The Mediterranean octopus, my great-grandmother, and 20th century growth

Octopus Vulgaris

Octopuses are very smart. This is one of my recent favourite octopus documentaries. They have more dexterity with their tentacles than we do with our hands, they can solve quite complex puzzles, they have inter-octopus communication through skin colours, and they can learn very detailed things from mimicking and copying each other. They are curious, deliberate, spatially aware, and super fast learners. The docco follows a Spanish research group dedicated to the evaluation of the intelligence of the common octopus (octopus vulgaris), and the results presented are quite impressive. The documentary proposes that despite the phenomenal cosmic learning capacity and long life expectancy of the (male) octopus, they haven't made a species leap for one simple reason. They can't systematically pass knowledge to the next generation, because after protecting her first clutch of eggs, the mother always dies. So for all their mad skillz, the Mediterranean octopus must learn all about the world for himself, in each generation, by trial and error and imitation of other octopuses. There is no direct help from other octopuses because a male octopus - even a directly related one -  doesn't appear to have the capacity for empathy, ie a spontaneous negative neurochemical sensation when another feels pain, and a positive one when another feels pleasure. They also don't bond, they are drifting individuals who are skilled at mimicry. Their brains simply don't seem to get to the point of "I see you are frustrated trying to open that jar. Let me teach you how."
And female octopuses are expendable. Even human experimenters don't bother teaching female octopuses anything. They always die just before the hatching of the first clutch of eggs. If they live long enough to have a clutch, they have been biologically successful.

Here's an octopus opening a jar.

And a curious and dexterous wild octopus stealing a camera, and maybe trying to work it. See, they're smart. You wouldn't see a goat or a tiger or a cockroach doing this. A monkey, maybe. But not half as classily.

A fabulous book called Braintrust (R, you would really like this book), proposes a link between neurological structure, and community, morality and cooperation.
Patricia Churchland neatly argues that our ability to adapt to, and live in, a magnificent variety of societies adapted to the local geography and technology, is built upon the neurochemical pathways for:

1. Caring - for self, and for kin/mate/community as for yourself
2. Recognition of others' psychological states, and predicting how they will act. (Particularly handy for wolves hunting in packs, for example.  
3. Problem-solving in a social context, ie dynamic optimisation within constraints
4. Learning social practices, through explicit and implict teaching, plus imitation.

She then goes through the neurochemical pathways of each of these, from an evolutionary perspective, with reference to multiple other primate species, prairie voles, reptiles, and game theory. I am halfway through, and enthralled.
(I am also stoked to see some good quality tangible work along the lines that Sam Harris proposed in The Moral Landscape. Ie, that science ought to stick her nose into the moral space in order to explain and evaluate different moral structures in terms of individual/community wellbeing, measured by neurological function, social cohesion and aggregate welfare of the people in that structure, and thus evaluate different moral positions on some kind of yet-to-be-developed measurable axes. This would let us happily develop past an external singular morality (Holy Commandments) just like we have for law and order, models of illness and health, food and nutrition, and animal farming. He proposes that we need to accept that there are many different 'peaks' and 'valleys' in the moral landscape, and seek to map them.)

Anyway, with my human tendency to anthropomorphism, I was appalled at the sad fate of all those female octopuses.

And being a 21st century Western woman, I am acutely aware of all those generations of women before me (and all around me in the world today) whose lives resemble (relative to mine) female Octopus Vulgaris.

My great-grandmother and me

One of my great-grandmothers, Magdalena, was born to a reasonably well off landowning Polish family in 1881, and this section is about her. Okay, World Wars 1 and 2 messed up her world quite a lot, but her life story and selected medical history can tell you what she expected for herself in terms of reproductive health, general health, endurance of pain, and general and female-specific potential causes of death.

• She survived several bouts of childhood illness for which I am vaccinated. Other children in the town died.
• She always expected to spend her adult life mostly pregnant or nursing infants, and reasonably isolated from her husband's daytime activities.
• She had a private tutor because they were quite rich and her father was considered indulgent educating her. A tutor was quite rare for young women. 
• She spoke six languages fluently but never learned to read any of them. (Her brothers had scholarly tutors too and they all were taught to read as children - she wasn't expected to need to.)
• She expected to have peasant maids for her whole life. They were to clean, fetch and carry, wash clothes, and care for her children in various capacities. Her task was expected to be to manage the household.
• She (and her contemporaries) understood that there was a real possibility of dying in pregnancy or childbirth, although she had a good live-in midwife and thought the likelihood was lower than for the peasant classes.
• She had about 13 pregnancies - we think - between 1903 and 1916, and did not expect them all to go to term. She also had an unknown number of miscarriages. There was one preterm stillbirth. She had one set of twins.
• She did not expect all her 12 live babies to survive childhood. She considered it extraordinary luck and good management that none died as infants during WW1, where their property was sporadically on the Eastern Front. Only one died in childhood, a girl, during WW2.
• By about 1960, she had a prolapsed uterus that would FALL OUT of her body and she would ask her daughter to PUT IT BACK IN PLEASE. It was so bad the Australian surgeons wouldn't operate.
• Forced labour in in Siberia had also left her with varicose veins like tree roots on both legs which she never had treated either.
• She had never took painkilling medication until the refugee hospital in Turkey in 1946. Not because of unavailability (except during the Wars), but because she would fill the prescription and save it for her family and household.
• She had tropical ulcers and parasites from 1948 onwards, which were never fully cured.
• She had learned hygiene and food preparation habits, and herbal medicine, from her own mother. She advised and treated herself, her family, the local peasants, other refugees, and others who knew to ask, with honey soaked bandages and nettle tea and chicken soup and a hundred other remedies.
• She died of pneumonia at age 95, half a world away in Australia.

My birthday was one hundred years and twelve days after Magdalena's.

• I was literate by the age of four. 
• I have had formal schooling, university education, and when I get organised I expect to do postgraduate study too. 
• I don't have a household servant. I pay a fortnightly cleaner, some fabulous childcare workers, and sometimes the local takeaway shops, to cover much of what a servant would have done. Electronic appliances do the rest. I do get caught out with three feral kids at 6PM and no help. Magda would have had help.
• I expect to spend most of my adult life working in what was until very recently clearly a man's job, with income and position based on my reputation and achievements and independent of my gender. 
• I am planning to have a long and illustrious career once my kids don't need so much from me.
• I expect to end up in charge of a number of men, and hopefully some women too. I will expect them to do what I instruct, regardless of me being female.
• I accept that pregnancy and infant nursing is a glitch in my career. I only resent this a little.
• I do not expect to have untreated gynecological issues. I expect mainstream medicine to be on top of female physiology by now.
• I have had 3 full term pregnancies. I expected to survive all of them. I required medical intervention after one of the births. It worked - I survived.
• I now expect to not have any more pregnancies. I have medical tools to control this.
• I expected all 3 children to survive birth. Now that they have, I expect all 3 to live to adulthood.
• I expect to put the same resources into educating our daughter and launching her into the world as for our sons.
• I expect painkiller, anaesthetic, antibiotics anytime I need them. I expect medical consultation and surgical treatment where it is warranted. 
• I do not expect to have to learn my own herbal medicine in order to treat myself or women and children around me because of some social priority structure or because medicine didn't know about female physiology.
• I can't speak of war, forced labour or refugee hospitals, but I would be more than indignant under such circumstances if resources are gender-prioritised, especially if it's away from me or women and children around me. That's my child-bonded brain flooded with oxytocin talking. (To be fair, Magda did mention that in DP and refugee camps after Siberia, women and children were medically and nutritionally well cared-for. In this point I suppose am contrasting with modern places like Somalia or Bangladesh.)
• I expect to drive cars and boats and operate machinery as I am licensed to. I do not expect to be confronted or questioned on a gender basis about this anymore. I expect to be able to obtain such licenses, tickets, certifications and access cards as I need for my job or my interests on the basis of being able to pass the criteria, not on the basis of gender.

Expecting a particular life drives social change

The general expectation of a woman consistently surviving childbirth, and having medical resources and attention when you need, changes individual and community expectations of life length, power and influence during her life, and the type of life she can lead. Because my community expects me to survive and contribute, it is worth educating me, paying me money for my exertions, fixing me up when I am sick, and indeed researching how womens' health actually works (because the Western medical 'typical' patient is male) in order to treat me effectively. So I feel entitled in a way my grandmother couldn't. She was further away on the octopus continuum. 

The 20th century was marked by periods of exponential economic growth (measured in GDP) in a great many countries. The following dotpoints are standard economic explanations.

• A proportion of this was technological: mechanisation, economies of (massive) scale, new industries like communications and aviation and 
• A proportion of this was medical: for example Malaria reduces a country's GDP by up to 5%. Put in clean fresh water and watch the community's GDP go up.
• A proportion is infrastructure-based, where trade (and GDP) grows following good roads and ships and telephone linkes.
• A proportion of this was the increase in size and complexity of service/support industries to production such as marketing, management consulting, finance and investment, litigation, insurance etc. These industries move around a comparatively very large amount of money for their tiny contribution to the flow of tangible goods. (cycling bidons and stress balls notwithstanding).
• A proportion of this is due to the new vast energy availability and consumption, in our use of power systems, transport, home and work electronics, and the digital revolution.
• A proportion of this is due to the increasing payment - and thus measurement - of previously unpaid womens' household or volunteer work, including childcare, nursing, social work, food processing, hospitality etc.
• A proportion of this is due to women starting to engage, and consume, in previously predominantly male activities, such as higher education, adventure sports, medical and dental treatment, travel, and all kinds of entertainment.

The elephant in the room has a long memory

Evolution is not fast. Women and men think and operate differently*. Gender equality and equivalency in antropology is a rich complex thing that I am not going to go into - except that typically men and women aren't equal or equivalent in a society. There is enormous diversity in humanity, but quite often men and women run in different, parallel 'working' worlds. Our species has had substantial and persisting evolutionary advantages from our gender-different brain wiring*. This simply does not change in a hundred years*. Epigenetics can change certain traits in 1 or 2 generations, but sex hormones as neurochemicals is part of the big structural stuff, because it is extremely similar across the globe and apparently selected over 40,000 + years.
Mounting evidence is indicating that mens' and womens' brains are very very different
(two extremely readable books btw, with lots of evidence and quite vicious feminist critiques.)
and this is how.

* BUT keep in mind that:

1. Temperament, culture and environment have a vastly larger effect on the brain and behaviour than anyone ever expected, we load our neural "firmware" in infancy and childhood and nobody quite knows how that works except that it causes magnificent variation in and between populations, and may be a factor in susceptibility/resilience to some mental illness.
2. There is an awful lot going on in your brain that is not gender-specific. Sex hormones are neural activity mediators rather than drivers, helping us with habits and reflexes and tendencies, not ruling our thoughts and actions (although parents of adolescents may wonder a bit).
3. Structural, neurochemical and hormonal variation is enormous between individual brains of each gender, and just about all neurochemical or behavioural gender-based normal curves have a large and poorly measured overlapping mid-region.
4. Neurochemical gender differences are age dependent. Differences are greatest at ages birth-3, 15-20, and when male and female brains both change for bearing and rearing of young. The difference effects decrease as you get older. Old men and old women are hormonally very similar.
5. **Anything here is a massive oversimplification.** It's an extremely complex area with a lot of conclusions drawn from fragments of data. For a slightly more detailed picture, go read the books above, plus some Google Scholar. For a very detailed picture, go do a PhD in gender and neuroscience.

Adolescent male primate brains are flooded with testosterone*, in humans it's from age 13 to 25. Teenage boys are* naturally confrontational and adversarial, they get hooked on the dopamine rush of doing exciting/fast/illegal/truly dumb things, they are suddenly hierarchy-focused and can develop a status-addiction, they have sex thoughts going in the background "like a TV in a sports bar", and they struggle to empathise, meaningfully communicate, or practically cooperate with any demographic except their age and status peers.

Primate females have more oxytocin receptors in key brain parts than the males* (it's a bit species dependent, human females have relatively many times more receptors*). Ovulating female humans have* apparently very complex, cyclical brains, but oxytocin is a dominant gender-different neurotransmitter. For most of a woman's life, blood oxytocin is more or less the same as a male's, but those receptors make the effect much more intense. Also, when a pregnancy occurs, oxytocin levels skyrocket. Oxytocin is a simple molecule used all over the brain - but in the female's corpus collosum it is super important in pair/family bonding, having empathy and reading others' emotional states, differentiating the in-group and out-group, and protecting and providing for the in-group with the same neurochemical reward as protecting and providing for oneself. It may also help the individual conceptualise social norms and expectations, and oxytocin levels rise when a monkey in a group is part of punishing an in-group offenders (eg ostracising a food thief). Doses of oxytocin can also make people of both genders more trusting, more communication-attuned, and more prone to spending spare time in social bonding activities like grooming, chatting, and non-goal-oriented cooperation (shopping and going to the toilet together).

Testosterone partially explains rugby union, and oxytocin afternoon chit-chats with the mums group where their hair is all nicely done.

But how is it that in the 20th century, women of all classes and backgrounds suddenly, abruptly, feel entitled to healthcare, paid employment, status in our own right? Our brain hardware doesn't carry this easily. Neither does my male colleagues' brain hardware cope well with a dominant low-testosterone woman in charge.

I propose that it is simple life expectancy and entitlement.

In the late 19th century, women started expecting to survive childbirth. They felt entitled to have plans and ideas for life after childbirth. And then from the 60's, to stop and start having children by choice. It seems reasonable to thus be entitled to have resources invested in girls: equal priority nutrition, education, public recognition etc.
20th century wars provided Western women with an opportunity to work in all kinds of paid (mens' world) employment.
Increased white collar work and certain new female-dominant professions helped in the overall raising of life expectancy, especially for working classes (eg. nursing, community health, unions, worksite safety enforcement etc)
By the mid 20th century, most of the developed world expected not to die from blood infection, measles, mumps, rubella, diptheria, polio, tetanus, cholera, smallpox, plague, malnutrition etc. Even cancer and traffic collisions are getting less deadly year by year. With each sudden death risk eliminated, our sense of entitlement rises.
This century, we have invented "childhood", "adolescence" - both social constructs which didn't exist in the Industrial Revolution and still don't in sub-Saharan Africa.
We have also stretched out childhood like never before, and educating boys and girls equivalently also conveniently and safely occupies them at school until their brains start to come down from the hormone highs.
We have stretched out working life like never before. People who in past centuries would have been wizened and crippled from physical work by 40 can typically now work to 60 or 70 - often out of choice, and with much better health!

By starting from better healthcare for women we are living much longer, we feel entitled to more, and we are less socially, politically and militarily disrupted by testosterone-fuelled young punks, because they're safely encased in school or university.

I propose that the early-20th-century injection of oxytocin- rather than testosterone-driven workers and thinkers has been a big factor in the large number of revolutionary paradigm-shifts in just about every arena: technological, social, political, literary, artistic, scientific, and philosophical.

What if the 20th century marks a change in our own species - as big as if a significant proportion of female octopuses could survive their first clutch of eggs, and thus take the first evolutionary steps to changing their brain chemistry and structure for empathy, and developing social structures to pass on their knowledge to the next generation? Wouldn't the octopus vulgaris species just take off like a rocket? They are so very clever and adaptable, all they would need to do is get their intergenerational act sorted out - and watch out, ocean floor!

Wouldn't it take off like - well - all the exponential curves used to describe 20th and early 21st century development?

I would be so proud of humanity if this were a preliminary to a species-wide structural shift. 

I wonder where it will lead.

I hope I live to be 95 like Magdalena. I might get to find out.

Chicken pot pie - dairy free, wheat free, but unsuccessful "power cooking"

I recently rediscovered an old idea, apparently now renamed Power Cooking. Spend one afternoon a week cooking large quantities, and filling up your freezer with pre-packed meals. This stash will then prevent any 5:30-7PM oh-my-fridge-is-empty-and-the-kids-are-climbing-the-walls-and-eating-the-furniture catastrophes, reduce the frequency (and financial and nutritional costs) of ordering takeaway, and leave more time during the evenings for knitting/technical documentation/trips to the park/retrieving the chooks from up the street.
We used to do this when we were students - we would cook a pot of beef massaman and then still have some variety in the week afterwords. Many juggling mums I know do this to provide meals when the nanny has the kids in the evening.

But I had never tried it for a family. I was worried about 2 limitations in particular:
1) The meals that fare the best are curries, casseroles, soups, meatballs etc. Not prawn stirfries, or cajun roast chicken, or perfectly cooked kangaroo steak with honey yoghurt sauce. I'm sorry. You can't freeze kangaroo steak.
2) For lots of hungry young kids, the quantities must be large. The freezer space must be large. You also risk them not eating the food on a whim.

But I thought I'd try it. At least a bit.
Pot pies seem to freeze OK.
Chicken was on special at Aldi.
Here is my recipe for dairy free wheat free pot pies (for those with dairy free wheat free eating)

Filling:

• Chop 2 large onions and brown them in 1tsp olive oil (takes about 10min). Add 2 crushed garlic cloves for another minute. Put this into a food processor.
• Chop 1.5kg chicken breasts into 3cm cubes. Sear them in a hot pan in olive oil, turning frequently so they get a little colour on all sides..
• Meanwhile, put about 100g stale bread (if you like 100% rye, spelt, or gluten free) in a mixing bowl and pour hot boiled water on it. Leave it to soak until you have soft mushy bread in a bowl of water. Pour out the water and add the mushy bread to the onions in the food processor. Blend it to a pap.
• By this stage, the chicken should be seared.
• Season the chicken with pepper, paprika, and either salt or Vegeta. Other possible spices include a little turmeric, cloves, Add about 1 cup of water and leave it to simmer for 20mins.
• Add the onion and bread pap to the brew. Add a handful of fresh chopped herbs: parsley, coriander, or thyme. This will thicken it up nicely. Cook 5 more mins if the herbs are woody. Set it aside till you need it.

Pastry:

• Sift 250g rye or spelt flour and a pinch of salt onto your workbench. (Make sure it's a clean bench.) 
• Put 100ml olive oil and 80ml water in a bowl and swish it around briskly with a fork. It might not look like it mixes but it does help. 
• Gradually add liquid to the flour and knead it into pastry. Knead for several minutes until it goes really smooth, almost glassy. Roll it to an even layer of about 1mm thin.

Assembly:

• Grease a Pie dish (for tonight) and/or some ramekins (to freeze).
• Put chicken mix in the bottom.
• Cut pieces of pastry to roughly the size of the top of each dish.
• Put the pastry on top of the chicken. 
• Pre-cook for 20mins at 180 degrees (150 degrees in a fan-forced oven)

Re-heat:

• When cooking from room temp or fridge temp, cook for another 20mins at 180 degrees (less time for smaller ramekins).
• When cooking from frozen, cook for 20mins at 150 degrees followed by 10mins at 180 degrees (less time for smaller ramekins)

The drawback:
It was extremely tasty. The ravening horde ate most of it at lunchtime. I only had 2 ramekins left in the fridge, and then my husband ate one for dinner. I am going to take the last one to work with me. There is no point freezing them, so the whole "power cooking" thing kindof fell apart.

I would love to take a photo but I fear it would be gone by the time I find the camera.

Ghosts in my knitting.

Ghosts are typically assumed to be spirits of people who are stuck in the physical world, and remain connected to places or objects or even other living people (especially their most loved or hated ones, or those very sensitive to the 'vibe'). Psychics claim to be able to connect to a person who has 'passed over' (ie dead) by holding an object of theirs. Cell 16 of the Old Melbourne Gaol is a place supposed to be particularly haunted, more so than the gallows cell. When we visited the gaol, the whole place was certainly spooky, but there was a guide dog which whimpered and refused to go into that particular cell.

..."If these walls could talk, what stories would they tell?"...
We also don't find it hard to believe that places and objects can be imprinted with an emotion or an event, and maybe a shadow of the people (or animals!) involved, without actually being the place of anyone's death.
Very strong ghosts, or layers of ghosts, can give visitors ignorant of the particular circumstances a 'vibe'; most of us go quiet in a cathedral, a sacred cave, or an elephant graveyard; and I challenge anyone to go to a university Halls of Residence during summer break, and not pick up the uni student pheromones of attraction/repulsion/lust/betrayal/revenge which have soaked into the walls.
Ghosts can be very personal too. When I visit places where I first went with a long-moved-on ex, I get a vivid sense of the two of us as we were then, still imprinted on that place. Would having a big argument with someone there leave an imprint on a cafe? Or put another way, would you go back there lightly?

...Small objects, small ghosts...
Most of us keep small items with our ghosts, we call them mementos or keepsakes. Typical ghost-carriers include jewellery, things with your handwriting on them, things you made or fixed, when you pick them up your mind flashes back to another time when you imprinted something on them. Something tiny - oh yeah I wrote that phone number down on a supermarket docket because my phone screen was broken, I dropped it outside the fish & chip shop, I remember that day, it was raining.... or something significant - Mum gave me that to cheer me up after I failed my first uni exam... If you listen carefully, sometimes you can pick up the ghost from someone else's stuff. This is why I love secondhand shops and antique shops - it's a real treat picking up a nifty thingo with a nifty ghost on it.

Knitting ghost map
My knitting has ghosts. The wool carries memories for me of where I found it, what I did with it (dyed, knitted the other half skein into something else) but there are tiny ghosts in the stitches too. Here is a recent project, made in a very busy week. Not my finest knitting effort, but perfect for illustrating a ghost map. I have labelled the ghosts in it for you guys, they are the memories that came back vividly as I felt the fabric and tracked my gaze along a row.  Sometimes even medium-sized ghosts can hide in a pattern sequence or garment change -especially a stripy one like this.

I wonder if this is true of all stuff handmade with thought and care.
And I also wonder if our mass-sweatshop-produced clothing and footwear, contaminated-factory-labour electronics, slave-labour chocolate and coffee, and conflict gems carry ghosts of the despair of the producers. Which might be why handmade stuff seems inherently 'nicer' to many people. 

 

It might not be pretty in the photo, but it fits me perfectly and actually looks pretty snazzy with black pants and Western boots, and it is a mosty-happy knit. The green band just above the waist contains excitement and good hopes for a newly pregnant mum and her fetus. And when I look at the lower left sleeve hem, I am reminded of the relief that I kept my job. Not a bad lot of ghosts for one jumper, huh.

Acclimatising him to not belonging

It was my eldest's first 'footy day' today. This means the whole school dresses up in football supporters' gear. Where we live, that implicitly means Aussie Rules, but if you have another religion, just picture your own junior sports day of football/rugby/Irish football/American football/whatever.
This is kindof what the other kids looked like - although in order not to have to chase permission from parents, I've ganked this photo from somewhere else that already got permission:

Football t-shirts, hats, scarves, shorts, all in their own teams, all items of clothing approximately the right size, some signed by football players, many very well used from AusKick on the weekends.

This is what my son ended up wearing:

A Korean soccer t-shirt in Mens XL, numbered with the 2006 world cup team captain.
Were there any other soccer/rugby/Irish football/American football supporters at the school?
No.
I did try to get him a football t-shirt in roughly his size in time for footy day, but I didn't try very hard, ie. I didn't see any in the windows of the op shops (read: thrift stores) I happened to walk past in the week before.
But then my husband and I discussed it, and we figured that it is actually may not be a good thing to spare our son the feeling of being different. He is a bit unusual. We are all a bit unusual. He might as well get used to it.

Nevertheless, I found myself fretting a bit. Had I sent him into the proverbial bear pit? Would he get teased, taunted and ostracised because it didn't fit?

He was just fine. He said he had to explain his t-shirt a bit, but then his friend Jack found a small logo with a tiger on the front of it and told him he was definitely a Tigers fan, and he ended up the captain of the Tigers team in the 5-on-5 games the school ran on the oval.
Just goes to show, if you're a confident enough 5 yr old, you can be a (Caucasian) Korean team captain of an Aussie Rules team.

My grandfather's best remedies

My grandfather has been in my thoughts a lot recently. For most of my young life, he was our third parent. He lived in our house, picked us up from school and often cooked meatballs for dinner, he fixed anything that was broken, he was practical and compassionate and when we asked him, he would offer straightforward advice on what to do about guys, assignments, teachers, teasing, any number of things.

When he died some years ago, at age 93, he was strong and fit and healthy and mostly deaf and going blind and all of his friends were long dead and we think he was pleased to finally go. He would say 'Dying's not so bad. I'm just waiting for God to take me'.

I have been missing him. Our kids keep us flat-out busy, juggling family and work is hard, there are so many jobs to do and never enough time and then when I turn around there's fruit peel all over the floor and someone is crying and screaming over a stuffed dinosaur, a stick that looks like a gun, a percussion instrument, an unequal distribution of cheese pieces, or a real injury. It's nearly 10PM and we're still doing the ironing, there's laundry to sort and documentation to finish and I am so very tired. We keep getting minor illnesses brought home from daycare and school and work. And one of these weeks I hope to actually have a phone conversation with one of my own friends. Catching up with anyone in person will have to wait for a few years, I suppose.

My grandfather lived three lives: an airman in World War 2, an immigrant with a wife and daughter in the '50's, and a grandfather in our house in my lifetime. When I knew him, he had a good sense of perspective. I recently went to his grave and tried to ask him something, of course the grass didn't answer, but sitting there while the kids asked questions about him, I realised that when he was my age, he was still based at an airbase somewhere in England and had only fallen in love twice, and had escaped death from either being a foolish young man or from being in the war about 7 times, he had a good dozen near-misses to go. He was a decade away from meeting his future wife and having a daughter, he was only halfway through the first of his 'lives'. He'd probably look at us and say "You're doing OK. It's not going to be like this forever."

He had a bunch of folk cures. This is one for sore throats. I just made myself one and I feel better. My husband won't touch this brew, he says it's a bit yuk.

• Two-thirds of a mug of hot strong black tea,
• Juice of half a lemon 
• A spoonful of honey (nothing revolutionary so far - but make sure the tea is still hot at this point.)
• One egg yolk (Separate off all the white. Break it in the half-shell using a fork and mix it into the drink really fast. It partially cooks in the hot tea.)
• A single shot of whisky (Probably not in the kids' version of this brew, even though some of the alcohol evaporates off if the tea is hot enough)

Another good cure is the brine from the jar in which his homemade and slightly fermented garlicky beetroot is stored. Cure for what, you ask? Cure for anything. On our last trip, some European cousins insisted that my husband drink a generous glass of fermented-beetroot-brine to ward off a cold. He managed to finish it then said it was 'a bit strong'. And yes it worked, no sign of the virus for the rest of the trip.

Here's one more of his old folk cures. When feeling melancholy and missing a dead friend, tell people a story about them.

On Glasses

I just got glasses. I love my glasses. In fact, I might be just a little annoyed that after all these years in engineering, I have only just now needed glasses. Yes, they are tedious to clean, they leave little dots on my nose after a long day, my kids are always trying to pull them off. But aside from being able to see every leaf on every tree and every hair on my kids' heads, and being able to read road signs in time to react to them, they have been fabulous for me at work. And in the supermarket. And everywhere, wherever I go, I look out through these clear-making glasses and people treat me differently.

I love my glasses for two reasons.
1) Women with glasses are assumed to be smarter, and worth listening to. People are listening to me a lot more these days. Women with perfect eyesight evidently ought not be engineers, indeed they ought not speak with authority on anything. Smart women always have glasses. Hollywood tells us so.

In Top Gun, Kelly McGilles's Charlie wore glasses every time the plot required her character to use her PhD. In the Iron Man series, Gwyneth Paltrow was only allowed to take over Stark Enterprises after her glasses proved her to be CEO material. Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly was clearly much smarter and more dangerous because she wore glasses. In sitcoms everywhere, glasses give a hot supporting female character the ability to use a computer, crack a cipher, speak a second language, know a plot-critical fragment of information at a particular time, run a covert investigation (usually using a computer), defend the accused in court, or hold their professional or intellectual ground.

2) Glasses are a great prop. Peering over the top of them and saying "Really?" can get a very satisfying squirm from a less-than-honest individual, whether my own child, a colleague, or a door-to-door telephone salesman. I really quite like taking them off to clean them whenever someone tells me about the latest project disaster. There is also apparently something where men apparently have a 'thing' about a plain woman taking off her glasses and suddenly being gorgeous (*shrug*).

This extract of an old Humprey Bogart movie "The Big Sleep" makes both points admirably. I love it.

Hooray for my glasses!