Year's End

For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

And to make an end is to make a beginning.

~T.S. Eliot, "Little Gidding"

I have a flourescent green Post-It sticking to the side of my screen at home. It's been there for over two years (I have very messy office - "creative", I like to think). Scribbled on it, very small, is a list of ten things I jotted down on a train, thinking about what I'd like to have achieved before I die.

As it's the time of year to be thinking about resolutions, I thought I might consider this list as one inspiration. For in 2010 I do intend to be inspired rather than ground down. The signs are already good.

So here it is, to be pondered.

1. Learn to tango
2. Visit India
3. Visit Venice (done this now, so I need to replace this one)
4. Play Lullaby of Birdland on the piano, no mistakes (getting there...)
5. Write a novel
6. Be size 12
7. Be on TV
8. Visit New Zealand
9. Learn to do tumble turns
10. Own a Chagall

Which of these should I focus on in 2010? Number 10 is going to be highly unlikely in the current business climate. Numbers 2 and 8 also look unlikely. I refuse to acknowledge that the recurrence of 5 and 6 for a number of years now indicates anything other than work pressures....

Crush

Schadenfreude is an unappealing emotion, I freely admit. But I couldn't help feeling a frisson of excitement at the news that Susan Sarandon is unexpectedly back on the market.

I have had a crush on Susan for about 25 years now. At first it was silent, guilty. Girls don't fancy other girls, right? Not if they like boys too? Everything was very clear cut when I was younger. You were straight, or you were gay. Or you were David Bowie.

I like the fact that these days it seems to be far more acceptable to blur the edges. I could rave on poetically for hours about her creamy skin, her lovely eyes and smile, her fantastic breasts, how she exudes sex....but such an ode might be in poor taste. And/or unnerving for those people who have categorised me into a different, narrower box.

So I'll just confess that she has featured regularly in my fantasies since a weekend of impressionable coincidence when I saw her one evening in her full splendour in the Rocky Horror Picture Show, followed the next day by watching her being seduced by Catherine Deneuve in The Hunger....... (oh to be in that scene....)

If you're not sure what to do in this flat dead period between one party and the next, a day in bed with Susan isn't a bad option. You could try Bull Durham to complete the set (Susan and a younger Kevin Costner, on the kitchen table....).

Anyway. I had resigned myself to merely aspiring to Be Susan when I grow up - but now it seems she's single again, who knows?

Surreality

Ever have that feeling you're adopted? Sometimes it's less of a feeling, more of a vain hope. In many respects I'm too much like my parents to pretend they picked me up from a church doorstep an hour after I was born. Although when I was about eight, I did go through a phase of pretending this, and telling my friends, and claiming my name was Perdita - the lost girl.

I am thinking of pretending this again, based on the conversation we've just had.

"You still like books and reading, don't you?"

Yes, I do. (Does anyone stop liking reading, I wonder?)

"There's a book we were thinking you might like. You said you liked that book about the place up in Yorkshire at Sutton Bank, and we thought of another one you might like".

Well, could be interesting.... cautious curiosity.

"It's by a lady dad knows. And she's from Yorkshire. So you'd like that."

Hmmm. Possibly.

"It's about butterflies. Someone in the shop said it was good".

"Yes, and you like supporting Yorkshire so this is a Yorkshire book. And it's by a lady dad knows. She writes a lot of books, they have names in from right round Sheffield".

Scared, now. Buying a book on the strength of that? Hmmm.

I unwrap the scary, parent-recommended, lady-that-dad-knows book.

It is The Peppered Moth, by Margaret Drabble. In case you hadn't already guessed.

Poptart

Miley Cyrus is a replicant. She was invented as part of a joint marketing project by Disney and Harvard Business School, and is genetically cloned in their Innovation Centre.

Focus groups have developed the optimum snub of her nose, curliness of her curls and the length of each eyelash. Her voice, however, has been taken from a forty year old soul singer, and the springiness of her dancing is due to the injection of a very small amount of Tigger DNA. This also accounts for her constant cartoonish cheeriness.

Her support act last night was her big brother's band. Her little brother was playing rhythm guitar in her set. Her dad is in the TV programme. The middle part of the show featured an extract from her film coming out next year. A long extract - about ten minutes. And it formed the backdrop to two subsequent songs. I'm suprised they weren't selling advance tickets there and then - text this number now.

We'd paid £250 for the tickets, but they'd had another £80 off us before we sat down (T shirts, programme, parking, hot dogs). It's a sophisticated machine, for sure.

They are grafting hard to get it right this time, after the Britney/Jamie-Lyn Spears family extravaganza crashed and burned so horribly. They are working on cloning a V2 Britney (going back to the plaits and mini-skirt jail-bait look which made the dads google her as often as YouPorn) whilst in the meantime, Terminators and Blade Runners are hunting the V1 Brit across the trailer-trash wastelands of America to take her out before she does any more damage.

If you don't believe it's a sinister cult, try watching 10,000 little girls, mesmerised and with shining eyes, line dancing in synchronisation.

Pop it, lock it, polka dot it,
Countrify and hip hop hip.
Put your hawk in the sky
Move side to side,
Jump to left, stick it -
Gliiiiiiiiiiiiiide.

Terrifying.

Blades

Hold on......don't go for the early bus just yet....

In the style (?) of the northern teams we know and love so loyally, I am attempting to pull it out the bag in injury time. It looks as if it may even go to penalties, but that might be exciting.

The brainchild and its scummy mummy are possibly sturdier and more resilient than they might look after all - momentary crises of confidence nothwithstanding.

Brainchild

The brainchild is in a bad, bad way.

Which also makes me wonder what the point was, of neglecting my otherly motherly duties to nurture something which is now so sick and brings no benefit.

Touting this thing round for adoption is more than heartbreaking. Who would want such a ruin, such a shadow of its former glory?

I simply do not have the confidence for a confidence-trick like this.

The market has fallen to pieces. I am exhausted, just exhausted with the haul of it. I am too old. I am too tired. There is no work to be had.

However. I guess my job now is to go down with the ship. Fuck.

Bedrock

Some things, you can't collect later in life. You had to be there, grow up in a particular kind of place, go to a certain sort of school, see a sky the hard grey of the limestone, the sheer stretch of a windy beach washing, washing away.

The words of anger, sorrow, love even - they don't have a resonance until I hear them spoken with soft, short northern vowels. And where we come from, understatement underlines the sentiment.

I'm becoming ever more conscious of the spaces in between, the silence as well as the words. Some things we say, some things we don't. I hear them all.

Sister Act

Today I’m headed off to carry out condition surveys with the Head of Maintenance at my client’s main site. Despite also being the principal trade union representative for the whole organisation, and therefore the guardian and upholder of right-on-ness, he finds it impossible to imagine that a girl can do this job. He fails to mention any technical issues (lifts, boilers, electrical systems) and looks disgusted if I ask questions that display any degree of knowledge of his team’s work.

The lads on the tools are embarrassed when I visit by the tit posters in their work area. Since the organisation whose buildings and systems they are maintaining is a beacon of women’s emancipation, I should think so too. However I expect this is the least important reason why the team is exclusively lads and no lasses.

Unfortunately my latest accolade does not help me here. I was voted one of the most Influential Women in my profession. I am confident that the handful of other women in the profession were the only people voting, the men pausing only to roar with laughter at the absurd oxymoron before returning to their golf, freemasonry and lap dancing bars.

It’s becoming more of a problem in our field as time goes on. When women of my generation were starting our careers, we knew there would be an element of struggle to be taken seriously, to get on. Cosmo had prepared us to challenge discrimination head on, insist on being taken on our merits, fight the good feminist fight.

Girls these days, fresh out of university, really aren’t expecting it. Often don’t recognise it for what it is, are not equipped with any tools to tackle it, and therefore in my field often fail to make the progress that their talent would pre-indicate. The most common reason for women leaving our professional institute is “leaving the profession”. Only a tiny handful of us are concerned (yes, all women).

More, much more, to come on this topic.

Smile

Yes, I know it's unseasonal. But doesn't it make a pleasant change from the wrist-slitting, throat-slashing, generally-despairing tedium of this time last month?

I can be happy, yes I can. Even exhausted in December with the shortest, darkest day tomorrow and a stinking cold.

There are lots of things that make me smile. Today I'm listening to songs that make me laugh.

1. I Bet You Look Good On the Dancefloor (Arctic Monkeys)

2. Common People (Pulp)

3. United States of Whatever (Liam Lynch)

4. You're Fit But You Know It (The Streets)

5. Gold (Spandau Ballet)

You might be wondering about Number 5. It's not supposed to be funny, I know. It's just the way that line ("you've got the power to know, you're indestructible") is several syllables too long for the music. The way he has to rush to cram it in, all piling up at the end of the phrase cracks me up every time. I suppose if I was trying harder, I'd insert little hyperlinks to YouTube, but if you're interested, the internet will know.

And if you're feeling too Sunday-afternoonish for googling, here is something else to make you smile. Vote for your favourite.

The Worst Album Covers Of All Time.

We Are the Children of Our Landscape

Consult the genius of the place in all;

That tells the waters or to rise, or fall;

Or helps th' ambitious hill the heav'ns to scale,

Or scoops in circling theatres the vale;

Calls in the country, catches opening glades,

Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades,

Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending lines;

Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs.

Alexander Pope

I dreamed last night that we walked up to The Plot.

The vivid descriptions from the book melded seamlessly with my own memories of our car struggling up the hairpins of Sutton Bank, powered chiefly it seemed by the willing-on and urging of three scruffy ginger-topped kids, our freckly legs sticking the hot vinyl seats of the Rover.

I'm not sure whether I've walked there or not. We knew our OS symbols, might have thought the chapel, the drover's road, the fort, the observatory would make some for interesting stopping points. We also knew how to read the contours, and that might have deterred us from the climb. The picnic spot along the ridge from the odd short-tailed white horse would perhaps have been a more likely stopping point.

I dreamed that we walked to the chapel along the drover's lane. It was spring, that time of year when the bright green bracken is just unfurling like a new baby's fingers. We walked inside and looked at the sculptures - and in my dream they were like the Broadbent Wings Over The World and the Gill reliefs on the London Underground Broadway building at St James's Park.

we sat in the lee of the wall and ate a picnic, drank tea from an old plaid-patterned flask my parents had in about 1972. We didn't say much - we didn't need to. I didn't know where we been, or where we were heading at the end of the walk. We turned our faces to the sunshine and enjoyed the perfect happiness of the moment.

We are the children of our landscape; It dictates behavior and even thought in the measure to which we are responsive to it."

Lawrence Durrell

The Two Rs

"Outside of a dog, a book is a man's best friend.
Inside of a dog, it's too dark to read".

If you know me at all, you know that I'm not exactly a lover of dogs..... to say the least. But I am a big lover of books. You're no better off, in many respects, loving books than you are loving men. They can both disappoint you and fail to meet your expectations, and seem full of promise at the start but fizzle out badly towards the end so that it hardly seems worth the bother of limping through to the final page.

Anyway I'm trying to write about reading, so let's come back to the point here.

One reason I originally looked into blogging was so that my "Virtual Book Group" could communicate about the books we were reading without sending 50 circular emails a day (my Inbox was collapsing under the strain). Now I'm a GoodReads junkie and the problem is solved.

Now, my reading choices are ecletic (if we're being pretentious) or to be more accurate, randomly voracious. Some books I have read for pleasure, others I've read for work or learning. Some I've enjoyed tremendously, others I've hated, some left me cold. I'll leave you to ask if you're interested. I think books are like food - junk, sandwiches and late night kebabs all have their place just as much as haute cuisine or a Nigella extravaganza. Unlike food, a book will not add to your waistline, and indeed I saw an article today which said that exciting and/or sexy books burn off around 900 calories due to the adrenaline which temporarily increases your metabolic rate. Excellent!

For my new diet, I am going to lie in bed reading Anita Blake books until I am a size 12. I imagine this will be no more unsuccessful than any of my previous diets. (Actually joking apart I am WAY too busy to be doing self-indulgent stuff like eating or sleeping, so all my clothes are too big for me now).

I would appreciate suggestions about what to read next - and whether it's in the bag-of-crisps or Michelin-star category. And obviously a few calorie burners too, to help me along.

I chose this photo because of my friend/writing coach who told me about Philip Pulllman's wise advice which I hadn't heard before. Almost as good as the quote at the start (Mark Twain - if you're interested).

"Read like a butterfly. Write like a bee".

Message received and understood. I think I have been getting these things the wrong way around.

Unsaid

I used to think I was a good communicator.Sure I’d be the first to admit I talk better than I listen. But I listen more carefully than you might think.

The linguist in me hears the words you choose, and the weight of history and association behind them. The counsellor in me knows that at some level you chose those words, rather than other words, for a reason. The musician in me hears the rhythm and pace, the tone and inflection, the cadences in your voice. The consultant in me watches your body language, the correlation or conflict between the words you say and the way you feel.

So why do I find it so hard to get other people to understand me? I should be able to do this easily. Indeed in several languages. Yet I struggle to express myself. Often I feel that, sitting in the other chair, there is an invisible scrambler hanging in mid air. I say one thing, something happens in the space, and a different message is heard.

Sometimes I chatter about little stuff because I don’t know how to talk about the big stuff.

Sometimes it’s the things people don’t say that really count.

Sometimes a touch or a look or an action is worth more than a thousand words. It’s the unsaid things in the silence that you should listen out for.

That's Not My Name

I have been cursed with a label that suited me too well. It chimed with a voice in my head, a whisper that suddenly grew loud and strident, sure in its truth.

I found, by chance (by fate? by devilish design? or maybe sought them out on purpose?) a series of men who agreed with the label. These were smart men - because they saw me for what I was. Were not fooled by the outer wrappings, the window dressing, the glossy competence of the carapace. Recognised the inner me and sang in harmony with That Voice.

At first they sang it with wry delight. Later they yelled, roared, raged. Then, generally, they stopped mentioning it. After all, it's only a small step from "hard" to "too hard" but the effort would have to be worth it, right? Ne vaut pas le detour.

There's a comfort, a familiarity in patterns, isn't there? Hear the same things often enough and the ritual might almost be soothing in its repeat. Perhaps it's the route of least resistance to play the role in which you're cast. And in the end, maybe the feeling you've become trapped in the wrong film might fade away and you might ...... settle.....

There have been people who have been close to penetrating the armadillo armour: The Voice tells me they still only see the edited highlights. If no one gets right inside, really close, they won't see what's really there. Or they won't get close enough to want to disprove the theory in the first place.

So what would happen if I decided to strip away every element of artifice? Just be - myself?

It looked for a moment like, after all this time, years of treading a groove into the same old familiar step, my label was going to be - wrong! A nervous, tentative excitement began to emerge, blinking in the sunshine, faltering like a bambi, wide-eyed and gullible.

Then it hit me. Slam. The whole situation is new, and shiny, and wonderful. But the label is the same. Different factors, old familiar outcome. All roads lead to home, after all.

Slutz

Someone, I can't remember who, once told me that the world is divided into two sorts of people. The sort of people that like to divide the world into two sorts of people, and the sort of people that don't. I liked that. There are all sorts of divisions, aren't there. The tongue curlers (I can); the left handed (that's me - or the cack-handed as my mum used to say....as a linguist I so love the origin of that phrase....); the believers and the infidels; horses and currant-buns in the National Portrait Gallery; the sheep and the goats. Course my favourite division-game is the legendary three-category Shag Marry or Kill which I feel sure could be the topic of a blog entry all of its own.

These days it's between the Bratz and the Barbies. I never imagined a time when I would be encouraging the girls to play with Barbies. I mean they're hardly striking a blow for the sisterhood with their simpering blondness and girly part-time dog-walking careers and their body-fascism, are they? But they are positively appealing in relation to the sinister new alternative the Bratz.

The Bratz are slutty creatures that were probably the school bullies. They wear tons of lurid make-up and are dressed for a cheap night out in a provincial nightclub. They buy their clothes from the market - or Lakeside if they're feeling flush (or nicked a handbag). They have spray tans and tattoos. They smoke (I bet). They binge-drink and get into girls fights, throw up over their own shoes on the way home and always fuck on the first date (they don't do second dates). They are enjoying their brief flowering as they will all have two kids and be on the social before they are 20.

The Barbies are American, probably staying in the UK with their mother's childhood penfriend so they can do some sightseeing and train to be kindergarten teachers or veterinary nurses or air hostesses. They are clean and wholesome and always have fresh white underwear. They have lovely manners and always keep their rooms tidy and make their beds as soon as they get up. They have steady boyfriends and are saving themselves for someone special.

Think Rizzo versus Sandy. Amy Winehouse versus Katherine Jenkins. Angelina Jolie versus Jennifer Aniston. Kate Moss versus Gywneth Paltrow. I reckon most girls fall into one category or the other. (If you're not sure - see if the girl you're trying to categorise has to take her feet off the ends of her legs when she wants to change her shoes - then you know she's a Bratz).

Which would you rather be? Take the question seriously: there's a battle going on in the playroom for the hearts and minds of our daughters.

I'd rather be neither. Dolls I would like to be:

• Any of the Thunderbirds (with the exception of the girls who are all crap)
• Aquamarina from Stingray
• Action Man With Gripping Hands
• Stretch Armstrong
• President Barbie (with Johnny Depp as my call-me-Monica intern)

Thoughts?

The Fat of the Land

I've been thinking about lard. Then lo and behold, I receive an email about it - an announcement, in fact. How spooky is that? "I need lard".

Not many people do need lard, nowadays, do they? Is it a dreadful mark of old age that I can remember when it constituted a core element of the weekly shop? The soft white block in its crinkly white-and-blue paper wrapper was an indispensable ingredient for pastry (no vegetarians or Jewish friends or halal issues to worry about back in Yorkshire in the 1970s, not where we lived anyway). I'm definitely giving my age away now, of course, referring back to the time we used to make pastry, rather than buy it ready-rolled, trimmed into neat circles in the chiller cabinet.

Lard was also used for the roast potatoes. I loved putting a chunk into the smoking hot roasting pan and seeing it disappear into liquid the very second it hit the blackened surface. Raymond and his ilk favour goose-fat now for their roasties (Tesco Value Lard is 28p for 250g, Tesco Finest Goose Fat is on special offer at £2.00 for 200g....) We fried our breakfast in lard, even the bacon and sausages. We fried a couple of slices of bread (white, Mother's Pride) in the pan afterwards, so as not to waste all that lovely fat.

Do you remember, we fried our chips in it? And it would harden in the chip pan, with little brown crumbs embedded in it, until it was time for the next batch a few days later. I never liked the look of it, with all those sinister dark bits and pieces, and the basket embedded at a slightly crazy angle like a ship in the ice. It made my stomach shiver. I didn't stop eating lovely home made chips though - just stopped looking at the pan.

Lard is deeply unfashionable now. We wouldn't have used olive oil - because we didn't like olives. They were Foreign. We actually used to talk about going out for a "Foreign Meal". Sesame oil, ghee, bouillon even - all indescribably Foreign. Aren't we cosmopolitan now?

The other out-of-fashion foodstuff I was thinking about, a cousin of lard, is suet. How would we make dumplings, jam roly poly, steak and kidney pudding without it? Oh, I remember, we don't eat those things much any more either. Which is a shame, really. Suet is mostly found in the animal feeding section at the supermarket now, tastily blended with linseeds and suchlike for the birds, although Atora Light Vegetable Suet (vegetable suet???) is still a seller. Albeit rather a contradiction in terms. What Light dishes are made with suet, I wonder?

I was in Melton Mowbray as I pondered these matters, considering the fate of the humble pork pie. Snack size pork pies are a great way to get your fat allowance for the day all in one go, and therefore appeal to my sense of efficiency. They are made from fatty cuts of pork (the pink parts), mixed with pork fat (the white parts). That jelly round the edge of the meat, that's fat. And the pastry contains both lard and suet. Job done.

Pork pies are enjoying something of a resurgence, and bucking the healthy eating trend, big time. The UK market is worth £130.9m with potential for further growth (she discovered, nerdishly, here). Along with pasties, their status as a historic artisan local food is seeing them served on the menu at some of the very finest restaurants.

It's just not right. Pork pie, a slice from a big one, should be eaten with a big pickled onion and a half of bitter in a Yorkshire pub after a long breezy walk. Followed quite possibly with jam rolypoly, home made custard and a little snooze. Ah, those were the days.

Precious

I might keep busy stealing watches, year after year, but time isn’t absolute. Some days it barely flows, lagging lazily like treacle from a spoon. The very hours we don’t want it to, it whips by in a blur - our perception of time is our reality.

Is it possible to savour the golden evenings, catch the drips of them in their amber glow and string them into a beautiful necklace of moments, to run through the fingers when time is creeping lonely-slow again?

Is there a way to freeze-frame the speedy flash of joy, to hold the hands of the clock while each instant is drunk to the last drop?

The scarcity of pleasure, the rare treat of stolen happiness, snatched from the gloom of these cold, dark days. Who knows how many hours of wonder are still to come, and how many are already crushed to dust in the pepper-grinder of the everyday humdrum?

Never has mindfulness, the stillness of living in the moment, struck such a powerful chord. These will be the golden days.

Unexpected Gift

Eleven years ago, almost to the minute, my new born little girl was placed in my arms. She was unplanned, unexpected and undiscussed - but very welcome. All night she laid beside me in the transparent cot, sometimes awake, sometimes asleep. She never cried, she was calm and relaxed. All night I looked at her and marvelled. And that's when I fell in love.

No-one told me that you fall in love with your children. That feeling of looking forward to seeing them every time you've been apart, the joy of waking up and smiling hello, the urgent need to press your face right against their skin and soak up their soft smell - it doesn't wear away with time.

I have loved the way that becoming a mum has changed me, opened up a softness that I didn't know was there, given me a sense of purpose and a sense of worth even in the darkest times. I love the pleasure of giving, helping, caring; of kindnesses welcomed.

I was told, by own my mother, that right from the outset I was difficult and hard to love. Hard to love. That's a tough label to wear, but the best way seemed to be to embrace it by being wilful, maverick, awkward, contrary. And to find a series of boyfriends, partners, husbands, who seem to strike a chord somewhere nasty within me, finding me difficult and hard to love.

And this is where being a mum has saved my soul - because my girls find me utterly adorable in every way. Lying with one cuddled fast in each arm, singing the mermaid lullaby we invented together, I can sometimes consider the possibility that they are right, and the rest of the world is wrong.

I was terrified of becoming a parent. All through my pregnancy I was distraught - knowing that the model I had was one I definitely didn't want to follow (my mother, an only child of odd, solitary parents, born in 1939 and didn't see her father for years, had struggled to create a family environment in any usual sense of the word). I still worry now, worry endlessly about the choices I have made - and not made. The expectations I might place on them, and limits I imply by not expecting enough.

Lately I worry, as girls growing into young women, about what I am teaching them to expect from a relationship.

There are lessons for me too. Learning to deal with two strong-willed feisty madams, living proof that Larkin was horribly right. Understanding that you can't make people, even little people, into something that they're not. I hadn't expected a child of mine to score 52% in the Eleven Plus mock and be advised not to enter. Equally I hadn't expected a child of mine to win dance awards, performing arts scholarships and Most Improved Player in her rugby team (the only girl).

They talked about this on a course I went on recently - a course where I've been a bit of a slow learner, and where some points are only just beginning to sink in. The course said, consider embracing people (not accepting them - too passive, but actively deciding to choose them) as they are, and as they are not. For heaven's sake, choose your children as they are - love them for their actuality and not their potential. I think I do that.

The point I'm slower to pick up on, is to embrace myself - as I am, and as I am not. To stop trying to be the New Improved Version (the route to being internally inadequate). It's all a bit Bridget Jones. The girls, however, love me just as I am, and they don't find it hard at all.