Must be here somewhere

It's been two and a half weeks since we moved but I still feel more dislocated than relocated. I keep turning the wrong way in the kitchen, opening the wrong drawer in the bathroom and fumbling for light switches which aren't where they used to be. For two weeks I didn't have the internet which meant that I had to do about three hundred administrivial things like paying bills and finding out about bin night by talking to actual people using what my mum calls the steam powered telephone. It felt really odd to ask questions out loud rather than looking for a written answer on a website. And the boxes I've unpacked! Who knew that thousands of books would need scores of boxes to move a mile. And none of them feel like they're in the right places yet.

The fact that the government changed while I was off-line gave me a real sense of precariousness about the state of the world. The telly kept talking about "Prime Minister-elect Rudd" but I didn't really believe it because I couldn't read political bloggers. I kept expecting to wake up one morning and find out the election result was all a house-moving delusion.

This sense of unease and confusion wasn't helped by reading the deeply unsettling A Game with Sharpened Knives by Neil Benton/. This is about the physicist Shroedinger (of the cat fame) who left Austria for political reasons after Hitler invaded. He sought refuge in Dublin during the Second World War when the infant Irish nation was in a state of tenuous neutrality, being bombed "accidentally" by the Germans and half expecting to be invaded by either side.

Schroedinger didn't really fit in. He lived with his wife, mistress and unacknowledged child in a deeply Catholic society. His home life suffered because of food and heat shortages and because he had a disastrous affair. His work wasn't going well. The weather was foul. He had enemies, both real and imagined, everywhere.

Benton created a great sense of menace and danger throughout this book that kept me perpetually off balance as I waited for some momentous disaster or another. I also felt quite out of my depth during long discussion about Irish poltics and physics. So, not really an easy read for a beach holiday.

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.

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.

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

Lucky escape

I thought I'd had a memorable enough journey home last night when the young stranger wedged next to me in the train carriage told me he'd just got back from overseas where he'd seen the stage musical of the book I was reading (Wicked by Gregory Maguire). He sounded so very thrilled but I couldn't tell whether this was because he loved musicals in a Friend of Dorothy way or if he was excited about being OVERSEAS. Seeing the book tells the life story of the Wicked Witch of the West in a very grown up way, I was tending towards the first assumption.

Luckily I didn't ask him to compare Judy Garland to whatever happened in this new musical I'd never heard of but talked randomly about how much better this book was than the Frank Baum Oz books I hated as a kid because then he spent the next 15 minutes on the phone to a female friend from his church who'd just become a pastor and talked about his first time travelling on his own at extraordinary length (Not that I'm making any assumptions about the mutual exclusiveness of Young Christians and campness - it just would have been awkward to have assumed the wrong way when we were sitting so very close together).

I'd almost decided not to catch that train because it was a bit full but my Beloved was home sick in bed and waiting for me to cook him dinner. If I'd waited another five minutes, it would have taken me three hours to get home because of another tiny problem with the transport system.

I simply can't imagine how I would have coped with being stuck on a train for two hours with that many people. At least I could have kept reading my book until it got too dark.