The second instalment of the DI Erica Martin series offers another slice of quality crime. Martin faces a "perfect storm" of a murder; so many suspects, so many motives, and a victim who is even nastier than the killer. These threads are all tied up with string in a satisfying conclusion.
A God in Ruins, Kate Atkinson
If the previous, companion novel Life After Life is about, well, life... then A God In Ruins is about death. Melancholy pervades the many overlapping stories of four generations of the Todd family. Atkinson's command of structure allows us to move around in time to span almost a century of Teddy Todd's life; but we return again and again to WW2, to Teddy's role in Bomber Command, with the circular narrative (plus layer upon layer of imagery and motifs) delivering the same sense of inevitability as the central plot device of rebirth in Life After Life. Why? Why circle around one core experience of an unexceptional (for those swept into WW2) man's life? It's not simply a gimmicky plot device, surely? No, Atkinson has a point to make and saves it for the closing pages, when her writing is breath-taking (literally, I held my breath for about four pages) and beautiful and furious.
Expat Living: New Zealand with kids
FOLLOWING ONE OF OUR OF BEST FAMILY HOLIDAYS EVER, I WAS INSPIRED TO WRITE THIS PIECE ABOUT NEW ZEALAND'S SOUTH ISLAND FOR EXPAT LIVING MAGAZINE
At first glance, New Zealand’s South Island looks like heaven for a road trip: chilling on sandy beaches and glaciers, tramping through rainforests and vineyards, inhaling fresh air and eating even fresher seafood.
But then my kids photo-bomb this idyllic scene.
The soundtrack retunes to squabbling, the freedom of the open road disappears in a puff of mealtimes and toilet breaks, the compass points to a suitcase that needs to be unpacked and repacked every day.
Only a unique combination of military-style preparation and laid-back Kiwi charm could navigate my family along the road to hell.
How Many Toys Do Your Children Need?
According to all almost everyone I interviewed for this BBC feature - children don't need many toys at all. OK, this message won't make me popular with children, grandparents or Toys R Us at Christmas... just call me Scrooge.
Read moreAnd my life is complete
There’s always something - an invisible thread - that ties an expat to the motherland. This bond often manifests itself in food.
Read moreDragons Alive - in Toa Payoh
I wish I’d come to Singapore in the ‘70s. First, to get some blessed relief from hard-wearing, heat-retaining, head-to-toe corduroy... and, second, to see the legendary mosaic playgrounds in their heyday.
Read moreTiong Bahru
The green East West line takes you to Tiong Bahru, quite the hippest hipster hangout with its art deco architecture and frothy coffees. A gem of a find for me is Books Actually, one of those rare independent book stores that gets one all enpassioned, stroking the covers and sniffing the ink.
Read moreInto the Art Garden at Bras Basah
Singapore keeps giving me deja vu. I spend a lot of time standing around thinking, ‘hang on, I’ve been here before’. And then I have to work out whether that was six years ago when I last lived here, or six minutes ago and I’m lost and driving round in circles.
Read moreBugis - jump off for Haji Lane
A lot changes in a little time in Singapore - coming back after a 6/7 year hiatus, it is very much same same but different. For one thing, hipster is now mainstream. Counter culture has arrived in a vintage dress, holding a granny's handbag, dating a skinny bloke in a daft hat. Emerging from Bugis MRT, a shopper has a stark lifestyle choice: enter the mainstream world of Bugis Junction or escape into the indie land of Haji Lane.
Read moreToa Payoh
My home station on the MRT is Toa Payoh. Toe-PIE-oh... only you have to say the ‘toe’ part as fast as is humanly possible, making it more like t’PIE-o. Toa Payoh was the first ever stop on the MRT map - Singapore’s subterranean railway opened in 1987 with a 6km stretch of track from here to Yio Chu Kang.
yellow - YELLOW
MRT = Mass Rapid Transport… everything is rapid in Singapore - like the growth of the MRT. There’s also an emphasis on mass, in the sense of ‘for the masses’, which brings me back to Toa Payoh.
Around 85% of Singaporeans live in public housing in the form of tower blocks in model towns, the like of which failed spectacularly in England but (in a classic case of student surpassing master) succeeded in Singapore.
Toa Payoh Town was the first to be entirely purpose-built by the Housing Development Board. And its convenient little high street - actually a few streets lined with all manner of chain- and mom-and-pop shops where I've bought everything from shampoo to a diamond - is thriving. Tell that to Telford.
Blk 170 Lor 1
The HDB arrived in Toa Payoh - the name is Hokkien for ‘big swamp’ - in the 60s, when the area was said to be as rough as Chicago, and most of the residents still lived kampong-style in attap houses. Wooden huts, thatched roofs, stilts to stay out of that ‘big swamp’.
Out on my balcony - 50 years on and 31-storeys up - there are no echoes of the kampong. Traffic is snarling on the PIE, brakes like hundreds of red eyes. I see street lights, flood lights, head lights, neon lights, traffic lights, dreamy submerged swimming pool lights, even the orange light of a gas flare off Malaysia - but no kerosene lamps. If I close my eyes, the cicadas and lapping water could suggest a swamp… but a siren, a TV set, and the little German-sounding bell belonging to a convent school below break the spell.
In the vanguard of the HDB and the MRT, Toa Payoh was a pioneer in the mass, rapid transport of Singapore into the future. “One of Modernisation’s / first ports of calls”, as the poet Koh Buck Song has it.
taste of the kampong in blk 169
There are many other reasons to visit Toa Payoh and not just transit at the bus interchange: the remaining dragon playgrounds, the excellent public library with its special kids’ area, the oldest Buddhist temple in Singapore, and a suggestion that the Toa Payoh Long House popiah might just be the best in the country. I’d say “I’ll be back” but I’m already here.
*** I don't have permission to reproduce it, so I won't, but the National Heritage Board has a wonderful photo of the attap houses in Toa Payoh with the new HDB towers in the background taken in 1968.
Never take fashion advice from a toddler
My four-year-old dresses much better than I do. The Curly Girlie’s wardrobe is a dream: a perfect outfit for any occasion and the shoes to match. It’s different for little girls. Fashion is a playground when you’re four.
Read morePoo diving
On holiday in Spain, I was faced with the choice between paying to empty and clean a medium-sized swimming pool or retrieve Alpha Blondie’s poo armed only with a pair of goggles and a sieve.
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Have a butcher's at this...
This post is apropos of nothing more than my spotting something this morning that I think is too cool not to share. In my local town, Winterthur, this cunning window display. A French boucherie? Mais non, regard-toi de plus prés... it's a wool shop on Metzgasse or 'Butcher Street'. Such a funky nod to this shop's historic roots. J'adore... even if I am veggie!
Read moreI think it might be Art
T’internet has let me down. I was hoping to find a convincingly authoritative site about the psychology behind toddlers’ drawings and/or colour associations. Nothing... Come on hippy, psycho-babbler bloggers, get with it.
It’s all because of two-year-old Alpha Blondie’s drawings this week. I should really say ‘portraits’ rather than drawings - the kid made me pose for them.
‘Mummy, you stand, I draw you. Stand up! Stand! Stand UP!’
‘Alright, alright, I hear you...’ *jeez*
Then he grabbed a pen and scored black lines down the page. After a few seconds I assumed he was just scribbling and I wandered off, but...
‘Mummy! You STAND, I DRAWING you.’
I froze. This is all new for Alphie, one of those sudden developments that signals a new door opening in the brain: yesterday - he scribbled, today - he represents what he sees.
The question is, what does he see? And that’s why I want an art psychologist...
Over and over again, he draws Mummy with dozens of legs and even more eyes. For the most part, I am brown.
Then he gets another piece of paper and draws an orange blob, which is Mummy, then a purple blob for himself and a yellow blob for his big sister. Daddy is blue. He inspects it for a while and then says, ‘No,’ and changes the Mummy blob from orange to brown. So I am definitely brown.
Read moreMore reasons to be cheerful
29 May: In response to my Reasons to be Cheerful blog from yesterday, Lycra Mum quite rightly commented that raising children offers ‘perks’ that make amends for not being paid to do the job. I wholeheartedly agree - I don’t want to be ‘compensated’ for bringing up my kids. But then, but then... there’s something about not being paid that rankles. A job without a salary isn’t a job, is it? It’s a hobby. Today I read this on Woogs World, where guest blogger Annabel Candy inadvertently summed it up perfectly: 'even though we do the most important and hardest job in the world we're not paid for it, so some people tend to think of mothers as women who aren't making a useful or valuable contribution to society.' Yeah, what she said! I'm not advocating for Mothers to be paid, but it would be nice to be valued.
Reasons to be cheerful
According to researchers this week I have two good reasons to be miserable.
Read more‘Do you love me more than my brother?’
question_mark_block
This is a trick question. There is no right answer. It ranks alongside, “does my bottom look big in this?” and “Mummy, where do babies come from?” as queries that should be side-stepped at all costs. Last time I got drawn into the ‘where was I before I was born?’ discussion - with Curly Girlie who was two at the time - my answer covered childbirth, God, the theory of evolution and, if memory serves me right, Islam. Now, whenever Curly mentions ‘that man who sees us all the time’, I have to reassure myself that she doesn’t mean some lurking perv, but the rather more benign presence of God.
Following the same conversation, she still - two years on - refers to the time ‘when I was a monkey’, and I don’t have the heart to inform her that evolution isn’t quite as simple as that.
In any case, the book Siblings Without Rivalry tells me that the ‘who do you love more?’ question should never be answered directly, as it only encourages competitive thinking between children. So when Curly Girlie dropped the big one today, I thought I was prepared.
‘Do you love me more than Alpha Blondie?’ she asked, while getting out of the car.
‘Curly, I love you more than you can possibly imagine. There’s no-one else in the world quite like my wonderful Curly.’ (See what I did there?)
Read moreMy Clockwork Child
In The Child Whisperer, Tracy Hogg describes the “textbook baby”, the one who develops new skills right on cue, exactly when the manual said they would. My Curly Girlie just turned four and, like clockwork, she’s turned into a little girl. Make that Little Girl - there’s a definite capital-G in her Girl now that she’s reached the grand age of four.
“I am only friend with girls,” she announced yesterday.
“What about Khan and Timo?” I said, “Your best friends at creche?”
“They’re girls.”
“Um, no, they’re boys.”
“Ah.” *Thinking* “Apart from Khan and Timo, I am only friend with girls.”
That’s clear, then.
Curly’s favourite colour is... sigh... pink. When she was only three, it was “rainbow”, but the clockwork child has dropped red and yellow and green and settled, predictably, on pink.
I’ve never been into the pink. In fact, I’d say I’ve actively encouraged a diversity of colour: her bedroom is painted bright red, her coat is deep purple with a red and white polka dot lining, she’s currently wearing a sky blue top with white stars.
But the pink has arrived, with the inexorability of death and taxes, and we shall endure it until she enters her equally inevitable purple and then black phases.
Read moreToddler Tales
It’s all about the conflict. No, not raising toddlers. Raising toddlers is mostly about conflict, but writing fiction is all about the conflict. This is what I’m learning on the Masters that I’m currently studying. Every story involves conflict, every character has some kind of thwarted desire, and in every scene something needs to happen. When you spell it out like that, it sounds obvious in a paint-by-numbers kind of way, and yet, and yet... I’m still not retired on the earnings from my bestselling novels about wizards...
Of course, my four-year-old Curly Girlie knows literary theory already. It seems to be hard-wired in kids.
“Do you want a story?” she says, “I’ve got one about a giraffe, one about a digger and one about a monster,” like a shopkeeper taking stock. Or perhaps a travelling bard in Homeric times, calling out her wares: “Roll up, roll up, for yer stories: I got yer Odyssey, yer Aeneid and yer Illiad on special, just twenty drachma a verse”.
Then she trots out the goods. A story she told this week went like this:
One day, a monster chased a little mouse, who ran away into space and hid behind the planets. But the monster found him, so he came back to Earth and hid underground, with all the moles and the pipes. But the monster found him, so the mouse got fed up and said “raaah!” and the monster ran away into the forest. The End.
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