Relaxed Parents

[Written May 7]

We’re mid-way through a week’s stay at a generous friends house in St Hillaire, Languedoc.  I won’t pretend that it’s been entirely relaxing but we really needed a few days out of London and a week free of his usual array of computer and console games, TV DVD and digital children’s channels certainly won’t do dudelet any harm.  Dudelette is enjoying her first week free of socks and bootees (London weather vs May in the South of France and has developed a compulsive fascination with her toes.  She’ll reach her feet up in the air, grasp at them like a professional yogi, then topple gracefully sideways, still clinging on to her feet for dear life.  Her vocabulary of whoops and chirrups continues to expand.  She’s also acquired a favourite toy -  a nearly-empty pack of wet wipes that crinkles and crackles in a most satisfactory manner.  She’ll lie on her back juggling with it via all four hands and feet for up to twenty minutes at a stretch before finally getting bored and demanding a trip to the other side of the room.

Dudelet hasn’t been so easily satisfied and has been giving free rein to his Jeckyl and Hyde tendencies.  But enough of that - we’re visiting here for the third time but the village continues to surprize us.  The afternoon of our arrival, we heard what sounded like a lazy brass band rehearsal in the distance as we walked back from a visit to the village shop.  We tracked down the noise to the village carpark and recylcling zone where we also found a carnival procession gearing up for departure.  The band were playing a kind of woozy New Orleans tune, something cyclical and insistent that was repeated over and over again as the dancers went through their moves.  They were in full costumes - sinister white theatre masks set in thin-lipped  concentration, grass Hawaiian skirts and bikini tops over long-sleeved white t-shirts and gloves with long, black wigs and floral reefs.  They carried lengthy, feathery sceptres which dipped and tapped above the heads of the spectators and some had pillow cases full of confetti.  The procession was led off by a tractor towing a trailer carrying an effigy of one of the dancers and the dancers followed with the inter-mingled crowd and band taking up the rear.  We watched them leave the carpark, the dancers slowly whirling and treading in the tractor’s wake, scattering confetti and making strange, marionette-like gestures.  They were evidently a mxture of genders and ages but it wasn’t always easy to tell.  Dudelet was fascinated and hovered at the front of the crowd for a little while before dropping back to take my hand.  He immediately relinquished it as a friendly woman with two young daughters in princess costumes offered him a handful of confetti.  He took it shyly and immediately flung it over supermum (who’d earlier commented that the dancers seemed to be targeting women). A lot of children seemed to be in costumes; there was even a scattering of small harlequins and columbines weaving through the throng.

After that, we followed them as they processed down the road.  Dudelet kept ahead of us, getting as close to the dancers as he dared and picking up fistfuls of discarded confetti like the other children.  He’d never seen or experienced anything like it and neither had we.  Eventually, they reached an evidently pre-arranged spot and the band had a rest whilst the crowd milled around the dancers who were evidently unwilling to drop out of character.

Later, we heard the band again from the house and dudelet and I dashed to the bottom of our narrow street to find that the procession had finally reached our locale as part of a programme, we guessed, of visiting every single spot in the village.

Earlier this evening, dudelet decided to make his own mask and have his own procession.  Heartbreakingly, he decided against it at the last minute.

“We don’t have enough people so it isn’t really a very good plan,” he told us.  So he and I went for a walk instead.  Then he went for another walk with supermum.  The light was beautiful and dudelet took his new super bubble blowing mixture.  Tomorrow, we’ll try and find a certain lake.  And tomorrow evening, I might write about it.

In the UK, anyway.

I’d seen so many post’s about Mother;s Day, I began to get quite paranoid that I’d somehow skimmed right the way around the calendar in a matter of a few weeks and had skidded straight past it.  So I looked up the date in Wikipedia.  If I was an American son and husband, I’d be in trouble.  Thankfully, I’m English.  Well, thankfully on this minor occasion.

Wikipedia pays heartwarming tribute to the tradition:

Nine years after the first official Mother’s Day, commercialization of the U.S. holiday became so rampant that Anna Jarvis herself became a major opponent of what the holiday had become. Mother’s Day continues to this day to be one of the most commercially successful U.S. occasions. According to the National Restaurant Association, Mother’s Day is now the most popular day of the year to dine out at a restaurant in the United States.

For example, according to IBISWorld, a publisher of business research, Americans will spend approximately $2.6 billion on flowers, $1.53 billion on pampering gifts — like spa treatments — and another $68 million on greeting cards ^[3].

Mother’s Day will generate about 7.8% of the US jewelry industry’s annual revenue in 2008. Americans are expected to spend close to $3.51 billion in 2008 on dining out for Mother’s Day, with brunch and dinner being the most popular dining out options ^[4].

Mothers, eh?  The grease and oil of the capital-military-industrial complex, evidently.

We had, on balance, a great week.  Two children were undoubtedly a lot harder work than the one we had the last time we went out to Languedoc but dudelet loved every moment (apart from the bits involving us prizing him forcibly off the controls of the hire car.  Definitely a budding Francophile.

Dudelette discovered her toes in a big way and they turned out to be her favourite toy of the whole holiday.  She spent hours grabbing hold of them, tweaking them, turning back her trouser legs to admire them…She still hasn’t shown much interest in turning over (as opposed to dudelet who was slowly crawling by now) but perhaps that’s down to a much more focused engagement with her immediate environment.   Dudelet, after all, discovered the other side of the room quite quickly but he never really built up much of a relationship with his little piggies.  Maybe he missed out?

Coming next - posts about France, of course!  Meanwhile, here’s some men playing boules in a village.

In Boris Johnson, one of the most vibrantly multi-cultural cities in the world just elected a man who calls black children “picaninnies”, is a right-winger in a clown’s costume and who is noted for his patronising contempt for anyone outside of his own class (old Etonian, Oxbridge…). And our intelligence as voters.

Well, I have to agree with his last point of view.

We’re heading out of the country for a week. When we get back, we should really think about moving.

…please go and vote. And please vote for anyone other than the BNP and Boris Johnson. I bracket the two together advisedly. I don’t want to wake up tomorrow and find that the people of the city I love have elected a clown and a racist for Mayor.

I’ll be putting my first vote down for Ken and my second for the Greens.

In my defense, I’ve had three glasses of something.

Yogamamamum (oops - sorry.  It really was only three glasses, honest) having failed to tag me with a marriage meme (by virtue of our cunningly having arranged to not get married over the last 16 years), has convincingly nailed me with the titular Food Porn Meme. A meme obviously designed to get the word “porn” repeated as many times as possible in an otherwise innocent blog post.

Well, y’know, I’m game.

1. What food do you consider the best “date” food? In other words, what meal or food item do you think is sexiest to eat in the company of someone you would like to look sexy around?

We have a five month old baby and a toddler. There is no such thing as sex. It was formally abolished by the Church about 1500 years ago, probably by someone named Origen. I believe castration was involved.

(Though I seem to remember that champagne and very dark chocolate have their place.)

2. What well-known person would you like to share a meal with?

I’d be way too terrified and tongue-tied to share a meal with any of heroes. Well, maybe Nick Cave. Definitely Nick Cave, in fact.

3. What does your perfect breakfast-in-bed look like? (Food AND the details, please. Candles? Music? Flowers? Hot tub? Dancing girls?)

What’s this thing you call breakfast in bed?

4. What do you consider the best application of whipped cream to be?

I don’t believe in any kind of corporal punishment. But it would probably be on top of a chocolate torte. Let’s face it, sweat curdles cream in a very unpleasant way.

5. Oh-God-No, Biff, the yacht is sinking! You are sent to the galley to retrieve the food. What luxury food items do you snatch first? The champagne? The caviar? Smoked Salmon? Truffles? Chocolate? Or something else?

Pasta. Lots of pasta. It’ll keep and you can eat it with cream and sausage meat made out of the wild pigs that are bound to be roaming the island we’re about to cast away upon. And very expensive brandy. It’ll add a nice something to the creamy wild pig sauce and could be used as a last resort for Molotov cocktails to take out the long-marooned bands of pirates that are bound to interfere with our island idle at some point. Probably accompanied by camera crews.

The Rules…
“Answer each of the five questions. Tag five bloggers you would like to pass the meme to. Have them link back to you and to this post as the source meme. You and they can take the graphic from here if they like.”

Tags?

Dan, who has trenchant opinions about food. And Marmite, though Marmite is technically a munition.

Bloglily, because I have witnessed at first hand the seriousness with which she attends to food.

TEOM, because she’s taken to using acronyms.

L.A. Daddy because his life isn’t complicated enough already.

And Ally, because she’s thinking about food and was foolish enough to delurk.

And blame this inventive individual who kicked this off in the first place.

Wat Buddhapadipa was the first purpose built Buddhist temple in South London. As it happened, we all trekked down to visit on a day when South London was (briefly) covered in snow. Dudelet lasted about twenty minutes and it was way too cold for dudelette but we had a glimpse of beautiful gardens and a thriving micro-culture in the midst of the most bourgeois of London boroughs.

About a month ago, dudelet finally reached the point where he could not only comprehend a relatively sophisticated rewards chart but could visualise the advantages of being sufficiently well-behaved over the course of a week to rack up the 20 stickers necessary for a “grand prize”. This was brought home to us quite literally when, given a five pound book token at some sort of school event, he chose to spend it on a sticker chart allowing the tracking of five different tasks over the course of a week. It came with an elaborate array of tiny stickers and he wanted to start there and then. So we did.

Currently, he gets his choice of star, crown, flower or any of a myriad other themes for achieving

• getting up after 7am (oh yes!)
• Getting dressed nicely without any fuss
• Being especially helpful with dudelette (i.e. waiting patiently for his stories whilst supermum puts her to bed)
• Eating all his supper
• Getting his pyjamas on and going to bed nicely (nicely is such an adaptable adverb)

He probably scores an average of three stickers a day and the threat of the loss of a sticker is frequently enough to bring him into line. The ultimate sanction at the moment, of course, is the deprivation of Doctor Who. Doctor Who is still an utter hero for dudelet and I have to say that I approve. Though supermum continues to loathe both David Tenant’s eyebrows and his acting. Or maybe it’s the way his eyebrows do the acting. Dudelet and I, however, are jointly entranced.

For me, it’s a hotline to my childhood - my Doctor was Jon Pertwee (if you’re British, male and over thirty, the odds are, you have a Doctor.)

Who was yours? And no, Paul McGann doesn’t count.

Anyway, stickers.  Beats shouting a lot any day of the week.

Some of you will know that I have an on-off flirtation going with Zen Buddhism and have done for a long time. Like most people, I initially saw Buddhism (and especially Zen) in fairly idealistic terms. I’m probably as prone to what Edward Said defined as Orientalism as the next Western liberal with a couple of volumes of D.T. Suzuki or Alan Watts on the shelf. Or at any rate, I was twenty years ago. (Possibly the only difference now is that I have several shelves full of those seductive books and even more unfulfilled good intentions).

Zen is, of course, an experiential religion (and make no mistake - it’s a religion, not a wussy ‘philosophy’) and that experience is fundamentally one of getting on your mat and sitting. Just sitting (more on sitting here and here, in that order). I don’t sit enough - in fact, I haven’t for months - but that’s another story. The other side of it is the ethical and philosophical side which has probably engaged rather more of my attention than it should do. It’s nice reading - comforting books about the dharma and being excellent to one another and showing compassion and so on.

Brian Victoria’s Zen at War is not one of those nice books. It’s a detailed account of the complicity of the Japanese Buddhist hierarchy (yes, hierarchy - just like the Pope) in the creation of the Japan that fought the Great Pacific War. Zen Buddhism doesn’t come out particularly well as an institution but the accounts of the heroism of individual Buddhists in following their consciences is inspiring.

Aside from analysing the contribution of Zen to the creation of what one might call a Japanese Nationalist psyche in the Meiji era, Victoria also examines a number of writers in detail, dissecting how the central notions of compassion were twisted and corrupted to justify the horrendous activities of the Japanese government and military in Manchuria.  The Chinese were effectively subjected to a colonial policy every bit as vicious and exploitative as those imposed by the West “for their own good” - the requirement of compassion to the whole was used to justify barbaric treatment of individuals and minorities.  Buddhist missionaries sent out to Manchuria effectively became government spies.

It’s a challenging read.  The upside of it is the willingness on the part of a small number of academics and priests to question their faith’s history and try to answer difficult questions about it, frequently in the face of considerable opposition (Japan’s reticence in confronting the ghosts of its past is notorious).

I think Buddhism is robust enough to stand up to this level of inquiry.  I’m not entirely sure the same could be said of Catholicism, though the Pope’s recent actions during his US visit are a start…

I’ll have something more substantial in a day or two once I get back into the blogging swing of things but in the meantime, here’s a song dudelet composed in honour of Doctor Who, to be sung to the tune of the Doctor Who theme.

Doctor Who
Doctor Who
Thank you for saving us
From the naughty aliens and killing them
Thank you, Doctor Who, Doctor Who
Thank you, thank you
Doctor Who