"The 70s were a mistake"

So said somebody at my 60th birthday party, viewing a photo of me and TAS shortly after we met (see below, and shudder). Nearly 10 years on and it all came flooding back yesterday when I was asked to remember what I could about childcare in South Camden (aka Bloomsbury) in the 70s, for a research project at the University of Warwick. 

What came out, I now realise, was not that much about childcare but a lot about me and the other mums. Comparing our experiences to those of my daughter with twins in Tottenham, or my son with his son in Marzaglia (Modena) it's like another planet. One of the things that was special about having kids in that bit of WC1 was that we and a few hundred other parents were in the catchment area of the Coram Children's Centre, the descendant of the Foundling Hospital set up by Thomas Coram in 1741. I and some 15 other mums were invited by our health visitor to start a Mother and Baby club in an upper room there when our babies were around six months old: for about three years the high point of the week was to spend all day Thursday there, sharing advice (how do you stop plastic pants getting hard and crackly? Have you switched to disposable nappies?) and watching as our babies turned into toddlers, learned to play together at least some of the time, coped with new siblings, and sat all together at lunchtime (cooked lunch provided by the Centre) throwing the fish fingers at each other.


But it was also significant that we all lived in flats, didn't have gardens, and even those who had cars didn't didn't need to use them much. This was a social leveller of a sort: probably the Mother's Club was more middle class than not, but by no means entirely so, and it was a million miles from the Hampstead playgroup I visited once, or the faculty feminists's discussion group I endured just once. Class, not in a simple sense but in terms of politics and social aspirations, reasserted itself when the kids got to school age. Meanwhile though we shared childcare, babysat for each other, borrowed and lent toys and clothes.


Like a number of other families there, we didn't have a washing machine, not because we couldn't afford it, but partly because we thought they were a bourgeois affectation and mainly because there was absolutely nowhere to put it. So the kids and I HAD do go out every day, not only because we'd have gone mad stuck in the flat, but also to get the washing done at the launderette: either the one just off Queen Square behind the Italian Hospital, or the one at the Coram Centre. The transport problem was solved - in part - for me and TAS when we found an eau-de-nil Silver Cross pram on a junk shop in Eastbourne for a fiver (TAS had to wheel it to Bloomsbury from Victoria). Both our kids could sleep in it, full-length, and for one of our many short-lived attempts to establish local cooperatives we found it could carry a baby AND 90lbs of bulk groceries from the newly-established Neal's Yard.


As well as the launderette and the shops in Lamb's Conduit St (greengrocer's on the corner; the Holborn Bakery) we had a choice of four fenced-in, clean green spaces: Bedford Square, a  locked square to which you could get a key if you lived near enough, and which had a tap so we could go there on hot days with a fold-up paddling pool and a canvas bucket and set the kids to work; Mecklenburgh Square where you could mingle with the faculty kids from the University accommodation in Goodenough House; Collingham Gardens behind the Coram Centre where we could have birthday parties and firework parties and do our catering in the Scout Hut; and best of all, Coram's Fields, the original forecourt of the Foundling Hospital, with its 18th century arcades, giant paddling pool, and a notice at the gate that said NO dogs, NO glass bottles, NO adults without kids. 


I saw someone (probably childless) taking a photo of this piece of "authoritarianism" - but for us the rules were a godsend. OK, the playground equipment was old and dangerous, but if your child got brained by a heavy wooden swing there was always the Province of Natal Clinic only 50 yards away and the Great Ormond Street Hospital around the corner. At a parents' evening at St George's, the primary school our kids later went to, I did try to get our MP, Frank Dobson, to take up the issue of playground equipment, but his response - before moving on to somebody more interesting, was "So fucking what?" Obviously lining himself up for his sparkling later career as Secretary of State for Health. 


Those few blocks of central London are a sort of "child city": we'd see terrifyingly sick children out for an airing in their wheelchairs; helicopters sometimes landed on the football pitch and ambulances were forever screaming past, if not to GOSH then to UCH or the National Hospital in Queen Square. So in some sense we lived in a cosy little village - not today's posh quasi-village like Highgate or Barnsbury, but a diverse and grounded community with at least some roots - but in other senses we felt connected to bigger things. We were close enough to Oxford St to hear the IRA bomb go off there (but not so close that a trip to John Lewis wasn't a major logistical operation).


Some of us from the Mother's Club are still in touch: I'm hoping that this blog post will encourage them to share their recollections or send them to the Warwick study. 

Landscape of Numbers

I notice that my last blog post was at the beginning of January. Clearly that new year resolution didn't last. Back to just writing about things when I have something worth writing about, and that has nothing (much, at least) to do with my research topic or anything else conceivably under the topic of "work".

Occasionally during my life I have tentatively asked another person "how do you see numbers?" been met by a blank stare, and have never been able to explain why I was asking the question. This morning I was reading Gunther Kress's essay "Design and Transformation" in Cope and Kalantzis' Multiliteracies (Routledge 2000) and came to the bit on p159 where he writes "...synaesthesia, the transduction of meaning from one semiotic mode to another semiotic mode, an activity constantly performed by the brain". I was a bit confused by this so I transducted myself to Wikipedia to get some other angles.

I'd vaguely heard of synaesthesia as a peculiar neurological condition in which, for example some people experience music as colour as well as sound, while for others, shapes have tastes: weird, but so alien as to be not even very fascinating, to me anyway. But when I looked it up I discovered that, what do you know, I'm a synesthete too! I have number-form synesthesia: I can only think about numbers as part of a very particular visual, spatial arrangement. My account of this would only make sense to others who have the same ...condition? affliction? gift?

Suffice to say that for me, 1-10 slope downwards and away from me towards the right in bright light, after which 11-19 slope upwards. Then each decade follows a humped up-and-down gradient, while at the same time the whole line continues to slope upwards to the right. The decades become increasingly shadowy and compressed by perspective, until they reach 99, after which they become bright again. The shadow is caused by a huge roof like that of a Victorian railway terminus which starts at 20 and ends at 99, but also shades the numbers from 12 to 20 because the light is coming from the distance, beyond 100. Because I am positioned at an oblique angle to all this, I can see "all" the numbers at once: beyond the station roof, they stretch away into a bright distance with hundreds, thousands and millions and trillions in it; though of course I can also arrange them under their own shed roofs if I need to - like when I think about bankers' remunerations, for example, or house prices in this street: one million to ten million slope downwards in bright light; eleven million starts an upward slope, getting darker, and so on.

The same landscape serves for time, with the years arranged in the same way; then any year has its own pattern of months in which January is light, February to March greyer, the summer months bright and the autumn increasingly dark; each year also slopes upwards, and my positioning with time is more flexible: I can turn round and, for example, look at 2011 sloping downwards . Within this each week has its own pattern, "humped" like the decades, with Wednesday at the summit and the weekend flat. Friday and Saturday are bright but Thursday and Monday are dark and Tuesday has a purplish, shiny tinge: this, sadly, is the only place in the whole schema where there is any colour. The weeks and months all fit in end to end within each year, but the years are packed side by side in the grand schema. This means that on New Year's Eve we all somehow have to whizz right back down the length of the year to start again at a bright new January 1st, lined up alongside all the other January 1sts in history - and in the future.

The more distant past can be arranged in the same pattern when I think about it, though it's quite a long way away and very much compressed by perspective. Thus what we used to call the Dark Ages have always been bright for me because they occupy the brightly lit 1-10 downward slope. Things get a bit gloomy around the tenth century. Before AD33 (since I had a Christian upbringing) the years slope away darkly again. But they tend to go in hundreds if not in thousands and when we are talking about the Neanderthals, or dinosaurs, or evolution, I can conjure up a long long slope of millions in a sort of unexamined medium light that trails away to a very small Big Bang like a dot in the distance.

It's possible that the basic design here: a line of numbers that goes under a shed roof and up a long slope - is not actually the only line. I think that once I used to "see" other parallel lines: that the whole thing was like a huge railway terminus with many lines following the same slopes. Now, I can't see them: there's nothing on each side of my line. But that "nothing" is also lit: there's brightness on each side of the bright part of the slope, and shadow on each side of the dark sections. What lies beyond? I can't look; I can only surmise "nothing".

Another, similar arrangement serves for the alphabet, but in this case it's just one long slope downwards. "A" is in shadow; after "N" it all gets brighter. There's no roof here: just one long slope from A to Z. As with the number schema, it would be very hard to represent this visually. It's clear to me as a mental tool, but it's also schematic and faint, almost abstract. It doesn't need detail, any more than it needs a rationale.

Flicking through different sites and articles on this topic suggests that some incline towards seeing synesthesia as an important natural gift; others as a disability - particularly in relation to number-form synesthesia. In many ways I incline towards the latter view. I've always found it difficult to think about numbers and to manipulate them in my head - though I can to some extent "overlay" some of the multiplication tables and other mathematical features on to the landscape. It is particularly awkward with time, because in order to look backwards in time I have to abandon my oblique "master view", enter the number sequence and then look backwards. This is why I now find it hard to sort out the decades from the 1970s onwards: they're shadier than the 2000s and on a downward slope, away from me. It's also slightly tricky to bear in mind that 2008 - 2010 is the same length of time as 2010 - 2012, because the first two slope downwards while the next two slope upwards, towards me.

It's easy to see that a lot of this has to do with early learning. Other number-form synesthetes (try a search - several of them are blogging) report that the bigger numbers, which they learned later, are harder to see - they also slope upwards, are compressed by perspective, or lack the clear characteristics of 1-10. But this still doesn't explain the predisposition to develop such schema in the first place. Apparently this is strongly genetic so I have e-mailed both my children to find out whether they understand what I am talking about.

Cretien van Campen (The Hidden Sense: Synesthesia in Art and Science, MIT Press 2007) suggest that subconsciously, and in our dreams, we are all synaesthetes, but that life and learning have crushed it out of most of us. This is an attractive idea, and one that's easier to support in relation to grapheme/colour or auditory/gustatory synesthesias, given that they have a clearer relationship to artistic production and pleasure. It's easy, but unhelpful, to blur the boundary between synesthesia and the generation of metaphor: the important difference is that synesthesia is involuntary, and can be limiting, whereas metaphor is enlightening and mind-expanding. I'd rather think that we dream in metaphors, not that we sink back, while asleep, into a synesthetic swamp. I wish I did have sound/colour synesthesia though: it sounds much more fun.

I know that for many years I regarded mine as a special secret that I wouldn't tell to anyone, and I'm well aware that this account will sound completely crazy to anyone who has not experienced it. When I did try explaining it to other people, they were baffled. Now that I have "come out" as a synesthete, it's an enormous relief and endlessly fascinating, if only to me. Talking with TAS just now about whether something or other happened before or after 2000, I was able to point out that it's harder for me to remember what was when before 2000, because it slopes away from me and is less bright. He of course is still baffled.

But it has started me wondering about some peculiar action/place linkages that pop into my head, for example when doing some very mundane and often-performed task. Why do I always think about the area around the south end of St Martin's Lane and Charing Cross Road, whenever I peel a clove of garlic? Why do I think about a particular view from the A30 just east of Lifton in Devon, whenever I put on mascara? Answers with well-researched reading lists, please.

Another bit of folk wisdom

I remember being told years ago that dropping an aspirin in a flower vase prolonged the life of the flowers, but always assumed it was one of those old bits of folk wisdom we didn't need to bother with any more. I have however dutifully poured into flower vases the contents of the little sachets you get with flowers from Tesco, labelled "lily food", "carnation food" etc, and wearily thrown the same flowers away after two weeks at the most.

But on the evening of December 2nd TAS and I came across these pussy willow twigs lying on the pavement near our house, brought them home and stuck them in a jar. Here they are on 7th January, still sparkling white and fluffy. But the remarkable bit is that on December 21st I wanted to brighten up the display a bit to decorate our Solstice Dinner that evening, so popped into Tesco, only to find that all they had left (apart from hideous Xmas bunches) were these rather manky carnations. Got them anyway, added some to the willow twigs and put the rest in another vase somewhere else. The latter got thrown out several days ago (so lasted maybe 10 days in all) but the ones sharing their now rather brown and scuzzy water with the willow twigs are still in full and perfect bloom.

Then it dawned on me: willow leaves and bark, as Wikipedia tells us, "contain salicin, a substance that chemically resembles aspirin" - so the old folk remedy is absolutely true! I shall now try chewing willow stems before my next long-haul flight.

145 pounds at last!

In February this year I had a meeting with Roma, one of the impressively slender instructors at the gym in Highbury, to review my exercise programme. She said she thought I was doing stuff rather aimlessly at the gym and I needed A Goal. My impulse was to shrug this aside: I've stopped doing Goals since I left the BFI and feel much better for it. But she insisted, so I said rather off-handedly that what I'd really like to do some time when I felt up to it would be to lose a stone (14 pounds). I'd always thought this rather vaguely - I knew I was a bit overweight and it was annoying how tight some of my clothes were, but I just figured you get fatter when you're older and that's that. But Roma seized on this and said "Yes that's a great Goal to have: what date shall we set for you to reach it?" Thinking fast, I looked well ahead and suggested my birthday, 29th May. So then Roma weighed me in at 81kg (178 pounds or 12 stone 7) and I was locked into the process.

No diets for me: I'd done several and I know they're all rubbish as far as serious long-term weight loss is concerned. If I was to lose weight permanently I'd have to get used to eating what I would be eating for the rest of my life, so there'd be no point in trying something outlandish. I also knew - or thought I did - that with a bit of self-awareness about alcohol, nibbles before dinner, snacks in the morning and afternoon, smaller helpings and no second helpings, I'd lose weight and all I needed to do was keep going. So I lost maybe four or five pounds in the first month, but then it all slowed down and got boring.

This was, of course, Roma's big moment. She ordered me to write down everything I ate for a week, count the calories, and report back to her. Tsk! So boring and old-fashioned, calorie counting. But I only had to count a few items before I realised I was simply eating as much or more calories as I burned. With my regular diet in front of me, I was able to decide which bits to cut: half my Birchermuesli in the mornings, and as much fat as possible ie no marge on bread and no cheese - so, effectively, hardly any bread either - and, very sadly, no more little morning treat of a gloop of cream in my coffee.

Keeping up the gym, swimming, twin care and allotment work took care of the energy expenditure, and having resigned as the Chair of the MEA my time in front of the computer diminished considerably. Crucially, TAS joined in and we began to lose weight together. I lost a stone by the agreed date, but then thought, why stop now? Why not another stone? This was not an eating disorder: I felt thinner than I looked, rather than looking thinner than I felt. Now and then I'd pick up a six-kilo weight and think: I'm not carrying that around any more! I didn't actually look that much thinner: it was only by September when I had lost another half stone that people started to comment on how much better I looked (or put it another way, remind me what a fat pig I'd looked a few months earlier, I guess). And it was later still that I started to notice it: I could feel bones I'd forgotten I had, and some of my clothes suddenly became unbearably huge. I've had to buy new bras and alter all my trousers, and I can put on socks and tie my shoelaces without groaning.

Now when I try to pick up a 15-kilo weight at the gym - I don't actually USE a 15-kilo weight because I can barely get it off the ground - I think: was I actually carrying all that around, and wondering why I got sore feet and problems with my knees and felt puffed out running upstairs? What was I thinking of? How did I manage to go on considering myself "a bit overweight"? Why didn't anybody - not even the doctor - tell me I was fat? The reason of course is that I wasn't THAT fat: a size 16 is not much to worry about compared to the really vast people you see every day - so my mere 32 pounds of extra flab didn't put me on anybody's Urgent list.

TAS has lost about the same amount, and we're more or less grinding to a halt on the serious weight loss idea. Our current weights seem about right: they're about the same as they were when we first met, 40 years ago. We have to keep an eye on it though: we weigh ourselves every morning (that being the most comfortingly lightweight moment of the day) and notice when too many of those little indulgences have made their presence felt. Two days in the Netherlands notched up four pounds on the scales and last night's little binge at the IoE graduate reception accounted for a pound and a half.

But the interesting thing is how quickly the weight goes again as soon as we get back to eating what we can now truthfully say is "normally". Of course, "my weight" is a flexible concept: everyone seems to gain 3 or 4 pounds during the day, and loses it again by the following morning. Eating early in the evening will make for a lower weight in the morning. So ideally (after Christmas, maybe) it would be good to lose maybe 2 or 3 more pounds so I'd know I'd always be less than ten and a half stone. But it's no big deal: essentially we've pretty much got to the stage where we both know what we can and can't eat if we want to maintain it, and more to the point, know that it's not hard for us to do that. What's probably going to be harder now is to stop ourselves becoming body fascists and casting disdainful glances at everyone who's bigger than us. Is that another things the ads don't tell you: the thinner you get, the nastier you are?

How Arthur and Marilyn changed my life

It may seen superfluous to add to the more than 53 million Google items about Marilyn Monroe but I think (needless to say) that I have a slightly different take. In 1956 I lived with my father, stepmother and brother in a tied cottage on the estate of the Earl of Drogheda (sounds grand, but the press called the House a "country cottage") where my father was head gardener (see my blog about him in October last year) and my stepmother helped out when things were busy (this is what posh history TV dramas always get wrong, because of course it would mess up the casting: country houses always corralled in any amount of help for cooking and cleaning from their dependent local economy whenever there were weekend parties).

When Marilyn and Arthur Miller were in England for their honeymoon and for her to play in The Prince and the Showgirl they stayed in Parkside House - on the edge of Windsor Great Park near Englefield Green - as described, rather fancifully, in Colin Clark's My Week with Marilyn. Laurence Olivier, who co-starred, was the go-between who set up the "country cottage" idyll so it fell to my father to pace the lawns with Olivier and work out (a) who Marilyn was - my father was a bit hazy on that - and (b) plan things for their stay. Secrecy was vital. My brother and I weren't told till much nearer the time, though we knew there would be someone important coming to stay at the House. I think I figured it would be a national leader - Tito I think was one idea I had - and I was a bit disappointed that it turned out to be a vulgar Hollywood star. We were on strict instructions not to tell anyone until after they had actually arrived. The estate was not that secure: we did at least shut the gates but anyone could get through the little wooden ones into our garden and thence to the House via the vegetable garden.

The first thing that impressed me most was the press pack. Exactly like a pack of dogs slavering over a bitch, they hung around the gates incessantly and broke in when they could. Two of them cornered me in the orchard and tried to be smarmy; it was when they called me "little girl" (I was 14) that I told them they were on private property and should leave. We were all amazed by their behaviour (of course it was nothing to what would happen now). It was one of the papers who bought bikes for Marilyn and Arthur following a chance remark that they'd like to go cycling. There is apparently an extant photo of Marilyn cycling but it must have been set up specially - she never left the estate except in a car. My memories of those gentlement of the press has stayed with me during a professional life in media education.

I did see Arthur Miller bowling along the main road on his new bike in Englefield Green once when I was in the ironmonger's. But my closer encounter with him (needless to say I was totally ignorant of his work, thanks to the so-called English teachers in my highly-sought-after girls' grammar school) was when he knocked at the cottage door one afternoon when everyone else was out, and asked to use the phone. What was amazing about this was that it was the first occasion an adult had been polite and respectful to me. He humbly explained that he needed to call his wife at Pinewood and the House phone appeared to be out of order. He hoped it wouldn't be too much trouble to use ours and he was sorry for the inconvenience. I was flabbergasted: what had I done to deserve such decency? I guess this has stayed there in the back of my head all the time I've been developing arguments about the assumptions adults make about what children can understand and deserve.

My stepmother Ruth helped in the kitchen: she remembers Marilyn coming into the kitchen - right through the green baize door! incredible! - on the first evening and asking shyly for candles for the dining table. Ruth also did the laundry and ironing, so of course we peeked in their wardrobes (that's what the help always do). I remember being disappointed by Marilyn's failure to follow the advice I knew by heart: blondes should wear pale blue; redheads green, etc. Everything in there was either black or beige, apart from the amazing red sheath dress she wore at some public event, complete with little lead weights in the ruffles. I thought her colour choices were sad; much later, I realised it was Fashion. I do now wear black a lot, but never beige. Again, it was Arthur Miller's wardrobe that really influenced my later purchases: I finally managed to afford a black cashmere sweater just like his and wore it for years.

I did see Marilyn herself for about 30 seconds. Ruth said I could come to the House when Marilyn and Arthur were leaving, if I stood outside the door and just watched. I remember peeking round the door to see Marilyn in a black "tent" coat, high black heels and her hair pinned up neatly in a bun, kissing the staff goodbye (yes, kissing the staff! - as an extra skivvy, I don't think Ruth got in on that). Then she came out of the front door, saw me standing there in my school uniform, sweaty and muddy from the hockey field, and stopped, confused for a moment and embarrassedly half-smiling, before turning away to get in the car. I felt ashamed: I felt I was behaving just like the press pack.

techno-hell

I always used to be contemptuous of hardware developers' endless quest for a black box that would do absolutely everything. Now I've acquired an iPhone (only to ensure that for PhD purposes I have a voice recorder and video camera always to hand, honestly) I am reluctantly coming round to the view that at least that makes three fewer machines to go wrong.

I thought that starting a PhD would involve long quiet hours in a library leafing through the tomes I'd always meant to read. My first proper talk with John, my main supervisor (we've known each other for years but now he has the unfortunate task of keeping me on the straight and narrow) revealed some of the things I was about to encounter such as EndNote and DropBox (was it The Guardian's makeover as the Guardian or was it EastEnders that started all this?) and propelled me towards getting the iPhone and a Mac laptop.

Still reeling from paying out my first year's fees and what seemed like incredible quantities of other stuff including a far higher incidence of ready meals given our once-again frantic lifestyle, I opted for a second-hand MacBook. Now it seems that every single attempt I make to get anywhere near my PhD work is frustrated by the learning curve I now face. It's not just steep, it's curling over my head like those nightmare enormous waves that loom up just when you thought you'd had a lucky escape from what you temporarily thought was the biggest wave you'd ever seen. Struggling through giant databases with names like ERIC and PsychInfo, each with subtly different interfaces, endlessly forgetting where I last saved what I laughably call "my research", constantly clicking CANCEL when I meant to click GO on the sadistically counter-intuitive university portal login, floundering in deep water with my surfboard out of reach, I stagger home only to discover that my MacBook doesn't recognise my iPhone, iTunes has decided that the only music I will ever need is Carmina Burana, and to top it all the damned DVD player won't work.

I realise that the reason for this last is that some long-vanished Virgin engineer (imagine describing that job to people at parties) has connected it up the wrong way and that we are now condemned to scrabbling through mountains of paper to find what our parents' generation always referred to (but why?) as "the book of words" for the DVD player, and to shuffling about on our knees in the squirming pile of dusty cables behind the ever-temperamental flat screen TV (yeah great, when it agrees to switch on, like about 50% of the time).

Sometimes I like to fantasise about rewriting my favourite SF novels (Ian M. Banks, if you want to know) with some creative touches of life on Earth now: drones fly smack into walls; somebody connects up the wrong power cables down in the bowels of the GSV, etc. Of course Banks' riposte would be that all these machines can mend themselves without disrupting the flow of the story. The only SF parody on the lines I'm thinking is Woody Allen's jibe at "goddam cheap Japanese flying packs" in Sleeper though I daresay there are lots more.

More often though I am liable to break down and cry. I sat stony-faced through War Horse but a software malfunction can have me weeping buckets. I think that today I'll give up on trying to get my invaluable, unrepeatable research videos into my laptop and leaf quietly through Vygotsky instead. He may have been persecuted by Stalin but at least he didn't have to defer to Steve Jobs.

Why a PhD? Why now?

For years I have been bullshitting about what kids learn about moving image media before they start school. For example:

"Given that children start to engage with and enjoy moving-image media in their second year of life – often in contexts with little or no adult mediation – then it seems probable that from an early stage they manage to acquire some understanding of the distinctive codes and conventions employed in these media, and start to develop strategies for making sense of all kinds of text (both print and non-print). "

I've used versions of this paragraph in various presentations for at least 10 years as a way of arguing that literacy teaching in schools needs to change. It's not entirely pulled out of thin air: I've gained in confidence in making this claim the more I meet teachers who are flabbergasted by the level of understanding demonstrated by children when they talk about film (as opposed to when they talk about books - if they do).

But I've always felt that I ought to stop and take the time to research this properly. When I started work at the BFI in 1979, I was registered for a PhD at the Institute of Education, for which I was going to explore a similar topic. But it soon became obvious that working at the BFI was not going to be a full-time job: it was going to be a lot more than a full-time job. 27 years later - white-haired, overweight and exhausted - I finally escaped from the BFI only to land in the frying-pan of two years' unpaid work, chairing the Media Education Association.

Now at last I feel properly ready for new things. When I first started to ponder the idea of starting a PhD, I thought that surely this topic must already have been researched and written about. But the more I looked, the more confident I became that no, probably it hasn't, or at least not in the way I intend to approach it. Then in January this year while on holiday with the family I observed my twin 14-month-old grandchildren suddenly terrorised by episodes of In the Night Garden - episodes that they knew well and had seen many times before. I was fascinated. Was this an example of a half-developed sense of narrative - the ability to perceive disruption without the capacity to anticipate resolution? I wanted to know more.

Seven months later (during which time I've also, completely coincidentally, lost 12 kilos) here I am, about to embark on formal research, with the twins as the focus of an ethnographic study that I hope will help me develop these ideas more coherently. I've tidied my office, spruced up my website, found two supervisors, filmed 2 hours of twins' TV-watching and started a reading list. Several good friends have tried to put me off this project: "why don't you just write a book?" they ask. My argument is that "just writing" is precisely what I have been doing for years. I am sick of grinding out rhetoric: I want to assemble evidence. Watch this space.