Books of 2011

Firstly, a belated Happy New Year to you all! I have been a very bad blogger and it’s been a combination of no time (due to baby commitments), stress and also a slow laptop which needs to be replaced. But I am back on the blog at last and I wanted to chat briefly about the books I read (or started to read) in 2011.

Books read: 20
Fiction: 11
Non-fiction: 9

A woeful tally of books read (half of 2010) but since I had three major life events in 2011 (marriage, birth of Baby F and a new job) this is pretty understandable. Even getting to 20 was a struggle at one point since I found that my energy for reading disappeared. I would get into bed with a book (and not always a good book, which would definitely have helped) and be asleep within ten minutes.

Fiction
I’ve been trying to decide on my books of the year and it’s difficult since the novels I read in January have dimmed a bit in my memory by December. The year started with the The Hand that First Held Mine and ended with the Hunger Games Trilogy and also The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes. I really enjoyed all the novels I read this year (with one exception which I didn’t finish).

One of the highlights was definitely The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman and I’m going to choose that one as my favourite novel of the year. I loved the sheer innocence, inventiveness and playfulness of Gaiman’s writing here.

Second place would be the Maggie O Farrell and third would be the Julian Barnes. It seems very reductionistic to list them like this but it helps clarify them in my head.

As for the Hunger Games, I was initially completely hooked by them and Suzanne Collins did an excellent job with character, concept and plot. But I found that, as hooked as I was, after a while I started to find them a little formulaic. I haven’t read any reviews apart from one by Litlove and the fact that they are so hugely popular (numbers 1, 2 and 3 on the Kindle bestseller list when I last checked) should be an indication of how good they are.

Suzanne Collins says she’s interested in the effects of war and violence on young adults and she does do a brilliant job of conveying the life-and-death drama of these young adults who must literally fight for their lives in a type of gladiatorial reality game show which takes place in a post-apocalyptic tyrannical state. Katniss Everdeen has echoes for me of Lisbeth Salander (The Girl who Played with Fire versus The Girl who was on Fire) and she’s an interesting combination of stength and vulnerability.

But, as I said, I had my reservations, one of which was that it was too convenient for the plot to be driven by the gamekeepers (which are really stand-ins for the author herself). I’ll be interested to read other reviews.

I thought Julian Barnes fully deserved his Booker. But then his books are always a treat, aren’t they? And I found this one a much more satisfying read than the last Booker-winner which I read which was The Finkler Question. L and I both found that a little odd. Of course I went into this book with huge sympathy for him after his wife died and I think I was looking for some signs of grieving. I’m sure they are there — the remembering of minutiae for example and the trawling through the past in order to make new meaning out of our most significant relationships. But I was soon caught up in the story of Tony, Adrian and Veronica and there was just enough intrigue to keep me guessing and not to baffle me entirely.

Non-fiction
Mostly psychology-related with some memoirs as well. The year started with Joyce McDougall’s Theatres of the Body which was fascinating and profound. She talks about how our bodily symptoms (and those of our patients) reflect our deepest issues. Very psychodynamic (which I loved) and also surprising. Jenny Diski’s memoir / travelogue Skating to Antartica was brilliant in parts. Then there are a number of books which I have started and intend to finish this year (time permitting). Paul Gilbert’s The Compassionate Mind. Lisa Appignanesi’s Mad, Bad and Sad. I’ve only read about 50 pages of this so far but I was very interested in the story of Mary Lamb and what it also says about our current models of treating ‘psychopathology’.

Thanks to Kindle, I can now dip into my TBR wishlist much more easily and two books which I have just started are What the Dog Saw (Malcolm Gladwell) and Sally Brampton’s Shoot the Damn Dog. I’d like to review that at some point (time, baby and work-permitting).

My non-fiction choice of the year would be Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand for the sheer brilliance with which she tells Louis Zamperini’s unforgettable story of resilience and perseverance during the Second World War.

Can do better

Leah (aka Baby F) is 10 months old today. She loves her food, loves books (they are her favourite toys) and loves people. She squeals with delight when we tickle her tummy and sometimes she just squeals to hear the sound of her own voice. She waves goodbye (sometimes with both hands) and says “bye”.

She tolerates tummy time but will usually roll on to her back within a few minutes. No crawling yet although she has managed to get from one end of the mat to the other by means of rolling. Some tentative signs that she’s thinking about it but no actual crawling (or shuffling along on her bum). She’s quite content to sit there and play with her toys and make all kinds of noises.

There’s some debate as to what she means when she says “da-da”. Naturally I think she’s referring to me but she’s also called L “dada” and she can’t say “mama” yet (although she has said “mada” and “bada”) so it could be a general word she uses for people she likes. I have no doubt that while she would be getting an A or an A+ for language development, her gross motor development report-card would read “Can do better”. Her fine motor development is good though and she is quite adept at ripping off parts of pages that are not stuck down firmly.

Incidentally, we are ignoring the peadiatrician’s advice to take her to a physiotherapist since we think there’s still plenty of time. Babies develop at different rates. Our baby loves chattering more than moving around.

She also has one tooth. It’s dear (although not so dear when she sinks it into L at breast-feeding time!) And mostly she sleeps through the night (although we’ve had a few horror nights when she had a cold). I was dispatched off to the chemist in the middle of the night last week to get some nasal drops.

Otherwise, not much to report. It’s the last day of school today so I’m looking forward to being on holiday. I will still see a few private patients until just before Christmas and then I’ll take a break for three weeks. I hope to be able to read a few books in between looking after Leah. The grannies also need a break so I imagine that I will be doing a lot more baby-sitting than reading.

I still hope to be able to talk about books and reading in this blog again sometime. Perhaps I should review children’s books. Julia Donaldson is a hit but we’ve recently discovered Emily Gravett. This is one of Leah’s Christmas presents. The best part is at the back where Cedric the dragon gets so annoyed with his mum (who has fallen asleep rather than read his favourite dragon story for the zillionth time) that he ‘accidentally’ breathes a ball of fire and burns a hole in the actual book that you’re reading. It’s very cute.

Babies and Bullying

BABIES are to be used in classrooms throughout Scotland as part of a pioneering initiative to reduce levels of bullying and aggression. The Herald in Scotland reports that the project, called Roots of Empathy, encourages children to interact in a nurturing manner with each other by bringing a baby and its parent into the classroom over the course of a school year.

Pupils are shown the attentive, loving interaction between the parent and child in a bid to teach them to better understand their own feelings and the feelings of others. The primary focus of the programme is to reduce problem behaviour, including fighting and bullying.

Louise Warde-Hunter, strategic director of children’s services at Action for Children, which is running the project, said it helped schoolchildren to get along.

“This raises levels of empathy among classmates, resulting in more respectful relationships and a dramatic reduction in levels of aggression among schoolchildren,” she said. “By increasing levels of emotional literacy in children at a young age we can lay the foundation for safe and caring classrooms and, in the long-term, safe and caring societies.”

That makes perfect sense to me but I’m still trying to get round the idea of bringing Baby F to school. I’m sure the kids would ooh and aah (well I hope they would) but the whole ‘bring a baby to school’ idea would involve quite a bit of organization and involvement from the mother (L in this case). Not practical for us since L is already swamped at work and I’m trying to get up to speed with the requirements of being a school psychologist 12 years after I last worked as a school counselor.

I’m enjoying it but there’s a fair amount of anxiety about living up to the standard set by my illustrious predecessor, who earned his PhD in Psychology in his last six months here and was a much-liked and respected speaker at schools and conferences. I’m lucky if I manage to get to one conference a year so the idea of actually presenting at a conference seems light years away.
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I’m pretty pleased that I’ve managed to post something since I’m usually so discouraged by the lack of sustained concentration when it comes to blogging that I don’t post anything at all. Perhaps I’m losing my blogging enthusiasm. But one thing I would really like is if any of my blogging friends managed to find me on Goodreads so that I can keep up-to-date with what people are reading and have read and recommended.
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Quite unrelatedly, L and I were browsing through Exclusive Books on Sunday when we saw a series of Gruffalo-related soft toys. They’re delightful and I was very tempted but eventually we thought that a book was probably more worthwhile. While we were admiring the true-to-the-book likeness of the toys, security arrived and were escorted into the backroom where the booksellers were keeping a shoplifter. I gathered that the shoplifter was a she and that she was black but other than that I didn’t hear anything more and felt a bit bad about being too curious. I remember that in the London riots the looters smashed all the windows in one street except Waterstones (which the commenters saw as a sign of the times – trainers being far more in vogue than books). But now I can’t help being curious. What was this woman trying to steal? Perhaps a DVD or a magazine. I can’t imagine anyone stuffing The Gruffalo under their jacket. But what if it was something for her child? Would we think any differently about it?

On the same topic, if you want to hear what Jenny Diski has to say about shoplifting (and her own shoplifting of books as a young teacher) then check out the podcasts at The New Yorker. I’m still reading and enjoying her Skating to Antartica but I don’t have anything interesting or profound to say about that.

Because there’s never a good time …

… I thought I would just seize the moment and post a few thoughts and pictures. I see that it’s been almost two months since I last posted. A lot has happened since then. I left the military and started my new job as a school psychologist. Baby F grew up some more and is now sweeter than ever. L is doing an amazing job at balancing working 5/8 at her job and being a mother. I finally finished reading a couple of books.

And here’s the thing. Having finished the books, I would love to write about them here but I don’t have the energy. It has been a big adjustment starting work as a school psychologist and then there are the day-to-day demands and anxieties associated with being a parent of a toddler. I’d love to say more about the job but I probably need to let it settle down first (and also not write about it on a public blog).

So what have I been reading? The first book was Writing through the Darkness by Elizabeth Schaeffer. She writes from personal experience about using writing to ease her depression. She suffers from bipolar mood disorder and found it incredibly useful to write down her thoughts and feelings. From there she started a writing group at Stanford University for people with mood disorders. She has some excellent ideas on how to use different kinds of writing in different ways. Journalling, poetry, creative writing exercises, writing about trauma and so on. She also provides very valuable tips on how to start a writing group of your own and how to handle feedback (only constructive feedback is allowed). It is the kind of book that makes me want to go out and start such a group myself.

The second book is a therapy memoir about recovering from Borderline Personality Disorder using dialectical behaviour therapy, Buddhism and online dating. The Buddha and the Borderline is really good from both a therapy point of view and a memoir perspective. Kiera van Gelder captures excellently in words what so many people struggle with. And the fact that she does it with self-effacing humour, honesty and courage had me cheering her on all the way through.

It would be good to read another therapy memoir and to be able to compare these two. But at the moment my attention is quite divided between my job and Baby F.

Speaking of which, a couple more pics …

I love her expression in the first one. She’s clearly quite unimpressed to be faced with the prospect of learning to play the piano. Perhaps she senses the hours of musical misery which her father inflicted on this instrument (and his family)?

In the bottom one she’s in her element on her safari mat with her Lion-Cow and other animals. She’s also wearing a green baby-grow in honour of the Springboks (it is World Cup time after all) and in the background you can see some of the books which are piled up on my bedside table.

That’s probably enough for now. I hope to be back before another two months go by.

Here a hip, there a hop …

... everywhere a hip-hop.

Nothing to report here other than a pretty cute pie-girl. Just thought I’d post a quick picture and shoot the breeze (in bulleted form):

* It’s times like these that Baby F (aka pie) gets called “Bunny Hop”. As you can see, it hasn’t taken us long to descend into full-blown baby-talk. Num-num and noof-noof (melody hammer) being two other examples.

* I also realised that tip-toeing around the house is now standard practice (as is whispering). It only takes a few full-throated cries to make you realise who’s the boss in this house.

* One month to go in the military. Yay.

* I am getting to read (just very slowly). Zadie Smith’s essays (very good) and some psychology (writing and depression). No novels at the moment (although August is the month for reading Angela Carter).

* Any suggestiongs on how to get baby rhymes and songs off repeat-play in your head? Yesterday it was “The animals went in two by two”. And today, actually today they’ve gone. No “George George Morrison Morrison”, no “Tie me Kangaroo down, sport”. Ah bliss.

* L and I celebrated our 6-month wedding anniversary on Friday by going for a rushed dinner followed by a good (but pretty damn depressing) play called Rose. (Rose is one-woman play about an 80-year old Jewish woman at the turn of the century.) By the time the second girl died I was ready to drown my sorrows – except the bar was already closed. Not the best date we’ve ever had but Fiona York was excellent in the emotionally draining role. In retrospect it wasn’t the best choice of play for two first-time parents already anxious about leaving their precious pie-girl for the evening.

* Ok, I can’t end on that note. Just to add that it’s so sweet to see the pure joy that gets elicited by a bowl of carrot puree. Squeaks, squeals and some leg-pumping thrown in to the mix. Eee!

Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand

I’m breaking my long silence on the book front to share some thoughts about Laura Hillenbrand’s Unbroken. Wow, what a book. As the sub-title says it’s a “World War II story of Survival, Resilience and Redemption”.

Louie Zamperini is one of those figures whom, once you read about, you’ll never forget. Helluva naughty as a boy, he found his redemption initially in running and became an Olympic athlete, running the 1500 metres at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. When the war broke out he enlisted as an Air Force Bombardier and saw incredible action over the Pacific. The aerial war in the Pacific alone is fascinating (especially since I’d enjoyed the TV series Pacific) and quite moving. Then Louie’s plane goes down in the middle of the ocean and he and two crewmen float over 2000 miles in 47 days on minimum rations while battling sharks and being shot at by the Japanese. One of the crewmen dies and Louie and his friend eventually get rescued by the Japanese, only to be sent to prisoner of war camps and having to endure terrible violence at the hands of the Japanese.

I must say that I really hated the Japanese while reading that section of the book and it was only near the end that I was able to step back and see Louie’s tormentors as sick individuals and not representative of the Japanese as a whole. By the time that the US drop the atomic bombs on Japan I could understand entirely why they did so. Hillenbrand doesn’t minimise the devastation that was wrought on Hiroshima and Nagasaki but I think you need to read the book to be able to appreciate what it meant to the US POWs at the time.

And then Louie is back home and trying to piece together his life again while giving inspirational talks. Haunted by nightmares and flashbacks of his horrific experiences, he drifts into alcoholism. I won’t give any more of the plot away than that but I found that my attention was riveted right until the end of the 400 pages (and all the notes).

Equally fascinating I think is the largely untold story of Laura Hillenbrand herself. She is the best-selling and award-winning author of Seabiscuit and it is fitting that her books speak about tremendous resilience and perseverance in the face of adversity since she herself has had to battle debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) from the age of 19. (If you’re reading this Litlove, then you will find her story particularly interesting. I would recommend the Washington Post article on her here).

Just reading the comments on this article I can see that the debates about CFS are pretty heated. No-one I think can deny the serious physical basis for CFS and yet what I find so interesting are the psycho-social aspects of this condition (or conditions). I gather that CFS sufferers hate to be told that their illness is exacerbated by psychological factors but as a psychologist I can’t help thinking that these do play a role.

And how fascinating it would be if Hillenbrand herself (with her incredible writing skills) were to take this up as a writing challenge. She says that she won’t since she lives with it all the time and that she wrote her two (now best-selling) books to escape her own suffering. While she has certainly enriched our lives in the process, Hillenbrand evidently finds it easier to describe others’ heroism and resilience rather than her own. I find myself wishing to know more about her own life and wondering whether she would be able to mirror her characters by rising above her own apparently impossible odds. (And with two such brilliant books behind her, I guess in some ways she already has.)

A few quotes from the reviews:

“The only runner who could beat him was Seabiscuit,” said Louie Zamperini’s coach at the University of Southern California, as this track star, who had competed in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, trained for the 1940 Olympics in Tokyo. But a deeply unfunny thing happened to him on the way to Japan. The 1940 games were canceled. Mr. Zamperini became an Air Force lieutenant. And he wound up going to Japan not as a miler but as a savagely abused prisoner of war. — Janet Maslin, New York Times

BARBARA KLEIN: Laura Hillenbrand spent seven years researching and writing her book. She studied personal letters, photographs, historical documents and books, and prisoner of war descriptions. She talked with many witnesses, both Japanese and American, who survived the war.
She also spent countless hours talking by telephone to Louie Zamperini. Yet she has never met the subject of her book in person because she cannot travel. Ms. Hillenbrand has suffered from extreme chronic fatigue syndrome since she was in college. Because of her condition, she rarely leaves her home in Washington D.C.
STEVE EMBER: Ms. Hillenbrand has told reporters that she likes to write about subjects that let her mentally climb out of her own body. She says she has a sickness she cannot defeat. That is why she is interested in how others face hardship. She chooses subjects who overcome great suffering and learn to face the emotional side of those difficulties. She says athletes are defined by this struggle to overcome difficulty. — Voice of America

Not the mama

It’s 6.30 on a Sunday morning and I’ve made it to my desk for the first time in what feels like weeks. I’ve been here during the week for other things (house admin and the like) but to sit and write? It feels like never. Part of my resistance is the clutter that’s everywhere. Piles of books that don’t fit onto the bookshelf. A couch filled with paper. There’s the fax machine, scanner, camera, printer, a box of books for the charity store, a replacement heating panel, a picture that needs to be hung on the wall. This is not a restful room. This is a place that reminds me of things not done and things still to be done. It’s a daily subtle criticism of my lack of good organisation skills. My desk chair is missing a wheel and it’s impossible to replace it (or it seems so) but the chair itself is comfortable enough that I don’t want to replace it. So we carry on with four out of five wheels.

I’ve got several good books on the go at the moment but I don’t want to mention any of them until I’m finished. I’ve already had to revise my estimates of books read this year. Halfway through the year and I’ve finished a total of eight books. That’s less than one book every three weeks! So what have I been doing rather than reading? Well there’s the small matter of the pie

And speaking of the pie, yesterday I was just lamenting the fact that Baby F hardly every smiles at me anymore. She’s four months old and sleeping through the night like, well a dream. We put it down to her being a girl. She feeds well, sleeps well. And while I’m sure that she smiles and gurgles to L much the time, yesterday she was looking at me as though I am someone she does know but she’s not sure what value I bring to this whole enterprise.

L said something sensible about how we don’t have kids to get things back from them. And Baby F does give me those heart-melting little laughs of hers. She’s taken to blowing little milk or saliva bubbles. When you make lip noises back to her she thinks it’s hilarious. But at other times she will look at me with these big serious eyes as if to say “Who are you again?” And then I’ll do a little tap-dance and smile and laugh a little manically and sing a little song and she will look unmoved.

“You’ve got to do better than that, whoever you are with the odd face that isn’t Mom’s and no boobs.”

I keep remembering the little dinosaur baby going “Not the mama! Not the mama!’ before braining his dad with the frying pan.

“It’s me, daddy!” I plead. Nothing. A raised eyebrow perhaps. A slight frown.

But it’s true that most of the time I don’t need anything from her. I’m not in this for smiles and giggles. I do love that baby smell and the feel of baby hugs. And even when she drops her lip in a little pout it’s sweet. But knowing that she’s healthy and well looked-after is good enough for me. And I need to take whatever opportunity I get to just sit with her (or walk with her) and read to her. Revolting Rhymes by Roald Dahl. Christopher Robin. The Gruffalo and so on. Last Saturday I got a CD of nursery rhymes from the library as well as “Daddy Hug” which has the wonderful sequence: “Daddy squeak, daddy chirp> Daddy hiccup, daddy burp!” which was the perfect excuse to let rip with a belch myself. If it’s good enough for Baby F, I thought, then it’s good enough for me. The first few times L laughed as well but then she’d had enough.

“Please don’t do that out of respect for me!” was L’s comment yesterday. She didn’t need to add that I’m not the second baby in the house and so I shouldn’t expect a “Good one!” in response.

How to respond to Julius Malema?

I want to fire off an educated and considered response to the shock of Julius Malema’s latest outbursts but I find I’m too cold, too distracted by other things and I find the situation too depressing. (To non-South Africans, Julius Malema is the newly re-elected ANC Youth League president and they have just called for the nationalisation of the mines and the banks and for land expropriation without compensation. They have backed this call with strong-arm bullying of the ANC leadership to the effect of “support us in this or you’re out next year”.)

How to respond to something like this? I think many middle-class South Africans might well respond with catastrophising. I commented to L that I was really worried that the South Africa that Baby F’s generation will grow up in will be worse than the country that we grew up in. And that is saying a lot if you consider that we grew up under apartheid. The message which I got from the ANCYL conference was this: You (whites) benefitted for too long under apartheid. It’s taking too long for us (blacks) to get rich and so we are just going to take the main drivers of the economy. It’s a powerful strategy and it plays into white guilt and black anger. How can we deny that whites benefitted under apartheid? Or that for many, many people the government has failed to deliver in 15 years what they promised? Should we blame whites for that?

But even to enter into the debate seems pointless. Malema and his group do not seem to be interested in the finer details of how to address poverty. They have seized the win-lose model of nationalisation and expropriation. There’s no space here for details, nuances, a consideration of all the efforts that have been tried before. Where’s the Constitution in all of this? A consideration of complexities? Addressing poverty is a hugely complicated thing. It requires a sustained focus on education, government and business incentives, redressing the wrongs of the past, encouraging investment and growth opportunities, regulation, entrepreneurship and also addressing the social barriers to employment such as crime and violence. What the ANCYL are doing is to take the most powerful weapon they have and threaten all and sundry with it. “Do what we say or else!”

And so I was sad and also a bit angry that they seem to get away with their talk of helping the poor while looking after their own political and economic interests first. One commenter on the Times Live site compared Malema with Hitler (and quite aptly I thought):

The policies, views and tactics of Julius Malema and his majority wing of the ANC Youth League sound familiar to those with knowledge of 20th-century European history.
Populism, nationalisation, land policies, the race card, anti free media, anti trade unions, an us-vs-the-rest mentality, “under siege” rhetoric, nationalistic bourgeoisie disguised as new socialism, It feels just like Germany 1939.
Your woodwork is bad, Julius. How is your world history? Theo Martinez

The editor of Business Day, Peter Bruce, (editor of Business Day) had this to say:

It will be hard one day for historians fully to capture the stupidity and spinelessness of Zuma and his administration. Compromised politically from the start, he has so stuffed his cabinet with people he owes political debts to that none of them now has enough authority to stand up and say that nationalisation or land seizures by the state without compensation will never happen. Derek Hanekom made a brave attempt on Twitter at the weekend, but he has no authority.

…

I know that it is fashionable to argue that Malema is a clever chap who knows what he’s doing. But he’s not. Like Zuma, he is an economic airhead with an instinct for politics and survival. No one in their right mind could possibly argue nationalisation and expropriation are cures for poverty and mean it. No one with a smidgen of concern for the destitute could seriously argue throwing a productive farmer off his land and settling the poor on it amounts to a plan worthy of the name.

It’s important to see Malema’s comments in context and that context is that of the ANC succession battle in 2012. Taken at an individual level, Malema’s comments about nationalisation seem to amount to idiocy. But they are not his comments and his policies alone. They are those of the ANCYL and they are designed to strike a chord with the frustrated and poor majority.

As a psychologist I find myself struggling to understand the vast gap between South African political discourse and everyday psychology-speak. In psychology we talk about anxiety and frustrations, empathy, feelings and thoughts and behaviour. In politics it’s all about power and self-interest, rhetoric and point-scoring, image-building, jockeying for position and endless arguments and counter-arguments. If we look at Malema from a psychological perspective it’s tempting to individualise his comments and call him stupid and even evil. But looked at from a political perspective he’s representing a particular group and lobbying for greater power with regards to other groups. As tempting as it is to despair at Malema as being just another “Mad Bob Mugabe”, the problem is much more complicated than that of misguided individuals. It’s a political problem which requires a political solution. The ANCYL have now declared their positions well ahead of the ANC leadership conference in December 2012. Let’s hope that the response from Malema’s opponents at the national level is a powerful one.

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On the home front, all is still good. By ‘good’ you understand that there are the usual joys, frustrations and anxieties attendant with parenthood. L is going back to work in July and I’ve been practising giving ‘pie’ her bottle. I’m pretty confident that I can hold the fort for the first week until our routine kicks in properly. And both grannies are besotted with pie and are ready to take her two mornings a week each (with B our domestic covering the last day).

What amazes me is noticing the small but incremental changes. Baby F is now four months old and she has just moved over from her crib to her cot. She looks so small and yet so much bigger than she was just a month ago. I look at her 1-year old cousin who is already walking and so much more alert and it’s incredible to think of the developments that are in store.

Incidentally, it was funny to see how A (her cousin) reacted when she saw her on Saturday. She walked right up to the pram, took pie’s blankets off and then took off her pink socks. I was astonished. I know that A has had to become a lot more assertive in relation to her other cousin (who is two weeks older and very busy and assertive) but why remove pie’s socks? Well it was quite simple. She has a pair just like them and she assumed that pie had taken hers! She’s so used to battling for toys with cousin S that she wasted no time in reclaiming ‘her’ socks. L’s sister calmly showed her that the socks were way too small for her feet and she allowed them to be taken away again.

As a photo-obsessed first-time parent, I’m naturally taking hundreds of pictures. Now if we can only find the time to put them all into an album (and then find some more time to finally put our wedding photos into another one!)

Gone but not forgotten

I’ve been away from this blog for over a month now and so I want to tell you what’s been happening. It’s been a busy month and there have been both good developments and sad ones. The sad concerned the sudden death of my uncle earlier this month.

This is not the place to speak about family matters but it was a particular shock to us. Families grow apart as siblings get older and my dad and his brothers went their own ways. Lately we hadn’t had much contact with my dad’s youngest brother and so it was a big shock to us when he died quite suddenly on Sunday the 8th of May. My dad had unavoidable work commitments in Swaziland and so wasn’t able to make it back for the funeral. I was asked to be a pallbearer and also to do a reading from 1 Corinthians:

Love is patient, love is kind, It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It is not rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.

And so on. It was a very fitting reading for Uncle C since he gave so much of himself over the years (perhaps too much). This was also the reading I’d done at my sister’s wedding and it felt so strange to be standing up there in my wedding suit and to be reading the same words. I was very sad that I hadn’t spent more time with my uncle when he was alive and sad for him for the disappointments he’d suffered over the years. But also proud of what he had achieved in his life, particularly with regard to yachting. The last conversation I’d had with him was around model yachts and more than a year ago he’d invited me to the Waterfront to see the yachts that he and a friend were making and selling. He had always been a keen sailor but as he’d got older he wasn’t as fit anymore and so he switched to model yachts. I was busy at the time and so I didn’t go. Now I wish that I had taken a greater interest.

Moving on to happier news, this month has been an exciting one for me work-wise. In the same week as my uncle’s funeral I went for a job interview as a school psychologist. I was understandably nervous but I had a good interview (in front of a panel of five) and yesterday I met the principal and signed the contract! And so in three months’ time I will be leaving the military and going back to my roots in education. I’m really looking forward to the challenge and I know this is a good move for me. As much as I learned a lot in the military, gained invaluable experience and made some good friends, it was not a long-term career option for me. I just wasn’t comfortable with going away on deployment, having officer’s training hanging over my head and just the general culture of ranks and saluting, uniforms and endless rules and regulations. Of course schools have their own rules and regulations and uniforms and hierarchies. But they are also nurturing environments and it’s a particular challenge to work with adolescents. I’m looking forward to it.

Another thing that’s kept me from blogging is that my part-time private practice is slowly picking up. Two months ago I started sharing another psychologist’s consulting room three late-afternoons a week after I’ve finished at the military base. It was terribly quiet to start with but I also knew that things would pick up in time and they have. It means taking a change of clothes to work (since I’m in uniform) and also a longer day since I start work at the military at 7am and I’m finished at the practice by 5.30pm. It’s an exciting development but also more difficult in a way since there’s more pressure. Medical aids often don’t cover psychotherapy and so clients need to pay for it themselves (which is particularly difficult in a recession).

And then of course there’s L and Baby F. L goes back to work part-time in July and I think she’s looking forward to it but is also quite anxious about how we will all cope with the change. Baby F will be four months old in two weeks’ time and she is cuter than ever. She has also, dare I say it, started to sleep through the night (and has been doing so for the past two weeks). I’m not even going to risk saying the words “easy baby” because that would be tempting fate. As for the anxiety about being responsible for this little one, I don’t think it ever goes away.

I’ll try and get back into a blogging rhythm soon – even it’s only every second week. But I wanted to say I haven’t forgotten about my blogging friends. Happy reading and writing to you all.

Easter reading

Freedom Day long weekend here and it’s freezing cold. I’m in the front bedroom at Betty’s Bay with L and the pie. Pie is going “a ooh goo” and L is going “blublublum”. Pie is wearing a white jersey knitted by granny and has just had some milk. L and I are drinking tea and eating hot cross buns.

I thought I’d tell you about some of the books I got for my birthday earlier this month. I can’t remember all the titles but here are the ones I remember:

Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand by Helen Simonson
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
Little Liberia by Jonny Steinberg
Edge of the Table (14 stories of youths from the Cape Flats)
The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman
Girl meets Boy by Ali Smith
Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
Changing my Mind by Zadie Smith

A good haul, wouldn’t you say? I’m also reading a few psychology books, including Writing through the Darkness (on writing as therapy for depression) and The Compassionate Mind by Paul Gilbert.

One novel which I really enjoyed recently is The hand that first held mine by Maggie O’Farrell which was really excellent. This novel is similar in structure to The vanishing act of Esme Lennox in that O’Farrell tells two stories (set in different times) which then connect in a powerful way. I see that the Guardian reviewer calls it a “compelling story about memory and motherhood”. Here we have the parallel stories of Lexie Sinclair (a journalist in 1950s London) and modern-day Ted and Elina (young parents struggling to keep things together following the birth of their first child). I won’t give any of the plot away but I’m interested in how O’ Farrell manages to keep the reader engaged and in suspense over such a long time.

She’s also excellent at set pieces and I was reading out bits to L such as the one which describes in graphic detail what is known in our household as the ‘squirty poo’. What amazed me as well was the way she turns it into a crucial plot-device.

I’ve also started Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand which is a good choice for a seaside holiday since it’s a romance with a difference set near a small English seaside town. I’m enjoying the interaction between Major Pettigrew, a retired military man, and Mrs Ali who runs the local shop. Some of the characters are a bit two dimensional but both the Major and Mrs Ali are very well drawn.

One of my favourite things about the Easter holidays is that I get to catch up on other reading such as the London Review of Books. I read a brilliant piece by Eliot Weinberger on George W. Bush’s memoir Decision Points. Weinberger uses the deconstructive language of Foucault to pick apart Dubya in a funny and very telling way.

Here’s an excerpt:

Foucault found his theories embodied, sometimes unconvincingly, in writers such as Proust or Flaubert. He died in 1984, while Junior was still an ageing frat boy, and didn’t live to see this far more applicable text. For the questions that he, even then, declared hopelessly obsolete are the very ones that should not be asked about Decision Points ‘by’ George W. Bush (or by ‘George W. Bush’): ‘Who really spoke? Is it really he and not someone else? With what authenticity or originality? And what part of his deepest self did he express in his discourse?’

He goes on to deconstruct the ‘lone hero’ style of George W. Bush and the fiction that is his memoir. All memoirs are fiction to a large extent but to see the way that Foucaultian theory unpicks the simple (and yet complex) way that the whole George W. Bush presidency was constructed is really helpful. I find it easy to get despondent about governments and politics (especially US politics) which is why it’s refreshing to see the subjectivity of leaders such as Dubya taken apart (almost like a doll) to see how they work.

And then I read (or tried to read) Jenny Turner’s piece on David Foster Wallace. Suffice to say that I’m interested to read his much-acclaimed Infinite Jest but definitely won’t be reading The Pale King.