Coffee, Kookaburras, Kooky Night Sounds and Christmas Kokolates

It is the last day of the year, and I can ALMOST report that I went an entire year without coffee.

I say ‘almost’, because we spent Christmas with extended family, where I am always offered many, many cups of coffee. I still really like the taste of coffee, if not the headaches, the palpitations, the sleepless nights and the ever-so-slightly increased urgency to pee, especially during long car trips along a highway dotted with unisex and therefore piss-ridden portaloos. So to be social, I bought a jar of decaffeinated Moccona (the best tasting de-caf), and joined in.

But my father-in-law gets distracted in the kitchen, especially when everyone takes their drinks different. So I’m pretty sure he gave me a fully caffeinated cup of coffee three days ago.

First, it tasted very strong. It didn’t taste like Moccona. I had to add sugar to it, even though I don’t normally take sugar. That should’ve been my first sign.

Second, I only got about three hours’ sleep the next night. I read the entire time without dropping off in bed.

This makes a change. I’m not sure why, but I’m always dopey at the coast. Climbing the stairs at my in-laws’ house, I feel as though my body has doubled in weight. Our house is almost 600m in altitude above theirs, and I suspect that’s got something to do with it. I’m reminded now of the months of bleeding noses when we first moved to Canberra. I don’t get those anymore, so I  guess I must be somewhat acclimatised to a higher altitude. Returning to Canberra from the coast always invigorates me, as dull as I may feel to be back after excellent holidays away.

My doziness at the inlaws’ house is also to do with the fact that they watch Boxing Day cricket. Boxing Day cricket is rather disingenuously named: it lasts days. Not just the one single Boxing Day. There’s days and days of it. I really don’t know what they find to talk about. I sat down to find out and my mother-in-law asked me what I was doing watching the cricket I had so disparagingly written off. “Look at all those people,” she said, meaning the crowd at the MCG. “All those people can’t be wrong!”

No, they’re not wrong about what excites them to the core. And neither am I. I find cricket commentary the most soporific song on earth, and is why I’m not worried about insomnia. I’m confident that even if I’m hit with the insomnia stick at menopause, I’ll still have the cricket on ABC.

Tired reason number three: the very long drive to get there. I spend the first night falling asleep to the after image of trucks, and I don’t think that sort of rest is the most restorative kind of sleep available.

There’s also the call of the subtropical birdlife at dawn, which is exotic enough to my ears that I don’t sleep through it. This is not an unpleasant sound, but it means I’m awake about 2 hours earlier than I’d choose to be.

My inlaws don’t have it so good when they visit us – we have a couple of flapping roof panels on our back veranda. My father-in-law nails them down afresh when he visits. They manage to work themselves loose in the meantime, and we don’t notice. No one in this house even hears them anymore, even on the windiest of days. (Which are windy enough to blow the trampoline clean across the yard.) If anything, I find the flapping and banging exciting in the most reassuring of ways. Atmospherically, it’s kind of like the sound you get when wind whistles through a partially open window on a dark, dark night. That sound drives one of my uncles insane, as an unrelated side note. But I only need to hear wind whistling through a cranny and I am taken straight to a scene out of Wuthering Heights.

By the way, does anyone else think Kate Bushes voice completely inappropriate for singing a song called Wuthering Heights? What we need is a woman with a sultry, low voice, not… that. (My husband was singing the Kate Bush version in the car. APROPOS OF NOTHING.)

There’s one more reason why I sleep a lot at my inlaws’ house. Because I can! I don’t even hear the kid! It’s amazing how that happens. When there’s only me to look after her, my ears are open to her every whim. But when there’s Nan and Poppy and Dad to share the care… I don’t even hear her getting into mischief. In fact, it was her Nan, not me this time, who heard her getting into somebody else’s chocolates in the next room. (Hint for three year old choc ninjas: Lying down on the carpet does not make you invisible. Also, avoid making the ‘nyom nyom sound’.)

Ah. These blessed Mother ears. They do have an off-switch after all!

And yes, back to coffee: the reason I thought of writing in the first place. Once we got home to Canberra we had no food in the house (still don’t, as a matter of fact), which led me to rifle through the freezer trying to find something defrostable. I found all sorts of stuff, including a tub of ice-cream which I’d assumed was brown stew (it most often happens the other way around). I also came across a tub of freeze-dried coffee, which must have been there for several years. I took it out of the freezer meaning to throw out, but once I opened the lid I was overwhelmed with the satisfying aroma of real, unadulterated coffee. I haven’t thrown it out at all. I’ve left it sitting on the windowsill in the kitchen. It hadn’t been there for two minutes when my husband emerged from his gaming lair.

“I thought I could smell coffee,” he said, dazed and confused.

“Ah, that.” And so I explained.

He’s off coffee, too, you see. Not because I wear the pants round here and forced him off it, but because some newish evidence suggests coffee may not be the best thing for individuals with elevated homocysteine levels. He says abstinence is much harder for him by dint of him working in an office full of nerds. And delicious free coffee. The first world dramas of working for a large and successful private enterprise! (They have magazines, too.)

This doesn’t stop him from poking his head round the door at periodic intervals and telling me that real coffee smells delicious.

I just made him a cup of decaf. But I bet if I go into the kitchen right now I’ll catch him with his head in that irresistible nose-trough of ground coffee on the window sill.

The Best Kind Of Daydream

An article in Scientific American traces the development of research on the art of daydreaming.

Daydreaming is broken into 3 types:

1. Positive-Constructive Daydreaming

representing playful, wishful and constructive imagery

This not only sounds lovely; it sounds beneficial to individuals and society. Surely it’s by engaging in this sort of daydreaming that we come up with our best ideas.

2. Guilty-Dysphoric Daydreaming

representing obsessive, anguished fantasies

This sounds like a sort of post-traumatic response, or ‘stewing’, in everyday parlance. Some people seem to do this quite a lot, turning minor arguments into huge ones, but only in their own minds. For obvious reasons we should try not to let our minds engage in this sort of daydreaming.

3. Poor Attentional Control

representing the inability to concentrate on ongoing thought or external tasks 

I now imagine an old-fashioned classroom — the kind with wooden floors and chair legs scraping, and chalk screeching down blackboards, led by a cane-toting teacher scalding Jimmy for staring out of the window. That’s the classic picture of the childlike and carefree pupil of yesteryear, constrained and reined in by the school system until he is old enough to be put to work in the mines.

This kind of daydreaming can stop you from getting things done, sure.

School has changed a bit since then. But I don’t think it’s changed quite enough.

Over the course of a typical day, do schools give students (and teachers!) enough time to contemplate?

During my twenties I taught at a girls’ high school. I used to schedule quiet time into my lesson plans, though I’ll freely admit that this was for my own sanity rather than based on any conviction or sound educational philosophies; I was as green as any beginning teacher.  When older and more experienced teachers happened to visit my classroom that I saw their surprise, and realised how unusual it was, to ask your students to do something radical like listening to classical music, each in contemplative mode, after giving them something to think about. “What a wonderful, calm environment this is,” they might say. But other teachers (especially one particular P.E. teacher!) would visit my quiet classroom, see my own relaxed posture, and assume we were all slacking off. She’d say something like, “Well, this is lovely!”, deliver her messages and stalk off.

I’m not suggesting P.E. teachers need to incorporate time for thinking during a sports match, but my English students did their best creative work when they were allowed time to think. I discovered that only by accident.

What can we do, then, to encourage positive-constructive daydreaming in our children?

As parents, we might:

• Keep TV out of children’s bedrooms, and also off in the living areas unless programmes are being actively watched.
• Encourage books over media which plays automatically (TV, movies, and digital books on autoplay). Stories can be enjoyed in many different ways, but the beauty of books is that the reader turns the page. The reader can stop reading at any time, and the story will wait. The reader decides when to turn the page, if at all. Their reading may lead them away from the story and into their own minds, and that’s okay too.

Right now I’m taken back ten years. I’m at university, in that frantic pre-exam period where even the quietest nooks and crannies of the campus become frenetic, and it no longer seems that every Tom, Dick and Harry is living it up in the coffee house; now everyone wants your seat at the central library. That’s where I am, and I’m studying for a linguistics exam. I’m sitting in that open space on the first floor, where we’re all surrounded by students from different disciplines.

At some point I look up and I see a familiar back-of-the-head. This is the head of a boy who went to the same high school as I did. But we went to a huge high school, where even students in our own year can look like almost-strangers. I’ve never shared classes with this boy but I know of him anyway. I know from prize-givings that this young man is called Olly and that he is super bright. I want to be that bright right now, because I’m sick of studying. I wonder what’s so different about him. How does he do what he does?

Olly was always one of those young men who seemed to walk around high school in an absent-minded daze, playing chess at lunchtimes but never seeming to do any real study, then blitzing everyone in the maths and sciences. Until this moment I hadn’t really wondered about what happened to him, but now I peer over his shoulder to take a glance at his textbook. I’m not surprised to see that he’s studying something like quantum mechanics, and his book is about something even more obscure than that – wave particle duality, or some such thing.

All I can see is the back of his dark head, but I’m distracted now, probably because I’ve been studying too long and need to take a break, but if I actually get up and take a walk I’ll lose my seat forever.

So I’m watching this young man and I’m fascinated. I’ve always been fascinated by what goes on inside the minds of people who are extremely gifted in the areas where I am not. He’s not even holding a pen. He doesn’t seem to have a ring-binder full of notes, either, or a bag. He’s just sitting there relaxing with a textbook, and more amazing than that, he’s not even reading the darn thing. He’s looking at the pages for a brief spurt; next thing he’s staring into space. He’s spending more time *thinking* about his book than *reading* it.

Maybe that’s the difference between Olly and the rest of us.

Any of Olly’s teachers would have recognised his amazing brain power, and even if they didn’t, he was the sort of boy whose reputation preceded him. I’m sure Olly was given space to daydream.

But what about the lesser mortals among us? Could it be that a major difference between Olly and less able students is partly (if not mainly) in varying abilities to daydream?

So, what can teachers do to foster positive-constructive daydreaming?

• Value quiet time for thinking. Quiet time in the classroom is hard to achieve, but all the more important now, because some students don’t ever have quiet time at home. They might come from large families where they share bedrooms with siblings, or even from smaller households where the TV or computers are never off, even in that precious thinking time that might happen naturally between wake and sleep.
• Moments of silence don’t necessarily need to be planned; it may simply be a matter of cultivating the habit of identifying key sentences in presentations and literally leaving pause for thought before continuing with your explanation, especially of a brand new concept.
• When I was a student teacher we were encouraged by a former principal to include ‘compulsory pause for thought’ in our questioning. This quiet phase is implemented by asking the class a key question, then refusing to take any answers for a set period of time, maybe 20 seconds. This seems like an eternity to the most extroverted members of class, but the introverts will thank you for it. You get different answers from different students if you do this, and it’s a good way to deal with the Hermione Grangers of this world.
• Obviously, the teacher needs impeccable classroom management skills before this is going to work. And the quiet moment does need to be enforced before a class of students gets the concept, because many have been trained all the way through school to thrust their hands into the air, or to call out an answer as soon as they think of one: this is race mentality, partly, and also one way for a teacher to foster an atmosphere of ‘energy’ in their classrooms, which always looks good to any outsider strolling by. And sometimes you do want top-of-the-head answers: during brainstorming sessions, for example. But at other times energy begins from within, and noise in the classroom isn’t necessarily a sign that the students are stifled, or that everyone is bored stiff.

It’s all about the dragon.

My husband and I have a recurring argument. It goes like this:

I say that Game of Thrones is high fantasy and he says Game of Thrones is not high fantasy; just plain old fantasy. I say Game of Thrones counts as high fantasy because it’s got dragons in. He says dragons are not the be all and end all of SF genre classification. I say on the contrary; they are a very convenient cut off point.

To change the topic completely and get us away from this circular discussion:

The Many Meanings Of The Dragon Archetype In Fantasy Stories from io9.

The Best of 2011: A Round-up

This is the stuff I discovered in 2011. That doesn’t mean it’s new. Far from it in some cases! It means I only came across it this year.

FAVOURITE TV SERIES

We’ve been spoilt for choice in the last few years, with television series getting the budgets they deserve. Last year I fell in love with Mad Men and only finished season three in the new year, but it doesn’t really count as a 2011 discovery. This year it was Breaking Bad.

Unfortunately for me, I live in a country where TV is slow to get here, so I have to keep away from all mention of Breaking Bad on the internet if I don’t want to ruin season four for myself.

This, of course, is why it’s prudent to wait until a series is finally over before even watching the first one. I didn’t watch Six Feet Under until five years after it had concluded, and I’m very glad I waited.

MOVIE

I saw some excellent movies this year but to be honest I sat through a lot of crud to find them.

The best was Precious.

CLASSIC MOVIE

I didn’t watch many classic movies, but I was still much impressed by Hud, whose storyline hasn’t dated at all.

AUSTRALIAN MOVIE

Candy.

And in other news, the Most Pretentious award goes to Tree of Life. Whenever we get the opportunity to go to see a movie at the theatre, it coincides with family being in the vicinity to babysit, and also with particularly poor choices. We really need to come up with something else to do on our wild nights out without the kid. Instead, we saw Tree Of Life at the Gold Coast, which was memorable mainly for the people who walked out in a huff, and for the audience clapping at the end… because it was FINALLY OVER. I didn’t think it was that bad, and I have a problem with certain vocal patrons impressing their views on others, but it wasn’t my cup of tea.

Most uncomfortable film goes to Hard Candy, in which closing my eyes wasn’t enough. I ended up blocking my ears, then wondered what I was still doing in the room. Only two other movies have affected me like that: One of them was SAW; the other was 28 Weeks Later. This one was very different from those two films, and very well done. Still, I won’t be seeing it again anytime soon.

NON-FICTION BOOK

I loved Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks for its unflinching yet balanced view of women in Saudi Arabia and surrounds. But it also made me very angry, to the point where I had to put it down at one point and come back later.

BEST DOCUMENTARY

Hot Cities made me feel a renewed gratefulness for my good luck in this life, and also made me worried about global warming. We should be worried. At around this time I also watched The Future Of Food, a two-part series. That had a similar effect. The latter was a good antidote to the hysteria surrounding genetically engineered food.

Hot Cities is on YouTube, of course.

NOVEL

Last year I loved Revolutionary Road and We Need To Talk About Kevin.

This year I took some wonderful suggestions and found a renewed love of YA lit. Every new book I read supplant’s last week’s favourite, but I’m very glad I discovered John Green.

Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You by Peter Cameron is a YA book by marketing and because the protagonist is in his final year at high school, but he could just as easily be a 40 year old man, except for the wonderful rendering of the teenage mind. I absolutely loved that book.

CHILDREN’S BOOK

My daughter’s favourite book is not my favourite book. In fact, the more she likes it, the more I grow weary of it. This year I discovered the work of Oliver Jeffers, first through the Heart In The Bottle storybook app for iPad. I later found The Incredible Book Eating Boy in our local library, and was impressed all over again at its simplicity, its use of colour and space and non-cliched storylines. But in the last week I came across Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner, and because I discovered it most recently, that is my new favourite children’s book.

BIOGRAPHY

The film of Edith Piaf’s life. Very sad, and had me thinking of her for a long while after.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

At the age of 16 I read the first two volumes of the Janet Frame autobiography, but put it aside when life took over. As a consequence I’d never made it to the end of The Envoy From Mirror City. I’m very glad I came back to it this year, because I’m now at the age Janet Frame was during this section of her life. Not only that, but I’ve also had the similar experience of plonking myself in a hostel somewhere in London and seeing what pans out. So I very much enjoyed the final in her trilogy, and I’m glad I waited until I’d grown up a little before reading the ‘adult’ part of her life. I’m sure I got more out of it.

MUSIC

It’s easy to see at a glance which albums I have been listening to this year; going to play count on iTunes tells me exactly what I’ve been obsessed over. The most listened to song goes to Somebody That I used to know by a long shot.

2011 will also be memorable for:

The Woolshed Sessions

If you like your music a little bit country, then this one’s for you. (I prefer ‘folk’. My MOTHER listens to ‘country’.)

This song is the standout, but the album sounds great in its entirety.

And if it didn’t make me sound like an inbred New Zealander, where there are two degrees of separation at most, I’d tell you Jess went to church with my high school BFF, and I might not have even discovered this album if it hadn’t been for that. It’s a constant disappointment to me that small productions (albums, books, short story collections) sometimes fail to get the recognition they deserve simply because the Marketing Machine is so effective at pushing a narrow range of things at us. And that’s the moral of the story: Keep looking hard and you’ll find the stuff you really love.

Florence and the Machine

official homepage

Dog Days Are Over

Paris Wells

For some reason, Paris Wells reminds me of Edith Piaf. (In dress only!)

As you can imagine, this album is great to exercise to. This music makes me walk nice and fast.

Reverend and the Makers

Perhaps because I’m approaching middle age I identify with the lyrics in this song in particular!

The Fratellis

Flathead

My taste in music only gets ‘harder’ as I get older. (Bear in mind that as a teenager I was listening to Bach.) I always thought it worked the other way, mainly because the old people in my life could never stand noise.

Gotye

Heart’s A Mess (though the iTunes title does not contain an apostrophe and for some reason this bugs me). A fantastic, very moving song which gets better and better the more I listen… (usually not the case).

It was around mid year they released the song I listened to the most:

Which led me to preorder their next album. It came out in August. I’m now a bona fide Gotye fan. Some wit on YouTube said, “I broke up with my girlfriend just to enjoy this song.” Unusually for YouTube comments, I laughed.

Kings of Leon

These guys aren’t new, but this year they were new to me.

Trunk got lots and lots of plays on the iPod.

But I also really like Talihina Sky, especially the softer version:

Kasabian

Fire

Aloe Blacc

This is one of the catchiest tunes of 2011. It’s so catchy I’m not sure I’ll still be listening to it next year.

I Need A Dollar

Grace Jones

A music reviewer listed a Grace Jones song as a classic, which reminded me of its existence. It was this one:

You’ll have heard it before, no? I’m not a fan of her other songs. Just that one.

WEIRDEST ITEM OF CLOTHING

I also happened to buy a t-shirt last summer with a depiction of Grace Bones on it. I didn’t know it was Grace Bones until the guy working at Christchurch International Customs commented on it. (I guess he’s trained to scrutinise people, and their t-shirts.) I bought it because it’s red, but I’ve managed to scare people with it unintentionally, most notably when I approached a dude sitting in a car to ask the whereabouts of a cafe. I actually saw him flinch.

This is it. And yes, it's a man's t-shirt.

(I actually took that photograph because I was impressed with the size of the cucumber.)

This year I also continued to listen to a lot of Nick Cave, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan, who will probably remind me of this decade, rather than of 2011 specifically.

MOST THOUGHT-PROVOKING PODCAST

I’m a big fan of podcasts and lucky for me this year I’ve been doing the sort of work which includes large amount of mindless repetitive tasks and is therefore well-suited to listening to all sorts of randomly connected interviews.

I continued to enjoy Saturday Morning With Kim Hill, my favourite interviewer ever. I discovered the Research Unplugged podcasts by Pennsylvania University, which you can subscribe to through iTunes U. Academics talk to the wider community about their speciality, which means they don’t get as techinical as they would if they were lecturing their students, and are able to focus on the most broadly fascinating aspects of their work.

I also listened to Freakonomics Radio Podcast, Nature Podcast and Wired Storyboard Audio Podcast, even though I don’t read the magazine. (It’s way more expensive to get here in Aus.) but the most interesting new podcast discovery is definitely Stuff To Blow Your Mind.

BEST FOOD DISCOVERY

2011 was an especially unadventurous year for food, and during winter I developed an unhealthy reliance upon freezer pies which needed to be put right come summer, when I switched back to steamed fish. (Also went through two kitchen steamers, which didn’t help.)

I also worked out that extra garlic improves any kind of soup. Two bulbs per pot, to be precise. This may or may not be related to the fact that it was a good year for avoiding colds and fluwhiz which all caught up with me big time come spring.)

DRINK

I finally found a brand of decaffeinated coffee which doesn’t taste like rat poison. Mocchona. (Recommended by a palpitation buddy, my second cousin.)

BEST APP

I’d like to offer something obscure, something which needs promoting, but the app I recommended to friends about to buy an iPad was always Flipboard, which I use to read all my blogs and RSS feeds on. It feels just like reading a magazine. I may have just found a better alternative for Flipboard, But since I came across it this morning, it’s too early to say. I’ll keep you posted.

13 Christmas Picture Books

There always seem to be a lot of Christmas picture books in our local library, but that’s possibly because parents only get them out during December, whereas they get other books out at any time of year. This has made the number of Christmas books seem, to me, who has been plodding through the alphabet all year, like a disproportionate number.

Sometimes Christmas picture books are produced for their own value; sometimes they’re put out as one of a hit series. For parents who don’t want any more emphasis on Santa Claus than already exists, there are Christmas books which don’t feature any of that. You may have to look a bit harder for those ones, however.

One thing is true about Christmas Stories: The story has to stand up in its own right, even if you were to take the Christmassy part away.

There are also a number of cliched storylines in Christmas stories:

1. One character helps another character to discover the True Meaning of Christmas.

2. The Night Before Christmas has probably been covered, especially in the app store. In order to justify yet another illustrated version, it had better offer something pretty special!

3. I feel there should be three, but can’t think of a third right now!

DREAM SNOW BY ERIC CARLE

What I really like about this book is that you don’t work out the old man is Santa until the end. Well, you might if you saw the picture of Santa on the front cover, and if you’ve got more than two points of IQ to rub together, but I didn’t.

I also like Eric Carle’s art – he’s like the Quentin Blake of picture books – an unmistakable style. This book has pages of acetate which add a layer of snow to the illustrations. There’s also a button which makes a tune on the last page, and I think this library book has had some love, because the button is pretty worn out.

(There’s a picture of Eric Carle posing with his friend who posed for him. Anyone else think those guys look like identical twins? I’ve never seen two non-related men look so much alike.)

GIVE HIM MY HEART BY CHRISTINA ROsSETTI, ILLUSTRATED BY DEBI GLIORI

This book takes the first and last verse from a Christian poem about the nativity scene. It’s a satisfying poem, and I’m not surprised it’s been revived via a picture book. This particular picture book isn’t all about the nativity scene – that is certainly the backdrop, but a non-Christian family could still get its message. Instead of Jesus, a little girl’s grandfather is the recipient of love. The message is that if you don’t have anything else to give someone, then your love is enough.

Rossetti’s full poem is here.

WENCESLAS BY GERALDINE MCCAUGHREAN

The story of Wenceslas may or may not be familiar to a young reader, but it shouldn’t matter because Geraldine McCaughrean has a real gift for retelling history in beautiful, original language. The language in this story is poetic, sparse and would be just as easily at home in literature for adults. I’d wager Geraldine McCaughrean doesn’t believe in simplifying vocabulary for the sake of young readers. In this story she includes words such as ‘postern gate’, ‘seven-league boots’ and ‘broached the brandy’.

If I have one gripe about this particular edition – again – it’s the layout and the choice to overlay light bodied font onto textured background. But for mastery of language, storytelling and rhythm, you can’t go wrong with this author, no matter what age she’s writing for.

OLIVIA HELPS WITH CHRISTMAS BY IAN FALCONER

Sure enough, books which inspired TV series are better than TV series which led to books. This is one good example.

Olivia is a pig. All the characters are pigs. Olivia is an especially enthusiastic little six year old girl in every other respect. In this story the reader is taken through a winter-time Christmas with Olivia’s family, with Olivia trying to help (enthusiastically) and managing, quite often, to bugger things up. Still, the results are humorous: she cuts off the top of the main tree to make a little one for the table centrepiece, for instance.

The illustrations are a limited palette of desaturated pictures with red and green touches. The drawings are combined with photographs.

ALIENS LOVE PANTA CLAUS BY CLAIRE FREEMAN

Just when you thought Christmas books had been done to death… In come the aliens.

This book is part of a series which includes Aliens Love Underpants and Aliens In Underpants Save The World. Our local librarian has chosen some of these underpants stories for storytime, and the children all colored in a shape of underpants afterwards. I’m not sure what makes underpants a hit, but I guess there is a developmental stage during which underpants are fascinating. Or perhaps it’s not the underpants concept itself, but realisation of the fact that (almost) everybody wears underpants, and therefore we’re all equal. I do remember having these weird thoughts as a kid – it often involved the Queen of England. Our father would tell us to mind our table manners, on the pretext that the Queen could drop in at any moment, so she featured quite large in our house. I tried to imagine the Queen blowing her nose, sneezing, burping, Lord forbid farting, and also wearing underpants.

I’ve never been able to manage that last one.

EMILY AND THE BIG BAD BUNYIP BY JACKIE FRENCH

At first sight this doesn’t look like a Christmas story, which is probably why there’s a sticker on the front cover of this one which reads ‘Christmas Story’. Therein lies the problem with Christmas stories set authentically in Australia – there’s no snow, no reindeer and, well there’s no Santa either, which isn’t a huge issue except the old fellow would die of heat exhaustion if he gadded about Down Under in that big red suit of his on a typical summer’s night.

The bunyip in this story is portrayed as a Grinch-like character who needs to be persuaded to participate in Christmas. The other characters are all cheerful and comical, and in the end they do manage to cheer him up by presenting him with a horribly noisy tuba. Bunyips, apparently, love to make horrible noise. That’s the wonderful thing about made-up creatures. A picture book author can paint them as she pleases.

ALL SAFE IN THE STABLE BY MIG HOLDER

This one’s a bit different because it’s told in close third person point of view from the donkey that carries Mary to the stable for Jesus’ birth, and even features a rat, who eats their food.

The finale is a page with folds out to four times the size of the book, with a picture of baby Jesus, and presumably to hammer home the importance of this particular baby, which the rat has questioned throughout. I’m not sure about the wisdom of doing these fold out flappy pages with books. Admittedly, this is a library book so there’s little wonder it’s covered in sellotape, but this also means some of the writing is upside down on the page and the book needs to be turned upside down in order to read it. This could have easily been avoided with more thoughtful book design. Or perhaps kids don’t mind having to manipulate books this way and that in order to read them, not nearly so much as I do.

CHRISTMAS WITH YOU BY VICTORIA BALL

This is a Christmas book more suited to families who celebrate the day without the Christianity. It’s a poem about enjoying the day together, playing in the snow, then ending up safely tucked into bed. The characters are a family of mice living in a nice, warm looking house. Of course, you don’t really notice they’re mice.

This is a ‘going to bed Christmas book’, in which a little mouse has much (secular) fun on Christmas day, and is tucked into bed by its parent.

The illustrations are wonderfully warm, with the atmosphere of an indoor fire burning all around. I’m not sure why but I love illustrations of mice sitting in front of the hearth. (Actually, they don’t have to be mice, in particular.) I love them even though in December in Australia you really don’t want to be sitting anywhere near a fire.

On the subject of mice, do illustrators choose to depict furry animals because humans are harder to keep consistent across different illustrations, or are there other reasons, I wonder, to do with avoiding Anglocentricity. After all, if the mice look like no human you’ve ever seen, then that mice could be you.

PRISCILLA AND THE GREAT SANTA SEARCH BY NATHANIEL HOBBIE

This is a rhyming text, perhaps inspired by Twas The Night Before Christmas. Except the rhythm in the progeny isn’t quite as lyrical. At times this book suffers for the sake of telling a rather complex story in rhyming verse. I think when that happens you might as well write prose.

This is the children’s book equivalent of chick-lit. I don’t mean to say this as a value judgement; it is what it is. Two girls go in search of Santa (a big adventure) and spend their time taking photos of each other (a necessary plot device, but still…) There are the pretty costumes, the mirrors, the binge slash celebratory eating, the BFF confidences, attention to hair styling and an overall lighthearted tone which one might find equally in chick-lit for adults.

MERRY CHRISTMAS MATTY MOUSE BY NANCY WALKER-GUYE

Mice must like Christmas! I suppose in the Northern Hemisphere, mice come inside for the winter season. Perhaps mice have traditionally been a part of many Christmases, with an abundance of food and therefore crumbs?

In this story, a little mouse (maybe 5 human years old) has made biscuits at school and can’t wait to give them to his mother. But on the way home, he encounters a number of different animals who are each very hungry. By the time he gets home he has only one biscuit left. This makes him very sad. His mother reassures him that it’s the thought and the experience of sharing that counts, and together they share the one last biscuit.

I think this is a classic case of a story which should have finished one incident earlier. (Always easier to pick in OTHER people’s stories, isn’t it!) If the story had ended with mother and son enjoying the biscuit together, the sweetness of the sentiment would have been preserved, but it’s as if the author thought this would be too sad for a young audience to cope with, so the next day Matty and his mother bake dozens of tasty biscuits and invite all their other friends around to share them. This ending is as valid as the other, naturally, but I think there’s nothing wrong with letting children believe that there are people (and animals) in the world who don’t get enough to eat. This is the world situation. Also, a storyline about making do and making the most of limited resources is somewhat undermined in the final scene of excess. No doubt this is something many of us get sick of round about Christmas time each year.

THE WATCHMAKER WHO SAVED CHRISTMAS BY BRUCE WHATLEY

The title of this one had me wondering if this was another ‘X discovers the true meaning of Christmas’ plots, but it’s not. Rather, it’s one of those Christmas books which helps to preserve the illusion of a benevolent Santa delivering presents to good boys and girls all over the world.

The story achieves this by having Santa come in to a watchmaker’s shop to have his watch fixed. It’s an incredibly intricate watch of the like the watchmaker has never seen. The only way he can get it to work is by using the hearing aid of the little boy who lives upstairs. I found this quite an odd plot twist, and we never do find out what the (young and single) mother has to say about the fact that her son is now effectively deaf, and that she’ll have to shell out for a new one.

Naturally, the old man in need of the watch turns out to be Santa Claus, and the watch is magic — allowing Santa to take his sweet time flying around the world delivering presents, eating cookies and drinking milk. He is accompanied by the watchmaker, who even has time to sew on the eye of somebody’s teddy bear.

The way I feel about Santa is this: it’s magical for very young children to believe in Santa, but once they’re old enough to start wondering about the logistics, e.g. How on earth does he get around the entire world in a single night? then it’s time for parents to come clean. This book seems designed to artificially prolong the wilful blindness of older children who would like to believe in Santa but find that they can’t — not 100% — and if you’re the parent of such a child, and would like to keep the illusion alive — this sort of Christmas book may prove useful. However, you’d also run the risk of starting your child wondering, even if they hadn’t before!

Most children’s books which feature Santa revel in a time of yore, when toys were wooden and simple — no plastic wrapped, licensed, heavily promoted toys will be found in such books (and for good reason). This story seems a heap an extra layer of scorn upon things which are modern:

The days before Christmas had been quiet for the Watchmaker. Watches with faces and hands had been replaced by digital displays and flashing numbers. The Watchmaker felt sad. There was only the instant — 11:43 or 2:36 — rather than seventeen minutes before twelve or thirty-six minutes past two, which gave you a feeling of time past, present and future.

This sentiment reminds me of that book by Lane Smith ‘It’s a Book’, in which it’s suggested that those who embrace new technology are missing out, or mentally deficient in some way. As a creator of storybook apps for kids, you can probably imagine how I feel about that.

SILENT NIGHT BY SANDY TURNER

This is a wonderfully original story, again about Santa’s visit.

The title manages to be both literal and ironic: The book features no words… other than the barking and yapping of a family terrier, who can sense Santa’s arrival even though none of the rest of the household know what on earth he’s barking about.

Although our library calls this an ‘easy reader’ (because there’s really only dog words, after all), the cartoon-style line drawings of this book require the observation skills and patience of an older child in order to figure out what has happened.

I would highly recommend this book, and I won’t spoil the plot for you.

CHRISTMAS EVE MAGIC BY LUCIE PAPINEAU

Well, if you’re going to write a ‘grump/sad sack discovers the true meaning of Christmas’ kind of story, best to do it as this author has done: unabashedly, with ‘Inspired by Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol’ across the front cover.

This story might appeal to children better than the Dickens story, since it features animals, and a pig who keep his toys locked in a safe. Since children may not have any money, their toys are their most precious objects, so this book is kind of like ‘Dickens for the young, modern child’.

This story is beautifully illustrated by Stephane Poulin, in that style I love (acrylic on canvas?), with animals standing around tables eating delicious looking food by candlelight.

How Do You Google?

Anyone here who has a blog, and who occasionally looks at blog stats, will know that there’s an awful lot of bad searching going down.

Take a look at this handy cheat sheet: Getting More Out Of Google.

And if you know any ‘digital natives’, make sure you pass it along to them. Just because someone has grown up with computers doesn’t necessarily mean they have absorbed high-level searching skills by osmosis.

2011 Fiction Map: Results

This year, with the aid of an app for iOS called ‘Notehub’, I plotted a whole bunch of places on a map. These were not places I went to in real life; rather, they were the fictional places I visited by means of novels, short stories, films and TV programs.

The reason I did this was two-fold:

First I wanted to become a little more aware of the world around me. Second, I wanted a visual representation of my literary and cultural influences. I say in the ‘About’ page of this blog that I focus on New Zealand and Australian literature, but I wrote that a couple of years ago. I suspected that I’ve moved away from this focus now, and that most of the stories I’m into tend to be set in the Northern Hemisphere. Turns out I was right.

THE WORLD

Here’s my world map of fictional journeys 2o11:

What you can’t see without zooming in, is the number of pins overlaid upon pins. This happens over New York and London. It happened nowhere else.

AMERICA

Here’s America. As you can see, I read/watched stories set all over America, with emphasis on the East Coast. But when I say ‘America’ I mean specifically ‘The United States Of’. I didn’t read or watch a single story set in Canada or in South America. I say this after having meant to remedy this over the past few months and never getting around to it. Isn’t it interesting that I have to go out of my way to. That’s how USA-centric we have become, I guess.

After plotting onto this map I definitely have a better sense of American geography. One thing this exercise had me doing was keeping on the lookout for clues about where something is set, and I’m now a lot more confident to guess whether some place on a movie looks set on the east or west coast, is northern or southern. I’ve never been to America, so this isn’t something that comes naturally, despite a lifetime immersed in American culture.

Maybe next time I meet an American I won’t be afraid to ask them where in America they’re from, because this time I might have a general sense of where it might be. I identify with Bill Bryson in a lot of ways. And here’s another:

Delaware may well be the most obscure of all the American states. I once met a girl from Delaware and couldn’t think of a single thing to say to her. I said, ‘So you come from Delaware? Gosh. Wow.’ And she moved quickly onto someone more verbally dextrous, and also better looking. For a while it troubled me that I could live in America for twenty years, have the benefit of an expensive education and not know anything at all about one of the fifty states. I went around asking people if they had ever heard Delaware mentioned on television or seen a story pertaining to it in the newspaper or read a novel set there and they’d say, ‘You know, I don’t think I ever have,’ and then they’d look kind of troubled too.

- Bill Bryson, from The Lost Continent

EUROPE

Normally I wouldn’t have been even this cosmopolitan in my fictional habits but, perhaps because I was doing this map as a project, I went out of my way to watch foreign films on SBS. In doing so, I sat through some right royal shockers, but I also stumbled upon some excellent, thought-provoking and truly original foreign films. So I guess it was all worth it. The problem with subtitled films is that you can’t do another single thing while you’re watching them. Not even ironing (unless you don’t mind the smell of burning finger flesh), but on the upside, subtitled films force you to drop everything and concentrate, which can be a good tonic for those of us inclined to multi-task with media.

NEW ZEALAND

I spent about a month in my home country this year, so this effort’s a bit shameful given that most of these pins are probably the result of homegrown programmes I just happened to watch on my parents’ TV.

AUSTRALIA

Considering I live here, there aren’t many pins on Aus. And not a single pin on the West Coast. Yet there’s plenty of good, award winning work coming out of Western Australia, so next year I will have to remedy that. I guess the paucity of pins reflects how little TV I’ve watched this year. Now we subscribe to DVDs online, and I’d almost always watch a movie or a rented serial drama than whatever happens to be on the box. I wonder if this trend is making us all more America-centric in our fictional lives.

ASIA

AFRICA

And I read not a single thing set in Africa.

It’s not that I ignored Africa completely; we watched an excellent but frightening  documentary called The Future of Food (you may have seen it) and another about coastal cities which are already suffering terribly from rising sea levels. This second series focused on parts of Africa also. I just didn’t think to read or watch any made up stories from that continent. Perhaps in Africa, more than in any other part of the world, I feel like fact will always be stranger and more frightening than fiction.

And I’ve heard Alexander McCall Smith say that this is what disappoints him about some of his potential audience — the mistaken idea that among all the poverty in Africa there can’t also be great joy to be had. I’m sure he is right. I’ll look into that for next year.

*

I would recommend this pinboard thing as an exercise to anyone — it’s addictive! I’d especially recommend it for teachers and their primary school aged children, as a cross-curricular reading/geography assignment. Most children are no longer asked to rote learn our countries, capitals and major exports (as my parents were forced to do) and I think we might assume in this globalised economy that children simply absorb that sort of information. Some do, but some of us didn’t! Those into SF and fantasy could have great fun appending their own hand-drawn maps, because naturally many fictional places are not set in any real world venue.

Related Link: 10 Real Life Places That Inspired Fiction.

I blame Winnie the Pooh.

Our three-year-old loves honey. If I ask what she wants inside a sandwich, it’s always honey. She likes everything better with honey.

I’ve been blaming Winnie the Poo, specifically the illustrations, inspired by these sketches:

But it seems I’m not to blame poor old Pooh at all, but rather human evolution:

The honeyguide lives in much of Africa, where it eats the wax, brood, and eggs of honeybees. In this, it is relatively unique. Wax is indigestible to most animals. The honeyguide has been simultaneously blessed with the ability to eat wax and cursed with the dilemma of how to obtain it. Honeyguide beaks are too small to break into beehives. Humans have a different problem. We crave beehives for their honey. We are willing to do almost anything to get to honey. In Thailand, little boys are sent a hundred feet up into trees with a smoking stick to do battle with three-inch-long giant bees and take from them their honey… Honey, to paraphrase the anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has “a richness and subtlety difficult to describe to those who have never tasted [it], and indeed can seem almost unbearably exquisite in flavour… [It] breaks down the boundaries of sensibility, and blurs is registers, so much so tat the eater of honey wonders whether he is savoring a delicacy or burning with the fire of love.”

- from The Wild Life Of Our Bodies, by Rob Dunn

Rate Your Poo

If you’ve ever had a doctor ask, ‘So… how are your bowel movements?’ and, like me, you’ve been a bit stumped for answers, the Bristol Stool Scale may come in handy.

See also: What Your Poop Should Look Like from Persephone Magazine. And since I’m on a roll here, Urine Color Chart.

The Pied Piper of Dogs

Jesus Christ in Richmond Park.

The fact that I laugh at this YouTube video seems like a shameful case of schadenfreude, but the truth is, I find it funny because I identify so well with that poor man.

If you live in rural New Zealand (which I briefly did), I would advise anyone to get a lapdog. One that doesn’t like sheep.

Instead, I got myself a lovely, sleek, black Labrador. I called her Porka, partly because all Labradors love to eat and partly because when I was two years old my mother asked for my considered opinion on what my new baby brother should be called. I suggested ‘Porkalane’. Apparently. It’s one of those stories I’ve been reminded of frequently, even though I have no recollection of it myself.

The new baby was named David instead, but when I grew up I got myself the dog I’d always wanted (my mother is a cat person). I took this opportunity to use up the wonderful name of Porkalane.

Which is all fun and games until you find yourself yelling ‘Porka! Porka!’ across public parks in front of picnickers. This happened quite a lot.

I did the dutiful thing and took my dog to pre-puppy school at the local vet’s, and then I enrolled her into proper puppy school which was held every Saturday morning at the local showgrounds, by people who liked dogs more than they liked people. I looked even younger than I was, and got regular lectures from the old man running the course about how my puppy’s bad behaviour was entirely my own fault.

Which was true to a point, because I was working long days and had only limited time to spend in her company. I took her for walks before work and after, and if ever we had a school event I dressed her up in Green House costume and took her along as an enthusiastic mascot. She was a great dog, but I’ve heard it said since that Labradors take a good four years to settle down.

I also used to take her tramping. (I’ve since learnt that non-New Zealanders might say ‘hiking through bush’.) She ran off leash along the track, always running back to me at steep parts, trying to help me navigate tricky slopes, but usually only getting in my way. I remember once emerging from a tree-lined track into a opening — the sort you might read of in novels — where we were now in a rocky enclosure, surrounded by steep hills. There, as it turned out, a farmer was grazing his sheep.

Porka took off like a dog shot at. The sheep ran, but they really had nowhere to go. I’m sure I sounded like the man in that video, calling my dog back.

Unlike the unfortunate man in our video above, I knew by then not to leave the house without the secret weapon: Liver Loaf.

Liver loaf is a disgusting dog treat you cook in your kitchen oven but which dogs (and cats) love. It’s made of white flour, heaps of crushed garlic, heaps of liver (liquefied in a blender), about six eggs and baking powder to make it rise into a disgusting, brown cake. You cut it up into tiny pieces and keep it in the freezer for when you’re dog training, or walking her off lead in fun places, in which case you’ll need a decent bribe to get her back.

Both the dog and the cat would sit at the edge of the kitchen (as close as they were allowed) literally dribbling onto the kitchen floor as it cooked. As for me, I had to leave the house otherwise I almost puked. It smells that bad. (I could leave a recipe on my blog, but I highly recommend just buying Schmackos. They’re expensive, but they’re cooked off site, so they don’t make you want to heave.)

Also, liver loaf is so tasty to dogs that if you walk in public parks with some crumbs of it in your pocket, you’ll find yourself the Pied Piper of other people’s dogs. This happens even if you’ve had, at any point in the last seven years, a crumb of liver loaf in your jacket pocket, ever.

So I don’t recommend Liver Loaf in general. I say this even though it’s liver loaf which trained my Labrador to come back to me, even when faced with the glory of a flock of sheep to chase up a rocky precipice and fall off the other side like lemmings. Or so I imagined in my nightmares, after the fact.

THE REST OF THE STORY

Porka was only one year old when I was faced with the daunting prospect of finding new rental accommodation which would let me keep a dog.

This is almost impossible.

I searched the classifieds, and they all said ‘No pets allowed’. A Labrador isn’t the sort of thing you can smuggle into a place, either. During her year of puppydom, Porka had chewed the upholstery off some outdoor chairs and the mudflaps off my car, dug up newly planted shrubbery, eaten the plastic curtain off her own kennel, had great fun with the feather duster, decimated numerous shoes and gumboots… the list goes on and on. I couldn’t fully blame landlords for wanting to avoid tenants with dogs.

I did find one woman in the classifieds, though, who was looking for a flatmate to help pay her bills. ‘Must love dogs’, it read.

‘Oooh,’ I thought. If this woman wants a tenant who loves dogs, that means she must love dogs herself, so she’ll just looove my dog. I’ll give her a ring!

Her house was in the roughest part of town, the part where I wouldn’t get out of my car and walk the streets, not under usual circumstances. But I was getting desperate.

The woman who answered my call sounded like a lifelong chain smoker. She also sounded like she might be missing a full set of teeth. As it happens, she wasn’t your typical dog lover at all – she told me that she kept a Rottweiler, which had scared off potential flatmates so far. This Rottweiler of hers didn’t like people very much, but if there was one thing it hated more than humans, it was other dogs. So no. No pets allowed.

I eventually found the perfect accommodation in a converted barn on somebody’s hobby farm, but I didn’t stay in New Zealand. Now, Porka lives on a different farm and has all the running room she could possibly need. I suspect she’s also very fat, because most Labs are, unless they’re put on very strict rations. She’ll be coming to the end of her life. I hope she’s had a good one!