Paris Ankara Express

Boys and girls at play.

2012-01-06T13:41:00.000+02:00

There's been a lot of talk lately in the UK, and everywhere on the internet, about the gender division of toys. Hamleys recently re-organised their toys according to interest, rather than gender. This was shortly after their headquarters were contacted by feminist blogger Delilah, who pointed out that their 'girl' and 'boy' floors smacked of gender apartheid. Of course, the change wasn't received everywhere with enthusiasm: still quite a few people appear to believe that girls are 'hard-wired' to prefer anatomically impossible dolls and pink tea-sets, whereas boys, if left to themselves, will choose cars and soldiers. This, in spite of all the hard work people like Cordelia Fine have been doing in recent years to explain why this isn't so in words of two syllables or less. Some people's brains are 'hard-wired' it seems, not to understand. But for those who do understand how hard it is to see what a child, no matter how young, prefers 'by nature', because their preferences are formed by their environment from the time they are babies, and because it's impossible for even the best, gender equal parents, to control more than a tiny part of that environment, it is time to take the debate further.

What toys you buy at the shop represents only part of a child's play activities, we all know that. A child is as likely, more likely maybe, to play successfully with a cardboard box and a bit of string than with the latest Christmas presents. This is good, of course, it helps their imagination and our finances. But it has a darker side. Many parents will say that although they would never dream of buying their sons toy guns, the boys still found ways of playing at killing each other, with sticks, with their fingers. Boys will be boys will be warriors. Girls will be girls will be mothers. With teddy bears, paper dolls, pets or small siblings.

I have nothing against playing mother. It is a fine occupation, and one which I would encourage more in little boys. Too often I have seen boys laughed at or chastised for pretending to perform domestic tasks, pushing a pram, wearing an apron, etc. It seems that little girls are 'by nature' designed to play these games, where nature means the approval of parents, peers, teachers and everyone else they might encounter, not to mention that all powerful influence, the little girl on the advert, looking at you from the tv screen, posters on bus shelters and the boxes in the toy shops. It is clear that if you want to succeed in life, you should do as she does.

But what of the boys who would play war? What of their parents who are 'powerless' to do anything about it, because, after all, they don't buy toy guns? Warring is a very powerful experience, they say - it's you and your team against the rest, it grabs all your instincts and emotions, magnifies them, focuses them - it's part of the human experience. I think I know what they mean. When on a couple of occasions, as a child, I have been at war, against indians, extra terrestrials, etc., I have felt the exhilaration, the sense of belonging, of being out of myself. Mostly, the excitement comes from the sense that you're out to kill, that you're unbound, that you can really hurt someone, even if it's only pretence.

So, great, you think it's harmless and enjoyable to let your kids pretend they're killing other human beings. How about letting them play rape, or torture? These are, after all, real things that go on in wars just like the fighting. And if you want your play to be more unisex, and to include kids who're not so good at running, say, then you can let them play the rape or torture victims. That way it's more realistic and more inclusive. It can be quite varied and imaginative as well. If you're in quiet surroundings and there's just a couple kids, they can play date rape. If there's one girl and a bunch of boys, they can play gang rape, with a couple of boys holding down the girl while the others take it in turns to pretend to rape and beat her. Sure, it's disgusting. I'm not happy with myself for writing it down, even. But is it really that much worse than letting kids pretend to shoot each other with the kind of weapons that will cause major destruction to the human body, and to re-enact horror scenes that take place daily in not so distant parts of the world, involving children not much older than themselves?

Can't we just say no?

School days, blood pressure days.

2012-01-05T10:01:00.000+02:00

It started when he was four. Some days, he just didn't want to go to school. We'd have to carry him kicking and screaming into the school bus, knowing that he'd probably be allright once he got there. The kicking and the screaming was always for us only, with other people, he would be calm.

Then he got a bit older, and a bit bigger. Carrying him kicking and screaming no longer was an option. Once he'd started big school, the screaming would begin at 6.30 in the morning, getting up time, not wanting to put clothes on time. No longer for our ears only, it woke up the neighbours. Some days we'd manage to make him go, some days not, and then, we'd have to make a fast decision as to who would stay at home with him, whether we could get a last minute childminder to come, whether we could afford it. Then we'd have to find time to make up the work we'd missed, somehow, find the money to pay for the extra childcare.

Really not knowing what to do, I contacted a forum for autistic people and their family. What do you do when you child won't go to school? The responses were not helpful. How dare you keep your child away from school, they asked? Would you allow a non-autistic child to miss school? Do you think his education doesn't matter because he's autistic? Why don't you just tell him he's got to go?

I pictured myself telling him, over the screaming. At the time he was just beginning to talk, and mostly in Turkish, at that, a language I had no command of. I felt powerless. Another person advised me to make sure he had an unpleasant day if he stayed at home: no toys, no videos, just work. I didn't even try it out. Max in an worked up, not wanting to go to school state, was a head banger. At the slightest contradiction, he would begin to scream at the top of his voice and bang his head hard, on the floor, on the wall, on the furniture. I couldn't let that happen. I had to pacify him. Just do it, they'd said. Don't let him bang his head, they'd say. I couldn't even begin to imagine how it would be done.

Then in the second semester it stopped. He started to go school every day, or nearly, quite happily. We became used to having our days to ourselves, free to go about our work, and with a little bit of time spare at lunchtime to get together, my husband and I, to discuss strategies for the following day, just in case something went wrong. Often we used that time also to discuss how to help Max in other ways. We decided to keep him from school one day a week, Friday, so he could go to his special ed. classes in the afternoon and not be too knackered. We worked out how to use social stories to communicate with him better and help him deal with his anxieties. We found a way of getting help for him in the school, even though there was no real provision for that kind of thing here.

Over the following year, we had some scares, some nervous moments, he did miss school a few times, but we were able, mostly, to write it off as him not being quite well: a lot of autistic kids aren't great at recognising when they're sick, or communicating it. So we would assume he was and he'd go back the next day. On the whole he had a great year. He changed a lot, he learned a lot.

Then it started again this November. At first, we'd think he was sick. And he was, at least some of the time: we were all plagued by some nasty colds that just wouldn't go away. But, now more verbal, he made it very explicit that he did not want to go to school. He no longer wanted to work, get up in the morning, he was going to stay home, play and draw. A couple of times we managed to drag him to the school bus. Then we got a phone call from the driver saying he wouldn't come out to go into the school building. The teachers managed to coax him out, but Max didn't do much that day, and the next day, he stayed home.

This dragged on until the Christmas holiday, during which he spoke of going back in January fairly enthusiastically. His teachers were very sympathetic. No one told us this time that we just had to make him go. No one accused us of being bad parents, or not trying hard enough. This morning was the first day back. He got up. Reluctantly let me put on his clothes. Complained of tummy ache, so didn't eat. Refuse to brush his teeth, and kept up a low pitch moan while I was putting on his coat. Downstairs, with his dad, he ate a pastry, and waited for the bus, all the time keeping up a monologue in which he told himself he had to go to school. When the bus arrived Max froze. My husband picked him up and carried him, like a marble statue, to the car, slid him in and left. No screaming.
Back home, my first thought was to switch off my phone, so I didn't get the call from the driver telling me things hadn't gone well. I switched it back on immediately, of course. No call came, so I imagine things went ok. Tomorrow is Friday, his day off, so we'll have till Monday to figure how to make him go back. Maybe he'll be fine. We just don't know.

I hesitated to publish this, because it seems too much like a rant about how hard our life is. It isn't. Hard, I mean. We're lucky that we've got jobs that pay enough for emergency childcare when we need it, that we've got a very flexible child-minder, that we live close enough to work that we don't lose a lot of time in commuting, that there's two of us, that our time tables are such that we can box and cox without too much damage to our careers most of the time, and I could go on. But it's taking its toll, on our health - hence the title - as well as our careers. The fact that there is no obvious solution and that a lot of people are unsympathetic makes me wonder how many parents are in that situation and just don't bother talking about it. Talking about it with friends often leads to them saying 'most kids don't like going to school'. If you're in the same situation as we are, you know this isn't the same thing. And if you want to talk about it, we're here.

To: Santa Claus, Re: Retirement, Cc: the Elves.

2011-12-08T14:18:00.001+02:00

Dear Santa.

Thanks for coming. I think it's abouttime you and I had this chat.

I'll be blunt: I have gone ahead and bought the iPad.I didn't even wait till Christmas to do it, I didn't wrap it, and Istarted playing with it straight away. Santa, honey, let's be honesthere: I've been asking you for apple goods for years now. And I'vebeen good. Certainly as good as some people who have prettiercomputers than I do.

So yes, I bought it. If you want tohelp you can get me some accessories. But I'll not be counting on youfor that either. My husband's on to it and he's a hell of a lot morereliable.

Santa: I think you need to stop. Youcan't handle the job anymore. Your memory's not what it used to be,you probably don't even know what timezone I'm in, and I'm prettydamn sure you don't know how to use the internet (you know, the linksI emailed you to the things I wanted? You click on them and orderonline).

I know you're supposed to be all aboutthe children these days. But, Santa, sweetie, honestly? I was inMarks and Sparks the other day, choosing something for a baby girl.All the stuff there was either pink and labelled 'Mummy's littleprincess' or blue with 'Mummy's little monster'. Do your elves makethat stuff? Haven't you read Cordelia Fine yet? Haven't you cottonedon to gender equality? Are you trying to undermine everything weteach our children? And to be honest, Santa, they don't reallybelieve in you anymore. My daughter is angling for some electronicgoods this year, so given your track record, it's probably best shedoesn't even ask you, and my son's writing lists for us, not you:that's how little he trusts you.

Look here, Santa, calm down a bit. AllI'm suggesting is that you take your long overdue retirement. I'msure the elves will look after you. And look, you're not completelyout of the picture, we still sing the songs. But I'm beginning tothink that even that is a bit out of order: all the threats 'You'dbetter watch out', the blackmail, and the really dodgy stuff –snogging the kiddies' mums, watching us while we sleep. Santa: getthe fuck out of my bedroom, now!

Santa, I don't know what happened toyou. I used to think you were a sweet old guy with too much time andmoney on his hands that parents could fob off the job of gettingprezzies for their kids on to. Now I'm concerned.

Listen Santa, no one is saying you'reredundant. Well. I mean there's lot of stuff you can get us. Likeworld peace. I'm sure lots of people have been asking for that andyou just haven't had time to get round to it because of lookingaround for all these toys. And better weather. Why don't you get onto that? The kids would appreciate a bit of snow on Christmas day,I'm sure, and I wouldn't mind if that bloody rain stopped.

Look Santa, there's really no need toget upset. We all get old – I didn't make the rules. If I had, I'dhave probably put a woman in charge by now, anyway. Ever heard of theglass ceiling? You've had a good run, Santa, but you can't blame usfor wanting a bit of change in the way we run Christmas. Santa,really, you're going to bring on a heart attack if you go on thatway. It wouldn't hurt to lose a bit of weight, by the way. Santa: PUTTHE GUN DOWN. That's right, give it to me. Ok, look, you can bring usgifts just this time. We've put our tree on the balcony by the way.We got a cat, he eats the ornaments. Well, you'd know that if you'dbeen paying a bit more attention. Anyway, just dump the stuff underthe tree and go. What do I want? Oh, just the usual. More computers,books, that kind of shit. You know what I like Santa. You shouldn'thave to ask year after year- you've known me since I was this high.Ok, look, fine. Just bring me a scarf. Yeah, sure, I'll wear it. Go,now. Yes you can have your gun back. But mind you don't play with itwhen you're near children.

Welcome to Bilkent Falls: an advent calendar story

2011-12-01T09:41:00.001+02:00

I take a still from my favourite Christmas film: It's a Wonderful Life, and I sketch it. I keep the trees, some cars, the Christmas decorations, and I leave out the shops and the busy street.

Instead, I draw our library and the campus path that leads down to it. In the foreground I draw the children playing in the snow. Max is lassoing the moon, George Bailey style, Charlotte is building a snow man with a zombie-Hermey. I use ink, watercolour, cutting and pasting, glitter glue and white gouache for the snow. For the cars I cut out some of Max's latest pictures.

Meanwhile, Charlotte is hard at work on the boxes. Cut out of construction paper and folded, each one has to be decorated individually. I do a few by gluing stills from the film, I get Max to do couple as well, with pastels on brown paper. Charlotte does most of the rest.

The presents can't just go in the boxes, of course. That would be far too easy. I dig out some small bits of material from a bag, and we saw them into twenty four little bags to be tied with ribbon.

Bill is called in on the last few nights for the heavy work: gluing the boxes together into a frame he constructs out of the same paper. I cut out the doors on the picture. The tiny toys go in the bags and into the boxes. We glue the cover on. It only just fits. And we put it up.

Max is the first to open: Charlotte will take the even days so she gets Christmas eve. He comes in the morning and looks at it, starry eyed. 'Oh, it's beautiful'.

You can find last year's advent calendar here, and the ones before here.

A day at the mall

2011-12-01T09:30:00.001+02:00

'Is this the right direction? Do yourecognize it?' 'I'm not sure: I'll ask the driver.' Yes, he says,this is the way to Panora. It's such a long ride: Charlotte isworried she won't meet her friends on time, although it's a good halfhour before the start of the film, so it should all-right. We drivethrough roads we don't know, trusting the driver to get us there. Wetake a turn to the left and there's a car in front of us, goingawfully slowly. Our driver brakes, and I'm thinking I'm glad hewasn't going too fast. Then I hear a bump and everything is in slowmotion. We swing back and we swing forward, once, twice, forever. Ihave time to remember everything I've always heard about caraccidents. There's a long silence. The driver turns towards us:Sorry. My hand is holding Charlotte's. She' ok. So am I.

Men come out of the cars in front andbehind us, looking angry, mean, too big for us to take on. I look atmy daughter again: she's not even wearing a fucking seat belt! Myeyes well up, but I keep it cool. She's ok, she's unharmed and justwants to know if she'll get to the mall on time. We put our seatbeltson. We wait a bit. We ask. They have to wait for the police. Everyoneis staying calm after all. We take another taxi to finish our journeyand the driver lets us out in the middle of a busy road because hesays there's too much traffic to go all the way. My eyes tear upagain as I try to cross with Charlotte.

She's relieved that she's not the lastgirl to arrive. I watch from a balustrade as she greets her friends,goes to buy the ticket. I call my husband to tell him not to worry,that we're fine, that it was no big deal, but that I was shit-scared. Ineed food. Junk food, to be precise, something with lots of sugar andchemicals that will go straight to the bits of my brain that won'tstop playing the scene over and put it to sleep. There's a big queueat the burger place, so I go to the chicken place. It's friedchicken. I used to find it pointlessly disgusting. Now I know thatthis is how some people in America actually eat their chicken I don'tmind so much. I also know what they do to the living birds thatend up in the paper plate so normally I avoid it. Today I have no fellow feeling forchicken.

The film is a long one. Some very dullyoung woman has to do some very dull things with a glittery vamp. Ihave to hang out in the mall, and wait for Charlotte's call. There'ssome Christmas shopping to do, toys for the advent calendar.Charlotte said there were some toy shops on the second floor. I wantto find a book shop too. I go look. I get lost. This mall is theclosest to hell I've ever imagined. Too many people, too much noise,and no way to find anything: where is Virgil when you need him? Itturns out the bookshop and some toy shops are on the third circle andthe other toy shops and accessories shop on the second one. Or is itthe other way round? Dante didn't have a thing on the people whodesigned this place. To find a toilet, you have to go round threetimes anti-clockwise, go into a broom cupboard, and up and down somestairs.

Fighting my ways through the crowds atthe bookstore, trying to see where they keep the books, amongst thetoys, the magazines, the cheap cds, I picture myself in a zombieapocalyptic world. I have a riffle and I take them out, one by one,creeping behind the bookshelves so they don't see me.

In one of the toy shops, there's aScream outfit, and a handful of pretty neat Star Wars costumes. Whata change from the usual snow white/ spiderman crap! The pictures onthe wrappings all show 10 year old boys. What do 10 year old boyshave that I don't? I pick up the tag: a lot of money, apparently –I leave the shop.

I'm sitting in the bookshop, drinkingoverpriced coffee when Charlotte comes and find me. The things Ibought are hidden in my handbag. She's pleased with her outing. She'shappy we came. We go home.

There's no logic in Christmas puddings.

2011-11-28T09:12:00.001+02:00

I won't bother writing the recipe down, as I posted it last year, but here are a few photos of this year's Christmas pudding making.

Old trusty recipe. Half made up, half copied from various books. Thoroughly imprecise. Vague quantities.

This is what we use for sugar: the gunk at the bottom of last year's pekmez bottle. We buy it in Cappadocia from a friend of a friend who makes it with white grapes, which is nicer than the stuff you buy in the markets and is made with black grapes. Apparently.

Fruit, spices, more fruit, candied peels. The sherry is mine. I've nearly ran out and forgot to order more supplies. I'm worried I won't last the winter.

This year I had to do without the mango amchoor powder as we'd run out. Instead I used what may or may not have been mace. It smells like pepper. I put a lot in. Just to see.

Diogene asked that I put in this photo of him, as opposed to one when he was trying to nick the fruit, stick his paws in the mix, or knock down jars.

The traditional family stir up. Efes dark in the background. That's Guinness substitute to you.

Glass bowls, some grease proof paper and a bit of string.

We decided to use one and a half time the quantities, for some reason we ended up with twice as many puddings. There's very little logic in puddings.

The shocking truth about Marie-Antoinette, by the hon. Edmund Burke.

2011-11-26T14:13:00.001+02:00

August 1795, London.

It is with great sorrow that I find myself obligated to report, for the sake of posterity, on a grave but thoroughly excusable mistake I have made. I am, I most shamefully admit, too much of a coward to share my recent observations with my own colleagues. The queen has been executed, and I do not want to sacrifice my reputation along with hers. I can still do some good for my country by holding the values I have always defended against those who would throw us into a senseless and bloody uprising.

It has come to my notice via a certain friend of my old enemy Price, that it was possible to publish one's thoughts for posterity without fear that they would be known during my lifetime. Though I am ignorant of the mechanics I have no choice but to avail myself of this method.

When I first saw Marie Antoinette, as you will know – for I have no doubt but that you read my Reflections on the Revolution in France – I was dazzled by her beauty and goodness. Though she was, naturally, standing so far from me that I could barely make out her silhouette from that of the surrounding trees, I was struck at once by the purity and refinement of her face, body, and manner. Through the gracefulness of her movements, the beauty of her mind was scintillating. In my book I also reported with terrible sadness the manner in which ruffians, criminals, assaulted her in her own room at night so that she had to seek refuge in his majesty's own room.

The creatures who took to the streets in that wretched summer of 89 had more in common, to my mind, with the zombies that were festering in the English country side than they had with the human race, and even less with that half angelic race to which the queen belonged. Their clothes stank, their mouths were but toothless, and yet, they clamoured for Parisian bread, which, if I remember correctly is harder than Robespierre's own heart, so that they could not even chew through it. But the women were the worst. They were stronger than then the men, hardly like women at all: able to carry the sticks they used to threaten those more graceful than them, and with voices that could be heard through the crowds, without a hint of that charm and gentleness which polite societies had come to expect from members of the weaker sex.

This is all I knew of those happenings at the time I wrote my book. And I stand by every single word I wrote about the Parisian women – if they even deserve to be called that, which I doubt. But after my book was in print, I began to hear some extremely frightening reposts, which at first, I saw fit to quash and deny as any gentleman would who had first hand acquaintance with a lady of the quality of the queen of France. This remained true until six weeks ago, when it was my misfortune to renew an old acquaintance, with a chevalier who had loved the queen even more than I had. His name, Rougeville, may not be known to you as he is not a writer and his part in this story is of little importance. Rougeville loved the queen chastely and hopelessly though he lived in close quarters to her as he was part of the king's circle. He was there on that fateful night, playing cards with the king in his rooms, when the queen burst in upon them. His account, told over a quart of clouded beer in the inn in which he was intent on putting an end to his days, still causes me to wake at night in terror and a sweat.

His Highness – for I must carry on calling him that, even though his head was two years ago – and my acquaintance had been playing a game of piquet, and had let themselves be distracted by some reflections of the king on cartography, as was their wont of an evening. The first they knew of the impending tragedy was some screaming in the adjacent corridor. The king's servant was sent to investigate, but even though the king was well aware that there were troubles in Paris, he imagined they had not reached Versailles and surmised that the noise came from a drunken boy who had fallen down some stairs. When his own servant did not return, he soon forgot the screaming to pick up his cards again. But as soon as he had started to lose, more screaming roused him to send another servant. That second servant not returning, he sent a third, and a fourth. In the meantime, the Swiss guards who had also heard the noise, had gathered in the corridor too, and the king could hear that some sort of battle was going on outside his rooms. So it was bravely and rather fearlessly that when a knock came on the door connecting his room to the queen's he demanded that Rougeville go and open it, while he kept himself at a distance only suited to his status – for the people of France would not forgive him if he allowed himself to be harmed. Rougeville opened the door, ready to rescue in his arms the object of his love from whatever evil had been unfolding.

But instead, he recoiled! The queen, who it is true, had been sick after sustaining a nasty bite while out on a hunt, looked frightful enough to put the fear of death in any one, love-sick chevalier, or not. Her face was a palish green, and she had scratched the part of her head when she had been bit, so that the bone was exposed. She still wore the wig that had been placed on her that morning by her maid, but it was covered with blood, grit, and what he could only surmise were bits of human entrails. Instead of standing straight she was crouched, her hands held in front her her, twisted like claws. Her fingers and her teeth were soaked in blood. Her graceful, youthful voice was replaced by a low whining growl. The chevalier had not choice but to close the door on her, but most unfortunately, not before the king had caught a glimpse of his wife and of what lay behind her: murdered men and women, their heads broken, the eyes rolling out of their sockets and what little was left of their brains leaking on the blue carpets from Persia.

The account as I have told it in my book is not all false. The Parisian ruffians did come in to Versailles, but that was after they called to deal with the massacre of the king's swiss guards. Once they had decapitated and staked all the queen's victims, and managed to contain the monster itself, they decided that they might as well arrest the king and bring him to Paris. The latter was too shocked by what he had witnessed to protest, and merely requested that he might be allowed to change into clean drawers before coming. Rougeville escaped and was spared. But the image of the queen haunts him till now, as it will me, till the day I die. I can only pray that my release comes soon.

I have just heard from Rougeville and he has requested that I listen to yet more of his gruesome confessions. I am to meet him tomorrow night. I can only wish that death takes me before I have to share in more of his nightmare.

Portrait of Autism #18

2011-11-20T10:57:00.001+02:00

'He's not autistic', he tells me, threelines into our conversation.

It's my son, he's talking about, not hisown, the three-year-old struggling to escape from his father's graspso he can slide down to play on the floor. Not quite his business,you may think. Except of course, that I'm at the special education centre, where autismis everybody's business. He tries to explain, but he struggles, ashis English is not what it used to be – he studied at an Englishlanguage university, as I know from a previous meeting. Max canspeak, he wants to say, he's friendly, so he's not autistic. I point out that evennow that Max has made so much progress, we're still experiencingquite a few difficulties related to his autism. The fact that if theslightest thing freaks him out at school he refuses to go the nextday, and is incapable of telling us why. The fact that he still hastemper tantrums that make us worry the neighbours will report us tosecurity, again. The fact that the rare conversations we have withhim are only ever about what he's drawing or transportation, wholives where and where we're going to on holiday. Not that I'mcomplaining: it's wonderful that he can speak at all, the tantrumsare a fraction of what they used to be and he goes to school oftenenough that he's actually learning stuff.

No, the man replies: that's just whatevery parent goes through. Autism, he adds, is just a name. The words'triad of impairment' come to my lips. But then, I'm never entirelysure about this classification. I mention that Max, probably like hisown son, finds certain kinds of social interactions difficult andthat his language development is still quite far behind that of thechildren – two years younger than him – in his class. So whilehe's sweet enough when parents and teachers at the center ask him howhe is, and while this is a huge achievement compared to how he usedto be, it's not something that will help him make friends in theschool yard. He's blessed with seriously good looks, so there'salways a gaggle of little girls queuing up to play with him, helphim. But he's never just going to join a game of football: he doesn'tunderstand the rules, and he wouldn't know how to communicate withthose who might explain. So he plays alone.

Among the older kids who go on Saturdaymornings, Max is probably the one who has the easiest time bothsocially and academically. There's a teenage girl who is, as far as Ican tell, non-verbal, meaning that she doesn't speak, or very little- although as far as I know she could be a very fluent writer: autismis weird, like that. There's a big boy who seems like a fluent enoughspeaker, but altogether avoids eye contact, at least when he's at thecenter. Max must seem like a success story, to parents of toddlers,when compared with those. Max is the kid they'd like their own to bemost like. They cannot really project anything more suited to theirchild's personality: for all his talk of autism being just a word,the father who spoke to me is almost certainly persuaded that his ownson will grow up to be like Max, not like the other two. At three,the boy is beginning to speak. He has good eye contact, seems to befairly well-behaved, and doesn't do a lot of stimming (repetitivemovement or noise that autistic people sometimes do). Max at the sameage was a whole different story. There's no reason to expect thatanyone will grow up to be like Max.

The father of the three year old wantsto make his point further – that Max is not autistic – byspeaking directly to him, in English. I must have told him threetimes already that Max's English is very limited, but that he'sfluent in both French and Turkish. By this point, another mother hasjoined in to the discussion of my son's autism. Oh yes, she says,having to learn several languages will mix up his head – that iswell known. And then she, too, proceeds to speak to Max in English.In the end, both Max and I were polite. Max offered a few slightlypuzzled 'Yes' s to their questions, and I did not say that Max'sTurkish was vastly superior to their English. And then we left.

A very zombie love affair

2011-11-19T16:53:00.001+02:00

After a long silence, we hear again from our eighteenth century correspondent, Mary Wollstonecraft who has much to relate of her philosophical progress since she last wrote here.

I am sitting down to write thishalf-way between Paris and Lille which I hope to reach beforetomorrow night. I am tired from the journey, and being with child hasaffected my capacity to reminisce – nonetheless, dear loyal reader,I will now attempt to bring back with words some of the painfulevents that have plagued me since I last wrote here.

'Tis two years now since I fled infectedLondon for Paris – two wonderful, peaceful years, when the onlyupsetting events were the occasional loss of a dear friend to theguillotine. 'Tis in Paris that I met my dear beloved Imlay, adoredcompanion and father of my child to be. France is mercifully free ofzombies. I believe the revolutionary practice of using the guillotineoften and plenty has so far prevented a general infection of thecountry: the blade that slices through the neck is democratic enough in thatit kills zombies and royalists alike. M. Guillotine, I should note,was one of the early proponents of the view to which I fullysubscribe that in order to destroy a zombie and prevent it fromrising again, one should separate its head from its body.

Back in London, my experience witheducating zombies so that they may claim their rights having failedrather than succeeded, I retreated for a while to my own affairs.After a spell in Ireland, where I was put in charge of protecting sixchildren from their zombified mother, I came home to start a schoolwith my beloved Fanny. Such happiness, however, would not last. Fannywas bitten, by one of my own sisters (a story I shall tell on a lateroccasion). I entreated her to leave England for Portugal, where Ihoped the weather would be more favourable to her condition. I soonreceived reports that she was worsening, and still in hope that Imight assist a recovery, I decided to join her. I lost no time insetting out and endured a tolerable passage in a ship ridden withzombies. My days were spent cutting through necks and limbs, and mynights locked away in a tiny, rank smelling cabin. As soon as I setfoot in Portugal, I realised that there could be no hope. Not asingle living soul remained: all had been zombified, which shouldhave come as no surprised had I reflected on the extreme catholicismof the natives. My dear Fanny expired in my arms, after I haddecapitated her.

Desolate, I returned to London,whatever small lust for life I had left all but used up in slaying myway through the journey back. Fortunately, my good friend Johnsonapproached me and offered me work in which I was able to lose mysorrowful self. I reviewed, edited, translated, even wrote book,which, I am not afraid to say, gathered a little success of theirown. Twas then also I met the treacherous Fuseli. Straightaway I wascharmed by his wit, and his worldliness, and I do not flatter myselfI believe when I say that he did not find my company unpleasant, atleast at first. But as s oon as I had persuaded myself that hereturned my affections, Fuseli found himself obliged to marry arelation whose sole capital were looks and an income.

Soon after thewedding – to which I was not invited – it became apparent to methat the young Mrs Fuseli was in fact entirely devoid of brains –except for the ones it was her practice to devour at breakfast. Yes,Fuseli had succeeded where I had so spectacularly failed: he hadtamed a zombie and taken her for his wife. Full of admiration for himand pity for her, I immediately offered myself as complement to theirhousehold. I argued in a convincing enough manner that whereas hehad apparently succeeded in training his dead wife so that he coulduse her body as he pleased without risk of infection, he must sorelymiss the intellectual company of a real woman. I put myself entirelyat their mercy, humbly requesting that they should take me into theirhome. To my great horror, Fuseli laughed in my face, and his wifegrowled at me in such a way that I came to fear for my life. Twasthen I decided to leave for Paris where I have at last found bliss,in the person of Imlay, a tall handsome American (Fuseli is Swiss andShort), with whom I am expecting to start a family in a short fewweeks.

click on Zombie Mary for more stories.

Midnight in Manhattan

2011-11-16T21:30:00.001+02:00

Is it just me or has Woody Allen taken to recycling scenes in his dotage?

First catch your pumpkin: a recipe.

2011-11-08T00:21:00.000+02:00

I' ve always felt a bit iffy about recipes that start with 'First, catch a rabbit'. I think Mrs. B used it, but given she was a London journalist, and she' d never set foot any where she could have caught a rabbit, one would be justified in thinking it was done for show.
So for readers who feel as I do, I apologise for this extravaganza.

First catch a bus, from the Ankara bus station, ASTI, in the direction of Nevsehir. At Nevsehir, get into a smaller bus to Goreme. When you get off, walk to your hotel, greet the owners like the old friends they have become, dump your bags, and go off for a restorative meal and walk.

The next day, hop into a minibus, driven by an even older friend, Zekerya bey, leaving the kids to sit at the back with his daughter, and enjoying the view. Drive south. Make your first stop at the market in Urgup. Feel a bit sad at the sight of the cows and sheep lined up for the coming sacrifice (Kurban Bayram), reflect that they've got it easier than the cows whose bits you buy in the supermarket most week. Let go.

Look at weird stuff, get daughter to ask what it is, taste it - like stewed apples, she says - buy a little, 'cause what the hell. The leaves make good tea, they say.
Study grapes, ripening in wooden crates, lettuces, lined up like wallpaper, nuts, herbs and spices in rolled up vinyl bags. No apples thanks, we'll pick our own, later.

Settle on a pumpkin vendor, ask his price: 1tl a kilo. This small one is three kilos - that's cheap and not too big to carry back.

They have olives! Husband is excited. He thought he'd missed the olive season. Not the olives in jars season, you understand: the raw olive season. He likes to prepare them himself in brine. We buy four kilos.

Next get everything back in the minibus. Drive some more. Stop off to look at some old stone with writing on it. It's not in any of our guides, we've never heard of it before, and have no idea what the writing is. Some really strange hieroglyphs.

A couple more stops: a prehistoric village with houses you can climb into, a monster of a church with Byzantine pretensions, surrounded by a huge monastery complex dug into the stone. No one around: again, this is not in any of our guides.

Our final destination: Soganli. Zekerya bey calls the restaurant ahead to tell them we're coming. They're crowded with two tour groups: but they'll make room for us, we come this time every year.

Out of the bus we fall, Max carrying a huge empty Safeway shopping bag.
The tables are set indoors. Normally we eat in the orchard but it's bloody freezing. But before lunch the ritual. Zekeya shakes the apple trees. The fruit falls every where and the children run and gather it in Max's bag. Zekerya and the restaurant owner cry: 'more! more!'

Bring the bag home after the holiday: fifteen kilos of apples, a pumpkin, some olives, and other essentials.

Carve the pumpkin for Halloween. Use the flesh for a soup, and for a pie.
Put a handful of flesh in a pan with a spoonful of water. Heat it a bit. Don't burn.

Wizz it with a hand mixer. Bang it in the fridge till you need it - it should keep a couple of days.
Mix a small carton of cream with the pumpkin. Add cinammon, crushed allspice, and grate what may or may not be mace into it. Add a bit of sugar, not much.
Prepare a crust: 200 g of white flour, 120g of cold butter, a couple of spoonfuls of sugar and a bit of salt. If you use gluten-free flour, add an egg yolk. Mix with your fingers and don't be ages about it. Add a bit of cold water, roll it, flatten it on some grease proof paper, put the greased pie dish on top, turn it over and make it fit.

Add the pumpkin mix, bang in the oven for about half hour. Take it out to cool, well out of the way of the cat. Eat.

The Piano Tuner: a Halloween Tale.

2011-11-01T09:25:00.000+02:00

- 'Shall we watch a horror movie? I ask. It's Halloween. It's what grown ups are supposed to do.'

- 'No.' He says.

He's wet, I think. Afraid he'll have nightmares.

- 'Fine.' I say, resigned. 'Let's go to bed, then.'

He looks up from his laptop:

- 'Coming. Leave a note for the piano tuner, will you?'

He doesn't mean anything by that. He said it as he sometimes says: 'Don't forget to put the tiger out'. I ignore him: our tiger is very small and it is not allowed out.

In bed, he says it again.

- 'Did you leave a note for the piano tuner?'

So I decide to tease. Is the piano tuner, I ask, a zombie freshly dug out of the grave to eat our brains while we sleep? Is he a vampire, who will knock on our door once and wait politely to be invited, before he bleeds us to death? Is he perhaps an escaped lunatic, carrying with him the dripping head of his previous victim in one hand and a long shiny knife to kill us in the other? Or is Freddy Krueger, with knives for fingers, a rotten face and an old stinky hat, waiting till we drop off to get us in our dreams? Is the piano tuner a small creature with a bent back and a hooked nose and piercing red eyes, who'll paralyse us with his spit and peel off our skin while we watch? Is he a small child with empty eyes, who will send us crashing to the ceiling with his supernatural strength? An old woman with an axe and a mad determined look on her face? Or a doll, even, a clown, anything at all, that I can summon from the films you don't want to watch with me?'

- 'Go to sleep.' he says.

But now I can't. The piano tuner is coming. I don't know what he is, but I know I should not close my eyes, or he will come for sure. I mustn't get up to check I've locked the door. Walking alone in a dark corridor is not recommended in this scenario. I might as well invite him in. Or go investigate a noise in dark attic by myself. Or find help where I might normally expect it. I look down at the shape of my husband's neck and head, half under the cover. Can I be sure it's him? I wake him just in case. I need to check. I look deep into his sleepy eyes. I have a vague memory that sometimes in films husbands get possessed by evil aliens. Better not to look too hard, then. If I'm lucky he'll wait till I'm fast asleep to murder me. Ignorance is bliss. I would rather die in my sleep. Painlessly, even, maybe.

But in the end, it is painful. I hear footsteps. My arms and legs are pinned to the bed by needles, knives and stakes. I try to hide under the cover, but again it comes for me. I manage to free a leg and I kick. The thing screams an unholy scream. It's a devil, now I know. Can I find enough strength to wake my husband and tell him to find a priest, an Italian, just like in the Exorcist? I fear he may be possessed already, as he's still fast asleep. I steal myself for more pain. I feel it moving towards my head. Will it enter through the mouth, the eyes, the ears? I close my eyes, shut my mouth, cover my ears and wait. And then it purrs. It was the tiger after all.

I put it out. I close the door.

All I can do...

2011-09-13T10:15:00.000+03:00

A couple of years ago, Rachel Cohen-Ruttenberg wrote on her blog about Simon Baron-Cohen's claims regarding empathy and autism. You're wrong, she said. Autistic people do have empathy. In fact, they very often have too much, which leads to a sort of paralysis of response. What do you do when the outside world is seeping through every pore of your being? You just close down. Now, Rachel know what she's talking about: she's autistic herself. Also, her argument has the merit of making sense, whereas SBC's arguments only really hang together because they tie with well accepted cultural stereoptypes, such as: boys like cars and don't communicate. Girls like dolls and talk all the time.

But Simon Baron-Cohen is not a snob, no, not he. So he agreed not only to read Rachel's post, but to respond to it as a guest poster in a blog.

Unfortunately, as he is a scientist, his hands were somewhat tied. All the poor man can do is 'look at the evidence'. And that evidence points clearly in the opposite direction of Rachel's own experience or that of other autistic people writing for her blog "Autism and Empathy".

And that evidence is first rate: SBC has asked a lot of autistic people, non autistic people and their parents to fill in a questionaire, asking them how empathic they are! This questionaire even has a proper scientific name: the AQ for autism quotient. And the you can find it on the web to find out if you are autistic.

So sorry Rachel and every one else: we simply cannot disregard this evidence.

Some day, people will say I didn't write my own books.

2011-08-18T10:39:00.000+03:00

I've been digging into the x-chromosome side of the history of philosophy lately. As soon as my manuscript on Mary Wollstonecraft (without zombies) was off to the publishers, I started reading Christine de Pizan. Then I had a bright idea and went further back. I knew that Abelard was studied in courses on Medieval philosophy. What about Heloise, his correspondent? And then I went a bit further down. Plato had female students - did any of them, or any other women in the ancient world, write anything philosophical?

I'd like to say I hit gold - but it would be slightly off the mark. There just aren't many writings by women philosophers before Christine de Pizan. And not many afterwards either until the seventeenth century, when every princess worth her salt started taking on Descartes, and a few English eccentrics wrote metaphysical treatises of their own. Then, gradually, there's an increase in the female branch of the family, and now we make up nearly 20% of the profession! Hurrah! In another three or four centuries, we might actually reach equal proportions. Never lose hope.

I've ranted before about why there aren't that many women philosophers, listing several reasons, none of them have to do with women not being good enough. But I think I may have come across yet another reason.

Reading up on the Abelard and Heloise literature, I found very little analysis of what Heloise had to say. Instead, authors questioned whether she'd written the letters herself. Was the whole correspondence a forgery from the author of Le Roman de la Rose? Or did Abelard himself concoct them as a publicity stunt? Some more generous commentators suggest that maybe Abelard discussed with Heloise what her fake responses might be before he wrote them. The thought that Heloise was a highly educated woman, who taught Greek, Latin and Hebrew to the nuns in the convent she ran, did not dampen the of those wanting to write her out of philosophical history. Of course no one suggests that it's because she's a woman. No. It just so happens that the best use of some scholars' time is in coming up with arguments why Heloise couldn't have written these letters. It also turns out that these arguments don't hold much water - as a more careful scholar, John Marenbon, convincingly argues.

When I eventually located a text attributed to an Ancient Greek woman philosopher, I had the same experience. I quickly found myriads of poorly constructed arguments why she could not have written her own piece of philosophy. Granted, the writer bore the name of Plato's mum. Given there are no records of her being a philosopher, it stretches the imagination a bit far to think she was a well-known author. It doesn't stretch it as far to think she would have written a short text though, so I'm not sure it's worth getting one's knickers in a twist. But the texts themselves are discounted as forgeries by men writing some four centuries later. Again, the arguments are shoddy. And no one seems to even entertain the possibility that the forger, or pseudonymous writer, could have been a woman. I call it bad faith. I call it bad scholarship. I call it bad philosophy.

Telling 'Im indoors about all this at lunchtime, we pondered why and when this taking over of women's philosophical productions stopped. After all, he said, nobody is claiming that Wollstonecraft's or Simone de Beauvoir's books were written by men. I said that maybe that was because they were both active, public figures, who discussed their works with other writers, so that there could be no doubt about authorship. He replied that maybe these memories were still too fresh in our minds, but that a few centuries from now, people would again start questioning whether these works had not in fact been written by Godwin or Sartre.

Which brings me to the title of this post. How long till fragments of my books turn up in some archive and someone, bent on identifying obscure philosophers from the past decides that I couldn't have written them and attributes them to a male contemporary of mine? I suppose I won't be worrying about the royalties, then.

A Welsh bestiary

2011-08-09T20:53:00.000+03:00

Max is not big on animals. I often feel a twinge of envy ('Your kid's autism is better than mine'!?! - I know...) when I read about autistic kids who get help from having close relationships with dogs or horses. Max is just afraid of them. It's been a pain at times, as animals do get around. But mostly, I've felt that he missed out not only on fun with cuddly beasts, but on a whole learning experience that other children get from talking about nature.

Well, things did start to change for the better during our Welsh holiday last month. Max was on the whole calmer around animals, able to talk about them and learn from them.

He went fishing in rock pools with a little net: proudly caught a dead crab, all by himself, and marvelled at the tiny shrimp and catfish his daddy captured for him. He also enjoyed throwing them back in the sea, so we had no floaters to deal with.

During our cliff walk to Aberystwyth, we were able to talk about sheep, and how they give us wool, and cows and how they give us milk. A few days later we visited a fantasy farm and Max pulled on the udders of a plaster cow.

I took him to a small zoo where he was given a cup of raw veg and peanuts to feed the animals. He let me handle the actual feeding part of it, but was absolutely delighted to see the squirrels eat the nuts.

But his favourite creatures were definitely the gulls, despite the fact that there were so many of them, that they came very close to us, that they were loud and aggressive, he loved them. He sought them out, imitated their cry, and walked up close to them. A week before we went to Wales, he was still scared of pigeons.

Today, he told me he'd like to have a cat.

A few bestial encounters.

Oh, one last thing. If you liked this post, would you mind terribly clicking on the RSS feed, here, or the Google connect buttons (top left), or by email at the bottom of this page? And if you didn't like it, you might still want to look around. There's three of us, you know, so you're (almost) bound to find something you like. And then, if you've still got time, you could share this post or stumble it, or both and get in touch with your local tv station to sing our praises. We'll love you forever.

What to do at the beach on a rainy day.

2011-08-08T19:53:00.002+03:00

Ok, so going into the sea when it's cold and raining does get old. After the first day of our Welsh holiday, I made a social story for Max with a list of things we can do when we can't swim. I don't normally do list posts - that's Marianne's thing - and this isn't really a list, more of a heap.

We blew bubbles, we painted stones, took a ride on a steam train, picked early blackberries, played in the playground, visited a zoo, took long walks in the country side, painted stones, learned how to do ceramics, threw a ball on the beach, built castles, went fishing in the rock pools, rode a boat on a pond, learnt how to wire up a circuit, played angry birds, and built Lego tractors.
Let's just say no-one got bored.

Oh, one last thing. If you liked this post, would you mind terribly clicking on the RSS feed, here, or the Google connect buttons (top left), or by email at the bottom of this page? And if you didn't like it, you might still want to look around. There's three of us, you know, so you're (almost) bound to find something you like. And then, if you've still got time, you could share this post or stumble it, or both and get in touch with your local tv station to sing our praises. We'll love you forever.

First - and last - date

2011-08-07T19:51:00.000+03:00

It had been a while since I hadn't been on a proper date. First of all, I'd been married for 10 years and living with the same guy for 5 more, so that's a total of 15 years without a date. Long time, eh?

I was freaking out. The guy - let's call him Robert, asked me out as we bumped into each other in the Paris metro. We hadn't seen each other in four years, chatted for a few minutes and he asked for my number, promising to call me a few days later. Right, I thought, he'll never call. I'm 34 and yet I still cannot tell when a guy will or will not call, I think it's pretty pathetic, but anyway. He called, of course (maybe I should strongly believe I am ALWAYS wrong and know, from now on, that men will do the exact opposite I think they will do. That should work!) and asked me out. On a date. As in, a real one. Restaurant and all. He even offered to pick me up at home.

I should have known something was wrong as I received the 15th text about where and when we should meet. Seriously. Pick a time and place, ask the woman if that's OK and go with it. It was flattering and sweet at first "Where would you like to go?" "I thought of this place, what do you think?", but then it got annoying. I'm not patient. There. I grow tired of people who do not know what they want.

Of course I bought a new outfit, spent an hour applying make-up and doing my hair, changed three times and swore a million times about said make-up, clothes and me being a fat cow. I think this was, by far, the best part of the date. I had forgotten the excitement of it all.

He arrived right on time and we walked to the restaurant. While we ate I begun to wonder if I hadn't been tricked or something: all Robert talked about was his ex-wife. By the end of the meal, I felt I knew her pretty well, now. What I did know for sure is that Robert was not over her.

He walked me home, the perfect gentleman. But for God's sake, it was the most boring evening ever. I was back home at 10pm. I called my girlfriends, took a cab and went off to have some actual fun in bars and clubs.

I thought he'd never call back but of course he did. I saw him once more (well, he was good looking and nice and clever, so I had to give him another chance) and it was just as disastrous. I had to tell him he was not ready. At least he agreed with me.

Dear Robert, I hope you'll be better at dating soon. What I know now is that your next date will not be with me ;)

Oh, one last thing. If you liked this post, would you mind terribly clicking on the RSS feed, here, or the Google connect buttons (top left), or by email at the bottom of this page? And if you didn't like it, you might still want to look around. There's three of us, you know, so you're (almost) bound to find something you like. And then, if you've still got time, you could share this post or stumble it, or both and get in touch with your local tv station to sing our praises. We'll love you forever.

The cliff walk

2011-08-06T20:34:00.003+03:00

The weather is turning. There is now more blue than grey in the sky and it looks as though it might get warm later on. That said, we're still avoiding spending time by the beach – yesterday we took the cliff top walk to Aberystwyth, today we're off to visit an Cistercian Abbey: Strata Florida.

The good weather is getting to everyone. Out of the window I just glimpsed an elderly man striding the beach in front of the cottages, a smile on his face and a bottle of rose in his hand.

The walk yesterday was more difficult than we'd anticipated, not because it was long or harduous – the climb was a bit steep at times but always you could walk it, rather than scramble. We're used to scrambling when we walk in Cappadokia. In fact, we're pretty much used to scrambling to the point where we have to go back because it's impossible and we probably took a wrong turn somewhere in the valley. The good thing about cliff walks is that it's fairly obvious where you should go. On the other hand, it's also pretty clear what would happen to you if you took a wrong turn, or if the children took a wrong turn. So it was a little nerve wracking and I pretty much had to drag Max all the way to Clarach (or some such thing) where we decided would be a good place to stop and ask for a lift – a mere four miles from where we started.

The good thing about having to stick close to Max is that we got to talk about what we saw a lot. I was able to teach him about how we get wool from sheep, and milk from cows which I think he understood. I also tried to explain that we ate the animals but couldn't think how to move his imagination from the large living thing to the plate of chili con carne. It was probably the first time he'd looked at a cow without cowering – he even baaaed at the sheep and moooed at the cows – so I didn't want to add pictures of slaughter to the mix.

We also saw a snail – not just a shell as we find in Ankara, but a living thing, out and about with its little horns poking out. And no, it wasn't the kind we eat, so I didn't bring that up. (I have a vivid memory of Marianne picking up a small yellow snail in our garden, and gobbling it up, thinking it was a sweet – she still loves snails.) We saw a moth with black, red-spotted wings. I wished I had a decent camera, then.

We stopped on a beach by a farm to eat our sandwiches. The farm was huge, resembling a small castle. White, and with a thick wall surrounding it. I thought of the farms I'd seen in Yorkshire, in particular the small pile of grey stone that had once been the inspiration for Wuthering Heights. Yorkshire was on my mind as the friend I'd called to pick us up at the next village had just moved from Leeds where we'd visited in previous years. How convenient, how thougthful of them to move right next door to a place where that is bound to become our new base in the UK. Thank you Hannah and Roger, for making our lives so easy.

Frankenchicken

2011-08-05T20:11:00.000+03:00

I've been reading a fantastic book by Rebecca Skloot called The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. It tells the history of the artificial growth of cancerous human cells for the purposes of research, of the dying woman the cells were harvested from, without her knowledge or consent and of her family who found out about the existence of the cells years later and never saw any of the money made from the growing business of selling HeLa cells, as they are still called. Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951, at the age of thirty-one. At that time segregation was still lawful and she ha been treated in the 'colored' section of the Johns Hopkins hospital in Baltimore. She came from a small tobacco growing town and had five children, the youngest still only a baby.

Reading through the book you can't help but reflect on how scientific research has so often been tied up with social injustices of various sorts - whether experiments are being conducted on vulnerable minorities to benefit the better off, or whether those minorities are blocked from participating more actively in the research because they cannot get degrees, jobs, dodgy research founding, results falsified to back up oppressive practices, etc. But one particular discussion in the book caught my eye. The author was digressing on the history of cell research and writing about 1912 Nobel Prize winner Alexis Carrell. Carrel, a Frenchman who later became a Nazi sympathiser and collaborator was famous, not so much for the research in organ transplant which earned him his prize, but for keeping cells from a chicken heart alive for over twenty years. Because the cells constantly multiplied, people were led to believe that Carrel had somehow created a giant chicken, which according to a BBC interview would be 'big enough to cross the Atlantic in a single stride'. It also caught the imagination of science fiction fans: in 1937, Bill Cosby read out a story called 'Chicken Heart' on the radio show 'Lights Out' in which a piece of chicken heart kept alive by a scientist grew and took to the streets, Blob-like, destroying the world in a couple of days.

People also spoke of the chicken cells as a potential elixir youth, because they were supposedly immortal, but Carrel was more interested in eugenics: how to improve the growth and the life span of a white intellectual elite, while at the same time sterilising the 'deviant' ones, or, if they proved at all dangerous, gassing them. The book in which he explained all this, Man, the Unknown, became a best-seller.

Towards the end of his life, Carrel witnessed a miracle in Lourdes and became a mystic. This, rather than his nazi sympathies, prevented him from obtaining a desired post in France. He died in 1944, before he could be tried as a collaborator. The chicken heart cells were destroyed shortly afterwards by one of his assistants, but not before they were tested and people realised there were none of the original chicken cells left in the pot: Carrel had been feeding the new cells into the culture whenever he poured in the embryo juice he used to keep the cells alive. One of the researchers working with him admitted that he suspected as much. Whether or not Carrel himself knew what he was doing is unknown. What a twat, though.

Photo credit

The sense that behind the grey, there is blue.

2011-08-04T16:14:00.000+03:00

This is the third of a series of posts I drafted while on holidays in Wales last month. You can read the first two here and here.

Running on the beach this morning I picked up a long piece of sea weed, like a big curly brown kite ribbon. I held it up in the air and it floated. I hung it up on the clothes line when I got back – thinking that given the weather so far, it would probably be the only thing up there. Yesterday and the previous day there was rain. And wind. We've not come out of our winter clothes since we arrived. And everyone assures us that this is not typical weather. I have the feeling that this is what you have to learn to say when you live somewhere on the Welsh coast, and it's best if you can believe it, even. But today, the air was slightly different. If you look at the clouds, and try to see through them, you nearly can. I don't mean you can see around them – the sky is still pretty much covered. But whereas yesterday the clouds were deep, dark, Sheffield grey, today they are a little more fluffy, a little more transparent. And behind the clouds, if you close one eye and look for long enough, there is blue.

Blue Island Ceramics

2011-08-03T17:05:00.001+03:00

On our second day, we fight back the weather by finding an indoors activity that is such that we'd rather do that than be on the beach anyway. We go and paint pots at Blue Island Ceramics. We're shown into a studio with two big tables and shelves all around, covered in white pieces of pottery. We're told to choose one each. Emma, step-sister in law, picks a milk jug and her daughter, Lottie, a box shaped like a cup cake, then Charlotte chooses a plate, Max a mug, and Bill and I decide we can do a bowl between the two of us, so we can also help (keep an eye on) Max. There was a dog outside, but Granny Gaby, step-mother-in law, mindful of Max's little quirks, has had it put inside straight away so Max is fine. No all we have to worry about is making sure Max doesn't break anything. He doesn't normally, but that's how we tend to react when he's in a new environment which is a bit close.

On the table there are numbered pots of colours. There's a tile that shows how each colour will look once it's cooked. And there's illustrations on the walls. Zana, the owner, shows us what to do. We clean our things first with a wet sponge, then we apply a first coat of paint with a brush, and a second with the sponge. We need to pick, design, get started.

Charlotte decides she's going to do an apple tree. Emma has to find something that will do for a watchmaker. Lotti wants sparkly colours. Max choose a bright blue and paints his mug all over. Then Bill suggests he draws animals. I pick a dark blue for the inside, and light brown for the outside.

A little later, Emma finds inspiration, Charlotte and Lotti chatter, but still find time to produce some pretty sophisticated designs, Max paints a penguin red, and I put lighter over darker, despite what Zana advised. We're all happy. Then Max has had enough, so Bill takes him out until they are nearly drowned by the rain and come back. Then Bill takes over the bowl and I help Max put the finishing touches to his mug. By the time we're finished, we've all had fun.

I don't think either of us expected Max to enjoy himself that much, or to fit in to such an extent. We both felt he might and deserved to try. I'm glad we took him and I don't think he stood out that much or caused anyone to worry unduly. He's definitely growing up and finding easier to fit in with the neurotypical world.

So a big thank you to Colin, Gaye, Emma, and Zana, who between them made this possible!

Welsh musings

2011-08-03T16:41:00.001+03:00

I've been away for a while, leaving sunny Ankara for doing-as-best-as-it-can Wales. My internet connection was sketchy - mostly over the phone - and I was busy enjoying myself and relaxing. But writing is relaxing, so I did jot down a few things which I'll post now, over the next few days, because I'm lazy and can't be bothered to think of something else, and also, because I want to post some of my photos.

Courtesy of my father in law and his wife, I am now sitting in the kitchen of a cottage in North Wales. Out the window is the sea. Rolling, cold, completely impenetrable by small children and their blow up boats, but the sea. And the beach, pebbles and sand, raised at the top by trucks and tractors and things who are unfortunately still here (although today, Sunday, they are home). And the rain, which flic-flocs on the windows at regular intervals. There'll be more of that during our stay, according to the people in charge.

On the other side of the cottage, out the front door, is a pub: the Railway Tavern. I'm already wondering whether it'll will be possible to leave the kids while they're sleeping and nip over for a quick one. It's such a small road – it has that miniature feel that old England (sorry – Wales) often has, the crowdedness, the lack of space between one tiny house and the next, the feeling that you can probably lean out the window just a bit and do your shopping. On the other hand, there's the lock barrier – also typical – the double glazed windows which means we won't hear Max's pitiful screams when he wakes up and can't find us, and the awkward front door lock, where you have to raise the handle as far as it will go to turn the key, and then you hear that plasticky 'clic' which means you can't open the door from inside or outside. I guess they'll do takeaways. In the meantime I'll focus on the sea-side view which clearly has learnt to look its best in the clouds.

That it's cold or raining, and that Max has been ill all day - with the obligatory puking on the way to the airport - is of course no argument for staying out of the sea, as I find out when I try to convince the children. That very afternoon we're in the water, jumping over waves. I am reminded of summers in Brittany when the water cannot have been much warmer, and the sky was a similar shade of grey. I must have whooped as loud as my own children then. Now I'm just cold. Alright – maybe a little excited at being in the sea too. Some things never get old.

Of cat and men

2011-07-23T00:52:00.005+03:00

I think I'm fed up with my cat. It's really disturbing, because I love my cat. I like it. I mean, not as much as I used to like it, but still.

I remember how it used to be at the beginning. I was all over it, cuddled it, though it was the cutest thing ever. I was thrilled that it would come to my bed and purr at night.

I don't think my cat changed much. I mean, it got older, but it's still the same cat. And yet, I'm just tired of having it around. I don't want that many cuddles anymore and when it comes at night all I want to do is sleep and for the cat to leave me alone. I don't want to play with it anymore, but I make tons of effort to take care of it.

I sometimes try and talk to my cat, but seriously, who am I kidding? How can a cat understand what I'm saying? So I just keep on making efforts, hoping it'll get back to what it used to be.

Now read this text again and replace "it" by "him" and "cat" by "man" or "boyfriend". Creepy, huh?

You're talking to me?

2011-06-22T22:10:00.008+03:00

For this week's writer's workshop over at Mama Kat's Losing it, I picked prompt #1, mainly because it's a list. Also, Sandrine asked me to write a list on Facebook and I tend to do as she says, otherwise I'll be in trouble. I know, she lives in Ankara, I in Paris, but still, she can be pretty convincing.

So here's 10 things I'd like to say to strangers who share unsolicited advice about my parenting skills (some of which I've actually said).

1- Thank you so much. Now please get out of my way before I ask my devilish child to bite you.

2- Wow. You seem to know a lot about parenting. You must be so proud. You're very ugly, though, can't be easy.

3- Interesting. Let me think about it and I'll get back to you. Not.

4- Yes, please DO call the police. My kids love uniforms, it might calm them down.

5- Yes, I would very much like them to stop, too. Now if there's nothing smart you can say, please move over. At least you can walk away. I sort of have to stay with them.

6- Do you have children? No? You have no right to give your opinion, then.

7- I'm sorry, I can't hear you, my son is screaming too loud.

8- Even though I appreciate your comment, I am against violence towards children. However, I'm more than open to it towards adults. Wanna check?

9- Yeah, you're right, they're horrible. Maybe I should just return them to the store. Oh no, wait, can't do that, they're CHILDREN.

10- What? Who? I'm sorry, they're not mine. I just borrowed them for the day and trust me, I am taking them back to their parents right now.

Just remember it's ALWAYS easier when the kids are not yours. And if you're not a parent yourself or have grown-up children, you are not allowed to give your opinion. There.

The beginning of summer

2011-06-22T22:07:00.000+03:00

We've not been blessed with sunny days these last few months. Instead of the usual Anatolian five minutes spring, followed by dry, hot days, we've had what I can only describe as English weather crossed with a monsoon. It rained every day for all of May and every other day for most of June. Especially in the evenings.

So yesterday, as we were setting off to a picnic party to celebrate the Solstice, I had my doubts. The picnic was set in the hills behind some out of the way university accommodation, and our hosts had gone to a great deal of trouble transporting blankets, torches, plate and cutlery and a three course meal! Had it rained on all that there would have been a bit of a scramble getting it back under cover... But the weather was beautiful, and the event truly marked the beginning of summer.

And then we went home.

My son, the artist.

2011-06-22T09:56:00.000+03:00

Last summer, I decided to join the Sketchbook project. It's a travelling exhibition organised by the Brooklyn Art Library. You send for a sketchbook, fill it in, send it back. They put it in a van and it travels. You get notified whenever somebody looks at it. Sarah in San Francisco picked up ours, last week.

I thought it would be a cool thing for Max to do, a way of marking the fact that at this time in his life, he draws all the time. Every week I throw out large quantities of paper (trees, I know) covered in little pictures of us, the teletubbies, boats, buses, planes, story boards for what he's done, what he's dreamt of, what he's going to do. The pictures are getting more and more sophisticated - he's getting good at colour.

In October we received a purple Moleskine notebook with a theme: A day in the life. I kept it on my desk, by my bed. When Max came to us at way too early o'clock, I whipped it out and told him to draw, knock himself out. By December he'd filled every page. We sent it back. It arrived in Brooklyn, and joined thousands of others in a van which went travelling. Five people have viewed it so far.

I paid a little extra to have it digitalised. Here it is. You can click on the thumb nail to see inside.

I think I might order another one this year. If you're interested, you can order one here.

A medieval philosopher goes on a slut walk

2011-06-14T19:01:00.001+03:00

If you're at all like me, you'll be irritated to hell by the nasty little comments people have been making about the slut walks. So let's get a few things straight.

Women, on the whole, do not dress up in short dresses because they want strangers to pay them for sex.

Those who do, actually want to enter into some sort of contract with their potential customers, that is, they must agree to serve them and settle on a price for their service. They are not free for all.

No woman, sex worker or otherwise, wants to be raped. This means, amongst other things, that choice of clothing never indicates the desire to be sexually assaulted, by strangers or otherwise. And that still obtains even with very short skirts and very low cut tops.

To think otherwise is utterly unreasonable. Men who work in construction often go topless, sometime showing off the proverbial builder's crack. Do we think that they are thereby inviting somebody bigger and stronger than them to take them by force, maybe with the use of the instruments of their trade? No. No one, to my knowledge, has even so much as suggested it. They undress because they're too hot, and because they can.

So granted, women don't always wear skimpy clothes because of the weather. But they do wear them because of fashion. And fashion, whatever one says, is important. A teenage girls who has nothing to do with it will find it harder to make friends - not to find a boyfriend, mind you: teenage boys don't care so much about fashion - they'll find it hard to fit in. Of course that can be character building. But let's face it, we're not all cut out for isolation, and it's actually not bad for us to learn how to fit in with a community of peers.

And then there's work. Who - outside of academia - is going to give a job to a 'frumpy' looking woman? Some jobs actually require you to dress nicely, that is, to wear skirts, and heels. Maybe not short skirts, but once we become used to a certain dress style, we're going to work with it as we can. I think it's outrageous that employers should demand that women dress in a 'feminine' manner, and that the fashion industry should so relentlessly target young women. But they do. So let's not pretend that we, women come up with the idea of wearing skirts all by ourselves.

And we shouldn't get raped for it. Or be blamed when we are.

I was mulling over all this, when I came across very similar arguments in a book I am reading for next semester's teaching. It's by a medieval French philosopher, Christine de Pizan:

I am troubled and grieved when men argue that many women want to be raped and that it does not bother them at all to be raped by men even when they verbally protest. It would be hard to believe that such villainy is actually pleasant for them. (The Book of the City of Ladies II.44)

She goes on to discuss a whole bunch of famous women, from Lucretia onwards, who clearly didn't like being raped. Then she asks whether women who like to look nice, who are coquettish are doing it to seduce. Nonsense, she says. It's perfectly natural, for men and women, to enjoy pretty things and looking good. It's done, unless one is actually required to dress a certain way, first and foremost for one's enjoyment.

No one should judge someone else's conscience from dress (II.62).

I like to think that if she could time travel, Christine would have put her ink and parchment down, last Saturday, and flown to London to join in the slut walk there. And with her medieval dresses, she would have fitted right in with the colourful and sometimes outlandish outfits that women wore on the march.

Spiders and other scary things

2011-06-10T09:05:00.001+03:00

I've never been scared of snakes in the way that I am of spiders. I remember a brother and sister whose parents kept an anaconda in a vivarium in their bedroom. I think the father was a zoologist. The parents were away often, and we would take over the house, often camping upstairs, by the snake tank, sometimes downstairs in the cellar, where other, smaller snakes were kept, as well as a variety of rodents to feed them. Sometimes we would take the snake out of its prison, allowing it to roam the room, slide over our lap, never thinking the poor thing might be indisposed by the smoke of the cigarettes we constantly lit. Once my friends' parents had found the snake in their bed, so we had to be careful always to put it back when we left the room. It took three or four of us to carry him on our shoulders - teenagers between 13 and 15. I wasn't often enough at the house to witness its meal times, but the son and daughter recounted with glee and horror how it would swallow a whole live baby goat.

I have other memories of this house. I remember playing manhunt, escaping with a friend out of the tiny bathroom window to climb onto the roof, then having to jump down from an uncomfortable height because I couldn't get back to the window and didn't want grown ups to find me up there. I remember another frequent guest, a slightly older boy who would boast of his frequent sexual conquests, and talk of the praise he got from women for his 'fairy fingers'. We called him a 'mythomane' - a pathological liar. In retrospect he was probably just struggling with his sexual identity. French teenagers of the eighties were not the most accepting of sexual difference (or anything else, for that matter).

This morning, on my way to work, I had an unwelcome flashback of the biggest spider I ever saw. It had been in the sink in my mother's kitchen one night, and just outside in the grass the next. I can't remember if I ever saw it, or if I was just around when others did. But my senses didn't seem to care. Within seconds I was walking faster, arching my back in case someone had put the spider there as a joke. Some joke.

Real women don't have caesareans

2011-06-09T08:29:00.000+03:00

At least, that's what old Mr Leboyer told Jane Garvey on last weekend's Woman's Hour. Supposedly the grandfather of natural birth, Leboyer told Ms Garvey that her two elective caesareans were a mistake. Her babies were breach, he said? So what: it's natural. She should not have been a coward and should have delivered 'naturally', i.e. through her vagina, and without any painkillers or assistance.

Ms Garvey admirably kept her cool when she asked Leboyer whether he himself had ever given birth, naturally or otherwise. 'Everything I know, I learned from Woman', the old man replied. For years Leboyer was an obstetrician and, in his own words, he supposed that giving birth must be so painful he would inevitably give his patients chloroform. Which does really make one wonder how any of them would have been in a position to comment on the experience.

Never mind, because Leboyer tells us that nothing in the birth giving process can be put into words. In fact, none of the important things in life can be put into words. The birth giving experience is a secret that women discuss with no one, especially not men. Again, Jane Garvey is forced to remind the old man whose memory is clearly no longer at its best, that he is not a woman. But, sharper than I had given him credit for, Leboyer has an answer for this too: the secret cannot be told, but it can be guessed, by wise men. Here one can only assume that Leboyer himself is such a man. Jane Garvey, obviously, is not.

A wise man, of course, can put into words what women cannot. So he goes on to explain what the birthing process really is: it's libidinal - he checks with Garvey that she knows what this means - it is the ultimate goal of the sexual experience.

Jane Garvey takes her job very seriously: instead of killing the old man on the spot, she probes him about other aspects of his theory: are there no circumstances where the medicalisation of childbirth is at all useful? What about the fact that so many women die of childbirth in the developing world?

'A lie!' insists Leboyer. A myth made up to stop you feeling guilty when you have caesareans! Giving birth dangerously is an essential part of the experience of being a woman, he says. When a woman gives birth, there comes a point when she thinks she is going to die. Then she is no longer afraid of death. This is what makes her a real woman.

Now I'm all sympathies with the view that child birth is over-medicalised. There are way too many places where women are advised to have caesareans when they don't need them, and without them being properly informed about the adjoining risks. I also don't like that in hospitals, we are trussed up like animals, lying on our backs with our feet up in stirrups, when it's really the worst possible position in terms of ease and comfort. I also feel that more women should have the option of being attended by midwives or doulas during the birth process, rather than - often male - doctors. Incidentally, what is Leboyer's view on the place of the midwife? In the kitchen, making coffee!

Whatever next, we think? Should the husband be waiting outside, ready to light his cigar? Mais oui! Leboyer tells us that birthgiving is a private experience between the mother and the child. On no account should the husband be part of it as he would break the woman's concentration.

At the very least, one hopes at this point that what he says is meant to be empowering for women - in his own twisted way. Wrong again: women, he says, do nothing during the birth process. It is the babies that do all the work.

At this point, all we can do is thank Mr Leboyer for his wonderfully encouraging words and thank the universe that because he's ninety he won't be with us much longer to say those words. Oh yes, and tell every one you know not to buy his book. Much cheaper to buy toilet rolls at the super market.

My NOT to do during Summer list

2011-05-26T08:33:00.000+03:00

For this week's writer's workshop over at Mama Kat's Losing it, I picked prompt #5: Your top 10 Summer Don’ts. You do know I love lists AND I also like telling others what to do -or in this case, not to do- so I think Mama Kat really thought of me there.

1- Don't fall in love with the bartender/surf instructor/lifeguard: he will not be Tom Cruise nor Kelly Slater nor any of those hotties from TV shows. Wipe off his tan, picture him in jeans walking in the grey city. There. Now listen to him speak. I don't think I need to add anything.

2- Don't go away on vacation in July: you'll just hate everyone when you get back in August. They will all be making fantastic holiday plans when you'll be losing your tan at the office. Chances are you won't have a tan at all, because we all know that it rains in July (especially in France, I know).

3- Don't go away on vacation in August: you'll just spend the whole of July envying those who take their holidays before you and chances are you'll see them coming back with a tan and this 'I'm just back from holidays and I am fine' look. Also, we all know it's too hot in August.

4- Don't buy ANY souvenirs. Those shoes look adorable ON THE BEACH. They'll just make you look plain stupid back home.

5- Dont you EVER have your hair braided. There is no excuse for that unless you are under 14 years old.

6- Don't go on a diet. Summertime was made for BBQs, rosé and cocktails. You'll be fat, but happy.

7- Don't go to parties on the beach. You'll just end up wasted and sleeping with a bartender/surf instructor/lifeguard (see point 1)

8- Don't follow any advice in women's magazines. They'll try and make you believe you can find true love (point 1 again), that you'll be thinner and that you will look fabulous with that green hat on.

9- Don't think it's the Summer until it's actually hot outside. Also, there is no excuse for flip-flops in the city. Just don't wear them. Please.

10- Don't think it'll last. We Parisians very well know actual Summer lasts for approximately two weeks. And that's if we're lucky.

The end of the pineapple

2011-05-23T21:57:00.004+03:00

A couple of days ago, I was given a pineapple. Yes, the fruit. No metaphor or anything, just a pineapple. I love pineapples, and not just because they make delicious piña coladas. But I just cannot peel them or open them.

Last time I saw someone try and cut out a pineapple, I fainted. Twice. Now I just don't look whenever someone tries to cut one. I must have been 17 years old. My mother was making dinner and was preparing a pineapple. We were chatting in the kitchen and I saw the enormous knife cut into her hand instead of the pineapple. Blood started pouring (yes, pouring) over the kitchen counter.

Now, as much as I am into vampires, I hate blood. The mere thought of it makes me sweat and that's the main reason why I didn't become a doctor (that and the fact that I sucked at maths, but like the blood reason better). I calmy walked to the bathroom, opened the closet, pulled out everything that was needed, walked back to the kitchen, rinsed my mother's hand under the water and put a bery big bandage on the wound. It feels like yesterday. I actually feel quite dizzy just telling the story. I looked at my mom, asked her gently 'Are you O.K. now?'. 'Yes', she said. And I fell. As in, fell on the floor, unconscious. I woke up a few seconds later, looked at her hand, and fainted again.

I've always been scared of knives but now I'm also scared of pineapples. So when I was given one a few days ago, I panicked. There is no way I am doing anything to that evil fruit. So I stared at it, I posted about it on FB and now I'm blogging about it. It looks like therapy, doesn't it? I hope it'll work. In case it doesn't, I'm bringing the thing to work tomorrow. I'll find a brave guy who'll kill the thing for me. My kind of hero.

Bloody ridiculous, isn't it?

L'argent et les femmes

2011-05-16T10:08:00.000+03:00

According to Le Monde on Sunday afternoon, after Dominique Strauss-Kahn's arrest in NY on charges on rape, DSK, the potential (not any more!) future leader of the French left, has two weaknesses: money and women.

Some days, most days, I'm glad I'm no longer live in France because of shit like this. Some days, I wish I was still there so I could spend more time kicking the arses of bastards who write and think that stuff. As it is, I'm limited to virtual arse-kicking.

So let's have it. We, women, are not a weakness. We are not a treat that you can become addicted to, or that you need somehow to resist. We are not displayed, as in a shop window, to tempt you into having sex with us. In fact, if you're an old ugly bastard like DSK, we'd, very frankly, rather iron our tits than have sex with you.

Oh, but they say, French women are not like that. They're attracted to power.

Listen, busters - I know there's many of you out there who think like that - I'm a French woman. And I know power is not really, of itself, an aphrodisiac. It can be, in the right circumstances, with someone attractive, some very clear rules, and a safe word. But when someone like DSK thinks he's getting laid by people who are not his wife because he's powerful, I think he seriously misunderstands the chain of causation that leads from his position at the head of the IMF to the women in his bed. Basically there's two ways in which it works.

1) As a powerful man, he has many people at his beck and call. If a woman says no to him, she can either be raped and no one will say anything, or lose her job, and no one will say anything.

2) In some very rare cases, a woman may choose to sleep with an ugly bastard because he may help advance her career. But, before we get all judgy here, I would like to exert some caution: it's often unclear whether a woman who sleeps with someone and sees her career move forward as a result really had any choice at all. The alternative may well have been what I describe in (1).

As to all those people who believe that, like Assange, DSK was set up by bankers who want to keep the left out of their money - that's neither here nor there.
What, to my mind, is rather disgusting, is that these men were aware of DSK's 'weakness', i.e. his propensity to indulge in sexual harassment and rape, and only chose to use it when their money was threatened.

Am I under any illusions that the bankers and right wing politicians are less likely than the men on the left to abuse women? Certainly not. I reckon they go to the same orgies - the only difference being that when the orgy is over the right-wing men go to church and the lefties go home to cook with their wives.

Conclusion: there's way too many bastards out there who think that women are treats they can consume, with only one scruple: that having too many is bad for their political diet. So let's not be surprised if they don't stop dishing out sexist policies that disadvantage women in all aspects of life, any time soon.

The royal ticking bomb

2011-05-10T15:54:00.000+03:00

I posted this yesterday on my other blog, The Forbidden Sister, but as the comments on that blog are broken, I thought I'd repost it here, and share it with you. Here goes.

We can now breathe a huge sight of relief – but ten days ago, unbeknownst to us, forces were at play to destroy us. Not only did they want to destroy us, but they picked a time when we were at our most vulnerable, basking in the glow of royal love vows and cartwheeling vergers. But the dark forces were very much at work, as we are now finding out.

There was a bomb. Not only was the wedding itself being targeted but it was done from its most vulnerable point – planted inside the bride’s womb! Top lifestyle/career blogger Penelope Trunk explains to us, step by step, how it came to be there and how it was defused. She tells us that Kate was indeed a ticking bomb but that her timely wedding was enough to defuse it, and that we should all be grateful to her.

Just in case the same terrorists decide to plant bombs inside of us too, Ms Trunk advises we follow the same steps as Kate.

1. Don’t bother about a career: it will only interfere with your finding a husband, and you’ll have to give it up anyway.

2. Have children young, before thirty, as otherwise they will have birth defects, and they will probably become terrorists.

3. In order to have children before thirty, you should be married by twenty-eight, which means that you must have found your prince by twenty-five. Ms Trunk links to ‘scientific research’ that proves this and quotes ‘zillions’ of books that back it up.

4. Relocate, relocate, relocate. Give up your career, if you were stubborn enough to start one, and follow your husband. It is a fact (scientific research, zillions of books, etc.) that women do not care much for their careers and that men do not care much for their family. Hold on, that’s not right. Of course men care for their family, it’s just that women care more. Or care better. Or are too stupid to say they care for anything else. Or whatever.

If you follow all these steps, disaster will be averted and the bomb will not go off.

I think we can all learn from this near catastrophe, and avoid making potential terrorists of ourselves by following Ms Trunk’s advice as closely as we can.

Social story for travelling by plane.

2011-05-09T13:42:00.000+03:00

We're doing it again, attempting to take a holiday in the UK. Two years ago, it was a bit of a fiasco as far as Max was concerned. He had daily meltdowns because he wanted to go home. We travelled around far too much, to visit relatives, go to a conference, and even took the train to Paris for a couple of weeks. And we had a huge amount of trouble getting Max into a plane - he had to be carried in screaming a couple of times. Not fun.

Then, last year, we discovered social stories. Drawing things for Max before they happen really worked. He would know what to expect, would rehearse it in his head, and be prepared. We drew some when we were going to fly to the coast to holiday with Marianne and her family. Max wasn't reading yet, but he understood pictures, no matter how sketchily drawn, really well. We got him there and back without too much problem, and there were no major meltdowns while we were there. It was a good holiday for all. No mean feat.

Then last month we went to Cappadocia and I drew some very detailed social stories about travelling and being there. Because Max can now read I also inserted quite a bit of text, which enabled me to get more detail into the sequences. This was a success. Max loves going to Cappadocia, but he always gets nervous at various points during our stay and that means he's more likely to have meltdowns. This time, he was relaxed the whole time, enjoyed every moment, and was even able to take in small variations in the plans.

So now our plane tickets are confirmed, I'm beginning to get busy with the stories. That means asking the people we're staying with some very detailed questions about houses and habits and stuff, and of course, producing the stories is, as you can imagine, quite time consuming. One thing I've tried is to scan the pictures and enter the text with a picture editor. This saves me having to draw the letters carefully enough so that Max can actually decipher them.

So, anyhow, here's what I've got so far. Any ideas as to how I might make it better are welcome. And please fell free to download it and put in your own text if you think that would be useful (I've used Picnic, which is free and easy to use).

Of boys and horses: what does autism awareness mean?

2011-04-15T09:50:00.000+03:00

'Do you know the way to Pancarlik church from here? No, we don't have a car. We want to walk in the valley.'

We get directions. In Turkish, of course. We check which of us have understood. It doesn't matter much what I understood as I can't so much as tell my left from my right most of the time. There's a hamam involved, the back of a castle, and you should take the little path to the right (or left?) not go straight down the valley to Urgup. Oh yes, and it's six kilometres.

We take our time to leave the castle top cafe, giving the patron just enough time to bring his friend who knows the region like the back of his hand. He explains in a bit more detail (turn right at the hamam, and walk till you see the back of that castle and then go down to the valley). We're still not convinced we're going to make the 6km walk without getting lost. I joke to our minibus driver that if we're not at Pancarlik in 3 hours he should send the helicopters. We grab our coats and look in the direction we're supposed to go (we think). And then, just in time, the guy from the cafe is here and he offers to guide us. It's a good price. And he'll take us to a church on other side of the valley first. He assures us he'll take it slow, for the children. Off we go.

The church is amazing. And we wouldn't have found it without him. You have to climb up a stiff side to see it's here, even. And it's not in either of our guides.
He's giving us all a hand on the difficult passes, and carries Charlotte's bag.
It's beautiful.

Then it's down again, and in the opposite direction.

Within a hundred yards, we freeze. Standing before us, are six horses, and two dogs. The horses are about to be mounted by a small tribe of French people in full horse-riding attire. Some of them are very young - younger than Max. Their beige trousers and black jackets look incongruous in the wild and muddy landscape. We freeze - Max screams.

I don't have much time to explain. I tell the man: he's autistic, and he's really scared of animals. Especially dogs. But horses too. The man nods and picks Max up. You're going on my shoulders, he says. You'll be fine. Max screams again a bit when we cross the area where the horses and dogs are. One child holds a dog, and a woman tells him to move it out of our way. Another woman tells Max not to scream. I tell her he's autistic and scared. I don't know if she's convinced, but she shuts up.

And then we're through. Max is calm. He comes down. He and the guide chat for a bit. Then the guide asks me why Max is afraid. Is it an allergy? Has he been hurt by a dog or a horse before? I say he's autistic. Then, as it doesn't seem to mean anything to him, I try to explain, in my skeletal Turkish. It's a mental condition. It means he has communication problems, speech problems, and he has phobias. He nods. That'll do.

We trudge on for six kilometres. jumping over the river every five minutes or so to get to the less muddy side. It's a bit cold, but after a while we still have to peel off a layer or two. The landscape is amazing.

The children are used to long walks, and they're mostly enjoying it. When Max gets tired, our guide carries him. Or he races him and then they sit down to wait for us. When they sit, I notice that he puts his hands on Max's head very firmly, the way Max prefers to be touched, the way that calms him. The way you're supposed to touch animals, and especially horses to reassure them. Very quickly, the two develop a rapport. For the entire walk, they're together.

Echolalia, Echolala: don't knock it.

2011-04-12T15:52:00.000+03:00

Before Max was diagnosed, before we even took him to see that first psychiatrist who told us all was fine but, when she saw us one year later, acted surprised that we didn't know Max was autistic and said she must have 'forgotten' to tell us - bitch - his kinder-garden teacher suggested all was not well with his linguistic development. Everything he says seems to be repeating something he's heard, she said. Even the tone is the same. When he says 'don't do that' (in Turkish of course, which is the only language he spoke back then), he's copying the voice of his teacher. This, she says, is echolalia. And it's not a proper way for language to develop.

She was right, in that echolalia can be a symptom of developmental disorders, like autism. Many autistic children who don't have 'spontaneous speech', who don't volunteer information about themselves, who don't answer questions, who are not able to make small talk, still speak a lot. That is to say, they repeat things they've heard other people say, on tv, etc. It just isn't relevant a lot of the time. Max used to rehearse entire conversations from his favourite tv shows before he could even say what his name was. Actually that's not very representative, as it's only recently that he's started to answer the question 'what's your name?' by anything other than 'what's your name?'. Let's say, instead, before he could ask for a glass of water.

We worried, of course. And shortly after this we did take him to see that psychiatrist, and then a speech therapist. But we were always slightly resistant to the idea that this repeating of what he'd heard was all bad, despite his teachers' assurance, from the height of her status as a psychologist, that it was not healthy.

I'm still not sure what the consensus is. I've recently begun to think that with autism, after a while, it makes more sense to think hard about the particulars of the situation you live with, than find out every thing about what everyone thinks - including the 'experts'. Not because every one else is wrong - but because every person with autism is different, and because you have to work within your particular environment and resources which people on the internet can't possibly know the details of. So after an initial bout of frantically reading every thing there was - which proved extremely useful to get started - I'm now dipping in and out, and mostly concentrating on understanding what makes our son tick. And here's what we've noticed.

Nearly all the things Max has been repeating for years are now part of his active vocabulary. They've helped shape his social interactions, his imaginative play, and inquiry. TV shows he used to repeat at odd moments are now part of his creative play. He plays 'tweenies' and 'teletubbies' and creates adventures for them based on actual shows, but also invented. (And believe me, if they were just recreations of what he'd seen, I'd know. There isn't one episode I haven't seen at least a dozen times.)

One fascinating feature of his echolalia, that always had us thinking that it wasn't quite as mindless as some people thought, was that he could translate everything he said. He'd start off repeating something he'd heard in Turkish, and pretty soon, he'd be saying it in French too. Just as inappropriately, but in translation. Now, I don't really know about the mechanisms of translation in trilingual autistic five year olds (which is how old he would have been then). But then again, I doubt anybody does. And I get kind of pissed off when people claim they do. Not like there's a huge sample for them to conduct research on, is there?

But here's the thing I was getting at - a bit rambly today, I'm afraid. Blame it on the late night return from our weekend in Cappadocia.

On our way to Goreme three days ago, we travelled next to a German couple who were clearly holidaying in Turkey for the first time. Max sat next to the man in the mini bus. I suggested he say 'Hi'. 'Merhaba', he said. 'Nalsilsiniz? Ben iyigim, tesekkurederim'. Or something to that effect. So I pointed out that the nice man probably didn't speak Turkish. Max is normally good at judging what people speak, but he wasn't really paying attention, too excited about arriving.

So now he takes one look at the man and works out he's not French, but probably speaks some English. So he pipes up: "Hi, How are you today? We're going to Cappadocia today!" All with perfect accent and pronunciation. Repeat three times. And this was a mixture of something he'd heard in the Tweenies, that he's been repeating recently and probably conversations he'd overheard between grown ups about Cappadocia. For how else would he know how it's pronounced in English?

So here you go: a mixture of echolalia and properly learnt language makes for perfect social creativity!

I was prompted to write this post by MommyleBron's post on that same topic. Her daughter has a slightly different form of echolalia - she seems to be a lot more verbal than Max, and quite a bit older, so that figures! - but I found Mommylebron's insight really interesting if only because it shows how differently a condition with the same name can manifest itself.

Social stories for Cappadocia

2011-04-08T15:08:00.001+03:00

I've spent the last two hours drawing social story boards for Max for our upcoming trip to Cappadocia, so I thought I'd share them with you. These took a while to draws as I did them on cardboard with an ink pen, and spent some time thinking through our schedule before hand. Everyday ones are usually quicker.
When I wasn't completely sure as to what we were going to do, I left the pictures in pencil, so I can change them later on.
Also, I didn't colour them, as I'm really bad at colour. But they would probably look more attractive if I did.

The first one is about how to behave at the hotel. I'm especially hoping that Max won't be too loud first thing in the morning. We usually stay in the same place at Goreme, so the story is reusable.

For those of you who are not familiar with Cappadocia, the funny pointy things are fairy chimneys, and in the early mornings you can see a lot of hot air balloons floating around. The big round thing Max is floating in on the second frame is a jacuzzi. One reason we love this hotel is that even though it's cheap and simple and the rooms are carved in the stone, the bathrooms are huge and the children can have baths! The hotel's name is the Flintstones, and I highly recommend it.

The next two cards are daily schedules for the saturday, sunday and monday. We come by coach. It's a five hour journey with a break in the middle. The second day we hire a driver by the name of Zekerya bey who takes us around. The third day we usually just go for a walk and then hop back in the bus to go home. We pretty much do the same thing everytime which really helps with Max! Again, I'm hoping I can re-use the cards by just changing the dates on them. (I had to write them as Max is into dates big way).

This will be the first time I use anything as complete for a trip. I'm hoping it will help smooth out some awkward moments. I'll let you know!

Overcoming my hatred of Teletubbies through crafts and autism

2011-04-07T10:37:00.000+03:00

Well, not quite. But it is a first step.
Before I tell the story and show you the pictures, you need to understand the depth of my hatred. I understand that all parents who have been subjected to them hate the teletubbies. Also aunts, uncles, godparents, babysitters, friends who drop by when it's on, etc. I know. Bear with me. Most babies who can will insist on watching the teletubbies as often as possible. They will make it clear early on that unless you put them in front of those post-apocalyptic creatures who take orders from a shower head, on a regular basis they will be unmanageable. You will not be able to have a shower, look at your email, or go to the toilet. Your life will be over. For a couple of years.

Now what you need to understand is that not only do I have two children, thus doubling the enforced teletubbies watching period, but the second one is autistic and has decided, not only that the teletubbies were his favourite show, but that he would use them as a learning spring board. Basically, the little bastard has made impossible for me even to consider weaning him off the Tubs. He's eight years old.

I have suffered for ten years now. I have watched them in English, Turkish, French, German, Russian, Czech, even. I know all the stories by heart. We have re-created all the sequences involving wind-mills, scary lions, trees with birds on them, flying sheep, etc, with drawings, cut out figures, plastic toys, legos, etc. We recite them on a daily basis. We have learnt much from them in terms of language, science, culture and social interactions. It's been painful, but fruitful.

Last week, we moved on to something new. Max decided that he was going to recreate a craft activity that he'd seen on the teletubbies. He said he would need some paints, green, yellow and red, some washing up liquid, paper, and a straw.
We asked him to make a list.

So I went and got all that from the kitchen drawer that contains everything we're ever likely to need for crafts. I realised that we're all out of finger paints but for green, blue and orange. So we used that. And here's what we did with it.

Orange

Blue


Rather unimpressive resulting picture

So there you go. The teletubbies are helping our autistic son be creative in a self-directed way. That's something, I suppose.

Gearing up for autism awareness month.

2011-04-01T11:35:00.000+03:00

I'm not doing a Portrait of Autism post this week, as I sort of did two last week.
But I wanted to tell you that I've been posting about autism on my new blog too.
But be warned before you go: these posts are in seriously bad taste and contain very bad drawings. In fact, some of you might want to stage an intervention to stop me using Linux's Kolorpaint. I'd understand. And I'd discreetly open another blog under another name.

But one thing I realised when writing these posts is that I've never made my views on the vaccination and autism debate clear here. So, at the risk of alienating readers, here you go: I don't believe vaccines cause autism. I believe it's important to carry on vaccinating children. That's it.

So if you want a laugh at my expense, please go visit my new blog and read my two autism awareness posts, here and here.

And while you're at it, please subscribe to the RSS feed on the new blog. Unless you do really feel I should quit, which, as I said, I'd understand...

Portraits of Autism #17

2011-03-29T21:56:00.000+03:00

I set out to write this piece two days ago, and ended up ranting about the under-diagnosis of Asperger's sydrome in girls. So yes, I was going to write about a young girl I'd met the other day at Max's centre. She and her sister.

She is pretty, with short black curls and a thin straight nose, which together with her almond shaped eyes give her a look of a sarcophagus painting of a Greek woman I've seen at the Louvre. Her thick lashes hide cover up her side-way glances. She's dressed meticulously with white tights, black mary-jane shoes, a denim skirt, and a frilly shirt. She looks about twelve, maybe thirteen. She came in with her younger sister. The same nose, the same eyes, the same clothing. The hair is longer. I surmise that smoothing thick curly hair on an autistic child who's bound to have sensory issues may not be the mother's idea of fun.

The younger girl looks about ten. She walks in the waiting room, confidently, and guides her sister to a vacant chair next to mine. She sits her down, gently, plunks a great big black handbag on her lap and asks her to wait while she goes and looks for the teacher. The other girl sits, quietly, for a few seconds. Shyly she raises her eyes, takes in her surroundings, and decides she can't stay. She gets up to follow her sister, leaving the bag behind. Within seconds the younger girl is back to fetch the bag. She shows no sign of impatience.

There's another woman in the room. She's with a boy of 5 or so. Together they're waiting for another boy about Max's age. The small boy has very short, shaved hair. He looks like a tiny thug. He's dressed like a little man too, as some boys from more traditional families sometimes are. When the girls come back in the room the mother calls the younger one over. How old are you? she asks. Where do you live? Is your mother coming to pick you up? The girl answers dutifully, casting a frequent eye on her sister as she speaks.

The small boy is playing with a jigsaw puzzle on a table by the window. The little girl goes to stand behind him, shyly. When he struggles she tries to show him where the piece goes. I'm not sure if she wants him to finish so she can play or if she wants to be included. Either way I'm relieved she still has time to play. She's not just her sister's minder. She's still a child.

The bigger girl is seating quietly. She seems much more peaceful when she knows her sister is in the room. Occasionally she glances at me, or rather at my paraphernalia of pink electronics and writing things. The glances last a quarter of a second, but I know she's here, I know she's taking me in.

Her sister is coming back to her now. I was wrong, she wasn't waiting so she could play. She's brought the jigsaw back to her sister. She sits besides her and shows her the picture in the middle. Look, she says. There's a rabbit here. And a flower. It's pink. And look at the tree in the corner. Do you see it? Do you like it? She's keeping her voice low, even. The older sister responds, a quiet 'yes' at the end of each question. She seems torn between wanting to please her sister and staying focussed on keeping the noisy surroundings out. Her sister knows that, and her questions soon stop. The two girls sit in companionable silence until it is time to go.

Oh, one last thing. If you liked this post, would you mind terribly clicking on the RSS feed, here, or the Google connect buttons (top left)? And if you didn't like it, you might still want to look around. There's three of us, you know, so you're (almost) bound to find something you like. And then, if you've still got time, you could share this post or stumble it, or both and get in touch with your local tv station to sing our praises. We'll love you forever.

Portraits of Autism: Asperger' s pink and blue.

2011-03-27T17:36:00.000+02:00

I haven't been to the autism education centre for a while, but when I go, I mostly see boys there. Sure, there's the occasional girl with Asperger. But even that's rare. One thing I found out recently is that Asperger is under-diagnosed in girls. What this means is that many girls suffer in silence, trying to work out what the hell is going on around them and how they're supposed to react to people and situations. They're coping with autism by themselves. This situation comes about because one of the many prejudices about autism is that it's a boy thing, that it's to do with having an extreme male brain.

I don't want to suggest that there is no truth behind any of this: more boys than girls do seem to be affected overall. But with something like Asperger, or high functioning autism, it's much harder to tell. How the symptoms manifest themselves depends very much on how a child develops. And Asperger doesn't affect the development of a child in quite the same way as classical autism does. Children with Asperger are good talkers, so they're not excluded from society as children who don't speak can be. So they get to be put into society's little boxes, just like any other child. They learn - with difficulty - the kind of behaviour that is expected of them as boys or as girls. So it's not suprising that Asperger's symptoms should manisfest themselves differently in boys and in girls. Blue Asperger for boys, and pink for girls.

But of course, the medical profession only recognizes blue Asperger's symptoms. So girls remain undiagnosed. As far as current diagnoses are concerned, there are 16 boys with Asperger's to every girl who has the condition. Dr Judith Gould, who is quoted in this Guardian article says it should be 2.5 to 1. This means that for every 16 boys who receive a diagnosis of Asperger's there are 5 or 6 girls who don't but who have the condition. One way in which the condition might manifest itself in girls when undiagnosed is through eating disorders. In any case, as women who have been diagnosed late in life, like Rachel Cohen-Rottenberg, will tell you, it's miserable, it's hard. It doesn't have to be.

I seem to be back

2011-03-24T09:12:00.000+02:00

For now, anyway. It looks like the connection to blogspot is restored in my area of town.

In the meantime I've been busy elsewhere.

I guest-posted on Roberta Wedge's lovely blog: A Vindication of the Rights of Mary. I wrote about my experiences writing a book on Mary Wollstonecraft. Not the one about zombies, but proper, serious philosophy.

I've also had fun with my new blog, The Forbidden Sister:

I came up with more good reasons why I don't like football.

I offered students invaluable advice about academic writing.

I gave a clear and fair appreciation of philosopher Imannuel Kant.

I wrote a book review/ ghost story.

And I don't think the cartoons distract from the seriousness of the subject matters, but I'll let you be the judges of that.

So, yes, I probably should have spent less time doing this and more time actually working or doing important educational things with my autistic son. And I will go back to more moderate posting habits. But it's all new and shiny!

So please go and give it some comment love and it will love you back.

(Not)* On Ada Lovelace's day: Emilie du Chatelet

2011-03-22T09:19:00.000+02:00

"Judge me for my own merits, or lack of them, but do not look upon me as a mere appendage to this great general or that great scholar, this star that shines at the court of France or that famed author. I am in my own right a whole person, responsible to myself alone for all that I am, all that I say, all that I do. it may be that there are metaphysicians and philosophers whose learning is greater than mine, although I have not met them. Yet, they are but frail humans, too, and have their faults; so, when I add the sum total of my graces, I confess I am inferior to no one."

Mme du Châtelet to Frederick the Great of Prussia.

Behind every great man, they used to say, stands a great woman.
Well, some still say it. So for every great woman standing behind a great man, I say:
Take a large stick, and hit the good man over the head with it. Then stand in the light you were hidden from. Enjoy.

All this is especially true of the wives, sisters, mistresses of the men of the Enlightenment period. Mme du Chatelet is an excellent example of a woman who could have used a large stick.

In her twenties, Emilie du Chatelet met Voltaire, then in his forties, and set him up in a family castle where they could conduct scientific research together. All this was partly financed by gambling: Du Chatelet used her skills at maths to win at cards whenever she and Voltaire ran out of money.

Voltaire was not a great scientist. Yet, he was considered the leader of their research team, and she the assistant. Du Chatelet, trying to help him write a treatise on light came up with some fairly interesting discoveries of her own, outshining his attempts at scientific experiments. Rather than simply helping himself to her work, as many would have done, Voltaire had the grace to be jealous of her superior skills and intellect, and they eventually broke up.

Du Chatelet went on to translate Newton's works. Her translation of his Principia Mathematica also included a commentary which made several critical points about Newton's calculations, suggesting revisions of some of his findings (she actually redid the sums herself to check they were right as part of her translation). She also brought in some of Descartes and Leibniz's metaphysics, in an attempt at synthesing the main ideas of the time.

She considered this translation to be her greatest work (she also published philosophical treatises) and hoped that it would bring her immortality. But another great man came along to make sure this wouldn't happen. Mme du Chatelet, said Kant, might as well have a beard as be a scientist of genius: women do not reason, he said, they can only sense.

Kant was a great man. So no one bothered with Emilie du Chatelet until the Twentieth Century.

...

* Looking up the site where I was supposed to link this, I found out that Ada Lovelace's day has been moved to October! Oh well, you can never write too much about women scientists or philosophers, with or without beards.

Portraits of Autism #16

2011-03-18T11:09:00.001+02:00

"Si tu manges ton dîner, tu auras de la force."

So my husband told our autistic 8 year old at dinner last night:
'Eat your dinner: it will give you strength'.

His little mind started computing straight away. If I eat my dinner I will have ... what? You will give me what?
He's hoping we'll say ice-cream. I can see it in his eyes, hear it in his tone.

But no. He knows that's not it, so he's going to try and understand. He points to pot of stir fried cabbage in front of him: 'This is strength?', and then to the pot of curried prawns, 'Is this strength?'.

It's hard not to laugh. But we don't because it's something he's highly sensitive to. It will start him off if we so much as smile. Also, this is the first time we see him trying to figure out the meaning of an abstract word.

So explain: strength is when you become strong, when you have muscles on your arms, and we flex our biceps, Popeye style.

'No!' he shouts. 'Not strength. Strength is going away now. Max is going to bed.'

Now it's not funny: he's upset, and he's scared. He tried to understand something new, and things didn't work out, at all. Throughout the rest of dinner, he's locked in and he keeps repeating 'not strength, not strength'.

In bed, he's tossing and turning, mumbling: 'No, not strength, not strength'.
But by the morning he's fine. Chirpy even.

Hopefully, he'll give this asking questions lark another go, and another, until he figures out everything he needs to know. And I'll make sure I have drawing materials at hand next time he tries.

In the meantime...

2011-03-16T12:32:00.001+02:00

... you can find me here:

http://theforbiddensister.tumblr.com/

Testing the ban

2011-03-16T11:11:00.001+02:00

As some of you may know, Turkish courts have blocked blogspot due a complaint by satellite tv provider Digiturk. Turns out some blogspot user posted links to football matches Digiturk was charging for.
Always hated football. Now I hate Digiturk too.

Anyhow, I'm trying to see if I can post by email.

Even if I can I'm entirely sure whether I can comment, or reply to comments.
So if I don't, please don't be offended.
If you have any bright ideas as to how I might circumvent the ban, let me know!

TREES

2011-03-16T08:05:00.000+02:00

Hello !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
this is sister3's entry for tara's gallery week 50

The theme is "trees"

Will it....
Or will it not...
Fall on my nose...

Week 50...
In 50 years, when my daughter is watching this tree with her grand daughter, I won't be there anymore.
But this tree will, and he will remember how much love I have for her
Hope she will too, forever.

I'm not always here, you know.

2011-03-15T18:16:00.001+02:00

Sometimes I'm elsewhere, talking about work type things, and the glamorous academic life.

For those who like that sort of thing, it's the sort of thing they like.
Totally.
Check it out.

The neighbours have no shame.

2011-03-10T10:54:00.000+02:00

Frolicking in the snow

Isn't this a classic scenario?

Stuck

2011-03-09T14:21:00.000+02:00

If I told you I'd just given up on an attempt to walk from my office to my husband's, a hundred metre or so away, for lunch, would you believe me? Would you think I was a wus? I thought so. So here's a few pictures I took this morning on my way to work...

Stepping outside our home...


'Im Indoors, carrying supplies.


Help.


My office is down that road.


Down the stairs to my office.

This was a few hours ago. It's still snowing (hasn't stopped for 24 hours, at least). Classes have been cancelled today, so not much is happening in terms of clearing the snow. Which is why I decided to stay in my office for lunch.
'Im Indoors is much braver and waded from his office to mine so we could eat our sandwiches together.We'll make it home this afternoon. It will take a bit longer than usual, no doubt. What I'm not clear on, is how our child-minder will make the journey back to the city... She might well be stuck with us till this is over.

This is my post for Tara's Gallery at Sticky Fingers. The prompt was: one word.

International Women's Day - Judge a book by its cover.

2011-03-08T09:33:00.000+02:00

This post is in honour of International Women's Day: a global day celebrating the economic, political and social achievements of women past, present and future, every year on 8 March, since 1911.

As part of my job, I occasionally review books. This is good, because I get free books, a publication of sorts to my name, and I get to find out what some of the other people in my field are thinking.

The latest one is a book by Robert Kane called Ethics and the Quest for Wisdom. Cool title, I thought, when the editor first contacted me about doing the review. A quick look at Amazon told me that the book seeks to revive certain ancient ethical beliefs and apply them to contemporary problems in social and political philosophy. Nice, I though. My kind of thing.

Then, a few weeks later, I received the book. Here it is:

Men, men, and more men. Fat men, skinny men, old men, young men, bearded men, bold men, men. Is this what the quest for wisdom looks like, I asked myself? If so, I might as well give up. Now.

But, no, this may not be as outrageous as it looks, I think. Maybe the book is some sort of a survey of these philosophers. These mainstream philosophers. Maybe that's what the author agreed to do. Even so, that would be problematic. These guys are 'important' because they are on the canon: every one has read them, so every one has to read them. If you haven't you can't join the game, you can't play with the big boys. You might read some women philosophers on the side, but don't talk about them when you're anywhere serious. It won't do.

But looking at the book, that's not even the case. The book is not a survey. And the author does refer to a number of women philosophers, at least twentieth century women philosophers. So what's with the cover? It seems like somebody, probably somebody working for the press, but maybe the author himself, decided that a gathering of these ugly mugs was the best expression of the Quest for Wisdom.

I beg to differ, and I won't bother to be respectful about it.

Women philosophers have been working just as hard towards the quest for wisdom as men philosophers have. Harder, perhaps, because every time one of them had an idea they managed to write down, one of the bastards pictured on that book would do his best to bury it.

Plato - top right - wasn't too bad: at least he allowed women to study philosophy at his school, and thought they would make just as good rulers as men would. Aristotle - bottom right - Kant - in the middle - Spinoza - on Kant's right - all had crazy offensive views about women's natural inferiority to men and believed it was impossible for a woman to produce good intellectual work. Aquinas - top, middle - thought women were so flawed they couldn't have been part of the original creation. Confusius - bottom left - believed that wisdom for women was complete subservience to men. Hume may have been alright, and Mill, well, he did take the credit for his partner Harriet Taylor's work on the The Subjection of Women. (He acknowledged her work, but still signed his name to it).

So in honour of International Women's Day, I'm going to take a small liberty with the venerable people at Cambridge University Press. I'm going to redesign the book cover. Here goes:

The Quest for Wisdom

Sophie de Grouchy, Emma Goldman, Hipparchia

Harriet Taylor, Mary Wollstonecraft, Simone de Beauvoir

Heloise, Hypathia, Christine de Pizan.

Happy International Women's Day!

Portraits of Autism #15

2011-03-04T07:32:00.001+02:00

Back when Max was being diagnosed, we took him to see a psychologist who had done some pioneering work in Turkey with autistic children. She had trained several child psychiatrists who were reputed to be the best in Ankara. Maybe that doesn't mean much in the grand scheme of things - Ankara not being exactly a centre for cutting edge autism studies. In any case she was much better than the first psychiatrist we took him to. That one 'forgot' to tell us, the first time around, that she thought Max was autistic...

One thing we were told in recommendation for this psychologist was that she had worked with autistic children for a long time, and had had some success in helping them live independent lives as adults. In particular, she had worked with twins who'd gone on to study at university. This gave me pause for thought. How many students are there who are autistic? How many of the students I've taught? And if I did teach some students on the spectrum, how did I respond to them?

There was one student, once, lets' call him Frank. He was one of those students who seem to be well-meaning but perennially disorganised. So disorganised, in fact, he hardly ever made it to class. He seemed very stubborn, very literal. He certainly didn't respond particularly well to my heavy sarcasm when I thanked him for gracing us with his company when he did turn up to class. He just stared, rudely. He did read the texts before coming, though, unlike many of the others. And he had interesting things to say in discussion. It's just that he said them in a slightly weird manner, always so serious, not always responding to others' comments, sometimes butting in at an awkward point in the debate. And that's what a lot of them do - students, that is - taking part in a philosophical debate isn't the easiest thing in the world. But his difficulties were a little more pronounced. Also, he tended to sit alone, and the other kids tended to ignore him.

I tried to encourage him - he was obviously a very bright, capable and hard working student - but I'm afraid I did lose my patience with him on a few occasions, and eventually, I stopped trying to help and he failed the course. The following year he was in my class again. Again, he failed to turn up for a few classes. Then, when he did turn up, he didn't have the right text. So I told him off. I said that at the very least, he could pay attention to what I said when he bothered to turn up to class. Then something very strange happened. He stared at me and said he'd never been to my class before, that we'd never spoken, and that he didn't have a clue what I was talking about. I got a bit annoyed. I suggested he might be going too far. He stared some more. Then, slowly, he came to a realisation and said: 'You must have been talking to my twin brother Frank. I'm Tom'.

So there you go: I had both of them in my class that year. Each as impossible as the other. Each highly capable, with fine philosophical minds, but finding every little thing an obstacle. Slowly it dawned on me that they might be autistic. But of course, at the time, I had no idea what that meant. And no one told me. Had I been better informed, I wouldn't have been quite so impatient with them, and I would probably have found better ways of teaching them. Or maybe they weren't autistic at all, and they were just slightly awkward students. But just maybe, they were the twins I heard about a few years later.

I don't know where they are now. I wish them luck.

Pink is a feminist statement.

2011-03-03T08:21:00.001+02:00

As much as I hate the pink aisle at the toy shop, as much as I hate the fact that nearly any where you go little girls' clothes go from pink to slutty without anything in between (whereas little boys' go from Thomas the Tank Engine to, well, normal, you know), as much as I hated it when my daughter's kindergarten's class was divided into boys and girls and the girls had to shout 'I do!' when the teacher asked 'who loves pink?', as much as, well, I hate all of this, I have to say, pink is sometimes pretty cool.

Here's a list of pink things I have:

A pink netbook: an NC10, with Ubuntu installed ever since I virused it.

A pink phone. Well, it's sort of lilac, which is one of the many ways in which it's unsatisfactory. I should have resisted the urge to buy a not-quite-pink phone and then I might have had one that worked a little better too. (I want a iPhone. Or a Google Phone. It's fine if they're not pink: see below).

A pink iPod touch cover. Not one of those overpriced apple ones, or one of those supermarket copies. Oh no. I have a crocheted one, with a little pink ribbon and a pink teddy bear button to hold it in place. I didn't crochet myself, but found a piece already made in a bag of whole my friend Jo gave us when she left town.

A pink kettle in my office at work. It's big and round, and the body is transparent pink with white top and bottom. Lovely. A pink Cath Kidston mug to go with it.

Some pink pens, pencils, notebooks, etc. In particular I have some pink moleskins which 'im indoors bought me, and which I love. I was always ambivalent about moleskins, as on the one hand they're supposed to be for writers, but on the other, the writers who actually used them were very 'male'. So having a pink one is a nice way of slicing off some of Hemingway's superfluous balls.

So not everything should be pink, of course. I would not decorate my home in pink. That would just be irritating, and wouldn't go so well with all the old Turkish carpets, copper tables and antique chests that clutter our home and make it look like the Grand Bazar of Instanbul. And I certainly never dressed my daughter in pink. Or bought her pink toys. In fact, I spotted some dollhouse furniture that would sort of fit in my son's house, but didn't buy it because they were all pink - who's ever heard of a pink bath or oven...

I could do it the other way round, I could have a sober grey, or tasteful beige office, and come home to extravagant pink. But the joy of owning things which belong to the world of work, the world of important people, the world of men, and for them to be pink is unutterable. The very thought that I bring into the 'serious world of men' part of the frivolousness women were confined in for so long is priceless. I'm not trying to fit in at work. It's my world too. Also, I like my home the way it is. It's neither masculine nor feminine. It's how we like it.

The best things in life ... come with food.

2011-03-02T08:10:00.000+02:00

This is my entry for Tara's Gallery. Her theme this week is : simple pleasures.


Baking with the kids


Shopping at the local market for seasonal fruit.


Picking your own apples, once a year.

Hosting big dinner party with lots of wine.


Watching bread being made in a village.

And sharing it with your mother.


A fish dinner with friends by the sea-side, to mark the end of a holiday.

Expressions of madness

2011-02-23T20:00:00.001+02:00

Kronos devouring one of his children

Francisco Goya

Painted on a wall of his house between 1819 and 1823.

Not exactly one of mine... I know.

But the expression of murderous madness and fear that leads an old tyrant to tear his own children to pieces is so evocative of what's going on in Libya, that I could not resist.

Terrible twos (and ones, and threes)

2011-02-23T00:19:00.005+02:00

For this week's writer's workshop at Mama Kat's fantastic blog, I chose prompt #2: 'What did they get into now? Describe a time your toddler got into something they shouldn't have.'

I have two children. The eldest, Alexandre, barely did anything forbidden or exotic during his toddler years. Granted, he did swallow one of my rings while jumping on the bed with the ring in his mouth, but it didn't hurt him, he just got it out the natural way - and boy was I glad that it was my husband who digged for it, I'll spare you the details. Alex is not that kind of boy. However, he will make others do crazy stuff, he'll enjoy the planning more than the doing.

My youngest, on the other hand, seems to have a special gift for doing crazy things. She's a little monster. Sweet, funny, smart but the girl has no limit. I think she's already done everything that could be done. Of course there's the usual drawings on the wall, the applying my very expensive make-up to her dolls and herself, carrying the new kitten by its tail to show it around the house, showing me, very proudly, one of its whiskers pulled off with her fingers, pouring my shampoo and conditioner into the cat's bowl, putting all the toilet paper down the toilets because after all, that's what it's for, isn't it? - amongst other things. All between the age of one and three.

A few weeks ago, I heard her cry in her room. I ran -O.K., three steps, but still, I managed to run into the wall and hurt myself - stupid, stupid small Parisians flats - and I found her choking. I did what any mother would do: I panicked. I tried to make her swallow whatever it was, or spit it out, but it was obviously stuck in her throat. Her life was in no danger, she was breathing by then, but it obviously hurt. I called the firemen and there they came, two and a half minutes later, all three of them. My boy was all excited, needless to say.

Roxane had swallowed a coin. A small one. She had totally swallowed it by the time the firemen were here but they still wanted to take her to the hospital to check her out, make sure it went down the right tube. Alex was excited about being in the truck, so was I (oh come on, three firemen, a truck and a child out of danger, you gotta enjoy things a little) and it was then that my adorable son chose to tell them about the time he had swallowed the ring. One of the guys asked me if I made a habit out of having kids who swallowed the wrong things. Hem.

Roxane turned out to be fine and it was at her daddy's place that she got the coin out, the same way her brother had. I am pretty sure she'll keep on doing crazy things. One day, she and Alex will team up and then, the serious stuff will begin.

I do wonder why she does all that. I also wonder why my whole family keeps calling her Marianne instead of Roxane. Beats me.

Cleaning up

2011-02-20T12:16:00.005+02:00

I don't like cleaning, but I like a clean house. Since I still haven't won the lottery and cannot afford a maid, I do it myself.

This morning, as my ex-husband came to pick up the kids for his week's vacation, I started cleaning as soon as I locked the door behind them. I cleaned and cleaned, washed the sheets, the towels, the dishes, opened every window, made myself some coffee and sat on my couch with a funny feeling. I realized I do this everytime they leave and I put their toys away in their bedroom and close the door.

I also changed pictures in the frame hanged up on the wall in the hall to replace their father with pictures of me and them. I then went to my Facebook account and deleted all the pictures he was in. I have albums as old as 2007 in there, it took me quite a while.

Not that I hate him, not at all, I have no hard feeling whatsoever, but I felt it was necessary and wondered why I hadn't done this before. I realized moving on takes quite a lot of time, there are phases, even when you're the one making the decision to leave. You can't erase 15 years that easily, and I have no intention of erasing them, for that matter. But it's a new life and I want to start fresh, clean.

Now I'm done and I feel better. Sometimes a little cleaning is all it takes.

A Valentine's day special

2011-02-19T17:49:00.001+02:00

I was sort of planning to ignore Valentine's day this year. It seems a lot of hype for not very much - it's just a meal, ain't it? And pressure.
But then my lovely husband brought flowers AND gave me a present. A heart-shaped box with heart-shaped chocolate inside!

So I did start to think more kindly on the holiday (as it's called in America - until recently, I thought a holiday was when you didn't have to go to work).
So I read people's valentine's posts, articles in glossy magazines, to find something we could do (apart from the obvious). And I found that nowadays, people watch films together on Valentine's day. Not just any film, mind you, but Valentine's day films.

Hmmm.

I went to a couple of shops which seemed to confirm this. Bookshop and supermarket alike had binfulls of 'romantic comedies' on special sale for Valentine's day. Meg Ryan and Julia Roberts galore.
I nearly went back to my previous negative attitude to the whole thing. Why pick a day which is supposed to be about the love you and your partner share and then irritate the hell out of it by watching bad movies?

But we do like to watch films together, and we don't get to do it often (you know, one of us is always too tired, usual drill).

So we did watch a film this week. But it wasn't from the Valentine's day special bin. We watched Night of the Living Dead.

So, happy, belated Valentines' day!

Ooh, and I bought a red heart-shaped cake.

Silent Sunday

2011-02-13T22:09:00.000+02:00

Alphabet Taxi Boy

2011-02-13T22:00:00.000+02:00

Today Max thought he'd build a set of doors for his taxi. He decided we'd drive to the library and the supermarket with it. He also decided that he'd tie his scarf once around the neck and once around the body of the car, to make a safety belt. We undecided that one together.

The doors kept falling apart.

So, after a very short while, he decided to revert to the old design.

Much fun was had by all (well, him, mostly).

Let them bleed

2011-02-10T09:54:00.000+02:00

I've been following the anti-abortion debates in the United States with a growing sense of horror - which is why I was grateful for some light relief from The Feminist Philosophers' blog with their cartoon: The Mombies!!!
But what are these people thinking? Do they really think it's ok to sacrifice a mother's life in order not to kill a fetus, even though the fetus will probably die if the mother dies before the fetus is big enough to survive?

But of course, that's not the end of the story. Women who are denied legal abortion will often seek illegal ones, and this, my friends, is not good for your health! Every 8 minutes a woman dies because of an illegal abortion! Oh, and yes, the fetus dies too. Making abortions illegal does not keep fetuses alive, it just kills the mother too.

So what, some people might say - so what, so people do say - a great number of women die from illegal abortions, but that number is nothing compared to fetus death from legal abortion! Baby murder! they say.

Just to be clear on that, as a moral philosopher (by profession), I'm meant to have a position on whether abortion is murder or not. I'm meant to know whether a fetus is a human being, or just a potential human being, whether your death can count as murder if you're not even conscious yet. Well, I don't. Not really.

But I'm quite clear on what other kind of things count as murder: taking the life of a person against their will, and that includes capital punishment, and killing in war. Not much to think about here, really. You inject poison into a person's arm, and you have to strap them to a bed so they don't try and escape while you do it - that's murder. You drop a bomb on a bunch of people, shoot them in the chest - that's murder. And yet, note that a lot of the people who support anti-abortion reform are also pro-capital punishment and pro-military intervention. Pro-life, indeed!

So granted, they believe a fetus is innocent, whereas a convict is not (well, not entirely clear on whether that's at all true of most death-row inmates...) and a foreign soldier or at a push, civilian, definitely is not. And a woman who got pregnant and wants to get rid of her baby? Of course she's not innocent! What was she doing getting knocked up in the first place? She got raped, you say? Well, let's face it, she was probably asking for it.

So I don't have a knock-down philosophical argument in defence of abortion, but I've got some pretty good ones against the anti-abortionists. I really don't think abortion is murder. But letting a woman bleed to death because you prevent her from choosing a safe abortion is murder.

Oh, and here's a thought for a possible compromise: maybe anti-abortionists would be ok with the idea of aborting only female fetuses since these females are likely to grow up into rape-provoking women? Hold on, isn't that the case already in some parts of the world?

Trolley Madness

2011-02-08T08:30:00.000+02:00

Note to philosophers: not going to bang on about the trolley problem. No:

this one is about Supermarket Trolleys!

So I hate shopping. I normally didn't use to do the weekly shop: it was 'Im indoors' job. From when Max was a baby, and all through his unmanageable years, he'd take him to our local superstore, and battle the crowds to bring home the necessities of life (booze, toilet paper, and a few vegetables). I would contribute by occasionally doing an online shop ('Im indoors isn't that good with computers: but don't tell him I said so ...) and producing a really snazzy shopping list on which all you have to do is highlight the things you need.

But things have changed.

'Im indoors does the bulk of the taking Max to Autism Central (time table thing), so I do the shopping. Sometimes I go with Max, who's no longer unmanageable, generally very helpful and only occasionally gets lost and takes a taxi home alone.

Sometimes I go alone. And that's when things don't work out so well. I'm not too good with directions, spatial awareness, and all that jazz. It takes me about six months to remember where everything is - but they move their shit around every three months. Also, I'm not good with crowds. All these souls, worrying about what they're going to eat, whether the baby is going to have a tantrum, whether these boots will actually be waterproof, of if they should try and buy that t-shirt this other person is looking at - they don't like it, but it's the last one. They make an awful lot of noise. They're everywhere, pushing, objecting, complaining. And that's not even the supermarket people who haunt the frozen aisle, and the washing powder one, waiting to pounce on you to ask you why you won't try a new make of stuff you don't even need. Frightful.

There's one way out, though. One way to avoid them all, which doesn't involve virtual trolleys, is the iPod way. I plug my ears, put the music on loud and suddenly the people disappear. They're just shadows now, without a care in the world. If they try to push past me at the fruit and veg weighing counter, I just push back with as little thought as if they were a branch in my path. The people waiting to tell me I should buy different fish fingers, or try some no doubt disgusting frozen fish cake - well, I can't hear them, so what do I care!

But the best is the trolley. When I'm unplugged, a shopper amongst others, pushing an increasingly heavy, and awkward trolley that won't turn properly, I curse to myself (maybe I curse aloud sometimes, but it's in French, so no one understands.) But with my iPod on full blast, when I'm surrounded by a bunch of automatons, I don't push, I run with the trolley, doing sudden stop-and-turns, or I push it along, following the rhythm of whatever song I'm listening to. Hey, sometimes I might even sing along.

The good thing about this system, is that if you meet a real person, they stand out very neatly against the shadows. So I saw and old friend, and I stopped instantly. We exchanged news, and talked about starting a reading group again, something I've been wanting to do for a while. I think it may even happen. I'll keep you posted.

Oh, one last thing. If you liked this post, would you mind terribly clicking on the RSS feed, here, or the Google connect buttons (top left), or by email at the bottom of this page? And if you didn't like it, you might still want to look around. There's three of us, you know, so you're (almost) bound to find something you like. And then, if you've still got time, you could share this post or stumble it, or both and get in touch with your local tv station to sing our praises. We'll love you forever.

SUNDAY "FOOODY" SUNDAY

2011-02-06T23:07:00.000+02:00

I'm back !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Well, actually, let's say I'm here this week...
So here's my entry for Tara's gallery week 45
The theme is "24 hours"

Suddenly I see

2011-02-06T17:06:00.006+02:00

O.K. so I've been single for the past seven months. Not single per se (hem), but basically single as in, not part of an item. I've had time to think of who I was, who I didn't want to be, who I didn't want to be with, what I wanted in life -well, this one still needs more thought, and what I didn't want in life -that one I sorted out pretty easily.

It was time. I'm 33 years old and I cannot believe I didn't take that time before. I think some sort of retreat should be compulsory, say, in your mid-twenties. For people like me, that is. People who want to make others happy, who are stubborn enough to try and make things work when the whole world tells them that it will never work out, people who go through life as if we were given second chances, as if it would last forever, as if choices did not have great consequences or collateral damages.

I feel sad that I only realize that now. Not that I'm old -I'm at least way younger than my evil sisters, not that I made that many mistakes, but jeez, I should have thought more about things before throwing myselves into them, should have held my tongue more often instead of saying things because I thought them at that exact moment without wondering if those thoughts would last.

Now I know better. I am still pretty spontaneous, still big-mouthed, still a pain in the ass, still throwing myself into situations but now, I take the time to think a little bit before I take big steps. Not only because I am a mother and a grown-up, but because I respect myself, as a person and others, too. I treasure my freedom as much as I treasure others' and that, my friends, is a huge change.

Suddenly I see, as K.T Tunstall sang so nicely. There's a new life ahead of me. There's a new life ahead of us all. Second chances do exist, you just need to take the time for a break. I'm ready now. Throw it at me, the happiness, the pain, the excitement, the terror, I'm ready. And this time, it won't be a fight, there will be no struggling. Because I strongly believe that all that is to happen to me, from now on, will happen because of a choice I made. And I am determined to make those choices with all my heart, to be as true as possible. There will be mistakes, but I honestly think it will be O.K.

Everything will be fine.

I hope this isn't too tasteless...

2011-01-26T16:25:00.000+02:00

This week's Gallery is all about children.
Lots of people posted pictures of beautiful, adorable babies and children.
But I think I've posted enough pics of my two here already. And as to pictures of us, the blogging sisters, you've already seen plenty.
So for this post, I'm asking you to spare a thought for children who are not beautiful or adorable: zombie children.

As the title says....

Oh, one last thing. If you liked this post, would you mind terribly clicking on the RSS feed, here, or the Google connect buttons (top left), or by email at the bottom of this page? And if you didn't like it, you might still want to look around. There's three of us, you know, so you're (almost) bound to find something you like. And then, if you've still got time, you could share this post or stumble it, or both and get in touch with your local tv station to sing our praises. We'll love you forever.

Of dreams and sea-shells.

2011-01-23T09:11:00.000+02:00

I had a dream: I was listening to a documentary about sea shells. Somebody was saying that there was only a very limited number of different kinds of sea shells in the world, that explorers had for a long time roamed seas and oceans trying to discover new types of shells, but to no avail.

You could forgive them for thinking there would be a wide variety given the amount or weird stuff you find in the sea! But whenever they would discover a new layer of the ocean, a body of water previously unexplored, the same dozen or so of sea-shells would turn up, no more.

In my dream I remember thinking of the time I spent in sand pits as a child, finding tiny shells, wondering how they had made it all the way to my playground in a parisian subburb, and I thought: when children all over the world play in the sand, they find the same shells. It's all a repeating pattern. It never changes.

There you go. It doesn't mean much. I'm not even confident it was a dream - maybe a daydream brought on by some actual show I was listening to. It was brought back to me this morning as I was cleaning out my desk with the intent of working on it and I found these:

Social media Gaga

2011-01-20T21:04:00.000+02:00

For this week's Mama Kat's workshop, I chose prompt #5 'How has social media changed you'.

My immediate thought was 'well, I am not choosing that one, seeing as I am the exact same person I was before the advent of social media'. Right. Hem. After a few seconds, I realized that I would probably be slightly depressed if I didn't have an easy access to Facebook for more than, say, two hours.

I check it at home, on my Blackberry and at work. I originally joined because Sandrine thought it would be a good place to share pictures and thoughts. Gradually, I looked for friends, people found me and, as much as I hate to admit it, I was addicted in no time.

I love it. I love the way I think of a status update and write it, secretly hoping my friends will laugh. I love checking my buddies' pictures, being a part of their everyday life.

My personal favorite is the chat option. It's like the phone, only better. And you get to chat with two or three people at the same time.

I know it's superficial, shallow, I know it's a unique marketing tool, but seriously, I'm in this world, I want to share. Sharing is my thing, you see. I hate being alone and Facebook keeps me close to the ones I love.

So yeah, it changed me a little, because I didn't need it before, but really, I've always been like that. I become addicted easily. I think it's the tools that change, not us.

Wood and Water.

2011-01-19T09:51:00.000+02:00

When we go to the Aegean coast we travel by train. Arriving back in the morning, I wake up and I see home. Gone are the olive trees, the pink laurels, the dark green hills and the deep blue sea. What I see outside the window is endless rounded hills, huge, smooth, yellow, and topped with the highest sky I have ever seen. That's when I know I'm home.

It is beautiful. But living in a semi-arid region, nearly desertic, but not quite, you get to miss two things. One is water, the other is wood. There are a few lakes and marshes around Ankara, a salt lake, a river, riddled with nasty chemicals, but you always get the feeling that the sea is far away. And the air is dry, so dry you can't breath at night. And it hardly ever rains.

And trees? Well, there are some planted on campus, very nice ones too, but you can tell they don't belong. They're not old or gnarled. They have to be looked after, cherished, lest they die. Which sometimes they do. (What do they put in the ground?!)

So when I go South to Cappadocia for our regular short breaks, I always look out for valleys in which there is an actual river. And I point my camera at it, and I click and click so that I have something for my eyes to feast, and to rest, when the Anatolian plain gets to be too much.

Here are a few from my last trip.

These are from the valley of Ilhara. I took these pictures while the others were visiting a church. I love carved and painted stone as much as any one in this family, but I knew that I would need to bring back some of that wood and water home with me.

Thoughts from the treadmill

2011-01-15T13:45:00.000+02:00

Melvin Bragg is introducing a program on Cleopatra. A woman woman with a mind like crystal and a voice to match explains why Egypt at that time wasn't unlike a modern state, full of debts. I can't focus, and my legs are heavy. What do I care if the Ptolemies slept with their brothers and sisters? I just want to go home, watch tv. I can't believe that less than a month ago, I was here, three times a week, working out like nobody's business.
My legs keep moving but slowly, like they know they have to, but just can't get into it.My mind is rehashing the latest drama over our son's education. Could we have avoided it? Are we sure we found the best solution? Is it going to happen again and is there anything we can do to stop it anyway? (We call it drama, but it's really life as usual, ex-pat life with special needs as usual, that is). Then I look at the timer and it's already eight minutes. My legs say 'only eight minutes'. I switch off the podcast and put my running list on 'shuffle'.

Dusty Springfield is telling me that 'Whishin' and Hopin'' won't get me anywhere. Even as I stop to think about the inanity of the lyrics, my legs, relieved, are picking up. Lying down and thinking of Egypt clearly wasn't going to do it for me, but a bit of music goes a long way. Then it's Lady Gaga, stranded on my iPod from the days when I had a crush on her music. 'Luv,Luv, lurve', she sings. I'm having visions of Swedish vampires being set on fire (mixing my videos, I know). The music speeds up and that image is chased by pairs of impossibly long legs stomping the ground like scissors. My own legs are completely off, now, moving faster, effortlessly, aching muscles replaced by springs.

My brain is relaxing too, no longer worrying, thoughts sliding through it like fish in a fancy japanese pond. I even keep going when Wham comes on: 'Wake me up!'. How do these things end up on my iPod? Then my twenty minutes are up (I know, but I'm working back up to a good routine). I lie down on the mat, before doing my sit ups, relaxing to Sir Duke. Just as I'm finishing my streches, Telephone comes on. I'm hoping I get that one next time.

Back home, Madness keeps me from peeing myself as I have to put water on for my daughter's pasta before I do anything else.

I considered myself tagged on this one by Jean, from Planet Outreach - ASD, because she wrote a beautiful post about her experience at the gym, listening to age-inappropriate music, and worrying about her special needs son.
And while I'm at it, I'll tag a few people myself:

Varda, from the Squashed Bologna - I'm sure you're not doing much exercise right now, with your operation and all, but anything will do!

Jen, from The Kind and Eye,

Amanda, from the Motherhood Umbrella.

Whether you go to the gym or do a bit of yoga at home once a blue moon, let's hear it: what do you think about? How do you motivate yourself? And tag others, while you're at it!

Smile

2011-01-13T22:27:00.003+02:00

Wow, what a week this has been. And it's not even over yet. I lost my voice, again. Not because of a nightmare, but an oedema which thought my vocal cords looked cool enough to go sit on them. Well, just the right one, actually.

So I can't speak. Rather, I'm not supposed to. But you know me, it's hard to shut me up.

I'm happy. As in, delirious with joy. The world never looked so beautiful, the future is full of promises and each day, for the past five mornings, I've woken up and smiled. It had been a while. Not that I wasn't smiling, you see, I smile a lot, but these days, the smile looks different.

I won't say why, because it's a long story, though I sure hope I'll tell you all about it someday.

But I thought I might share this with you.

Smile, people. Life is beautiful.

LOVE

2011-01-02T20:55:00.000+02:00

This was sister3's entry for tara's gallery week 40
Thetheme thi week was LOVE

HAPPY NEW YEAR !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Of coffee, country cottages and Christmas coincidences

2011-01-01T12:53:00.000+02:00

While I was in Paris a couple of weeks ago, I came across an old friend I hadn't seen since I was a child. I found it on a shelf in my mother's kitchen.

It used to sit on the mantle piece of the big stone fireplace in the common room in our grandparents' country cottage. In that fire place there was a big old black cauldron, some stokes, and in winter, a log or two, crackling because they were covered in dried moss. This is where our parents would heat the water to fill the plastic bucket in which they washed us. The tiny stone sink only had cold water coming out of it. On the mantle piece next to the grinder, there was a big jar filled with empty matchboxes, the big kind, that my sisters and cousins and I used as temporary homes for any insects we caught. Temporary as in last, unfortunately.

I used to play with the grinder, trying to make flour with grains I'd pick up on my walks. The idea was to make bread with it. When I reminded my mother of that, she said she used to have to grind the coffee in it as a child, and how it used to hurt her legs as she would hold it between her thighs. This does bring some perspective to the popularity of instant coffee - if you spent your childhood handgrinding coffee beans, it must be a relief just to pour water on granules! Nah. It makes no sense. The stuff's disgusting.

In our home, we make coffee in a metal pot with a filter on top.

I bought it for one pound in Holloway twenty years ago, on the day I moved to London. But it takes a while to make filter coffee by hand, so we keep it in the pot and then it goes not so nice, or on a busy morning, we go without coffee, which is never a good thing.

So, this year, I had a bright idea for a present for 'Im indoors. Something that would allow us to make coffee quickly and without making a mess. And 'Im indoors had the exact same thought.

I think it's time for another cup of coffee. Fancy one?

Christmas leftovers

2010-12-31T19:36:00.000+02:00

Jesus it's been a long time. Two weeks since our last post. You'd think it was Christmas or something. Anyway, not that I have any thing in particular to relate, but I thought I would clutter your readers a little with a few random thoughts and pictures.

We had friends over for Christmas from Istanbul. We don't have a spare room, so we decided to sleep in the living room so that the children could come jump on us and open their presents first thing in the morning. Strike that. We didn't actually want them to jump on us. We wanted them not to jump on our guests.
We had a lovely time opening presents. 'Im indoors and I ended up giving each other the exact same gift! But more on that some other time.
We wanted a breakfast that was special, but didn't take any time to prepare and wasn't too much of a mess to clear up afterwards. So bagels and salmon it was! Special because it's not that easy to get bagels in Ankara, and because smoked salmon is, well, christmassy.

After that it was prepare, prepare, prepare. We were expecting twenty people for dinner so there was plenty to do. Of course some of it was already done: the mince pies you see on the breakfast table, the pudding, and most of the vegetables that had been cooked, peeled and pureed during the week. We had pureed celery, quince and black carrots. Yep. And if you don't believe me, here they are:

'Im indoors also made some red cabbage and apple, but, ever so unfortunately, could not find horrors, I mean brussels sprouts, in the shops this year. So, we had to do without. (Who on earth is responsible for the idea that brussels sprouts are a treat that should be served at Christmas? Because they're seasonal, you say? What's wrong with oysters?)

And of course there were roast potatoes, to go with the duck. And the two geese.

Because I nipped to Paris just before Christmas, I brought back a tin of foie gras and some cheese (Brillat Savarin, the kind that you spoon out). So we made that into little canapes (why are they called that? Canapes are things you sit on, in French).

'Im indoors, on these occasions, is mostly responsible for manning the oven. I'm in charge of the carving knife (to serve the birds but also to threaten people who skip line to get a second helping, which does happen when you've got a lot of guests). He managed to get two geese this year by ordering them from a butcher's in town and picking them up before the butcher had sold them to someone else, which he is prone to do. So here's a picture of the man and his bird.

The birds in question are a fair amount of work to prepare. First, a goose is never plucked properly, so you always have to singe it before you do anything else. Then the little fuckers have this huge digestive tube that, for some reason, you have to take out. This involves sticking your arm up its arse, fiddling with the inside of its neck till you find the cartilage thingy and then pull. And pull. And pull some more till the bloody thing comes out.

Then you have to find the bits inside and sort the ones you can eat from the ones you can't. And from the ones your husband would quite like you to keep but you think it's too much of a hassle to prepare them so you bin them quickly while he's not looking. And all of this must be done at least a day before so you can soak the livers overnight before making the stuffing.

Then you make the stuffing. That's ok, provided you've already peeled the chestnuts. Not having brussels sprouts helped there, as we didn't have to keep whole chestnuts and it didn't matter if we made a mess while peeling them, or overcooked them before. And you need pork, of some kind, of course. And calvados. (Don't even mention breadcrumbs, rice, or sage, please. I do brussells sprouts and pudding for Christmas. Don't think that's English enough?)

The last bit of the bird preparation is the bit that makes me think I'd make a good mortician. You have to saw up the cavities and any bits of skin that may have torn. That's very important people! Don't skip that! Then you cover it with foil (until the last hour of cooking), stick it in the oven for the appropriate amount of time, and let someone else take care of it (which I believe involves getting some of the fat out so the beast doesn't drown. You can keep the fat afterwards as it's nice for cooking potatoes.)

After dinner we normally force our guests to sing carols. They sort of feel obliged to, because we've just fed them goose and foie gras. I'm not sure it's a great idea though, as some of us are very bad singers indeed, and without a piano or a guitar to keep us going, we tend to sing in different keys and keep different times!
So, no recording, but here's a couple of pics.

After that, it was mostly clearing up. Thank god I'd bought some paper plates so didn't have to wash up much. On boxing day we were up as early as usual and sat down to a relaxed breakfast, with leftover mince pies and a pomelo, which is now all gone.

So, you'll understand, I think, you'll forgive us, even, if I say that tonight, we'll be seeing in the new year in bed, preferably with our eyes closed, after a light family dinner and no fuss. But tomorrow we have some friends coming over. And we're doing duck. See you next year. Have a good one.

sparkling tree

2010-12-15T22:19:00.000+02:00

This is sister3's entry for tara's gallery, week 39, "sparkle"

I failed.
Twice.
Fisrst because I'm late this week, and Sandrine was king of angry...she just said I was "vilaine" wich is like "naughty", and that she was expecting a soon post...
2nd because I intended to make the same picture than Tara (click on week 39 link), and my picture is just an awfully ugly stuff

So here's my post for this week
It's a very nice christmas tree though ! And the kid's eyes are really sparkling when they look at it ! and under it !!!!

I think we live in Narnia...

2010-12-12T21:24:00.000+02:00

So Max and I took our usual Sunday walk through campus - except I dragged him on the sled. Here are some of the sights and creatures we met on the way.

So cold.
Funny how I always forget that.

A lovely day in December.

2010-12-11T12:19:00.000+02:00

What a wonderful morning! Max and I woke up early - he could tell by the luminosity that the first snow had come. Proper snow too. The ploughs came around 5.30, and by 6, everything was white again.
Bill and I didn't really fancy going outside, as we were both recovering from colds, so we wrapped up the kids warm, and sent them out to play in front of our building. They took the sleigh and a carrot, and off they went.

Now Charlotte is gone to her gym class, Max to his therapy. I have a pot of carrot soup simmering and some pastry resting for mince pies. Later Max and I will make biscuits to take to friends tonight.

Aside from that the Christmas spirit is well and truly up.
Sinatra has been crooning seasonal tunes for ten days now, our tree is decorated, as is the doll's house tree. Max is expecting Santa daily, asking to have Christmas stories read to him, and putting pictures of Snowmen up on our walls.

Also, the children are in a Christmas band, the Specs. (No, nothing to do with Max being on the spectrum, these are initials. Although I agree, it is fitting). Our friend the fantastic Erin, who organises the Christmas Carols night at our local is giving Julie Andrews a run for her money by having four children sing and play various instruments. Max is lead singer and percussionist for 'Jingle Bells', and he was actually able to rehearse with the other kids, wait for the right time to come in, sing in tune, and not speed up half way through. I'm impressed.

So now I'll just put my feet up and watch the Christmas Glee episode. Have a lovely December weekend everyone!

Enchanted

2010-12-09T12:41:00.000+02:00

For this week's writer's workshop at Mama Kat's, I chose prompt #4 "Enchanted".

Last Sunday, I took the munchkins to see Rapunzel. Great movie. It really felt like watching a good, smart romantic comedy. Lots of hilarious scenes, lovely songs -and not boring, loved it. Now of course the children want a cameleon, but other than that, I highly recommend it, even for grown-ups.

When I got back home, I wondered how come I'd enjoyed it so much, why it felt like magic and then it struck me. Not only did I believe in the love story, but I also knew I could have it. As in, it could happen to me. Not that I want my hair to grow like that nor meet a thief who fights with a horse, but I thought "hey, this could be me, falling in love, feeling that again".

I realized that each time I saw a movie, say, during the past five years, I was sad whenever there was a big love story. I just couldn't help thinking that it could happen, sure, but not to me. I had a good life, I did love my husband, but well, you know.

I'm a big girl, I know those are not true stories, but I also know that one should never give up, that love is right there, somewhere, that true love can happen, that things can be simple, easy. I'm not talking about ideal love for life, I'm talking about two people finding each other, soul-mates. I somehow always knew it was a possibility, but I was sad because I wasn't going to get it.

Now that I'm single again, I want that. Nothing less. Just not now. But someday, yeah, I'll meet my thief. I just hope he won't fight with horses.

WHITE

2010-12-06T21:03:00.000+02:00

This is Sister3's entry for Tara's gallery, week 38
The theme is White

Anyone wants an hug ?

Oh, one last thing. If you liked this post, would you mind terribly clicking on the RSS feed, here, or the Google connect buttons (top left)? And if you didn't like it, you might still want to look around. There's three of us, you know, so you're (almost) bound to find something you like. And then, if you've still got time, you could share this post or stumble it, or both and get in touch with your local tv station to sing our praises. We'll love you forever.

Boxes

2010-12-05T08:47:00.000+02:00

I went to a Montessori school today. The company I work for has a partnership with them and I was invited for a full tour.

When I got there, I was taken aback by all the children. I know, a school is supposed to be a place filled with children, but usually, when you enter a French school, it's as quiet as a cemetery and all the kids are in class, listening to the teacher.

The school system here makes our children go to school as early as 3 years old and it becomes mandatory at age 6. Since most parents cannot stop working for six years, the majority of French kids attend l'école maternelle and then go to l'école primaire the year they turn six. They are asked to stay there from 8:30am to 4:30pm and only get two breaks. Days are long and exhausting, and they also have homework the minute they start l'école primaire.

My kids, Alexandre and Roxane, go to school. Alex is in his 2nd year of primaire and Roxane just entered la maternelle. She's happy enough, she loves her teacher, has a BFF and a fiancé. Alex, on the other hand, has had troubles for a long time. It started during his first year, actually. He hated school and I had to tie him up to take him there. As in, force him in his stroller and put my hand on him while I was locking him up.

Now it's a little better. But basically, he's been bored to death since day one. Most teachers don't get him. He doesn't seem to think like others, doesn't count or understand the same way his friends do. He has buddies, but the schoolteacher told me recently, like they all did the previous years, that somehow, he didn't belong. That the classroom stuff were of no interest to him.

He needs to go to school, because he has a lot to learn, but that little boy thinks outside of the box, and school is the place where you must enter the box. I was always happy at school. Lazy as hell, but I liked my friends and the teachers. Those are not good enough reasons for him.

When I went to that school today, I saw kids who talked freely, who were doing different things, who looked happy. And they knew so much, you'd be amazed. I could picture Alex with them, I just knew he'd belong. I knew that was the place for him.

That school is not only far away from home, but it's also extremely expensive. I can't see how I could afford it for my kids. And I thought that was so unfair. Let this be my plan, I want my kids to have that, I thought. I was trying to figure out how I could make them have it when I thought maybe I ought to think outside of the box, too.

I think ALL children should have access to that. I think our educational system has serious flaws, even if it has its good sides, too. So I decided that instead of trying to make more money or marry a billionaire, I should try and do something to bring Maria Montessori's method into public schools.

Big plan, I know. A little hopeless. But it matters. I'll try. And maybe I'll also marry a billionaire and he can help me a little ;)

Portrait of Autism #14

2010-12-03T09:57:00.000+02:00

It's one of those days when the sun is shining through dirty window panes and the heating is on full blast everywhere. It makes me feel a little sick, and not nicely predisposed towards to the people around me. There's a lot of them today - parents, siblings, grandmothers, everyone has come out for therapy. All women today - which is unusual - and most of them covered - even more unusual.

There's a child screaming, somewhere. He was whimpering just before his class started but now he's howling - has done for fifteen minutes.

Opposite me there's a tiny boy in a pushchair. He's waiting for an older brother, but it looks as though he's on the spectrum too. He's shaking his head violently from side to side. His grandmother who encouraged him at first - maybe he's trying to say 'no'? - is trying to stop him now, as he looks like he might hurt himself. God, that child must be hot! He's wearing woolly tights under warm trousers, and what looks like three layers of polyester on his back, plus a huge blanket for going outside that hasn't been moved off him properly. I want to get up and undress him and the only reason I don't is that I remember what it was like having strangers coming up to me in the streets, telling me my children weren't dressed warmly enough, pulling their trousers down so their ankles weren't exposed. How can something like being too hot be a cultural variable?

The mother is fussing with little plastic bags containing food and drink. I can see her think 'If I get the right combination of drinks, and food into my boy he won't act out'. I know, I've been there.

On the other side of the room, there's another group of women sitting around the laptop, arguing over how to make it work. 'Is it plugged in?', one of them keeps asking. It turns out it's not. A teacher comes in and helps them put the plug in the hole. Now they need to decide who is going to watch their child on the webcam. Normally it's all pre-arranged, but today is chaotic.

And then, just like that, nearly everyone's gone. The only people left in the room are Charlotte and myself, and a woman and her daughter. The sun's shining a bit less too, and I'm beginning to feel more comfortable. I whip out my pad, and start to write about the weather, and the crowded waiting room. I feel this is going to be a bad-tempered post and I think it's just about okay, it will show that parenting an autistic child doesn't make you immune to pettiness and trivial peeves.

But as jot down the first paragraph, the woman at the laptop speaks to me. She's asking me if I'm French. I look at Charlotte for confirmation that I've heard right. The woman is covered, wearing a long coat as well as a headscarf - not a bright peasant outfit, but not a typical city covering either. Sort of quiet and cheerful at the same time, with a little grey fabric flower pinned on the breast of her coat. People don't normally ask me if I'm French. They assume I'm German, or American. They either speak to me in what they think is my native language, or ignore me completely. I'm a foreigner.

So I say yes. And I volunteer that my husband is English. She says something else: 'Why are you here?' I'm not sure I've understood so I turn to Charlotte again. I expect she wants to know why I'm Turkey, why I bring my son to a Turkish speaking therapy centre. It turns out she wants to know who my autistic child is, and what his diagnosis is. So I tell her. And I ask about her. She says her son is sixteen. Non-verbal. Does not communicate in anyway, just likes to sit by himself, playing electronic games. They've been coming here for four years now. Before that, they used to go to a place near their home, which is a village by the airport, a couple of hours from here. But that place wasn't any good, so now, they come here once a week. It takes them the whole day for a two hour session.

She asks me what I do with my son during the day. She asks if I work. If I've found someone to help look after him when he's not at school. She doesn't work, she has to stay at home with the boy, as he won't allow anyone else to look after him. Her husband is a mechanic for the local 'jendarm' the army run rural police. She has two other children, both daughters, both very bright. The youngest, who is here, is fascinated by Charlotte's ability to speak three languages. She's not shy about talking to us either, and, like her mother, she's understood that she needs to speak slowly, clearly, and use simple words when she addresses me.

The mother asks me what I think 'caused' the autism. I say I don't know. I hear it's partly genetic. She says: do you have any autism in your family? I say no, not that I know of. She says, me neither. We both shrug. She says: 'What can I do? I come here every week, but nothing changes, he never makes any progress.' I ask 'Is he happy?' She says 'No, except when he's by himself. Or with his sisters. He loves his sisters.' The little girl looks to Charlotte: 'Do you and your brother love each other too?' Charlotte says yes, emphatically. The two girls look in each other's eyes, and something passes between them.

This is the face of Fu Manchu (it makes no sense at all)

2010-12-02T16:57:00.000+02:00

I never got lyrics. When I was a teenager, my understanding of English was mostly better than my peers, just because I spent so much time in the UK. No, scrap that. I just picked it up because my brain thought I was English - crossed synapses or something.

Anyway - if I listened to the lyrics, I knew what they meant. I just couldn't hear them or remember them. My friends would sing entire songs they'd heard once or twice on the radio, faultlessly, with the right accent, intonations. I went through a phase, like most teenagers, of feeling pretentious about Pink Floyd lyrics. Now I can't listen to them too closely or I cringe... Sometimes I write down the lyrics of a song I like, but to this day I can't remember the lyrics of my favourite songs...

It's not like I think it doesn't matter: some lyrics are beautiful and add to the song. Some are crap and take away from it. One of my favourite tunes at the moment is Cee-Lo Green's 'Fuck You'. Not 'Forget You' cause that doesn't even fit. Since when does Pop music get bawdlerised? But the song is about a boy whose girlfriend left him for someone else and he's accusing her of being a gold-digger, of prefering the other guy because he's got more money. And he's 'like, Fuck you, and fuck her too', and we're, like, going along with it, cause the tune is so damn catchy, and the beat so arse-twitching. But the lyrics do bother me, a little, and they mean that my enjoyment of the song isn't as pure as it would otherwise be. Nothing a beer or two wouldn't fix - my principles tend to be soluble in small doses of alcohol- but you see what I mean.

Then there's the song of the same name by Lily Allen - the kind of lyrics you want to shout along with, and the tune is good too. But the music just isn't up there with Cee Lo's. It's a nice tune, no more.

So I say, forget the lyrics, and revert to words that don't make sense and that you can forget. That's what the Beatles were to me for years, and I'm glad to see, now that I am familiar with them in their written form, that they don't actually make any sense most of the time. This is great. Just what I need.

But let's face it, the master of the nonsensical, non commital lyrics has to be Desmond Dekker with his Israelites and, my favourite, the Face of Fu Manchu. As he says with (so little!) eloquence: it makes no sense at all!

This was my entry for Josie's Writing Workshop. The prompt was 'Get Lyrical'.

Friend or Foe?

2010-12-01T21:39:00.005+02:00

For this week's Writer's Workshop at Mama Kat's, I chose prompt #1 "Have you ever had a fight with a long time girlfriend and never made up?". Of course I did. We girls have lots of friendships and they can be very exclusive during teenage years.

I met Sarah (not her real name, of course) when I was in High School. We didn't hang out together much, I was pretty popular and she wasn't: I was one of the cool kids, dating the pretty guy and always surrounded by friends. It was a relief after the disaster that middle school was. Anyway, we met again at University, where we both studied English, and became friends.

Friends, as in, I tell you everything, we're twins, we're always together. Cute. Except that we were 18 years old, not 14. Makes it less cute.

Even less cute when you know that she suffered from bulimia, that she tried to make me break up with my then soon-to-be husband (and now soon-to-be-ex-husband).

Not so cute when you know that she started to say nasty things about me to all my friends, with whom she had made friends with because she had none of her own.

Not cute at all and even scary when the long haired brunette she was turned up at my door one day with short blond hair, I swear, my exact shade.

Just creepy, in fact, when you know that she went to my hairdresser to make sure she got the exact same look.

I told her to go see someone, to get help. I called her mother, telling her that she needed to take care of her, that she was in bad shape, that I just couldn't do it any more. When my friend found out I had done this, we had this huge fight. She yelled and screamed and I kicked her out, telling her I didn't want to see her anymore unless she started seeing a shrink or something. My other friends kept seeing her for a while, and some even had me pegged as the "evil girl who won't help her friend." But they soon let her go when they realised she was repeating the same pattern with them.

I think of her, from time to time. I wonder how she's doing. I wonder if I was a bad friend. I wonder what else I could have done. And then I shrug and I go back to my life, thankful that I don't have to deal with Single White Female anymore.

It's no longer too early for Christmas and my advent calendar's ready!

2010-12-01T09:00:00.000+02:00

UPDATE: You can check out our 2011 calendar here.

So a while back I wrote about my struggles to find an idea for an advent calendar. Then Maggie from Red Ted Art pointed me to her Christmas Crafts post, and there I found something I really liked. Gail from That Artist Woman had made a citiscape, with little boxes on a piece of cardboard, and with presents (or, rather more cunningly, bits of papers saying where the presents are hidden). So I thought it would be nice to try.

It started with a plan - you can't build a city without a design, a bit of compressed wood chip, primed by Charlotte, and a cup of coffee.

I wanted to use something more solid than cardboard, because the idea was that we'd be able to keep the calendar as a picture after we'd opened all the boxes.
For the design, I decided that each building should be a house that we go to - whether friends', school, supermarket, or restaurants. I made sure to include some of Max's favourites, like the library, where he likes to go and have tea (don't ask!).

For the map, I tried to recreate a simplified version of the university campus we live on, the kid's school, and the part of town we regularly go to (for those in the know: Rumeli the soup restaurant is the last house at the top.)

I put the mountains that we see in front of our house and to the right. I put more snow on them then there is at the moment (where are we? California?!) - nothing wrong with a bit of encouragement.

Then we had to decorate the inside of the buildings - so there'd still be something to look at once the houses were taken off. I did this with Max, he drew the figures and we glued them on top of some squares of sticky paper (the kind, I believe, on puts inside one's drawers, for whatever reason).

For each house I handed Max a pit of paper with the address or the name of the person who lives there and he chose who or what to draw. Mostly it's pretty representative, but it turns out that our friend and neighbour, Banu, shares her building with Max's favourite TV show dinosaurs: Casimir and Hyppolyte... Our own house is going to be the 24th box, and it's decorated with a Christmas tree.

For the houses I drew Charlotte a rough model, gave her size, numbers, and other specifications, and she got on with it: measured, drew, cut, painted. For colours we used cobalt blue, white and mars black. Charlotte added reds and yellows to the mixture for the houses.

Then came the assembling - would you believe it's near impossible to find a way to sticky tape these things together?! And the finishing touches: felt trees and snow men, a taxi, dolmus (minibus) and bus, a tiny Father Christmas coming down the mountain with his tiny reindeer, and snow.

For the snow we used a method recommended both by Charlotte and by our artist friend Mineke. Take a tooth brush, dip it in white paint and flick the hair over your picture. It's fun! It goes everywhere!

Then at night, when the kids were safely tied to their beds, and their doors padlocked from the outside, 'im indoors and I set to filling the boxes and attaching them to the picture. Much swearing was involved - the key to it is to make sure they stick well enough so they won't fall down, revealing the presents before it's time, but at the time they should be easy to pull off and not leave a mark on the picture. The answer seems to be lots of swearing, and deciding to keep the picture flat on the dinner table at night and while the kids are at school...

Any how, here it is:

Box number one was opened this morning by Max: a playmobil figure. Happy boy!

let's celebrate

2010-11-29T21:45:00.000+02:00

This is Sister3's entry for tara's gallery, week 37
The theme this week in celebration ! Any one

Kind of dificult for me to post on celebration, as I'm strictly forbidden to post pictures of husband (except for his nose actually , as I'm really pleased to say each time I speak of him...)and child, and friends...
So all I have is my sisters...Not too easy , n'est ce pas ?

We were celebrationg, I swear !

Marianne is crying because it was the last day together,

(or because Alexander dpfjiofjzio didn't call her back ?)

and Sandrine and her family were flying back to turquie, Marianne staying in Paris and I behind my camera...

But we were celebrating ! It was our Mum's birthday,

and it was the 1st time since very long we were together

Now, since february, we are together in an other way, our blog

And our blog our posts, are the best celebration !!!!

Come on, let's celebrate !

The proof in the (Christmas) pudding

2010-11-28T18:23:00.000+02:00

A week late, as always, we stirred the pudding.

Our ingredients:

750g mixed dried fruit, bought at the market in Urgup, Capadocia, including currents (i.e. 'Corinthian' grapes) Sultanas (or 'Smyrna', i.e. 'Izmir grapes'), black and white raisins, that had to be seeded, prunes, soaked in Jameson so they're soft enough to stone (yes, not because I want to up the alcohol content. No, not at all), figs, dates, black apricots. Then there's the usual: sugar, bread crumbs, a bit of flour. Some butter (I'll be f****d if I use beef fat or margerine), eggs, black beer, our own limoncello imbibed candied peel, some white grapes pekmez (molasses) bought in Urgup. And spices: allspice, cinnamon, and, my favourite, mango armchoor powder. Don't ask.

So now it's boiling. It needs to be in for ten hours. We'll do five tonight and another five tomorrow. Then it sits on a shelf till Christmas day when it has to be boiled again (only three hours, though).

But before wrapping it (greaseproof paper over the bowl, tied with string, foil covering it), it had to be stirred, by all the family.
Starting with the youngest: our very own (very literal) Jamie Oliver:

And of course you have to have a sixpence in the pudding. They're not that easy to come by here, so we use a nazar boncuk: a bead for chasing away the evil eye.

So now, as they say, the proof is in the pudding. But the nice thing about traditions is that you do the same thing over and over again - so we're not overly concerned about how it will come out. Now all we need is for our friends from Istanbul to get going with the brandy butter!

Oops and some gratuitous cuteness

2010-11-25T21:37:00.000+02:00

I posted a partial draft by mistake earlier. If you got it in your reader, please ignore!

In the meantime, here's a bit of gratuitous cuteness, just for the hell of it.

Portraits of Autism #13

2010-11-25T13:38:00.124+02:00

Last week I asked my boy what he wanted Santa to bring him for Christmas.
He broke into a huge grin and said: 'A present!'
So I push: 'what would you like your present to be?'
He looks puzzled for a second, then he understand and the grin is back: 'A bus!'
- A bus for your playmobil?
- Yes!
- And anything else?
Now he can barely contain his joy: 'A car and a taxi too!'

This is not something we've had before. Apart from a good long period between his second and seventh birthday, where every time he walked past a sweet shop he would scream, Max has not asked for presents. His interest in receiving them has been on and off - never on for long enough to open all the gifts he would be given on a birthday or for Christmas.

So contrast last week to my attempt at getting any kind of answer to the same question last year and his reply then: 'No! No Santa! Santa is ill! There will be no presents!' And then he covers his ears - the autistic signal for 'I don't want to be around this sort of shit, I'm in danger of freaking out big way, get me out of here now.' Ok. Santa is ill. He can't make it.

Now he was happy enough when presents were handed to him - as long as there was no Santa in sight. But after he'd opened a couple that was enough. And then, of course, there is no garantee he'd play with them - not straight-away in any case, and sometimes not for months.

Last summer he got the idea of presents. My mother was visiting and he anticipated opening up her case and finding presents. He even stipulated that the present would be a plane. It turned out he was right - I managed to sneak in a quick phone call to her while she still had time to buy one. When his other grandmother visited, she was already in the plane when he told me she was bringing a bus. Oops. So I bought one on her behalf and that seemed to go down ok. Ish.

We've been working on his materialistic streak since July. After each session of homework, he gets a sticker. Five sticker means he can choose a small gift. The first few times he asked for bottles of bubble mixture, the only non-edible thing he'd ever really asked for. Then it was drawing pencils. Then in August, he got a brilliant idea. He asked for his very own water dispenser, tea-glasses and tea-spoons, so he could make himself (very watery) Turkish tea. Later that month, he dragged my husband into a toy shop. Full of apprehension they went. Max picked up a small plastic airplane that he'd spotted through the window: the cheapest thing in the shop!

Now every Sunday, after he's completed his sticker chart, we go to the toy section of the supermarket. So far he has had a dozen small airplanes and half a dozen small buses.

I don't know how to feel about his lack of imagination when it comes to gifts. He really does seem to enjoy the buses and planes. And he loves playing with his other toys as well, but just hasn't gotten around to thinking that he might like to play with other things he hasn't got. This might also be a function of the fact that he's just not exposed to that much advertising. His sister never really asks for much either. For Christmas she wants the Dr Who Annual, the Guinness Book of Records, and a couple of novels. That's it.

When I walk into a toy shop, or even a book shop, I see all these little plastic things that boys, younger than Max even, lust after. I don't know what they are, but I know they are hugely significant to little boys in terms of their social positions at school. If you don't have the latest 'thing', you know, the one with the lethal rabbit that turns into an atomic coffee cup, then you're nothing, your friends won't play with you, and you will be miserable. Max doesn't even know what these things are. Part of me is glad that he's missing out on mindless materialism and the exposure to toy weapons. Part of me is sad that he doesn't belong in this way. On the other hand, I frequently find marbles in his pockets - that all important primary school currency. If I ask him where he got them from, he'll give me a girl's name. Clearly some kids at the school want him to belong!

But now, finally, it seems he's understood that presents can be chosen, and asked for in advance in order to guarantee their arrival. This weekend, between finishing up the Advent Calendar and making the Christmas pudding, we are going to write our very first letter to Santa together.

Now I'll just have to figure out a way of explaining letters...

Not a thanksgiving post

2010-11-25T08:33:00.000+02:00

For this week's writer's workshop at Mama Kat's, I chose prompt #5 ('That time you fell down') because I'm French and we don't do Thanksgiving. But we do Beaujolais Nouveau. It's a national celebration that takes place every third Thursday in November every year and it's all about drinking wine that's not even good and way too expensive for what it is, but there you go, we're French.

So I have to tell about a time I fell down. Choosing one is pretty hard, because I fall constantly. I also hit myself all the time, but that's another story. I think there are two times I fell down that I'll remember forever. Here's the one I picked.

When I was in "Collège" (your Middle School), my mom was an English teacher there. I know. Not easy. I think nothing even remotely embarrassing should happen to you as a teenager. I mean, you're already ugly, either too fat or to skinny, with parts of your body that grew before others - and it's usually not the ones you want to see growing faster, so I think that's enough to deal with.

Of course we all were teenagers, excepts for perfect people who were always good looking. Well, as gorgeous as I am now (I AM almost dating Alexander Skaarsgard, I can call myself gorgeous) I was horrendous. My hair was permed and made me look like a sick poodle, I had no pimples, thank God, but I did have 20 extra pounds and that doesn't make your life easy. I kept a few ones, you know, just to remember those days. Right. Anyway. I was madly in love with a guy named Jeremy who did have pimples, so many that his blue eyes was all I could see (there wasn't any space for anything else, you see, because of the red marks. Am still wondering why I ever liked him).

When the bell rang in the morning, we all had to stand in line, outside, grouped in classes. I was late that day during my second year, because I had spent too much time trying to make my hair look better in the bathroom. I was fully aware it was a disaster, you see. Just a tad of good taste remaining, although certainly not something you could see in my choice of clothes.

So I was late, everyone was already in line, two by two, and he was there and OMG (to be read with a very high pitched voice) he looked at me. Of course he did. I was the only one there, walking, but at the time I just couldn't wait to write this in my diary.

So I walked, eerily, floating a little, trying to look cool, trying to pretend I didn't see him, trying to hide my hair. Now that's lot of things to think about when you walk. So I fell. As in, stumbled and collapsed on the ground, in front of the whole school. I tried to get up as fast as I could but my knee was apparently dead, so I just lay there on the ground.

Humiliated is not a strong enough word. Of course it makes me laugh now, but that day, I was mortified. Strangely enough, nobody laughed. They just stared and finally, someone came and helped me stand up. It wasn't Jeremy. He made fun of me for ages after that. He knew I liked him - I wasn't very subtle, you see, drooling whenever I saw him.

Of course Jeremy never dated me. But I did see him a few years later, perm and extra pounds free and told him he wasn't cute enough for me. Boy, that felt good. If only he could see me with Alexander now... I know. I know. We're not really together. But we could be. Definitely.

BLACK AND BLANC

2010-11-23T23:16:00.000+02:00

This is Sister3's entry for tara 's gallery, week 36
And this week's theme is: Black and White.

So,

I took this picture this summer, we were in France, in a little town you might know : Saint Tropez...!!!
(Yes, you can hate me now)
And over there, there is no way you can go out without THIS hat
So I bought one (quite cheap actually)
It was perfect, except for wind
It travelled since this summer in the car
It is now a pancake, as flat !

Salad Bar Philosophy, anyone?

2010-11-23T09:19:00.001+02:00

I was listening to woman's hour again today. It was a program I'd meant to catch on the day it came out but didn't in fact listen to for a while because my computer got virused (and all...) So I listened to the podcast here. The reason I was so keen on listening to it was that they'd announced it on twitter as being about women in philosophy. As in academic women philosophers. In actual universities, teaching in actual jobs. Why there are so few of us.

So the women interviewed were saying, surprise surprise, that it's all down to cultural stereotype. Women aren't supposed to be good at abstract reasoning, and cold stuff like logic and maths. Which is sort of what Rousseau said. And Aristotle, those pillars of the sexist bastards community.

But when women do end up teaching philosophy in universities, it is sometimes said that they do a different kind of philosophy - they tend to gravitate towards more applied or practical subjects like ethics and aesthetics, whereas men do the more abstract metaphysics, philosophy of mind or language. I haven't counted. And I'm not really aware of anyone who has, so I don't know if that's true.

In order to do a proper study you'd have to know what to look at as well - what people teach? They often don't choose what they teach, or even if they do, it doesn't always match their research interests or their qualifications. You can't look at Ph.D titles either as people often change their research interest as they grow. And if you look at publications, you might get a fairly disparate view of what people have been working on because of the luck involved in getting stuff accepted (I have two articles out on the philosophy of crime fiction, which I by no means consider to be my main research interest!)

But even if this were true, it does not follow that women are naturally better suited to teach or conduct research in these areas. And yet that is often what is assumed. Women are more concerned with practical things, it is said, and less interested in the abstract. Again with Rousseau and Aristotle.

That would be bad enough, but now add to the equation that metaphysics, etc is also described as 'hard' philosophy, and sometimes - wait for it - 'meat and potato philosophy', whereas ethics, etc. gets called 'soft', or 'cream puff' philosophy - the easy, non-essential, stuff. And who do you think came up with these distinctions?

So let's do a bit of maths here: men start philosophy departments and do metaphysics, etc. A few women trickle in in the fifties and take what's left, what the men don't mind them doing. So the men call what the women do 'soft' and decide that women are naturally suited to work on these topics (those unnatural women who want to do philosophy in the first place, that is). Then these women train other women who then end up working in the same field. A myth is born.

Now when I started studying philosophy I did choose the 'hard stuff'. I enjoyed it, and was moderately successful at it. Then I got very bored with it and decided that what I really enjoyed was writing about Plato's political theory. Now that's another kettle of fish altogether as it fits neither in the 'hard' or 'soft' categories. But as the years went by, my research was influenced by writers I admired, and these were mostly women: Martha Nussbaum, Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Anette Baier, and more. So now I'm doing a lot of ethics, 'soft' stuff. Also, I teach Aesthetics in my department, cause no-one else can, and because it's sort of fun. So I'm a typical woman philosopher now - the system caught me and transformed me into what I ought to be. Another way of seeing it, is that I do what I bloody well feel like doing, and fuck the lot of them. I do smogasbord philosophy. Salad bar philosophy.

I was just reading yesterday, in the New York Times, an article attempting to explain why there are less women in academic philosophy. The author, Andy Martin, was blithely arguing that philosophers, are all 'a bit autistic', and that, as Simon Baron-Cohen tells us, autism is an 'extreme male brain', successful philosophers are typically male. I rest my case.

(No I don't quite rest it, I encourage you, if you haven't yet, to go read what I think about Simon Baron Cohen's take on autism here. It isn't pretty.)

(Also, although I'd love it if my son became an academic, and I certainly don't see why autistic people shouldn't be in academia, and indeed some are, I think we all know how hard it can be for an autistic person to fight their way to the top of anything, and to end up in a profession that requires them to interact with hundreds of people every week. So please.)

(Oh, and yes, some philosophers are socially awkward. But being rude, absent-minded or self-centrered is not the same as being autistic. For fuck's sake).

Now I'm done.