June 2008 Archives

Nkosi, sikeleli Afrika., or in Shona, Ishe Komborera Afrika.

Concerts

On Wednesday I'm going to see R.E.M. I had Radiohead tickets because R.E.M was sold out, but thanks to marktplaats and some good luck I swapped! Funny thing, the guy that phoned me to swap had such a young voice that I thought he was a teenager. I was really expecting the door to be opened by someone's mum, but no, it was a middle-aged man. It goes with the article I read recently about how the only people who can afford to go to concerts are the middle-aged. Ehm. That says a lot about me I know.

On Saturday I checked my email early enough and got tickets for Amy McDonald (I missed her last time she was in Amsterdam) and also for Jason Mraz. A few weeks ago I got tickets for Paul Weller. So that's four! I love living in the Netherlands, it's a musical playground.

Personal Manifestos

I read on a motivational website the other day about making your own personal manifesto. Despite sounding all Chairman Mao, a personal manifesto seems like a really good idea. What are you really after? What do you want? What are your primary goals in life?

The idea is to define your goals in one sentence which you can repeat to yourself as a kind of mantra or a reminder of why you're doing thing you're doing when it's bogging you down. Or maybe just to define to yourself what you really want. If you ask most people what their goals are, they'll have some longwinded explanation (after looking away embarrassedly) about what they think they want. The key is taking that longwinded explanation, trimming all the bullshit away and leaving just the core. I'm still working on my manifesto, but I'd love to know if any of you have one.

Being good-enough

I'm struggling with the concept of not being a 'perfect' mom anymore. My kids are in daycare for 102 hours a month now. It's 102 hours that they used to be with me, albeit while we were at football, the gym, tennis lessons, at home. I doubt if much of the 102 hours was actual one on one time with me, but still, I was there. Now I'm not there at all during those 102 hours and I'm not there during the time they're asleep at night. 

Perhaps it's time to revisit the concepts of Donald Winnicott's Good-Enough Mother. When I was in psychotherapy back in the mid-90s and agonising about being a 'bad parent' my psychiatrist presented me with Winnicott's work (The Child, The Family and the Outside World) as well as Alice Miller's Drama of Being a Child. I read through them and although I was able to analyse and rationalise the contents to myself I was never able to apply the concepts to my own life. Perhaps now that I'm older I'll be able to apply those concepts more effectively.

This ties in a bit to some of the things that my post on The Reader made me think about. The futility of making choices for other people and the inability I have to let go and allow those choices to happen. There's nothing harder sometimes than standing back and letting things take their course.

White and African

Still reading Blood River and I'm about half way through now. The immense grief I felt for Africa at the beginning of the book has abated a little, but I find that some passages really shriek at me. Like the one I read about how the Congo massacres in the 1960s run a black vein of fear through every white African, because we've heard about it from when we were little and it pulls on the 'them and us' divide that is instilled in us from birth.

When I was about 9 or 10 our white neighbours were held at gun point by black rebels in their house. The man was raped and tortured to death while the wife and their three kids cowered in a bathroom which was inaccesible from outside. They heard him screaming all night until he finally died at about 5 am. In the morning the party-line telephone rang and the news filtered slowly from farm to farm until finally it got to us. The first thing my mom said, standing in the passage in her candlewick dressing gown, tears streaming down her face, was 'my god, it's getting to be like the Congo here'.

Tim Butcher is quite astute in his observations about white Africans sometimes.

Last Sunday we went to the Kroller-Muller museum in the Hoge Veluwe. I had such a great time that I've been nervous about writing about it in case it tarnishes.

They have Seurats! The neo-impressionist paintings were my favourite, including the Pissarros. Another artist who was striking, yet weirdly not tied to any one style was Jan Toorop. After seeing his work I had to go Google him.

The current exhibition of photographs running alongside the main collection, entitled Nature as Artifice was really fascinating. The photographers use different techniques to capture the Dutch landscape, ranging from creating dioramas of the landscape and photographing it as if it were real to attaching a camera to a kite and taking photos by remote control at precisely the moment when the landscape becomes abstract. Again I found the secondary exhibition to be more interesting than the main collection, maybe because it's more current.

I was pretty stunned when I saw that there are paintings dating from 550 AD! I wonder if those people who painted them ever thought that there would be people standing looking at their work in a building so far removed from the monasteries of the 5th century? We are all so contained in our own 'now' that this as a possibility just seems absolutely surreal.

Not as surreal though as the discussion we had cycling back to the car park where we listened to the birdsong and then wondered aloud whether town birds go on vacation to the country in the summer ...

The museum cafe is lovely (beware the richness of the chocolate cake, but order the ham and cheese sandwich as the ham is some of the nicest I've ever tasted) and the surroundings are beautiful and unspoiled. This specific Sunday afternoon was part of one of the nicest days of my life. I started off depressed about Africa and spent the morning in tears but by the afternoon it had all turned to sunshine. Later on there was icecream- mine was melon, pear and peach and then we watched Juno. It's a nice movie but a bit overacted.

And for the next 52 Sundays, (more or less), take a look at this website (Dutch only, sorry). It's the website linked to a great book that takes you for a walk and a meal every Sunday to unusual locations in the Netherlands and Belgium. Now just to decide where to go this Sunday!

Also I have to share the Verve kick I'm on right now ...

I just started reading Tim Butcher's Blood River, based in the ruins of the Democratic Republic of Congo, formerly Zaire and formerly the Belgian Congo.

It depressed me. Especially when I read this article this morning.

I talked to B yesterday about taking the boys home to South Africa for Christmas this year and the conversation turned, as it does, to the stability of Africa. He says South Africa is like Zimbabwe was 12 years ago when we left. I don't know, I can't really tell. He mentioned rolling blackouts of electricity, which only started in Zimbabwe in 1997 or so I think, but which are common in South Africa now. Hearteningly, wikipedia has no entries for human rights abuses under the South Africa entry.

I try not to follow African news at all. Sokwanele is the only media I read about Zimbabwe and M reads the BBC and tells me what has been happening in Zimbabwe. He is always surprised that my attitude to the news of atrocities, shootings, mutilation and murder is indifferent at best and blase at worst. It's not that I don't care, it's that I have African apathy. No optimism = no disappointment.

My mom, on the phone last week, told me that she thinks that if South Africa cuts power to Zimbabwe something 'might happen'. I heard this irrational hopeful tone in her voice and my heart sank. How, after 28 years of watching Zimbabwe stumble, falter and fail can she have any kind of optimism at all?

People ask me all the time, 'why don't your parents come and live here?' as though removing one's parents from their home country, the country of which you are a third generation citizen, is that easy. 

On that note, my citizenship exam for the Netherlands will be on 11 July. Shortly after that I'll bury my past and say goodbye to my heritage, while I embrace orange culture and a world removed from steamy Africa. 

Should I summon my dream lover with yarrow under my pillow? Nine flowers or nine blades of grass?

I packed up all my unread books today. I don't need to buy a new book until 2010. Curiously, I got two copies of my bookclub book, The Book Thief,  from Amazon. My first thought was 'fuck, did I click 2x on that!?' then I saw it was an error and thought 'wow, I'm lucky.'

Midsummer's luck, maybe?

Never in my life had I considered tracking my period, until this year in March when I got kind of interested in knowing when it was going to happen next and whereabouts in my pms cycle I was. I have a calendar in my diary, provided kindly by Opzij magazine, (a feminist magazine here in Holland) which allows you to track and predict your menses based on when the last one started.

It gets better than that (and there is a reason I'm telling you this). Today I found, via browsing, a website called Mon.thly.info which sends you an email telling you when you'll be getting your period based on the dates you've entered in previously. I was able to enter five months of data and now the calendar will give me interesting details like which day and phase of my cycle I'm in, like this.

Today apparently I am on day 16, having ovulated on Wednesday and my cycle averages 28.2 days. If I'd wanted to make babies yesterday was do-it-day.

Imagine how useful this will be for planning when to get pregnant, for when you hit the menopause? Or when not to book your holidays? And aren't people just so clever sometimes?

Now someone needs to make a PMS calendar based on the same information except instead of your own email you enter in your boyfriend/boss/co-worker's emails and they get an email that week saying 'Beware of the bitch!'

'One minute I held the key, then the walls were closed on me ...' - Coldplay, Viva la Vida

I filled in my new 43 things list yesterday. I had an old one from 2006. I was surprised at how many of my goals were sort of non-tangible really non-achievable type of things. Obviously I wasn't listening in the bit where they told us how to set goals in school : Make them achievable dammit!

Achieved from my old list:

• Get my driver's licence. Yes!
• Lose 40 pounds. Done and more.
  
• Go to the gym at least three times a week. Not at the moment but I did for two years.
• Drink 8 glasses of water a day.
• Go vegetarian. Did that and then stopped, because I really do quite like being an omnivore.

My new list is here.

I'd love to know if you have a 43 things list too.

I've just finished reading Bernhard Schlink's The Reader.

M bought it for me in Waterstone's last time we were there. He mentioned the book while we were reading the cover of another but couldn't remember the author and then five minutes or so later we happened to pass a shelf and there it was. So he bought it for me. Who can ignore fate when it punches you in the face like that?

It was one of those books where I cried when I reached the end because there was no more story left. Bernhard Schlink has you, the reader, living the life of Michael Berg. You feel the emotional intensity of his passion for Hanna Schmitz and his grief at the revelations that lie around the corner in every page of this book. It's a love story set against the Holocaust and the Holocaust plays a central role, yet at the same time takes a back seat as the story of Michael and Hanna unfolds. Philosophical and yet curiously spare, I thought every sentence had meaning. Sometimes I skipped back a few pages just to read them again and try to absorb the bareness of the language and the heavy meaning that lay within each one.

One of the passages in the book which touched me really deeply and made me think was one on collective guilt. As a white 'daughter of Africa', (and I say that ironically), collective guilt, or 'white guilt' is my constant companion. White guilt is ever present, yet easily negated.

How many white people from Africa distance themselves from their backgrounds by saying 'Yes, my parents are terribly racist, but I'm not like that at all!'?  I know I'm guilty of this, because I truly believe I'm nothing like my parents generation, yet at the same time I am the product of my upbringing so I must accept, at some level, the similarities between me and them.

The burden of choice, made by the previous generation, regardless of their own personal involvement in that choice, weighs heavily. In a situation like that of the current Zimbabwe the pendulum eventually swings back and almost everyone who negated their background and distanced themselves from their past previously will now vociferously support the failure of black rule and quote statistics about how Zimbabwe was once the bread basket of Africa.

They, our parents, are collectively guilty of the crime of trying to protect a dream, whether ethically correct or otherwise, and we, as their descendants are collectively guilty just by the fact of being and of loving them. It's a bitter pill.

Bernhard Schlink says it better:

'I envied other students back then who had dissociated themselves from their parents and thus from the entire generation of perpetrators, voyeurs, and the wilfully blind, accomodators and accepters, thereby overcoming perhaps not their shame, but at least their suffering because of the shame. But what gave rise to the swaggering self-righteousness I so often encountered among these students? How could one feel guilt and shame, and at the same time parade one's self-righteousness? Was their dissociation of themselves from their parents mere rhetoric: sounds and noise that were supposed to drown out the fact that their love for their parents made them irrevocably complicit in their crimes?'

The other questions raised in the book are philosophical and deal with the responsibility of making choices and decisions and especially those that involve others. Michael talks to his father about his dilemma with revealing the secret that could have changed the future for Hanna. His father says:

'Don't you remember how furious you would get as a little boy when Mama knew best what was good for you? Even how far one can act like this with children is a real problem. It is a philosophical problem, but philosophy does not concern itself  with children. ...But with adults I unfortunately see no justification for setting other people's views of what is good for them above their own ideas of what is good for themselves. ... We're not talking about happiness, we're talking about dignity and freedom. Even as a little boy you knew the difference. It was no comfort to you that your mother was always right.'

This part made me reflect on the futility of making choices for other people. There's a whole spectrum of reasons why we might make choices for someone else, from absolving them of responsibility to actually believing we might be doing the right thing. In the end doing so does nothing except strip both parties of any dignity they might have had.

This book was deeply thought-provoking and I urge you to read it. If not for the philosophy, then for the story and the extreme clarity of the language.

Links to articles about The Reader or it's author:

NY Times
The Guardian

Reviews of Bernhard Schlink's new novel, Homecoming:

The Guardian
LA Times

I'd like to read Flights of Love next, as described in this review.

The Reader on Amazon.

So even I might just have a bit of football fever now...

These are the flags decorating the street outside my friend's house in Utrecht.

Cool huh?

I started reading Charlotte's Web about two years ago I suppose and was immediately captivated. Charlotte is writting a book, a book which, when it's published, I'll be first in the queue to buy. Then after I've bought it I'll be driving to the Burg to get it signed (all this despite the fact that I am terrified of driving and the idea of the autobahn fills me with dread).

Charlotte reads and reads and has grown up travel adventures.  When I discovered her blog I think I spent a day and a night just reading and reading and reading. 

It's funny, you know, (apparently that's my catch phrase for when I'm about to deliver something I've been thinking about for a while), but almost everyone I know who I really really like are people that have been transplanted in some way from what's familiar to them into a situation where they've had to re-learn everything they know.

I hope, one day, to visit Charlotte in The Burg and drink a few very very large glasses of something bubbly in her garden, while barbecuing, preferably making lots of smoke to annoy the neighbours.

Charlotte's Web

Chloe is a new blog friend of mine from this year.

She lives in Greece and takes fantastic photos. She writes about interesting things like how to be irresponsible while appearing to be responsible, the stuff people say on buses, admits to buying things she shouldn't buy, has a category on her blog called My Malevolent Disposition, (I have one too  - disposition not category - funny thing that ...), and a thing for James McAvoy.

I like her. Hope you like her too.

Oh, and Coldplay's new album was out yesterday... got it yet?

The Froth

Jeanne is South African. She's also an accomplished cook and runs a fascinating blog called Cooksister in addition to a busy day job. I 'met' Jeanne about two years ago when I stumbled upon her blog and we started chatting via email on and off and commenting here and there on each other's blogs.

We share so much cultural background and our tastes in food are uncannily the same. Her love for fun, barbecues, the great outdoors, anything edible, the joy she so clearly takes in cooking, photographing and writing about what she makes in a really great, really accessible style is contagious. The recipes really work and the food Jeanne makes is clean, non-fussy, with really clear flavours on the palate.

Then there's the expat angle where she shares some of the reasons she started blogging, which are much the same as the reasons I originally started to write - the isolation of being away from everything you know and the desire to keep up, somehow or another with your family.

She's a media darling too!

Cooksister.com

'I've looked for love in stranger places.' - Melee, Built to Last

The distance from Amsterdam Schiphol to Harare Kutsaga is approximately 5109 miles or 8222 kilometers. Flying time is approximately 17 hours including stopovers, either in Nairobi or Johannesburg or both.

The approximate number of days since I last saw my parents is 2008.  There were approx. 2191 days between that visit and the one before.

London - Harare cheapest fare is around 627 euros.

There are 120 days until my dad turns 70. So I'll be up 63 days if I can get back in time...

I'd like to introduce you to Francine. For the longest time I've been watching her life in pictures and reading her stories about her babies and her life.

I feel a weird sense of longing when I read about her days and see how much care she takes to enjoy the little things, to capture the moments that pass me by, when I could be capturing them much the same as she does. She combines her family and her work almost seamlessly whereas I feel like I flounder, a fish out of water, trying to keep myself from drowning.

I used to feel immensely envious of the love that she and Peter have after so many years together. They're obviously still deeply in love after all this time and just how on earth do you do that?

I met Francine in September 2007 and she is just like she is on the screen, a soft-hearted, emotional person who I can't imagine being anything other than lovely.

Stukje bij Beetje

I've had this odd hungry feeling recently, like I can't quite get what I want. Or there's some hollow space that needs filling or something. If I knew what it was I'd sort it out. I know it's an eating disorder thing, but I've been looking in cupboards for things to eat, trying out all kinds of things and not being actually happy with anything I've put in my mouth. Yesterday I had cereal for lunch and seriously considered oatmeal porridge for dinner. At 9 pm I had bread and jam with no real excuse.

I've worked it out though: what I really want is my mom. I have really vivid memories of some of my mom's comfort eating things, mostly after waking up from a nap in the afternoon. One of her favourites was a tomato ketchup sandwich on white bread with a thick layer of margarine. She also liked leftover roast potatoes straight from the fridge, but she really really liked leftover bread and butter pudding.

So because I can't have my mom here today I'm going to try to ring her instead, and while I do that I'll share my favourite recipes for her favourite pudding.

Bread and Butter Pudding (for microwave/combination)

75g butter
6 thick slices bread (I like using Fries suikerbrood)
100g raisins
45 ml sugar
grated zest of 1 orange
2 ml cinnamon
2 large eggs
300 ml milk

1. Preheat oven to 230C.
   
2. Butter the bread and cut into fingers. Layer in an ovenproof buttered dish with the raisins.
   
3. Sprinkle each layer with cinnamon, sugar and orange zest. Don't be stingy with the sprinkling, you can't have too much of these things.
4. Beat the eggs and milk together, then pour over the bread. Leave to soak for about 15 minutes but longer if you have the patience.
   
5. Bake on combination 6 (this is in a panasonic combi oven, if you have a different kind just wing it) for about 20 - 25 minutes until golden.
6. Serve hot with cream.

This recipe is nice because the combi cooking keeps the inside of the pudding moist. If you don't have a combi function here's a classic recipe from Robert Carrier, and from my mom's favourite book: Cooking for Friends. This is the one I used to have when I was growing up.

Robert Carrier's Bread and Butter Pudding

175g softened butter
12 slices thick cut white bread
4 tablespoons marmalade
juice and finely grated rind of 2 large oranges
juice and finely grated rind of 1 lemon
75g castor sugar
Custard:
400 ml milk
2 eggs
2 tablespoons castor sugar
4 tablespoons lightly whipped cream

1. Preheat oven to 200C.
2. Grease or spray a shallow 1 3/4 litre baking dish.
3. Spread slices with butter and marmalade and cut into triangles.
4. Combine juice and rinds in a bowl, add castor sugar and combine until dissolved.
5. Line bottom and sides of dish completely with triangles of bread dipping them into the orange syrup as you use them and arranging them buttered side up. Filled the lined dish with the remainder of the bread triangles, reserving a few for the top of the pudding.
6. Make the custard by heating the milk to just below boiling point then beat the eggs lightly and pour the hot milk onto them gradually, beating constantly. Return the mixture to the pan, add sugar and stir over a low heat until the custard thickens to the point where it will coat the back of the spoon.
7. Remove from the heat, cool slightly and stir in the cream.
8. Pour the custard over the bread in the baking dish, cut the remaining triangles in half and soak in the rest of the syrup and arrange on the top of the pudding. Pour the leftover syrup over the top.
9. Bake for 30 minutes or until crisp and golden on the outside with a soft creamy centre.

On January 26, 2007 I must have missed my mom too, because I just found this post, which has my own bread and butter pudding recipe in it.

So now you have three possible recipes, and I still miss my mom.

(Comments actually work again now, choose comment anonymously and fill in the fields.)

• I bought an epilator. It's a nice thing, once you get over the fact that instead of the 5 minutes in the shower doing your legs that it used to take you, it now takes half an hour to achieve the same result. And you end up with this ghastly uber-prickle situation whenever you get goosebumps. Nasty!
  
  
• I just paid my daycare bills all the way back to October. They hadn't billed me yet so I got a bill for 2600 euros in one go. Ouch. More shocking than the epilator.
  
  
• I had my hair cut short at my local hairdresser. This is the kind of hairdresser where you can't make an appointment but you have to wait in the queue. It cost 22 euros versus 60 at the middle-aged-lady hairdresser I went to before who cut my hair all wrong. The fancy-pants hairdresser I went to in Amsterdam was 150 euros and this haircut is better than any I had from either. I had to wait 2 hours for a place but still - score!
  
  
• When I was in the hairdressers one of the daycare workers came in. This is someone I've known for almost 6 years, since Seb started at pre-school here. She'd been fine all along until about a year and a half ago when I noticed that she was behaving oddly. Subsequently she started working at the daycare that the kids are at now and a few weeks ago I noticed that she was drunk when I picked up the kids. I reported it to the owner, and she was placed on office duty, away from the kids, and was supposedly getting some help. On Saturday when I saw her she was absolutely shit-faced.
  
  So, what to do now? Tell the owner of the daycare? Keep quiet? This is a difficult situation for me because part of me is sorry for her and part of me is still the little girl that had to deal with alcohol issues growing up.
  
  
• On Thursday I went to see Martha Wainwright in concert at Paradiso. It was good, but I was tired and she sort of went on and on a bit in some of the songs.
  
  Con: the going on and on.
  Pro: she looks like she's having a kicker orgasm during some of the songs. Go Martha.
  
  
• The next concert I have tickets for is Radiohead on 1 July. I'm considering Alanis on 13 June, but listening to some of the new songs I'm not so sure... some of them sound a bit nasty? Moratorium is ok. Here's a preview clip for the whole album. The thing about Alanis is that she makes me wonder if I'll ever grow up? I mean, it doesn't look like she has.
  
  
• It's almost the end of another school year. The kids finish school on the 27th June and then go into daycare for the summer. I'll be working mornings only while I recover from my neck injury, but they'll still be at daycare the majority of the time to allow me to rest. After the summer Joe goes to Group 3 and Seb to Group 6.
  
  They don't know about the divorce yet. They'll be going to a workshop in the summer where they'll be with other kids in the same situation and be encouraged to work through their feelings. I hope when we tell them that they'll be able to adjust quickly to their new situation and understand that they actually have more time with each of their parents, separately.
  
  
• Watched Atonement this weekend. Sad, but James McAvoy is a joy to behold. He was a joy in Shameless too. Chloe thinks so too.
  
  
• My new car is a Hyundai Getz 2005 model. It looks like this one. Same colour, just with a sunroof too. Nice huh? I'll try not to crash this one!
  
  
• Comments are still broken. They were never really intuitive with this version of Movable Type and now they're absolutely broken. Sorry! One day maybe I'll get around to fixing them. I've tried re-enabling comments but nothing works. Until then, you can mail me. Link in the sidebar.