2008 Review

Well, here we are at the end of another year, so I suppose it’s inevitable that I’m sat here taking a moment to reflect on everything that has happened this year, before opening the ground of 2009 and setting my goals for next year.

It’s been a funny year, with more than it’s fair share of ups and downs, though it feels right now that there have been more ups than downs.  That in itself is telling, given that the last 5 Christmases since my Gran died have been appalling, with depression sucking me into the darkest of black holes and suffocating me to the extent I’ve been almost completely paralysed by misery. This year is different – perhaps enough time has passed, or perhaps the therapy has paid off , or perhaps it’s just that we weren’t forced into a huge, pressured all-family affair and were able to stay at home, just the five of us, and not perform to any else’s timetable or expectations. Whatever the reason, it has been very welcome to have a Christmas that I’ve taken pleasure in, and felt relaxed over.

The single biggest change has been adjusting to Minnie Bellaboo’s arrival – last Christmas she was only a couple of months old and we were in total chaos. This year we are probably still in chaos, but it’s chaos that has our own distinct rhythms to it, so is manageable. She has grown into such a strong personality too, she’s no wallflower shrinking into the background given two very noisy, determined and extroverted siblings, and it has been a delight to watch her blossom and hold her own amongst the big ones, carving her own little niche in this family.  Rumpus started school in September, and he’s changed so much – he seems so much more settled and confident, though the maths obsession remains – his teachers are impressed, I’m more cautious about it (the A spectre will intrude, though I think I’m worrying unnecessarily). Honey continues to excel at everything she does – I’m so proud of her talent and hard work I think I could explode – she’s such a sweet, gentle soul, but she gets on and gets what she wants all the same. I feel very fortunate to have the three of them in my life – I don’t know how I ever got on without them.

We’ve made some major lifestyle changes this year, the chief of which has been cutting the supermarket out of our lives. It has worked a treat. We get a family organic fruit&veg box every week from a local supplier, and I’ve found the most marvellous farm just down the road where we can get home-produced meat and eggs and locally sourced dairy and cheese, and the co-op and other local village stores have more or less supplied all other needs this year.

It has been surprisingly easy, and what has astonished me is that 1) less choice is actually easier to deal with, 2) shopping can be a pleasure instead of a horrific ordeal and 3) that it costs us less to buy totally fresh produce and make all meals basically from scratch. Next year I’m hoping that I’ll get more time in the garden and we’ll be able to eat much more of our own produce than we did  this year. We’ve significantly reduced our vehicle usage – t’o-m cycles into work and we walk whenever possible (thank heavens for the baby sling), so we’ve saved hugely on fuel bills too. Ebay has been a revelation as a source of clothing for the entire family – being able to buy a massive bundle of children’s clothes for less than I’d otherwise have to spend on a single outfit has been mind-blowing, and of course the knowledge that by opting out of the textile/fashion industry we’re turning our back on a huge tranche of unsustainable and wasteful consumerism fills me with joy. I know we still have some blind spots to focus on, and that we’re not in a position to be smug or complacent about it, but I feel that we have again moved towards a much greener lifestyle, living more lightly on the world that sustains us than we were before.

Magpies Laundry is such a natural extension of that philosophy, I’m so pleased it’s taken off so well this year. At the beginning of the year it was nothing more than the germ of an idea and a few patchworks and memory quilts I’d done for friends and what was essentially a life-laundry service via local estate agents (bottom has *so* dropped out of that market – it’s dead and gone). At the end of the year, here I am, a commissioned textile artist in TWO craft galleries, with a full order book for the next 2 months (credit crunch notwithstanding)(so far), and I’m about to open a little Etsy store, just to see how that flies – another string to my bow – though I think I’ll hold it at that, since I don’t want it to eat into either my writing time, nor get so big that Bellaboo has to go into formal childcare. When she starts preschool then I’ll maybe expand it more, but that’s a way off and I’m not planning that far ahead just now. (big step forward, that, not overplanning my life!)

I haven’t acheived as much as I wanted this year with my writing – but then I started late. It took me until May to get back to the pc, and although I kept reminding myself that in paid employment with normal benefits and salary etc, I’d get a whole year off for maternity leave, it didn’t quite wash. But then I’m my own worst critic, so it wouldn’t be right if I gave myself a break. But when I look back on the last six months of work, I think I can be pleased with what I’ve done. Starting Holly Lisle’s ‘How to Think Sideways’ has opened an entirely new door on my writing, and I’m gaining so much from that it’s just phenomenal – I’ve got some incredible ‘doh!’ moments when something totally obvious has highlighted a huge gap in my thinking and/or writing that I’ve been blind to up to that eureka moment. And the sweet-spot map has given me the keys to understanding why a number of perfectly adequate stories have been left to rot. I haven’t written a huge amount of new material, but I have reviewed and consolidated what I do have, and I feel ready to launch into a major programme of work next year to start turning it around into saleable inventory, AND I’m building up for a novel – I can feel it growing and kicking in the belly of my mind. I listened to a Doris Lessing interview on Radio 4 this morning, and she said that writing was torture, but that not-writing was worse, so she always goes back to it no matter how painful she knows it’s going to be. I can identify with that. The discipline of maintaining a (short) story every other work is a good one, and I am glad I’ve taken it on, in part because it’s starting to yield results and in part because my critical eye is getting better in sorting the wheat from the chaff in my stories. This is helped hugely by the crit groups I’m involved in over at Forward Motion – identifying strengths and weaknesses in other writers’ stories and craft is an enormous help to my own. I think I’m going to brave the shark-infested waters of Roving next year, though I’m not sure how regularly I’ll be able to make it there, given that I had to drop out of a short-story group because I couldn’t hack the pace. One for the backburner. I relished the success of my non-fiction publications, but I’m not sure I’m going to follow it up with more, regular, journalism. Fiction is my love, and I don’t want to divert too much time away from it – I’m battling for every second and going short on sleep as it is to even get close to what I want to do.

It’s all feeling and looking good, and I can’t remember the last time I felt so positive going into a new year. I feel as though my attempt to both realise my dreams and to decompartmentalise the different areas of my life and integrate them into a coherent whole is yielding results, and I wonder why I lacked the courage to give it a shot up until now. I guess the conditions weren’t right for me to be forced into bravery? Or perhaps I just needed to mature to a point where I could understand what makes me tick and how to channel that knowledge into productive activity, rather than just running the hamster wheel of wishing and pushing and stressing and never looking to see if the view is changing. Or needs changing.

How was your year? What changed for you this year? How do you feel about next year?

Let’s hope it’s a good one.

 

And finally, some top stuff for the year . . . . not all of these were new this year, but they were new to me . . . do you agree? What’re your picks?

Best Film: Mamma Mia

Best DVD: Bourne trilogy

Best TV Show: Heroes

Best Album: Tie! Santogold and Kings of Leon

Best Book(s): The Algebraist, Iain M Banks, Runt Niall Griffiths and On Chesil Beach, Ian McEwan

Political event of the year: there can be only one. Barack Obama’s election.

A pause for thought

So, here I am. It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m sat at my laptop with a very nice glass of red. We’ve had a lovely day with my brother and his family, and now it’s all quiet and I’m just gathering myself before powering down for Christmas, as it were. The children are all asleep (or at least in bed), the presents are wrapped, the tree is dressed and gorgeous (and so am I (I wish!)), the fire is burning, even the veg and associated bits and bobs are all good to go tomorrow. All we need to do on Christmas day is to wake up, eat and open presents.

I feel incredibly lucky.

I *am* incredibly lucky. I was lucky enough to be born into a culture and country where there is no significant physiological threat to my wellbeing – I have never known what it’s like to be homeless, hungry or abused. I was lucky enough to get a good education and lucky enough to be able to apply that education in the field(s) of my choice in a culture and country where there is no social threat to my existence – I am granted liberty, I am enfranchised, and I have the guarantee of equal treatment under the law, and I have only ever been unemployed out of choice, and the only manual/menial work I have ever done has been temporary and of short duration. I am lucky because I have all my family around me, and barring the odd squabble and some bickering, we all get on and we all love and support each other.

It has not been easy – t’o-m and I have worked damned hard for what we have, we weren’t born into privelege and neither of us have university degrees, but the dice have always fallen our way. We’ve had our share of sorrow along the way – we’ve had to deal with suicide, miscarriage and bereavement – but we’ve survived and we’ve come through it.

And sitting here, feeling so lucky, so priveleged, and just so thankful for everything I have, I can’t help but think of those who are less fortunate than I. I read a story yesterday in the Kenyon Review about Afghanistan, and that made me mindful of both the soldiers serving out there, the civilian population caught in the middle of it all, and the families of those soldiers facing Christmas without their loved ones. I have been revising an article about the Congo I started over a month ago, and that has made me mindful of all the people in Africa who have no home, no security, no food, no shelter, who are living in fear and poverty. And Rumpus was talking about Santa, and who he was and why he only visited children (and not grown ups), and so (quick thinkingly) I told him that in the beginning Santa only visited orphan children who had no  mummies and daddies to look after them, and then decided that all good children deserved gifts at Christmas – and that made me mindful of all the children in this country (and elsewhere) who will not get presents this year, or who will not find themselves at the centre of a loving and secure household. And the families affected by the credit crunch who face losing just about everything  through no fault of their own.

And there, but the grace of god, go I. It is nothing more than luck that I am here, sitting in the comfort of my home, where I can be myself and be happy, and that I am not facing the terrors of an uncertain future and wondering how I will feed my children tomorrow, wondering where they will sleep, and wondering how I will protect them from the danger all around.

I am lucky, and I am grateful for it. And so I will have a lovely day tomorrow, and enjoy the time with my children and my family.

How do you feel?

Happy Christmas. I hope you all have a wonderful day.

Santa baby

Santa baby, slip an agent under the tree, for me
I’ve been an awful good girl
Santa baby, and hurry down the chimney tonight

Santa baby, a magazine acceptance too, or a few
I’ll wait up for you dear
Santa baby, and hurry down the chimney tonight

Think of all the fun I’ve missed
Think of all the fellas that I haven’t kissed
Next year I could be oh so good
If you’d check off my Christmas list
Boo doo bee doo

Santa honey, I wanna contract and really that’s
Not a lot
I’ve been an angel all year
Santa baby, and hurry down the chimney tonight

Santa cutie, there’s one thing I really do need, the deal
From a major publisher
Santa cutie, and hurry down the chimney tonight

Santa baby, fill my stocking with a fanbase, and checks
Sign your ‘X’ on the line
Santa baby, and hurry down the chimney tonight

Come and trim my Christmas tree
With some paperwork all in legalese
I really do believe in you
Let’s see if you believe in me
Boo doo bee doo

Santa baby, forgot to mention one little thing, a prize
pulitzer or orange is fine
Santa baby, and hurry down the chimney tonight

Hurry down the chimney tonight
Hurry down the chimney tonight

Bring it on!

Well, it’s Sunday night and I’m sat here with a warming glass of Remy Cognac and all is well with the world.

All the presents are wrapped. The cards are all written, and gone, although the last few looked like a spider having a fit in an inkwell rather than actual handwriting, but there you go. The shopping is done, barring a trip to the farm on Tuesday to collect the turkey and a trip to the co-op for a couple of odds and ends that I forgot (and we probably won’t need). The house is clean and tidy, the tree is twinkling, the fire is burning.

Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow . . .

I *am* a cliche . . . but I’m enjoying the rare luxury of a Christmas at home, not having to charge up and down the country visiting relatives. Sure, we’ve got family coming to us on either side of Christmas, but it’s all pretty informal and it’s all organised (barring some baking of mince pies, sausage rolls and such), so I’m all unstressed by the whole business.

It probably helps that t’o-m does the actual roast on Christmas day . . . I’ll produce good meals x 3 daily, but he is chef par excellence when it comes to the Sunday roast, and enjoys the cooking, so I’ve happily handed all responsibility to him. All I have to be is fabulous, darling, and manage croissants and champagne for breakfast. I think I can cope with that . . .

A little bit of happiness

Great news!

This morning I got a nice thick packet in the post . . . and as I was wondering what the heck it could be (all my online Christmas Shopping has arrived), it dawned on me that this package was kind of book shaped.

And indeed, that is what it was. A very beautiful copy of Flash Magazine (International Short-Short Story), and in it is my story: Ursula’s Roses.

I was literally squeeeeee-ing like a teeny-fan and jumping up and down. The children thought I’d gone completely insane and I’m not sure if they were laughing with me or at me (or just a bit nervous of the loony woman in the house).

It’s just exactly what I needed to give me a bit of a lift when my current writing is so blocked and stalled and unproductive. The only thing keeping me going is the backlog of unedited stuff, because for some reason I’m in a hyper-critical mood at the moment so I’m dead-sharp on the editing . . . but this is a big incentive to keep the inventory turning.

And thanks to Jay Lake, because his ’story a week’ and the commitment I’ve made to follow that (at admittedly a story-ever-other-week pace) has forced me to keep things churning no matter how low I feel, and I guess that’s what’s needed if I’m going to stand any chance of making it pro. Now it’s bearing some results (I’d just about given the story up and was preparing to re-sub in the new year – it’d been over 100 days) it gives me something tangible to hand on to.

I think I’m going to have a night off to celebrate . . .

Banned Books meme

I came across this list of banned books over at ljcblue’s blog, and though I don’t usually do these, this one caught me . . .

 Some of them surprised me (how could James and the giant Peach be considered offensive?????), and some of them have inspired me to go and read these books, some of which I knew about but haven’t read yet.

Now I’m off to update my amazon wish list with some of the one’s I haven’t read yet . . .

Look through this list of banned books. If you have read the whole book, bold it (and I’ve made mine purple because the bolding didn’t show up in this layout). If you have read part of the book, italicize it. If you own it but haven’t gotten around to reading it yet, *** it.

1. The Bible
2. Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
3. Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
4. The Koran
5. Arabian Nights
6. Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain
7. Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
8. Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
9. The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
10. Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
11. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli
12. Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
13. Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank
14. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
15. Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
16. Les Misérables by Victor Hugo
17. Dracula by Bram Stoker
18. Autobiography by Benjamin Franklin
19. Tom Jones by Henry Fielding
20. Essays by Michel de Montaigne
21. The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
22. History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon
23. Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
24. Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
25. Ulysses by James Joyce
26. Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio
27. Animal Farm by George Orwell
28. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
29. Candide by Voltaire
30. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
31. Analects by Confucius
32. Dubliners by James Joyce
33. Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
34. Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway
35. Red and the Black by Stendhal
36. Das Capital by Karl Marx
37. Flowers of Evil by Charles Baudelaire
38.Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
39. Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H. Lawrence
40. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
41. Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
42. Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
43. The Jungle by Upton Sinclair
44. All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
45. Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx
46. Lord of the Flies by William Golding
47. Diary by Samuel Pepys
48. The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway
49. Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy
50. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
51. Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak
52. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
53. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey
54. Praise of Folly by Desiderius Erasmus
55. Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
56. Autobiography of Malcolm X by Malcolm X
57. The Color Purple by Alice Walker
58. Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger
59. Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke
60. Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
61. Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe
62. One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
63. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
64. Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
65. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
66. Confessions by Jean Jacques Rousseau
67. Gargantua and Pantagruel by François Rabelais
68. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
69. The Talmud
70. Social Contract by Jean Jacques Rousseau
71. Bridge to Terabithia by Katherine Paterson
72. Women in Love by D. H. Lawrence
73. American Tragedy by Theodore Dreiser
74. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
75. A Separate Peace by John Knowles
76. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
77. Red Pony by John Steinbeck
78. Popol Vuh
79. Affluent Society by John Kenneth Galbraith
80. Satyricon by Petronius
81. James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl
82. Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
83. Black Boy by Richard Wright
84. Spirit of the Laws by Charles de Secondat Baron de Montesquieu
85. Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut
86. Julie of the Wolves by Jean Craighead George
87. Metaphysics by Aristotle
88. Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder
89. Institutes of the Christian Religion by Jean Calvin
90. Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse
91. Power and the Glory by Graham Greene
92. Sanctuary by William Faulkner
93. As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
94. Black Like Me by John Howard Griffin
95. Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig
96. Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
97. General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
98. Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
99. Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Alexander Brown
100. A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
101. Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman by Ernest J. Gaines
102. Émile Jean by Jacques Rousseau
103. Nana by Émile Zola
104. Chocolate War by Robert Cormier
105. Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
106. Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
107. Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein
108. Day No Pigs Would Die by Robert Peck
109. Ox-Bow Incident by Walter Van Tilburg Clark
110. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
111. Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
112. The Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling
113. The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
114. A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
115. The Witches of Worm by Zilpha Keatly Snyder

Catering miracle!

My children hate stew.

It’s utterly incomprehensible to me. I love stew. I always have done, in all its forms, as the ultimate in cold-weather winter-comfort food.

Their hatred of it causes me a huge headache at least once a week. The activities schedule (my calendar has been known to make grown men (i.e. t-o-m) weep) means that on at least one night a week we come home too late for it to be feasible for me to start cooking dinner when we get in. Logic therefore dictates that it must be something that can be started before we leave . . . and stew (or casserole in some form) is the best and easiest option. Throw it all in a pot, throw it all in the oven, and leave it to get on with it, with a minimum of aggravation. Perfect.

Except, the children hate it.

Not good.

Pondering this problem, I reviewed what they will eat. They like the low-spice chicken biriani I do, and they adore the local takeout’s chicken korma. Hmmm, I thought, curry goes down well.

Now today, we had a carton of pilau rice left over from the takeout we had on Saturday night. As a big special, we got takeout and watched Strictly Come Dancing (or Strictly Come Prancing, as it’s known in this household). Honey and I adore it, it’s my guilty pleasure and she just loves the music/dancing/costumes. The men in the household are less impressed but tolerate it AND the X-Factor final. I excluded myself from the latter event. I hate the X-Factor on principle and with a vengeance, and refuse to have anything to do with it. It is not musicianship, it’s glorified karaoke, and I despise it. I am filled with loathing for the treatment they have given to Jeff Buckley’s beautiful, painful Hallelujah, taking from a simple, evocative masterpiece to a pompous, overblown, easy-listening travesty. Someone ought to be shot for that. In fact, I’m supporting the campaign to make sure that X-Factor disgrace doesn’t make to #1. Grrrrr. ANGRY. Even angrier than I was about that terrible Leona Lewis version of Snow Patrol’s Run. Everything I hate about the X-Factor embodied in a single tune. ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!

/end rant

I digress.

The point being, I decided to try and make curry instead of stew. AND IT ONLY BLOOMIN WORKED!!!

500g beef skirt, cubed

2 medium onions

450g can chopped tomatoes

200g red lentils (dry weight)

1/2 litre veg stock

100ml double cream

slug of olive oil

1/2 tsp ground coriander

1/2 tsp ginger

1 tsp paprika

1 tsp turmeric

Fry off the onions over a medium heat until soft and transparent, in olive oil seasoned with spices. Add the cubed beef skirt and brown off, then toss in the lentils (I use the ones that you don’t need to soak) and ensure they are coated with the olive oil and spice mix.

Put into casserole dish (with lid) with the can of tomatoes and the veg stock and the cream, mix together, and sling into a pre-heated oven @ approx 125 C for at least 2 hours.

And that’s really it. We had the carton of rice so I put that in the bottom of the oven (with the lid on) at the same time and it was fine. Pilau rice or basmati is easy enough to make as an accompaniment given more time, or I guess it could be added to the pot some 30 mins from eating, though I think it would need more liquid to stop it being too dry.

And the children loved it . . . back for seconds. My stew dilemma is over.

t-o-m says if I bothered to read the instruction manual for the cooker I could work out how to use the timer, and then I could broaden my range much, much further in terms of meals-ready-to-eat when we get home late. He’s probably right, but I’m not sure I trust it enough . . . .

twist of black pepper

Very simple.

Bah! Another rejection

“The flowers have all gone”

- rejected by Abyss and Apex today. Well received but decided not to publish. Hope I’ll consider them again. That’s good??

- straight back out to Fantasy Magazine with a couple of minor tweaks.

no messing about.

inclination and opportunity

Minni Bellaboo is the naughtiest child we’ve had.

That’s t-o-m’s view, as stated yesterday when she’d unpacked his CD tower for the eleventy-zillionth time and ice-skated across the floor on his U2 album. (no bad thing, imo, but he doesn’t quite see it that way).

I’m not certain I agree. I think it’s purely that being third in line, she has more opportunity for exploration and excavation than either of the others had, AND she reaps the rewards of being a follow-on explorer and excavator, in so far as the others have at various times done most of the things that she attempts in some form or another, and have suffered no harm.

Honey is a cautious child. It’s no suprise, and common amongst all the ‘firsts’ we know. I’m certain it has something to do with over-protective  first-time parents totally terrified of anything that might harm that impossibly fragile thing entrusted to us, screaming and removing said potential threats when infant (watched like hawk) gets within metres. So her approach to life is quite measured, tentative and highly risk averse.

Rumpus was born with a full-on, head-first attitude (hello! 1hr 30 labour start to finish – should have read the warning signs in that one!) that has got him into all sorts of bizarre situations, but because he was a ’second’, he got much more relaxed parenting than Honey did, AND he got lots of lovely attention into the bargain because by the time he arrived, Honey was at school.

Now we have Minni Bellaboo . . . very laid back, but with an ingenious opportunistic streak a mile wide. Stairgate the kitchen to stop her getting in those cupboards? No problems. She’ll just go into the garden room and excavate the plant pots or check out the cat biscuits by way of tasty snack. Barred from the garden room? No problem. There are plenty of climbing options in the living room. She can’t walk, but she can climb the sofa. She mountaineered her way up onto the windowsill without too much trouble, and was tremendously pleased with herself as a result. Hauled down off there, she’ll move to the bookshelves. It takes very little time to de-shelf a row of books, and it makes a satisfying noise when they all come down, to say nothing of the mess. The same applies with CDs, (and worse, antique (well, nearly!) vinyl). The a-v equipment has lots of interesting lights and buttons, and we have yet to discover a door lock that she cannot circumvent (short of attaching a yale to the thing), given a couple of hours watching everyone else get it open and closed.

Where I see the big difference between her antics and her elder siblings is in and opportunity – she gets much more than they did, simply because my attention (our attention) is diffused over a wider range of both children and other activities, so she gets less focussed attention and interaction than either of the others did (note: less, not none. The second difference is in inclination. Honey’s cautious approach and Rumpus energy mean they don’t have the inclination or patience (respectively) to work these things out. inclination. Minni is *so* much more determined and single-minded than her siblings, and it is impossible to deflect her from her chosen activity/objective. Admittedly, she goes for it primarily as attention-attracting behaviour – if excluded from anything, it is a nailed on guarantee that some sort of unpacking or mountaineering exploit will take place, because even exasperated parent is better than no parent at all, it would seem.

If I wasn’t constantly tidying up after her, it would be hilarious. As it is, it’s a reminder that often, taking a couple of minutes out and playing with her or engaging her attention and interest in a positive activity is the quicker way to get things done, rather than ploughing on regardless and getting frustrated that I’ve got to redo job x again because she’s trashed it as soon as my back is turned.

And today she produced the best word in all the wide world: “mummy”. Makes me all warm and squooshy inside.

bye, bye, Sky!!

Hooray!

We got a Freesat HD Box today, and despite an afternoon of cursing as various bits of related technology did/did not work correctly with it, t’old man (t-o-m) finally got it up and running this evening. It is of an order of magnificent on our projector, and I swear it sounds better too, although I’m informed that’s not technically possible, I’m just imagining it.

What impresses me most of all is that we have cancelled our subscription with Sky. I am overjoyed. I don’t really watch much (any) TV at all unless there’s a good movie on, but the children and t-o-m enjoy it and I’m not that much of a killjoy that I’ll spoil their fun. I do mutter dark comments about television being anaesthetic for the soul, stopping you thinking, dreaming, acting, being, but no-one takes much notice of me so I’m kind of a lonely voice in the corner.

What is particularly invidious is the advertising on the children’s channels. It is so aggressive, and so pervasive, that even Rumpus can do brand recognition on any number of names and he can’t even read yet. I had seven shades of a blue fit a couple of weeks ago when I heard them both singing jingles . . . drives me mad how those adverts get into their heads, and of course they are not old enough or experienced enough to understand what is being done. Even Honey, who is relatively sensible and mature for her age, turned me after a debt-company-advert and said “mummy, you could have more money if you took out a homeowner loan with xyz”. I nearly spat my coffee into next week, I was choking so hard. I explained to her how debt & credit works, and that the long and short of it is that you end up paying more for the things you get using it, and that you usually are still paying for them long after they’ve finished being useful to you. I’m not sure she really understood, but I think she grasped the edges. The gender-targeting is poisonous, too . . . lots of pink and babies and nurturing things for little girls, and equal quantities of action, violence and explosions for boys – there is simply no middle ground, and no room for children to explore different toys and games depending on their interests, talents and abilities. I think it absolutely iniquitous how early in their lives corporate homogenisation starts in on children. I know there’s the argument that advertising income funds the programming, but to be honest the quality of the programming on some of them is so poor, I’m of the opinion that less programming might not be a bad thing. I just hate the way the television turns them into voracious, indiscriminate consumers, feeding their discontents. It’s not restful or relaxing, it turns them into miserable, hyped-up malcontents, and I get more fights, arguments and bickering post-tv than at any other time. It’s just not good for them. To say nothing of the fact that whilst it’s on, they’re total zombies and its impossible to talk to them or interact with them in any way. GAH! Kill the television. Bad, bad, bad . . . .

Anyway, I can rest easy (or easier) now, because the switch to Freesat means that we’ve lost almost all the children’s channels and are left with a mere 6, most of which the children don’t like. By necessity, and process of elimination, they are back on Cbeebies/CBBC and guess what? “Mum, this is cool. Why didn’t you let us watch it before?” (head: wall). I particularly like the fact that there are real people on these channels, whereas on some of the other ones we were getting (Nickleodeon, for example) you could go days without seeing an actual human. Nonsense. And the escape from advertising is just pure heaven. Less, yet again, is definitely more.

I am loving it.

Hallelujah.