Perils of Christmas 1 - The Tree

1. Drag tree home from local, overpriced yet convenient, under the railway bridge tree emporium and realise you need to rearrange furniture to put it up.

2. Rearrange furniture.

3. Get ladder to open frozen loft space and find stand and decorations.

4. Remember you have two stands and neither is really right, plus one is actually broken. Ditch broken one.

5. Attempt to hold up tree with one hand while tightening stand screws with the other until tree vaguely wedged in and doesn't topple over completely.

6. Cut away spiderweb of nylon and realise tree is bushier than you thought, so drag stand out from the corner, triggering immediate topple effect.

7. Crouch under branches, holding main tree stem with one hand and rectify topple to reasonable degree.

8. Unloop lights from box. Realise that to get to plug to turn on lights will require snake-like belly crawl underneath tree and arm's length reach with prickles in your head.

9. Put lights problem to one side and unwrap baubles and decorations. Realise that you quite like most of them and have three camels, a skunk and a glittery pink-lipped frog amongst many others. Resign yourself that your tree will not be especially sophisticated and refuse to draw conclusions as to what this says about you.

10. Attempt to disperse lights around tree without increase in topple effect.

11. Position decorations decoratively.

12. For the final touch, attach metal star to top branch and watch it bend gently sideways with the excess weight.

13. Perform snake-like belly crawl under tree to turn on lights.

14. Step back to admire and realise you have constructed the leaning tower of Pisa with bells on.

15. Leave for 24 hours. As list towards the floor increases, realise you should have attached guy ropes to secure more fully.

16. Unearth picture hooks and string for tree improvement scheme.

17. Construct guy rope system by hammering picture hooks into underside of shelves (first losing a hook for half an hour and finding it in the bin) and running string around tree.

18. Perform snake-like belly crawl to plug in extension cord for lights, thus obviating need for futher crawling.

19. Realign tree in stand and ultimately adjust Pisa list from front topple to a backwards lean. Decide this is the best you can do.

20. Stand back and admire. Pour large drink.

Bizarre channel hopping incident

So just flipping around, as you do, and stumbled on some black and white footage of a large man singing in Russian on one of those old studio variety shows, complete with full fur hat and belted tunic. I recognised the voice immediately, since my parents played his records when I was a kid. Ivan Rebroff was a big thing in popularising Russian folk songs in the 60s and 70s. Of course, he was actually German. When you think of the context, it was all pretty odd. His claim to fame was a voice that spanned four octaves, from deep bass to high counter tenor. I watched him finish the song, one of the show-off pieces that covers the whole voice. And then, very bizarrely, once Rebroff had done his bows in his beaver hat looking like Peter Ustinov's younger brother, the camera cut to a very young Rolf Harris, in massive Buddy Holly glasses, as host of whatever weird variety show it was. 'Thanks Ivan.'

Weird blast from the past on the music for me, and just plain weird otherwise.

Outrage

Now I'm good and mad. Really, really furious. While the euphoria over Obama's victory on Tuesday is still widespread and apparently keeping most of the world on a high, the degree of the challenge he and his administration face domestically couldn't be more starkly illustrated than by this article from the Washington Post highlighting the lack of medical care in the poorest communities. It's beyond outrageous. There are more difficult problems in the world, more serious decisions that need to be made about the wars we are fighting and their horrible cost in lives around the world, but this is indicative of the callousness with so many people have been treated within America while the Republicans played political power games with wealthy health care donors. Why should they care about rural Afghans or refugee Iraqis when they have so little interest in their own?

Over the summer for the past nine years, an organisation called the Remote Area Medical Volunteer Corps has set up a giant field station for dentistry, eye clinics and other medical care for three days a year in Appalachia, Virginia, trying to treat the thousands of people who drive and sleep all night in their cars to get treatment they and their families cannot otherwise afford. They were set up to work in Africa and South America, but have extended to rural America. Read the article and then watch the videos. The statistics on diabetes are terrifying, while people go to the three day event for cancer screening, unable to get scans in any other way. Think about it: your only chance to afford treatment, screening, dental work, glasses for you or your children is three days a year with thousands of other people. It is upsetting and disgraceful and enraging that in the eight years of the Bush administration, any attempt to provide some kind of state health care has been greeted with the kind of 'socialist' label thrown at Obama in the closing stages of the campaign when he dared to mention that perhaps some redistribution of the spoils in America might be necessary.

In this acceptance speech he said that Americans need to look after each other. The people volunteering in Virginia do the best they can. But it's a disgrace that a single mother can't get her own teeth treated because by making sure that her daughter has her teeth done first and gets the glasses she needs for school means there isn't time to treat her too. Virginia is not in the Third World. But you wouldn't know it. That a little boy of two has potentially life-threatening abcesses in his mouth that would not otherwise have been diagnosed, less than a few hours drive from the Capitol, should shame everyone in power. I am so enraged for these people. They may not have even voted for Obama, but if he has the courage to take on some powerful interests, then he may be their only hope for a decent, better life.

The morning after the night before

So much has been written about the Presidential election all over the net that it hardly seems worth adding my two cents worth, but tonight of all nights I wanted to jot down what it’s meant to have seen the numbers stacking up for Barack Obama last night and finally explode into history with such resounding joy. His speech was worth waiting for and of course it strikes me as both sad and absurd that anyone who heard it could still doubt his sincerity, dedication and ability to be President. But the faces of the crowd at McCain’s concession rally spoke not only of disappointment, but real anger that bodes ill for the enterprise of rescuing the country on which the Democrats have embarked.

Already today the knives are out for their own witchhunt and more worrying, to reform what can only be an even more dangerous and desperate right wing movement. As Joan Walsh on Salon commented on one such outburst, it looks like some kind of Onion spoof, except that it’s real. And here in the UK, I also read a splenetic and vitriolic diatribe by non other than Melanie Phillips in the Spectator which, together with her and others’ inexplicable persistence in believing in a John McCain that never existed, shows how hard it’s going to be to achieve the healing cohesion that Obama set out as one of his aims.

I hope that Obama will gather around him the best and most thoughtful minds in the country and beyond, people who have spent the last 21 months, or four years or eight years questioning, harrying, shouting, persuading, arguing on all the topics on which this election hung – war, healthcare, poverty, education – and that he uses their expertise and experience to help him forge a new blueprint for the country. There are sane, measured, intelligent, compassionate and above all positive voices that need to be heard around and beyond the White House and the new administration.

I should say ‘President Elect Obama’, which sounds clumsy and absurdly formal, but it also sounds good, like a couple beginning to savour the flavour and shape of unfamiliar words - my fiancé, my husband, my wife. Because today feels like the beginning of a real relationship, not a dewy-eyed surrender to some messianic figure, but an engagement between adults, on a level of equality. The kind of relationship between govenors and governed in which the compact can be forged on a basis of mutual respect. I don’t know if President Obama will be the kind of great reformer that some groups and commentators have been hoping for since his candidacy began, or how far he wants to fundamentally change the way we are governed. He could start with how the electorial system itself functions.

But changing the way we are governed was what the Bush regime has been working on with their shameless and shameful recasting of even the basic meaning of what it means to be an American citizen, what the Constitution means and their perpetual redefining to their own dwarfish and cynical vision of what America, that most specific and elastic of ideas, can be allowed to encompass. With Sarah Palin’s transparent lack of understanding of even the first principle of the first amendment of the Constitution, which does not in fact enshrine her or any individual’s right not to be criticised, any of the apparently respected and responsible people who thought she would be good enough to be second line to the Presidency should be ashamed of attempting to perpetrate such a fraud on the public. Because at heart, that is what it came down to. Sarah Palin was, and unfortunately is, the worst epitome of a creed that decries generosity of spirit as socialism and has elevated ignorance to the status of a virtue. These pernicious lies must be denied loudly and often.

Throughout the campaign but particularly in its closing stages, the Republicans, and their unprincipled candidate, proved that they would rather sow vicious seeds of division, hatred and fear than allow the citizenry to make their own decisions based on whatever personal criteria were important to them. The Christian Right have made a mockery of the first word of their own movement with their utter failure to honour the most basic precept of of their religion – do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Pretty fundamental stuff, except that the fundamentalists appear to have long since decided that certain unhelpful ideas can be excised from the bedrock of their faith. While we heard plenty about the former domestic terrorist that Obama knew, no mention was made of the other domestic horror-mongers in the South who murdered and terrorised the black popuiation with impunity. It’s nice to know that even Creationists will indulge in the odd deployment of natural selection when it suits.

As I write this the fireworks are bursting in air for Guy Fawkes – that cheerful bastion of iconoclastic bigotry transformed into harmless clouds of drifting cordite. It sounds like peppered gunfire. And meanwhile in Afghanistan today, an estimated 40 people were killed by real bombs in a US strike. Eleven people were killed in bombings in Baghdad and and Gaza is still a byword for misery. And then there is Congo. The role the United States plays or should play has to be discussed openly and with a maturity that recognises that victory, that glib rallying cry, comes in many guises, one of which may be called defeat. But an honourable defeat, whatever that may be, is worth more than continuing despair and new generations of hatred. The pivot on which we all feel ourselves turning since this morning will, I hope, at least allow this discussion to take place. Instead of building on the fear of others and of ourselves, we need to accept that humility is a virtue that has fallen out of the national lexicon. As a nation, we need to reacquaint ourselves with it.

Ever since I saw Obama’s speech, I haven’t been able to get Jesse Jackson out of my head – the pictures of him so deep in the emotional significance of the sight of the first black President Elect have haunted me all day. The tears that overwhelmed Jackson and swamped his joy in that moment were a reminder of the cost in lives great and small that it took to get here. In California my 17 year old god-daughter danced around the house as the result came in because she and her sister now believe that the world is made anew for them. And although I may more cynically feel that history and experience tells us never to entirely let down our guard, I too have to believe today that now there is a chance for what has been so wrong to be put right.

I have intended to add some thoughts on the US election many times and then found myself either too overwrought or more usually too tired to follow through on the random notes I tend to make. But thinking about how the second debate went and some articles on the reception of Sarah Palin and just what the likes of Jefferson and Adams would think of the level of political discourse, I went looking around for some historical background. And I've found this, which sort of says it all:

"I sincerely wish... we could see our government so secured as to depend less on the character of the person in whose hands it is trusted. Bad men will sometimes get in and with such an immense patronage may make great progress in corrupting the public mind and principles. This is a subject with which wisdom and patriotism should be occupied." --Thomas Jefferson to Moses Robinson, 1801.

Bad men and their patronage have got America where it is today, internationally reviled, economically defunct and with the likes of Sarah Palin in the running for Vice-President at the hands of cynical opportunists, intellectually paralysed. Democrats have allowed the Republicans to steal the concept of patriotism and redefine it in their own image, throwing in the flag for good measure to create a religion of nationalism which is as close to idolatry as any secular belief system I can think of. That version of patriotism cannot question what is done in its name, nor seek for explanations about why the country has become a byword for hatred, deceit and selfishness, nor look to the horizon and beyond for some humility as to its place amongst nations. As for wisdom, apparently John McCain is meant to be what passes for it now, according to his campaign.

Jefferson just wouldn't get elected today.

So that's that

Saw some of the Olympic closing ceremony. Insanely spectacular in a fairly repetitive way, but:

1. What's the deal with on the UK bus with the gold lame for Leona Lewis, the artfully mixed race violinist-cellist combo in sports kit and David Beckham in his uttelry dull track suit? Bonkers.
2. Nothing staged about the crowds out in the Mall in front of picturesque Buckingham Palace. Nothing at all.
3. What was Placido Domingo doing there?
4. How many toilets do you need to have for 91,000 people in that stadium?
5. Is it not actually possible for Boris Johnson to do up his jacket? And how badly was he longing to shove his hands in his pockets, only to quickly remember that, in front of several billion people, maybe he really shouldn't?
6. Jacques Rogge seemed best able to handle the flag waving bit, though presumably he's had more pratice than most.
7. The Memory Tower - freakily beautiful. Since one of the artistic directors is on record as saying that he doesn't think such things are achievable in the West because of the different work ethic and human rights, does this mean that only totalitarian regimes can do proper spectacle?
8. Were any of the fireworks seeming in and around the stadium actually real?

Ah well. I hardly watched any of it. Slightly scary to think that it's over and now over to London. Saints preserve us.

PS This article by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker from Beijing is great. "And thus the attempt to keep politics out of sport, which is as futile as trying to keep the sweat out of sex, began to falter once more."

Photo

Looking at this picture, I can't decide if, instead of being a kind of cute, grown-up joke, somebody might think it's actually offensive. I mean I can think of a few people who might. Is a picture of a toddler with a cigarette in her mouth actually funny or not? It is to me only because I can still remember that slightly edgy tang to the smell of the tobacco when my parents took out a cigarette, the crinkle of the paper in the packs, but oddly not the ashtrays so much. Perhaps my mother was really good about emptying them. Considering I've never been a smoker myself, I remember my childhood among smoking parents and their friends with a certain fondness for it. My father likes to say that when my sister and I were very little and were playing with our cat, if he threw an empty cigarette pack down, all three of us would scramble for it. Now, in some ways, that sounds like the worst kind of feral parenting. But this was in a posh apartment in Paris. What you can't see is the rest of the picture that I cropped, which is my mother in the foreground, bending towards a table for a light, fag in her mouth, short skirt and long hair. Put it all in colour and take away the marble fireplace, and it's a picture from a hand-wringing documentary on the decline in family values.

I dont' know what I'm trying to get at with this really. Except about how context shapes perceptions. And how innocence can become corrupted with hindsight, history reinterpreted through current assumptions that played no part in the original scene. Bit of a leap, but it's getting late. And I was thinking about reshaping history because of the annoyance of the day newswise, which was this article about a prayer group in the US that prays in the gas stations for cheaper gas and actually thinks that God's been bothering to listen. Nothing to do with market forces at all. I guess the bit that really got to me was reworking the words to 'We shall overcome' into 'We'll have cheaper g-a-a-s'. Selfish nutters.

Finally, progress

So, new laptop! No more excuses for so many things. Just have to take off some old work from the poor, redundant museum-piece IBM and off we go. Like the several moths that are even now careering around the room, along with an increasingly dopey fly. Hell- now I'll have to murder some innocent creatures. Which they appear to know, since the moths are dive-bombing me. I refuse to engage with the idea of strategically minded moths. It must be the shiny lights. Obviously this machine just demands blood sacrifice or something.

Except now I've remembered The lesson of the moth. Damn that anthropomorphism.

Germ attack

The things you notice when you're at home sick.

1. The sofa isn't quite as comfortable as you might wish for lounging purposes.
2.Why are there men with theodolides pointed at the house next door, first in front, then in next door's back garden, among the increasing triffid-like weeds? This does not bode well.
3. Is it really OK to take out of date Day Nurse? Too late now, I've done it. But where is the nearest chemist again...?
4. Daytime TV is still pretty shit.
5. Having said that, I've never actually seen 'The Barefoot Contessa', and having seen the last third now, it's about as weird a Hollywood film as I've seen. Humphrey Bogart as the mentor director to Ava Gardner's naif, 'fairy-tale' starlet who ends up with emasculated Rossano Brazzi in post-war Italy... Talk about pot-boiler.
6. No matter how hard you try to avoid it, you cam't stop the seductive voice of your bed from getting you in the end. Off I go.

I need a new computer

If I had a new computer at home, then I might actually do this more often. It's been a long time, what with one thing and another, and then I couldn't remember my password. Of course, saying I need a new computer is just another way of putting off doing things, and sitting in front of the screen all day for work doesn't really endear doing the same thing in the evening to me. But I'd like to.

And reading over the measly posts I've done, I'm going to revisit the idea of things that have given me pleasure over the last few days.

1. Getting up slightly earlier than usual, putting on some new CDs of French chansons and exercising to them. Which is mad, but fun. Most of them are pretty rhythmic and jolly and in the morning that's about all I can take.

2. Baileys. I've become tragically addicted to it again after about 20 years and it is just an alcoholic milkshake. But a nice one. It reminds me of college days, how sad, but that's the last time I regularly drank it. A fattening and bad habit to indulge in, but tough.

3. Going to a surreal performance at Wilton's Music Hall of Elizabethan miserabilism in the form of John Dowland songs, sung by a really good counter-tenor in a 'multi-media' presentation, by which they mean projections and the like. Actually it was very interesting - the layering of the Tudor songs, in a rotting Victorian building, with a 21st century setting (an office cubicle, in a suit, against back projections of a failed office affair). Bizarre but it worked. And the songs were oddly relaxing, despite their generally downbeat nature - lots of woe and dwelling in darkness and letting him die. Yes, well. Wilton's is a great setting for some really off-the-wall stuff.

4. Weirdly, given I mentioned something similar in my previous post, the odd throwing together of scrambled eggs with pesto and feta. I know - but pretty nice. I must be drawn to these posts after particularly stressful weeks in which I'm not able to do proper cooking. On the other hand, I did make a rather nice veg soup, which was pretty good considering it was thrown together at 7am on a Tuesday. The rest of the week was really downhil from here.

5. The book I'm reading, called 'Ring of Conspirators' by Miranda Seymour, about Henry James and his circle of friends, literary and otherwise, which is just a big gossip-fest but very well written and intriguing about Conrad, Stephen Crane, Ford Maddox Ford etc. And that several of them lived in villages where we lived sort of gives it another resonance. Specialist interest, obviously.