I was just looking at my site meter and had never checked the 'Organizations' statistics before. 1% was from the US Government. What does that mean? Do they check every blog as a matter of routine? Is it because I sometimes mention the ARI? Is that not coded cunningly enough?
- posted by Iris @ 3/22/2004 11:21:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
I have been writing quite a lot recently as I have been here alone for two weeks. But now this is about to end, tomorrow in fact, and I am dreading it. I have been so happy by myself with only teeny responsibilities and just talking to people on the phone. I have to go to London and deal with children coming home happy after their holiday and then having to settle back into vile weather and dull jobs etc.. My older daughter has still not got used to things and now it will be all three. Then they are coming here and will dominate the computer all day and all night. How CAN I prefer living totally alone? But, oh dear, I do. This is weird and not good.

I also think that my son should put off university for another year after all as he now thinks that he applied for the wrong subject. This means he has to immediately cram for a summer exam, which will be very, very stressfull for both him and myself. But then he can go and do a language and literature course at acnamalaS University, (Spain), for a few months in the Autumn. A positive and sensible step. All is not lost...... Just that I now have to do intensive organising to set all this up and I don't want to... moan.

I have just been fiddling about with Amazon and realised that it makes my life perfect. I sit here safe and comfortable in this attractive place with no irritating neighbours and many opportunities to pass the time in a thousand pleasant ways and to my door, like magic, comes a flow of any book, film, game or CD that I desire. Often overnight. I have my cats for company and my revolving satellite dish to show me the world. If I feel lonely I can speak to my children or friends on the phone or write on the internet. But I never do feel lonely ...... It is as if I have pre-empted my old age. By the time I AM actually old I will be bored to death with this but it will be TOO LATE to do anything else. This is possibly quite scary but a deep inertia seems to have set in, perhaps the result of a long winter. I am boring myself.
- posted by Iris @ 3/22/2004 10:57:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
As anyone who knows me would agree, I have a fairly unusual name and when I wanted to use it for my hotmail address there it was, no problem. Then I joined moc.291 and to test it out I put in myself. My name came up and I started to read my details... but they were completely wrong. How crap is this site? It lists anyone in the country with the same name and their address, phone number, map of the district round their house AND, scarily an AERIAL PHOTOGRAPH of their house. (I actually tracked down someone who was lurking behind an unlisted number and had recently moved, through this site. It found her in one second from the voting lists and proudly displayed all the above information for me. I felt a chill as I looked down from above on her house and thought of her sitting cosily inside thinking that no one unwanted could ever find her).

Then I realised that the site is not crap at all. THERE IS SOMEONE ELSE WITH MY NAME. Not only that - I am not there. I feel as if this bitch has blanked me out. I am the designated voter for the farm and am on every voting list. Why am I not mentioned?

Then again it is cool in a way to have a person out there with the same odd name as you, perhaps I could contact her and we could become close, twin-like friends. Her address was about two counties away and very near the children's old school. She also appeared to live in a large, grand house called Something Hall. I Googled it in. 'Something Hall - a Day Out for All the Family! See rare breeds of farm animals and, for the kiddies, spend time in Badger dlroW!'..... Right.... Well, that is quite interesting. I like all those things but... wait a moment.... my memory is stirring.... A year or so ago I had a spate of bizarre e-mails which I originally thought were a joke. They were from someone called simetrA who was touring the Far East and sending back her impressions. If you imagine rehC from sseleulC on that trip then you get the picture. My children said I must reply and tell her she had the wrong person but I couldn't bear to as I loved them so much. She thought that she was writing to her sister. They did stop quite quickly anyway so I didn't feel that guilty. Then, months later, another two odd e-mails arrived, 'Dear ...., I thought I would let all the members of the family know my latest thoughts on the creation of BADGER DLROW'!!! OMG! It is the same girl, of course....

Now in creepy detective mode I logged on to 'Friends detinueR' and looked up the major private schools in her county. Typing in her/my name I struck lucky on the third try. She had left a message for her old school friends with many details of her past and present life including the company which she was working for (and details of B.... World). I eagerly put in the company name - Oh great, she was working for the edisyrtnuoC ecnaillA. She was also the same age as my daughter. This C...A... is the militantly pro-hunting organisation which lobbies and marches to counteract any anti-hunting propaganda. I am ambivalent about hunting, as I have written before, as when you live in deep hunting country you see many facets which sentimental townspeople don't understand BUT... I do not want to be thought of as a banner waving fanatic and target for Animal sthgiR groups or even for casual acquaintances who might Google my name to think that I am that person. I Googled her name - there she was with several entries and not only under the C..A.. but boringly too. She seemed to be co-ordinating some dreary campaign to make people eat more game and send in fun recipes for venison etc. THIS IS NOT ME!!!!

Anyway, I am not going to contact her and I think that Life is really unfair to do this. How many people are looking at me and thinking secretly that I go round promoting fox casserole? Crap....
- posted by Iris @ 3/21/2004 11:18:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
It is like ....ering Heights here with lashing rain and whistling, screaming wind. The forecast was as hysterical as usual, warning of severe gales with structural damage lasting for several days. I decided to panic when something actually happened, for once, and did not kill myself rushing about putting candles everywhere, ready for endless darkness or laying fires or finding hot water bottles. F@ck it. My only precaution was to ask my daughter in London to tape the last episode of S... and the C... in case the electricity went off in the middle. It is so far 24 hours of medium gale, not so bad but really noisy. Now I have seen S.. and the C... it can do its worst. (Rather patchy, rushed ending I thought - as if they hadn't spent as much time on the last twenty minutes as the rest of the episode. Everyone is cross about Miranda being left with a crap life. In 'Which S.. and the C... Girl Are You?', I was Miranda and feel a personal interest in her welfare.)

I was reading an article about amusing, cutting edge women who have a best friend who is much older. I noticed an odd thing which was that all the pairs looked exactly like each other with the same hair style and clothes sense. I wonder if the older one picked on the younger out of subliminal vanity or the older reminded the younger of her mother. I have a great friend who is twenty years older than me and I met her twenty years ago. Of course she looks much older now but to talk to I am never concious of any difference between us. She also looks nothing like me, having wavy red hair and perfect legs so that she can wear shorts with confidence.

She has never married and has no children but does have a rewarding career and many, many friends. Her closest companion is her parrot who is judged to be about thirty years old so has about a hundred left to go, ensuring that my friend, B..., spends many hours worrying about what will happen to it when she is gone. The parrot dominates her entire life and is horribly indulged. It is quite normal to have a phone chat with B.. interrupted by sudden shrieks of 'No, noooooo Parrot. Stop, Not THAT... Oh well, never mind. All right then..'. 'What on earth is going on?' 'Oh, it had climbed up the bookcase and was ripping the back off one of my first editions but it doesn't really matter....'. B... seems perfectly content with the way that her life has turned out and moans far less than anyone else I know.

This is ironic as another old friend, L..., always held up B... as an awful warning of someone who had made tragically short-sighted Life choices. L..., herself, was in fact American but she had married a famous English academic as his child bride and become naturalised. After a few years she tired of provincial university life and ran away to London, where she became a femme fatale. We were living in Norfolk and I had just had my second baby when my husband appeared one weekend, all jolly, and said that he had invited two 'new friends' to stay as he knew that I would 'love' them especially the girl, called L.. He had been introduced to them in a 'literary' London pub that we used to frequent and we had many people in common. So their staying would be really 'easy' and not have to involve me screaming and running about cleaning and then crying because I was so tired and had been up all night with the baby and hated everyone. He said. By the time they arrived I had, of course, been doing all these things and was in a terse mood. This was not helped by L.. being gorgeous, drifting about chain smoking and chain drinking and laughing tinkliely while saying 'God, you are so AMAZING looking after little children like that. I don't think I would ever have the patience.... Does anyone want to play croquet while the sun's setting? And let's take all the wine outside'. While I stomped off frumpily to put the children to bed. Made even more irritating by having to call L.. in to the phone twice, to talk to some suicidal man who she had left in London when, as it turned out, she 'ran away' to our house with her new lover. This lover was not only a great deal younger than L... but had been the protege (with an accent) of the suicidal telephoner and the whole thing was really mean. She ponced about constantly, always with drooping cigarette and glass of wine, saying smugly how 'terrible' she felt about hurting him and how 'difficult' it was that he loved her so much. I loathed her.

My husband adored her. I even found that he had told her that it would be such an awful loss to the world if she never had children that she should have one and give it to me to bring up. As she was too wild and amusing to do anything so dull herself. I was f@cking annoyed. A year or so later, with my children that much older, I returned to being rather more wild and amusing myself and on one of her steadily more frequent visits I began to warm to her. We found more and more in common and eventually we were as close as THAT. Typically my husband was then totally left out. Ha! I even drunkenly offered to bring up her children for her ... and I meant it. 'No, no. Of course I want to have a baby and be a real mother, just not quite yet. I'm not sure I've found the right man, (currently about the twentieth person to have fallen insanely in love with her since the year before), but I'll do something about it soon. I mean, my worst horror is to end up like B..., you know, to wake up and find that you've frittered your life away on love affairs and suddenly you're too old to have children'. This turned into a familiar refrain whenever I saw her, particularly if I had my daughters with me. 'Oh, they're sooo sweet. I long for a baby of my own. Don't want to end up like B... Ha,ha..'.

Meanwhile she had 'bolted' from man after man, any of whom would have been happy to marry her. She seemed to only enjoy being wooed and won, romantically. As soon as things settled down and became domestic she was looking round for another conquest. The latest lover knew her reputation only too well and the day after he asked her to marry him he locked her into his upstairs flat as he left for work. No use. She managed to climb dangerously out of a high window and fled to the arms of the next man she had her eye on. And this turned out to be the end. He was, cunningly, separated but unable to get divorced as his wife could just about bear to live without him but only if they stayed legally married. Every time he even hinted about moving the situation on she would threaten, or on several occasions attempt, suicide. Not only that but she and their children rang him constantly as if he was still living with them and called him round to check the boiler etc. as a matter of course. She and the children also had many ongoing and fascinating problems which kept him on the phone for hours in the evenings. L... was totally upstaged. She fell desperately and grovellingly in love with him.

Two years passed. When I saw her I was shocked, she was very, very thin and had a nervous, unselfconfident air. She was still chain smoking. 'His wife won't hear of a divorce - she never will. I really think we should be trying hard to have a baby but he isn't that keen. He hasn't said No but he doesn't care as he's got three children already. I feel a bit mad sometimes, we never, ever talk about me. It's either his problems or his family's problems, I just come second all the time'. 'Err - this is obviously not the best moment - but I'M pregnant again and I wondered if you'd like to be godmother?' 'What! But you promised that next time we'd be pregnant at the same time and do everything together'. 'I know but this was actually a complete accident and anyway I'm getting older too. I can't keep putting it off'. When my son was born I rang her. She was charming and seemed thrilled to be his godmother. She came round a week later and held him, wondering at his tiny nails. She never saw him again.

Over the next ten years I only met her on a tiny number of occasions and always by chance. She was still with the same man and the same situation and by the end she was in her forties and too old to have children. She never mentioned B..'s name any more and nor did I. It would have been too cruel.
- posted by Iris @ 3/20/2004 08:28:00 PM comment

 
Raining, luckily, as this was the day that I had marked for the start of the Spring gardening offensive and this year I so don't want to do it. I could spend the next month doing heavy digging and intensive weeding and it would still not be really under control. Get off that beach and take the first plane back here, hippie gardener, you know you want to.

I had, sadly, been seduced by 'The gnittuC Garden' as I have a spare patch of ground which would be perfect for it. She has turned this idea into a major, but still charming, industry and has a website, (moc.nedraggnittuceht.www), which sells seeds and plants as well as flower arranging stuff and things to wear while deadheading. I obviously grew out of the 'I am a romantic countrywoman standing in the sunshine with a trug filled with freshly cut roses' mental scenario many mud-caked years ago. So at least am never tempted by face-framing hats or special aprons with 'twine pockets'. My normal wear is a sweat-marked T-shirt and no socks. The only way to get through the hellish digging is to have some kind of dream vision spurring you on. Therefore......... the cutting garden!

I suppose I should have learnt my lesson about this as I pass various other overgrown corners which were my 'dreams' of earlier years. The 'fruit cage', which, due to stalling on my husband's part, ('To do this properly would cost at least £1,000, which we do not have'), was never actually caged and, although planted with carefully chosen varieties of bush fruit, now only provides early summer sustenance for hundreds of blackbirds who eat everything while still green. The banks of 'meadow flowers' on slopes that are too difficult to mow, which looked perfect the first year when I had planted the seed on bare fresh earth but have been slowly choked by grass until all the pretty wild plants have disappeared and only dandelion-like things remain. 'I hate these f@ckers, they are getting into all the lawns', my husband sets off with a massive plant-death spray. The ornamental pond, with solar water jet and centrepiece to a small rose garden, now somehow green and choked with weeds, (rashly imported by me from the stream when everything looked too bare), which I cannot clear out as two different kinds of spawn are wound amongst them. While the 'rose garden' has been horribly kicked about by the pheasants I encouraged to hide here during the shooting months and one of the crucial 'focal' clumps of rushes is flattened and broken. (A 'well-known trick of foxes' according to an article I came across by accident. There is about a mile of wild rushes only two fields away. Why has this bastard chosen my garden?).

The Spring digging hell was meant to have been solved a few years ago when I read about a 'garden tiller', light and compact and perfect for ladies. This miracle was so easy and fun to use that your plot would be immaculate in a trice and you would laugh at the idea of employing a gardener. So I bought one. It was okay the first year although it didn't start that instantly and involved a lot of mud and wild wrestling as it constantly veered off to the side. If you stopped moving for an instant it dug a huge hole straight down and then stuck, smoking scarily and would often wedge thin stones into its inside and then dare you to put your hand in. It also only ran on a peculiar ratio of oil to petrol and I quite soon lost the instructions and had to guess, 'Do NOT alter these quantities or your machine will be irretrievably damaged'. Could be that's what happened or could be that I got fed up with the whole thing and left it to rust in a damp shed. Who wants to garden as if you were riding a motorbike?

This year I decided to re-think what I actually used. Well, I do need flowers for the house and vast amounts of salad, (God knows how many pesticides are on supermarket stuff), and I really like green beans and runner beans are pretty and last for weeks and spinach and small carrots and lots of different herbs. While potatoes don't do well here because of the 'wilt' and I always plant endless rows and we only eat about a quarter and there are brilliant organic ones in the shop. So that is a massive boring chore removed in an instant. I will have a flower and salad garden. Exactly like the C..... G...... catalogue in fact. Surely I have not been influenced subliminally? (The 'frightfully amusing' vegetable of last year was Cavalo Nero, a dark cabbage-like thing whose seeds had to be specially imported from Tuscany and which was served at many a trendy table and greeted with awe. It tastes just like normal cabbage).

I had noticed that most of the young shoots in the vegetable garden had been eaten right down including all the parsley annoyingly. This garden is up behind the house and we have planted a small wood to the North of it. (You get grants for this and we have planted (or had planted) hundreds of tiny trees all over the farm). This wood was the first one, however, pre-grant, and I actually put in many of the trees and bushes myself, choosing romantic old varieties like ancient crab apples and wild pear with honeysuckle and 'wayside mix' wild flower seeds where it met the drive. So I like to wander in it, smugly, thinking, 'I made this'. (It is SMALL). For the last year, however, things have become a little stressful as the wood has been taken over by a rabbit. When we first came they were everywhere but not near the house. I love rabbits and was sorry when the population dwindled to nothing, probably because the shoot in the wood was rearing more pheasants and so many more foxes moved in. So .... when I first spotted a tiny rabbit in our wood I was thrilled. It must have been brought up there by a 'wild' cat and then got away. Quite quickly the rabbit grew vast and imposing. Every time I walked into 'my' wood he was sitting there, staring at me. If I saw him first I felt compelled to back away silently and go home or if I didn't he would throw himself hysterically into some prickly holly bushes so I felt guilty, and went home. I have pretty much given up going there and wasn't thinking about it until yesterday I was pottering along the drive, in fact pondering about varieties of salad, when far in front of me I saw a huge rabbity figure cross the path and, in a practised and purposeful manner, push through the hedge into the vegetable garden. Crap. Now it all falls into place - the general nibbling, the lack of parsley AND those droppings by the pond which I had attributed to a small, constipated deer. What shall I do? Not only was I actually feeling really happy about the new form of garden but fun seeds have already started arriving in the post. (Not Cavalo Nero). I can't bear to put in all that effort and then have all the seedlings eaten. There is no way of rabbit-proofing the hedge and also there is no way that I would hurt, or knowingly upset, the rabbit. Why is life never simple?


- posted by Iris @ 3/18/2004 10:21:00 AM comment

 
Another stressful thing is that while my daughter is away I stupidly promised to tape her favourite programmes, which are on six different channels and occasionally at the same time. This brings home the sadness of my future without every single silly, feel good, taking me out of myself series that I have watched for the last eight years or so. They have all just or are about to come to an end. How could this happen? None of the replacement shows are any use. 'piN n' ckuT'? 'The C.O.'? That idiotic one about match making? I can't even remember what they all are. I would rather turn the television off - I can't believe that I said that. I am about to tape 'legnA' now which is still going here but, I am whispering now, it isn't very good any more. A pale shadow which only serves to remind of those glory years. I can't even look at the last few episodes of Oz. You do not have to kill off most of the main characters after a five year series - you leave on a high, hopeful note, any dedicated viewer could tell you that. I'll have to go back to the Comedy Channel and watch re-runs of 'Cheers' and 'My Two Dads'.
- posted by Iris @ 3/16/2004 07:55:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
I have just spent some hours in hopeless panic mode about terrorist attacks on London. I can't bear the fact that we have this perfectly nice, totally safe house here which could withstand many forms of social breakdown and there is nobody in it but me. We even have a generator, (although it is never used as a colony of jackdaws have settled into the generator shed). We have an unlimited supply of wood, enough food and candles for at least a month and several shotguns. Also we are well enough known in the local town to be allowed to buy stuff when everything runs low - like in the last petrol crisis when 'strangers' calling at the garage were told that the pump was empty. Oh, and we have our own spring, so we don't even have to worry about poisoned water. AND the children refuse to come here. The words 'Don't be ludicrous' are used. I used to be like this when the ARI were bombing. I would ricochet between the heap of jelly state and the 'F@ck them I will not let them affect my life' state, several times a day. I suppose I am the most likely to be blown up anyway as I am constantly on the train.
- posted by Iris @ 3/16/2004 07:25:00 PM comment

 
Scary - the wonders of modern science. I pathetically still find it hard to believe that I can just ring my daughter's mobile number as normal and she answers while lying beside a pool in Thailand. 'Yes, what?', casually. 'Well I just wondered if you were okay as you have left THREE MESSAGES'. 'Oh they weren't for anything. I was bored yesterday and thought I would say Hello'.

I just noticed too late that there is a Webcam trained on the beach near the hotel on the first island they stayed on. How modern science is that? I could have actually watched my children sunbathing live in Thailand from the comfort of my own home. There is something not normal about this.
- posted by Iris @ 3/15/2004 10:32:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
Either I spend too much time alone, talking to myself inside my head, or I am going senile. I find it incredibly hard to remember if I have already written things here or just thought about writing them here. I would be very grateful if, tact aside, anyone who recognises stuff coming round again would point this out.

This is because I was inspired to talk about manure by Badger's post on that subject. Many years ago I was living in Oxford with a man to whom I later became engaged. I have not written about him yet but will eventually. (Or perhaps I have). This man, A..., was very social in a serious way which involved taking in big public events of 'The Season', like tocsA and yelneH. If you don't know, H...ly, is the smart rowing competition which takes place on the river at, surprise, H...ly near Oxford, every summer. Going to it involves vastly expensive tickets, dressing up insanely and then spending all day drinking champagne in striped marquees with your back to the water. I was with him, and happy to be, because he was my antidote to previous hippieness which had gone beyond all reason in my commune-like flat. I had finally been forced to move on when someone had shouted at me for going to the dentist, saying that anyone 'cool' would obviously be able to mend their own teeth by the power of their mind. (That couldn't be true, could it?). Anyway, a dedicated science student who laughed scornfully at any unproven fact was, at that time, just what I was looking for.

I had practically no money, possibly because I did not have a job - which are hard to come by in a university city. So I was forced to make most of my clothes from material I bought in the market. For H...ly I had excelled myself by copying a photograph out of eugoV. This involved a simple shift-type dress made from gorgeous embroidered material, (self-coloured restrainedly), and with the neck and sleeves bound with ribbon, also the same colour, restrainedly. But THEN, not only did I cover a large straw hat with the same material and bound with same ribbon BUT covered some old shoes with the material too. This may sound like crap on paper but in the flesh it looked very, very expensive. (It was after all lifted totally from some haute couture design).

This was the first time that I had been to H...ly and it was something of a disappointment. There wasn't very much to do as I couldn't give a f@ck about rowing and we didn't see anyone else that we knew. Still, it was pretty, I was perfectly dressed and I am always happy to spend a day drinking. Then, phew, someone was waving at us from the crowd. It was J..., an older man who owned a small and excruciatingly selective private school based in his country house outside Oxford. He occasionally employed A... to give one to one science tutorials and then to spend the evening amusing him with university gossip. With J... were two strange and intimidating figures. The man looked like a designer gypsy and the woman like a hippie supermodel with waist-length white blonde ringlets and vast false eyelashes. They were not smiling. Settled at a small table by the water J... and A... were nattering away about school and the woman was staring intensely at the rowers. I turned politely to the man. 'Err... so.... what do you do? Are you a teacher?', I said squeakily. (As if). He looked at me in a flat, contemptuous way. 'Not at all. I have made my entire fortune by selling manure'. 'Wow. How amazing'. He turned away from me and spoke to J.... The woman lent forward. 'I don't normally talk to rich bitches like you but I have to say I love your outfit. Where did you get it?' 'Rich? Are you insane? I made it myself with stuff from a market stall'. 'What! Is that true! Hey, D.........', she pulled at the man's sleeve, 'Did you hear that? She made all her clothes herself, like me ... and she's not rich at all'. 'Really?'. A warm smile crossed his scary features. 'Me and C... here were having a pretty crap day. It's so intimidating being surrounded by all these arseholes'. From that day onwards C.... and D... became two of my closest friends. (I will explain about their life-style some other time).
- posted by Iris @ 3/15/2004 01:26:00 PM comment

 
This reminds me of an odd moment just after 9/11. I happened to be in a shopping mall when the announcement came that we should stand in silence for three minutes to show our respect for the dead. The whole place immediately stopped and a total hush descended. Then, far in the distance, came the tapping sound of heels on marble and right through the central corridor, the noise ridiculously loud in the stillness, swept a puzzled-looking woman dressed in flowing black Arab robes.
If I could have taken a photograph of her whisking through the ranks of motionless Western people I think I could have sold it to a newspaper to encapsulate the feelings of that day.
- posted by Iris @ 3/15/2004 11:56:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
I have just observed the three minutes silence for Spain, in front of the TV. This moment is slightly marred by my pondering 'What on earth are they thinking?'. If you were a terrorist and you set off bombs a few days before an election where the pro-war party were certain to win and then not only were they thrown out and the anti-war party surprisingly elected but this party's first statement was that they would immediately withdraw from Iraq. Surely you would then think, terroristly, 'Gosh, that worked really, really well. We must do this again some time'.
- posted by Iris @ 3/15/2004 11:44:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Anyway..........

L.... is in fact only half Jewish but the strange thing is that his father, foreign and Jewish, was bouncy and happy, totally positive at all times and without a care in the world. While his mother, English and not Jewish, was filled with a strange lingering melancholy and spent much time alone, brooding and reading books about the H0loc@ust. His father arrived in England after the War penniless after some horrific form of escape from persecution. He stepped off the boat at Dover and went to a cafe where he was forced to share a table with a shy young girl sitting alone. He struck up a conversation in his forward, foreign, twinkly way and by the time they had finished their tea they were madly in love. Her snobbish, middle-class family were furious and said that they would disown her unless she gave him up. So within a few months they were married and lived happily ever after. The family DID disown her and she hardly saw them again for the rest of her life but she didn't care because she adored her husband so much. And by some major effort of work and forward thinking he quite soon became a millionaire by buying up cheap warehouses and investing in the import/export market.

L... had a childhood of ridiculous privilege and luxury. At one point while on a train journey along the Mediterranean coast his father was struck by the attractive skyline of Monte Carlo. He bustled the family off at the next station and swiftly bought a large waterfront appartment - just to have - before resuming their trip. Everything would have been wonderful except for some rather large flaws. One was his older brother, who was a complete bastard. He was odd and nasty and I think probably does have borderline Asperger's Syndrome in its unpleasant form. He made L...'s life miserable in a thousand tiny ways and obviously exacerbated the other flaw which was the crippling lack of self esteem thing. As he got older being so rich also wasn't always good.
It was wearing and embarrassing to have so much more money than everyone else he knew. In those days England wasn't the best place to be nouveau riche. I found that a friend's brother had been to the same university. 'Did you know L....? What did you think of him?'. 'Oh... that playboy ... I never spoke to him. Well obviously we had nothing in common'. If only he had known. L... had the clothes and the car but he did not have the personality. He spent most of his university years reading in his room or driving his amazing car around by himself. Even the girl that he longed for wouldn't have him. She told people that he was too flashy and probably insincere. Ahhhh - L..., the most straightforward and old fashionedly romantic man I know.

This all reinforced his feeling that he couldn't cope with strangers and that everyone basically thought that he was crap. As he didn't need to work he never did. 'An OFFICE', he said ' How could I work in an OFFICE. There are other people there - all the time'. And he wasn't joking. He sold his beautiful house when he married again and just keeps a tiny basement flat in London. He lives a modest, almost spartan life now. He goes everywhere by bicycle and when alone here lives off vegetables from the market and the occasional half-bottle of wine. Spends a lot of time brooding and reading books about the H0loc@ust.

He is occasionally roused by some bizarre onslaught on his peaceful life by his older brother although I think after the last one they are no longer speaking. Their father died very suddenly and unexpectedly after a minor operation. He was buried in a charming cemetary outside London in a tiny garden-like plot surrounded by railings. Their mother was distraught and retired to the appartment in Monte Carlo where she lived alone for the rest of her days. Visited regularly and dutifully by L... and just about never by the selfish older brother. While visiting L... in London years later she became ill and died after few weeks, having been totally looked after by him as the brother was abroad. He arranged a quiet cremation, with her few remaining friends following him out to his father's grave where she could at last be reunited with the love of her life. They were grouped in the little garden, with the priest about to oversee the scattering of the ashes, when there was a wild hooting sound. A taxi screeched to a halt in the middle of the cemetary and L..'s brother leapt out. 'Stop, stop... L... , quickly, come here'. He rushed forward and snatched the urn from L..'s hands. 'I must take this immediately', lowered his voice to a mutter, 'Do you have NO idea? Mother is still registered as a citizen of Monte Carlo. If her body is buried in England all her money will be taken in taxes. We have to consider this whole matter at a later date'. With that he ran back to the taxi, still carrying the ashes, and zoomed away. The mourners were left staring, in a state of shock. When L... consulted a lawyer he was told that everything his brother had said was total nonsense. In spite of shouting phone calls and furious letters L...'s mother's ashes are still in his brother's posession three years later. Resting God knows where.
- posted by Iris @ 3/14/2004 04:22:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
What...what...what? I was rambling on about to embark on a long description of L... , when the screen froze and then turned black. I had to turn the computer off and when I put it back on and re-logged in not only was my unsaved writing still there but it had published itself. I think I will retire for a little as that luck does not happen twice.
- posted by Iris @ 3/14/2004 11:49:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
I might enlarge a little on this friend, who I will call 'L....' as that is not his name. One of the reasons that we bonded was our shared research into why on earth we are so unselfconfident. He makes me think of the story of the Sl..ping Be@uty's christening. A string of fairies must have come forward and showered him with intelligence, charm, good looks, kindness, empathy, sporting prowess and a loving and millionaire father. Then a black-cloaked figure limped up and offered her gift of ridiculous, crawling, lack of self-esteem. Why? How.. could he possibly feel like that? I thought my lack of self-belief was beyond all reason but he is a thousand times worse. We have sat around indulgently discussing this over the years and can only conclude that it is genetic. There is not a single person in my family who isn't cheerful and outgoing. Even the grandfather who was reclusive did it in a tough, smug selfish way.
- posted by Iris @ 3/14/2004 11:23:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
One of my closest friends in the world is about to return to London after six months away. I first saw him as a photograph in a magazine about twenty years ago and fell instantly and unrequitedly in love with him. This isn't as random as it seems as I was only looking at the picture because the accompanying article was about some people I knew who were his business partners. I kept his image in the back of my mind until about a year later, at one of their parties, there he was. He was unhappily married to an incredibly beautiful girl, (like a younger and even better version of ecadnaC negreB), and hopelessly in love with his childhood sweetheart who was also incredibly beautiful in a Jaqueline ttessiB way. (I can't think of anyone more recent because they did weirdly look practically like twins of those two actresses when young). Sadly, and as it emerged very annoyingly, both his wife and mistress were not only slightly mad but manipulative and not incredibly bright. Under the circumstances there was no way he was adding in an extra element. 'Look, please, please don't be in love with me I just can't deal with it. What I really want is a woman FRIEND'. 'Oh......... well... all right then'. It wasn't quite like that but nearly. We 'clicked' totally at first conversation and I became his confidante and he mine and have been ever since. There is nothing too intimate or embarrassing for us to 'share' and the only drawback is that he has a depressive personality, so too long a stretch in his company can leave me feeling drained.

He eventually divorced and married a South American woman who was accidentally pregnant with his child. She turned out to be, not mad, but manipulative and even less bright than the others and he still yearns for the elusive childhood sweetheart. He now spends half of each year in South America, which keeps our friendship fresh, and we don't write or e-mail while he is away because it makes seeing each other more interesting. He is Jewish and is one of only a tiny number of people left in the world with his surname as the rest died in the camps.

Funny creature - I will write more about him maybe but ................ the sun has finally come out.
- posted by Iris @ 3/13/2004 02:03:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
As I can never in a million years put a photograph of myself here because the only pleasure of this is that no one in England knows about it. I thought , instead, I would reveal the source of my basic wardrobe - how exciting is that? I have bought clothes from this catalogue for about four years and this season they do look unusually plain and ordinary BUT every time I wear one of their things someone says 'Where did you get that?'. Also you might think that they are very expensive BUT they put out the catalogue so early that they are having their sale just when you actually want to buy stuff and by then it is less than half price. So............... I am writing this backwards, naturally. ku.oc.tsopybtsaot.www.
- posted by Iris @ 3/13/2004 01:15:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
I am trying the writing little sections method. The fog has cleared away and, (as in bizzarro world), not only has the snow melted and totally disappeared within a few hours but it is now raining and quite warm.

I was very struck by an article about French women who, apparently, make themselves happy at a shallow level by having all the tiny things in their daily lives as perfect as they can be. Like always having an immaculate pedicure; drinking minute cups of rare and expensive coffee; using an antique fountain pen; filling the house with fresh flowers and ...... always wearing a haunting and delicious perfume. Unfortunately, when I have tried living like this I have found that it is true. The down side is that I am too lazy to keep it up, even, incredibly, not 'getting round' to spraying on some scent in the mornings. How could I be so pathetic? I ask myself. One reason might be that I have never found a 'daytime' scent that I really like. I am drawn to exotic, musky perfumes which one would wear at night in the harem and find most light 'fresh' scents remind me more of something that you might use to air the lavatory.

I thought that maybe pure flower essences would be good and spent ages sampling the whole nogilahneP range one morning in sdorraH. Although very expensive they still had that peculiar 'cleans where other bleaches cannot reach' under current. I could have been distracted by the fact that their counter is oddly sited near the bottom of the famous naitpygE escalator with its shrine to Princess D.... and D.... F.... The other place for this is 'oJ enolaM' whose shop happens to be very near my doctor, so I forced myself to brave hundreds of intrusive assistants (mostly male, weirdly), and also go through their stock, sniffing from countless tiny spills of paper. It was all vaguely 'wrong'. But I was too wet to leave with nothing (there is a scary person on the door) so I bought 'Gardenia', really too heavy for daytime and with a touch of 'the under current' and 'Red Roses', pleasant but reminiscent of your granny. I almost bought a 'Red Roses' room candle to mask the smell of cat food in my bedroom but luckily checked the price first which was FIFTY POUNDS for a 6" by 4" lump of wax. Who buys this stuff?


Perhaps the only answer is to have a perfume specially mixed just for me. I know that you can and that it is really, really expensive. But if I add up all the different scents that I buy over the years and then leave to rot maybe it would work out cheaper in the end. The one that I wear at night now is 'ocoC' and I have liked it for years. Before that it was a scent called 'tidnaB' by Robert teugiP which was suddenly withdrawn from Europe and then only sold in Russia, inexplicably. My older daughter stomped downstairs rattily one day and thrust a bottle of Chanel 19 at me. 'You'd better have this as I can't wear it apparently'. 'What do you mean?' 'The others say it makes them go all squiggly as it makes them think I'm you'. I had completely forgotten that I used to wear that perfume all the time when they were little but had not used it for more than ten years. Also my middle daughter found that she was feeling odd and uncomfortable with her boyfriend one evening and suddenly realised that he was wearing a new aftershave which was the one that her brother always used. He had to go and wash it off before she could bring herself to touch him.

I am not very concious of scents and can put up with unemptied rubbish bins etc. better than most but perhaps I would be happier without the lingering cat pee and burnt toast hovering at the back of my brain. I am using the 'Red Roses' as a bedroom spray plus primulas in pots and keeping a subtle hint of 'Gardenia' for de-stressing on the train. (By the way - a good 'natural' antidote to cat smells is to lightly scorch a twig of rosemary; it is a bit medicinal but overpowers other scents easily. I discovered this by dropping one on the hot plate accidentally).

- posted by Iris @ 3/12/2004 05:23:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
I feel so sad and angry about about the bombing in Spain. It is the country I feel closest to in a way as my parents used to take me on holiday there every year right through my childhood and I also wandered around romantically for a few months with my boyfriend as a teenager. Also my son is meant to be spending time in Madrid when he gets back. An acquaintance is leading a ground-breaking experiment in reproducing an ancient naitpygE tomb down to the last detail and said that my son could come and observe, make coffee etc. while sampling Madrid clubbing, I mean cultural life. I suppose they are not so likely to do anything else for a while after somethng like that.

ATE are very close to the ARI which is why I feel especially mad and obsessive about it. I'm surprised Hollywood hasn't made a film about their romantic struggle. The two groups exchange information and weapons and some top ARI man is/was married to an ATE 'freedom fighter' woman.

How CAN these people think that their minuscule concerns are worth devoting their lives to? Is it just that they can't bear to face up to their total insignificance in world terms. Have you ever taken in the actual size of Southern Ireland compared to the noise they make? It was brought home to me when we were on holiday in Corsica. There were BOMB ALERTS, as the 'Free Corsica from the Yoke of the Foreign Invader', (France in about 200 BC.), separatist organisation was 'active'. And they did actually blow up some cafes and holiday villas. You sit there thinking, 'You unbelievably sad bastards. You have NOTHING real to complain about. Face up to that fact and f@ck off'.
- posted by Iris @ 3/12/2004 11:36:00 AM comment

 
I haven't written much as seem to be in a state of suspended animation. This is partly the weather. By March ideas of Spring, warmth, planting things or even opening the windows are at the front of my brain but as this is not possible I have switched off from the present and rest in waiting mode.

Yesterday there was a BLIZZARD WARNING. For f@cks sake. We are all really bored with this. Winter is OVER. I begged a ride to the shops to stock up (mostly for animals as I keep neurotically stocked all the time in case the world comes to an end suddenly). I think the weather persons are just keeping themselves from being sued as they constantly now over-estimate the severity of cold fronts etc. Settled cosily in bed with electric blanket, coffee, toast, books, new magazines and cats arranged on and under covers in a non-aggression pact, I waited smugly for 'things' to get going. The forecast had had a tense- looking man posed in front of pictures of buried cars etc., saying that gale force winds were coming from the North with serious snow drifting and NO ONE should even think of driving no matter what. After hours had passed and cats had wandered off and I had read the magazines, a light wind sprang up and , all right, it DID snow for about an inch or two. Out of decency I forced myself out into the 'storm' and piled up bird supplies of old crusts, plate scrapings and ancient cheese from the fridge which I afterwards realised was low fat so not ideal in the circumstances. (Strangely, a huge blackbird instantly took over the food pile and beat off all comers meanly until they gave up at dusk. This morning most of the food is still there. I have never seen them do that before except to other blackbirds).

I woke up today to a particularly depressing sight. There is deepish snow everywhere but it is quite hard to tell as there is also a thick FOG! I can't remember that ever happening before. Crap.

I realised that one reason I don't write so much is that every time I have to make an effort to go to the computer specially. I can see that most people dash off odd thoughts while they are at the computer anyway, as well as their longer thought-out pieces. A large proportion only blog while they are at work. I constantly think of things I would like to say and write them in detail in my head. Then an hour or so later I have either totally forgotten the whole thing, as my brain has filed it away as done, or I can't be bothered to 're-write' it all over again. I have been trying to deal with my 'all or nothing' tendencies about everything. Either I do something intensively or not at all. This is totally stupid and makes me stressed and brooding. I will make a Spring Resolution. FIND SHADES OF GREY. ONE STEP AT A TIME. A PILE OF LITTLE THINGS MAKES ONE BIG THING, (or falls over and leaves little things messing up the floor - NO, no it doesn't). As soon as this idiotic snow f@cks off I will go out and dig up a small patch of garden and plant a small number of the bulbs that are hidden in the back of my wardrobe as I couldn't face dealing with them in the Autumn in pouring rain. AND - a ray of sunshine has just appeared behind the mist.


- posted by Iris @ 3/12/2004 11:08:00 AM comment

 
Back. The two younger children are safely in Thailand and have rung me to prove it. They are staying on one of the islands in a hotel belonging to a friend's brother, who went native there about twenty years ago. Then on to a smaller island to stay with my daughter's old school friend who has also gone native. She is very pretty, clever and has rich, loving parents and yet has chosen to live alone in this tiny place and become a professional deep-sea diver. What is it with that? Several of the childrens' friends and two of mine have done variations of the same thing. I have too much pointless imagination to want to mess around in the depths, not to mention a horror of anything snake-shaped. Also, I was reading the travel guide about Thailand and the weather there is not ideal. For about six months of the year it appears to be either raining or suffering 'violent storms' as well as tropical heat. I am praying that it won't be idyllic enough for my son to abandon all thought of university. The only gardener I ever managed to find down here, ( and keep with excesses of charm, niceness and non-interference), suddenly announced last Spring that he 'couldn't take the climate any longer' and was going to Thailand for a month. He never returned.
- posted by Iris @ 3/10/2004 12:13:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
OMG - while distracted by stuff I forgot to pass on a really annoying thing. A friend of my husband's is a literary agent who has had unexpected and well documented luck recently. Riding high on this he has turned his attention to the new and fascinating (to him) world of blogs. He has signed up and got a HUNDRED THOUSAND POUND advance for an English woman's blog. (You know what I think of most of these and this is no exception). I will give the name here and you can see what you think. Guess what - it has an unusual twist - she is a H00KER!! How original and worth reading that makes her. ruojedelleB-uk.blogspot. I found it by just typing in B...d...J... if that doesn't work. Badger, you could run off an American version of this in your sleep.
- posted by Iris @ 3/03/2004 03:54:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
Oh dear - while I am having a small life crisis my husband's family have gone into free fall. In the past week two of my husband's closest relatives have died suddenly. One was his 'aunt' who although not actually a relative had lived with his real aunt for most of their adult lives in a non-lesbian, old fashioned, jolly hockey sticks kind of way. She was an Englishwoman of the old school, always brave and cheerful and on retiring at the age of sixty she began to roam the world on adventure holidays on her own. At one point finding the source of the Nile or something when over eighty. She also served on many secret food industry committees and was our source for the information that the French have been concealing B.S.E. for years. She died from one day to the next while planning yet another trip. Apart from his father she was the last of that generation of his once large family.

Also last week his cousin died of cancer. He was more like a brother to my husband as the two families both had two boys and if they hadn't been slightly different ages you would have thought one of them had been swapped at birth. My husband and this cousin both had fair hair and were not totally thin. They both went to the same university, had the same rather selfish and socially ambitious world view and loved food and drink and upper class country life. Their two brothers are both dark, very thin, strongly religious and keen on charity work, went to more unfashionable universities because they didn't care about social life, are uninterested in making money and live in the centre of town. The illness was like one of those joke scenarios - he mentioned to his doctor in passing that he had a mild backache and was told that he had six months to live. I didn't specially like him as he was rather name-droppy and rude but he has a very nice wife and was one of the most amusing raconteurs I have ever met. Last time I saw him he was telling stories of his friendship with Jacques itaT who he came across when working on one of his films as an extra years ago and we were all crying with laughter. Oh well..................

My husband's brother rang today to say that the house next door to them had burnt to the ground during the night and had caused thousands of pounds worth of damage to their house. Which they had just finished rebuilding so that they could let part of it. He also mentioned that he was already a bit fraught as last week the woman on his other side had collapsed in the garden with a brain haemorrage when he was alone at home and had to drive her to hospital. This had turned into a huge saga and main news item when her hurriedly summoned husband had been attacked by a madman as he ran down the corridor to her room, hampered by a massive bunch of flowers. 'Wife dies as husband lies unconcious outside her door' said the papers. We had no idea that my husband's brother was waiting in the room at the time.

I am carefully not speculating on what is going to happen next. Fate seems to be doing quite well on its own.
- posted by Iris @ 3/03/2004 01:08:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
It is worrying that tiredness and not eating have such an effect on one's moods. Of course things seem much better today and at first light even, my brain was sorting out plans for my son's happy and successful university career. But how often are you making decisions while feeling on top form? Never probably. So the smaller paths that you take through life are usually chosen in a random and stupid manner, although you think you are being reasonable. Hmm ... that may finally explain how I got where I am today

As it was, by chance, the day for my lift to the supermarket I thought that I would buy anything I really liked and eat it all. Forgetting guilt or diets. Apparently if you do this with small children they automatically settle for quite reasonable life sustaining things after a short time. When I got back I had chosen, (for this one day), boiled eggs with thick white toast and huge amounts of butter and strong coffee. Then for lunch scallops and bacon in a garlic, cream and white wine sauce with spinach (which took 'literally' five minutes to make from raw, I must do this more often) and then organic plum yoghourt. Dinner was beef stew with different root vegetables and cauliflower cheese and parsley mashed potatoes and afterwards fresh sharon fruit. And drinking orange, mango and banana mixed juice. That all looks quite well-balanced and healthy and not THAT fattening if you keep the portions down. Except as it is some of my favourite food I ate so much stew etc. that I had to lie down fainting with fullness and couldn't even have a cat resting on me for some time. Crap. I knew this would happen. I will have to follow the example of yerduA nrubpeH with her one piece of chocolate cake a month and space out my 'food I really like' days with the precision of a surgeon. (Although actually wasn't she totally anorexic and probably thought that even having cake once a month was a terrifying slip into obesity?).

I have stunned my brain with food rather than whisky so that it can reprogramme all my thoughts and file things in peace and I can start tomorrow fresh and sensible and take a wide, straight, gently sloping path into the future.
- posted by Iris @ 3/03/2004 12:28:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Everything is going horribly craply. All these years I have somehow believed that things always eventually worked out for the best and mostly they did and now they are not. My son's interview did not go well. I went to London on the train yesterday evening. Washed clothes, found vital pieces of paper and letters from University etc. and packed them into a neat small rucksack. Discussed his appearance and chose garments that looked tidy and respectful but not sad or too unfashionable. Went over everything in CV and copied sample painting from internet, stuck it onto black card beautifully and then placed in pre-bought display pocket ready for interview discussion. Had bracing midnight talk about how clever and handsome and nice and perfect for the course he is, (true). Persuaded older daughter who was at this university and did this subject to come with us to make things easy. Got up vilely early, made breakfast, kept son and daughter to military time-table so that we caught perfect train and sat in perfect quiet compartment and went over his CV again and found taxi in plenty of time and arrived perfectly. I sat on a wall outside so as not to look as if his mother was with him and my daughter went in just in case a lecturer recognised her and thought better of my son for it. (They didn't).

Then the interview did not go well. They didn't ask any of the type of questions that the prospectus said they would or that the university help book said they would. They asked him nothing about his personal life or really about the CV. They asked academic test-type things and wanted detailed answers about stuff that he learnt two years ago and couldn't remember well. This is a huge subject and there is no way he could have revised all this and it is TOTALLY NOT what they implied would happen. He got panicky too when he saw how it was going and had two brain freeze moments of crucial unfortunateness. As both my daughters did this subject I do know perfectly objectively that he would be brilliant at it and the university would be thrilled with him. His teachers at school gave him a really good reference and were keen to go on helping. And it is all not going to work out. Why is Life so cruel? I said before, he always seems to have bad luck in this low level dreary way. With him I never for a minute feel that I can sit back and let things take their course. I am always doing damage limitation or encouraging or thinking how to change some situation from negative to positive. But he is the nicest person in the world with many, many exceptional qualities. I know this is boring but I don't know what to do next. He so doesn't deserve to feel a failure and have to reapply and waste another year when he is actually cleverer than his sisters and got the one low grade by chance. I hate everything today. Especially smug, dull, over promoted academics.

Synchronicity. On the train I read out a piece from a newspaper about a Dept. Head at this university saying that they were automatically binning applications from people with double-barrelled names to try to keep the number of private school candidates down. And they were letting in poorer children with ridiculously low grades. 'Oh Great. Why am I even bothering with this interview?', said my son. I was sitting on the wall outside for about ten minutes before my daughter came back. Two people from opposite directions met just in front of me. 'So Colin, how are things going?'. 'Not so well. Some newspaper has picked up remarks I made about letting in children with low grades and printed them totally out of context. The whole thing is about to stir up a huge row with the private schools all over again'.

This is one of those days when I feel that a downward spiral has started. Perhaps spending almost the entire twelve hours on various trains hasn't helped. The children went back to London and I came here. There is still snow round the house and nowhere else in the entire county. 'By God, that's weird', said the taxi driver. It mirrors my life. And ........... when that book quiz said that I am 'The noiL, the W..... and the W............obe', one reason was that I was coming out of a long winter of the spirit. Well - obviously NOT.


- posted by Iris @ 3/01/2004 09:32:00 PM (0) comments comment