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.
Wednesday, 30 November 2011
Thursday, 24 November 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, 23 November 2011
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.
Tuesday, 22 November 2011
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.
Sunday, 20 November 2011
A pub lunch
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?
Saturday, 19 November 2011
Gender agenda
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.
Thursday, 17 November 2011
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.
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.
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.
Wednesday, 16 November 2011
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.
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.
Wednesday, 9 November 2011
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.
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.
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.
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.
Tuesday, 8 November 2011
Kissing: the return
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.
Monday, 7 November 2011
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.)
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.)
Sunday, 6 November 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, 1 November 2011
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.
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.
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