The reader

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

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

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



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

Food: Christmas dinner



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

Here's the menu:

Amuse bouche of pomegranate, salmon roe, and ginger tapioca

Salmorejo with scallops, bugs and tomato crisps

Duck roasted in young merlot with figs and apricots

Mulled wine granita

Berry and orange trifle

Cheese

Petits fours and tea

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

Here's a few of the courses:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

'Twas the night before Christmas...



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

Books: Minimum of Two, by Tim Winton

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Ta!"

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

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

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

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

The euro veto

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Street art: Darwin at the museum

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

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

Tickling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

House training

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

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

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

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

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