Mensa, mensa, mensam

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I think I have talked before of the joys of extended family living. (Here on the compound I have: mother, stepfather, sister, brother-in-law, nieces, older niece's other half; then, three miles up the road, step-nephew and niece, two step-great-nieces and great-nephew, who was christened on Sunday, and very splendid he looked in his ancient lace dress.) One of the particular delights is an informal kind of bartering system, which naturally fell into place over the years. I take my mum bunches of mint from my garden, because she does not yet have any, and she sends me old periodicals in return, so that I do not have to take out a separate subscription; that kind of thing. It is oddly satisfying.

Lately, I had been feeling sad about my vast collection of terracotta pots, which would never quite stand upright on my gravel, and kept falling over and chipping and making a general mess. I had vaguely thought about some kind of bench or table, and had looked about on the internet, but everything was ugly and expensive and not at all what I wanted. So I averted my eyes from the pot carnage outside the front door and pretended it wasn't happening, since I could see no good solution.

Then, a couple of hours ago, my sister called.

'Do you want a table?' she said. She is in high clearing-out mode, just at the moment.

'Do you mean a lovely big weathered outside table, by any chance?' I said.

'That is exactly what I mean,' she said.

I could hardly believe it. It was as if she had read my mind. I told her of my sadness over the pots, and how all I had been longing for was a table.

'Can I give you something in return?' I said.

'Oh,' she sighed. 'I'll just settle for the Love.'

For some reason that made us laugh quite a lot.

'Love and a table,' I said. 'It's all we need.'

Ten minutes later, my kind brother-in-law roared up with the table on a trailer, along with three wooden chairs, which were, as an outrageous bonus, covered in lichen, my favourite thing. I ran out of superlatives.

'You are a scholar and a gentleman,' I said.

'I know,' he said.

I am so excited that I could not wait until tomorrow to show you.

'I expect this will go on the blog,' said my brother-in-law.

'You betcha, ' I said.

 

Bonus lichen chair:

I really do feel outrageously lucky. Love and table, what more could anyone ask?

A mild diversion

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Today is all visual, to take your mind off the budget.

It was going to be in black and white:

But then I saw the poppies and the peonies, and had to go into colour:

Then I became slightly mesmerised by the extraordinary bark on my beloved Scots pine:

And then I realised that, in some cases, all you need for happiness is a really big stick:

While in others, all that is required is some mossy grass to sprawl upon:

Apologies for slight dog overload. It was either that or a knotty Keynsian argument. I think I probably came down on the right side of that choice.

I leave you with a glorious thought from Albert Einstein, who knew a thing or two:

'There are two ways to live: you can live as if nothing is a miracle; you can live as if everything is a miracle.'

The bizarre power of the internet

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

1661 words today, but they were absolute buggery bollocks. I am sorry, gentle readers, but really: bollocks. The more I wrote, the more awful it got. I was scrabbling around for adjectives, always a terrible sign. I was not even making much sense. On I bashed, despite it all, like someone walking across a blasted moor in horizontal rain. In some ways it's quite magnificent, to go on writing that badly for that long. It felt very British, anyway. Perhaps I was paying unwitting homage to the England football team.

After I had finished this festival of mediocrity, I went to have a look at the internet, to cheer myself up. One of the things I love most about the bloggers I follow is that they always make me laugh. Who cares if I wrote 1661 substandard words? It's a first world worry if ever I heard one.

I found lots of lovely diversion out there on the net. I clicked from link to link, until I found something that really caught my attention. It was an instruction, and, in a very strange way, for no apparent reason, I followed it, almost to the letter.

This is the original:

(From The Debonaire, which I found via India Knight's Posterous page)

This is my version:

The reason it is not to the letter is that I do not appear to have the Helvetica font, which I am quite grumpy about.

But really. What am I? Some kind of mad sheeplike person who just does whatever the internet says?

Also, even more bizarrely, I am quite cross that the original Helvetica picture is much better than my own. I am getting competitive about something that does not matter, found at random on the internet, created by someone I do not know.  If I was only very slightly nuttier than I already am, I would go back and strive for a better effect. Luckily, I do have actual work to do.

In the meantime, to introduce a welcome note of sanity, here are some pictures of a charming silver birch wood from yesterday, with some extra lichen thrown in, because you know how I love the lichen:

It was a gloomy old day (summer ruthlessly declines to grace Scotland with her presence), but the trees still contrived to have a beauty and grace all their own.

Finally: very lovely comments on Saturday's post. Thank you all so much for them.

Saturday

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

England last night were crashingly, shockingly, bruisingly awful. The newspapers are all over it, so I won't bore you here.

The only question I did have, as an irregular observer of football, is: why? It really bothered me, the whole thing seemed so inexplicable. There was a bunch of highly paid, individually talented, internationally rated men, bumbling about the park like amateurs after a night on the town. The experts had no clue. It was nerves, it was pressure, it was the expectations of the media, it was the coach, it was the four-four-two. Rooney was grumpy, but no one really knew why, since he has everything any twenty-four-year old could ever want. The manager said, vaguely, he felt the spirit was missing, which did not sound much like a technical term to me.

Then I suddenly got it. There is no explanation. Sometimes talented people find their talent fails. Great novelists write rotten books. Brilliant tennis players crash out in the first round. Lauded designers produce hideous dresses. Venerable banks go bankrupt overnight. Gifted politicians pursue disastrous policies. Comics lose their timing. Oscar-winning actors start chomping the furniture. Great horses get beat.

I am oddly relieved by this revelation. There need be no forensic post-mortem. It's just life, baby.

In the meantime, there are the trees:

And the flowers:

(Those are my sister's new plants, of which I am mildly envious.)

And of course there are these two, who never fail:

Have a lovely weekend.

A small blogging revelation

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

The cross critics of blogging always slam it as a narcissistic exercise. The irony is that this cruel blast always comes from columnists. One could, if one was being very rigorous, argue that being paid to broadcast your opinions on any given subject, whether you are expert in it or not, is verging on the narcissistic. I could not possibly comment. Actually, I could.  I get huge pleasure from reading the columnists; I think they do me a great intellectual service by challenging my own ideas so they do not set into stone; but I would never say they are free of ego.

I think it is exactly the solipsistic nature of blogging that makes it so interesting. Of course I adore the objective, professional outfits like The Daily Dish and Michael White and John Rentoul and Michael Tomasky, and the other good political blogs, where I can go for argument and facts and an overview of what is happening in Iran or Beijing or Whitehall or Washington. But those I really take to my heart are the records of individual humans.

I like being given a glimpse into a way of living quite different from my own, in other countries and cultures; I like seeing other passions and other rooms. You could turn the whole argument on its heels and say that it is quite the opposite of narcissism; it is an act of generosity. (I have found that generosity, interestingly, is the absolute hallmark of everyone I have encountered since I started this blog.) I adore seeing the dogs and gardens and lunches and loved ones and frocks and fascinations of lives that, without this medium, would never have touched my own.

What I love about writing my own blog is the absolute freedom it brings. I do think about the writing; I try to give you light and shade; I am conscious that I should not bang on too much about one subject. I give thought to the look of the thing; hence the new camera. I try, not always successfully, to be diverting, because you are giving me the gift of your time. (I know I do not always succeed, and sometimes am so blank in the head after a day of writing that I must fall back on dog pictures, and do not think I take for granted your forbearance when that happens.) But essentially, I bash out whatever takes my fancy that day. I very rarely censor myself, and certainly never engineer something for a target audience. There is no target, because you appear to come from all nationalities, demographics and time zones. This is marvellously liberating: all I can do is give you the personal, and hope that a sliver of it might turn out to be universal, when the light is coming from the right direction.

So, this is an amateur effort, in the true sense that it comes from love. I also do a little paid blog, for a rather august publication. I had to send one off this morning, and you should have seen the metaphorical pencil sucking that went on. The moment I step into the real world, I am crashingly conscious that things are Expected. I am doing it for cash, so it must be utterly polished and professional. The publication in question does have a quite particular audience, so I find myself writing for them. Is this suitable? I think. Will this do? What on earth will they think of this nonsense? Will they find my slight flakiness and odd obsessions endearing, or blastingly dull?

As a result, the whole thing becomes stilted and slightly artificial. I keep thinking I must sit up straight; I am in polite society now. The irony is that the self-imposed pressure to do my best means that I often do my worst. Instead of just being myself, I am writing as if I am dressed up in my formal Sunday clothes. However hard I try to be natural, I cannot help adopting a persona.

Another irony: one of the things I always tell my writing students, in the annual workshop I do in my local arts festival, is write for yourself. The moment you are conscious of a market or an audience, you are lost. Readers are finely attuned; they will sense any hint of phoniness or striving for effect, and ruthlessly cast you aside.

Theory and practice, my darlings. Theory and practice.

It does make me realise how lucky I am to have this space, to be entirely free. It makes me realise how incredibly fortunate I am to have such kind and loyal readers, who take me just as I am. It also makes me think that perhaps blogging is the ideal tool for budding writers: it is the perfect place to practice your most authentic prose. This does not mean sloppy or slapdash or excessively self-regarding; it does mean that you get to be your true self, as long as the semi-colons are in the right place.

 

1661 words of book today, so as usual the brain is fracturing. Not sure if any of the above made that much sense, but I wanted to say it anyway. Sometimes I just have to sing a little hymn of gratitude to the lovely blogosphere.

Pictures from my walk yesterday evening, when the sun finally broke through the clouds:

A perfect field of daisies.

A perfect dog in a perfect field of daisies. (Her sister, as is tradition, was off digging for moles, and so cancelled her photo opportunity.)

These amazing drifts of wild flowers have sprung up all over the woods, almost overnight it seems.

Look at them. There were nothing like so many last year. Look how well the brave little chestnut tree is doing, too.

More drifts. Just in case you did not get the idea.

Lovely older niece, whom I do not think you have met before, with adorable dog.

Adorable dog is certainly ready for her close-up. I swear she actually poses the moment she sees a camera.

These beauties just grow wild on my wall.

This is the hydrangea whose name I cannot remember. Is it a bush hydrangea or a tree hydrangea? Anyway, it is about seven feet tall and is part of my elder and hawthorn hedge, and these are its first flowers this year.

Once I start getting arty with the garden gate, I know it really is time to stop. Also, I have to go and buy some beer for the England match, in my continuing pursuit of football clichés. I have crates of delicate Pinot Grigio, but I cannot bring myself to drink white wine whilst yelling at the referee for a bad offside decision. It just would not feel right.

Point of information for those of you who do not do football, and have never had the suffer the agonies of watching England play: it is physically and psychologically impossible to watch an England match without alcohol. The pain would be too great.

Really am stopping now.

Have a lovely Friday.

In which I spy an unexpected lesson

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I woke very tired this morning. It never stops amazing me how enervating mental work can be. I tell myself, when I am shattered after a day of typing: oh, for God's sake, you are not working down a mine. I have an awed respect for people who do manual jobs. I look at the soldiers in Afghanistan, and, quite apart from the physical danger of their work, what astonishes me is how they carry heavy packs and wear full armour in forty degree heat. So I always feel like the most terrible fraud when I declare myself exhausted after a bit of poxy writing.

Also, unlike you mothers and wives out there, I do not have children to tidy up after, or another half to tend. I do not have to go to corporate events and be charming to dull people. I do not have to give presentations or have meetings or calculate budgets. I do not have to commute round the M25, cursing the traffic. All I have to do is write one little book, and take the dogs for a walk, and have my daily chat with my dear old mum. I really am the most awful powder puff.

Anyway, today I was pathetically tired. The last three days of crazed writing spurt had pulled every last atom of energy out of me.

'Oh yes,' Sarah said, laughing, when she called yesterday and I told her of the hundreds of words. 'You are in your manic phase. People can set clocks by it.'

I thought: I'll take the day off. My rule is that I must work six days a week. The day of rest is usually Saturday or Sunday, but sometimes I take a naughty weekday and then write over the weekend.

I'll just go and look at the internet, I thought. My idea of a day off is not to go to the beach, but to indulge in an orgy of political geekery. I can catch up on all those American politics shows I love so much, and watch The Daily Politics on the iPlayer. (Sometimes I really do wonder that I reveal all these dark secrets to you. Sometimes I wonder that you don't all run away screaming, or at least laughing and pointing.) Once at the computer, with a huge pot of coffee at my side, I thought: perhaps I'll just have a fleeting glance at what I did yesterday.

It wasn't too bad. It wasn't Mrs Woolf, but it was not shaming. Some of the tiredness receded. I felt my brain start clicking into gear. Perhaps I'll just do a hundred words, I thought, for the hell of it. I'll do a quick, crafty hundred, and then there will be something to mark the day.

I chose a section that did not need any research, so I would not have to stop to look things up. I just let a bit of a theory develop. I like making things up on the hoof; later I can go back and see if they make any sense or not.

Two hours later I had 1200 words.

I thought: it's all very well, this lashing and planning and forcing and demanding. Maybe sometimes we need to fool our minds just a little. Perhaps there are days when we get more done if there is not a twelve-point plan. Once I gave myself permission not to do anything, I got rather a lot done. I can't work out if that is a profound life lesson, or if it is just me, with my idiotically contrary nature.

Outside, big white clouds are falling away behind the Wellingtonias, to reveal the first blue sky we have seen for two weeks. The swallows are performing a pas de deux, flying low over the bright grass. There is absolute quiet. My mind goes blank again. But that's all right, because I did my words.

 

No new pictures today, so here are some from the last couple of weeks, all collaged up:

You know I love almost nothing more that a bit of moss and lichen, so here is a little festival of both:

Finally, all the blues and all the mauves, my favourite colours after green:

Have a happy Thursday.

PS. When I say wives and mothers, don't think I am ignoring the husbands and fathers and the work they do. I know that most of my dear readers are women, and I may be sometimes guilty of assuming an entirely female sensibility, if there even is such a thing. When Sarah and I wrote Backwards, we did think it would probably be of most interest to women, but one of the nicest reviews we ever had was from a seventy-something man called Arthur on Amazon. It was particularly touching to us, because it was rather a surprise. In the same way, I do tend to think of this blog as a gathering of women, and I always get a tremendous fillip of surprise and delight when I have a gentleman caller. Especially during the World Cup.

Not that I would ever stoop to stereotyping, but you boys are all biologically programmed to think of nothing else but football for the next three weeks.

Only joking.

And another thing

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

I know that you all have lives and jobs and dogs and children and husbands and wives. I know that you have houses to clean, thoughts to think, food to cook, gardens to garden, books to read, and miles and miles to go before you sleep, but do take five minutes to look at this.

I think it must be a spoof. It is a website set up to guard and preserve the great English language. (How could I resist that, when I am the scourge of the dangling modifier?) Here, however, is the title emblazoned on one page:

QES ENGLISH ACADAMY: Rogues' Gallery

I'm certain it must be a typographical error. They surely must know how to spell academy. I might have had a cheap laugh at that and walked away, but I clicked on Julian Fellowes, who is their number two rogue, below George W. Bush and above the European Union. Here the ironies were piled so deep I had to struggle my way through them. The furious article denouncing Fellowes for being a pretentious snob who cannot write English and does not know how to use the subjunctive is possibly the clunkiest piece of prose I have read this week. Or last week, for that matter. It's flat and ugly on the page, confusingly punctuated, and often mildly unclear.

It favours a shockingly clumsy use of dashes. It is far too free with inverted commas, often for no apparent reason. It uses gratuitous exclamation marks. It does not know that Gosford Park was a film, not a television play.

There is also a weird class warrior aspect to it. It accuses Fellowes of being posh, and a snob, but then uses the word 'fraightfully' to describe his speech. Anyone interested in language and the strange, mazy class system of the British knows that 'fraightfully' indicates the refined speech of the aspirant lower-middle-class, the Hyacinth Buckets of the world. It means that people who are not posh are trying to sound posh. Fellowes is upper middle class, and speaks with the clipped accent of the old landed gentry, overlaid with the slight camp of the theatrical community. None of this matters a whit in any sensible discussion, but if you are going to make an ad hominem attack, you should at least make your insults accurate.

Then there is a most peculiar problem with commas. I became quite fascinated with this site, and roamed all over it. On every page, I found at least two glaring mistakes in punctuation. I was going to list all the missing commas for you, but I know you have jobs and lives and dogs.

I keep feeling that I should get cross about all this. Who will guard the guardians? Then I think: oh, really, it's just silly.

 

Found via Johnson, the Economist's excellent new blog, which is funny and well-written and knows what to do with a comma.

PS. I'm sorry, but I have to give you one of the QES comma howlers:

'At a Board of Trustees meeting in early March, it was agreed with much pleasure, that RHEA WILLIAMS would be appointed as acting Chairman of the Society, with immediate effect.'

The only way that sentence works is if you put in a comma after agreed, or take the comma out after pleasure. If I were getting really sniffy, I might also point out that board of trustees is not a proper name and therefore does not require capital letters. And, since I appear unable to stop, is it slightly odd to refer to a woman as a chairman? I know that chair and chairperson are ugly and unwieldy, but what is wrong with using chairwoman? We quite happily say businesswoman. Imagine how curious it would be if you read: 'Miss A was a highly distinguished businessman'.

Oh, perhaps I am crosser about this than I thought.

A slightly random Wednesday

Posted by Tania Kindersley.

Feeling most peculiar. I had an old lady early night last night, so woke at five this morning, and by eleven had already made egg bread for breakfast, tidied the kitchen, contemplated the Saville Report from every conceivable angle, made guacamole, taken the dogs for a walk, fed the pig, scanned the newspapers, written 1312 words, and shouted at Jim Naughtie on the radio for what I considered moral relativism. (He said the British Army should be held to a higher standard than the IRA. Why? Surely everyone should be held to the same standard, which is patently universal: killing unarmed people is wrong. Besides, the IRA regarded themselves as a proper army, so standards, by their own lights, should be identical. Naughtie should go back and read his Kant.)

Anyway, the point of it all is that now it feels like it is six in the evening and my day is run.

I wanted to say something interesting about Twitter but am not sure I have much intellectual firepower left, after all that. I have not been much on Twitter lately, despite my early love affair with it. I'm not quite sure why. I get moments of sudden shyness, thinking oh really, I have nothing pithy and interesting to say, I'll just hide in my room. After a few days away, the powerful feeling of a swinging party going on without me kicks in, and I imagine that I do not have a metaphorical thing to wear. But I also wonder whether it is because I am blogging more. I love reading blogs that post regularly, and so my resolution in the last few weeks has been to try and put up something every day except for Sundays, even if it is only a picture of the dogs. Besides, my mother reads this, and she gets quite affronted if there is nothing new for her to look at. It may be that there is only so much self-expression in me. Once I have told you everything here, I lose the impetus to tweet. I do rather miss it though, because my fellow Twitterers are so charming and funny. I have no answer; as you can see, there is not much coherent thought left in me, and I can only pose half-arsed questions.

A note on the weather:

There has been no sun here for days and days, just blank, low skies. This morning I discovered why. The sun comes out at six, shines for two hours like gangbusters, and then gets bored and buggers off. If I want some summer, I am going to have to stop getting up at eight and do the dawn chorus thing every day.

A note on the pig:

She is back in fine health and has a sexy rare breed boyfriend, so there may be piglets.

My word of the day:

Coulrophobia: a morbid fear of clowns. Apparently it is the third most widespread fear in Britain, after spiders and needles. I have no fear of spiders, needles or clowns, but my mild dislike of heights has blossomed into proper vertigo, I grown embarrassingly girlish when faced with wasps (much squeaking and running away), and I am not good with birds in the house.

Article of the Day:

Danny Finkelstein on Saville in The Times. The paywall is not yet up, but you do have to register, which is why I can't do a link.

Bizarre statement of the day:

'Clogs. They inspire fear in many.'

This is from the Vogue blog. Can they really mean it? Is this some kind of new research project that no one has told me about? Is it like the clown thing? It's just that in my whole wide life I have never heard of clogs inspiring fear. Perhaps the clog people are so scared that they do not actually go outdoors, but contemplate their terror in darkened rooms. It's very hard to tell.

Obscure thing I know of the day:

If you want racing people to take you seriously, you should never refer to 'Royal Ascot'. It's just Ascot, as in: 'Are you going to Ascot this year?', or 'The Royal Meeting', as in 'Yes, I love the Royal Meeting'. (My father actually hates the Royal Meeting so much that he leaves the country for a week each year at this time, because otherwise he might be tempted to go, against his better judgement, and risk losing sheds of cash in the frenzied betting environment.) 

And if you really want to show off, you should know that the Saturday is called 'The Heath Meeting', because the Queen does not go. La di dah, my darlings.

This is what the ladies wore to the races in 1926.

 

There was one more thing I was going to say, but my brain is about to fall out of my ears. I am going to have some buckwheat for strength.

Just to remind me, and you, this is what it looked like the last time we had midday sun:

That was the 4th of June. The FOURTH. No wonder I am going a bit crazy in the head.

Stopping now. Really.