A late review from a local paper makes specific mention of me, in very positive terms. One of those that mentions everything that they liked about the play, and then starts a new paragraph with something like 'but it is James Hogg as Roger who... etc etc'.
"There you go," one of my colleagues says, who's read this blog post. "Surely that counts as a 'towering genius of the modern stage' remark?"
No, of course not, it's made of bitey snapping eels just like all the others. What's that? Would you like a compliment, Mr Hogg? Why no! Of course not. I'd like to pick holes in it and find ways of reducing it to a meaningless statement that's really talking about the writer instead. Or feel angry that the rest of the cast haven't been singled out as well when they deserve it just as much. If not more! And goddamn it, I know Oscars are for film work, but why they hell haven't they included mine in this review?
We watched the film Hitchcock the other day. There was a very good line in that when Hitchcock bemoans the fact that the film industry never gives him any appreciation. I can't find the exact quote, sadly, but it's a great film and worth seeing. Do that rather than waiting for me to find the right webpage to lift it from. Along the lines that nobody ever comes out and says 'well done, you're really good,' in so many words.
You kind of expect that they probably did, that they did it via the medium of giving him lucrative film deals, valuable opportunities and their support and time as he experimented on new stuff. And you know, reviews and audience reactions and so on. Isn't that enough?
Yes and no. It ought to be, I know that, but that's a rational belief. We're all still beholden to that personal voice inside that can't quite believe or trust any of the external reviews, good or bad. You want it on a mark sheet, or from some kind of combination auditor/evaluator representing your family, friends, all your peers and your own internal figurehead of self-worth, whatever that may be.
And even then, it's likely only going to be valid on the day you get it. Tomorrow always has it's own doubting demons to be dealt with. Which is good, otherwise there wouldn't be a challenge worth waking up to face.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Friday, December 20, 2013
Advent
Counting down the days.
This is something that V habitually does when one or the other of us is away. Every time we catch up on Skype, usually daily, she'll tell me how many days are left until we're back in the same place. It drives me up the wall. I prefer to shut my mind to however much of the wait is left and just get on with it. Being constantly reminded I won't see home for however many days it is gets torturous.
This time, not so much. Perhaps our habits have rubbed off on each other. Now I find I'm mentioning the countdown most days, telling her "it's only X left now", whereas she's mostly talking about the things we'll do as a family once I'm home.
F mostly talks about what a good girl she is. "Goo gl goo gl goo gl," she says a lot, when she's not saying "mamamamamamama!" (if V isn't quick enough to bring her food) or "dadadadadadadada" as she shakes the iPad around affectionately. No idea what she makes of her remote papa, I'm probably just a form of bearded teletubby to her. Beardy-Weirdy? But I get a very enthusiastic reception on skype calls, which is very heartening.
Now she can walk all the way round the edges of the coffee table by herself. And she's tall enough to reach the TV and try and change the channels. Her crawling already has a strong element of trying to stand up in it, she flexes her feet round to get them flat on the floor then sort of hunch-hop-crawls forwards. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she's walking before I'm back.
And in the run-up to Christmas, I'm okay again. Done my shopping, got gifts ready to take home, looking forward to seeing my parents and family up in Scotland for the 24th. There's only a month left here, already, it's not that long.
Home stretch. I can make this.
This is something that V habitually does when one or the other of us is away. Every time we catch up on Skype, usually daily, she'll tell me how many days are left until we're back in the same place. It drives me up the wall. I prefer to shut my mind to however much of the wait is left and just get on with it. Being constantly reminded I won't see home for however many days it is gets torturous.
This time, not so much. Perhaps our habits have rubbed off on each other. Now I find I'm mentioning the countdown most days, telling her "it's only X left now", whereas she's mostly talking about the things we'll do as a family once I'm home.
F mostly talks about what a good girl she is. "Goo gl goo gl goo gl," she says a lot, when she's not saying "mamamamamamama!" (if V isn't quick enough to bring her food) or "dadadadadadadada" as she shakes the iPad around affectionately. No idea what she makes of her remote papa, I'm probably just a form of bearded teletubby to her. Beardy-Weirdy? But I get a very enthusiastic reception on skype calls, which is very heartening.
Now she can walk all the way round the edges of the coffee table by herself. And she's tall enough to reach the TV and try and change the channels. Her crawling already has a strong element of trying to stand up in it, she flexes her feet round to get them flat on the floor then sort of hunch-hop-crawls forwards. I wouldn't be at all surprised if she's walking before I'm back.
And in the run-up to Christmas, I'm okay again. Done my shopping, got gifts ready to take home, looking forward to seeing my parents and family up in Scotland for the 24th. There's only a month left here, already, it's not that long.
Home stretch. I can make this.
Wednesday, December 18, 2013
Scenes
Lots of schools audiences. This is good. I don't think audiences quite realise how much a cast can hear and see of them sometimes. Usually as a sort of many-headed blur out in the half-dark of the auditorium. But you can often see the front few rows pretty clearly, and hear a lot of what's going on out there. It's not the cinema, you know. We can hear your asides, we're just keeping to the convention that we can't. Like the 'privacy' of curtains round a bed in a ward.
Young kids don't always get theatrical convention. They answer questions for you, or shout helpful advice. "What should I do?" Titty asks at one point, trapped in a storm with the Amazons abroad on her island.
"Hide!" shouts one kid. "Steal their boat!" shouts another. She does both, which is lucky for those kids. I guess they understand the conventions of telly or story telling, though I also wonder if they think they've given her those ideas?
"We built the harbour, made the fireplace with our own blood, sweat and tears!" sing the Amazons.
"That's gross," opines a young lady in the third row.
Someone suggested I should stab the policeman with a spear when he comes to tell us off. Ha, kids today, eh?
-
I've never done a relaxed performance before. This isn't because I'm remarkably uptight as an actor, neurotic mess though I may be. This is a performance for audience members who don't respond well to the usual restrictions. So the house lights stay on, the audience can move about and talk as much as they want and our louder special effects are muted. It's for families who can't come to standard performances for whatever reason - very young babies, children with special needs like autism (which makes theatre additionally confusing and alarming), elderly bladder limitations, that kind of thing.
Really odd, from up on stage. Someone in the auditorium echoes most of our lines back to us. We can see people wandering around from time to time (just as in school shows, where teachers ferry kids in and out of the loo all through everything). There's a strange and rather ghoulish chorus of moans and howls that comes and goes. It's hugely distracting, so we all cling desperately to our stage relationships to focus through it.
But it's very gratifying, to know you're giving a show for people who don't get to see them otherwise. We go out to meet the audience (and reassure them that we're just normal people really, or at least as near to it as theatrical types get) afterwards.
One family tells us it's the first time they've got to go to a show all together, as their young son's condition means they wouldn't be allowed in otherwise. He calls us all by our character names and plays enthusiastically with the puppets.
There's a group of old folks from a home, who all look very dazed but pleased. When I say hello and ask if they enjoyed it, one of them asks me to help her put her coat on. Is that a no? Or does she think I'm a carer? No idea, she's pleased enough to see me either way.
-
We get letters from some of the children who've seen the show, politely formulaic ones where the teacher has told them to list their favourite bits and wildly enthusiastic ones where they've drawn elaborate scenes from the play in orange felt-tip.
None of the representations of Roger has a beard. I feel this is significant in some way.
-
The Theatre Christmas Party is at the local Skiddaw Hotel. I don't drink anything, but I still dance about like a big floppy twat once the disco starts up. Facebook, I hate you preemptively.
-
Corpsing happens.
I drop a clasp knife which is about to be referred to in the subsequent scene. It bounces once, falls through a hole in the set and is gone. We can do nothing except continue, all of us desperately trying to work out what we'll do to cover this.
Stage management hand me a replacement as I squat by the wings during the next song. It's a rather incongruous stainless steel butter knife from the Green Room. Definitely not the knife we just had or what the actors on the other side of the stage are expecting to have handed to them, but at least a knife, thank God. But because I know how poor a replacement it is, I start cracking up in advance of handing it over.
"Hand me that knife you found, ship's boy," John tells me.
Roger wants to keep the knife for himself, he's pretending to have forgotten all about it. So I say "Whaaa-haa-haaat kniii-hiiiife?" in return. It's an unusual choice, as line readings go, but I think I make it feel justified.
Not as bad as Nancy's fumbled line "Titty didn't hear much dicking", a few shows previously. Not digging, then? Well, okay, I guess that's new direction. We all break upstage to unearth a treasure chest with far more urgency than usual on that cue so we can snigger in private.
"Did she just say dicking?" asks everyone on the front five rows.
Yes, audience, yes she did. Now let's all move on.
Young kids don't always get theatrical convention. They answer questions for you, or shout helpful advice. "What should I do?" Titty asks at one point, trapped in a storm with the Amazons abroad on her island.
"Hide!" shouts one kid. "Steal their boat!" shouts another. She does both, which is lucky for those kids. I guess they understand the conventions of telly or story telling, though I also wonder if they think they've given her those ideas?
"We built the harbour, made the fireplace with our own blood, sweat and tears!" sing the Amazons.
"That's gross," opines a young lady in the third row.
Someone suggested I should stab the policeman with a spear when he comes to tell us off. Ha, kids today, eh?
-
I've never done a relaxed performance before. This isn't because I'm remarkably uptight as an actor, neurotic mess though I may be. This is a performance for audience members who don't respond well to the usual restrictions. So the house lights stay on, the audience can move about and talk as much as they want and our louder special effects are muted. It's for families who can't come to standard performances for whatever reason - very young babies, children with special needs like autism (which makes theatre additionally confusing and alarming), elderly bladder limitations, that kind of thing.
Really odd, from up on stage. Someone in the auditorium echoes most of our lines back to us. We can see people wandering around from time to time (just as in school shows, where teachers ferry kids in and out of the loo all through everything). There's a strange and rather ghoulish chorus of moans and howls that comes and goes. It's hugely distracting, so we all cling desperately to our stage relationships to focus through it.
But it's very gratifying, to know you're giving a show for people who don't get to see them otherwise. We go out to meet the audience (and reassure them that we're just normal people really, or at least as near to it as theatrical types get) afterwards.
One family tells us it's the first time they've got to go to a show all together, as their young son's condition means they wouldn't be allowed in otherwise. He calls us all by our character names and plays enthusiastically with the puppets.
There's a group of old folks from a home, who all look very dazed but pleased. When I say hello and ask if they enjoyed it, one of them asks me to help her put her coat on. Is that a no? Or does she think I'm a carer? No idea, she's pleased enough to see me either way.
-
We get letters from some of the children who've seen the show, politely formulaic ones where the teacher has told them to list their favourite bits and wildly enthusiastic ones where they've drawn elaborate scenes from the play in orange felt-tip.
None of the representations of Roger has a beard. I feel this is significant in some way.
-
The Theatre Christmas Party is at the local Skiddaw Hotel. I don't drink anything, but I still dance about like a big floppy twat once the disco starts up. Facebook, I hate you preemptively.
-
Corpsing happens.
I drop a clasp knife which is about to be referred to in the subsequent scene. It bounces once, falls through a hole in the set and is gone. We can do nothing except continue, all of us desperately trying to work out what we'll do to cover this.
Stage management hand me a replacement as I squat by the wings during the next song. It's a rather incongruous stainless steel butter knife from the Green Room. Definitely not the knife we just had or what the actors on the other side of the stage are expecting to have handed to them, but at least a knife, thank God. But because I know how poor a replacement it is, I start cracking up in advance of handing it over.
"Hand me that knife you found, ship's boy," John tells me.
Roger wants to keep the knife for himself, he's pretending to have forgotten all about it. So I say "Whaaa-haa-haaat kniii-hiiiife?" in return. It's an unusual choice, as line readings go, but I think I make it feel justified.
Not as bad as Nancy's fumbled line "Titty didn't hear much dicking", a few shows previously. Not digging, then? Well, okay, I guess that's new direction. We all break upstage to unearth a treasure chest with far more urgency than usual on that cue so we can snigger in private.
"Did she just say dicking?" asks everyone on the front five rows.
Yes, audience, yes she did. Now let's all move on.
Monday, December 9, 2013
Snippets
The viking combat game I did some voice work for patched the sound in over last weekend. Like a chump, I eagerly went to the forums to look at the response. Maybe, you know, pick up some compliments.
"I'm not being funny, but, right, is this a placeholder for an actual actor? The saxons sound like they're at a tea party. How do I turn them off?" asked Aeronwen (hopefully not his real name, but you never know on forums).
This clearly serves me right. Fishing for compliments should only ever net you the eels of unpalatable truth.
Just after the show opened, the four of us playing the Swallows reconvened to examine how we were managing to steer the boat round the stage. It operates on a Flintstone Engine and handles like a wonky shopping trolley. All of us have bruised our shins, knees and coccyges whilst sailing her.
After spending half an hour sliding round the stage, it turns out that the main problems are
a) Susan and
b) Me (Roger)
If the two of us stop trying to help, the Swallow can turn more freely, stay on course for longer and crush fewer of the appendages of those pushing her.
This is good news, obviously, I can take it a bit easier on stage. More time looking excited and enjoying sailing around, less time having to get out and shunt (which was hardly helping the illusion of gliding round the lake, in all honesty).
It reminded me of one of my less proud moments in the other kind of theatre I've had in my life.
"Can I do anything?" I asked a surgical consultant of gastroenterology during a routine procedure once. I was wondering if I could get a bit of practical experience like helping clear stray blood out of the surgeon's way or pulling on a retractor. That's the kind of low-end dog work lucky house officers might get to do by way of introduction to surgery.
"Yes. Fuck off out of my way and go and finish the discharge summaries for my clinic yesterday," he said. This is the kind of low-end dog work consultants consider to contain adequate training opportunities for house officers, one of many reasons why I'm now an actor rather than a top gastroenterology surgeon. I'm still getting in the way, though.
We have two preview nights for the show. After the second, we also have a party. As I'm standing in the theatre bar, waiting in line for the excellent free curry, fresh from a bout of cheery compliments from the theatre's artistic director glowing with vicarious triumph, I realise the tannoy is playing 'There's No Business Like Show Business'. This is a happy and warm moment.
Following press night, I find I have forgotten my forum-surfing lesson. I don't usually read reviews for plays while I'm still in them, it's just asking for more eel attacks. This time I do.
The reviews are up in the Green Room, and I overhear enough snippets from the others to know they're basically kindly. The snippets make me unbearably curious. After two days of stuffing my fingers in my ears and humming loudly, I cave in, grab the sheaf of reviews and dig in.
'James Hogg has a beard and big hairy legs,' critics agree.
Even though the point of the reviews mentioning my beard-and-legs style of acting is to point out that (remarkably) they didn't find it made me unpalatable as a seven-year-old boy, my feeble ego can't quite accept this as praise. So rather than being glad it's not 'dear god why doesn't he just fuck off and do some paperwork in a back room' as I once became accustomed to, neither is it the 'he's a towering genius of the modern stage' I'm inevitably hoping for.
Goddamn eels.
My knees hurt all the time. There is still no hot water at my digs. I tried to watch a film that contained a minute-long scene about a dad feeding ice cream to his son for the first time, and got so tearful I had to stop watching it. There is indeed no business like show business. Perhaps we should all be glad.
"I'm not being funny, but, right, is this a placeholder for an actual actor? The saxons sound like they're at a tea party. How do I turn them off?" asked Aeronwen (hopefully not his real name, but you never know on forums).
This clearly serves me right. Fishing for compliments should only ever net you the eels of unpalatable truth.
-
Just after the show opened, the four of us playing the Swallows reconvened to examine how we were managing to steer the boat round the stage. It operates on a Flintstone Engine and handles like a wonky shopping trolley. All of us have bruised our shins, knees and coccyges whilst sailing her.
After spending half an hour sliding round the stage, it turns out that the main problems are
a) Susan and
b) Me (Roger)
If the two of us stop trying to help, the Swallow can turn more freely, stay on course for longer and crush fewer of the appendages of those pushing her.
This is good news, obviously, I can take it a bit easier on stage. More time looking excited and enjoying sailing around, less time having to get out and shunt (which was hardly helping the illusion of gliding round the lake, in all honesty).
It reminded me of one of my less proud moments in the other kind of theatre I've had in my life.
"Can I do anything?" I asked a surgical consultant of gastroenterology during a routine procedure once. I was wondering if I could get a bit of practical experience like helping clear stray blood out of the surgeon's way or pulling on a retractor. That's the kind of low-end dog work lucky house officers might get to do by way of introduction to surgery.
"Yes. Fuck off out of my way and go and finish the discharge summaries for my clinic yesterday," he said. This is the kind of low-end dog work consultants consider to contain adequate training opportunities for house officers, one of many reasons why I'm now an actor rather than a top gastroenterology surgeon. I'm still getting in the way, though.
-
We have two preview nights for the show. After the second, we also have a party. As I'm standing in the theatre bar, waiting in line for the excellent free curry, fresh from a bout of cheery compliments from the theatre's artistic director glowing with vicarious triumph, I realise the tannoy is playing 'There's No Business Like Show Business'. This is a happy and warm moment.
-
The reviews are up in the Green Room, and I overhear enough snippets from the others to know they're basically kindly. The snippets make me unbearably curious. After two days of stuffing my fingers in my ears and humming loudly, I cave in, grab the sheaf of reviews and dig in.
'James Hogg has a beard and big hairy legs,' critics agree.
Even though the point of the reviews mentioning my beard-and-legs style of acting is to point out that (remarkably) they didn't find it made me unpalatable as a seven-year-old boy, my feeble ego can't quite accept this as praise. So rather than being glad it's not 'dear god why doesn't he just fuck off and do some paperwork in a back room' as I once became accustomed to, neither is it the 'he's a towering genius of the modern stage' I'm inevitably hoping for.
Goddamn eels.
-
My knees hurt all the time. There is still no hot water at my digs. I tried to watch a film that contained a minute-long scene about a dad feeding ice cream to his son for the first time, and got so tearful I had to stop watching it. There is indeed no business like show business. Perhaps we should all be glad.
-
Thursday, November 28, 2013
Back at the Ranch
My voice work in Sweden continues apace, despite being away. I have pickups to do from my last two jobs.
This is tricky. There is no sound studio at the theatre, although they lend me a good portable mic and cables. I wander round the mezzanine levels in my lunch hour, doing sound checks. The first pickups I have to do are of a wounded viking bandaging himself, which is why I can be found crouching in corners near the lifts, hunched over the mic and moaning softly.
Very well heated, the theatre. Lots of air conditioning. Plenty of odd whirrs and bonks from the pipes. Lots of strange clunking noises from the tech team building or dismantling sets. Occasional sounds of actors warming up, as of distant whalesong. The mic is excellent, it can pick all of this up no bother.
After several failed attempts, the swedish studios send me advice. I need to pad the walls in whatever room I'm recording in. Use a blanket or mattress, they suggest. Get a sound shield for the mic so your plosives are muffled. Improvise. We need this material, urgently.
Improv I can do. I gather extra supplies from the theatre and get to work.
The theatre is too loud, my new digs are quiet but very echoey (tall ceilings and plaster walls are a bad combo acoustically, it seems). The smallest room in the house is, well, it's the smallest room in the house, if you get me.
Which is why 2200 hrs most nights this last week have found me sealing myself into the toilet by jamming my duvet into the door cracks, then balancing the mic amongst the shelved books no English toilet should be without. If I jam a bunch of loo roll into the cistern to stop it dripping, then squat on the lav and read into the mic through a coat hanger with a pair of old nylons stretched over it, the sound quality is apparently 'quite good'. At least this is now a pharmaceutical manual, I'm not lurking in the water closet and screaming like a stuck saxon. Not for work, anyway.
Another day, another dollar.
Meanwhile, at home, F has learnt to crawl.
She doesn't quite pick her feet up, so as she goes forward, her babygro sort of stays put. And she runs out of steam quite fast, but where she used to immediately lie face down and scream for assistance, she now has a short rest, musters her energy and starts again. Two or three times, anyway, then she feels she's made the effort and someone ought to come and help her out. A trainer, maybe, do some stretching.
I get to skype fairly often, confusing conversations where I'm placed on the floor via iPad and then picked up and shaken cheerfully. Or replaced with Facebook, F has worked out how to do that somehow.
But it's not the same as being home, not even close. And I can't help but feel that she's more interested in the iPad than the daddy inside it, although she does coo and wave at me for the first couple of minutes of our chats.
V is coping amazingly, despite work/babysitting timetable clashes and woes. I've been so busy I haven't had much time to get maudlin, although the rest of the cast have kindly stopped asking me if I'm missing my family. Apparently I tend to smile wanly and then gaze into the middle distance with a mournful expression for the next ten minutes. It holds up rehearsals.
Thousands of people every day work away from their families. It can be done. It is not the end of the world. If it's not too thespy to hurl some Samuel Beckett around, I'm very much at the 'I must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on' stage of this trip. Krappy, in other words.
This is tricky. There is no sound studio at the theatre, although they lend me a good portable mic and cables. I wander round the mezzanine levels in my lunch hour, doing sound checks. The first pickups I have to do are of a wounded viking bandaging himself, which is why I can be found crouching in corners near the lifts, hunched over the mic and moaning softly.
Very well heated, the theatre. Lots of air conditioning. Plenty of odd whirrs and bonks from the pipes. Lots of strange clunking noises from the tech team building or dismantling sets. Occasional sounds of actors warming up, as of distant whalesong. The mic is excellent, it can pick all of this up no bother.
After several failed attempts, the swedish studios send me advice. I need to pad the walls in whatever room I'm recording in. Use a blanket or mattress, they suggest. Get a sound shield for the mic so your plosives are muffled. Improvise. We need this material, urgently.
Improv I can do. I gather extra supplies from the theatre and get to work.
The theatre is too loud, my new digs are quiet but very echoey (tall ceilings and plaster walls are a bad combo acoustically, it seems). The smallest room in the house is, well, it's the smallest room in the house, if you get me.
Which is why 2200 hrs most nights this last week have found me sealing myself into the toilet by jamming my duvet into the door cracks, then balancing the mic amongst the shelved books no English toilet should be without. If I jam a bunch of loo roll into the cistern to stop it dripping, then squat on the lav and read into the mic through a coat hanger with a pair of old nylons stretched over it, the sound quality is apparently 'quite good'. At least this is now a pharmaceutical manual, I'm not lurking in the water closet and screaming like a stuck saxon. Not for work, anyway.
Another day, another dollar.
-
Meanwhile, at home, F has learnt to crawl.
She doesn't quite pick her feet up, so as she goes forward, her babygro sort of stays put. And she runs out of steam quite fast, but where she used to immediately lie face down and scream for assistance, she now has a short rest, musters her energy and starts again. Two or three times, anyway, then she feels she's made the effort and someone ought to come and help her out. A trainer, maybe, do some stretching.
I get to skype fairly often, confusing conversations where I'm placed on the floor via iPad and then picked up and shaken cheerfully. Or replaced with Facebook, F has worked out how to do that somehow.
But it's not the same as being home, not even close. And I can't help but feel that she's more interested in the iPad than the daddy inside it, although she does coo and wave at me for the first couple of minutes of our chats.
V is coping amazingly, despite work/babysitting timetable clashes and woes. I've been so busy I haven't had much time to get maudlin, although the rest of the cast have kindly stopped asking me if I'm missing my family. Apparently I tend to smile wanly and then gaze into the middle distance with a mournful expression for the next ten minutes. It holds up rehearsals.
Thousands of people every day work away from their families. It can be done. It is not the end of the world. If it's not too thespy to hurl some Samuel Beckett around, I'm very much at the 'I must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on' stage of this trip. Krappy, in other words.
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Hi Diddle Di Dee
It's up to you, really, to decide which of the following moments from my last three weeks was the most glamorous.
Rehearsals started about ten minutes after I arrived in Keswick. Dad gave me and my sister a lift down to Keswick, we arrived at ten to ten and I declared myself present at the box office. Before I could even say goodbye to my sister, our stage manager appeared, pounced on me and whisked me off to the rehearsal room. I've never been attacked by a trapdoor spider, but extrapolating from this experience leads me to sympathize with the prey.
At least this was a friendly spider. Rather than the more traditional 'hang you up and drain your internal organs' treatment, I got tea and a welcome pack. The draining of actorly juices could happen at leisure over the next few weeks of work, there was no rush.
There's no heating in my digs. Well, okay, that's not fair, there is heating. It's just switched off. It's switched off at night. It's also switched off during the day, when everyone is out.
It is switched on for an hour or two in the morning and an hour or two in the evening, because that's when people are in. Not me, of course, I'm out from 0930 to 2130 right now. This enables me to skip all the heated hours and make the most of the cool, damp ones instead, like some form of large hairy slug.
Like most Keswick houses, this one's made of green slate. Green slate is a bugger to heat, apparently. So much of a bugger that it's clearly cheaper not to try. The current energy prices aren't helping, I expect. Bastard big six.
I get an electric blanket for my bed to make up for the fact I won't be at home when the radiator is on. It works. It works really well. The lowest setting makes me sweat like a pig. When I turn it off, the sweat all slowly freezes under the duvet. I'm an actor-flavoured sweatsicle by morning.
Rehearsals are fairly sweaty and intense, it's a movement-heavy show in which I play a wildly enthusiastic seven-year-old. 'Sweat' seems to be one of the themes for the show so far, in fact. There's nothing nicer than getting back after a long sweaty rehearsal and climbing into a deep, hot bath. I know this because I can't. There's no bath at my digs, which are also on the wrong side of town. The icy rain I trudge through for half an hour every night is the closest I get to one.
At least there's a shower. It's cleaner than the rain water, although not really any warmer.
Two weeks into rehearsals. My voice is feeling the strain of singing and shouting all day, I'm getting pretty hoarse. An old chum of mine is sending me helpful emails about the time she developed nodules on her vocal folds and needed an operation. I should eat plenty of salmon and almonds, apparently. And turmeric. That sounds quite nice. Nicer than an operation, certainly.
My landlady is very helpful and friendly. She may have yak genes, she seems immune to cold. She's also a little fussy - she stands next to me in the kitchen, talking at high speed about the hiking she'll be doing all day, and joins in with my cooking. By, for example, chucking half the water out of the pan I've just filled because you don't need that much to boil eggs, for goodness' sake, and oh! the autumn colours in Keswick, oh, the colours James.
Well appointed though the kitchen is, and she's stressed I'm welcome to use it (as long as you use the mats, I can't bear crumbs), I'm not here for long enough to cook. I'm on a diet of tuna mayo sandwiches and hard boiled eggs, easy on the water. I don't mind that at all, it's healthy and cheering. But after a week of it, I certainly wouldn't mind some almond and turmeric salmon to go.
I'm not sure I feel entirely at home here. I don't feel much at all, really, I'm too numb with cold. After hanging up my laundry and going out for the day, I come back to discover she's (helpfully) spread it out to dry on radiators all round the house, a shirt here, some socks there. Not the underwear. I never touch underwear, she later tells me. Never have, I've been saying it for years. They should make a play, call it 'I don't touch underwear'. You could be in it.
Well intentioned though she doubtless was, she's gone out as well, so the radiators have all turned themselves off. I ladle my cold, damp clothes into my suitcase and move to another flat.
My voice is getting pretty hoarse. Too long since I last worked this much, too long since I did any vocal warm-ups regularly. I'm drinking hot water with lemon, ginger and honey all day. It's not enough. Time to add garlic as well.
This kind of remedy is much discussed in the Green Room during tea breaks. Which throat sweets to avoid, what vitamin supplements are cheap in town this week, how thixotropic is your manuka honey, all that kind of thing. Okay, not the last one, I made that up. But we do talk about manuka honey a lot. Mostly about why on earth would you pay forty quid for a jar of it.
My new throat medicine tastes like 75% of a good chicken noodle soup. It just needs the meat and noodles. Everybody says so, because they can all smell it. Not just in the Green Room, which is redolent with the steam and spice of a handful of different Dr. Theatre Brews. Also in the rehearsal room, where garlic has quickly become the dominant note.
At least my voice gets some extra rest, if only because people veer away from me outside of the obligatory bits in rehearsal. No conversation is good conversation.
I'm ramping up the drama for all of this of course (hello, I'm an actor) - it's not quite this dreary or relentless. The company is excellent, the show is great fun to work on (if exhausting) and I do like Keswick, lonely and dreich though it can be. But I'm definitely feeling the distance.
Roll on January, I want to say, although it feels ungrateful to my current employers. Even if I love my job, and this is a good one, make no mistake, being away from home is taking a toll.
-
Rehearsals started about ten minutes after I arrived in Keswick. Dad gave me and my sister a lift down to Keswick, we arrived at ten to ten and I declared myself present at the box office. Before I could even say goodbye to my sister, our stage manager appeared, pounced on me and whisked me off to the rehearsal room. I've never been attacked by a trapdoor spider, but extrapolating from this experience leads me to sympathize with the prey.
At least this was a friendly spider. Rather than the more traditional 'hang you up and drain your internal organs' treatment, I got tea and a welcome pack. The draining of actorly juices could happen at leisure over the next few weeks of work, there was no rush.
-
There's no heating in my digs. Well, okay, that's not fair, there is heating. It's just switched off. It's switched off at night. It's also switched off during the day, when everyone is out.
It is switched on for an hour or two in the morning and an hour or two in the evening, because that's when people are in. Not me, of course, I'm out from 0930 to 2130 right now. This enables me to skip all the heated hours and make the most of the cool, damp ones instead, like some form of large hairy slug.
Like most Keswick houses, this one's made of green slate. Green slate is a bugger to heat, apparently. So much of a bugger that it's clearly cheaper not to try. The current energy prices aren't helping, I expect. Bastard big six.
I get an electric blanket for my bed to make up for the fact I won't be at home when the radiator is on. It works. It works really well. The lowest setting makes me sweat like a pig. When I turn it off, the sweat all slowly freezes under the duvet. I'm an actor-flavoured sweatsicle by morning.
Rehearsals are fairly sweaty and intense, it's a movement-heavy show in which I play a wildly enthusiastic seven-year-old. 'Sweat' seems to be one of the themes for the show so far, in fact. There's nothing nicer than getting back after a long sweaty rehearsal and climbing into a deep, hot bath. I know this because I can't. There's no bath at my digs, which are also on the wrong side of town. The icy rain I trudge through for half an hour every night is the closest I get to one.
At least there's a shower. It's cleaner than the rain water, although not really any warmer.
-
Two weeks into rehearsals. My voice is feeling the strain of singing and shouting all day, I'm getting pretty hoarse. An old chum of mine is sending me helpful emails about the time she developed nodules on her vocal folds and needed an operation. I should eat plenty of salmon and almonds, apparently. And turmeric. That sounds quite nice. Nicer than an operation, certainly.
My landlady is very helpful and friendly. She may have yak genes, she seems immune to cold. She's also a little fussy - she stands next to me in the kitchen, talking at high speed about the hiking she'll be doing all day, and joins in with my cooking. By, for example, chucking half the water out of the pan I've just filled because you don't need that much to boil eggs, for goodness' sake, and oh! the autumn colours in Keswick, oh, the colours James.
Well appointed though the kitchen is, and she's stressed I'm welcome to use it (as long as you use the mats, I can't bear crumbs), I'm not here for long enough to cook. I'm on a diet of tuna mayo sandwiches and hard boiled eggs, easy on the water. I don't mind that at all, it's healthy and cheering. But after a week of it, I certainly wouldn't mind some almond and turmeric salmon to go.
I'm not sure I feel entirely at home here. I don't feel much at all, really, I'm too numb with cold. After hanging up my laundry and going out for the day, I come back to discover she's (helpfully) spread it out to dry on radiators all round the house, a shirt here, some socks there. Not the underwear. I never touch underwear, she later tells me. Never have, I've been saying it for years. They should make a play, call it 'I don't touch underwear'. You could be in it.
Well intentioned though she doubtless was, she's gone out as well, so the radiators have all turned themselves off. I ladle my cold, damp clothes into my suitcase and move to another flat.
-
My voice is getting pretty hoarse. Too long since I last worked this much, too long since I did any vocal warm-ups regularly. I'm drinking hot water with lemon, ginger and honey all day. It's not enough. Time to add garlic as well.
This kind of remedy is much discussed in the Green Room during tea breaks. Which throat sweets to avoid, what vitamin supplements are cheap in town this week, how thixotropic is your manuka honey, all that kind of thing. Okay, not the last one, I made that up. But we do talk about manuka honey a lot. Mostly about why on earth would you pay forty quid for a jar of it.
My new throat medicine tastes like 75% of a good chicken noodle soup. It just needs the meat and noodles. Everybody says so, because they can all smell it. Not just in the Green Room, which is redolent with the steam and spice of a handful of different Dr. Theatre Brews. Also in the rehearsal room, where garlic has quickly become the dominant note.
At least my voice gets some extra rest, if only because people veer away from me outside of the obligatory bits in rehearsal. No conversation is good conversation.
-
I'm ramping up the drama for all of this of course (hello, I'm an actor) - it's not quite this dreary or relentless. The company is excellent, the show is great fun to work on (if exhausting) and I do like Keswick, lonely and dreich though it can be. But I'm definitely feeling the distance.
Roll on January, I want to say, although it feels ungrateful to my current employers. Even if I love my job, and this is a good one, make no mistake, being away from home is taking a toll.
Saturday, November 9, 2013
Author's Note
I'm away at the moment, living over in the UK while I work at Theatre By The Lake in Keswick. We're doing Swallows and Amazons for Christmas, a musical version with songs by Neil Hannon (of the Divine Comedy) - please come and see it if you're in the vicinity!
That means a short hiatus for this blog, while I try and learn all the lines/songs/glockenspiel parts I need. Not a total hiatus, or I wouldn't be posting this. Being away from home and F for the first time is a new and strange experience, one which I'll try and write about in due course. For now, though, a short pause will ensue.
In the meantime, thanks very much for reading! The webpage I've set this up on informs me there are around seventy or so of you reading, which is very cheering. Although I may need to discount the twenty or so regular hits I seem to get from Russia. I don't think I know that many Russians, although I'm quite prepared to be a sleeper hit in Siberia if it comes to it. Still, hits from a botnet are still hits, count your chickens while ye may.
In the self-interests of self-promotion, please do let me know if you're enjoying this through whatever social media methods you prefer to employ. Like on Facebook, retweet on Twitter, run naked through the town shouting my name - it's all good. I'll be awfully grateful.
That means a short hiatus for this blog, while I try and learn all the lines/songs/glockenspiel parts I need. Not a total hiatus, or I wouldn't be posting this. Being away from home and F for the first time is a new and strange experience, one which I'll try and write about in due course. For now, though, a short pause will ensue.
In the meantime, thanks very much for reading! The webpage I've set this up on informs me there are around seventy or so of you reading, which is very cheering. Although I may need to discount the twenty or so regular hits I seem to get from Russia. I don't think I know that many Russians, although I'm quite prepared to be a sleeper hit in Siberia if it comes to it. Still, hits from a botnet are still hits, count your chickens while ye may.
In the self-interests of self-promotion, please do let me know if you're enjoying this through whatever social media methods you prefer to employ. Like on Facebook, retweet on Twitter, run naked through the town shouting my name - it's all good. I'll be awfully grateful.
Friday, November 1, 2013
Moving - 3/3
0815, Monday morning.
Moving day. We didn't set alarms, relying foolishly on F's regular wake ups to get us up on time. But the clocks went back yesterday, and no amount of explaining this prevented her getting up dead on her previous schedule.
So we've been up since four. A quick feed, a quick play, then we all lie on the mattress in the bedroom together and try and get what sleep we can. The bed has been taken apart, ready to be removed. F thinks this is interesting, so she doesn't want to sleep much.
She wants to kick me in the face affectionately for two hours instead. At one point, she grabs my beard with both hands and yanks herself over to me so she can give me a big kiss. In my heart of hearts, I know how sweet this is. Sweet, sweet pain.
When V realises it's past eight, and that the removal men might already be coming up the stairs, and that we're all lying around in various states of undress with packing still undone, things start moving fairly quickly.
She goes into overdrive, packing with a kind of focussed, furious speed that reminds me of early Jackie Chan movies. I've just finished shovelling porridge into F when the removal guys arrive. Three of them, two tall gangly guys and a shorter, stouter, older one who's already wheezing coming up two floors, even though they took the lift. It's like the two-and-a-half stooges.
- You've got a lot of stuff for a small flat, the tallest and most gangly one says. It's the tone of voice mechanics use for the parts of the engine that need to be ordered from abroad.
The original plan was to let them into the house, then retire to a decent cafe and eat a langorous breakfast. Instead, I'm bouncing F (who seems delighted that someone is taking all the pesky boxes out of her house at last) around while V blurs from room to room, stuffing boxes and swearing at intense velocity.
Breakfast is cancelled for now. Swiftly, I am dismissed from the flat. This is a sensible thing, because F needs to be out of the way and someone has to go with her. But because I'm exhausted and hungry, I take offense, and stomp round the city centre in a huff, muttering nonsense into my beard about being sidelined. Any wise man would be delighted to get out of the final, awful stress of packing. I am no such thing.
Appropriately, it's pouring with heavy, dismal rain. Eventually, I calm down and head over to the new flat, where I am supposed to await developments. Here, I find there is no functioning bathroom, as the firm we rent from are renovating it in a hurry. According to the offical terms, we aren't supposed to move in for another five days, but we've got an early deal because otherwise I'd have to go and work in the UK about five minutes after the furniture arrives.
As I sit on the cold and barren floor, F immediately fills her nappy with something indescribable, and laughs merrily into my face as I deal with it.
Many, many hours later (well, okay, about four. But it feels like a lot longer, mostly because we end up doing lots of plodding around in the rain while the removal guys finish up), we're in.
And despite my temper tantrums, it's been relatively painless. There are some new holes in the back of the liquor cabinet we weren't quite expecting, but, as the saying goes, you can't make an omlette without punching holes in your Billy Bookshelf. V and I are friends again, i.e. bickering cheerfully.
Most importantly, F is entirely delighted with her new house.
It's got windows! With views of trees! And big silver handles you can hold on to while Daddy keeps you steady on the window ledge! And long hallways that you can really use to get some proper momentum in your baby stroller! And all the boxes are here now too!
Of all of us, F has used the stress of moving most productively. She's started talking, saying 'titta!' to get our attention where it's needed (Swedish for 'look!' as opposed to 'breasts!', although the two can therefore occasionally be used synonymously). She has started standing up by herself, although this is still a short-lived state of affairs that requires attentive ground crew close at hand.
But most triumphantly of all, she has started feeding herself with a spoon. The correct end of it, and everything.
We have moved to a bigger house. The future has attractive views of an artillery fort, and is all the brighter for it.
Moving day. We didn't set alarms, relying foolishly on F's regular wake ups to get us up on time. But the clocks went back yesterday, and no amount of explaining this prevented her getting up dead on her previous schedule.
So we've been up since four. A quick feed, a quick play, then we all lie on the mattress in the bedroom together and try and get what sleep we can. The bed has been taken apart, ready to be removed. F thinks this is interesting, so she doesn't want to sleep much.
She wants to kick me in the face affectionately for two hours instead. At one point, she grabs my beard with both hands and yanks herself over to me so she can give me a big kiss. In my heart of hearts, I know how sweet this is. Sweet, sweet pain.
When V realises it's past eight, and that the removal men might already be coming up the stairs, and that we're all lying around in various states of undress with packing still undone, things start moving fairly quickly.
She goes into overdrive, packing with a kind of focussed, furious speed that reminds me of early Jackie Chan movies. I've just finished shovelling porridge into F when the removal guys arrive. Three of them, two tall gangly guys and a shorter, stouter, older one who's already wheezing coming up two floors, even though they took the lift. It's like the two-and-a-half stooges.
- You've got a lot of stuff for a small flat, the tallest and most gangly one says. It's the tone of voice mechanics use for the parts of the engine that need to be ordered from abroad.
The original plan was to let them into the house, then retire to a decent cafe and eat a langorous breakfast. Instead, I'm bouncing F (who seems delighted that someone is taking all the pesky boxes out of her house at last) around while V blurs from room to room, stuffing boxes and swearing at intense velocity.
Breakfast is cancelled for now. Swiftly, I am dismissed from the flat. This is a sensible thing, because F needs to be out of the way and someone has to go with her. But because I'm exhausted and hungry, I take offense, and stomp round the city centre in a huff, muttering nonsense into my beard about being sidelined. Any wise man would be delighted to get out of the final, awful stress of packing. I am no such thing.
Appropriately, it's pouring with heavy, dismal rain. Eventually, I calm down and head over to the new flat, where I am supposed to await developments. Here, I find there is no functioning bathroom, as the firm we rent from are renovating it in a hurry. According to the offical terms, we aren't supposed to move in for another five days, but we've got an early deal because otherwise I'd have to go and work in the UK about five minutes after the furniture arrives.
As I sit on the cold and barren floor, F immediately fills her nappy with something indescribable, and laughs merrily into my face as I deal with it.
Many, many hours later (well, okay, about four. But it feels like a lot longer, mostly because we end up doing lots of plodding around in the rain while the removal guys finish up), we're in.
And despite my temper tantrums, it's been relatively painless. There are some new holes in the back of the liquor cabinet we weren't quite expecting, but, as the saying goes, you can't make an omlette without punching holes in your Billy Bookshelf. V and I are friends again, i.e. bickering cheerfully.
Most importantly, F is entirely delighted with her new house.
It's got windows! With views of trees! And big silver handles you can hold on to while Daddy keeps you steady on the window ledge! And long hallways that you can really use to get some proper momentum in your baby stroller! And all the boxes are here now too!
Of all of us, F has used the stress of moving most productively. She's started talking, saying 'titta!' to get our attention where it's needed (Swedish for 'look!' as opposed to 'breasts!', although the two can therefore occasionally be used synonymously). She has started standing up by herself, although this is still a short-lived state of affairs that requires attentive ground crew close at hand.
But most triumphantly of all, she has started feeding herself with a spoon. The correct end of it, and everything.
We have moved to a bigger house. The future has attractive views of an artillery fort, and is all the brighter for it.
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Moving - 2/3
Sunday.
We need to get to a certain state of packedness before Aunty M and family turn up in the morning to help shift all the boxes of unused junk in the cellar over to the new place, and we're not far off.
Last time we moved, it was country to country. Everything went from our fifth floor ex-council flat into a van, then on to a boat, then over the North Sea, then into an already furnished and fairly full single bedroomed place. I remember boxes, mostly. There were a lot of boxes. Lots of boxes and lots of nowhere to put them.
We somehow managed to stuff them all into the underground storage cage that comes free with your Swedish flat. If you took everyone's abandoned summer furniture and old college photos out of it, it would have the same warmth and charm as a battery farm for attack dogs. Heavy double bunker doors reinforce that 'Top Men' secret warehouse feel. It also has a lighting system on a timer that always cuts out just as you finally found what you were trying to dig out.
A joy to work with, basically. I started rolling my mental sleeves for the torture of dealing with this weeks ago.
F is happily playing with cousins A and L upstairs, and V and her sister are helping them. Uncles K, J and I get stuck into the boxes. (That last one is me, not a new Uncle I you've never seen before. Just to clarify.)
And it's fine. All perfectly fine. Three short car trips later, everything is stashed temporarily in what will be F's new room. Nothing broke, nothing fell on anyone. The lighting didn't even manage an inconvenient blackout. Great! Also: Unusual!
In what feels like no time, we're all eating celebratory pizza in the old flat. F tries very hard to join in. She's been getting on very well with her older cousin A, who has specified he is to be called Big Brother A now that he's got a little sister. But F has intimidated him into a certain level of caution after he's tried to take toys off her to show them how they work. I've been taught the same lesson, I know how he feels. She'll learn in her own time, thanks, and god help your eardrums if you try and get ahead of that schedule.
The removal men are coming around 0800 tomorrow. Despite this good day of work, we're still not ready. For the rest of the day, V and I work in exhausted shifts, one playing with F, one frantically stuffing alternate handfuls of old underwear and crockery into moving boxes.
By 2200, we're worn out, lying on the sofa and not packing anything any more. Our usual affectionate bickering is increasingly snappy. We both badly need sleep.
We're still not ready.
We need to get to a certain state of packedness before Aunty M and family turn up in the morning to help shift all the boxes of unused junk in the cellar over to the new place, and we're not far off.
Last time we moved, it was country to country. Everything went from our fifth floor ex-council flat into a van, then on to a boat, then over the North Sea, then into an already furnished and fairly full single bedroomed place. I remember boxes, mostly. There were a lot of boxes. Lots of boxes and lots of nowhere to put them.
We somehow managed to stuff them all into the underground storage cage that comes free with your Swedish flat. If you took everyone's abandoned summer furniture and old college photos out of it, it would have the same warmth and charm as a battery farm for attack dogs. Heavy double bunker doors reinforce that 'Top Men' secret warehouse feel. It also has a lighting system on a timer that always cuts out just as you finally found what you were trying to dig out.
A joy to work with, basically. I started rolling my mental sleeves for the torture of dealing with this weeks ago.
F is happily playing with cousins A and L upstairs, and V and her sister are helping them. Uncles K, J and I get stuck into the boxes. (That last one is me, not a new Uncle I you've never seen before. Just to clarify.)
And it's fine. All perfectly fine. Three short car trips later, everything is stashed temporarily in what will be F's new room. Nothing broke, nothing fell on anyone. The lighting didn't even manage an inconvenient blackout. Great! Also: Unusual!
In what feels like no time, we're all eating celebratory pizza in the old flat. F tries very hard to join in. She's been getting on very well with her older cousin A, who has specified he is to be called Big Brother A now that he's got a little sister. But F has intimidated him into a certain level of caution after he's tried to take toys off her to show them how they work. I've been taught the same lesson, I know how he feels. She'll learn in her own time, thanks, and god help your eardrums if you try and get ahead of that schedule.
The removal men are coming around 0800 tomorrow. Despite this good day of work, we're still not ready. For the rest of the day, V and I work in exhausted shifts, one playing with F, one frantically stuffing alternate handfuls of old underwear and crockery into moving boxes.
By 2200, we're worn out, lying on the sofa and not packing anything any more. Our usual affectionate bickering is increasingly snappy. We both badly need sleep.
We're still not ready.
Wednesday, October 30, 2013
Moving - 1/3
Autumn!
With punctual Swedish efficiency, the leaves drop from the trees in a pack, like jaundiced commuters. The sun gives a final, satisfied nod at a summer well done, then heads behind the rocky hills, leaving iron grey skies and a chilly promise of rain behind.
Properly demarcated seasons over here. None of that Indian Summer nonsense that the UK favours, where October might or might not be warm, try and guess whether to unpack your sweaters.
It's Friday lunchtime. We're off to Haga to pick up the keys for the new place.
This is F's second time in the flat. She saw it with us when we first looked round, although she was pretty sleepy then. She's a bit on edge, this week. All the boxes and fuss are getting to her a bit. Not much, to be fair, she's a very calm person. A little more clingy than usual, and her sleep patterns are a little off.
Doing better than V or me, though. Two days left and there's nothing at home but unpacked clothes and frustrated discussions about where things will go. Only one of us at a time can pack, the other tends F.
Her first reaction to the new place is to squeal with glee and do an excited assisted toddle down the hall and into the big, empty living room. The squeal echoes, which is a new and funny thing that needs to be investigated. Not before the second reaction, though, which is to squat, grunt and produce a massive great poop.
Other, more experience, parents frequently told me in the first few months that when she gets on to solid food, her nappies will get way more unpleasant. In my naivety, I thought I knew what to expect. Basically adult shit, right? In all its variegated wonders. In no way classifiable as anything other than rank, but generally nothing spectacular.
Oh, how wrong. How wrong and foolish! No, this is a spectrum of stomach turning reeks I never could have predicated. Queasy turned-vanilla stinks. Fish-like aromas, in the most Lovecraftian sense of fish-like. Spoiled meat seems a quaint nosegay in comparison. This is spoilage on a Veruca Saltine scale. Gag. Bleh.
I suppose that having your nappy changed in your new, if featureless, room is a good first impression, really. A nice normal start, if a little more humming than humdrum.
Now we just need to put all the furniture in without going mad with stress, and everything will be hunkydory.
With punctual Swedish efficiency, the leaves drop from the trees in a pack, like jaundiced commuters. The sun gives a final, satisfied nod at a summer well done, then heads behind the rocky hills, leaving iron grey skies and a chilly promise of rain behind.
Properly demarcated seasons over here. None of that Indian Summer nonsense that the UK favours, where October might or might not be warm, try and guess whether to unpack your sweaters.
It's Friday lunchtime. We're off to Haga to pick up the keys for the new place.
This is F's second time in the flat. She saw it with us when we first looked round, although she was pretty sleepy then. She's a bit on edge, this week. All the boxes and fuss are getting to her a bit. Not much, to be fair, she's a very calm person. A little more clingy than usual, and her sleep patterns are a little off.
Doing better than V or me, though. Two days left and there's nothing at home but unpacked clothes and frustrated discussions about where things will go. Only one of us at a time can pack, the other tends F.
Her first reaction to the new place is to squeal with glee and do an excited assisted toddle down the hall and into the big, empty living room. The squeal echoes, which is a new and funny thing that needs to be investigated. Not before the second reaction, though, which is to squat, grunt and produce a massive great poop.
Other, more experience, parents frequently told me in the first few months that when she gets on to solid food, her nappies will get way more unpleasant. In my naivety, I thought I knew what to expect. Basically adult shit, right? In all its variegated wonders. In no way classifiable as anything other than rank, but generally nothing spectacular.
Oh, how wrong. How wrong and foolish! No, this is a spectrum of stomach turning reeks I never could have predicated. Queasy turned-vanilla stinks. Fish-like aromas, in the most Lovecraftian sense of fish-like. Spoiled meat seems a quaint nosegay in comparison. This is spoilage on a Veruca Saltine scale. Gag. Bleh.
I suppose that having your nappy changed in your new, if featureless, room is a good first impression, really. A nice normal start, if a little more humming than humdrum.
Now we just need to put all the furniture in without going mad with stress, and everything will be hunkydory.
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Talking Dog
Someone asked me directions in the street again the other day. I get this fairly often. I either look helpful or locally streetwise, some combination of the two perhaps. Deceptive, whichever, I'm usually neither over here.
Swedish streets are numbered with odds down one side, evens on the other, as is standard practice in the UK also. This seems to confuse people quite a lot. Several times in Göteborg I've been asked where (e.g.) number 6 is by a puzzled wanderer staring up at numbers 5 and 7 with their messily ended wits in full view. This occasion was one such.
- Where's number 8, she asked.
- I'm not sure, but I think it's down there, I said, pointing to the relevant end of the (clearly labelled, you muppet) street.
She gave me a funny look, hopefully not because she'd smelt the deadpan sarcasm.
- You're not Swedish, she said.
- No, I'm English, I said, displaying the tremendous wit and sharp turn of phrase for which I am doubtless fabled.
- But you're speaking Swedish, she said, with another funny look.
- Yes, a bit, I said. She gave me a final funny look and left.
This, in my experience, is the only thing we're famous for abroad, we English. Not inventing cricket, not that we used to have an Empire, nor that we're hilariously sarcastic, two-faced, sanctimonious workaholics obsessed with politeness and tea, true and observed though all these things are. No, the stand-alone achievement of the English is that we can't speak other languages and have to be helped along, like lost children, if we're going to accomplish anything.
Judging by the funny looks the lost woman was giving me, my talking Swedish made her feel like she'd stumbled into Narnia. Maybe she found number 8, maybe she just went home to have a long lie-down, I'll never know.
Swedish streets are numbered with odds down one side, evens on the other, as is standard practice in the UK also. This seems to confuse people quite a lot. Several times in Göteborg I've been asked where (e.g.) number 6 is by a puzzled wanderer staring up at numbers 5 and 7 with their messily ended wits in full view. This occasion was one such.
- Where's number 8, she asked.
- I'm not sure, but I think it's down there, I said, pointing to the relevant end of the (clearly labelled, you muppet) street.
She gave me a funny look, hopefully not because she'd smelt the deadpan sarcasm.
- You're not Swedish, she said.
- No, I'm English, I said, displaying the tremendous wit and sharp turn of phrase for which I am doubtless fabled.
- But you're speaking Swedish, she said, with another funny look.
- Yes, a bit, I said. She gave me a final funny look and left.
This, in my experience, is the only thing we're famous for abroad, we English. Not inventing cricket, not that we used to have an Empire, nor that we're hilariously sarcastic, two-faced, sanctimonious workaholics obsessed with politeness and tea, true and observed though all these things are. No, the stand-alone achievement of the English is that we can't speak other languages and have to be helped along, like lost children, if we're going to accomplish anything.
Judging by the funny looks the lost woman was giving me, my talking Swedish made her feel like she'd stumbled into Narnia. Maybe she found number 8, maybe she just went home to have a long lie-down, I'll never know.
Monday, October 28, 2013
Bump
I'd been expecting it for a while, but F's first actual banged head was still a fairly traumatic experience.
For both of us, obviously. And her more than me - she didn't see it coming. She's getting better and better at walking now, although she needs support. This is either from me holding her hands or from whatever furniture is nearby, she's not that fussy.
I know she'd rather walk away from me towards an open room or other interesting vista than walk towards me, she makes that very clear. Not that she doesn't like me, but my face has been well visited by her exploring hands. Whereas other, lesser-used parts of the flat like the kitchen or bathroom still hold mysteries.
Anyway, a few days back she was pottering round the bedroom, using the side bars of her crib as a vertical ladder to progress. I hovered nearby behind her, ready to catch her when she overbalanced. She did, obviously, tripping on her own feet. And then that turned into a game, where I'd count to three and go 'wheee!' and she'd let go and fall into my lap.
When she tried playing that game without me, we got to the bumped head part.
In classic parenting style, I'd barely looked away for a minute. I was moving the laptop out of her loving clutches. It took three seconds, no more, I swear.
I looked back in time to see her topple backwards, lumbered-tree style, full-length on to the floor. It's a terrible noise, the hollow knock of skull on parquet. I think now, several weeks later, I can still feel it echoing round my spine and chest.
Lots of howling and tears, obviously, as well as a terrible wounded look which to my mortified mind read as 'I thought you'd be there to catch me'. But lots of hugs later, completely forgotten, and back to staggering round the coffee table perfectly happy.
Concussive amnesia is my diagnosis. It clearly works wonders.
For both of us, obviously. And her more than me - she didn't see it coming. She's getting better and better at walking now, although she needs support. This is either from me holding her hands or from whatever furniture is nearby, she's not that fussy.
I know she'd rather walk away from me towards an open room or other interesting vista than walk towards me, she makes that very clear. Not that she doesn't like me, but my face has been well visited by her exploring hands. Whereas other, lesser-used parts of the flat like the kitchen or bathroom still hold mysteries.
Anyway, a few days back she was pottering round the bedroom, using the side bars of her crib as a vertical ladder to progress. I hovered nearby behind her, ready to catch her when she overbalanced. She did, obviously, tripping on her own feet. And then that turned into a game, where I'd count to three and go 'wheee!' and she'd let go and fall into my lap.
When she tried playing that game without me, we got to the bumped head part.
In classic parenting style, I'd barely looked away for a minute. I was moving the laptop out of her loving clutches. It took three seconds, no more, I swear.
I looked back in time to see her topple backwards, lumbered-tree style, full-length on to the floor. It's a terrible noise, the hollow knock of skull on parquet. I think now, several weeks later, I can still feel it echoing round my spine and chest.
Lots of howling and tears, obviously, as well as a terrible wounded look which to my mortified mind read as 'I thought you'd be there to catch me'. But lots of hugs later, completely forgotten, and back to staggering round the coffee table perfectly happy.
Concussive amnesia is my diagnosis. It clearly works wonders.
Saturday, October 19, 2013
Safety Begins At Home
Ah, the toddling age.
We're on the brink, now. F toddles round the flat, bourne aloft on the trembling wings of a giggling Pappa. More and more she shakes me off, rather preemptorily. Then she falls over.
It's not nice to say 'I told you so' to a 9-month-old baby. By which I mean it's not a very kind thing to do, being able to say 'I told you so' to anyone is always kind of fun. Gather your little pleasures in life where you will, say I.
As we're about to move house, everything is sort of half-boxed at the moment. V was firmly restating our avowed intent to make sure the new place is properly childproofed. For the sake of making this a better story, I shall claim that as we were having this conversation, we were interrupted by a cry of childish glee (I think it actually happened during an attempt to clean the breakfast things up or something far less apt). Looking round, we saw F had discovered how to open the kitchen drawers, and was wielding something bright and bladed as though about to grant herself sight beyond sight.
This is a most unfair tendency of babies. Well, our baby, I shouldn't generalise. She learns stuff on the side and then suddenly presents you with a fait accompli. Trying to stay a step ahead of her is like playing a game of chess with someone who's very abruptly decided you're actually having a kung-fu match and counters your rusty Sicilian Defence with a well-swung guan dao.
The bladed implement turned out to be something fairly blunt and innocuous, honed to a razor edge merely by our imaginations. The kitchen drawers clearly needed something slotted through them to keep them closed. I was thinking broom handle, but V got a glint in her eye and went rummaging round in one our cupboards.
It is indicative of the kind of household we run that our child-proof lock is a medieval broadsword. In its scabbard, of course, we're not monsters.
Breaking Spoon Developments - F can now use a smurf as a spoon. Not an actual spoon, of course, just smurfs. Slow progress is still progress.
We're on the brink, now. F toddles round the flat, bourne aloft on the trembling wings of a giggling Pappa. More and more she shakes me off, rather preemptorily. Then she falls over.
It's not nice to say 'I told you so' to a 9-month-old baby. By which I mean it's not a very kind thing to do, being able to say 'I told you so' to anyone is always kind of fun. Gather your little pleasures in life where you will, say I.
As we're about to move house, everything is sort of half-boxed at the moment. V was firmly restating our avowed intent to make sure the new place is properly childproofed. For the sake of making this a better story, I shall claim that as we were having this conversation, we were interrupted by a cry of childish glee (I think it actually happened during an attempt to clean the breakfast things up or something far less apt). Looking round, we saw F had discovered how to open the kitchen drawers, and was wielding something bright and bladed as though about to grant herself sight beyond sight.
This is a most unfair tendency of babies. Well, our baby, I shouldn't generalise. She learns stuff on the side and then suddenly presents you with a fait accompli. Trying to stay a step ahead of her is like playing a game of chess with someone who's very abruptly decided you're actually having a kung-fu match and counters your rusty Sicilian Defence with a well-swung guan dao.
The bladed implement turned out to be something fairly blunt and innocuous, honed to a razor edge merely by our imaginations. The kitchen drawers clearly needed something slotted through them to keep them closed. I was thinking broom handle, but V got a glint in her eye and went rummaging round in one our cupboards.
It is indicative of the kind of household we run that our child-proof lock is a medieval broadsword. In its scabbard, of course, we're not monsters.
Breaking Spoon Developments - F can now use a smurf as a spoon. Not an actual spoon, of course, just smurfs. Slow progress is still progress.
Thursday, October 17, 2013
Vi Simmar
First big family outing in a while, this. Mormor, Uncle D, cousins A and V and the three of us all went to the local pool.
One of the things I like most about Sweden is their Viking history. It filters down into society on a national level in the cheery, quiet way Swedes do so well. Our local pool is called Valhalla. For a myth/legend/fantasy roleplaying nerd like me, being able to say 'I went swimming in Valhalla last weekend' is completely awesome.
Like the bus route that travels to nearby Bifrost (one of Göteborg's suburbs), however, the reality is less of a heavy metal album cover than I dreamed. True, the woman at the front desk did recognise Freja. Only because her pram has a customised nameplate, though, not because she recognised a returning goddess. Nor is it pulled by cats, however cool V and I may be. As valkyries went, she was kind of... I don't know, Librarian-y? Tortoiseshell glasses, jumper and nametag. No chainmail anywhere. I suppose it wouldn't help much in a swimming pool, but still disappointing.
F loved swimming. She loved the warm shower beforehand. She loved the noise and shrieking. She loved hanging out with her cousins and kept trying to run after them in the paddling pool. She loved being carried about by comparatively naked parents. I kept hearing the ghosts of the midwives muttering 'skin to skin' in the background.
The heated pool wasn't open, we were just swimming at room temperature, but F stayed happily enthralled for about an hour and a half before getting tired. Even then, I couldn't in all honesty say if she got tired and shouty because she was cold or because she'd tried to bite through a metal sprinkler casing and failed. Cousin A lasted the longest of us all, sternly denying he was cold as he watched older kids jump off the high diving board and shivered madly.
I hadn't enjoyed swimming so much in years. Public baths get reallly dull when you're older. Endless lengths, either stuck behind some doddering pensioner doing a functional breaststroke or being mown down by sneering professionals crawling like an outboard motor. Getting out with grey, chlorine-bleached skin that makes you look like an elderly prune. Where's the joy in that? Running around in the shallow end with your little nephew on a foam surfboard, pretending he's a motorboat driver - that is exercise I can get behind.
We went to McDonalds afterwards, which slightly spoiled all the health I guess. Worth it for the looks as I spoonfed F her spaghetti and sauce from a milkshake cup, though. The guys behind the till wouldn't risk untrademarked tupperware in their microwave, against the manufacturer's recommendations or something. There were whole tables of parents staring at me with concentrated hatred in their eyes. A little hypocritical seeing as their own (older) sprogs were knee-deep in nuggets, of course, but there you go.
F loved the restaurant, of course, more noise and lights and things to stare at. Part of her contentment turned out to be that she'd swiped a rattle from the kids' pool by way of a momento, the crafty devil, and was rattling it gladly under cover of her sheepskin. Plus watching mamma and pappa eating food with their fingers was a novelty to her, she liked that.
A really good day out, all in all. I'm looking forward to going again, after suddenly remembering how much fun swimming used to be as a kid. Takes kids to remind you of that, I guess.
Breaking Spoon Eating Developments - There have been no new spoon eating developments.
One of the things I like most about Sweden is their Viking history. It filters down into society on a national level in the cheery, quiet way Swedes do so well. Our local pool is called Valhalla. For a myth/legend/fantasy roleplaying nerd like me, being able to say 'I went swimming in Valhalla last weekend' is completely awesome.
Like the bus route that travels to nearby Bifrost (one of Göteborg's suburbs), however, the reality is less of a heavy metal album cover than I dreamed. True, the woman at the front desk did recognise Freja. Only because her pram has a customised nameplate, though, not because she recognised a returning goddess. Nor is it pulled by cats, however cool V and I may be. As valkyries went, she was kind of... I don't know, Librarian-y? Tortoiseshell glasses, jumper and nametag. No chainmail anywhere. I suppose it wouldn't help much in a swimming pool, but still disappointing.
F loved swimming. She loved the warm shower beforehand. She loved the noise and shrieking. She loved hanging out with her cousins and kept trying to run after them in the paddling pool. She loved being carried about by comparatively naked parents. I kept hearing the ghosts of the midwives muttering 'skin to skin' in the background.
The heated pool wasn't open, we were just swimming at room temperature, but F stayed happily enthralled for about an hour and a half before getting tired. Even then, I couldn't in all honesty say if she got tired and shouty because she was cold or because she'd tried to bite through a metal sprinkler casing and failed. Cousin A lasted the longest of us all, sternly denying he was cold as he watched older kids jump off the high diving board and shivered madly.
I hadn't enjoyed swimming so much in years. Public baths get reallly dull when you're older. Endless lengths, either stuck behind some doddering pensioner doing a functional breaststroke or being mown down by sneering professionals crawling like an outboard motor. Getting out with grey, chlorine-bleached skin that makes you look like an elderly prune. Where's the joy in that? Running around in the shallow end with your little nephew on a foam surfboard, pretending he's a motorboat driver - that is exercise I can get behind.
We went to McDonalds afterwards, which slightly spoiled all the health I guess. Worth it for the looks as I spoonfed F her spaghetti and sauce from a milkshake cup, though. The guys behind the till wouldn't risk untrademarked tupperware in their microwave, against the manufacturer's recommendations or something. There were whole tables of parents staring at me with concentrated hatred in their eyes. A little hypocritical seeing as their own (older) sprogs were knee-deep in nuggets, of course, but there you go.
F loved the restaurant, of course, more noise and lights and things to stare at. Part of her contentment turned out to be that she'd swiped a rattle from the kids' pool by way of a momento, the crafty devil, and was rattling it gladly under cover of her sheepskin. Plus watching mamma and pappa eating food with their fingers was a novelty to her, she liked that.
A really good day out, all in all. I'm looking forward to going again, after suddenly remembering how much fun swimming used to be as a kid. Takes kids to remind you of that, I guess.
Breaking Spoon Eating Developments - There have been no new spoon eating developments.
Wednesday, October 9, 2013
Hometime
I was briefly back in the UK last Sunday, meeting with the project organisers who are commissioning me to do some writing on psychosis. Nothing like a late night flight into Stanstead to make you feel psychotic, it really did the trick in terms of stoking my creative engines. My passport is almost out of date, so the photo is ten years old. I got a very searching look at border control, and had to produce additional proof of identity. It's true, beard growth corresponds to terrorist tendencies.
Being back in London is an increasingly odd experience. Stuff carries on changing after you leave, of course, so new buildings mushroom up from concrete sites and shops get replaced with new shops selling the same thing in different colours. This is usual and to be expected, if jarring all the same. What makes it even odder is when I find myself speaking instinctive Swedish to the people I bump into on the tube.
"Are you queueing for the ticket machine?" asked someone.
-Nej nej nej, I reassured her hurriedly. It sounds pretty medieval to the modern Brit (not that she was one, I think she was an Italian tourist). Coincidentally I'm trying to learn how to pronounce Anglo-Saxon at the moment for a voice over job. Anglo-Saxon isn't totally dissimilar to Modern Swedish, it turns out, same Germanic roots. My Swedish probably sounds a bit medieval at the moment too. If this was one and a half thousand years ago, I'd probably fit right in. Or be executed in both countries as a spy. Either works.
Even weirder is that V has recently started apologising in English to her collidees in the street. And in the proper London idiom, too, a startled 'Sorry' without eye contact before briskly moving away so they can't hear you muttering how it was their fault anyway. She's very annoyed about this, she doesn't want to have English mannerisms. They don't come across well in Swedish, apparently. Her employees asked her to stop being so polite when making stage calls the other week. It seems 'Can Mr. So-and-so come to the stage please, thank-you!' can make you sound patronising, i.e. English, and is to be avoided.
The worst thing about the visit was just how much of a wrench it was being away from F. I'm pathetic. Two hours and I was already in emotional turmoil. What if she walks when I'm gone? Or what if she misses me so much she's upset? Or what if there's, I don't know, a landmine! Sweden is very prone to landmines! I must go home at once.
F did notice I was gone, long enough to look round and ask 'ba pa?' of V once. That was as missed as I got, which is A Good Thing (if somewhat wounding to my pride). She was asleep by the time I got home, so I had to stay awake until three o' clock in order to pick her up, smell her hair and reset my spiralling blood pressure. Keswick is going to be a sore test, I fear.
In Other News
- V took F to the baby group last week. She knew about the same number of children's songs as I did, which was immensely comforting. To me, at least. Not her.
- Spoon Progress: on being offered a filled spoon, F will take it in both hands and stick it firmly into her mouth, then turn it upside down so she can lick it clean. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. It already has porridge on it.
Being back in London is an increasingly odd experience. Stuff carries on changing after you leave, of course, so new buildings mushroom up from concrete sites and shops get replaced with new shops selling the same thing in different colours. This is usual and to be expected, if jarring all the same. What makes it even odder is when I find myself speaking instinctive Swedish to the people I bump into on the tube.
"Are you queueing for the ticket machine?" asked someone.
-Nej nej nej, I reassured her hurriedly. It sounds pretty medieval to the modern Brit (not that she was one, I think she was an Italian tourist). Coincidentally I'm trying to learn how to pronounce Anglo-Saxon at the moment for a voice over job. Anglo-Saxon isn't totally dissimilar to Modern Swedish, it turns out, same Germanic roots. My Swedish probably sounds a bit medieval at the moment too. If this was one and a half thousand years ago, I'd probably fit right in. Or be executed in both countries as a spy. Either works.
Even weirder is that V has recently started apologising in English to her collidees in the street. And in the proper London idiom, too, a startled 'Sorry' without eye contact before briskly moving away so they can't hear you muttering how it was their fault anyway. She's very annoyed about this, she doesn't want to have English mannerisms. They don't come across well in Swedish, apparently. Her employees asked her to stop being so polite when making stage calls the other week. It seems 'Can Mr. So-and-so come to the stage please, thank-you!' can make you sound patronising, i.e. English, and is to be avoided.
The worst thing about the visit was just how much of a wrench it was being away from F. I'm pathetic. Two hours and I was already in emotional turmoil. What if she walks when I'm gone? Or what if she misses me so much she's upset? Or what if there's, I don't know, a landmine! Sweden is very prone to landmines! I must go home at once.
F did notice I was gone, long enough to look round and ask 'ba pa?' of V once. That was as missed as I got, which is A Good Thing (if somewhat wounding to my pride). She was asleep by the time I got home, so I had to stay awake until three o' clock in order to pick her up, smell her hair and reset my spiralling blood pressure. Keswick is going to be a sore test, I fear.
In Other News
- V took F to the baby group last week. She knew about the same number of children's songs as I did, which was immensely comforting. To me, at least. Not her.
- Spoon Progress: on being offered a filled spoon, F will take it in both hands and stick it firmly into her mouth, then turn it upside down so she can lick it clean. There is a light at the end of the tunnel. It already has porridge on it.
Friday, October 4, 2013
Mobilis in mobile
Time to move house again.
We've been looking for three or four months. There's only so many times you can tread barefoot on a Smurf at three in the morning before deciding your daughter needs her own room. I can't quite decide which is my favourite. The Pirate Smurf's cutlass is quite bendy, although not quite bendy enough. Not as bad as the drones on the Scottish Smurf's bagpipes. Not, of course, that putting her in her own room will make any difference. Smurfs are probably fairly invasive, like lice.
Sweden has all kinds of helpful laws for people who rent houses, as we do. Veronica has been renting from the same company for seventeen years or so, and it's a first-hand contract. Whatever that means, I'm a little vague about the legal ramifications, but it's clearly a good thing. People arch their eyebrows and emit low whistles when she says we have one.
One of the things it means is that you can swap your existing flat for another one in the same company. The longer you've been with them, the higher up the waiting list you go. V had her heart set on the Haga district, a very calm and family-friendly part of the centre of town. It used to be a warehouse district, and was almost pulled down in the eighties to make room for something with more glass, steel and potential profit for business in it. Luckily forward-thinking hippies occupied it and got the demolitions cancelled. Now it's full of cobbles, antique shops and vegetarian coffee houses.
And, from November, us.
We've got a place at the foot of the hill with Skansen Kronen on it, an old artillery fort. Our balcony looks straight out on its foresty flanks. I can already see F running up and down them, skinning her knees and discovering nettles. And I can already see me struggling to keep up whilst attempting to pluck Smurfs out of my soles.
There's a mild downside, of course, which is that we have to move in under a month. On a day where V is closing one show and opening another the day after. And the day before I go back to the UK for three months, to work on a Christmas play in Keswick. V is already champing at the bit to throw everything into moving boxes immediately. I'm trying to resign myself quietly to not knowing where anything is when I get back, as well as steeling myself for three months of not being at home.
Time to stay changeable within a changing element, to borrow Captain Nemo's motto. Although he generally seemed to find things like moving house and spending time away from family fairly easy to bear. Perhaps I should invest in an incredible submarine, it could solve a lot of problems. Although there's no parking at the new place, so perhaps I shouldn't.
We've been looking for three or four months. There's only so many times you can tread barefoot on a Smurf at three in the morning before deciding your daughter needs her own room. I can't quite decide which is my favourite. The Pirate Smurf's cutlass is quite bendy, although not quite bendy enough. Not as bad as the drones on the Scottish Smurf's bagpipes. Not, of course, that putting her in her own room will make any difference. Smurfs are probably fairly invasive, like lice.
Sweden has all kinds of helpful laws for people who rent houses, as we do. Veronica has been renting from the same company for seventeen years or so, and it's a first-hand contract. Whatever that means, I'm a little vague about the legal ramifications, but it's clearly a good thing. People arch their eyebrows and emit low whistles when she says we have one.
One of the things it means is that you can swap your existing flat for another one in the same company. The longer you've been with them, the higher up the waiting list you go. V had her heart set on the Haga district, a very calm and family-friendly part of the centre of town. It used to be a warehouse district, and was almost pulled down in the eighties to make room for something with more glass, steel and potential profit for business in it. Luckily forward-thinking hippies occupied it and got the demolitions cancelled. Now it's full of cobbles, antique shops and vegetarian coffee houses.
And, from November, us.
We've got a place at the foot of the hill with Skansen Kronen on it, an old artillery fort. Our balcony looks straight out on its foresty flanks. I can already see F running up and down them, skinning her knees and discovering nettles. And I can already see me struggling to keep up whilst attempting to pluck Smurfs out of my soles.
There's a mild downside, of course, which is that we have to move in under a month. On a day where V is closing one show and opening another the day after. And the day before I go back to the UK for three months, to work on a Christmas play in Keswick. V is already champing at the bit to throw everything into moving boxes immediately. I'm trying to resign myself quietly to not knowing where anything is when I get back, as well as steeling myself for three months of not being at home.
Time to stay changeable within a changing element, to borrow Captain Nemo's motto. Although he generally seemed to find things like moving house and spending time away from family fairly easy to bear. Perhaps I should invest in an incredible submarine, it could solve a lot of problems. Although there's no parking at the new place, so perhaps I shouldn't.
Wednesday, October 2, 2013
White Lamb 2: The Reckoning
Lately, I met a crocodile who drives around in a car. He was pretty big and fat, and he blows a trumpet. The car was too short and his tail was too long, so it had to go on a little trailer at the back.
Okay, not really. This is a nursery rhyme. I told you I was going to learn them all before going back to the toddlers' group, and I meant it. All the classics. Krokodilen i Bilen (The Crododile in the Car) - tick. Bockarna Bruse (The Billy Goats Gruff)- tick (although a bit dubious on the last verse). Här Dansar herr Gurka (Mr Cucumber is Dancing Here) - tick plus. Var bor du lilla råtta (Where Do You Live, Little Rat?*) - about eighty percent. That's it for now, sadly, and that's only taken me less than a week because I half knew them already from F's CD. And Lille Katt, obviously, but I can sing that in my sleep now. I probably do.
F decided that my practice was a good idea, so she did some too. She woke up at three in the morning before the group and sang for about two hours. If I thought I might have a better chance at looking like I knew what was happening, I was wrong. I looked like I'd been on a month-long bender instead, right down to the flame-grilled eyes and the head full of hoover fur.
All the same, it was much more positive this week. I found a stroller for F, who whooped with joy and started trying to run over some of the crawling babies with great glee. She must be really frustrated that she can't crawl yet, I had no idea her envy ran so deep.
Ready to show off my newfound prowess in the singing circle, they surprised me by flinging out an English one. Possibly just for me, I'm not sure - I think some of the older kids have been learning it at their dagis as well. But we sang 'I like the Flowers', which I haven't sung since doing drama warm-ups back in my student player days at King's on the Strand. Turns out the Swedish for Boom-de-a-da is something like 'oo-de-lalli'. Probably not a strict translation, but it suffices.
*To which the answer is 'In Your Hat'. Hooray for nursery rhymes.
Okay, not really. This is a nursery rhyme. I told you I was going to learn them all before going back to the toddlers' group, and I meant it. All the classics. Krokodilen i Bilen (The Crododile in the Car) - tick. Bockarna Bruse (The Billy Goats Gruff)- tick (although a bit dubious on the last verse). Här Dansar herr Gurka (Mr Cucumber is Dancing Here) - tick plus. Var bor du lilla råtta (Where Do You Live, Little Rat?*) - about eighty percent. That's it for now, sadly, and that's only taken me less than a week because I half knew them already from F's CD. And Lille Katt, obviously, but I can sing that in my sleep now. I probably do.
F decided that my practice was a good idea, so she did some too. She woke up at three in the morning before the group and sang for about two hours. If I thought I might have a better chance at looking like I knew what was happening, I was wrong. I looked like I'd been on a month-long bender instead, right down to the flame-grilled eyes and the head full of hoover fur.
All the same, it was much more positive this week. I found a stroller for F, who whooped with joy and started trying to run over some of the crawling babies with great glee. She must be really frustrated that she can't crawl yet, I had no idea her envy ran so deep.
Ready to show off my newfound prowess in the singing circle, they surprised me by flinging out an English one. Possibly just for me, I'm not sure - I think some of the older kids have been learning it at their dagis as well. But we sang 'I like the Flowers', which I haven't sung since doing drama warm-ups back in my student player days at King's on the Strand. Turns out the Swedish for Boom-de-a-da is something like 'oo-de-lalli'. Probably not a strict translation, but it suffices.
*To which the answer is 'In Your Hat'. Hooray for nursery rhymes.
Sunday, September 29, 2013
Baby Gym
F makes me feel horrendously unfit. Already, her podgy baby arms and legs are becoming lean and muscular. When she's not asleep, she's always doing crunches, sit-ups, squats and press-ups to better herself. In fact she's recently started including the weight of her high chair to press-ups, pushing herself and it away from the table over and over.
In contrast, I have done no dedicated exercise in the last eight months.
Picking her up and down might count for a bit, I suppose. Because she's always gaining weight, she's always slightly too heavy for me. This is excellent training, I suppose. Keep increasing what you benchpress, that's the way forward, isn't it? If I keep it up, by the time she's thirty five or so I'll look like a young Schwarzenegger. Except I'll be seventy. And still a better actor, even if I'm demented by then.
We walk a lot too, that's healthy. We bought a new baby bjorn, so I can keep carrying her until she's three or so. They're great things - they take all the stress of carrying baby out of your arms and shoulders and concentrate it handily in your lower back instead. F gets tired and shouty after about three-quarters of an hour in it. It takes me about three hours to massage the knots out of my sacrum after that.
She enjoys it, though, she likes being able to see out and grab things, and her patience for being sat in the pram is swiftly decreasing. Not that she has much patience. After the baby group, she's started trying to crawl a bit more. She knows there's something to it, she can see the point. Like the spoon feeding (latest development - use of a loaded spoon as a comb), she can't quite see how to achieve it yet. She's just really really angry that lying on her face and flailing isn't the right answer, although not quite angry enough to call it a day on that particular tactic.
In contrast, I have done no dedicated exercise in the last eight months.
Picking her up and down might count for a bit, I suppose. Because she's always gaining weight, she's always slightly too heavy for me. This is excellent training, I suppose. Keep increasing what you benchpress, that's the way forward, isn't it? If I keep it up, by the time she's thirty five or so I'll look like a young Schwarzenegger. Except I'll be seventy. And still a better actor, even if I'm demented by then.
We walk a lot too, that's healthy. We bought a new baby bjorn, so I can keep carrying her until she's three or so. They're great things - they take all the stress of carrying baby out of your arms and shoulders and concentrate it handily in your lower back instead. F gets tired and shouty after about three-quarters of an hour in it. It takes me about three hours to massage the knots out of my sacrum after that.
She enjoys it, though, she likes being able to see out and grab things, and her patience for being sat in the pram is swiftly decreasing. Not that she has much patience. After the baby group, she's started trying to crawl a bit more. She knows there's something to it, she can see the point. Like the spoon feeding (latest development - use of a loaded spoon as a comb), she can't quite see how to achieve it yet. She's just really really angry that lying on her face and flailing isn't the right answer, although not quite angry enough to call it a day on that particular tactic.
Saturday, September 21, 2013
Baa Baa White Lamb
F had her first taste of day care today. She went for a couple of hours of playing with other toddlers and near-toddlers at a local church hall. Good fun for her, I hoped, plus lots of new ideas for movement and some new toys to bash around. Her smurfs are starting to unionise, I suspect, I felt they needed a day of rest.
Being a parent makes me terribly competitive. From quite a competitive start, as well. It's not a race! I keep telling myself. Nobody is keeping track of how quickly your daughter grows, or when they hit milestones. Well, okay, they are, the midwife does it. But that's just quietly professional, there's not prizes or anything. Are there? There should be, is my basic instinct. And F should win them all.
The reason I mention this is that in a group of about ten children (I lost count very quickly), F was the only one there not actually walking or crawling independently. "Oh, that's fine, Valkyria/Odin* didn't start until he/she was twelve months" people kept telling me reassuringly. Except the proud mum sitting next to me, whose son was two weeks younger and leaping balletically round the mat like a young Nureyev.
The singing circle was kind of an ordeal - I knew slightly less than half of the songs. F has a CD of kids songs, some of which have osmotically embedded themselves into my brain through repetition. Not enough to do anything more than poorly and obviously lip-sync my way through the Swedish equivalent of 'Baa Baa Black Sheep', anyway. Which is 'Bä, bä, vita lamm' and has a totally different tune, just to make it even worse.
Hampered as usual by my dismal Swedish, I felt a bit gloomy by the end. Everyone else sat in the common room having fika whilst their kids romped and cavorted independently round the far end of the room. I sat with the kids, holding F up so she could play with the big plastic activity centre she wanted to grab. Lying next to it wasn't quite good enough, that made her get shouty and impatient, and whilst she's extremely close to crawling or pulling herself upright, she's a shade away from it still. So I'm still her bionic walking machine.
F had a splendid time, which was obviously more important. Other than the bit where she unexpectedly nearly stood up and faceplanted vigorously onto her nose, at least. All the other kids came and stood round me in an accusing circle, staring at F while she howled or checking back with their own parents to see if they'd learnt from my mistake. Perhaps no actual judgement was passed, I don't know, but for a moment there it felt quite Lord of the Flies. My head certainly felt at risk of being left on the handles of the inflatable rocking horse as a warning.
We're going back next week. By then, I will have taught myself the lyrics to all Swedish nursery rhymes and F will be able fly. That'll show 'em.
*Not their real names, sadly
Being a parent makes me terribly competitive. From quite a competitive start, as well. It's not a race! I keep telling myself. Nobody is keeping track of how quickly your daughter grows, or when they hit milestones. Well, okay, they are, the midwife does it. But that's just quietly professional, there's not prizes or anything. Are there? There should be, is my basic instinct. And F should win them all.
The reason I mention this is that in a group of about ten children (I lost count very quickly), F was the only one there not actually walking or crawling independently. "Oh, that's fine, Valkyria/Odin* didn't start until he/she was twelve months" people kept telling me reassuringly. Except the proud mum sitting next to me, whose son was two weeks younger and leaping balletically round the mat like a young Nureyev.
The singing circle was kind of an ordeal - I knew slightly less than half of the songs. F has a CD of kids songs, some of which have osmotically embedded themselves into my brain through repetition. Not enough to do anything more than poorly and obviously lip-sync my way through the Swedish equivalent of 'Baa Baa Black Sheep', anyway. Which is 'Bä, bä, vita lamm' and has a totally different tune, just to make it even worse.
Hampered as usual by my dismal Swedish, I felt a bit gloomy by the end. Everyone else sat in the common room having fika whilst their kids romped and cavorted independently round the far end of the room. I sat with the kids, holding F up so she could play with the big plastic activity centre she wanted to grab. Lying next to it wasn't quite good enough, that made her get shouty and impatient, and whilst she's extremely close to crawling or pulling herself upright, she's a shade away from it still. So I'm still her bionic walking machine.
F had a splendid time, which was obviously more important. Other than the bit where she unexpectedly nearly stood up and faceplanted vigorously onto her nose, at least. All the other kids came and stood round me in an accusing circle, staring at F while she howled or checking back with their own parents to see if they'd learnt from my mistake. Perhaps no actual judgement was passed, I don't know, but for a moment there it felt quite Lord of the Flies. My head certainly felt at risk of being left on the handles of the inflatable rocking horse as a warning.
We're going back next week. By then, I will have taught myself the lyrics to all Swedish nursery rhymes and F will be able fly. That'll show 'em.
*Not their real names, sadly
Friday, September 20, 2013
Swing
Swings are fairly safe for an eight-month-old, right? I mean, as long as you don't go nuts and start trying to get them to orbit the bar or anything. Or leave them to it while you go and get ice cream. And I'm talking the bucket seats here, that's obvious. Not the dangling tyres or the single rubber strap ones. Basically nothing that looks like it should have been on Gladiators. I'm not a monster.
I'd been tempted to give F a go on a swing for ages, but that nagging internal voice that tells you unsupervised fun is the same as bad parenting kept me from it. There was also an external voice that kept reminding me to wait until my wife wasn't at work. It wasn't a nagging voice, can I just make that very clear? She reads this blog, after all. It was a dulcet voice of kindly reason, one that I love very much.
F likes swings now. Creaky ones especially, they make a good noise. Even better than that is a creaky swing with another child in it, that's fascinating. I don't know if F is watching older kids to pick up movement tips or whether she's just trying to work out what they are. She's only recently realised things like birds and animals are at all interesting. Ducks are now hilarious, for example. Only a few weeks ago she was totally indifferent to them because Look! Leaves!
F likes most stuff, to be fair. Novel things especially, which covers pretty much everything. She doesn't generally seem to get scared or apprehensive of new stuff though, she just giggles or guffaws and tries to grab it. Worrying comes later on in development, I vaguely recall.
What bliss not to have to put up with that! As the top of my head begins its long, slow reveal through my increasingly grey-shot hair, I can't help but be a little jealous. About seventy percent of the parenting I feel I do (F does most of the hard work, learning motor functions and how the world works and all that shit. I'm basically a combination butler and pack mule, really) seems to be telling myself not to panic.
Not worrying is, for me, a learnt skill, the kind that I have to concentrate quite hard to maintain. Perhaps it will become automatic over time, the way that anything does with daily practice. Nothing in my experience or the many other parents I know seems to suggest this is the case, however. Fingers crossed for graceful balding, then.
I'd been tempted to give F a go on a swing for ages, but that nagging internal voice that tells you unsupervised fun is the same as bad parenting kept me from it. There was also an external voice that kept reminding me to wait until my wife wasn't at work. It wasn't a nagging voice, can I just make that very clear? She reads this blog, after all. It was a dulcet voice of kindly reason, one that I love very much.
F likes swings now. Creaky ones especially, they make a good noise. Even better than that is a creaky swing with another child in it, that's fascinating. I don't know if F is watching older kids to pick up movement tips or whether she's just trying to work out what they are. She's only recently realised things like birds and animals are at all interesting. Ducks are now hilarious, for example. Only a few weeks ago she was totally indifferent to them because Look! Leaves!
F likes most stuff, to be fair. Novel things especially, which covers pretty much everything. She doesn't generally seem to get scared or apprehensive of new stuff though, she just giggles or guffaws and tries to grab it. Worrying comes later on in development, I vaguely recall.
What bliss not to have to put up with that! As the top of my head begins its long, slow reveal through my increasingly grey-shot hair, I can't help but be a little jealous. About seventy percent of the parenting I feel I do (F does most of the hard work, learning motor functions and how the world works and all that shit. I'm basically a combination butler and pack mule, really) seems to be telling myself not to panic.
Not worrying is, for me, a learnt skill, the kind that I have to concentrate quite hard to maintain. Perhaps it will become automatic over time, the way that anything does with daily practice. Nothing in my experience or the many other parents I know seems to suggest this is the case, however. Fingers crossed for graceful balding, then.
Thursday, September 19, 2013
Spoon Update
It's been well over a month of training now. F can
- Put food onto a spoon with one hand
- Take food off a spoon with one hand
- Eat food with one hand whilst holding a spoon in the other
- Hold an empty spoon and bowl and pretend to eat out of it
- Not actually combine these activities to eat with a spoon yet
The blast radius for her feeding attempts is about a foot smaller, although this merely means it's also about an inch deeper in partially-masticated goo.
This is all quite frustrating for all concerned. This probably also means it's normal.
- Put food onto a spoon with one hand
- Take food off a spoon with one hand
- Eat food with one hand whilst holding a spoon in the other
- Hold an empty spoon and bowl and pretend to eat out of it
- Not actually combine these activities to eat with a spoon yet
The blast radius for her feeding attempts is about a foot smaller, although this merely means it's also about an inch deeper in partially-masticated goo.
This is all quite frustrating for all concerned. This probably also means it's normal.
Wednesday, September 18, 2013
Nostalgia
Gosh, time goes by terribly fast. I was bouncing F on my knee the other day. She's well over two foot tall now, it's getting tougher on my knees daily. I can't really believe she's the same baby that only a handful of months ago was able to lie fully stretched out on my chest without hanging over the edges. Aww, I thought with a tint of rosy spectacle, those days are already done. I miss them!
As though to remind me of the perils of fond hinder-gazing, F immediately got her first cold and spent the entire night awake and yelling. Not aggressive or miserable yelling, just 'hey, I'm awake, let's play a game' yelling. To start with, anyway. The miserable aggression came later, once she realised that mummy and daddy weren't up for it at three in the morning.
I got her cold soon after (she'd caught it from V, who'd caught it at the theatre). I made mine much worse by doing a stage fighting gig out at a local fortress. It was lovely weather, I didn't think I need a coat. Especially as I'd be dressed in a 17th century velvet frock coat and leaping from assorted battlements, wielding a rapier. Seeing as my Swedish is still pretty lousy, I hadn't realised I'd be expected to stay on after the fight for almost four hours, standing about looking gormless as a foil for the tour guide's wit. Professionally gormless, you understand, I was acting it. The fact that said wit was also too Swedish for me to follow merely helped.
By the time I got home, I was running a fever. I didn't sleep beyond an hour that night, and that was grabbed on the sofa because I kept waking F up by sneezing in the bedroom. Luckily, F was pretty much better the following day. For her, anyway. She couldn't understand why daddy didn't want to play at three in the afternoon either, very unreasonable.
P.S. - The long pause since the last blog is partly due to this cold. It knocked me pretty flat for a week or so last month, when all this happened. I'm a terrible one for getting out of habits if I'm thrown off my routine. I'm still planning on writing something roughly once a week. I can't imagine I've left anyone horribly bereft by skipping a few weeks, but apologies if you thought we'd all been kidnapped or something. I'm back now, and I have a few catch-up blogs to make up for the pause.
As though to remind me of the perils of fond hinder-gazing, F immediately got her first cold and spent the entire night awake and yelling. Not aggressive or miserable yelling, just 'hey, I'm awake, let's play a game' yelling. To start with, anyway. The miserable aggression came later, once she realised that mummy and daddy weren't up for it at three in the morning.
I got her cold soon after (she'd caught it from V, who'd caught it at the theatre). I made mine much worse by doing a stage fighting gig out at a local fortress. It was lovely weather, I didn't think I need a coat. Especially as I'd be dressed in a 17th century velvet frock coat and leaping from assorted battlements, wielding a rapier. Seeing as my Swedish is still pretty lousy, I hadn't realised I'd be expected to stay on after the fight for almost four hours, standing about looking gormless as a foil for the tour guide's wit. Professionally gormless, you understand, I was acting it. The fact that said wit was also too Swedish for me to follow merely helped.
By the time I got home, I was running a fever. I didn't sleep beyond an hour that night, and that was grabbed on the sofa because I kept waking F up by sneezing in the bedroom. Luckily, F was pretty much better the following day. For her, anyway. She couldn't understand why daddy didn't want to play at three in the afternoon either, very unreasonable.
P.S. - The long pause since the last blog is partly due to this cold. It knocked me pretty flat for a week or so last month, when all this happened. I'm a terrible one for getting out of habits if I'm thrown off my routine. I'm still planning on writing something roughly once a week. I can't imagine I've left anyone horribly bereft by skipping a few weeks, but apologies if you thought we'd all been kidnapped or something. I'm back now, and I have a few catch-up blogs to make up for the pause.
Monday, August 19, 2013
Spoony
V read a website last week, one of those 'normal childhood development milestones' ones. They're great. One quick read provides 90% of your RDA of paranoia and fear. F was looking pretty good - bits of walking, talking, etc, plus what it referred to as 'increased levels of activity', which is certainly true. It also said 'starting to use a spoon.'
Nope, none of that. She's trained me to do it for her, more or less. But if some random website says normal children can do that by this age? Well, by God and St. George! I shall immediately commence a rapid programme of spoon training, and devil take the hindmost.
I had a simple approach - feed F about two-thirds of her usual breakfast porridge, then offer her both bowl and spoon and let her work it out.
Learning Notes
Day 1
Porridge feels good. Good on the face, good on the elbows, good on the floor.
F can now keep her baby skin smooth and soft with regular oatmeal peels.
Two metres is still inside the splash zone.
F has mastered this skill Matrix style. Yes, that's right - there is no spoon. Thank you, I'll be here all week.
Day 3
Porridge can be used like a drum.
Porridge can be used like glue.
Porridge can be used as a projectile weapon.
Porridge should not be used as porridge. That's boring.
Day 5
Sudden progress! F can now fill the spoon. Then she meticulously wipes it clean with her other hand, turns it upside down and chews the other end. Every little helps, I guess.
All the same, holding the spoon and dipping it into the porridge after a mere five days seems like a tremendous rate of progress. I don't know when she's practising between meals, but she must be slipping it in somewhere. Middle of the night, maybe? When she wakes up yowling at 0300, it may represent some new breakthrough in spoon theory. I did find porridge on her blanket this afternoon, which may prove this hypothesis. Either that, or eight metres and a wall is still inside the splash zone.
Nope, none of that. She's trained me to do it for her, more or less. But if some random website says normal children can do that by this age? Well, by God and St. George! I shall immediately commence a rapid programme of spoon training, and devil take the hindmost.
I had a simple approach - feed F about two-thirds of her usual breakfast porridge, then offer her both bowl and spoon and let her work it out.
Learning Notes
Day 1
Porridge feels good. Good on the face, good on the elbows, good on the floor.
F can now keep her baby skin smooth and soft with regular oatmeal peels.
Two metres is still inside the splash zone.
F has mastered this skill Matrix style. Yes, that's right - there is no spoon. Thank you, I'll be here all week.
Day 3
Porridge can be used like a drum.
Porridge can be used like glue.
Porridge can be used as a projectile weapon.
Porridge should not be used as porridge. That's boring.
Day 5
Sudden progress! F can now fill the spoon. Then she meticulously wipes it clean with her other hand, turns it upside down and chews the other end. Every little helps, I guess.
All the same, holding the spoon and dipping it into the porridge after a mere five days seems like a tremendous rate of progress. I don't know when she's practising between meals, but she must be slipping it in somewhere. Middle of the night, maybe? When she wakes up yowling at 0300, it may represent some new breakthrough in spoon theory. I did find porridge on her blanket this afternoon, which may prove this hypothesis. Either that, or eight metres and a wall is still inside the splash zone.
Monday, August 12, 2013
Both Ends
Freya is talking now.
Proto-talking, to be fair. Like 'Mama' does mean 'mummy', but also 'myam myam' (as in 'give me more food'), 'pick me up' and 'I'm awake, come get me.' 'Baba', which seems to denote me, also has multiple connotations. I don't think I get all of them yet. I'm also interchangable with mama, which for F's purposes is quite accurate.
It's funny, she actually first started saying 'mama' about three months ago. She said it over and over again for about two days, then totally lost interest in it and wouldn't repeat it at all, not for love nor money. We didn't actually offer her money, to be fair. Maybe that's where we went wrong.
Suddenly, whatever linguistic switch that operates these things is back on, though. She shouts for whoever takes her fancy when she wants to change positions or get dropped toys.
She shouts a lot, actually, just happy babbling. The best one is the long held note she does when you push her pram over cobbles. She clearly enjoys the way the bouncing makes her voice shake. Gothenburg has some pretty rough streets. They're the ones that make her sound like a yodelling competition.
As though to balance out the endless stream from the top, though, she got constipated yesterday.
F isn't a complainy baby. Pretty calm, generally, which means V and I aren't used to her having a day when she's all screams and miserable faces. Maybe it was a week of very hot sweaty weather, or maybe eating too many majs krokar, don't know. I do know she passed an interesting collection of pinecones and snail shells, perfectly sculpted out of poop.
No wonder she wanted to spend the entirely day lying stomach-down on mummy's legs, it looked exhausting. We went out and got a healthy supply of prunes and fresh fruit, including a punnet of raspberries. They're one of F's favourites, one of the first whole fruits she tried.
She can eat them all by herself now. You can recreate the spectacle of F eating a punnet of raspberries in your own home. Simply load handfuls of them into a shotgun and fire them at a chair from above. Once your house looks like the aftermath of a Guy Richie film, you have the general effect.
It worked, though, very smiley and active today. Also poopy, but in a good way.
Proto-talking, to be fair. Like 'Mama' does mean 'mummy', but also 'myam myam' (as in 'give me more food'), 'pick me up' and 'I'm awake, come get me.' 'Baba', which seems to denote me, also has multiple connotations. I don't think I get all of them yet. I'm also interchangable with mama, which for F's purposes is quite accurate.
It's funny, she actually first started saying 'mama' about three months ago. She said it over and over again for about two days, then totally lost interest in it and wouldn't repeat it at all, not for love nor money. We didn't actually offer her money, to be fair. Maybe that's where we went wrong.
Suddenly, whatever linguistic switch that operates these things is back on, though. She shouts for whoever takes her fancy when she wants to change positions or get dropped toys.
She shouts a lot, actually, just happy babbling. The best one is the long held note she does when you push her pram over cobbles. She clearly enjoys the way the bouncing makes her voice shake. Gothenburg has some pretty rough streets. They're the ones that make her sound like a yodelling competition.
As though to balance out the endless stream from the top, though, she got constipated yesterday.
F isn't a complainy baby. Pretty calm, generally, which means V and I aren't used to her having a day when she's all screams and miserable faces. Maybe it was a week of very hot sweaty weather, or maybe eating too many majs krokar, don't know. I do know she passed an interesting collection of pinecones and snail shells, perfectly sculpted out of poop.
No wonder she wanted to spend the entirely day lying stomach-down on mummy's legs, it looked exhausting. We went out and got a healthy supply of prunes and fresh fruit, including a punnet of raspberries. They're one of F's favourites, one of the first whole fruits she tried.
She can eat them all by herself now. You can recreate the spectacle of F eating a punnet of raspberries in your own home. Simply load handfuls of them into a shotgun and fire them at a chair from above. Once your house looks like the aftermath of a Guy Richie film, you have the general effect.
It worked, though, very smiley and active today. Also poopy, but in a good way.
Saturday, August 3, 2013
Friday 2nd
0700 - F and V are both up at the same time. V is getting ready for work and having breakfast. F is, well, basically the same, I suppose. While V eats, I feed F, then myself, and then play with F for a bit until she goes back to sleep.
0800 - V has left, F and I are sleeping. So flat out that when the digital TV installation people call, I don't notice, and wake up to their polite note on the doormat. It's pretty polite. I suspect their attempt to rouse me was pretty polite too, I don't usually sleep through doorbells, but you never know.
0900 - F has a second breakfast, banana flavour porridge with some mango and apple puree on top. She liberally applies this to her face and hands, accounting for her excellent complexion.
1000 - As I sit and look for acting jobs on the internet, I'm struck by the aroma of feces that seem heavy in the air. Looking round, I can see F in her stroller with a nice sticky tail of poop extruding itself down her right leg. Amazingly, it avoids the stroller, floor and toys altogether, instead accumulating nicely all over the inside of her clean clothes. And then, shortly afterwards, Daddy.
1100 - More sleep for F, some writing for me.
1200 - Out and about, picking up groceries from Willys (a Tesco analogue), a package for V and an iced coffee from Espresso House (a Starbucks analogue) for me. After all, this is my second official day as a lattepappa, staying at home while my wife works. I got off to a bad start, I didn't have any coffee at all yesterday.
1300 - Lunch, which is chicken with rice and vegetables today. We've run out of fruit puree, I didn't think to pick any up from Willys, and F is extremely vocal about her displeasure. Instead, we make do with vanilj krokar. These are basically vanilla-flavour wotsits (and just as awful as that sounds), but F loves them.
1400 - F is napping solidly, after a rousing few hands of Sweep the Smurfs. I need to invent some kind of self-redeploying smurf escalator (a smurfscalator?), otherwise I'm solely responsible for maintaining a constant supply of pixies to the bookshelf. It's like working in a tiny blue bowling alley before the automation of pinsetters.
1500 - I'm practising an unaccompanied song for an audition next week. F helps by accompanying me, first on the piano, then by singing, and then by mashing the wordsheet into the piano keys. This helps because I can't rely on the words any more, I have to learn them.
1600 - We go out for a walk to the botanical gardens. It's a very hot, sticky summer day here. August is called Rotten Month in Sweden, because all your food goes off twice as fast in the cloying summer weather. F cools off by splashing around in the fountains, where she's extra interested in the other naked toddlers doing the same thing.
1700 - Still out walking, wandering through Haga and looking at the outside of a flat we're interested in. F is more interested in the teddy bear blowing bubbles outside a toyshop. I explain to her that we can't add that as a requirement to our flat-hunting, but she doesn't seem convinced.
1800 - We all sit together in a little cafe that's on one of the bridges over the canal. V and I have a cool beer and some chilli nuts. This enrages F, who can't see why we get exciting fizzy drinks and crunchy things where she gets nothing. And I've left the thermos of water for making velling (her evening milky drink) at home, so we have to make do with more krokar.
1900 - F goes to bed and falls very totally asleep. V and I sit up on our computers, searching for flats or reading about advanced philosophy.
Okay, not really. V goes to bed around ten, I sit up playing computer games until late (0100), because it's Friday and I let myself do that on Fridays. Sorry. Maybe I'm a terrible parent.
But would a terrible parent buy their daughter this?
0800 - V has left, F and I are sleeping. So flat out that when the digital TV installation people call, I don't notice, and wake up to their polite note on the doormat. It's pretty polite. I suspect their attempt to rouse me was pretty polite too, I don't usually sleep through doorbells, but you never know.
0900 - F has a second breakfast, banana flavour porridge with some mango and apple puree on top. She liberally applies this to her face and hands, accounting for her excellent complexion.
1000 - As I sit and look for acting jobs on the internet, I'm struck by the aroma of feces that seem heavy in the air. Looking round, I can see F in her stroller with a nice sticky tail of poop extruding itself down her right leg. Amazingly, it avoids the stroller, floor and toys altogether, instead accumulating nicely all over the inside of her clean clothes. And then, shortly afterwards, Daddy.
1100 - More sleep for F, some writing for me.
1200 - Out and about, picking up groceries from Willys (a Tesco analogue), a package for V and an iced coffee from Espresso House (a Starbucks analogue) for me. After all, this is my second official day as a lattepappa, staying at home while my wife works. I got off to a bad start, I didn't have any coffee at all yesterday.
1300 - Lunch, which is chicken with rice and vegetables today. We've run out of fruit puree, I didn't think to pick any up from Willys, and F is extremely vocal about her displeasure. Instead, we make do with vanilj krokar. These are basically vanilla-flavour wotsits (and just as awful as that sounds), but F loves them.
1400 - F is napping solidly, after a rousing few hands of Sweep the Smurfs. I need to invent some kind of self-redeploying smurf escalator (a smurfscalator?), otherwise I'm solely responsible for maintaining a constant supply of pixies to the bookshelf. It's like working in a tiny blue bowling alley before the automation of pinsetters.
1500 - I'm practising an unaccompanied song for an audition next week. F helps by accompanying me, first on the piano, then by singing, and then by mashing the wordsheet into the piano keys. This helps because I can't rely on the words any more, I have to learn them.
1600 - We go out for a walk to the botanical gardens. It's a very hot, sticky summer day here. August is called Rotten Month in Sweden, because all your food goes off twice as fast in the cloying summer weather. F cools off by splashing around in the fountains, where she's extra interested in the other naked toddlers doing the same thing.
1700 - Still out walking, wandering through Haga and looking at the outside of a flat we're interested in. F is more interested in the teddy bear blowing bubbles outside a toyshop. I explain to her that we can't add that as a requirement to our flat-hunting, but she doesn't seem convinced.
1800 - We all sit together in a little cafe that's on one of the bridges over the canal. V and I have a cool beer and some chilli nuts. This enrages F, who can't see why we get exciting fizzy drinks and crunchy things where she gets nothing. And I've left the thermos of water for making velling (her evening milky drink) at home, so we have to make do with more krokar.
1900 - F goes to bed and falls very totally asleep. V and I sit up on our computers, searching for flats or reading about advanced philosophy.
Okay, not really. V goes to bed around ten, I sit up playing computer games until late (0100), because it's Friday and I let myself do that on Fridays. Sorry. Maybe I'm a terrible parent.
But would a terrible parent buy their daughter this?
 |
| Baby V Cthulhu in Facial Feeding Frenzy Championship. Result - 1:0 |
Saturday, July 27, 2013
Moving Out
Ah, they grow up so fast.
Already, I find myself sitting at home as F makes her way out into the big wide world. Going to do things I can't do, have experiences I can't share, wearing such old clothes of mine as she's decided will suit her better. While I sit at home remembering the days when she'd sit on my knee and play happily. What a maudlin old man I am.
How much worse when she actually has to leave home for real, I wonder?
As it was, I was sitting at home feeling sorry for myself because V had taken F swimming for the first time and I couldn't go with them. This was because they'd gone with Godmother L to a ladies-only nudist beach along the coast from us. This was another reason to feel a bit left out. Surely the naked ladies would understand the camera was only for photos of my daughter's first paddle?
I've seen photos, which are almost as good. (Of my daughter paddling! What did you think I meant?) F wearing my old green bandana over her UV swimsuit, and making it look much better than I ever did. Not a particularly difficult achievement, admittedly, you could drop the bandana on the decaying carcass of an exploded elephant seal and it would look better than I ever made it look. But still.
F is in a grabbing phase. She has learnt to grab. She enjoys this very much, when it suits her purposes. Her purposes this week mostly revolve around her feet, but like her father before her, denuding a low-lying bookshelf of tomes is quite high priority too. She's taken a special interest in a stack of Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks, relegated to a bottom shelf out of the eyeline of visitors. I claim this as evidence she's already interested in mynerdy timewasting dark arts. V says it just means she wants to throw them out.
Grabby when it suits her purposes, though. Sometimes this is just out of fun. She's got a collection of plastic smurfs from her mum. Although she kind of likes picking them up and chewing them, she'd much rather thrash a chubby arm through a line-up of the little blue creatures sending them all flying instead. Smurf tossing - less offensive than dwarf tossing. I can see it catching on.
And she's lazy at dinner. She can pick things up and transfer them to her mouth, but it takes her a while and it's still fairly inaccurate. 'Mouth' can translate as far as 'ear' or 'Daddy', depending on just where some decimal place goes awry in her mentally predicted trajectories. She often tries to get us to put the food into her mouth instead.
She does this by opening her mouth and adopting a position like a skydiver, then vigorously launching herself face-first towards the spoon or your hand, depending. As with genuine skydiving, it's not a neat way of eating.
Already, I find myself sitting at home as F makes her way out into the big wide world. Going to do things I can't do, have experiences I can't share, wearing such old clothes of mine as she's decided will suit her better. While I sit at home remembering the days when she'd sit on my knee and play happily. What a maudlin old man I am.
How much worse when she actually has to leave home for real, I wonder?
As it was, I was sitting at home feeling sorry for myself because V had taken F swimming for the first time and I couldn't go with them. This was because they'd gone with Godmother L to a ladies-only nudist beach along the coast from us. This was another reason to feel a bit left out. Surely the naked ladies would understand the camera was only for photos of my daughter's first paddle?
I've seen photos, which are almost as good. (Of my daughter paddling! What did you think I meant?) F wearing my old green bandana over her UV swimsuit, and making it look much better than I ever did. Not a particularly difficult achievement, admittedly, you could drop the bandana on the decaying carcass of an exploded elephant seal and it would look better than I ever made it look. But still.
F is in a grabbing phase. She has learnt to grab. She enjoys this very much, when it suits her purposes. Her purposes this week mostly revolve around her feet, but like her father before her, denuding a low-lying bookshelf of tomes is quite high priority too. She's taken a special interest in a stack of Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks, relegated to a bottom shelf out of the eyeline of visitors. I claim this as evidence she's already interested in my
Grabby when it suits her purposes, though. Sometimes this is just out of fun. She's got a collection of plastic smurfs from her mum. Although she kind of likes picking them up and chewing them, she'd much rather thrash a chubby arm through a line-up of the little blue creatures sending them all flying instead. Smurf tossing - less offensive than dwarf tossing. I can see it catching on.
And she's lazy at dinner. She can pick things up and transfer them to her mouth, but it takes her a while and it's still fairly inaccurate. 'Mouth' can translate as far as 'ear' or 'Daddy', depending on just where some decimal place goes awry in her mentally predicted trajectories. She often tries to get us to put the food into her mouth instead.
She does this by opening her mouth and adopting a position like a skydiver, then vigorously launching herself face-first towards the spoon or your hand, depending. As with genuine skydiving, it's not a neat way of eating.
Friday, July 19, 2013
Bragging Rights
Bragging about anything baby-related seems kind of hubristic to me. Like copper-plating oneself before going out in a thunderstorm. Every time we've said 'oh, she's so lovely, very calm', F will usually erupt into a volley of fox-like shrieking within ten minutes or so to prove us wrong. Similarly, if we've ever said she's got a temper, she bathes whoever we've made the claim to with a basalm of smiling.
She likes making us look like delusional liars, I guess.
All the same, I can't help wanting to brag a little bit this week. F is maintaining her high rate of learning, which this week seems mostly to be object-related. She manipulates things, really really concentrates on picking them up and putting them down and turning them round, waving them around carefully like a wizard with an experimental wand. All whilst focussing intently on how her fingers and wrists move.
She's worked out that things dropped from the table go to the floor, so when she hurls insert any given object here to the ground, she looks after it to check it's trajectory. As though she can't quite trust gravity is still working. She needs more proof.
I'm tentatively giving her access to her plates and cutlery. I wouldn't brag about the results of that, it generally earns me a healthy coating of fruit puree or a good workout for my knees and lower back as I crawl amidst the table legs looking for her spoon. But she gets the overall shape of the expected performance one gives with them, even if she's just roughly approximating the choreography. I can appreciate that, it's all I ever managed in musicals.
No, this week has seen only one thing I want to brag about. She's been quite the last few days, as we're trying out a slightly new and improved routine. Some of the squalling is along the 'hang on, we're supposed to do this now, what are you playing at?' lines.
Some of it is because we aren't putting her to bed quickly enough.
Babies, I was led to believe, cry when you put them into their beds. Then you stand next to the cot, cajoling and pleading in whatever form you mistakenly believe will work, until they've broken your body and spirit. At which point they can rest happy, leaving you sobbing on the changing mat. F has done her fair share of that earlier on this year.
But now, she gets angry and shouty until you put her down. Not just tiredness, the eye-rubbing and grouchiness that comes with that. This is a different kind of yelling, much more pointed, like the kind when you don't let her eat your spaghetti or close the iPad when she's using it. 'I've had enough of your nonsense! Take me to bed now!' seems closer to what she's telling us.
Great, right? Miracle baby. Plus she sleeps for ten or twelve hours every night at least, as well as long afternoon naps. Smug smug braggity smug.
Obviously we're looking at webpages called things like 'babies who oversleep' and 'early onset narcolepsy - a parent's guide', and both pretending we aren't. 16 hours a day is well within normal limits (isn't it? isn't it?), so it's all fine. We're fine. Nothing to worry about here. No sir! Just move right along, let someone else see our somniac prodigy.
I get the distinct impression F is actually just lying under her blanket half the night, sniggering to herself. Try and comb the tangles out of my hair? Take this new parental worry! Tee hee hee.
She likes making us look like delusional liars, I guess.
All the same, I can't help wanting to brag a little bit this week. F is maintaining her high rate of learning, which this week seems mostly to be object-related. She manipulates things, really really concentrates on picking them up and putting them down and turning them round, waving them around carefully like a wizard with an experimental wand. All whilst focussing intently on how her fingers and wrists move.
She's worked out that things dropped from the table go to the floor, so when she hurls insert any given object here to the ground, she looks after it to check it's trajectory. As though she can't quite trust gravity is still working. She needs more proof.
I'm tentatively giving her access to her plates and cutlery. I wouldn't brag about the results of that, it generally earns me a healthy coating of fruit puree or a good workout for my knees and lower back as I crawl amidst the table legs looking for her spoon. But she gets the overall shape of the expected performance one gives with them, even if she's just roughly approximating the choreography. I can appreciate that, it's all I ever managed in musicals.
No, this week has seen only one thing I want to brag about. She's been quite the last few days, as we're trying out a slightly new and improved routine. Some of the squalling is along the 'hang on, we're supposed to do this now, what are you playing at?' lines.
Some of it is because we aren't putting her to bed quickly enough.
Babies, I was led to believe, cry when you put them into their beds. Then you stand next to the cot, cajoling and pleading in whatever form you mistakenly believe will work, until they've broken your body and spirit. At which point they can rest happy, leaving you sobbing on the changing mat. F has done her fair share of that earlier on this year.
But now, she gets angry and shouty until you put her down. Not just tiredness, the eye-rubbing and grouchiness that comes with that. This is a different kind of yelling, much more pointed, like the kind when you don't let her eat your spaghetti or close the iPad when she's using it. 'I've had enough of your nonsense! Take me to bed now!' seems closer to what she's telling us.
Great, right? Miracle baby. Plus she sleeps for ten or twelve hours every night at least, as well as long afternoon naps. Smug smug braggity smug.
Obviously we're looking at webpages called things like 'babies who oversleep' and 'early onset narcolepsy - a parent's guide', and both pretending we aren't. 16 hours a day is well within normal limits (isn't it? isn't it?), so it's all fine. We're fine. Nothing to worry about here. No sir! Just move right along, let someone else see our somniac prodigy.
I get the distinct impression F is actually just lying under her blanket half the night, sniggering to herself. Try and comb the tangles out of my hair? Take this new parental worry! Tee hee hee.
Sunday, July 14, 2013
Half Birthday
Six months already? Surely not.
I was having a conversation at a barbecue with a slightly drunken Iranian yesterday. The gist of what he was saying seemed to be about parenthood, how it's not just about raising your children and seeing them develop. It's also the mirror of that, seeing how they develop you and what comes out. It was an interesting point and probably very true. Some of the profundity may have been lost behind a fug of booze, though, the conversation was a fairly incoherent medley of politics, psychology and nationalism.
Also at the barbecue yesterday were two other babies, one only a few weeks old, one a couple of months behind F. V and I both swore the youngest one was much smaller than F had ever been. It wasn't true, F turned out to have been shorter and lighter at birth. It's just impossible to imagine her as a little red rag of a person like that any more, all tiny and floppy and crinkly. Not now she's mastering flirting and chatting, or has decided that other people sneezing is the funniest thing ever.
F has done a heap of developing. Even a video from two months back, showing her trying food in a spoon for the first time, shows a totally different little girl. She can sit upright unaided now. Sometimes, anyway, if you prop her up right. She hasn't quite worked out that leaning forward will upset the balance. But yesterday was the first time she did it without the set up, she grabbed the bar across her pram and then stayed there for about fifteen minutes, happily doing pull-ups and gnawing on the fabric cover.
She plays piano with me and enjoys singing along. She can just about get her nap back in her mouth without our help. She can eat a wafer biscuit, biting out soggy mouthfuls with her two baby teeth. She can stand upright if she's got something to hold on to. All this is new in the last week or so alone.
And physical achievements like these don't really get across the way that she's appearing as a person now, her character emerging from the confused crying and constant sleeping she did as a newborn. As though a little more of her brain wakes up every time she does. She's interested in things, she asks to be taken to stuff that's caught her eye. She sulks if she's not allowed to, e.g. chew through daddy's earphone cables.
After the first bloom of interest in a project has waned, I'm frequently guilty of moving on to something else and never finishing what I started. This is a trait supposedly common in people born in a Dragon Chinese zodiac year, as I was. Knowing that has often made an excellent excuse, of course, astrology is usually a self-fulfilling prophesy I find. Scorpios are brooding, passionate and secretive? Excellent! I'll maintain those character flaws instead of working on them, I'm supposed to be that way.
I mention this as an excuse for why I haven't written anything on this blog for two weeks. Being a father gets exhausting and difficult. It is easy to get tired, and I have been feeling that lately. It isn't that F's not doing as much funny or sweet stuff or being less inspirational, just that I haven't been able to muster the energy to write about it.
F is a different project every day, in a sense. I don't think of her as a project, a job or a chore, despite her occasional efforts to convince me otherwise. It would be impossible to lose interest, she's just too interesting.
The first time she tries something out, it doesn't usually work. The wafer biscuits, for example - watching her trying to get her hands to do what she wants is fascinating. You know the intent is there, but it's like seeing a first time crane operator on their first demolition job The things that fall down and break aren't quite the ones she's aiming for yet. But she doesn't give up, she keeps trying. And she's also very good at asking for help, often quite vocally.
When I started writing this particular entry, it was a bit of an uphill struggle. The tiredness I'm still feeling, the suspicion I'm writing to a rather empty gallery, the typical writer's niggle of 'what am I writing all this for?' - all there in spades today. Luckily F woke up and wanted to play. We played Scrabble. F loves playing Scrabble, it's one of her favourites. I hold her up to the box and she takes the title printed on the side as an instruction as she tries to pull it out of the stack of other board games.
Half an hour of that has restored my faith in the world. That's why I like being a dad so much. F can be a better, more developed person every time she wakes up. She's very inspirational that way. She makes me feel I might be able to do it too.
I'd prefer to develop into a person less likely to get so over-excited about a bag of scrabble letters they start crying, mind you. Let's face it, though, I'm a wuss. That would probably be a step up.
I was having a conversation at a barbecue with a slightly drunken Iranian yesterday. The gist of what he was saying seemed to be about parenthood, how it's not just about raising your children and seeing them develop. It's also the mirror of that, seeing how they develop you and what comes out. It was an interesting point and probably very true. Some of the profundity may have been lost behind a fug of booze, though, the conversation was a fairly incoherent medley of politics, psychology and nationalism.
Also at the barbecue yesterday were two other babies, one only a few weeks old, one a couple of months behind F. V and I both swore the youngest one was much smaller than F had ever been. It wasn't true, F turned out to have been shorter and lighter at birth. It's just impossible to imagine her as a little red rag of a person like that any more, all tiny and floppy and crinkly. Not now she's mastering flirting and chatting, or has decided that other people sneezing is the funniest thing ever.
F has done a heap of developing. Even a video from two months back, showing her trying food in a spoon for the first time, shows a totally different little girl. She can sit upright unaided now. Sometimes, anyway, if you prop her up right. She hasn't quite worked out that leaning forward will upset the balance. But yesterday was the first time she did it without the set up, she grabbed the bar across her pram and then stayed there for about fifteen minutes, happily doing pull-ups and gnawing on the fabric cover.
She plays piano with me and enjoys singing along. She can just about get her nap back in her mouth without our help. She can eat a wafer biscuit, biting out soggy mouthfuls with her two baby teeth. She can stand upright if she's got something to hold on to. All this is new in the last week or so alone.
And physical achievements like these don't really get across the way that she's appearing as a person now, her character emerging from the confused crying and constant sleeping she did as a newborn. As though a little more of her brain wakes up every time she does. She's interested in things, she asks to be taken to stuff that's caught her eye. She sulks if she's not allowed to, e.g. chew through daddy's earphone cables.
After the first bloom of interest in a project has waned, I'm frequently guilty of moving on to something else and never finishing what I started. This is a trait supposedly common in people born in a Dragon Chinese zodiac year, as I was. Knowing that has often made an excellent excuse, of course, astrology is usually a self-fulfilling prophesy I find. Scorpios are brooding, passionate and secretive? Excellent! I'll maintain those character flaws instead of working on them, I'm supposed to be that way.
I mention this as an excuse for why I haven't written anything on this blog for two weeks. Being a father gets exhausting and difficult. It is easy to get tired, and I have been feeling that lately. It isn't that F's not doing as much funny or sweet stuff or being less inspirational, just that I haven't been able to muster the energy to write about it.
F is a different project every day, in a sense. I don't think of her as a project, a job or a chore, despite her occasional efforts to convince me otherwise. It would be impossible to lose interest, she's just too interesting.
The first time she tries something out, it doesn't usually work. The wafer biscuits, for example - watching her trying to get her hands to do what she wants is fascinating. You know the intent is there, but it's like seeing a first time crane operator on their first demolition job The things that fall down and break aren't quite the ones she's aiming for yet. But she doesn't give up, she keeps trying. And she's also very good at asking for help, often quite vocally.
When I started writing this particular entry, it was a bit of an uphill struggle. The tiredness I'm still feeling, the suspicion I'm writing to a rather empty gallery, the typical writer's niggle of 'what am I writing all this for?' - all there in spades today. Luckily F woke up and wanted to play. We played Scrabble. F loves playing Scrabble, it's one of her favourites. I hold her up to the box and she takes the title printed on the side as an instruction as she tries to pull it out of the stack of other board games.
Half an hour of that has restored my faith in the world. That's why I like being a dad so much. F can be a better, more developed person every time she wakes up. She's very inspirational that way. She makes me feel I might be able to do it too.
I'd prefer to develop into a person less likely to get so over-excited about a bag of scrabble letters they start crying, mind you. Let's face it, though, I'm a wuss. That would probably be a step up.
 |
| No month |
 |
| One |
 |
| Two or three? Not sure |
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| Four |
 |
| Five |
 |
| Six |
Saturday, June 29, 2013
Firsts
F has a tooth now.
We know this because she uses it to savage any hands that are left within range. She's good at luring you in, as well. If you touch her, she does a cute grabby-cuddly thing that makes you go 'awww ook at da riddoo baby'. That lasts just long enough for her to bend over your hand as though she's going to kiss it, but don't be fooled. She's actually going to clamp her 90% gums on your knuckle, then shear the 10% tooth backwards and forwards as though she's sharpening it on a strop. No idea why, it really doesn't need it.
This is a big first for her. She's actually been pretty reasonable, considering razor-sharp nuggins of enamelled bone are breaking out inside her mouth. Not too grumpy, not too sleepless, not too much indigestion. Lots of drool, but not so that I could really tell the difference.
We're starting her on solid food. Well, solider food. It's all paste or goo, the kind of stuff I used to serve to elderly people on nursing wards. Most of it looks and smells pretty unappetising. V says the pureed fruit tastes good, I'll take her word for it. The salmon and stew things I tried this week (to check if they were hot enough, I hasten to add, I'm not one to steal my daughter's food without a good reason) were blobby, bland things.
I guess that's appropriate, though, babies aren't allowed most of the best foods when they're starting out. No green leafy salad, no honey, no salt, no sugar, no chocolate, no pulses, no dairy. It's a miserable list, and one I seem to have an unerring ability to forget.
After the midwife told us that letting her lick a finger's worth of whatever we're eating is fine, it gets her interested in food, I keep thinking 'oh, a tiny bit of this won't matter'. Then V vociferously points out that I'm about to feed her, oh, I don't know, bloody steak with a honey soy glaze, served with a cheesy puy lentil bake and a mound of raw spinach. With twixes stuck in it. You know, something really appropriate.
I'm just keen to let her try things, I guess, it's very exciting watching her eat something for the first time. I can't read her reactions, though. She always looks as though you've shoved an old sock under her nose on spoon one. By the last spoon, she'll be crying if you don't feed her fast enough. We haven't found anything she doesn't seem to like yet. I guess she takes after me, and will happily eat old tyres so long as there's bread or pickles to go with. Or peanut butter. Which she also isn't allowed, that reminds me.
So feeding is going well. Like a fish to water, I'd say, if that didn't imply a degree of smooth and liquid grace that's not quite there yet. She also takes after me (and farfar) in her ability to get food in her eyebrows whilst eating. Like a hog in muck, that's probably nearer the mark. Very happy, anyway.
The other first for this week was yesterday. I had a voice audition to go and prep for, a computer game thing where they wanted samples of me screaming. So I did a vocal warm-up before I went out, something I've not got round to doing for several months. Lots of vocal swooping up and down scales, saying 'ma-may-mee-moo-more', blowing your lips out - all that stuff that actors do with total po-faced seriousness before a show, something that usually makes it look even more idiotic.
F sat on V's lap throughout, staring at me in puzzled disbelief. 'Is that something people do?' she seemed to be thinking. 'Will I have to learn that? I'm really not sure about growing up any more. I think I'll just stay like I am now.'
For me, this was my first thrilling taste of how she'll react to everything I ever say or do while she's a teenager.
We know this because she uses it to savage any hands that are left within range. She's good at luring you in, as well. If you touch her, she does a cute grabby-cuddly thing that makes you go 'awww ook at da riddoo baby'. That lasts just long enough for her to bend over your hand as though she's going to kiss it, but don't be fooled. She's actually going to clamp her 90% gums on your knuckle, then shear the 10% tooth backwards and forwards as though she's sharpening it on a strop. No idea why, it really doesn't need it.
This is a big first for her. She's actually been pretty reasonable, considering razor-sharp nuggins of enamelled bone are breaking out inside her mouth. Not too grumpy, not too sleepless, not too much indigestion. Lots of drool, but not so that I could really tell the difference.
We're starting her on solid food. Well, solider food. It's all paste or goo, the kind of stuff I used to serve to elderly people on nursing wards. Most of it looks and smells pretty unappetising. V says the pureed fruit tastes good, I'll take her word for it. The salmon and stew things I tried this week (to check if they were hot enough, I hasten to add, I'm not one to steal my daughter's food without a good reason) were blobby, bland things.
I guess that's appropriate, though, babies aren't allowed most of the best foods when they're starting out. No green leafy salad, no honey, no salt, no sugar, no chocolate, no pulses, no dairy. It's a miserable list, and one I seem to have an unerring ability to forget.
After the midwife told us that letting her lick a finger's worth of whatever we're eating is fine, it gets her interested in food, I keep thinking 'oh, a tiny bit of this won't matter'. Then V vociferously points out that I'm about to feed her, oh, I don't know, bloody steak with a honey soy glaze, served with a cheesy puy lentil bake and a mound of raw spinach. With twixes stuck in it. You know, something really appropriate.
I'm just keen to let her try things, I guess, it's very exciting watching her eat something for the first time. I can't read her reactions, though. She always looks as though you've shoved an old sock under her nose on spoon one. By the last spoon, she'll be crying if you don't feed her fast enough. We haven't found anything she doesn't seem to like yet. I guess she takes after me, and will happily eat old tyres so long as there's bread or pickles to go with. Or peanut butter. Which she also isn't allowed, that reminds me.
So feeding is going well. Like a fish to water, I'd say, if that didn't imply a degree of smooth and liquid grace that's not quite there yet. She also takes after me (and farfar) in her ability to get food in her eyebrows whilst eating. Like a hog in muck, that's probably nearer the mark. Very happy, anyway.
The other first for this week was yesterday. I had a voice audition to go and prep for, a computer game thing where they wanted samples of me screaming. So I did a vocal warm-up before I went out, something I've not got round to doing for several months. Lots of vocal swooping up and down scales, saying 'ma-may-mee-moo-more', blowing your lips out - all that stuff that actors do with total po-faced seriousness before a show, something that usually makes it look even more idiotic.
F sat on V's lap throughout, staring at me in puzzled disbelief. 'Is that something people do?' she seemed to be thinking. 'Will I have to learn that? I'm really not sure about growing up any more. I think I'll just stay like I am now.'
For me, this was my first thrilling taste of how she'll react to everything I ever say or do while she's a teenager.
Friday, June 21, 2013
Dealership
New pram.
V has been fixated on getting a new one for months. More months than we've had F for, I suspect. We've got a hand-me-down from Uncle D, a perfectly functional three-wheeler with a basinette fitting for baby. Nothing fancy, maybe a little battle-weary, but it works.
Well, okay, it worked. Three wheels is a good and stable arrangement, but the centre of gravity on the pram wasn't as low as it could be. Try and get it over a steep curb and it could feel a bit precarious. And it didn't have free wheels, you have to push down on the handlebars to turn a corner. V isn't as strong as usual at the moment after her illness, so pushing it up and down hills or round supermarkets was a lot tougher than it should have been.
And it was old, and the wrong colour, and one of the tyres wouldn't reinflate, and then screws started falling out of it for no obvious reason and look, it's just not even a decent design compared to all these new ones on this website and goddammit okay we'll go and get a new one. It only took mentioning it three times a day for three months to get me to agree.
Now, I'm not an unreasonable man (spoiler: I am an entirely unreasonable man). In all honesty, I couldn't really tell the difference between pram A and pram B when asked to give an opinion on a catalogue image. The idea of going to a special pram shop and trying to pick one out felt like a terrible minefield of an experience, especially when I know my wife already has strong and preconceived opinions on what we should get. "You like this one? Really?" Pressure plate tripped, kaboom, legs flying in all directions.
But it needed doing, so I steeled myself.
God, they're like car dealerships. Lot after lot of glistening moulded contours, sturdy all-terrain wheels and folding cockpits. Sat-nav and hidden machine guns on option, I don't doubt. And very helpful sales staff, ready to give you six confidential reasons why they personally would pick the 5000 SEK model over the 2500 SEK one, all of which revolved around the terrible risks to your infant's health entailed by not having adjustable suspension or a built-in cup holder.
Once I'd got over my curmudgeoning, though, it was kind of fun putting F in new buggies and taking her for quick spins up and down the aisles. She was definitely enjoying it, which cheered me on, at least. We got a four-wheeler with easy action steering, a seat that can face forward or back depending on who's sulking about what and red go-fasta stripes on the hood. As well as a sticker that promises the extremely dubious quality of Polar Protection. Yeah, just like Scott had.
Everyone was happy, not least the three sales assistants we got through. V bartered 10% off for taking the last of that particular model (Emmeljunga's Ozone. They are so like cars, right down to the desperately trendy urban names) off their hands, seeing as how it was the one out on display. Until the next one that they put there after we'd left, at any rate, but that's just my cynicism talking.
There's a kicker to this tale.
The morning after I fully expected our breakfast conversation to be about something other than new prams. How naive. "When we fly to Scotland, we're going to have to get a cheap and rubbish pram to take with us, because I'm not trusting Ryanair with this one."
Facepalm.
V has been fixated on getting a new one for months. More months than we've had F for, I suspect. We've got a hand-me-down from Uncle D, a perfectly functional three-wheeler with a basinette fitting for baby. Nothing fancy, maybe a little battle-weary, but it works.
Well, okay, it worked. Three wheels is a good and stable arrangement, but the centre of gravity on the pram wasn't as low as it could be. Try and get it over a steep curb and it could feel a bit precarious. And it didn't have free wheels, you have to push down on the handlebars to turn a corner. V isn't as strong as usual at the moment after her illness, so pushing it up and down hills or round supermarkets was a lot tougher than it should have been.
And it was old, and the wrong colour, and one of the tyres wouldn't reinflate, and then screws started falling out of it for no obvious reason and look, it's just not even a decent design compared to all these new ones on this website and goddammit okay we'll go and get a new one. It only took mentioning it three times a day for three months to get me to agree.
Now, I'm not an unreasonable man (spoiler: I am an entirely unreasonable man). In all honesty, I couldn't really tell the difference between pram A and pram B when asked to give an opinion on a catalogue image. The idea of going to a special pram shop and trying to pick one out felt like a terrible minefield of an experience, especially when I know my wife already has strong and preconceived opinions on what we should get. "You like this one? Really?" Pressure plate tripped, kaboom, legs flying in all directions.
But it needed doing, so I steeled myself.
God, they're like car dealerships. Lot after lot of glistening moulded contours, sturdy all-terrain wheels and folding cockpits. Sat-nav and hidden machine guns on option, I don't doubt. And very helpful sales staff, ready to give you six confidential reasons why they personally would pick the 5000 SEK model over the 2500 SEK one, all of which revolved around the terrible risks to your infant's health entailed by not having adjustable suspension or a built-in cup holder.
Once I'd got over my curmudgeoning, though, it was kind of fun putting F in new buggies and taking her for quick spins up and down the aisles. She was definitely enjoying it, which cheered me on, at least. We got a four-wheeler with easy action steering, a seat that can face forward or back depending on who's sulking about what and red go-fasta stripes on the hood. As well as a sticker that promises the extremely dubious quality of Polar Protection. Yeah, just like Scott had.
Everyone was happy, not least the three sales assistants we got through. V bartered 10% off for taking the last of that particular model (Emmeljunga's Ozone. They are so like cars, right down to the desperately trendy urban names) off their hands, seeing as how it was the one out on display. Until the next one that they put there after we'd left, at any rate, but that's just my cynicism talking.
There's a kicker to this tale.
The morning after I fully expected our breakfast conversation to be about something other than new prams. How naive. "When we fly to Scotland, we're going to have to get a cheap and rubbish pram to take with us, because I'm not trusting Ryanair with this one."
Facepalm.
Tuesday, June 18, 2013
Bring Your Daughter To Work Day
I often get work at very short notice. Acting is great this way, because you might be having a quiet month and feeling as though that's it, your career is over. Then pow! Out of nowhere you get something and it's all hoots and gravy again.
Equally, acting is crap this way, because out of nowhere you get a miniscule opportunity, you work like stink for it and then have nothing to show when the audition turns out to be for someone else entirely and they just didn't explain it properly.
Not that this was one of those times. This was a voice job, one where I'm expected to liase with the client via Skype during the recording. Said client kept changing their mind about what dates and times would actually work. When it came to it, V was tied up with a follow-up x-ray, and it turned out that none of the rest of the family were available to babysit. So F came to the studio with me.
The studio head was entirely welcoming about this. He has younglings himself, he knows how it goes, and he said actors often bring their kids in with them. After all, you get hermetically sealed into a sound-proof booth so that your 'creativity' can't leak out and disrupt the delicate equipment. No matter how loud your child, the end recording isn't going to be affected.
All well and good, but when it comes down to it, no amount of explaining to F that daddy was going to bugger off and leave her alone for a while was really going to help.
We had a decent length walk out in the sun beforehand. I even got to the studio a little early so I could feed her and tuck her up. "Make yourself at home," the guy who let me in said rather snidely, as I whipped out a bottle and a baby and set to.
I left her snuggled under a blanket in her pram, safe in the dim recesses of the staff kitchen, then left to do the recording, hoping that she'd be okay. Optimism is a fine thing, if rarely rewarded in life.
The recording went fine, two sides of A4 about some deathly dull corporate website tool in eight minutes flat. Coming out of the seclusion of the booth, I found everyone in the office had donned earphones and was huddled in front of their computer monitors with studious looks, the kind that tell the world they are working on something really important and cannot possibly come away from the terminal just now.
F was howling and weeping in the kitchen, kicking the sides of her pram in a panic, unable to work out why she'd been abandoned. She was fine once she'd been picked up and reassured that this wasn't an orphanage. It took me a bit longer to calm myself down, not that my own fears were any less unreasoning.
Still, good to know it can be done. I don't think I want her to get used to being dumped in kitchens, exactly, but despite our mutual terror nothing bad actually happened. Both of us will have to get used to this in due course for our lives to run normally.
Equally, acting is crap this way, because out of nowhere you get a miniscule opportunity, you work like stink for it and then have nothing to show when the audition turns out to be for someone else entirely and they just didn't explain it properly.
Not that this was one of those times. This was a voice job, one where I'm expected to liase with the client via Skype during the recording. Said client kept changing their mind about what dates and times would actually work. When it came to it, V was tied up with a follow-up x-ray, and it turned out that none of the rest of the family were available to babysit. So F came to the studio with me.
The studio head was entirely welcoming about this. He has younglings himself, he knows how it goes, and he said actors often bring their kids in with them. After all, you get hermetically sealed into a sound-proof booth so that your 'creativity' can't leak out and disrupt the delicate equipment. No matter how loud your child, the end recording isn't going to be affected.
All well and good, but when it comes down to it, no amount of explaining to F that daddy was going to bugger off and leave her alone for a while was really going to help.
We had a decent length walk out in the sun beforehand. I even got to the studio a little early so I could feed her and tuck her up. "Make yourself at home," the guy who let me in said rather snidely, as I whipped out a bottle and a baby and set to.
I left her snuggled under a blanket in her pram, safe in the dim recesses of the staff kitchen, then left to do the recording, hoping that she'd be okay. Optimism is a fine thing, if rarely rewarded in life.
The recording went fine, two sides of A4 about some deathly dull corporate website tool in eight minutes flat. Coming out of the seclusion of the booth, I found everyone in the office had donned earphones and was huddled in front of their computer monitors with studious looks, the kind that tell the world they are working on something really important and cannot possibly come away from the terminal just now.
F was howling and weeping in the kitchen, kicking the sides of her pram in a panic, unable to work out why she'd been abandoned. She was fine once she'd been picked up and reassured that this wasn't an orphanage. It took me a bit longer to calm myself down, not that my own fears were any less unreasoning.
Still, good to know it can be done. I don't think I want her to get used to being dumped in kitchens, exactly, but despite our mutual terror nothing bad actually happened. Both of us will have to get used to this in due course for our lives to run normally.
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