Timothy, after watching the RSC’s latest, excellent production of Hamlet: ‘The only winner in that scenario was the grave-digger’.
No kidding.
Et tu, Brute? 2 February 2010
I knew I anthropomorphized cars when I went to the US at Christmas: they all looked like they’d been gagged, which I didn’t understand until I realised that I’d assigned them all faces, and without their front registration plate they didn’t have mouths. My Skoda doesn’t have a name, but I definitely pat it on the dashboard to apologise when I grind the gears by accident. And I might, sort of, say hello to it every evening when I climb in after work. Only once the doors are shut. What I didn’t anticipate was feeling like Brutus brandishing a bloody knife once we decided to sell it.
It makes good economic sense to put it on the market: one thing after another has landed it in the garage over the past six months, and we can’t afford to keep plugging money in when we’re getting nothing out. It’s not a bad car – in fact it’s deliciously easy to drive, comfortable, economical and with an endearingly random pattern of skyscrapers on its upholstery – but with the number of miles we put on it, it’s no longer the car for us. It needs to be put out to pasture, homed with a gentle old granny who will drive it to the shops once a week and feed it premium diesel. It all makes sense. It does. Oh, but what a betrayal. When it takes me to work and back every day without having to be near other people or trains. When it puts up with me method-singing first thing in the morning. When it tells me the temperature outside, so I can tell everyone at work and prompt meaningful will-it-snow discussions. To turn it away after all this time! We’ve had some differences, the Skoda and I, most notably in the early days when I couldn’t bay park properly and said some cutting things about the size of its backside. In turn I confronted its inability to accelerate fairly quickly, and we both moved on to a relationship of mutual understanding.
Good times. Good times.
I know it’s not real. But still – I don’t talk about getting a new car in front of it. It might be sad. It might cry lemony tears of windscreen washer into our driveway and sit in stony silence all the way to work. Poor Skoda. It’s not you – it’s me. Oh alright, it’s mostly you.
Gluttons of the World Unite… 1 February 2010
…You have nothing to lose but your scarily prominent hip bones! Alright, not as catchy as the original.
It’s a cruel irony that someone who loves food as much as I do should be afflicted with a bug that makes eating repellent. I’m not throwing up, unfortunately – if I were, I could indulge in whatever I wanted and accept that I’d be seeing it again later – I just feel sick. All the time. Especially when faced with anything remotely edible. I looked askance at a Strepsil earlier, I kid ye not.
Well, no more of this nonsense, I say. Down with visible ribcages. Down with sick bowls. Let the revolution begin. Today I’ve put myself on a gruelling regimen of little and often, to work my way back up to normality. I’ve just spent half an hour chugging determinedly through a single slice of toast and a glass of milk, and you’d better believe that I’m doing the whole thing again in two hours’ time. Timothy has bought one of those Tesco’s Indian Meals for Two – as close to culinary Nirvana as I expect to find in this life – and put it in the fridge to encourage me. It taunts me every time I go in there for more margarine, but not for long. Yes, sweet orange tikka masala. Oh yes, naan bread of spicy deliciousness. Yes, yes, pilau rice of radiant beauty. I’ll be coming for you one of these days.
The Sickest Person In The World. No, Honestly. 28 January 2010
Not to exaggerate, but I am at present the sickest person in the whole world. No, it’s not terminal, and yes, I’m clearly well enough to be sat up in bed typing this, but a certain hallucinatory clarity is one of the happier side effects of the dreaded sinus disease: you feel like someone’s gripping your face with their long-fingered, merciless hand, but strangely everything appears much larger than life as a consequence. This is why I’m sat writing while Tim is watching the new series of Armstrong and Miller – I can’t handle moving pictures, but a nice blank Word document is quite soothing.
During one of my grim little episodes sat on the floor of the bathroom earlier – a position made even more depressing by our current lack of sink and floor tiles – I passed the time by using my superhero sinus-vision to read the front of our washing machine. I needed something to focus on that wasn’t the ancient crumbly cement beneath my backside, and there weren’t many options under the circumstances. Anyway, I discovered that our washing machine is called a ‘Lavamat_Turbo’, which prompts more volcano and carpet associations than I think the makers intended (and why the randomly situated underscore?); it also has a mysterious setting called ‘Aqua Alarm’. Much more high-concept than the boring old ‘40’ and ‘60’ cycles I’ve been using all this time. I wonder if it plays a jingle when you wash your clothes. I will find out, when the angry hand lets go of my face.
I scorn your X-ray glasses. Sinus-vision rules.
Next to four-hour doses of paracetamol, Timothy is my best friend. He is all the time, of course, but especially so when I’m ill. He runs baths, fetches drugs and sick bowls, rifles through our cupboards to find something I can eat and then heroically eats it all himself when I can’t finish it. One of the best, the very best things about marriage is that you always have someone to fall back on. Except when he’s doing the dance he invented for the Total Wipeout credits: then you just try and avoid the flailing fists. Be careful, love – my head hurts.
Some Melodious Sonnet 24 January 2010
Come Thou Fount of every blessing
Tune my heart to sing Thy grace;
Streams of mercy, never ceasing,
Call for songs of loudest praise.
Teach me some melodious sonnet,
Sung by flaming tongues above.
Praise the mount! I’m fixed upon it,
Mount of God’s unchanging love.Here I raise my Ebenezer;
Hither by Thy help I’m come;
And I hope, by Thy good pleasure,
Safely to arrive at home.
Jesus sought me when a stranger,
Wandering from the fold of God;
He, to rescue me from danger,
Interposed His precious blood.O to grace how great a debtor
Daily I’m constrained to be!
Let that grace now like a fetter,
Bind my wandering heart to Thee.
Prone to wander, Lord, I feel it,
Prone to leave the God I love;
Here’s my heart, O take and seal it,
Seal it for Thy courts above.
We sang this in choir at Stake Conference this morning. If there’s a hymn that better and more movingly acknowledges our human tendency to go astray and God’s kindness and understanding of our weaknesses, I don’t know it. It was written by Robert Robinson, a 22-year-old Methodist preacher in the 1750s. He lost his father at ten, and by the age of seventeen was engaged in unspecified riotous living (wine, women and song, I presume) as a barber’s apprentice in London, when he and his friends got a fortune teller drunk and made her tell them their fortunes. She told Robert that he’d live a long life, which so horrified him that he decided to turn over a new leaf and become a preacher.
I’m not sure whether he would have retold this hilarious conversion story very often (Mr Robinson, tell us the one about the drunk fortune teller again!), but he knew well enough what it was like to wander, which is what makes this hymn feel so touchingly personal, I suppose. I wish it were in the hymn book.
Snowed In 6 January 2010
There’s more snow outside than I’ve ever seen in my life. Alright, scoffy Canadians, I know you’re so used to it you probably got an infant-size sledge from Baby Gap for your first birthday. It’s more than we usually get here, though, and is jolly exciting.
I have learned today that sledges can be made from:
- Large sheets of lino
- Cupboard doors
- Lids belonging to the square plastic boxes people keep under their beds
- Tin foil roasting tins
- Half a garden water butt, sawn down the middle (admittedly not too streamlined).
All of which must have been rather painful on that bumpy hill. We had an actual sledge, with brakes and everything, and I’ve still got a lump the size of an extra head growing from my lower back. I’m going to call it Colin.
Post-Holiday Cheer 5 January 2010
Happy new year!
That’s not strictly accurate, as it happens, though I certainly hope you have a happy year yourself. Thus far, 2010 has been blighted by misfortune. We left Mobile, and it was probably the only time I’ve ever felt reluctant to go home after a holiday. I cried all the way to Gate 5, and was a good way over the Atlantic before I stopped wanting to. After a while, it became obvious that BA weren’t going to turn the plane around for me, and, well, the climate was no good for my hair anyway, so I became resigned to going home and started to focus on the positives (nice comfortable house, fondness for little rubbish car, power shower, shepherd’s pie, etc).
Unfortunately home wasn’t quite as welcoming as it could have been, as it was too busy doing some serious flooding from a burst pipe upstairs. So we spent our intended nap time moving furniture, taking up carpets, calling our insurance company and cultivating frostbite on our feet, and it wasn’t nearly as good as a nap, I can tell you. Oh, and my inadequate ear tubes underperformed again during the aeroplane’s descent, meaning I was staggering around imitating Quasimodo on moving day, with one deaf ear and half a seized-up face. Is it possible to have more fun, I wonder?
Despite all this unexpected drama, I’m determined to have a cheerful kind of January. The plus side of our house being frozen solid is that a) we’ll be spending a lot more time in bed till it’s fixed, and b) it’s so beautifully warm in the office that I was wholeheartedly glad to be back at work. Optimism helps us see God’s loving hand in the details of our lives, so said someone-or-other, and one of my new year’s resolutions is to spend more time noticing. Obviously I’ll have no problem being optimistic on shepherd’s pie days, but on salad days I may have to work a little harder.
I’m twenty-five in just over two months. It’s the sort of anniversary that leads naturally to wishing you’ve accomplished more, but I’m going to try and use it as a prompt to actually accomplish more instead. I’m not sure yet what that will entail exactly, but staying optimistic on salad days will be a very good start.
C'mon, smile! SMILE!
Mobile Day 10: Still Elementary, Even Without the Deerstalker 31 December 2009
Do you know, I rather loved the new Sherlock Holmes film, despite Guy Ritchie spraying his usual bare-knuckled, sweaty, mockney testosterone all over the screen. I think I loved it mostly because of Robert Downey Jr, for whom I’ve cherished a soft spot since he was the best thing in the increasingly wobbly Ally McBeal. He’s brilliant as Sherlock Holmes: witty, haggard and deliciously intelligent. I doubt Conan Doyle purists will be pleased – and since, to my everlasting shame, I’ve never read any of the stories, I can’t comment there – but it was quick and funny and wonderfully conveyed the Victorian murkiness of London. Jude Law made a likeable Dr Watson (when does he get the time to see any patients, I wonder?) and Rachel McAdams was the token satin-ruffled double-crossing love interest. The plot was preposterous, of course, with more than a touch of Dan Brown silliness; unlike Tom Hanks and his eyebrows, though, nobody took anything very seriously. Good entertainment after a sunny day in Fairhope and an excellent meal in O’Charley’s restaurant.
Today, a bit of culture: it’s been chilly and rainy in Mobile so indoor activities were the order of the day. When it rains in Mobile, the moisture seeps into clothes and furniture, leaving you all clammy and cold. So damp and unpleasant was the weather, in fact, that Mum and I had mashed potatoes and gravy for lunch, and felt much better for it. The men in the house spent the morning and much of the afternoon shooting pixellated bullets at each other on Counterstrike, then around 3pm we headed for the Mobile Museum of Art. It was a surprisingly large building with a Goya exhibit and several rooms of intricate wooden sculptures. Well worth the visit.
Now, we’re waiting for dinner while watching Harrison Ford in Patriot Games. Timothy is not impressed that Harrison’s wife drives a Porsche while Harrison got landed with the clunky station wagon. According to him, this is why the Ford family got attacked by Sean Bean the IRA terrorist: bad vehicle management. In future, he tells me, he will take responsibility for the Jeffcoat family Porsche in order to prevent such tragedies happening to us. I tell him that Sean Bean has never had a grudge against us, especially not while sporting such a flamboyantly rubbish Irish accent, but he’s determined to take necessary precautions. It’s good to have such a selfless husband.
Mobile Day 6: Keeping with Tradition 27 December 2009
I don’t think I’ll ever understand American football. The commentary from ESPN isn’t helping: ‘When you get the third and ten, second and nine, you have more options to drive it down’, the commentator just said, all knowledgeably. Third and ten? Should it be third and tenth? I dunno. Quite a bewildering end to Boxing Day, although nicely traditional on this side of the pond, of course.
It’s good to be reunited with the more familiar of my family’s Christmas traditions as well as the unfamiliar. On Christmas Eve, we headed off to a Dollar Tree shop with twelve dollars in our pockets, to buy two-dollar joke presents for each other’s stockings (it used to be ten pounds and a 99p shop in the UK). It was quite a small Dollar Tree, so we kept running into each other in the aisles; trying to sneak past without revealing our eccentric present choices added a somewhat thrilling element of espionage to the morning.
This rite of passage over, we picked up Chinese takeaway for dinner. Tim and I were tremendously pleased when the food arrived in the little white Chinese boxes we’ve only ever seen in films. We were almost too full to fit into our new Christmas pyjamas and pose for the pyjama photographs. These seem to have expanded in scope and ambition over the years. Should make for an interesting Facebook album, for I fear my mother is determined to reveal them all to the public at large. Perhaps I should have worn a bag over my head. Luckily Home Alone was on standby to bring the day to a satisfying close. ‘Buzz – your girlfriend. Woof!’
Christmas Day was a highly enjoyable mixture of present opening, large dinners, a walk in the park in late December sunshine and an evening of energetic living room dancing. Then this morning we had some photographs taken for an hour and afterwards headed to the beach. Scarborough used to be the beach of choice in England – we wore approximately twenty-seven layers and ran around freezing our faces for an hour before the lights came on and we went home. This beach had whiter sands and clearer skies and was altogether lovely, even if it did prove beyond all doubt that throwing and catching are irretrievably beyond my capabilities.
Mobile Day 3: Dinner and a Show 23 December 2009
Steak dinner…
…Plus the most fabulously intricate Christmas lights ever seen…
…Make pretty much a perfect evening. Especially when you pass classy establishments like this on your way home.
