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.

That was a good day. Claire was five weeks old; her Janny and Uncle Barnes had come out from Australia to rejoice in her presence. We took her to visit Afshin in the Oakland Hills, then we dropped by Alcatraz to see Jack and Salome and their menagerie.

Janny said: “I can live with the cats and dogs playing with the baby, but I draw the line at the rat!”

But Anna was the best rat ever. I was a sad disappointment to her because my hair is too short: her favourite place to sit was under your ponytail, although she would settle for a pocket or a hood. She was a cheerful, friendly, highly intelligent person, with delicate little pink hands that she used to keep herself scrupulously clean, and a strong and beautiful tail.

Unlike Salome’s fraidy-cat dog Belinda and big gay horse Noah, Anna was brave as a lion. She was bred for snake food, and when she was a few weeks old she was for sale in a huge cage full of white rats. Salome reached in and all the other rats ran away from her hand, but Anna sat looking up with her customary merry confidence. She faced death with the same courage.

We are in escrow, which is a lot like being in limbo. If you say your cultural equivalent of novenas for us, our property inspections will go well.

I bought Jeremy’s birthday present, and I’m not going to tell him what it is.

Except that it’s very cool.

Those koans did something to me. Thursday night Jeremy and I prowled around Japantown in dual quests for tempura (highly successful) and Christmas presents (futile). We browsed the Kinokuniya bookstore for hours, eventually picking up another Miyazaki DVD in order to obtain parking validation.

So Friday night we watched Princess Mononoke again. It’s such a strange and gorgeous film, so pretty and so alien. Then this morning I stumbled across the quirky Japan home page, which amused me for hours.

The Lonely Planet guide to Japan says it’s a wonderful place to travel with kids. Hmm.

He is splendid; a big dark bay New Zealand thoroughbred with a splashy white star. He’s very solid for a TB, like a scaled-up pony, legs like tree trunks. He’s quiet and sweet, but it was cold on Saturday morning and the wind got under his tail and he gave some great bucks. I stayed on! Which was lovely, and made up for the fact that I ride very untidily these days. David took one look at me and laughed.

But I did stay on, and even got a couple of decent canter transitions. Laz has a huge athletic canter like Noah’s, the sort of canter that makes life worth living.

When I was a kid, bored in English class, I used to design my perfect stable block, with a courtyard in the middle and wash bays and a proper high hay loft and a break room. David’s new barn is like that. The old one, with its swaybacked roofline and rotting timber, is completely gone. The new complex sits back up the hill, commanding a sweep of lawn down to a restored Los Trancos Creek.

It’s very beautiful. It’s also very strange to see a place I knew so well and loved so much, completely changed, and yet to feel happy about it. The things I really liked about the property – the creek, the trees, the grass, the sunshine – are the same or better, and the things I didn’t care for so much – the damp, dark stables, the tack room in a shipping container – have been replaced with clean bright well-constructed stalls. It’s the opposite of entropy! Postponing the heat death of the universe as we speak!

Claire loved the horses, and the horses loved her. They’re so gentle with kids, breathing warmly on them and touching their faces with sweet velvet lips.

Today Claire learned about brushing her teeth. I have this way cute little rubber bristle pad that fits over my finger, and a tiny tube of toothpaste flavoured with apple and pear. She found the toothpaste delicious, and the bristles rubbing on her teeth and gums deeply soothing. She sang “Aaaah” and joyously drooled.

I am pleased with Ellen Ullman’s book The Bug, because it’s a little bit like the book I’m writing, but at the same time – completely different! This is perfect. I can say, “You know, it’s like Microserfs or The Bug meets Mating and A Suitable Boy and the Aubrey-Maturin saga”, and publishers will have no earthly clue what I’m talking about. But other people, people exactly like me, will crave my book like the geek-girl crack it is. And if you can’t cater to your doppelgangers, to whom can you cater, hmm?

In other news, I have a new horse! Laz. His name is Laz.

I am reading good Zen koans to Jeremy over the phone.

“I like that one,” he says, chuckling. “Am I allowed to say that it has a good punchline?”

Me, I would never have left Ogion to go to Roke. Which is why I’m not Ged.

Wow. Feels even better than last year. I’m all teary, but it’s probably the unaccustomed indulgence in red wine and chocolate.

Why do I do this to myself? 48000 words, of which 18000 were written yesterday and today.

My shoulders hurt. And as for my brain…

You know what friendship is? Friendship is when you call someone and say, “Hey, I’m really sorry that I exposed you and your husband to this stomach flu that’s going around and I’m really, really sorry he got so sick from it, but all three of us have it now and I was wondering if you could come and take Claire for a bit?”

And she says, “I’ll be there right away.”

The people cry out for pictures; I am powerless to resist. Here she is with a loaded banana.

One of the most fantastic, endlessly delightful things about living in San Francisco is that if you get interested in a particular thing – genetically modified tomatoes, say, or alternative forms of rocket propulsion, or the massive advances in our knowledge of child psychology over the last 30 years, or how difficult it is to forgive someone who has hurt you – chances are the world expert in the field is living and working within a 40-mile radius, and sooner or later you’ll get to hear him or her speak.

Fred Luskin was just great. I’m writing it down here so I don’t forget.

“It’s been a mixed blessing, I have to tell you. The work we’ve done has helped a lot of people, but at the same time I hear an endless succession of horror stories. I hear so many that I don’t even react the same way any more. Talk to enough people about what hurts them and you’ll learn two things: how difficult life can be, and how downright shitty people can be. I see an inexhastibly supply of people who have been hurt. There is so much unkindness, ineptitude and selfishness in the world. We all struggle. Life is so much harder than we thought it would be.

“But the fact is, we over-dramatize our own stuff. This life is meant for us to figure out how to survive it. If we have $100 in the bank, we’re among the top 1-2% of wealthiest people who have ever lived. If we can have some relationships where we experience kindness, we’re truly blessed. How often, when your car starts, do you stop and think, ‘Thank you’? How often are you genuinely grateful for a meal?

“We have a biological imperative to scan the world to find out if we are safe, and we have a biological imperative to suffer from loss. To counterbalance those imperatives, we have to scan the world for its blessings, too. Our biology dictates that negative experiences register in our whole body, while positive experiences can stay on the surface. We have to offer thanks, and welcome goodness into our very cellular being. When we come home to somebody who loves us, to a child who holds up its hands to be hugged, we have to breathe in that blessing.

“As human beings we are built vulnerable. We are subject to physical decay. All the people we love will die. That sucks. When you go out into the world you underestimate the enormous risks you take. You have to find food, shelter, love, meaningful work, friendship. It’s incredibly hard. And every single thing that hurts us reminds us how vulnerable we are. We can win the game of Monopoly, but when the game is over, it goes back in its box, and so do we.

“When we get angry or upset we invoke the stress response. Blood drains from our prefrontal cortex and into our limbic system. We literally can’t think straight. At the same time, our livers release cholesterol to gummy up the blood in our hearts, just in case we get bitten by a lion and might bleed to death. Getting angry is like throwing Drano through your circulatory and immune systems, that’s how much damage it does.

“Forgiveness means you give the same attention to the things that do work for you as you do to the things that don’t, and talk about them with the same gusto. Life doesn’t owe you more than it gave you. It’s up to you to find goodness in what it gave you. It just takes practice.

“Count your blessings.”

Claire is hooting mournfully. It’s not like her at all.

Kiki: What have you done with the real Claire? This child is an imposter!

R (to the tune of Rubber Ducky): Doppelganger, you’re the one, who makes bath time so much fun…

J: At least, you’re one of them.

I had to cook two dinners last night, because I made a mistake on the first one. The beef stew made with our own chicken glaze was filling the house with delicious savory smells, when I remembered to my chagrin that I had browned the steak in seasoned flour and butter, meaning that if I fed it to Shannon and Cian, both violently lactose-intolerant, I would poison them.

Luckily Shannon had brought another chicken, brined with kosher salt. I sliced up some carrots and Yukon Gold potatoes and threw them in the roasting pan with olive oil and ground pepper. There were vine-ripened tomatoes and avocadoes and baby spinach for the salad, and the very last bottle of the celestial 1999 Adastra chardonnay to drink. I threw the gold-and-blue Provencal tablecloth on the kitchen table, and the six of us had a proper Sunday roast. The bird was juicy and tender and delicious and the schmaltzy vegetables disappeared in nanoseconds.

We sent the boys out for a couple of bottles of cheap red, and peeled five overripe pears. They went into a pot with an entire bottle of wine, a couple of spoonfuls of sugar, sprinkles of cinnamon, nutmeg and ground cloves and a dash of vanilla essence. The pears simmered for an hour while we finished off the chardonnay, and then we ate them, poached to a nicety.

Claire ate her pieces of pear, and her face filled with wonder.

Tonight: stew!