Alpacas on my mind

We had another adventure, this time to Ely. We weren't long in the town, but I bought a new notebook which is always exciting. On the two journeys we saw a lot of local wildlife. Readers from overseas may wander what kind of birds and animals it is usual to see in this part of the world.

Well, we saw rabbits, pheasants, partridges, pigeons, sheep, goats, geese and chickens, all of which are rather ordinary, though always nice to see. On this trip, we also saw a field with about a hundred and fifty swans, perhaps on their way up to the Wash. At one point a field mouse scurried across the road and at another point, a gorgeous white barn owl flew along beside us. We also saw an ostrich and a herd of alpacas.

Really. We really did. Not even in the same place. There was an ostrich in someone's back garden and a herd of alpacas, including some rather small ones, in a field. I thought they were llamas, but when I got home and looked on-line I found that they were, in fact, alpacas. If that's not proof of Climate Change I don't know what is.

This magnificent photo is by Stevie-B, licnesed under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0. The barn owl we saw was similarly beautiful, but it was in flight and if I had tried to get my camera out I wouldn't have enjoyed watching it.

Sometimes life is too exciting

I didn't leave the house for the month between Boxing Day and Friday, when we went shopping for wallpaper - an expedition only slightly less exciting than it sounds. We came home with £60 worth of wallpaper having paid only £15 (this was in Focus, if you need any wallpaper just now).

But I am wanting to get out again this week, at the very least to attend the dentist appointment that I missed a few weeks back. The trouble with this kind of rock'n'roll lifestyle is that, what with this kind of social calendar, together with all the drugs and the unrelenting sexual experimentation, one barely has the energy to write.

The Goldfish Guide to Painting a Portrait from a Photograph in the Absence of Talent or Experience.

Now this I am chuffed with. I've never painted a portrait before and this is roughly what my mother looks like.

Of course, I did cheat and I thought I should confess all here in case it might be useful to anyone else. I know there are a few proper artists who read here, but there might be someone who has a similar absence of either talent or experience as me.

First off, I used a photograph. Obviously. I used a digital photograph which I printed off as big as I could, which happened to be A4. I found a painting board at the back of my craft cupboard which was about half way between A4 and A3 and of the same proportions.

Using these proportions, I then drew a grid of approximate squares on both my photo and the board. You don't need to measure along the edge - you'd have to use fractions of milimetres. Instead you use that old trick from school maths where you lay the ruler diagnonally across at a multiple of the number of lines you want to draw. So for example, if I wanted my grid ten across on a board 334mm wide, I would lay the ruler such that one edge of the paper was on 0mm and one was on 400mm, then draw a mark at every 40mm. I'd then repeat this so I've got my two dots I need to draw a straight line. Does that make sense?

I then turned the photo upside down and began to copy the picture across, using the lines as a guide. Copying upside down is a very good idea if ever you're copying an existing picture, because it forces you to draw what you see as opposed to what you know to be there - I imagine this is particularly important with faces, which we instinctively want to be symmetrical and orderly, when of course they're not - especially not in my family.

Anyway, I then splodged all the paint onto the board in a random fashion, returning to it for a few minutes at a time a few times a day for several days. Okay, so that's not fair; I suppose I do have some experience with using paint, but as you may have gathered, I tend to decorate things in a cartoonish manner as opposed to proper painting.

And I have to say, that whilst the painting is a good likeness to my mother, it doesn't compare brilliantly to the photograph. So a further cheat should probably be, destroy the photograph and nobody need be disillusioned.

Listen

The ability to listen to each other is the most important social and intellectual ability we can have, but it isn't always easy. Every time we truly listen to someone, or read carefully what another person has written, we risk having something of our own worldview challenged or permanently altered.

This is why we can't afford to do it all the time; anyone who listened to or read every word of advertising they were exposed to on a daily basis would have time and energy for little else. Much of everyday social interaction requires the endurance of banality, where one must smile and nod from time to time and think over one's plans for a new type of spacecraft as your friend laments her decision to date yet another Pisces.

Meanwhile, we lack role-models. For example, to watch our MPs debate - the people whose considered decisions effect all our lives - is rather like listening to a sober version of Just a Minute; they are often less interested in the substance of what their colleague is saying than whether or not they are going to slip up. Of course, there are many occasions in politics where some detail of a word or phrase is pivotal, but when did you ever see footage of the House of Commons when someone said, "Actually, I see what you mean now." or even "That is a valid point, however..."?

Trouble is that it feels good. Sara wrote an excellent post about this just the other day. Pedantry can be fun, tripping people up and laughing at their foolish ideas. However, I think pedantry should almost always be about laughter and we should only laugh at those who we can't afford to listen to; people with inpenetrable prejudice and hatred. We need to give a little more leeway to those who claim to have similar objectives to our own (peace, tolerance, democracy, a nice family Christmas without any major rows, etc..).

It is very important to recognised shared objectives. We struggle to do this, even within the closest relationships; neither lover wishes to argue, both wish they could be friends again and yet they treat one another like enemies. In other areas of discourse we can get massively distracted by something which seems like a fundamental difference but which makes no odds to the subject at hand. Almost religious conflict involves this error; we all want to live in peace, but how can I trust someone who doesn't worship the Holy Hamster of Birkenhead?*

The Golden Rule of listening is to always assume that the speaker is as intelligent, sensible and sincere as you are and to expect at least something of what they are saying to be true. If you assume that everything a person says is bullshit, that they are bound to be stupid or unreasonable, then there's no point talking to them at all. However, if you take this approach to all those who disagree with you, you'll never learn anything and you're certainly not going to resolve any conflict.

People are never simply wrong; only ideas and arguments can be wrong, usually because of mistakes which we are all capable of making. It is impossible to correct someone when you don't really know where they're going wrong; it's no good repeatedly contradicting them in the hope that they'll figure it out themselves in the meantime. By the same score, if you don't understand another person's mistake, you can't rule out the possibility that you have made the mistake.

But this is also very difficult. Too often, we are tempted to behave as if we are right on principle; I am right because I am an expert, because I am more experienced, because I am a good person, because I am a good parent/ Christian/ feminist etc., so if you disagree, you must be wrong. I'm sure we all do it to some extent, forgetting that the other person has just as much reason to think the same about their own supremacy.

One must learn to force the mind ajar every once in a while if one is to develop in any way whatsoever.


I am using the language of spoken communication here, but of course I really mean pay close attention to what another person is communicating by whatever means; "listen" is easier to type.

* As far as I know, nobody currently worships the Holy Hamster of Birkenhead (praise be to the hamster), but if they did, they would undoubtedly advocate Treat others as you would wish to be treated just the same as everyone else in the world.

It speaks!

Alexander has started talking. Kind of. He's started pointing at things and uttering monosyllabic nouns (not just any nouns though; roughly appropriate ones). That he thinks all birds are ducks and all vehicles are cars is demonstrative of his impressive pattern-recognition skills. After all, imagine how well developed you'd have to be before you could explain the qualities that cars and other vehicles have in common. I mean all road vehicles have wheels, but not all wheeled things are road vehicles. And they all travel on the road but so do bicycles. It is really very clever to recognise the connection, I think.

He has also taken to declaring "Done!" after each meal. Being so well brung-up, this horrified me. "You mean, he can't manage a thank you?"

In the picture he is wearing a jacket I made him in the autumn. This was an incredible feat on account of the fact that I had no pattern, no experience of making such a garment, but most crucially, I hadn't taken a single measurement of the child and just had to guess how big he was. This was a very foolish way to go about things, but I was fiddling with it when I was rather ill and by some miracle it worked.

Unfortunately, he is sporting a somewhat "Auntie made me wear it" expression in the photo...

The queerest of the queer

Queer is one of my favouritest words in the English language - favouritest being another word I like, although that's not strictly speaking English. As I was growing up, I heard queer used to mean several different things:

(1a) adjective: odd, amusing, eccentric; "John looked terribly queer in his new wig and nobody could take him seriously."
There is also the Lancashire/ Yorkshire expression "There's none as queer as folk." (meaning there aren't anybody who is as strange as what people is, so to speak).

(1b) adjective: odd, sinister. "Shortly after his wife disappeared, Mr Smith was seen digging his garden in the middle of the night. There was something queer about the whole thing."

(2) adjective: unwell. "Jenny was sent home from school with a poorly tummy; the poor kid did look ever so queer."

(3) adjective: impoverished. "Sally said she was queer this week so I leant her a fiver."
sometimes used as down Queer Street. "Since the factory closed, the whole family has been living down Queer Street."

(4) verb: to spoil or pervert something. "I'm afraid my experiment with coriander has queered the entire soup." There is also the expression to queer someone's pitch, to sabotage one's plans, as in "Harriet didn't really want the job, but when she found out I wanted it more than anything, she decided to apply just to queer my pitch."

(5) adjective: homosexual or else not heterosexual. "He doesn't like football, so he must be queer."

These uses undoubtedly vary from region to region; I know my Yorkshire and Suffolk grandparents use the word quite differently. Incidentally, at least the first three of these queers are used in the Hitchcock classic The Lady has Vanished, my favourite being when the lady in question is described as "A queer old bird" (in the sense of 1a). I myself aspire to such a description should I live long enough.

In most of its descriptive uses it is rather vague and non-committal, not even as strong as peculiar. This subtlety and its ambiguity has always made it a rather funny word. On The Fast Show, Paul Whitehouse's Arthur Atkinson, a parody of Arthur Askey, had two inexplicably funny phrases (pretty much all he said); "Where's my washboard?" and "How queer!"

And perhaps because of all this, queer represents probably the most successful reclamation of a term of abuse by a disadvantaged group. Of course, it probably never had quite the spike of the N word, cripple and others, it is a soft word and has become the most inclusive way to describe that group of people who are not straight. After all, without the cultural baggage, bisexual (for example) is no more pertinent than prefers blondes or monogamous.*

[And while I am on words bisexual is a rubbish term. What's this "bi" malarkey? The defining experience of being this way is that one's sexual wiring fails to categorise the population into two opposites with nothing in between. Some people have tried to overcome this with the awful pansexual (which sounds like you fancy everyone) and the even worse omnisexual (which sounds like you fancy everything). Never mind.]

There is, of course, the dyslexic's nightmare which is... I'm sorry, but even now I'm thinking BLT, even though I know it should have a G in it somewhere. But what is the significant thing that makes us a group? Not that we deviate in this way or that, but what we deviate from and the political and social implications of that.

I'm not altogether comfortable with using this label to describe myself because I have the good fortune of having a heterosexual life-partnership, but then perhaps it is those with the most privilege who have the most responsibility to show solidarity (I'm not sure - my concern is that I might not be entitled to the word, not that I would be ashamed of it).

However, I think I could probably be described as queer in a few others senses and I make it my habit to use the word in every sense and at every opportunity. Which may seem a little queer, but that's the way I am.


* Sly Civilian has written some great stuff on this subject.

On a completely unrelated subject, Maddy puts everything into perspective with the excellent telling of her very scary Christmas in Russian Roullette. This was such a great post it needed to be mentioned here.

The book sucks

So I'm reading through one of the most difficult passages in my book, a moment full of sexual tension and intrigue. Unfortunately, I read that my heroine remains

hoovering by the door.

Characters do take on a life of their own, but that's ridiculous. I'm trying to bring things to a head and she's worrying about the domestic chores.