Scatterings of Contentment 15 October 2009

More and more I conclude that happiness is a decision rather than a circumstance. I’ve noticed that when I come home from work and answer the ‘how was your day’ question, I could either add up the little things and say it was awful, or add up some of the other little things and say it was brilliant. It depends on what I choose. Happiness is not a gooey, marshmallow-like cloud that descends upon you when all of your problems have receded to make room for it. It’s in a million tiny details. You have to gather them into one place to appreciate their impact. It’s like the hundreds-and-thousands you get on top of a Fab ice lolly – scattered separately you wouldn’t notice them much, but all crammed together they make a crunchy delicious multicoloured topping for people of all ages to enjoy. I may need to work on this analogy a little.

Included in my hundreds-and-thousands of happiness today were: pink silicone muffin cases I bought from the pound shop; a stupid joke Timothy made as he walked out of the door to his meeting; the scarf I wore to work; finding out by myself how to format something unusual in Excel; the orange leaves swirling round the car in the country lanes on the way home. Now I’m barricaded in our bedroom, the lamp on, the clothes put away, dipping into a stack of poetry books and being floored by Seamus Heaney. He is astonishing. Astonishing. Why have I never noticed before?

St Francis and the Birds

When Francis preached love to the birds
They listened, fluttered, throttled up
Into the blue like a flock of words

Released for fun from his holy lips.
Then wheeled back, whirred about his head,
Pirouetted on brothers’ capes.

Danced on the wing, for sheer joy played
And sang, like images took flight.
Which was the best poem Francis made,

His argument true, his tone light.

Seamus Heaney

How was my day? Just wonderful.

Many Hands Make Light – If Paint-Splattered – Work 11 October 2009

Today I am deeply, sincerely grateful to one Hubert Cecil Booth, who in a stroke of brilliance in 1901 invented the vacuum cleaner (apparently he tested his hypothesis by putting a handkerchief over his mouth and sucking on a restaurant chair. History does not record the reaction of his fellow diners. This is one of life’s random facts that bring great happiness). Yesterday I spent two hours on my hands and knees scrubbing paint from a violently purple ridged carpet, and came away with chapped hands, grid-patterned bruises on my knees, and what felt like an iron bar across my shoulders and neck. Consequently this morning I walked around with an angular, flamingo-esque stiffness in my head and got hand-cramp trying to peel potatoes. Imagine living as a woman before Mr Booth got his brainwave and started sucking on restaurant chairs. I think I would have scored rather low marks in a society where your competency as a wife was assessed by the state of your freshly-scrubbed front step.

So very excited to be vacuuming. Nice one, Mr Booth.

Aside from my deviation into 1890s housewifery, our Helping Hands service project yesterday went very well. Tim was Reading’s team leader, so we arrived at the care home in Oxford at 8.30am, after an obligatory McDonalds breakfast, for the health and safety briefing. Having noted all the places where people could potentially fall off ladders (usually places where ladders were), we got to work painting our allotted three bedrooms. Predictably, the rooms were brown, purple and bright blue, respectively – paint colours that must be used with exquisite, non-NHS-funded care if they’re to be used at all – so we had large tubs of magnolia waiting to freshen things up. First coats were done everywhere by lunchtime, when we paused to eat sandwiches lovingly (if rather eccentrically) prepared by the primary children. Tim was disappointed to note that the chocolate bar he was allocated was orange flavoured – forbidden under the Timothy Code of Fruit and Chocolate Abhorrence – but the very lovely Julie Kennedy dug through all the leftover bags and rescued two plain bars instead. Very gratefully received.

The worst part of a day like this is the part near the end where most people have gone home, and the ones who are left realise how long the fiddly clearing-up jobs are going to take. This is why I found myself on hands and knees scrubbing paint stains out of carpets. Timothy had a similarly left-over job washing up paint trays, and emerged hours later with callused, wrinkly alien fingers, wincing. But it was amazing how much 90 or so people can get done in one day. New fences were put up, the garden cleared and a new raised flowerbed created for those in wheelchairs, paving slabs cut, a new handrail erected, every room freshly painted and the curtains replaced. It made an incredible difference, and watching so many people working hard alongside us was a huge morale-booster. Volunteering boosts more than morale, apparently: according to the Corporation for National and Community service, those who volunteer experience ‘lower mortality rates, greater functional ability, and lower rates of depression later in life’. So despite all evidence to the contrary, scrubbing that floor will actually make me live longer. I won’t bother with the neck brace then.

The Road: Father and Son Stumble Towards a Brighter World 7 October 2009

Maybe the best way to explain how I felt about Cormac McCarthy’s The Road would be to say that I finished it almost two weeks ago, and haven’t yet been able to persuade myself to return it to the library. My house would somehow be diminished without it. I’ll have to let it go at some point, if only to save myself the astronomical late fees, but not yet; not yet.

Though published in 2006, the story feels absolutely appropriate for the climate-conscious 2009: after a devastating, but unnamed worldwide disaster, civilisation as a whole has collapsed. The natural world is burned or burning, and the only colour to be seen is the grey of the ash that covers every surface like deadened snowflakes. Most people are dead; those who are not band together in cannibalistic tribes, keeping prisoners in the cellar to ensure a constant food supply. In the middle of this desolation, a father and son travel together towards the warmer south coast, where with luck the desperately difficult tasks of finding food and staying warm will be easier to manage.

It’s not clear why the south will provide their salvation. The father is tortured by memories of his life before the cataclysm, and by the moral compromises he is forced to make to keep his son alive. ‘In the nights sometimes’, McCarthy tells us, ‘he’d wake in the black and freezing waste out of softly coloured worlds of human love, the songs of birds, the sun’. We suspect that the south is only an end-point to fix his attention upon; without a purpose, he would lose what little direction he has left. The boy has never known another world. He has to have the phrase ‘as the crow flies’ explained to him, since he’s never seen a crow, or anything else for that matter, fly in the sky.  Nevertheless, despite the inhuman horrors he witnesses, he is instinctively kind and generous. He needs to be reassured constantly that they are ‘the good guys’, that they are still ‘carrying the fire’. ‘You’re not the one who has to worry about everything’, his father tells him after a particularly harsh encounter with a would-be thief. The boy responds, ‘Yes I am. I am the one’.

This is nothing less than the truth, because it is the boy who will inherit this blackened world, and will have to make something of it. This is what allows the book to be redemptive and uplifting as well as bleak.  McCarthy’s austere, pared-down writing style perfectly fits the reduced and ruined landscape he creates – his imagery, such as his description of the burned dead still in their cars with ‘ten thousand dreams ensepulchred within their crozzled hearts’, is devastatingly effective – but it also beautifully implies a basic foundation upon which to begin building a new society. You can almost envision the world getting shakily back to its feet, as the boy gets to his and continues down the road alone, carrying the fire to an almost-hopeful future.

When The Grass Is Jewelled 29 September 2009

Autumn days, when the grass is jewelled
And the silk in a chestnut shell
Jet planes meeting in the air to be refuelled
All these things I love so well
So I mustn’t forget
No, I mustn’t forget
To say a great big thank you
No, I mustn’t forget

It was only when humming this primary-school song on the way to work that I realised it’s not about autumn at all, but gratitude. Either way, why a seven-year-old would be thankful for the refuelling of jet planes is beyond me, in hindsight. A case of Think Of A Rhyme, Any Rhyme on the part of the author, I reckon.

Jet planes aside, there’s a great deal to be thankful for now that autumn has arrived. Some examples that occur to me are:

1) The smell of bonfires drifting on cold, late-night air.

2) The glorious, russet-red leaves of a particular line of trees at the entrance to Milton Park. With the early-morning sun behind me, they outline themselves in fiery brilliance as I round the corner. Worth an intake of breath most mornings.

3) The fact that my favourite foods become fashionable again in cold weather. Stews, shepherd’s pies, roast dinners and all manner of pudding-and-custard combinations are suddenly on everyone’s menus, so I don’t feel like such a gravy-hogger.

4) Finally, and most fabulously, the BBC’s Saturday evening camp-fest Merlin is back on our television screens. The teenaged wizard Merlin acts as the reluctant servant of Prince Arthur, secretly fending off various beasts and perils under the benevolent, cross-eyed gaze of Gaius, the castle’s medicine man, and occasionally wandering into the castle’s crumbling cellar to chat to John Hurt the Dragon about his destiny. Giles from Buffy also makes berobed appearances as Uther Pendragon, whose main function is to outlaw sorcery in Camelot and give orders that directly contradict what the rest of the cast are thinking. Some might say that the bad acting, bad scripting, and awful CGI detract from the series’ enjoyment; the initiated know better, of course: they only add to its endearing charm. In the episode we watched last night, Mackenzie Crook got possessed by an ancient sorcerer, put on a raven feather jumper that made him look like a tar-coated Big Bird, and made a lot of castle gargoyles come to life and ravage the town. As this is before the watershed, we weren’t allowed to see anyone get disembowelled with angry stone claws, so instead a lot of townspeople were menaced to death, before Merlin came to the rescue. Classic stuff. The overly dramatic theme tune can even be sung through a mouthful of couscous. And we have it on good authority from the series preview that at some point in a future episode, someone will say the wonderful line: ‘I’m afraid, Sire, that your bride is… a troll’.

The run-up to Christmas looks bright, doesn’t it?

In Defence of the NHS 16 September 2009

A call to the inhabitants of this green and pleasant land: ring the bells and bang the drums and sing the praises of Aneurin Bevan. People should have written poetry about him, put his photo on classroom walls, sold novelty hair pieces in his honour. Aneurin Bevan was responsible, in 1948, for the institution of this country’s National Health Service, thus adding himself to the rather short list of politicians who have accomplished tangible, long-lasting good for the country at large.

I’ve discovered that the National Health Service is like the UK’s bumbling and slightly inept granddad: we moan about it constantly between ourselves, but the moment someone else dares to take a swipe at it, we unite in our indignation. So it has been, of course, with the recent NHS-bashing indulged by our Republican friends across the pond, in response to Obama’s proposed healthcare reforms. Even the nice old vicar on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day got in on the act, spending his three-and-a-half minutes explaining why a health system catering for all regardless of personal circumstances was self-evidently the most Christian way to do things. It’s not like him to be so partisan, and I raised an eyebrow in my car even as I also let out a savage, un-Christian ‘Too right! Choke on that, Glenn Beck, you whinging mentalist!’

Because, of course, the arguments used by these detractors of the ‘evil’ NHS seemed, to the casual observer, ludicrous bordering on the downright nonsensical. I’ve always considered the US to be a country of mostly normal, rational, functional people, with the odd nutcase now and then, as in all countries. This anti-healthcare campaign has thrown all my assumptions into confusion, as though a large percentage of these normal, rational, functional people have followed the example of the whack-jobs at Fox News and had Insane-o-Wheats for breakfast. I can’t understand why so many people have become incandescent with rage about a system designed to help fund treatment for the millions of people who can’t pay for basic healthcare. Was the high point when Investor’s Business Daily told the world that the British-born Stephen Hawking would be dead if he were a Brit, because the NHS would consider his life to be ‘worthless’? Um, Mr Hawking speaks with that slightly Americanised computer voice because he has motor neurone disease, not because he’s actually an American computer. It’s called a Google search. Look it up. Maybe the most bizarre moment came when hundreds upon hundreds of people congregated outside town halls around the country, carrying homemade signs comparing Obama to Hitler. And here’s me thinking that Hitler was responsible for the mass-murder of at least 17 million people. Turns out he was also trying to make sure that 46 million people could be diagnosed with cancer without also having to worry about bankruptcy. Hasn’t he had some bad press over the years?

Watching these otherwise normal people, standing with their placards and slogans and their voluble horror at the possibility of having to help the less fortunate, I felt much as I feel when I see people putting their dogs in Halloween costumes: shiftily embarrassed, in genuine despair for the future of the species, and a little bit sick. I mean, these people sat at home and actually made signs to let everyone know that they don’t want universal healthcare, an ideological position we usually associate with the petty dictators of Third-World African countries. Weren’t they ashamed to say such a thing in public? Do all these reasonable-looking people come back from a day at the office, lock themselves in their rooms and spend the evening cackling and rocking on a pile of dollar bills? Who can explain this?

Today I had an appointment at the ENT clinic of our city hospital. The building was a little shabby and the clinic was running half an hour late, but my (probably badly paid) consultant was unfailingly kind, looking sympathetically uncomfortable as he sprayed me with anaesthetic and fed a rubber tube up my nose to a place it really shouldn’t have been allowed to go. Afterwards, my anaesthetised uvula flapping disconcertingly around the back of my throat, I was traumatised enough to award myself an Honorary Order of McDonalds, Deli Sandwich Class. But while I was concerned about drooling in public, I wasn’t at all worried about being able to afford the return appointment they booked for me in December. Because I’m lucky enough to live in a democracy, and so my healthcare is free. I’d much rather be part of Mr Bevan’s rambling, all-inclusive NHS than arguing with the receptionist of my insurance company’s private hospital: all shiny floors and stethoscopes and absolutely no soul.

The Sweaty Smell of Success 15 September 2009

I miss academia most often in September. There’s something about all the irresistibly tempting Back to School stands in Tesco that makes me wish I were starting a new term of something – something that gives me an excuse to spend lots of money in bookshops, and write essays, and expand my soggy brain with lovely new words and ideas. There are things I don’t miss about school and university (falling asleep in the library and wearing the same jumper for days on end spring to mind), but at this time of year I forget about all of them. I’m overtaken by a vague, powerful longing to buy new pads of A4 paper and accost people on the street to tell them what I think about Restoration theatre.

It's like a drug.

I wonder how long it will take before September stops being my Month of the Fresh Start? It hasn’t yet, anyway, so in the three years (ulp) since I graduated I’ve attempted to do something different once summer is over, mostly to distract myself from that pencil case stand in Tesco. This year I decided to freshen up our flat. The shower was broken. A good start. Also, the shower curtain was about three bacteria away from moving around of its own accord. Time to get rid. The walls could do with some attention, too: the previous occupants left in a lot of random wall plugs, and we never removed or painted over them. A picture frame might be nice. Or a cabinet! My, the possibilities were endless.

The shower was our first mistake. You’d think that a simple desire to wash in the mornings would be easy to satisfy, but not so: having taken off the old, crusty shower once it had finally clanked itself into silence, we sallied forth to the DIY shops in Reading. We knew (although in retrospect, how little we knew) that our boiler wouldn’t take an electric shower, so we’d need…the other kind. Having accidentally bought an electric shower, we took it back, and sallied forth again with a little less enthusiasm. Turned out the ‘other kind’ was a power shower, now as rare as gold-dust and just about as expensive. We decided that an electric shower was our only financially viable option, and went back to pick up the shower we’d returned not an hour previously. Then we went to a different shop, mostly out of shame, and bought a glass bath screen. That evening, we discovered a) the new, electric shower wouldn’t fit into the space the old shower had occupied; b) some more tiling would therefore be required; c) the screen was missing half its parts. Tim went back to B&Q for supplies, and spent an hour chipping away at the wall before the very sharp and conveniently rusty chisel he was using buried itself into his hand. It bled rather a lot, unsurprisingly. Once we’d bandaged it up between us, I sent him downstairs and started cleaning up the mess we’d made. I came down to find him attempting to open an oven pizza with his head. Such was the stress of the day.

Monday saw the tiling finished, the shower fitted, the gaping hand wound healed and no resultant tetanus – so far, so good. We switched on the shower. It didn’t work. After a bit of fiddling, Tim concluded that it wouldn’t work, ever, and we definitely needed a power shower. We took the electric shower off the wall, and spent the remainder of the evening sobbing ‘I just want to be clean’ into our respective pillows. End of day two.

On Tuesday we took the electric shower back, having carefully drained it of water and packaged it all up as much as possible. Thankfully the people at Wickes accepted the return and gave us the money back, although they had no more power showers in stock. Tim went to Bracknell and bought the power shower. I returned home from my meeting at 10.30pm to find him banging his head against the wall in our cistern cupboard (quite a small space to conduct a tantrum): we were missing a pipe we needed. Still no working shower. We smelled, rather a lot. End of day three.

Wednesday finally brought relief. Not only did the shower work, but it was the BEST shower this world has ever seen, thus making up for the days of hell that preceded it. Still, it hasn’t been an auspicious beginning to the month – if replacing the shower turned out to be a seven-day wrestle with plaster and piping, what horrors might the wall plugs unleash?! We wait with bated breath.

Is this really what adults do in September? All things considered, I’d much rather be talking about Restoration Theatre. Get me an A4 pad, wide-ruled, sharpish. And one of those little coloured markers. I love those.

Getting Away From it all…and Coming Back 3 September 2009

I love being home after a holiday. When we drove off the Boulogne ferry very early on Monday morning, it was only the lateness of the hour and inadequacy of the setting that prevented me from falling blissfully to my knees and kissing some English sand, as did the bemulleted Kevin Costner in Prince of Thieves. I managed to work the phrase ‘my native land’ a full seven times into conversation during the drive back down the M4, buoyed with a bubble of happiness that managed to stay afloat even when the alarm went off at 7am the next day.

The return to the UK was all the more satisfying, coming as it did at the end of a truly wonderful holiday. We spent just over a week in a picturesque, rambling country house in the middle of Normandy, which was filled only with fantastically ugly antique furniture until we filled it even fuller with fourteen people.

Tim and I slept in a tiny attic room with a sweeping view and a bed with a gaping crevasse in the mattress; my unofficial waking up time became 2am, as I would lose my grip on the edge of the bed and roll, inexorably, downhill to wherever Tim was.

We ate large, baguette-related meals in the dining room and out of cool boxes in the car, went on sunny, dusty walks, swam in green lakes overhung with tangled trees, and only once pulled out onto the left side of the road by accident (quickly rectified; no casualties). The most confusing thing about the roads was not the right-hand traffic but the roundabouts – easy enough to drive around, but each with its own, hilariously random collection of sculpture, ranging from six full-size plastic cows to five-feet-long paperclips to a selection of hanging baskets on decorative fishing poles. And as you gape, and one of you says ‘Is that…a cow?’, you miss your exit. Rubbish.

On Monday we visited the castle at Falaise, the birthplace of William the Conqueror (or William the Bastard as he was first known; one suspects he was keen to get some conquering done in order to shift his awful nickname). For reasons best known to the renovators, the castle had been decked out on the inside with a mixture of sandstone and stainless steel, and the audio tour initially seemed reluctant to dwell on William at all: we were treated to philosophical musings on the similarities of chess to medieval society, and an account of a Christmas party given by Eleanor of Aquitaine. Then in the final room we were directed to the far wall, which sprang to life with a projected animation: William, crossing the sea to invade England, pauses to remember the touching story of his royal father seducing his peasant mother (ah, romance), then enjoys some highly dramatic, musical flashbacks to his own upbringing and rise to power. It was all very…French. And brilliantly enjoyable.

Claude Monet’s house and garden at Giverny was a botanical paradise, from the jumble of flowers spilling out onto little pathways, to the more ordered calm of the famous lily pond. Considering Monet was a painter, he had some very funny ideas about decoration. For instance, everything in his kitchen, from woodwork to accessories, was bright yellow. It’s like he had only one pot of paint left over and just thought well, what the heck. Splash it everywhere boys. I would’ve thought the guards in the house might have suffered from eye-strain, but they didn’t seem to mind: they were startlingly overprotective of the house and its contents, leering threateningly at people with cameras (which weren’t allowed), and raining a torrent of outraged abuse onto Seb as he accidentally leaned against a stool. Bad boy. Don’t you know whose stool that was?! The rest of the village was similarly beautiful, but I bet Monet won the Giverny In Bloom prize every year even so – in the late afternoon sunshine the garden was glorious.

The final two days were spent visiting D-Day sites and memorials, a sober and somehow ennobling way to conclude, I thought. I had unwittingly prepared myself by reading Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front a couple of nights before (see Appendix A, later, for why this is the best first world war book ever written). Foolishly, I read the last third all in one go before bedtime, and spent several hours afterwards staring dry-eyed and shivery with horror at the ceiling, repeating Wilfred Owen’s ‘Futility’ to myself because that’s the only war poem I know by heart. A different war fought on the Normandy beaches, but the same devastation of young life. From a distance, the Commonwealth cemetery at Bayeux, with its four-and-a-half-thousand grave markers in cream stone, looks peaceful and serenely dignified. When you stand in the middle of it, and realise that every one means a 19 or 20 year old boy died painfully, and violently, and that four-and-a-half-thousand families had to make peace with that for the rest of their lives, it’s almost unbearable. It puts the famous verse ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning/ We will remember them’ into context, doesn’t it? I was overwhelmed by their bravery, and by the insignificance of my own concerns, which I suppose is what these memorials try to help us remember.

All of which really put me in the frame of mind to appreciate home and all its comforts. I promise you my emotions were quite as fervent as Kevin’s, and I would have seized with pleasure the opportunity to embrace the soil of my native land, mullet stirring gently in the stiff English breeze.

Oxford Road: The Musical 4 August 2009

Aha, Mr Jobs: methinks I have found a crucial flaw in the design of your mighty iPod. Walking with it is well-nigh impossible. Why didn’t that come up at any of your market research review meetings, eh?

At first, all seems straightforward. It is one of the rare occasions that I’ve had to forego use of the car, and hence walk the mile and a half from the train station to home. Walking in office clothes (especially office shoes) is uncomfortable and boring. The scenery of Oxford Road is likewise not calculated to lift the heart and refresh the mind. To the rescue comes the iPod – surround yourself in a bubble of your own musical taste and the time will flash by.

The first pitfall presented itself as soon as I pressed the play button. I surely can’t be the only one incapable of walking to music without walking in time to the music. Yet there are surprisingly few songs that fit my walking pace. Slightly too fast and I end up striding like a demented wind-up robot, all straight legs and manic expression. This looks stupid, and there are cars around, with people in them. Stop, and change the song. Much too slow and I have a chance of walking at double speed. This is just about acceptable if I conduct the down-beat with a free hand (note: this must be done subtly; see above comment re. people in cars). Slightly too slow is worst of all: I’m forced to adopt a hip-swinging, come-hither swagger that says nothing so much as ‘At home, I practice being Jessica Rabbit in front of the mirror’.

Which brings me to the second pitfall: walking with music playing in the ear blocks out grimy reality, and replaces it with your very own soundtrack, making you the star of an edgy, yet strangely uneventful urban Broadway musical in which passing the tattoo shop is the climax of the first act. As such I find it hard not to adopt the emotion of whatever song happens to be playing, whether it be passionate cheerfulness or forlorn heartache. Much to the consternation of passing cyclists, I’m sure. I am mostly successful in refraining from singing out loud (although I couldn’t prevent a triumphant ‘Soooooometiiiimes’ from escaping me this afternoon just before the roundabout); however, the temptation to break into a set of skip-ball-changes with coordinating arm waves (see anything involving Gene Kelly for an example) is becoming dangerously attractive.

Imagine my face squashed joyfully against that lamppost...

You see what you’ve done, Mr Jobs? One of these days I’m going to skip-ball-change myself under an articulated lorry, and then you might give a bit more thought to what happens when you put music in people’s heads.  Tsk.

Oh, Zuckerberg. Where Did It All Go Wrong? 25 July 2009

I think I might actually be nearing the end of my rag with Facebook. I’ve stuck with the world-conquering super-network since its early, grimy days as a university-only messaging service, where the novelty of gawking at other people’s drunken photographs and thinking up ‘Rachel is’ statements was all thrilling and edgy. It was like MySpace, but for grownups. Well, now it’s like MySpace, for every tweenage idiot on the planet, and every single one of them wants you to know, yes you, right now, what angel job they’d be given in heaven, what mathematical vector they’d be if being mathematical vectors was allowed, and, especially, which boy in the Twilight series is their Dream Date.

And if you’re not taking these quizzes (and if not, why the cheff not?) you’re broadcasting your most personal, uncomfortable thoughts all over the status page. It used to be the case that in the throes of your melodramatic teenage angst, you’d scrawl it all in your journal to feel heartily embarrassed about later, or you’d write a heartbroken/soul searching song with lots of diminished seventh chords, or you’d just buy lots of black clothes and spend your evenings wondering why No one Understands You. This is all fine and dandy, and is a rite of passage as a teenager. As a species we concentrate all our ridiculousness into six years, so we can be relatively normal for the rest of it. Unfortunately, one person’s melodrama is another’s really boring drivel. And thanks to the Book of Face, now every single one of your online ‘friends’ (whether actual friends or friends of friends or people you think might make your friends page look cooler) can read all about every one of your ‘So-and-so wonders when life will get better for me enough already!!!!lol’ days. And if that includes me, consider me thrilled. Especially by the mixed third/first person sentences; I love those.

Of course, I’m well aware of the hypocrisy of this rant, because I’m not about to deactivate my Facebook account. I can reel off this argument because I’ve already gone over it several times to myself. It serves a practical purpose (family abroad; can keep up with their news and photographs without having to be intrusive or rack up huge phone bills). It allows you to Facebook-stalk old high school classmates, to see – let’s face it – if they’re married, having kids or have put on shedloads of weight. And there’s an undeniable little frisson of excitement to be gained when your status update or photo album attracts a flurry of comments. This is what worries me though: that this determination to relay every, tiny, intimate detail of your day, no matter how boring and/or inappropriate, is sort of…egotistical. Because, really, every time you tell that inviting little blue box that you’ve got a urinary tract infection (a real example, though I wish it weren’t), you’re assuming that your 371 friends (plus any number of their friends, if they comment on it) would be edified by that information. And you were so convinced of the worldwide importance of your bodily function news that you needed to publish it immediately on a public forum. I saw a status update on someone else’s computer the other day, sent while the person was in labour. Important news, undeniably. But isn’t the fact that you’re birthing a child more important than updating your Facebook page? Was it absolutely necessary to stop, mid-contraction, to type it in and press ‘send’?

I just found out that, unless you stumble across a tiny little tickbox on a forgotten settings page, your Facebook photos and details can be used to create ‘Facebook Ads’ for your friends. Basically Zuckerberg can appropriate your face in order to sell stuff to people, based on what you’ve put in your profile. I worked up a little energy and was shocked, and opted out. But honestly, I can’t see many people minding too much. Not when it means more people get to see your status updates and be reminded what a cool, hilarious person you are, right? Why should the site be bothered about privacy rules when none of its 250 million users are? It seems that while Facebook used to record people’s lives after the event, now it informs and influences the event itself. Your day doesn’t exist if Facebook doesn’t know about it, so take another moody-looking photograph and stick it on your wall.

When You Go There, They Have To Take You In 16 July 2009

My younger brothers are here. They’re downstairs, right now, in that comatose, sweaty state they call sleeping. And they smell and seem too big and ungainly and make lots of noise and have an immense amount of hair, but still: I feel more myself with them in the house. Or rather, I reconnect with a self I don’t often occupy these days. I think Jane Mersky Leder expressed it best:

Our siblings push buttons that cast us in roles we felt sure we had let go of long ago – the baby, the peacekeeper, the caretaker, the avoider…. It doesn’t seem to matter how much time has elapsed or how far we’ve travelled.

Very true. Fifty-one weeks of my year are without family. And I love my life, don’t get me wrong (why do so many grown-ups go around looking so miserable when married adulthood is so much fun?); I just feel somewhat loose and untethered with brothers and sister on a different continent. I only notice when they come back, one golden week a year. It’s like I take a deep breath and remember myself in the way they see me. Oh yes, I think. That’s who I am. It doesn’t even really matter how well we get on – we are the same, underneath. We draw from a common pool of childhood memories. We are each other. (Too sentimental? Yes. Concentrating a year’s worth of sibling interaction into seven days makes for heightened appreciation but also mawkishness, I find.)

We’ve had a good week, so far. We’ve visited Oxford museums, gone swimming, raided Topman, eaten lots of food, talked. Harry Potter Day was yesterday, the clear highlight of the week – we went to see the film once Tim arrived home from work, then discussed and analysed every scene from every angle on the way home. My favourite conversation:

James: Doesn’t it make you wish there were more than seven books?

Rob: Doesn’t it make you wish it was real?!

James: (flatly) No. If it was real, you’d be a Muggle.

Rob: (rises at once to the bait) No I wouldn’t.

James: Yes you would. You think you’d get a letter at seventeen, inviting you to Hogwarts? It’s too late for you. You’d be a Muggle. You just don’t understand how it works, Rob.

Rob: You just don’t understand the magic of the Harry Potter series.

This is an in-joke at James’ expense (a line from a film review he wrote aged nine), so we all laugh and he growls, threateningly. A pause.

Tim: Rob, if it were real, you’d be a house elf. (The back seat erupts in outrage.)

Ah, family.