Head Space

Like Virginia Woolf, my mother thought it was important for a woman to have a room of her own. Ironically, it took a move to a smaller house to get her what she wanted. The house I grew up in had three proper reception rooms, plus a huge utility room (that was originally the kitchen),  a vast kitchen / diner and sun room. Upstairs there were six bedrooms (if you count the box room, which was always full of boxes, and one year, full of apples, individually wrapped in newspaper and perfuming the room with the smell of comfort and autumn as they slowly rotted). Outside there was the garage, the old outdoor loo (converted into a fuel store) and a shed big enough for my brother to hide quite happily all day when he was bunking off school.

Despite this abundance of space, my mother never had a room just for herself. We three kids each had our own bedrooms. My father had his study, and also appropriated the sun room, utility room and shed for the paraphernalia he used in his war of attrition against the house (it kept trying to fall down, he kept patching it back up again, but never properly). It was only when the family house was sold and my parents moved to a newly built, much smaller, house, that my mother got her own room. I suppose my mother thought that she had finally earned a right to her own room - she had retrained and launched herself into a very successful career as a financial advisor when I was in my early teens. In her room she had a sofa, a desk and a full wall of mirrored built-in wardrobes. My mother loved her job, she was hugely sociable, and she loved fashion - her room catered to all these needs.

She bought a traditional writing desk, with little drawers and a pretty bowed front. To sit at it, she used 'Aunty Jo's Chair', a delicate antique chair handed down from my mother's maiden aunt. I'm sitting on that seat right now - it has a wicker seat and is held together with ivory pegs. We weren't allowed to sit on when we were kids,  it was deemed so fragile, but it has survived my using it almost every day for some fifteen years. My laptop lives on my mother's little writing desk, or rather it rests there, when it is charging, or when it needs to be connected to the printer. When I'm writing, I usually sit at the kitchen table. This is partly because the writing desk isn't really the right size and shape for what I need, and partly because the kitchen is the nearest thing I have in this huge, Victorian house to a room of my own.

Don't get me wrong - I had a room of my own. We have a study, I used to work in there. But sitting at the desk, with my back to the door, I felt isolated and cut off from the rest of the house. I didn't like it. Here in the kitchen I can hear the kids in the other room, the washing machine running in the utility room, the rain dripping from the jungle-like tendrils of last-year's wisteria outside the window. The cats come in for a bite to eat and a quick leg-rub. There is evidence everywhere of the food we have just eaten, or the food I am going to cook later in the day. This is my room.

Vintage Butterflies

Just a reminder that the old blog - or Vintage Butterflies, as I like to think of it, is archived here:
Vintage Butterflies. There is also a permanent link to the old blog over there on the right. For new readers, a visit to the old blog is highly recommended (by me, which isn't really much of a recommendation, but there you go). There is a better display of my photography there, plus a year and half's worth of, well, more of the same, really.

Ka-boom

It was perfectly possible to live in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s and never really see 'The Troubles' first hand. Riots, bus-burnings, punishment beatings, shootings with homemade guns, all these things happened no more than a mile away from where I grew up, but, like most people, I only saw it on the news. There were times, though, when the Troubles came to our part of town, and, once, to my own doorstep.

I was maybe nine or ten years old. Coming home from school, I noticed a white BMW parked across the road from our house. We lived on a very busy main road, and the car was parked near a small row of shops, so it shouldn't really have stood out. But Northern Ireland was still sufficiently economically blighted that a nice car was something that turned heads.

I went to sleep in my parents' bed that night - I can't remember why. What I do remember is being plucked out of my bed by a soldier. He carried me out of the house and down the street to where my mother was waiting for me with a pair of shoes and my coat. The next thing I remember is being put back to bed at a friends' house - their son was off at boarding school, so I got his bed. Somewhere between these two events, I overheard enough to understand what was going on: a car bomb had been planted outside our house.

We lived in a large (but decrepit) semi-detached Victorian house. The other side of the house (which was in much better order) was occupied by a very nice, quiet, older couple. They kept themselves to themselves, but were very kind. I once spent an afternoon in their kitchen when my mother went out and forgot to leave the back door open for me. The lady of the house gave me chocolate biscuits and orange squash, and told me to feel free to use the connecting gate as a short cut (there was a little gate linking our two gardens. Rumour had it the houses were built by brothers who shared the gardens). It was the only time I was ever in their house. What no one told me, because it wasn't the sort of thing you wanted to go spreading around, was that the tall, quiet grey-haired man who lived next door was a judge.

Hence the car bomb which was, you've guessed it, in the white BMW. The white BMW that I can still see in my mind's eye. The white BMW that sat opposite our house all afternoon, as I did my homework, watched TV, ate my tea, had a bath. Sat there, full of explosives. In the end, the army performed a controlled explosion and the only damage to our house was to the windows. I returned home the next morning to find the windows already boarded and my mother grimly sweeping the broken glass into green-tinted shimmering piles. She promptly sent me off to school, which seemed very unfair to me at the time.

We had a lucky escape. How lucky? A few years later, a Catholic judge was shot and killed at point blank range in front of his family and hundreds of churchgoers as he left Mass at our local church. We rarely saw our neighbours after the car bomb incident. The little gate was closed, the short cut decreed out of bounds. Their new security lights were so sensitive they flared up at every passing pigeon. But we didn't dwell on it, because close as we came to disaster, we were still very lucky compared to the people who lived in fear, day-in and day-out. As the politicians fight over the final details of devolved government in Northern Ireland, they would do well to remember the bad old days, to remember what it was really like to live with fear, oppression and economic deprivation, and get themselves back around that table.

Acid Reflux

Okay, so Acid Reflux was posted here, but I've taken it down due to boring legal stuff about first publishing rights, not to mention the ever-present problem of plagiarism.


Any NYC Midnight people who came here to read the story can PM me on the forum and I'll send you a (top secret) link to the story.

All human life is here

Anyone who has ever been a member of a gym will know how tribal they are. Anthropologists don't need to travel up the Amazon or into the depths of the jungle to study the human condition, they just need to come hang out in the locker room for a day or two.

My male friends tell me there are certain etiquettes in the main gym (flexing your muscles in the mirror when no-one is looking is not to be encouraged, for one thing), but my area of expertise is The Studio. I love gym classes - I'm easily bullied, and will never walk out, so it's the best way for me to get a proper workout.

Go to any given class a few times, and you start to see how a bunch of strangers very quickly establish a pecking order, and an unspoken etiquette. Regulars have their particular spot, and are most irked if someone else is in it. Never mind if you've never done the class before, you should know better. Rule is you lurk at the back until you earn your own spot.

Regulars can also fall into the category of Fawners. They suck up to the teachers, always have a little chat with them at the beginning of class, a little laugh, maybe a hand on the arm (especially if the instructor is male) and then take their place at the front with a smug look on their faces.

But woe betide the substitute teachers, because Regulars are usually also Bullies. They'll give this poor substitute the stink-eye as they set up for the class, then loudly sigh and tut has they half-heartedly follow a routine that dares to be different from the usual. Quite often they will ostentatiously walk out half-way through. 'I gave him/her a chance,' their look says, 'but I'm not wasting my precious time on this.' Last week, however, the worm turned. A substitute teacher came in, through the snow and ice, with very little notice, to take the Monday morning circuits class. The usual suspects moaned and groaned and, worst of all, whispered to each other while shooting sideways glances at the teacher. Very mature - and every one of them over the age of 40. But this particular sub had clearly seen it all before. She politely but firmly told them to put up or shut up. One walked out, the rest meekly picked up their dumb bells. I gave a silent cheer.

While these tribes are universal, there are cultural differences. The New York breed are meaner, and more vocal. There are certain people who believe that money entitles them to perfect service, every time, no excuses. At the first gym I joined in NYC, there was a bunch I called The Harridans. They were there every day, and always did at least two classes back to back, but only half-heartedly, so they weren't any fitter than the rest of us. But they bitched and moaned about everything - the teachers, the facilities, other members. They sucked the joy out of everything. One day Chief Harridan complained to a woman who kept 'invading her personal space' during a class. The woman apologised, explained that she had very poor peripheral vision and needed to go where she could see the teacher. 'Well, I don't think this is the class for you, then,' Chief Harridan replied. Nice.

After I'd been going to the classes regularly for about a year, the Harridans decided I had served my probation and should be inducted into the ranks. They asked me my name, quizzed about my life ("What does your husband do? Where do your kids go to school? Summer rental in the Hamptons or no?), and decided I was acceptable. No more could I slide in to the back of the class and get on with my own thing. There was a spot saved for me at the front. So I did what any right minded person would do. I changed gyms.

It's snow joke

I really didn't want to write about the weather, honestly. But it has been dominating my life for the past few weeks. In the days when both the kids went to the local primary school ten minutes walk away, bad weather didn't bother me. Even the supermarket is within hiking distance (as I discovered last February. It's very inconvenient when it snows on Big Shop Monday).

Ever since the Boy and I got stuck in the snow before Christmas I've been very nervous about driving in this weather. It turns out that my lovely, road-hugging, huge-engined, rear-wheel drive BMW Does Not Do Snow. I've always been very vague about the difference between front-wheel drive and rear-wheel drive. This morning I discovered that front-wheel drive will let you get up the hill in the snow and rear-wheel drive won't. So there we were, turning our wheels, the car hopelessly wallowing across the road, and people in little Fords and Hondas happily bouncing past us and on their way. No-one stops to give a BMW driver a push either. So Hubby got out and pushed. We managed to get it turned around and back down the hill and I managed to neither panic nor flap, for which I think Hubby was grateful.

What is really annoying is the degree of anxiety the whole thing is giving me. Never having been one to suffer from anxiety or panic attacks, I now find myself obsessively checking the weather, worrying about whether or not I'm going to have to drive. And lying in bed in the middle of the night listening to the cars outside, trying to work out from the sound of their wheels on the road whether it is icy or not. Which is all ridiculous, because I live in a major city, I don't have to leave the house to go to work, and everyone else in the family is capable of getting to where they need to go by foot. And there are people in remote villages who have been cut off for weeks. There is one man up in Scotland who lives in a light house. His wife left a few days before Christmas to go buy a turkey and she still hasn't been able to get home. So I really should pull myself together.

But as a very wise friend of mine pointed out, trying to talk yourself out of your misery just because other people are much worse off never works. Your own misery is not contingent on the degree of misery of others. For me, though, the best medicine is to go through the process I call Naming the Beast. As soon as I admit that I'm feeling anxious / miserable / depressed, I almost immediately start to feel better.

Which is what this blog post has been all about. Thank you for listening.

A new year for old passions

This New Year's Eve (unlike many before), I was able to look back at the old year with some sense of achievement. As most of you will know, I've had my first, albeit modest, success with The Writing. But there were other achievements in 2009: the Girl has happily made the transition from primary to secondary school; the Boy has found his football feet and has been promoted from goalie to striker; Hubby has managed to keep all bones intact and re-found his love of cycling, while cultivating a beard that I find surprisingly alluring.

But perhaps one of the most unexpected pleasures of the year was my rediscovery of dance. I used to love to dance, but somewhere around the time the Girl was born, I mysteriously lost all sense of rhythm and with it, all confidence on the dance floor. Coincidently, I also lost the ability to bake a decent cake and the curl in my hair. After the Boy was born, the curls and the cakes came back, but I never danced. Early in 2009 I slunk into the back of dance class at the gym. I was self-conscious and awkward, but the choreography came easily and as the weeks progressed, I got my groove back.

As a child I was sent to contemporary dance classes. Yes, that's right - while my friends were all doing ballet or Irish dancing, I was wearing a black leotard and footless tights and pretending to be a tree, or a mouse, or some such. Why my parents were so determined to make me a freak and a social outcast, I'll never know, but you have to admire the consistency of their efforts. Incongruously, my most immediate association with dance class is mud. About the time I started classes we lost several feet of our garden along with four venerable lime trees to the construction of a new fly-over outside our house. To get to dance class I has to wade through claggy clods of red clay that smelled of gas and that special sort of wetness that only comes from under the ground. I'd leave my shoes, now twice as heavy as when I left the house, in the porch of the church hall and slip into my soft black dance shoes. With the weight lifted from my feet, dancing felt like flying.

My dance teacher lived up to every stereotype of a dance teacher you could think of - she had a thick Eastern European accent, she was tiny but terrifying, she thumped the rhythm of the music out on the top of the piano like it had personally insulted her. I had no idea what I was doing most of the time, but whatever it was, she seemed to like it. I soon found myself, at the age of eleven, promoted to dancing with the adult class and even performed with the troupe several times. But of course, being me, this didn't build my confidence, it only gave me more opportunities to feel lost, out of place, an outsider. I gave up dancing two years later and never took a class again, until 2009.

I discovered many years later that my dance teacher, Helen Lewis, was an Auschwitz survivor. She always wore long sleeves to hide the identification tattoo on her arm. She was a respected choreographer and teacher and she published a memoir about her time in the Auschwitz, A Time to Speak. She died on 1st January 2010 at the age of 93. I shall dance with abandon in her honour.