Auf Wiedersehen, Pets

Today I spent at the pool vigilantly watching my threesome, who range from swimmer to paddler to fully paid-up water wings user. Tomorrow I take them to Alsace Lorraine to visit friends who, for their sins, are spending the Whitsun holidays in a camper van in a village that my friend described as “one house” (thank God for satnav). Thursday, we leave for Berlin.

With sunshine and holidays abounding, I bid you a brief Auf Wiedersehen. I am taking a blogging and Internet break for a couple of weeks. I plan to spend the hours that I’m not soaking up the wonders of Berlin and Lübeck working on my novel, which I have been neglecting since the sun arrived in Germany a couple of weeks ago. During my last two runs (six kilometres!), I crystallized the action of Chapter Six in my head and now have to get it all down before it vapourises.

I also plan to look for the ultimate summer dress. If I can’t find it in Berlin, then I can’t find it anywhere!

See you at the end of the holidays. May the sun shine on you wherever you are. Tschüss!

Dresses and Sunshine

Yesterday, I went shopping in Heidelberg, looking for the ultimate summer dress. Then I got cross and went home. What is going on with fashion? Dresses are either ground-length maxis that are tentlike at best, shrouds at worst, or ridiculous little miniscule shifts in which one can neither ride a bike nor stride along a street without revealing to the world one’s position on women and hairiness. Being short, the maxi style makes me look like a traffic cone, and being curvy with thighs, the mini ain’t an option. And don’t even say “leggings” to me. I’m with the Fug girls on leggings: hate them on anyone over 20, unless they are dancers or Kate Moss.

As well as the Sixties maxi/mini mindset, there’s this ridiculous love-affair with Eighties fashion going on. I’ve done bib-fronted, frilled Victoriana already, I did the sweater dress look at 12, I’ve seen the racer-back come and go once before and I’ve worn jumpsuits. I did baggy pinafore dresses to death in my teens and I don’t ever want to wear one again. I want to wear a dress that emphasises my shape, not one that disguises it. I’m also hating the smocks - I both look and feel pregnant in them - the big clunky beads sewn onto everything and the ugly neon colours.

My other moan of the day is that German high street fashion is so generic. Not only do the three main high street brands - Esprit, Mexx and S.Oliver - all look identical to each other, they seldom move from their formulae. This year’s Esprit summer look (sporty pants, T-shirts, and stripy shirts) looks pretty much like last year’s Esprit summer look. Boring. At least in H&M, you find some healthy Scandanavian madness, but yesterday it had come over all Eighties neons so I flounced out as quickly as you could spin me right round, baby.

So my search for the ultimate summer dress, the dress that would be neither too long nor too short, that wold flatter the good bits and hide the imperfections, the dress that I could wear out at night or to the pool with my kids? Came to naught. I was tempted to buy two things: a black maxi skirt (until I realised I have one already) and a silver-grey wrap dress printed with white butterflies from H&M (until I realised that I have two wrap dresses and a third, while it might be pretty, would not in any way be Ultimate). Instead I picked up some new bistro-style glasses, a couple of photo frames and stopped off at the nursery on the way home and bought potting plants for the terrace. Who needs clothes?

Today was Mother’s Day, the day I would have liked to worn my ultimate summer dress, given that it was an exquisite day and we cycled to a restaurant in the next village for real, Italian, crispy-based pizza. I wore a dress that is two years old. While it is black and as my husband kindly pointed out, smacks slightly of Sicilian nonna, it was just the right length for cycling, clung in just the right places and floated in other places. Thanks to my darling family, who woke me with home-made presents and spoilt me with their love all day long, I felt fabulous. Like a really fabulous Italian grandmother. New dresses are clearly not essential to my happiness, but my four darlings certainly are.

And a little bit of sunshine helps.

Confessions of a Slacker

722 words. That’s all I’ve got to say about that.

I’ve also been slacking on the blogging front. This is probably the first time - apart from holidays - that I haven’t blogged for a whole week.

Instead of writing and blogging, I have been doing some living. In the style of the lovely Ms Make Tea, here are some random items of life that have got in the way:

• A morning at Daisy’s kindergarten, making her Schultüte with her. The Schultüte is a cone-shaped object, decorated according to the child’s fancy, that is filled with goodies and presents, which the child takes to their Einschulungsfest. This is a special day to celebrate starting school. It involves a church service, a walk to school carrying both Tüte and spanking new backpack (the Rantzen), a ceremony of welcome and a visit to their classroom with their new teacher. Then they go home, have coffee and cake with the family, and unpack the Tüte. Daisy’s is beautiful: a winter ice-skating scene with sparkling ice and mountains, all in white, blue and silver. She is clearly moving out of the pink princess phase, which is a relief.
• A visit to the Auslaenderamt to renew my Aufenthaltserlaubnis. Yes, that is as stressful as it sounds - German officials are very officious and I always tend to arrive minus the one vital piece of paper that would ensure having my residence permit renewed on the spot. However, the guy in charge of surnames N to P, which encompasses us, is the most relaxed official in Germany, and the whole thing was achieved in five minutes. Afterwards, we sat in the sun in Heidelberg cafe and breakfasted. Lovely!
• Three jogs and a yoga class with my very lovely yoga teacher (I have to say this because she now reads my blog and doesn’t want to be cast as one of the nasty Germans in the drama that is Life in the Burg - and she is very lovely). All my runs have been outdoors and I have loved the sunshine, the green hills and the swift wide Neckar river.
• Going through the children’s clothes, putting outside the old and outgrown ones for charity (and placed these on the street for removal today) and replacing winter clothes with summer ones. It is lovely to see everyone running around in sandals, short sleeves and sunhats.
• Planning and booking our family’s visit to Berlin and Luebeck next week. We are staying in holiday apartments rather than hotels, which, I discovered on my last visit to the Hauptstad, is the way to go. I am dreaming of Berlin.
• Watching DVDs! I laffed my way through the first season of Flight of the Conchords, which is a hilarious programme about two New Zealand musicians trying to make it in New York, with the help of their abjectly useless band manager, Murray. I also watched Babel, with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, which is an excellent and sobering film.
• Discovering the Love Food Not Waste website, which I am plundering for tips on how not to waste food, in light of Emily’s EcoJustice Challenge. Broccoli stalk soup anyone?

And now I’m off to lie in the hammock.

‘Fess Up Friday

Today is the day that writers confess how their writing week has gone, thanks to the lovely and very Literate Kitten. Mine has been both good and bad - some highs followed by some lows, followed by highs again. I felt my fiction writing terror this week, but also a calm confidence that I can keep taking this novel forward. My story died at this same point - 30,000 words - three years ago, so this week it has been crucial for me to break through the obstacle and keep going. And I did it - it now stands at 36,000! My goal for now is just to keep going: I’m not after a major piece of literary fiction, I just want to get to the end and see what happens. The burnishing and polishing I will save for the second draft.

This week I finished Chapter Five on Monday night. Full of confidence I submitted it my writing cheerleaders (dear friends, who are also writers and readers, and whose job it is right now to be completely encouraging) immediately, then slept. When I woke in the morning, I read it again and realised I had been over-confident. It was wrong, all wrong. I was too far forward in the story and needed to reign it back in.

That’s when the fear and the doubt started, those mean little thoughts that say, “You are going to fail”, “It’s never going to happen”, “You’re going to die a bitter old woman who never finished a novel.”

Last night, inspired by this challenge, I faced my fears and completely rewrote Chapter Five, all 7,000 words of it. I submitted it to my cheerleaders at 2am. There are parts of it I like and parts of it I’m iffy about, but the main thing is that it keeps the story going forward. And that’s my goal: onward and upward and ever forward, with no looking back.

This week I plan to have some thoughts about Chapter Six. I plan to go to gym and then to the Cafe with the Chais, and write in my notebook with a pen about a woman whose son has left and who wakes up to realise he took her joy with her.

International Harry Potter Day

OK, it wasn’t, it was International Workers’ Day and in Germany, Father’s Day, but somehow the theme of our day was Harry Potter. Today, the girls mixed magic potions which they poured into little glass jars and threaded onto string to wear around their necks. Lily’s was a potion for luck, and Daisy’s was a multi-functional “do-everything” potion. Then they saddled up the broomsticks for a lively game of Quidditch in the garden. Lily was the Seeker.

At some point, I was up in the bedroom with Ollie, and we had the following HP-related conversation:

Ollie (pointing to a Harry Potter paperback which I have been reading to Daisy at bedtime): That’s my Harry Potter.

Mummy: Oh, do you like Harry Potter?

Ollie: Yes.

Mummy: Is Harry Potter a wizard?

Ollie (laughing): Nooooooo.

Mummy: Oh. My mistake.

Ollie: He saw his Mummy and Daddy in the mirror.

Clearly, he was taking in some of the story as I read it to D. And it would be hard to forget the scene, as both Daisy and I cried when we read it. Then Lily joined us and took part in the crying. As a family, we are very moved by Harry’s orphan status.

This evening, while I was reading a far less interesting book to Daisy, Lily - who is now on HP and The Half-Blood Prince came in and noted that all the baddies in the Harry Potter books are known by their surnames: Voldemort, Snape, Malfoy, Quirrell. She’s right, of course. I forsee a great future for her as a book blogger.

Tomorrow, I’ll be posting on the Literate Kitten’s writing challenge Fess-Up Friday, where writers confess to how much or how little they have written that week. I’d better go and tackle the monster that has become Chapter Five. I call it Voldemort.

People Who Explain Too Much

In my blog bio, I say that one of the things I dislike is people who lack the ability to edit. An anecdote doesn’t have to be perfectly crafted, and it doesn’t even have to have a great punchline, but it really shouldn’t bore me. When you’re telling me about the fabulous new restaurant you went to, please leave out of your story what time you left home, how long it took to find a taxi, and how long you had to queue outside the restaurant. In the tale of your mind-blowing seven-course tasting menu, these details are irrelevant. And, if you insist on telling me all, please note my body language: not looking you in the eye, twiddling my thumbs, whistling, getting up to go to the toilet. If we are on the phone, the verbal tics indicating that I am fondly remembering the scones I once had in Upper Whallop in 1972 - and not listening to you - would be: sighing, long silences, no warm “ahas” and the sound of the TV remote control at work. Clues, people, clues. Receive them, and act accordingly.

I have had many bruising sessions of Too Much Information. However, during these long years of having my body language ignored by people who love the sound of their own voices, I have had the time to devise My Guide to Bores.

The first is The Pedagogue. The Pedagogue loves to teach and uses every social situation to fill other people up with his or her learning. So accustomed to hearing his or her voice in the classroom, or training-room, or university tutorial, The Pedagogue believes every occasion is a chance to share knowledge. And, accustomed to pupils shuffling papers and picking their teeth with staples, The Pedagogue will ignore all signals that his or her audience (of one, two or twenty) is bored rigid.

The second is Details. Details believes that no story is complete without times, dates and verbatim reports of what people said. A report from - I hesitate to call it a conversation - Details will go something like this: “And so she said she would pick me up at nine on Tuesday, but I had to go to the supermarket first, so by the time I got home it was nine-fifteen, and she was waiting in her car outside my house and she said, ‘Hurry up, we’re going to be late’ and I said, ‘Just let me throw some make-up on’ and she said, ‘OK but make it snappy.’ So I went upstairs and I thought I would change, but I couldn’t find my new jeans anywhere. I turned the washbasket upside-down and found them at the bottom, but they were smelly, and by then it was already nine-thirty, and then she called from the car to say where the hell are you, and I said I was just changing. She said hurry up, so I put on my old jeans and threw on some lipstick and just brushed my hair really fast, but by the time I got the car it was nine-thirty five and so we were late for the movie.”

In the pantheon of bores, there lurks The Enthusiast. The Enthusiast has a single hobby or interest, which is arcane to the rest of the world, but infinitely fascinating to him or her. No matter how hard you try to lead the conversation to new and uncharted waters, The Enthusiast will try just as hard to return it back to his or her safe haven. Whether it is clay-pigeon shooting, advances in prosthetic limb technology or the invention of the Kreepy-Krawly, the Enthusiast will direct your comment that you still haven’t decide whether you would support Obama or Hillary if you lived in the US straight back to birds, limbs or pools. No straying is tolerated with the Enthusiast.

Another type is The Entertainer. This is the person who the first time you meet him or her, you think, “Hilarious! What funny stories! I’ve never laughed so much!” The next time you encounter the Entertainer, you hear the stories again. You come away thinking, “Whoops, she must have forgotten that she’s told me those already. But what a hoot!” The third time you meet this person, you realise Those Are Her Stories.

A fifth is The Narcissist. Much like the Enthusiast, the Narcissist likes to grab a theme by the coat-tails and milk it for all it is worth. However, unlike the Enthusiast, the Narcissist’s favourite topic is wide-ranging, engrossing and infinitely fascinating in all its aspects, for of course the Narcissist is in love with him or herself. Any conversational gambit of yours will be met with “When I …”, “Of course, my feeling is …” or “I always say …”

To the bores, I say this:

• Read your audience. If they are yawning broadly, have a desperate look in their eyes or have slumped over in their chairs, chances are you are boring them.
• Ask questions. When the person responds, try asking them another question and even a third. You’ll be surprised by how refreshing it is. (For the Pedagogues out there, don’t for God’s sake, ask, “Do you understand me?”. You will be whipped upside the head.)
• Employ your edit facility. You may have lost it, but for the sake of the rest of us, seek it out, dust it off and put it to good use.
• Put yourself in someone else’s shoes. When someone makes a comment, instead of relating it back to yourself, try saying, “That must have been wonderful/hard/challenging/hilarious for you.” You might even make a friend.

That would be my rant over. However, if you want to read more on sexist bores, then Rebecca Solnit’s article Men Explain Things to Me: Facts Didn’t Get in Their Way (which I found via the F-Word Blog) is superb.

Project FGN

Before I give you a brief update, let me just note that after a talking-to from my husband, the project will no longer be known as Thin, Grey Novelist but Fit, Grey Novelist. Being thin is not a good goal, but being fit is.

Being Fit

I ran five kilometres for the first time last week. I liked it so much I ran the distance three more times during the course of the week. The key to my running success: an iPod! Having pooh-poohed them, I was surprised at what a huge difference music of my own choice made to my stamina and enjoyment. Thanks to the above-mentioned husband for a wonderful present and my fabulous gym playlist. You are a superstar. I also attended a yoga class and a fitness class with Tommy “Teletubby” Fitness Instructor. Today, I have a sick child and a nauseous headache so no gym attendance happening.

Being Grey

I went for my annual haircut on Saturday and refused highlights. Very empowering.

Being a Novelist

I’m stuck on Chapter Five. There’s not much more I can say about that, except that this novel is exactly at the point where it died three years (the 30 000 word point) and I’m having a mini-crisis. However, my lovely writing cheerleaders stepped in and said inspiring words to me about Chapter Four, so as soon as I post this, I’m heading off to face the unlovely protagonist of Five.

I’m having some very entertaining email contact from the 70-year-old father of a friend of mine. He (the father, not the friend) lives on a yacht in Malaysia and is a writer. We are sharing information about agents and publishers, but he is much further down the line than me, having had a novel published in the Seventies and with a completed manuscript now. He asked me if Commonwealth writers can approach US literary agents and while I saw no reason why not, I mailed an agent in San Francisco just to check. His response was:

You’re not under obligation to query British agents
exclusively.  I would take a close work at your work to see where you
think its natural home market lies, since each market has different
tastes, and then query based on that.

So watch out, all you US agents. You’re going to be hearing from me and my yacht-living writer friend! I may be grey, but I’m getting fit and I’m coming at you, unpleasant protagonist and all. Now I really must go and drown her, or something.

A Neighbour Apologises

STOP PRESS!

In an unprecedented move, a Burg neighbour has apologised to expat Frau Otter for stating baldly in public that her children are bringing rats to the suburb. Frau Otter says she is still recovering from the shock.

“I was amazed,” she says. “I have been accused of many things by my neighbours. But this is the first time, someone has apologised to me. It’s just a pity that her apology, unlike her accusation, wasn’t public.”

Frau Otter says that she had been in the crowded local bakery one Sunday morning, when the neighbour, who we will call Frau A to preserve her anonymity turned to her and said, “‘A rat ran over my husband’s foot yesterday. I spoke to Frau G, who denies that the rat has anything to do with the three compost heaps in her garden. She said maybe your children have been picknicking in the corner near our garden, and that’s why the rats are there. It’s pretty disgusting.’”

“I was so stunned I couldn’t say anything at first. Then I told that my children very seldom eat in the garden, especially as it has been winter, but if they do, they have a chocolate or an ice-cream which they eat up. They never leave food remains in the garden.”

Frau Otter reports that on recently meeting Frau A again outside the bakery, her neighbour apologised to her.

“She said, ‘I didn’t mean to insult you, I just wanted to warn you about the rats. I don’t want one of the children to be bitten.’”

Frau Otter says that having been accused of having stinky bins and offensive barbeque smoke by neighbours, it was appalling to have her children accused of bringing rats to the Burg.

“I feel vindicated now,” she says. “Clearly not all my neighbours are insane lunatics.”

The EcoJustice Challenge

Today, as many bloggers have noted, is Earth Day. I have been guiltily noticing some of the bad things I do, including the environmentally not-friendly practice of driving to the gym in order to run on the treadmill. Bad Charlotte.

Then I chanced upon Emily’s EcoJustice Challenge, launched today! It’s a challenge that hopes to get us to change bad habits like the one mentioned above. I quote verbatim:

So, here is how this challenge will work. The first step is for anyone who wants to participate to pass the link onto at least five other people (or even if you don’t plan to participate, if you like the idea, please pass it on). If you have a blog of your own, this can easily be accomplished merely by linking to this site in a post on your own blog. Below is a list of things you can choose to do. Once every quarter between now and April 21, 2009, I will add to this list. Your challenge is to choose something from this list, to experiment with it, and to post about it here. Or, if you’d rather not post, that’s fine. You can just choose what you want and leave comments on this blog. You can choose to implement as many or as few from the list as you would like. You can choose to stick with one (or more) for an entire quarter, or you can mix and match (one — or more — this month, a different one next month, etc.). My hope is that by the end of the year, at least one item from the whole list will have become a way of life for you and your family. And if you’re already doing some or all of these things, come up with others you want to do, share them with us, and post on them instead.

To join the blog as a posting member, please send an email to: ecojustice08 AT gmail DOT com with your user name and the email address you’d like to use for the purposes of this blog. I will add you to the list of users. Also, please post on your own blog, if you have one. That’s it. And now, here are your choices for this quarter:

1. Choose one day a week in which you will not use your car at all (barring a major emergency, like having to drive your spouse/child to the hospital for stitches). Before you immediately dismiss this one, because you have to drive to and from work every day, please think about it. Is there no one with whom you could carpool two days a week? If so, the day you’re not driving would be the perfect day not to use your car at all.

2. Choose one “black out night” per week. All lights and all electrical appliances are off by 7:30 p.m. and don’t go on again until the next morning. What will you do without lights, television, your computer? Well, the weather’s getting nice where many of us live. Sit out on the porch/deck and tell stories. Read by candle light. Write letters by candle light. Play games by candle light. You know, people did this sort of thing for thousands of years. My guess is that if you have kids, this will be an exciting and fun challenge for them.

3. Choose two days a week in which you are only going to eat organic and/or locally-grown food. Do you know that inorganic farming is one of the best examples of evolution that we’ve got going these days? All the pesticides that have been used to grow our food have helped to create “super bugs” who are becoming more and more resistant to our chemicals. We’re definitely losing this battle in more ways than one. Talk to the people at your local farmer’s markets. Many of them are growing their food organically anyway; they just aren’t certified, because it’s a difficult and expensive process to be so. Buying locally, of course, cuts down on the oil used to transport food long distances.

4. If you need to go anywhere that’s within a 2-mile round trip radius of your home, walk or bike. Where might this be? The first place that springs to mind for me is your children’s school bus stop. Perhaps the post office is close to your home. The library? For me, it’s both the post office and the bank. If you’re super lucky, maybe you have a farmer’s market that’s close by. Or maybe you don’t live close enough to anything, but you do work close by to that deli, say, where you always drive to pick up lunch.

5. Read that challenging book about the environment that you’ve been putting off reading, you know the one you don’t want to read, because it might make you a little uncomfortable (e.g. The World without Us, Diet for a Small Planet, Affluenza). Read it. Post about it. Maybe implement an idea or two based on what you’ve read.

6. Buy only those things sold in recyclable packaging and make sure you recycle that packaging.

Hooray for Emily. My plan for this quarter is to do 1 and 6. I will choose and commit to a non-driving day (and jog out from house rather than on a treadmill) once a week. Also, I plan to read and post about Affluenza and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, both of which I already own.

Please post about this, pass it on and commit to one or two of Emily’s challenges. Together, we can do it!

More on Privilege

A few days ago I did the Privilege meme, devised by PhD students at Illinois State University as way to get people thinking and talking about privilege as a way to think and talk about class. The model is US-centric, which I found doing it, as a couple of questions weren’t relevant to me or the education system I came from. I did it out of interest anyway, but came away with a sense of unease that it hadn’t begun to reflect the privileges I grew up with in apartheid South Africa. Mandarine noticed this and commented:

This is sobering indeed. Especially when I consider that I used to believe South African whites were all spoilt kids, but that I score much higher (25/34) than you (18/34) on this ‘test’.

Actually Mandarine, white South Africans were all spoilt kids. I’ve devised some additional questions to the meme, which do reveal the level of our privilege.

Bold the true statements. You can explain further if you wish.

1. You had live-in domestic help when growing up.
Until my parents were divorced and then we had a domestic worker who came Monday to Friday. She bussed into the city from an outlying township.
2. That help was expected to clean house and take care of small children simultaneously.
Absolutely. I was strapped on the back of my nanny while she swept and cleaned.
3. You had two domestic workers: someone to clean the house and someone whose sole responsibility was child-care.
4. There was additional part-time domestic help in your home: someone to assist with domestic chores such as ironing or someone to garden.
Yes, a gardener came a couple of days a week.
5. You were not expected to take responsibility for any domestic chores.
I learnt how to cook and how to operate a washing machine at university. I was not expected to do any chores at home, though I did help my mother clear the dishes in the evenings when our domestic worker had gone home.
6. Your schooling received more government funding than the schooling of others.
7. Your tertiary education received more government funding than the schooling of others.
8. The training of your teachers and professors received more government funding than the teacher training of others.
9. Your schools had better facilities than the schools of others.
10. You lived in suburbs with running water, electricity, large houses and big gardens; suburbs where others were forbidden by law from living.
11. On leaving school or university, you were more likely to be hired for the job of your choice than others.
12. You presumed you would enter a profession on leaving university; blue-collar work was never an option for you.
I began working in 1992, and in 1994 the new government started its affirmative action programme for people who were previously disadvantaged. Had I stayed in South Africa, I would probably have had to work for myself or start my own company as most of my friends have done. Luckily, their privileged education means they have the tools and the wherewithal to do this.
13. You or your parents did not have to travel long distances to work because your suburb was near the city centre.
14. You did not have to travel long distances to school because there were many schools in your suburb.
15. You routinely went on holiday to the beach or the game reserve.
16. Your parents or friends’ parents routinely had overseas holidays.

In apartheid South Africa, privilege was bound up less with class than with race. It’s become more class-related now, as a black professional middle-class that enjoys many of the above privileges grows. However, as a product of apartheid, I have to acknowledge that I was unfairly privileged above others on the superficial basis of my skin.