...we are going on a summer holiday...fun and laughter on a summer holiday...for me and you...

Among the Bohemians

Experiments in Living 1900 - 1939. Virginia Nicholson. (2002) Viking.

Free thinking artists and the development of a bohemia, based on gypsy travels and colourful dress, garlic, freer love lives, unorthodox relationships, naked wild children, and experimental parenting bordering on neglect. What's not to like? Fabulous book with themed chapters about manners, love, children, money, travel; all the good things. Gender relations I found particularly revealing. Great inequality continued.

"Today we can conduct relationships with people from any class without fear of ostracism, while deploring oppressive , stratified societies. Our choice of friendships and love affairs are our own. The idea of chaperonage makes us laugh; women are independent. We recognise that children have potential that must not be squashed...We re hatless, relaxed and on first-name terms with people we barely know. Red paint, ratatouille and yellow corduroy brighten our lives...We live in a society which most people's great grandparents would hardly recognise..."p279

"the Bohemians... resolved to bring their children up as happy, carefree, creative individuals, and they were determined to spare them the boring, punishing childhoods that so many of them had been forced to endure. It was Rousseau versus repression." p97

Some children did not learn to read until 12 and it seemed not to do any harm to their future lives and careers. Some felt the need for strict order, one son of the John brood for example joined the navy.

"Many parents saw the provision of liberty for their children as a prior condition of creativity, both their own and their children's. But at times one feels that this neglect was as much expedient as ideological. Bringing up children is very hard work. For parents with not much money, teams of nursemaids boiling nappies, starching frills and enforcing table manners were beyond their reach. Leaving children to get on with their lives was a great deal simpler and cheaper than keeping them up to the mark....You could maintain cleanliness and order, or spend the time on creative activities - but not both."p 76

Slinky Malinki strikes again

parrot hat

The parrot hat is complete, and now cryptic instructions like 4htr into 4 ch sp do not scare me. The flower used almost as much wool as the hat itself. It's lovely and warm with extra heat on one ear...

i heart the co-op

i heart the co-op...for the fresh fruit and veg, all in season, organic even, and a reason to venture out  to the park on a saturday.

The Enchantress of Florence

Salman Rushdie. 2008. Jonathan Cape, London.

The best book of the year so far. I love the story telling, the fantasy, the richness of the language. The stories are from the Mughal Empire and the Medici court in Florence in the 1500's, and ofcourse these meet. 

The story was completely untrue, but the untruth  of untrue stories could sometimes be of service in the real world, and it was tales of this sort-improvised versions of the endless stream of stories he had learned from his friend Ago Vespucci-that saved little Nino Arhgalia's own neck after he was found hiding under a bunk in the forecastle of the flagship of Andrea Doria's fleet. p.168

Something quarrelsome rose out of the story, a green stenchy wisp of discord floated up out of the tale and infected the women of Sikri, so that reports began to reach the palace of the bitter quarrels between previously loving sisters, suspicions and accusations, irreparable breaches and bitter estrangements, cat-fights and even knife fights, the bubbling of dislikes and resentments of which the women in question had barely been aware until the unmasking of Khanzada Begum by the foreigner with the yellow hair. p. 204

on love's end...

Love's banal declension through squabbling towards n end. p.280

on parenthood...

The emperor had experienced many feelings concerning this individual:amusement, interest, disappointment, disillusion, surprise, amazement, fascination, irritation, pleasure, perplexity, suspicion, affection, boredom, and increasingly, it was necessary to admit it, fondness and admiration. One day he understood that this was also the way  in which parents responded to their children... p.311

on nationhood and religion...

...because the Raushanai are the chosen people, destined by God to inherit the earth, so if they want to grab their inheritance a little ahead of time, who can say they are not entitled? p.314

Normally he was all languid  grace and fluid gestures. Today, however, he was almost flustered, as if the news he had to impart was bouncing around inside him and knocking him off balance. p.320

Heavenly Date

And other flirtations. Alexander McCall Smith. 1995. Canongate Books

Nine short stories just the right length for my train journey. 

McCall Smith writes with the smooth calm tone and the almost reasonable suggestions of a hypnotist. Sinister events presented ever so calmly. Creepily convincing.

Wrong About Japan

A father's journey with his son. Peter Carey 2004 Vintage

Peter Carey develops an interest in Japanese manga books and movies via his 12 year old son. 

This book is about their travel in Japan; interviewing directors, fans, and sword makers. Evocative of the blurriness and misunderstandings involved in travel, between cultures and generations. I liked the descriptions of the contained anti social boredom of the teenager and the failed need to interpret and understand of the father.

This is reading in a daydream of my own of somewhat far off travel plans, perhaps once Joy is out of the pram. 

Crisply written, like an extended weekend magazine article.

Australian Parrots

second (revised) edition by Joseph M. Forshaw Illustrated by William T. Cooper. Lansdowne Editions, Melbourne 1981.

or Tea and crochet

A winter cold has us at home browsing through picture books  - this one of Australian parrots with full page illustrations and more technical information than Joy and I require quite at the moment. 

To go with the red capped and indigo capped parrots I have started a crochet hat for me. Lacy and patterned crochet at the edge of my abilities. In dark lilac wool with a navy edge and a navy flower.