Here is the grin alluded to earlier. Jeremy calls this picture “Claire, wary of a competitor”.

Had an odd morning. Woke from a nightmare where Grant, Kirsty, Jeremy, Claire and I had ended up in a giant youth hostel in a shopping mall, all chrome and strip-lighting. One of the youths, a fat, spotty boy, was a serial killer. His big thing was cutting out peoples’ spines, the way you butterfly a chicken. I dragged Jeremy out to the taxi stand to get away, but we spent months and months in waiting in line for a taxi, during which time the serial killer developed a crush on me, lost weight and kept coming around with flowers and chocolate.

I was woken by the sound of garbage bins being bashed together, which is normal on a Thursday, but the sound went on and on.

“I think our garbagemen want to be drummers,” I said to Jeremy.

“It can’t be bins. It must be a construction project,” he claimed, and padded over to the window.

“Oh,” he said, “you’re right. There are hundreds of bins out there.”

“Hundreds?”

“Hundreds.”

Recycling has come to Alabama Street.

Here you can see one of the garbagemen playing a bin like a drum.

The ratatouille was great, with a non-canonical but pleasantly sharp English cheddar grated over the top. The bread pudding was celestial, the best I’ve ever made. Don’t know if it was the goat’s milk or the water bath I baked it in or the slow, cool oven that gave it such a silky, luscious texture. More experiments are called for.

Reading Mortals, Norman Rush’s very-long-awaited follow-up to Mating, one of my favourite novels. I keep wanting to call it Mordles after a memorable review of a Bruce Willis-Demi Moore movie I never saw. Demi’s accent was so bad, the reviewer said, that the film should have been titled Mordle Torts.

Rush’s prose is as delectable as ever, but ten or twelve chapters in, I have to admit I am bugged by what I perceive as two flaws. First, the story is told as stream-of-consciousness, rather than the flashback of the earlier book. The structure of Mating let the narrator (Karen, apparently, but I’ll never get used to calling her that) leave out the prosaic parts. In Mortals you’re immersed in Ray’s consciousness as he walks down the street, with random memories and associations flitting about. It’s tremendously well observed, but it is at times, and it galls me to admit this, a bit boring. Ray waits for a gap in traffic. There’s no gap. There’s no gap. There’s a gap. Ray crosses the road.

This wouldn’t be so much of a problem if it weren’t for flaw two. I don’t like Ray much. He’s uxorious, usually a big hit with me, but he loves Iris in a whipped-cur kind of way. Something’s up between them and instead of saying “What’s up with us?” he slinks around. He hates his brother, which I find hard to forgive. And as a spy, he compares very unfavourably with Stephen Maturin (who doesn’t?)

Ray takes money for his work and in one excruciating scene, allows his chief to humiliate him. Stephen killed men for less, much less. Not that I think Stephen’s bloodthirstiness is an amiable trait or even possible to transfer to Gabarone in 1991, but Ray just sits there and takes it. A man with a spine would have told Chet Boyle to go and fuck himself. Ray’s too invested in the idea of himself as a spy. Without the agency, he’s just another Milton scholar, which makes him feel impotent. Which makes him impotent.

Oh, oh, I just figured out why that scene squicked me so much: Chet Boyle is Keith Power, right down to the sweaty wattles! Mystery solved! Delicate shudder. I just hope Keith doesn’t ego-surf Google…

And no sign of the man, who missed his train again. But dinner should be yummy: ratatouille and rice, with a vanilla and goat’s-milk bread pudding to follow.

Claire hoots.

Late at night, at the house of Fitzhardinges:

J: Guess what I’ve got?

R: A baby?

J: And she’s asleep.

R: Guess what I’ve got?

J: I don’t know. What have you got?

R: A half-knitted scarf.

J: And a ball of wool.

Pause.

J: It doesn’t get any better than this.

My big ole Swedish Warmblood is alive and thriving, thin and immensely tall, much taller and more emergency-orange than he was this time two years ago, I am sure. He still walks with his head in the air and his white-stockinged legs swinging out in front of him, a self-proclaimed prince among ponies. He’s been living in Point Reyes, in a place so ridiculously beautiful it could have been one of the sets for the Lord of the Rings. Seeing him made me so happy that I am still grinning.

“Ruby was sitting in the back of the car, saying ‘One, worms. Two, snakes. Three, lions…’ John said: ‘What’s that, Ruby?’ And she said: ‘Things I don’t like.'”

I first tried it ten years ago, when I was working with Fred at Pierre’s in Temple Bar. Now, every winter, the madness descends, and I roam the city in search of white beans, goose confit, the crust broken six times and allowed to remain the seventh time it forms.

Last night, Bistro Clovis: a perfect cassoulet in the style of Toulouse. Jeremy had salmon in a banana leaf. The tarte tatin was also superb, with tender pastry, caramelized apples and a dollop of dense, sour creme fraiche. All with a bouncy Beaujolais that inspired me to song.

Forgot to tell you what his birthday present was: a top-of-the-line 40GB iPod, silver, engraved with his email address. Coolest toy EV-AH. Send MP3s.

The bubble’s back. I suspected as much a few months ago, the day Knownow got funded and I found myself eating Beluga caviar and drinking champagne on Paul Allen’s yacht. I just came off a classic interview with a Canadian software millionaire, about his latest venture.

“We have a waiting list of people who want to work for us, for free,” he said, “just to prove themselves. We’ve spent the last eighteen months cherry-picking the best ideas in the Western world… grid, autonomic computing, utility computing…”

No scientific enlightment or liberation of women for this visionary futurist, nuh-uh. My job, an unending font of comedy gold.

Ellen’s new baby is here, Sadie, a little sister for Madison. Yep. Mad and Sad. She says if she has another girl she’ll call her Gladys.

I parked for two hours at a thirty-minute meter, and didn’t get a ticket. Fear my fu!

The deal is that J takes charge of the progeny on Saturday mornings so that I can spend forty minutes trying to sit to Laz’s big, athletic trot, then Claire and I get out of the house on Sunday afternoons so that J can descend into hacker trance.

My riding lesson was fantastic, by which I mean that I couldn’t even get him to strike off on the right canter lead, but I kept trying. This is new and cool. Pre-Claire I used to get infinitely frustrated with myself over things like this, and give up out of sheer pique. I felt that familiar anger welling up as I failed over and over again, but then a brand new super-ego voice kicked in and said:

“Don’t worry, you’ll get it, or not; just keep trying.”

So I hung on and kept my hands down and my seatbones square and my lower leg as glued to his side as possible, and asked and asked and asked for the transition, and didn’t get it. And behold, David was extremely pleased with me, because it turns out he’s not just teaching me how to strike off on the right canter lead. It was very Zen, and reminded me of labour. Mama-fu, or as Beckett put it: I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

But I digress. To keep up my part of the bargain I did the rounds of the East Bay (it’s pig Latin for beast). Swept the infant to Emeryville Ikea, your designated Sunday-afternoon breeder-homemaker Mecca, where I found the pure wool blankets my heart had yearned for lo these many weeks, in indigo and cream, as well as some wood photo frames and a five-pound bag of Swedish meatballs. To the Oakland hills to play with Fizzgig the Pomeranian and Ignatz the iguana, as well as their human slaves Morrisa and nj. To Elmwood for delicious turkey soup with the Jaffe-Tsangs, then back over the bridge to bake the meatballs and tell J all about our day.

J needs to hack, it’s a physical thing. He gets sort of distant and abstracted when he has spent too long away from code, as though voices are calling him to the Other Place. This was his first chance for a week or so to get very deeply into bug-squishing, and it did wonders, the way a walk in a sunshiney garden will do for a normal person. He was all pink-cheeked and cherubic when we got home. Weird, but so sweet.

When she sleeps her hair goes all skew-whiff so that she looks like a tiny Bill Murray.

J: You’re implying that Claire is a cannibal.

R: ?

J: Tractor trailer, old Macdonald, she has eaten all of these except the horse.

R: Ah.

Pause.

R: I prefer the term ‘flesh enthusiast’.

R: This sweater has a hole in it too! Why do all your sweaters have holes in them?

J: The good ones get worn a lot, and they get holes.

Pause.

R: Salome has persuaded Jack to use moisturizer.

J: I see.

R: Would you use moisturizer?

J: Where? Under the beard?

R: You’ll never be Cary Grant, will you?

J: No.

R: Which is okay, because he’s dead.

J (deadpan): Cary Grant died wishing he was me.

Claire made it across the room on Monday, and since then has been pushing herself a little further every day. Her dedication is a wonder to behold. She staggers a ways, looks up to make sure we are watching, grins all over her face and claps her little fat starfish hands together. Ham.

Robert and Gayu gave her a tractor-trailer for Christmas, with Old Macdonald the farmer and a horse and pig and cow and sheep and chicken. As Jeremy points out, she’s eaten all of these now, except the horse. I have to stop myself naming the horse Boxer and the pig Snowball.

It’s a fabulous toy, but the most surprising thing is that she plays with it the way Jeremy would, not the way I would. I used to line my toy animals up in order of height; later, they’d form parliaments and stage debates. Her chief interest in the animals is flinging them aside, or in more benevolent moods, handing them up to me. The tractor, on the other hand, is a source of continual delight. She loves its heft and growl, and keeps inspecting it to find out what makes it go.

The other news, such as it is, is 987 Alabama’s advanced state of decrepitude. We woke this morning to a cheery cascade of water down the window behind my iMac. My business-sized envelopes and old Linux laptop were already soaked. After several increasingly clipped and precise phone calls, the building manager deigned to send his amiable handypersons around. They looked at the damage, said “Oh yeah, the whole frame is rotted through, see,” and then they just sealed it along the bottom.

We’ll see how well that works out.

Busy holiday. Christmas was grand, very cold but sunny. We had a bang-up Irish brunch at Shannon’s place, and perfectly brined turkey with all the trimmings at Kate’s. Toys snowed upon Claire. Her first birthday candle stood atop the Christmas pud.

Yesterday Blanca looked after Claire and Rowan while we went to see the splendid, the amazing Return of the King. Today I jumped my lovely Laz, then Michael and Patricia took Claire and Cian while we went to see the wonderful Master and Commander. All in all a very happy end to the best year of my life so far.

Not everyone has been so lucky: various dear friends are mopping up after surgery and a funeral. Better fortune next year, I wish and hope. Babies growing up healthy and strong, scars healing, talent recognized, projects moving forward, hard work rewarded, changes of government that bring better and kinder people into power. More art, more friendship. Peace.

Jeremy: It’s Jesus Christ Superstar without the songs.

Rachel: It’s Life of Brian without the jokes.

Claire: A-BAH!

To my complete delight William John and Korben Hugh are here and hale and hearty, all fingers and toes present and accounted for. Their mothers demonstrate the ridiculous fortitude of the Australian female. The other day I chatted with Moira on the phone – while she was in labour – and Samantha decided it was probably time to mosey along to the hospital when she was nine centimetres dilated. Seriously, if I ever want an army of genetically superior supersoldiers to advance my nefarious schemes, I’m just going to recruit some of my girlfriends from home.

The pest inspector said: “The wood, down at the front. It is empty.”

“Empty?” asked the buyers.

“You know. I stick my pen through, and there is nothing there. Empty.”

And the buyers were enlightened.