Since it turns out I have a parental philosophy.

I sometimes worry that some of the people in my life see me as a bit of a basket case. Not just a hormonal one, I mean. A scary, needy, over-protective, co-dependent mother type of basket case. The sort that Daisy should be protected from. I worry that people look at my decision to spend most of my time with my daughter, and think it’s unhealthy.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that sitting worrying about what these people think for any length of time probably is a bit unhealthy, but that point aside, I don’t think I’m a scary mother. I choose to spend most of my time with my daughter, because, as I mentioned a few days ago, I believe that children need parents. I believe that they need them pretty much 24/7 when they’re little, and that they need them a lot more than society necessarily realises when they’re older, and for rather longer into life, too. Besides, most of the time I like her. I miss her when she’s not there - largely because I’m genetically preprogrammed to want her where I can keep an eye on her. It’s not oppressive and unhealthy, it’s how the species has survived this long.

Compared with lots of other children her age, Daisy doesn’t do much ? not much that’s structured, anyway. Frankly, I don’t know how other people fit it all in. There are people who do some sort of toddler group every single day of the week, and sometimes more than one. Maybe those people spend half their lives at work, functioning at a pace of life I can only marvel at, and find it difficult to slow down on the days when they’re at home. Or maybe they have no strategies for keeping their children happy and occupied when they’re in the house. But we just don’t have a need for that. We go to one group a week, and fill the rest of the time with visits to people (sometimes people with children, sometimes people without) and errands ? the pace of life thing means that I wouldn’t normally choose to go anywhere else on the same day as I’ve been to the supermarket, for example. If we’ve no burning urge to leave the house for the sake of getting out, and nowhere in particular to go, why bother?

When we’re at home, we draw, read, play with play dough, watch CBeebies, do jigsaws, and engage in any number of imaginative games using dolls, prams, toys cars, dolls houses, toy kitchens, etc. She is reasonably good at the highly useful skill of playing by herself, but will happily include me if I’m amenable, and play with other children when she comes across them ? to the extent that they are able to play with other children at this age. Two and a half is a bit young for much more than playing alongside other children. Nevertheless, she is sociable, friendly, and coming on just fine, as far as I can see. The point is, she doesn’t seem to need constant exposure to other children, to be able to relate quite happily to other children.

As far as I am concerned, it’s not that I spend no time apart from her. For a start, she’s usually in bed a little after 7.30pm, and the evenings are my own. Kevin and I tend not to go out much, but mostly because we have nowhere in particular we want to go. We certainly don’t feel trapped in the house by Daisy’s existence, and we have a small stock of (usefully free) babysitters to call upon when we need them. We both occasionally go out alone, but not that often because, in a follow up to the Mother Likes To Be With Daughter shocker, is the Wife Enjoys Company of Husband expos?. In addition, Daisy goes out for tea at the house of some friends of ours once a week (and has done since she was a few months old), and every week I have to choose between housework, and playing on my computer, as the best way to take advantage of the opportunity. We both cope fine with being apart, but I happen to believe that she copes so well because it doesn’t happen too often. Her security is largely built on my presence, and the less I was there, the more she would hate my being gone.

I believe that children need parents. That I ended up as a full-time mum was something of a fluke of circumstances, but I can see now that it was so completely the right choice. Daisy needs me to be there. One day she won’t need it so much, but I don’t plan to dictate when that should be. We’ll know.

I am, of course, flooded with them, though I’m a bit less rabidly psychotic than I was a couple of weeks ago. At the moment, they’re taking the form of apocalyptic fantasies - and not fun ones. I seem to be spending all my time worrying about something terrible happening, and Daisy being left all alone to cope with it. What am I thinking, bringing children into the world, when within their lifetime the odds are, the sea levels will rise, most of the land will be flooded, the oil will run out, and the world will descend into anarchy and open warfare over the production of food and drinking water, never mind anything else?

And if that doesn’t happen, some massive terrorist thing will come along and wipe out half the city/country/continent, creating a similar post-apocalyptic survival situation for her. The world’s going to hell in a handcart, and poor Daisy will have to survive in it. And there’s nothing I can do to protect her, except get cavity wall insulation. And some cavity walls to put it in.

I may need to monitor my media input a little more carefully. I’m not sure I’m doing myself any favours by listening to Radio 4 at the moment.

Inside the Catholic Cathedral

Today, we visited the Catholic cathedral in Liverpool. I’m always struck, when I go in, by how I don’t hate it nearly as much as I feel like I ought to. It’s a concrete sixties monstrosity, which was falling down by the mid-eighties, and so isn’t even fit for purpose. The corrosion of the bells above the main door has stained the concrete green, in a way that they’ve only partially managed to clean off in the recent renovations, and as a piece of architecture, it seems forever stranded in a state of just-missing.

That’s what I think when I’m sitting here, postulating. When I’m actually there, though, I love it. It’s so calm, so peaceful, and so focussed on God. I love that all the windows are dark blue and purple, giving it a twilight quality even at 1.30pm. I love the big crown of thorns sculpture that dangles over the altar (I wanted to say communion table - I’m such a non-conformist protestant). I love the stations of the cross around the outside edge, and all the little chapels dedicated to this and that. Mostly, though, I love the people. All the staff, even the tour guides and people, just seem to radiate this spirituality that really touches me. A foreign nun, being given a guided tour by one of the staff, stopped to take photos of Daisy in one of the chapels (I let her - she’s a nun, and anyway, Daisy’s cute), then gave her a blessing. I don’t even know what that means, but I know that it’s the sort of thing we don’t do enough of in my church tradition. And I know Jesus did it, so it can only be good.

Inside the Anglican Cathedral

I find the place much more of a spiritual experience, even on a Saturday afternoon when they’re moving the furniture round for some kind of chamber orchestra to play, than I’ve ever found the Anglican cathedral to be. That’s impressive, don’t get me wrong. It’s the biggest protestant cathedral in Europe, it’s impressive on sheer scale, but it’s only like a incomprehensibly large parish church. With a cafe. And being there feels more like visiting a building, and less like calling in on God.

And coming on the back of many generations of protestant snobbery, that’s saying something.

I bet you didn’t know that I grew up with a band? Well, kinda. When I was a very small child, we lived in a three-bed end terrace in Liverpool 4, which has since had a two storey extension added to the side, and is probably a four or five bedroom terrace by now. The house was just around the corner from the church that we went to. The church has always been inextricably linked with my family, for generations. Even now, I have aunts and uncles and cousins, and who knows what else, there. At the time, my parents were part of an evangelistic group called Agap?, along with my dad’s sister, brother, brother’s girlfriend/fianc?e/wife, cousin, and a whole range of others, who were involved in various ways, to various extents, and for various periods of time. My mum was in charge of The Bookings, the money, and of not being allowed to go to things because of the children. My dad used to preach, I think, and Neil, and Jan, and Carol and Eric used to sing.

Mostly they sang songs that Neil had written. They used to call it “gospel”, but it wasn’t gospel in a black sense. If anything, it was black gospel meets seventies folk. They even made a couple of tapes which they distributed… well, I’ve no idea how widely they were distributed, but we had half a dozen, on the off-chance that we met someone who wanted one.

The first tape was called Reason For Living, and this is the one that was an integral part of my childhood. Other children pretend to be pop stars, or cartoon characters. We used to play the tape, and pretend to be Aunty Jan.

We were children, and children don’t analyse things. They certainly don’t analyse for lyrical quality, or musical depth, or significance of meaning. Listening to it again, now, I’m struck by how Neil’s lyrical style probably benefited enormously from the first time he bought a modern bible translation - some of the songs are taken verbatim from scripture, which I’m all in favour of, I just don’t understand what they’re saying. That speaks of my lack of education, I suppose - I bet they knew what the songs meant. More than that, though, I’m bowled over by the sheer optimism of the songs. The open-hearted naivety.

I don’t know how Neil and Carol and Jan look back at Agap?. I suspect that they’re the tiniest bit embarrassed, in the way that everyone is embarrassed when they look at their creative efforts of two or three decades ago. Times have changed, styles have changed, and more importantly, they’ve changed - mellowed, matured, not to be any better or worse, just to follow the normal and natural development of life. They’re no more the teens and twenty-somethings they were then, than I’m the four-year-old.

It’s not mine, so I don’t have to get embarrassed by it. My Agap? tape is a huge part of the backdrop of my childhood, and I hold it in great affection for that reason. I also admire the courage, the vision, and the desperate desire the please God that led them to make it - they had more passion and motivation when they were little more than kids themselves, than I’ve ever had.

Yesterday, I had a conversation with my father, in which he told me that he thought I was inclined towards unconventional solutions to things, and that other people frequently interpreted the unconventionality as evidence that I haven’t thought about it properly. Example: we are planning (and we may never get past the planning stage) a new kitchen. It can’t go where the old kitchen is, because of changes to the legal requirements for locating hobs, so we’re looking at converting our morning room into a kitchen, and our kitchen into a pantry. In keeping with this model, we are looking to store the food (dry goods, fridge and freezer) in the said pantry, along with a sink and dishwasher, and to use the main kitchen for actual cooking, and the storage of dishes, utensils and pans. I think it makes perfect sense - gather your ingredients before you start, and take them into the kitchen. If you forget something - well, it’s not far away, you can go back, but try not to forget things. Other people have a huge problem with this. Primarily with the fridge - everything else they can cope with, but we can’t, apparently, be serious about keeping the fridge out of the kitchen.

Maybe my willingness to take this approach is born of the 3.5 years I spent with the fridge and the freezer in the dining room, as a “temporary” measure. You get used to it, you really do. In any case, the decision has come out of careful thought about what will fit in the two rooms, and how we intend to use them. The assumption of many, though, is that we simply haven’t thought about it properly at all.

The thought that occurred to me, when Dad was pointing this out, is this:
It is the unconventional solutions that you are much more likely to have considered properly. They don’t just appear from nowhere. If anything, not thinking it through is what will lead to the conventional solution, since the default position is to do whatever everyone else does. So, the next time Kevin or I tell you that we’re planning to do something a little off-the-wall, pause a moment before you tell us that we’re insane - because the great likelihood is that we’ve considered it much more carefully than you have.

Scrabble - a game I prefer to play,
because I’m better at it

Part of our holiday was, for me, a journey of self-discovery (as opposed to the journey of sheep-discovery that was required to get to the house we stayed in) (I’m not calling it a holiday cottage, since it was a house by anyone’s standards, and one that you could have fitted two of mine inside). Self-discovery, in my experience, is not much fun, so to be avoided when you’re supposed to be on holiday. Of course, it is also true that on holiday, you get the chance to depart from the norms enough to discover yourself in the first place, but I digress.I am fiercely competative. I didn’t know. Did you already know that? Because I didn’t. I naturally assumed that since I’m not remotely ambitious, I wasn’t competative either, but it’s not true.

Example 1: we played several games on holiday, and I was rubbish at them. I was rubbish at the dictionary game, in which someone picks an obscure word from the dictionary, we all make up a definition, then vote for the most plausible one. You get a point if the majority of people vote for your definition, and you get a point for voting for the correct definition. Everyone else was giving their vote to the funny ones, in order to bestow a point to the originator as a demonstration of their appreciation. I was voting for the most plausible, because I wanted to win.

Example 2: we also played a game called Take Two. It’s a variation on Scrabble, using the pieces but not the board, and it works best with between two and four players. You each take 7 pieces, and attempt to arrange them onto one interlocking grid, using only valid words. As soon as one person had done so, they call, “Take Two”, and everyone takes two more pieces, which can be a lifesaver, or can throw you into complete disarray. The winner is the first to form a complete grid once all the spare pieces have gone. The thing is, skills-wise, it’s completely different to Scrabble. You succeed with being able to arrange your pieces into small words, quickly. I’m rubbish at doing things quickly (and with the meandering pace of life that Daisy and I lead these days, I’m getting worse), and I never use a small word if three large ones will execute the task with an acceptable degree of adequacy. I was dismal at Take Two, and the humiliation was it’s a word game. I have two degrees in English, Kevin should not be able to beat me with ANYTHING that uses Scrabble letters.

Take Two, logically enough, I much preferred when it was one-on-one - the pace of the game was slowed, so I had a little more time to use all my pieces in a 12 letter word. I’m a linguistic show-off who hates to lose.

Risk, when we played it, I enjoyed much more because whilst I didn’t win, playing with Mission Cards means that the winner usually does so suddenly, and I felt like I was doing well right up to the end.

Now I’ve come face to face with this rather unattractive personality trait, I can quite see that it’s always been there. My sister hated me when we were children, because I derived immense satisfaction from beating her into the ground at any competative game we played, and when that didn’t work, I would hit her over the head with my superior vocabulary (the ultimate fall-back of many an older sibling). At school, I developed an intense dislike for a friendly, personable, and fairly attractive boy called Jonathan Thorpe, because he was always, always, always two points ahead of me in class, making him top, and me second. I didn’t want to be second. I wanted all to bow down to the mighty intellect of Ruth, and for as long as he kept doing ever so slightly better than me, nobody would.

I suppose it’s a variation on perfectionism - the idea that if you can’t guarantee to win a game, there’s really no fun in playing it, though where that leaves the poor souls who are supposed to play against me, for the sheer statisfaction of being thrashed, I don’t know. Quite what I’m supposed to do about this alarmingly self-absorbed competative streak… well, I don’t know that either.