Glorious mysteries

We attended a funeral for J., Karin’s kindly old colleague.

“J. and I used to talk hockey,” said the priest. “Sometimes joyfully, sometimes with a little griping.”

That was about it for reminiscing about J. (Reminiscing is done at the wake, apparently.) The priest and mourners then prayed the Glorious Mysteries, in which are included:

• one Apostle’s Creed
• six Our Fathers
• six Glory Bes
• five Oh My Jesuses
• fifty-three Hail Marys
• other formulae

My heart sank around the thirtieth Hail Mary. Was the priest shooting for one hundred? Mercifully, no.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I finished reading the Adrian Mole series. It gave me much pleasure.

I’ve begun reading The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side. It features Miss Jane Marple and is set in the classic murder-village of St. Mary Mead. When I finish, I’ll’ve read all sixty-six of Dame Agatha’s crime novels.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Daniel, somehow, is learning to speak in French.

Bonjour, Daddy, he grins. Ça va.

Not bad for not having been taught. And his accent is spot-on.

Peanuts PDFs; UK map; Midwestern wedding

All of the Peanuts strips, PDF format, $25. Offer ends in 12 days.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

My UK wall map – a Christmas gift from my father-in-law – has been framed at last in a heavy, wooden contraption from Goodwill. Karin, the handy one, did the framing. My idea is to hang the map next to the TV so that we can check it when we watch homicidal/​agricultural/​veterinary programs, e.g. our latest, The Highland Vet.

Current reading: François Mauriac, Genetrix; Sue Townsend, Adrian Mole: The Prostrate Years (the last book in the series). And lots of other books.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I should describe the wedding we attended on Sunday. Samuel bore the rings with aplomb. The much younger flower girl lagged behind, so Samuel retraced his steps, grabbed some petals, and strewed them for her. All else went according to the script: the brief vowing ceremony; the post-vowing, pre-dining interlude for photos; the popcorn and donut tables; the soda and liquor booths; the dinner rolls, sweet corn, and mashed potatoes; the couple’s dance, the bride’s dance with her father, and the groom’s with his mother; and the Cha-Cha Slide. There was no removal of the garter with teeth – none we stayed for, anyway. When we left, I was dead-tired. I’d held squirmy Abel for several hours. It was as wearying as if I’d spent the day moving house.

Samuel and Daniel loved the Cha-Cha Slide; their grandpa danced it with them. That ex-DJ was in his element. I’ve not met a more ardent ritual-relisher.

Springtime (pre-equinox)

Loud t-storm; air so warm, we have windows open. Earlier, when Samuel’s school bus arrived, he paced the aisle, unwilling to disembark in what was then a light rain. I had to climb aboard to coax him out. And earlier still, I’d gone with Karin, Abel, and Daniel to meet the boys’ new doctor (the previous one, a Seventh-day Adventist, has moved to Guam for a three-year religious sojourn). Upon our return to Toad Hall, the alarm was blaring. It took us an age to turn it off. Daniel ran down the block, did a round of hopscotch, and ran back.

I’m tempted to try reading Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, but the schedule is just too packed.

“He – for there could be no doubt about his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it – was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters.”

(The opening lines.)

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I’m reading Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction, set just before Britain’s 2003 invasion of Iraq. Adrian is a die-hard Blair supporter. He believes there will be no war because that’s what Blair tells Britain. Adrian’s 17-year-old son Glenn has joined up and trains in Aldershot, running in full battle-dress on builder’s sand. Adrian has just used a Barclaycard blank check (29% interest) to obtain down payment funds (I forget how many thousands of pounds) for his trendy canalside loft, which he is furnishing on store credit (almost £10,000 at 20% interest). Moreover, his parents have sold their house to a developer and bought a pig-sty to convert, by “DIY” methods, into their new dwelling (“The Piggeries”). Meanwhile they live in a tent.

It’s a cheap trick, relaying what’s in other people’s books, but this stuff is too good to keep quiet about.

Adrian Mole: The cappuccino years

At 10:00pm not-quite-four-year-old Daniel runs through the house like a madman, or a young cat. So he does most nights.

So Samuel used to do. But now he must rise for Kindergarten, and has conditioned himself to retire before eight o’clock.

Abel, at thirteen months, sleeps last. He has taken a turn toward ultraviolence.

Adrian Mole is in his fifth book. He is thirty years old. He has two sons. One of them, he recognizes as his son. The reader recognizes them both. Adrian isn’t the most self-aware diarist.

It’s the 1990s. Blair is the new Prime Minister. Adrian works as an offal chef at Hoi Polloi, a Tory restaurant. In his spare time he scripts an unsold radio serial, The Windsors, about the Royal Family. Princess Diana’s death scuttles Adrian’s plot. Adrian’s own life seems plotless, notwithstanding his acquisition of sons.

His parents also are chronic failures – after a livelier fashion (even what with Adrian’s father’s depression). The most impressive figure in this book is Adrian’s mother, who unexpectedly succeeds as a ghostwriter, spinkling pages with unsolicited references to Germaine Greer (author of The Female Eunuch).

“Philistines” always succeed where Adrian fails.

Adrian considers writing to be his vocation. Thus he wastes time agonizing over semicolons.

Pity. He is eloquent.

I sometimes wish I lived in pre-feminist times when if a man washed a teaspoon he was regarded as “a big Jessie.” It must have been great when women did all the work, and men just lolled about reading the paper.

I asked my father about those days when we were preparing the Brussels sprouts, the carrots and the potatoes, etc., etc. His eyes took on a faraway misty look. “It was a golden age,” he said, almost choking with emotion. “I’m only sorry that you never lived to see it as an adult man. I’d come home from work, my dinner would be on the table, my shirts ironed, my socks in balls. I didn’t know how to turn the stove on, let alone cook on the bleeding thing.” His eyes then narrowed, his voice became a hiss as he said, “That bloody Germaine Greer ruined my life. Your mother was never the same after reading that bleeding book.”

Bear in mind that Adrian is on the liberal end of the political spectrum.

I reflected on his feelings as I chopped vegetables for our “hobo’s stew.”

Closing credits

Everyone in the house has been ill. We’ve missed church two Sundays. We did go to a special Christmas service in the middle of the week (it seemed, briefly, that we were OK).

My fever broke last night. I’m still coughing. Please excuse the less-than-effusive presentation of this year’s credits list.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

I thank:

Karin;

Jasper and Ziva;

Samuel, Daniel, and Abel;

other relations;

Samuel’s teachers and bus driver;

Daniel’s teachers (the Numberblocks);

our church;

our neighbors;

our librarians;

my reading group;

the Psmiths, for their book reviews (see their latest);

fontsmiths, for their fonts;

poets, for their poems;

Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, for domestic fiction;

Sue Townsend, for her “Adrian Mole” books (see, also, the “secret diary” of fourteen-year-old Margaret Thatcher …

… a work of hilarity, not charity);

the Ecuadorian national soccer team – especially, Moisés Caicedo, Pervis Estupiñán (whose year was actually rather poor), Alan Franco, Hernán Galíndez, Piero Hincapié, Willian Pacho, and Enner Valencia;

the Criterion Channel, especially for the Chinese crime dramas Black Coal, Thin Ice (now unavailable) (set in Harbin) and Only the River Flows (rural Jiangxi);

the Fox Corporation (!) for Tubi – especially, for Crime Stories, Da Vinci’s Inquest, From Hell (now unavailable), Lake Mungo, Looney Tunes, Tom and Jerry (esp. cartoons with Droopy), and, way back in February, the Super Bowl;

just about every streaming service, for Peppa Pig;

Goodwill Industries, for books and stretchpants;

Jarritos, especially for Mineragua;

and

Taco Bell, for soft tacos with potatoes, lettuce, cheese, spicy sauce, and supplemental guacamole.

December’s poems

Say it isn’t so! Loveless by My Bloody Valentine has been removed from Spotify.

John-Paul: “What’s Spotify even for, if Loveless isn’t included?”

Karin: “A lot, considering how many hours Spotify is used in this house.”

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Here are reggae lyrics from The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole. Bear in mind, the diarist/​poet is in his younger teens.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Hear what he saying by A. Mole

Sisters and Brothers listen to Jah,

Hear his words from near and far,

Haile Selassie he sit on the throne.

Hear what he saying. Hear what he saying. (Repeated 10 times.)

JAH! JAH! JAH!

Rise up and follow Selassie, the king.

A new tomorrow to you he will bring. (Repeat.)

E-thi-o-pi-a,

He’ll bring new hope to ya.

Hear what he saying. Hear what he saying. (Repeated 20 times.)

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Not a Christmas poem, exactly, but certain themes are characteristic of the season.

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Another quasi-Christmas poem:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Little boy, O so small,

Please don’t pull upon my mole.

It’s attachèd to my neck.

When you pull, it hurts like heck.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Karin wrote it.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Mother Goose:

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

When good King Arthur ruled this land,

He was a goodly King;

He bought three pecks of barley-meal,

To make a bag-pudding.

A bag-pudding the King did make,

And stuffed it well with plums,

And in it put great lumps of fat,

As big as my two thumbs.

The King and Queen did eat thereof,

And noblemen beside;

And what they could not eat that night,

The Queen next morning fried.

⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯⎯

Not only have I run out of “mole” poems, I must give up the “Christmas” pretense.

Happy birthday to Abel

He turned one. He slept most of the day because the doctor gave him five shots.

More appealing, if less vital, were these gifts:

Cupcakes.

Onesies (i.e., bodysuits).

Wagon, Radio Flyer, plastic, small. For giving rides to stuffed animals. (Did I mention he walks now?)

Dog, white with black spots, plastic, noise-making, profoundly disturbing to Samuel.

Literature: Fortunately, by Remy Charlip. Not really meant for Abel’s age-group (he doesn’t object). Amusing to Samuel. Mildly disturbing to Daniel. Both reactions are correct.

Most of these gifts were from Karin’s dad’s family.

Abel was to have had a little party at my parents’ house, but my mom slipped on some ice and broke her arm. She’ll have surgery later this week. Last night, when I called, she was in high spirits: adequately drugged, surrounded by other progeny.

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Here is another quote about the postman Courtney Elliot, from The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole:

Courtney Elliot has offered to give me private tuition for my “O” levels. It seems he is a Doctor of Philosophy who left academic life after a quarrel in a university common room about the allocation of new chairs. Apparently he was promised a chair and didn’t get it.

It seems a trivial thing to leave a good job for. After all, one chair is very much like another. But then I am an existentialist to whom nothing really matters.

I don’t care which chair I sit in.

I don’t think I would leave a university if I didn’t get a Chair, but I might if I didn’t get a chair. Some intellectuals (e.g., Victor Hugo, Sam the Architect) stand before a desk to work, but I’m not so vigorous as to do that.

Not just any chair would do. I would need a sofa, or at least an armchair from Goodwill.

Postmen vs. dogs, pt. 2

(Cf. “Dumb Witness,” the entry before last.)

From the second “Adrian Mole” book (The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole):

Monday June 14th
Moon’s Last Quarter

Our usual postman has been replaced by another one called Courtney Elliot. We know his name because he knocked on the door and introduced himself. He is certainly no run-of-the-mill postman, he wears a ruffled shirt and a red-spotted bow tie with his grey uniform.

He invited himself into the kitchen and asked to be introduced to the dog. When the dog had been brought in from the back garden Courtney looked it in the eye and said, “Hail fellow, well met.” Don’t ask me what it means; all I know is that our dog rolled over and let Courtney tickle its belly. Courtney refused a cup of instant coffee, saying that he only drank fresh-ground Brazilian, then he gave my father the letters saying, “One from the Inland Revenue I fear, Mr Mole,” tipped his hat to my mother and left. The letter was from the tax office. It was to tell my father that they had “received information” that during the previous tax year he had been running a spice rack construction company … from his premises, but that they had no record of such a business and so could he fill in the enclosed form? My father said, “Some rotten sod’s shopped me to the tax!” I went off to school. On the way I saw Courtney coming out of the Singhs’ eating a chapati.

Did you know that the first two books made Sue Townsend “the bestselling novelist of the 1980s?” (according to the author bio). (Would that be YA novelist, British novelist, or novelist full stop? No idea.)

Reading report

Our first snowfall. Mary is polling the eight siblings and spouses – five of whom work for the schools – as to whether tomorrow’s school hours will be (a) normal, (b) truncated, or (c) canceled. My money is on (a). Not that money has been pooled. The prize is bragging rights.

UPDATE: It’s (b). I won’t have to go out early to put Samuel on the bus.

(I’ll have to drag Samuel and the other children down the snowy block two hours later, since Karin will’ve gone to work and I can’t leave Daniel and Abel at home.)

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My reading year is half over and I’ve completed just one-third of the intended total. I’ll have to devote the rest of the year to kiddie novels.

Eve Titus’s Basil of Baker Street, a.k.a. The Great Mouse Detective, will be my second “mouse” book of the year.

Later, I may attempt the “Watership Down” series, which is about rabbits.

(It’s time someone wrote a capybara epic. Or does one already exist?)

I also have begun reading the eight-novel “Adrian Mole” series: hugely popular in Britain, neglected in the USA, unknown to me until some months ago. The first book is very proto-Dog-in-Night-Time (there’s even a hapless cur). Except, the narrator isn’t neurodifferent, he’s just an ordinary, awful thirteen-year-old boy. He’s not literally a mole or any sort of vermin. The book also has things in common with Mike Leigh’s movies, and (I suppose) with What Maisie Knew.

I also must read two Agatha Christies/​Mary Westmacotts per month; and I’m chipping away at my second Ed McBain police procedural, Give the Boys a Great Big Hand (a title which, morbidly enough, is meant to be taken literally).

As for the group’s reading, six weeks have been allocated to Uncle Tom’s Cabin and associated texts. I also continue to read Austen and Trollope. In short, everything I’m reading, except the rather acid Mansfield Park, has broad, crowdpleasing, page-turning appeal; all the fiction, anyway.