(Largely) wholesome content
The garden, the children, the dog
First of all, I must shout out to one of the best books I have read all year, Chopping Onions on my Heart by Samantha Ellis. I’m writing a longer, more thought-out post about her book, language and connection, but very briefly, if you enjoy books about culture, language and food, Samantha writes about her Iraqi Jewish heritage and language in a short non-fiction book that reads as beautifully as the very best fiction - witty, intensely moving and for me, unputdownable. Books like this feel so important - providing a window into a fascinating, relatable culture. The title comes from the Judeo-Iraqi Arabic phrase yethrem basal all ras efadi! - ‘you’re chopping onions on my heart!’ - which you’d use in the context of the phrase ‘you’re rubbing salt in the wound’. But doesn’t it sound so much more visceral as ‘you’re chopping onions on my heart’?! This is a language that FEELS THINGS. Strong relate here. And more seriously as you read through the events of the book, powerfully grounded in the experience of Samantha’s own family, there’s the quiet but timely reminder of the devastation which comes from following people who encourage division and hatred, rather than curiosity and understanding. (Insert the bastard of your choice into the appropriate historical/right bloody now situation, as you wish.)
That said, it’s a book full of hope, and I think you will love it. You can find signed copies via from the link above, and if you are buying from the other place you can click the book cover below. (I had a proof copy, but bought a lovely hardback from a real bookshop and can see myself buying more copies, as I inevitably give away really good books to visitors - only recently bought a file copy of John Lanchester’s ‘The Debt to Pleasure’ having given away about six).
And now for the (mildly) less wholesome content. Does anyone else have real difficulty turning off the swearing in front of their children? My brief time in a restaurant kitchen has left me with an incurable tendency to swear, which has finally caught up with me in the form of Alba (aged 3.) With the hushed tone of one revealing a particularly good piece of gossip (she’s learned from the best), she told me the following on the way home:
Alba: ‘Mummy. Daddy said a naughty thing when he was driving.’
Me: (mildly amused) ‘Oh yes? What did Daddy say, darling?’
Alba: ‘Daddy drove up to a traffic light, and it turned red, and he said - ‘Oh fuck it!’
Me: (choking, and trying not to laugh at my angelic-looking child swearing for the first time) ‘ALBA!!’ You know that’s a very naughty word. Children really can’t say that word. It’s ok for grown-ups to say it sometimes. Although we probably shouldn’t.
Alba: ‘But sometimes - it’s good to say it?’
Me: (giving up, and corpsing) 'Ye-es, sometimes it does feel good to say it. How on earth did you know that?!’
The funniest thing about this - to me, not to Tim - was that Tim reserves his swearing for situations which really warrant it, whereas I swear almost as punctuation. And yet Alba’s first instinct was to lay the word at Tim’s door. (He was outraged, and says he did no such thing.) Smugly, I thought perhaps my swearing-as-punctuation meant she hadn’t noticed. I was wrong.
Yesterday, when spoonfeeding Mia pomegranate seeds (I know, I know, I never claimed not to be incurably bourgeois), my hand slipped. The bowl - luckily plastic - fell to the floor, sending seeds in every direction. And before saying what I planned to say, I - again, so smug, so much building hubris - yelled ‘BUGGER!’, thinking that it was at least a little less bad for the children to hear. Alba didn’t miss a beat.
‘Mummy, you should say - ‘Oh, FUCK!’.’
I nearly spat out my own pomegranate seeds. ‘ALBA!’
‘That’s what you should say when you drop something. Oh, FUCK!’
‘ALBA YOU NEED TO STOP SAYING THAT WORD!!!’
I reminded her of our first conversation on the subject, where I’d asked her to promise not to repeat the word again until she was a grown-up. Or at least fifteen. She’d refused, until (parent of the year here) I told her that children who use that word aren’t liberally given given ice lollies on nursery pickup or chocolate (it is 70% cocoa solids) in their porridge. And would she like to reconsider her answer? She did.
And I, sadly, will have to reconsider my language.
‘Just look’, I said to my best friend, gesturing across the road. ‘A husky. They need enormous amounts of exercise. They are not suited to domestic life.’
My friend looked pointedly at Pepper, and then back at me. ‘You know people might say the same about you? With a border collie?’. It would be accurate to say she received a volley of splutters in reply: ‘absolutely not’ ‘outrageous’ ‘perfectly good family pet’ ‘gets tonnes of exercise’, etc, etc.
But - much as I hate to admit it - were Pepper at full collie capacity, as she was for her first three years - she might now be just as unhappy as that doubtlessly under-exercised husky. Very annoyingly for a dog whose brother won gold at Crufts last year, Pepper has a dodgy back, and is on severely reduced exercise as a result. (We’ve done the lot: x-rays, MRIs, hydrotherapy - short story, she cannot run at full tilt to catch a ball for hours on end because it leaves her in considerable pain, even if with her single-minded collie determination she would run through the pain until the point at which she collapsed, and even then she’d try to get up and keep going. She’s on meds which helps. And we haven’t told her about her brother Colin’s success, in case she gets jealous.)
But back in her youth (and mine), conscious of her mental and physical capabilities* and terrified by all the literature promising me that a bored border collie would turn into a destructive lunatic, we were out for at least three hours a day. We covered:
riverside walks on the Thames Path, on and off-lead, learning to stop stock still if I yelled ‘CYCLIST! (largely successful.)
endless ball-throwing in Mudchute Farm (with frequent exhortations for her to be the bigger person, and stop barking at the sheep), Greenwich Park, Hyde Park, Green Park, Port Meadow - basically any green space large enough to lob a ball
sniff-walks through Canary Wharf, where she once left a banker close to tears. No, she didn’t bite him! (Anything but a tiny socialist. Autocrat to the core.) He explained that he’d had a border collie just like her, even down to the same patch of white fur on the neck. With his voice breaking, he said: ‘We called her - Patch!’. I made awkward sounds, Pepper did a rather better job, and licked his face in sympathy.
learning to ride on the Tube, roundly embarrassing me as a pup when a couple of workmen got in on a hot day - tattoos, vests, toolbags etc. One look (or sniff? all the testosterone?) and she rolled on her back on the tube floor, and opened her legs. I mean - really!
inspired by Chaser, a fabulous book about a retired linguistics professor who taught his dog 1000 words, I taught Pepper the names of all her toys, testing her by asking her to retrieve them from another room. She acquired - ahem - quite a collection of Jellycats, among cheaper toys (I was child-free at the time - and also, is it just me, or are Jellycats 200% more expensive than they were six years ago?) Anyway, Pepper was filmed a couple of years ago collecting 80 of her toys by name as part of a study on dogs and language learning for the University of Portsmouth & the Max Plank Institute, and every couple of months now a nice researcher comes with a box of new toys and tests for her to do at home which she adores. (We have a theoretical moratorium on new toys, but people do tend to keep buying them for her, and it was just her birthday. Interestingly she never mixes them up with the children’s toys.)
learning Mandarin. Ok, she can’t speak it, but seems to understand it - she had dog-sitters as a pup who she adored, and they spoke in Mandarin to the dogs they looked after. (Because they were from China, not as a paid-for extra teaching dogs a new language.) To this day, if there’s a couple speaking Mandarin within earshot on the Tube or out and about in London, Pepper gets terribly excited thinking it must be them, drags me over, and then looks confused. I have to explain that my dog overheard them, associates Mandarin with her oldest friends, and that’s why she’s now begging for pats. Naturally, they oblige.
When The Times interviewed us about our lovely riverside pad and Pepper’s training, a commenter wrote underneath that someone should call the RSPCA with my keeping a collie in a flat. I was extremely tempted to write back that it was REALLY QUITE A LARGE FLAT, and we were hardly ever in it, but refrained. (Bloody Times commenters, though.) Really, does this dog look anything but majestic in a domestic setting? She does not.
Of course, she is often less majestic:
*Have you seen the Sean the Sheepman sheepdog videos? They are just incredible - though it pains me that his working dogs seem to sleep outside in sheds. My vet friend says this is just how farm dogs live and they don’t mind, but I can imagine if Pepper had ended up herding sheep (which my vet friend assures me she’d be brilliant at), she’d have wheedled her way into the farmhouse by the end of the day, made eyes at the remains of a Sunday roast, and set up camp on the farmer’s wife’s best sofa.
I feel I have run out of room for a proper bit of gardening content, so just quickly, LOOK at these beauties who have come out. So cheering! I am fairly certain they are Apricot Beauty, Negrita Parrot and the wonderful double petalled pink is Foxtrot, not sure on the plain purple, but love him nonetheless. (All of these are from Riverside Bulbs.)
I hope you enjoyed this post, if you did, please do hit the heart button - algorithm etc etc. And I hope you have a wonderful weekend! Mini xx
Have you read Lessons in Chemistry? I loved reading about Six-Thirty’s learning of words.
Very funny on the swearing. I swear a lot - comes from years ago working in a corporate environment when everyone used it- as you say - like punctuation. Toned it down a bit but of course Adam picked up words.
He was a bit older than Alba when he did this but he went through a phase of asking if he could swear on the way home from school -
for tension relief. Sometimes it would be super loud operatic style singing instead. I used to let him swear for the duration of the 10 min walk home so he could get it out of his system - on the understanding that he wouldn’t swear at any other time unless there was very strong provocation! 15 now and swears with some of his teachers (as in they swear too) at school. Which surprised me initially but actually I don’t mind.