Everybody was Kung-Fu fighting…

The school holidays are over and everyone in the family has stopped vomiting. Good news all round. You might think only one of those was great news but somehow my kids are the kind who spend the holidays saying wistfully “I can’t wait to go back to school. Holidays are boooooring”. Odd. They did not get that from me. I try not to take it personally.

We went back to see Kung Fu Panda 4 for the oldest child who’d missed out the first time (see: vomiting) and everyone enjoyed it. Including me because this time I understood that there was a second panda who was the father of the Kung Fu Panda who in completely different scenes and this was not just a massive continuity on the part of the filmmakers who had missed that the Kung Fu Panda was (a) travelling with a wily fox and (b) in a completely different place, travelling with an irritable goose. This was not explained in the story. As far as I knew. Although first time we saw Kung Fu Panda 4, I had my eyes closed for a good while so I may have missed the subtle clues. Also, I’ve never seen Kung Fu Pandas 1, 2 or 3 so that put me at a disadvantage. But I feel very much up to speed now so that’s a relief and will no doubt come in handy one day.

Eventually there’s going to be a time when no one wants me to take to take them to see any kind of Kung Fu Panda. That’s going to be a sad day so I’m making the most of it while I can even if it means seeing the same movie over and over until every kid has seen it. That’s part of the fun. It was a good school holidays (apart from all the vomiting) and now the days are quiet again and I can do some writing, and that’s pretty good too.

Too Smug, Too Soon

School holidays here and I’ve spent the last week watching gastro slowly make its way from one family member to another. For a while I thought it was going to miss me and I was feeling very pleased with myself for my superior hand-washing and my incredible face-not-touching skills. “Look at me, disinfecting the bathroom for the millionth time and not being throwing up. Truly, I am the envy of all.” As always, I was too smug, too soon and lived to regret it.

I did have a genuinely excellent nap on the second day, so it wasn’t all bad. And, now that it’s over, I feel so relieved not be in pain that it’s almost enjoyable to do normal things like hanging up the washing on the clothesline and vacuuming under the couch (almost, I said. Almost. I’m not a lunatic). I feel all energised and happy to alive. Which is not my usual state. And that was just from a short gastro. Imagine if I’d just recovered from the Black Death, I’d be high as a kite for the next decade.

So, although the school holidays didn’t go quite to plan, things aren’t all bad. The only tricky part is that child number 1 missed out on our trip to the cinema to see Kung Fu Panda 4 and was promised there would a return visit. So, guess who the lucky parent is who will be seeing Kung Fu Panda 4 twice this school holidays? That’s right. I am that lucky lady. I’d never seen Kung Fu Panda’s 1, 2 or 3 so I spent most of the first trip completely baffled (Who is that goose? Who is that other panda? Are they both Dads to that other panda? Did that nap I just took make this movie more or less confusing? Why is Awkwafina in every single animated movie, including the trailers for the ones that haven’t come out yet?”). Let’s see how perky I feel after I’ve sat through that one again.

Deluged

At home with child number 3 who is “sick”. i.e. too sniffly to go to school but well enough to help me reseed the lawn in the backyard and plant a passionfruit next to the fence. Probably the ideal amount of sickness, really.

The writing I was planning on doing, will be postponed. Same with the procrastination about writing I was planning on doing.

Instead, we’re watching I Woke Up As A Vampire and Bluey. I recommend the Bluey.

Later in the day it poured with rain. The passionfruit looks okay but I think the lawn seeds are drowned. It’s looking muddy out there.

Later on I checked with child number three to see if she might go to school tomorrow and she sniffed dramatically and said “I think we’ll decide in the morning.” So that’s we’re doing.

Reading, Listening, Watching

Reading: I just read The Rules Do Not Apply by Ariel Levy because I remembered liking her previous book of essays, Female Chauvinist Pigs. This was very different and, although, I already knew there was a graphic account of a miscarriage, it was still confronting. For the rest of the book, I was impressed by the confident way Levy charges into her career and the array of terrible decisions she makes in her personal life. My face was like the grimace emoji for a good third off the book. So beautifully written though. I also read Australian comedian Judith Lucy’s Drink, Smoke, Pass Out. Made me laugh, made me think about how our family stories shape us, made me wonder if her liver was going to survive the carnage she puts it through (spoiler alert: it does!). She’s honest about things most of us would just pretend never happened, which I always appreciate.

Listening: Helen Lewis has a new podcast out called Helen Lewis has Left The Chat and it’s great. She captures the horror of the school Mums WhatsApp group and the swirling menace of the workplace Slack group very well. Apple Podcast link. You can also listen to it on the BBC Sounds website which is where I go for my radio comedy needs.

Watching: I recently started watching one episode of Friends every day. I’m absolutely steadfast in my belief that Friends is one of the greatest sitcoms of all time and would be recognised as such if they’d just called it “The Madness of Ross Geller” and promoted it as a ten-season arc of one man’s descent into insanty. Season 6 is the high point for me, with all the tension about keeping Monica and Chandler’s relationship secret but every season has superb episodes. I’m on season seven now and just watched the Holiday Armadillo episode and it’s superb. I’m finding the slow watch so much better than bingeing, where one episode just blends into another and (if you’re me, watching late at night after the kids are in bed) there’s too much danger of falling asleep.

Please dial 1

I just spent too many hours looking at rotary phones. I don’t need a rotary phone. I don’t need any kind of landline because only spammers ring the one I have now and I don’t think I should waste a rotary phone on scammers. They deserve nothing better than a temperamental Uniden that randomly hangs up on callers or sometimes puts them on mute, which is what I have now.

Still. Those rotary phones are pretty. I could put a pencil in the holes to dial, like a 1960s movie. That is, if I ever used my landline. Which I don’t.

When I wasn’t staring at vintage phones, I was finishing reading a detective novel. It was fine. I think I let it linger too long, though. I started reading it a year ago, then forgot about it because I started crashing through all Sally Hepworth’s novels. By the time I went back to it, I’d forgotten who everybody was and what all the clues were. Every time a character looked meaningfully at, say, a torn love letter or an overturned chair, I had no idea why. A sensible person would have flicked through the book to get the highlights before ploughing on but I’m not that person. I’m up to the next one in the series now, fingers crossed I take less than a decade to read it or I’ll be in trouble again.

Oh Sandy

I’m in the parent stage of life which means I no longer do interesting and exciting things, I just watch my children doing them. Today I watched them run around a beach for three hours non-stop. Then we went for lunch and when we got home, I lay quietly on the couch for a while because I was tuckered out from all that… watching other people doing stuff. In my defence, I wasn’t completely inactive. As well as my usual role of personal photographer and videographer, sometimes I wandered over and said “watch out for that jellyfish on the sand” or “stop pushing your sister over, yes, I know she’s a zombie but just the same stop” or even “it’s raining quite a lot now, maybe we could leave? Oh, okay. Five more minutes then. I’ll just shelter under this tree”.

The good part was that they were all exhausted so we all lay on the couch together and talked about how tired we were and how many jellyfish we’d seen. Also one child wearily handed me all the shells he’d collected and said, “Can you wash these, put them in a container and bring them to me?” (NB: I did none of these things) and I was very pleased because it was his first real attempt at delegation and that’s going to come in handy if he ever wants to be a middle manager. Something to look forward to there.

It was a good day. Sandy, but good.

It’s New Year’s Late

Hooray, it’s 2024! Said everyone else, seven days ago. The years change but I’m still a late adopter.

Sometime in December last year, I made a resolution to blog every day this year. But then I was bit tired on January 1st and I didn’t really feel like it so I made another resolution to blog intermittently and with a feeling of general guilt, and that seemed more my kind of thing.

My inbox has been full for the last week of emails about setting goals and being the best you can be this year. This is my fault because last year I discovered a new, highly enjoyable type of procrastination - productivity gurus, especially the YouTube ones. Such a good way to waste time, watching other people talk about how much they’re getting done in the day. You can live vicariously through them, feeling a sense of real achievement, as the housework piles up and the books are absolutely not being written. It’s so comforting to learn about all the hacks that could improve my life, the one I’m not living because I’m sitting on the couch watching productivity videos. Did you know there are seven hacks that could save you three hours a week? I feel like one of those hacks should be “stop watching productivity gurus” but maybe that’s something they’re saving for later. Also did you know that there is a two minute rule, a five minute rule, a two day rule and an Eisenhower matrix? And that’s just the beginning. I’ve learned about 5AM productivity routines, weekly growth rituals and intermittent task audits. And none of it has helped a bit.

This year, I’m going to be anti-goal, anti-hacked, anti-audited. I’m just going to turn up and see what happens. That might be even better than being productive. Let’s see.

The Cheese of Nothingness.

How’s the third book going? Well, yesterday I ate a wheel of brie and an entire box of crackers and wrote 230 words. So, on the cheese eating front, things are going well. There’s a strong future ahead of me there. Maybe a simple smoked cheddar, next time. Or a blue cheese and don’t be stingy with the mould. Possibly something a bit fruity. The world is my cheese oyster and that’s the way I like it.

In the book writing department, however, it’s a slow plod. I’ve reached that point where I have a lot of words but they zing off all kinds of directions, mostly unrelated to each other. Characters turn up, gallop around a bit and then are never seen again. Sometimes I open a chapter to see what I’ve got and think “Oh no. This is not good. Who wrote this nonsense? Then I remember it was me. I wrote the nonsense.

This is the normal state of being half way through a book. For me, at least.

Are there writers out there who start at chapter one (“Pow! McWivern heard the bullet go over his head. He smiled to himself grimly. They weren’t going to take him hostage again. Not again. Not today.”) then just keep pounding the keyes until the final page (“He scooped her into his arms and kissed her deeply. She melted in his embrace and he slid out the Beretta 21A Bobcat she had hidden in her pants. “Oh McWivern,” she said, “You always get your girl.”)? Are there writers who have no chaos? No writing out of order? No forgetting halfway through a page what they named a walk on character so Susan suddenly becomes Rebecca?

If there are, good luck to them. They’re probably very successful and happy. They’re not staring a computer screen with one hand in a packet of Jatz cracker biscuits, dreaming of Roquefort.

I’m not of their kind. How I wish I was. It seems much better than the disasters I get myself into. I write bits and pieces of scenes all over the place and then wade through them, trying to figure out what I have and what I need to write. Some days it starts to come together, depressingly slowly. Many more days I have nothing. But on those days, we’ll always have cheese.

Reading. Watching. Listening.

Watched: Dinner At Eight (1933) Oh, I love the sharpness of 1930s comedies and this is one my favourites. Everyone is wonderful in it but my favourite is Marie Dressler who has one of the greatest closing lines in the movies. Jean Harlow has just the right mix of hardness and glamour. It’s a treat from start to finish.

Reading: I read this interview with Nora Roberts in the New York Times. An excellent review of her life and work but, being the New York Times, they do have to include a digression on Language We Would Never Use Nowadays. This time it’s plundering tongues. Still, once they get that over with it’s a very satisfying piece. Link or Archive Link

I also read the new Britney Spears biography. I had low expectations for this (not every celebrity biog can be Demi Moore-as-written-by-Ariel-Levy calibre, intimate and gruelling) but whoever Britney’s ghostwriter was they’ve brilliantly structured each chapter into biographical mini-essays centring around the control and abuse of women’s bodies. And there’s the anger. She’s so angry and, if even half of what she says happened to her is true, she has every right to rage. Amazon Link

Listening: I’ve been listening to the Private Eye Podcast because it’s funny and it’s about politicians in a country that’s not my own so I can enjoy the absurdities without the accompanying feeling of “these are the people my taxes are paying for?”. Ideal. And who doesn’t love a joke about Boris Johnson?

The Hard Sell Is Out

Finally, after many false starts, The Hard Sell is available on Amazon. I probably should have mentioned this when I published it a month ago. Yes. That would have been ideal. Still, here we are.

It feels like a victory just getting this book finished. For a long time, I thought it wasn’t going to happen. After I published my first book, I immediately started on my second and planned to have it out within a few months. A year at most. Well. An embarrassing number of years later (okay, it’s five), here it is.

I didn’t mean to take so long but it happened. Partly because I had another baby in that time and hyperemesis is the enemy of productivity. It’s surprisingly difficult to Get Stuff Done when you’re busy trying not to throw up all day. There are probably better women than me out there, who outline a 10 volume magnus opus while they’re lying miserable on the bathroom floor. They probably keep to a strict 10,000 word daily schedule because these books aren’t going to write themselves, guys! I’m not one of those women. Good luck to them. I mostly spent my time complaining. Then I had a baby, taking my child collection to three, and that was delightful but, again, not all that helpful when it came to having time to sit in front of my computer banging on the keyboard.

The other problem I didn’t figure out for a long time. I’d started the story in the wrong place. Once I’d moved it to a year later and let my main characters deal with the aftermath of their choices the year before, things got better. It was painful deleting all those words but, on the bright side, they were terrible.

Then there was family life stuff and a lot of procrastination as always, but I kept plodding along because what else is there to do? Getting to a final draft felt like I’d finished a hundred marathons, one after the other. After that, the rewrite was a breeze.

I’m very happy it’s out. I hope people will like my spiky, work-obsessed, convinced-she’s-unlovable, Anne as much as I do. I think she’s amazing.