Wandering lost

I always end up writing about places when I intend to write about people. I'm not sure how to kick the habit. These nicotine patches certainly aren't helping.

Last week I gave a guest talk to a travelling troupe of writers from my alma mater. I was invited along by my friend, Leslie Brody, who published an excellent biography of Jessica Mitford last year.

Domesday skyscraper. 

Her book should be required reading for anybody who wanders around and hates being told what to do - like how to sing for instance, or what to read.

I took the gang to my favourite pub in an alley off the Strand, and someone asked: why do you wander? 

It's a good question. I don't really have a good answer.

Tolkien is currently shouting at tired commuters from lampposts: "all who wander are not lost!" His travel enthusiasm is in promotion of the British Library's current exhibition Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands.

Some who wander are suckers for this kind of thing, so I found myself there this week. I quickly discovered that many great British writers have appalling handwriting (except for Charlotte Brontë  - hers is exquisite).

You there! Scratch my nose!

The British Library is wonderful. Glass bookcases scrape the ceiling, and apparently the basement descends to 25 meters. Guys with coiffed hair stare down from the architecture with a sternness that can only come from decades of being unable to scratch a nose-itch. 

Writing Britain  uses text and illustration to chart the Green Man's long walk from Hobbiton to to Dog Island by way of Wessex, Metroland, and Jerusalem-upon-Thames.

Kipling said: "Out of the spent and unconsidered earth, the cities rise again". Islington was a quiet suburb, and Marylebone a dairy farm.

Satanic Mills, then and now.

If you walk from Moorgate to the Museum of London, you can see chunks of the old Roman wall waiting patiently for the surrounding steel and glass to fall. 

The message of the British Library's exhibition is that writing about places is writing about people. Which makes me feel much better about my bad habit circa line one.  

In addition to wandering all over the place on paper, I wander in and out of London every few years. Thomas de Quincey once said: "my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep."

Champagne and a lie down

I don't know what the American way of birth is like, but apparently on private British wards you a bottle of champagne and a lie down afterwards. Sounds peachy, yes?

Smell the roses, but do keep going.

On the NHS, the midwife gives you about thirty minutes before she tells you to sit up and start breastfeeding. If you are a reasonable human, you insist that you need to rest, and surely it can wait till later. 

The midwife tiredly responds that all that jazz is over - it's time to get up and get on with it. NHS midwives excel at ripping bandages off quickly.

So happy day to all the great mamas I know, who don't rest and never get to wait. And happy day to our beloved ones, as tired and relentless as we are, who make it possible for us to carry out our task with joy.

May the lot of us spend the distant future drinking champagne and napping. For now, let's get up and get on with it.

Peril

Maurice Sendak would approve of my children. When confronted with a book of fairy tales, they bypass the soft stuff and go straight for Hansel and Gretel. 

You may be unfamiliar with Hansel and Gretel, unless your mother also read you weird old charity shop fairy tales, because it is simply too creepy to have ever survived the great Disney de-Grimm-ification machine. 

Where the wilderness is. 

The story features a pair of starving, abandoned children lost in a deep, dark wood. They stumble upon the Venus candy-trap home of a local witch, who promptly imprisons them, stokes the fire, and sharpens the knives. 

But the siblings get the upper hand through deception, and they burn the witch alive. Reckoning they are now confined to a life of crime, they steal her life savings before fleeing the scene. Upon locating their father and presenting him with the plundered witch loot, they find he is suddenly filled with an unprecedented bout of paternal affection.  

My children love this story. They ask for it every night, then hover at my elbows, enraptured. Their favourite bit is when the witch pops out of the cottage and says, and I quote: "Gotcha, nasty nippers!"

Now in the hours leading up to bedtime, they assume the identities of Hansel and Gretel. They dig out an old witch hat from last Halloween, and shove it in my direction, their eyes lit with excitement. "Say it Mama," they whisper, "say nasty nippers!" 

I say the magic phrase in my best witch voice, which sounds about like Lauren Bacall spliced with Alvin the chipmunk. Then I stoke the fire in my oven (their play tent) and wait for the inevitable. 

Boy, am I tired of being shoved head-first into that play tent by Hansel, while 

Witchcraft. 

Gretel up-ends the penny jar all over the floor. 

Although it's hardly surprising for London children to be worried about kid-phobic adults on weird diets, I was initially baffled by their love of peril. However, after reading about a little boy lost over continents, time and transport, I changed my mind.

Children not turnips. Before they can run or speak their angst, they know an ancient truth: the world is a dangerous place full of child-sized traps. 

Scary stories, and struggles against nightmare monsters, are just practice for the world. Fluffy stories about bears and disembodied solar baby heads (actually, that one scares me) are by contrast pretty pointless. 

This afternoon I assumed my witch alter ego and I locked my youngest nasty nipper in her crib at her request. A shadow shot past me and slunk towards the crib. 

"Don't worry sis" said my elder nipper, "I will save you."

Shelter

The sellers of ice cream arrived before the storm. They drove along the streets of London, sneaking glances over their shoulders. Somewhere lurked a great storm beast with terrible teeth that could not be denied.

Time to pay the piper.

Or that's how I imagine Ray Bradbury would have described last week, had he been here for the epic sunshine, and witnessed the ice cream men blockading every playground exit and entrance in London. 

My children have now had ice cream up to their eyeballs. Who knows - it could now rain from here to October. The smug ice cream men have driven away, just like Sylvester McMonkey Mcbean and his money printing machine.

The cool wind returned this week. And with it two gabillion deadlines. So to the grindstone. 

Posts may be moderate or poor, occasionally good for the next two months, before eventually clearing. 

Misadventures in food packaging

The cure. 

Nothing beats the blues like Texas chile.

It's so easy to cook that you don't even have to be sober or awake to make it. Nor do you have to be Texan, even if you are both asleep and drunk. Texas chile is a comfort food that spans borders.

Here's how to make it:

• saute an onion and several cloves of garlic
• add a packet of mince 
• throw in oregano, a tin of kidney beans, two tins of tomatoes, salt and cumin. 
• chuck in the scalding chili additive of your choosing. 
• drown the lot in cheap read wine. 
• simmer a couple hours till nearly burnt, then wash it down with what remains of the cheap red wine. 

The trouble with Texas chile a la Chaos HQ, is that it has to go over corn bread and under sour cream. Sour cream is easy enough to come by in London, but cornbread ain't. 

Just say no. 

In the homeland a box of Jiffy cornbread will set you back about forty cents. Sadly Britain remains a Jiffy-less island, even though you can buy a $14 box Lucky Charms in Primrose Hill, which is proof that every expat has a super-gross junk food craving (I admit with shame that mine is Aunt Jemima fake maple syrup).

Last week  I reckoned I was in luck when I stumbled upon a box of Aunt Jemima corn bread in my local shop. I didn't think much about the phrase 'no mess baking' on the box until it actually came to cooking it. Regular readers such as my mother will recall that I have a visceral hatred of fake-lazy cooking products. 

Really?

Texas chili on the burner, I cracked open the cornbread and was nearly knocked down by a horrible fake cardboard baking tray. But then came the real horror: a pouch of cornbread mix and a note instructing me to dump an egg into the bag, squish it around into a slime concoction, and not puke while so doing. 

Make no mistake - no mess baking has its consequences. I can now confirm that chasing an egg yolk round a plastic bag with your fingertips is substantially grosser than just getting a mixing bowl dirty. 

And yet, all it took to wipe the memory of egg squishery from my fingertips was an overly gluttonous helping of Texas chile, and some cheap red wine. So I forgive Aunt Jemima. After all, she is the champion of fake maple syrup, which shines above and beyond your run of the mill fake food products. 

Mama FAQ

Happy day, British mamas! I should confess here that the word 'mothering' sounds to my American ear like 'smothering'. 

I might have forgotten Smothering Sunday had it not been for an intervention by the eternally wise Bibsey Mama. Having now remembered it in the nick of time (whew), here follows a motherhood faq a la Chaos HQ. 

For banana showers. 

Describe Motherhood in three words

Poo. Puke. Bananas. The universal uniform of motherhood. Some say this triplicate is good for the complexion, others say it builds character. Most agree it poses significant challenges to mental health. 

Does your experience differ from your mother's? How?

My mama raised three kids and several dozen chickens with only an occasional 'darn it'. I manage two kids and one toaster by speaking a sailor dialect. 

What's the hardest thing about being a mum?

Kids go bananas at the slightest provocation. 

What's the best thing?

Kids go bananas at the slightest provocation. 

How has it changed you?

I don't even remember what used to get me out of bed in the morning. I mean, no one was kicking me or demanding bananas in those days. 

What do you hope for your kids?

That they will never lose their joy and nonsense. 

What do you fear for them?

That they will lose their joy and nonsense. 

What makes it all worthwhile? 

The reasons are more numerous than stars in the sky. Like days spent jumping puddles and hunting invisible dragons, covered in finger paint, glitter, and bananas. 

Novelty

I read something last week that really captured my imagination: 

The narratives of the traditional "life-story" are breaking down into unrelated pieces. We work 40 jobs over a lifetime...we move location and we start again and again in the deregulated, privatised world of self-selling. We inhabit virtual places as much as we do real ones. Facts become blurred and we live out fictions. For works of writing to reflect this world, they also have to enter into the language and forms of our time, otherwise we end up with confused, over-stuffed, compromised books that use an old form to try to talk about a new time.

For better or for worse, I reckon this is what now feels like.

This paragraph comes from a piece about fiction's future in the Guardian. The writer, Ewen Morrison, is about to publish a new sort of novel: 'a mixture of facts and fictions, images and videos'.

As a former inhabitant of a 'department of factual verification', I agree that facts are pretty nauseatingly dull on their own. Mixing fact and fiction is where the good stuff comes from.  

Always with us. 

Morrison argues that novels should be novel. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't think Jonathan Franzen is God's gift to fiction.

Like some, I still love the smell and feel of old books. A dream of mine is to reanimate old, forgotten literature in novel ways. 

I know a local librarian who is very wise. He can, for instance, produce batmobile sketches on short notice, and he generally gives the impression of one who could have joined the space program but just couldn't be bothered with anti-gravity. 

This afternoon I got into a long conversation with my wise librarian over a common interest of ours: 'London Labour and the London Poor'. This book was written as a series of newspaper articles by Henry Mayhew in the 1840's. It is a journey into Victorian ethnography, economics, and grimmer than Dickens stuff. Have you ever considered the pay and working conditions of rat catchers, for instance? 

Mayhew's work is woven together from oral life histories. As with America's Federal Writers' Project, this makes the line between fact and fiction a blurry, complicated one. When telling your life history, what would you leave in? Take out? Change? 

Mayhew's work still resonates - perhaps in part because his subjects lived in a broken, deregulated world of self-selling. My wise librarian has photocopies of Mayhew illustrations up in the library billboard. 

I will follow the progress of Ewen Morrison's book with interest. And I will read Mayhew's 'Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Life' as suggested by my wise librarian. My interest lies not only the ghost of literature future, but also the ghost of literature past.  

Leaplings

Emily Carlisle has written a wonderful piece on leap year babies for the Guardian.

The cult of cake. 

She highlights some interesting facts related to leaplings - for instance, did you know leapophilia is a thing? Neither did I!

The piece serves as a cautionary tale to future parents, by pointing out the feckless cake inefficiency of leapless parents.

You see, my two were both born shortly before Thanksgiving. Each year by Christmas I am knackered, having sacrificed an entire season to the pillar of cake.

By contrast, Emily's twins were born on February 29th four years ago. Today they mark their first proper birthday in four years. That's right: four years, two kids, one cake.

So to all you full-term women out there: I suggest you aim for today should you ever want to have a cake-free moment again in your life.

And to everyone else: beware the leapophile!

Quotidian

Doomed.

We are coming out of the dark.

A gazillion snowdrops are bursting forth from ancient soil, and promptly getting mashed to bits by trainers. The ducks and the humans are looking friskier.

Still cold afternoons remind me of that Tennyson verse:

          Twilight and evening bell,
          And after that the dark!
          And may there be no sadness or farewell,
          When I embark.

February is a pretty useless month, except for eating pancakes and catching up on movies missed in the parenting line of duty. 

I recently turned on 'Life in a Day', the world's first crowd-sourced movie, which is freely available on YouTube. I approached this movie gingerly, because I feared it would be 90 long minutes of people looking really smug while skydiving.

Back in 2010 when there was a call for footage, I considered sending something in. But I didn't on the assumption that Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald wouldn't appreciate clips of kids being whimsical and failing to blow out candles in spite of repeated instruction. In hindsight, I couldn't have been more wrong on this point. 

It turns out that 'Life in a Day' is awesome and totally unpretentious - one of the most uplifting films I've seen. And regular readers (hello Mom!) will know that my tendencies towards cynicism and cake enthusiasm prevent me from getting uplifted easily.

Like it says on the tin, the film is about all the quotidian wonder and pedestrian joy contained in one earthling day. 

One of my favourite clips in the film involves a guy who is travelling around the world by bicycle. He weathers many disasters, like being repeatedly knocked over by truckers. But he always gets back in the saddle, sometimes after a few days in hospital.

The path less truckered by. 

How I would love to embark on a similarly crazy journey. Occasional trucker maulage seems such a small price to pay for pure freedom, unfettered by stuff.

So should dispatches from the land of mañana ever stop, you will know that I have given up silly material trappings like a coffee press and clean socks, and donned my bicycle wings. 

Wave to me from the open road, unless you are a trucker, in which case keep those hands at ten and two.  

May there be no sadness or farewell when I embark.

Lurve

Happy Valentimes Day, as they say in New Mexico.

Breakfast of happy champions.

My mom writes great letters. A good thing, as her children tend to wander, putting her in the position of homefront correspondent.

Here's what she sent me today:

Have a lovely day, and remember this true fact -- chocolate makes you happy!! 

So as I sit here eating a metric truckload of chocolate, I'd just like to point out that I am merely following my mama's orders. Plus, I already ate my vegetables.

So there.

Nomnomnom.