Symbolic Forest

My mother is rushing around tonight in a bit of a panic. Being a regular churchgoer, and church organiser, Christmas is obviously a busy time of year for her. Tonight, though, the mother and all the other church organisers are all rushing round in a panic, searching all the cupboards at the church, searching each other’s houses and attics, searching and searching and saying to each other: “well, where did you last see them?”

Being a church, they have to have a nativity scene in one of the side chapels off the nave. It’s all set up already, with the stable and the animals. Mary and Joseph get added on Saturday, I think, and then the Baby Jesus on Sunday morning.^* At the moment, though, there’s a slight problem. Well, a major problem, when it comes to setting up your nativity scene. The Holy Family have gone missing.

* Or possibly at Midnight Mass – not being a believer myself I’m not sure on the details.

Keyword noise: Yuletide, Christmas, church, nativity, nativity scene, The Mother.

Heard on the radio this morning: a member of the Lords claiming that gay marriage Civil Partnerships are a bad thing because they’re unpatriotic.^* This country was built, apparently, on the values of two parents, their children, and the sacrament of marriage.^**

As I’ve said before, my mother is becoming part of the Genealogy Boom, one of the thousands of people who are using the internet to research the names of their ancestors. And, one of the good things about this is that the thousands of people doing this are finding out that the typical Family Values chorus – in the past, everyone lived in a happy, stable two-parent family and the world was a Better Place – really is a load of rubbish. In the past, people didn’t divorce. That’s because they couldn’t afford to. They still had affairs, though, and multiple relationships, and children out of wedlock. Every family has tangled knots in its family tree, because the people in the past really did behave just as badly, or well, as people do today. Family Values is a political myth, and nothing more.

* I tried to look up which specific homophobic peer I was listening to, but her name isn’t listed on the Today website running order, and I don’t want to have to listen to it all again just to catch her name.

** although she claimed that even though she was describing marriage as a sacrament she didn’t mean it in a religious way.

Keyword noise: Civil Partnership, conservatism, divorce, family, gay marriage, genealogy, history, homophobia, nuclear family, social conservatism.

I need help.

I have no idea what to get my mother for Christmas. No clue at all.

She’s the worst person in the world to buy presents for. She doesn’t like smelly things. She doesn’t wear makeup or perfume. She’s on a strictly-controlled diet. She rarely wears jewellery. She has so many unread books and unwatched DVDs that it’ll take her a year or two to get through them all. She doesn’t like ornaments, because they complicate dusting. In other words, she’s awful when Christmas and her birthday come around.

So, any ideas?

Keyword noise: Christmas, gift ideas, gifts, presents, The Mother.

This is the time of year when the black moods usually hit. I’ve heard of SAD, and maybe it’s that. I don’t know. Maybe it’s that the things I’m scared of, when I think back, all seem to have happened at this time of year too. When it gets back round to November again, the dark fears all start to come back.

The Mother has been in a dark mood lately too. She doesn’t like to talk about it, but I know she’s always had depression, and has always tried to hide it and pretend it’s not a problem. I can tell she’s having a bad time too; so maybe it is all about the season.

Keyword noise: depression, SAD, seasons, winter, The Mother.

In today’s news, top scientists have discovered that being a bit chilly does indeed help you catch colds. For me, it’s a timely discovery; on Saturday I started to feel a bit wobbly at the edges, and I spent most of Sunday in bed, sneezing, sinuses blocked, hoping my fuzzy headache would clear itself. I’m blaming the rather ill-planned heating arrangements in my office. It does have a radiator, but at the far end of the room to my desk, which may as well be 1,000 miles further north as far as I can tell. Every ten minutes I have to walk to the far end of the room to warm my numb fingers, so I can keep typing.

The Mother was pleased by the news: “Look! See! Mothers are right when they tell you things!” I tried to point out that she had always said the exact opposite when I was small. If I looked at all sniffly on the day of a PE lesson, I’d be told: “getting out there on the field will do you good – the cold will kill all the bugs off.”

Keyword noise: cold, illness, sickness, sneezing, sniffles.

My mother is still beavering away at the family tree, on various genealogy websites. She still hasn’t really got the hang of the internet yet, though…

“What’s a GEDCOM file?”

“Have you looked it up?” Google, google. “It’s a file format developed by the Mormons to store genealogical data.”

“That was quick! I didn’t know you could use it as an encyclopedia! Can you look anything up on it? I mean, if I didn’t know what an elephant was, could I look it up on the internet?”

The thing I try not to think about is: this is probably the level that most internet users work at.

Keyword noise: genealogy, The Mother.

The Mother has discovered The Internet. Specifically, she has discovered a plethora of genealogy websites, and is using them to try to track down our family tree.

Now, her family is fairly easy to trace back into the 19th century. They had a family bible, kept newspaper clippings and wedding invitations, and are nice, simple, and straightforward to track. My Dad’s family, on the other hand, is another matter.

Dad doesn’t know anything at all about his family tree, beyond his parents, sisters, and the names of a few more distant relatives. Questions to my grandmother, before her death, always went unanswered. However, my aunt has kept plenty of details about our family, and does know a lot more about how they’re all related. As we were visiting her anyway, The Mother asked her if she could get out her family births book so The Mother could copy it all down. And we quickly found out just how complex and baroque my father’s family really was.

For one thing, their surnames are all rather confusing. Once you go back beyond the current generations, very few people in our family bothered to get married. This was, it turns out, one of the reasons why my grandmother always refused to answer queries about family history. It’s very unclear whether her parents ever did marry – there’s no record of it, and my great-grandmother kept paperwork in both surnames until her death – but, my aunt told us, anyone who asked my gran directly about this would usually get punched. Some of my gran’s brothers and sisters shared her surname; but some of them took their mother’s name. My great-grandfather was apparently in the Cavalry – “there’s a photo of him in uniform, on a horse” – in India, in the 1920s, but nobody knows any other details about him.

My grandfather’s family is just as confusing. They, also, rarely bothered to marry. When they did, it often made things worse. One of my grandfather’s close relatives married a man called Frank. Her sister then married Frank’s son – I’m not even sure how you draw that on a family tree. Their son, incidentally, was the mayor of Southampton a few years ago. Having a grandfather who is also your uncle, in an entirely legal way I should add, clearly doesn’t stop you entering politics.

The Mother, being upright, respectable, churchgoing, and definitely no-sex-before-marriage, was rather shocked at all this. She is one of those people who sees The Past as a golden age of morality, when things were done properly and you didn’t get all these single mothers all over the place; so she was rather surprised to see that before her own generation, a lot of my ancestors just didn’t think that way. Myself, I’ve always had a suspicion that Victorian morals are both fairly modern and a middle-class innovation, so I was rather pleased to find all this out. Even though it might make genealogists blanche at the thought of trying to draw the tree out, I rather like my ancestors now.

Update, September 24^th 2005: we’ve since discovered that my gran’s parents never were married, because my great-grandfather already had a wife, who he never bothered to divorce.

Keyword noise: family secrets, genealogy, history, morality, The Parents, The Mother, social history.

The other week I was struck with a sudden spurt of enthusiasm for handicraft-type stuff, and I decided I should make myself a bag. I need a new handbag—the strap on the last one got worn through by a slightly-rusted metal loop—and making one would be fun and an ideal way to have something a bit different. It surely can’t be that hard to knock up a basic shopping-bag style thing, out of some decent thickness canvas or hessian or something, which i can sling over my shoulder. To decorate it, I decided I would get The Mother to hunt out some of my old swimming badges (the oval-pointy shaped ones) and sew them on, a vertical line on either side.

I knew this would be a good idea when, a couple of days after I thought of it, I saw a girl with swimming badges sewed onto the seat of her trousers. I mean, nowadays, two people can be a fashion movement. So, I phoned The Mother and asked her to find them, if she hadn’t chucked them out.

“Why do you want them?” she asked.

“To sew them on things, of course. What else are they for?”

“I’ll send them to you,” she said, “if you tell me the address of your website.”

So, it looks like the handbag might be off the menu for a while. I really don’t want The Mother coming here and lookin round every page on the website. And I know that if she did find it, she would look round every page and read every bit of information. I know she would. I don’t want her knowing that much about me.

Keyword noise: crafting, The Mother.

My mother has a fairly nice stereo. It’s nothing special—not one of those hi-fi enthusiast setups with everything separate, but it has all the ordinary functions and features and is worth a few hundred quid. She won it, a year or two ago. She was thinking about buying a new one to replace their mid-70s record player, when all of a sudden she won one that was worth a fair bit more than she was thinking of spending.

I, on the other hand, do not have a stereo. Well. I have a small portable, which was a christmas present when I was at university. The CD part has been broken for a few years, but it still plays tapes and the radio. The CD drive on my computer plays some of my CDs, but not very many; it’s on its last legs.

So anyway. On the phone to the mother yesterday, she says: “Oh, by the way. What’s a micro-hi-fi system?”

“Um … a hi-fi system that’s smaller than a mini hi-fi system? One of those that’s a 6-inch cube and nothing else? I don’t know? Why?”

“Oh, I was just wondering. I’ve won one, you see.”

Gah!

Keyword noise: The Mother, luck.

June has come in, and everything is full of drizzle, still. Typical. I forgot to say “White rabbits!” until mid-morning, too.

This site probably isn’t too useful to you unless you live in Oregon or want to make a skirt out of an old pair of trousers, but I just love the picture on the home page. I wish I could draw like that.

I’m tempted to try the trousers-into-skirt thing too, although it would take ages cos I don’t have a sewing machine. I have several pairs of trousers which have developed holes in Unfortunate Places, which could do with a new lease of life. Reading the intructions, I realised that lots of skirts in the shops over the past year or so are deliberately designed to look like they have been hacked out of an old pair of trousers. Did anyone else spot this earlier, or was it just me that was in the dark?

Another fashion item that I’ve spotted in the shops recently that’s been bugging me a little is Scholl sandals. Why are these suddenly all over the place? The Mother had a pair of these, identical to the ones in all the fashion stores right now, twenty years ago. Of course, they can’t have been fashionable in 1982, because The Mother was wearing them. So why are they so popular now?

Of course, heavily-promoted and popular aren’t quite the same thing. I should look at people’s feet more. Maybe. It’s a shame The Mother’s feet are so much smaller than mine, because she probably still has hers at the back of a cupboard somewhere.

Incidentally—on the subject of The Mother’s feet—when I was born, I’m told that the first thing my dad said was something like “deformed fingers and toes just like yours!” Now there’s romance. And they’re only slightly bent.

Update, 2^nd May 2022: The site this post linked to is no longer online, and I have no idea if it’s been moved elsewhere, but I thought it worth keeping the post here because I did eventually follow the instructions and use it to make myself a skirt. I still have the skirt, even, although it doesn’t fit me any more. The site was by a woman called Andrea who was a member of one of the same mailing lists as me, and it really did have lovely illustrations. And, as an aside, when I originally wrote this I didn’t know quite how messed up my parents’ relationship actually was.

Keyword noise: The Mother, clothing, Scholl, shoes, crafting.