We had a sort of family Christmas tea thingy on Sunday, to swap presents as my sister's away up the coast on Christmas Day itself. I gave Da Niece my latest discovery, which involves two rather entertaining kiddie books by one John Himmelman, Chickens to the Rescue and Katie Loves the Kittens. The Katie one is amusingly rude about dogs, but the chickens one is pleasingly demented, featuring chickens in snorkelling gear, crash helmets and heavens alone knows what else, all with the requisite degree of fuss and feathers. Thusly:



The conversation went something like this:

SISTER: Kids' books these days are really lovely. Also, you always seem to find the subversive ones.
ME (thoughtfully, placing tips of fingers together in approved Patrician pose): Why, yes. Yes, I do.

It is remotely possible that she was also eyeing my Christmas tree, which this year is graced at its apex, inside the giant Christmas star, by a tiny green plush Cthulhu doll I won in a raffle at a CLAW tournament lo these many moons ago. He's very festive.

I feel that my Aunt Dahlia quotient is proceeding apace. Those sproggle-owing individuals among you who don't mind a spot of subversion, now with extra verse, I do heartily recommend John Himmelman.

In other, equally weird and lateral Christmas news, today I appear to have emerged from the stationers bearing something the tillslip insists is an "XMAS GAL SIN". I wish I could say that this gal plans to sin extra-subversively at Christmas, but I fear it'll be the usual: idolatry (still immersed in Supernatural), sloth, gluttony and taking the Lord's name in vain while I try to beat the (*#$^*^$ Fire Temple in Zelda.

Definition of success: hand Da Niece, who turned four yesterday, her birthday present, which included a slim vol. entitled Polkabats and Octopus Slacks, and have her utter a demented shriek of joy at the title. I recommend said vol., incidentally - it comprises a random selection of completely off-the-wall and surreal short poems with psychedelic illustrations and a nice line in unlikely rhymes. (I acquired it off Loot, not sure if Exclusive wots of its existence). She also scored the obligatory Gaiman (The Day I Swapped My Dad For Two Goldfish), thus ensuring that I have fulfilled my auntly obligation to build up the necessary sf-geek-cred good and early.

Have woken up this morning with exhaustion, a snuffly head and aching joints, and a tendency to go for student throats with my teeth. Well, phooey. Shall console myself with silly photos of my silly cat, who insists on perching on the subwoofer, overflowing gently:



The only possibly caption for this photo is, of course, ALL YOUR BASS ARE BELONG TO US.

Vignette from yesterday's party: distressed four-year-old comes dashing through the house to find me, because something in my bedroom (where three of them have been perpetrating unspecified small-girl evil) is ringing. I wander through and switch off my bedside alarm clock, which has mysteriously set itself.

"Someone must have switched it on," I say thoughtfully. "I certainly didn't. Who was playing with it?"
A ring of innocent faces gazes at me raptly. They exchange conspiratorial looks.
"The cat did it!" volunteers someone.

This morning I was rudely awakened at 7am by the ringing of my alarm clock, at the extremely loud and intrusive end of its graduated scale, which is audible even three rooms away behind a closed door. Staggering, dazed and semi-nude, through the house, I eventually tracked the bloody thing down tucked in a corner of the bookshelf in the guestroom, beeping its little head off.

I knew we'd be in trouble when the cats developed opposable thumbs. I struck a blow for an unsubjugated humanity by wantonly not feeding them breakfast before I staggered back to bed.

I know the PA system in my local supermarket is bad (even when they're not trying to talk over their current, premature soundtrack of bad R&B covers of syrupy Christmas carols), but I'd swear that this morning the manager said "Manfred, calling Manfred, please will all available chicken sexers come to Receiving". I... I think my brain is stunned.

I also wish to record for posterity the indecent amount of pleasure I'm finding in tracking down weird and wacky kids' books for my three-year-old niece. This morning: I STINK!, which is a pleasingly rumbustious soliloquy from a garbage truck.

My family has a serious thing for owls, having raised two spotted eagle owl chicks when I was still at school. The surviving owl, the legendary Fred, lived in our garden for years and was semi-tame enough to come into the kitchen or stomp down the passage into the bedroom, hooting to herself - and, in fact, to try and nest in my mother's cupboard, in the remnants of a thoroughly destroyed straw hat. Fred-offspring were later actually produced on my dad's workbench in the shed. We like owls.

Da Niece appears to have inherited this liking, if her choice of birthday cake theme is any indication. In this case the wol is psychedelic, as only a three-year-old can possibly appreciate. The different-coloured eyes are particularly trippy. I also rather like Da Niece's incredibly grubby face in this shot.

Wow. In the Department of the Randomly Surreal, I've just taken a phone call to my office landline in which the annoying MTN voice lady announced that I had an SMS. This was followed by a throaty male baritone which observed, in perfectly level tones and without noticeable word breaks, "MY MOM HAD STROLL WE HAD TO SEE HER IN." What is this, the new spam?

The last few days, for some reason, are making me fully grok the significance of the Georgette Heyer phrase "an irritation of the nerves." My nerves are irritated. Things fret me when they shouldn't, which is possibly why the usual EL non-communication is getting to me. On the other hand, twenty minutes browsing the Can Haz Cheeseburger archive were very soothing. I'm not a huge fan of LOLcats, only about one in twenty is truly amusing, but cute kitties are good for the soul.

My mother's youngest sister used to live in Cape Town, and was a notable figure in my childhood for the perfectly lovely books she used to send us. Literate aunts are extremely important, as I frequently tell my niece. Anyway, my favourite among the books that she sent was Anne Fine's The Summer House Loon, which is unusual in the annals of my childhood kiddielit memories in that it isn't actually fantasy. It's a sort of social and emotional comedy, I suppose, seen through the eyes of the barely-teenaged Ione, who both observes and manipulates the interactions between her blind professor father, his beautiful typist, and Ned, the dopey, hippy, shambling, entirely endearing grad student who's in love with the typist. I think I had a crush on Ned when I was a kid, actually, he's a wonderful combination of intelligent, funny and helpless. The story ambles gently and wittily between relationship angst, academic rivalry, early Sardinian trade routes, impromptu party-arranging, teenaged manipulativeness and first experiences of drunkenness; it's sharply well-observed and pleasantly inconsequential. I think its huge strength, though, is the way it immerses you in Ione's adolescent world, in its classic combination of narcissism and fascinated observation of grown-up motivations and concerns. I also suspect that this book is at least partially responsible for my attraction to the world of academia.

In the Department of Tabloid Surrealism, more Daily Voice billboards:

HIS LIFE ... AS A SNAKE!

I'm quite fond of the ellipsis in that one, it lends such an air of portentuous expectation. I also can't work out if its hints at animal transformation are more or less suggestively intriguing than the scenario suggested by its billboard-mate:

NO END TO BIN OF DEATH!

While this is clearly talking about binjas, I can't imagine why it's an endless ninja rubbish bin. Perpetual motion binjas?

Went back to the gym this week - feeling quite good, actually. Although, in the Department of the Malice of Inanimate Objects, on my way home from my first session the traffic light on Boundary/Main celebrated my return by suddenly losing the green phase allowing us onto Main Rd, backing up a huge queue of sweaty post-gym-goers who were becoming steadily more annoyed - and, one assumes, smelly - as the lights cycled through phase after phase without ever giving us a chance. Eventually we took matters into our own hands and filtered lawlessly out on the red into gaps in the traffic, amid a cacophony of hooting. It's amazing how persecuted a simple malfunction can make one feel.

Today's inspiration to parents everywhere:



Bibliophibians. Damn straight. I don't have the procreation excuse for my thousands of books, but I really don't propose to let that stop me. Also, this is a clear mandate to go right on buying random books for all the toddlers I know.

Speaking of which, the next kiddilit installment is in honour of The Mysterious Mwotn, since he's also fond of it. Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth is a truly odd exercise in children's allegory, featuring enormous amounts of conceptual and linguistic play. Milo, the hero, drives in his little toy car past his purple tollbooth into a world of embodied concepts: he jumps to Conclusions, becomes lost in the Doldrums, and visits the two kingdoms of Dictionopolis and Digitopolis, who are at war having lost the Princesses Rhyme and Reason to the Demons of Ignorance. While the moral is clear, the book's wistful, whimsical tone stops the whole thing from being too preachy, and it has lovely touches of humanity and humour. Part of the charm is, I think, in the illustrations, which capture the tone perfectly.


Last Night I Dreamed: I was staying in a holiday house in England, in the snow, and writing columns for an old academic colleague whose political journal had a circulation of precisely 500 Scotsmen.

Mmmm. August's end-of-month payday celebration dinner, aka the Salty Cracker Club, was late this month - we ate at Ginja last night. We like Ginja. It's unexpected - you have to sidle down a narrow alleyway to get to the door, and inside its walls are painted a womblike red and the waiters are articulate and astonishingly over-informed. The food is amazing. Nouvelle/fusion, tiny servings laid out with geometrical precision on huge, white, interestingly-shaped plates, with various intense sauces and odd but wonderful combinations of flavour. I always start out that kind of meal thinking "rotten swizz" in terms of quantities, since you pay anything up to four times a steakhouse price for about a fifth of the food, but I'm always totally won over - and full - by the end of it. Particularly toe-curlingly ecstatic taste experiences last night included butter flavoured with honey and black beans, duck with foie gras, springbok wellington, dorado with walnuts, and bitter chocolate mousse served with eucalyptus ice-cream. Also, we drank too much and argued about Terry Pratchett. No surprises there, then.

In keeping with the food theme, this morning I hung out with my sister's family and made purple meringues under the exacting eye of my niece, who is a young lady who knows exactly what she wants.

This Retro Kiddielit September appears to have additional rules: no famous/obvious books, but instead the ones people might either not have heard of, or might think they're the only ones who ever read. (This is to cover my butt for not covering, for instance, The Hobbit).

Gerald Durrell is best known for his often hilarious autobiographical animal stories, My Family and Other Animals being the most famous; he is also, however, the author of a few children's novels. I grew up with The Donkey Rustlers, a kid-angled comedy set on Corfu, and on Rosie is my Relative, a Victorian romp about a repressed young man who is unexpectedly bequeathed an elephant by a mad uncle. My favourite, however, is The Talking Parcel, a children's fantasy about the underground realm of Mythologia and its absent-minded wizard ruler H.H. Junketberry, and the dastardly take-over plot by the evil Cockatrices. Durrell has that lovely combination of slight insanity with complete matter-of-factness; the adventure is a breakneck hotch-potch of slapstick, derring-do, eccentricity and inventiveness, together with a genuine sense of wonder and beauty and of the importance of preserving creatures put at risk by the modern world. Also, bonus effeminate eighteenth-century weasels, mooncalves, hiccupping firedrakes, a sea monster who's a chef, and a parrot who uses more long words than I do.

I think the Cosmic Wossnames are feeling bad about Monday, Day Of Hell, because they obligingly rained buckets all afternoon yesterday. This is, as you are well aware, balm to my soul. Today is equally cloudy and rain-promising, and things are Looking Up. Nice phone call from my dad last night, plus promises of kid mohair yarn, also helped. Also, the faculty manager has approved my day officially ending at 4pm, which means - yay! - I can resume Friday afternoon Angelfests with d_hofryn. (Although not this Friday). This resumption was clearly foreshadowed yesterday when the nice student's cellphone went off in the middle of a curriculum advice session with the Angel theme, which shows a degree of taste almost mitigatory to the iniquity of having your cellphone on in my office in the first place.

Random linkery! Because I have too much work to do (again!) to post properly. We have discussed, somewhat volubly, kiddie music in this venue in the past, and I feel obliged to pass on Zoogobble, which is a blog dedicated solely to - surprise! - music for kids. I hope this will materially assist all desperate parents, aunts and other purveyors of indoctrinatory music to the very young. The latest news is that BareNakedLadies are about to release a children's album, which should be worth a listen, yes indeedy.

And, on a not unrelated theme, Improv Everywhere, for whom I am vast developing a geeky passion, staged a "spontaneous" Food Court Musical. Their dedication to "scenes of chaos and joy in public places" makes me very happy.

My favourite Xmas moment for 2007: my Evil Landlord gave me a set of kitchen knives, lovely ones in a bamboo stand. The gift tag was two plasters, with "TEH DOC" scrawled across their back in marker pen. I think stv's getting to him. But I went "awwwww".

Also, my niece in a bucket on the patio, circa Xmas day. She's insanely cute, and also at certain angles disturbingly identical to me at that age.



Thanks to all the Boxing Day braai attendees, it was an extremely pleasantly relaxed occasion despite slightly mad quantities of people. You should have stuck around for the aftermath, which was entertaining: me attempting to stop my mother from doing the washing up. This is basically futile, and we ended up in Twin Sink Mayhem, ripping through the debris in short order in a side-by-side mutual attempt to reduce the amount done by the other. Duelling banjos have nothing on us.

Last Night I Dreamed: vividly enough that I woke myself up at 2am replying to the loud statement I damned well heard from the mad old bat next door, although I think it was a particularly vivid dream. She said something like "Aren't you done yet?", implying that I should have been doing something rather than sleeping peacefully. I think I mendaciously shouted something like "Almost finished!" before realising I was dreaming. Then I couldn't get back to sleep for hours. Consequently a bit frayed today. Also sore from Gym, The Return.