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."

Where dolls come from

Last week I spotted a perfect doll's house in a dimly-lit shop window. It was real down to the tiny brass knocker on the doll-sized front door.

The shop had no sign up, and no indication of its purpose apart from a hand-written note on the door declaring it to be "a toy collection, not a toy shop".

Intrigued and possessing of few manners, I barged in.

Down the rabbit hole. 

Inside I found a fairy godmother towering over a miniature floor-to-ceiling kingdom of dolls' houses and related paraphernalia. Everything in her magical world was intricately non-standard, from the wonky chimney pots to the tiny jars of rainbow sweets.

I asked the landlady of wonderland where such amazing things as this came from, and she whispered that her collection had been forty years in the making. 

Her collection, I discovered, is an entire house of dolls' houses - room upon wondrous room. The dolls' houses are chock full of the stuff of miniature life - light fixtures, plumbing, and sumptuous dinners that won't come unstuck from perfect porcelain plates.

No two houses are the same, but one is more special than the others: the one arranged by the landlady's favourite little farm boy, decades ago. The boy is grown, but there are still wooden cats napping in the kitchen of his house, and plaster ducks socializing under a grand chandelier in the loo.

Fake plastic tea. 

Why a grand chandelier in the loo? The boy wanted to look at it while he took his bath. And why ducks? They are waiting for the boy to return for his bath under the grand chandelier - they want to play in the puddles that form on the floor as he splashes about.

You may not have realized that fake plaster ducks had so much patience. Neither did I. There's a lot us grown-ups don't know about fake plastic ducks.

This magical toy collection is absolutely real, but I can't tell you how to find it. Rather than advertise, the landlady of wonderland waits for all those who truly believe to find her. 

So should you ever find yourself in Kentish Town, follow the second star to the right and carry straight on till morning. You may meet the two bad mice along the way.

Wandering lost

I always end up writing about places when I intend to write about people. I'm not sure how to kick the habit. These nicotine patches certainly aren't helping.

Last week I gave a guest talk to a travelling troupe of writers from my alma mater. I was invited along by my friend, Leslie Brody, who published an excellent biography of Jessica Mitford last year.

Domesday skyscraper. 

Her book should be required reading for anybody who wanders around and hates being told what to do - like how to sing for instance, or what to read.

I took the gang to my favourite pub in an alley off the Strand, and someone asked: why do you wander? 

It's a good question. I don't really have a good answer.

Tolkien is currently shouting at tired commuters from lampposts: "all who wander are not lost!" His travel enthusiasm is in promotion of the British Library's current exhibition Writing Britain: Wastelands to Wonderlands.

Some who wander are suckers for this kind of thing, so I found myself there this week. I quickly discovered that many great British writers have appalling handwriting (except for Charlotte Brontë  - hers is exquisite).

You there! Scratch my nose!

The British Library is wonderful. Glass bookcases scrape the ceiling, and apparently the basement descends to 25 meters. Guys with coiffed hair stare down from the architecture with a sternness that can only come from decades of being unable to scratch a nose-itch. 

Writing Britain  uses text and illustration to chart the Green Man's long walk from Hobbiton to to Dog Island by way of Wessex, Metroland, and Jerusalem-upon-Thames.

Kipling said: "Out of the spent and unconsidered earth, the cities rise again". Islington was a quiet suburb, and Marylebone a dairy farm.

Satanic Mills, then and now.

If you walk from Moorgate to the Museum of London, you can see chunks of the old Roman wall waiting patiently for the surrounding steel and glass to fall. 

The message of the British Library's exhibition is that writing about places is writing about people. Which makes me feel much better about my bad habit circa line one.  

In addition to wandering all over the place on paper, I wander in and out of London every few years. Thomas de Quincey once said: "my steps in London came back and haunted my sleep."

Peril

Maurice Sendak would approve of my children. When confronted with a book of fairy tales, they bypass the soft stuff and go straight for Hansel and Gretel. 

You may be unfamiliar with Hansel and Gretel, unless your mother also read you weird old charity shop fairy tales, because it is simply too creepy to have ever survived the great Disney de-Grimm-ification machine. 

Where the wilderness is. 

The story features a pair of starving, abandoned children lost in a deep, dark wood. They stumble upon the Venus candy-trap home of a local witch, who promptly imprisons them, stokes the fire, and sharpens the knives. 

But the siblings get the upper hand through deception, and they burn the witch alive. Reckoning they are now confined to a life of crime, they steal her life savings before fleeing the scene. Upon locating their father and presenting him with the plundered witch loot, they find he is suddenly filled with an unprecedented bout of paternal affection.  

My children love this story. They ask for it every night, then hover at my elbows, enraptured. Their favourite bit is when the witch pops out of the cottage and says, and I quote: "Gotcha, nasty nippers!"

Now in the hours leading up to bedtime, they assume the identities of Hansel and Gretel. They dig out an old witch hat from last Halloween, and shove it in my direction, their eyes lit with excitement. "Say it Mama," they whisper, "say nasty nippers!" 

I say the magic phrase in my best witch voice, which sounds about like Lauren Bacall spliced with Alvin the chipmunk. Then I stoke the fire in my oven (their play tent) and wait for the inevitable. 

Boy, am I tired of being shoved head-first into that play tent by Hansel, while 

Witchcraft. 

Gretel up-ends the penny jar all over the floor. 

Although it's hardly surprising for London children to be worried about kid-phobic adults on weird diets, I was initially baffled by their love of peril. However, after reading about a little boy lost over continents, time and transport, I changed my mind.

Children not turnips. Before they can run or speak their angst, they know an ancient truth: the world is a dangerous place full of child-sized traps. 

Scary stories, and struggles against nightmare monsters, are just practice for the world. Fluffy stories about bears and disembodied solar baby heads (actually, that one scares me) are by contrast pretty pointless. 

This afternoon I assumed my witch alter ego and I locked my youngest nasty nipper in her crib at her request. A shadow shot past me and slunk towards the crib. 

"Don't worry sis" said my elder nipper, "I will save you."

Novelty

I read something last week that really captured my imagination: 

The narratives of the traditional "life-story" are breaking down into unrelated pieces. We work 40 jobs over a lifetime...we move location and we start again and again in the deregulated, privatised world of self-selling. We inhabit virtual places as much as we do real ones. Facts become blurred and we live out fictions. For works of writing to reflect this world, they also have to enter into the language and forms of our time, otherwise we end up with confused, over-stuffed, compromised books that use an old form to try to talk about a new time.

For better or for worse, I reckon this is what now feels like.

This paragraph comes from a piece about fiction's future in the Guardian. The writer, Ewen Morrison, is about to publish a new sort of novel: 'a mixture of facts and fictions, images and videos'.

As a former inhabitant of a 'department of factual verification', I agree that facts are pretty nauseatingly dull on their own. Mixing fact and fiction is where the good stuff comes from.  

Always with us. 

Morrison argues that novels should be novel. Unsurprisingly, he doesn't think Jonathan Franzen is God's gift to fiction.

Like some, I still love the smell and feel of old books. A dream of mine is to reanimate old, forgotten literature in novel ways. 

I know a local librarian who is very wise. He can, for instance, produce batmobile sketches on short notice, and he generally gives the impression of one who could have joined the space program but just couldn't be bothered with anti-gravity. 

This afternoon I got into a long conversation with my wise librarian over a common interest of ours: 'London Labour and the London Poor'. This book was written as a series of newspaper articles by Henry Mayhew in the 1840's. It is a journey into Victorian ethnography, economics, and grimmer than Dickens stuff. Have you ever considered the pay and working conditions of rat catchers, for instance? 

Mayhew's work is woven together from oral life histories. As with America's Federal Writers' Project, this makes the line between fact and fiction a blurry, complicated one. When telling your life history, what would you leave in? Take out? Change? 

Mayhew's work still resonates - perhaps in part because his subjects lived in a broken, deregulated world of self-selling. My wise librarian has photocopies of Mayhew illustrations up in the library billboard. 

I will follow the progress of Ewen Morrison's book with interest. And I will read Mayhew's 'Criminal Prisons of London and Scenes of London Life' as suggested by my wise librarian. My interest lies not only the ghost of literature future, but also the ghost of literature past.  

Shortaphysics

Yesterday Ali toddled off and the house went suddenly quiet. Not a great thing, considering that "quiet" and "toddler" go together like "bucket of petrol" and "lit match". So I went to find Ali and prepared myself to douse at least one fire.

I found her sitting zen-like on my bed, reading The Prophet with a look of deep concentration and wisdom on her little face.

A good friend gave Papa and I a copy of this book when we got hitched. It's grown into one of my favourite books over the years. So it filled me with pride to see her reading it, if upside-down.

Philosophising. 

I love Ali's look of wise concentration. It is not a look that you generally see on two year old kids' faces. It is the sort of look that inevitably makes grown-ups laugh, because seriousness in children is pretty adorable (much to the chagrin of serious children).

It is because of Ali's trademark expression that I tell anyone who will listen that she is going to be a metaphysicist when she grows up.

But who knows where the wind will take her little feet? I can only dream that she outruns me by a million miles.

Which brings me to my favourite passage in the The Prophet.

Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, and though they are with you, yet they belong not to you. You may give them your love but not your thoughts. For they have their own thoughts. You may house their bodies but not their souls, for their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams. 

Poor Ali is recovering from a bug. She doesn't  get along well with bugs. We've neither of us slept a lot this week, and this passage has been ticking across my interrupted dreams like subtitles.

This week at Chaos HQ

We are boldly going where no short person has gone before: the interdisciplinary world of alien mechanical engineering. Luckily we are aided by Q Pootle 5 and a trusty tin of cat food.

Earth to Moon Unit: Do you read me?

Isil, the talented virtual pen behind Smiling Like Sunshine, is highlighting Children's Book Week over on her home planet. There you can discover short person books on alien mechanical engineering and everything else under whichever sun you happen to live by.

F-bomb

Someone has been wiretapping my bathroom. And they've made a million bucks out of it.

The loo is my swearing refuge. It's where I run to when my nocturnally expressive child won't be pacified for the fiftieth time. Here no one judges me. Here no one picks up verbal weaponry for strategic deployment at effing playgroup.

I don't know who dunnit. It may have been Nixon's ghost attempting revenge, but acting on bad intelligence. It may have been the out of warranty gremlin in league with the crap evil spy agency.

However it happened, a transcript landed on a printing press and ventured onto the interwebs where it met with a shi*tstorm of approval.*

'Go the F**k to Sleep', written by Adam Mansbach and illustrated by Ricardo Cortes, is a bastardized version of 'Goodnight Moon'. It has topped the Amazon bestseller list, converting the previously pro bono medium of midnight bathroom effing and blinding into a fat golden goose.



The title is certainly more memorable than 'Mummy is crying in the loo again', which would have been my best shot. The illustrations are lovely, and the tone of wits end soothery is perfect:

The cubs and the lions are snoring, wrapped in a big snugly heap. How come you can do all this other great shit, but you can't lie the fuck down and sleep?

Maternal regression

I am regressing.

As I mentioned last week, my first job was as a dishwasher in a busy cafe, where I discovered that the removal of melted cheese and chili (known locally as 'superglue') is darned-near impossible. My boss was an overburdened cook, occupied with a minimum of five swearingly-annoying tasks at any given moment. Consequently she could get a bit gruff, and in her gruffer moments she made me think of Pong from The Ascent of Rum Doodle, that rarest of literary treats: a slapstick comedy about mountain climbing.

Eventually I grew up (somewhat), went to university, got married, and got a job that didn't involve washing dishes. Yet the specter of Pong never ceased to loom large over my destiny. The arrival of two short people has brought me full circle back to my cheese-plate days.

Pong II at work. 

According to our local Babish dialect, 'mama' is a polite word for 'hoover'. The gremlin formerly known as my sweet darling baby is a very industrious messmaker. Also in her dialect, 'toast' means 'projectile' and 'good morning' means 'Chaos shall reign forever, and ever, amen'.

Sadly, I simply cannot mama-hoover at the rate that she upends the world. My local branch of the Grumpy Persons Brigade (or 'the villagers' as a friend of mine very charitably calls them) cannot understand how challenging it is to keep up with a dedicated entropist, and they often look on with derision as we entropise our way through public places.

I have it on good authority that some time in the next eighteen years or so this sort of behaviour will stop. Someday Pong II will hang up her mess-saddle and then calmly inform me that I am embarrassing and could I please go away now. Someday I may even return to a job that does not involve Pong-imitators or molten cheese in any form.

Till then, zen mind. Beginner's mind. Dishwasher's mind.

Lonesome, quarrelsome heroes

Out on the bleak rainy road recently, I saw a bright orange lorry emblazoned with: 'Iceland: because mums are heroes'.

For my brethren on the mañana side of the Atlantic: 'Iceland' in this instance means Britain's premier budget frozen foods shop, not that other rainy island. You can buy a hundred differently-packaged bags of fish fingers at Iceland the store, and a lifetime's worth of ketchup.

I had a few questions to ask of this lorry. Like: Was Boudica a big fan of frozen chips? Does the purchase of bulk freezer peas transform a mum into a some kind of Odysseus, tied to the mast of a death-star buggy, braving the siren call of fresher foods? Are mini-vans as sexy as bat-mobiles? Have us mums really got as little fashion sense as Wonder Woman?

THIS IS SPARTA!!!

But the lorry drove on before I could get any answers. I tend to have this effect on slogans that I try to interrogate.

The apparition of this motto in my morning left me thinking of that scene in The Princess Bride, where the dashing hero Wesley is captured by Prince Humperdinck and strapped to a super-duper-evil torture machine in the dungeon pit of despair. As the film makes abundantly clear, the super-duper-evil machine process is quite painful and screamy, and it extracts years off Wesley's life in the blink of an eye. He leaves the dungeon a broken, aged, near-dead sort of hero.

The super-duper-evil machine process definitely has some similarities to this parenting gig. Kids will give you a backache in place of a social life. They are the world's most effective antidote to youthfulness in adults. Of course, they also infuse life with a deep, abiding sense of purpose - something you normally can't purchase on the frozen foods aisle.

So if I was a Motto Creator instead of a Soup Developer, I'd suggest this revised wording for the orange lorries, to better reflect the general experience:

Bog Standard Woman be warned!: children will turn YOU into that frazzled woman at Iceland at 3 in the afternoon: bad posture, no obvious hairstyle, shockingly ugly footware, ketchup-spattered ex-maternity shirt, gripping a trolly with white knuckles, yelling childishly at a rabid pack of short people to STOP BEING SO FLIPPING CHILDISH. 

Because yes indeed - mums CAN be heroes. But madness is compulsory. And fish finger procurement is highly likely. 

However, take heart Bog Standard Woman: a mama is a sort of whisky priest - she soldiers on through the Icelandic jungle, hounded by short creatures on all sides. Aisle after frozen aisle, no spending money left in her holey pockets (it has all gone on battery-operated bubble-blowers and other awful plastic tat). All she has left is a grain of hope, a truckload of caffeine, and a nearly-spent flask of brandy if she's lucky. Seriously uncool, flawed, duty bound to her calling, even to the death. 

A grumpy, exhausted and very well-disguised hero.    

So here's a Mothering Sunday toast to dishevelled heroes with maternal battle scars - join me in raising a chipped sippy cup to tough days gone and a brighter, taller future. I hope to heaven that I may one day wear an obvious hairstyle, discover good posture, and a luxuriate in a calm demeanour. For now, I simply want the day off. I plan to spend it napping, heroically.

Bright post, big internet

Standing in the armpit of strangers is one of the most beautifully-written posts I've read in a long time. My post of the week comes via Elsie Anderton, chatelaine of The Babylon Lane Tales, and is actually more than a week old (all of us here at Chaos HQ struggle with simple concepts like 'time'). Thanks to the lovely Ella of Notes From Home, and the BMB blogger of the week, for hosting.

After a few short words of this lyrical post, you too will extricate yourself from a stranger's armpit and walk in her shoes to that place where you can just be you, with the memory of a small hand in yours. Reading it, I was reminded of Jay McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, one of my favourite books.

As you might infer from a title like Bright Lights, Big City, the book has bupkis to do with babies. Even so, the last two lines have become my parenting mantra: 'You will have to go slowly. You will have to learn everything all over again.'

The good side of the city. 

In other news, Chaos HQ is relocating to the bright city from the dim suburbs. As such, posting will become even more sporadic over the next few weeks while I argue with my ISP and rummage about in a mountain of boxes for my lost brain.

I will move slowly, punctuated by moments of flailing about. I will try, fail, and eventually succeed at learning everything all over again.

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. 

Even pack rats get the blues

I live in a homing beacon for crap toys. For the past three years an entire galaxy of 'cheap and nasties' (term courtesy of A&E Mum) has found the magnetic draw of my house irresistible. My research indicates that this is due to my home's geographical location on the conversion point of two ancient polymer ley lines—it is essentially a semi-detached plastic henge.

For the first three years I didn't mind. I became a bit of a toy-pagan myself. My Mama Stockholm Syndrome reasserted itself and I began identifying with the junk, even giving the most hateful bits names: Creepy Dog, Molly Dolly, etc. But the clutter that alighted innocently at first began to flock in an increasingly Hitchcock-esque manner. Before long there was something menacing and undeniably stickerman about.

The Clutterati. 

Things went bump in the night—against the arch of my foot any time I was so foolish as to set foot out of bed. By day I was mad-dogged by their fearsome leader. Sometimes I could have sworn that he changed location without any human moving him.

One morning I had a premonition of a mighty judgement coming: a vision of myself turned into a plastic cat lady, buried under shape sorters and poorly-drawn fake plastic kitchen food. Clearly something had to be done. But for the life of me, I couldn't think of what.

Then, while stumbling over toys one day, I landed upon an insightful documentary on this very subject called 'Toy Story 3'. Inspired, I commenced operation 'Crap Toy Desertion'. Now the teeming plastic masses are in bin bags in the garage, bound for the charity shop (which is where most of them came from in the first place).

Riding off into the fake sunset. 

I can once again walk across my own sitting room without risking foot injury. All that remains is to hang garlic above the doors to prevent a recurring infestation.

I feel unburdened, weightless, peaceful, as I sit here. The first toy was the hardest to toss. But each one became easier, more rewarding, until I was chucking them into bin bags more rapidly than Sylvester McMonkey McBean throws Sneeches into his Star-On machine.

Hang up your plastic saddles. 

I had a joyous epiphany: having children doesn't have to mean a houseful of crap. Funniest thing about possessions: they grow to possess you, if you don't show them the door first.

22: Turtle doves

Advent day 22 has landed, after circling around The Gallery (thank you Tara at Sticky Fingers).

Joined at the lip. 

Birds, like fish, tend to be aggressive jerks when it comes to dating. You couldn't, for instance, bring a mallard drake home to meet your mum. But a handful—doves, robins swans, eagles—form couples.

I identify with swans. Mostly because they are grumpy. They are also territorial, belligerent, structurally incapable of being useful before noon, and mostly useless after that. They are defensive, nest-proud, and they shout at anyone who looks sideways at their kids. They eat all manner of murky pond gunk, and appear to communicate through a series of honking and farting noises. 

Muddling through the pond-scum of life together. 

But swans are also graceful, deliberate, unflappable. They are loyal unto exhaustion and they love unfailingly for life, only opening their wings wider to allow for ugly ducklings. Which is to say, swans also remind me so very much of my other half, Papa. 

A strand of three (or four) is not easily broken.