All sorts of lapsed bloggers have been crawling out from the woodwork and behind stones this Christmas period. I feel inspired to join. If anybody out there isn’t on FB/my text list/the grapevine and is thus unaware, baby Jenny joined us on December 20th (just: 1.11 am). I may be a biased and rose-tinted mum – and it may be early days – but she’s a pretty perfect baby and her big sisters are thrilled. More photos can be found here, including one of M&T dragged from their beds to meet the new arrival, and for those of you who enjoy such entertainment her birth story will follow just as soon as I can bear to put her down for long enough (and as soon as I find time without a babe-in-arms that isn’t immediately claimed by another child or some essential household task. Or sleep.) All I will say for now is that independent midwives rock, and are worth every single penny.

Her first couple of days of life were spent on the sofa snoozing and feeding (she is a champ and has gained a lb already, at 10 days old) and generally getting over the whole pushing out a baby at way past one’s bedtime thing (didn’t get to bed until after 3 the night she arrived). My favourite event was surprising Sara, in whose house we had been at 5 pm on Saturday (no baby): her face was a picture when she walked into our living room at 10 am on Sunday to find a whole new human being had arrived overnight! On day 3, we finally managed to put up the Christmas tree and were visited by a different midwife; this one had wondered the day before J arrived if it would be worth trying a wee bit of homeopathy: we had discussed whether it would work if you didn’t believe in it. She maintains it clearly does (I think she’d have arrived regardless). Day 4 my milk arrived – I need say no more for anybody who has been through it – as did my parents.

A pleasant if necessarily quiet Christmas: mum and dad came and cooked goose and trimmings (and now they have gone I can put selected leftovers in the bin but shh don’t tell!) and occupied M & T with games and crafts. They (the girls) had clearly absorbed all the propaganda about santa not coming if one didn’t go straight to sleep: when I went up to tuck them in and fill their stockings, I found two girls lying perfectly straight under completely undisturbed duvets, clearly neither of whom had twitched a single muscle since bedtime. Both slept until 745 which was quite a present for us, too. [Aside: at a week old I find it hard to evaluate whether J is "good", but I am getting a lot more sleep now than when I was pregnant, which probably means she is. I was asked today whether she was sleeping through, which struck me as a bit nuts.]

J and I had our first outing yesterday – her first ever trip outside the house, my first venture beyond the garden shed for 10 days. Lovely to get walking not waddling and I so enjoyed getting the baby sling back out. Today was busy with the health visitor (a profession of which I have not been given cause to revise my opinion), a trip to the hospital for J’s hearing test (all clear) and a new tumbledryer as mine picked the perfect time to break down. J has experienced three short car rides so far and has screamed through them all which does not bode well for next week when we must go to Surrey.

Let’s see if it works with this long and convoluted test post.

Also, Torchwood is on.

BANG

January was busy, with my birthday swiftly followed by Cameron’s significant birthday plus party, with my grandmother’s funeral thrown in somewhere between the two for good measure. February has so far been remedially peaceful.

(ok I changed it a little to suit)

(I seem to have rather a lot of these sitting in my unread pile upstairs)

I’ve read it
I read it for school
I started but didn’t finish it
I’ll never read it
Maybe one day
(Never heard of it)

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell (will finish one day when I have time)
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi: A Novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
(Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies)
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs Dalloway
Great Expectations
(American Gods)
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
(Middlesex)
(Quicksilver)
(Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West)
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
(Anansi Boys)
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
(The Inferno)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse (shudder)
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
(The Corrections)
(The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay)
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States: 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
(Neverwhere)
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-Five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
(Oryx and Crake)
Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
(The Confusion)
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Aeneid
Watership Down
(Gravity’s Rainbow)
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

1. The rules of the game are posted at the beginning.
2. Each player answers the questions about themselves.
3. The player tags 5 people and leaves a comment telling them they’ve been tagged & asking them to read their Blog.

Q. What were you doing 10 years ago?
A. We were in the throes of buying our first house – we moved in in July – and caught up in wedding preparations (married in September). I was writing up the first year of my PhD.

Q. Name 5 snacks you enjoy
A. Chocolate, magnums, ryvitas with peanut butter, veggy dips with hummous, cake.

Q. Things I would do if I were a billionaire
A. I don’t really aspire, does that make me weird? I suppose I’d treat all my family – pay their mortgages and give them a nice holiday. Pay our mortgage (oh and I suppose we might move to another house, so I’d pay for that) and have a daily cleaner.

Q. Five jobs that I have had
A. I don’t know if I’ve had five! My first job, aged 13 or 14, was in a French bakery-cum-cafe on Saturdays; I stayed there until I left to go to university. Second job (first uni summer) was running a cafe in St Ives, Cornwall, 3 or 4 days a week. Single handed. Second and third summers I waitressed in the restaurant at Wisley RHS gardens. I spent a year at Shell from my degree, and went back there the following summer to do a study into diesel trucking. When I finished my PhD I got a job as a medical editor and although I am not still employed by that company, that is what I am still mostly doing.

Q. Three bad habits
A. Failing to put things away when I have finished with them – or leaving them lying about half-done for days on end. Wandering off in the middle of doing something sensible (unloading the dishwasher, doing a jigsaw with the children, ironing, potting on seedlings…) and inadvertantly spending half an hour online before remembering. Brackets.

Q. Places I have lived (I’ve changed this as naming 5 seemed odd)
A. Addlestone, Edinburgh, Chester, Manchester, Warrington, Tokyo

Q. Five people I want to know more about
A. Um. I am shamefully lacking in curiosity because I can’t think of a single one.

I’m not tagging anyone because most of my friends won’t do memes (you know who you are!). If you’d like to do it please consider yourself tagged, and please leave a comment so I can come and read your answers.

But first, the rules:

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, choose people to get tagged and list their names.  Or don’t.  Who’s going to check?

OK, here’s my eight:

1. I am in a pre-Christmas flap, not helped by having evenings out planned (why now, when I haven’t been out all year?!) and made even worse by this ridiculous insistence on making virtually everything properly, from scratch, myself. Where does that come from?
2. I really want to learn to sail. I love boats. One day I will. Why didn’t I do it when I was a student?
3. I was a really good waitress (it’s all about attention to detail, people – so editing and waitressing go hand in hand in my opinion) but lacked the bicep strength to be very good at silver service and am glad I don’t have to do it any more.
4. I went to a carol concert at Chester Cathedral last night, which was lovely if freezing.
5. I want to stroke a tiger.
6. I have a great sense of direction and am hardly ever lost, but I cannot link the words left and right with the appropriate direction – apparently it is a form of dyslexia - which means I am hopeless at giving directions. I’ll draw you a map with no problem whatsoever but put me in the passenger seat and apply a bit of pressure and I’ll be there going turn left (flaps right hand)! no no not that way! I said left (gesticulating rightwards). This causes much marital strife as Cameron is terribly literal in his interpretation of directions and ignores handflaps (at his peril).
7. My first word as a baby was brandy. Start as you mean to go on, I say.
8. I have eaten more chocolate than is probably recommended this evening: Cameron is out, Tamsin is very restless, and I have 20 pages of anticancer gubbins to edit before I can go to bed. I feel a bit sick.

And I nominate Kitchenwitch, to provide a break from her thesis; Ally, who has lost her blog muse; Mia, who is always full of random oddness (in a good way) and VP, because I am just getting to know her.

The bag itself: I was given it by my mother-in-law last Christmas (you will need a big bag now you have two children). I love it. It is large and black and has brightly coloured batik cats all over it: the only problem, if I was looking for something to complain about, is also its virtue: it is so capacious things just disappear into its depths. I use it both as handbag and nappy bag, though when (if) I go out without children I decant* purse, keys and phone into a smaller bag – like Karen, I wonder what I carried before I had children (and went here to find out: links a bit erratic so scroll down to the 18th) – and skip along feeling light and unburdened.

Inside:

• Two hats for Tamsin; one woolly and bobbly and oh so cute, the other pink and jersey and also very cute.
• One nappy: size 1 totsbot, yellow.
• My notebook, full of random scribblings. Lists, recipes, addresses, Japanese vocabulary (I’ve had it a long time).
• Red gloves, mine.
• Fruit knife.
• a brown leather purse, in which I keep vouchers and cash that has been given to me and the girls as presents – in principle, if we are out and I see something they might like (a new toy or similar) I can use that to get it. In practice, I forget it is there.
• Tamsin’s mittens: they match the woolly hat, above, and she will not keep them on.
• My prescription sunglasses.
• A powder compact: Clinique, quite ancient.
• Crabtree and Evelyn comfort cream (for nappies) – rarely used but you never know.
• My purse: fat with reward cards and bus tickets.
• A pen.
• An old to-do list (which, I note, contains “tax return” as its first item. I really must.)
• Two contact lenses – one for each eye, which is pretty good going.
• Keys to my parents’ house. Must give them back.
• A sachet of lemsip.
• An old shopping list (snow-white costume, boots, birthday cards for October birthdays).
• A receipt for library fines.
• Lipstick (I cannot remember the last time I applied it).
• A doll shoe, small and pink.
• Tamsin’s sippy cup, yellow, half an inch of water (recently put in the bag).
• A small tupperware with some cheesy nibbles for Tamsin.
• Happy hippy out and about spray (like this).
• Wipes: expensive eco ones. Like Karen, it worries me that normal branded ones remove pen and paint so well: they are also the best way to clean my stainless steel kitchen bin and make it shiny. I do sometimes buy asda fragrance-free, because they are so very cheap, though.
• One admission ticket, child, to Stockley Farm. I think we went in August.
• My phone: Nokia, 3 years old. If I agreed not to upgrade last summer they slashed my tariff by 2/3. Who needs a whizzy phone?

*what word do I mean, here?

[aside: may I quote from this week's Observer TV guide? "BBC3...is seemingly staffed by the sort of idiots even an undergraduate would dismiss as unsophisticated...as tragically middle-aged and out-of-touch as all those thirty- and forty-somethings clogging up facebook in a desperate attempt to recapture their lost youth". Ahem.]

We did have a trip to Worcester last week, home of the family Naan (and she’s put a lovely picture of T and me halfway down); had a lovely time. Bit nervous before as she was one of those friends I have known, like, forever* but never actually met. But within minutes all was fine, even if I was not allowed to look in her fridge.

Spent some time at the allotment over the weekend – Monty says it is now June (and he is correct) and so one is to plant one’s. Um. I am sure he had a proper word for them (but it’s late and I’m tired) – you know, the things that have been in the greenhouse because they will die if the frost gets them. Sweetcorn, squashes and beans, in my particular case: I have a cane wigwam for the beans. I cannot express how proud of myself I was when I constructed it.

*Note teenage facebook-user-type vocabulary.