The reader

I'd always hoped that Anya would be one of those kids who could say as an adult: "I grew up in a house filled with books." Technology being what it is, the line is more likely to be: "I grew up in a house whose e-readers had unusually large cloud-based virtual libraries." But...you get the idea.

Anya, for her part, adores books, and has done ever since we showed her "Monkey see, monkey zoo," a soft fabric number full of textured, manipulable lions and penguins.

Nowadays, she'll often want to take a book to bed with her and flick through it as she drops off to sleep, much like her parents. Going to bed, she gets so excited by the prospect of some pre-sleep storytime that she'll often clear out an entire bookshelf in toddling back and forth with things she wants us to read to her. She can spend quite hefty periods of time just leaving through her books, pointing out zebras and butterflies and bees and other favourite animals.



It's the start of the habit of a lifetime.

Food: Christmas dinner



We had Althea over for Christmas dinner after Anya went to sleep, and it's fair to say that we pushed the boat out a bit. Five courses, plus cheese and petit fours and lashings of fizz and red wine. Still feeling a bit bloated now.

Here's the menu:

Amuse bouche of pomegranate, salmon roe, and ginger tapioca

Salmorejo with scallops, bugs and tomato crisps

Duck roasted in young merlot with figs and apricots

Mulled wine granita

Berry and orange trifle

Cheese

Petits fours and tea

It was actually really easy to do in advance and would easily scale up to more people. We've got a fair amount of leftovers.

Here's a few of the courses:

The amuse bouche was dead easy and only needed a little advance preparation. The idea is to play off that weird textural sensation you get from salmon roe, that intensely fishy, golden amber stuff that sometimes turns up on top of sushi.

When you think about it, there's quite a few other foods that have this quality to them. Tapioca is one--something that I love in that Taiwan pearl milk tea and in a good tapioca pudding. I hated it as a kid because I felt it was like eating frogspawn, but that same quality makes it a good match for the roe. Plus, you can flavour it with whatever you want.

For the third ingredient I had wanted some citrus. There's a tragic blog somewhere out there of a guy who worked at the Fat Duck, Heston Blumenthal's garlanded fine dining restaurant, and spent days teasing apart pink grapefruit segments into individual cells for a garnish on his liquorice-poached salmon. I wasn't going to do anything like that, but some citrus fruits fall apart into cells much more easily. Pomelo breaks up in your hands and finger lime, a variety from Australia, will exude tart green spheres like caviar when you cut it in half and roll it between two fingers.

Well, Kate was doing the shopping and wasn't able to find either of these, so in a moment of inspiration she picked the ingredient that made the dish: pomegranate. The roe is actually very intense so it needs something like pomegranate to stand up to it.

The only bit of pre-preparation is making the tapioca. I flavoured mine with ginger but really you can use whatever marries well with the other ingredients-I was thinking of using anise if the citrus had been available. Just boil up a pan of water, add your flavourings--in this case, half a dozen slices of ginger root--add some seed tapioca, and first boil covered for 15 minutes then leave to cool for another 15. Drain and remove the flavouring and refrigerate--you can do this the day before.

On the day, get out your ingredients and take some of those Asian soup spoons that fancypants restaurants use for these things. You want to eat the whole thing in one mouthful. Place a biggish basil leaf on the spoon and then place some little dollops of tapioca and pomegranate seeds onto it, before taking a little roe and plopping it in the middle. A few shavings of lime zest and it's ready to serve.

OK that's enough for now. Other recipes to follow shortly.

'Twas the night before Christmas...



Actually, it's Christmas morning now and Anya is having her breakfast. This pile of presents will start being demolished shortly. For everyone reading, thanks for paying attention and I'll try to return  to a more regular schedule soon. I have a new job and new phone, which has made life a bit hectic and merits blog posts in its own right. So Happy Christmas, or hanukkah, or season's greetings. Missing you all!

Books: Minimum of Two, by Tim Winton

I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that Tim Winton is my favourite novelist writing in English today. And I think in some ways he's more suited to the short story than the novel.

His male characters are generally stuck, mentally and emotionally, going round in circles and unable to break old habits; his female characters have more gumption, but their lives still change in baby-steps. Everyone, to some extent, is still the prisoner of things that happened to them as adolescents or young adults. As a result, he's better at capturing that sort of pregnant stasis that informs some of the great short stories, rather than the movement that you need to animate a novel.

I was switched on to him by 'The Turning', a collection of stories from 2004 which gradually coalesces into a sort of novel. Characters recur through different stories at different stages of their lives; eventually it builds into a sort of messy coming-of-age story for a community, or even a sensibility. It's not a new technique but it's beautifully handled and his empathy for the characters shines from every page.

"Minimum of Two" is in many ways a dry run for "The Turning", in that there's likewise a couple of recurring stories threaded through the collection, both of them picking up on characters from earlier novels. The main strand here tells the story of a musician, his wife and child from birth to the age of three; they're young, hard up, in the suburbs of Perth, and he's struggling to cope with the build up and aftermath of his father's slow death from cancer.

It's a flimsier work than "The Turning". In particular, the title piece--with its tender but muleish male protagonist, wise but indifferent wife, and a plot filled with violence, bitterness, incomprehension and sex--looks in retrospect like a bad pastiche of a Tim Winton story. Another tale, about a cafe owner confronting death in the form of an ailing customer, is a little too neat and parable-like to carry it off.

But the characters are so powerful. His protagonists are almost all in some sort of spiritual torment--and when they're not, they're simmering in its wake or making their first attempts to move beyond it. They're haunted by their pasts in a way that's reminiscent of Graham Greene. The result is rarely monotonous or depressing, especially when Winton can write with such apt brevity.

This book's probably only for Winton fans. But even here, when he's at his best he says more in ten pages than many writers manage over the course of a career.

"Ta!"

While my mum was out here she taught Anya this word. Whenever Anya handed her a toy, or a sock, or a half-chewed bit of food, mum would say "Ta!" And pretty quickly Anya picked it up.

But there's often a bit of a slip in meaning with these things. Most of us think of "ta" or indeed "thank you" as something said by the recipient of an object or favour to indicate their gratitude. But Anya sees it as describing the act of handing something over. More specifically, the act of her handing something to someone else.

So she's never yet said "Ta!" when I've given something to her. But frequently she'll toddle up to me, hold her bunny out, and say--with the easy imperiousness of someone who's grown up with servants--"Ta!" And then stand like a statue until I accept it. What she's really saying is less "thank you" than: "I won't be needing this any longer, daddy, kindly take it away."

I realise that, in a sense, she has grown up with servants (they're called "parents"), but still. It's like living with a midget Maggie Smith.

The euro veto

I must admit I'm feeling a bit conflicted about Friday's news out of the EU summit.

On the one hand, my instinctive reaction when a Tory politician returns from an EU summit with the continent's other leaders declaring him isolated is to blame the Brit. That's especially the case when his main objection was to the financial transactions tax: it's an excellent idea and should be supported.

But should David Cameron have signed up to the treaty proposal that 23 of the 27 countries signed up to? Absolutely not!

Europe is suffering a slow-motion run on its peripheral economies because a river of capital that once flowed towards them is turning back. Investors are betting that these economies are going to suffer minimal growth or deflation--and may even leave the euro zone, causing dramatic depreciation. So they are taking their money out of these economies and putting it somewhere safer.

As an excellent, exasperated Martin Wolf column in the FT pointed out last week (no link, my phone browser is bust), this is a balance of payments crisis. What's needed to stop it is to convince investors that the deflation-and-dissolution scenario is wrong. Two things that would help with that objective are some prospect of economic growth in the periphery and some evidence that the ECB will stand behind euro zone debt to avert a breakup.

But the diagnosis that seems to have come from the EU's leadership is that this wasn't about balance of payments, but about government debt. I mean, if the main actions being planned at a big summit in the middle of a crisis are about restricting governments' ability to rack up debt, you'd hope that government debt played an important role in the crisis, right? Right?

Because it's just boring truth that Spain and Ireland were both running budget surpluses when this whole mess began in 2008. Italy ran a primary surplus and had been reducing its debt load since the mid-1990s. Greece was a mess, but Greece is a very small economy. If the EU thinks government debt caused their crisis, they've got their diagnosis wrong. And they're using this misdiagnosis to prescribe a medicine that will likely harm an already ailing patient.

Governments actually need budget flexibility, especially during a crisis. If you think some of the countries in Europe are in trouble now, imagine how much worse it would be if they were cutting still more jobs and benefits to meet some arbitrary fiscal rule: unemployment would rise further, wages would fall lower, businesses would deepen their investment cuts.

Most of the euro zone seems to have surrendered this point in the hope that the ECB will do the right thing and start bringing down government bond interest rates by announcing a major program to buy already-issued debt--something they are legally allowed to do, but have decided not to. But there's no sign yet that the ECB plans any such thing, and the governments have just conceded a massive bargaining chip.

I should say: I'm very much in favour of a more integrated Europe. I'd support a move towards it becoming a sort of confederated state. Coordinating fiscal policy across the euro zone is a great idea. But governments and central banks have an immense role in the welfare of their people, and this proposal takes away many of the benefits of the current system (in particular, its flexibility) without replacing them with anything positive, such as tax transfers.

Street art: Darwin at the museum

There's a street corner just 60 seconds from our house that for a long time operated as a sort of graffiti smorgasbord: seemingly everyone doing street art round the inner west had painted something there and more layers were added all the time over the top of older stuff. The whole was just a riot, a palimpsest of words, colour, and cartoonish and bizarre imagery.

A few months back I went past and the whole thing had been painted over. I was a bit miffed about this until a week or so later and saw the whole had been replaced by this awesome piece of Victorian wrought iron gothic. I think it depicts the main hall of London's Natural History Museum; if so, it's oddly appropriate that now someone's finally plucked up the courage to paint over it, it's with a Darwin-headed monkey crouching on the mezzanine.

Tickling

Anya is very into tickling at the moment. She's loved it for a while but the enjoyment seems particularly intense right now--nothing is quite as fun as having someone tickle and poke her sides and armpits and tummy till she can't bear it.

It's interesting though, that until a certain age she simply had no "tickle reflex". You could flutter and poke on sides and armpits to your heart's content, but it would do nothing for her. And indeed, much of what passed for tickling until relatively recently wasn't, I think, a tactile experience: she'd shriek with laughter when I blew raspberries on her tummy or pretended to eat her feet, but I think the cue was aural or visual, rather than the sensation.

This absence of reflex is odd: newborns instinctively reach their hands out for balance when jogged, and hold their breath when submerged. But the same doesn't go for tickling, which seems as instinctive as anything I can think of. I guess it belongs in the same category of things as disgust, an instinctive-seeming response that is learned rather than innate. It's a reminder that the old dichotomy about animals being creatures of instinct and humans being creatures of reason doesn't tell the whole story: reason is often instinct tricked up in rational clothes, and instinctive responses often grow from a root of reason.

I got reading on the interminet about theories of tickling. The sensation is confined to primates (though some researcher has found evidence that rats may be ticklish), and there's actually two types: knismesis, the sense of an insect running across your skin; and the more pleasurable gargalesis, the one that makes you laugh. Awesome words!

Darwin thought gargalesis served some fundamental social function, noting that pleasurable tickling mostly occurs only between family members. A more recent researcher reckons its a form of play fighting, noting that "ticklish" parts of the body don't necessarily have most nerve endings (eg., the fingers and palms of the hands aren't ticklish) but do correspond to vulnerable parts of the body.

That reminds me of the tickle fights I would get into with my brother Robs as a kid. He's nine years older than me, so would always win, and we both understood these fights as basically mild and enjoyable violence: it was even nicknamed "biff and bop". This strikes me almost as like play-fighting among kittens: a genuine scrap, but one that's pleasurable rather than frightening.

One other thing Wikipedia taught me today: the Romans, supposedly, tortured people by tying them down, dipping their feet in salty water, and bringing in a goat in to lick it off their soles. That's horrible, I guess, but quite funny too, if it's not some nonsense dreamed up by Petronius.

House training

Anya's still nowhere near the age where we can really potty train her, but she's old enough that we've been trying to introduce her very gradually to the concept.

In practice, this means rolling up our good rug so she can run around a bit nappy-free and trying to sit her occasionally on the potty to get her used to the thing without it being a big deal.

She certainly loves that potty, but unfortunately she's only marginally interested in sitting on it. Oftentimes she goes into the bathroom, grabs hold of it and carries it out to the lounge room like an oversized wedding cake, before setting it down purposefully and proceeding to tip random objects into it (we get through a lot of disinfectant).

Occasionally we can coax her to sit on it; but being the live wire she is, she's up after about two seconds and exploring the room again.

It's no big deal: we've got literally years to sort this one out. But as parents who've always used disposables nappies because most of the eco arguments for reusables don't really stack up when you factor in water and energy usage, we'd still like to get her out of this resource-intensive stage of her life soonish. I mean, it's not like Australia's full of huge holes in the ground that can be used as landfill. Oh, wait...

Book: Central Reservation, by Will le Fleming

John Were--a very old friend and occasional visitor to this blog--told me earlier this year that he'd done something quite wonderful and inspirational. He's set up, from scratch, an innovative publishing house, Xelsion, and has already published his first book: Central Reservation, by Will le Fleming.

Xelsion is a fantastic project--you can read all about John's ideas at the link--and Central Reservation is a wonderfully poised achievement to kick it all off.

It's a ghost story in which the 13-year-old protagonist is haunted by the spirit of her twin sister after a brutal car accident, while the slaughter of the 2001 foot and mouth cull rages through the English landscape. The twist is that these ghosts don't have any particular intent and don't interact with the world: they're just impassive presences, registering their existence but no more. That focuses attention back on the thoughts and experiences of the living, who are the real subject of the tale.

Le Fleming creates a sort of rural gothic of bleak motorways, hardscrabble dairy farms, pyres of culled cattle, hazmat-ed mobile slaughter crews, parasitic spirits and dysfunctional extended families.

I have a taste for melodrama and the gothic, and I actually think he could have got away with allowing these images to resonate more: the novel is at its best when it teeters queasily on the edge of myth, neither real nor unreal like the ghosts it describes. I'd have liked to have read more about Holly's relationship with her (living) sister, and indeed her parents too: the intensity of immediate family relationships seems more suited to the building up of atmosphere in this context than the major subplot focused on Holly's cousins.

Still, these are quibbles. Le Fleming creates a powerful sense of place--the paradoxical claustrophobia of these vast open spaces--and truly inhabits the lonely, frustrated and passionate mind of his protagonist. He also has a beautiful ear for language, and an eye for the striking image. It's an impressive achievement: go buy it.

A glimmer of hope?

The world has understandably reacted with horror to the news that even Germany is failing to sell its debt, after investors bid for only 60% of a government bond auction yesterday. But I think there's a faint glimmer of hope in the news.

The problem, as I see it, has always been that the euro zone is in the grip of a speculative crisis. There's nothing fundamentally disastrous about the big euro zone economies, but we are seeing a self-fulfilling panic where the declining price of euro zone debt is causing conservative holders of that debt to dump their holdings, further pushing the price down and causing more dumping.

What's needed in that sort of situation is not a new budget or prime minister, but a circuit-breaker: someone to come in and buy the debt no one else wants. After all, a lot of euro zone debt looks like a bargain at the moment: the interest rate premiums that owners will receive are in most cases at their highest since the creation of the euro, and in the case of countries like Italy, France, Austria and Belgium, there should be little reason to think the government is much less able to pay its bills.

The weak link, as I see it, is the ECB. It's let it be known that it's not prepared to fulfil that circuit-breaker role, and won't even cut interest rates to the levels of its counterparts in the US and UK. People fear that with the central bank demanding that the only way out of this crisis is through years of punishing austerity, some economies will gradually crumble till they really can't pay their debts, or even quit the euro altogether. Those fears are all rational reasons to drop euro zone debt, and they're all driven by the expectation that Europe's central bank has more or less gone insane.

The ECB's justification for this, laid out by governor Mario Draghi in a speech last week, is that governments, rather than the central bank, are the only ones who can restore confidence. Yes, Spain has enacted the most painful cuts in its democratic history and is suffering 20% unemployment, but it still needs more austerity; eventually, investors will start trusting it again. Look at Germany, they say: it's not having any problems.

In that context, I think the failure of the German debt auction should serve as a salutary wake-up call. The proposition that the problem will be solved once peripheral economies become more like Germany only works if at least Germany is doing OK. If, on the other hand, investors fear that the ECB is allowing a run on euro zone debt and driving Europe into a continent-wide recession, you don't even want gold-plated German debt.

It still seems a big ask for the ECB to completely reverse its direction on this. To do so would be an enormous mea culpa: more likely is Martin Wolf's prediction that "the ECB risks being remembered as the magnificently orthodox central bank of a failed currency union". But if this failed auction wakes the ECB up to the fact they're on the wrong track, then it represents a faint glimmer of hope amidst the gloom.

Along the back roads

 

I was doing a reporting trip to the upper Hunter Valley earlier this week, an area northwest of Sydney just outside the range of weekend holidaymakers and so with a genuinely rural, backwoods feel to it.

The drive back to Sydney is about four hours whichever way you do it, so I decided to take the most obscure and Deliverance-ish of the three possible routes. The main road, you're on freeways almost all the way; on the larger backroad, these eventually dwindle to narrower, two-lane roads winding through the forests and valleys of the northern Blue Mountains. The last time I went that way, there was little except broken-down old cottages, and horses grazing on a strip of grass hugging close to a stream. Above, the gully walls were lined with gumtrees. The road I took yesterday was even more remote.

I first noticed it on Google Maps. Thinking about places to go for a rural break close to Sydney, it's hard to miss the fact that there's a vast expanse of green north of the city--the Wollemi national park. This is an incredible place in itself: in 1994 a park officer rapelled into an isolated valley and discovered the few dozen wild remnants of the Wollemi pine--a living fossil whose last relatives died out millions of years ago. The whole park is the size of several English counties, and there's a road leading through the deepest part of the forest. Bang in the middle of it Google Maps puts a single word: "Putty."

What was this place? I zoomed in on the satellite view but couldn't tell much more. At one point, the trees hugging the road peel back in the tetris shapes of cleared land, and some smaller roads--tracks, really--branch off from the highway. A few buildings are scattered about the clearings, but not much else. I was intrigued.

I don't know how universal this feeling is, but the European imagination has always seen something magical at the heart of forests. It's where you find gingerbread cottages inhabited by witches, or wolves dressed as grandmothers. So maybe it's sentimental or romantic of me, but something seemed special about such a nondescript place, itself surrounded by such a huge expanse of wilderness. You could draw a circle of unbroken forest around Putty and fit the whole Sydney metro area into it.

The start of the drive is anything but magical. The middle Hunter Valley is one of the world's biggest coal districts, and the turnoff to Putty takes you from rolling vineyards to a nightmare landscape of vast geometric pits, waste heaps, and berms, studded with the dwarfed outlines of tower-block sized diggers and trucks the size of three-storey buildings. But suddenly this peeled away and I was driving through a winding gorge in the dusk, with a stream surging half-hidden beneath tree ferns to one side. At times, we drove through lashing rain and low, clinging clouds which condensed on my windscreen. Breaks in the mist would show tendrils of vapour breaking from the ceiling of cloud and settling over the treetops. We crawled up and down hills; through flat, straight sections, and then another knot of gorges.

An hour of this brought me to Putty. It was much as it looked from the satellite: pastures running towards forest, a crumbling roadway studded with cattle grids. A sign from the main road pointed to some tea rooms--which were closed long before I came near--and something called "Putty Hall". I was envisaging something like Downton Abbey, but it turned out to be a forlorn single-room hut, whitewashed and locked up in the driving rain, close to the point where the asphalt gave way to dirt. There was a community noticeboard outside; the last event was dated in September.

I suppose this place started out as a logging camp before the national park was gazetted, and nowadays it seems to be supporting a very meagre dairy industry. Perhaps there are some weekenders here too. It feels like the ends of the earth, but it was only two hours' drive from central Sydney.

Music: Wintercoats covers "No Scrubs"

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGR4uDn7iR4&w=560&h=315]

 

I know next to nothing about this guy except he's from Melbourne and builds textured pop like this on a looped solo violin. Yesterday and today i was up in the Hunter Valley reporting a couple of stories, and on the long drive back and forth I played plenty of radio to keep me alert and pass the time. This came on just as sun was setting over the Hunter Valley wine country yesterday and when I got home I had to look it up.

A pub lunch

This afternoon was steamy hot so we went to the local pub for lunch and a drink. Anya has been eating like crazy today--muesli for breakfast, a bowl of spinach and lentil soup for lunch then half an apple for pudding, and a decent amount of our lunches too--so clearly she had some calories to work off. So she spent most of the time crawling up and down the stairs, and honestly she went up and down those things more than a dozen times.

She would dearly love to walk forwards down stairs like a grownup, and though she likes a steadying hand to help her with this task she gets very wriggly and grumpy if we try and hold her arm too tight. She doesn't need anyone looking after her! She's an independent woman, OK?

Gender agenda

Clothes shopping for Anya is fun. She looks so cute in whatever we dress her in that it's basically a grown-up version of playing with dollies.

Of course, as the male of the species, I never played with dollies as a kid. I played with Action Man TM, which came with a selection of outfits in desert camouflage, arctic white (with snow goggles!), traditional camouflage, SAS black, scuba diver, or just the basic blue plastic underpants for winding down by the pool after a hard day's warring. So, clearly, nothing at all like a dolly. Dollies are for girls.

These thoughts come to me when clothes shopping because at times it's hard to wade through all the pink, sparkly, "Daddy's little frilly fairy princess" outfits for girls. There is very little unisex clothing, or even clothes in neutral colours like orange or green, and we have to work pretty hard if we don't want Anya to be dressed as a sort of toddler Barbara Cartland.

I'm particularly reminded of it at the moment, because Anya is of an age where she's getting very interested in Things of all sorts, and some of those Things are strongly coded in terms of gender. So, this morning, she found Kate's earrings you can see in the picture and was holding them up to her own ears. Likewise, she's been pretty obsessed with draping herself in Kate's purple pashmina and parading around looking magnificent. Other parents have told us that, once she starts to assert herself, it will be next to impossible to avert the tsunami of pink. Does all this mean that she's turning into, horror of horrors, a girlie girl?

Well. I think liberal, feminist parents like ourselves can probably get too het up about this stuff. I haven't read the recent book "Cindarella Ate My Daughter" by Peggy Orenstein, but I like what I understand to be her main thrust: that kids of a certain age get quite obsessed with playing up to gender stereotypes because they don't really understand what gender is, and playing with the idea is a harmless part of working out their own identities.

That doesn't mean that parents shouldn't be teaching their kids that gender is something you use and enjoy, rather than something that restricts and defines you. I'd hate Anya to grow up thinking she was fated to be some helpless, airheaded princess, just because she's a girl. But I don't think that's actually what happens to kids, especially not if their parents don't see gender in that way. And I think adults might over-interpret these gender signals being sent out by their children.

After all, when I think of the adult women I most respect there just isn't any direct link between their feistiness and independence and their level of interest in things that are coded "feminine". And many of the Things that Anya is obsessed with don't fit into neat categories. She's utterly fascinated by cars and ants, and talks about them all the time; her favourite dance at the moment is a rather blokish stomp.

If she were a boy perhaps we'd see this as evidence that her personal interests are being written by her chromosomes, but I think it's no more indicative than her interest in earrings and dressing up. She's just into stuff that interests her: it's the adults who are so obsessed with coding various objects and activities as "masculine" and "feminine".

I suspect that these toddler obsessions have almost nothing to do with what she's into as an adult. But just supposing they are, it suggests she'll grow up to be a stylishly-dressed entomologist who loves driving and dances badly. I don't think that sounds like a case of gender confusion. I think that sounds like a personality.

We of the reality-based community

George W Bush's sinister wing man Karl Rove once castigated opponents of the Iraq war as the "reality-based community". The phrase has now gone down in history as the essence of right-wing derangement--these guys are gleefully out of touch with reality! But the original meaning was a bit more complex, and relevant to our times.

The phrase came from a conversation Rove had with a journalist, where he was basically calling his opponents cissy. "History" might have been a better-chosen term, in that Rove was essentially saying: "You guys record history. We make history." The "reality" reference was more about the way that Rove and his allies were drunk on their own power, and in love with their superhuman Will: "You think reality is something you experience. We think it's something that we make."

Of course, that is in itself a type of derangement, but it gets at the core issue that these guys aren't just out of touch. They've become out of touch because they're convinced they have vast power to remake the world in radical ways, a mission more noble than that of the dull pragmatists.

As you can guess, I think the unreality-based community is firmly entrenched in key positions of power around the world right now. In the U.S., the right want to reverse the past 80 years of history to return America to a small-government stance not seen since the 1920s, and they're prepared to hold the world's largest economy hostage till they get their way. Obama has already offered them the most radical plan of spending cuts ever offered by a modern U.S. President--and this during a slump, when the economy needs stimulus!--but Congressional Republicans rejected it because they don't want him to pass significant legislation.

In Europe, the hard-money fanatics are refusing to step into a speculative crisis that threatens to blow apart the euro, saying that the onus is on troubled countries to make their economies more like Germany's. Leave aside the fact that the likes of Spain and Ireland were far more fiscally responsible than Germany, and the fact that it's pretty well impossible for the whole euro zone to run an economic surplus like Germany (if your current account is in surplus, someone else's must be in deficit to balance things out). If the solution to this crisis is really to remake almost every euro zone economy on German lines, that project would take decades, whereas the euro could fall apart within days.

The ideas that have least currency in political circles are actually the pragmatic, tried-and-tested ones that are mostly being ignored. Economies in the doldrums need stimulus, and it's most effective if it's directed to people at the bottom of the heap. When economies are growing below their trend, they need to grow above trend for a while to get back to that trend. Austerity programmes have never been a spark for economic growth, in the absence of surging export demand or monetary easing. And when a country's debt is under speculative attack, central banks need to stand behind it.

These measures would also fit a definition of populist politics. They would work to improve the lives of people who are suffering, while also helping economies in the longer term.

People need to understand that those in power aren't just grimly sticking to a painful but conventional programme that's our best way out of this mess. They are grimly committed to using this crisis to undertake a radical remaking of the status quo, and no one really knows where their policies will take us.

A big thank you!

For some reason it's hard to blog outside your fixed area. Pretty well all the posts here can be summed up as either "Anya is cute", or "this world affairs thingy makes me *seethe*", or "pretentious thoughts about everyday nonsense". It's meant to give a taste of my daily life but it's a public web page, so most of it is a bit less personal than I'd be if I was writing an email.

All that meta stuff is a "pretentious thoughts about everyday nonsense" run-up to saying thanks to my mum, who has been staying with us for three weeks having granddaughter time and has been an angel throughout. We are already in mourning for her weird ability to keep our house cleaner than we've ever been able, and to rustle up delicious dinners at the drop of a hat. But more than that, it was wonderful having time to sit in our yard together drinking a pre-dinner glass of wine, or watching how Anya fell in love with this silly woman with the white hair. I hope that we give as good if we ever make it to grandparenthood.

New words

Anya is picking up new words seemingly every day now, so I'm not going to be able to keep this word list going much longer. But it's fun to write: the words she uses are almost as concise a way as I can imagine to describe her world, or at least the parts of her world that are important enough to her to have names. This is a brief, incomplete list:

Lights: There was a stage when she was totally obsessed with lights. Put her in a room and she'd obsessively point at the ceiling, grinning at you for approval, saying "lights" at each individual socket. We had many conversations along these lines.

Ants: Anya loves words ending in "-ts" (see: "nummets!") and this has to some extent taken over from "lights" as flavour of the month. Jasper the cat eats his food from a bowl by the back door but he's a bit of a messy eater, and there's usually a halo of food scraps spread around. Now it's summer, this attracts a column of ants all day long, and Anya likes to squat on the back step, jabbing out an index finger and muttering "ants!"

Cocodill: I think I've mentioned before that one of her first favourite animals seems to be the crocodile. It's also one of her most complex words. God knows what she sees in them--I hope the affection wears off before we go back to northern Australia.

Cocoleh: This one's a bit baffling. She started using it the other morning to talk about prunes. She was quite definite about the word but I can't quite work out the etymology. She's either noting that prunes are sort of dark and ridgy, like "cocodill" (qv.), or she's learned that chocolate is a word for something dark and sweet and she's got confused (she's not eaten much chocolate in her life, poor dear). Or, she's just come up with a random term.

Tiger: Althea gave Anya a giant stuffed tiger from Woolworth's before her first birthday, and she's been obsessed with it ever since. An important part of getting up in the morning is greeting tiger, and crawling on it, sprawling on it, and, yes, humping it are all vital daily activities.

Burr: A favourite flying animal. She's quite good at recognising these: anything with clawish feet, even in a book, is instantly recognised. I think the feet are crucial: I'm not sure that she always recognises web-footed ducks as "burr".

Gannie: My mum had a great time with Anya while she was visiting and the feeling was mutual. Towards the end of her stay, she was rewarded with her own name. I think the letter "r" is a really tricky one in Indo-European languages (lots of Asian languages don't have it at all, the fact that launched a thousand racist jokes), and Anya doesn't seem to be using it yet. So "granny" becomes "gannie".

Bub-aows When you blow bubbles around Anya she just hits some pinnacle of toddler cuteness, grinning from ear to ear, running to pop them, and singing out "bub-aows" in a voice filled with pure delight.

Bubbies: Nipples, both male and female. Sometimes when we get Anya into bed in the morning she'll sit there playing point and touch and proclaiming: "bubbies". I think she finds it fascinating that both mummy and daddy have them.

Mine: Parents of older toddlers *hate* this word, but while Anya is pretty familiar with it she doesn't use it excessively and, when she does, it's with a playful tone, like she's toying with you. I'm sure this will fade and she'll start using it in the self-focused way that gets parents' backs up, but for the moment it's just sweet.

Car: If Anya was a boy, we might be sagely nodding that her obsession with cars is a sign of How Deep-Seated Gender Really Is. As it is, it's just another thing she's into. She loves being in the car, and when (as last weekend) we visit friends with plastic toy baby-cars, she loves to get in and have a drive around. Most of all, though, she loves to be wheeled along the street in her pram, enumerating every car she passes.

Play: Her other vehicular obsession: planes. We have enough of these whizzing over our under-the-flightpath house that she's very familiar with them, and we've ridden in a fair few, too.

Wotzis?: What's this? Anything new or interesting to her, she has a language ritual she follows. First she points, has a closer look, turns it over...

Ohh!: ...then she says this too, as if she's some sort of connoisseur of random fluff and bits and bobs. This is actually a quite handy turn of phrase because you can reply to "wotzis?" by saying "that's a GRE-NADE! A GRE-NADE! Yes!", or referring otherwise to whatever she happens to be handling. Of course, I think the ritual is more important than actually finding out what x is called, so much of the time it's not a teachable moment.

Up: Another ritual. I'm not sure yet whether she understands the word's more general use, but if you put her in a pram she thinks it's great fun to lift the sunshade and say "Up!"

Dah: What we say when the sunshade goes down.

Whee: Something you say around playground swings, and potties.

Buh-bye: This was in the last list, but I wanted to include it again because the way she's started using it is so hilarious. It still means "farewell" much of the time, but it's also "I've had enough" or "Get that out of my sight". Give her food she doesn't like, and she'll "Buh-bye" the first mouthful.

Buh-bye.

Raising the drawbridge

It's the oldest trick in the b-movie script book: if you're going to kill somebody off senselessly, make sure you give them some bad qualities to bestow a sense of justice on the event.

I've been thinking quite a lot of late about the intensifying denigration of the losers in this economic crisis. Greeks and Italians are shiftless scam artists, the unemployed and too lazy to buckle down to the jobs that are available, student protesters are dirty hippies unprepared to make tough, adult choices.

This sort of chatter seems to have become quite de rigeur in some parts of the financial blogosphere and media. The Economist's Ryan Avent has a great takedown of the stance, in a post laying into laying into economist-blogger Tyler Cowen, who really should know better:

"It is remarkable to me how readily old, successful professionals dismiss the labour-market difficulties of young adults as the product of their poorly-chosen majors and general lack of ambition, and on what flimsy evidence they're prepared to base these views."

It's not a great mystery what's going on here. Humans are naturally empathetic. We mostly don't like to see our fellows suffer, still less so if we're in some way responsible. To get people to accept with equanimity making others worse off in large numbers, you need certain psychological processes to take place to ease the transition.

One of these processes is the Milgram experiment-type insistence that what's happening is an irreversible consequence of immutable rules. "I was just following orders." "We have no mandate to do that." "If we allow this one instance, it's the thin end of the wedge."

Another of these processes is what seems to guide this blame-the-victim rhetoric:
dehumanisation of the losers. Being a bystander or a responsible participant in a time of suffering is a lot easier to accept once you've convinced yourself that the victims are in some way beneath you, and have brought it on themselves through their inferiority.

Of course, there's nothing new in this stance, which has been used to comfort elites about inequality since society began. But it's still striking to witness the raising of this mental drawbridge going on in real time.

Don't cry for me, Berlusconi

So Silvio Berlusconi has promised to resign and everyone is over the moon because hey, ho, the witch is dead. I'm not so convinced.

Matt Yglesias gets at the nub of the problem when he says that we're seeing a sort of coup by Davos Man.

That's an intentionally provocative way to look at it. In particular, I think it underplays the fact that Italy ceded a lot of its sovereignty in these matters the moment it gave the ECB control of its monetary policy. Bad monetary policy can provoke crises that cause governments to topple, and there doesn't need to be any great conspiracy behind it.

But what's exactly right is that the disturbing thing in this is not Berlusconi's economic policy, but the manner of his removal.

Look: Silvio Berlusconi is one of the worst leaders of any modern democracy, a sleazy, corrupt showman whose grip on Italian public life is an embarrassment to the country. But saying this is all his fault will lead people to think that removing him will sort Italy out, when in fact this problem needs much more than a stern technocrat with a magic wand.

The fashionable thing to say is that Berlusconi's years of mismanagement have left Italy's economy growing too slowly to pay off its debt burden, and therefore this is all his fault. But it's simply not true.

For most of the two decades since Maastricht, Italy's GDP growth was sluggish, but average for a big euro zone economy, and certainly faster than Germany's. Its deficits, likewise, were pretty much in line with its peers, and rarely more than a percentage point bigger than best-in-class Germany. Take away payments on its debt, and it's been running a surplus for years.

Italy had problems, sure, but ones it shared with much of the the rest of the euro zone: slow growth, low female employment, a frigid birth rate; plus a few of its own, such as corruption, high inter-generational and inter-regional inequality. The reason it's in crisis now, though, is that the ECB has jacked up interest rates in the middle of a slump, to the point that Italy's hitherto manageable debt is spiralling out of control despite last week's cut.

What you have here is a classic speculative crisis, where some investors are prepared to bet heavily that they can outstare a central bank in a game of chicken. It's very much like the moment when George Soros broke the Bank of England in the 1993 Black Wednesday crisis.

The ECB has a nuclear weapon: it can create as much money as it wants and buy as much Italian debt as the market will sell. If it's prepared to use that weapon, then the buyers of Italian debt will be rewarded and short-sellers will be flattened. But it's afraid to use its own balance sheet, and its insane governance structures mean it's probably incapable of doing so.

The more lightly-armed speculators are smelling blood, betting that Frankfurt will suffer a failure of nerve rather than fight them off. If they win--something that's now looking increasingly likely--the euro will be history and the ECB will have written its own epitaph.

My gut feeling

I finally found out last week what my mystery abdominal pains were about: I've had giardia, a very common (if rare in rich countries) gut infection.

I'd actually suspected this already. Having travelled a fair bit through the developing world, I'd read all about giardia and recognised the combination of stomach cramps, no fever, and fatigue. The thing is though, the key symptom that every backpacker is sniggeringly aware of--what Wikipedia's prim medical jargon calls "foul flatus", and the rest of us would call incessant, eggy farts--was absent.

I took some tests last week that eventually confirmed it was giardia, and I've been on antibiotics all week to shake it off. The question everyone's asked me is how I got it--which is a reasonable point given that this is basically a traveller's disease and I haven't been anywhere more exotic than London and Queensland over the past year.

The answer, I think, is that people get giardia in developing countries because general hygiene is lower in those places. Giardia travels along the fecal-oral route--which isn't a scenic drive between two Portuguese villages, but fancy medical talk for getting crap in your mouth.

That can come from a street food vendor in Dhaka not washing their hands properly, or a baby wipe falling on your arm as you struggle to change a grumpy nappy. I'm very careful about the whole handwashing thing, but it only takes a speck to make you sick so at some point I must have picked it up--though Anya, interestingly, seems unaffected. Anyway, there's a lesson in all of this: parents of pre-toilet trained kids are basically living in a developing country, all the time.

Kissing: the return

I think I might have mentioned earlier that Anya is sweetly obsessed with kissing. She kisses her favourite toys, random objects like the staircase, and of course her friends and relatives.

We went shoe shopping with her while we were down in Melbourne and she sort of took this to the next level. There was a big mirror for the kids to look at themselves with their new shoes, and she went up to it and started basically acting out a scene from a moralistic painting about the dangers of vanity.

She spread her arms wide on the glass, smiled and looked deep into the eyes of her reflection, and gave it a little kiss. Then she gave it another. Then she closed her eyes. Another, this time longer, more lingering. She stood back, looked at herself, smiled again. Then the eyes closed and she went in for another. At this point my mum comes up and says, "She's having a snog!" And she was.

I found the whole thing hilarious, but I can't deny that there was a little facet of my being that was internally shouting: "I don't know where she gets that from!" Of course, I do know where she gets it from: she's watched Kate and me kissing enough times, and she imitates everything she sees at the moment. But I guess I got an early twinge of that vague shock parents tend to get when their kids are about three, and start developing a rudimentary sense of sexuality.

This is an interesting dilemma for my views on child-rearing. I really don't want Anya to have an overdeveloped sense of appropriate or inappropriate behaviour, or to be ashamed or embarrassed about doing things she shouldn't be embarrassed by. But it would likely be embarrassing for me and Kate if she spends her childhood pashing and humping everything that moves.

That's where developing a sense of the public and private comes from, I guess. Of her own accord, she'll quickly work out that there's a difference between how people behave in the public and private spheres, and even between different arenas within their public and private lives.

But it's still an interesting shift. We change babies' nappies, bathe them, wipe their noses and kiss their bellies in front of anyone and everyone. As they grow, we create a private space for them, in which they can develop their sense of self in isolation from the wider world. Where we draw that boundary between public and private is important, but I'd be lying if I said I had any idea how to do it.

The magic toyshop

Since I was a little kid I always found it exciting that I had an uncle who owned a toyshop. In the kid retail universe, toyshops are only a fairly short rung below sweetshops in terms of outright awesomeness. But the problem was that the uncle in question--Jim--lived in Melbourne. This meant that, apart from one holiday when I was five, I never got to visit Boy and Girl again until my childhood was far behind me.

This past weekend we went down to Melbourne with my mum and Anya and I got, vicariously, the experience I'd been missing out on. There were brightly-coloured windmills, ceramic animal figures, wonderful sculptural weighted toys (my aunt Astrid gave Anya one of them, a red clown sat astride a blue-and-yellow ball which contrives to always remain upright as it wheels about the room). Best of all, a sort of wooden pine tree with big flat multicoloured leaves forming a spiral ladder, which rang out musically when you dropped a marble down it. Even the blowing bubbles were superior: on touching the ground, instead of bursting they mostly just stuck, giving Anya the chance to go up to them, burst them with one thrust-out index finger, and delightedly declare "bub-aows!"

We got back to Sydney last night, after a wonderful weekend with Astrid, Jim, and his partner Robert. Our bags are laden with toys, and one last one--a ridable bee on castors, which Anya was kicking away on and mum very generously bought her as a Christmas present--will follow in the post. I'm hoping we can come down again soon to stock up some more.

(Attentive readers will have noted that the actual Angela Carter novel "The Magic Toyshop", is actually a bit horrible and more grimy and odd than magical. But I like the title so it stays.)

Blaming the Greeks

I'm really sick and tired of all the rhetoric about feckless Greeks and Italians that has been chucked around in recent weeks.

It's very easy to blame the victim in these cases--particularly when you start involving Punch and Judy figures like Berlusconi, or Athens bureaucrats evading taxes and retiring on handsome pensions at 50.

But the way I see it, you have four classes of people who were involved in this collective failure: euro zone-level bureaucrats; national bureaucrats in the basket-case countries; international bond investors; and the general public in the basket-case countries.

All of these groups except the general public had a specific professional responsibility to get their economic forecasts right. But it's only the general public who seem to be paying any price for the fact that the forecasts were wrong, in the form of high unemployment, benefit cuts, and the promise of years of recession.

There's a tendency at the moment to blame the ordinary people for what went wrong: silly Greeks, borrowing loads of money to build overpriced homes in the middle of nowhere. But that way of thinking seems to me to shred the social contract, because part of the point of having big complex societies is that we can all delegate particular responsibilities to experts.

If I get mugged I expect the police to take some responsibility for sorting it out. They're experts in criminal justice: that's why we all agree to pay their salaries. If they tell me it's my own stupid fault--don't you know the streets can be dangerous?--and, furthermore, they'll be confiscating my job and my pension to help deal with this crime wave that's sprung out of nowhere, I'd be right to feel a bit miffed.

The people society tasked with getting this stuff right, got it wrong. If you told a professional bond investor today that Greek sovereign debt is no more risky than German sovereign debt, she'd fall off her chair laughing. But if you told the same investor five years ago that Greek debt was significantly more risky than German debt, she'd still have fallen off her chair.

She'd jab a finger at the screen of her trading terminal, showing the minimal spread between the two bonds--the extra interest rate that people demand for making riskier loans. "Why isn't the market seeing these risks you're so worried about?", she'd ask.

She might even point to a chart of Greek GDP growth, which had--along with Ireland and Spain--been the best-performing of the euro zone economies ever since the currency's inception. She might then have made some sort of past-performance-based forecast of greater things to come, similar to the ones we now routinely make for China.

As we all know by now, the mandarins and business people charged with directing economic policy did very well from the decades up to 2008. Indeed, they're still mostly doing very well. Societies whose own wages were largely stagnating mostly thought this was a decent bargain because the wisdom and foresight of these people was delivering an era of unprecedented economic stability and (in the case of the euro zone periphery countries now so castigated) growth.

People are upset that this stability turned out to be an illusion and doubly so that they're being asked to pay for others' mistakes. But what really adds insult to injury is being told that the mistakes were theirs: that the average Greek supermarket manager should have seen the writing on the wall before taking out that mortgage, or getting that pay rise, and that really the whole problem is just a result of them getting greedy and having ideas above their station.

The case of the missing key

Anya's language learning is proceeding rapidly but in a deeply haphazard fashion. An example: although she talks about "nummets" and "nummy" all the time (meaning "food" and "tasty"--and yes, we're both independently convinced that the former is a noun and the latter, an adjective), she still has no word for "milk". Despite the variety of her food and drink and the importance of eating to our perceptual lives, everything that goes down her throat is thrown together under the label of "nummets".

What makes this vagueness weirder is how specific she can be in other contexts. About a week ago, she started using what is still her only full-blown three-syllable word*, and it's not "strawberry" or "pineapple" or "broccoli". No: it's "crocodile".

This was initially baffling because we'd not made great efforts to introduce her to the notion of the crocodile. It's just not something that had occurred to us much, and there was perhaps a latent sense that we didn't want to establish the crocodile as one of her cuddly friends, given the existence of real unfriendly specimens in the wild not too many hundred kilometres to the north.

Still, there's long been a little crocodile transfer on the tiles beside the bath; and one of her favourite toys has for months been a Fisher-Price xylophone in the shape of a plastic croc, with the bars laid along its back and a mallet clutched in a hinged and goofy mouth.

Her affection for this critter was brought home to me today when Kate found my keys, which have been missing for the best part of a week after we spotted her playing delightedly with them. We overturned our desk, looked under sofas, went through bags in our fruitless hunt. Last night, we even took the extreme measure of tidying our bedroom, but still nothing. Kate found where Anya had hid them today: shoved down the crocodile's throat, like Captain Hook's clock.

*Thinking about it, "mummia" and "daddia" and "nummia" all have three syllables, but only just.

Hold the milk

I've had some sort of a stomach problem the last few weeks, that's left me fatigued and constantly clutching my aching abdomen. It's still a bit of a mystery what's causing it (my hunch would be giardia, but so far I am, thank goodness, missing the key symptom: noxious flatulence). However, after a visit to the doctor on Thursday and pending the results of a couple of tests, I've been told to drop the dairy from my diet.

For what it's worth my equally unscientific hunch is that my problem isn't lactose intolerance; but the experience of going dairy-free is also proving a lot easier than I'd have expected. Part of this is probably down to the fact that my mum is paying an Anya visit, which means we all get wonderful meals cooked for us. Part of it is also that I actually eat less dairy than my self-image as a cheese-eating surrender monkey would suggest. And part is probably down to the fact that a soy flat white, while no substitute for a proper coffee in beverage terms, does the job pretty well as a caffeine delivery mechanism.

But it's also making me rethink my attitude to eating dairy. Giving up dairy just isn't that hard. And it's a pretty awful industry in a lot of ways: I think a utilitarian, Peter Singer-style argument could even be made that it's less ethical than certain types of meat-eating.

I'm quite resigned to the ethical minefield you immediately stumble into when you start thinking too much about what you eat, and so I'm fairly sure I'll be back on the butter once the doctors give me the all-clear. But I might think twice in future about the number of lattes and flat whites I put away over the course of an average day.

Suffixes

At first, Anya could only speak Japanese. Or rather, the language she did have shared that difficulty that Japanese has around multiple consonants. Every syllable was either a vowel, or a consonant followed by a vowel--ena-ga-li-sha, rather than english.

She grew out of that a while ago, but recently this stuff has got a whole lot more sophisticated. She's obsessed with suffixes! So three of her favourite words--mama, daddy, and nummy (food/tasty) are increasingly now mummets, nummets, mamia, nummia and daddia.

This is quite an interesting process, in terms of language. Essentially, she's learning the rudiments of inflection, at least through play. Lots of languages have a rule of one-concept-one-word: in Mandarin Chinese, you can't really change the meaning of a word or its context in a sentence without adding extra words. Others have a lot of inflection: in Latin, "amo" (I love) means something very different to "amat" (he/she loves), although the root of both words is the same. English I think is somewhere in between: most of our inflections regarding tense, case, and person have been dropped, though we still add -s for the plural of nouns and the third person of verbs, and -ed for the past tense.

At the moment of course, she's just playing around. I don't think she remotely understands inflection and I don't think she's using it with any intent beyond the pleasure she's taking in saying funny things. But I think it's interesting that she's picked up this linguistic habit so easily. And I wonder, if she'd spent her first 14 months around people talking an inflection-less language, whether she'd be playing this game at all.

Who wants to be a millionaire?

Every time I start to get blase about Australia's crazy housing market, something happens to blast me out of my complacency.

Kate was at the ATM today and, just for fun, went in to ask how much we could borrow. The answer they threw back was A$1.2 million. In case you think that means we're rolling in it, you'd be wrong. Certainly we're doing OK: in Australia, our household income is probably towards the upper end of the income distribution. A sensible fiscal policy would see us paying more in taxes. But we're not A$1.2-million-loan rich; not even close.

That loan, based on a quick look at a few mortgage calculators, would likely eat up 70% of our combined net income--even at current historically low interest rates. We'd have to cut our current non-housing spending by nearly half, and that's before accounting for council tax, water rates, maintenance costs, and the compulsory mortgage insurance we'd be taking on. Am I alone in thinking this is insane?

Furthermore, we'd only need to provide a few months' worth of pay slips to get the bank's approval--they wouldn't want to pry into our bank statements to see how we'd cope with such a drastic drop in disposable income.

Now I can actually understand why a prudent bank might make that loan. We have an unusually large amount of savings--sufficient for a deposit of more than 20% of the house price, although not with a loan that size. If we default on the loan, as we surely would, the bank gets the house. And assuming the percentage fall in the housing market is a bit less than the value of the deposit, they'd likely still be in the black once they come to sell it.

But I can't understand why an honest bank would make a loan on such easy terms, or why a prudent regulator would permit it. Unless these easy terms being described are just a marketing gimmick to hook us in before offering a more conservative mortgage--which would be dodgy trade practice in its own right--this bank is showing deliberate negligence about their borrowers' ability to pay up. That's fine in terms of their own interests, but in terms of their borrowers' interests, it's really just a high-class variety of loan sharking: conning people into debts they can't pay off by exploiting their shaky understanding of personal finance and compound interest.

You can be sure that if we took out the loan and did default, the bank would be quick to trot out the same mantra we've heard from creditors everywhere since 2008: "These people were greedy and borrowed more than they could afford. We're the innocent victims and need to be paid in full."

But when I think about a personal loan, I see an expert and a novice sitting together in a room. In the case of a mortgage, the novice homeowner will likely carry out this negotiation only a few times in their entire life; the expert bankers will be doing it hundreds of times a week, or more.

Most of us have only the dimmest ideas of how our incomes and living costs change over the course of a lifetime; mortgage lenders, on the other hand, have vast research departments with decades of data about this stuff. I'm sure they're pretty quick to trot this information out, once borrowers go delinquent and they need to modify the loan. The studied indifference about doing so in advance is just immoral.

Film: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Wednesday was exciting: we went out to see a film. This doesn't sound a big deal, but it's actually something we've been seriously deprived of since Anya came along. When we've had a chance to take nights out before now, we've been more likely to go for dinner or to gigs, which are both pretty much irreplaceable experiences; so far we've mostly watched films on the sofa at home.

Anyway, a chance meeting in the park means that we've now retained a babysitter, Michaela, so we can go out when we want.

The film we saw was Werner Herzog's latest documentary, which is all about the cave art uncovered in 1994 in the Chauvet cave in southern France. This is the oldest reliably-dated artwork in human history, but the cave environment is so fragile that only a handful of researchers are allowed to visit each year. Herzog persuaded the custodians to allow his crew to visit.

One unusual aspect of this film is that it's shot in 3D. It was the first 3D film I'd seen and, for the first few minutes while my eyes adjusted, they were watering profusely and tears ran down my face. But it's a great example of why, whether this technology succeeds or fails, it can be used for more than just blockbusters: with all these dark, claustrophobic shots of cave walls the 3D brought to life a place most of us have no chance of actually visiting.

Herzog has some sort of instinct for uncovering eccentrics, and sure enough there's a circus performer-turned-archaeologist who had to give up his visits to the cave at first after he started getting intense, recurring dreams of lions; plus a master perfumier, who hopes to find out undiscovered caverns trapped behind ancient rockfalls not by feeling for the cool air, but by smelling their odour emanating from cracks in the rock.

But for the most part, he does the right thing and steps back, keeps quiet and let's the images do the talking. That's a good strategy; indeed, my main criticism is that the soundtrack at times becomes a little too obtrusive and jarring, unlike Herzog himself. There's an odd flight of fancy near the end involving albino crocodiles at a weird vivarium near the caves heated with waste water from a nuclear plant, but for the most part he's rather distant and respectful. Which feels right for a documentary about something so ancient, so fundamental and so fragile.

The strawberry diet

Anya has always hitherto been a complete omnivore. Pretty much anything we gave her, she would inhale indiscriminatingly before bouncing off to work down the calories with an intense stair-climbing workout.

But these things start to change with toddlerhood. She's not picky yet, but she's starting to rank her foodstuffs a bit. And guess what? Sweet stuff comes top.

We've been fairly sparing of the sweet things we've given her so far. She first tasted ice-cream two weeks ago, when we were having an early dinner with our friends David and Kathy and their nearly-three-year-old Ellen. After a brief moment of confusion, the glucose started to work its magic on her synapses and she started doing her impression of a boa constrictor dislocating its jaw to swallow a pig.

Obviously we're wary of that getting out of hand, but we give her fruit all the time. She can finish off a tangerine in a couple of minutes, eat half a pear without pausing for breath, chomp an apple into sauce within seconds. But most of all, she loves strawberries.

This morning she woke up before six, so I gave her a bottle in an attempt to get her back to sleep. Sometimes this works. Not this morning, though: 20 minutes later I was up and giving her the usual breakfast of weet-bix with peach puree. Feeding her breakfast in these circumstances can be tough, because she's already full of milk; after about half-a-dozen spoonfuls, she was getting bored.

Anyway, I tried out what I thought was a clever daddy strategy: I cut up a strawberry into tiny bits and strewed it over the weet-bix. At first, she allowed this into her mouth, but after a few minutes of bulldog-chewing-on-a-wasp facial gymnastics she gobbed the weet-bix down her front, happily pronounced the result "nummets!" (yummy) and went reaching for more bits of strawberry. Reader, I'll admit: after a while, I just gave up and just let her eat the rest of it. I'm telling myself that I'll have plenty of time to try to get the better of these food battles; but Anya's clearly got herself an early lead.

Even better than the real ding

Since Anya's completely obsessed with bunnies--which, for those who haven't been keeping up, are called "ding-ding-ging" in Anyaspeak--we had to take her to the petting zoo at the Spring fete that was held on Saturday in the Scientology school that's directly behind our house.

Yes, you read that right. It's a primary school for Scientologists, but aside from handing us a bag containing L. Ron Hubbard's guide to an ethical life (sample advice: "Always remember to brush your teeth"; sample wild claim: "This is the first non-religious guide to an ethical life ever written", give or take two and a half millennia of philosophy; sample creepy bit: "the insane are incapable of learning and must be avoided"), it's pretty much your everyday school. So, they do building work that's vaguely inconsiderate of the neighbours, have music classes, run around the playground screaming at each other, etc. And in the Spring holidays, they have fetes.

So. Anya is completely obsessed with her ding-ding, a little square of fabric with a bunny head on it that accompanies her to bed. We have three identical models so that there's always one in use, one being washed clean of chewing/puddle/soil/food marks, and one being dried. But, except on one occasion when she was a lot younger, Anya's never seen a real live bunny.

When we first went into the petting zoo, we were handed a guinea pig. Anya wasn't too sure what to do with it, and was much more interested in the grey bunny being held by the girl next to us: flinging her arms around and yelling "ding-ding-ding", caught up in a sort of toddler Beatlemania. I tried to teach her to pat the guinea pig but she wasn't interested until the little girl went off and we got our hands on the ding-ding.

And then she became rather subdued. I've seen her like this before: I call it the 'meeting-her-god' moment. I think she was quite simply awe-struck to be in the presence of a living bunny; while she patted it a few times under my guidance, she seemed to be half-fearing that touching it would be a form of sacrilege.

Without E

Doing without 'p' is hard, but writing is particularly tough if you can't fall back on our font's most popular symbol. It's a trick which 'La Disparition' pulls off, but not a thing I could sustain across any significant gap. Too many words contain that symbol, and you quickly run out of ways to twist your diction into familiar forms without using a contraband glyph.

You can't talk about things past, as most 'past' words contain a standard suffix with that symbol; our most common word is also out of bounds--that most particular kin of 'a'; on top of that, using pronouns is full of pitfalls.

That said, I think this would work as a parlour activity to maintain a sharp mind, and I'm struck that it's not popular, away from that solitary book. As a sort of brain gym, it suits comparison with doing crosswords: you must show a broad vocabulary, plus agility in positioning words and adjusting your gist, if you want to carry it off. A list of synonyms (I can't put its usual tag) would aid this task; but it's a fun and satisfying distraction to do it without any support. Still, this is similar to wading through syrup if your writing is usually quick, and I think for now that 200 words is inough.

Ractical roblems

There's a reason that blogging has been light of late, beyond just laziness: a key has fallen off my mobile, making it hard to write stuff without using a host of stratagems to get around its absence.

Obviously I can't directly tell you which letter because I can't write it, but it's the first letter of a country bordering Germany, the former Czechoslovakia, Russia, Lithuania, and Belarus, which rhymes with 'Roland'. Oh, and the headline of this blog is a clue. In future, '*' will stand in stead of the ineffable letter.

Now I'm trying it at length, it's actually oddly easy to just substitute alternative words. Years ago I bought, but have yet to read, a translation of the Georges *erec novel 'La Dis*arition', titled 'A Void' in English. The novel's claim to fame is that it doesn't use the letter 'e' anywhere, instead taking a range of roundabout ways to get the same ideas across. Translating such a book, while retaining the 'e' ban, is clearly the work of the insane.

My letter is clearly an easier one to miss out, but I'm struck now how easy it is to get by without letters you once thought essential. Ah, good old English language, with three ways to say just about everything: a nightmare for those trying to learn it, but handy for those whose mobiles are falling to bits.

Make the pie higher!

George W Bush was roundly mocked for his comment, when asked about inequality during the 2000 election, that the country shouldn't be focused on who has the biggest share of the pie: "We ought to make the pie higher!", he said.

But he actually made a decent point, one which seems to have been forgotten nowadays.

Real economic growth is becoming impossible in rich countries because corporations are hoarding money. US corporate profits are now at a 60-year peak, relative to GDP; cash holdings by businesses are also at record levels.

In normal times companies would be investing this windfall, but they aren't because they see dismal prospects for demand. One reason for this is that the ordinary people who they depend on for sales are short of cash. For decades, incomes have barely kept pace with inflation. The best way people found to get ahead in recent years was to take on a mass of mortgage and credit card debt; paying that down is now further choking off disposable incomes. With unemployment at historically-high levels, salaries everywhere are now being trimmed again, skewing returns even more towards capital rather than labour.

This column by Reuters' Jim Saft puts it brilliantly:

"At the moment it is hard to see what will break the Gordian knot presented by lack of confidence and unwillingness to invest or spend. But it is possible to start sketching the outlines of what a recovery would have to look like.

"Corporate profits must stabilise and probably fall as a share of GDP, as more of the fruits of production are directed towards workers (and consumers). Businesses will have to take far more risk by ending the accumulation of cash and liquid assets and instead investing in far less liquid fixed assets and creating more jobs.

"Reversing three decades of corporate policy and central bank theory, wages and other forms of compensation will have to start rising faster than prices for a time. Corporations and central banks will have to tolerate a period of “inflationary” wage gains.

"It is not clear how lower corporate profits would play out in equity prices. Prices would suffer from shrunken margins, but presumably gain from faster growth. It is possible to imagine a scenario in which the economy recovers but equity prices languish. It might be the only way for the economy to recover."

At the moment rich countries are in a vicious circle where as the economy grows weaker, the share of production going to capital rather than labour grows. As labour's share of production shrinks, so does demand for goods and services, further weakening the economy.

Companies are doing their duty to their shareholders by maximising their profits. But the overall result of an economy where everyone is doing this against a backdrop of moribund demand is that shareholder returns are ultimately weaker: profits are just making up a larger slice of a smaller pie.

I think societies work best when people are working together, with confidence, towards some mutually-beneficial outcome. But of late we've exchanged that vision for a desperate, zero-sum struggle over control of a dwindling resource. That certainly doesn't benefit the poor who are likely to lose out, but it doesn't help the winners much, either. We'd all be much better off making the pie higher.

Why we need Occupy Wall Street

I'm a bit late to this because I've been busy obsessing over my beautiful daughter, but I want to add to the growing chorus in support of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

One thing that's been far too lacking through this financial crisis, barring the Greek protests and the Spanish indignados, has been a vocal and active movement angry about what has happened. I actually see the Occupy Wall Street crowd as having the same sort of function, in that sense, as the London rioters. Clearly I'd rather bump into some articulate New Yorkers than the London rioters in a dark alley; but the fear is part of the point. Political and economic elites need a bit of fear at their backs if they're going to be spurred to change anything.

Looking back on the 20th century, it's easy to assume that all the concessions to justice, freedom and equality made over the course of the century came about because they were the Right Thing To Do. But, historically, elites don't have a great record of giving up their power and privileges out of the goodness of their hearts. The progress that has been made has usually been because elites felt that some short-term concessions were needed for their long-term security.

For example, people had been complaining about the effects of poverty in England since the Peasants' Revolt. It was a grand concern by the start of the 19th century, and became a tubthumping populist issue by the time Dickens was in his pomp. But all this achieved nothing until the rise of socialist parties led mainstream politicians to start fearing for their careers and the stability of the status quo. Germany and the UK started establishing social programmes within a few years of the SPD and the Labour party getting their first electoral successes.

Likewise, the existence of the Eastern Bloc was a huge incentive throughout the 20th century for Western countries to improve their citizens' welfare, lest they turn to Communism instead. The rolling back of those advances over the past four decades tracks pretty closely to the decline and fall of the Soviet empire.

I can remember fearing nuclear annihilation as a child in the early 1980s, so I'm not going to paint the Cold War as some sort of golden age. And, clearly, government spending as a proportion of GDP has mostly been on the rise in recent decades--even if the range of social provision has narrowed, inequality has risen, and the tax base has focused further down the income scale. But, as Francis Spufford's short story collection Red Plenty demonstrates, the competitive tension that existed during the Cold War was virtuous: countries on both sides of the iron curtain truly felt a need to demonstrate to their populations that theirs was the better system.

The West won that battle hands down but since it lost its fear I feel it has lost its way, too. Elections rarely threaten major changes: it has become a commonplace that lobbyists have a greater influence over policy than the voters who put politicians in office. We live in the era of Margaret Thatcher's "There Is No Alternative", but in these difficult times more than ever, we need to realise that there is an alternative to the status quo.

I don't believe elites will realise that on their own. But when confronted with mass, middle class protests, as during the poll tax riots, they are sometimes forced into realisation. Here's hoping.

Mourning in America

I do want to write something about the Occupy Wall Street movement but it's taking some time to get my thoughts together, so this is just a quick post on the outpouring of grief for Steve Jobs.

I'm not really bothered either way about Apple as a company. They make some good products--Kate has an iPhone and iPad which I enjoy tinkering with--but after some bad experiences with an iMac back in the day I've never wanted one for myself. I'm certainly a bit turned off by the cultlike attitude of some Apple users, but the devices are smart and do merit a degree of devotion.

What I'm more struck by is the way Jobs' death has become an occasion for an outpouring of mass grief. It reminds me of the death of Princess Diana in the UK, or Steve Irwin in Australia; further afield, the British public's mourning of Princess Charlotte in 1817, or the Chinese commemoration of Hu Yaobang that sparked the Tiananmen Square protests.

All these seem to be great collective rituals that mark not so much the life of an individual, as the moment when a nation swings about some real or perceived historical fulcrum.

So Diana's death, and Princess Charlotte's, were about a desire to cast off aspects of a certain hierarchical, dour quality in the British establishment; Irwin's was a wake for a larrikin Australia as it receded from the reality of an increasingly slick, metropolitan country. Hu's death, like that of Tunisia's Mohamed Bouazizi earlier this year, marked a culmination of popular frustration with a repressive society.

In that sense, what meaning are people drawing from Steve Jobs' death? My guess is that the mourning here is for the passing of a certain vision of America that never quite existed, though perhaps should have. Here was a figure for both sides of the culture wars, an unabashed former member of the counterculture who was also CEO of the world's second-biggest listed company. An entrepreneur and a manufacturer, at a time when America is worried it is running out of both. An American whose products have become world-leaders, at a time when America is losing its global leadership. Someone whose company has grown while America's economy has stuttered, and who seemed to be winning rather than losing from his relationship with China.

I don't think that's at all a complete portrait of the man. He was also a tyrannical control freak who cancelled Apple's philanthropic programmes when he took over in 1997, denied the paternity of his daughter in a particularly shifty way, bullied and alienated his colleagues, showed little interest in the string of suicides and poor conditions at his supplier Foxconn, and deployed armies of copyright lawyers to tie up his competitors in often-spurious courtroom battles. But an image is already being created to suit the myth.

That's really not meant to denigrate the man; merely to take him off the pedestal onto which, post-mortem, he's being hoisted. Like most hugely successful people, he had a mixture of good and bad qualities, and was fortunate enough to find a concordance between the single-minded pursuit of his own interests and the desires of a broader public. But before we start seeking our salvation by turning him into a sort of secular saint, maybe we should start looking to the ways we can help ourselves without the intercession of the faithful departed.

The joke

We've known for ages that Anya has a sense of humour--she laughs and shrieks with delight all the time, and first cracked up when she was about four months old.

But she's done a couple of things the past few days that look like rudimentary jokes. I honestly can't tell if they are or if I'm just reading too much into them; I'd be interested in the insights of psychologists about when joke-making develops.

Anyway, the jokes. Don't worry if you don't laugh out loud: it's more the manner in which they were done that was joke-like. She makes us laugh for real all the time just by clowning around.

1: On Saturday I was putting her to bed and we were looking at one of her favourite books, which involves a procession of a baby, a duck, a mummy-like woman, a dog, a girl on a horse, a boy on a bike etc., all heading to the seaside. Since many of these are things for which she knows the words, we often point to the baby, or dog, or mummy, and repeat their names in Anyaish.

Well, this time she did that, but she was getting it all wrong: she pointed to the mummy, and said "buh-bee". Then grinned at me with a twinkle in her eye. Then she pointed to the baby, and said "hah-hah-hah" for dog, and grinned at me again. Now I can't swear that she wasn't just getting confused--and she might have been looking at me for guidance about whether she was getting it right or wrong. But she knows these words well and uses them correctly, ooh, a couple of dozen times a day. It certainly seemed that there was something deliberate, and smile-worthy, about the error.

2: We bought her some 'crayon rocks' at the weekend. These are little pebble-shaped crayons that are easy to hold in a toddler's hand and scribble with. They also, frankly, look a bit like sweeties. So Kate was sitting with her on Sunday playing and scribbling, and Anya took one of them and held it near her mouth. She then made the mock nibbling gesture that we make when we're pretening to eat up her feet, or eat her food, and said 'nyum-nyum-nyummy' with that same twinkle in her eye. What she didn't do is what she normally does with things she wants to eat: stick it in her mouth and start chewing.

Obviously I might be reading way too much into these two incidents, but they certainly resemble one classic definition of a joke: a knowing reference to something that both parties know to be untrue, impossible, or nonsensical. And she's seen plenty of examples of jokes so far: the mock tummy-biting that has been cracking her up for the past nine months depends on the idea that her parent is simultaneously loving and gentle, while also behaving a bit like a savage tummy-biting beast.

Still, it's one thing to imitate that playful behaviour; quite another to extract from it a sort of theory of humour and apply it in a different context, as she seemed to be doing with the book and the crayons. Indeed, that definition of a joke seems to me to depend on the child having a theory of mind, which she isn't likely to develop for another couple of years.

I'm inclined to think she has started telling jokes, since I'm a proud dad who values humour highly. For the same reasons, you should probably treat me as an unreliable witness.

Don't innovate, litigate!

Last week at work I sat in on a court hearing where Apple is trying to stop Samsung releasing its tablet PC computers in Australia. Samsung had hoped to have these on the shelves by today, but there's every possibility now that it could be the new year before they're released.

It doesn't matter much to me either way which way this case goes, but it was frankly a bit depressing sitting through what felt like an attempt to use the courts to ban a product to stop it competing with the iPad.

I'm no expert on patent law, but many of these big technology disputes of late seem to relate to companies' patents on processes rather than specific pieces of technology. I can see why that approach appeals to a maker of consumer products: after all, most of the individual components that make up an iPad are manufactured by Apple's suppliers, who presumably own the patents. Even with Apple's more integrated, customised approach to product design, a lot of what it's doing is assembling other people's components in a very whizzy design and marketing it cleverly. With that set-up, what can Apple claim copyright over, if not processes?

So we have the sort of case that was discussed last week, where Apple is asserting Samsung copied its method of swiping a touch-screen, and the way that the touch screen distinguishes between meaningful taps and accidental knocks.

It seems to me that these sorts of processes shouldn't really be patentable. Apple's not asserting that Samsung has pilfered technology from them, but that it shouldn't be allowed to make products that work in the same way as Apple's.

To me, this would be analagous to an early car company patenting not the internal combustion engine, but the petrol-powered motor vehicle. It would probably have resulted in vastly greater profits for the car owner, but there would probably be a lot fewer cars on the road. (No bad thing, you might say.)

The technology industry has so far always done very well at innovating to make products that people want. And traditionally there have been pretty low barriers to entry--Bill Gates knocking up his first operating system in his garage, etc.--which have meant that people with simple good ideas have a decent chance of turning them into marketable products.

These patent wars seem to change that. Indeed, they're distorting the very shape of the industry--the consensus on Google's recent takeover of Motorola's handset maker is that it was intended to provide Google with a patent shield, a treasure trove of intellectual property which it could throw at any competitor alleging infringements.

If that is the direction this is going, then future Steve Jobses won't just be able to piece together their first Apple Macs and build a company from nothing. Such a litigious environment will favour big companies that can hire armies of lawyers, not little start-ups with big ideas.

After all, the graphical user interface on which Apple's early success was built was first developed by Xerox; if they'd had a patent for "method of operating computer through visual representation" and sued Steve Jobs for infringement, would Apple ever have grown big enough to launch its own patent suits?

Clothed in Tyrian purple

This girl just loves pulling clothes around her neck. She was playing dress-up like this all afternoon, like some child Roman emperor.

She bangs the gongs

I'm just having an early-morning play with Anya and I've had a great demonstration of how babies are really little empiricists.

We have a big metal mixing bowl she loves playing with. It's got everything: an intriguing shape, dim shifting reflections in its surface, and it makes a satisfying "bong" when she batters it.

This morning she was bashing it with a wooden spoon and seemed to notice that, when she held it aloft with one hand on the rim, it makes a particularly dramatic, Rank Organisation-style clang. She then put it down on the ground so the ring was muted by the carpet, and banged it again. Listened; picked it up again and made the full-volume "bong".

She repeated this enough times that it was clear she was basically doing an experiment to see if holding the bowl up was what turned it into a gong. And I suppose this is what babies are doing all the time, any time they learn a new skill or fact about the world. But I've not often seen such a pointed illustration of it.

As usual, the photo misses the key moment, so you'll have to take my word for it till I get a phone with a better camera.

New videos!

I've finally got round to uploading some videos to Anya's YouTube stream so you can see some moving pictures evidence of some of the stuff I've been going on about.

Here's a bit of walking, from when we were up in Queensland last month:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2LpbVbw8B5k&w=560&h=315]

 

Here's some chatter from the same holiday:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WFzNYgALvhc&w=560&h=315]

 

And finally, a bit of kissing and possible narcissism:

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=opRVAgOGsWc&w=560&h=315]

First ever Anya-English dictionary!

Anya seems to be putting on a sort of linguistic spurt. Those random syllables that have been spilling out of her for the last nine months are rapidly attaching themselves to things and concepts, beyond the basic mama-dada stuff. It's hard to keep up with and tricky to decipher much of the time, but here's a first draft of a dictionary:

Mama/Mummy : Kate or woman

Dad/Dada/Daddy : Dave or man. Or, sometimes, Kate.

Yow-oww : Cat. She does this whenever she sees Jasper, as a sort of formal greeting.

Hah-hah-hah : Dog. Also used to express excitement. A sort of puppy-like panting.

No : Every toddler's favourite word, normally accompanied by a shake of the head. She says it with a long vowel, and it comes over as rather genteel.

Ess : Yes. This is relatively new, but she does seem to be starting to express a bit of affirmation.

Num-nyum-nyum : I'm hungry, or food. She can repeat this endlessly as a sort of song accompanying mealtimes.

Diggun-ding-ging : Her favourite toy, the bunny she sleeps with. Another sing-song word. I can see this toy is going to end up being Dickon the bunny or something.

Uh-oh : Remark to call attention to something falling on the ground. She still loves dropping objects, so we hear this a lot.

Buh-be : Baby, or puppy. Probably baby.

Buh-bye : What it sounds like.

Some others that she's used more rarely or tentatively.

Wak : Duck. A favourite bath toy. If it waks like a duck...

Fuh : Fan. She's fascinated with ceiling objects and she seems to have picked up our use of this one.

Buh : Ball. She loves the way they bounce, so I think she's using this to talk about them. But it's sometimes a bit unclear.

After that there's a whole host of words that she understands but doesn't use: "Put on" and "Take off", "Nose", "Mouth", "Touch" and some others that slip my memory. I'll try to update as new ones enter the lexicon.

Anyaish has no word for snot