Update:I'm on hol in a godforsaken part of the world where the only internet access is the public library, so I won't be able to read or comment on anyone's blogs until I return to civilization.  Thanks very much for the many entertaining comments on this blog.

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Born in the middle of a tea party

I was born in the middle of a tea party. Exactly nine months earlier my parents had got married and gone on honeymoon to Paris. From the safety of the hotel bathroom my mother had screamed at my father, "If my mother knew what you wanted to do to me, she'd never have let me marry you." Obviously, just a passing sentiment.

In the last few days of her pregnancy it was obvious she was going into labour and so my grandmother (my father's mother) went to sit with her. It was a very protracted labour so the next day she went back bringing a sponge cake and since my mother wasn't very good company, she invited the next door neighbour, who came bringing salmon and cucumber sandwiches and made the tea. The greengrocer's wife (who was having an affair with my grandfather) hearing that my mother was in labour came by with a big basket of fruit and stayed. When the midwife and the doctor who was a family friend, arrived with a bottle of whisky ostensibly for my father, the party was complete and everyone had a good time, except my mother who was in pain.

Eventually I came out, breech, and when it got to the messy bit of cleaning up, everyone left except the greengrocer's wife who did the washing-up on the way out.

Two years later, my brother was born in the same bed, in the same room, but alone. My mother refused to have anyone but the midwife there. She never really got along with my grandmother anyway.

(My mother likes to tell me my birth story, but only as an adjunct to the Real Story of her wedding.  Her mother slapped her face and told her that her elder sister Rutie (who was kinda ugly) should have got married first which she said spoiled her day.  (My grandmother later slapped my face when I got my first period, 'to take the shock away').   She says that apart from when she asked my father and his brother to strip to their skivvies to make sure they weren't hairy men, that she'd never actually seen an even semi-naked man before and was very vague about the mechanics of sex.   Although my mother was from a very Orthodox background, she was 23,  so how she could not have known about sex I don't know.  Personally I think my mother has a vision of how things should have been and just sets out to correct history by repeating her own version often enough that she gets to believe it, even if I'm sceptical.  I could be wrong though, my mother's family are quite peculiar.

I just felt like writing a bit of autobiography before I get into my dottage and forget everything and have to tell lies to cover it up.  Not much happening in my life.  I have some great pics of my son at prom and graduation and when I find out how to make them look ok, I'll post them.  Had a slightly weird experience yesterday. I went to a beauty shop for a manicure and pedicure, a Spanish place that I am accustomed to going to.  I've never been when its full though and it was yesterday, everyone was black or Spanish (Santo Domingan) except me, no big deal, but then I asked to have my hair straightened. I have mad, long, red uncontrollable spiral curls.  The hairdresser picked up a lock of my hair and shouted out something in Spanish and shrieked and I had all these people coming up to me pulling my hair and telling me not to do it.  There was so much fuss that ladies were lifting up their hood hairdryers to see what the noise was all about.  At the height of the melee there was a power cut, so I left $40 on the counter and made my escape. My nails chipped, shit.  You'd have thought I was asking something really weird wouldn't you, but what it amounts to is no-one likes their own hair and everyone likes someone else's.

Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash By Elizabeth Royte This is a very dense book that appears to cover every possible aspect of garbage disposal and recycling in New York in particular and California and other states in general. Its quite interesting and very worthy and ... ultimately meaningless as a statistic towards the end reveals that only 2% of all garbage is household waste. The rest of it is industrial, primarily manufacturing and commercial, mostly restaurants and fast food outlets. One of the quite shocking (if you imagine this planet weighed down with detritus) figures is that for every 100 pounds of manufactured goods, 3,200 pounds of waste are generated. Elizabeth Royte quotes from a paper by Samantha McBride of NYU's Dept. of Sociology on consumer recycing. 'Such programs', she wrote, redirect 'the focus of environmental concern away from the material unsustainability of the current economic system, instead turning it inward on the self'. As long as we insist on living in an economy that revolves around forever researching, developing, manufacturing, selling, purchasing, using and discarding goods in favour of the Next New Thing, the focus on trash will be how to deal with it. We really should be concentrating on how not to make so much of it in the first place, but we won't, we're too addicted to 'new'.

Currently Listening Jazz A Saint-Germain By Angelique Kidjo, China, Dee Dee Bridgewater, Francois Hardy and Iggy Pop, Jacky Terrasson, Patricia Kaas, Les Nubians, Brigitte Fontaine, Elli Medeiros, Various Artists.  This is a hell of an album - worth it for Angelique Kidjo, Patricia Kaas and Iggy Pop alone.

 

Good news Six years ago, as some old-time Xanga friends might remember, I battled with the private American school here (fees $1100 month now, it was $600 then, but it doesn't have accreditation even if it does have snob value) because they said my son was so slow he needed to be in a special school, had ADHD, was messy beyond the norm and refused to go on teaching him without a full-time teacher's aide.  I battled against this saying there was nothing wrong with my son but you don't like mixed race kids.  I even brought in the UN rep for Education and Culture who admittedly was family.  I lost.  I had to remove my son and home-schooled him with two other kids - also blondes with a black father - and an American teacher as the tutor for a year.  He passed the exams to re-enter the school as pre-arranged but they refused him re-admission saying there were no places even though he was first on the list.  They also kept $1800 of my money.  The school had very few non-whites in it at that time; there were never any places when (black) friends of mine phoned up.  One friend of mine who is white and whose children are mixed race said that she didn't want to send her kids to the local school as she didn't want 'it' to rub off on them.  Meaning she wanted them to be culturally what?  She's British, not American!  What she means is that she wants them to have her standards and avoid ghetto culture.  I understand that. But there isn't any ghetto culture here!  Its a rich island not some deprived inner-city area.  Quite a lot of parents with mixed kids send their kids to school locally or to the Church schools (fee paying and very good) as some of the committed Christian Americans do.  But most expats either send their kids to the English or the American schools some because they get their fees paid from their companies and so the kids can re-enter the mainstream when, if, they go back to their own countries, and some who pay their own fees and live here because of fear of mixing too much with the locals.  The poorer ones sacrifice a lot to send their kids to a place where the parents network and every weekend its another dinner party or barbeque to go to, I can understand that, its the social life they desire.  Funny thing.  The friend who sends her daughter to the private school to avoid her getting ghetto might talk with an English accent in front of her mother (as my son does) but the rest of the time she speaks like all the other island kids. And she has a local boyfriend!  Her mother will get over it, after all she married a local at one point. Anyway the proof of the pudding is in the eating and my son is graduating on the Honour Roll from the local High school with the same GCSE qualifications as if he'd been in the UK.  He also won the Book Scholarship so all his books will be paid for at the local college (free) which offers US Associate Degrees and hopefully A-levels so he can get the right qualifications for university as he wants to be a lawyer.  If you make the Honour Roll in college, scholarships from the government are automatic so he has to work hard for two years now and stay on that Honour Roll.  He says he doesn't want to be poor like his mother! Wasn't that badly-written?  I'm in no mood for editing.  There is an equally-badly written rant on protected. Just read:  Penis Pokey, by Christopher Behrens.  This is a simple board book with a round hole cut out through the (w)hole centre of the book.  There is no text, just pictures.  One spread features a peeled banana - with the banana missing, another a fireman and hose with the hose missing etc, each spread funnier than the last.  It is for you or your male friend to insert the missing item!  There is only one problem, the hole is ummm a little errr how to put it, well its a little on the small side for the local (Caribbean) populace, but the ex-pats think its great fun!  Wonderful bachelor/ette party gift. Just read:  Broken Spears: A Maasai Journey, by Elizabeth L. Gilbert.  Gee, what a treat this book is with its pictures of startlingly beautiful young men with bodies ripped beyond perfection (it makes sense, to my senses!).  Interesting too, but the photos are the main point. Currently reading - Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash, by Elizabeth Royte.  I enjoyed her first book, The Tapir's Morning Bath so much, I was pleased to find this.  Did you know that treated sewage which doesn't have to adhere to particularly high standards regarding pathogens and poisons, is pelletized and sold as fertilizers for growing non-food crops?  In fact some of the companies making these 'biosolids' actually give them away as they are paid by the municipalities to treat the sewage and giving the 'fertilizer' away is just a means of disposal for them.  Do you think this might have anything to do with the rotten tomatoes around right now?

Praised for her maturity - she finds her drama in books!

Having been praised for my maturity (by a Xangagod, no less), I thought I'd better try and live up to it and so I've removed from public view the two blogs I wrote on the inflammatory remark and subsequent ones left on my Bitter blog.  All I will say is this (and this is a true story), three years ago one of my kid's cousins lit a fire in his grandfather's shed and ran away to enjoy the blaze from a distance.  Naturally he got caught, naturally he tried to get out of it by throwing around lies and accusations and trying to bring others into it, and just as naturally the adults wouldn't let him get away with it.  (Adults = the mature people  - like me ). Since it certainly wasn't the first time he'd caused trouble he was sent away to school in the UK where he is under much heavier manners than the rather relaxed lifestyle we all live on the island.  There should be a blogring with involuntary membership and a badge called Siberia for flamers.

On Thursday my friend Heikle was induced as her baby hadn't moved for the last 24 hours.  This upset her as she wanted a natural childbirth.  I didn't really have Xanga flames in my mind as I was on hand-squeezing duty.  She was Gordon Ramsay's pet - he trained her as a pastry chef - and if you've ever watched his tv program Hell's Kitchen, you wouldn't be at all surprised by her international repertoire of curse words.  In the end though the baby's heart was slowing down so they did a C-section and discovered the cord had been wrapped around his neck.  He was a healthy 7'lb 15 oz, but considering she's only 5' tall, you could see that the baby had probably had no room to move at the end.  (Actually I met her when she was in my cafe and cursed loudly in Arabic and I said, "I understood that!")

We are all wondering what colour he will turn out to be (he's white right now with smooth dark hair, but that could change in a week or so) as though Heikle is white with long dark curly hair and brown eyes, her father is Moroccan - dark with a big afro.  Her bf, a local man, has brown skin and blue eyes.  This could be interesting. The baby's name has changed from Dupree to Aidan and from Marlon to Remington, at the moment she is stuck on Remington, a name no-one but Heikle likes.

These are the books I've been reading this last month.  Right now, I'm reading Oliver Sack's Musicophilia and Martha Stout's The Sociopath Next Door.  They are both pretty heavy-going so I might look for some more chicklit tomorrow.  Got any suggestions?

Just finished - Escape By Carolyn Jessop, Laura Palmer 4* This is a long, very readable book about life inside the FLDS.  If you want a good review, check Amazon.  I would only add that I wish Carolyn Jessop hadn't tooted her own horn quite so long and loudly and had maybe told us about the achievements and personalities of other decent people inside this cult.   I also wish she would have told us of some of the joys and happy occasions as I don't believe that life was so unremittingly bad 24/7 for everyone (except her when she was in college, very few others had that chance of relief and education).  I do believe that the rivalries of fellow wives were bad, but not to the extent of continual horrific child abuse given that several of her teenaged kids wanted to return to the FLDS and one, even after three years of living a normal life, did.  It was well-written, edifying, a real page-turner but I think it lost by what it omitted and I shall look for another book on the FLDS to make up for it.

Saving the Lost Tribe: The Rescue and Redemption of the Ethiopian Jews By Asher Naim 5* You don't have to be Jewish (or interested in Jews) to read this. It was given to me by my Jamaican atheist bf who had read it for all sorts of reasons (as one does in hospital) and said that one of the interesting points was that for the first time in history, Blacks had been taken from Africa in large numbers not unwillingly and not to slavery and bondage, but to be welcomed home as the lost tribe.  I found it interesting mostly because it was a picture of Ethiopia that is more true than the local West Indian, rasta-influenced one of Ethiopia = the Promised Land.  It was better than some of the Amazon reviews made it out to be.

Flowers for Algernon By Daniel Keyes 5* I have recently employed a kid with somewhat normal intelligence but the social abilities of an over-talkative, wildly enthusiastic 12 year old.  He's just arrived on the island after being badly bullied in the UK at his special college - his mother sent him to live with his father who is head of CID here.  The island psychiatrist said he should go to the skill centre which is where people with a mental age of generally no more than 6 go and spend their days stuffing envelopes and other unrewarding occupations.  A friend who has a company teaching sailing offered to employ him part-time and I took up the slack - neither of us could bear to see such a nice kid (age 22 today) be consigned to that sort of existence.  So I was looking for books to read on mental challenges and bullying and found this classic book.  Algernon is dumb and has a job and is unaware that the teasing is so nasty it is the worst kind of bullying.  He becomes the subject of an experiment that gives him overwhelming intellectual powers and we see how he deals with the world from this new aspect.  The experiment is not completely successful though and he regresses, not unknowingly.  Its a wonderful book and brilliantly written.

Sickened: The Memoir of a Munchausen by Proxy Childhood By Julie Gregory, Marc D. Feldman 4* This was a really good read.  Small girl totally victimised by mother into believing she really is ill and rehearsed in what symptoms she must tell the doctors about, has scarcely recovered from this dreadful abuse in her 30s.  We are conditioned to believe that mothers love their children and do their best by them, so when the abuse doesn't take the form of bruises and broken bones, its as invisible to us as is the mother's mental illness to the doctors who treat and overtreat these poor children.

The Home for Wayward Supermodels By Pamela Satran 1* If you are over 12, there has to be something better to do than read this badly-written fairy tale of a blonde kid who gets discovered, helps her fat ethnic best friend up the ladder, discovers her true daddy, gets her mother to look after fellow pregnant supermodel (and reunites her with the baby father) and finally gets the courage to leave her hick bf with promises to marry him in the future.

Secrets of the Model Dorm: A Novel, By Amanda Kerlin, Phil Oh 3* This was a great deal better.  Life in a dorm of bunkbeds with a rotating crowd of room-mates all of whom have been 'discovered'. They spend their days at go-sees trying to get work and their nights in clubs getting off their head.  Drugs and drink are considered more acceptable than 'evil' potentially-fattening food.  Those that fail to get work get sent home, but minutes later, there's another new ultra-thin beauty being dropped at the door by the agency.

Mistaken Identity: Two Families, One Survivor, Unwavering Hope By Don & Susie Van Ryn, Newell, Colleen & Whitney Cerak -1* This is bad.  Really, really bad.  It took me a couple of hours to read this really stupid book where the central question was never answered.  Two girls from good Christian families (much is made of this, but I can't see how it would have been any different if they'd been atheists) were in a car crash. One was killed and buried without her parents ever seeing her presumably-mangled body.  The other lived but was in a coma.  The two girls were the same age, both blue-eyed blonde types and from the pictures, quite similar-looking.  There was even a picture of the girl in the hospital in a cervical collar with her hair scraped back showing her uninjured face very clearly.  So the central question is, how come for five weeks the family sitting with the girl never realised it wasn't their daughter?  Unless they were identical twins, this had to be people deceiving themselves, but who knows?  That is the only point of the book and it is never addressed.

Chore Whore: Adventures of a Celebrity Personal Assistant By Heather H. Howard 3* Its no wonder Britney Spears is like she is, these people are totally divorced from reality.  Money really can buy you almost everything you desire, including a gun range in the basement you get to through a secret door in the bedroom, but it can't buy you happiness or sanity.  However, if someone hands me over a (small or large) fortune, I will happily try and be the exception, at least I would be able to afford treatment.

The Tulip and the Pope: A Nun's Story by Deborah Larsen 4* A girl gives up everything, including cigarettes (the most difficult challenge) to become a nun.  Its a very detailed view of life as a postulant and nun in a traditional convent.  Years later she leaves and re-enters the world and goes back to smoking.  Her heroine, whom she constantly refers to, is Audrey Hepburn in the Nun's Story.  The reflections on a way of life that has almost disappeared, since most convents, this one included, have modernised, was interesting.   I feel it is somewhat akin to the FLDS as detailed in the book Escape, above, in that people can brainwash themselves into any life style, no matter how personally unfulfilling and how strange the demands made on them are, especially if they are told it will make them holier and put them in the front of the queue at St. Peter's gates when they die.  What kind of heaven they imagine they will be going to though, a place of boring chastity, endless praising, no snacking, chatting, shopping or getting online would bore me to death if I had to endure it for all eternity.  About a day off the internet with no snacks is all I could stand!