Nothing Special?

"It doesn't really feel like Christmas, this year, does it?"

I've heard that from a few quarters.  I've heard a few different reasons for behind the lack of festive feelings, too:

• It's not the same without small children
• We've all been so busy, it's just kind of snuck up on us
• It's become such a bother - so much to *do* and not really much fun...

The last time I felt really Christmassy was a few years ago when I decided to make all of the decorations myself, out of paper.  It was back when my grandmother was still at home, and my mother and I were living with her to take care of her.

I don't know why I came up with the idea, I just felt I needed to actively do something for Christmas.  That, and all of the traditions we used to have when our family was bigger than four people (the youngest of which being 29 or 30) had pretty much atrophied and died.

We no longer "all got together" for Christmas - we were "all together" more or less full time.  My uncle was the only one who had to come over - and he came over three or four days a week, anyway.

We used to get dressed up and go out for Christmas lunch, and then come back to my grandmother's house for Christmas dinner.  Now, we just ate lunch at home, stayed there and ate the exact same food for dinner (and then ate it again the next day, because we don't eat much, but we still have enough food to feed a family of ten).

My grandmother used to make Christmas themed food for most of December - shortbread, fruitcake, that sort of thing.  She wasn't up to cooking any more, and my mother and I were both so busy with work and things that neither of us really remembered to do simple things like baking.

And, then, the food we did eat?  Well, apart from the prawns, there was nothing we couldn't or didn't get any time during the year, if we felt like it.  Heck, we could get the prawns whenever we wanted, too, we just didn't.

So, I thought I'd make a new tradition.  A tradition where we took the time to make things for Christmas.  I encouraged everyone to join in with me, bought enough coloured paper for us to deck out the whole place and found some easy designs to make (paper chains, paper angels, paper snowflakes, paper baubles, paper water-balloons-that-could-be-baubles...).

My family did not take to the idea.  In fact, my mother and grandmother both acted like I was somehow insulting them.  Not only did they not try to join in, they also both glared at me for asking them to.  Oh, and they steadfastly insisted on decorating the house with the plastic baubles and tinsel that they already had in the Christmas decorations box, and made it clear that *my* paper decorations were just silly, thank-you-very-much, but we'll include them anyway to make you happy.

Apparently, in my house, things should only be handmade by small children.  In the absence of small children, they need to come from a store and be shiny.  Actually, I think it had more to do with my family's inbuilt hatred of anything that seems fake.  They probably thought the idea of imposing a "new tradition" was tacky.

I didn't try it again next year, which was a bit of a pity because I really enjoyed it.

It was something that I just didn't do every other day of the year.  It was pretty pathetic (I'm about as dexterous as a trout), and quite frankly a small child might have done just as well... but it was still me going out of my way to make an effort to celebrate something.

I think that's what has been missing from most of my Christmasses.  I don't know about yours.  The lack of a special effort.

I don't feel very festive, because I turn around one week before Christmas and say:  "hey, it's Christmas - I should do something..."  and then I throw something together that takes no real time or effort on my part, is only there for a week and then gets thrown back into the box.

I don't make or find or do anything special for Christmas - and I don't look forward to seeing the effect of things I make or find or do.  We just go through the motions and get it over with.  Even the gifts we buy seem more like a chore than anything else:  "Oh, gawd, Christmas is coming.  What do you even want for a gift?"  "I have no idea".

So, this is my theory on why Christmas doesn't feel special or festive any more:

I'm doing it wrong.

Angela Harding

Discovered a new artist today, courtesy of Slightly Foxed:

Angela Harding.  She does this sort of thing:

Which seems pretty darn awesome to me.

Van

You know how, occasionally, you get to certain points of your life and want a thing?  Like getting to age X and thinking "why don't I have a house?"  Or age Y and thinking "Damn it, I forgot to secure a family to take care of me in my old age!"

I've been feeling a need to stave of my impending mortality by buying a new car.  I've never owned a new car.  Every car I've had has either been on loan, an ancient hand-me-down or a second-hand car that was at least eight-years old when I bought it.

My current car is actually my mother's old car.  When she bought a new one we used my car (which was older than hers) as a trade-in, and I inherited hers.  Technically, it still belongs to her - we never bothered transferring anything into my name.  I don't actually own anything at all.

Now, maybe my complete lack of property is a good thing - it fits in with my desire to be a stateless nomad.  It doesn't fit in with my desire to pack my life up into the back of my combi van in order to be that stateless nomad.

It also doesn't fit in with my desire to own a large farmhouse where I can raise six kids on a diet of fresh apple pie and make jam and vinegar for the local markets - but then again nothing in my real life does.  I'm not entirely convinced that's even my dream.  I think I borrowed it from a version of myself from an alternate reality.

Anyway, over the years I have often felt a desire to at least own a new car for a little while.  I know the car will age, but it seems as though it would be nice to have a brand-new car at least once.  However, I keep meeting some strange resistance on this front.

I have this conversation with my family on a semi-regular basis that goes a little like this:

Me:  I'm thinking of buying a new car.
Them:  You don't need one yet.  Drive the car you have into the ground a bit more, first.
Me:  I'm thinking of fixing up the car I currently have.
Them:  Why bother?  It's so old it's not worth repairing.

Which, to my mind, translates as:  "you don't deserve nice things.  Keep your bomb and be happy about it."

But, you get that.

Anyway, due to the fact that things have been slowly disintegrating on my mother's old car, I'm slowly convincing my family that they don't need to keep talking me out of buying a new one.  The fact that every single other member of my immediate family has bought a new car over the past few years might also have something to do with it.

So, now the conversation has taken a similar, but more peculiar turn.  I am at a point in my life where I want boot space.  I don't want to scale down from the station wagon I'm currently driving - I want to scale up.  A ute would be nice - a van would be better.

Utes and vans aren't cheap.  They also aren't what my family have in mind.  Both my mother and uncle bought smaller cars when they upgraded, and they don't quite understand why I would want a larger one.  My uncle knows a thing or two about cars, and I keep asking him what he thinks about Ute A or Van B - to which he answers "why don't you just get a hatchback and learn to tow a trailer?"

It seems vans and utes cost money (duh), and are expensive to run (duh, again) and come with all sorts of features that don't interest him at all (I can live with that).

I think he's starting to finally take me seriously, though, and give me some real advice about the kind of cars I actually want to own.  You never know - by the time I can actually afford one of these things, my family may have finally made peace with the fact that I want it.

English was my first love...

...but will it be my last?  English of the future, or English of the past?

I've noticed, lately, that I've been dismissive of English.  I've been having such an interesting time exploring other languages that I've fallen into the trap of seeing the baggage of English rather than the magic of it.

There was a time when I was spell-bound by the linguistic possibilities that English could offer - and the intricacies of the language throughout time.  I studied Old English, Middle English and Jacobean English at university and loved every minute of it.  I loved the poetry of the language itself, but also the joy of the literature.  Plays, poetry, novels...  I revelled in the written word of my native language.  I used to write sonnets just for the pleasure of playing with the rhythms and structures of the language.

I seem to have left that somewhere.

When I started learning German I was excited by what it could teach me about English - English is a Germanic language, after all.  Then I started to get enough of a grip on German and Estonian that I began to see the poetry in those languages, and I'm so hungry for these shiny new words that I've forgotten the joy I used to find in my own.

Also, I'm so caught up in the global language debate that I tend to see English as something holding people back, rather than a source of wonder and poetry.  I feel so strongly that everyone should try to learn another language, that I've almost begun to hate the English language purely for its hegemony.  It's such a shame that people who speak English don't feel the need or desire to learn anything else - and such a shame that most speakers of other languages see learning English as the best use of their time.

Granted, anything is better than having French as the international language (that has to be the worst spelling system known to man), but I don't think English should be the ultimate lingua franca of the world.  I don't think it's good for native English speakers - it makes us lazy and gives us a sense of cultural superiority that we don't deserve.

But...

But I used to love English.  I used to love exploring the nooks and crannies of the language - the ebb and flow of the grammar, the endless possibilities and nuances of the vocabulary.  I used to cherish the way a word like "cherish" could add a completely different colour to a sentence than, say, "adore".  I used to love seeing how we gathered together words from all over the world and piled them up in an almost reckless order, like a bowerbird gathering shiny things for his bower.

I loved the way you can say "a gaggle of school girls" to evoke a mental comparison between school girls and geese.

Evoke.  Such a beautiful word.

I guess I still love English, but I've stopped appreciating it.

I have finally decided to take the TESOL subjects for my Master of Applied Linguistics next year.  It took me a while to make up my mind.  I knew that, with my background as an English teacher and my recent acquisition of a Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching, the TESOL subjects would be useful, logical and relevant.  I could probably get a job anywhere in the world teaching English...

But I wanted to play with different toys.  For some reason, even though all of the projects I want to do for a PhD could easily be done from a TESOL perspective (and the TESOL subjects would be useful grounding for that), I wanted to look at them from different angles.  Two years ago I would have jumped at the chance to learn about TESOL, but right now the idea of teaching English almost bores me.

Language is such a big, big pie, and English is just one slice of it.  A rather large slice, but only one slice none-the-less.  Yet I will never know another language as well as I know English.  And at the end of my days, when all my knowledge bleeds away, I will have Shakespeare and Yeats long after Liiv and Goethe have gone to dust.

And that's okay.

Skellig decoded

So, for those of you who just sighed at the sight of a post in poorly written German, allow me to elaborate on the last entry.

Skellig is a book by David Arnold.  I had seen the telemovie a few months back and I thought I should probably read the book at some point... but then I simply forgot it existed.  About a week ago on of my friends mentioned it on Facebook as a highlight of a recent reading club thing, so I decided to borrow the copy in my library and read it myself.

It was a really good book.  I can thoroughly recommend it - especially to people looking for something a young teenage boy wouldn't completely hate (but isn't full of bum-jokes or "warriors of the whatever").  It's something I consider a good stretching book in that it half straddles a few different genres, so it can move you out of reading the same thing all the time.  It's a little bit fantasy, and little bit family drama, a little bit kids-own-adventure.  Once upon a time it would have been classified as "fantasy", but these days I guess it would be "speculative fiction".

The lead character, Michael, narrates the story, which takes place over a few days in his life.  His family has just moved house to a complete wreck of a place.  The previous owner was too old and infirm to take care of the house (he basically moved into one room on the ground floor in the end - even having a toilet installed), and the place needs a lot of repair work in order to get it ready for the new baby...

Except the baby came early.  Too early.  Everyone is trying to fix the house and worry about the baby at the same time.  Michael feels incredibly out of sorts.  He isn't sure what he should or could be doing, and he's worried that the baby might die.  He isn't worried without reason - the baby really might die.  He hopes he can make her better just by thinking about her - and getting other people to think about her as well.  Even the weird man he found in his shed.

There's a weird man in the shed.  He's just huddled in the back corner, behind piles of junk stored by the previous owner, apparently living off bugs, mice and the occasional Chinese takeaway   He's grumpy, crotchety, stiff with arthritis and waiting to die.   This distresses Michael no end, as he doesn't particularly want anyone in his house to die - even the weird people his parents don't know about.

Speaking of weird people, Michael's new neighbour, Mina, is the kind of girl who would no doubt be the weirdest kid in the school - if she actually went to school.  She's home-schooled, which perplexes Michael initially, but then turns out to be very useful.  She helps Michael get the strange man out of the shed (which is very unsound and might collapse at any moment), and in the process they discover something quite remarkable.

Let's just say the strange man might definitely be strange, but he might not necessarily be a man.

The book consists of very short chapters (most only two pages long), which are quite easy to breeze through.  It's the sort of book where you just want to read "one more chapter" before you put it down.  It gets oddly hypnotic, in places, but vocabulary is, by and large, true to the character.  It sounds like something a "Nothern" boy might say.  I'm not sure exactly where the book is set, but it seems to be somewhere in the North-East of England.  I'm also not sure exactly what age Michael is, but I'd say somewhere between 9 and 12.

One of the things I really liked about the book was the relationship between Michael and his father.  They clearly love each other very much and get along quite well.  There are a few fights and scuffles, but you always get the sense that Michael can see that his father cares about him and is concerned about him.  It makes a pleasant change from the kids' books where the parents are the obtuse people who are getting in the way, or the jerks who just don't understand.

Now, I obviously didn't say all of this in my last post, but I did, at least, say this:

"It was very good, and quite interesting"

Practice German Journal: Skellig

Ich habe das Buch Skellig von David Almond gelesen.  Es war sehr gut und ganz interessant.  Der Held des Buch (auch der Icherzähler) ist ein Junge, der Michael heisst.  Seine Familie hat eines neues Haus gekauft, und Michael ist nicht froh.  Das Haus is alt und heruntergekommen - es braucht viel reparieren.  Aber, das ist nicht warum Michael nicht froh ist.  

Michael ist nicht froh weil seine kleine Schwester sehr krank ist.  Sie war zu früh geboren.  Sie ist sehr klein und sehr schwach.  Er ist besorgt wegen sie.

Aber...  Etwas seltsam ist in seine Garage.  Ein Mensch?  Ein Mann?  Eine Kreatur?

Ein Engel?

Mit seine neue Freundin, Mina, helfe Michael der Mann.  Michael und Mina finden etwas erstaunlich, und lernen viel.

Michael ist eines sympathisch Charakter.  Er scheint meistens realistisch - jedoch manchmal ganz unwahrscheinlich.

Die kurzer Kapitels des Buch gefällt mir.  Das Buch war sehr einfach zu lesen. Ich fand es schwer zu anzuhalten.  Ich empfehle dieses Buch Ihnen.  Es war gut.

Cheese smuggling!

Something to warm the heart of every Thursday Next fan:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19751695