The Gallery - One day of sunshine and showers, beaks and claws, pipes and drums.

Welcome to Sunday, 29 August 2010. This is what it looked like where we were:

This week, those of us who take part in the Gallery have been asked to take part in an almighty photo journal, a "what we all did on our Bank Holiday Sunday", a snapshot of blogging life, on one, for most of us probably not particularly important, Sunday in August. 

Because for three bloggers, Sian, Josie and Eva, it was an incredibly important day.  On 27 August, they flew out to Bangladesh to see first hand the work that Save The Children are doing.  They are already sending amazing posts, photos and tweets back.  Please think of them, read what they write, and support Save the Children.

Back in Blighty, and a million emotional  and humbling miles from the poverty they are experiencing, this is what we did. The Floors Castle Massed Pipe Bands Day. A wonderfully Scottish, goose-pimple-inducing, paddling-pool-fishing, falconry-watching, umbrella-sheltering, roast-hog-eating, caber-tossing, skirling, dancing, marching celebration of the idiosyncracies, charm, and weather that the British Bank Holiday (despite it not actually being a bank holiday in Scotland) is all about:

 

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I have a shame-faced admission.  I have amended this post after publishing, because I failed totally to put in the most important part - about the work Sian, Josie and Eva are doing for Save the Children, with the Blogladesh initiative.    I suppose that's a neat image for the way in which we all (at least I hope it's not just me) have brilliant intentions of doing something that helps those less fortunate, but get wrapped up in our own lives and forget to do even the little we can.  I am very ashamed, and apologise to them, and to Tara, who wanted to use the Gallery to publicise what they are doing.

In my defence, I'd left blank the paragraph I was going to put in so I could put the links in, then forgot to do so at midnight last night after a six hour drive and a bad night the night before, then published the post, then linked to the Gallery from my phone and the train, then realised and spent the rest of the day traipsing round London looking desperately for an internet cafe so I could make the amendment.  Without succcess.  I did fall in the Round Pond though, so I've got my comeuppance...

The Gallery - This picture is on my wall

This is the only picture I have ever taken that I have printed out, put in a frame, and hung on my wall.

I took it on our honeymoon in Positano. I think it looks impossible, like something Escher would have imagined.

I am very proud of it.

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This picture is in response to Tara's Gallery, and unusually, I have taken the brief literally this week and actually given you a picture that, in and of itself, I am proud of.  Instead of one of something I am proud of having done, or made, or given birth to...

I bet there are going to be loads of really amazing pictures in the Gallery this week, both literal, and not-so.  Go and have a look!

What's in your kitchen (and what should I have in mine?)

The most expensive thing I've ever bought is a house.

The second most expensive thing I've ever bought, is, you guessed it, the old house.

The third most expensive thing I've ever bought (by a significant distance, I hasten to add) is, I think, about to be a kitchen...

The people were here today. They've got lots of whizz-bangy, exciting, state-of-the-art, hideously expensive ideas.  I've got some too, but not as many as they do.

So, before I look pleadingly at B, sign on the dotted line and head off to seduce the bank manager, I'd love some help:

What's in your kitchen? What's not in your kitchen but you wish it was?  What should I have (and, perhaps more importantly, what should I not have) in mine?

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The picture is not my current kitchen (funnily enough)... in fact it's Mary Berry's and is from the Beautiful Kitchens Blog for which thank you.  Needless to say, it's rather larger than mine.

(Not) the Gallery - Memory

This isn't my Gallery entry. It can't be. There's no picture in it.

Tara set A Memory as the subject for the Gallery this week, and I can't do it.  Because how do you separate your memory of a moment from the photograph you took of it?  How do you choose a photograph that represents a memory, when the very existence of the photograph affects, and indeed, can create, the memory itself?

What's your first memory?  Mine is swimming.  I was about 2 1/2 and I was in  Haverhill Swimming Pool with my Daddy.  I was wearing a green towelling (aah, the 70s!) swimming costume with  a white trim.  That's all I remember, not the chlorine smell, or the noise, or the excitement of the splashing; just the costume and me, and my Daddy.

Only that's not my first memory at all.  I thought it was. I've told people it was.  And then about ten years ago I was looking through my parents' photo albums and there it was. My memory.  It's not a memory of the event. It's a memory of the photograph.*  

There's a book by Penelope Lively called The Photograph in which Glyn, a landscape historian, whose job is to discover the truth of the land through photographs and documents, discovers a photograph which changes utterly his view of his life, and in particular his relationship with his wife.  His memories of years of marriage are utterly undone by that snapshot, that moment in time captured on paper.

The journalist Jane Shilling wrote this in response:

A click, a flash, a whirr, and there we are, captured for ever in a moment of absolute truth: not the approximate truth of memory, which drifts and blurs in the retelling, but a palpable, glossy, 6in by 4in chunk torn from the fabric of passing time and stuck down here, in this album, to remind us, in case we should forget, of who we were, and what we were doing at a certain instant.

So where is the memory in a photograph?  Or is the photograph the memory itself?

There is one other photograph I would have, could have, perhaps should have, if it were not for the fact that it shows the faces of lots of my friends and given I don't put my own face up here, it seems unfair to put up theirs, used this week.

It was taken (not by me, so I shouldn't really use it anyway) at the wedding of my wonderful brother- and sister-in-law, T and K.  T is B's brother, K is one of my very best girlfriends from university.  They met utterly independently of B and me, but it meant that their wedding was a coming together of all of my friends as well as B's lovely family.

The only problem?  I don't really remember it. As my own wedding did, it passed in a blur.  S and A were born by c-section nine days earlier.  The wedding was four hundred miles away.  We had both, pre-scan, been asked to read.  We had said yes.  We wanted to go, we were going to go. We went.

And we were there. We read, we sang hymns, we wept just a little (well, I did).  I know all this, because I was told, and because I have seen the pictures, but really, I don't remember much of it at all except for one moment.  We had left the cathedral, we had got to the reception and a hundred of B's relations and family friends all milled around, wanting to congratulate us, to hold the scraps of humanity we had with us, to smile at L who was on top flirty 19-month-old form.  And I wasn't interested in any of them.  I remember - it's about the only thing I do remember - smiling and nodding and walking, as purposefully as I could, through the be-hatted and be-kilted guests to the far corner where my girlfriends, the friends I have known for nearly fifteen years now, were sitting, thrusting a baby into a pair of waiting arms,and plonking myself down and thinking for the first time in nine days: "relax".

And at that moment, "click".  A memory: fixed in time, like a fly in amber.

I'm sure it's not T and K's favourite picture of what was clearly an amazing day.  But it is mine.  Because I remember it.   I'm just sorry I can't show it to you.




*which clearly should have, and could have been another entry for this week, only funnily enough it's not digital, and it's at my parents and I had no way of scanning it in...

Terrible Two

I'm told that twins are harder work than one.  Everyone says so, both in words and silently.  You hear it in the pitying looks you get when you waddle past at 34 weeks pregnant and bigger than most at full term, or the gasps of shock from old ladies who peer in the pram, or the admiring glances when, by some miracle, and for more than ten seconds in a row, both babies are on top cute form.

But, you know what? I never really felt it.

I think the thing about having twins, especially after having a singleton, is that you realise that all you can do is to deal with what life throws at you in the best way you possibly can.  And yes, at times it feels impossibly hard, but it did with L too, and I can't honestly say that the worst moments with L were worse than the worst moments with A and S.

Until now.

Now I get it.  Now, two, at nearly two, are hard.  Harder than one.  Oh, so much harder than one...

We're at that stage.  And the fact that I know it's a stage isn't making it easier.  That stage where the penalty for failure is death.

And I fail.  Regularly, reliably and unremittingly, I fail.  I take off their pyjamas when they want them on. I choose the wrong socks.  I take the banana out of its skin.  I give them macaroni cheese for supper.  I put them in their pushchair.  I get them out of their pushchair.  I give them the wrong toy.  I stop them playing with the door.  I say "no".

So I fail.  And the punishment is swift and relentless.  Screams of pain, of misery, of years of unloved neglect.  Of the unrecoverable sadness that only a well-fed, cossetted, adored 20-month-old can feel when she's been told she can't have a packet of raisins.

And sitting here, both of them asleep upstairs, it's funny.  But oh, when you're living it, when you're jiggling a writhing, caterwauling baby on your hip, as she pushes and fights with rage-fuelled strength, flailing with both arms at your glasses, yanking on your hair, while you desperately try to soothe her, though with no idea what it is that you did wrong, and simultaneously try to ignore the desperate wails from your ankles as the other one screams with fury because she can't take off her shoes, knowing all along that you're failing their big sister, who just wants you to read me a story Mummy please, the funny side seems so very far away.

It's just a stage.  It's born of frustration.  I know it. They can't talk.  They can't say "Not those socks; the blue ones please Mummy", or "Please could you possibly cut up the banana for me in slices no more than half a centimetre thick" so they voice their displeasure, they express their personalities, they show their independence in the only way they can.  All babies do it.  It's part of being nearly two.  I get it. I really do. 

I just wish I'd realised how calm my life was with just the one.

Charity Begins

If you have enough to eat, and a safe place to sleep, and nobody wants to kill you or take you from your family, you are among the most fortunate few of a troubled world, and you should never forget your sheer luck.

I read this last Sunday. Joseph O'Connor said it in the Observer magazine, and, although it's certainly not the first time that's been pointed out to me, and I'm equally sure it won't be the last, it's been niggling at me.

I'm lucky. I'm so, so, lucky.  My whole family is, and most of the people I know.

It's not just O'Connor's words though. It's these pictures:



which Potty Mummy posted a couple of days ago, and the reports that Motherhood and Anarchy posted from the Jheelpur slum in Bangladesh, as well as the fantastic support that Josie, Eva and Sian are giving to Save the Children through the Blogladesh initiative.

And the question is, what am I going to do about it?

And while I realise the dramatic answer would be to say that I'm going to whisk my entire family off somewhere to "make a difference", I am also reminded of Milton: They also serve, who only stand and wait.

I feel, secretly, that giving money to charity isn't enough, that I should be the Borders' answer to Mother Teresa.  To be doing.  To be putting my body on the line.  Getting my hands dirty.  Going to Bangladesh, like Motherhood and Anarchy did, and Josie, Sian and Eva are.  But I can't.  And the amazing people who can and are doing those things need money to do so.


B and I already give regularly to charity, and we also sponsor three children in Zimbabwe, Afghanistan and Mali, but somehow, now that none of that is my money, it feels like I am not doing anything, or perhaps just that we can do more.  So I'm going to go back to basics, and I'm going to tithe my own, small,  income.

I'm also going to do (and indeed am doing) something that that British side of my nature thinks is rather inappropriate, (and that, having seen what the Blogladesh initiative is doing, now also feels a bit lame, but still... ) I'm going to blog about it.   Each month I'm going to pick a charity, and I'm going to write about it, in the hope, not that you'll all think I'm wonderfully smug for giving money to charity, but rather that whatever publicity charities can get is valuable, and might be of some help, however small.

So, and with apologies to Save the Children, because the video was actually the first thing that I saw that got me thinking like this, and because it seems to cover the aims of all those who have made me think over the last week, 10% of my last month's income has been sent to Unicef:

"We believe that nurturing and caring for children are the cornerstones of human progress.  UNICEF was created with this purpose in mind – to work with others to overcome the obstacles that poverty, violence, disease and discrimination place in a child’s path.  We believe that we can, together, advance the cause of humanity.

We advocate for measures to give children the best start in life, because proper care at the youngest age forms the strongest foundation for a person’s future."

You can find out how you can support Unicef by clicking here.

A tale of two chickens

I sent B to a large supermarket (yes, that one, you know what I'm talking about but they're not paying me for this post (quelle surprise!) so I'm not giving them any free advertising) the other day to buy a chicken.

He fulfilled the task admirably, coming back with a lovely yellow, corn-fed, happy chicken that had lived its days merrily pecking in the dirt and probably having massages and  manicures for all I know.  The only problem was that he'd bought a chicken for six and I'd forgotten to mention that we were 11.

So I went out to the local supermarket (Haldanes. They're not paying me either, but given there's only one of them, they deserve the advertising) and bought another one.  There wasn't any option: it was chicken or chicken.  I got chicken.

Now, I know B had instinctively bought the super, friendly, happy, chicken, but then that's because that's the sort of thing we can do.  We are lucky enough to have sufficient disposable income to be able to pay just shy of £10 for a chicken because we are also woolly liberal enough to worry about whether our chicken has had a nice life before it gets decapitated and stuck in a hot oven with an onion up its bum.   I appreciate that there are lots of people who don't have the luxury of that choice and to be honest, I think I would have said the difference came more in how you felt about what you were eating than in what you were actually putting in your mouth.

It turns out I was wrong.

Here are the nutritional values of those two chickens: 

Look at the calories.  And the fat content.  And give yourselves no prizes for working out which one is which.