J and the girls take the bus south, I go north. The buses are frequent so there’s usually not enough time to wave, but one morning last week, Mission Street was empty for a while. I waved, the girls waved. I waved. They waved. I blew kisses, they blew kisses, I made heart shapes with my hands, they made strange squashy shapes with theirs.

Then we all paused. Still no bus. Awkward.

I made jazz hands. They made jazz hands.

All three of us started to dance.

We danced and danced. We boogied. We step-ball-changed. We twirled. Julia, especially, twirled.

For ten minutes, on two sides of Mission Street, we got our white girl funk on.

When my bus finally arrived I saw a woman on the other side of the street solemnly high-fiving Jeremy and the kids.

A police car.

A woman with her hands over her mouth, staring in distress at:

A deer, sphinx-like in front of the woman’s little hatchback and looking around, its ears erect, its lovely legs folded badly.

The deer was not going to be okay.

The morning light slanted through the haze, and we all sped up and drove away.

All of which is to say: dear my Australian friends, screw both candidates and vote Independent or Green. But you were going to do that already.

Eek!

I could not fail to notice the walk – which with an obviously athletic body could only be described as unmistakably masculine. Indeed Tony must be the most masculine and athletic of Australia’s politicians, and not boringly so. I have often thought that had he been on the left he would be the media’s pin up boy.

My stars! Is it warm in here? Get a room, boys! The piece, disappointingly, does not continue with “…my heart palpated as he caught my eye. His eyes, twin flames under that stormy brow, burned as he huskily whispered my name…”

My dream also ended unsexily. I told Abbott off for his platforms and policies, although I did it a bit self-consciously, since most of what I object to in his position (he’s bad on gay marriage, immigration and the environment) is exactly the same as what I object to in that of his opponent. He’s a Catholic monarchist! She’s a centrist cipher! They fight (property) crime.

I have only theories about the right. Despite my decade-long flirtation with Christianity I always thought of myself as socialist, just a Fabian socialist. It was a shock to discover that my church was actually hard-right, anti-abortion, anti-feminist and come to that, anti-women and children, at least in practice.

More recently my theories have revolved around the Big Five personality traits – the idea that our personalities can be mapped along five independent vectors: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. This research made immediate sense to me when I first encountered it. It’s trivial to note, for example, that I score sky-high on Openness and Neuroticism, and that I am introverted as hell. In fact Julia’s the only Extravert in our little family – the only one who draws energy from company, as opposed to from solitude – and framing it in this way has helped me to accept her manic glee.

My theory is that conservative people do not score very high on Openness. Is that tautological? And it’s not even that, as a progressive, I think things are going to turn out well; it’s just that I know from bitter experience that whatever else happens, time will pass. Sometimes that’s a good thing – +1 to team White Blood Cells! go the Emancipation Proclamation and the Civil Rights Movement! science yay science! – and sometimes it’s an awful thing – bring back the bookstores; boo to old age. But either way, there’s no point fussing about it.

I also, relatedly, subscribe to the notion that conservative religion is pretty much all about sublimating the fear of death. I know it was for me. And it would explain a lot about how conservative religious people behave; their nasty secret sins, and their otherwise weird and alien assumption that as long as their imaginary superhero in the sky “forgives” them, then despite all evidence to the contrary, no actual harm was done. They store up for themselves so many riches in heaven that they leave the earth a smoking crater. This life doesn’t matter! It’s just a starter life! Do-over! I’m not a fan. Can you tell?

Separately, I finally got a glimmer of understanding the libertarian point of view when I realized how historically late an invention the income tax is, and how little tax people used to pay:

Another income tax was implemented in Britain by William Pitt the Younger in his budget of December 1798 to pay for weapons and equipment in preparation for the Napoleonic wars. Pitt’s new graduated income tax began at a levy of 2d in the pound (0.8333%) on incomes over £60 and increased up to a maximum of 2s in the pound (10%) on incomes of over £200 (£170,542 in 2007).

Put like that, it’s obviously a shocking imposition, and I myself would far prefer not to be hurling a goodly fraction of my income at the US military establishment. But I don’t mind a bit paying for public schools; I would pay more; and I would prefer to pay for Medicare for All and a respectable public transportation infrastructure than to pay for my private health insurance or my car. My parents, you see, taught me that it is good and right to share. Because they’re pinkos.

So those are my theories: that conservatives want things to stay the same, and they don’t want to be made to share. When I think of it that way, you know, I can honestly sympathize. I don’t want to grow old and die, and I don’t like being made to do things either. But I am going to grow old and die, and I do have an awful lot of privilege while other people have far less, and it behooves me not to bogart the cash and the happiness and the, you know, access to clean water and antibiotics and so on. My ethical stance boils down to an ultra-streamlined Postel’s law: be kind and tolerant. Or even more simply, don’t be a dick (Cheney.)

Then there’s that whole weird thing about taking the Bible seriously. Or more precisely, taking extremely tiny morsels of the Bible, daisychained together with logical contortions and dubious interpretations, as an infallible guide to modern life that totally lets you off the hook for being a homophobic douchebag. I dunno. I find far more beauty and wonder and testament to the human spirit and the awesomeness of life in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. But you knew that already.

All of which is to say: dear my Australian friends, screw both candidates and vote Independent or Green. But you were going to do that already.

(At least you guys have preferential voting and won’t accidently Nader yourselves into a Bush administration, touch wood. But that is another ranty, for another time.)

ANYWAY. I’ve been riding regular Sunday and Tuesdays with Hard Taskmistress Erin, who for example requires us to post to the trot with no stirrups, or transition between “crossrail two-point” and “five-foot-fence two-point”, or canter from two-point, or from the walk. God help you if you don’t have a secure lower leg, which I still don’t, despite all our hopes and prayers and wishes to the contrary.

In fact, and in keeping with my life’s generic conventions as post-slacker romcom (probably directed by Lisa Cholodenko and starring Tilda Swinton), my lower leg is now ironically inclined to be too far forward. More irony! I have a sudden and serious problem with tiny crossrails. I can jump a decent 2′6″ vertical in respectable form, and then I can drop Bella in a shocking spot in front of a jump she could step over.

This is the story arc this season. I worked on getting Bella into a more uphill canter by engaging my core muscles, and I ended up hunched and pumping with my shoulders. I wasn’t releasing over fences, and then I was throwing the contact away and leaning over her forehand. My two-point ended up all weird and crouchy. I finally figured what I was doing wrong through all of this. Dudes, I am trying too hard.

It was very clear this morning, when I was working really hard on my posting-trot-no-stirrups, and then my hip hurt so I tried to relax and just do it minimally, and Erin immediately said “That’s better.” And again, when she had us drop our stirrups at the canter, and as soon as we did, my leg was more secure. And again, when we were doing a canter pole to a vertical to a canter pole and then four strides to a crossrail, my distances and releases improved the moment I started counting strides aloud. The more I don’t do anything, the more I don’t think about it, the better it is.

I think I’m at the slightly dangerous point of having improved quite a lot, but not as much as I would like to have improved, so I am reaching for harder things and in doing so neglecting the fundamentals: breathe, sit up straight, keep still. It’s the paradox at the heart of riding – maybe anything difficult. You have to sweat to create the muscle memory, and then you have to distract yourself, meditate, transcend, absent your thinky monkey self so that the muscle memory can actually work. I get to control the direction and the pace, and then I have to let Bella handle the actual galloping and jumping over the fence. She’s much better at that part than I am.

And that’s the thing. If you drive stick, you can probably remember having to think about changing gear, and then not having to think about it, and then maybe driving along something like Highway One between Jenner and Point Arena and being the car; drinking the curves and feeling the suspension as your own spirit-level inner ear. Riding’s like that – your proprioception expanding to encompass another entity – with this exquisite refinement: you end up with two souls.

Saturday was nuts: we were out of the museum by 8; Claire made it to wushu, and Salome and I made it to the Farmer’s Market, but only after being distracted by two of more than sixty simultaneous garage sales on the hill. Next year we will plan accordingly. She got a lamp and a very nice grey sweater vest. I got a pink bag I am not sure about, and Mary Janes and a cardigan and a brocade cushion cover that I am perfectly sure about, all for $8.

After the market we went to Julia’s! Kinder! Barbeque! Then Claire and I battled traffic to the Container Store, where I got baskets for the shopping bags and shoes that otherwise litter our entry hall. The baskets are a perfect fit! I am enamoured of my new, clutter-free entry hall. Jan, who arrived while the girls were at swim class, only asked “Why do you have so many shoes anyway?” I came late to the stereotypical shoe love, but I am making up for lost time. The girls were beside themselves with delight at seeing Jan.

Yesterday I rode Bella over fences, and we did a big course, and rode it better than we’ve ever done before, so that was insanely great. Then Danny and Liz and Ada came over and we had roast chicken with two kinds of yams and potatoes and carrots and a salad with spinach and yellow cherry tomatoes and squash blossoms. And it was very delicious.

Danny is thinking of buying Albion Castle in the Bayview and making it his supervillain lair. I pointed out that it would be almost unworkably far away from Mission burritos, and he said that tapping the Alameda-Weehawken burrito tunnel could be his first crime.

This morning Julia started kindergarten. She was radiantly brave, and gave me a huge grin and a thumbs-up as she marched into her classroom. I got something in my eye. I have two schoolgirls now, and no more little kids.

“Was that the sound of the economy rolling over?”

“The lights are going out all over America — literally.”

“Here are some truths which I believe to be self-evident: that the USA has been running on fumes since the beginning of the 21st century.”

“…a country that once amazed the world with its visionary investments in transportation, from the Erie Canal to the Interstate Highway System, is now in the process of unpaving itself…”

“America has transformed itself from a nation of earnest, muscular, upright citizens to a land of overfed barbarous morons ruled by grifters.”

“Emerging nations are making huge efforts to upgrade their roads, their ports and their schools. Yet in America we’re going backward. ”

“In times like these politics gets very crazy. The public forgets how misled and confused it is and develops vicious certainties that do not necessarily jibe with reality.”

“The antigovernment campaign has always been phrased in terms of opposition to waste and fraud — to checks sent to welfare queens driving Cadillacs, to vast armies of bureaucrats uselessly pushing paper around. But those were myths, of course; there was never remotely as much waste and fraud as the right claimed. And now that the campaign has reached fruition, we’re seeing what was actually in the firing line: services that everyone except the very rich need, services that government must provide or nobody will, like lighted streets, drivable roads and decent schooling for the public as a whole.

“So the end result of the long campaign against government is that we’ve taken a disastrously wrong turn. America is now on the unlit, unpaved road to nowhere.”

When you can no longer tell the paranoid blogger from the Nobel prize-winning economist at the newspaper of record, something somewhere has gone very wrong.

Massive props to my bff Skud!

Tyrannosaurus!
Oh, no! A meteor!
Tyrannosaurus!
Oh, no! A leaf-eator!

Milo: I think that I will never ever write another song.

Me: Because this one is so perfect?

Milo: Yes.

Now you are ready for my story. I have called my husband on the telephone. This is what ensues.

R: Can you stuff the girls’ sleeping bags into the big IKEA bag? And pyjamas for each of them? And a change of clothes for tomorrow?

J: Sure.

R: …with a pickle?

J: You don’t like pickles.

R: Hate ‘em.

J: The girls don’t like pickles. NO ONE LIKES PICKLES.

R: Someone must like pickles.

J: Because they exist?

R: …yes, that was going to be my supporting evidence.

J: So someone likes neutrinos?

R: Not very often. And only in caves, far beneath Antarctica.

J: They like them. They just don’t like to interact.

Lucky J and I had dug some old Burning Man camping armchairs outta the attic, because I jammed myself into one of those Sunday morning and read books for a couple of hours while the able-bodied – including, humiliatingly, my four-year-old – circumnavigated Turtle Back Hill. This was follow-the-sun sloth, because I had to keep dragging my chair into new sunbeams in the woods at our campsite. Eventually the chair had little tracks behind it, as do rocks on Racetrack Playa. Anyway, enough rest and being lazy and I started to get the circulation back in my toes, and on Tuesday night I had a decentish ride on Omni, the big handsome black off-the-track Thoroughbred I have been riding lately.

Omni is item the second. He’s way dumber than lovely Bella but he’s brave and strong and gentle and wouldn’t harm a fly. He reminds me a little bit of Scottie in that you talk to him through his cadence, lengthening and shortening the rhythm of his stride. But Scottie was a big chicken, and Omni’s not afraid of anything. I am, you’ll be relieved to hear, not getting attached to him at all; when I secretly think of him as Black Beauty I am merely being ironic. The other day, when the message I was passing along the reins to him was “I love you, I love you, I love you,” was an inexplicable error for which the management apologizes; the relevant brain centres have been summarily fired.

Item the third is maps. One reason I adore China Camp is because it is surrounded by wetlands, so that the map of it always reminds me of the awesome map in Arthur Ransome’s Secret Water:

What made it even awesomer this time was reading Secret Water to Claire. We’ve been having a revival of Swallows & Amazons fever ever since Liz moved into a houseboat and Danny bought Daisy. I see that Liz has been doing some cartography of her own.

Item the Fourth: glory but I have been having a brilliant run of books lately. I can especially recommend The Little Stranger and The Haunting of Hill House, two basically perfect Gothic horror stories; The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters, which succeeded in making me even more upset about the DPRK, which is quite a feat; The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, the first book of popular science to reduce me to incoherent sobs three times – it encompasses the whole spectrum of what I think of as My America, from Wired to The Wire; everything by Peter Hessler, whose books are an excellent complement to that awesome Yellow Gorges documentary we saw, Up the Yangtze; The Marketplace of Ideas, which I think lingered in the back of my mind all through this Cambridge jaunt until I had the first glimmering, a couple of weeks ago, of insight into the way the Oxbridge experience was intentionally watered-down and exported throughout the English-speaking world, so that what I was given was not a classical education in that sense but a colonial simulacrum of one, the University of Sydney as a branch of the Scouts or Pony Club – not a new insight at the intellectual level (sidere mens eadem mutato, after all) but actually *felt* this time around, and now having to be processed; and on an entirely different note, a novel that has stayed with me ever since I read it much earlier this year, Michelle Huneven’s remarkable Blame.

Blame got me interested in AA, which turns out to have been heavily influenced by William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience, a copy of which is also on my nightstand waiting to be read, which is not altogether surprising as both the Huneven and the James were recommendations from Jessa Crispin, whose taste is sometimes enigmatic but never dull. Oh! I am so very fond of books, and of the San Francisco Public Library, and I am so lucky to have them.

Item the Fifth: I want to tell you about two awesome things that Claire said; forgive me. On the second-last morning in London we took McKenze out for a large and stodgy English breakfast. McKenze was amused at having overheard Julia describe her as “bossy”; we laughed, and asked the children whether McKenze was bossy or nice. Julia stubbornly stuck to “bossy”, but Claire said with what was to me quite surprising judiciousness: “bossy and nice.”

Later she came up with an idea for an art project for this year’s Balsa Man. I said that this year we could stay back from the fire, so she wouldn’t have to be scared about getting burned, and she said something that absolutely floored me:

“I wasn’t scared I would get burned. I was scared for some of the other people, who were being silly.”

She’s only seven. She was six when this happened, and she got in such a right state about it that I had assumed for a year without even thinking about it that she was terrified on her own behalf. I’d no idea she had such complex modelling of and empathy for complete strangers in place already. Some days I think maybe I am doing a few things right. But really I can’t take much credit for her remarkable and complicated self; it is, after all, her self.

I guess I did have a lot to say, and didn’t need the artificial constraint of Five Things Make A Post after all! Let me go back and rewrite the segues! Nah, bugrit. You know I love you, right?

We had lunches in the cool dining room and dinners on the terrace looking out over a yellow field of grass next door. My God, the food. Tomatoes and cucumbers and greens and avocados and hard boiled eggs and black olives. Cheese! Creamy brie and nutty gruyere. Dense rich baguettes. Jesus God the stone fruit: nectarines so juicy eating them was like trying to eat a mango. Apricots jumping out of Jan’s tree, red-speckled and hot from the sun, intense as concentrate.

We didn’t do much else but eat and talk. I read A Place of Greater Safety, Hilary Mantel’s French Revolution novel – this after reading her Tudor novel Wolf Hall in England. Best holiday reading since Hemingway and Gertrude Stein in Paris. We bought a game of Carcassonne in Cambridge and found it to be great fun, like mah jongg; we played it for an hour every day after lunch. Jan took me to the market in Lezignan-Corbieres, where I bought a quilt for our bed that may be the most beautiful and grownup thing I have ever owned. It cost fifty euros.

McKenze and I were chatting so hard we missed the exit to Carcassonne airport. Being Californians, we assumed the autoroute was like the freeway and that we would be able to turn around in a few miles; in fact, it was 17km to the next exit… we made our flight, which was late anyway, and Jan and Jeremy were having fewer kittens than I would have expected. I would have had dozens of kittens, me. A tearful farewell ensued. Jan will be visiting us in San Francisco soon.

Ryanair is horrible. Stansted is miraculous and the express to Liverpool Street was at least fast, but then we were on the Underground in rush hour with all our luggage, and that blew. I remembered we could get out at Lancaster Gate and walk, and that saved us a transfer and four stops, which was good. Our hotel was expensive and our room was tiny, but very very welcome. Grant and Jo met us at a funny little Italian place around the corner and we had a very merry dinner.

Our one day in London was way too long and intense from my trying to pack too much in; but the girls got to see Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament and Tower Bridge, at least from a distance, and we met Cait and Nora and James and rode on the London Eye, and then Grant and Christian met us for lunch at Canteen and I had Eton Mess, which is always a highlight. Then we caught the bus to the British Museum and I showed the girls the Parthenon Frieze and the Rosetta Stone. And Kirsty and Chris met us in the Great Court for tea and scones. And then we went to Kensington Gardens and had a bottle of wine while the kids played in the playground there, so very civilized, and then we went to a Thai restaurant, and then I had to take the kids back to the hotel and collapse.

And then we came home. The flight was fine/awful. The cat is overjoyed that we are home and I have the scars to prove it. Monday was a public holiday, luckily, so I did two loads of washing and weeded the flower garden and went to the vegetable garden with Salome and Kathy and all the kids, and we harvested the arugula and had that for dinner last night. Yesterday morning I rode Bella, far better than I expected to, but we did have a parting of ways after she took a long spot at a fence and I lost my balance. Talk about coming back to earth with a crash. I’m a little bit gimpy but fine.

We’re chimpanzees. We confabulate madly to justify decisions already made before we knew we had made them. We’re engrossed in power and dominance games. The White House press room is a great example (oh, Helen Thomas, no.) Those reporters cannot come out and write the obvious, necessary things – the things Fred Clark, for example, writes – because they fear they will lose Access to Important People, and their chimpanzee balls and ovaries shrivel at the prospect. Judith Miller could not simply point out that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction and that his (secular) Ba’ath party had no connection whatever with the (religious) al Qaeda and that Congress was being very thoroughly lied to in the lead-up to the Iraq War. Those of us who did point these things out until we were blue in the face – and I claim no special insight here, there were ten million of us on the streets that Saturday – weren’t listened to, of course, because we had no Access. You had to be at least that deluded to ride that ride. Chimpanzees that fell in line with the dominant narrative of the day got plum embedded assignments and Halliburton contracts and, what was it? Nine billion US dollars in cash, in steel containers, “lost” somewhere in Iraq? Yeah. Everyone was lying, but it is in the nature of chimpanzees to go along to get along.

I do it too, God knows, the most corporate and compromised person in any of my personal circles. I have baby chimpanzees and an eye on the prize and I want some of that river of lost cash so my kids can go to good colleges (for-profit institutions engaged in the sale of privilege) and thus obtain precious precious Access. I listen and retell stories in my own bit of the great chimpanzee collective confabulation, our great work, our oral Wikipedia, the first draft of a bullshit history that is itself trying to defend the victors from their victims. I try to tell the good, useful software from the cynical rip-off, smart decent CEOs from sleazy embezzlers. I try to inject a laudably Fred-like note of clarity and sanity into the proceedings. But I can’t unchimp myself, can’t not want to be liked and accepted, can’t not want to keep what I have and maybe get some more for the kids. So, moral weakling that I am, I have to pay attention to where I am slipping, to the gross things I let myself off so lightly for (I fly too much, I eat meat, I drive a car, I speak politely to bankers.) I see the master narrative working away at my weak spots, singing its siren songs, tempting me.

Jan has a stack of newspapers – the arts and culture sections of the FT and the Times – and try as I might to simply read them as if I were chatting to Grant about books, I can’t separate the cheerful gossipy absorbed enthusiast’s conversation about stories from the dreary vuvuzuela of Capitalism Victorious. I can’t see the World Cup or Wimbledon as anything but huge cynical spectacles arranged to distract people from the fact that we are ruled by thieves. This is, of course, my own fault thanks to my massive ignorance and lack of engagement with sport – I do see that football and tennis can be beautiful – but I also see their utility to a malign elite. Say one urban black kid in a million gets to be a college basketball or football star, gets to be rich (and have his brain pounded to jelly, in the case of football); the others might just shut the fuck up, toe the line like good beta and gamma and delta chimpanzees in case the magical hand in the sky – the A&R guy, the reality TV audition, the lottery, the Dragon’s Den – comes down and chooses them next time. Bread and circuses. Retirees in Reno and Vegas feeding their Social Security through slot machines, and voting Republican in case they hit the jackpot.

God forgive me, I do find this intensely interesting. A huge part of what makes Hilary Mantel sing on the page – and Patrick O’Brien too, come to that, and Vikram Seth and Jane Austen – is the acute ear for these negotiations and confrontations, the lie told so often it starts to sound true, the master narrative nudged towards Reformation or Revolution by daily repetition and recapitulation (hahahaha, see what I did there?) I saw this in my Master’s thesis too, reading the mid-nineteenth-century Irish journalists who wrote The Nation when there was no nation, who created The United Irishman when Ireland was not united. Those men – John Mitchel, Charles Gavan Duffy, William Smith O’Brien – wrote the Republic of Ireland into being. A thing has to be thought before it stops being unthinkable.

This is what we are going to have to do. We have to dream up a good world for our grandchildren (it took the Young Irelanders seventy-odd years, it will take us at least that long.) We have to dream up sustainable and carbon-neutral societies, civil rights, human rights, equity for the poor world. We have to tear down the walls that keep the poor people out, because a walled garden whose only function is to exclude is not paradise. It is a fortress and a prison. (McKenze was a child when the Berlin wall came down; last night I tried to explain to her what it was like for us, growing up in the Cold War, thinking that the world would probably end in nuclear war before we were thirty, then finding in the space of six months that all our atlases had become obsolete. I said, it was as if Palestinians and Israelis were hugging in the streets. As if the two Koreas were reunited.)

Because Fred is right. The unemployed people are not an economic problem; they are our friends. The people in the poor world are our brothers and sisters. The Foxconn suicides, the war in Congo are embedded in this MacBook on which I write; my whole lovely happy life is predicated on exploitation and poverty. It’s not okay. Activism has to become a habit with me, prosaic, wonkish activism: pressure on Apple and other manufacturers to examine their supply chains; pressure on Arizona and the federal government to reform immigration and education, and to create jobs and provide more opportunities for working-class kids than the military or a football concussion; pressure on the press corps to stop telling so many transparent and idiotic lies. We can’t make a paradise on earth, we can’t extricate ourselves from accommodations that are also deals with the devil, we can’t ever make things perfect or pure because to do so is to build walls that keep people out. And also because we are chimpanzees and weak. We can’t, in fact, win – this is the long defeat, life ends in death. But we can be on the right side, sticking up for the truth and against bullies. We can say the things *we* want to have happen until they drown out the idiocies of macroeconomics and neoconservatism, and become the new Overton Window. It’s not just about walking away from Omelas; it’s about going back with an EMT team, breaking the kid out of that cage and sending her to college.

“We were about to call the hotel and ask if there was a woman sitting outside looking VERY ANGRY,” said Grant.

I ordered a bottle of Pinot Grigio. It was an incomparably mild and lovely London night. Miss Ghostwood 2010, the beautiful Tallulah Mockingbird, was gracious enough to join us. We talked about every possible thing: Books (we all worship Hilary Mantel with an unholy passion and have progressed beyond Wolf Hall into her memoir and her earlier novel, A Place of Greater Safety. Edward St Aubyn is clever and bitchy and shallow but fun reading for a middle-aged European trip), People We Know (we love you all and are thrilled you’re doing so well. Except for that one guy, we hate that guy), Marriage And Relationships And Kids And So Forth, and Stuff We Are Planning To Wow The World With (no spoilers, sweetie!)

The hotel was, well, cheap. And close to work. And breakfast was included, and the full English was pretty much a full English, you can’t go far wrong. But the liquid purporting to be coffee was, how shall I say? Regrettable. J and I snuck off to the British Museum for a quick culture-gorge. They’ve planted a Representative South African Garden out the front, with jade plants and agapanthus and rare precious Elephant Foot Plants. J said: “The bees have been visiting all differently-coloured flowers and have stratified pollen sediments on their legs. You can see the different layers.”

Reader, I married him.

We started at the Royal Graves of Ur – irresistible carnelian and lapis lazuli and gold – and walked through rooms and rooms of Sumerian and Assyrian and Lydian and Phrygian art. Walls and walls of cuneiform, part of Assyria’s royal library: sketchy, inaccurate astronomical observations and thousands of words on the meaning of entrails, deformed babies, other omens:

“So many sophisticated civilizations,” said Jeremy, “almost no science.” They were doing pretty well by the standards of their day – fire, agriculture, writing, cities, leisure, art. But how frightening it must have been, the unknowable world; eclipses, fire flood and famine, the world beyond the walls. On to the Oxus Treasure, four horses driven abreast, a chariot worked in gold. Wicked Lord Lytton looted another like it when he was Viceroy of a famished India.

And suddenly we are in Ancient Europe, with the birth of farming in Iran – the garden of Eden, between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Room after room, culture overload. At last, Sutton Hoo. We spent a long time looking at the cloisonne work on the shoulder clasps. You can’t see it, but the blue squares are themselves checkered dark and light blue: it is millefiori glass. The workmanship. Jeremy said he couldn’t figure out how the thing was made. It made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

Too Much British Museum Girl! Work, back to Cambridge, last day in Cambridge, work, lunch with the XenSourcers and their babies. Packing, too much stuff, bags too heavy. Jeremy threw up all night the night before we left. Taxi to the station, train to Stansted, easy well-designed interchange to the terminal, standardly horrible Ryanair flight to Carcassonne. Julia whined all the way: “I want my Janny NOW!” That’ll teach me to call it a short flight. Ninety minutes is long when you are four.

Janny! And Julia’s comical Joy Face. Hiccups with the car rental nobly surmounted, culminating in us pushing away an abandoned rental that was parking us in. A Peugeot 305! Brand new and great fun to drive. The children were each allowed to choose one name for it; they both chose Twinkle; so it is Twinkle Twinkle, Little Car. Les Oliviers and its large cool rooms and breakfasts and dinners on the terrace. It is too hot at lunch time. All the trees came down and now there is a view across a fallow field to a stand of trees with the hills beyond. Oh my God, the food: pistachios and olives and creamy Brie. Apricots and nectarines that you can’t eat without juice running down your chin. Crisp cucumbers, unctuous avocados, sausages, ham, hard boiled eggs, hummus, lashings of rose wine: it is Elizabeth David and Enid Blyton all rolled into one.

Saturday night, a party in the village square. Tomato salad with mozzarella and black olives, roasted leg of duck with green olives. Dancing and dancing and dancing, a smoke machine, lasers, the macarena, conga lines. Three generations of Fitzes getting their funk on. Carrying Julia home, where she fell asleep instantly in my arms. Sunday afternoon, a visit to one of Jan’s friends. Swimming in her pool in a walled garden on a hill surrounded by vineyards. The garden itself, cherry and apple and almond trees, rose rooms, a gate with frog ornaments, a green porcelain lion. The wind farms turning in the distance. This morning, climbing the hill to the ruined castle. The village full of walled gardens. The girls sitting in the window of the curtain wall.

The first time I came to Les Oliviers, a girlfriend, not even a daughter-in-law, I looked at the yellow-walled room with the twin beds in it; and the thought that I might one day fill them with Jan’s grandchildren was too presumptuous even to be allowed to form.

I forgot to say that they were selling little bronze horse votives in the shop at the British Museum; and that Jeremy bought me one.

Next we went to the Museum of Zoology, where Julia saw the whale skeleton and said rather gobsmackingly: “I remember this. You brought me here when I was two.” Gobsmackingly, because I did. The museum is fantastic, full of skeletons and stuffed animals and things set in resin, all side by side in an old-fashioned large white room. We loved it. After that we had scones and jam and cream, and then home where I could not keep my eyes opened and napped while Jeremy made spag bol, and then awake (barely) for another splendid episode of Doctor Who. Today we caught the train to London – I earned some cross looks from nice ladies in the seats across the aisle for explaining to the girls that the British had actually stolen the Parthenon frieze from Greece. In Shoreditch we met Grant and Kirsty and all walked over to Hackney City Farm, which is remarkable for its excellent donkey and humble, radiant pig. And then I had my perfect moment after all, sitting in the sun in the garden there while the children played. Now the boys are making bangers and mash and the little girls are watching In The Night Garden and Kirsty and I are communing with the great world in the Net.

To clarify: I am blogging. Kirst is trawling OKCupid, looking for lerve!

Where it was frickin freezing and we huddled, chilly, in deck chairs grimly eating scones. Oh, whatever; it wasn’t until we were walking back through the meadows and I stood in a fresh cowpat that I realized that none of this actually matters, that I was just so very happy to be with my best boys and girls. There were cows, well, steers, grazing by the river. I had been reading Temple Grandin’s Animals In Translation, in which she describes the charming curiosity of cattle, so I got down at eye level and one of the beasts did come up to us, all liquid eye and prehensile tongue. Then Claire made a sudden move and he trotted away.

I had a funny exchange with Grant, then or later; about how hilarious I find it that I have such a great job, since I had assumed from an early age I was too delicate a flower, by which I mean too utterly useless, ever to survive in a market economy. That I needed a tenured job because otherwise I would not be able to hold down a job at all. How weirdly things turn out.

“Have you considered,” he said, “that maybe you were wrong in the first place?”

The kids made it all the way back to Cambridge, more or less, and we met Kirsty and Chris at Fitzbillie’s and had rather great brunch, and then walked to an art store and bought sketchbooks and paints and markers for the girls, and then to the pub in Midsummer Common, the Fort St George, for cider. Lovely wandering conversation, gossip and politics and ideology, dialectic and praxis, books; mad fun for wonks.

I failed fast that evening, shivering like someone woken at 3am, and indeed the girls were already out like lights. But Jeremy had the perfect cure for what ailed me: Doctor Who! In real time! Sleep fell from me, and it was a splendid episode and all. Chris cooked for us, a fabulous eggplanty pasta sauce. And then I was gone.

Hangover! It was brutally hard to get started on Sunday morning but at length we were all in a punt on the Cam and I was bonding with Rory, our guide, a townie, over politics, to Jeremy’s considerable amusement. Then to Dry Drayton where I was introduced to Thokki and reacquainted with Freydis, two very respectable Icelandic horses (they are not ponies, no matter how small; they are dignified.) Keir dropped us at home where Grant was waiting to roast a chicken with us, and Chris came by as well. We blanched broccoli and made spinach salad with pumpkin seeds and roasted an eggplant and put away two bottles of only-passable sauvignon blanc, made delectable by the company.

On Monday I was hungover and jetlagged and exiled from my happy home, bound for London with a rolling suitcase that broke en route. The bus took a ludicrous 45 minutes to get to the station. All was dire! Until I got to the hotel and saw all my colleagues and realized, possibly for the first time, how smart they all are and how much I like them. Then I met Grant and Kirsty and Jo for dinner and had the same revelation about them.

I think this is the first time I have been in England medicated and healthy and sane. I kept having strange third-party high realist visions of myself as a competent and likeable person. Odd. And with this it is suddenly possible to not feel threatened by new things or people; to respond to things as they are, instead of continually dancing around all the abysses only I can see. At one point during the conference our CFO was making incredibly stupid jokes, and we were all half-laughing half-groaning, which was his point, and I put my arm around him and said “I love you,” which is a thing I never do; but it was true.

The conference went okay. The other best moment, for me, was when a newish colleague called me “Amanda” by mistake, and later explained that it was because she thinks I look exactly like Amanda Seyfried. Since I’d been feeling oldish and frumpy around the new women hires, many of whom are seven feet tall with glossy hair to their waists, no lie, and since I have loved Amanda Seyfried since the first season of Veronica Mars and not only despite but secretly even because of Mamma Mia, this made me gloriously happy. I walked on air all the way back to the Underground.

What with the good mood and the sanity and all, I spent the whole journey to Kings Cross looking at the other people on the train. Good Lord! Women of London, you are so beautiful and stylish! Your colour choices are fashion-forward, and your statement necklaces fill me with awe! Straight men and lesbians of London, how do you not fall madly in love every time you turn your heads?

Where was I? Other than covered in not-even-my-own-blood I mean. Um, Heathrow, Heathrow Express, Paddington, change at Edgware Road for District and Circle Line, Kings Cross which is where I finally lost my mind – England is so fricken crowded that your personal space is much smaller than it is in San Francisco and after a while this encroachment and the sleep dep and the crowds and noise combined to make me HOMICIDALLY PSYCHOTIC – and had to be consoled with an egg salad sandwich. And so to Cambridge, which is pretty, and our flat, which is smaller than last time but closer to the river and the Co-op. We shall see.

We staggered out for dinner by the river last night and fed the ducks on the way home and the children were out like lights by 7.30pm and you know what that means, don’t you? Yes, it means that they woke promptly at 2am ready for play and it is 6.25am as we speak and I have spent the last four hours and 25 minutes trying to keep them from making more noise than a pair of annoyed parrots with kettledrums attached to their feet, which is unbelievably STILL a less horrible jetlag experience than last time. Next up: Grantchester with Kirsty and the Godfathers. Birds are tweeting. It’s good to be here.

It follows from this theory that all the other Rachels are as consumed with envy of me as I am of them.

How is it possible that I could have had an athletic kid? I talked her through the DoctorMama running program – basically when in doubt, slow down – and then she paced me all the steep way up Bernal Hill and all the windy way back down it. She didn’t have loud complaints until halfway up Precita. I measured the distance on Gmap Pedometer and that 7yo ran 1.3 miles. Dude!

After that we all packed ourselves into the car and drove to Canyon Market and bought baguettes and foccaccia and two kinds of cheese and prosciutto and salami and caprese salad and blueberries and raspberries and cherries and peaches and vanilla yogurt. We ran into Kathy and Andrew in Glen Park and abducted their little daughter, and then Salome and Najah and Milo and Salome’s friends Julian and Heather and their daughter Lilly came too, and eventually Jack and Kathy and Andrew finished their errands elsewhere, and we all sprawled on the daisy-strewn grass in Glen Park Canyon and ate ourselves foolish while the children went Lord of the Flies in the woods.

There was a basset hound of exceeding beauty, whose name was Desdemona. When we all descended on her to pat her she rolled over for tummy rubs and writhed her whole body to wag her tail and howled with joy. Aroo!

Meaning, I think, comes from doing a full accounting of your limitations and assets, your passions and your weaknesses, your belief system and your fears, and then rubbing up against the things that cause you to panic, like an allergy skin scratch test, and find out what your reactions are. Once you figure out how you can contribute to the greater good, once you’re able even to define that, you take that information and pour yourself into one direction. Regardless of discomfort or regrets or what-ifs. (And then doing that over and over again, until death.) That does not fit on a T-shirt. That to me is more important than bliss, which would really just lead me back into bed, maybe with a bowl of corn flakes, or maybe I would become like an elderly widower, and just Wait for Death. Or become Alice James.

She: How about this rain? Cold enough for ya?

He: Obama weather.

They snigger.

He: I scored. I took a short position worth 1.5 million, and the whole market went down four points this morning. They’re mad at me at work but I don’t care! I just sent my boss the commission slip. The client said ‘Do you know what you made on that trade?’ and I said ‘Bra…’

(He is a white man.)

He: ‘Bra,’ I said, ‘I always know my commission. That is the first thing I know.’

She (admiringly): You just don’t give a fuck, do you.

He: I don’t give a fuck. They could fire me, I wouldn’t care.

She: Really?

He: Really. I would walk. I got plans. All I want is for someone to give me fifty million dollars.

T. remained a rock star for the rest of the flight. I think maybe two other passengers figured out I had a cat in there. Rose met us at the arrivals area with a hot chocolate from Emporio Rulli for me. Handover accomplished.

ARE WE THERE YET? 5:30PM PST: America is really big. America exceeds the battery life of this laptop.

SKY, 5:11PM PST: America is big.

MIDWEST, I GUESS? 4:50PM PST: In which the futuriffic Internetz in the sky are harnessed to mundane ends:

Francis: sounds like smooth sailing up there
me: THIS IS A FAKE CAT
Francis: cats are supposed to claw and hate you!
me: so it is written!

LET’S PUT THE LAKE BEHIND US, 4:37PM PST: Upheaval! Tenzing changes chirality. Now she is sleeping counter-clockwise.

THERE IS A LAKE DOWN THERE, 4:11PM PST: I like flying Virgin. We’re on the Chic Mobile. I ate a wrap. Tenzing is mellow. I went into this liveblogging gig expecting more fireworks, frankly.

35,000 FT, 6:08PM EST / 3:08PM PST: Dayumn, this is awesome. I’m going to make kittens a permanent addition to my flight kit.

We’re above the clouds. Tenzing is nestled on my foot, inside her carrier. Every now and then I reach in and give her a scritch. I cannot believe how calm and brave she is. Beebs would have ripped one of my arms off by now. Is this what normal cats are like?

JFK, 3:35PM: I met Francis in the hotel lobby. Tenzing’s carrier is tiny and black and discreet; she can turn around, but only barely. She is being incredibly brave. So is Francis, who strode away after saying goodbye with only the most manly of tears in the eye. Real men love their kittens.

Note for future cat-accompanied travel: the cat does not go through the x-ray. She has to come out of the carrier and face security like any other person. The first time I held Tenzing it was to walk her through the metal detector. She curled in my arms like an apostrophe and watched as I collected all our bags.

This will not be possible with a cat like, say for example, Bebe.

MANHATTAN, 1:04PM: The kitten is on the subway.

MANHATTAN, 9.37AM: Celebrity cat Twyla wishes Tenzing bon voyage.

MANHATTAN, 9.02AM: Later this afternoon I will be escorting celebrity kitten Tenzing on her move from New York to California. Watch this space!

“I loved it that you were responsible and took great care of Julia,” I said.

We came home and Claire and Jeremy investigated a set of grasshopper robots for the Community Arts and Science day at Claire’s school on Friday. Jeremy will be running the solar-powered robot work table. Julia and I curled up in my bed. She fell asleep first and I held her and listened to Claire and her Dad talking about solar power. There was nowhere else I wanted to be, nothing else that could have made me so happy.

For example: I’ve been experimenting with wearing things other than jeans and tshirts very occasionally. This morning I walked out of the bedroom in the new Frye Melissa boots Jeremy bought me, a thrifted brown wool skirt, a pink tshirt and a black cardigan. Julia looked me over shrewdly.

“You want to change that jacket,” she said. “You want the sparkly jacket.”

Chagrined, I changed the black cardigan for a chocolate-and-gold one I picked up at Thrift Town last week. I have to admit, it looked a lot better.

As if that weren’t scary enough: We’ve started an ongoing series of stories about Blair and Dahlia, the girls’ interdimensional evil twins. They live in a town called Frank Sarcastor and they always misbehave and are cranky. They don’t eat nice food, just things that taste of snot. At swim class they fill the pool with jello so all the children get stuck.

“Maybe you should go and live with them,” said Julia today. “Since you are always cranky.”

I have no idea how we will get through the next six months. Keep us in your thoughts.

And what is more: I would never have fixed the stupid car if I’d known I would spend most of a week stuck in traffic.

This morning I was riding with Erika, who is maybe the thinkiest of the trainers I work with. Friday morning lessons with her often end up being hilariously technical, in a way that would completely baffle the objective eye: we do an exercise five or seven times, then come into the middle of the ring and talk intently for a while, then go back out to the track and do exactly the same exercise – albeit, hopefully, better.

This morning’s exercise could not have been simpler. There was a pole on the ground along one long side, and two poles on the ground on the other long side. The two poles were five strides apart. Poles on the ground are practice jumps, with no risk. The idea is to meet them as perfectly as you would need to meet a 3-foot Swedish oxer.

It’s all about pace. You need a medium canter – neither long nor short – and you need it coming out of the corner, ten strides before the fence. Then you need to sit still, except that if any problems come up you need to correct them. I started out fucking up this exercise in two distinct ways. First, I thought Bella’s medium canter was too long, so I kept trying to shorten her pace. Second, in my efforts to be quiet over the fences themselves, I would seize up five strides out and be a passenger. Erika called it my “blank stare.”

Remember Bunk telling Kima that a good detective has soft eyes? Yeah, that. My fixes were, first, to stop trying to collect a poor mare who was already in a lovely pace, albeit long and low as dictated by her QH ancestors. My second was to ride actively into the fences – while sitting still. In other words, do less at the corner, and do more in the five strides in. But hardly any more. Do almost nothing. But do enough. Got it?

Oh my God, it felt so lovely when I got it right. I let her go forward and she flowed. I felt her wanting to drop her left shoulder and I put my left heel down a millimeter and corrected the angle of my left wrist a degree, and she straightened and hit the perfect distance. It wasn’t by accident, as it had been all the other times we got it right. I rode it, and it was good.

She has four white stockings and a wide white blaze that roans out on one side of her face. Her orange coat is mirror-bright and almost dappled with good health. She has soft eyes herself, except when you tighten her girth and she pins her ears and does sea-monster fierce faces. I am not at all attached to her, you will be relieved to hear.

When the sun leaked through I saw his ribs, and the dull hide taut over his knife-sharp hips.

I used to think that his death had been some kind of instructive episode, as in My Friend Flicka or The Red Pony; that it had made me a better or at least more compassionate and empathic person. Now I am not so sure. I am not, after all, a particularly compassionate or empathic person. I don’t know that grief teaches you anything much except that grief never ends. I love my dead as fiercely and needily as I ever loved them when they were alive, but without hope.

“Bad dreams,” I told Jeremy when I woke up.

“What about?”

“Alfie.”

“Was he a demon horse, risen from the grave?”

“No. He had cancer and he was going to die.”

It would be really nice if anyone who ever supported the unjust occupation of Iraq would kindly STFU about the deficit. Unless it is to say: “We are very sorry. We were wrong.”

Julia sings:

“I love the world.
I love everybody in the whole world
and I love to do anything!
This is my weekend.
Oh the weekend is so-o-o beautiful.
Everything is so beautiful,
so beautiful,
SO-O-O BEAUTIFUL!”

Between the decluttering, the new garden and the fact that I basically had my car rebuilt this week… I guess it’s spring :/

It was an inauspicious day anyway. It had been raining all the way down to the barn and the weather was bitterly cold as well as soaking wet. I don’t like riding in the indoor – although I am grateful to have an indoor, and not have to face the unpleasant choice between riding in the rain or not riding at all for two months out of the year. And then Scottie’s bridle had the curb rein on, and I haven’t ridden with a curb rein since I ill-advisedly put a double bridle on Alfie when I was about eighteen.

Technical notes: Scottie’s bridle isn’t a double, because a double bridle isn’t just two reins, it’s two reins attached to two bits. Scottie is still wearing the rubber jointed pelham he likes so much, but the bit converters that handled the bit and curb chain via a single rein had been taken off, and a thinner rein had been buckled to the lower ring to control the curb chain through a lever action.

I walked carefully up to Erin, explained and offered to take the curb rein off. That’s because you need light, consistent hands to ride with a curb chain if you’re not going to jab the horse in the chin unfairly; I don’t think my hands are good enough yet. Erin told me to get over myself. So off we went with me holding the reins as if Scottie’s jaw were made of rare bone china. I’ve had it drummed into me forever that you don’t hang on the horse’s mouth, and you especially don’t do it with a strong bit, and if there’s a curb chain involved as well you don’t do it cubed, times one hundred, with cherries on top.

Turns out Scottie really really likes it when people are respectful of his mouth. And my new improved lower leg helps a lot with getting him moving forward with impulsion. He rounds himself and gives you these amazing cadenced trots and canters, and it feels spectacularly huge. I glanced over at Bella and looked at her skinny little neck and thought ever so slightly rude thoughts about small mares with no forehand.

Erin set up canter poles, and after we’d ridden through a few times, forward and straight, she raised the middle pole to be a low vertical. This worked really well for me because I had to keep my leg on and concentrate on keeping a light strong position two strides in and two strides out of the fence, all while holding the double handful of reins, and not smashing Scottie’s Waterford-crystal lower jaw. This is how I relax, by the way.

Finally, we did a twisty-tight course with sharp turns. Beth and Austin aced it both times. I completely flubbed it the first time and rode it not-prettily the second. But we jumped everything and my position was half-decent over the jumps and best of all, Scottie at no point got anxious or tried to speed up or roar away. His anxiety issue is almost resolved, and he’s like another horse – like Austin, almost! Cheerful and honest and good at his job. But flashier than dear old Austin :)

The main problem was that Scottie kept cross-cantering during the changes of direction, so we finished with some canter circles on the flat until I could keep him united at the canter. This was difficult, but also revelatory, because a disunited canter was Alfie’s biggest problem and I could never figure out how to ride through it. Not only have I improved dramatically since Alfie’s heyday in the late eighties, I have improved a lot since three months ago, when I was afraid to ride Scottie over fences. It was a patchy ride, bad in parts but good in others, and I finished it flushed with happiness and hard physical effort. Completely worth braving the rain for.

Thanks so much, handsome man. You taught me a ton and had the best cadence I have ever ridden. I hope the clover is hock-deep where you are going, and that your new owner loves you crazy.

Then Salome called so I dragged on some clothes and we ran to the farmers’ market for dried apples and apricots, pistachios, pink lady apples, broccolini, tangerines, bread, eggs, dandelion greens and a pot of live basil. Then home to weed the wilderness that our front patch and the jacaranda’s tree well had become over winter; then to Flowercraft for pansies and violets and petunias. I cut back the bougainvillea so that now it is possible to reach the faucet without being eaten by triffids. The Icelandic poppies survived, to my joy. We planted the annuals and the garden looks adorable.

Then to Crissy Field where the girls swam excellently, then home to eat Jeremy’s roast chicken with a caprese salad with the fresh basil on it, and last week’s bok choi revived in peanut and sesame oil and a lashing of soy sauce. Nom. Then greek yogurt and strawberries and blueberries for desert, drizzled with orange blossom honey. Om nom nom.

And then we crept out into the San Francisco twilight and released a tub of ladybirds into the garden to eat the aphids. One caught a ride in on my shoulder and is now buzzing around the back of the sofa while Jeremy exhorts the children to sleep.

Another bright jewel of a day, rounded out with this.

Nature by Numbers from Cristóbal Vila on Vimeo.

My heroine this Ada Lovelace Day is Dr Elizabeth Flint of Christchurch, New Zealand. Dr Flint is New Zealand’s leading expert on desmids, which are single-celled freshwater algae of considerable beauty.

Dr Flint took her MSc degree at what was then Canterbury College in 1931. She moved to England where she monitored London’s water supply before working for the RAF’s Operational Research Section in World War Two. She returned to New Zealand in the fifties and wrote the three definitive books on desmid taxonomy.

Betty is also my mother-in-law’s godmother. I met her on a trip to Christchurch in, I think, January 2001. We talked nonstop for two hours at the cafe in the botanic gardens – for all her stature she is generous and curious and pragmatic and fiercely funny – and then she dropped us at the airport in the 1958 Ford Consul that she had bought brand new. She was working then but has since retired, although not particularly early: Betty will be 101 this year. She was, and is, tireless.

To women of her generation – to the Bettys and Rosalind Franklins and Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hoppers and to my Auntie Barb – my geek feminist sisters and I owe more than I can possibly say. These women light my way and let me see what I can be, and what my daughters can be.