Comfortable Disorientation

 

Gulp.  It's been a while...     I did consider starting a new blog altogether, or deleting the past - looking back over the old posts felt so strange - as I wasn't sure it made sense to continue.  But given that there was never really a defined point, I like the sense of continuity even after such a break.  Besides, I couldn't bare to give up the name. I've dropped "a place to put things" though - I find so many other places for that these days.

I won't bother filling in the gap. Anything salient will be obvious.

6 months

Where did 6 months go?  I have it all documented in endless photographs of Joseph but no idea what we've actually done with the time. 

Joe has been very busy growing and developing and at 6 months is beginning to categorise similar objects together.  I know this because tomorrow we're going to the Birkbeck Babylab so he can participate isn a study looking at what makes babies categorise different objects together. 

Today I also saw this new understanding in action.  While we were hanging out in the kitchen, he was staring at my mug.  At first I thought this was because it has Daffy on it and was reflecting in the shiny binUntil I noticed he kept turning his head and checking out Matt's Bugs mug on the table before coming back to Daffy and making little "ha!" noises as he switched views:

6 months is also when it's recommended to start offering food other than milk.  For the hell of it we're trying baby led weaning, so rather than spoon-feeding him pureed mush, we're giving him bits of the stuff we eat and are letting him go at it himself.  It's proving to be messy (very, very messy) but a whole lot of fun.

   

Parenting styles

Since Joseph made his arrival, the cat no longer has the run of the house. At night she's restricted to the kitchen and garden.  Matt and I have different methods of getting her off the sofa and into the kitchen before heading to bed.

I pick her up, give her a cuddle and carry her into the kitchen.

Matt encourages her to come into the kitchen of her own accord - by putting a small amount of food in her bowl and rattling it.

Hmmm...

Suburban and mumsy?

I'm struggling a bit with my self-image.  I feel like I've been unceremoniously booted out of my old life and identity and haven't yet settled into my new one. 

As I go on my daily walks around nappy valley, smiling and nodding at the other 30-something mums pushing their Quinnys/Bugaboos/PhilandTeds, I have never been more painfully aware of being a demographic.  It's only recently dawned on me that I've moved to suburbia, in my head it was just down the road from the gritty midpoint of Brixton-Stockwell-Clapham where I used to reside.

I no longer fit into my old clothes and as I slowly buy new ones I'm no longer sure of my style.  Is a new uniform in order or not?

There's a distinct lack of acceptable inspiration for my freshly evolving identity. I keep running into stereotypes I would rather back away from.  When it comes to mums of small babies the only images you ever really see are:

The Celebrity Mum:  I'm avoiding images of these at the moment. 

The Frazzled and Not Coping Mum:  The polar opposite to the celebrity mum, these run the full gamet from teenaged-single-mum-in-bedsit to previously-successful-and-together-professional-in-meltdown

The Poster Mum:  You see a lot of this sort of dewey skin-heavy idealised image in advertising and packaging. The Johnson's Mum if you like.  I think the idea is that the perfect innocence and purity of the baby somehow magically rubs off on it's mother.

The Nurturing Glow Mum:  This crops up mostly in health brochures particularly anything on breastfeeding.  It always feels a bit dated and 70's to me.

Oh and then there's the Yummy Mummy. Urgghh, don't even get me started on this one. The mere phrase manages to sound twee, smug and a bit ick all at once.

So you see, a lack of positively real images of mums.  Which is why the Be A Star campaign, intended to increase the number of breastfeeding young mums in Lancashire is so refreshing.  It's not often you see images of mums that are both real and aspirational.  There's nothing mumsy about these girls. Shame they're all so young!

How to buy technology

This is one of my occasional notes to self.

When buying technology - especially technology of the personal and portable kind - always, always let the heart rule the head.

This thought has been prompted by the rediscovery of my old friend the Nokia 8310 found languishing in a box full of wires* in a dark and dusty cupboard.

Gosh, I loved this phone.  I remember vividly the first time I saw one, sat outside a pub with my friends Gemma and Chris.  Chris, who always has the latest and greatest gadget, pulled his phone out of his pocket and Gemma and I exploded into a cacophony of cooing. Chris is quite a big bloke, and I have to say the 8310 seemed incongruous in his paws. In hindsight it really was a girl's phone.  But a beloved girl's phone at that.

I got my own as soon as I could, and kept it way longer than considered respectable by technology upgrade enthusiasts.  I eschewed camera phones for yonks because they were so damn ugly in comparison. I'd still use it now without a hint of embarrassment. In fact, I think I just might.

Every phone I've had since, including the one I have now, has been forgettable.  For all the functions and features, each has disappointed.  All were head choices, selected after a process of research and semi-rational comparison, all left me feeling flat and wistful.

Perhaps the iPhone will reignite phone delight?  The wonderful Stephen Fry's description is the most compelling piece of persuasion I've seen for it so far...

"Beauty. Charm. Delight. Excitement. Ooh. Aah. Wow! Let me at it."

* I can't describe the sense of dejection and depression a big box full of wires gives me. Wires and cables are one of the most miserable aspects of modern life. If I ruled the World wires, cables chargers and the like would come in a rainbow of colours, textures and patterns and be sold and exchanged in haberdasheries like ribbons.  I like ribbons a lot, they make me very happy.

Superstition and luck

On Wednesday The Times ran a Halloween-themed article about the superstitions and beliefs of the British public.  A survey had been conducted by Ben Schott and Ipsos Mori and for the most part the results were fairly predictable. A good proportion of us believe in all sorts of twaddle (like ghosts 38%, extra terrestrials 31% and guardian angels 38%), with women, tabloid readers and those of C2DE socio-economic grades more likely to believe in the paranormal than their male, broadsheet reading, professional counterparts. 

Apparantly, only 15% of us believe that the number 13 is unlucky.  I say apparantly because on the last two occasions I've flown, I've found myself sitting in row 13 having forgotten to check in early and having to make do with the seats not desired by my fellow passengers. Given that this was business class on BA, it's reasonable to assume that many of these row-13 avoiders were male professionals, though perhaps not British, admittedly.  This might be explained by the fact that quite a lot of us believe in fate (64%). While we know 13 is just a number and that considering it unlucky is silly (especially when we're responding to a questionnaire), willfully choosing to sit in seat 13 still feels like a wanton and unneccesary provocation of fate.  It doesn't really make sense, but then people often don't.

I was tickled by how many of us physically knock on wood (51%). This is something I do without thinking. What with the house move and the pregnancy I've been doing it all the time recently.  Of course, I don't really believe it has any luck-inducing benefits. It's just a thing I do when I find myself talking about desired future outcomes as if they're already in the bag. It's a way of acknowledging that I know I'm getting ahead of myself, counting chickens before they've hatched.  If I'm completely honest, a little bit of me believes that reaching to touch something wooden may help ward off any bad luck I might encouraged by being so presumptuous.

Hypnosis and headaches

As a student I took a mini-course in hypnosis.  One of the psychology lecturers offered it as a no-credit extra for those interested or considering using hypnotherapy in their dissertations.  I signed up simply because I was curious, besides, it just seemed a cool thing to learn.

The opening paragraph in the lecturer's typed course notes - rediscovered in my attempts to preempt house-move chaos - asserts that "any reasonably intelligent person can be hypnotised provided they are willing....equally, any reasonably intelligent person can induce hypnosis in many people". Which is a little worrying, as I turned out to be rubbish at it. 

It gets worse; further down the page we learn "much of hypnosis depends on empathy, much more depends on mutual trust, and a great deal depends upon careful observation" I pride myself on my empathetic sensitivity, and would be moderately miffed to think it was a lack of these abilities causing my failure.  Fortunately, solace is to be found: "Over and above all these, your success ultimately rests on your authority and confidence". This was undoubtedly where I fell down, I was up for playful experimentation but I never really believed I had the power or persuasiveness to convince someone else to do anything more than pretend to be hypnotised.

Despite my lack of success as a hypnotist, the course proved useful. If nothing else, It gave me a method for treating headaches which I continue to use to this day.  The idea is to get yourself into a deeply relaxed but conscious state - through self hypnosis, though I'm sure any other good relaxation technique would suffice - and then concentrate on visualising the headache, really trying to see it as a physical entity. So, you might try to pinpoint the position of the pain inside your head (which is harder than it sounds as they tend to start moving around as soon as you do this), and to ascertain the exact shape colour and texture of the headache, and so on.

I'm not sure whether there's any theory behind why this should work to soothe an aching head, but in my experience it works.  Though perhaps not as reliably as a couple of decent painkillers.  I've always liked to imagine that it's the impossibility of the task that takes away the headache's power; as aches don't really have a shape or a colour, trying to 'see' such things, just highlights the fact that there's nothing really there.

I was planning to make a link between this and why I've found blogging a struggle recently, but now I've got here the link doesn't really work.  Never mind.

Who says qual researchers don't move with the times?

An office clearout reveals a nice archive of voice-recording technology. These days, most of us are using a new-fangled digital recorder/USB thing like this:

But our first foray into digital was using mini-disk recorders.  These proved unreliable and were a nightmare to use, we ended up with a locker-full that never got used as everyone reverted to tape versions:

In my career I've loved and lost a fair few classic tape recorders like this.  I generally opted for the ones where you could playback at double speed:

   

I know many a quallie who gets misty-eyed over the classic Walkman Professional. It has to be said, it's remain the most dependably reliable piece of kit - I've never known one to fail or break:

Finally, we have a couple of these perfectly preserved at the back of a locker.  I used to have one at home, but I've never used one professionally.

Home

We're in the process of trying to make all the pieces of the jigsaw fit together in order that we can move home.

We've had to face people rejecting the place that embodies home for us as not being right or good enough for them - which hurts even though I know it's silly to take it personally.  At the same time we've been nosing around other people's homes - kind of like the day job, but the houses are generally tidier - while building up a collaborative vision for what we want 'home' to look and feel like for us over the next few years (we're expecting it to involve an extra family member - due February). 

So when I caught Ikea's new TV ad this morning it really touched a nerve. 

Then tonight I stumbled upon the UK at Home website,  a collaborative photo journalism project being conducted over the next week exploring the richness and diversity of home in the UK. There's going to be a TV programme and a great, big, juicy book coming out of this as well as an online collection - exciting huh?

Well it excited me, so much so that I almost didn't spot that Ikea are the sponsor.

Under the wallpaper

It's been a while... I guess I sort of slipped out of the habit of posting. I've been rather preoccupied, and I'm still trying to make up my mind whether or not to post about my preoccupations.

In the meantime, I've been prompted into posting as I need somewhere to put these photos:

In case it's hard to read, back in '92 and clearly mindful of recording for posterity I wrote "Helen Louise Brook admired Sophies wallpaper 11/4/92. Aged 16"

Sophie (who now works for the government and was once approvingly admired by our current PM for her clear appreciation of wine) had more political matters on her mind.

"The conservatives have just won for the 4th time. Stuff Labour! (Neil K has resigned - ginger haired idiot). (9.4.92) Tories 4 Lobour 0. Bella is 4 and she is a pain"

I have no memory of writing this, or of the wallpaper. Sophie has no memory of ever being pro-Tory - or so she claims...