I had a very long and complex weekend. Chickens were involved. Claire and I were marooned at Ikea for a while, and were forced to subsist on Scandanavian crispbread and gravlax until Carole came to our rescue.

Salome and I drove up to Davis where we saw some of the nicest horses I have ever seen: Seffer, Najih, Abu Zanzabar, Zadaran, Namib, Crystal Naiah, Auralu, Zenobiyah, Bright Flame and Anduril. At the same time, Claire got a pony! Don’t panic, it’s just a Radio Flyer Rolling Pony, but we named it after Najih.

On Sunday afternoon we all bundled off to the Connecticut Yankee to watch the game. As I could not be less interested in sport without losing consciousness, we amused ourselves discussing plans for a reality TV show involving twins.

My first idea was that Paris and Nikki Hilton should be forcibly conjoined – say, lop off a leg each and sew them together at the hip. Then they could hop around A-list parties in Manhattan. They share DNA so no risk of rejection. Then I realized we could do this to Mary-Kate and Ashley as well, and have the two twin-sets jelly-wrestle. Jack had the best idea of all: throw in the Bush twins and send them all on a road trip…

My dream life has been better than Netflix lately: see below. This morning I was Harriet Vane engaged in a delightful murder-mystery romp with a gloriously platinum Lord Peter. The action took place some time after Have His Carcase but before Gaudy Night, yet Peter and I were already lovers, and as soon as the miscreants were brought to justice we tumbled into a four-poster bed like a giant linen meringue, in a grand room with sunshine streaming through French doors that opened onto a formal garden and maze.

I woke to the hoots of our blicket. She had a marvellous weekend, camping with the Murgisteads on Friday night (Daisy and Belinda sleep in their own tent: this is true) and playing with Knoa and Avi on Sunday afternoon. Jonathan and I stripped off Knoa and Claire and hosed them down in his front garden. I have to tell you, spraying naked toddlers with water on a hot summer day is pretty much the most fun ever.

Last week was a week of outrageously good news which I am not yet allowed to get too excited about.

“I can’t believe you guys let me join the Fab Five,” I said. “It’s like a dream come true.”

Ted and I were making hors-d’oeuvres of roast beef, horseradish and Melba toast.

The make-better was an ancient homeless man with a wispy silver beard and a very obvious brownish toupee. Jai was holding his hand and talking to him in an intense undertone. Kyan was wondering how to broach the subject of the toupee. Thom was kicking his feet, having nothing to do.

“In fact,” I said, puzzled, “if it wasn’t so obviously real, I’d think I was dreaming.”

“If it turns out you are dreaming and you wake up, do you want me to come into your life and make it fabulous?” asked Carson.

“Oh yes please…”

Atkins dieters may wish to skip this entry. Yes, Mister Pesce, this means you.

Because I have to say that after a hard evening’s drinking (two pints of pear cider, two!) at my newly discovered local dive bar with its amazing and unsuspected garden, there is nothing, absolutely nothing nicer than bringing a bunch of rowdy friends back to the house and boiling up masses of wholewheat spaghetti and pan-frying broccoli and zucchini and baby spinach and cherry tomatoes and sweet corn in several glugs of olive oil and grating cheddar and pecorino romano and gruyere over the whole mess, and eating it with a fresh hot baguette and a bottle of Penfolds Koonunga Hill Shiraz. And then polishing off two pints of ice cream for dessert. I swear, it was just like that manipulative Coke ad that always used to make me sniffly, only it was real.

Claire climbed the entire play structure at the Precita playground, alone, just so she could slide down the big slide. She is fearless. In order to conserve the equilibrium of the universe, I have been equipped with extra fears. Cian, too, is facing existential crises daily. He got very tired in the swing and started chanting:

“I want… I want… I want… I want…”

We guessed water, juice, hugs, something to eat: all wrong. Then we realized what he was trying to say:

“I want! I want! I want! I want!”

Yearning for something impossible to articulate, aged two. It’s hard to be Cian sometimes.

Later we swung by Emeryville for the weekend’s third barbecue. Salome and I raided Toys R Us and brought home a sandbox in the shape of a tree stump. This made Claire squeal for joy. Leslie and Neil turned up, and the neighbors Lyndell and Katya brought their baby Zarina over to play with Claire. Chickens clucked, corn cooked, beer was drank.

Eventually we all piled into the house for the West Coast premiere of The Curse of the *****. Despite a certain hamminess in one key performance, it’s a wicked film, spooky and pretty and funny. Reminded me a lot of the early Peter Jackson.

Claire fell asleep on the way home, so naturally she woke at midnight and wanted to play with her Daddy until 3am.

Breakfast with Peter the Rocket Scientist at Valentina; a visit to The Crucible in Oakland (with a looong detour through the blighted city when we got severely lost); molten iron!; lunch at Atlas; a cheerful afternoon in Leonard’s back yard, chatting about the Clark campaign and whether there is life on Europa or Titan.

There were two Chinese girls about Claire’s age in Atlas. The elder of the two asked “Are you Claire’s mother? Is she Chinese?” “Err… no…” “But she has such pretty eyes!”

Leonard, talking about vulcanism on Io, said: “The thing about Io is that it has this gravitational tidal effect from Jupiter… Okay, I just sounded like someone out of Star Trek.”

“No! No! No! I don’t want the chair to move!”

“But Cian, you’re the one moving it!”

“WHY am I moving it?”

“What’s that you’re reading? ‘My Wicked Wicked Ways, by Errol Flynn.’ Errol Flynn… hey, I think I know that name!”

“He was an actor in old films. He played Robin Hood.”

“Oh! Oh, I didn’t know that he was wicked. How was he wicked?”

“Women, drugs.”

“Oh! Well, why would he want to write a book about that? What if it fell into the wrong hands?”

“Mistah Kurtz, dead he.”
Brando, that is. Timor mor-
tis conturbat me.

The non-dream Alex, last September, with Jeremy and Claire:

Got home from university tired, hungry and sweaty, the cotton strap of my Army Surplus backpack digging into my shoulder. Bag full of books on Cycladean figures and Geometric votives for my Greek art essay, due Monday. An unseasonably hot day in May. Mum was in the kitchen, methodically bread-crumbing veal cutlets. Alex was in the family room inspecting Mum’s African violets, which sat on a planter just inside the plate glass windows looking onto the weedy patio.

“Hey Mum, hey Al,” I said as I headed past them to my bedroom. Then I stopped, backed up, and looked Alex full in the face. He blinked.

“I like your hair,” I said.

“Just had it cut,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck.

“Aren’t you going to introduce me?” asked Mum.

“Err – sure. Mum, this is Alex, a friend of mine from… Ireland…”

“Nice to meet you, Mrs Chalmers,” said Alex.

“You’ve never been to Ireland,” said Mum.

“No, but I will,” I said. “Alex – what are you doing here? I’m not even going to meet you for another, what, three, four years? Is it 1989 or 90?”

“Ninety, I think. I’m at Bull Alley. Have you seen these plants? They have fur on the leaves.”

“But -”

“I just thought I’d come and see if your childhood really was as 70s-grotesque as you always said.”

“I beg your pardon?” said Mum.

“He’s joking,” I said, grabbed Alex’s arm and dragged him past the unicorn poster and into my room.

We sat awkwardly side by side on my single bed, facing the mountain of old computer printouts on my desk – Dad brought them home from work so I could write abysmal poetry on the back – and the dusty fantasy novels and china horses crammed onto my bookshelves. There was a dead fly on the black window-sill.

“This house is very…” said Alex. He picked up my poem about Yuri Gagarin:

(Y) The stars are shining where you left them
(U) One hundred miles above the ground
(R) No one goes out there to disturb them
(I) The skies are empty that you found…

“Yeah, the house,” I said, gently retrieving the poem. “Do you like my Hollie Hobbie wallpaper?”

“It’s not quite as spectacular as the lime-and-orange paisley in the kitchen.”

“Jesus. To be fair, Mum’ll replace it with fake red brick in a year or two, when she pulls up the wall-to-wall flokati in the front room… I can’t believe you came.”

“Hey,” said Alex with a grin. “What are friends for?”

…and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love
And not those things that they were emblems of.

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street
Old kettles, old bottles and a broken can
Old iron, old bones, old rags, the raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

“I thought of a name for my biography.”

“Oh yes?”

“Voracious.”

“Heh. Not bad.”

“Jan, what shall we call your biography? The Matriarch? Now Listen Everyone?”

“No, none of that! Oh, wait. None Of That is pretty good. Yes, None Of That.”

“That’s great. Richard?”

“A Draft of a Life.”

“Awesome. Jeremy?”

“Compilation.”

“Ooh, nice. Or Compiler, or Virtual Machine.”

Endless anxiety dreams about waking up too late for a call this morning. Made it to work on time, checked email, found that I’d mixed up time zones and missed the call.

Airports are no place for infants. I can still feel the marks of Claire’s fangs on my collarbone. The computers in immigration went down on Friday and it took over an hour for the blicket’s abuelo and abuela to emerge from the bowels of the airport. Under the circumstances I think Claire’s attempts to rip my throat out were a pretty restrained response.

Claire’s grandmother is a formidable cook, and I am an exceedingly competitive woman, so we’ve all been eating very well. On Friday we had roast chicken with a pear, blue cheese and baby spinach salad, and amazing blueberries to follow. Saturday morning was our inaugural trip to the Ferry Building farmer’s market, so on Saturday night we had Byran, Shannon and Cian over for roast salmon with red, white and purple potatoes, freshly shelled peas and a salad of arugula and dandelion. Bryan liked the peas better than anything else I think I’ve ever cooked for him, funny daft Irishman that he is.

Last night we had Jamey and Carole and Rowan to dinner. I made a big lemon, chicken and zucchini pilaf, with a bread-and-butter pudding for dessert. In your face, Dr Atkins! Cafe Rach serves all carbs, all the time.

It’s Jan’s turn to cook tonight, and I’m all, Top that, lady, but she’s all, I have thirty years on you child, and I’m all, Yeah, well Nyerr.

Also yesterday we took Claire to the Asian Art Museum. She likes museums for their acoustics, which greatly amplify her cheery hoots. I’m given to bitter complaints over the fact that the powers-that-be threw the SF Public Library out of this building into the somewhat less beautiful building next door, but the Asian Art Museum gradually won me over with a combination of astounding jades and a very enlightened area equipped with markers and crayons for bored kids. Claire made her first pictures, which to my completely unprejudiced eye display astonishing talent and precocity. My daughter, vampire or fine artist? Time will tell.

The phone rings. It’s the CEO, who’s been working from our office all week.

“I know you’re tearing your hair out on the report and I respect your time,” he begins, and my heart sinks, “but Tim has someone here he’d like you to meet. Is that okay?”

“Yes absolutely,” I say stoically.

They’re up in a minute, the CEO, Tim, and Tim’s new puppy Josie, a Burmese Mountain Dog-border collie cross puppy who gallops around the newsroom before bouncing into my lap and licking my chin. (She’s called Josie because Tim also has two pussycats.)

“Here’s the client…” says the CEO, grinning.

Everybody gets a cuddle of the sweet-smelling, blue-eyed pup. She’s delighted with everything. We return to work feeling much cheerier.

“Thanks for setting up that meeting, I got a lot of value out of it,” I call to the CEO as he leaves.

“You’re welcome.”

The puppy doesn’t want to go downstairs to the sales department.

“Dogs have a lot of integrity,” I tell Tim. “I think she’s more comfortable in editorial.”

“Then I watched the sky. I discovered near Deneb there is one more star. I check the star charts. No star there. So I determine this is a nova. This nova can be seen for four days naked eye and then it disappeared. It was independently confirmed by National Observatory. This was my biggest discovery in life as amateur astronomer.

“In 1054 AD there was a supernova, so bright, in Taurus. In Chinese a supernova is called a guest star. This supernova is the Guest Star of the Heavenly Palace.”

Naishi Min was for many years the director of the planetarium at the Shenyang Science Palace in Shanghai. He explained that Chinese philosophy specifies five elements: metal, wood, water, fire and soil. These are associated with five kinds of organism: fish and dragons, beasts, birds, shells and humans.

In the spring sky are five constellations, associated with the five organisms, colours and cardinal points: the blue dragon in the east (our Scorpio), the white tiger in the west (Orion), the red phoenix in the south (Hydra) and the black tortoise in the north (parts of Pegasus and Aquarius). The fifth cardinal point is the center, and its constellation is the Yellow Dragon, the Emperor Xuan Yuan. It’s our Big Dipper.

I asked whether the constellations were associated with the elements. Naishi thought for a minute and said firmly: “No.” Everyone chuckled. The elements are associated instead with the five naked-eye planets: Mercury is water, Venus metal, Mars fire, Jupiter wood and Saturn soil.

He showed us an ancient carving (first century AD)? of the Yellow Emperor in his chariot, clearly recognizeable as the Big Dipper. The Emperor holds a fireball with a tail in his hands. Naishi cross-referenced this with contemporary astronomical records, and sure enough: “Halley’s Comet,” he said proudly, and the audience sighed happily.

Western constellations are stars joined by lines – individual actors connected by stories, all jumbled up together. Chinese constellations are areas of sky separated by walls. The Emperor rules from his heavenly palace. The order and hierarchy in the sky reflects the order and hierarchy ordained here on earth.

The traditional Chinese name of Sirius is Heavenly Wolf(!); Canopus is Old Man of the South; Vega is Weaving Princess; Altair is the Cowboy. The Princess and the Cowboy were in love, but the Princess’ cruel mother separated them by creating the Silvery River (the Milky Way). All the magpies in the world took pity on the lovers. On the seventh day of the seventh month they create a bridge over the river so the Cowboy and the Princess can be together.

Lots and lots more: the 28 lunar mansions, twelve of which define the Chinese zodiac (Claire’s a horse, Jeremy’s a dog, I’m a pig – “I know”, said Ian). Naishi himself, his daughter and brand new grandson are all monkeys. “I’m the monkey king!” he said. He makes wonderful popup books of constellations and rocket ships and telescopes and armillery spheres. In the sun there is a crow with three feet – the ancient Chinese interpretation of sunspots. In the moon there’s a rabbit.

The moon goddess’ husband had two pills for longevity. He gave them both to her. The first made her immortal, and the second made her so light she floated up into the moon.

As we drove home:

Ian: What did he call the supernova? The gayest star?

Kat: The gassed star?

R: The guest star!

Kat: The guessed star?

Starting July at the Chabot Space & Science Center: Dragon Skies: Astronomy of Imperial China.

She wakes promptly at eight and hoots to be fetched. One of us pads barefoot into her bedroom, where she’ll be sitting alertly in the crib. When she sees us she holds up her arms imperiously. She is scooped and brought into our bed for a morning drink of water from her spillproof cup. If we’re lucky she’ll doze for a while, as the sunlight tracks across the bed and the cat rolls onto her back and purrs and kneads the empty air.

More usually she’ll raid my bedside drawer for the Bonjela, an anaesthetic ointment for her gums, sweetened with purest saccharine. This is her preferred breakfast food. Denied this delicacy, she will roar her grief. At this point Jeremy and I argue about who gets up to give her breakfast. I generally win. Jeremy takes her away for muesli and organic yogurt, some of which she eats, the rest of which is daubed fetchingly on her face, torso and immediate vicinity.

I curl up with the cat and read a chapter of my book or snooze, unless Bebe is out of kibble, in which case she will pounce and attack my hands, and I’ll catch her and cuddle her until her growls subside into a grudging purr, and then I’ll feed her, because if I don’t she’ll just wait till I’m asleep and then rip out my throat. So cute!