It’s a wise child that knows its own father.

R: I can’t wait until she starts talking.

J: Dada! Da?

C (pointing casually at J): Da.

Well, I finished the story about Novell. To my surprise, it was as sparky and provocative as my novel isn’t.

A horde is descending on my house tonight. We’re going out for tamales. Mmm, tamales.

Other things I’m hoping to make time for: a Triad gig at Cafe Claude on 11/14, featuring nj on keys, and the revived Crimson Club at the Plush Room, featuring the delicious Spencer Day. As Jeremy says, he is the Day everyone wants to seize.

I should be writing about Novell, but I am not. I remember having a long argument with Grant in about 1996, at one of the big Blanche summer picnics in the Botanical Gardens in Sydney. Sunshine, jacarandas, ibises. I affirmed that Novell was a dead company walking, and he said that it was not. These days people pay me to be wrong about such things, while he’s an international DJ. So it goes.

Last night Sumana reminded me that I haven’t seen Rabbit Proof Fence yet, making me a traitor to my people.

At the Day of the Dead, Jeremy said: “Claire stared down Death! She had a staring competition with one of the Deaths, and he blinked first. It is not her time!”

She has a cold and her nose is blocked, which she hates. When thus distressed, she likes to make what I like to call the Worst Noise In The World (WNITW). It’s not as loud as you might think, but it’s beyond unbearable nonetheless. It’s an irritable, keening “EEEEeee,” with the clear implication that wrongness has taken root and that I am to blame. It makes your flesh creep; in fact, what your flesh would like to do, ideally, is creep away out of earshot and huddle under a soundproof bunker somewhere. Then there will be a pause, for breath, in which you hope against hope that she’s fallen peacefully asleep, but know in your sinking heart that this is not the case. Then the WNITW continues, slightly higher and louder. It’s a bit like listening to a giant mosquito that is also kicking you energetically in the ribs.

The WNITW annoyed the cat so much that she bit me on the elbow, clearly agreeing with Claire that I should be held responsible. The cat is especially peeved about the weather. The unseasonably hot October meant she hasn’t grown a winter coat yet, so she has to fluff out her summer silk in a doomed effort to keep warm. She looks like one of the soot-creatures in My Neighbor Totoro or Spirited Away, but with teeth and malevolent green eyes. When she sits on me crossly, I can feel the cold pads of her paws through my jeans.

And then of course the cat starts to purr and the snot-nosed brat grins at me gap-toothily, and my woes are washed away.

I am having no end of trouble with my Nanowrimo novel, which I thought would be easy, more fool me. It’s set from 1877-1917, and I don’t want to introduce any of the verbal anachronisms that set my teeth on edge in, say, the cheesy sub-Georgette Heyer Regency romances that I never read on the sly in second-hand bookstores, why are you looking at me like that? Ahem. But the effort to remain authentic to the period seems to have squashed any spark of life out of my characters; they are dull and flat. I know it’s possible to write vibrantly about the past: the Aubrey-Maturin books and A Suitable Boy are two of my references for this project. I think I’m insecure about the quality of my research, and that in trying too hard not to do anything wrong, I’m preventing myself from doing anything right.

Well. Here is the grindstone, and here is my nose. What a strange phrase that is. Why would anyone want to grind their own nose?

Last night we bundled up the baby in an old woolly jacket of Cian’s and trundled her down to 24th & Bryant. The scent of burning sage made our tummies rumble. There were Mission hipsters with their faces painted to show the skull beneath the skin, and Aztec dancers with elaborate feathered headdresses and bells on their ankles. A jazz band marched, all in white, with a white-faced bride dancing ahead of them, whirling like a dervish. Twelve skeletons formed another marching band, all of crisp loud drums. There were more skeletons on stilts, with flowered sombreros, the deranged love-children of Manny Calavera and Carmen Miranda. My favourite band is the medieval one with the recorders and wooden xylophones and the coffin all decked out in lace; straight out of Ingmar Bergman’s Seventh Seal and into my neighbourhood, eerie and beautiful, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

The only year I’ve missed it was last year, when I was hugely pregnant. The truth is, I always wander down and then stand there feeling like a complete idiot in my Gap jeans and Blundstones, the most middle-class white girl in all history. But the Day of the Dead is one of the things I love best about the Mission. I have no idea who organizes it or how they get the Pabst-swilling loft dwellers and the liquid-eyed Incas to play nicely together for just one night of the year, so it seems almost magically spontaneous to me, as though the truck loaded with flowered crosses drives itself to the corner of Bryant & 24th from its usual parking space in the Land of the Dead.

With the honourable exception of my mother, I grew up among people uniquely squeamish about death (and, indeed, most other basic truths of the human condition). One day when I was little, Mum took a day off work for a behind-the-scenes tour of the Northern Suburbs Crematorium. She came home and told us all very cheerfully that when she dies, she would like to be cremated and have her ashes scattered at sea. She also left clear instructions not to overspend on the coffin or flowers. She’s the Jessica Mitford of Sydney’s Northern Beaches, is my ma.

I miss her awful these days (she’s in Australia, Winnebago-ing the outback, and frequently out of mobile phone reception areas), but the juxtaposition of the cheesy papier-mache skeletons for sale at Galeria de la Raza and the tear-stained women holding pictures of their dear dead reliably conjures her up. I’m glad that Claire’s first home is the crazy, messy Mission, where the Hogfather takes to the streets banging on a drum. I’d like my girl to walk in the benevolent presence of the ancestor-spirits who endowed her with their wily, resourceful DNA. I want her to take joy in all this, because naturally, the very second she was born, I started to hanker after grandchildren of my own…

Last night she woke every ten seconds or so to feed. This morning my darling husband and I are sullen, moving our slow thighs while all about reel shadows of indignant desert birds. Ah well; Peter the Rocket Scientist will be here soon, and we’ll head out to Foreign Cinema for steak.

I clocked up five chapters of my Nanowrimo novel yesterday. Jeremy tried to get into my pants by saying of one section: “That’s very Trollope.”

Flirt.

I had been planning to get up early and write before boy and child woke, a plan which now seems about as practical as flying to the moon on pure goodwill and cheer.

It was hot summer on Thursday, and then so cold on Friday that it snowed quite heavily in Marin. Various energetic throwings-out of unnecessary clothes have left me with almost nothing to wear in winter. Shannon called and I whimpered so piteously that by the time I got to her house, she had the thermostat cranked all the way up and hot coffee on the stove for me. Bless.

But before the ice age, on Wednesday, I was walking up Wiese Street as a teenage boy walked down it, shirtless, his cargo pants riding low on his hips, his belly all six-packed up like a Praxitelean bronze.

Mmm, you’re pretty, I thought, and he caught my eye and grinned at me and said: “You’re pretty.”

Woot! Mama’s still got it. (And I’m pretty sure that I was, in fact, old enough to be his mama.)

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..which is just the sort of thing she would say.

She was all dressed up for Cian’s birthday party this morning, and Carla at Atlas, who is Claire’s number one fan, exclaimed:

“Look at you in your jammies! Where are you going?”

“She has a date with her boyfriend,” I said. “He’s an older man. He’s two.”

Jeremy added: “He’s old enough to be her brother.”

After work I took Claire to the playground behind the Bernal Heights library. They have good baby-swings there. It was about six when I started loading her back into Hedwig, but already dark, because daylight saving ended yesterday.

There was an almighty thunk. I looked up to see a gold sedan bounce off a red convertible stopped at the stop sign. Just a fender-bender, I thought, but surely car-on-car wouldn’t make such a horrible meaty noise?

A woman at the cafe on the corner said, loudly but in a weirdly conversational tone: “Oh my God. She hit him.”

I hoisted the baby onto my hip. A crowd of us gathered around the guy, who was sprawled in the middle of Cortland, holding his right thigh. He grinned valiantly up at us. The woman who had been driving the red car, who had hit him, was kneeling beside him, calling 911.

“Are you all right?” asked the waiter at the cafe.

“Of course he’s not all right,” scolded the witness, “he’s been hit by a car.”

“He thinks he’s broken his leg,” the driver said into the phone.

She should be the villain of the piece – she hit the guy, after all – but I thought of the man who ran in front of me on Fourteenth Street yesterday, and how I’d hardly seen him in the half-light and only missed him by a metre or two. Her hand rested very gently on his shoulder. Her face was intent as she listened to the instructions coming over the phone.

“Don’t move him,” she said.

The victim had been carrying a case of Budweiser. The waiter opened it and gave him a beer. He raised it to us all.

The ambulances arrived with remarkable promptness. I finished loading Claire and drove very carefully home.

Incredibly tasty macaroni and cheese at Universal, with mesclun drenched in balsamic vinegar. Shady umbrellas to keep the hot sun off. Claire has her own piece of cheesy macaroni and is chewing solemnly. The coffee is delicious.

R: I’ve realized that my level of achievement, objectively measured, has little to no effect on my actual mood.

J: Zwoop(1) how wealth has almost no correlation with happiness, except for extreme poverty, like not actually having enough to eat.

R: Well, yeah. As long as I get enough food and sleep, my mood seems more or less arbitrary. Maybe I could just choose to be optimistic rather than pessimistic? To enjoy the sunshine and the baby and the coffee?

J manfully refrains from rolling his eyes at me.

Everyone knows who Ada Lovelace’s father was, but do you know who she married? A direct descendent of William of Occam, the Occam’s razor dude on whom the protagonist of The Name of the Rose was based… My Nanowrimo novel gets more and more intriguing. I love research.

I think I’ve diagnosed and cured, if not the cause of, at least a contributing factor to my below-mentioned grumpiness. I’d been planning to rework Charlie Ravioli for Nanowrimo this year. Trouble is, much as I love the novel (and fully as I intend to rework it and try to get it published), it was spawned by a painful event in my life that I’m currently trying my utmost to get the frick over. I just ended that run-on sentence with a preposition, didn’t I? I also used the word frick, because I’m a mother now and should at least make a token effort towards not swearing like a sailor. As Sarcastor has noted elsewhere, my once-feared edge is lost, a mere memory, gone with the wind, I might as well just buy the minivan, adopt the Labrador and get REPUBLICAN SOCCER MOM tattooed on my head.

(Fragment of a dream last night: “She had no mottos, only tattoos.” Also, I was Mina Harker, having an exquisitely pleasurable lesbian love affair with a gorgeous vampire trapeze-artist in an alt-history Victorian England where they’d discovered genetic engineering and cloned the Kraken. Strange.)

Ahem. Where was I? Oh yes; it turns out that reworking an existing piece is against the rules. You didn’t think Nanowrimo had rules? Think again, kiddo. Obviously these rules are unenforceable in practice. There’s nothing to stop you cutting and pasting, oh, say The Voyage of the Beagle and submitting that as your novel, except for your innate sense of honour. Aren’t you gallant? But the FAQ in its wisdom states:

“No works in progress allowed. You have too much invested in them. Give yourself the gift of a clean slate.”

2003 was supposed to be the International Year of Cope. It didn’t quite work out that way, or hasn’t yet, but we live in hope, because that’s just the kind of cheese-eating surrender monkeys we are. So my early Christmas present to myself is a clean slate – My! Second! Novel! The title is Breeding – Sarcastor, would you please stop sniggering like that? It’s scrummy, and it’s about ponies, and it’s set in an alt-history Victorian England where Dorian Gray is the A-list dinner guest (“He looks so young!”). I can’t wait to get started.

So when I said normal service would now resume, I apparently didn’t mean I’d be, you know, posting to the blog or anything.

Good day yesterday. I started out very grumpy, knowing only that I needed large quiet rooms, Dutch still lives and possibly a glass of coffee in a leafy courtyard. The Palace of the Legion of Honor provided all of the above, although the quietness was significantly ameliorated once Claire started experimenting with the exciting acoustics. To Bernal for tea with Carole and Jamie and Rowan, and home for roast chicken and apple crisp. And so to bed.

Sorry about that. Normal service will now resume.

I’ll admit the weather was a little sub-par, but apart from that, the Crosby-Macgowan wedding was pretty much perfect. We arrived at the marquee pitched on the Wilderstein lawn just as Miss Emily began playing Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 on her viola. We bumped into Mike and Cheryl and were thrilled when Paul appeared in the nick of time. Being Paul, he had tales of derring-do: he’d driven up from Atlanta in a 1991 BMW he’d bought from a charity wrecking yard. He’d had to replace the fuel tank because it had rusted through and when he parked it on a hill all the gas leaked out. He also lost a windscreen wiper blade, improvised with a t-shirt, and when that didn’t work, just stuck the wiper out so it gestured impotently in the rain. Paul always hugely enjoys these vehicular misadventures, which is lucky, because he seems to have rather a lot of them.

Tori was Best Woman and wore a splendid dress made from indigo and gold brocade. Kathryn appeared in a sumptuous wedding gown, all drifts of crimson and azure silk under white lace, with a lovely Victorian headpiece. The reading, from Mary Zimmerman’s adaptation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, was so beautiful and touching that I ran out yesterday to buy it for a friend. When the deed was done, Kathryn came dancing up the aisle with her brand new husband. I may have blubbed. The chronicles are unclear on this point. What is known is that I love a good wedding, me.

After the ceremony we got to explore the house, which was the home of FDR’s distant cousin and dear friend Daisy Suckley. It’s an exquisite Queen Anne mansion decorated in the aesthetic style by one of the Tiffanys. Many of the volunteers who maintain and preserve the place are descended from the Suckley’s cooks and butlers.

“People like the Suckleys, they just lived off the capital,” explained a docent. “Whereas our parents, who came from Europe and went into domestic service, saved their money and bought land of their own.”

There’s your social history of the modern West.

Lunch at the Cripple Creek Restaurant in nearby Rhinebeck was as glorious as you’d expect from Matthew and Kathryn, which is very glorious indeed. The wines were extraordinary, starting with the sparkling Hermitage, like dark fizzy blood. Later I was overcome by good cheer and had to be helped to bed, but Rach Honnery assures me she remembers everything and will tell me all about it, by and by.

On Sunday we took the scenic route back to Boston, arrived with an hour to spare for our flight and spent that entire hour in airport security. They frisked Claire for weapons and undressed me to my singlet. Maybe I looked disgruntled. On the six-hour flight to San Francisco, Claire stood on Jeremy’s tray table and hooted at the baby in the seat in front, much to the delight of everyone in earshot, I am sure. The infinitely gracious Robert Walsh picked up three very weary Chalmers-Fitzhardinges at the airport, and the cat Bebe failed to conceal her overjoyedness at having us home.

Last week we tried to catch up on everything – paying bills, debriefing friends, woogling the cat and so forth. In theory at least, we are all caught up now.

I want to go on another trip.

It is possible that we have been travelling for too long. Last night I dreamed I was pushing an airport trolley loaded with our luggage around Matthew and Kathryn’s wedding, which was for some reason taking place in Las Vegas.

In the waking world, we went to Cambridge for a look at Harvard. It felt necessary, since we’d been in the other Cambridge on Saturday without making it out to see the colleges or, indeed, anything other than Donna’s excellent compost heap.

Rach Honnery said: “Look, you can get Claire a onesie with ‘Harvard University’ written on it!”

I said: “Can you get one with ‘Actually, Mum and Dad believe that state-funded education is a really good idea’ on it instead?”

“I’m sure you can somewhere. This is Cambridge, after all,” said Michael, “but probably not here.”

We walked through the gardens. Harvard’s lovely, especially in the slanty amber light of sunset, and the students are all about nine years old with impossibly clear skin. I remember when I was young I fretted and fretted about my looks, and someone told me that young people are always beautful just by virtue of being young, and I thought that was tosh, but it wasn’t, they really are.

“There’s a gate up there with ‘Enter here and grow in wisdom’ written above it,” said Michael.

“I guess ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ would’ve been a bit glum.”

“You’ll need to get a scholarship if you want to come back,” Rach warned Patrick.

“UC Berkeley’s an excellent school, and so cheap,” I told the children.

“Nah, Patrick’s going to be an Oxford boy,” said Rach. “He’ll win a scholarship and drink yard-long beers, like Bob Hawke.”

Patrick belched, in a very creditable imitation of Bob Hawke.

“These are all residential buildings,” said Michael. “The library’s over there. I used to know various statistics, so pretend I remember them, and have told you.”

“Cool. Where do they inject the sense of entitlement?”

“I think it’s a pre-condition of entry.”

“Do we turn right or left here?” asked Rach.

“Right, of course…”

We’re in the Giraffe restaurant in Marylebone. Claire is playing charmingly with Grant and her balloon, when something suddenly annoys her and she cries.

R: Quick, give her some moral guidance.

G: Don’t cry. People will think you’re weak and take advantage of you.

We’re at Michael and Rachel’s beautiful apartment in Arlington, which seems mind-bogglingly huge after our microstudio in Bayswater. Claire is raiding Patrick’s toy cache with exclamations of approval. Jeremy and Michael are comparing notes on their respective free software projects, both wearing khaki shorts and black t-shirts and sitting like mirror-image bookends on the sofa.

I’ve found the book my heart has been yearning after lo these many years: From Dawn to Decadence by Jacques Barzun. Because I’m essentially pig-ignorant I came to it without any prejudices (I actually picked up a copy at the Palace of the Legion of Honor bookstore because I’d been having a very interesting conversation with nj and Morrisa about the nature of Western identity, and it seemed vaguely topical).

If I’d realized that Barzun, with Lionel Trilling, was the presiding genius behind the hallowed culture program at Columbia University, I’d probably have been too snarly and chip-on-my-shouldery and resentful to read the thing. As it was, it went into the backpack because Volume Two of the Janet Browne Darwin is still in hardback and too heavy to carry on the flight to Amsterdam. My life is gloriously punctuated with such happy accidents. The book is pure distilled essence of curmudgeonly humanity, with an embedded bibliography I’ll probably be able to immerse myself in for the next year or two. It’ll be just like taking a Western Culture class at Columbia only with no fees and no exams, woot!

His perspective on the stuff I know reasonably well – say, Shakespeare and Josephine Tey and the Tudor lie and Swift and Bach and the rise of the novel and Fielding and the Regency and Romanticism and Dickens and Dorothy Sayers (and this is no credit to me, by the way, but all to my good teachers and fabulous high school librarian) – is extremely accurate and illuminating, which makes me trust him as a Dante’s-Virgil-ish guide through the savage vastnesses where my above-mentioned pig-ignorance is profound – Montaigne and Pascal and Hume and Locke and Hegel and Kant and the French revolution and Beaumarchais and Berlioz and the Transcendentalists and well, the rest of the Western canon. Cough.

It is, in short, a brilliantly generous book in the sense that I was banging on about the other day; it invites you in. He’s explicitly in favour of short strong words and transparency and intellectual rigor and common sense, as opposed to obscurantist jargon and the rarefied blather of the academy. Remember how I said that when my reading is on the right track it throws up all sorts of serendipitous coincidences? Barzun quotes that exact same essay of Hazlitt’s on Shakespeare. (Oh, and Alex and I, all unknowing, read A Problem From Hell at exactly the same time.)

In Dublin, the sun shone and we ate like kings. Alex was sleek and happy, like a well-fed cat. In London, too, the weather is delightful, and we have had four scrumptious meals in three days. You expect good scones with clotted cream, but I had a delicious caprese salad on Sunday night. What’s going on? This isn’t Europe, it’s topsy-turvy-world.

Claire hoots with joy that toys as irresistible as autumn leaves actually grow on trees.

Restaurant Gilles Goujon at the Auberge du Vieux Puits – inn of the old well.

Amuse-bouche of cherry tomato, cheese and watermelon, which was a bit odd, actually. More than redeemed by the melon balls with proscuitto, port granita and rockmelon mousse that followed: the mousse especially was fresh, airy essence of rockmelon, like eating a melony cloud.

Then crayfish tails with fennel sorbet drowned in a bouillon. The soup melted the sorbet into a delicious green foam.

Then a slab of perfectly seared tuna.

Then two of the best lamb chops I have ever tasted, and I have eaten a great deal of tasty lamb.

Five cheeses beyond words, especially the feathery chevres.

Citruses with a scoop of ambrosial creme fraiche sorbet.

The petits-fours: a tiny strawberry and cream, like a ruby set in platinum; tart raspberry tart; buttery creme brulee; a shot-glass full of coconut cream with passionfruit puree as an exclamation mark.

Jeremy and I have been discussing whether it was actually as good as French Laundry, or merely of the same order. I believe more research is necessary.

The old well was in the foyer, with glass tiles so you could walk over the top of the water. Claire found this delightfully hoot-worthy. She flirted shamelessly and charmed every table, and at one point was abducted to the kitchen, where doting cooks fed her pink marshmallows.

Other things that contribute to my current mood of quiet glee: seeing Alex’s wonderful one-man show Entertainment, meeting his fiancee Ioanna and hanging out in their kitchen drinking and telling idiotic jokes till four in the morning, with Claire snoozing peacefully on my lap.