New football fan?

This isn't a photo of us watching Sydney FC play on Friday night.

One excellent example of optimism is taking a three-month-old baby to a second soccer match after missing 80 per cent of the first game she went to because, at various stages, she was cold or hungry or had a wet nappy or didn't like the noise and needed to be walked around.

It was almost worth it though: at her second game, Winnie only needed two new nappies, one feed and confined her screaming to 20 minutes. She did spew on my nearest neighbour who asked to hold her for a while* but, on the upside, she fell asleep for the final 15 minutes and had to be woken up to go home. I reckon I saw 30 minutes of the game.

*probably also a season tickedtholder. I wonder if she'll be back...

Only picky because I care

I finished The Laments by George Hagen yesterday. I'd rescued it from a discount bin in a notoriously mercenary book chain because I loved the cover. And it is both very pretty and an extremely accurate reflection of the book's insides. (Good work, book designers!)

Curiously, even though I'd read the blurb, the title subconsciously reminded me of The Commitments and I half expected it to be about a Celtic musical group rather than a family with Lament as a surname.

According to Howard Lament, Laments have always travelled. That's his reasoning for uprooting the family at the first sign of problems where they're living at various times in South Africa, Rhodesia, Bahrain, England and the US. And they do have problems: from baby swapping and family tragedies to unpleasant neighbours and disappearing bosses.

But, despite their misfortunes, there's a lot of joy in the Laments' lives and Hagen has a charmingly light touch that never strays into mawkishness. I was very teary at the ending but glad at the same time. I also reaaly loved the way Hagen described the ups and downs of a marriage over a couple of decades as the partners grew and changed.

I did have two quibbles: a newborn is described as smiling delightedly at people which is high;y unlikely if not impossible (Winnie didn't do this for four weeks) and a boat is found abandoned "in the Coral Sea twentyt miles east of Brisbane" which I think would probably be a bayside subrban backyard. But these are tiny things realy.

The other day, before reading the Laments, I almost bought Hagen's next book Tom Bedlam which is all about long lost sublings and trying to create a family in the nineteenth and early twentieth century England and South Africa but I wasn't sure how the touchy-feely stuff would be overwhelmed by the grand historical themes. Now I think it'll be great.

Pink's just a colour like any other

If you've never bought your baby girl pink clothes and most days avoid dressing her in the pink things well-meaning rellies have sent because they don't really go with anything, you shouldnb't really mind if strangers say "oh what a gorgeous little boy! How old is he?" After all, they're not to know, unless they're actually watching a nappy change.

Still, I don't understand why boys get ALL the other other colours.

Not quite right

I probably haven't said so in so many words before but I often to like to think that there's a parallel universe where I grew up next door to Jasper Fforde. At seven we would have promised solemnly to marry each other when we grew up. In primary school I would have instructed him carefully in the right way to play "Mothers and Fathers" and he would have let me help stage motor cross rallies with his matchbox cars. We would have listened to The Goon Show on ABC AM on Saturday afternoons, giggled at The Two Ronnies on Friday nights and hidden under the couch during Dr Who. We would have discovered PG Wodeghouse and Jerome K Jerome together but probably one of us would have introduced the other to Jane Austen and Kurt Vonnegut.

Of course, in high school we wouldn't have been seen dead together and would have ostentatiously ignored each other on the bus home but in second semester of first year of uni he would have run into me in the queue at the undergraduate library. He would be wearring the most deplorable acid wash jeans and a chambray shirt that his mum had bought but we would have realised we both adored Red Dwarf and we'd have picked up where we'd left off six years earlier. For the next decade, I would try to set him up with any single women I knew: "He's really funny. You've just got to get past the bad clothes and hair." Eventually, of course, he would have found someone utterly perfect and completely unlike me and got married and on the day of the ceremony my heart would have quivered ever so slightly because things would never be the same between us again.* I mean, where else was I going to another male friend who read the Brontes voluntarily? And who else would have come up with something as delightfully absurd as Jurisfiction? And why can't we all have home gene-splicing kits so people can have pet dodos?

This background explains my shock when I got to page 60 of Thursday Next's latest adventure First Among Sequels where she says:

"Since I'm an Outlander I have powers of abstract and long-term thought that most fictioneers can only dream about. The thing is I don't generally tow the line, and Jobsworth doesn't like that."

Oh Jasper!

Luckily, this is about the only thing I can complain about. The book's an utter delight otherwise, a comic tour de force of sci-fi and literary in-jokes coated in whimsy, puns and metaphors streched to the point of absurdity.

I like the Thursday Next series better than Fforde's two Jack Spratt books, not least because she's such an attractive heroine. In this adventure, she's something of a rarity in popular fiction - at least as written by a bloke: a 52-year-old female action hero with an active sex life. Good on you, Jasper.

*Any resemblance between this fantasy and the plot of My Best Friend's Wedding are acknowledged but purely coincidental.

Karl Marx and H.G.Wells

Lately, when I should have been reading tips on baby-wrangling or cleaning the oven, I've been struggling with The World of William Clissold by H.G. Wells.

This was a infuriatingly uneven treatise on how H.G. would like to redesign the world dressed up as a novel with a curmudgeonly protagonist perfectly balanced by the chips on both his shoulders. (Incidentally, I've never understood that expression. My parents used it a lot, confusingly, often when we were having chips for tea. I remember at least once them telling my big brother to "get the chip off his shoulder" in response to some ordinarily petulant statement like "Mary's got more than me" or "why do I have to turn the telly off to have tea?" and we'd both look for the chip we thought had somehow leapt off his plate.)

I'm not just guessing that these are H.G.'s views: he has a overly defensive foreword where he protests far too much that this is FICTION and just because most of his views are consistent with Mr Clissold's doesn't make the book any less of a NOVEL. And Wikipedia says so too, so there.

Basically, William Clissold is a rich scientifically-trained industrialist who doesn't like the way the world is run and wants to rearrange everything so that men like him are put in charge of a world government because they'd manage everything far better than the current crop of politicians. This was set in 1925 so he was upset by the Great War and the Bolshevik revolution and the failure of the League of Nations to achieve anything like a meaningful World Governmnent.

So far so dull. But there were some cute whimsical things in between the megalomania. Mr Clissold was very keen on socalism which he thought had been dreadfully distorted by Karl Marx's idea of history as class struggle (although he spends about 200 pages crticising the landed gentry for mistrusting not just the working classes but clever men like himself).

He thought Marx should have smoked less and taken more exercise, preferably cricket although he acknowledged that this would have been difficult given the length of the Marxian beard, even in an age of great beards.

This made me wonder what the Cricket World Cup would look like now if Marx had started a trend of cricket-playing amongst Communists. After all, Iron Curtain countries would have had a very long time to develop professional state-based training regimes. There's no reason why they would have stopped playing once the walls came down. In any case, I don't think Australia would be doing that well if they had to face China, Russia or Cuba in the Baggy Green. And what would that do to our national identity?

The Trouble with Harry

This is some sort of record for me:

Time elapsed from aquiring (borrowed) copy of Harry Potter #7 to starting to read: 18 hours

Previous performance (for HP #6) (approximate only): 30 minutes

Time elapsed from starting to read to finishing HP#7: 43 hours 36 minutes
HP#6: less than 24

What I was doing instead while trying to read Harry Potter #7 in order of relative frequency:
1. Feeding the baby
2. Changing the baby's nappies and clothes
3. Playing with the baby
4. Persuading the baby she'd like to go to sleep
4. Washing the baby
5. Sleeping
6. Talking to grownups
7. Watching telly
8. Cooking
9. Washing clothes
10. Washing myself
11. Shopping (for food!)
12. Exercising

Number of these I didn't have to do while reading HP #6:
1-5 (well obviously), probably 9, maybe 8 and, in all probability, 12. I may have skimped a bit on 5 and 7 last time round too.

And I was pretending that motherhood hadn't changed my priorities!

Oh almost forgot: time spent treating the internet with extreme caution to avoid spoilers: 8 days.

Conversations ended with hands on ears and loud humming to avoid hearing spoilers: 3

Number of spoilers encountered (in a newspaper! with no warning!!): 1