No Redeeming Features

I love my nephews. I'm a simple soul really - I love my family. So it was rather a shock to hear my sister-in-law say "I've really had enough of him, I have no patience for him, he has NO redeeming features" about the elder of the two, yesterday. He is five. He's just broken his arm, so probably a bit grouchy because of that. He's a bit bolshy sometimes, but nothing compared to most children I've encountered (I have been a nanny, a babysitter, and Oldest Cousin at any family gathering for most of my life). Obviously, I'm biased. But I still think that's a harsh thing to say. A few minutes later she was saying that she hadn't meant it at all, but I can't quite put it to bed. Should I say something to her or not? I know I almost certainly won't (and I do love her too), but it upsets me - particularly that she seems to favour his little brother so very much. I have a secret hope that the small one will turn out to be much more of a tearaway than the older one, just so she realises that he's actually a naturally fairly good chap.

In other news, I am off on holiday to Northern Cyprus tomorrow. I will do my very best not to cause a diplomatic incident but I can't guarantee it. Of course I am full of good resolutions that I will go swimming every day, do proper stretches every morning, not drink too much and read lots of improving books. We shall see.

Past Imperfect: Tense

"So do you ever wish you'd had children, then?" An innocuous enough question, from a nice woman in my team, after we had just discovered that we are pretty much the same age and she has a fourteen-year-old daughter.

Useless to lecture her on the changing demographics of motherhood: useless to do anything, really, but answer honestly that, yes, I often do, but that it hasn't happened so far and seems unlikely to in the near future - and if it's not in the near future, it's probably never.

Even though to the outside world it might not look like it, to me in some ways it feels like it's because I have never been enough - pretty enough, nice enough, compliant enough. My rational self knows that this is rubbish: the rational self, however, doesn't get much of a look-in when you are ambushed by something this simple.

So I talked on about how much I was used to getting my own way, and how difficult it was to accommodate the needs of another adult, let alone a baby. But it wasn't a conversation I enjoyed. I could hear myself creating my persona afresh: it was never the right time, there are compensations, I have choices my mother never had.

But it's like Schroedinger's Cat. The only way you can ever prove those freedoms were worth having is by killing them dead. And if you never do, you have to accept that a significant part of the human race will pity you, which is pretty unbearable.

Shallow as I am, I would just like to record that though any emotion detected here is entirely genuine, I am very pleased with the title of this post. And quite possibly about to commit mass murder of the Japanese businessmen shouting and stamping up and down the corridor outside my hotel room.

Inciting Hatred

Yesterday, I went out for a meal with colleagues. We are all working away from home, staying in hotels (quite posh hotels) in Edinburgh, and we met up in the Cambridge Bar in Young Street (very nice, thoroughly recommend it, even though it's full of awful idiots like me - see below).

I had a sort of out-of-body experience when I could hear our conversation from the point of view of someone overhearing us, and it was horribly sobering. We sounded like utter, utter twats: what airmiles scheme are you enrolled in, what hotel loyalty cards do you have, which of the posh hotels here is the best ("well, the Balmoral has the most comfortable beds, and the Sheraton the best gym and pool, and the Hilton the nicest staff...."), etc etc. We sounded spoilt, tiresome, and expecting an awful lot out of life.

But then, this morning, wearily packing my case to change hotels (fully booked in the one we are supposed to use on this project today and tomorrow), I was thinking that actually, yes, it does require quite a lot of nice stuff to make up for the only being at home at weekends stuff. That John Betjeman poem was going round my head:

From the geyser ventilators
Autumn winds are blowing down
On a thousand business women
Having baths in Camden Town.

Waste pipes chuckle into runnels,
Steam’s escaping here and there,
Morning trains through Camden cutting
Shake the Crescent and the Square.

Early nip of changeful autumn,
Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,
At the back precarious bathrooms
Jutting out from upper floors;

And behind their frail partitions
Business women lie and soak,
Seeing through the draughty skylight
Flying clouds and railway smoke.

Rest you there, poor unbelov’d ones,
Lap your loneliness in heat.
All too soon the tiny breakfast,
Trolley-bus and windy street!

Harsh, but fair, I suppose. Though thinking of myself as a business woman does make me giggle, rather. And my breakfasts are anything but tiny.

Bouquets at Dawn

Just got back from a wedding. It was nice, the bride looked good, etc etc etc. But DULL! Why are other people's friends (or in particular, other people's friends' other halves) so arse-achingly boring? And do I seem that dull to them? I bloody hope not.

One thing that struck me was how strong the imprint of the traditional wedding is. This one was between a Dutch Protestant and a black South African adopted into a British liberal Jewish family, so for the avoidance of argument there was no religion involved, but it was still all white tulle and lilies and bridesmaids and the bride's father bringing her down the aisle and stuff like that. And the civil wedding service still uses some pretty archaic prayer-book style words. I suppose if you don't want a ChurchLite wedding, you need to get some druid to do it on a hilltop at dawn or something.

I have got progressively calmer about the fact that I may well never get hitched (particularly after meeting other people's friends' other halves and realising afresh how many truly dire people there are around), but for me, when my father died and I thought that he would never haul me down the aisle and hand me over, it made me think about whether I would really want that anyway. I say no, of course not: but I bet a lot of the brides who end up being given away by daddy would have said that too. It is very odd how much of a traditionalist vein it seems to bring out in even the most non-traditional people.

The only wedding I remember actively enjoying and thinking was truly original was one that incorporated a pub quiz in between the service and the reception, with the bride as questionmaster and the groom and best man as the markers. It was brilliant fun.

The business traveller speaks

I had an almost entirely unjustified hissy fit this morning. The hotel I was staying in very nicely upgraded me yesterday evening to an enormous suite - big enough to fit in a cocktail party of about 150 people in 2 rooms, I reckon (plus a full-blown orgy in the enormous bed). Sadly, it was just me, for one night only, strewing my remarkably small number of possessions around with abandon.

Then, this morning, they told me it would cost me more than I'd thought when I booked it. They said it was the "de luxe" rate and that I HAD been told. I said I hadn't. They said that one of the most experienced receptionists had booked it and of course she'd told me. I said she hadn't. In the end, the customer was right, but boy, did they make me feel pathetic.

Of course, to me personally, it doesn't (or rather shouldn't) matter at all, as it's business travel on expenses. But I hate the way that just because you aren't paying for it yourself you are suddenly not supposed to notice or care how much things cost, and are made to feel rather grubby for doing so. It so happens that the client I'm working for is one whom, in an abstract sense, I loathe and disapprove of, and so really I should be trying to spend as much on expenses as I could. It's just that the £6 for a litre of mineral water, the £13 for a nasty pretend-smart salad, really, really annoys me, because it is greedy and not value for money.

I ended up saying "Don't patronise me by pretending that your different rates actually mean anything, other than the maximum amount you think you can screw out of each customer...." Oh well. I don't suppose that hotel will ever upgrade me again.

Otherwise, I was remarkably cheery. I love love LOVE it in aeroplanes when you fly above the clouds and magically it's sunny there (especially evening or early morning sun), even though pissing down on the ground. I wish Donne or Shakespeare could have seen that: I'd love to read what they made of it. And I managed to time it so I was listening to Monty Python's Galaxy Song as we took off, which made me laugh: "The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding/In all of the directions it can whizz/As fast as it can go/The speed of light you know/Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is....."

Bonny Prince Thea

Normal, sloppy and intermittent service has been resumed on this blog. For once, though, I have an excuse. I have been exiled to Scotland for work, which I am wondering whether I will end up liking very much (probably not, but I am trying to be positive).

With a bit of luck, I will be able to get a flat in Edinburgh in a couple of weeks, and then I can have friends to stay at weekends if I don't feel like the long slog down to London from Edinburgh. And Edinburgh itself is such a beautiful city (what a pity I'm working on an industrial estate outside Livingston....). Yesterday when I got up the sun was shining over the Firth of Forth and I could see it from my hotel - it was wonderful.

The getting up at five on Mondays is going to be a bit of a bugger, though. And the ultra-organisation needed to have any sort of social life (I have just arranged to have lunch with someone six weeks from now) is utterly antipathetic - I like to have a bit of give in my social arrangements. Oh well. It is, after all, what I get paid for. I just wish I could greet it with enthusiasm rather than resignation.