Today is the last day of the pheasant shooting season. Which is why the people wanted to come and stay. I am fairly ambivalent about game shooting. I don't want to do it and I never go and I secretly encourage any birds that wander up from the wood to stay safely near my house. But compared to chickens they do have a nice life and a quick death. In the wood below our house there is a very professional pheasant shoot and as they use our fields they give my husband so many days a season, free. It seems incredible but if he had to pay it would cost several thousand pounds a year.

When I was going through the fit earlier in the week I prayed meanly to any Higher Being that if I was forced to have guests for the weekend then could the weather be as crap as possible so that the shooting would be miserable. Last night the people turned up oozing with niceness and charm and bringing me lots of PRESENTS. My husband must have said something to them - they really aren't normally like this. The wife was especially wonderful although usually not a 'woman's woman' at all. She brought me a large pot of miniature daffodils; a gift wrapped collection of scented candles; a hardback biography; a box of miniature quiches as a first course for dinner; a huge bag of assorted croissants so that I wouldn't have to 'bother' about breakfast' and a bottle of wine. WTF?. And then was cooing and complimentary about the house, the cats, my clothes, my food ..........

Unfortunately I had forgotten to cancel the request to the Higher Being and rose this morning to quite ludicrous weather. Not only was it misty, fatal for shooting high flying pheasants, but raining like you have never seen. It was almost solid. As they waded out to their cars with set smiles I felt really, really sorry for what I had done.

I don't know what to make of this - if I hadn't had an over the top fit and been rude and screamy then everyone would have been much less nice to me and would have taken all the cooking and cleaning effort for granted. I hate women who are irrational and hysterical and make scenes about nothing and have always gone for the reasonable, objective approach. But the other thing seems to give me a better time and more 'respect'.

I am going to London for a few days to buy Skiing clothes. Another thing I didn't think I would ever say.

Minnie never comments here any more. I tried to lure her out with the recipe for cheese sauce but failed.
- posted by Iris @ 1/31/2004 12:37:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
I confided in my daughter as she was about to set off to work at 'the office' and I thought there might be some possible weirdness. The trigger for my unfortunate remark had been that I had just discovered that my husband had asked some people that I really don't like to stay for this weekend. He had mentioned asking them last week and I had said absolutely not as then I would have to clean and cook and look reasonably all right (out of pride) and anyway I hate them, I hate them, I hate them. That seemed clear enough but apparently not as he had then asked them.

'What do you think?', I said to her. 'Well, you were a bit over the top, I mean , you hardly need to get divorced but he was totally out of order'. It is so funny when you end up asking your children to sort out your life. The other two don't like it but she is very straightforward and practical and as the middle one I think she feels it gives her some status. She went in to work and obviously 'spoke' to Daddy, as soon afterwards he rang up, charmingly, and said he was going to buy expensive delicatessen food and bring it down so I didn't have to cook tonight. And the 'separate lives' etc. was as if it had never been. But it is there under the surface.

The problem is that things often end up all right after someone has 'spoken' to Daddy. That is one of the reasons that I had thought of very low level Asperger's syndrome. He so regularly and paranoidly gets the wrong end of the stick and when you go over whatever the situation was and explain what everyone REALLY meant etc. he is always surprised. The children used to joke that all his wrinkles came from a permanent expression of surprise at the world. I know that probably some massive percentage of academics have borderline Asperger's syndrome and it is no big deal. In fact if I knew I was right it would be worse as then he would have an excuse for behaving badly and I couldn't even criticise.

I am quite glad that I was moved to write all that depressing stuff as it obviously gives a 'rounder' picture. But I will leave it now before both my commenters feel that they would prefer to slip quietly away to somewhere more cheerful.
- posted by Iris @ 1/30/2004 01:27:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
This is like the day of a thousand posts. Maybe I should not have written all that especially as I left out all the interesting interwoven strands and people. It was just such a shock to be thrown from one way of being to another in a few seconds. The stupid thing is that my husband has actually been much nicer over the past year and seemed to be making some sort of effort. That has probably led subconciously to me being more aggressive and letting out ages of pent up fury. (I used to deal with him being horrible in public, particularly, by going quiet and trying to get everything over as quickly as possible so it stopped being embarrassing). I used to 'literally' feel my blood boil, a really weird sensation, when he said putting-down things and I was in situations where it was better not to start an argument.

This total turn round in the balance of power in our relationship started after I had my third baby and he wouldn't sleep more than two hours consecutively for a year. I felt sick and foggy and like screaming for large amounts of the time; right up until the day when I was sitting on the floor looking out through the french window onto the balcony. And he crawled briskly across my view ON THE PARAPET. He had pulled himself up on a huge plant pot. I sat still for a moment and through my head went the reasonable thought, 'If he falls off I will be able to go to sleep'. I had to use an effort of will to spring up and hurtle towards him. The next day I went to the doctor and cried and he said, 'Why on earth didn't you come to me before. Give him two spoons of this at bedtime'. My son slept normally right through that night and for the next two years until I weaned him off the medicine. (Then he slept badly again but by then I could bark 'Go back to your room' and turn over).

But from that time onwards I was not the same. It was as if the combination of the birth and the prolonged not sleeping had caused chemical changes in my body. I was nervous and unselfconfident, even when drunk, for years. And I found it absolutely impossible to get back to being as thin as I was before being pregnant although with the others I had been even thinner after a few months. As I got lurkier and more reclusive my husband became more and more confident but not in a good way. He got rude and sneery with me and with the children too and it all escalated until I felt crushed under it and retreated inside and stopped reacting. Then lots of years went past and things happened which I will talk about some other time. And about two years ago I started to notice that I was feeling as I did before my son was born and then soon I was normal again. Odd. And immediately as I grew stronger my husband started to get less confident and horrible and recently has been almost 'nice' for quite long periods of time. So my choosing to have a sudden confrontation maybe leading to divorce is perhaps rather idiotic. But it came out of nowhere - unsought and unplanned.... and may well again.
- posted by Iris @ 1/30/2004 12:41:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
What a difference a few hours make. I was rather happy this morning as it was sunny again and I had made the positive step of arranging the holiday. Which would cheer up my son and possibly me and January was about to be over.

Then I was talking to my husband on the phone and he was being annoying and suddenly out of my mouth came the words, 'I can't stand all your dreary friends and it would obviously be better for both of us if we led separate lives'. I was so surprised that I put the phone down. And he did not ring back. On the principle of once things are crap you quickly do the other dreaded things you were putting off, so it is all crap at once, I opened a letter from my father which had lain around for two weeks. I have not spoken to my father for three years since all the tiny meannesses on his part ended in a last straw. I had a feeling this letter would contain something I didn't want to hear so I had so far not heard it. He said that he was 'touched' that I had 'remembered' him at Christmas (a tiny gift) but his season had been very quiet as he had been 'not too good'. And that was it. Oh what does that imply? He has flu or cancer? Oh for f@cks sake.

I know it is a bit of a jump from my describing my life before I met my husband, to this. It is just such a long story of only average interest that I haven't been able to drag myself to the keyboard to write it. The thing is that in films when Nerds get confident they turn out amusing and wonderful but in real life that is not always the case. My husband has not only recently been through a protracted and very irritating midlife crisis. (Casual tone, 'Funny, I was waiting at the bus stop and the woman next to me thought that I was eighteen'). But, by an accident of life and work, has been placed in a position where he is surrounded by 'fun people' who are all very nice to him as he is either their boss or landlord. Giving him the impression that many of his observations and remarks are either clever or funny. At home his family's response is rather different and more realistic. He also drinks a lot. And when drunk even a little bit becomes aggressive and spiteful on a sliding scale.

I don't know what to do. In this immediate case I can brush over it or even apologise and I expect it will be soon forgotten, (unless he has rushed off, thrilled, to the divorce lawyer). But in the long term? I will be very honest here. I have thought about divorce on and off for years but I kept hoping that he would maybe go back to being the perfectly nice person that I married. If he didn't, I really couldn't bear him getting married again and having more children, so I would rather struggle on than let that happen. If he had any money to pass on I wanted MY children to have it and I also knew I couldn't take watching him poncing about happily with someone younger who hadn't realised how hateful he could be. And I couldn't bear him having a 'second chance' with children after being such a crap, absentee father with ours. Also I knew that I would NEVER want to marry or even live with someone again so I would be 'facing my old age alone'. My children are totally with me on this whole thing. I think my older daughter actually hates him and had spoken to him only a handful of times in the three months before she went away, (they live in the same house). My son finds him exactly as I find him and has very little to do with him but has a more silent approach. My middle daughter works for him part-time and gets on with him quite well at 'the office' as she says that he is a totally different, pleasant and reasonable person there. Where everyone, including her, has to do exactly as he says. But she gets much snappier and more exasperated by him when they are at home.

The main thing is that he is dull. He never makes me laugh. He doesn't like 'popular culture' in any form and has a blank and despising lack of understanding of the pleasures of 'trash'. He doesn't understand people and takes them at face value a lot and when I point out obvious flaws like manipulation, exaggeration and showing off, he shouts that I am hyper-critical and no one likes that in a woman. My older daughter and I have seriously wondered if he has border-line Asperger's syndrome as he is so lacking in empathy and is obsessive about tiny detail at the expense of the 'big picture' to a bizarre degree. He also seems incapable of seeing anything except from his own point of view and often thinks that people who think differently are 'mad'. (Usually me). He latches onto things and people (also once me) and thinks that they are totally wonderful and then after a bit drops them and thinks that they are totally crap (again - myself).

But, but... people who work for him and come across him in business would tell you that they really like him and he is 'quite an old sweetheart' as one assistant said to me when I was edging in a veiled meanness. He has a slightly shy, charming air with people who he thinks are useful or admirable in some way and is also pleasant enough with anyone who he can control.

The 'other him' is confined to drunken outbursts when crossed and general nastiness at home whenever he senses the mildest criticism. Which is fairly often as he is very annoying in little things stemming from his complete self-absorption. As we don't always want to do the same things all of us have made our bedrooms, in London and the country, into bed-sitting rooms with TV's, music etc. Except him. He has refused any of these and has spartan, freezing bedrooms with one harsh light and piles of old socks. He therefore has to always be in the main room watching the TV channel of his choice or playing very loud screamy opera (even and always at breakfast time in the country - the opera). Which dominates the whole house and makes everyone else tense and ratty. The atmosphere when he isn't there is fun and happy; when he is there is polite, dull and vaguely uncomfortable.

For a long time when we were first married I was considered the 'fun' person and he was the nice, rather amusingly naive partner who pottered around in the background opening bottles of wine and went to bed early. He seemed thrilled to have me and accepted his role. Then, when I had my third child and was bogged down in dutiful stuff and also no sleep for a year, he took on a whole new job and also became a landlord and started to think that he could be just like me. But he isn't. And by then the being like that was no longer appropriate as the children had to come before selfishness and partying. He wouldn't accept that and didn't and left all the drudgy, dependable day to day being there part of parenthood to me. And he was really drunk almost every day and didn't come home until late at night and we didn't want him to.

So.................there you are. That is it without any of the fascinating details. When Nerds Go Bad.

As I said - I have no idea what would be the best thing to do. Any suggestions welcome.

- posted by Iris @ 1/29/2004 06:23:00 PM comment

 
OMG. The AOL vote on whether you think that the Hutton report was a whitewash. 76% thought that it was. I thought it was just me. AOL voters must be a reasonable cross section of people surely and probably quite left wing. So that slimy bastard hasn't totally got away with it after all.
- posted by Iris @ 1/29/2004 04:48:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
This is my blog and I can be boring if I want to.

What is it with my random 'Just published blog' choices when I am logging out? Remember they are only there for TWO minutes.

The last three days.

One of the blogs listed was 'tohS in the kraD' which I have read occasionally linked from 'nayR's site., and this was about 4.00 am American time.

Last night while I was writing my daughter rang and said it was snowing heavily in London, which hardly ever happens. The blog I picked turned out to be English and the latest post was a photo of her standing in the snow in central London.

Just now I just chose the top one and it was a girl in Hong Kong with a very short Links list but including 'tnemyaD' who often comments on various sites I know including J....ua.


What, what? Or are there actually less blogs out there than I thought?
- posted by Iris @ 1/29/2004 12:52:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
I have just realised why I enjoy 'blog world' so much. The people that I read the most all combine intelligence, cool and an appreciation of stupid stuff. The only friends that I have in true life who are like that are my own children. Which is why I spend so much time with them. My friends of my own age are either clever and interesting but in a dry way or cool in a rather pretentious way and, in fact, none of them like stupid stuff. We, (my children and me), have a little test. 'Do you think this is funny? My son has a friend whose father is called Igor'. 'Errr... does that mean that he is foreign?'. ' NO. You have failed the stupid stuff exam' - as normal amongst my acquaintance. We also have a life size cardboard Buffy, (dressed classically in black sweater and trousers), standing in the corner of our kitchen. She was unwrapped as a birthday present several years ago and left where she stood and our eyes no longer take her in, partly as she looks a bit like my eldest daughter. Every single friend on first seeing her has said, 'So - who is that then, ha ha?' 'IT IS BUFFY!!'. (Could they be joking?'). 'Sorry.....Buffy?'. They weren't. And this includes my husband.

I would like to say here that we saw the original Buffy film when it first came out on video about ten years ago and immediately 'just knew'. We bought the video instantly and watched it over and over and then followed the series from beginning to end including reading the magazine. This is not including my husband obviously. Why would I feel like this when no friends of my age here do? It is actually rather odd and lonely. At parties I can talk for hours to twenty-year-olds about a variety of things that really interest us far more easily than to people of fifty. Is this very, very sad? But what can I do about it?

Also - is yrreT ttehctarP popular in America? I used to love him but now he is rather written out - he still has his moments, however.

One of my cosiest memories is from the year when I was teaching my son at home, (he was 12), and in the winter we lived totally in my bedroom. Which is big with a view down the valley and the only proper heating and contained a vast TV. 'adleZ' had just come out and for weeks he played it obsessively and got me hooked watching. Every night I would drowse while a small figure still crouched on a cushion at the end of my bed, fingers flickering as he galloped back towards the town at dusk. The sound of the ocarina finally lulling me to sleep. Oh, happy times.
- posted by Iris @ 1/29/2004 12:25:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
I have just watched an hour and a half of TV discussions on Tony Blair and the BBC and the Hutton Report. I am writing this for me when I look back months later.

I loathe and despise Tony Blair and the Hutton Report was obviously got at in some way. Tony Blair is a mediocre nonentity and his wife is an idiotic crystal wearing star f@cker. While he has been Prime Minister politics has been brought to an all time low.
- posted by Iris @ 1/29/2004 12:14:00 AM comment

 
My son decided that his entire life would be different if he was thinner. To the untrained eye he already looks thin but apparently the ideal male figure is a skeleton very lightly covered with muscle. After some shouty arguing I gave in and he embarked on the A....ns diet, with me to keep him company. After two weeks, today in fact , he has lost 9 pounds and I have lost 1. Dr. A.....ns says that it is very , very unusual to lose so little and I must have cheated. I had some whisky with water on that tense evening after the furniture unloading but my son had two evenings of vodka and diet coke. I hate Dr. A....ns and all his works.

The only good to come out of it is this recipe for really nice, really quick cheese sauce.

THE NICEST CHEESE SAUCE IN THE WORLD. (and the most fattening).

In a saucepan mix 1/4 cream cheese with 3/4 thick cream, (making up any amount you want), add large lump of butter and then grate in strongish hard cheese like cheddar until it tastes how you like it. Stir round until it is melted (about 2 minutes) and add some salt and pepper.

You will be surprised how much of this you can eat and it seems to go with anything.


- posted by Iris @ 1/29/2004 12:08:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
This is not something I ever really expected to say. 'I am going skiing'. Not to A.. as Sweden is 'fully booked, I'm afraid'. Is that likely? Every room in the entire country? But to Seefeld in Austria. Last night I had decided that the whole thing was not meant to be and my son seemed to have lost interest. This morning, however, there was brilliant sunshine and a feeling of hope in the air and I thought 'Stop being so crap all the time'. Odd that if it had been raining I almost certainly would not have made the effort. Perhaps if I had lived in Spain all my life I would be a dynamo of positivism. With the usual high level of synchronicity, the first travel site I chose from about fifty turned out to be owned by someone I once knew vaguely as we both wrote for the same magazine, (him about winter sports). I sent a description of my ideal holiday, based heavily on A..., and mentioning my allergy to children and within an hour a charming youth rang me with the details of Seefeld. And within three more phone calls - the holiday was mine. I think it may have been the last spare skiing holiday in Europe.

Earlier I had decided that if all else failed we would go to the 'relatively undiscovered' snow fields of Romania. 'Surprisingly comfortable hotels and restaurants boasting open fires, live bands and the regional dish of roast bear meat'. When I was about to settle for Austria I asked the youth about Romania. 'I have to say I wouldn't go myself. It is still very primitive and full of cut-price Eastern Europeans'. 'The guide mentioned eating roast bear meat'. 'Well there you are - that pretty much says it all'. Anyway, no way in the world would I have eaten some poor bear, you have to draw the line somewhere. Reindeer, on the other hand.

My son is very suspicious of sudden decisions and thinks that this holiday may be in some way doomed. (I haven't yet told him that he is signed on for the 'Beginners Package' which involves four hours tuition every day and starts several hours before he normally gets up). Oh well, f@ck it. Surely it must have some moments of pleasure? Although I now see that the hotel has a 'free creche'. Why would they need that when there aren't any children? Seefeld - 'A small beautiful town in the Austrian Tyrol....stylish and sophisticated...casino....horse-drawn sleighs... shopping opportunities....'. Cool - I can stock up on green felt garments with embroidered leaping antelopes.

Speaking of Austria and stylish and sophisticated. When I was ten my best friend and favourite person in the world was called Sophie and she lived a life of (to me) amazing glamour. Her father was a well-known scientist and they lived in a stunning house rented from the University. It was featured in a book by C.P. wonS called 'The sretsaM' as the residence of one of the main characters and I recognised it immediately when he mentioned the mirrored hall. Sophie and I spent hours in front of those mirrors in various forms of dressing up clothes. The main staircase was reflected and we would sweep down gorgeously, staring at ourselves. Not only was she very, very pretty but she had THREE handsome older brothers.

AND the house, which was massive, was actually divided in half and in the other half lived another glamorous family who had four children too. Who were identical in ages but the three oldest were girls and the Sophie one was a boy..... And the mother was a famous ballet teacher and her studio was in the house and Sophie could go through and join in any class she wanted. This was when we all wanted to be a ballerina more than anything in the world. I practically lived there for about two years and nobody minded because the house was so full of people and every meal was at an endless table set for twenty with wonderful unusual food. The garden was also endless with 100 foot trees and exciting, slightly dangerous things like car tyre swings hanging scarily high up.

At that time my parents were still happy to take all their holidays in Cornwall or Scotland and I had never been abroad. Sophie.. however... Her father's work concerned velocity or something and part of it was that he had invented a coating that made skis go faster. To 'further his research' he was forced to take his entire family on extended skiing holidays every year and the next door family usually went too. I loved Sophie but sometimes it was all too much. My winter holidays were spent ... at home. The piles of photographs of laughing people on snowy peaks, of 'marmots'(?), of people drinking 'gluhwein'(?), the treasured pressed flowers - 'gentians' and 'eidelweiss' (?) and unbearable exotica like her miniature Austrian dress with lace apron. How could anyone have a life so perfect? Why oh why couldn't I have holidays like that and bring home things like that? Well, finally, next week I will.
- posted by Iris @ 1/28/2004 07:47:00 PM comment

 
I was so struck by Badger's accounts of hoarding and pack-rat-like activities. ( I am sorry not to do linking but I am terrified to fiddle with site in case the disappearing posts thing starts again).
I am an awful warning of the expanding space leading to expanding piles of old newspapers scenario.

I too have that motherly feeling about practically any object however small and dirty it may be. I always think sadly about the time when it was fresh and new and loved as it fell out of the cereal packet. There is a bit in ycnaN drofttiM's 'The tiusruP of Love' where the children can invariably reduce their sister to tears by chanting a rhyme about a matchstick. 'Oh little houseless match. It has no roof, no thatch...'. That works for me as well. There is no way in the world I can ever throw out anything with a face. Those eyes......... staring up as you finally tie the top of the rubbish bag. 'Toy Story' was disastrous, it confirmed my worst fears.

Our old house in Norfolk unfortunately not only had a vast, boarded attic but also a range of dry barns. I therefore kept - everything. I have constantly tried to fathom why something seems dull and unimportant in the present but as soon as it has moved into the past it takes on some romantic, nostalgic aura. Why would I be incapable of throwing away a pair of smelly child's trainers now three sizes too small? Why would I put them into a plastic bag in the attic 'For now'? Why have I kept not only every single child's school book since they were babies but their TEXTBOOKS too. 'Face it, Mother. No one is going to go through the 'Pirate' reading scheme ever again. They were f@cking boring AND didn't teach us to read'.

I have kept practically all the 'nicer' clothes the children have worn since they were little as well as all of my own. And worse, when my mother died my father appeared with his car filled with bags of all HER clothes which he couldn't bear to give away - and then nor could I. When the children went to boarding school they collected piles of stuff to decorate their rooms , redundant when they returned and now here. The same when the girls went to college except there were piles more of it - like two flats worth. I also keep glossy magazines of which I buy millions. A friend of mine, who didn't even have a very big house, had something called 'The Magazine Room' where she threw them when read, as she felt that they would somehow come in useful,(perhaps for a 'decoupage' screen), or she might want to look through them again. When she moved she made someone else clear it out as she couldn't bear the loss and they filled an entire builder's skip.

When we left Norfolk I did a certain amount of sorting but it was agony. Finally I just emptied drawers randomly into black bags and a massive van brought them here. Everyone was so bored with unloading that they were tossed into the nearest barn with various oddments like strangely shaped Victorian baths, an entire heavy iron spiral staircase in pieces, a broken weather vane, an unplayable piano, (the insides ravaged by mice), and smuggled old magazines concealed in brown packing boxes. This barn quickly proved to have a defective roof but I kept the doors closed and didn't look.

When the house roof was renewed two years later I insisted that they board over the attics and since then I have managed to fill up the entire space with ancient hamster cages, boxes of old Christmas cards and, spookily, a whole room full of tied up bags of clothes. I also have two bedrooms and a landing piled with more recent stuff and this is not mentioning many hundreds of books heaped everywhere. We also have a flat in London crammed similarly. We were looking at photographs of some ancient school production of The W........ of Oz with my son as a flying monkey. 'That was rather a good costume', someone said 'I know', I replied, 'That must be why it is still hanging up in my bedroom'.

As I am phsically and mentally incapable of throwing anything away I think I have found the answer. Slow composting. Most things in the damp old barn are rotting gently away and as the rats have colonised the attics a certain shredding process is probably dealing with the softer material. And as long as I don't look I am kept perfectly happy.
- posted by Iris @ 1/27/2004 10:56:00 AM comment

 
I hope that it is just the time of year. I found I was gazing at the photograph on the 'Looking for Mr. Right?' pop-up and thinking 'Hmmm...not bad'. (He was wearing 'intellectual' glasses so that you would not mistake him for a rapist). Actually, do rapists often wear glasses? They would be quite likely to get knocked off and crushed underfoot during the struggle. Which would impede his escape. So if you had to wear glasses and were therefore probably quite 'intellectual', you would realise that things would go better if your victim had taken lonpyhoR. Although, according to a 'police spokesman', 'In England, the chances of your drink being spiked are very, very small'. One thing less to worry about then.






- posted by Iris @ 1/27/2004 09:45:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
I am going mad trying to set up a weeks skiing holiday for my son and me. His Gap year is going insanely badly as he has not heard from any universities so has no idea if he has to re-take his French exam or not. Either they will all say No or they will say Yes provisionally or they will say Yes. Each option means he would have to do something different. Why is Life so cruel? This is all happening because he got 296 marks instead of 300. So is counted as one grade lower than he needs. And would have passed easily except that the brilliant teacher who had been at the school for fifteen years decided to go and find herself up the Amazon or something. So his last crucial year was spent with a hastily promoted SPANISH French teacher who can't speak English too well. The ludicrous Catch 22 element was that he originally wanted to do Spanish but after a few weeks with this same woman he switched to French, as she was so irritating and incompetent. Then the next year he found to his horror that she had become his new French teacher. When I rang the school and asked to speak to the Head of the Language Dept. to complain I found - Yes - SHE was now the Head of Languages. The Dept. therefore consisted of her - inefficient, annoying but also smug, arrogant and untouchable - and a weedy, hopeless male literature teacher prone to squeaky shouting. And this is one of the most expensive schools in London with a really good academic reputation. Maddeningly, several of his class were bi-lingual so would do well even if taught by a gorilla; which means she will never be found out.

I am boring even myself but it is so f@cking unfair.

Anyway, to cheer him up from an all time low and to force myself out of the house I thought that we could go skiing. I have never done this but was once, ( a far away once), a keen ice skater. All his friends are back at school re-taking or have disappeared abroad in some uninteresting and unaccompaniable way or obviously he would not have considered the uncoolness of this idea. I thought that we would go to Sweden, to erA. Thus avoiding any immediate and horrific French or German half-term invasions of tiny bores. I have had a romantic idea of this place since I read some article years ago about torch-lit pistes and dog-sled expeditions culminating in snow picnics with barbecued reindeer meat, (I can do that - I once ate blackbird pate). The town is on the edge of a huge frozen lake which you can skate across.

And it seems to be totally booked up. This cannot be happening. I have messed about with the Internet for two days and can find nothing. On one site it said, 'Hotel rooms in A.. at this time of year are like gold dust'. Tomorrow I am throwing myself into the hands of a travel agent. Oh, help me please, please. The horrible truth is, too, that both my son and I are activity resistant and would always rather stay where we are however vile the present and exciting the future. If this doesn't work out, I can see weeks of slumped procrastination setting in. I sometimes wonder if God actually wants me to do anything.
- posted by Iris @ 1/26/2004 10:54:00 PM comment

 
My husband and his brother have driven off into the night in a huge empty van. The house is now full of extra furniture, none of which I like or want, but in the end what could I say. When they went to the old childhood home they found that the new owner had stepped in prematurely and cut down every tree in the garden, including many ancient fruit trees, and then run some kind of bulldozer over it so there was just flat mud. Every single plant that his mother had spent her life nurturing had disappeared. Even if you were going to build in one corner there was no reason in the world to do that. One of their neighbours accosted them in tears. God, what a lucky escape I had - or a mean selfish escape..... Every time they carried anything in, his brother would say something like, 'Mother was sitting at that dressing table just two days before she died'. So there was no way that I could say, 'Well that's a bit hideous, shall we put it in the barn for now?'. Every room seems to have several chairs and a table too many and the house generally has a strange Victorian parlour atmosphere.

It is very hard to write as my cat from downstairs has moved to the computer chair permanently and when I get her off she sits firmly on the mouse pad staring at the arrow on the screen. By coincidence I was reading the AOL news about children's names and it said don't be tempted to call your child something silly like nooM Unit. Oh dear. That is what I call my cat. It's not her real name , of course, but she is silver and shaped very like a full moon. We couldn't think what to call her or her sister for ages. We waited for their characters to emerge and her main characteristic, apart from an angelic nature, was that she was possibly not the most intelligent animal on earth. Once she was running past me in the garden towards a flight of three steps and just before she reached them she looked back over her shoulder for a second and then jumped up two steps and rushed on at full speed with a massive 'clunk'. I was reading, for amusement, a 1930's cookery book about Moorish food written by some English younger son who had gone native. And there it was, 'Chicken looFcaM', 'Grey looFcaM' it just suited her perfectly but also was a bit mean so she is actually called 'nooF'. (Or 'nooM Unit'. ) I find that cat's names always evolve with people calling them things that rhyme with their names, until that becomes their name, etc....

Anyway, after voting, the UK AOL readers had decided that the two favourite children's names were 'Joshua' and 'Ellie'. Weird - I don't know a single person who has called their children that. The piece also said that in America it was now popular to name your children after food and that 'Gouda', 'Veal', 'Cheddar' and 'Cappuchino' were accepted as perfectly normal. No wonder you all call your children by pseudonyms in your blogs.




- posted by Iris @ 1/25/2004 10:41:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
Are you going to show the right time and date? It is 17.30 on Jan. 24.
- posted by Iris @ 1/24/2004 05:29:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
My son has been here for a few days as we thought that it was going to snow - as that is what the weather forecast said - but it has been foggy and dank as usual. But NOW the forecast is snow just when he really has to go back. I do not want to be snowed up here on my own. There is no fun in making weird meals from things scraped off the back of the fridge and throwing snowballs and photographing ice hanging off twigs by yourself. Bugger - as all English people say, apparently.

Oddly, I seem to have no telepathic communication with my children whatsoever. Although I have had many strange incidents with other people. For example, my daughter was going to Amsterdam for the first time, so I decided to ring a very old Dutch friend to ask if she could be prepared to help if anything disastrous happened to her. I hadn't actually been in contact with this friend for ten years and had NEVER ever rung her. She picked up the phone and gasped. When it rang she had been crossing the room towards it to ring ME (for the first time ever) to say that her daughter was visiting London and could I help if anything disastrous happened to her.

Anyway, every time one of my children has been in any serious trouble or has had an accident I have been pottering about, humming, without a care in the world. Last week one of the main news stories was of a British tourist being shot in India. I read this carefully and, phew, it was nowhere near the place where my older daughter was staying. The next day my son said that she had rung because there were no e-mail faciities and she was just checking in. Okay, fine, I potter off still humming. She rings yesterday because she has just had her passport stolen and , Oh yes, she hadn't wanted to 'worry' me but things had been a bit tense because an acquaintance of theirs, staying in the same hotel, had been shot last week. 'WHAT DO YOU MEAN? You are not in that part of India.' 'Didn't I say? We decided to travel on and visit somewhere different.' ' Arrrrrgh!' 'Well I rang last week especially so you knew I was all right'. 'But I didn't know there was anything for you NOT to be all right about'. 'Yes, because I didn't want to worry you'............ Not only was this man staying in the same, and only, hotel in this tiny village but my daughter was sitting lonelyely in some wood by the river at exactly the same time that he was being shot in this same wood. She and her boyfriend then had drinks with the man's travelling companion while he discussed the surprising lateness of the man's return and then had to console him after he had gone out and made a horrible discovery. Also had to watch the police savagely beating up two non-local Indians who had been picked on as the murderers. Though , she thought, rather obviously not. By the time she finally rang she had moved to the next city and immediately had her bag containing all credit cards, money, passport etc. stolen. She appeared totally calm and infused with an annoying Eastern fatalism. I wish I could say the same about myself.
- posted by Iris @ 1/22/2004 12:54:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
I just had to log back on again as I loved the blog I picked on the way out. I will not put it here as I know that no one else will bother to read it but in her recent posts she revealed that she has never travelled beyond Indiana in the West and Maryland in the East; that she met her husband when she was 16 and has never looked at another man, (she is 35) and that her parents picked her Christian name out of a hat.
- posted by Iris @ 1/22/2004 12:44:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
Raining again today. It IS January so it could at least snow. They keep forecasting it and then backing down. Every year I promise that I will do something that makes use of January, rather than waiting for it to pass. This is a whole month of my life. When I am finally standing in front of a firing squad, how I will long for those lost weeks. I also try to think of people who look forward to January for some reason because it is the high point of their year. People who ski or hunt or perhaps take a holiday in Barbados because it is so f@cking dreary here.

My husband has finally managed to sell his childhood home now that his mother is dead and his father is pretty much senile and will be in 'sheltered accommodation' for ever. (He was a sort of miracle baby, born when his parents were unusually old). It is a family house, built in the orchard of his great-grandfather's house and my husband and his brother were both born there. Now all the family have died or gone and the new owner will probably build in the garden. They are doing a final pack-up this weekend and then driving a vast lorry down here with the more precious stuff. My husband asked me to come over and spend the last day alone with him and his brother so that I could dig up various rare plants to take away. Err............... No, no, no. How horribly sad and peculiar that would be. Surely they would rather just be there together to say goodbye to everything? I notice that there was no mention of my sister-in-law going but she has a reputation for distancing herself from difficult family occasions. As I am a forward thinker, I cunningly zoomed down here and then pretended that I had made an informed decision that I would be more helpful clearing spaces etc. ready for them.

I am such a coward about public displays of emotion. I think it is because I cry a lot while I am alone so now anything can set me off and I have got so used to it that I have to keep leaving the room when watching TV with other people. I look at teletext news every morning while having coffee and am regularly sniffing away at the endless reams of miserable things. I thought once, 'WTF are you doing? Why don't you just NOT put this on, so that you aren't starting every day full of sad thoughts?' . But then I decided that it was pathetic to go through life not knowing and at least I was letting my feelings out with all the muffled sobbing and anyway I seemed to be addicted to teletext and turned it on automatically. Actually, when I have been on holiday without newspapers and with weird TV news about impenetrable Italian, or whatever, troubles, I have found that I just switch the same feelings to smaller problems inside the family. And get all muffled sobbing and brooding about those instead.

I vowed last January that I would visit every city listed on the European weather teletext site. That I would spend a weekend once a month in a different one until I had worked through them. What fun that would be, even if I went alone. Have I done that? Of course not.

My brain almost instantly began to rubbish the whole idea. 'So and so has been to thingy recently and said that it was really disappointing and dangerous'. 'You don't like flying and all the planes are going to be blown up anyway'. 'Expensive hotels are so dull and you might as well be anywhere but cheap hotels are scary and you will be raped'. 'You hate talking to strange people who often turn out to be very boring and these people will be FOREIGN so you will be speaking ANOTHER LANGUAGE stupidly and badly'. 'You don't really care that much about old churches'. 'You will have to take all your meals alone'. 'You are very bad at getting to sleep but if you take a sleeping pill you will not hear the rapist breaking into your room'. 'You are good at being by yourself but wandering round a strange city on your own is actually incredibly sad and lonely'. Oh, all right, it was obviously a really stupid idea. Well done Brain. I can always count on you to show me the sensible path.
- posted by Iris @ 1/22/2004 12:29:00 PM comment

 
The fourth series of one of my favourite drama-soaps just started and is horribly disappointing. How these little things get to you. It is 'The terceS efiL of sU' and they have removed yet another of the main characters; I know that life is like that but it ruins it. I love aidualC navraC so much and long for her to be my friend - they wouldn't dare to take HER out. I realised that with a huge amount of work, combined with her coming to England for some reason, I could possibly meet her - and she would maybe really like me in spite of my being a sad fan person and then she WOULD be my friend. This is a little project - by this time next year I will have spoken to C...C.... The thing is that not only do I have several friends in Australia based in major cities and one in the media BUT my godchild's mother's best friend is actually an Australian actress, though lives here, and not majorly famous just the 'I know that face, what's she been in?' sort. Still ............

I am listening to a CD by luaP lebieS which I bought for personal reasons which I will reveal in a moment but I really like it. To start with I thought, inoffensive C and W background music, but then I played it again and it got better and better. The thing is that my kitchen is L-shaped with the speakers round the corner from the stove so you can't really hear lyrics that well if you are cooking. My favourite track had a charming tune so I put it on Repeat and after humming along for about five times I realised that I had spookily picked from 12 tracks one that mirrored the stupid 'Cinderella' aspect of my life (not exactly obviously). 'edirB. '45'. So one must have subliminal hearing as well as everything else as none of the other tracks have any relevance to me at all. What does all this subliminal memory, hearing etc. mean in day-to-day life terms and choices?

The personal thing is that because of C.....C........ I was thinking about women I have really liked and remembering an American who was my great friend for a couple of years a very long time ago until she went back to America and I eventually completely lost touch with her. I have tried various ways of finding her in the past but I assume she is married again with another name. In one of the last letters she sent me she was talking about an affair she once had with a musician called P.... S..... who was famous for 'ekoms dooW and segnarO'. Which I had never heard of so took no notice. This all came back to me last week and I tried to trace him because I thought I could write to him and see if he knew where she was. Apparently he is now working in a bakery in Maryland but I couldn't get any further. So I bought his CD so that I it wouldn't seem rude to know nothing about his music if I ever got hold of him. Ah..........the pleasures of an empty life.
- posted by Iris @ 1/20/2004 02:48:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
At least one tiny piece of the world has fallen into place. At last the age old battle comes to an end.
Is the famous regional meal of scones served with jam and thick cream called a 'Devon' cream tea or a 'Cornish' cream tea? After many hundreds of years of wrangling an archivist has discovered a 'document' which mentions that the monks of a Benedictine abbey in DEVON a thousand years ago served medieval cream teas to the workers repairing the building. This was so popular that they extended the service to weary travellers passing by. Sounds pretty final - but there is something almost too perfect about this. Could the 'document' be a fake? I am actually on the Devon side so I don't think I'll bring that up.


Also in the papers are reviews of a autobiography about how awful it was to be brought up by a mother who followed the nawgahB. I had nothing to do with this myself but a surpringly large number of my friends did and from totally disparate groups too. Funnily enough they were almost all rather straightforward and intelligent people. To the outsider, (me), the whole thing looked like an idiotic and transparently obvious con but they were all really happy with it and followed him for several years. They must have started off when the cult was smaller as they had all spent time in India and had had many conversations with the B... himself. I met a woman only a few months ago who still calls herself by her B.... name. It went through a period of being fashionable with upper class hippies who obviously had time and money to spare and I was quite shocked at how much some of them had handed over to him. When I questioned them about his strangely materialistic spending habits they would laugh fondly and say things like, 'Oh B......., he just can't resist a Rolls Royce', as if it was some endearing little quirk. They all stuck religiously to wearing shades of red and orange and the locket-thing with his picture. It was quite bizarre when we gave parties as sometimes they made up about a quarter of the guests. They were never horrible about trying to convert us but also couldn't leave it alone and would drone on sadly about how they found it impossible to BELIEVE that we weren't interested and it was only a matter of time.
Unfortunately, for them, I had heard gossiping about the sex side of the ashrams and how one friend of ours had stupidly told the B.... that he thought he might be gay. That night he was blindfolded and led into a darkened dormitory and locked in with ten other men. By the morning he had realised that he definitely wasn't. Also a shy, practically virginal girl friend was put through the same treatment in order to release the real her or something. She would never talk of this but sometimes had a strange smile.

They finally went out to the B....'s town in the desert in Oregon and I think it was all just too big and impersonal and apparently vicious in-fighting started amongst the elders of the cult , money was unaccounted for, and the atmosphere of love and happiness ruined. (Partly by having to wear compulsory plastic gloves while having sex, I gathered). Any feelings of regret that I might have harboured(?) about missing out were flushed away when I saw a documentary about the B.... and on a fuzzy video clip of one of his 'cleansing sessions' was the familiar figure of one of my girl friends, naked and writhing on the carpet in front of about a hundred people, who seemed to have been interrupted in the middle of a cocktail party. Naturally I looked puzzled when she asked, casually, if I had noticed that the programme was on. 'What programme?'. They have all taken off their orange garments years ago , of course, and seem as straightforward and intelligent as they were before it all started. Then again, what do I know of what happens at night, when the dormitory doors close.
- posted by Iris @ 1/19/2004 09:59:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
I have just been looking at the 'seiggolB'. Who are all these bores? Where is everyone that I know? I have only heard of two people and only like one of them. The British section is totally crap and although this may seem mean - please don't vote for 'A - ager Blogs'. He won some prize for it in England and it was in the papers so I looked him up and it was incredibly dull and ordinary. Also he looked so smug in his photographs. I have read several teenage American blogs which were all amazingly cool and funny compared to his. In fact I can't stand any English blogs because I know all their references only too well and it is horribly obvious how dreary they must be in real life. Hello - you can count me in here too. Why aren't I out partying rather than typing and moaning?
- posted by Iris @ 1/19/2004 06:28:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
I have just found a blog in Icelandic (I assume). I will write it here in case it has any interest but I'll put it backwards as any linking between us will probably not have much future. addib.blogspot. The 'most recently published' thing is becoming stupidly addictive especially as they are gone within a couple of minutes so have an exciting fickle hand of fate quality.

I give in........... I am sitting here bored and cross and not sure what to do about the future and not sure if I need to do anything about the future. I had a very realistic dream last night where I had just met someone who I felt really happy with. He had come to our house for dinner, just with me and the children and they were being wary with him but I didn't care because I liked him so much and he liked me and he made stupid jokes and we were relaxed and HAPPY. And when I woke up it felt strange as I have forgotten what that is like.

My husband is a very peculiar man and I am afraid of starting out on trying to explain my situation because it is so f@cking annoying when anyone doesn't accept exactly what I say, because what I say is the truth. This is not an interesting account. It isn't about big, cruel secret perverted things. It is one of those French films where nothing happens for five minutes and then someone turns away and lights a cigarette.

I will write a little bit and then some more later.

Although shy, I was pretty and wore amusing clothes and had an innate understanding of cool. Maybe because I read so much, not only books of every kind but also endless magazines and I liked experimental foreign films and foreign music and so was naturally accepted as the girlfriend of clever, good-looking alpha males who felt that they had a cutting-edge quality but also a poetic, pilosophical, searching druggily for the meaning of life side too. Because I lived in a university town there were plenty of these to go round and for some time I was part of whatever 'inner circle' was on offer. Some of these people have ended up quite famous. None of my closest friends though. When my age group moved to London I went too and for two or three years had a very interesting and wild time. The point was that at every stage I was behaving in a way that you could look back on later and think, 'Well, at least I didn't waste my youth away. There were the opportunities and I took them'. (This is obviously relative. I could have taken millions more opportunities if I'd been more confident).

Meanwhile, on a parallel path, my husband was a student at the same university but I had not met him yet. We were there together but he was drawn to the 'Brideshead Revisited' side of life and spent his time drinking port in pannelled rooms and driving to outlying estates wearing tweed knickerbockers to shoot pheasants. He was happiest when his life most approximated to that of a grand house in the 18th century and spent his summer vacations travelling around Europe looking at paintings or salmon fishing in remote parts of Scotland. He was not a great one for the ladies and had a rather dull girlfriend, who he met while they were at school, for years and then dumped her rather meanly and became the 'friend' who goes round with established couples. I am not implying that he was at all gay, he was just quite shy and was happy pottering with his art and fishing and especially wine and food. He was also really sweet and enthusiastic (well, about those things) and rather nerdy and perfect to accompany various couples so they didn't get too bored with each other on their country house weekends.
In fact his life continued exactly like that for years - until he finally met me.
- posted by Iris @ 1/19/2004 12:49:00 AM comment

 
How is it that there are apparently at least two million blogs out there and twice lately I have found a blog at random which links back to the ones I always read? Out of boredom I thought that I would start looking at one of the 'most recently published blogs' each time I was logging off. So yesterday I did and in their list of links was one that I sometimes read which I got from the blogroll of someone I often read. As I read about 10 people at most and these two are in no way major or have massive numbers of comments that was odd, I thought. The one before was when I Googled A. tseroF and one entry was a reference to 'P's mooR' in a blog, which was just a dullish housewife in Ohio saying that she had seen this book mentioned in the comments of a blog she read and was reminded of how much she loved it as a child. So I went to the comments and the whole post was exceptionally interesting and amusing so I mentioned it and Badger said she had already seen it and later I found a link to it on another blog I occasionally read too. So that was quite convoluted and strange as well.

Soon you will be sorry that you encouraged me to go on.
- posted by Iris @ 1/18/2004 10:46:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
I will skate with the blades a fraction under the surface.

Something that I have not mentioned before, possibly.

I never drive. I CAN but I really hate it and never feel casual and in control. My parking is like a joke about women parking and I feel insane if anyone drives very closely behind me. When we were first here I had an ancient car with very stiff gear changes which I felt safe in as you had plenty of time to change your mind if you had hysterically changed into first while going at top speed. I drove my son to and from school every day for a year, which was 15 miles away along country roads with steep hills and every form of extreme weather and suicidal animals. As I was crap at turning round etc. I had to set off extra early to get into the one space in the school car park where you could drive straight in and out. If it was taken I had to wait, hoveringly, half way up the drive until it was free again or most of the other parents had gone. At one point in the winter the journey became so scary, with thick fog, or icy roads, or snow, or deer standing just round blind bends and in darkness too, that I started taking beta-blockers half an hour before each journey and having to lie down for a bit with a strong drink when I got home. I also screamed a lot while driving especially along the windy, hilly river road where all oncoming lights totally blinded you even when they were dipped.

Once my son left that school I have pretty much never driven again. I go to the supermarket roughly every ten days with a friend in her car and otherwise I am here. In a prison of my own making. For the fifteen years that we lived in Norfolk I could not drive, although there was a village shop a mile away which I would drag along to occasionally on foot. I suppose that is where I perfected living inside my own head.

Another thing.

We are not poor. But then again I am older and have been poor in the past. Also, although we have a large house in the country surrounded by 200 acres of its own land and a big two floor flat in chic Notting Hill, they are in no way luxurious or even comfortable. All they have is a certain amount of space. In both cases we bought them when the areas were not fashionable, ( the flat just after we were married), in fact 'the only place to live' at that point was Chelsea and someone said, 'You're moving North of the Park! Is that wise? There's no one there'. Sadly there are now only too many people here and a large number of them are assholes.

Third thing.

Following on from the not being poor. My children all went to private schools right through including three years from 13 to 16 at a famous (though probably not to foreigners) boarding school. There - I've said it. The thing is that most English state schools are just terrible. Thousands of people who can't afford it kill themselves to send their children to private school so that they can have a decent education, as otherwise they almost certainly won't. My oldest daughter went to a state primary school for one year. It was in our village in Norfolk and they were desperate to keep up the numbers or it would be closed down. She learnt, I would say, nothing. A friend offered to give the children French conversation classes, free, and the headmaster said, 'French! Why would children like this ever need to speak French?'.



- posted by Iris @ 1/18/2004 06:48:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
Of course now I have said that I will go on writing my brain has frozen. In spite of a house full of cats I can hear a rat chewing something really close (it had better be inside the wall) and they all have that 'I'm not listening' expression.

As I haven't read other blogs for a bit I was wandering around and got furious about the IRA again, having moaned about their portrayal in American films this morning. Having to deal with their bombing campaigns in London is the nearest I have been to understanding what it would be like to experience a war. I haven't been close to a bomb that has gone off but I have been within a couple of streets twice and been through many 'scares' some of which were hoaxes and some where a bomb was deactivated. I think that having to file slowly out of theatres or huge department stores when a bomb may explode at any moment were some of the most horrible experiences of my life. I have also been trapped in streets with policemen ushering people in random directions and having no idea which would be the safe way to choose.

One of my worst. I had taken my son, then small, to meet my daughter off a train and we were standing at the barrier watching the train draw in when a mad-looking policeman ran towards us waving his arms and screaming, 'Run. There is a bomb right here'. My daughter's train had screeched to a stop but it was already partly alongside the platform. I took my son's hand and raced towards the exit and found that it was sealed. Then the tannoy said 'Will everyone try to take cover near Platforms 1 to 5. The station exits are closed as we believe that there is a second bomb outside.' There was no cover but I found a huge concrete plant container and pushed my son down behind it; there was no room for me and he kept peering over it saying 'What are we doing? Nothing's going on', while I mashed his head back underneath. After half an hour of mental hell the police cleared away all their yellow tape and my daughter came walking towards us. We never knew if it was a hoax or not but when you are going through it there isn't a lot of difference.

Some friends of mine whose father was high up in the Army had the front of their house blown off (they were all out at the time). The mail box outside another friend's house exploded. This was a long running and horrible tactic along with the bombs in street litter baskets idea. There are STILL no litter baskets at railway stations. A bomb under a car a few streets away was intended for an acquaintance of ours but went off early killing a passing cancer specialist. A passer by noticed what looked like a bomb in the gutter near my childrens' school. It was and it had been lying under a car for TWO days while the entire school had passed back and forth to the gym, walking within a couple of feet of it.

One of the scariest things was that you always felt that even if you second guessed the IRA they could always get you because they were quite incompetent when out of their element in London. The bomb near our school for example had been left under a car that did not belong to the person they were after and he had moved from that address some months earlier.

Two of the many reasons that I hate them. The most personal. One is that they ruined Christmas for me for years with their 'Christmas bombing campaign' which usually started with a bomb in one of the main shopping streets in the West End around the beginning of December and ended on Christmas Eve. Even if they didn't go off there would be lots of 'coded warnings' by men with Irish accents which involved evacuations of shops, streets and underground stations and left you jumping at every shop announcement and checking all the emergency exits and trying to spend as little time as possible on higher floors. The other one, many years ago now, was the torturing to death of a friend of mine's soldier cousin while he was serving in Ireland. They took him to a lonely cottage and afterwards fed his body to the pigs.

The IRA are really just the Mafia under another name. An Irish friend who also hates them told me that a relation of hers who works in a factory had to pay money every week to an IRA 'representative' who came round and collected 'donations' just after they received their pay packets. One week the relation said that as he didn't support the IRA he didn't want to give them money any more. The next morning when he went out to go to work he found his car a burnt out wreck. When the 'representative' appeared the week after he lent close and said 'So, will you be paying or would you like it to be your children?'

Right - well that is all out of the way and never needs to be discussed again.

Typically, just as the IRA seem to have moved on, the Islamic terrorists have taken over. A couple of months ago I was in the basement of a huge Oxford Street store when the familiar running security men and soothing tannoy announcements happened all over again. 'Make your way slowly towards the Northern exits etc.' Have people no memories? I was away up the escalator like a ferret and muttering and pushing at top speed. 'Slowly' indeed. I couldn't believe it but I passed people still finishing their coffee and others sauntering along chatting. While outside they all stood around by the big plate glass windows, talking. I actually ran from the shop, well jogged, and sprang into the first taxi I saw and told him to drive in a circle well away from there to my house. They remote-exploded the 'bomb' and it turned out not to be. But if it had been, many of those coffee drinking idiots would not be alive.

One of the stupidest legacies of all those years is that I once read that all stores have secret codes to broadcast if there is a bomb and these have to be very ordinary so that the public don't panic. They gave some examples like 'Could Mr. Prendergast please come to the stock room'. So whenever they said anything that wasn't a lost child or money saving offer, I would make my way towards the exits and wait to see what happened. The last month one though I was out of practice. The tannoy did a funny little bing, bing, bing noise and then repeated it three times and I actually thought 'That sounds a bit like an alarm but no one is doing anything so I will carry on and pay'. Just after I had the running security men thing started. Next time I will drop my shopping and run.

- posted by Iris @ 1/18/2004 12:08:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
I am interested in little signs and indications that Life throws around. I don't usually act on them but note them and sometimes ponder pointlessly. I haven't written anything because I was thinking of giving it up. When I started I thought that an answer to this difficult time would emerge and that there might be a pattern in the memories which came up. All that happened was that I didn't reveal any of my true problems because I felt sad and whiny putting them down and also that it would be impossible to portray the trivial facts accurately enough to show things as they are. Also I didn't feel that I could really talk about the past because I don't want my children to find this and be upset. (Nothing major - they don't like any talk of 'wildness' and bad behaviour to a really surprising extent). But the present problems are rooted in that past.

So the writing turned into a fairly cheerful, would-be amusing skate-over of day to day life. Although I suppose that was what I was doing in reality. Then one morning I was thinking about 'I, ssAhole' and how talented and funny she is and about that one day when she wrote a sad post but immediately deleted it. When people asked her why she said something like 'This blog isn't here for things like that'. I hadn't read her for a bit as children had dominated the computer over Christmas, so I went to have a look and found that she had broken up with her husband and had been miserable for ages without showing a sign. I had been thinking about her that day as I had decided that writing about Life positively made things better in reality and so was a 'good idea'. Then a few minutes later, there is the proof that this is not the case. What sort of sign is that?

I was also quite struck by my having decided to write more from 1 January and then my blog disappeared on 31 December and fell to pieces, parts of which have never returned. What sort of sign is that?

Today, when I sat down to write, I was joined by one of my cats who normally never, ever comes upstairs. She lives permanently in the kitchen by the stove and if you carry her up she breaks free and runs back down like a wild thing. (Maybe because her mother rules the top floor from my bedroom). I wasn't actually joined. I found her in the computer chair and had to move her, struggling, (both of us) to a seat next to me with the computer chair cushion on it. I was scrolling down 'Favourites' to start writing and paused to get a cup of coffee. When I came back she was sitting on the keyboard and the screen was displaying the old 'golBathon 2003 ' page which said 'Thank you for your pledge'. And what sort of sign is that?
- posted by Iris @ 1/17/2004 02:08:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
This is also a little test.
- posted by Iris @ 1/06/2004 11:25:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
I will be away for a few days so I think I will give the blog time to settle. Also I am now nervous of wasting an hour writing and then suddenly .... it is gone. I wrote the ending to the fascinating synchronicity story twice. And it is still not here.

I have just printed off my entire blog for safety but now of course it may fall into the wrong hands. I must hide it in 'plain sight' but what do I have that is so boring that none of my family would ever bother with it? Actually - a folder with 'Notes on PHP' might be good. Then again they might want a folder and assume that I would never miss that one. I know. A folder with 'Hints on Crossword Solving'. AND - I can print out a couple of crosswords from my new 1,000 Crossword CD. and put them on top.

I counted the words so far and there are 30,000. That seems quite a lot in one way but then again, not that many in another. I didn't write a geat deal in the first month so it is really 10,000 per month. Not very much but it was totally painless.
- posted by Iris @ 1/06/2004 09:25:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
Here I am posting on Iris's blog, la la la. It works from here. Maybe if you update your browser - maybe it is a problem with a corrupted version of Internet Explorer or whatever browser you are using. I fixed the template problem.
- posted by Liz @ 1/06/2004 02:56:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
AAAAAAAAAArgh. I tried pressing the 'safe mode' to see if that helped and it wiped off the one bit of writing that I had somehow retrieved from yesterday which stopped about half way through and turned into streams of code. The word f@ck seems somehow inadequate. I am going home now and I may be some time.
- posted by Iris @ 1/02/2004 08:39:00 PM comment

 
Every time I come back here something else is different and wrong. I know this is boring to read but as the Support system is unavailable I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO. This time the Publish option on the lower line wasn't there so I tried Re-publish and all the already written posts (such as they were) disappeared and when I pressed the lower Post to bring them back a message came saying No Data. the Web page could not be opened etc.

Why is the Support systen unavailable? Is it just me?

Does Phil Ringnalda still exist? I would be so, so happy for him to do anything he likes in here if only he could sort it out.
- posted by Iris @ 1/02/2004 08:31:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
This seems to have worked but everything else including all recent writing and archives has disappeared. I will try not to panic and now write about my Vet.

We have also had the same Vet. for many, many years as he is a friend of my husband's cousin. In direct contrast to our dentist, the Vet. is renowned for his good looks and boundless cosy charm. Oddly, in a similar way, however, I was watching television randomly one day and there HE was. It was one of those con-the-public reality programmes and they had told a lot of yuppie bankers that their firm had introduced compulsory medical check-ups. The amusing twist was that our Vet. was doing them exactly as he would for a dog. As I remember, not one of them questioned him although they did look vaguely puzzled. Especially when he made them crouch on all-fours on the examining table; roll over; lift up their arms and legs one-by-one and pant. At the point where you would normally cough he said 'Would you mind making a sort of barking noise?. 'Rarf?'. 'Well no. I was thinking more of a 'Woof''. EVEN THEN they didn't get it. It was actually f@cking funny.
- posted by Iris @ 1/02/2004 02:56:00 PM comment

 
Finally realised that there is a tiny link under blog entry point which tells you about problems - which there are but I'm not sure if they are the same as mine.

I will write about my dentist and see what happens. Another resolution is to sort out my tooth. I am so crap about this. My top teeth don't really show at all when I talk, so as long as I remember not to laugh wildly I can get away with the fact that one of my teeth is cracked and I obviously need to have it capped. I also have a filling at the back which has a crumbly feeling and probably other stuff too. I have not been to the dentist for far too long as he has a mad quality. We have had the same dentist for 20 years and his work is really good but he shouts at you if he thinks you haven't been bothering to floss and leans heavily on your face while probing so that you have actual bruises the next day. He is also very rough while drilling and when the anaesthetic wears off you find raw patches in your mouth. He refuses to wear a mask and breathes rather horribly and spittily into your face and always pushes the sucking tube down repeatedly so that you keep choking, which makes him annoyed. Particularly as his chair is arranged so that you are lying practically upside down.

But ........ he is really , really good. Do I swap brilliant dentistry for kindness and charm? As I am afraid of him and will probably not go at all as things stand? Or pull myself together?

He is never there on Fridays as he is the official dentist to a large Zoo. One day while idly watching Children's TV I realised that the man in the lions' den in a white coat was him. No wonder he uses excessive force when sorting out one's back molars.
- posted by Iris @ 1/02/2004 02:36:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
The Support site just has an error message when accessed from Blogger and from Google. My writing has disappeared possibly for ever. This cannot be a coincidence as it happened at the EXACT moment that I was supposed to start spending more time on it. I have no idea what to do. Possibly charity work.
- posted by Iris @ 1/02/2004 11:05:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
This is the second of the pieces of writing which disappeared when I pressed Post and Publish. As you can see it has not been reproduced 'right'. Also - WHERE IS EVERYTHING ELSE? If the Support site is still unavailable to me I will leave here never to return as God obviously needs me for some other purpose.
- posted by Iris @ 1/02/2004 10:58:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Okay. I will not let this affect me. I will write it all again ... and cheerfully.

I am writing one more thing about synchronicity as it is the most synchronistic thing that has ever happened to me and I would like it to be recorded.

Many years ago I was insanely and relatively unrequitedly in love with someone called J...
One evening I watched a film where information was passed between two computers in a fascinating and new way which made a big impression on me. That night I had a very long and realistic dream where I met a man called the Marquis of M... We went out on dates, fell in love and decided to get married. (I told you it was a long dream). I was feeling unbelievably happy but at that moment I saw him drive up in his car looking strange. He jumped out, (it was a low sports car) told me that he had been thinking it over and that our marriage would be a mistake and we must never see each other again and drove away. I woke up in the morning crying.

In true life I had never heard of the Marquis of M... but as we had been so close in the dream I looked him up in 'Who's Who' to see if he actually existed. He DID but he was about eighty. BUT HE HAD A SON........ This son not only had the same christian name as my beloved J..., he had the same middle name.. AND....he was born on the same day of the same year.

'This is not possible', I hear you say, 'She must be lying'. Well, I am not. And after much pondering I think I have worked out how it happened. I was totally obsessive over J... and thought and planned about him all the time and the computer film must have triggered some memory in my subconcious. About two years before I had been researching an article for a magazine about whether any modern aristocratic families still followed the old tradition of the first son inheriting, the second going into the Army and the third into the Church. (It was a light-hearted piece and was never finished). The research involved speed reading through 'Who's Who, (a vast tome recording EVERY titled person and their ramifications in the U.K. in miniscule print). So I HAD seen the details of the Marquis of M... without realising it, although I had skimmed past him as he did not have three sons. You understand that this was
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