Blog challenge Day 8: A moment

Five in the morning. I wake my husband and tell him it's time. He panics. We have planned it so carefully, and now we don't know what to do. We are visiting my grandparents, we are far away from the hospital where I am supposed to go. He calls the ambulance. I am taken to another hospital – the one where I was born, where my father was born. A serendipity. They ask me when the labour started and tell me cheerfully that I could have waited until evening. While paperwork is done, I crouch on a hard bench. There are other women in the same predicament around me. Nobody really cares. One woman screams: “I am dying, please do something!” A nurse looks at her with contempt: “You should have thought about it when you f-d”. Finally somebody comes to look at me, and suddenly it is very urgent. The nurse gets scolded. I have just about had my baby on the tiled floor of the waiting room. 

 

Blogg challenge: Day 7: Your best friend

Me and my Alyona in school, 1967.

At least I don't have to think about it. Alyona and I have been friends since we were two. Of course we were then the kind of friends that parents take to visit each other saying: “Now run and play”. We would also be sent to run and play under our nannies' care. The nannies gossiped, we played. Gulliver's travels was out favourite make-believe. We went to school together, and because we had known each other before school and because we lived in the same house we become officially best friends. We had secrets, we had imaginary countries and our private language. At some point my mother decided that Alyona was bad influence for me and forbade me to play with her. But children at that time had more freedom than now. We all played in the backyards and streets and squares, nobody could control us. Then she came into grace with my mother again, and we were allowed to go home to each other and play. Yet oftentimes she made me jealous because she played with someone else and wouldn't let me join.

In summer, Alyona went to summer camps, and I was sent to the country with my granny. I was tremendously envious. Some years ago she confessed that she had been tremendously envious of me who didn't have to go to camps. One summer, which as I realise now must have just been a couple of weeks, I was allowed to visit Alyona at her granny's country house. It was my happiest summer ever. Her father allowed us to read in bed, eating biscuits! Who wouldn't be envious of such a father.

We became more detached during our teens, with new networks and interests. Alyona was popular with boys. I wasn't. We almost lost touch in university, but got close again after our first broken marriages. When I moved to Sweden I realised after a few years how much I missed her. The first time she visited me in Stockholm, Staffan got very upset. Alyona and I were talking all the time, and Staffan complained that he understood every word, but had no idea what we were talking about. He felt we only uttered every third sentence. He was right. We knew each other so well that everything didn't have to be said.

Some time ago we started travelling together every now and then. First time I let her choose the destination, and that's why I know every little obscure museum in London: she made me do some serious sightseeing. The next time I managed to take her through check-in and security at the airport without her knowing where we were going. Each time we meet we have tons of things to talk about. We know things about each other that nobody else knows, not even other significant others. A whole life shared.

Blogg challenge Day 6: Your day

All my days start with the cat urging me to get up. She has already had her first breakfast, but she hopes I don't know and will give her more. Unless I am in a hurry I stroke her for a while – they say it keeps your blood pressure down. Then I do a quick Asian self-massage, which is basically patting yourself all over. It's amazing what a difference it makes. Staffan prepares breakfast while I take a shower. We eat in the kitchen and drink coffee in the living room. I dress and make up my face. Before leaving, I sit down with a three-minute hourglass.

The traffic was really slow this morning, but I don't mind. I listen to Classic FM. I have been training for a long time to actually listen and not let my thoughts stray away. It is harder than you can imagine.

I had several activities planned for the day. This is a family joke. Some years ago one of our granddaughters went to a two-day camp and was very excited because they had had five activities before lunch. My first activity today was a Formative Talk. This is the part of my job that I like least. It implies talking to my research group members and telling them that they must work harder and Comrade Napoleon is always right.* I have to report to Director of Research that we are all working as hard as we can. Actually, the Formative Talk turned out to be quite pleasant. We went to Combination Room for a cup of coffee and talked about all kinds of things, mostly related to working harder. I had another Formative Talk later on that also went well (more coffee in Combination Room). Before that, I sent my secretary abstracts for two research seminars, and since she is so amazingly efficient she had put them on the web almost before I sent them. There were about three million urgent emails to respond to, three student essay drafts, one (only one today!) recommendation letter, one masters application, two visiting scholar applications and a few inquiries from overseas students. I also managed to write to the College Principal and the Faculty Head asking for money for my research centre and explaining why this should be their highest priority. Every morning I write a list of urgent things to do on a piece of paper. I do have a proper planner in my computer, but it is never just as satisfactory as ticking off something on paper. Today I never even got halfway through my list.

During lunch I had to explain to a colleague who had not heard it before what I did for a living. As soon as I mentioned children's literature he started asking me what he should read for his two-year-old and was clearly disappointed when he realised that it wasn't what my work was about. Some people had seen my BBC interview about President Obama's children's book and made caustic comments.

I had a brief supervision session with a student, and then I taught a class. It is my favourite class: first introduction to picturebooks. It's always a revelation. The students have these preconceived ideas that picturebooks are for babies and get a shock when I start discussing the complexities. By the time I got through my slide show they were awed. Then I told them to pick a book each from a pile on my desk and spend the last hour of the class looking at it. At the end of the hour they felt they had just begun. Which was exactly my intention.

I took a brief look at my email before I turned off the computer to make sure that nobody had given me the Nobel Prize today either. There were loads of messages which I will deal with tomorrow.

Staffan made a delicious stew for dinner, and the cat is getting better. It was a very satisfactory day with many activities, and I am very, very tired. I am going to bed and read a non-work-related book. If there is such a thing.

* quoting Boxer in Animal Farm

Blogg challenge Day 5 Your definition of love

From the vantage point of my age love is completely different from how I would have defined it what I was young. And even then, how do you define love? It is even more difficult than defining children's literature: everyone know what it is, but try to define it, and you are lost.

I have been reading some cognitive psychology recently. Human emotions are results of chemical processes in our brain caused by the degree of achievements of our goals through our actions. Happiness is a basic emotion that occurs when our individual goals are successfully achieved. Love is a social emotion based on interaction with other individuals. Love is the desire to have your own goals incorporated with the goals of another person. This sounds very dry, but if you consider what it means, you wish someone else to be happy together with you, on equal conditions. If you don't care about the other person's well-being, it's not love. If your emotion is self-destructive it's not love either. This makes much better sense to me now than it would do when I was young. My love for my partner implies a balance of our well-being, which is extremely difficult to achieve, even after many years of training. My love for my children implies that I wish them well without necessarily sacrificing myself for their sake (of course I would in an extreme situation). Love is hard work rather than a gift from heaven. But I wouldn't have believed this when I was young.

Blog challenge Day 4: What you ate today

A few years ago my GP decided I needed to lose weight and sent me to a group (not Weightwatchers). The first assignment was to write down – honestly – what you ate during a day. Looking at my list, the nurse said: “But this is a perfect diet, what's your problem?” I wasn't on a diet, we just eat healthily. (My problem was hypothyroidism).

I have had the same breakfast for years. A glass of freshly pressed orange juice, two slices of ham or sausage (preferably of two different kinds, for the sake of taste), a boiled egg, fresh cucumber, tomato and paprika. Occasionally some cottage cheese. And a cup of coffee with frothed milk. When I want variation I make scrambled eggs, and on Sundays we always have eggs Benedict, without toast. But today it was plain hard-boiled egg. 

At half past ten I had another cup of coffee with a slice of cheese. 

I normally have proper hot lunch in the Great Hall in college on weekdays. There is no such thing as a free lunch, so my lunches come with strings attached. The idea is that you take you time, talk to your colleagues and hatch great ideas. This is how all the Nobel Prizes at Cambridge were born.

But today I stayed at home in the morning because we were collecting out cat from the vet. Then I was in a hurry and gobbled up two slices of cold roast beef and a tomato, and off I went. No wonder I was famished when I came home. Staffan made oven-baked hamburgers (much tastier than grilled) and I made courgette sauce with onion and tomato. Staffan had wine with his meal, but I didn't. I had a peach. Now we are sitting in front of the fire with a cup of tea each and watch the cat stretch her paws. 

Yes, you've guessed right: we are LCHF.

Blog challenge Day 3: Your parents

My parents were very young when they had me, and they were married because they were having me. Abortions were illegal, and they got money from their parents to go to a reliable doctor, but instead they went to an ice cream parlour. I guess I should be glad for otherwise I wouldn't have been here to tell the story.

They were still at university, and they lived with granny and grandpa because a young family could not get a home of their own at that time and in that country, and also because my granny took care of me, together with great-granny and a maid. My parents loved parties, and in summers they would go on exciting travels while I was left in the country with granny. I was brought up with hard rules and was often spanked by my mother. I was forced to eat up my porridge and the hateful beet soup. My mother sew my clothes, and although I now realise that they were really pretty, I hated them because they were different from everybody else's. My mother also used to punish me by not talking to me. She would pass me without looking at me or talking to me for weeks. Then suddenly she would be as usual.

Nonetheless I always admired my mother, and she was my role model. She gave me the right books to read and took me to museums and concerts. When she got her PhD at the age of 36, which was late by all standards, she said she expected me to beat her. I didn't, I also got my PhD at 36, but it was after two interrupted PhDs, so I hope she wasn't too disappointed.

My father was a heavy drinker and a genius and lived in his ivory tower. When I was a teenager we spent our summers in an artists' colony in Karelia, and he and I would go fishing and mushroom picking. I would hear his music growing out of our walks. I was proud of him at performances. He was never angry with me, but he was detached. I only realised how much I loved him after it was too late.

When I started to have boyfriends, my mother developed the typical evil stepmother syndrome and ruined every relationship I had. I realised it many years later, but of course a daughter of marriageable age implied that she was over the hill while she was still young enough to be the prettiest of them all. It is hard to imagine not being loved by one's mother, and it took me years to get free of her deadly grip on me. Even now I sometimes feel that she can get at me if she cared enough. Luckily, she pretends I don't exist. Nobody has hurt me as much as she did, and yet I am grateful for everything she did for me. I am not like her, but almost everything I am is her doing. Despite and not because.

We are responsible for those we have tamed

So why am I pretending it hasn't happened? Perhaps now, with the imminent danger over, I can articulate the experience of the past 20 hours. I came home early yesterday, after a day of back-to-back meetings that had all been satisfactory, and I was cheerful. I had had a very late and substantial business lunch so I wasn't as famished as I usually am when I came home, and it was Friday, so I sat down in a comfortable armchair with a glass of blush wine. Miso came and jumped onto my lap. Well, she didn't quite jump, rather crawled, but I took no notice because cats are like that. Only five minutes later it was obvisouly very, very wrong. I cannot explain it, but she felt like a piece of dead skin, and she didn't purr, and she hadn't groomed herself. We sat there for a while, and Staffan held her for a while, and I held her again, and then I heard Staffan call someone, and for some reason I thought he was calling Julia who knows all about cats and would know what to do. In fact, Staffan called the 24-hour veterinary service which just happened to be two streets from us here in Milton. We had driven past it at least twice a day the past eighteen months, with unuttered hope that we would never need it.

I knew Miso was really bad because she didn't even try to escape, and she lay dead still on the examination table, but she screamed with pain when the doctor squeezed her. She had bad wounds that I hadn't seen, and bruises, and, X-ray showed, broken ribs. And, blood test showed, kidney failure.

We don't know how old Miso is because we took her from a home, but she is at least twelve. Cats can live longer than that, but of course I have been thinking about how much longer she will be with us. When I see the agility with which she jumps through a half-open window I hope she will live many years. I am such a fatalist that I keep telling myself that we can't really know who of us goes first. So I shouldn't say I wasn't prepared. But I wasn't.When Staffan tried to hold my hand I had to brush it away not to burst into tears there and then. I guess the veterinary people have seen this happen over and over again.

They kept her overnight, and we came back to a silent, empty house, looking at her bowls and her blanket and stumbling over a tin of cat food in the fridge. We went to bed without a purring bundle of fur on my hip. We got up without a hungry scream in the kitchen. Nobody came to demand a lick of frothed milk from my coffee. The morning was very, very long. In my mind, I was digging a little grave at the bottom of the garden, behind the conifers. Staffan and I kept talking about irrelevant things.

Then we called the veterinary and heard that Miso was eating and doing fine. We could come and see her in the afternoon. We did. She was tired, but who wouldn't be after such a night. She had a tube attached to her little paw; half her back had been shaven to clean the wounds. But she was glad to see us, she sat up, she purred, she ate some food, just so show us (I know I am being silly now). The nurse praised her for patience and good behaviour.

With some luck, we can take her home tomorrow. Her kidneys will never be ok, but we can keep her going with the right kind of food and some medication. Maybe a month, maybe a year, maybe several years.