Ray of sunshine

Last week, Ray left planet earth in a rocket bound for the great beyond.

Humans and aliens both loved Ray, who referred to his craft as 'joy'. His stories helped grown-ups retrieve their childhoods from the attic, and prevented youth from sending their imaginations out with the recycling. Plus, he just seemed like everybody's granddad.

Cult of Ray. (Alan Light, 1975)

Ray said: "Life should be touched, not strangled. You've got to relax, let it happen at times, and at others move forward with it." Ray grew up in libraries, and loved paper. But he eventually said that Fahrenheit 451 could go electronic, like a fire balloon casting off into the dark unknown.

He was wise to make his home in Los Angeles, because here in London, it's summertime again. 'Summer' is an ancient Celtic word that means 'three months of rain, just like last year'.

Britain is a land of traditions. Rain or shine, a hose-pip ban must be declared each summer. Yet under no circumstances must anyone contemplate fixing the leaky Victorian sewer system under London. Rain or shine, Union Jacks will flood the streets for Jubilees, and Olympians will flex at appointed times on blinking plasma screens in terraces. Shows and showers carry on, year upon year.

Where traditions are destroyed, it is traditional for the local council to do the destroying. In May, Brent council sent the police to stand guard as they stripped the Kensal Rise Library of its books at 2am. It's not clear whether their concern was ex-military sniper-librarians, or Dan Brown books. In a move that would make Cindy Lou Who cringe, they even removed a plaque commemorating the library's opening by Mark Twain in 1900.

London's libraries are becoming an endangered species. My two local libraries were closed just this year. I'm no economist, but I can't imagine that supplying Kensal Rise with the latest Dan Brown book is anything like bailing out the Royal Bank of Scotland - even given Dan Brown's rate of publication.

Douglas Adams once wrote an excellent profile of local councils. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy opens as a guy called Arthur Dent wakes to find a wrecking crew in his garden, poised to tear down his house on planning orders from the council. When Arthur becomes agitated, the wrecking crew insists that planning documentation has been posted for months...in a disused lavatory, behind a sign that says 'beware of the leopard'. Of course, only minutes later earth (excepting Aurther Dent) is vaporized by alien bureaucrats called Vogons, who are making way for an intergalactic bypass.

Don't panic. (Megan Trace, 2011)

I suspect the officials who shut down Kensal Rise Library at 2am have posted lengthy justifications for their actions somewhere - likely in a disused mental lavatory, guarded by a leopard. 

When their busy schedule of defending the universe against sniper-librarians allows, Vogons and councilors should both consider spending more rainy summer afternoons in the library. They can bring their Kindles if they like. Ray said: "There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them."

The unexamined life

A very long time ago, around when organisms first crawled from primordial soup towards certain violence and bitter disappointment (not intended as a birthing euphemism), the eternally-wise Alyson tagged me in a game of 20ish questions as per the Guardian. Here, many evolutionary stages later, follow my answers to the questionnaire, abridged to save on reader eye strain.

You may wish to whip out this affidavit the next time you can't sleep. Or if you ever suspect that your own life is very boring, a quick glance back here should convince you of your rock star powers. 

Who would play you in the film of your life?
I'd like to say Jessica Rabbit, but I suspect it would be Gene Wilder.

What is your favourite smell?
Earth after a thunderstorm.

Where would you like to live?

In a Taos adobe with a chilli patch.

What is your favourite book?

Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Short and bookish

As one of the dork persuasion, I am contractually obligated to love books. My mum read The Lord of the Rings to my sister and I when we were very young. I can only assume that she had an entire universe of lozenges to hand. Perhaps this is why I currently sport an Orc-like hairstyle.  

One moon to rule them all. 

I am chronically short of lozenges, so my daughters are treated to some less hefty evening reads. Here are some our favourites, as per a lovely suggestion from Kate Takes 5 and MummySquared :

1. Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak. About the night that Max donned his wolf suit and sailed off into the stubborn wilderness of childhood. A manifesto on how to face down parents and monsters alike with awesome belligerence.  
2. What Was I Scared Of? by Dr Seuss. A tale of spooky green pants, er trousers, with nobody inside them. Featuring pecks of snide, doubt-trout, and being nice to scary things.
3. The Snail and the Whale by Julia Donaldson. An apology for snails with an itchy feet, or as per the infinite wisdom of Tanta: the best way to explain wanderlust to the under-fives. 
4. The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein. If you can read this bittersweet tale of a tree who loved a boy without weeping, then you need to get new tear ducts installed.
5. Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown. The classic American goodnight book. Our copy, gifted by the lovely Auntie S, only retains structural integrity by a duct-tape thread. I consider I Took the Moon For a Walk by Carolyn Curtis to be the imaginative soul-mate of Goodnight Moon - complete with weeping grass, moon-shoes, and ghosts in the belfry.  

There is a pale bearded man who haunts these parts. He might be Santa or Odin, but he is lanky, chain-smokes, and doesn't appear to own a raven. He pilots a vast mobile library around on tiny pot-holey roads; he knows everything about any book under the sun, and hands out Bookstart packs like they are pure, magical gold. I reckon his RV is actually some sort of spaceship from another dimension.   

My favourite grown-up book, Something Wicked this Way Comes by Ray Bradbury, features one library, two boys, and a flock of carnival bad guys. Naturally, the boys run to the library when they need to escape from evil. 

Libraries are wonderful places - especially in painfully-quiet neighborhoods like mine. I'm no expert - heck, I'm hardly even awake to be honest - but closing down libraries does seem a bit like binning cats to save on cat food to me. 

Voodoo child

My autumn garden is full of spiders. Yesterday I watched a fly go from creature to cadaver in the skip of a heartbeat and the twitch of eight legs. Webs loom everywhere I walk, ghost-like apparitions right at head level. My face has been snared a few times and I suspect it might be me, not the flies, they are after.

Tonight I put on my shoe and felt something soft and leathery squish up against my toe. My brain said mouse, but reaching inside I discovered it was just a shrivelled, slightly fuzzy chunk of green pepper. I recognised the bite marks and the modus operandi. 'Don't mess with me Mama,' the pepper implied in Ana's voice, 'I know where your shoes live.'

Garden-variety Shelob

Ana is an old hand at threats. When she was 18 months old we drove to an old fisherman's cottage on Anglesey for a weekend. In the evening she slept like an angel in her travel cot, while Papa and I watched little fishing boats cast their nets into a peaceful sea. A tentative sense of calm crept back into our lives; we decided that everything was going to be okay and that travelling with kids could even be fun. But it only lasted until the following afternoon. Halfway through nap-time I heard a loud smack from Ana's room, followed by an angry roar. A moment later, vengeful toddler footsteps thundered down the hall. Papa and I were trapped in the sitting room, mugs of tea still in hand as a shrieking, wild-haired toddler came for her revenge like something out of a horror film.

Travelling with Ana was out of the question now that she could shimmy out of a travel cot head-first and pursue us to the ends of a holiday cottage. Naively, we thought she could still be contained behind the trusty wooden jail-bars of her cot at home. Not long after the Anglesey incident, I went to Germany for a weekend, leaving Papa home alone with Ana. My first morning away, he rang to say that Ana escaped the cot and woke him with a very sweet 'Papa thirsty?' and a very cold cup of water in the face. Ana got a proper bed and a gate across her door after that.

We don't get too many Houdini-style escapes these days, except when a very sleep-deprived Mama forgets to shut Ana's gate. Tonight I put the kettle on for peppermint tea and tried to forget about the shoe-pepper threat. I turned around to get a teabag and nearly dropped my mug in fright. There stood Ana in the middle of the kitchen floor, grinning cheekily with her plastic Halloween pumpkin in one hand. 'Hi', she said with menace. Then she turned and slunk silently back up the stairs to her room. I followed and shut the gate tight.

Ana doesn't fully understand Halloween yet, but her prankster instinct has been on override for weeks. This year she will trick-or-treat, rather appropriately, as a crocodile.

It's a trick

My good childhood friend, OneArmGirl, has just reminded me of our childhood candy-missions. A lovely French lady down the street (our neighborhood's sole European representative) used to call us 'the Halloweeners'. The thing I really loved about Halloweening (and can only admit to now as an adult) was that on one trusty October night every year, us big kids got to re-enact the magic of being little. Candy was the excuse for all the dressing up and childish larking about. It was the act itself that was magical--heading out into the wood-smoky darkness, painted faces pressed against the cold car windows, wide-eyes focused on distant candy-beacon porch-lights in the black rural night, bright and remote as the stars.

I find that one side-effect of having kids is that my brain likes to revive dusty childhood memories like this from the mental attic and replay them to a sentimental score on my internal nostalgia-projector. For me, the season of 'pumpkins ripening toward the knife' (Ray Bradbury) has been one of birth, death, upheaval, love and migration. The stuff of life, good and bad. Certainly no shortage of memories to mull over as the light closes in for winter.

Farewell summertime nest

The world outside turned golden this week. The temperature dropped and wind-rustled leaves took on a tell-tale brittle note. Summer is collapsing into autumn. It caught me by surprise again. Every summer seems eternal, even though I'm old enough to know better by now.

Which reminds me of Ray Bradbury, a hero of mine, who turned 90 at the end of August. 'Dandelion Wine' is a book about how kids experience summertime as the great magical forever. There are a thousand perfect summer moments in it, including one about fire balloons in the 1974 introduction he added to original 1957 book.

Grandpa and I walked out on the lawn and lit a small fire and filled the pear-shaped red-and-white-and-blue-striped paper balloon with hot air, and held the flickering bright-angel presence in our hands a final moment in front of a porch lined with uncles and aunts and cousins and mothers and  fathers, and then, very softly, let the thing that was life and light and mystery go out of our fingers up on the summer air and away over the beginning-to-sleep houses, among the stars, as fragile, as wondrous, as vulnerable, as lovely as life itself....My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark. The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer. 

Seasonally, 'Something Wicked This Way Comes' follows 'Dandelion Wine'. Although principally concerned with autumnal menace, it also happens to contain one of my favourite passages on motherhood: 'They nest in Time. They make the flesh that holds fast and binds eternity. They live inside the gift, know power, accept, and need not mention it. Why speak of Time when you are Time, and shape the universal moments, as they pass, into warmth and action?' 

Warmth passing.

Sunlight is starting to wane. Fun fairs are setting up across England, in all their weird kitschy glory. Just over the horizon, bonfires burn. Soon firecrackers will wake my children at night. 


I've spent the past few golden afternoons knitting together unrelated passages from the books of summer, and searching out pint-sized jumpers that were lightly cast aside by my autumn babies in the innocence and optimism of last spring. These items nest not in time, but usually behind the sofa.