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

Film: Wall Street

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f83M2zR4smU&w=420&h=315]

 

It's hard to believe I'd never seen this film till this weekend, which was cold and miserable and demanding some sort of film night comfort when we'd put Anya to bed on Saturday. So many standout quotes have made it into the lexicon--"lunch is for wimps", "greed is good" etc--that it's attained the status of modern classic, no doubt helped by Oliver Stone's stratospheric levels of self-belief.

But it didn't quite make it for me. It might be just that the world has changed so much since then. The world of the 1980s Masters of the Universe seems almost antique, as when Gordon Gekko boasts that total personal wealth as high as $50 million is attainable in this freewheeling new world. Obviously inflation has changed things, but still: Goldman Sachs' Lloyd Blankfein made that much in 2007 alone.

There's also a few clangers--particularly in the denouement, which involves what seems to be a wholesale misunderstanding of shareholder behaviour (they agree to sell stock for $18 the day after it had been trading for $24).

But I think the main problem is that while the film strives for greatness, it only manages it in flashes--and the best lines do go to the antihero Gekko. That undercuts the moral thrust of the thing, which seems to be saying that Gekko is destroying the lives of American workers. As a result, the film basically fails to make the case it's trying to present--a correct one, as we can now clearly see--that the financialisation of the US economy since the early 1980s has harmed its performance and the lives of its working people.

Obviously that's a pretty high standard for a mainstream Hollywood drama. But it is pretty much the one Stone sets for himself, with the film's father-son dynamics and grand set-pieces. So while it's diverting, the film is a bit like one of those tequila sunrises or mai tais the characters are no doubt knocking back in their spare time: tasty, but a bit insubstantial.

One thing where I have to hand it to this film, though, is the stellar cast. Michael Douglas, Martin and Charlie Sheen, Daryl Hannah, Sean Young, Terence Stamp, James Spader--even that guy who plays Dr Cox in Scrubs as a bad-tempered trader. That's the sort of ensemble that only a Robert Altman could assemble these days.

Graffiti outside my office

I'm not normally a fan of tagging, but this is awesome and sort of gritty-opulent.

Baby-slam!

A commonplace of baby books is to notice that infants naturally perform yoga poses as they grow: sitting in a half lotus, sleeping as the downward dog, propping themselves and crawling as the cobra and the cat.

I'd like to add something to this: once they start running around and being rambunctious, they naturally do pro-wrestling moves.

I first noticed this lying on our bed a few weeks ago. Anya was leaning back against the footboard (which is about neck-high on her) stretching her arms out on each side and puffing out her chest, smiling a little as she did so. Then she launched herself and came running up to the head end where I was lying and threw herself, arms outstretched, on my chest. She's now 9 kilos or something, so this isn't nothing. In fact it was a sort of baby power-slam, and I sensed that while she was leaning against the footboard she had imagined herself standing on the ring ropes, being egged on by a bloodthirsty crowd.

She's got some other moves up her sleeve. If you're lying down--on the mat, as it were--she'll sometimes crawl up and over you to straddle you, and then start bouncing triumphantly on your defeated body. And sometimes when I'm carrying her on my shoulders she'll desperately try to lean back. I figure this is practice for the day she really does have me on the mat and she's trying to do that neckbreaker move where you wrap your legs around your adversary's shoulders and flip them backwards over your head.

In the meantime I still have the advantage of weight and height but I would warn all who meet her not to underestimate the speed and agility of Anya: The Onesied Avenger.

Seas of green

One of the things that rarely ceases to amaze me about this country is the sheer richness and abundance of astonishing, untouched natural landscapes.

The cottage where we stayed in Berry was perched on the hump of a hillside dipping down to a rolling brook shaded among the trees. From every window on one side of the house, all you could see was the forest tumbling down the steep slope opposite; step outside and you'd glimpse the craggy escarpment of the Great Dividing Range looming above. The lawn and trees flickered with rosella and galah parrots, a wombat lumbered around as our friends arrived on Friday night, and, early on a crisp Sunday morning, an invasive fox stalked past through the high grass.

I used to look on the 28 hectares of Highgate Woods--a small forest in North London which was never built on or extensively logged--as a sort of miracle. And there is something remarkable about its ability to persist almost untouched while the industrial revolution rolled around it and one of the world's great cities grew to swallow it up.

But the almost profligate profusion of near-untouched landscapes in Australia makes such scraps of nature seem few and mean. A typical farmer may have a Highgate Woods'-worth of forest sitting on their land and regard it as little more than an irritant.

I suppose this is what Europe was like in the days when the great boreal forests stretched from the Urals to the Atlantic. Whereas nowadays even stretches of "wilderness" like the Scottish Highlands are the result of intensive sheep-farming, logging and hunting. The same is true of Australia in a way--Aboriginal people had a huge role in shaping the environment through fire agriculture, for instance--but the absence of pastoral and arable farming means the human impact is almost invisible to my eyes. The landscape seems pristine.

So despite myself, I can't help a certain incredulity sometimes when I hear of threats to Australia's woodlands. I agree with those who want to preserve this unique environment from development and degradation, but what I find most amazing about this country is not the scarcity of the natural environment but its vast, untouched abundance. All the more reason to preserve it, of course; but we should stop for a moment to wonder and be thankful for the scale of what we have.

Bunny bread

Seeing as how Anya worships bunnies, it's appropriate that our food-related simulacrum this morning was not a Toasted Cheesus, Blessed Virgin Mary Latte, or a Mother Theresa Cinnamon Bun, but Bunny Bread. Miracle of resemblance aside, it tasted great spread with avocado.

In Berry

So this weekend we're on holiday in Berry, a cute little town on the south coast of NSW. This place is capital of the tree changers--Australians who've given up the rat race for a life in the country, running a hobby farm on the edge of a forest somewhere.

As a result, Berry has not one, not two, but THREE bakeries to service the deracinated urban yuppie clientele. I went to get croissants and bread at the yuppiest one this morning and it was bustling at 8am on a Saturday.

Marx was right

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Listening to the debate in the UK about abolishing the 50p rate of income tax, I'm struck by the degree to which Karl Marx was right to analyse political decision-making on the basis of different classes fighting for their class interests, rather than those of the population as a whole.

The 20 economists who signed the letter to the Financial Times which sparked off the latest round of debate didn't feel the need to defend their proposition with any actual evidence, beyond some vague hand-waving about hedge-fund managers moving to Switzerland. But they seem to see that as OK, because the letter is basically a statement of class interests so doesn't need empirical support.

I'm always amazed how little actual analysis is considered necessary when it comes to doing things that benefit the rich. This is particularly ironic given the fact that, when it comes to cutting programmes that benefit the poor, elites prefer to adopt a steely resolve despite overwhelming theoretical and historical evidence that fiscal contraction during recessions tends to make the problem worse, not better. The proposition that limiting top tax rates is good for the economy as a whole is taken to be so obvious that it doesn't need proving. Which is a good thing, because the evidence just isn't there.

Take the argument that higher tax rates will cause hedge fund managers, or Andrew Lloyd Webber, or Phil Collins, or whoever, to flee to somewhere more friendly to their cash. This is basically a hysterical anecdote dressed up as an argument. Rich people move countries all the time for all sorts of reasons. But if marginal tax rates (rather than, say, the presence of friends, restaurants and other diversions) were their main motivator then the populations of boring tax havens like the Channel Islands, the Caymans and Bermuda would be vastly larger.

Actual studies have been done on the effect of tax rates on migration--and not just between the culturally distinct, geographically remote population centres of Europe but between U.S. states which share a common language and culture and whose borders often pass through the centres of cities. You'd think those lower barriers to migration would if anything make such tax-shopping more likely, but there's no evidence of it. I guess that explains why the richest people in New York live in Manhattan and Long Island in high-tax New York state, and not across the Hudson in lower-taxed New Jersey.

The other argument is that people will limit their productive activity because of the disincentive of higher marginal taxes--the Laffer curve. This depends on the idea that cutting taxes will actually increase government revenues, because people will be encouraged to do more taxable work.

It's certainly true that if marginal tax rates hit 100%, people have a 0% incentive to do extra work to lift their incomes above this level. But it doesn't follow that the optimal upper rate of marginal tax is therefore always 40% or lower. Indeed, the most recent research on this topic suggests the optimal rate could be above 80%. It's worth noting that, while cutting taxes for the rich is taken to be inextricably linked to strong economic growth, for most western countries it's the three decades following world war two when marginal tax rates were highest and economic growth was strongest.

Of course, 80% is the sort of pips-squeak figure calculated to make rich people wince. How could they afford their lifestyle, if faced with such rates?

Two things strike me on that point. For one, people always seem to read marginal tax rates as describing the portion of their total income that the taxman will take away. When in fact, they only apply to income above very elevated levels--the UK's 50% band is for the slice of income that falls above £150,000. These sorts of changes would only make lifestyle differences to someone spending almost all of a very high income on consumption, and we know that the very rich spend more on saving and investment.

Also, the sorts of spending that the rich worry about affording--mortgages, school fees, cars, wine, luxury goods and high-end holidays--are precisely the sorts of supply-constrained or positional goods whose price is largely a function of the amount of money available to be spent on them. Cut the income of the rich, and the prices of these goods will fall in parallel. And if they don't fall quite as fast, isn't that the shared sacrifice, necessary austerity we're meant to favour?

What's that in plain English?

I had one of those emails journos dread today--the one where a contact for a story tells you you've got something wrong. But I was relieved to read it and discover that it was actually about something I'm pretty sure I got right, but the (very personable) PR who sent it would like to be wrong.

I'd written a story about a company whose staff were being investigated for insider trading, and late in the day the company announced that the staff in question had "stepped down".

Now I hate this term. Its just a euphemism, synonymous with "resign". Which itself is a now-accepted legalistic euphemism for "sacked". So I translated the company's "step down" into "resign" in my article, and that's what the mild complaint was about.

There's a sort of blandifying of terminology that's been going on here for some years. We all know how it works: x is caught with his hands in the till (it's normally a he), and in the old days he would have been called into the boss' office and given the boot.

Nowadays, the boss provides him with a resignation letter, drafted by the company's lawyers, and tells him to sign it. Everyone's a winner: x gets to say he wasn't sacked, and the company gets a contract binding what x can subsequently say and do about the situation.

The thing is, everyone knows this trick now, so the euphemism has had to move on. Now the boss says there's an investigation, and x is just quitting his position temporarily. The impact of the news is softened by being split into two announcements, one of which will only come out when the investigation concludes and the whole thing is old news. It's a classic "reputational management" shell game.

The idea here seems to be to redefine "resignation" as an irrevocable move, whereas "stepping down" or "stepping aside" is a temporary process potentially followed by reinstatement.

But to my knowledge, both legally and lexically, they all describe the same thing. Resigning just means you stop doing something. You can start doing it again. You can resign from a particular role without leaving the company. It's nothing permanent. Indeed, we already have a good legal term for irrevocable departure: "termination with prejudice". PRs don't like using that one. It sounds very bad.

Am I being too bolshie about this? I've had this "step down"/"resign" ding-dong with PRs before and I've asked lawyers about it too, but no one's ever given me any sound basis for the distinction. The "stepped down" neologism seems to want it both ways--to imply the decisiveness of "we sacked him" while maintaining the blandness of "we are looking into the matter and will cooperate with all relevant authorities".

I suspect that some PRs now see "resign" as meaning "irrevocably quit" precisely because they're so used to using it as a euphemism for "terminated with prejudice" that they think the meanings of the phrases are the same. But they're not.

Still, I feel linguistic evolution is moving against me. Journos tend to parrot the phrasing on press releases, both for the rubbish reason of laziness and for the more justifiable reason that they don't want to misquote anyone. That means that, language being built on common usage, the PR industry's insistence on this neologism will eventually see it find its way into the dictionary.

But I'm a language curmudgeon. I shudder when I see "enormity" used to descibe something big but not too dreadful, or "alright" used to descibe something other than a catchy song by Supergrass. So I get grumpy about being enlisted in an attempt to airbrush the English language for the benefit of those who can afford to hire PRs.

Recipe: La Caldareta

In honour of the previous post's paean to easy cooking, this was what we had on Saturday: Extremaduran slow-cooked lamb shoulder, ripped off a Moro recipe.

I love lamb shoulder. It's one of those cheap, cheap cuts of meat, like beef shin or brisket, which is almost superior to prime cuts if you cook it right. I think this is something to do with sinew and fat: they all need slow cooking to get the toughness out, and they all tend to be larded through with fat so need time to let it render out of them. After a few hours in the oven they're all luscious richness, but a shoulder of lamb that feeds four only costs A$16--pretty cheap in Oz these days.

The recipe is dead simple. Chop up a tablespoon each of thyme and rosemary. Get a shoulder of lamb--about 1.2kg should feed four as part of a meal. Rub it in half the herbs and sea salt and leave it on a plate for 20 minutes to an hour.

Then chop up an onion and break off a dozen garlic cloves--leave the paper on them. Get a big roasting dish that will sit on the stove and fry these up till they're translucent and soft. Add half a teaspoon of fennel seeds, half a teaspoon of smoked paprika, the rest of the herbs, and half a bottle of white wine mixed with 30ml of brandy. Mix it all up and put the shoulder on top, skin side up.

Cook on 175C for 2.5 hours, basting at least every 40 mins. Make sure that onions don't get stranded on the top as you do this, because they'll char. If it looks dry, add more wine or water.

Get about 1kg of medium-sized waxy potatoes. Quarter them and sprinkle them with salt. Once the 2.5 hours is up, turn the heat up to 225C and throw the spuds in, turning them in the juices.

Cook like that for 45 mins and make sure the meat gets 10 mins to stand before you dish up. Don't bother getting elegant slices of meat--it will just fall off the bone and dissolve into strings--so pile people's plates with a mess of meat and potatoes, and sprinkle with the juices, onion and garlic.

My kitchen rule

We had some friends over for lunch on Saturday and I think I've finally worked out how to cook for people. Yes I can cook, but for years having people for dinner or lunch was a mite stressful because I'd tend to look through cookbooks until I saw something that looked AMAZING and decide I had to cook that for my friends.

The trouble being that the AMAZING recipes are always the ones that involve lots of last-minute pan-frying, or sauce reduction, or some other sort of process that keeps you chained to the stove. I'd then add several side dishes that are simple on their own but a pain in aggregate, and once starter and dessert was in place you had a massive hassle and all I could do was drink wine and listen to everyone else when it was all cooked.

Now I knew that the secret to all this was preparing more simple meals. But I'd managed to convince myself that what I was planning was pretty simple, and indeed it was if you didn't see having friends for dinner as a social event rather than practice for working in a busy commercial kitchen. Once I started talking to people and having fun, the whole match broke down.

Anyway, all that's a roundabout way of saying that I've finally worked out that, when planning a meal for guests, you've basically got to set it up so that you're wondering what you'll be doing most of the time. There should be basically nothing that needs doing for an hour before people arrive. If it feels like there's no work to do, there will probably be just about as much as you can take.

Things I like about Newtown

On my way home from work tonight--a damp, drizzly spring evening--this stage was set up opposite Newtown station and a sort of nu-folk band was playing. It's part of the Sydney Festival fringe. But you'd never get this stuff in Woolahra.

Walking: the evidence!

The inability to post video content means these sorts of posts will always be a bit underwhelming.

But I'm sitting on a bench here while Anya delightedly does laps of the 5 metre pavement in front of me, slapping her feet all the way. Crawling is looking distinctly old hat.

Kiss, kiss

Anya is a kissing machine! My BlackBerry is incapable of uploading videos so I can't really demonstrate this visually, but you'll have to take my word for it.

She discovered about a fortnight ago that Kate and I spend a lot of our time putting our lips to her and making smacking noises. So she's clearly worked out that this is something people do to things they like.

When I got up with her yesterday morning, she was on a kissing campaign. She kissed the sofabed in her room; she kissed all her toys strewn on the floor; she kissed several books, and in "The Crunching Munching Caterpillar" (one of her favourite books) she kissed the caterpillar on every page. I obviously got plenty of embraces too.

She's also very into blowing kisses, a trick she might have learned from her friend Sofia. Her version isn't quite an elegant wafting of an airy kiss: more a smacker to the heel of the hand, followed by a karate-chop and a big smile. But you know what she's getting at.

How many Australian politicians can dance on the head of a pin?

So Canberra's plans to do a refugee swap with Malaysia have been thrown out by the courts and a glimmer of hope has emerged that after 10 years the country might at last abandon the cruel charade of offshore processing.

The ruling bans offshore processing of refugees--the cobbled-together Pacific Solution that won John Howard the 2011 election on a wave of post-9/11 xenophobia. But the opposition have for once dropped their policy of relentless obstruction by offering to join the government on a bill to overturn this, thus continuing to immiserate refugees so as to cause splits in the Labor vote.

The modern Labor party being a worthless shower of clueless machine politicians, I think it's odds-on likely that they'll gratefully accept this terrible deal. But I'm freshly amazed at how hermetically divorced from the reality of migration this whole issue is. It's like those old mediaeval theological debates about how many angels can dance on a pinhead: it's not really about migration policy, but rather about a morality play populated by gullible bleeding hearts, uncouth queue-jumping refugees, ruthless people-smugglers, bold sailors, xenophobes acting in the foreigners' best interests...

Of course, there are several facts that can't be mentioned in this debate, such as:

*The details of Australia's immigration policy make no difference to the number of refugees wanting to come to Australia by boat

*The frequency of people coming by boat relates more to Indonesian law enforcement and weather factors than to anything else

*Running detention centres, both on- and off-shore, is a lavishly wasteful and expensive way of processing refugees

*So is preventing them from working

*The vast majority of people in Australian detention centres, both onshore and offshore, are eventually granted residency

*The vast majority of illegal migrants in Australia are visa overstayers from Europe and North America

*The vast majority of refugees who claim asylum on arrival in Australia come by plane

*Australia actually needs migrants, and most refugees who make it here come from precisely the skilled classes of society the country needs most

*Successive waves of migrants have made Australia a vastly more pleasant, interesting society than it would have been if it had maintained the British-Irish stodge of the mid-20th century White Australia policy

*The sorts of people who would uproot themselves and cross the world in this manner are showing precisely the initiative and smarts that would make them good workers and taxpayers in future

*The uncertainty and powerlessness of being incarcerated in detention centres causes mental health problems in detainees which will make them a burden on local health services once they're released.

I'm leaving out the myriad humanitarian arguments and sticking to pure self-interest here, since Australian public life seems entirely immune to humanitarianism when confronted with people in boats. But clearly the driving force behind all of this is that this country has vast wealth to share, and the least we could do for people fleeing oppression and warfare is extend a welcoming hand.

Politicians may feel this is all just elaborate theatre which they need to play out for the sake of some posited wedge of racist voters, but it has real-world consequences. These people deserve our help.

Sun worshipper

In Australia, the sun is super-intense and the population still weighted towards pasty, reddy-blonde types from British Isles stock. That means that we're all very solicitous about protecting our kids' skin.

I'm told my cousin Astrid was barely allowed out as a child without a protective layer of SPF-25; schoolkids all have standard-issue neck-shaded caps, like recruits to some French Foreign Legion child army. To be seen out on a sunny day with a bare-headed child makes middle-class parents feel as socially awkward as if they were caught offering their toddler a cigar.

That's all very well, but Anya has other ideas. She doesn't much like having her face touched, so she'll scream blue murder as you try to put sunscreen on her; and while we're not sure she actively dislikes wearing hats and the baby sunglasses we've bought for her, we're quite sure she actively loves taking them off. A hat will remain on her head for about three seconds before she doffs it, plays with it for a while, and throws it idly to the ground. Put her in her stroller and roll the shade overhead, and she'll lean forward until her face is in the sun again, the copper glints in her hair glowing in the light.

Her one exception to this rule is our hats and sunglasses, which she absolutely loves wearing. So we're going to lead by example this summer: wearing hats and sunnies until she gets envious, and decides to join in.

I have a condition

Don't eat Made in China pine nuts!

This isn't some xenophobic drive to protect the strategic Tuscan pine nut industry, it's a warning against pine mouth.

For the past couple of days I've had a weird metallic taste in my mouth. It's worst after I eat food: a sort of tacky, astringent copper-coin flavour that's impossible to get rid of. I don't know if this is psychosomatic, but it's not unlike the taste of pine nuts that have gone off.

From what I can see, this is a recognised condition that some people pick up from eating pine nuts. The little research that's been done seems to point to the Chinese White Pine as the source of the suspect nuts, though to be fair it seems pretty unconfirmed. This isn't some melamine-contamination China food scare: by all accounts the Chinese have been eating white pine nuts for millennia without problems. It's actually a slightly intriguing mystery that this condition wasn't really spotted until relatively recently.

Still, till further notice I'm going to be wary of Chinese pine nuts when I'm grinding my pesto. The condition supposedly goes away after a few days or weeks at most, and it seemed to peak last night. But while it's more an irritant than a debilitant, I'm not in a hurry to get it again.

Walking!

As with so many of Anya's key developmental stages, I'm not sure exactly when the breakthrough came on the walking front. Go back three weeks, and she had never taken a standing step unsupported. About two weeks ago, she managed her first tentative shuffles, and showed off a few in time for her first birthday. But this was only walking in the sense that sliding down a snowy hillside on a baking tray is a bit like Olympic luge.

Over the past few weeks the toddles have been getting longer and more confident. Today she reached some sort of a tipping point: for the first time, she seems to be getting around more on two limbs than four. She'll follow you around the house at a fair clip, stand and dance, and even make her way up and down slopes with only the slightest slip-ups. She's a bipedal baby! Or I should say: a two-footed toddler, a baby no more.

Simultaneously, she appears to have given up knee-crawling; preferring a crab-like style of skittering about on hands and toes, on the occasions when she does crawl. Lots of babies--I think my brother Robs was an example--only ever crawl like that. She seems to think that the old knee-crawl is beneath her now, and wants something a bit closer to vertical.