Motherload

I found the BBC Radio 4 Programme broadcast yesterday ('The World's Best Teachers') captivating and inspiring. It was all about Doug Lemov's techniques for teaching, which focus on gentle, non-invasive interventions helping children and students to bring their attention back to the classroom. Teachers can stay in control of their own emotions, and children don't feel yelled at and coerced. I found it inspiring for so many reasons. When I was a university lecturer, we were never given any teacher training at all, which is why university lecturers are, on the whole, poor teachers. All my teaching was based on having done a load of acting and improv as an undergraduate – I acted my way through. On the whole that worked fine, unless I was in a sticky situation with one student, or wasn't as familiar with the material I was trying to teach. I did have a year in the classroom, in France, in a Lycée Technique in the Vosges. I was 21, on a year abroad during my un...

Yesterday, my son was nearly assaulted on his way home from school. Another mother said that she'd seen him 'enthusiastically skipping' along the road after a school club. She'd thought of asking him to walk with her, but hadn't wanted to 'cramp his style'. He stopped to stroke a local cat he knows, called Ollie. He was nearly at the turn-off to our road. It was just before 5pm, on a dark December evening. A white van pulled up beside him, and the driver leaned across. He said that he had some sweets in the van and asked if my child would like to get in and have some. My child said, 'Um, I live round the corner, and I have an appointment at home, so, no thank you'. The man scowled at him, and drove away. Then my son ran all the way home. When he got to the door, he came in, rattling away at me about something that had happened at school. He was wheezing, and I was concerned, told him to get his inhaler. It was only then that he told me about ...

Picture the scene: I was just getting a roast chicken and trimmings out of a hot oven, when my daughter sidled up behind me and told me she'd had a bad test score. My mother was hovering in the background, my son was creating merry hell somewhere nearby. I had five minutes between dropping him back from an activity, before I headed off to his school for a parents' evening.  Dear Reader, what do you think my reaction was?  Sadly, no, it wasn't the measured, calm, 'Oh dear, darling, never mind, I'm sure you'll do better next time – what do you think went wrong?' No. I looked down, and all I could see was that the trimmings were overcooked – blackened, actually – and I lost my temper. I stormed off out of the house, and my husband found me, fuming as I looked through son's books, predicting dire reports and spitting tacks about the National Curriculum. WRONG. WRONG. WRONG.  I emerged from son's class with a renewed respect for teachers, ...

The last main speech of  The Taming of the Shrew  (written around 1590-94) has always confused me.  It's the speech in which Katherina seems to prove to the assembled guests that she is entirely tamed, and obedient to her husband's wishes, even if this is at the expense of her own mind, heart and reason.  It is a huge forty-three lines long, beating out again and again the many ways in which women are inferior to men, because a man is 'thy lord, thy life, thy keeper,/Thy head, thy sovereign'.  Women who are 'mov'd' into being scornful, says Kate, are like 'a fountain troubled,/Muddy, ill-seeming, thick, bereft of beauty'. While men commit themselves to 'painful labour both by sea and land', women simply lie 'warm at home, secure and safe'.  When a woman is 'froward, peevish, sullen, sour,/And not obedient to his honest will', she is a 'foul contending rebel,/And graceless traitor'. Because women's bodies are,...

Someone posted this piece  in the  Washington Post   by Mihal Greener, an Australian writer raising her family in Holland,  on my Facebook page this morning. It made me want to cry. According to the April 2013 findings by UNICEF in their report 'Child well-being in rich countries: a comparative overview ', Dutch children are the happiest in the world. I'd heard about this report, and about Mihal Greener, a couple of years ago, when UNICEF first published this finding, but somehow it made a greater impact this morning.  Perhaps it's because yesterday I stood in the dreary, wet playground and endured two mothers, one each side of me, making endless less-than-subtle digs about status, work and motherhood in the minutes before pickup, without ever actually asking each other a question . I'd had a very nice day, working from home, getting on with stuff. After five minutes of playground pleasantries, I felt like a collapsed balloon. Again...

I am seeing a herbalist occasionally at the moment, who is not remotely sympathetic about my 'issues' with food, which I find HUGELY challenging. When she asked, on my latest visit, what I had been eating and serving the kids, I found myself going blank and feeling rebellious, sulky, and cross. Even though I actually plan menus. On paper. She has a direct and unemotional manner. She doesn't do sympathy, she does diagnosis and treatment. It seems that I wish to be treated with kid gloves, as though I might shatter if she uses the H-word (that's H for healthy). Part of me doesn't want to go back to see her EVER AGAIN. Mean, horrible lady, who won't pander to my whims, won't be nice to me for being such a hero as to Address My Problems. Another part of me thinks (knows) she's doing me a favour. She's assuming I am fully functional – an adult, forsooth! – and that I'm ready to hear good advice. In fact, her assumption, oddly, is that, since I...

David Bradley I had the immense privilege this week of taking a turn about Hyde Park with the remarkable David Bradley. His funny, satirical, angry essay, 'A Eulogy for Nigger', has just won the Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize. Here is what we talked about: http://shinynewbooks.co.uk/…/interview-with-david-bradley-…/ And this is a taster of the essay: http://shinynewbooks.co.uk/…/an-extract-from-the-nhe-essay…/

Dear Friend, I went on holiday with you, to write. We had the most glorious week, sitting with computers and books out in the late summer Corfu sunshine, gin at six on the terrace, views of the cerulean Ionian Sea towards Albania, ruminating, me on Motherload, you on the Romantics. Each evening saw us sauntering towards a harbourside restaurant, where you laughed as I ate a lot of Greek Cheese Pie, and calamari that made me sick on the last night. We managed to eat at Gerald Durrell's villa, much to the envy of my children. We returned together, with our small bags, sitting side by side on the flight, quietly reading, occasionally muttering to each other. We parted at the baggage reclaim with a brief hug and kiss. I rolled my weekend bag away from you, did not look back, through customs, and out to the dreary tube back to Bounds Green. At one point, you asked me a question, ministering to me as you were that week, making me tea, making me sit down and keep working, keeping m...

Rebecca Solnit has published the most wonderful essay in Harper's Magazine this morning. She, or her editor, have also managed to give it the best title – 'The Mother of all Questions'. On the face of it her essay is a response to all the pigs who've ever hounded her for not having a baby, but it is so much more than that. In it she comes up with an excellent term for the best way to respond to a closed, negative, spiteful question: to be rabbinical . I'm not sure that I could borrow that word, being so completely unJewish as I am. But I, too, long for a word for that way of being which allows you to respond to spite by gently reflecting it back, opening up its painful, mean little folds, and helping your hound to see a bigger picture. I'm currently reading Marilynne Robinson's Gilead , a yearning love letter from a dying father to his future adult son. There is that same quality of mercy, and perpetual wonder, that in anyone else's hands would soun...

This. This is happiness to me.

‘Since when had he been waiting? Since he had made himself free for waiting by losing the desire for particular things, including the desire for the end of things. Waiting begins when there is nothing more to wait for, not even the end of waiting. Waiting is unaware of and destroys that which it awaits. Waiting awaits nothing.’ BLANCHOT, M., L’attente l’oubli , Paris, Gallimard, 1962,  trans by John Gregg as Awaiting Oblivion , pp. 24-5,  University of Nebraska Press, 1997. 

Summer is as dreadful as ever – it's not that we're not doing nice things, it's that woven into those things come horrible events like having too many friends with cancer at the moment, two with terminal brain cancers. This week I have been an adult. This week I visited my friend who has terminal brain cancer. We wanted to put on a 'play in a day' with her children, mine, and her cousin's, because she and her cousin used to love to do this in their own childhoods. The play eventually ended up as a two-minute iMovie, some kind of insane Arthurian Dance-Off. It was fun, but it was also not at all fun. It is not fun to see children playing, and know that their mother is going to be taken away from them. However much one can dress up the day with costumes, and ice cream, and pasta and iMovie. Yet this is what you do when there are children, because children want to play. They understand what is going on, but they want and need to play. They are full of unquencha...

Jon Day as cycle courier, back in the day I sat down with Jon Day, one-time cycle courier, now English literature lecturer, and had a very enjoyable discussion about cycling and his wonderful essay on it, Cyclogeography (published by the rather fabulous Notting Hill Editions). What I really loved about Jon's views on cycling was that he thought the British attitude to the bicycle was po-faced, while the French have a completely irreverent, subversive and inherently revolutionary take on le cyclisme . You can read the interview here – and take a look at Shiny New Books , which is all about what's hot in literature this summer.

So here is how Knausgaard names my particular Motherload: 'I had nothing but contempt for precise plans to pinpoint the most suitable time , both as far as our own lives were concerned and which ages went best together. After all this was not a business we were running. I wanted to let chance decide, let what happened happen, and then deal with the consequences as they emerged . Wasn't that what life was about? So when I walked down the streets with Vanja, when I fed and changed her, with these wild longings for a different life hammering away in my chest, this was the consequence of a decision and I had  to live with it. There was no  way out, other than the old well-travelled route: endurance . The fact that I cast a pall over the lives of those around me in doing do, well, that was just another consequence which had to be endured. If we had another child, and we would, regardless of whether Linda was pregnant now or not, and then another which was equally inevitable, su...

I'm not given to advertising, nor am I much of a cook, so this is hardly a major endorsement. But I am sitting on a secret, soon to be a secret no longer. This man's cooking is breathtaking. I've been sitting in his cafe, pretending to write, but actually eating cake, drinking great coffee, scoffing extraordinary flavour combinations in salads, and munching on bread selections, for the last two years. I've been greedily keeping him to myself (although everyone in Muswell Hill now knows about him). He's opening a new place in Hoxton, I think, and I'm already bracing myself for the day when boring old Muswell Hill is left behind in his wake. The point about Chris is that he is Australian, and has worked all over the world. He feels the magic of herbs and spices, nuts and seeds. He understands that you need to keep things fresh and simple, but also put them together to make the tongue tingle. He serves pieces of cake as big and generous as his heart. Chris...

A friend of mine recently decided she was going to look for ways to get her kids involved in volunteering, as she was finding it really difficult to show them altruism in action. Sounded like a really good idea, and I promised to join in. An opportunity duly arose to pick up litter after a local festival, so I got my daughter to come with me at 6pm, reassuring her it was just a few minutes of her time. We walked around a park on a warm sunny evening, the longest day of the year, in orange hi-vis vests with pink gloves and litter-pickers (which have a surprisingly accurate and satisfying grip) for under half an hour, collecting bits of nougat, cigarette butts and plastic bags.  As we went, we discussed the philosophy of altruism.  AKA, she was furious with me. She really could not accept that doing something to help the community without a direct return to herself was reasonable, worthwhile or anything except a punishment (welcome to my world, darling). She was...