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.

taking it to the post office

On going to the post office to mail a present:

Me: I’d like to send this parcel, please.
Post Office Lady: Let’s see if it fits through the letter slot.
(it doesn’t).
POL: Oh. Well now you’ll have to send it as a parcel, instead of a letter.
Me: (having anticipated this scenario). That’s okay.
POL: It’s just that it’s a lot more expensive.
Me: I know.
POL: I mean, a LOT more expensive. (she examines it). If it were a letter, it would be a dollar ninety-two. As a parcel, it’s nine dollars.
Me: That’s okay. It is a parcel. It’s not a letter. It would have to be a couple of millimetres thick to get through that slot. This is over an inch.
POL: Can you make it any thinner?
Me: Well, no, because that’s how thick the thing in the parcel is.
POL: Because it would be a lot cheaper.
Me: Yes, I suppose it would. But that would involve not actually sending the thing that’s in the parcel, and just sending a letter instead. In fact, if I didn’t send anything at all, it would be free. So maybe I should try that next time.
POL:…
Me: nine dollars, then?

fiction part 2

Can't show you the whole thing, because it's a pressie currently in the mail. But pretty, no?

So, but fiction. “Write what you know”? Really? But what on earth would be the point? And how monumentally dull. “Here is the story of me and myself and my life and everything I do and think and say, in exactly the way I always do and think and say it.” If everyone wrote what they knew, there’d be no Mister Pip, no The Book Thief, no My Name Was Judas. Isn’t the whole point of fiction in fact writing what you don’t know, because otherwise, er, it wouldn’t be fictional? Don’t we pay fiction writers for their imagination?

Sorry. Fiction writers earning money. Let us pick ourselves up off the floor and hold our aching sides.

There again, if people didn’t write what they knew, there’d be no Kindness of Strangers, which was my favourite book of 2007. I wonder how much of Edwin + Matilda there'd be? We'd hope at least the brutality was completely imaginary. (Mostly I wonder when some publisher outside of NZ will be clever enough to pick this one up).

In other news, the apartment has a Smell suspiciously as if something’s Gone Off in the fridge, only I’ve checked, and nothing’s Gone Off in the fridge. Which suggests, more worryingly, that something may have gone off Somewhere Other Than the Fridge.

You see? Writing what you know. Not always preferable.

hats on

The black hole of insomnia sends your brain in funny directions. At about the beginning of sleepless hour number two last night, the song “On Ilkley Moor Baht ’at” popped into my head. It may have been because I was onto singing random songs to lull myself to sleep, having already gone through the usual repertoire of times tables, thinking of countries for each letter of the alphabet, and sighing.

On Ilkley Moor Baht ’at is a song that hasn’t invaded my mind for many years, but I couldn’t shift it last night. The thing you need to know for the whole thing to make sense (as far as any folk song ever does, as they are mostly utter nonsense), is that “baht ’at” means “without a hat”. That is, the character in the song has been walking on Ilkley Moor without his hat.

Well, you can imagine!!!

No?

Okay, well, it’s like this. The song begins with a friendly question, of the sort that might arise from a chance meeting on the village street: “Where has tha been since I saw thee?” The response: “On Ilkley Moor baht’at”. The friend, with a nudge and a wink, suggests “Thou’ve been a-courting Mary-Jane”, but by the third verse has taken something of a left-turn at the traffic lights, prophesying: “Then thou shalt catch tha death of cold!” However, in verse four, he has reconciled himself in the way of a true pragmatist to the outcome: “Then we shall have to bury thee.”

The hatless one may be wondering, by verse five, exactly what goes on behind the eyes of his so-called friend, who muses: “then worms’ll come and eat thee up.” After which it’s a natural progression to “then ducks’ll come and eat up worms”, and to follow (post-shooting expedition we must presume), “then, we shall come and eat up ducks.”

The final, chilling indictment of the walker’s cavalier attitude to headwear is an event in the musical canon that, I realised with sudden clarity last night, can be likened in import to nothing less than the Tristan Chord. “Then,” sings the passing-concerned-friend-turned-crazy-person, “we shall all have eaten thee.”

So much is encapsulated in this seemingly simple, bouncy and repetitive song! (Repetitive such that, in the time it’s taken you to read this, the song would just about be coming to the end of the first verse.) It manages to imply everything from a basic understanding of the nitrogen cycle, to existential questions of the very circle of life, connotations of cannibalism, the fragility that must surely ensue in a society built on such foundations; indeed, the very existence of God and divine wisdom.

Who wrote this work of genius? Where does it come from? Have we all missed a trick, shutting our ears to drunken folk singers yawling through its tedious verses, when we should have recognised the unique opportunity for theosophy it presents?

Of course, you might say I just need to get some sleep.

what I did not do tonight and why

Tonight, I went along to the local Amnesty group. They were having a film night at a Centre.

I wheeled my bike out of the apartment and locked the door. Then I unlocked the door and went back in to get my helmet. Then I locked the door again. Then I put on my helmet. It was not my helmet. So I unlocked the door, swapped the helmets, put mine on, locked the door, got on my bike and left.

The Amnesty film night was on Queen Street. The email said so. I have not lived here that long, but I was rather proud that I actually know where Queen Street is, so I headed there. On the way, as I ba-bomped over a kerb, the bolt holding the left bracket of my basket to my handlebars pinged off. The basket teetered crazily. I shrugged and carried on. I still had the right bracket. Every time I went over a bump, the loose left bracket jingled.

I got to Queen Street. Except it was Queens Avenue. I stopped beside a park where two ladies were walking their dogs. One of the dogs was very excitable, and it was trying to jump about and poo at the same time. I asked the ladies where Queen Street was. They said I was on it. I said, no, this is Queens Avenue. Yes, they said, but there isn't a Queen Street. This must be what you're looking for. The dog succeeded in pooing. The lady didn't scoop it. I thanked them and carried on. I was in the 100s. The place was in the 600s! I pedalled harder. The loose basket danced and bounced. I found the 600s. I found 656. It was just a house. I turned round and cycled back the other way. I must have got the number wrong. I looked at 626. It was a house too. I pulled in to the side of the street and thought.

Then I realised I was cycling on the wrong side of the street! I was cycling with the kerb on my left!! But I am not in New Zealand! How could I have cycled up a busy main road on the wrong side, with cars coming towards me, and not noticed?! I almost had a heart attack. Then I saw that it was a one-way street. So the cars were all going the same way as me.

I couldn't find the Centre. My back wheel started making a funny noise as if something were caught in it. I started going home. I cycled past a row of pretty yellow brick houses. Their doors went red, orange, purple, brown, yellow. I cycled past many law firms, and a pub where the men stood outside and watched me go past, and a sign saying I could have Botox and look great for Spring, and a grocery store that sold "most Middle Eastern foods". My basket hung more crookedly and the bracket jingled.

I took a wrong turn into a suburban, tulippy wilderness. The houses were big and quiet. Finally I arrived home. I was so excited to find out what I had done wrong that I opened my email right away. It said, 636 Queen St.

I went back out into the hallway, turned, and wheeled my bike into the apartment. The basket performed a final exuberant galliard, and descended to the floor.

happy and serene, despite everything

The world of applying for jobs is sometimes a disheartening one, and you have to take a bit of happy where you can find it. Here is what made me happy today. My Top.

About fifteen years ago, and for reasons lost in the wreathing mists of time, my mum was given a really lovely batik outfit upon finishing a teaching gig in Singapore. In a bizarre twist, it turned out (we realised years later) to be the uniform of Singapore airlines. My mum, not being built like a typical Singaporean lady, or indeed being one to wear outfits entirely made up of matching batik cotton, gave it to me. The skirt, alas, is lost, but I still have the Top, and I love love love it.

When I put it on I feel a little like a pretty and serene Singapore airlines lady, as long as I don’t actually look at myself. We flew on Singapore airlines back from NZ, and (notwithstanding their draconian luggage regulations that had us throwing clothing and shoes into a charity bin right there in Auckland airport before Uncle Tom Cobley and all) their ladies are all so poised and pretty and serene that I want to be one. On that flight, one of the airline ladies stopped her progress down the aisle so she could check out my knitting, and exclaimed over it, which was kind, and she thanked me profusely for making her such beautiful socks, which was a tremendously funny joke, because not only were they honking big men’s socks but there’s also no way in the world you’d need such a thing in Singapore and also, someone as petite and beautiful and serene and poised as her would never, never disgrace her feet with something so crude and homely and sheepy. And guess what else? The Singapore airlines ladies still wear the same outfit as the one my mum gave to me after the Singapore people gave it to her. Because why change perfection?

I have not had this Top for over a year because it was packed away while we were in New Zealand. It’s hibernated in a cold Canadian garage all that time; quite an ordeal for something whose roots are in beautiful, tropical Singapore.

So today the Top and I were reunited after all this time and it was quite a joyful thing.
And that was what made me happy today. I may even go apply for a job at Singapore airlines. After all, I already have the Top. The poise and the serenity will surely follow.

doing things by halves

I'm halfway through my secret knitting project.

Wait...buying the yarn is half, right?

Oh.

Well, in any case, here's the secret project, which also involves graph paper, meaning the first thing I need to do is design the secret project. I begin to feel as if the "plenty of time" I've left may not, in truth, be all that plentiful.

I got my bike back from the bike shop, tuned up and newly be-tyred. Cycling gives me a split personality. It's my A to B, not really my weekend fun, and I both love and hate my bicycle. Due to it having the biggest wheel diameter I've ever seen on a bike, it bowls along at a cracking pace when you get going. But being over fifteen years old, it's made of what's essentially cast iron (note: does the above sound to you like a description of a penny farthing? must check my bike is actually not one) so it is very heavy to get going and push up hills. (Having said that, my attitude to hills has changed dramatically since my New Zealand experience, viz: "Canada, you call that a hill? Oh come on.")

Anyway, for the first half of a journey I relish the zippy freedom from footslogging or waiting for buses that don't even go exactly where you want to, and I gaily pedal along to the library with my bell and my basket like an earnest Enid Blyton-eqsue bluestocking. Then I get puffed and overheated, and cross about the hills and the wind and the weather and the effort, and this second half of the trip makes me arrive at my destination a cursing and maleficent hoyden. It's quite a transformation, but probably not one you'd want to be party to any more than, say, half of the time.

fair enough

Just about the best we can manage here in Canada on Saturday will be to drink a smug cup of didn't-I-do-the-right-thing tea, because in the world of fair trade, we're a bit behind. Notwithstanding Ten Thousand Villages, of course; they are the bestest, but otherwise we're poor performers in fair trade terms.

New Zealand ramps it up on us a bit with TradeAid. In Rotorua, they're practically next door to the bookstore, which meant that during my Time Of Woe in the wet midwinter (that is now of course fast approaching again), I bought and ate a chocolate bar from them every. Single. Day. Every day. TradeAid, my sanity thanks you, and I miss you much.

The UK is absolutely all over it; you don't visit a special little shop with tea and coffee nicely presented amongst wicker baskets, it's just in the supermarket and the high street and all over everywhere. They're so far into it that now they're coming out the other side and everyone's wondering if fair trade is really all that fair and now there's even different types of fair trade, and everyone's standing in Sainsbury's with fourteen different packets of sugar trying to figure out which is the fairest of them all. Even crumbly old Marks and Sparks sells organic cotton t-shirts, which is even more important than fair trade t-shirts, because it's all very well paying people half-decent money to grow cotton, but if they're *dead from pesticides* it won't make all that much difference.

Anyway, you have to do the best you can with what you've got.

My other means of being fair is to get stuff I can get locally, locally. (Which for some people is the dichotomy, and mostly you end up doing a bit of both and hoping the karmic gods see that you're trying your best). So my tea is modelling Saskatchewan-grown alpaca sock yarn, which I grant you is not local to me now, but it was a couple of weeks ago.

Sock yarn this lovely, when it comes in skeins, is the epitome of joy and despair, in yarn terms. Most people agree it's best to wind the skein (long oval yarn) into balls (compact round yarn - still with me?) to use it. In practice, with a yarn this clingy and fine, you get about three quarters of the way through (the big ball on the left) before the weight of what's left behind isn't enough to keep it straight. It tangles itself up in a big knot, and I end up cutting it in frustration and starting a new, smaller ball, and on and on till I get teeny bits I probably won't end up using. Despair. But the sock is already looking so lovely. Joy!

The other thing about buying locally-made yarn over your standard, imported from some giant faceless foreign yarn-making corporation (what a concept), is that is costs about double. So in fact I'll probably be keeping the little endy bits and they'll be useful for darning when the socks eventually fall to holes, because ain't no way I'm throwing these out.

And I didn't even need a fair-trade chocolate bar to help me regain my sanity on that one. I'd better have one anyway though. And, hey, on Saturday? Grab a cuppa, won't you?

a trilogy of things

1. I felt such joy when writing an article this week on the Te Papa Colossal Squid Event. Even the name of it pleases me. You can't help but be excited by the sheer scientific happiness radiating from this monumental squidly event. In the squid world, this rare and extraordinary thing is the e-squid-valent of the moon landing. Everyone is just so darn thrilled by it. Go see! And you will be too. Squid! Not just giant, but colossal! It's a great big squid!!

2. I'm about to read Dubliners. Again. Despite my deeply-held conviction that nobody should ever have to read anything by James Joyce more than once, or even preferably at all. But a) I will shortly mark exams on it, and b) I'm conscientious and c) it's really not fair on the candidates to just hate the book they studied all year and to feel all huffy and crunchy when marking their exams. So the huff and the crunch are being bundled away in the back of a closet and I am being open-minded.

3. Yesterday, when I got out of the shower, there was an ant on the bathmat. When I went in the bathroom later, there were two ants on the bathmat. Today, there was an ant on the bathmat again. There are no ants on the floor. Or anywhere else in the entire apartment. Did Ikea do us a special ant-hatching bathmat deal?

4. I just started Extras, the fourth in Scott Westerfeld's Uglies trilogy (it's better than the others). And in August, Breaking Dawn, the fourth in Stephenie Meyer's Twilight trilogy, comes out. Four-logies. They're the new trilogies.

lessons learned

I meant to talk about this earlier, because *WOW*. It's lately been confirmed that the World's Biggest Lesson was exactly that - in official world-record-ese.

The Global Campaign for Education set up a good, good thing. The Lesson was 30 minutes, to be held at one of 3 different times during April 23rd (to account for the time zones), ending with a test to see how much people had learnt. The topic was quality education as a basic human right, and in many of the countries that took part, the Lesson was taught by kids (sometimes by kids who are currently excluded from formal education) and attended by adults, celebrities, politicians - even the King of Cambodia.

Participating groups then reported back to say how many attended, and the count was taken, and although it's still rising, the world record has officially been set, with over 7.5 million people learning the same Lesson at the same time.

You can check out the photos here, and they make that inarticulable Thing well up inside me. That Thing we all have that makes us want to cheer and cry at the same time and that is really much , much more than just that, but that is generally -as I say - inarticulable. Where you feel power - 7.5 million!! - and powerlessness - only 7.5 million in the whole world?? From let's do this!! to where do you even start??

I got to be a highly-educated woman (notwithstanding the fact that if they did qualifications in your actual common sense, I'd barely scrape a GCSE) in a world in which one in four of us (women, that is) is illiterate. I'm constantly reminded, with events such as these, that I'm lucky enough to make a living editing a newspaper rather than delivering one. The only difference is my education.

Given that, according to GCE's estimations, 72 million kids worldwide are missing out, 7.5 million - and that's altogether; it includes the attendance of the already-educated politicians and celebs and general adult population and kids who are in school - seems like a bit of a drop in the ocean. But it's a start.