Not really.
Had you there, eh?
Ho ho
The great breastfeeding debate
Reply
Category Archives: Uncategorized
I’ll fresco if al have to
Jean Byrne, why have you forsaken me? I’m not talking about your fondness for luminous yellow or those accessories manufactured in NASA’s spare parts department (all of which give me a serious Jean-on). All it takes is you reporting a spate of bad mood burglaries by the sun across the South-east and there’s a stampede towards Boots to replenish the fake tan supplies.
And it’s only beginning, the force-feeding me happiness. “Isn’t the weather great?” delivered ad nauseam in the vocal equivalent of three thousand exclamation marks in font size 90, caps lock on. A challenge to the likes of me who shares a facial expression range with Van Morrison on a night out at a comedy club.
Ordinarily, when the temp numbers go double, I barricade myself in the house and wait patiently to swear at the first eager neighbour unable to resist digging out his lawnmower. Usually after he’s done with that other popular outdoor activity – smoking. There he is at his backdoor, post-meat ‘n’ veg Lambert and Butler in one hand, hip in the other, surveying the lawn, and the compulsion hits. Even better if it’s nine at night. If it’s OK for the ice-cream van to come playing the theme from Match of the Day, it’s OK for him to rev up his pneumatic grass-cutter.
This year would’ve been no exception had we not endured one of those visits from friends that will have me lying about being the outdoor type for the remainder of the season. The anxiety usually begins at the biscuit aisle in M&S (height of sophistication round our way), and ends with their premature departure following one crying session too many from their wee one following the umpteenth encounter with our wee one. Halfway up an Ikea tunnel on a tiled floor, as their parents strain to discuss the merits of pre-school programmes, one woman hoping the other hasn’t noticed her one has been enjoying unfettered access to chocolate fingers. But the evidence is everywhere.
So that’s it. From here in, it’s the communal neutral green grass cushioned park. No polite restraint when our children are pulling one another’s limbs off. No no intervening and passive parenting before swiftly feigning concern when the cup has already been knocked over just because they’re having a coronary. And no post-visit grazing on the sickening collection of buns they brought. The same ones that wouldn’t ever meet M&S socialising standards. I’d say it’ll be safe to suggest a dander to the ice-cream van though. Every sun-split cloud and all that.
My 1st abandoned post
Title: “Too many protest singers, not enough protest songs”
Theme: Decline of the protest song in popular music.
Inspired by: Recent elections, political apathy, the corresponding rise of the insidious ‘play list’ dictated by 20 and 30 something taste-making slaves to brand bland, uniform devotion to Converse, and the focus group.
The main point: Contemporary music can be charted along a number of defining political epochs. It was about creating a sound and a look that was new within the context of a strong feeling that the world was somehow being changed and that something radical was happening. That’s over. I don’t want it to be, but it is.
Evidence:
Past (with a few still present): Billie Holiday, Pete Seeger, Woodie Guthrie, Dylan, Joan Baez, Patti Smith, Nina Simone, Bob Marley, Punk, Billy Bragg, Springsteen, Neil Young, Ani DiFranco, Manu Chao etc. etc.
Present: Pussy Riot
The title of the abandoned post is a line taken from a song by the illustrious Edwyn Collins. Girl Like You’ was released in 1994. A trawl from that year reveals one song aspiring to protest status: Zombie by The Cranberries. I’ll let you draw your own conclusion on that fantasy.
Conclusion: Political conscientiousness and angry protest music has been hi-jacked by tofu-chewing multi-millionaire best mates of the G8 and dumbed down to a lazy ringtone. The traditional fight for justice among the musical fraternity has, more or less, been reduced to the wearing of a poxy wristband. Every second a brain is desensitised by a Mumford & Son song *claps hands* There goes another.
Reason for abandonment: I live in a time when delicate irony is contemplated over coffee so *sips* I was unable to whip myself into enough of a frenzy. The needle returns to the start of the PJ Harvey album and we all stroke our chins like before.
What to give the man who has everything?
What do you give the man who has it all?
The wife and kids
The lovely home
The successful job
The healthy parents
The many friends
The 10k personal best
The everything he’s lived for
The youth on his side
The second house a mile from his first
The halfway from heartache
The rental agreement
The kids two nights a week
The emotional disorder
The stranger for a wife
The impending separation
The unlonged for silence
The science of new appliances
The both sides of the bed
The 10 month personal worst
The healthy parents
The many friends
The sanctuary of work
The strength on his side
The everything to live for
The new world order
The halfway to a new beginning
Very little, I suppose.
Just an assurance that you’ll keep pace
With him till he gets there
Where we’ll all be waiting.
Spoiler alert
“It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the Government always get in”
As emblazoned across one ballot paper in lieu of a cast vote. The height of deviant behaviour detected during my day at the local election count. Still, a fair point, well made.
Things I haven’t learned as a parent
1. What male parents make of it all. Or fathers, as they are sometimes called on Earth. In a world wide web of ninth degree scrutiny of mothering by mothers, it’s hard to tell.
2. Why a campaign hasn’t been launched by someone somewhere to ban the hideous term Baby Led Weaning. Or a campaign to ban me from convulsing over it. Or a piss-taking swipe at it, or an earnest unpicking of it in the context of the ever expanding lexicon of parenting. Everything that pisses me off about parenting can be summed up by it. Look, I’ll settle for a poxy bumper sticker at this stage.
3. Whether I have prevented even one prospective parent from buying an Angel Care monitor. I’d like to think I’m doing my bit to support parental consumer ‘choice’. Add to that one less travel system purchase and my job here on hell is done.
4. Of any parents who came through private maternity care freely willing to admit they thought it was a waste of money. They must exist. Step forward like good people. We’ll disguise your voice. We’ll even distort your face. We won’t use your real name. We’ll get Miriam to do the gushing intro and that surly McCullough bloke to interview you with his confidence-inspiring indifference. How about a witness protection programme? A French fancy? Two French fancies? Both pink?
5. Of any songs about parenting. That’s worrying. Parenting is on a par with vegetarianism and jogging in the song-writing department. That ought to tell us something.
7″ Heels
Do the names Yannick Etienne, Cheryl Parker, or Katrina Phillips ring any bells with you? Me neither; until tonight. And they would’ve been condemned to obscurity forever had I not been reminded of my close acquaintance with these women by the release of Morgan Neville’s award-winning documentary 20 Feet From Stardom. The film pays tribute to those unsung heroes of contemporary music – the backing singers. In anticipation of seeing it, I’ve been digging out vinyl featuring memorable backing vocals that often feature forgettable backing vocals that threaten to murder them all single-notedly.
Yannick Etienne climbs the world’s highest vocal peak on Roxy Music’s Avalon. I’ll risk busting a vocal chord every time I hear it to assail those closing notes that orbit a vocal range only dogs in Siberia can hear. And maybe Joe Pasquale. Here, have a listen, and find out what knocking yourself out by strenuously flexing your voice might feel like. If you succeed, I’ll nominate you for a Darwin Award.
Ditto Cheryl Parker on I Can See from Martin Stephenson’s Gladsome, Humour and Blue album. Poor Cheryl went on to join Beverly Craven (of “you light up another cigarette and I pour the caustic acid over your ears” fame), but prior to that fall to disgrace, she was knocking about with one of the underrated folkies from Oop North. Stephenson was one-time label mate of Prefab Sprout who themselves incubated their own wistful houseplant that doubled up as a backing vocalist. Allegedly. Just put some white tights over your head, eat half a packet of Oreos and loll your head around to re-create those vocals. Cheryl would knock her unconscious by merely drawing breath. You’re gonna pull an Elvis lip at the 80s production, and I’ll worry you’ll dismiss him on the basis of listening to one of the weaker tracks on the album. Free the shackled mind, as Cheryl sings before hopping her vocals up on a rocket launcher.
Wait a second, it’s not on youtube, and I’m fucked if I’m deleting a paragraph that slags off Prefab Sprout’s backing singer. We’ll never see the likes of it again. Buy it on iTunes.
To my mind, Katrina Phillips was always a young Kathy Burke crossed with the fiddler from Dexy’s circa ’84. She and Terry Hall are ambling through the streets of Brighton hop-scotching around their feelings and promising each other they’ll always be friends. They’ll vow to meet up in 20 years time on the promenade, she in her dungarees, he in his sullen lips. This imagery should never have been tampered with, but their vocal game of tig took a turn for the unexpected tonight when I discovered she looks like the love child of Annie and Marmalade Atkins, scientific progress permitting. “So walk where angels fear to tread….”, you’re it, Kathy, I mean, Katrina, “… for everything we ever wanted”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X6c5ntJ6Kw0
Month’s Mind
Losing your faith on a pilgrimage to The Holy Land. That still cracks me up. There you are in the photograph, all 46 mother-of-four years of you, flanked by camel humps in those ridiculous square shades that devour your face, high up presiding over your travelling companions like The Queen of Pop-socks herself.
No spa breaks back then, just a girly week in Jerusalem with a pick ‘n’ mix of the habited and the devotional. And you. No furious ten-page follow-up message-board dissection. No outburst of empathy from strangers at the touch of a keypad, just an indelible question mark left next to your thoughts on the point of it all. And there it stays, mostly, until one of their kind gets a rise out of you obliging you to roar obscenities at the wireless and demand they “get a life”.
And still you occasionally slip into their place of worship on a Saturday night to bow your head and try to square all the question marks with the inevitabilities that befall your family, passed away and present, members of which you email occasionally when you can be bothered despite your virtuoso typist past. Google is an order you give your grandchildren.
I tell you I started this blog thing last month, as a hobby mainly, a way to relax since there’s not a hope of me losing the will to live entirely by going running, or cooking, or cleaning. I half expect you to ask if I’m coming out of writing retirement after twenty years but you’re already lost in your Sudoku. We thought you had it bad with the crossword. Remember when you flew to visit me and leaned over in the taxi with the paper wondering what I thought 5 across could be? Some addictions don’t require Wi-Fi.
Tomorrow, after we clear up, and your son-in-law cajoles your granddaughter up to bed, I’ll slouch on to the sofa reaching for the laptop. You’ll come in looking for your umbrella (“just in case”), and each of us will slide into our respective back pews to join the herd for a while, collect our thoughts, and zone out in the only way we know how.
Top 5 things that freak me out on planet blog
1. Parenting blogs. Specifically, my tendency to take a leisurely stroll around them for a casual snoop only to re-emerge completely freaked out. Like many a habit I should avoid, it’s totally unavoidable. I fear it will culminate in a 50 paragraph purge in here, then we’ll all be sorry. I’m working on balancing one earnest thought-provoking post with every four laugh-alongs. That way I’ll prevent myself from calling it quits and shopping myself to social services. I’m one ‘motherhood’ article away from adding them to my contact list on speed-dial.
2. That I can’t change the name of this blog. It took me five days to settle on a theme. This was the fifth choice. Or was it the seventh?Anxiety over the latter could well re-surface to shove it into this top five as a stand alone head-stagger. I’ll settle down with the title eventually; it’s just that on some days, like today, I’d like to rename it Darby O’Dildo and the Little Penises. Shrugs.
3. Endless photos of food I can’t eat. My food fetish works in a way that there is never sufficient time to leave the meal unattended on the plate to look at it through a lens.
4. Widgets. I don’t have to know any more than how to pronounce the word. I have full confidence in their ability to mess me up, so I stay away from them.
5. That by some cosmic joke, Gary from IT is reading this and laughing his bollocks off. Gary, how did you find me when I can’t access this place in work? And while I have you, is it true that yer man was sacked for indulging his on-line porn habit?
Those last few words should do wonders for addressing another minor anxiety on here – the stats (hyperventilates).
Password Protected
Hi ho. It’s back to full-time work, I go. This time to one of those large organisations with its own IT Department. Gotta love those IT guys. Every day is a no-uniform day, another opportunity to remain nonplussed with head down while all about them are losing theirs. And go by the name of Gary. Usually.
Gary set me up on the system on my first day before sauntering back to his mothership with an over-the-shoulder warning I’ll need to change my password regularly. It took a nanosecond to lash in the first: my Daughter’s name and birth year. There was a time I would’ve approached the task by having a generous stare into space before being jolted back into real time with precisely the right song title for there and then, only for it to be rejected for not containing the requisite mix of numbers and letters. Napoleon36. A historic figure and a few random numbers to you, an Ani DiFranco song and the year of my Mother’s birth to me. [“Everyone is a fucking Napoleon”. Except you, Ma, you’re just naturally short.]
Passwords represent rare opportunities to smuggle a teeny wee piece of your heart and soul into a soulless workplace. The hidden bit of you for when a framed photo or potted plant won’t do. When the frame is empty and you couldn’t give a fuck about plants. The password protects those cordoned off files and feelings you can’t share with anyone. Except on the rare occasion a Gary needs it, and they’ve probably heard them all. I wish I could remember all of mine and print them off like the keyboard-track of my life.
I’d forgotten the scale of my Ani DiFranco habit back in my 20s. Her middle finger was perpetually aloft to the latest man who’d broken her heart, and to The Man who breaks millions to make millions. Notsosoft – the first, and sole remaining, password from an early email account. A relic of me as the idealist, brimming with enough angst to take Him and his sort on. Like many of us thundering up the highway towards World Change, I was seduced by a boy down a back alley where we both overstayed our welcome. Subsequent passwords from that love affair: firedoor00, untouchable02 (as in Untouchable Face), and thereyougo04 [..”swinging down the boulevard..”]
Damestreet08 didn’t expire till ’09. Scene of my first kiss with my now husband up against a fancy streetlight outside the Brian Boru Pub on the corner before you cut down to Burdock’s. We parted an hour after it started from where I floated back to the car-park. It was locked so I had to cough up eighty quid to get my car out. I’d have cheerfully paid double that. Fakeempire09 and Slowslow10 came later followed by the date and place of our wedding. Now I bring our little one in to work every day. All kitted out in lower and upper case accessorised by a one and a two. Till home time, when she comes running towards me with her lopsided ponytail and Minnie Mouse t-shirt giving me a few ideas for the next password.
There’s a change in constellation. Something’s been re-arranged. Even Ani is lighter of step..http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUM_i666O8A
Got a password story to share?
department of speculation 