100 Days - 16

Chatted with family last night over zoom; when I say chatted, I mean they chatted. I feel ambivalent on the subject. It's nice to be able to see them, it's nice to be included, but I have nothing to say. I don't feel it is conducive to conversation, it feels stilted. I also find that it makes me feel more remote. I have this sense of being on the periphery of everything; on the outside, looking in at people. I am not good at staying in touch and have gone long periods without seeing my family much. They all see each other much more frequently than I do so I have ended up feeling like an outsider, like I used to be part of it but am not any more. I have been struggling with a feeling of unreality, and then I have times like Saturday when the irrelevance of everything I do all just becomes overwhelming. 

This is not what I wanted to write. I wanted to write a nice upbeat little piece about how mum and dad shared their memories of VE day (they were both nearly 9 at the time). I wanted to say how I felt like an effective parent because Tish had a migraine and I helped her calm down and looked after her until she was able to go back to sleep. I wanted to say how nice it was to come home and find Monkey and Toby making the dinner, though by the time it was ready I felt sick and not hungry. I should be trying to focus on the positive things, how am I supposed to help Monkey be more positive if I can't even do it myself. 

Also why am I waffling on about what's going on in my head when what's going on outside in the world is so much more important.

It's late. (This is Monday's post, but posted after midnight).

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload

100 Days - day fiveteen

Oh how I laughed. Look, parents are going to sue the government for failing to provide education for their children. Having been a home educator for many years with the Education Welfare Officer breathing down your neck every now and then, demanding that you demonstrate you were providing an education for your children on pain of having them forced back into school, I did find this report most entertaining. Call it karma or something. 

I have read, mostly on facebook, a lot of posts about people 'homeschooling' during the coronavirus lockdown, both positive and negative reactions. Lots of jokes about how teachers should get a big pay rise because making two children sit down and jump through the academic hoops you have planned for them is really hard. Others saying how much their children have flourished away from the stresses of compulsory school attendance. Also home education pages pointing out that what parents are currently doing is *not* home education. It is crisis management. If you're interested Idzie Desmarais writes at 'I'm Unschooled, Yes, I Can Write', and this article on National Geographic. I hope that the experience, the enforced extended companionship of their children, has shown parents that children are people too, and that they don't need to control their every waking moment for them to be 'learning' stuff (whatever that means).

In keeping with the rest of the post, today's Book to Make You Think: Weapons of Mass Instruction by John Taylor Gatto from 2013

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload

100 Days - day 14

You don't like my attitude? Who are you my fucking dad? What's my name? Martine. Would you like the manager's mobile number too? I'm sure that he would love to deal with a complaint about my lapse in politeness. I'm sure it would be high on his list of priorities today. So you go back inside your twee little flat on fucking lapwing lane and call him and he will say, really, Martine, that sounds out of character for her, but I'm sure he would be happy to supply you with a more polite postman in future, one who doesn't have an emotional response to the current stress of the job and life in general but who can deal with everything with a cheery smile. I'm sure that any discomfort you felt at my lack of politeness can be rectified by reporting me to my manager since people in twee little flats on lapwing lane should not be discomfited in any way and are entitled to absolutely politeness in all circumstances. But this will not come out of my mouth. I want it to. I want to stand in the middle of the road and scream. I want to walk away from the van and sit quietly under a tree somewhere until the desire to scream subsides. I don't want to be polite. I am sick to death of being polite, of being cheerful, of being helpful, of being obliging. Sick.

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload

100 Days - Friday the 13th day

Rebecca telling it like it is. I wish I could be this forthright. In my head I can, sometimes, but when I get angry about things it often makes me inarticulate. That's all for today, not up to writing.

Today's Book To Make You Think: Catch 22 by Joseph Heller from 2011

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

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100 Days - twelfth day Tree joy

I gathered rather a lot of tree seeds during the autumn and did not plant most of them. (Not beating myself up about that.) Some that did get planted were left to their own devices in the yard over the winter. (Not beating myself up about that either.) Most of the pots have weeds in them. Last week I swear there was only weeds in this one... but I went outside this morning and found three little oak trees (one on the right is very tiny). Much joy. 

On the subject of trees, here are two of my avocado trees. You know all those complicated instructions for sprouting an avocado stone, involving suspending it over water for weeks waiting for a root to emerge? Well just forget all that nonsense. These were grown by just pushing the stones into some compost and watering occasionally. The third pot on the left there has a mango pit in it. When I cut it open there was a tiny sprout coming from it so I have planted it in the hope that we may get a mango tree at some point.

Today's Book To Make You Think: New Finnish Grammar by Diego Marani from 2013

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload

100 Days - day eleven Living Otherwise

I acquired Milkman by Anna Burns from mum when I visited, what now feels like years ago but was only in February. It has taken me quite some time to read as I kept falling asleep abruptly while reading then waking up half an hour later with a very stiff neck. None of the people in the story have real names. This matters because who they are is not important. The book is about this profoundly dysfunctional society (Northern Ireland) and the way it affects people's lives, their interactions and relationships and even what they think.

"I myself spent most of of my time with my back turned in the nineteenth century, even the eighteenth century, sometimes the seventeenth and sixteenth centuries, yet even then, I couldn't stop having a view. Third brother-in-law too, for all his exercise obsession and of whom everybody in my district could have sworn didn't have a view, turned out to have a sharp view. There was no getting away from views and of course, the problem was these views between the areas, between one side and the other, were not just not the same. It was that each was intolerant of the other to the extent that highly volatile, built-up contentions periodically would result from them; the reason why too, if you didn't want to get into that explosive upsurge despite your views which you can't help having, you had to have manners and exercise politeness to overcome, or at any rate balance out, the violence, the hatred, the blaming - for how to live otherwise? This was not schizophrenia. This was living otherwise." (p.112)

So middle sister, as she is called, likes to read while walking. Unbeknownst to her people are disapproving of this weird behaviour and she is being viewed as 'beyond the pale', a category of people who are seen as outsiders. However when out running she finds herself being stalked by milkman, a member of the paramilitaries, who has decided that she is the girl for him. She tries to ignore him, even when he makes veiled and not-so-veiled threats against maybe-boyfriend. The community notice this stalking and assume the worst. Even her mother does not believe her when she insists she is not having an affair with milkman. All the while she is trying desperately to get on with life but against her will is drawn into the world of renouncers.

It took me many many pages to understand. Why doesn't she just tell him to go away I wondered. But thats not how things work. Mum summed it up after I emailed her about reading it. She said it's about a society based on fear. Life has to be lived as is dictated by the paramilitaries; where you live, who you associate with, what you say, where you shop, how you behave. Because if you don't someone may just turn up on your doorstep and shoot you. Families are both guilty by association and protected by association. And it becomes so normalised that people police themselves, and each other, because they are afraid. I grew up during this period, and the 'troubles' was a constant feature on the news in my childhood. I never understood this division along catholic/protestant lines. I never understood how the disagreement went so deep that people could be killed for it. I'm not sure I do now, but this book has certainly helped me understand how people lived their lives and why.

This statement by middle sister about marriage sums it up (marrying the wrong person and her ma's pressure on her to get married are constant themes throughout):

"Of course there was the big one, the biggest reason for not marrying the right spouse. If you married that one, the one you loved and desired and who lived and desired you back, with the union proving true and good and replete with the most fulfilling happiness, well, what if this wonderful spouse didn't fall out of love with you, or you with them, and neither of you either, got killed in the political problems? All those joyful evers and infinites? Are you sure, really, really sure, you could cope with the prospect of that? The community decided that no, it couldn't. Great and sustained happiness was far too much to ask of it. That was why marrying in doubt, marrying in guilt, marrying in regret, in fear, in despair, in blame, also in terrible self-sacrifice was pretty much the unspoken matrimonial requisite here. That was why too, I protected myself by not getting married; further, by sticking to maybe-relationships in spite of my intermittent longing for, and futile attempts to mould me and maybe-boyfriend into, a proper relationship." (p.256)

So, there are far reaching and convoluted consequences to the situation, even though there is never a 'situation' between middle sister and milkman (not to be confused with real milkman, who is actually a milkman). People die. For random and often unrelated reasons. It is the uncertainty that keeps everyone in line. The notion that you don't even know what thing you might do that will be disapproved of. And of course people can take the political situation and use it for their own desires. But try and do that and they are still watching you:

"So they beat him up. And it was for his behaviour that they beat him up, not for the irritation of guns, for wearing a balaclava when everybody knew who he was anyway; not for threatening me either, a woman, one of their soul sisters. No. It was for being a man and coming into the Ladies unannounced. He had shown disrespect, been dismissive of female fragilities and delicacies and sensibilities, had shown no courtesy, displayed no chivalry, no gallantry, no honour. It was that he had no manners basically. If he chose to walk in on them while they were applying lipstick, adjusting hair, sharing secrets, changing sanitary towels, then so be it, there would be consequences. And here they were, those consequences, happening now. After the current consequences, after they told their men which they were going to do in a minute, there would be further consequences." (p.310)

So. I was just about to write that this was a 'proper' blogpost. Despite my original intent when I started this blog eleven long years ago I have drifted in to only expressing opinions about books. The purpose of 100DaysToOffLoad is to share what you are thinking. I am going to have to work on the idea that I can share opinions about other things too and it will be a proper blogpost. This book has caused me to think a lot. In fact that is why I like reading. Although I do read for entertainment the books I enjoy the most are the ones that make me think, the ones that show me something about life that I had not encountered before. So in light of that I am going to start a Books to Make You Think link in each of my posts: Fugitive Pieces by Anne Michaels from 2010.

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload

100 Days - day ten blog post

Here is a blog post about not having anything to write a blog post about. I can't let myself off the hook or I will abandon the 100 Days project, and it's late and there is not time to finish the book review post I started this morning. I made some red pepper hummus, but it lacks a certain something that the hummus from Unicorn has. I wanted to try and eat nutritious stuff for lunch this week rather than bagels with peanut butter which is my go to lunch when I can't be bothered to plan. Tish and I made baklava yesterday and I took some of that too, to balance out all the veggies in the hummus wraps:

There are now various goslings on the pond, and Tish reported seeing more cootlings too. No sign of any of the ducks making babies though. 

We ordered pizza for dinner because nobody could be bothered to cook. I was kind of saving getting takeaways until people might get sick and not be able to go out, but nobody is sick and being not bothered is the next best excuse. 

Stay safe. See you tomorrow.

#100DaysToOffload