Like Pewari, you may have noticed I’ve not been here much. I’m going to share my drivel too, to get back into it (don’t feel you have to read). We’ve just been Very Busy lately, but not the sort of busy that makes for blogging – visitors, school stuff, kiddy stuff. Y’know. Karen, Pete and Bernard came, which was nice, and then Mia did, which was nice too. Tamsin’s birthday is later this week so I’ll be back with photos then (though there are a couple from this weekend here). I had a night out with some School-Gate Mums, which was not at all scary once I got there (but very alcohol-fuelled) and Maggie’s new bestfriendinthewholeworldever, from her class, is moving to sodding Ireland at the end of the month, which is something of a disaster.

Found at the kitchenwitch‘s site and a welcome diversion from the glorious combination of solo-mumming and work

(ok I changed it a little to suit)

(I seem to have rather a lot of these sitting in my unread pile upstairs)

I’ve read it
I read it for school
I started but didn’t finish it
I’ll never read it
Maybe one day
(Never heard of it)

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (will finish one day when I have time)
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
(Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies)
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs Dalloway
Great Expectations
(American Gods)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
(Middlesex)
(Quicksilver)
(Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West)
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
(Anansi Boys)
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
(The Inferno)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse (shudder)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
(The Corrections)
(The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
(Neverwhere)
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
(Oryx and Crake)
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
(The Confusion)
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
(Gravity’s Rainbow)
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

 VP tagged me and it would be rude not to play. I think I might have done it before but if I can’t remember then I am sure you won’t either.

1. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. The player tags 5 people and leaves a comment telling them they’ve been tagged & asking them to read their Blog.

Q. What were you doing 10 years ago?
A. We were in the throes of buying our first house – we moved in in July – and caught up in wedding preparations (married in September). I was writing up the first year of my PhD.

Q. Name 5 snacks you enjoy
A. Chocolate, magnums, ryvitas with peanut butter, veggy dips with hummous, cake.

Q. Things I would do if I were a billionaire
A. I don’t really aspire, does that make me weird? I suppose I’d treat all my family – pay their mortgages and give them a nice holiday. Pay our mortgage (oh and I suppose we might move to another house, so I’d pay for that) and have a daily cleaner.

Q. Five jobs that I have had
A. I don’t know if I’ve had five! My first job, aged 13 or 14, was in a French bakery-cum-cafe on Saturdays; I stayed there until I left to go to university. Second job (first uni summer) was running a cafe in St Ives, Cornwall, 3 or 4 days a week. Single handed. Second and third summers I waitressed in the restaurant at Wisley RHS gardens. I spent a year at Shell from my degree, and went back there the following summer to do a study into diesel trucking. When I finished my PhD I got a job as a medical editor and although I am not still employed by that company, that is what I am still mostly doing.

Q. Three bad habits
A. Failing to put things away when I have finished with them – or leaving them lying about half-done for days on end. Wandering off in the middle of doing something sensible (unloading the dishwasher, doing a jigsaw with the children, ironing, potting on seedlings…) and inadvertantly spending half an hour online before remembering. Brackets.

Q. Places I have lived (I’ve changed this as naming 5 seemed odd)
A. Addlestone, Edinburgh, Chester, Manchester, Warrington, Tokyo

Q. Five people I want to know more about
A. Um. I am shamefully lacking in curiosity because I can’t think of a single one.

I’m not tagging anyone because most of my friends won’t do memes (you know who you are!). If you’d like to do it please consider yourself tagged, and please leave a comment so I can come and read your answers.

Tagged by Karen, I am not in the least self-important and anything that provides a nice simple task to divert me from the three half-composed posts lurking here is welcomed.

But first, the rules:

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, choose people to get tagged and list their names.  Or don’t.  Who’s going to check?

OK, here’s my eight:

1. I am in a pre-Christmas flap, not helped by having evenings out planned (why now, when I haven’t been out all year?!) and made even worse by this ridiculous insistence on making virtually everything properly, from scratch, myself. Where does that come from?
2. I really want to learn to sail. I love boats. One day I will. Why didn’t I do it when I was a student?
3. I was a really good waitress (it’s all about attention to detail, people – so editing and waitressing go hand in hand in my opinion) but lacked the bicep strength to be very good at silver service and am glad I don’t have to do it any more.
4. I went to a carol concert at Chester Cathedral last night, which was lovely if freezing.
5. I want to stroke a tiger.
6. I have a great sense of direction and am hardly ever lost, but I cannot link the words left and right with the appropriate direction – apparently it is a form of dyslexia - which means I am hopeless at giving directions. I’ll draw you a map with no problem whatsoever but put me in the passenger seat and apply a bit of pressure and I’ll be there going turn left (flaps right hand)! no no not that way! I said left (gesticulating rightwards). This causes much marital strife as Cameron is terribly literal in his interpretation of directions and ignores handflaps (at his peril).
7. My first word as a baby was brandy. Start as you mean to go on, I say.
8. I have eaten more chocolate than is probably recommended this evening: Cameron is out, Tamsin is very restless, and I have 20 pages of anticancer gubbins to edit before I can go to bed. I feel a bit sick.

And I nominate Kitchenwitch, to provide a break from her thesis; Ally, who has lost her blog muse; Mia, who is always full of random oddness (in a good way) and VP, because I am just getting to know her.

After gently joshing Karen about the impeccable neatness of her (and Pete‘s) bag – what, no receipts? – I was inspired to empty mine. All the way to the bottom; I suspect I have never excavated so far in the year since I was given it. I haven’t photographed it, that would scare you.

The bag itself: I was given it by my mother-in-law last Christmas (you will need a big bag now you have two children). I love it. It is large and black and has brightly coloured batik cats all over it: the only problem, if I was looking for something to complain about, is also its virtue: it is so capacious things just disappear into its depths. I use it both as handbag and nappy bag, though when (if) I go out without children I decant* purse, keys and phone into a smaller bag – like Karen, I wonder what I carried before I had children (and went here to find out: links a bit erratic so scroll down to the 18th) – and skip along feeling light and unburdened.

Inside:

• Two hats for Tamsin; one woolly and bobbly and oh so cute, the other pink and jersey and also very cute.
• One nappy: size 1 totsbot, yellow.
• My notebook, full of random scribblings. Lists, recipes, addresses, Japanese vocabulary (I’ve had it a long time).
• Red gloves, mine.
• Fruit knife.
• a brown leather purse, in which I keep vouchers and cash that has been given to me and the girls as presents – in principle, if we are out and I see something they might like (a new toy or similar) I can use that to get it. In practice, I forget it is there.
• Tamsin’s mittens: they match the woolly hat, above, and she will not keep them on.
• My prescription sunglasses.
• A powder compact: Clinique, quite ancient.
• Crabtree and Evelyn comfort cream (for nappies) – rarely used but you never know.
• My purse: fat with reward cards and bus tickets.
• A pen.
• An old to-do list (which, I note, contains “tax return” as its first item. I really must.)
• Two contact lenses – one for each eye, which is pretty good going.
• Keys to my parents’ house. Must give them back.
• A sachet of lemsip.
• An old shopping list (snow-white costume, boots, birthday cards for October birthdays).
• A receipt for library fines.
• Lipstick (I cannot remember the last time I applied it).
• A doll shoe, small and pink.
• Tamsin’s sippy cup, yellow, half an inch of water (recently put in the bag).
• A small tupperware with some cheesy nibbles for Tamsin.
• Happy hippy out and about spray (like this).
• Wipes: expensive eco ones. Like Karen, it worries me that normal branded ones remove pen and paint so well: they are also the best way to clean my stainless steel kitchen bin and make it shiny. I do sometimes buy asda fragrance-free, because they are so very cheap, though.
• One admission ticket, child, to Stockley Farm. I think we went in August.
• My phone: Nokia, 3 years old. If I agreed not to upgrade last summer they slashed my tariff by 2/3. Who needs a whizzy phone?

*what word do I mean, here?

..and no blogging because I have been suckered into pesky facebook. Hours fly by and nothing is achieved (so no major change from the norm) although I have become quite Zen about the whole thing: in 3 short days I have moved from but what is it for distress to accepting that it just is. And I’ve made other people join me: can you be evangelical and Zen? And a concomitant revival in my twitter account, because let’s face it if you are going to share your inane day to day activities with the world, why not do it on a minute-by-minute basis?

[aside: may I quote from this week’s Observer TV guide? “BBC3…is seemingly staffed by the sort of idiots even an undergraduate would dismiss as unsophisticated…as tragically middle-aged and out-of-touch as all those thirty- and forty-somethings clogging up facebook in a desperate attempt to recapture their lost youth”. Ahem.]

We did have a trip to Worcester last week, home of the family Naan (and she’s put a lovely picture of T and me halfway down); had a lovely time. Bit nervous before as she was one of those friends I have known, like, forever* but never actually met. But within minutes all was fine, even if I was not allowed to look in her fridge.

Spent some time at the allotment over the weekend – Monty says it is now June (and he is correct) and so one is to plant one’s. Um. I am sure he had a proper word for them (but it’s late and I’m tired) – you know, the things that have been in the greenhouse because they will die if the frost gets them. Sweetcorn, squashes and beans, in my particular case: I have a cane wigwam for the beans. I cannot express how proud of myself I was when I constructed it.

*Note teenage facebook-user-type vocabulary.

Just a short quick post, sort of whispered (because Pewari, who is paranoid because she’s had lawyers’ letters, is convinced Gillian McKeith is actually psychic and will find me out and sue me for being mean) but I must direct you to this fabulous article*. I confess I don’t watch her programme; I saw it once or twice and couldn’t bear the bullying, nor the fact that she claimed to analyse people’s poo and the corners of their mouths. The article misses out the most important point (presumably because it would be libellous; as, presumably, is this. But I am a small and insignificant blog rather than a national newspaper so prepared to risk it): that she gives no indication of taking any pleasure whatsoever from life. Frankly I’d rather eat the odd ice cream or plate of chips and be happy than survive on aduki beans and goji beans (huh?) and be cross all the time**.

*I like the quote …otherwise it wouldn’t be called “science”, it would be called “assuming”, or “guessing”, or “making it up as you go along”, which sounds horribly like my PhD, and those of many of my friends – but that is another story altogether.

**Of course I am cross all the time. But that is the lot of a mother-of-two and not a result of over-indulgence in blue-green algae. That’s not food, it’s slime!

Jo’s tagged me to share 5 things you don’t know about me – though I have no idea when she did so as her posts, bizarrely, are timed but not dated (yes, I am aware that there are other people out there who have tagged me and been completely ignored: I’m thinking. Sort of). It kind of depends who “you” is (are?) as most people reading this, I believe, know me in real life (or at least via MSN or email) as well. Hey ho:

1. I am about to become an aunty for the second time (and I know if it’s a niece or a nephew even though my sister will swear blind she didn’t find out and I just shrug and say “if she does, she’s not telling”. Hee hee!). I love being an aunty.

2. I was a girl guide for far longer than is seemly or socially acceptable, ie not just brownies but guides and rangers and even a brief stint as a leader. I can tie knots.

3. My hair is falling out. It didn’t do that after M was born (or perhaps I didn’t notice because in those days it was short and – halcyon days – had some semblance of a style).

4. I have a hankering to sail and absolutely no idea why I didn’t learn when I was at university. Love boats. Married a man who is sick on a pier.

5. Tamsin’s birth story, as promised.

Edited to add: Just realised I didn’t tag anyone else to do it. So I choose Mia, Katy, Ally (because surely she has shared it all), Karen (who I know will hate it and refuse to play) and the other Lisa.