Pippin arrives

Just when we thought the sleepless nights were over and the nappies done with, we take on a new responsibility.    A new responsibility with a wet nose, a wagging tail, two bright eyes and an eager disposition.

Pippin at nine weeks

Pippin is nine weeks old today and has lived with us for the past three days, a Labrador-collie cross from a farm in a nearby village.  I’m looking forward to long walks and games of ball throwing, watching him run with the children and the whole social life that revolves around owning a dog.

But right now he’s a pup (a necessity for a dog that has to adapt to chickens), not yet socialised or house-trained, unable to go out properly because his jabs aren’t complete, and missing his mum.  This explains why I was up at 6 this morning and 5am two days ago comforting a whining creature, why there is the occasional puddle to mop up and why, like in the old days of having toddlers, precious objects are being lifted out of reach.

He is a delight already, loves people who come to the house and will readily roll over for anyone who looks prepared to scratch is tummy.  He trails after me as I potter around the house and if I’m still, he curls up on the floor and follows my every move with his eyes like a small black shadow.  He can be frisky too -  he loves to chew the furniture when he isn’t trotting off with a shoe in his mouth.

Shoes, chair legs, tissues, clothes, electric cables and human limbs are all grist to the mill, or to his teeth anyway.  I have had to create makeshift barriers out of cardboard boxes, paint chilli paste on sensitive items and even change out of flowing skirts to escape the shredding action of his small but effective jaws.

I’m assured he’ll grow out of the random chewing as well as of the occasionally painful habit of jumping up, but only if we train him properly.  The real work still lies ahead.

Dictionaries

I grew up on dictionaries.  My mother placed a few in my cot to force my head lie on a particular side.  She had plenty of them because she was a translator: there was Larousse for French, Collins for English and and assortment of bilingual aids to translation, from the general to the highly specialised.  I still own a trilingual chemical dictionary in French, English and German, forty-odd years old, which I couldn’t bring myself to part with after her death.

There were also the tiny Collinses for going truly abroad to a country whose language none of us could actually speak.  I still have the Italian one in which my sister and I taught ourselves to count.  And now I have added more for the languages I have dabbled in since: German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch.

Growing up bilingual meant that my sister and I learned our French and English more slowly than other native speakers.  We could deal with some topics only in one language until the other had had time to catch up.  Often a sentence begun in one language would call for a word we could only think of in the other, while the right word hovered on the edge of our consciousness.  Our mother, ever the strict matriarch, would not allow us to dodge the problem by talking Franglais.  Worse, some words in one language really do resemble words of the other while having a totally different meaning, and woe betide the girl who used one out of context.

As we turned constantly to our mother, the oracle of the right word in the right place in the right language, she grew exasperated and evolved a stock answer to all our languague queries:  “Look it up on the dictionary.”  This would have us reaching for the shelf and taking down the fat volume in which all the answers were inscribed.

This reflex stayed with me later on as I began to tackle the big questions in life.  Why are we here?  Is there a God?  Why do people suffer?  These existential problems plagued me, and so I longed to reach for the simple solution, the big book in which the answers were neatly listed in alphabetical order.

Whatever philosophers and theologians have written, there is no such book.  Study the Bible as I might, I still have to think for myself – growing up is the art of living with the imperfect, the tension between the ideal and the achievable.  There are no indexed answers waiting between folded pages, on a shelf in a corner of the lounge.

And yet I am still fond of browsing dictionaries.  I am often distracted, as I search for an entry, by the words in bold type at the top of each page that mark the searcher’s place in the all-powerful alphabet – filbert, overweening, purdah, thulium.  Such ill-assorted words rise to the surface of my mind as I move onto other tasks.  They may not have done much good in the cot but dictionaries remain a non-negotiable part of my life.

Hospital

Padua Children’s Ward, at the William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent (UK), exudes a sense of permanence.  There is a parents’ room with comfy sofa, a TV, fridge, microwave, kettle and sink.  In the early evening parents are playing with their children in the side rooms, some with the radio on softly in the background.  A couple of hours later the little ones are asleep and all is quiet.  The place feels unhurried – to me anyway; staff are friendly and the other parents respectful.  For a place that is transient by its very nature, the ward has been made to feel like a home of sorts.

While I worked as a microbiologist at London’s Great Ormond Street Children’s Hospital (GOSH), I never saw the wards.  I saw plenty of little patients in lifts and corridors as I moved between labs in my white coat.  As GOSH takes only the severest cases, I knew that every adult I passed who wasn’t staff was the parent of a seriouly ill child.  This awareness was enough to sober me during my daily rounds.

So it was also a sobering experience bringing my son to Padua Ward two days ago.  We were assigned a “cubicle”, actually a tiny room with just one bed.  On our way there we passed a woman in tears outside another room where a baby squalled.  “She’s been like this for hours,” she explained to a nurse who was doing her best to comfort her.  Behind this ward’s calm façade lies the hidden drama of sick children, of parents condemned to spent long periods here, waiting, worrying, suffering.

I felt humbled as my son began to rally.  With his headache, fever, weakness and dehydration from nearly 24 hours of vomiting, he really did look terrible.  But as the time passed and he continued to keep his fluids down, I knew he was improving, and that we’d be home later that night.

Film goes where print cannot follow

Books that are made into film are rarely better in that form.  Too often a film races through complex networks of action and relationship, keen to get the story in a straight line and tell just enough of it to make sense.  In some the story resembles a series of ticked boxes as familiar events are assembled like hooks on which to pin the visuals, while the real sentiment is left out.  In others the action and characters are so altered that readers who have loved the books barely recognise their old friends.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is especially guilty of this latter sin, distorting the Elrond into a jealous father who wants to draw his daughter away from Middle Earth and leave its allied peoples to their terrible fate.  The stately Aragorn becomes lovesick and doubt-ridden, and even Treabeard the Ent withholds his help until he is brought face to face with the destruction of his forest.

But the Lord of the Rings has moments of filmic splendour that manage to transcend even Tolkien’s breathtaking vision.  One such is the moment of despair in The Return of the King when, just before the turning of the tide, all appears lost and hope seems at an end.

Denethor, steward of the city of Gondor and an angry and embittered man, sends his second son Faramir into a hopeless battle to punish him for the death of his more favoured older brother, Boromir.  Sadness and fear accompany the departure of Faramir and his army.  The wizard Gandalf watches in shocked silence while the women of Gondor strew the  men’s steps with flowers.  From this battle none will return save Faramir himself, gravely wounded.

As the army rides out Denethor is shown shut up in his great hall, occupied with peeling red fruits which he does not share with Pippin, the hobbit who has sworn him allegiance.  Instead he orders Pippin to do something that seems tragically inappropriate to the hour: to sing.  Pippin, while Denethor tears at the fruit with his teeth and lets the red juice run down the corners of his mouth, produces a song of melancholy sweetness that becomes the soundscape of the doomed fighters lining up to face the orcs.

The scene ends with Pippin in tears, unable to continue, while Gandalf sits in the courtyard weighed down with foreboding.

As an expression of injustice and despair, it takes some beating.

Against the tide

Every Wednesday my other half and I have a date.  We try and spend time at the local swimming pool to exercise our joints, muscles and lungs and if not actually increase our fitness levels, at least avoid seizing up altogether.

The trouble is, having grown up swimming in the open sea, I had pools.  This is one of the best in our locality, with good changing rooms and large lockers, a normal rectangular pool (no irregular beach) and lanes arranged for the lunchtime crowd.  I’m fine about the swimming, I just hate dragging myself to a pool.

What do I hate so much?  Perhaps it’s the smell of feet which this pool can’t seem to shake off.  Or maybe the fast American pop being pumped out at us, with a thumping beat some swimmers apparently need to keep them in rhythm.

Once I start on the lengths there are always problems with speed.  I have to deal with slow old ladies hogging the intermediate lane and whom I overtake three at a time, and with large men thrashing past me, eating up the lengths, displacing as much water as an ocean liner and making me gulp the pool water.  Much smoother are the sleek women, hatted and goggled, streaking ahead in the fast lane.  One strange bearded man performs the front crawl with paddles strapped to his hands and barely  moving his legs.

I’m sure I seem just as strange to others.  I like to vary my stroke between the sedate breaststroke and energetic backstroke and front crawl.  I also like to do stretches in the buoyancy of the water, dodging the determined length rats between bouts of exercise.

I can take about 20 minutes of this.  Afterwards I will smell chlorine on my hands for the rest of the day.  The best part of the pool, barely visible through my perennially steamed-up goggles, is the large clock telling me it’s time to leave.

God, probably

It’s tough being a Londoner these days.  It’s trying enough having to wait for a bus that never comes, in this inclement January weather.  But then when it does come, it expects you to make your mind up about God.  200 of London’s buses are carrying the slogan of an atheist advertising campaign that was launched last week:   “There is probably no God.  Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.”

A further 600 UK buses are to be thus anointed at a cost of £140,000, raised by the British Humanist Association.  The campaign, endorsed by such luminaries as Richard Dawkins and Stephen Fry, aims to give people permission to be openly atheist and to celebrate freedom of speech.  We are assured that between 30 and 40% of the British population have “non-religious beliefs” and apparently, these people need to be given a voice.

It’s hard to believe this when atheism seems to be considered the only respectable position among the British chattering classes, particularly at The Guardian and the BBC.  After hearing writers, presenters and interviewees out-do each other in chalking up their atheist credentials, I find it amusing that anyone can still imagine they belong to a beleaguered and voiceless minority.

Even more amusing is that little loophole, the word “probably”.  It conjures up a vision of them all arriving at the Pearly Gates and saying to St Peter:  “We did say probably, please let us in, please…”.

At least the Christian response has been in like style.  According to The Guardian, the think-tank Theos sees the slogan as “a great discussion starter”, presumably for disgruntled bus passengers.  The Methodist Church has even thanked Dawkins for encouraging “a continued interest in God”, as though it were afraid he might fall by the wayside if the atheists didn’t keep an eye on him.

Meanwhile, I can’t help thinking of  better uses for £140,000.  More buses perhaps?

Drawing arm gets Christmas boost

Look, no rubber:  the world’s most incompetent artist has drawn a bird.

The inspiration – and the skill – for this feat came straight out of a book called Draw 50 Animals by Lee J. Ames.  I have purchased this book for countless children this Christmas and, having successfully used it to produce a tortoise, decided we needed one for the family.  Now my daughter has drawn a horse, my son a wolf and I this creature resembling a bluetit.  It feels like a small seasonal miracle.

I have always mourned my total inability to draw.  As a child, how many pages did I fill with rubbish while others created perfect, life-like pictures, until I finally got the message?  I have zilch artistic flair and just have to accept it.  And while it’s tempting to dismiss such skill as being of no value in later life, the truth is that many jobs depend on the possession of a good eye, floristry and hairdressing to name but two.

My daughter discovered this young when her dissatisfaction with the way I arranged her hair led her to take over this responsibility from her earliest school days.  I have barely been allowed near her locks since she was five.

True, I have always been able to “draw pictures” with words and express my feelings for landscape in poetry.  But his cuts little ice with a child who wants her mother to draw her a duck, as I was once – only once – requested to do.  The duck, or let’s call it a head with a wing and a couple of legs, went the way of the hair and said child took over the task herself, far better ducks emerging repeatedly from her more inspired hand.

Now Lee J. Ames has breathed new life into the old drawing arm.  As I understand this, you start with a circle here and an oval there and build up with extra lines, and assuming the original shapes were placed correctly, there on the page is a recognisable bird.  So stand by National Gallery, here I come.  Or maybe I’ll just start saving credit-crunch money and cut hair.

Education of extremes

Get this term: “multiple exceptionalities”.  Try  to remember it long enough to research it on the internet, and you will find it refers to people who are gifted and disabled at the same time.  In the context of underachieving children, the expression describes intellectual gifts that are masked by specific disabilities, or difficulties which a child uses his or her extra abilities to overcome.

Either way, neither the disability nor the gift is correctly targeted by the school.  This mean that a bright child, assessed as average or below average, can become extremely frustrated.

Perhaps I should count myself lucky that in our case this frustration has spilled over into challenging behaviour, so that we have all been forced to ask ourselves why an obviously clever child is consistently underperforming.  Hard as they have been to live with, the moodiness, lack of co-operation and propensity to needle others might be interpreted as a healthy cry for help.

Papers on the subject of multiple (or dual) exceptionalities describe cases where a physical disability, like poor sight or hearing, is masked by a child’s superior ability to cope.  They also say the situation can be far more subtle than that: high ability coupled with behavioural problems, or with poor motor skills that make it hard to write.  Children displaying these often get no help because even when they are spotted, they are impossible to pigeonhole.  In today’s UK educational parlance, they belong to the “gifted and talented” and to the “special needs”.

Look more closely at the exceptionalities literature and you might even find yourself described somewhere.  People may argue that the term applies to “too small a population to merit concern”.  But the more I read, the more I think it describes vast numbers of us who experienced problems at school.

Our compulsory western school system, of which we should be so proud, has failed us by becoming a universal machine that cannot accomodate the extremes.  In its on-size-fits-all environment, the task of addressing some children’s problems while encouraging their extra skills can be lost in the scramble for league-table ratings.  Officially sanctioned efforts to remedy this, in the form of specialist help, have to be fought for instead of being available as of right.

But children just do not come neatly trussed and packaged, waiting only for a school to anoint them with the balm of standard education in order to grow and flourish.  They develop in fits and starts and even those with no serious problems at home may display extremes of ability and behaviour.  There is no better argument than this for treating them as what they are: individuals.

Church Tower Abseil

I hadn’t intended to take part.  It’s a mad way to raise funds and I hate heights anyway, so I planned to take pictures of those who were brave enough to attempt it.  But then I had reckoned without the atmosphere on the day.

The weather was perfect.  The 100ft-high medieval tower of All Saints Biddenden, Kent, was bathed in late summer sun.  There was not a breath of wind and all of nature, still green, seemed to cry out for celebration.  Among the onlookers, the tone was quietly jocular as the first batch of abseilers received their instructions.  Children played among the slanting grave stones, grown-ups rested their cameras on stone tablets where the dead were forgotten amid this profusion of colour and life.

As the morning wore on and triumphant abseilers, many of them novices, either stepped or sagged off the end of ropes, joining them became a matter of community spirit.  It looked easy too, I thought, as I watched the harnessed candidates crawl backwards down the wall like spiders: people of all shapes and sizes had succeeded.  If I didn’t try now I knew I would regret it.

At least that’s what I told myself as, duly trained, I stepped out onto the flat top of the tower.  The wind was no stronger up here but the sounds of people were much further; the tower exuded its own special tension.  Our mouths went dry and I began to wish there were a toilet nearby.  Jane, ahead of me, joked through gritted teeth about witches as she ascended the scaffold that would launch her into the void, tethered at the front but with nothing behind but a bit of harness.

My turn.  I am hooked up, twice, for extra safety.  My instructor is calm and reassuring.  As soon as I push against the ropes I am hovering over the edge, and then I can no longer see him.  Keep my right hand on the rope behind, my left in the loop in front, concentrate on loosening the right a bit at a time.  I am told to straighten my legs when all I want to do is curl up in a ball.

But I stand up straight and then the world goes quiet.  They are all watching me, the scattered matchstick-sized people I know are waiting below, but I won’t look at them.  There’s just a wall, a set of ropes, a lot of sunlight, and me.

Going down is harder than I thought.  I pass the landmarks made familiar by watching earlier abseilers: the windows, a couple of ledges, a bee’s nest in the rust-stained stone.  My weight is still supported by my gloved hand but I can’t reach the wall with my feet; instead of making a fluent descent I am swinging into nothingness, the ropes threaten to tip me on my head or spin me round altogether.

I reached the ground shaking but exhilarated, sound rushed back into my ears and time began to move forward again.  I felt I had earned my round of applause.

Moleskine mania

I wrote the following on 2nd September 2008, at 12.40 precisely:

“I have just bought my first Moleskine notebook and I can already feel the romanticism oozing from it. I’m sheltering in an arcade from the rain that has kept up all morning. Canterbury (Kent, UK) is a dirty grey and groups of bedraggled pensioners are forced to pause before launching themsleves on the weather, umbrella to the fore. I’m sitting on a borrowed café chair to eat my lunch and write, and I’m trying hard to keep the famous acid-free pages dry.”

After trawling the internet on the the subject of Moleskines, I have struggled to find something new to write about the little “cahiers” whose cost (£9.99 in WH Smith) is out of all proportion to their size, 9×14cm. Neither the sturdy cover, the closing elastic nor the back pocket would seem to justify the expense. It was even surprisingly tough to find, tucked away on a special carousel dedicated to travel notebooks and even that, said the sales staff, was an experiment. So why have I pursued this object throught the pages of Bruce Chatwin’s writings and several journalist blogs that have sung its praises?

The Italian manufacturers, Modo&Modo, declare to anyone who will listen that their product is the inheritor of Chatwin’s favourite notebook, despite a 12-year gap in production after the writer himself was last able to locate one, and the fact that the originals were made in France. They would even have us believe that the very same was employed by Van Gogh, Hemingway and Picasso for random jottings that became major works of art. These claims are dismissed by detractors as so much humbug.

It is a fact of modern life that marketing a product to a niche customer base is likely to involve the internet, preferably via an interactive website for users to exchange ideas. After endowing the Moleskine with a romantic pedigree no one is seriously in a postion to argue with, Modo&Modo must feel their attempts to do just that have succeeded beyond their wildest dreams. On their own website moleskine.com as well as others such as ‘SkineArt and even Flickr and YouTube, the artistic contents of the Moleskine, that epitome of private journaling whose symbol should be a writer hunched over in private concentration, are laid bare. The challenge seems to ring out: what can you do with this?

So what do I think about it? Expensive it is, but classy and highly portable. It opens well and has a pleasant feel in the hand while writing. Now I’ve got it, I’m already using it for brief notes written on the move, to develop later. Whether I’ll buy another one when this is filled is a different question.

At least Chatwin’s belief that “the Moleskine is no more” is no longer true. The Moleskine, or a version of it that may or may not be recognised by him, is here to stay.