TV.
Last night was the first programme of this year's 'giB rehtorB'. I like it and I always watch quite a lot of it and I don't care who knows it. I always find the little details of other people's lives fascinating, which is why I read blogs and why I took part in the first 'efiL pawS' for that magazine years ago.

This one looks quite promising but with a rather bizarre g@y bias. Out of twelve people - four are g@y. As the programme is meant to vaguely mirror British society that is something of a surprise. I think that in the past the g@y contestants have always given 'good television' and always lasted through to the final weeks. Last year was fine by me but apparently seen as boring by the general public - as they had made the apparently hideous mistake of choosing a set of pleasant, attractive, not totally stupid people who were nice to each other. OMG - that must never happen again! So now they have picked out a collection who are all almost guaranteed to set each other's teeth on edge and who mostly pride themselves on 'telling it how it is' etc.. I find that much less interesting. I far prefer to watch a group fall apart who originally seemed civilised and perfectly suited.

I also watched some of the American B... B..... last year. What do you think it says about our two countries that the American programme is set up as the exact opposite of ours? Here the internal nominations for who is thrown out each week are kept strictly private to the point that anyone who hints in even the tiniest way, raised eyebrow, head tilt etc., to another contestant about who they are voting for is warned and in one case forced to leave. They are not allowed to take in writing materials or even books in case they use them to indicate or influence another person's eviction choice.

Whereas ... in America the entire programme is about ganging up and forming alliances to ensure that you have back-up to stay in and someone else is seen as a threat. They talk constantly about who they are going to nominate and manipulate, lie and bitch the whole time. In the last one a girl even slept with someone on camera to ensure her survival and then the next morning he voted her out. In England the contestants walk out into vast cheering crowds and fireworks etc. In America they ooze through a door, alone, into an empty interview room. At the end of the English one the winner goes through all the above magnified a hundred times and meets the previous contestants on an outdoor stage - everyone hugging and weeping. In America they appear, again, in the empty studio with the previous contestants sitting silently on a row of chairs. Last year some couldn't even bring themselves to congratulate the winner as they said that in order to win she had behaved like such a devious bitch they never wanted to see her again - and this included her boyfriend on the outside, who said he now had '..reservations' about their future together.

Of course the American one is much more dramatic, so the differences probably have no more meaning than that the American producers are better at keeping viewers glued to the screen.
- posted by Iris @ 5/29/2004 09:49:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
B1rthday.
It is my older daughter's b1rthday today and she is in London and I am here. My son is here too so she managed to wake up this morning in an empty flat. This is not as cruel and uncaring as it seems as she had originally said she would be in the country this weekend - it is a holiday one - but then the dullness of this compared to several parties happening there became apparent. My husband and other daughter both had to leave for work really early too, by chance, but left her a decorated sitting room with piles of presents and flowers, so it isn't soo bad. Also she had managed to have a little quarrel with her boyfriend and they are 'not speaking' - on her BIRTHDAY how could he? (Or 'Yay!' Is this the first crack ...?).

When they were VERY little if their birthdays were on some really inconvenient day, when their father had to be away or something, I would just tell them that their bithday was on the Saturday before it really was. This seemed sensible and normal at the time but now actually seems rather odd and not very nice ....

My older daughter should really have been born yesterday, 27th May, but the labour dragged on over midnight because of the hospital's incompetence. I went into strong labour in the evening of 26th May - so any fool can see that in no way should it have lasted so long. She was finally dragged out by forceps at 1.00 am on 28th May and I still feel annoyed that her birthday hasn't got a seven in it like mine and my other daughter's. Also the hour's time lapse means that she doesn't have an exact synchronicity connecting her to another close friend although it is still strange. While I was in labour this friend, the future husband of one of my dearest girlfriends, died, from one minute to the next, of a freak and totally unexpected br@in h@emorr@ge. In fact he died in the late evening of 27th May - just when she should have been born. The girlfriend immediately became her godmother, although I hadn't originally intended it, and they have had a strong bond all my daughter's life.
- posted by Iris @ 5/28/2004 11:25:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Religion.
A little country news. Our pr1me m1n1ster has decided to prop up his popularity in his own party by returning to the vital question of gnitnuH and attempting to force through an anti bill using some dusty and ancient 'right' which everyone had forgotten existed.

With admirable cunning some wily country folk have realised that the smilsuM and the sweJ are allowed, within their religions, to do things to animals which are otherwise normally described as 'f@cking cruel'. Just as, or more, cruel than what happens to a country fox. So they have set up 'The Church of the edisyrtuoC' as a new religion and only need 7,000 signatures to make it legal - which they will get just like that.. This 'Church' is marketed as tapping into the timeless spirit of the traditional countryside, with all its rituals and forms of dress. And this means that they can take their case to international courts and fiddle about legally indefinitely.

The whole thing is quite amusing I thought - rather like the 'H0me Gu@rd' and the wart1me spirit for which we were once so famous. The only drawback for me is that the Head and founder of this new church turns out to be someone we know slightly. Who lives VERY near to our house. The ant1 people are numerous and fanatical and also may not have totally accurate maps. Perhaps I should pin a notice at the top of the drive explaining, in big letters, my feeble and fence-straddling attitude to this whole question. In the hope that they will pause to read it before roaring up and f1re-b0mbing my house.
- posted by Iris @ 5/27/2004 10:29:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Life.
I was just thinking 'What would you do if this was your last week on earth? Would you rush around wildly ... and get in touch with hundreds of people ... and say many crucial things?'. And if so why don't you 'Live each day as if it were your last' which is obviously really sensible advice? Because I realised that if it were my final few moments here I would lie about reading and pretending that it wasn't actually happening. I have said everything crucial I ever wanted to say already and if I had really wanted to do anything surely I would have made some tiny gesture towards doing it by now? It is quite unnerving to realise that you are totally lazy even when staring into the jaws of de@th. (Lucky I wasn't the only 'One' capable of saving eladynnuS).

When the 'yag eugalp' first appeared the facts were rather vague and blurred so that just about everyone paranoidly thought that they might be carrying it. (I can't write its name backwards as that would be similar to the Fench spelling. Stupid French - why can't they just use the same word as everyone else. Bloody foreigners. Oops - now I will be going to prison. A court here has just ruled that if you call someone a b... f.... it is a horrific raci@l slur, meriting the harshest punishment. It is as if they are TRYING to stir up resentment where it never existed .... in England you tack those two words onto the end of any conversation about 'abroad' as a matter of course. Another of our fine traditions lost for ever ..). Anyway, the main comfort that many people drew from this was that for the last year or so of their lives they would be really thin and finally have a perfect figure. As if, in a teeny way, it would be almost worth it. I even read something similar in an obituary of someone who had died of cancer. It said something like, 'At least, towards the end, she drew some comfort from the fact that she had regained her girlish silhouette'. I am glad that I am now mature enough to say, 'F@ck my silhouette. I would rather be fat and alone but alive'.
- posted by Iris @ 5/27/2004 09:56:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Coffee.
This is now the thirteenth day in a row with brilliant sunshine and NO RAIN. When I glanced into the mirror I saw that I had reached that familiar early summer moment when my winter-dulled hair had lightened and skin darkened to become exactly the same colour. An unfortunate choice of beige T-shirt completed the look and a huge weevil was staring back at me. Maybe the interim answer is very heavy eye make-up and definitely no pale clothing.

I then moved on to pondering about the coffee I was holding and how I now buy the riaF edarT brand although it is not the nicest. You can probably tell that I am pretty self-involved and carefree about world problems but when you are staring at thirty different bags of coffee on a supermarket shelf and one is marketed as the choice of any decent person and the others are plainly 'big business' only - then what can you do. My one tiny sacrifice for the general good.

I was also thinking about the way that Britain seems to have abandoned so many of its little traditions and rules about daily living. When you read books like T1m P@rks' autobiographical descriptions of life in Italy, where it is unheard of to have milky coffee after 11.00 am, and compare it to here where just about everyone appears to be on a totally personal eating and drinking regime it is like another, older world. When I was at school in C@mbr1dge one of our annual October amusements was to hang around in the china department of the biggest store and watch the sad, twitchy new undergraduates milling about choosing their teapots. Obviously, for most of them, the first domestic purchase they had ever made and - as it would be used so often and would be constantly on show - a defining signal of their level of coolness. They would stand for hours apparently with their brains spinning out of control, picking up pot after pot. Modern? Retro? Ironic? Aaargh. I can't decide but I can't leave without one - if only my mother was here ...

Now, not only have teapots disappeared from the lives of anyone under thirty but so has tea. Apart from a fashion for milkless Asian or herbal infusions, everyone seems to drink coffee twenty-four hours a day. And at 'tea-time', which has also mostly ceased to exist, it is probably more normal to be topping up your two litres a day water intake. It all adds to that floating, uprooted feeling that so many younger people seem to have but then again my daughter's Italian best girlfriend chooses to live here. 'All those stupid 'rules', who on earth can stand to be told what tiny thing they're meant to be doing every minute? That's why I got out'.
- posted by Iris @ 5/25/2004 10:01:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Drinking.
If this turns out to be true then I want to hit myself over the head repeatedly. Over the last few weeks my husband has become more and more 'normal', with no strange mood swings, manic shouting, rudeness or irrational selfish behaviour. This has coincided with him visiting an @cupunctur1st for back pain and her telling him that he is in very bad physical shape because HE DRINKS TOO MUCH. She managed to really frighten him and he immediately went onto the yaH di3t and cut down his habitual daily drinking to a whisper.

I was talking to my daughter on the phone saying, 'What's up with D@ddy? He just spent the weekend here and was totally nice the whole time - like another person. He even asked if I minded him playing blasting opera at breakfast and when I rolled my eyes HE DIDN'T PUT IT ON!'. 'Hello', she said, 'he's NOT DRINKING'.

It just can't, can't be that simple ... He can't have ruined all these years of our lives with his erratic nastiness when just by NOT DRINKING he would have snapped back to the pleasant, kindly person I first met. I had no idea that that person was still in there. I obviously realised that drink played a part in his personality change but I imagined that there were lots of other outside factors and that the new horrid person was the real him coming out.

Also, if he can cut down his drinking so drastically from one day to the next then he isn't even a real alcoholic - it was just a habit. So he could have done this AT ANY TIME if I had realised and worked out how to trigger it.

I am hitting myself over the head as we speak. And then I am off to hit our doctor, who, when I spoke to him in desperation a couple of years ago. Saying please could you talk to my husband next time he comes in and tell him that he is drinking too much but without revealing that I have asked you. Replied, 'Too much? Oh I don't know, he has never seemed particularly drunk when I've met him in the evenings. Do you think you might be exaggerating a little?'. (They are old friends). And then when my daughter had an appointment a week later he said to her, casually breaking his oath of confidentiality I notice, 'So your mother was here worried about your father's drinking. I don't think he really drinks that much, do you?'. When she said, 'Well actually, he DOES drink a lot', he smiled patronisingly and said 'Let's just see how it goes, shall we?'. Or in our-world speak 'I don't want to do anything about this because it is embarrassing as I know him socially and anyway Iris is obviously being naive and hysterical - da, da, daaa and I don't care anyway ...'.
- posted by Iris @ 5/24/2004 09:55:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Synchronicity.
I wrote once about N1ck Dr@k3 and how I had thought that he was practically unknown and bought some ancient CDs and sheet music of his as one of my son's Christmas presents. And then found that my daughter and all her friends knew and loved his music but he WAS pretty much forgotten and my son had never heard of him. Although there are a series of good detective stories that feature him and his lyrics, by Ph1l R1ckm@n.

Anyway - he is suddenly all over the place as Br@d P1tt has been talking about him and how wonderful he was, in a programme about his (N.D.s) life. I was reading a long newspaper article about him today which had an interview with his sister. Who turned out to be an actress who is only lightly famous but I have always remembered her as she was the star of a film made in my home town when I was at school. And in one shot I am walking along in the background in my school uniform, for one mini-second. I was telling my daughter this on the phone and she couldn't picture this actress at all although fascinated by the N.D. connection. Then I turned on the TV and there was this very actress in some mystery series. And I haven't seen her in anything for possibly ten years. So that is weird. And the series was based on books by El1z@beth G30rge which makes it more interesting to put here ...
- posted by Iris @ 5/23/2004 09:42:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
W1shmaster.
I read a huge number of fa1ry stories as a child and later on one of my favourite films was 'B3dazzl3d' (the original version, naturally). So by the time 'W1shmaster' came along it only re-enforced the care I took to take precautions when stating random preferences. Touching wood; quickly saying 'Not really, though, ha, ha ...' or 'But of course who actually needs that much money?'.

However - I have suddenly remembered, with horrible clarity, my oft-stated and precaution-free remarks about my perfect future. Which were based on my total happiness in the company of my children - alone. 'What I would really like', smug smile crosses features as I am SO amusing, 'is for all of you to marry someone, have lots of children and then get divorced and come and live here with me'. We have many barns crying out to be turned into cosy homes and it would be like a little village filled with extensions of myself - heaven. (And don't think that I am mad here - this is by no means an unusual scenario in these slacker days. Especially if the parents have a big house, in fact most children don't even bother to move out to a barn).

An objective viewer will have already seen what I had missed. W1shmaster was listening - and my daughter is moving inexorably towards the fulfilment of my dream.
- posted by Iris @ 5/21/2004 08:27:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Postscript.
As I was publishing this the phone rang. It was my daughter, who then had a long a very friendly conversation about trivia. As if the previous day's events had never been .... What, what....?
- posted by Iris @ 5/19/2004 12:01:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
Drama.
I said that I would only write about cheerful things but I am starting to wonder if someone has just put that old curse on me. 'May you live in 1nter3sting t1m3s'.

This isn't actually very interesting (or horrible), as such, but these last days have been a change from my normal life of pottering and moaning softly. I wrote months ago about how my older daughter was away travell1ng with her boyfriend and how, frankly, all of the rest of our family including my husband were bonded in not being able to stand him. This is unusual because my husband is rarely on the same wavelength as we are and also because the rest of us are practically ALWAYS on the same wavelength. I have never known a situation like this.

Even when one of us has had some friend that the others don't find specially congenial, the one of us has always agreed that they can see our point but there is some specific aspect of this person which makes them enjoy their company. Computer game expert; foreign film buff; obsessive shoe-shopper; vicious old gossip ... You get the picture. In this case we ALL find the boyfriend's presence agony ... and my daughter can see NOTHING wrong with him.

My children and I are really close and they have obviously turned into the brother and sisters that I longed for when I was a child. I am NOT a 'smothering' mother as you can tell from the fact that I live here a lot of the time and they live in the London flat. Where they have a separate floor with its own front door. I have killed myself all their lives to make sure, as far as I can, that they see each other as close friends because I missed that so much as an only child. And, considering their age differences and character differences, I was secretly really proud of how unusually well they got on. UNTIL NOW - BECAUSE OF HIM.

My daughter was travelling alone with him for six months under quite fraught and sometimes dangerous circumstances. We had prayed that his uninterrupted company would finally bore her into reality. BUT NO. Sadly, they met up with her best friend who happenend to have a boyfriend with such rampantly awful qualities that it drew the two of them closer together. When they returned he had to find a new flat and couldn't immediately - so stayed with her in the small upstairs flat for THREE MONTHS. He has just moved out.

Those three months have driven my son and middle daughter mad. My two daughters are now practically not on speaking terms and she has bonded EVEN MORE with him over my middle daughter's 'psych0' behaviour (caused totally reasonably by him being so irritating). He is also still spending several nights a week in our flat as his new one is miles away.

The evening before last things 'came to a head' and my middle daughter screamed at them over various things. My son, who had lurked silently at the edge, said that they were all totally accurate although the the force of her argument was marred by the high pitch and crying. Yesterday my older daughter rang on her mobile during a break from her yruJ S3rvice (not ideal timing) and said that due to this unreasonableness she was thinking of moving out and going to live with him. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO.

It is hard to explain why he is so annoying. It is not even exactly 'annoying'. He is 'leaden' and very, very dull. If you think of the words 'sparkling', 'fun', 'interesting', 'empathy', 'charm', 'amusing', 'always gets your jokes', 'knows the same books and films as you', 'tactful', 'social asset', 'pleasant to have around' .... and then think of their exact opposites. That might give you some idea. Imagine someone who inevitably moves slowly in front of you as you were about to do something quickly. It is sad that he is obviously a kind and decent person and not stupid but ..... that is not enough. And not only not enough - she would up until now have been the first to dismiss someone like this after just a couple of hours. She is really bright and very sharp and funny in a scarily perceptive way. So what has gone wrong?

The other two had begged me to 'speak to her' as they were too wet to confront her but they felt that the whole relationship had gone on long enough and they couldn't take it any more. I had actually 'spoken' before she went abroad and after stomping off and crying etc... she had surprisingly returned and said she could 'see where I was coming from' but surely I didn't want her to cancel her trip. Well, no .. So how could she have come home and somehow assumed that we didn't feel those things about him any longer? I haven't mentioned that huge numbers, if not all, of their closer friends also feel exactly the same. The words 'What is she thinking?' have been spoken many times.

So when she said she might move in with him it suddenly came pouring out. And she became very, very upset and defensive. And couldn't understand what I meant about him and wouldn't accept that 'everyone' saw him in the same way and longed for them to break up. And, horribly and madly, accused me of saying these things just because I 'wanted to hurt her' ... Oh dear.. You can't know how much of my life has been selflessly devoted to trying to make them happy.

If she married him our family and the closeness that I have worked for all these years would be totally shattered and my other children completely agree. They already refuse to stay here on the weekends that she has brought him. And, weirdly, we have all separately noticed that the more comfortable he seems to feel in their relationship, the more, in tiny ways, he seems like less of a 'nice' person and the less well he treats her. So eventually perhaps even his only two assets of niceness and decentness would be gone...

I have taken this stand now - and it had better not be alone - because I couldn't just let her drift on thinking happily that we had all come to accept him. Please, please let it make her stop to think ... Surely it's impossible that she could be right about him and what seems like everybody else in her world could be wrong?
- posted by Iris @ 5/19/2004 09:32:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Commenting.
As the number of comments here has dwindled to practically none although the S1temeter reveals a roughly normal number of visits - I naturally assumed that I was so boring that there was nothing anyone could say. BUT .... on looking around I realised that this seems to be quite a common trend. I wondered if this was because the hard core visitors to any site slowly become so friendly that they peel off and start communicating more by private e-mail? Unless you are very confident and open, a large and usually deeply fascinating part of your life is just not suitable to put out there for random strangers - or worse, acquaintances - to see.

It is very restful to be able to use real names and not, in my case, to have to write stuff backwards. But it obviously defeats the whole purpose of the 'Diary' type Blog.

In passing - I see that one or two people have been looking at my archives recently and I just wanted to say that I did NOT go through months sadly without any Commenters. The whole site crashed and disappeared and was rescued by the heroic Badger but the Comments were lost for ever.
- posted by Iris @ 5/18/2004 09:57:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Doom.
Perhaps I should change the name here to The Blog of Doom. Unless there are outside circumstances beyond my control I will be writing about cheerful stuff for a bit - or not at all. Just before I move on, here is site which probably should be required viewing - I am writing its name backwards. www.xirtaemeht.com.
- posted by Iris @ 5/17/2004 08:13:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
Unforseen.
As the great writer @ntonia F0r3st puts it 'The best disasters are totally unexpected'. On Friday I waved my son off to the train after two weeks of well-balanced, nourishing meals and well-balanced, nourishing conversations about his future. On Saturday morning I was on an open phone line to my daughters trying to ascertain whether he had serious head injuries and was about to die.

On Saturday night - when we were finally assuming that he was all right - I wrote a detailed account of it here. I am obviously not a born writer because when I read through it I felt that it was intrusive and 'wrong' and I deleted it.

He had gone to an all-night party after an evening of drinking elsewhere and feeling a little slurrey had corrected that with something that could be mistaken for b@king powder. Then, refreshed, he had taken part in a 'dr1nking g@me'... and WON (I am so proud). Soon afterwards he fell over, hitting his head with all his weight on a stone floor, and passed out. On Saturday my middle daughter noticed that he had not come home and rang his mobile to check his movements. No reply. After three more calls a scared-sounding strange girl rang back saying that he had been lying unconcious for FIVE hours but they didn't know who he was or 'what to do'.

I won't go into the endlessness that followed but I will say that it is very hard to tell the difference between the symptoms of he@d injury and @lcohol p0isoning. Either of which could have been fatal. My daughters and I were particularly mad and freaking because we happen to know TWO boys who died after hitting their heads while drunk. One in almost identical circumstances after a minor fall. 'Luckily' he had fallen onto the front side of his face so although looking hideous it had not done any permanent damage.

The maddening thing is that you would have picked him for one of the most sensible of his friends and in fact he is. Only the day before one of our stuffier neighbours told me what a charming boy he is and how they are really pleased that he gets on so well with their (virginal, over-protected) daughter. Unfortunately he can remember absolutely nothing from the time that he won the 'game' up until Saturday evening. So has no real idea of what we all went through and the potential seriousness of it. You can see him thinking secretly 'Pack of fool women'...

I still feel as if I had been through some kind of vicious physical fight. My muscles are all aching and I'm exhausted and I keep finding myself thinking odd thoughts as if he HAD actually died. I suppose mothers have that worry at the bottom of their mind every time their child goes out of their sight and it never goes away.

- posted by Iris @ 5/17/2004 10:07:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Motherhood.
I have been finding it very hard to write recently, as has been obvious, so I thought I would take a word at random and then try to find some memory attached to it. So this is today's.

When my third child was born I knew that this was the last one and if I was ever going to get it right then it had to be now. I had been doing my best impression of a model mother for some months when I happened to read an article in one of the Sunday supplements. 'Are you wasting your child's time of greatest learning potential?'(or something)'Here is a mother who's making sure her son has the best possible start'. And there was a large photograph of my acquaintance, Mary, bending smilingly over a toy-crammed cot.

I had met Mary because she had once been engaged, before I knew him, to a man who became one of my closest friends. They had stayed on warily amicable terms in spite of the odd circumstances of their parting. He had rashly asked her to marry him while he was still engaged to his previous girlfriend, who lived abroad. After juggling these two fiancees in an indecisive and cowardly fashion for some months he finally snapped and broke it off with them both. Mary appeared to take this stoically and only begged him to spend one last evening with her before he left. They had drinks and dinner and then wandered around the streets talking calmly and nostalgically about their time together. Finally he hailed a taxi and they drove to her home for a final goodbye. As she stepped out onto the pavement she collapsed, unconcious. At the hospital they pumped her stomach and told him that it had been a near miss - if she had made it those last few steps into her house and shut the door she would have died. And that was what she had wanted. In her pocket had been a huge number of @spirins and from the very first moment he had met her, right up until the ride in the taxi, she had been secretly taking them one after another throughout the entire evening.

Well - Mary had moved on, in fact she was now a well-known journalist though in a rather specialised field. She wrote acclaimed articles about people with exceptionally serious physical deformities. And, apparently, had become a baby expert. Her child was only about six months old but already had a full time-table of stimulating learning experiences lasting not only throughout the day but even at night. She had set up a tape recorder by his cot which played selections of classical music to him while he slept - and he was already showing strong preferences. I was totally crushed. I was doing none of these things and I didn't have the time or energy to begin. How could I have music playing at night, he slept in my room? Even though I threw the newspaper away its words lurked in the back of my brain making me feel inadequate.

Another few months passed and I was at a drinks party given by a social Catholic hostess. I was introduced to a charming priest, in charge of one of London's most fashionable churches. I mentioned that he looked rather tired, I supposed as one of the drawbacks of his church being so popular. 'Not exactly. Its ridiculous really but I am being kept up at night by this baby'. 'What do you mean?' 'I don't quite know how it happened but one of my congregation was talking to me about her problems managing her job and her child and she seemed quite desperate. So I said my housekeeper would babysit one afternoon for a couple of hours. And it has escalated to this farcical point where she is leaving the baby with us for five days at a time and just coming for it at weekends. Every time I ask her to take it away she threatens to kill herself. The ironic thing is that she's a journalist who writes about childcare'. 'Err ... is her name Mary, by any chance?'. 'How could you possibly have known that? Oh dear, I shouldn't have said anything'.

This is all years in the past and Mary finally got a full-time Nanny (in fact two - one for week-ends) and did not kill herself. But I never forgave those months when I felt harrassed and inadequate because of her articles. And her son never showed any particular aptitude for or interest in classical music. Although for a short time he was in a rock band which had some minor hits.
- posted by Iris @ 5/14/2004 11:49:00 PM (0) comments comment

 
Generations.
I was just thinking, boringly, how strange it is that my husband's father was born in exactly the same year as my own GRANDFATHER. So over that century his family had two and a bit generations, while mine had three and a bit .... But - my entire family apart from my father and his mother all died exceptionally young. And my husband's family all lived to be exceptionally old and in fact outlived all of my family.

I feel this may have some significance but I don't know what it is.... Except that one should never take anything for granted. As when I was a child I used to lie in bed at night thinking 'I am so glad that my family were all so young when I was born because that means they won't die until I am ancient and won't mind'.
- posted by Iris @ 5/14/2004 09:39:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Dark Waters.
Last night mud came out of all the taps. Earlier I had put on a wash of my son's irreplaceable T-shirts bought in Thailand, 'No, Nooooo - don't do that. What if they shrink?'. 'They are on 'cold' and I will dry them by the stove. Nothing can happen'. Da-daa! Cue for Fate to wake up and take an interest. Later I vaguely became concious of the distant sound of rushing water and discovered that the washing machine seemed to be on endless re-fill. Which continued even after the electricity was switched off. And of course meant that I couldn't open the door; behind which some precious T-shirts wallowed soppingly. Aaaargh!

Faint racial memories stirred and I turned the water off at the mains and managed to get the door open. But OMG, what is this? All the clothes were covered in MUD! I sneaked them away to the bathroom and rinsed quickly by hand. A few minutes later there was a shriek from downstairs, 'WTF ..... my glass of water is full of DIRT?'. 'What do you mean?' I turned back to the washbasin. Ah, right .. my tap too was running dark brown.

A soft blanket of total boredom and not wanting to bother to cope descended. 'Oh f@ck it. There's something wrong with the Spring'. I rang my husband. 'Hmm .. yes. It sounds like the collection chamber. It's probably worth your having a look'. 'Are you insane? It's dark here'. 'SO? Just take a torch and a crowbar to lever the cover off and then see if there's a leak anywhere'. Errr .....NOT ON YOUR LIFE. The 'chamber' is a whole spooky field away. 'Anyway - how come mud is coming through the taps? Why isn't it trapped by the filter?'. 'Filter? Ha, ha ... that stopped working months ago. Didn't I say?'. 'NO! YOU DID NOT! So we have been been drinking water straight out of the ground from a field full of animals?'. 'God, you're so squeamish. If you want a new filter then order one. Oh and could you turn off the feed to the swimming pool. I think I left it running'. Rings off casually.

The word AAAAAARGH!!!! in no way does justice to the screaming noise. He had driven away TWO DAYS ago leaving a water feed tap full on which we normally put on tricklingly for a few hours at the most. This had drained the collection chamber down to a bottom never normally seen by human eye and containing god knows what. AND this god knows what had been coming out of the taps and drunk by us ....

I made my son go out into the creepy dark and turn the tap off. After a couple of hours the water ran clear and I secretly re-washed the T-shirts. He hasn't tried them on yet because he trusted me ... How can a dull country life still manage to inspire a full range of violent emotions.. from fear to anger to revulsion to shame .. in just a few short hours?
- posted by Iris @ 5/13/2004 09:39:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Horror
Why oh why have Blogger done this? Who could possibly think that this new layout is better? I was only away for a few days and came back to this horror. I HATE IT.

I haven't been writing because the house was full of people who irritated each other and me and were always using the computer or fiddling with it. Or using up my time by making me cook endless meals or tidy everywhere so that chaos and more irritation didn't set in... And I never write about the things in my mind because they are all dreary and when you sit down suddenly you feel ashamed of your feebleness and write a jolly post instead. And your 'readers' would obviously prefer some witty triviality rather than day after day of pathetic stuff about how 'awful' everything is and how your husband has turned into a selfish pratt and makes your life totally miserable.

And because of this I no longer feel that his relations are my responsibility in any way BUT ..... his father is about to be 100 YEARS OLD. (I told you my husband was an incredibly late 'miracle baby'). And there is going to be some horrific family gathering of every possible person with his father wheeled in senilely. As I have obviously been expecting his father to die for years and he has practically no memory so is very (understatement) difficult to hold a conversation with - I stopped the children visiting him as it would only upset them and he didn't know who they were. (I am not heartless in the least - it was a well thought out decision). So that they then wouldn't be THAT upset when he did finally die. But NOW all that is f@cked because of this agonising 'party' where all their old memories will be revived and when he dies at any minute they WILL be upset after all.

This is another example of how Life ensures that I NEVER win. F@ck it...
- posted by Iris @ 5/12/2004 10:26:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Local Excitement.
I feel like J@ne Aust3n today and not only because I am living (for the moment) a dull life in the middle of the countryside BUT ... because there is finally a new tenant at the Manor. This large house, although about half a mile away, is actually one of our nearest neighbours. When we first came here there was hardly any property on the market and we were thrilled to find this one, which had been registered as a farm and so ignored by rich Londoners swooping past in vast 4x4s. Only a few months later though, maddeningly, the Manor suddenly came up for sale at the same price.

When we went to torture ourselves by looking over it, however, the reason for the low price was horribly obvious. Not only had the vast 18thC. stable block been totally burnt out but the entire building was rotten and the garden had been neglected for so long that mature trees were growing all over the walled vegetable garden. Of course I still wanted it. But it did have the creepy drawback of being situated on the side of a steep hill not that far from the road. So anyone with binoculars (and EVERYONE in this part of the country has 'sheep-checking' binoculars) could see into most of the windows from miles away and your little bedroom light would be obvious to the entire district.

The house has fifteen bedrooms and we all waited 'with bated breath' for a huge, cheerful Victorian - or preferably Edwardian - family to buy it and fill the valley with the sound of childish laughter. Sadly, this was not to be. The house was bought on-line, sight unseen, by a gay, single, merchant banker who was based in Hong Kong and had massive bonuses to burn. Luckily as it turned out. 'Whoa! You ever seen that film 'The M0ney P1t'...?', said the local Mr. Fixit. Who had taken over as 'site manager' for the absentee purchaser. 'It's going to have nothing on this'. The pit was made even deeper by the fact that the owner was obviously bored out in Hong Kong and sprang over-the-toply into his new hobby - interior decoration. Rare silks, hand-bl0cked w@llpapers, heavy hand-made curtains, ('Costing more than a THOUSAND pounds a window!!' revealed Mr. Fixit in awe), poured into the building. The stables were immaculately restored and the gardens chain-sawed into terrifying neatness - rather rashly, as we now had an even better view from the road. Inevitably, after spending only two holidays there,( both at Christmas), he ran out of money. And probably realised that Hong Kong is a more congenial place for a lonely gay than a vast empty house on a vast empty moor.

The problem now was that in order to get some return on the costs of taffeta-lined bathrooms etc. the house had to be placed back on the market at a scarily inflated price. For the past year and a half it has skulked on its hillside with unconvincing patterns of lights flicking around on a time switch. It has been burgled amateurishly twice. 'Just local boys, not to worry', said the (local) policeman. Who on earth had that kind of money and that kind of taste....?

Da daaa! A television personality - of course! Yes! How cool is that? We are going to have our own neighbourhood TV star. I'm not sure if she is famous outside England but she is very famous here - even my husband had heard of her. Everyone is going around smiling and stopping to chat out of car windows and slowing down to stare intently at 'her' house as they pass along the road. The little public path that crosses our land may turn out to be a blessing after all. Next time I hear voices and stare rattily out of my window there could be a merry band of sit-com actors passing through the trees. How fun is that..?
- posted by Iris @ 5/05/2004 09:52:00 AM (0) comments comment

 
Not Disguised.
I have made such efforts to keep myself from any English person who might Google randomly and recognise me. (I am not famous in the least but I have lived in London and elsewhere for years and know many people). But of course I didn't realise at the start how tiny a word could be to set off a search. I am going to have to go all the way back and rewrite every key phrase. In the last few days I have been pretty near the top for TWO different searches of quite serious things. One the 'Gr3yh0und D3rby'! You see, I know how to do it NOW, too late. The other was the original book of 'The L1fe Sw@p'; oddly enough, I couldn't remember the name of the author of the book - and now the search has told me and I can buy it from 3-B@y.
- posted by Iris @ 5/03/2004 09:50:00 PM (0) comments comment