These are troubled times. What cheers me up is using the ‘What’s the worst that could happen’ theory. I was reading in a book today, ‘Everything Bad is Good for You’ that in certain types of movies we are led to anticipate the sequence of events. The example the author cited was the clichéd nubile-babysitter-at-home-alone-apart-from-the-kids-who-forgets-to-lock-the-door… You know what is going to happen next…

So with Neen headed off to the States this weekend, what are my unlocked doors?

We have had one burglary and one flood this year, and taken steps to avoid their recurrence. We have nothing left worth stealing. (Are you listening, blogger-burglars?) So if I forgot to turn the alarm on, and if the same burglars came back, they would probably leave again in a hurry. If the water tank flooded again, the insurers would replace the ceiling, and paint the bathroom. (Nothing wrong with that?)

I can up the ante a bit. Let’s say the tax people discovered that my procrastination has extended to not registering as a taxpayer, what could happen? They could freeze my ‘assets’ (good luck to them finding any!), and make copies of my hard-drive, which is full of stuff like this, rather than a trail of financial deception. So we would move in with a friend until it was sorted out. Easy.

Hmmm. The unpaid traffic fine Neen was disputing? They could confiscate our rusty ford, which would hopefully then get trashed. We need a new car. Can’t scare me.

Illness? Nope, I’m all prepared. I have a copy of the wonderful book ‘Where There Is No Doctor’ waiting to be consulted. It is a basic medical text aimed at primary care givers in an African village setting. (Sure, I could be less self-sufficient, and just go to the doctor or emergency room…) I can cure virtually everything using rehydration fluid and splints made from stout branches. My children are in safe, if somewhat unsophisticated, hands.

Gimme something with bite…

Aliens. In the unlikely attempt of jelly-beings from another universe working out how to travel light years and enter our atmosphere without their rudimentary bottoms getting singed, I am prepared. Like C3PO in Star Wars, I have mastered one language, and learned to say ‘hello’ in several others. I can offend the beasts in French, and then pour cleaning fluid on their flying orb, as it ‘gets rid of all known germs’.

And anyway, after two weeks in the isolation of my house, I may appreciate a fresh environment, even if I do end up with small hexagonal scars above my kidneys…

If Neen is kidnapped by a terrorist group trying to prove a point, that may work to our advantage. Being resourceful, she will escape, and then we can write a harrowing, poignant biography, which will be picked up by Oprah, and then we can retire on the royalties.

Now the smaller things that could go wrong seem infinitely less challenging. The kettle breaks, so that I can’t boil water for instant noodles, or my morning coffee? Easy peasy. I’ll resort to doing everything on an open fire. Washing machine breaks? Pah! Just wear the clothes till they are uniformly brown, and then buy other clothes. Like Reacher in the Lee Child novels. (He’s an ex military policeman who roams around, and buys clothes, wears them for a couple of days, and then discards them. Practicality is the name of the game).

Underneath my stoic veneer of confidence, I have my fears. There must be something for which I am not prepared. Oh yeah. The fingernails… Anything you’d care to add to my list of disasters? You are more than welcome to do so, provided you tack on a workable solution. I need you. I need your help, internet.

Survivor, Cape Town. Three people, fourteen days. Watch as two children outwit a grown man, and aim for their daily reward of as much chocolate as they can eat, and unlimited TV. They wish.

In my five years as a father, I have learned many things. I tentatively learned how to pick up a floppy newborn, and carry him through the house without banging his head on the door-frames (after a few tries, anyway), I learned how to wash his hair without touching the creepy fontanelle. (Am I the only person whose stomach turns at the idea of thin membranes, pulsing veins and delicate brain matter fizzing beneath?)

I have changed nappies, both disposable and cloth, and dealt with a small hillock of squishy poo. I’ve been vomited on, punched, had my eyeballs scratched and lost count of the amount of times my glasses have been misted by the fine spray of a baby learning to raspberry.

My youngest is now two and a half, the eldest, five and a half, and I have never cut their nails. As babies, those pale crescents were scarcely bigger than  this: (. No way was I going to go anywhere near them. Not with those ‘safety’ scissors, not with little clippers with tiny rabbit decals, and not with anything sharper than a spoon. I have been happy to trim hair. I have bathed and powdered them. I have nursed them through fevers and allowed them to cut their teeth on my fingers, but I have never touched their nails.

Which must soon change. As Neen will be away for two weeks, I have the choice of mummifying their fingers and toes in masking tape, or trimming those ridiculously fast-growing talons. I fear Neen will return to a family of children with truncated stubs at the end of their hands. They will resemble the flippers of platypuses, and will be useless for any act requiring fine motor co-ordination. They will be forced to wear stout leather gauntlets at school, and become known as ‘the webbed ones’. All that will remain to me is the hope that one day plastic surgery will progress to regrowth of fingertips, and that they won’t hate me for spoiling their chances of becoming concert pianists, or macramé experts.

And that is just the hands. How much will I have to pay some private cobbler to custom-make booties for their clunky appendages? Ever seen pictures of those women in china whose feet were bound? That is exactly the kind of image that haunts me when I consider the task at hand.

You need fingertips to do so many things. Like fasten buttons, type Pulitzer prize-winning novels, and pick your nose. They will be stump-fingered illiterates, with giant crusty boogers dangling from their nostrils…

But so much of parenting is pretense. You act as though you’ve done these things a thousand times before, but in your head you are screaming in fear, expecting someone to call your bluff: “Hey! You! You’re not qualified to do that! Step away from the baby, thaaaat’s right, back off…” Did previous generations know how to do these things, or did they just wing it, too? Maybe Jewish people have the right idea. After a circumcision, a little fingernail trimming is nothing…

Don’t tell Neen about this! I’m already having to pretend everything will be just fine while she’s away.

A separate thought: If she is flying backwards in time to Atlanta airport, if she keeps on going long enough will she be young again? If the pilot kept on going, would the plane be full of wispy headed infants pooping in their seats? Who would land the plane? Who would supervise the drinks trolley? Do you have thoughts like this, too?

So our insurance paid out. We received notification that we will be reimbursed a big chunk of cash for items liberated from our house during a recent burglary. The temptation is to spend the money on carefree living, rather than replace the vanished goods. We didn’t get enough to replace all the cds, but at least we will be able to start gathering some again. I felt justified, until I worked out how much money we have spent on insurance over the last ten years.

Don’t ever do that. It’s like working out how much money you have earned over your lifetime, or how many bags of chips you eat a year. Some things are best just appreciated at the time, and not thought of in terms of hundreds, thousands, or how many you could fit into an oil tanker.

Try that as a diet. Work out what, say, one chocolate bar a day looks like when multiplied by the average life expectancy: (365x 75) and you get over twenty-seven thousand chocolate bars. For some people, that could be doubled. Likewise with cigarettes. A pack of twenty a day for sixty years (although life expectancy is somewhat querulous with smokers) = 438000 cigarettes. That’s a lot of crud going down your throat.

If you work out how much money you spend on these things, that can also be a deterrent.

I read a book last year on the body-building culture (purely as something different to read; not out of any personal interest). It was a bit of an expose on the crazy lengths men and women go to to inflate their bodies. The bizarre thing was that the obsession left these people unable to make reasoned decisions regarding their bodies. They would eat vast quantities of food, and use so many pills and drugs that their kidneys looked like peanuts, and their veins as thick as ropes of licorice. Men of thirty were finding themselves in frailcare as their bodies gave up.

I remember leaving home when I was eighteen. I no longer had to be responsible about feeding myself. Also, there was no mum to feed me. I would binge on huge bags of cheese doodles, giant tubs of chocolate flavoured gloop, and anything else that made my mouth water. I would stuff my face, and then be broke. Then I would go a week eating nothing solid at all. I would subsist on the orange juice in my tequila, or the calories in beer.

I lost weight. And very nearly my mind. And I gained a very real appreciation for the meals my mum had made me. Soon, I replaced my mother with Neen (ha ha ha just kidding…Ow! Stop hitting me ow! Ow!) And started eating again…

Not that I am worried about the prospect of being left to my own devices again, as Neen travels to the States next week… I guess we will find something to eat. Sigh. I will be off work, so cooking won’t be a problem. But I’m guaranteed to gain a renewed appreciation of Neen’s culinary wizardry.

But I expect to be a little thinner, too.

If you live in the city, chances are you’ll probably end up at a coffee shop. All over the world, millions sit tipping mugs to lips, and pacifying the caffeine monkey sitting on their shoulder. I often do just that for business reasons, and frequently I’ll sit opposite someone who orders decaffeinated coffee.

Am I alone in thinking that this is a bizarre thing to do? To go to a coffee shop, and to order an item that has had the coffee bit taken out of it? Essentially, they are drinking brown coffee-flavoured water. I just hope that it’s not a trend.

Turn around, and there will be ‘Un-coffee shops’ popping up on every street corner. Clean-cut people will be sipping their brown water, absent-mindedly playing with their little packets of non-sugar, or ‘sweetener’. Later they will head off to early-evening clubs, and drink alcohol-free beers, and then shadow box in the parking lot.

I know for a fact that in Brazil, coffee agronomists have created a caffeine-free plant, and are in the process of making it commercially viable.

If you are a vegetarian, have you ever really honestly enjoyed one of those soya-dogs? Or soya burgers? They are as edible as stage props made from polystyrene. I can still remember a guy at school being sold a bag of origanum under the guise of dope, and him faking being stoned. Shooo, duuude, far out…

Going to a coffee shop and having decaf is like a gay man going to a straight singles bar. What’s the point? (Unless he’s fishing for compliments about his new highlights). Kinda like having a cell phone that never rings. The temptation is to fake interesting half-conversations. “Yeah… Don’t worry, we took care of him… yeah…In the trunk… Weighted down with stones…What?…Oh, that. …I’m on the bus…Salmon, if ya know what I mean…”

But the minute you do that, the thing will ring, and your cover will be blown…

The moral is: Don’t tell anyone you enjoy something. They’ll do a few research papers using under-graduate students as guinea pigs, and then come up with vague theories about the harmfulness of everything. Then those same scientists will get cushy jobs designing faux products.

Just sit back and enjoy your little pleasures, and don’t give in to those people who would rather be two-dimensional tromp-l’oeil mirages, diluting everything they do with ‘de-’ this and ‘non-‘ that. Double Espresso anyone?

(Formal apology: no gay men or under-graduate students were harmed during the tappin ou of this nonsense. It’s just that say, Eskimos wouldn’t have been as funny in a singles bar, what with all that seal blubber, and real guinea pigs ar sorta cute, unlike under-graduate students).

Is the following a koan on which to meditate, or the babblings of a man who has lost his metaphorical ear to the madness of this age…?

‘A flat cockroach is as quiet as a propeller that isn’t moving’.

Thank you, James, for that piece of wisdom (?). I don’t know where he gets it from.

Today as I sat on the rocks, I watched a pod of dolphins hunching their way through the water beyond the wave line. The sky was overcast, and they appeared as dark shapes, sinister even. A far cry from the cheerful chatterers we are led to expect. The dolphins of doom.

Following yesterday’s post, in which I revealed the unglamourous truth behind my façade of neatness, I struggle to come up with anything constructive. Did I mention that my ragged pants are at least clean? I hope so.

In case you were all wondering who I killed in the army, the answer is nobody. In the ‘80’s, all white boys/men over the age of sixteen if they had dropped out of school, or eighteen if they were finished with school were conscripted into the Defense Force. These were the dying years of apartheid, and if you refused, you could be imprisoned for six years. I was lucky, in that I was the first intake to do one year instead of two.

I could have picked up my British passport and gone to the UK like my brothers, but I elected to remain South African, to be with Neen.

I chose to be in the military band, as I played the trumpet, and spent a wasted year in the Kalahari Desert, playing at parades. I had to do a solo for the ex-president, FW De Klerk (remember him?) when he was still president. I drank more beer than you could possibly imagine. When I started, I told them I was off my head, so they refused to let me carry a weapon. Oddly, they chose people like me to sit in a small trench at the shooting range, and replace the targets. We sat huddled under our oversized and dented helmets, with the rifle rounds pinging around us. I still get very edgy when I hear gunfire…

Retrospectively, I should have taken the moral high ground and gone to prison, but I was politically ignorant at the time. Plus, they issued us with natty underwear. I guess being involved in rebuilding SA makes up for that in a small way.

We are a sensitive lot, my family. Tonight James was weeping over a ‘pet’ songololo that had gone missing. A songololo is a centipede. Not to be confused with a ‘gogga’ (the g’s pronounced like the ‘ch’ sound in chutzpah). (chawcha) which is just a general name for a bug.

And I lied. In my comments for yesterday. I said I don’t have a favourite pair: I do. They are red, and still relatively intact. I call them my lucky pants, although is not meant to have any of the innuendoes single men may attach. I simply feel more complete, call it being holistically dressed. I am at one with myself, body, mind and underwear. I have ‘centred’ myself in the best possible way.

Thank you for listening. The truth heals.

There is a saying that I learned when I was in the army, when preparing for inspections. When you are a young man not used to the confusing and taxing world of ironing, you quickly find ways of avoiding this nightmare task. We had big green steel cupboards, which when opened were designed to show all your uniform bits and pieces lined up and pressed. The socks had to be rolled up, with little ‘smiles’ folded in to them. Ironing we managed to get around by ironing only the side of the clothes visible on opening the cupboard.

Which was fine, unless your commanding officer chose your face to dislike, and decided to rifle through your things. As he gloatingly uncovered some unwashed clothes, or the unironed halves, he would say ‘Bo blink, onder stink’

Roughly translated, this means ‘shiny above, stinky below’. It implies that you have swept the dust under the carpet…

Much like the character in the Edgar Allan Poe story, ‘The Black Cat’, you would stand at attention, with your most soldierly expression, hoping that tiny screams wouldn’t reveal the horror within. It was tempting, under that amount of pressure, to throw open your cupboard and cry ‘See! The monster walled up within the tomb!’ and release the guilt, but that would have meant early morning inspections for a week, so instead you tried not to draw attention to your cold sweat, hoping that he wouldn’t perceive the juddering fear.

In some ways, that saying has stuck with me.

When we were trying to sell our previous house, we cleaned it as never before. All extraneous junk was either crammed into cupboards, or shoved into the ceiling as we prepared to have a ‘Show House’. Weird thing was, without piles of papers and toys and books lying around, we kind of liked the way our house looked. Fortunately, hordes of people came and went, and none were foolish enough to open any of the cupboards. Had they been, there would have been court cases for sure. ‘Man crushed by toppling lawnmower’.

Here’s a secret you probably shouldn’t be allowed in on.

I seldom buy my own underwear.

I feel uncomfortable going to the clothing stores and browsing in the underwear section. The shelves are designed to make you pick up satin tangas by accident, when all you really want are conservative underpants. I am not the kind of man who gets a kick out of shimmering boxer shorts with the undergarment version of a bumper sticker emblazoned on the front. I am not that young that I wear low-slung jeans with boxers showing. Also, suffice it to say, that boxers don’t do it for me. I feel insecure in them.

As a result, I wear the few pairs of underpants in rotation until they start to disintegrate. Finally, Neen is usually the one to highlight my denial, and point out the ragged elastic, and threadbare fabric. I then have to keep my head down, dash into the shop,  grab what I hope are the correct size in a pack of five, and pay. My shame is complete as I am ALWAYS served by a woman, who tries hard not to laugh as she rings them up, and when I get home I realize that I’ve bought XXXL, or they have some unlikely logo in an unlikely place… I’d rather eat nails than return them for a credit, so I stick them at the back of the cupboard.

Now, I do try and stay neat as far as my ‘overclothes’ are concerned, so why the discrepancy? I wouldn’t go out with holes and bits falling off my shirts or trousers. Oh yes, and my socks don’t last long, either. I seem to have very abrasive feet, and Neen gets very vexed by my wearing these things that end up more hole than sock. Strangely, I love the feeling of new socks, and the way my feet sit snugly inside, unchafed by rough boot inners.

I am therefore pretty happy when I get socks for birthdays or Christmas. As long as there is something less functional in the gift.

Neen laughed the other day when we went to a busy mall, and I said (tongue firmly in cheek) that I just wanted to shop privately, so what if someone recognizes me from my blog? After a long time, she stopped laughing, and gently helped me to understand that that was not just unlikely, but impossible.

Which is great, considering the information you now have and probably wish you didn’t. If I see you on the street, kindly keep your eyes above waist level, and think pure thoughts. (My underwear and socks, holey or not, are always clean so the ‘stinky’ part of the saying does not apply). I’ll accept the name ‘holey-pants’ but not ‘stinky-pants’. That is reserved for my as yet un-potty-trained daughter.

It’s amazing what you don’t know about people… I bet some of you have your own secrets… Care to share?

Last night we watched what should have been a harmless film on TV. It was called ‘Blast From the Past’ , starring Brendan Fraser. The movie itself isn’t particularly new, so if you bothered to see it, then it may have been some time ago. Adam’s parents, both clichéd thumbnail characters from the sixties, are designed to epitomize the ‘good-old-days-‘. They build a fallout shelter, and when an airplane crashes they are shut away for 35 years, believing that there has been a nuclear holocaust.

During that time, they have Adam, and raise him in this bubble, free of any human interaction apart from their own. They try to teach him cultural norms, but in the absence of culture those things become absurd. Meanwhile, decades are passing up above, as the conservative America of the Sixties becomes the anything-goes-seventies, the wild-eighties and finally the Been-there, done-that-nineties.

The son emerges from the shelter, and at first applies all the lessons taught him by his kooky parents. Then he figures out that he has to adapt, and manages to do so, while remaining innocent.

The reason I fill you in on all this, is that it set me to thinking.

So many of our friends have opted to be Stay-at-home-moms, and do home schooling, that we have often questioned Neen’s return to work after our children were born. (Note, we only briefly discussed my returning to work…). We have wrestled with these decisions many times, and we are comfortable with the choices we have made, as being appropriate for us at this point in time.

There seems to be a raging debate happening about the viability of working mothers, and yet no real debate about working fathers.

I have no desire to live in the ‘good-old-days’. I suspect they don’t exist. I want my children to go to school, as terrifying a place as that can be, and have the benefit of dealing with different personalities and cultures. Of course I want to instill what I believe to be a healthy moral system, but I do believe that that can only have meaning within the context of other moral systems.

If you have chosen to home-school, good for you. I don’t think it is a doomed philosophy. This is all about my choices as husband and dad to my wife and children.

We did discuss the viability of my staying at home to look after the children full-time, as Neen is certainly more marketable in terms of her career. I love my children, and at work sometimes I feel an incredible longing to be with them, especially when people bring their own children into the shop where I work. What has helped us to decide for me to carry on working, is, I guess, a combination of things. We believe, (shock number one) that the husband is the head of the home (even though he spends so much time at work!). This is in part owing to our commitment to a bible-based parenting style.

While Neen does submit to me (shock number two), it is never ever ever ever (got it?) a case of me ordering her around. What this means to us is that we make decisions together, and then I take responsibility for the consequences. It is not based on a concept of her inferiority, but rather a belief that I am answerable to God for my actions. Plus, we are one, anyway.

(If you are wondering about why the heck I am writing this, the reason is that I hardly ever write in response to my heading about the role of a husband).

Of course, sometimes a two-year-old can feel like the head of the household, and we are tempted to submit to their tantrums and whining regularly.

I have no desire to turn my children into ‘Dobsonites’, or whoever is the current guru of parenting. The bible has very little to say on the raising of children, but lots to say about the character of God, and consequently, the character of the those who claim to follow him. We aim to steer our children in a Godward direction, and hope that we have enough integrity for them to trust our decisions. Ultimately, they all belong to Him anyway.

The reason the movie got to me, was that it reminded me of how we/other parents can become obsessed with one way of doing things. We try to remove all opportunity for risk and error, and in doing so place our children in grave danger. There will always be things they need to measure out for themselves, and part of their transition to adulthood will involve making their own decisions based on both a moral foundation and learned experience.

I’m making all this up, so feel free to criticize me, but I do want what is best for my children. But I also want what is best for me. And Neen. See, my children are so important to me, but I cannot afford to lose myself and my own goals in an act of ‘sacrifice’ that doesn’t help any of us. I need to have dreams. And not just dreams involving flying across a chocolate river wearing a brown super-hero costume. (I know, I know, lay off the late-night cheese-fests).

I am incredibly proud of my family. My wife, for the sacrifices she makes both at home and at work, and my children, for their ability to love us and accept us.

James, I think, imagines that all daddies work in bookshops, and Hannah gets to have two loving mommies. Her day-mom is someone I respect too, which is also important.

.

May they emerge from our fallout shelter of a family not trapped in some unhelpful anachronism of a worldview, but rather protected by an aura of proven wisdom, and able to pass on some great things to another generation.

Scary thought: In about fifty years time, will this current age be thought of as ‘the good old days’? While there are some great things about the present, we could all correct that misperception in an instant.

If you read my header, and you see ‘husband’ you may have a picture in your mind of what that is. I guess those thoughts would involve a range of images, from couches, sports on TV, lonely golf days, philandering b*st*rds, suited dudes off to the office, a romantic supper, toilet seats akimbo, jokes about turns to do the dishes….

I could go on.

Being a husband is hard work. Sometimes. It can also be one of the most rewarding roles. I love it. I love Neen, and I am glad to be co-dependent. In a good way.

(p.s. In case you are a husband, and I am creating an unrealistic picture of joy and reward, I apologise. You may now return to your butt-scratching in front of the sit-com re-runs).

Life is tough. Yesterday I had the choice of two parties to go to on Saturday. The first was a sixth birthday party with a pirate theme. The second was a baby shower for a boy, so presumably blue would have been present in sky-like quantities.

Which would you choose? The benefit of both is that you would come home while the sun is still in the sky with your integrity intact.

And I used to be a social butterfly. Flit flit. As it ends up, our grocery shopping took so long, and was so physically and emotionally taxing, that we went to neither. Yes, physically: Hannah fell asleep and needed to be carried limply up and down the aisles, and yes, emotionally: James picked up every second item to claim it as his favourite. Eventually he was doing his Rumplestiltskin act, hopping up and down and screaming, and we felt a trifle fatigued.

While we are not Catholics, I do sympathize with them, as they watch John Paul 2^nd fading away. I can remember way back in 1978 when he became part of history; whether you agree to his doctrine or leadership style or not, he has been a familiar face for an awfully long time. I guess he is about to die, and then someone new will come. Imagine being that person, knowing the dirt-digging that will go on by the tabloids. Poor guy.

Also, he can no longer wear that cool scarlet robe of a cardinal, but will be forced to look like a chess piece.

What makes me mourn even more is the re-election of deranged despot No 1, Robert Mugabe. Pity Zimbabwe, and all who have to put up with his destructive reign.

But I am sure none of you know what it is like to be subject to a war-mongering dictator. Do you?

Across the world, from Australia to Hawaii, people are reaching deep into their psyche to examine the novel ‘The Da Vinci Code’. Now I may not be a famous novelist, nor am I an expert on the history of the catholic church. What I do know is that these are not new ideas. Dan Brown has simply threaded them together in his ‘compulsive’ storytelling way.

I tried to read ‘Angels and Demons’, the first in the series. I also thought I should give ‘The Da Vinci Code’ a go, since 30 million people have read the thing. I hated both of them. I could care less about secret societies and clandestine brotherhoods, and I am absolutely convinced that Jesus never even dated, never mind had a wife/sexual relationship. But fine, you are welcome to your opinions on those things.

What bothered me was his inability to write in a style more sophisticated than the ‘Hardy Boys’ novels I read as an eight-year-old. I am not a writing snob; I read all kinds of books, but I do draw the line at piercing blue eyes, and glistening whatevers. Had I not been reading a copy that belonged to the shop, I would have flung it from the train. Hopefully it would have become embedded in wet cement, and been dug up two thousand years from now as a relic to be chuckled over by a society more advanced than ours seems to be now.

Apparently, muddling the ancient mysteries of the Bible is easy, even for the very young. Hannah, aged two, just today was enlightening me as to the true nature of Jesus.

‘Jesus is died’ she said

‘And…?’ I prompted

‘He came alive in the water’

‘Yes…?’

He has hair’

‘What does he do?’

‘He came to spank everybody’

‘Eh? But Jesus loves everyone’

‘He came to spank…?

Me: ‘Nobody’

He came to spank… nobody… for touching the blinds. You mustn’t touch the blinds, and eat them’

‘Er, right’

‘The blinds can make you sick, and Noah eats beetles. Noah is hungry’

Noah is not just a historical figure, he is Hannah’s classmate at her daymom. Apparently he is something of an entomologist. Or Eat’em-all-agist.

So, Dan Brown, I eagerly await your new novel, based on the apparent will of the Lord to spank everyone, for touching the blinds. And the Dastardly parents who tried to keep this information from the world. They hide in suspiciously normal suburban homes, decorated with odd arcane symbols in crayon on the walls, at about knee-height. The truth is out there, and I mean Out There…

Man, I haven’t done one of these thingies for a while… Thanks, Jilbur.

1. What book would I like to be? Be a book? I guess the kind of book would be a crazy joy-ride of a book with a happy ending, as I can be very sentimental. But to answer the question, any of Roald Dahl children’s books. They are all filled with humour, dark twists, and underdogs overcoming adversity.
2. Have I ever had a crush on a fictional character? I reckon part of the sign of a good book is its ability to seduce you into personally involving yourself with the characters. Oddly, though, I am more drawn to stronger male characters, but not in the erotic sense. That said, remember ‘Janet and John’?  Did you see the way that girl could jump! Whooo-hooo! Also, the character ‘Bootsie’ in the James Lee Burke novels that is married to Robicheaux, but only because she dies tragically of Lupus.
3. What is the last book I bought? I get given book proofs and advance copies for work purposes, so if I buy a book it’s a really special occasion. The last one was a big book on rats, in preparation for the adoption of one into our household, from a second-hand bookstore.
4. What is the last book I read? ‘The Center of Winter’ by Marya Hornbacher. One of those where the characters are words that rise like Frankenpeople from the page, to live in one’s head for a while. Loved it!
5. What book am I currently reading? To diversify: a non-fiction title called ‘Blink’ by Malcolm Gladwell. It’s all about our ability as humans to make decisions in a split second. He debates whether or not our conscious or unconscious minds help us to decide our likes and dislikes, our preference for certain personality types over others… Very interesting, especially as I loathe decision making.
6. What five books would I take with me if I was stranded on a desert island? Back to fiction, as non-fiction would be harder to choose from many favourites. Here are some I would reread and reread until the glue disintegrated…The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver. I loved her evocation of the Congo in the sixties, and her ability to write in the different voices of her characters. The Yearling by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings: A classic story of coming of age in the Florida everglades. Again, she created a brilliant sense of place. The Shipping News, by E Annie Proulx: Hey! There’s that ‘I can picture that town’ writing style. I guess I enjoy books that put me there in the story…To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. ‘One of those ‘Must Read Before You Die’ books. I was in love with all the characters. And finally: Anything by James Lee Burke. Good books don’t have to be literary, even a thriller can entertain you and lift you up for that quick-fix feeling. Wading through books for pretension’s sake is a waste of time, don’t you think? I dig his Louisiana heartland plots, and his passively malevolent baddies. (And please try any of Robert Crais’ ‘Elvis Cole’ books…)
7. Tag, you’re it… Thanks, Jill, for the task. Hmmm. I guess Neen, because I like her taste in reading, even though it differs from mine, and maybe Lee, because his Pa wrote one.