Return to the mothership

Ali has discovered the plot of every story ever told.

Beam me up, mama. 

Here it is: baby misses mama, baby goes searching for mama, baby finds mama, baby is filled with joy and screaming adulation.

A twist on the plot is that sometimes baby is looking for papa. Sometimes even - gasp - mama and her papa.

Ali likes to loudly recount this plot structure during movies. TV shows. Book reading time. Etc.

Lately her parental search algorithm has bleached into the physical world. Toys must be nested with their parents.

Which is why we spent last weekend at the zoo: a baby giraffe had to be reunited with her mama.

Plastiraffe. 

There is a London restaurant called Giraffe that tolerates kids more than most London restaurants. And they give away little plastic giraffes with the smoothies.

One problem with little plastic giraffes is that they are pretty cool and thus worth fighting over with your sister. This means that little plastic giraffes are usually missing at least one leg and look a bit twitchy.

Another problem with little plastic giraffes is that they miss their mamas so very much.

And so our twitchy, three-legged plastic giraffe had to be returned to her mother unit. As an added bonus her papa was there too.

You there Mom?

The giraffe parents looked uncertain when confronted with their blue plastic offspring, even though she was offered up to them with much joy and screaming adulation.

At moments like these I am reminded that my kids see me very differently than I see myself. They seem to think I am a super-human who holds up the dome of the world.

I remember having this concept of my parents too. I know it will be replaced  with criticism, then understanding.

Which is a relief: dome-holder is an awfully hard title to live up to. And it can lead to backache.

6: Still at the frost fayre

Butterfly kisses. 

Day six in Advent. Last weekend we met the world's most talented face painter, who I suspect may actually be on the payroll of North Pole Inc. I came home with a winter butterfly.

This week at Chaos HQ

We are cooking up mischief.

Sugar, spice, dynamite. 

And poking penguins in the eye.

Take that, smug chick.

Babyzilla and Kid Kong are preying on London.

All your museums are belong to us.

 And pushing all of Mama's buttons.

Where is the 'eject to outer space' button, boss?

This week, last week, next week, and onwards, we find ourselves deeply lost in the belly of the summer holidays. And we are feeling rather less optimistic about the prognosis than Jonah did. All bets are off.

Stay tuned for more civilised weeks to come. In the meantime, duck and cover.

Snakes in the grass

My time on this island began in Oxford nearly a decade ago. I arrived in my early twenties with my beloved by my side and not much else.

I quickly discovered the particular fish-out-of-water-feeling that comes with landing on foreign dirt - like that first cold step outside after a swim - a lonely, shivering kind of uncomfortable that starts at the pores and ends up in the bones. Thankfully (somewhat) temporary.

Travel with me alone towards Iffley. 

Like many before me, I discovered that England is expensive. Especially Oxford. Especially since we were already broke. So my beloved and I cultivated free hobbies, like walking.

One day we left Jericho and wandered into Port Meadow, an ancient common northwest of Oxford. We passed The Perch, the Trout (pubs), the ruins of Godstowe Abbey and kept right on walking. Quite unplanned, we walked 35 miles that day. By chance we bumped into a self-proclaimed recovering journalist called Linda Ellerbee who was trekking the length of the Thames for her 60th birthday (and later wrote about it). She walked with us for a while before hitching a ride on a narrow boat. It was from her that we got the bonkers idea to walk the length of the Thames, which we later did.

Return to dust. 

Iffley lies down the Thames Path in the other direction, south of Oxford, past Christ Church Meadow. There is a 12th century church there called St Mary's. It is so old that the faces protruding from the stone have returned to blank slates. Accross Iffly lock, there is a meadow, and in the springtime the meadow is full of an unusual-looking native flower called snake's head fritillary.

Rose by another name.

We spent our two Oxford springs searching out snake's heads in the grass; skint, foreign, blessed with companionship and sturdy feet. A less lucky twenty-something called Keith Douglas wrote this about Iffley four years before he died at Normandy in 1944:

What sudden fearful fate
can deter my shade wandering next year
from a return? Whistle and I will hear
and come another evening, when this boat
travels with you alone towards Iffley
as you lie looking up for thunder again
this cool touch does not betoken rain
it is my spirit that kisses your mouth lightly. 

This ramble into yesteryear's photo album was inspired by Flashback Friday, hosted by the lovely Cafe Bebe.

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.