Blinking into the light

Your blogger will be out and about this week, reading from 33 West at Hammersmith Library on Thursday evening, as part of the Story of London Festival. Come along if you are in the vicinity - I'm up first, so make sure you are early!

In other news, Hoovering the Roof  has been a major success for the East Dulwich Writers' Group. The first print run sold out, and it was a runner-up in the National Association of Writers' Groups Annual Writing Awards.

Not ones to rest on our laurels, we have been beavering away for the past several months, and Hoovering the Roof 2 will hit the shops in late November, just in time for your last minute Christmas shopping. Look out for promotional events in late November and throughout December.

Teen Queens and Strong Thumbs

So there it goes. Summer 2010. On warmer afternoons I can almost imagine it is still summer, but in the mornings the grass is heavy with dew, and the early evening sun now slides behind the house rather than sailing above it, casting longer shadows over the garden. Both kids are back to school now (after a false start for The Girl, who has been suffering with a Mystery Ailment for a few weeks now). A mixed bag of a summer, but I'm sorry to see it go.

The Girl's transition to Teen Queen continues, although not at a steady pace. As she spent more of the summer with us than with her friends, she gradually reverted to something more like the girl she was a year ago. Not that there is anything wrong with the girl she has become, it's just that there is a slightly harder edge to her when she is with her secondary school friends. By the time we went on holiday, she had been hanging out with me and the Boy for a few weeks, so was ready to enjoy herself Old School - playing with inflatables in the pool, diving to find fish in the sea, building sand castles (and digging wells - it's clearly genetic).

The Boy has a very peculiar inner alarm clock. On school days, he has to be dug out of bed with a crow bar at seven a.m. On the weekend and holidays, he wakes bright-eyed and bushy tailed at six-thirty. He says it's all to do with having something worth waking up for. Given that he is allowed to play his DS before breakfast during the holidays, I can see where his priorities lie. It has been nice for Hubby, though, that the Boy has been waking early all summer - it is lonely for him, setting off for work while we all slumber on. Now the Boy is back at school, I will miss his Random Daily Statement, the best of which was: 'I've just noticed, I have very strong thumbs.'

And now we are back in the thick of it and it seems like I am always doing six things at once, none of them very effectively. But it's not quite time to put away the flip flops yet - at least not until the clocks go back.

Four wheels bad

When I was growing up, our family car was a Land Rover. That Land Rover there on the left.

Sounds okay, right? Very nice, in fact, four-wheel drive cars being the vehicle of choice for many a suburban family these days. Well, no. Not okay at all, for two reasons. One, this was in the 1970s, and two, this was Belfast.

In the 1970s, the only people who drove Land Rovers were farmers and soldiers. They were utility vehicles, not family cars. Our Land Rover was undercoat-grey (come to think of it, it may indeed have been painted just with undercoat, and remained unfinished, a bit like the house). The interior was finished in a fetching combination of rivets and bare metal. The seats were upholstered in bum-numbingly hard plastic. In lieu of a boot there was a loading area with a handy integrated folding shovel. Just what every family needs.

Being driven about in this grey tin box was mortifying. My friends' dads drove proper cars, with velour upholstery and radio-cassette players and windows that wound down with a handle, not ones that slid down with an alarming crash when you released the catch. One of the back windows had been replaced with clear plastic sheeting, the glass having been broken long ago. I occasionally got a lift to school with a friend whose dad wore leather driving gloves while driving their Ford Grenada, the executive car of the day. I say they were friends, but actually, these girls just happened to go to the same school as me. They spotted me at the bus stop one day, pointed out to their dad that we went to the same school, and he stopped to offer me a lift. And there was another difference between my father and other people's fathers. He never, ever, once, drove me to school. I don't think he ever just gave me a lift somewhere, anywhere. Given how much I hated the Land Rover, I should have been grateful for that, but of course, it was just another point of difference between me and everyone else in the world.

Of course, it wasn't just social embarrassment that was wrought on us by the Land Rover. Like I said, only farmers and soldiers drove Land Rovers in the 1970s. In Belfast, the only other Land Rovers on the road were painted camouflage green and driven by British soldiers. So there I was, a Catholic girl in a sectarian city with an English, Protestant father who drove a Land Rover but who wasn't a soldier, who was in fact a university professor with middle-class tastes without the middle-class income. In a city where your cultural identity was everything, I didn't have a clue who I was.

There were times, however, when the Land Rover came into its own, never more so than when we went on holiday to Donegal. With its four-wheel drive, the Land Rover happy trundled down onto the beach. On more than one occasion my father helpfully towed away other cars that had foolishly followed him onto the sand and promptly got stuck. With its back door swung open, the Land Rover provided a changing room, a place to make sand-free sandwiches and a spacious shelter from the rain. The folding shovel was often used to dig sand wells - my father would dig holes in the sand so deep and wide that he had to cut in steps to climb back out again,  after digging down and down until he hit water. The plastic spades other families bought from the harbour gift shop were no match for my father and his proper, made-for-emergencies shovel. Other fathers tried to dig similar wells, perhaps driven by spade-envy, but they never made better than ours.

One year, finally, the Land Rover failed its MOT so comprehensively there was no saving it. It was so dilapidated and full of rust that it could only be sold for scrap. And that was when I discovered that there was one thing more socially damning that a Bad Car, and that is No Car. For a while (I don't know how long, but it felt like forever) we had No Car. I didn't know anyone else with No Car.

Luckily, the only way you can go from No Car is up. One day, on the back of an advance from his publishers (I think) my father proudly brought home the Princess. That wasn't some sickly pet moniker we gave the new car, that was the actual name of the model. The Austin Princess. It was royal blue and had proper windows and a boot. And a few years after that, oh joy, the Audi Quattro. White with those three distinctive black rings emblazoned on the side. Not only did we have a car, it was a Cool Car. Change came to my family in what felt like an avalanche in the 1980s. My mother started a new career in financial services and all of a sudden money was something that came out of the hole-in-the-wall on demand, not a scarce commodity carefully counted out from my mother's black cash tin. Cars came and went - company cars changed on a whim. But the funny thing is, I hardly remember those cars. But the Land Rover, much as I loathed it, was a member of our family, and being eccentric and awkward and downright bonkers, it fitted right in.

Deliver unto us our daily bread

Watching the supermarket vans pootling around South London, I am reminded that there is nothing new under the sun. Ordering online may be very 21st century, but having your groceries delivered was the norm for most of the 20th century. Only in the last few decades of the last century, when cars and supermarkets became ubiquitous, did we take it for granted that we had to go to the shop, the shop couldn't come to us.

When I was little, my mother didn't drive (she could drive, but it was generally considered better that she didn't, more of which later). So my father was sent off on a Saturday morning with a list to do The Big Shop. My father liked the list to be written in the right order, according to the layout of the shop. He even went as far as to type out a master list that my mother could consult when compiling the weekly list, so she could select the items she wanted and write them down in the right order. It is to my mother's eternal credit that not only did she use this master list, but she seemed to do it with a good grace too.

During the week, supplies were topped up by the delivery men. My personal favourite was the bread man. He would pull into our drive in his little Ormo Bakery truck, white with a large purple butterfly painted on the side. I would hop in the back with my mother's list and inhale deeply. If you think the bread section of the supermarket smells good, you would think you had died and gone to heaven in the back of that van. Along with all the usual bread, there were the local specialities: soda bread, potato bread, Veda, barmbrack, and muffins. These weren't savoury 'English' muffins or sweet American muffins (which are cakes, let's face it). These muffins were small, round, slightly flattened bready rolls that were a little bit sweet, with a smooth, thin, glossy and buttery crust. They were delicious fresh out of the packet or split, toasted or buttered. There was nothing else like them - it was only much later in life that I discovered they were a local variation on the most delicious bread of all - brioche.

We had lots of other things delivered directly to the house. I remember getting packets of sausages and bacon from the back of a van as well (may have been the bread man branching out, I can't remember). We had sack loads of coal and 'slack' (smaller pieces of coal good for damping down the fire without putting it out) delivered too. The coal man brought the coal round to the back of the house where we had two huge wooden coal bunkers. The coal man filled the bunkers from the top, while we got our daily supply by opening a little hatch at the bottom and poking at the compacted pile with a small shovel until a little avalanche trickled out into a waiting bucket.

Other fuels were delivered by Mr Munn. We had paraffin lamps and heaters that came in very handy when the Unionists called General Strikes in the 1970s and you could never be sure when the electricity would be on. Later we also had gas heaters that ran from bottled gas and had to be lit by flooding the front panels with gas then firing the pilot light. The result was a small, but none the less alarming explosion. Once the pilot lights had inevitably failed and we had to use matches to light the gas, it got hairier still. But it was worth it to be warm. Mr Munn ran a hardware shop and delivered clear plastic cans of pink, oily paraffin and the gas canisters. He wore a brown shopkeepers coat and a flat cap, was a thin as a whippet and taciturn to the point where you could complete an entire transaction without him saying a word.

And when all these methods of procurement failed and my mother found she had run out of something essential, she did what any sensible woman would do. She sent a small child off to 'run a message' to the corner shop. I would do the same, if only we still had such a thing as a corner shop.

Coming up next: my family and cars. A source of embarrassment, identity confusion, and fear for one's life (and not just because of my mother's driving).

Banana Phone

The phone doesn't ring much in this house, especially during the day. Hubby rings in the morning to let me know he hasn't fallen off his bike or under a bus, and again at lunchtime because, well just because. He calls me when he is leaving work so that a) if he is getting the train I can go pick him up from the station, b) if he's on his bike I know when to start panicking and calling local hospital and c) under either scenario, I can get the dinner on.

Lately, however, I've been getting lots of scam phone calls. At least once a day. We have caller id on our phone so I can usually see the number of the person calling. When the number is listed as 'International', I know what's coming next. First it was the people telling me they were calling from the UK government and I had been awarded a grant for something or other. Purr-lease. Do these people not see the news? The UK government ain't giving no money to no one right now, or for the foreseeable future. They certainly aren't going to be chasing me to make sure I get what I'm owed (which is, of course, precisely nothing).

And then today there was the call apparently from Sky. 'Can you confirm that you are a Sky customer?' the lady asked. Well yeah, along with about half the population. 'What type of Sky box do you have?' Okay, these scammers really aren't trying hard enough. Sky know what boxes I have, they know which rooms they are in, hell, they probably know what I ate for dinner last night while goggling at their box. Note to scammers: not good enough. I hung up.

The other calls I get regularly aren't really scams, but they aren't quite kosher either. I have debt collection agencies calling me looking for a Jenny Someone-or-Other. I know the names of everyone who has lived in this house for the past twenty five years and there has never been a Jenny Anyone. So I tell them that, and then they want to know who I am and what the address is, which I tell them is none of their beeswax. What confuses me about this is that the calls keep coming, no matter how many times I tell them they have the wrong number. Are these people not working on commission? Why are they wasting their time calling numbers they know are wrong? Probably because the computer dials for them and they, the poor hapless souls, just get on with reading the script, their will to live diminishing just a little with every uttered syllable.

So if you are going to call me any time soon, make sure I know it's you, because otherwise I'm not picking up.  Or send me a text. I haven't had a scam text for, oh, at least a month.

Oh yeah, and the plant in the picture? It's called Honesty.

Measuring Perfection

The Boy is a worrier. Has been since his early days at school. He worries about letting people down. He worries about not living up to expectations. He worries about things he has done in the past, things he might have to do in the future. He has asked me several times over the past year if the credit crunch is going to affect us. When I stayed in bed with the flu, he was so tense with worry, he could barely speak. We are working on the worrying, but you can only do so much with what you've got.

So the Boy is not best suited to the current environment in primary schools, where every breath is bench-marked. I didn't really worry about SATs and testing with the Girl, because they didn't bother her. She is the perfect example of a good all-rounder. Always met her targets. So while I disagree with the SATs in principle, on a personal level I found them hard to get worked up about. But now the Boy is finishing Year 4 and preparing for Year 5, the requirements of the SATs are looming larger in his life, because he has Failed to Make Progress.

It's like a label hanging around his neck. He is achieving well above average in all his subjects, but his literacy score has not improved over the course of this academic year. I talked to his teacher about it - he is not scoring as well as he should in comprehension. This surprises me. I read with him often, and his comprehension seems fine to me. Okay, so he sometimes gets things ass-backwards, but don't we all? So I dig deeper, and it seems the problem is not his comprehension, but his ability to demonstrate it in written work.

He dislikes writing. Always has. Unlike the Girl, who would sit and scribble down stories for hours, he has always been more interested in other forms of expression. Anyone who knows him will tell you that he can talk for his country, and hold his own in pretty much any conversation. His curiosity and thirst for knowledge about the world know no bounds. But ask him to write down what he did yesterday, or to put into his own words something he has just read, and he freezes.

When the Boy first started school in New York, he was a full year younger than the oldest kids in his class. He was four, but expected to read and write like a five year-old. The teachers put pressure on me to get him tutoring. I resisted. Within a year he was reading well above his age level. The brain develops at its own pace. The same applies to his written work. Okay, he's struggling now, but does it help that he knows his current score according to the National Curriculum, and knows what he 'should' be achieving? I seriously doubt it.

I will give him as much extra help with his writing as I can, not because I think he has a problem, but because it will make his life much easier if he can conform to expectations. But I've also made it clear to him that I think he is perfect the way he is and that SATs are not the be-all and end-all of measuring a child's worth.

The Boy Speaks and Feminists Weep

There are times when raising a boy is like wrangling with an alien. No matter how much I try to humanise him, he remains obdurately Boy. One afternoon last week he dealt me a double whammy.

It is starting to rain when we get home from school so I enlist his help to bring in the washing. As we start unpegging the washing, the following conversation takes place:

Boy: I'm not touching anyone's underwear.

Me: It's clean. And anyway, what about me? I have to touch everyone's underwear. 

Boy: Well, I'm definitely not touching your bras.

Me: Whatever.

Boy: Actually, no, you know what, I am going to touch your bras! And then when I am older, I can boast to my friends that I have touched a woman's bra. Because it's every boy's dream, right?

At which point he starts racing around the washing line looking for bras. I say nothing but think it's quite sweet that he still thinks it's the bra that's the thing, not what goes into the bra. Later that afternoon, we are watching TV and an ad for Pampers comes on. As the young mother is shown leaning over her baby, changing it's nappy, the Boy exclaims:

'Yuck, I hate this ad!'

'Why?' I ask, 'it's just a baby's bottom.'

'No, it's that woman's boobies. They are way too big! It's disgusting!'

I have no response. I am literally slack jawed with speechlessness. On seeing my expression, the boy says:

'What? I'm a nine year-old-boy!' 

As if that explains everything.

Where did I go wrong?

I've tried to bring up my kids to be relaxed about their bodies, and the human body in general. My mother was taught by the nuns at her boarding school that she should never be completely naked, unless she was in the bath. There was an elaborate system for getting dressed and undressed that kept the optimal amount of flesh covered at all times. I don't know if my mother stuck to this regime religiously (pardon the pun), but she was certainly very modest, and very fond of wearing layers of undergarments. Slips and half-slips, camisoles and petticoats were all part of her moral armour. She would even wear a vest under a sundress.

She could never bring herself to talk to about sex. My sister had to tell me about 'the facts of life'. My mother was educated, confident, out-going. She hated the repression her upbringing had left her with, but she couldn't break the cycle.

So, naturally, I don't want my kids to have any of those hangups. I've tried to engender a nonchalant attitude to the human body. Up until recently I thought I'd been reasonably successful. But I'm beginning to realise that are two things I just can't fight: he's Nine and he's a Boy.