords and dance in a circle, weaving the swords together to make a star-shape, which is what rapper sword dancers have done _at the end of every single dance since the beginning of time_ and yet still hold it up high in the air for applause.

MORRIS DANCERS: hold up the star of swords
ACADEMICS AND HIPPIES THAT ARE NOT YET DEAD: applaud weakly
MORRIS DANCERS: toss the star of swords to THE CHARISMATIC EMCEE
THE CHARISMATIC EMCEE: skims the star of swords ninja-style into the last remaining MEN FROM THE COUNCIL.

THE MEN are instantly decapitated by the whirring blades. Their heads bounce across the trampled grass. A lone flip flop sinks into a pool of blood.

MORRIS DANCERS: Time for a pint, then?

not barking but wistful

You find me today wistfully wondering if, just sometimes, it wouldn’t be nice if certain fictions could be the truth and certain truths entirely fiction. O, I know, but that way barking madness lies. And if there’s anything I am not, it’s barking mad. Obviously.

That aside, I am currently absorbed in book blurbs, gathering up ones that publishers have sent me to show off to library people who are choosing what brand spanking new books they’ll be getting in come September. I have no argument with most of the blurbs that publishing people come up with. They are fearsomely hard to write; in the cleverest hands they are an art. It’s not a review; you have to summarise everything about the book and indicate why one cannot afford to miss reading it, in about a sentence. And the sentence can’t be “God, I mean, like, buy this book!!”

Anyway, when you are talking about the type of books that are generally bestsellers, which is what I’m concentrating on at the moment, there are only so many ways you can describe the newest, latest, shiniest crime thriller. So I am forgiving of a certain amount of repetition of ‘unforgettable ‘,‘fast-paced’, ‘gritty prose’, that is ‘intricately-plotted’ and finds a character ‘at the crossroads of x and y (passion and betrayal/ cooking and gardening/ um, barking and mad). And frankly, if anyone were to say any of those things about anything I’d written, it would totally shiver my timbers for many, many months. (Except, possibly, ‘gritty prose’, because that surely just gets right up your swimsuit).

I feel a certain redundancy in sending forth these particular blurbs, though, because really, what library in the world is not going to buy the new John Grisham, James Patterson or Patricia Cornwell? Can there be a single library out there that sees a new John Grisham is on the way and feels an overwhelming need to read the blurb before deciding to buy it? No, there cannot. They are going to say, “Look, it’s the new John Grisham, I will need the usual 20 copies”. Not "But what is it about?? Is it fast-paced and gritty, or fast-paced and unforgettable? Tell me, oh guru of the blurbs!”

CLOTHED IN WISTFULNESS is the intricately-paced, fast-plotted story of a woman who finds herself at the crossroads of fiction and truth. Hers is an unforgettable and, um, intricately…er, I mean, gritty, no! gripping, gripping, um, like, story. Oh, wait, I said story already. God, I mean, like, buy this book!

Nadal, six; Knitting, love

Knitting a pattern on which you have to concentrate – including regularly counting up to four – while watching the men’s Wimbledon final is, for the record, inadvisable. Especially when the final, including rain breaks, lasts for six hours. That’s a whacking opportunity for a whole lot of pattern misreading.

So, what to do? Bearing in mind I designed the pattern, do I:

a) Still pitch a fit and rip it all back, knowing it will kill me to leave it wrong?

b) Remain completely calm, and remember the intended recipient of the knitting in question will be merely weeks old when he or she receives it, and probably won’t be all that bothered either way. And his or her parents will be too knackered to notice. So I can simply recalculate the pattern to fit my glaring errors?

c) Realise my tenuous commitment to mathematical accuracy makes it unlikely that writing the pattern a second time around, while at the same time pitching a fit, is going to result in any degree of correctitude in the new version, so it’ll just make everything worse in the long run?

d) Pitch a fit and leave it?

I’m going with d, for the moment.

standing on guard for thee

On Canada Day, although it's not really mine, I can belt out O Canada with the best of them. As a Commonwealth anthem goes, though, it's astonishingly straightforward and short. I started wondering who might win the face-off of musical self-love among O Canada, God Defend New Zealand, and Advance Australia Fair. And here are my findings.

Bilingual?
Canada: Oui
NZ: Ae, bro
Australia: Yeah, right!

Long?
Canada: One verse is seriously all they could think of?
NZ: 5 verses
Australia: Your standard 5 again.

Mention of God?
Canada: Yes
NZ: Yes
Australia: Nope

Militaristic bombast?
Canada: We stand on guard for thee. Twice.
NZ: Apparently, “peace, not war, shall be our boast”. Encouraging.
Australia: Not until about verse four, when the ‘foreign foes’ arrive.

Sexism?
Canada: True patriot love only required from ‘all thy sons’.
NZ: Men of every creed and race. No gurlz allowd.
Australia: I almost *died of shock*, because it’s not in there until verse five, when the ‘sons’ arrive.

Geographical attributes
Canada: Vague at best. The True North is about as specific as it gets, see also knowing where you are on a map.
NZ: The mountains are ‘freedom’s ramparts’.
Australia: Do you want a list? Jeez, Australia. Calm down. Yes, you’re physically amazing. We get it.

Shameless self-promotion
Canada: ‘Glorious and free!!’
NZ: ‘Our country’s spotless name.’ And insufferable smugness.
Australia: ‘for we are young and free’, and better at cricket than you, so there.

Sorry, what?
Canada: Actually, without the necessity to fill five verses, this is pretty straightforward.
NZ: ‘Guide her in the nation’s van’?? Can someone check if I’ve got this wrong? What on earth?
Australia: ‘Rousing to arms like sires of yore’. I'd like to see that.

The irony
Canada: ‘We stand on guard for thee’, except on the world’s longest undefended border with XXXthat dangerous clownXXX our bestest friend.
NZ: ‘Make our praises heard afar.’ ‘Crown her with immortal fame’. Oh, NZ. Don’t you know how much of the world thinks you’re just a bit of Australia?
Australia: It says of Britain: “with all her faults we love her still”. Until the next referendum, that is.

Inexplicably, what it doesn’t mention
Canada: Hockey, double-doubles, and winter eight months a year.
NZ: Number 8 wire, L&P, and ‘sweet as, bro!’
Australia: The black stump, a thousand poisonous things that *keel you*, and, fortunately, Kevin Bloody Wilson (no link. I just can't).

The tears prick my eyelids when…
Canada: With glowing hearts we see thee rise, our True North strong and free.
NZ: Honestly? It’s too passive for that. It’s all up to God. The Canucks are ‘standing on guard’, the Aussies are ‘toiling’ with ‘courage’. Come on, NZ. Make an effort.
Australia: In joyful strains then let us sing…

Happy Canada Day. Keep your stick on the ice, eh?

in the abstract

Buying iced tea at Tim Horton’s today, I was reminded of my trip to the Rotorua Starbucks last summer, being offered the choice of either “zen” or “passion” iced tea, and on asking the difference, being seriously informed that one “comes with Passion” and the other “comes with Zen”.

And it suddenly struck me that the evil empire of coffee has completely missed a trick here, offering only two different Abstract Noun Iced Teas. Where the Disappointment iced tea, or the tea of Wistful Regret? Where the iced tea that "comes with" an Unfocused Yet Persistent Sense of Irritability? Where, indeed, the Vengeance iced tea with a side of whipped non-fat Malice?

Awaiting your ideas for the new abstract noun menu, please.

heartsease

A few years of skipping gaily about the globe gets you used to Not Owning Things. Because if you Own Things, you have to have somewhere to Put Them. And really, in the end, Everything You Own has to come to about 30 kilos.

So! This is quite the momentous event. I bought a DVD! Canada Pony Express took its sweet time in delivering it, but I guess that just adds to the build-up. And Oh! This…











…is made of awesome. It tastes of beauty and wonderment. If you were sick with a great sickness, and breathed in this concert, it would cure what afflicted you.

That is all.

fingers, signings, and pretty pretty hair

How fitting that on the evening I returned from the publishing orgy known as Book Expo Canada, I found my parcel finally made it to Sydney and a special booklady on the other side of the globe is properly attired for winter with woolly knuckle tattoos that read "book diva". Bless her for thinking it read “book avid” – I guess it does when you’re wearing them and reading upside-down. And are a little hard of thinking.

I did pretty well at Book Expo with only picking up freebies I absolutely was desperate to read. I even put down and left behind books whose covers seduced me when I discovered they were just not my kind of thing. And there were some almighty seductive covers. Not even always the books. I work for a place that gets hundreds of copies of every publisher’s catalogue every week, and I still picked one up just because the cover is so freakin’ beautiful it makes me want to weep.

I almost never get books signed. I don’t get the point. The authors already wrote the books for us, with 60 to 100,000 real meaningful and carefully-crafted words in them, and that's the important bit. I’m not sure what it adds to have them write their names at the front. If I really admire an author, I’d rather just tell ‘em why. What do you have of them, when they have written their names for you? Do you own a bit of their soul? It’s a really weird construct, for my money, the signing of things.

And then, the Yarn Harlot was right there at BEC. So naturally I stood in line and asked her to sign a book for me. I did kind of get to tell ‘er why I admire her, though I was just able to stop short of gushing over how pretty her hair is. But when you have a name that long, signing it over and over must absolutely kill you.

N.S.B.P. Live 2008 - are you ready to ROCK??

Every evening on the way home from the Land of Library, the carpool passes an apartment building. In the foyer of one end, every evening, a barbecue is taking place. The chairs are arranged in the doorway, while the barbecue itself balances between the front step and the pavement.

It’s led to quite the discussion. The first point that came up was that we are not all completely groovy with barbecuing on the front porch/ deck/ stoop/ entryway. As opposed to round the back of the house/ flat/accommodation. One of us was very firmly of the opinion that front porch = bad; back porch = good; viz, why would you barbecue on the street when you have a perfectly serviceable backyard in which to do it?

Then there was the drinking aspect. Were the two old guys with no shirts on, sitting in deckchairs in one of the small towns we passed through, who were not barbecuing but were drinking beer in the front yard, less or more acceptable than the motley crew in front of their apartment, also free of shirts, waving their burgers at passersby and – and this is another aspect – sitting on their couch, which they had pushed outside for the occasion?

Then, in the cycling leg of my triathlon commute home, I passed two shirtless guys drinking in chairs in their front yard with a barbecue and exceptionally loud music. Where on the scale do they fit?

Among the carpool, there appeared to be a sliding scale in effect, with the worst combination being some sort of neverending front-deck drunken shirtless barbecue party (and presumably, I don’t know, the most acceptable being sipping Pimm’s on the patio behind the summerhouse).
I'm leaning towards the side of "as long as it's a block party and we're all invited..."

But what do you think? Are you offended by the shirtless front-porch barbecuers in your neighbourhood? Or are you in fact the shirtless barbecuer yourself? I want international responses on this one, folks, because there are few things more fun than sweeping cultural stereotypical generalisations and, you know, poking fun at the Australians.

In the end, only one certainty arose from the whole debate, which was that Neverending Shirtless Barbecue Party would be an awesome name for a rock band.

in pain

This morning, I’ve been shown the brochures to the world of regular people, and been asked if I want to book in and become a member.

I’m not sure I do. It is a frightening place.

Specifically, it is a world in which regular people own cars. It appears, because of my job, that I now have to consider becoming one of them.

The ownership of the car is not in itself too scary. Find a used car, get it inspected to ensure it won’t fall apart the minute you drive it away, pay the money. Own car.

But it transpires that Ontario is the most expensive province in Canada for car insurance. Add to the mix someone who’s never owned a car in Canada, never been insured, is completely off the record in automobile-related terms…and the annual cost of even the most basic insurance is almost as much as I was intending to spend on a car.

This is very scary bananas indeed. It has all made me extremely shaky and no longer in the frame of mind to even start looking for a vee-hickle. How do regular people do this?

I am also in a world of actual, as well as mental, pain. Some of you know I can be highly-strung at times, with a great deal of nervous energy fuelled by large amounts of tea and biscuits. Well, the other day in the carpool we got to talking about spiders and wetas and long-legged beasties. You know how talking about those things makes your skin kind of super-sensitive and you imagine there’s a redback climbing up your leg at every moment?

Later that evening I sat working at the computer, and one of the pins that was holding my hair up slid out slowly down my neck.

To my over-prepped, hyper tea-fuelled mind it could clearly be nothing less than a black widow making her deadly way down my shirt, so naturally I freaked the frack out. My left hand flew up to the back of my neck at the speed of light to remove the beast. This had the effect of flaying every last tendon in my left elbow, causing me more pain this week than the actual spider bite would’ve.

Especially bearing in mind that the spider was, in fact, a hairpin.

But what should I do about the car? My carpool buddies say I can keep paying them fuel money. But are they just being nice, and they’d rather I properly pulled my weight? Do you think this insurance thing is just something that needs time to sink into my mind, and after a week or so I’ll be okay with it and ready to take the next step? Could I come round to the idea of making monthly payments on a consumer item (on insurance, for crying out loud), which by the way is also a world that I have never inhabited?

Seriously, is this the kind of thing you regular people do? And are you still able to sleep?

matters arising

1. You people sure like a girl who farms her hair. I’m leaving it, ok?

2. Maleficent hoyden, yes. In this instance, 'hoyden' is correct usage, not 'harridan'. I figure I have at least twenty years before I'm a harridan, if at all, because I don’t intend to start an unhealthy dependence on tanning beds, drinking gin-and-tonic on people’s staircases at parties, or over-using mascara. I remain committed to hoydenry.

3. Deadlegging. Is it perhaps only schoolteachers and schoolkids who know what this is? I’m not going to tell you how to do it. Because it’s not a very nice thing to do to someone, that’s why. Grow up, will you?

4. Comments, m'dears. I love your emails much, but really the little clicky thing at the bottom of posts is there to make it more convenient for you to tell me these things. I want to sink luxuriously into your emails for your private and delicious between-me-and-thee-and-the-gmail-data-miners thoughts, not your queries on my choice of vocabulary. Pants, god bless her, is trying hard, but she’s only one woman. (And for the record, my vocabulary choices are always correct. Always. Don't fight it.)

the smaller the mammal, the more likely it'll kill you

Periodically in the news, we read how someone with a more than somewhat tenuous grip on reality climbed into the lion enclosure at London zoo carrying a Sainsbury’s medium frozen chicken or a kilo of steak as kitty-appetiser. The individual invariably gets his or her head ripped off, and the papers barrage the zoo spokesperson with questions about why there aren’t more deterrents to stop people climbing into lion enclosures. The spokesperson grits her teeth and explains “Seriously, dudes, we were more or less working under the assumption that the large predatory carnivores with big claws and teeth would be deterrent enough.”

This week, the WWF’s attempt to film the world’s rarest rhino in the wild hit a bump, when mummy rhino spotted the spy camera and charged it, smashing it into a million pieces. Wild animals don’t like us, and that is le fact, viz, the beard-stroky truth that a swan can break your arm and a wombat will snap your legs like a couple of toothpicks as soon as look at you.

Well, out-of-control wildlife violence is apparently no longer restricted to large exotic species. A report from the New Zealand Herald this week tells of another clearly well-adjusted lad who’s been fined 500 bucks for battering a teenager with a hedgehog.

It was a heroic kamikaze effort for the hedgehog involved. Police said it was unclear whether or not it was dead at the time of being lobbed through the air as a missile (though eyewitnesses report hearing a tiny voice squeaking “put some spin on me, bro’!” just prior to the attack). The NZ Herald’s online poll prompted by the incident asks: ‘Your Views: Is a Hedgehog a Weapon?’

Other reports include a snowshoe hare glassing someone in a Halifax bar “for looking at my boyfriend funny”, and an otter deadlegging a kid in the schoolyard for his lunch money.

thumbs. and wigs.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, my poor old melodeon-playing dad has been forced to resort to medical means for the brutally arthritic thumbs that are the occupational hazard of the ageing folky. It's some sort of topical steroid affair, and obviously the whole thing is neither pleasant nor delightful. Never one to not point out the comedy inherent in such hideously unfunny situations, though, I can't help but notice the side-effects of this stuff: "over use" could result in the patient becoming "agitated or confused".

He's a folk musician.

I mean, How would you tell?


In other news, because I've been getting wordy lately and need some pictures, this...













...is a year's worth of hair from after the pre-New Zealand emigration wigs-for-kids shearing (excepting a few instances of grabbing bits and hacking at it in disgust to avoid the worst of mullethood). You need a minimum eleven inches to donate; I figure it'll be a good two more years before it gets long enough for another harvest, and for kids' wigs, there can be no grey. I'm not sure if I've got two more years before it encroaches. What do you think? Wait it out, or head for the scissors?

Where are you from? You sexy thing!

Exam season’s over, so the red pen's put away for another year. Not at all depressed by the standard of essays this time round. What is depressing is the choice of books that are the stalwarts of the 16- and 18-year old English Lit reading list canon. High school English courses are absolutely at the root of Western society’s nutcase attitudes to sex, because if teenagers had a normal and straightforward approach to it before reading these texts, they’re certainly going to be screwed up for ever afterwards.

Take the Great Gatsby. Daisy is utterly wet and a weed, with a voice that “drips money” and a husband who cheats on her and also does a neat sideline in breaking women’s noses. In A Streetcar Named Desire, meet the wife-beating rapist whose loony-tunes sister-in-law seduces underage boys having previously prompted her gay husband to shoot his brains out. In 1984, the outcome of sex is to be stomped on by rats until you swear you’d rather have them eat your lover alive to spare you the torture. Enter the Quiet American – “you can have her interests, I just want her body”, and the classic good-times game of having a political rival assassinated just because he stole your bird. The Color Purple, please let’s not even; Of Mice, Men and Vaseline gloves; Death of a Salesman and those infernal Symbolic Stockings, the dutiful wife knowing all about the nameless mistress but standing by her man. Sons and Lovers, for crying out loud!! Oh, and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Me, me, and thrice me.

Every instance of sex in the whole pack of them is, I’m sorry, but absolutely batshit crazy. Apparently the only way it can be done is by beating each other up, shooting ourselves out of the closet, degrading and hating and objectifying each other.

Could we put on the syllabus one book where people have sex – even, call me crazy, a relationship!!! - because they like each other? One book. It’s not much to ask. Submit your ideas please.