Thursday: To Do

• Get up after less than 5 hours' sleep, knowing you will not go back to sleep and wondering why you have suddenly become insomniac: tick

• Finish current work novel (including over breakfast): tick

• Travel right across town to spend two minutes getting my fringe cut so I don't have to peer at the Governor-General through it in two weeks' time (nearly every weekday between now and then being taken up with 9-5 meetings) at the Admiralty House launch of this book, of which I am a contributing editor: tick

• Buy sheer anklets for trying on girlie shoes: tick

• Buy girlie shoes (see Admiralty House): FAIL

• Visit Papa Cat and be shouted at about the River Murray and the Rann Government for an hour and a half (Papa Cat is back in finer form than ever after his recent health whoopsie): tick

• Plan bulb planting (oops, typed 'blub planting'. That too): tick

• Plant bulbs: tick

• Sear lamb shanks, add onion, garlic, tomato and red wine, put in oven: tick

• Wash jumpers: tick

• Solve mystery of Amex card activation: tick

• Activate Amex card: tick

STILL TO DO

• Start next work novel

• Read 100 pages of PhD thesis to be examined, take notes

• Scan four book covers and attach them to emails

• Unpack, check, sort, label and put away four postbags of new books (approx 20-30)

• See if the one designer label (Peri Cutten) garment I own looks all right with the only dress I own that might conform to the vice-regal dress code. (It's an elegant black velvet jacket/coat thingy whose main claim to fame is that I once wore it to a dinner party where the partner of a very distinguished novelist was wearing the exact same garment except about four sizes smaller. We congratulated each other on our good taste, the only possible course of action in this situation.)

• Find the brooch made of black and pink pearls -- homage to Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson -- and loops of silvery gauze ribbon that will liven up the Peri Cutten a little, and the matching earrings

• Try yet again to find said dress code online and check if black is acceptable (it might not be; they seem quite strict. For instance, apparently you can't carry a handbag with a shoulder strap; it's a clutch or nothing. The expression 'clutch shudder' took on a whole new meaning this afternoon when I looked at how much some of them cost)

• Write and send cheque (charity)

• Write and send invoice (work pay)

• Write and sent email about aircon servicing (aircon servicing)

And finally, and most importantly, fit all of this around the season finale of Grey's Anatomy. Priorities, people.

Harry Potter and the Magic Realism

In today's Crikey newsletter, Peter Craven reports on the new Harry Potter movie:

... it’s so episodic that it actually has the material for a huge mini-series where the snogging and quidditch alternate with the armies marching by night, the deatheaters speeding like a vision of hell through Britain’s low sky.

A huge mini-series where snogging and quidditch alternate with the armies marching by night, eh? Fantasy schmantasy, sounds like real life to me.

Perspective, restoration of

I spent an hour today with a dear friend drinking sparkling wine and bemoaning the state of our peer group -- almost all of whom including both of us seem to be in some sort of trouble or state of crisis -- and whingeing and moaning about the next few weeks, which one way and another are going to be difficult and demanding. When I got home I decided to tackle a couple of long-neglected tasks before settling down to the current work novel, and started with the very cobwebby outside of the front door hinge side.

Brush jab sweep tug, I went, thinking gee this is a strong web and look at those off-white bobbly things, I know they don't bode well: little arachnid labour wards. As I stood imagining the horror of lots of little spiders bursting out of them, a movement caught my eye: a very large redback, its scarlet stripe blazing, charging up the broom handle towards my right hand.

I would have taken a photo, but let's just say there wasn't time. And a shot of sludgy redback puree on the front verandah really doesn't convey the drama of the moment.

But there will be no more whingeing before lights out, and possibly not for the rest of the week.

Clearing the decks

Last time I whinged in this my OWN PERSONAL ONLINE SPACE about feeling crushed by the workload, some drive-by psycho, a species of which I seem to get more than my fair share, unless it's just the same one all the time, in which case s/he will no doubt show up again here for another round of ticking off a total stranger for what she writes in her OWN PERSONAL ONLINE SPACE, and if s/he does, the comment will be binned, and God if there's one thing I do love it's a subordinate clause, turned up in the comments box and snottily pointed out with a disturbing amount of hostility considering that it's a total stranger, or perhaps it isn't, which would be worse, and isn't it interesting that these people are always anonymous, which I think is pathetic, that I'd get more work done if I didn't spend so much time blogging about how much work I have to do.

Now while this is doubtless true, it shows a deep ignorance of the writing process and its many stages, most of which are not visible to the naked eye. I was reminded of this by a wonderful post from ThirdCat, currently in Spain and on her way to Scotland where she will perform in her own one-woman standup show at the Edinburgh Fringe, which is one of the things the post is about. She considers blogging the whole process in a series called the Road to Edinburgh and then remarks

a ‘Road to Edinburgh’ series threatens to be a bit like a term-long school project at the end of which the teacher might write, ‘Tracy might have done better had she spent more time doing her project and less time talking about it.’

Now as you can see, this teacher and my drive-by psycho (who I sometimes think is no more than a projection of my own superego, which is the bit that stands over you like a sergeant-major telling you to be good and obey the rules, as opposed to the id, which is the bit that keeps getting Barry Hall and Sam Newman into trouble) have a great deal in common. But I think they are both wrong and here's for why.

The writing process, as any writer will tell you, and not just creative writing but any writing, is a series of complex manoeuvres, all of which but the final writing-it-down are invisible to the naked eye. You have to do a great deal of mooching and faffing and dreaming and meditating and wandering off down blind alleys. You have to, as it were, draw sketches and rub them out and draw more sketches. I've said before in other places that I think blogging is like dreaming and one of these days (when I don't have so much work to do, and am therefore living on nettle soup) I'm going to actually read up on dreaming and write something substantial about writing and blogging and dreaming.

But for the moment I have cleared my head to get back to work (being here at the computer at 7 am on a Saturday morning because I woke up worrying about the workload and couldn't get back to sleep) by the simple expedient of whining about it first, and somewhere in the recesses of my subconscious, two book reviews have been forming themselves into sentences and paragraphs.

A post in homage to the full moon

Southern Gothic

The combined effect of a mention of Bobbie Gentry on the current Lazy Sunday thread at Larvatus Prodeo plus the amazing clip of the equally amazing Barry McGuire singing 'Eve of Destruction' at James Bradley's City of Tongues, with James' comment that 'the great ones never date', produced a kind of chemical reaction that sent me hightailing it to Google to find this:





This was one of the first songs I ever learned to play on my brand-new guitar (which I still have, stained with the blood of my fingers) and sing. I've got a particularly vivid memory of a houseboat holiday when I was sixteen, singing this song as part of the after-dinner family self-entertainment in an exaggerated Southern accent while my parents and sisters threw in a lot of Yee-ha and Lord have mercy in a kind of call-and-response approach, but my dad, half-cut and feeling no pain, and if I was sixteen he must still only have been, what, 42, got a bit more creative and started throwing in responses that acted as a kind of subtext to what is already an extremely veiled and secretive song, its drama residing in its silences. So our version, sung forty years ago in the middle of nowhere on a boat tied up to a willow on the bank a river that now belongs to history and myth, was full of things like this:

That nice young preacher Brother Taylor dropped by today
(Ah hates them preacher men)
Said he'd be pleased to have dinner on Sunday, oh and by the way
(Here we go, this ain't good)
He said he saw a girl that looked a lot like you up on Choctaw Ridge
(Ah tole you never go up there)
And she and Billy Joe was throwin' somethin' off the Tallahatchee Bridge
(You in biiiig trouble)

The test of a LOLcat is whether it cracks you up the second time

PASS

Irritants: a series less occasional than I would like

*Clears throat, rings town crier bell, unrolls parchment*


'Disinterested' does not mean 'uninterested'.

'On Ermintrude's behalf' does not mean 'on Ermintrude's part'.

'Cohort' does not mean 'mate'.

Irritating as these and their constant and egregious misuse may be, they pale into insignificance beside the moment when a young person employed by the Channel 7 News referred to 'Michael Jackson and his panache for plastic surgery.' It took me several minutes to work out that the word this 'journalist' should have been groping for was penchant and that's not really right either.


*Rolls up parchment, retires to Ladies' Lounge for a medicinal brandy*

I always did like John Alexander

"We don't need dreary old feminism any more, it's all irrelevant [sic], we're equal now, we're empowered."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA


UPDATE: Mindy's comment has alerted me to the fact that this is a very ambiguous post. The above quotation is attributed not to John Alexander but rather to assorted young women I've heard expressing that opinion in recent years. The hollow laughter is my response, and the link explains why. John Alexander actually comes out of it looking really good.

Irritants: an occasional series

Yesterday I went to a meeting that was scheduled to begin at nine. It was a Public Service thing so we're talking fifteen or twenty people, city office, professionals, tight schedule etc etc. The meeting was due to go all morning with what turned out to be one five-minute break. A whole morning of not working (at my actual job, I mean; these meetings are bloody hard work) puts me far enough behind in the weekly schedule to get uneasy, and I'd made a special effort to get ahead beforehand.

As one who keeps owl hours, I was unable to go to sleep at a reasonable time on Sunday night so was up again at seven after five and a half hours of uneasy sleep, which at my age is not enough to get you, fully functioning, through an active day. In the car by 8.10, drive for 40 minutes through peak hour traffic including massive, extended, longterm roadworks at one corner of the CBD, find a city park, haul arse into the office and down to the bowels of the building and its claustrophobic and badly heated main meeting room.

Where we then sat for 25 minutes waiting for everyone to turn up. 'We' included one very senior public servant who is presumably handsomely paid for her time. The last latecomer (there were several) finally strolled in at 9.25 and did not apologise. After another ten minutes of faffing, the meeting finally began. The last to arrive said casually later 'Oh sorry, thought it started at half-nine.' This with the starting time in bold at the top of the agenda.

Given that we stayed behind schedule for the rest of the morning, it was inevitable that the harassed organiser would ask us if we could stay on over time, but before I could say 'Sure, if I'm paid for it', the last latecomer was -- inevitably -- the one who said 'Oh no, sorry, I have to be elsewhere.'

None of the latecomers were crucial to the meeting. We could easily have started without them at nine. And that's 25 minutes of my life I could have spent sleeping or working (or blogging), and that I'll never get back. Yes it's a tiny tiny thing, and I've said to myself several times now 'Let it go, Indy', but for some reason, and unusually, I can't. Am thinking blogging it might help. And the next time I'm running late I will try to remember how incredibly bloody inconsiderate it is of the poor sods who are waiting for you, having successfully made the effort to get there on time themselves.

Why it really doesn't feel like work

I sit on the sofa and I read one novel after another: good novels with bad bits, bad novels with good bits, good novels in whose subject matter I have no interest and bad novels whose subject matter interests me very much. The bottom line is not judgement (even though as a reviewer it is my job to judge, at least up to a point) but rather analysis and discovery: what works, in fiction, and what does not. And how, and why. If I ever get the time to write a novel of my own I will come to the task equipped with a vast armoury of brilliant models and cautionary tales.

Working through the pile, I come to a novel of almost 500 pages that is more sugary than all the iced tea in the whole of Louisiana, where it is set. But there is one irresistible quality that has kept me reading for over 300 pages and will sustain me to the end: an almost magical lust and passion for dancing, singing, eating, drinking, colour, life and beauty that never seems to desert the people of Louisiana, black or white, urban or rural, rich or poor, despite the residual dark horrors of the South and even when life has been blasted by a natural disaster that an indifferent, incompetent government can't or won't deal with adequately. It's a quality that mesmerised me in the first blog I ever followed properly.

(And one that I saw again in the Louisiana blogs (now sadly defunct) of the amazing Liz from Granny Gets a Vibrator, miraculously still well three years after the killer cancer and, though no longer blogging AFAIK, still findable as Wachendorfia on Flickr for those of you who miss her.)

And I have been rewarded for persevering with Calla Lily Ponder Chalon, a character born the same year I was, who reminds me of a cross between Magda Szubanski's Chenille (from Chenille's Institut de Beauté and House of Hair Removal), and Julia Roberts' hairdresser character in Steel Magnolias: 'Ah will not let mah own personal tragedy interfere with mah ability to do good hay-uh.'

I say 'rewarded' because on page 350, Calla Lily sits down and writes this letter.

May 22, 1977
New Orleans, Louisiana

Dear Mr President and Mrs Roslyn Carter,

I am a beautician. I work at a salon called Ricky's in New Orleans, Louisiana. I am a happily married woman who pays taxes, even on tips.

Now, Mrs Carter, you have chosen the perfect cut for your hair type. You especially have lovely hair for a woman your age, and it is very well kept. Mr President, you're thinning on top, so I think you'll strongly relate to what I'm about to say.

I speak as a beautician when I ask you to think, "How would you look as a bald couple?" One nuclear bomb would melt out all your hair. I am a professional in the field of beauty, but I don't know any cures for radiation-melted hair. And as far as I know, no one else does, either.

The human body is not a Styrofoam wig stand. I, for one, will not think you are a ninety-pound weakling if you get rid of the twenty-megaton bomb. I would like to go on waking up and cooking and doing hair and loving my husband.

If nothing else, please: Think of your looks.

Yours Very Sincerely,
Calla Lily Ponder Chalon

Michael Jackson Youtube of the Day ...

... says it all.

Randomly plucked from the vast lucky dip of life's mysteries

Among the numberless occasions afforded by life for irritation, here's one that's been getting to me lately more than usual: can anyone explain to me why so many people (on and offline) who all too clearly know less than nothing about (a) literature, (b) psychoanalysis and/or (c) feminism will go a long way out of their way to belligerently trash all ideas and enterprises involving one or more of them? It seems to be mainly a boy thing. I can understand why blokes feel threatened by feminism, at least until they've actually taken the trouble to find out a bit about it, but what's the problem with the other two?

All suggestions gratefully received, although I'm expecting at least one drive-by from at least one of the types described above and I won't be grateful for that at all.

In praise of the winter solstice

Stephanie at Humanities Researcher is off tonight to a winter solstice feast, where seasonal poems will be read. I will be celebrating Solstice Lite with ceremonial mulled wine up in the Adelaide Hills with my mate R tomorrow afternoon and proposing a ceremonial toast: roll on earlier sunrises and later sunsets. But I love the idea of a seasonal poem, so here is my absolutely favourite winter one, Coleridge's 'Frost at Midnight'.

The frost performs its secret ministry
Unhelped by any wind. The owlet's cry
Came loud -- and hark, again! loud as before.
The inmates of my cottage, all at rest,
Have left me to that solitude, which suits
Abstruser musings: save that at my side
My cradled infant slumbers peacefully.
'Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs
And vexes meditation with its strange
And extreme silentness. Sea, hill and wood,
This populous village! Sea, and hill, and wood,
With all the numberless goings-on of life,
Inaudible as dreams! the thin blue flame
Lies on my low-burnt fire, and quivers not;
Only that film, which flutters on the grate,
Still flutters there, the sole unquiet thing.
Methinks its motion in this hush of nature
Gives it dim sympathies with me who live,
Making it a companionable form,
Whose puny flaps and freaks the idling Spirit
By its own moods interprets, everywhere
Echo or mirror seeking of itself,
And make a toy of Thought.

But O! how oft,
How oft, at school, with most believing mind,
Presageful, have I gazed upon the bars,
To watch that fluttering stranger! and as oft
With unclosed lids, already had I dreamt
Of my sweet birthplace, and the old church tower,
Whose bells, the poor man's only music, rang
From morn to evening, all the hot Fair-day,
So sweetly, that they stirred and haunted me
With a wild pleasure, falling on mine ear
Most like articulate sounds of things to come!
So gazed I, till the soothing things I dreamt
Lulled me to sleep, and sleep prolonged my dreams!
And so I brooded all the following morn,
Awed by the stern preceptor's face, mine eye
Fixed with mock study on my swimming book:
Save if the door half opened, and I snatched
A hasty glance, and still my heart leaped up,
For still I hoped to see the stranger's face,
Townsman, or aunt, or sister more beloved,
My playmate when we both were clothed alike!

Dear Babe, that sleepest cradled by my side,
Whose gentle breathings, heard in this deep calm,
Fill up the intersperséd vacancies
And momentary pauses of the thought!
My babe so beautiful! it thrills my heart
With tender gladness, thus to look at thee,
And think that thou shalt learn far other lore,
And in far other scenes! For I was reared
In the great city, pent 'mid cloisters dim,
And saw nought lovely but the sky and stars.
But thou, my babe! shalt wander like a breeze
By lakes and sandy shores, beneath the crags
Of ancient mountain, and beneath the clouds,
Which image in their bulk both lakes and shores
And mountain crags: so shalt thou see and hear
The lovely shapes and sounds intelligible
Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.
Great universal Teacher! he shall mould
Thy spirit, and by giving make it ask.

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,
Whether the summer clothe the general earth
With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing
Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch
Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch
Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall
Heard only in the traces of the blast,
Or if the secret ministry of frost
Shall hang them up in silent icicles,
Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

Biblical world view legitimised: Australian feminist icon turns in grave

What with first the longlist and then the shortlist, I'm not really all that surprised that the 2009 Miles Franklin Literary Award has been won by what was by far the safer choice of the two front runners, a novel in which a bitter, twisted woman called Eva (geddit? geddit?) corrupts the young hero, takes away his innocence and warps his psyche for life with her nasty dangerous bent sick non-missionary sexing-on ways. She robs our hero of Paradise, that's what she does; she pushes him into his fall from grace.

Because, as we all know, that's what women do. The Bible tells us so.

I reviewed Tim Winton's Breath for the Oz and I bent over backwards, to the point of indecency really and no it's not something you'd like to see, to be fair. I have great respect for Winton's considerable fiction-writing skills, and I wouldn't like to seem to be dissing the people who like his work. Yes it's a 'good novel', no argument there from me. But. But. Butbutbut.

It's completely incredible to me that in 2009 there are still people who don't get this, but looking at comments around the blog and MSM literary traps there clearly are, so let me spell it out once more:

It's not just some simple-minded essentialist thing about equal numbers of men and women. It's not a case to be met with 'We don't need feminism any more because we're equal now' (I assume this lot are actually unconscious, or trapped in a big plastic bubble, or living in some parallel universe like the Magic Faraway Tree). It's not about 'But can't they just be chosen on literary merit?', a common bleat that begs the question of what literary merit is, whose values infuse it, whether it can ever be objective or absolute, who decides what it is, and what sorts of values have dominated literature and the judgement of literature and the formation of its canons for centuries. A quick read of A Room of One's Own is all that's needed for answers to most of these questions.

No, it's this: that the masculine world view is still the norm, the feminine world view a lesser variant; that the masculine representation of women is still accepted as the truth, while female resistance to that representation is seen as some kind of wilful rebellion; that masculine values are still (mis)taken as universal values, and feminine ones seen as aberrant and unimportant in the world. Simone de Beauvoir still puts it best, even after all this time. 'There are two types of people in this world: human beings and women.'

And spare a thought for the dedicated, hardworking feminist Miles Franklin, who scrimped and saved and ran herself short to amass the capital for the establishment of this prize in the 1950s. In her name, let me record here that in the chronological catchment area for this prize, the following excellent novels, most of which have won at least one major literary prize, were published (NB Michelle de Kretser's The Lost Dog was eligible last year, not this year, but likewise came nowhere):

The Household Guide to Dying by Debra Adelaide
The Spare Room by Helen Garner
The Lieutenant by Kate Grenville
Vertigo by Amanda Lohrey
The Good Parents by Joan London

All were eligible for the prize, within the terms of Franklin's will: of 'the highest literary merit', and dealing with 'Australian life in any of its phases'.

None of them even made the longlist.

Yes, as anyone who's ever been on one knows, the judging panels for prizes of all kinds are weird beasts, and their ways are a mystery even to themselves. Goddess knows I know that this is true.

But still. But. Butbutbut.

From my email inbox

In the coming weeks you will be contacted by the Governor General’s office with regard to the various protocol, dress code etc associated with attending a function at Admiralty House.

Can anyone explain to me why this sentence should produce an overwhelming desire to turn up in a sweaty blue tradie's singlet and the grottiest, daggiest tracky daks I can find? The convict ancestry, perhaps?

And me the proud owner and frequent consulter of this book since 1984, too:

A girl like I

A comment chez one of my Facebook Friends this morning regarding the much simpler '"less" v. "fewer"' issue has prompted this grammar post that I've been meaning to put up for a while now, especially over the last few days when I've been reading for review a self-published novel that has all kinds of charm and interest but that makes this 'I/me' mistake on almost every page, constantly distracting and irritating the reader -- something that could have been avoided if someone had shelled out for five or six hours of a good basic copy-editor's time.

Some will recognise this post's title as a signature phrase of Anita Loos' immortal siren Lorelei Lee from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.* These tales are told by Lorelei herself and Loos puts the phrase in her mouth to signify an attempt to be proper and genteel that, ironically, actually signifies the opposite.

And there's a lot of it about, and so I offer a very simple test to apply when/if one is ever dithering about whether to use 'I' or 'me'. This is a grammatical issue to do with the nominative and accusative cases, but since that sort of discussion makes people's eyes cross, I offer a much easier way to get it right.

Alphonse and I went to the R rated movie.

The R rated movie was very educational for Alphonse and me.

The test is simply to take the other person out of the sentence and see what it looks like then. Would you say 'The R rated movie was very educational for I'? No of course you wouldn't. So if you say 'for Alphonse and I', that's wrong too and for the same reason.


*That Wikipedia entry describes Loos' husband as a 'philandering hypochondriac'. A less attractive and more infuriating combination of spousal qualities can scarcely be imagined.

Teaching writing*

Some important aspects of the craft can be taught, but the art of writing must be taught in the same way that art is taught in art school, and music in music school. Nobody would dare turn up to the door of a music school saying ’I’d like to be a guitarist, but I don’t have a guitar, I don’t have time to practice, and I don’t listen to music’, but people do that in writing courses.

From here, a long and detailed interview with novelist M. J. Hyland and a great read.

*The title I've given this post has reminded me of a particularly fraught staff meeting in my former workplace, where we were hammering out, at glacial speed and temperature, all the new subjects that were to be taught the following year, all aspects of all of which had to be subjected to the democratic process and agreed upon unanimously before proceeding. We spent at least three hours on the title of a new first-year subject that eventually sported the title 'Reading Writing', and then moved on to the question of a title for another new subject about literature and religion. Quoth the then head of department: 'Well, if we're going with the double gerunds, how about 'Seeing Believing'?

Needless to say, sadly, that one didn't get up.

David Eagleman

This bloke was in Sydney last week for the Luminous festival, in a collaborative show with Brian Eno at the Opera House; did anyone see him?

I don't know how well his little book Sum: Forty tales from the afterlives would work as a performance, but qua book it is pretty damned dazzling. As a neuroscientist, albeit a freakishly young-looking one, he has probably spent a fair amount of time thinking about (a) how the brain orders information, (b) what constitutes a human being ('Sum' here is a Latin pun), and (c) death. The fruit of said thought is here, in forty hypothetical scenarios about what might happen when we die.

Clearly he's also a poet. Look at that word 'covey', suggestive as it is of birds and (with one change of letter) witches, which some would say are the two creatures that might produce an angel if they bred.


Some highlights:

In the afterlife you discover that God understands the complexities of life. She had originally submitted to peer pressure when She structured Her universe like all the other gods had, with a binary categorization of people into good and evil. But it didn't take long for Her to realize that humans could be good in many ways and simultaneously corrupt and mean-spirited in other ways ... Might it not be possible, She considered, that a man could be an embezzler and still give to charitable causes? Might not a woman be an adulteress but bring pleasure and security to two men's lives?

*

When you arrive in the afterlife, you find that Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley sits on a throne. She is cared for and protected by a covey of angels.

After some questioning, you discover that God's favorite book is Shelley's Frankenstein. He sits up at night with a worn copy of the book clutched in His mighty hands ... Like Victor Frankenstein, God considers Himself a medical doctor, a biologist without parallel, and He has a deep, painful relationship with any story about the creation of life ... reading again and again how Dr. Victor Frankenstein is taunted by his merciless monster across the Arctic ice. And God consoles Himself with the thought that all creation necessarily ends in this: creators, powerless, fleeing from the things they have wrought.

*

There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second in when the body is consigned to the grave. The third is that moment, some time in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.

Now they tell me

The Flood Warning for Adders that freaked me out last night appears to have been downgraded to a Flood Watch. I wish I'd known that before I spent an hour outside in the cold this morning with shovels and trowels and garden gloves, climbing ladders and cleaning out gutters and clearing gully traps and digging drainage channels and improvising sandbags, here in this low-lying part of town where the stormwater floods straight down my concrete driveway from the road in sheets.

Covered in the mud and glop of ages but virtuous and warmed up from the exertion, am on way to shower before hitting the road to the hospital to visit Papa Cat. Who is much better: not as serious as we feared.