Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

A funny thing happened on the way to IKEA the other night. Not funny-haha, and not funny-peculiar, more funny-OMGWTF?!

One of the nice things about living five minutes drive from an IKEA outpost (don't laugh Auckland, you're next) is the ability to make purchases at whim, and to do it at odd times of the day, when the shop is least likely to be mobbed. The big boy was in need of a new chest of drawers, and it was one of those summer holiday days when you've got nothing much planned. If you've done the zoo and the science centre and the dinosaur museum, a healthy forced march through a pleasantly outfitted home decoration warehouse followed by lunch of meatballs and chips can be just the cheap date you're looking for.

So we headed off for a spot of shopping and some canteen cuisine by way of an early lunch.

IKEA is hit or miss. Fantastic for some things -- unpainted furniture, kitchen units, duvet covers, dish brushes -- and dodgy for other things, like electrical goods and pretty much anything involving moving parts. I momentarily took leave of my senses and forked out for a kitset dresser [insert jocular Scandinavian name here - let's say KRAPPA]. It came in two large, heavy boxes. Lifting it into and out of the car was no fun, but putting it together took a very pleasant and involving two and a half hours.

As we slotted and screwed and tapped and hammered, it became increasingly clear that the KRAPPA would not do. It was heavy, ugly, and the "wood" was made out of crushed weetbix and the sweat of oppressed children. Plus, the bottom drawer was not even a drawer, but a mock drawer on plastic casters. And it had already jammed our fingers twice. By the time little bro woke up from his afternoon nap, the dresser was completed, Busyboy was despondent and I was adamant: we don't need to spend three figures on KRAPPA. It would have to go back.

Because the other nice thing about living five minutes drive from an Ikea outpost is that, thanks to their decent return policy, you can take back your mistakes at highly convenient times, like that otherwise useless slot between dinnertime and bedtime.

Richard is a good sport, so he loaded the KRAPPA back into the stationwagon and set off. A few minutes into bedtime story time, I got a phonecall.

"IKEA appears to be a crime scene" said Richard, sounding a little rattled. "I'm not actually sure how I got into the parking lot, because it's just me and about a hundred cop cars and fire engines and guys in hazmat suits and they've evacuated the shop, blocked off the parking lot with yellow tape, and at a guess I'd say they're not processing returns tonight."

Like I said, OMGWTF??

I did a quick google (as you do, if you don't have a police scanner), and discovered a report about some strange-acting woman in JOGGING GEAR who had scattered MYSTERIOUS WHITE POWDER all over the car park and the entrance to IKEA and a nearby bank around 5pm, and ORANGE ALERT HAZMAT FREAKOUT BLAH BLAH BLAH. Brought to you by the news helicopter hovering over the car park, whocketa-whocketa-whocketa, presumably whipping up a great dustbath out of the MYSTERIOUS WHITE POWDER.

Richard came home and we googled again and discovered the truth of the matter. City police, state police, and the FBI agents on the scene apparently cracked the case a couple of hours after that first sighting when a small group of people dressed the same as the original woman came jogging through the car park. Following the trail of flour. En route to a party.

Because they were Hash House Harriers. And that's what they do, and have done, for the last sixty years: the "hounds" run for beer, following a path laid down by the "hares," of flour or paper or kitty-litter or chalk or who knows, jellybeans. They are, in their own words, a drinking club with a running problem.

It sounds like fun. Indeed, they say that if you've got half a mind to join the hash, that's all you need.

Now when I say that law enforcement "cracked the case," I mean "yelled at the hashers, who were trying to explain, to stay behind the yellow tape; continued with decontamination of the area knowing that it was just flour; then arrested two of the Harriers for breach of the peace." And the kind of breach of the peace that is not just misdemeanour, but a felony.

Holy overreaction, Batman!

Cracking the case did not include re-reading the FBI briefs on what-not-to-worry-about that explicitly mention the hashers and why not to worry about them.

You can read how it unfolded on the night here, and here. The second story contains this immortal quote:

"I thought virus because everyone was wearing the white suits. That's what they do when they see viruses," said IKEA shopper Rosa Pierrottet.

By the next morning, the story had cooled down a bit from Terror Threat in Elm City! to Back-To-School-Shoppers Inconvenienced At Great Expense.

But police and the mayor of New Haven were insistent that charges would continue to be pressed, and somebody would have to pay (despite the fact that all the emergency staff who turned up were presumably doing the job they're paid to do anyway).

And it was revealed -- this is the best bit -- that the miscreants who were helping the police with their h'enquiries were a German brother and sister, Daniel and Dorothee Salchow. He's a pediatric opthalmologist who's just taken a job at Yale's Medical School, after working in Washington, D.C., and doing charity work in Central America. She's a top lawyer from Hamburg.

As Dr Salchow told the New York Times, which took a slightly more urbane view of things, "Not in my wildest dreams did I ever anticipate anything like that" when planning the hash.

I've never hashed but I know people who have. I e-mailed my brother Greg, who has hashed in Singapore and Malaysia with the original Hash House Harriers (it's a colonial sport, started in 1938 as a way of injecting a spot of exercise into the traditional weekend collapse into a pitcher of Singapore Slings).

Greg had this to say, although I had to delete a few swear words:

It's flour. It's fun. Get a grip and a life. I'm quite upset by this, actually... irrationally wound up mostly about the way it's being Shock Horror reported.

I mean, yeah, ok, so someone overreacted about "suspicious activity", but surely you could change the entire way a country reacts to something like this by running a story that went "Two fun people having fun using flour to mark a trail - like the scouts used to do when this country was great and free - were inadvertently inconvenienced by some wicked overreaction. Says Police Chief and Drama Queen Bob Troublesome, "sorry about ruining your running - it sounds like great fun, but maybe you should use coloured flour next time. I mean, terrorists would never colour anthrax, it'll always be a Suspicious White Powder, right?"

We've been hashing here in Singapore for six years or so and have never had a problem... partly I think because our behaviour is so far outside what Singaporeans do and what the cops are looking for that it's developed an elephant in the living room / SEP kind of effect.

There's an equally lively discussion here, with lots of hashers weighing in on their largely trouble-free activities -- although the story about the black hasher who had to convince the cops that he was not tossing handfuls of cocaine on the ground was a little worrying and not just because of the racial profiling involved. Because, I mean,handfuls? of drugs? Who does that??!

As my other brother observed, Osama was probably giggling like a schoolgirl reading the reports. And in my opinion, if nice German doctors can't run for beer and we can't return our KRAPPA for a refund on the same damn day we bought it, the t*rr*rists have won. What do you reckon?

Free the New Haven Two!

Take it away, Dr Sparkles...

--

P.S. Awesome Iceland reports coming soon - watch this space.

Little brother is talking. It’s a very happy coincidence that most of what he wants to talk about begins with B, and that B is one of the easiest sounds for a young mouth to make, so he has a lot to talk about. What it means for the rest of the family is that we have to listen very carefully indeed to figure out whether he is discussing a ball, balloon, book, boat, bath, bread, bear, bird, bok-bok (the chickens who live down the road), bed, bike, bus, brother, or indeed big brother’s bike. Or shoes, which for reasons of his own he calls “bores.”

Talk about your minimal pairs.

It’s like a game of charades all day long. Luckily he gestures like an Italian, or like somebody trying to make themselves understood to a foreigner. Which I suppose is what he is. (And come to think of it, he is also something like 1/256 Italian somewhere along the line, so maybe it’s a throwback).

He can also tell you, among other things, about lights, the moon, more, mamama, dada, and brother; cat, car, and “cold” (cold milk), as well as splash, pool, and that closely related word, poo. (That gives me flashbacks to the phrase I least liked hearing when visiting the local pool, while living in Ithaca one hot summer: “The public pool is now closed in accordance with New York State health department regulations.” Whereupon the punters would flee the pool, while a teenage life-guard bravely waded in to retrieve the offending object with a paper cup).

He has also coined several excellent words that the rest of us have adopted because they sound so cool. They’re more like sound effects, violently emphatic uvular fricatives with lots of extra saliva. The word “sauce,” as in tomato sauce (as in, I won’t eat that until it has sauce on it) is pronounced as a genteel throat-clearing noise, sort of like the sound a walkie-talkie makes between transmissions. It’s distinguished from “truck,” which also a throat-clearing noise but more liquid and with an upward inflection, like an old smoker hawking a loogy. Whereas “Huckle,” the cat's name, is a repeated liquid throat-clearing noise, such as one might make before throwing up a hairball.

The maternal ear is a very finely-tuned instrument.

Just as well. It is the second child’s burden (and gift) to have to fight for an audience and to actively request conversation, if necessary by pulling somebody’s hair.

Recent research into language acquisition suggests that the higher an infant’s socio-economic status, the more adult utterances are addressed directly to that child. This seems dodgy on a number of levels, and yet also intuitively true -- even if those improving utterances are all something along the lines of “Minerva, sweetie, please put down the nice kitty” or “But darling, Daddy prefers that you don’t throw rocks” or “Horatio, would you like to go to the Italian restaurant or the Thai one?”

The better-off kiddos hear several million more words by the time they start school; some studies say 3 million by age 3. Chattering classes = cultural capital.

The corollary, as far as I can see, is a kind of domestic class-system. With parental attention a finite resource, successive children might slip further and further down the communicative ladder, the youngest falling into a pit of dire verbal poverty and grasping at the occasional “Stop that!” or “Oh god, the baby” that comes their way.

Ah, but there has to be an upside: as Oscar might have said, we’re all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the big siblings.

This would explain both why little brother is so expert at blowing raspberries on anyone who will sit still (a practice he was initiated into at about three days old), and also why he is making a hugely premature bid for two-year-old status by perfecting the words “NO!” and “MINE!” and, more intriguingly, by engineering dozens of situations in which he can triumphantly yell “NO!” or “MINE!”

In the dojo of brotherhood, he’ll have his black belt by the end of the year.

(Incidentally, he pronounces NO in the Icelandic way, “neigh,” which will come in very useful next week. I hope to introduce the word for yes, too -- já, pronounced “YOW!” -- and we might even have cause to say help, which is spelt hjálp and pronounced “HEYOWLP!” Come to think of it, that’s how we pronounce it, too.)

Comparisons are odious, but when I look back through my e-mail outbox (the modern girl’s equivalent of a baby journal), I see that his brother was talking in small but complex sentences at about the same age, to anyone who would listen, including himself. I came across this account of a 16 month old Busytot:

He has a mirror that I velcroed to the side of his crib when he was first standing up, to give him an incentive to do so (his own lovely face). It's as terminally filthy as a budgie mirror, because he’s always snogging it or giving his mirror twin a drink of milk.

Yesterday I peeked in on him when he'd just woken up, and he was having this looooong conversation with himself in the mirror, nodding madly and emoting like crazy: "Oh no, bonk 'ead! Poor Jams. Bonk a 'ead! It's OK. Sorry Jams. Sorry 'ead. Oh dear. Bonk a 'ead!"

So I went in and asked him who had bonked what head. He grinned at me, plodded to the other end of the crib, and then turned and ran full tilt at the mirror and firmly head-butted himself. He did it about ten times to be sure, laughing like a maniac. Which pretty much sums up what he's like to live with at the moment - super physical, super linguistic, super funny, and sometimes you just stand there shaking your head and going "uh...?"

It's very enlightening to have had an early and prolific talker followed by a perfectly regular boy of few-ish words. It enables me to look at baby bro and realize how much more must be going on in his head than he can convey verbally. It must be very frusterating, to quote his older brother, and I resolve daily to pay closer attention to what he’s trying to tell us.

This approach paid off this morning, when the little guy asked -- using a combination of such words as he has, along with elaborate facial expressions and operatic gestures -- "Hey, WTF happens to the balloon in Goodnight, Moon?" Good question! There it is on the first page, bobbing around near the ceiling, such a big deal that it’s one of the first things the book mentions: “In the great green room, there was a telephone, and a red balloon...” And then sure enough, about three quarters of the way through the book, it’s gone! And then it’s back again, just in time for “Goodnight noises everywhere.”

I’ve read that book a thousand times and never noticed the continuity glitch. He’s such a details guy.

(Funnily enough, the anniversary edition of this classic book performed its own sleight of hand, removing a cigarette from a jacket photo of the illustrator... which prompted this acid piece of satire.)

Big brother, on the other hand, reads for narrative. He has always been passionately, desperately involved in the ups and downs of the story. He gets swept up, takes it very personally, and hates books where anybody is eaten by anybody else, even in fun. Which rules most fairytales out. As a toddler, he once tried to literally climb into a book we had just been reading, he loved it so much. And he wept when I read him a book version of Incy Wincy Spider. We’d get to the rain washing the spider out, and his lower lip would tremble, and he’d splutter “Poor, poor spider,” with real tears running down his fat little cheeks.

Little brother is more intrigued by the hydrological aspects of that story: how the spider gets in and out of the drainpipe, where the rain comes from, etc. It’s all business to him, and entirely satisfying business at that.

(Which is not to say that big brother is not interested in mechanics, just that he prefers the meta-mechanics of fiction itself: aged four, he asked me why all books didn’t have giant quotation marks on the front and back covers, since the whole story inside was being “told” by somebody, wasn’t it? Even if they’re not alive any more? And even if it doesn’t say “he said” or “she said”? Damn! I vaguely remember covering that in grad school, but I’d need to get Derrida and Jonathan Culler down off the shelf to be sure).

Or take Inside, Outside, Upside Down, the Berenstain book about a little bear who plays in a box that is then unexpectedly carted away by a deliveryman on a truck; serendipitously the box falls off the truck and bursts open so the little bear can run home and fill his mother in on what’s just happened.

For big brother this book was beyond the pale - an existential horror story, a sinister R-rated account of an attempted kidnapping (bear-napping, really) and a small bear’s lucky escape from the clutches of a dastardly ursophile. The few times we tried to read it, he would scream in fear as the box was wheeled away by the smiling big bear in the denim cap. Oops. Fortunately he did not develop a life-long phobia of deliverymen, nor of cardboard boxes and the many cool things you can do with them.

Wheeling out the Berenstein classic a second time round was instructive. Little brother finds the story only mildly disturbing -- and only, as far as I can tell, because the careless delivery-bear/would-be bear-napper neglects to tape the box shut before placing it upside down on the trolley and then onto the unsecured bed of the truck from which it will fall with a rewarding CRASH into the middle of the road.

The overall narrative holds no terrors for this fearless child. He’s mostly fascinated by the cunning way the authors arrange for the bear to turn out right side up, and will contort his own body this way and that to figure out how it all works out. I think his next move will be to persuade his big brother to re-enact the story, with big brother as deliveryman, and little brother playing the brave and heedless bear. I’m sure it will be cathartic all round.

The enormous creature formerly known as Busytot can read!! When he started school last September he could make out his own name, that of his friend Jack, and STOP signs. Now he can fluently lecture from his favourite books, write his own thank you notes, and sound out those billboards on the side of the highway advertising dubious adult emporia. Good question young man: what is an emporium, anyway? Ask your father.

It’s a magical process, the breakthrough to literacy. It happened mainly offstage and during school hours, thanks to his very sweet teacher and a literacy initiative, called, funnily enough, Breakthrough To Literacy.

The whole class – a mixed bunch of five to seven year olds – spends the whole school morning working on reading and writing. They read to each other, to the teacher, and along with a computer version of the day's story, then they take home photocopied versions of the books to keep. I was pleased to spot Joy Cowley and Margaret Mahy among the authors, more than once.

They also collectively write and illustrate books about every field trip and major class activity, and write in their journals every day. There’s a wall of sight-words to help with spelling, but the kids are also encouraged to charge ahead and write phonetically just to get their ideas down. This leads to some fantastic phonetic innovations – Busyboy himself is very keen on adventures starring villainous bad giz and fearsome stinging squerp’yens (note the learned apostrophe), and his friend Lyle specializes in Star Wars fanfic that features Obi 1 Knowbi getting repeatedly nokt out by Dark Vata.

I’m all in favour of Shksprean spelling to get things rolling, especially because it helps break the twin tyrannies of the Blank Page and the Dictionary, both of which can be horribly intimidating to children at either end of the skill spectrum. But school has proven to be normative in other, more surprising ways.

After a discussion at school about the dialectical double negative beloved of songwriters everywhere (ain't got no/ can't get no/ she ain't nuthin' but a...), Busyboy came home and sternly informed his father that he would need to rewrite the lyrics of the Daddy Song.

The Daddy Song? You know the one. Every house has a different version of this classic endless lullaby, but it goes something like "Hush little baby, don’t say a word/ Momma or Daddy’s gonna buy you a mockingbird. And if that mockingbird don’t mock/ Daddy's gonna knit you a rugby sock..." and so on.

(Our version rhymes "If that baseball cap don't go on backward" with a reference to the disgraced Senator Packwood, for inscrutable reasons known only to Daddy, who is an American politics buff.)

Anyway, the song is now performed in standard English, which makes it less folksy and charming but more lexically correct and thus more acceptable to our little OED (over educated darling).

School, but not his teacher, is also responsible for introducing the concept of Bad Words. He already knew them -- how could he not, growing up with the colourful language of the Old Country spoken fluently at home by both parents -- but he didn't know about them.

I found it enlightening to discover that there are, officially, three. "The F word, everybody knows that one, and the B word, I don't know what that is, and ... the S word, which is really bad. I'll tell you what it is if you like: [stage-whispered as if school principal is standing right behind him] Stupid!!" He reserves this high-voltage word for very very bad people indeed, like President Bush, the s----- president who started the s----- war.

As well as his patient and gifted teacher, there are a couple of other people who can take credit for Busyboy’s explosion into literacy. Like his parents, I guess, who have read him an estimated five thousand books over the last five and a half years -- and that’s just the bedtime ones. And we'll keep reading to him as long as he keeps up the fiction that he can’t read, and beyond.

But I must also thank the authors, without whom. Now, I always pictured the lad finally getting it with one of the books we’ve read to him several hundred times over the last few years. The Seuss masterpiece known since infancy as Bop Bop Bop (which is also a favourite of our s----- president, it transpires). Or maybe Little House on the Prairie, the name of whose dog "Jack" was the first word that leapt off the crowded page and straight into Busyboy’s delighted brain. Or one of the more recent favourites, like Rachel Hayward’s winning McGregor, the Fiendish Cat.

But nope, when push came to turn-the-page, it was all about comic books. I mean, graphic novels. No, actually, I mean comic books.

One night only a few months ago, checking to see that all was well upstairs, I heard a little voice chatting away from a darkened room. Peeking through the crack in the door I could see Busyboy hunched over a book, holding his dim night-light up to the page and tracing the words with all the focus of a man breaking the Enigma Code.

"Just... one... doggone... minute... Miss...” He ground to a halt. "Kissy? Hope? Hmmm, Kissy Hoper?" It was a pretty good guess for Cheeky Hobson, considering that on the page in question, Miss Hobson is aiming to plant a big smacker on a sheepish Wal, until The Dog intervenes by chewing through the rear carseat from the boot into which he has been banished.

The punchline for that one was evidently a bit hard to fathom, so Constant Reader flipped back to a well-loved, reliably hilarious full-page single-frame. "I don’t care... how... flamin'.... smart... the dog is, he’s not... flamin'... smart... en, eno, enough... to get to that... flamin'... car, car, carcass…. And the Dog says, He's flamin' right! Hahahahaha! That's excellent!"

So yes, thank you Murray Ball for services to literacy in the greater New England area! And thank you too to Diane diMassa, creator of Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, for your child-friendly collection of cartoons about your fearless Chicken the Cat, who runs a very close second to The Dog in my son’s affections.

Mindful that my new reader will sound out this post someday, let me say for the record how proud I am of him. It is an astonishing everyday miracle, accomplished without fanfare but with so much private satisfaction and excitement. Lots of private satisfaction in his case, since the lad managed to hide his new skill from us and his teacher for several months, in the first instance to make sure that we would keep reading to him, and in the latter so as not to embarrass the other members of his reading group at school, some of whom are still getting to grips with the alphabet.

I was quick to assure him that a) we won't stop reading to him, and b) his classmates will arrive at the same place sooner or later, so he doesn't need to hide his light under a bushel.

The transcendent moment of learning to read is, as Francis Spufford puts it in his sweet and erudite memoir of a bookish childhood (The Child that Books Built, 2002), the point when writing stops being "a thing – an object in the world," and becomes instead "a medium, a substance you look through."

Here is how Spufford describes his breakthrough, while he was off school for several weeks around his sixth birthday:

When I caught the mumps I couldn’t read; when I went back to school again, I could. The first page of The Hobbit was a thicket of symbols, to be decoded one at a time and joined hesitantly together. Primary schools in Britain now sometimes send home a photocopy of a page of Russian or Arabic to remind parents of that initial state when writing was a wall of spiky unknowns, an excluding briar hedge. By the time I reached The Hobbit’s last page, though, writing had softened, and lost the outlines of the printed alphabet, and become a transparent liquid, first viscous and sluggish, like a jelly of meaning, then ever thinner and more mobile, flowing faster and faster, until it reached me at the speed of thinking and I could not entirely distinguish the suggestions it was making from my own thoughts.
[...]

I. N. In. A. In a. H, o, l, e. In a hole. I, n, t, h, e, g, r, o, u, n, d. In a hole in the ground. L-i-v-e-d-a-h-o-b-b-i-t. In a hole in the ground lived a hobbit... And then I never stopped again.

Isn't that beautiful, the way the prose itself re-enacts the experience it’s describing? An effect only heightened if you read the passage out loud.

Even as Busyboy moves on from Dr Seuss to Encyclopedia Brown (who, we decided the other night, would probably be called Google Brown these days), the last vestiges of preliterate approximations remain in his speech and some of his writing. While back in New Zealand in January, he remarked upon the masses of confetti along the motorway. I thought we must have been following a particularly enthusiastic bridal party, until it dawned on me that he meant graffiti.

Then there was some concern for a while that his favourite barber was in a war, until we established that "Iraqi" did sound a lot like "Rocky." (Other related questions linger, to be answered all in good time -- perhaps by the Iraqi kids we visited the other day who just arrived in town as refugees. Alas, their English isn't quite good enough yet to fully take in Busyboy's sincere apology for the behaviour of the s----- president).

On less controversial topics, he asked me the other day how to spell "un-the" -- you know, the opposite of "on-the," as in "the cat is un-the the table." And in his speech, people still love "us other" instead of each other. Plus, you know that machine in the shop, which they tally up your groceries on? It's a "cash reducer." (It really is!) And even though he knows too much sugar is bad for your teeth, his "taste bugs" really really like it.

Speaking of taste bugs, would you like some decaffeinated beer? That's what he plans to invent, when he’s a grown-up, to address the gross unfairness of children not being allowed to drink alcohol.

My mad scientist is also hard at work on blueprints for a scooter-stroller, to address the gross unfairness of mums not being able to keep up with their older child zooming into the distance on the newly acquired Razor, on account of having to push increasingly large toddler-guys in the stroller. It's just what it sounds like: a regular old stroller, but with a scooter attached to the back so you can coast along. Stand back, ladies - I'm first in line for the prototype!

The boy's new scooter is both a present for the first summer holiday/end of first year of school, and my trump card for tired big-boy legs in Reykjavik later this month. It's a nifty gadget, which folds down to fit in the suitcase or under the stroller, and can be whipped out and snapped together at a moment’s notice.

Scooter: $30. Helmet: $30. Watching the kiddo determinedly test-drive both around the shop last night like a crash test dummy only marginally more graceful: flippin' priceless.

Oh, and more on that increasingly large toddler-guy next time: he is now officially a walkie-talkie!

I’m not one to gossip, but -- it was a right old kiwi invasion last weekend in NYC, what with the premiere of Eagle vs Shark and the impending debut of the Flight of the Conchords series on HBO (where they will be taking over the slot just vacated by the Sopranos, which went out with both a bang and a whimper).

Just about everyone connected with both projects was in town, along with the Phoenix Foundation and a band of rogue ukulele-ists to provide the music.

So here you go, some bold-face sightings, warm off the presses after a full-on fifty-six hours in New York City and a couple of days getting over it...

WOWING the crowd at the legendary four-string freakshow that is the East Village's Ukulele Cabaret, three members of the Wellington International Ukulele Orchestra: Gemma, Carmel, and co-pilot of the Conchords Bret McKenzie.

The winsome trio delighted the audience with a clutch of Kiwiana classics, including "Ten Guitars" and "Blue Smoke", then stunned the crowd later with probably the first hard-rock ukulele version of "Nature" ever to be sung along to by a darkened basement full of happy New Yorkers. Haere mai New York! Everything is ka pai!

All credit to homeboy Jason Tagg, co-instigator of the Ukulele revolution, who not only hosted the evening, but also many of the artists at his astonishing home in the former Murray Space Shoe factory in the West Village. That's him in the blond wig in the "Nature" video, and he's a real sweetheart.

OVERHEARD at dinner afterwards: “Blah blah blah what are you up to these days blah blah went to school with him blah blah blah works with blah blah last time I saw her blah blah next project?” Aah, the sound of authentic New Zealand gossip, or as we prefer to think of it, reknitting the social fabric to keep the whole world nice and warm. Sort of a verbal Swanndri.

SEEN on a T-shirt and nothing to do with New Zealand but we loved it anyway: "Go [HEART] Your Own Damn City."

HEARD, but barely, at the Saturday night premiere of Eagle vs Shark: Taika Waititi's aggressively understated welcoming spiel, which continued the fine Aotearoa tradition of radically underselling your product in a city devoted to the art of overselling. The laconic New Zealander may be the next big thing, but Always Be Closing, Taika! Your next backers were probably in the audience!

ACCLAIMED by the full house, which had to turn people away even though they had tickets and had already collected their free popcorn: Eagle vs Shark. Funny, deft, and beautifully made, it’s already a front-runner for the Oscar for Best Use of Appalling Wallpaper in an Excruciatingly Awkward Sex Scene. A winner, unless you're the sort of person who used to hide behind the couch when Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em was on, in which case avoid.

HOT TO TROT at the afterparty on the spectacular rooftop deck of the Delancy were Jemaine Clement looking handsome in red and Loren Horlsey impossibly pretty (and unrecognizable as her character Lily), while Cliff Curtis and Harry Sinclair cast an avuncular eye over the goings-on. And was that Michel Gondry in the corner, chatting to the producer of Frontseat? Bien sûr!

DRUNK at the same party, not just several hundred people, but many, many, many complimentary bottles of the sponsor’s fine product, something your columnist hadn’t tasted since sixth form, when it was the preferred alternative to Rheineck.

Oh yes, and BUSTED dancing like, it has to be said, a sixth-former, right up the front when the ethereal Phoenix Foundation took the stage downstairs: a blogger better known for her demure domestic preoccupations and long thought to be past all that. Didn’t she have children to get home to? This weekend, apparently not! My lips are sealed!

--

PS See the Conchords impress David Letterman here.

And I say, it’s all right. All the darkness of a long New England winter (and a grudgingly prolonged New England spring) leaves cobwebs in the cupboards of even the healthiest mind. As part of the mental overhaul that feels as necessary this time of year as planting beans and enjoying the first roses, I’m cultivating what the motivational speakers would call an attitude of gratitude. Y’know, where you count your blessings and put ‘em all in a cheerful little basket against the next rainy day.

The human brain is a funny thing. Negative experiences and feelings make an instant and sometimes lasting impact, whereas positive events – so scientists say -- must be repeated or held in the mind for some time to really sink in and stay handy. Watch a cat napping in the sun for a good example of how to do this. You choose a good spot, settle in, and just, like, really go there, for twelve hours or so, until you’ve soaked up enough warmth to function as a portable heater for the next twelve.

With that in mind, here’s what my cognitive solar panels are running on this week:

The Oxo mango slicer. Form and function in one handsome package. You’ll never struggle with a recalcitrant mango again. Slide this baby down through the fruit, then do the criss-cross inside-out hedgehog thing with the two perfect halves you’ve effortlessly produced, and make two children happy simultaneously. Pause to marvel at the ridiculous size of the stone left over, and wonder briefly if the mango is one of those fruits whose seed must pass through the digestive tract of an animal in order to successfully sprout. A komodo dragon, probably.

The Famous Five. Yeah, they’re racist, sexist, and improbably slim given all those slap-up lunches, teas, dinners, and suppers, but I say, what an adventurous crew! I’ve been re-reading these to Busyboy (with appropriate elisions and rewordings – it’s awfully queer, but the phrase “suspicious foreigner” just seemed wrong), and am reminded all over again how fundamentally thrilling these archetypal, bluntly delivered stories are. Tunnels! Ruined cottages! Pre-teen children wandering unsupervised over islands, moors, and beaches! Third-act criminals who are easily outfoxed! A faithful dog! It’s topping stuff. And George is the perfect role model for a new generation of transgendered kids. Anne’s not a bad old thing either, especially when she dumps a bucket of icy water over a boy who is so rude that even Busyboy was shocked.

(Plus, hoorah! The classic adults-only Comic Strip versions are on Youtube, here and here.)

Dirty Sugar Cookies. Cooking is one percent inspiration and 99% perspiration, especially if you live in a tiny walk-up apartment in the city, have a kitchen that’s the size of most people’s dining tables, and two children who are all mouth and no trousers when it comes to sampling your valiant stabs at exotic cuisine. Iron Chef takes a back seat to Ironic Chef, as the indomitable Ayun Halliday channels her inner Julia Child and makes up for a childhood of picky eating. It’s a wonder she hasn’t chopped her fingers off, dashing between the kitchen and the keyboard the way she does. This is immersion cooking, with full and frank narration. If you’ve ever cursed like a sailor at a recalcitrant mango, or tripped over a toddler while tossing a pancake and still caught it! this blog is for you.

My Dishy bag. Ah, the simple pleasure of a decent everyday bag that happens to be gorgeous as well. It’s the perfect size and shape (holds a purse, three paperbacks, two spare nappies, and a drink bottle), a fabulous way to use the sort of teatowel you always leave in the drawer for best, plus it’s useful for smoking out the covert Aotearoa-lovers out there.

Speaking of bags, I can’t believe it took me this long to acquire some non-disposable shopping bags, as the city we live in marches slowly towards banning the plastic kind. I feel better already about being kind to the planet (even though plastic bags are allegedly only 0.2% of the local garbage stream, they are disproportionately given to wafting themselves up into trees and remaining stuck there), and it’s made carrying the shopping into the house so much easier. Four of these do the work of a dozen flimsy plastic ones, of which one always split on the way up the stairs, always the one with the eggs in.

A walking baby. He knew how to do it, and had marched up and down the kitchen a few times to show that he could. But he still preferred to drop to his knees when there was a need for speed (which for this guy is all the time). I didn’t fret at all, because it was less far to fall, and besides, it made us all laugh to watch this little cartoonish guy rocketing past, leaning waaay back for balance and pumping his little elbows like pistons, looking like a hardened speed-walker who’d worn his legs down to the kneecaps without noticing.

Just this weekend, however, he got it: the theme from 2001: A Space Odyssey started playing as he rose to his feet, raised his hands to shoulder-height in primal primate fashion, and then started moving one foot after the other as if he had only just discovered they were individually hinged at the hips. Five thousand circuits of the downstairs and upstairs later, I think he’s got it; by jove, I think he’s got it.

Matthew McFadyen. Well helloooo, Mr Darcy. I only just caught up with this latest film version of Pride and Prejudice, and it’s true what the critics said – it’s more Gothic than Regency, but all the hotter by that very token. In between appreciating the painterly brilliance of the cinematography and set-design, I admired the director's choice to play Mr Darcy not as a stiffly pompous fellow with optional broomstick where one should not be, but as a tongue-tied, stammering fool for love. There were perhaps one too many gratuitous pussycat grins from the unspeakably pretty Ms Knightley for my taste, although she was a creditable Lizzie, and Donald Sutherland performed a nice twist on a good old part as good old Dad. All in all a lovely production, with that rare thing: a fully-imagined inner life for poor old long-suffering Mary "you have delighted us long enough" Bennet.

The beginning of swimming season, and with it the happy sight of a five and a half year old Busyboy doing cannonballs off the diving board into twelve feet of water. Not just cannonballs, either, but also doodle-bugs (inspired by this fine book), which are apparently like cannonballs but marginally stealthier, in that you don’t actually yell “CANNONBALL!” as you do them. Although I’m sure the good citizens of England’s south coast would agree that if you’re anywhere near the point of impact, a doodlebug is ultimately about as stealthy as four-plus stone of very fit boy hitting twelve feet of water, bottom-first.

And you? What cheered you along this week? And what will carry you through the (blessedly short) New Zealand winter, or wherever you are?

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PS Has anyone been to Iceland? Got any tips for travelling there with kids?