My Uncle Jim

By Omega Mom from 3KidsNoJob

Uncle Jim was a much-loved presence in my childhood. He had a double-honorary title. For a start, he wasn’t a blood relative nor an uncle, but a great-uncle by marriage.

There’d been one child, a little girl called Phoebe, who’d died when she was four. She had fits. She was a little odd. You could see it in the old family photographs where she’d be eyeing the camera doubtfully while her cousins beamed and showed off, big, cartwheeling blurs off to one side.

Uncle Jim and my great-aunt, Mary were devastated. The more so when they became close to a sick neighbour’s little girl and offered to adopt her. At the last moment, the mother recovered and decided to take her back.

But there was no sense of life lived under the shadow of grief. It must have been there, but perhaps they made a conscious effort to pack it away when we came to visit.

They loved us unconditionally, just as they’d loved my mother and her brother when they were growing up. We loved them back. For several years, I’d wake up, go to their room, climb into bed with them and share tea and biscuits with them. Then, one summer, my mother suggested that I was getting a little too big for ‘that sort of thing’.

She said it very gently, but I still felt a sudden pang of what felt very like shame, sensing that I’d been betrayed by my size. Too big and too innocent. I never got into bed with them again.

Uncle Jim had an orchard. I’d ride on the bonnet of his tractor, pick the apples, help load them onto the ancient, creaking conveyor belt that circled the big packing room and dropped them with a gentle flump into the padded compartments, big, medium and small, reading for crating up. It was safe, fun, idyllic, a job description of a child’s perfect holiday.

When I came back from the orchard, I’d often read. There was no shortage of choice. There were antique children’s stories in one bookshelf; my great aunt’s detective and ghost tales next to them and, upstairs, Uncle Jim’s small library.

It was here, one day, that I encountered a small volume I’d never seen before. It seemed to be about children, so I started to read it.

It didn’t take long before it dawned on me that it was not quite what I was expecting. It did feature children having exciting adventures but ones which required adult help of a rather peculiar variety.

I stopped reading and put it back. I felt just as I had done when my mother talked to me about getting into bed with Uncle Jim and Aunt Mary. Shamed. As though reading the book had in some way made me a bad person.

It was this sense of being somehow to blame that made me bury the whole event. I didn’t remember it again until years later, when Uncle Jim was dead and the orchard long since grubbed up to make way for a fine crop of executive houses.

It wasn’t a secret I kept deliberately. And I’ll never now know what lay behind it, if anything. All I do know, though, is that my beloved Uncle Jim remained just that, all the time I knew him – beloved. And I can’t help feeling glad.


Written by Omega Mum. Her blog, 3kidsnojob, takes a mainly wry and optimistic but occasionally bitter and twisted look at life without an income.

Blog Review: Thinks By Me

The Blog: Thinks by me

The Reviewer: Omega mom from 3 kids No Job

First impressions:

It took a while to load so I had to time to ponder the enigmatic title. A song, maybe? Then I got to the profile. “A kickboxing Mum of 2”? “Recovering Type A personality”? Wow! Blog as energy bar. I’m interested.

Design:

What a nice, easy design to follow. There was a good, clear layout and excellent, and restrained, use of graphics. She is somebody who clearly has a strong visual sense and it really shows. There was only one small disappointment: that relaxing picture of a coffee cup suggested a mid-morning break while the kids are at school, rather than manic, kickboxing energy.

Content:

She’s a regular blogger – 25 posts in August – not easy with the summer holidays, so well done. Posts go up every couple of days, so lots of fresh content. That coffee cup visual is an accurate reflection of the content. I was imagining a manic, Type A blog kick-boxing its way through cyberspace. In fact, it’s essentially a ‘What I did’ diary that records the everyday niggles and triumphs that characterise life with children: vans that break down just as you’re planning a holiday; the trial of back to school shopping expeditions and so on. It’s all pleasant stuff, if undemanding.

Depending on where she wants to go with her blog, something to consider might be a bit more development of some of the themes she raises. For example, http://jjecolsen.blogspot.com/2007/08/different-looks.html tackles a subject of great interest to a lot of women – why men on the whole prefer their partners to have long hair. Judging by the comments she got for this post – the ‘stinking men’ one made me chuckle - the topic arouses strong feelings. She could do a lot more with it.

Similarly I was intrigued to note that she really enjoys shopping with the children for their school uniforms. http://jjecolsen.blogspot.com/2007/08/school-shopping-ya-poo.html If I told friends I enjoyed shopping with my children for their school stuff, they’d lynch me and it’s something I’d simply assumed was universally loathed by everyone. Again, it’s a topic that might be worth developing because she has a different take on the subject.

Best and worst:

Super design. No real worst. At a personal level, the Christianity, though prominent in the sidebars, didn’t dominate the content, which I find a comfortable arrangement.

Blogrollworthy:

I’d certainly consider coming back to this one, if only because I’d love to know where the kickboxing comes in! She has an interesting perspective on aspects of family life but I’m not sure she realises this. If she takes a step back once in a while and maybe looks at writing about a few more of the ‘whys’ in her life, rather than just the ‘whats’ she might end up with something quite special.

Score:

Blog Review: Real life

The Blog: Real Life

The Reviewer: Omega Mom from 3kidsnojob.

First impressions: 'Real Life' burst on to the screen with its intriguing title and lovely flower picture. As a mother of three children, real life is something I seem to experience a lot of, sometimes to excess. I'm also a music teacher, so I was also drawn by the author's nicely written personal profile which describes her as a voice and piano teacher.

Then I came across the first of many references to Jesus. As a committed agnostic, religious blogs aren't something I'm naturally drawn too. To cut it for me, and for any casual reader who doesn't share the beliefs of 'Real Life's' author, this blog was going to have to work extra hard. When I'm reading, I want entertainment, not a sermon, however well-intentioned. So I was a little apprehensive, wondering which of the two I was going to get.

Design: I liked this very much. A lot of thought had gone into delivering a blog that was easy on the eye and, crucially, easy for the new reader to follow. Pictures were plentiful and well laid-out, links were quick and well organised, the sidebar was nicely arranged and the posts easy to find. There was also plenty to do - music to listen to and a competition to enter. Again, it was struck a good balance: energetic without being over-crowded. I had just one thought: new readers like me need easy access to the back story, so having a few more posts on screen without pressing the 'older posts' button might help.

Content: It's a nicely written blog with a straightforward, unpretentious style that's easy to read. Sentences are short, points clearly made and the author is obviously blessed with a good sense of humour when it comes to recounting the lighter side of family life. There's a nice post – How to get great customer service that anybody with young children can relate to, about how using your offspring tactically can guarantee you good customer serivce.

I also enjoyed 'Playing with Fire' a laugh out loud account of man's desire to set a match to anything remotely flammable 'that's just sitting there waiting asking to be burned'.

These general, family-life posts were few and far between, though, and no wonder. The author notes that, 'I always want my readers to see Jesus first,' and it's therefore unsurprising that the bible features a lot, whether through direct quotes or commentaries on different passages used to offer a perspective on everyday life. You either like it, or you don't and with lots of awards from and links to like-minded groups and individuals, it's clear that Real Life is a popular and well-regarded read with a predominantly Christian audience.

Best and Worst: The design was excellent. The content, for me, could have done with more of the funny family anecdotes and less of the direct religion but, given the author's strong Christian faith, that's unlikely to happen, in which case I suspect that she'll mainly be preaching to the converted.

Blogroll worthy: For me, no, solely because of the religious content. For any Christian out there keen to leven a hard-core religious message with humour, I suspect it's a must-read.

Score: Because of the above, I found it a hard blog to rate. I'm going for a six, though, because the design and the nice writing style which kept me going long after I'd normally have given up.

Do you want your blog to be given a no-hold barred, honest review? Sign up here.

Feature Post

Cut Flowers

Written by Omega Mum from 3 Kids No Job

Get married and the words ‘for ever’ trip off your tongue and up into the ether like silver bubbles of air in a top-lit seascape.

Nothing in life can prepare you for eternity, though in my case double maths with Mr McC, - a teacher so dire that we ran competitions offering a night out with his cardigan; second prize, two nights - came close.

While we juggle with the infinite nature of the universe, we’re evolving into creatures so full of self-interest and deficit in concentration that gazing at anything other than our own navels is rapidly becoming a task of almost insuperable difficulty...

Click here to read the full post

Cut Flowers

Written by Omega Mum from 3 Kids No Job

Get married and the words ‘for ever’ trip off your tongue and up into the ether like silver bubbles of air in a top-lit seascape.

Nothing in life can prepare you for eternity, though in my case double maths with Mr McC, - a teacher so dire that we ran competitions offering a night out with his cardigan; second prize, two nights - came close.

While we juggle with the infinite nature of the universe, we’re evolving into creatures so full of self-interest and deficit in concentration that gazing at anything other than our own navels is rapidly becoming a task of almost insuperable difficulty.

Yet we still propel ourselves into happy ever after unions blessed by officialdom and nourished by dreams, sex and fairy stories.

It’s like those battery advertisements where all the little toy rabbits beat a toy drum in unison, a confident welter of pink fluffiness. One by one, as the batteries fade, the confident drumming dies away.

‘For better or worse’ stops tripping off the tongue so easily once you’ve spent countless days checking the children for triple sixes while, once again, your husband calls to say he’s been held up at the office by a fifteen way international satellite call when you both know he’s got his feet up on the desk, open beer by the laptop until the bedtime ‘all clear’ sounds for the night.

My parents did their best to put me right on fairytale endings and castles in the sky. They saw creating a make-believe world for the very young as a waste of precious time and effort. Father Christmas had my mother’s voice and my father’s mocking laugh and the tooth fairy never had the right change.

And they taught me early on what really happens in marriage. The muted cross-border exchanges of fire in undertones. The escalations and stand-offs. The failed treaties. And then, war.

My siblings and I would sit on the staircase and listen, then go in and beg my mother to get a divorce.

“Why stay with him?” we’d ask.

“He makes me laugh,” she’d say.

We grew up and out of their house, its four suburban walls too small for our hopes. When we visited, my father, coiled in his chair like a serpent, would greet us like interlopers.

“Why stay with him?” we’d ask my mother.

“I feel sorry for him,” she’d say.

He developed leukaemia. There was nothing they could do. His face, always gaunt, shrank like boiled washing over the bones which rose up, tectonic plates under the skin.

We came back, my sister, brother and I, to share the weight of the responsibility like pallbearers.

One day, I arrived home. My father was asleep.

“He’s been out,” said my mother. “He’s tired.”

“On his own? Where?” I asked.

She took me into the living room. An enormous vase of flowers spread green, embracing arms towards the walls.

“He bought them?” I was incredulous. In my father’s eyes, cut flowers ranked with crossword puzzles for pointlessness.

There was a card, too.

“Thank you for everything. With love, Leo.”

At the funeral, we followed the hearse to the cemetery. My sister wore long black gloves and dark glasses and looked, said my mother, more like the grieving widow than she did.

My mother died two years later. “Why did she stay married to your father?” people would ask. And I couldn’t answer, because I still don’t know. But after over a decade of marriage, maybe I can start to guess.

Blog Review: Tangocherie

The Blog: Tango Cherie
The Reviewer: Omega Mum from 3 Kids No Job

Let me be honest. As a non-dancing and infrequently-traveled UK citizen, reviewing Tangocherie, a blog written by a dance-mad expat US citizen living in Argentina, was always going to be a challenge. Shared interests aren't a given with blogs, of course. I suspect everyone has chanced upon something light years away from his or her own life only to find amazing and wholly unexpected insights. So I was ready to be gripped.

First impressions: Where are the posts? It's not immediately clear and takes time to find out. You get the description, which is concise. You want to see more. You see the post titles, click on one, wait, scroll down, down, down and down a bit more and finally you get paydirt - but you certainly have to be willing to dig through the assorted logos first. Somebody in a hurry would probably give up. So at the moment, it's a blog that takes a while to get into.

Design: As somebody who's still working on importing pictures correctly, I'm in no position to pass comment on the design. But, obviously, that's not going to stop me. The upfront section is very overcrowded. You need either a really strong design to lead you into the blog or the first post up there and waiting - which, on the whole, makes life easier for the reader who doesn't want to be hanging around.

I like the use of photographs. They make this blog. And where some of the technical language could make it a little inaccessible, they really were worth a thousand words, possibly more.

I had a bit of a margin issue. It's not a problem if you read the blog in Firefox, where I'm told there's a reasonable 2 cm margin. But view in Internet Explorer and you jitterbug right to the end of the page and screech to a halt just by the background - which isn't that easy on the eye. A little space would work wonders. It might also be sensible to put in some sidebars to incorporate some of the page clutter, or add bits and bobs to the footer of the page, not the top, so those all important blog entries are quicker to find.

Posting frequency: Tangocherie posts fairly regulary. There were 12 in June (to 29th) - so certainly a reasonable level of new content.

Content: What I want from somebody who's an expat is a blog that conveys something of the excitement, bewilderment, annoyance or sheer difference of being somewhere that's not home. It's amazing how many ex-pat blogs set in fabulously exotic locations seem to take their whinges from home, pack them up, ship them them out with the luggage and then put them proudly out on display for blog readers. Yes, we want to know that you're a real person - but we want to know what your new life has to offer. Otherwise, the location becomes irrelevant. That's not the case here. Tangocherie certainly gives you a sense of being away from home - but I think it's something that could be made even stronger.

Topics include waiting - it's always fascinating, especially when you're English and therefore born to queue - to know how good other nationalities are at waiting - so I enjoyed 'Line of Dance' (June 8th) which was about a whole day spent in different queues.As you might expect, there was also a lot, lot, lot on dance - but the lady is a dance teacher, so it's to be expected. I also enjoyed 'Night of the Milongueros' (June 22nd) which was a nice description about how the dance tradition lives on.

One plea. Can we have more labels and more definitions. A definitions text box to a sidebar would help here, or a link on the main page to a page of definitions. That's especially true for words the non-specialist might struggle with. If you're a tango enthusiast, you won't need them, but if I'm following Milongueras back through the blog I need the promise that somewhere there'll be something that tells me who they are. It just makes things easier. At the moment, I think this is a slightly specialist blog - I may be wrong, but my hunch is that it's a must for tango lovers but a bit marginal for the rest of us. And if that's what Tangocherie wants to do, I'm sure she'll be really successful. But more posts about what the place is like - on the lines of 'Line of Dance' - would broaden its appeal for the rest of us and bring readers flocking in.

Best and worst:
Best - The use of pictures really made the blog for the non dance expert like me. I also enjoyed the glimpses into every day life in Argentina that pulled you up short - like the ATMs routinely running out of cash.
Worst - The design. But it wouldn't take much (remove clutter, make access to the blog quicker and easier) to sharpen this up.

Blogroll worthy? Would I come back: Yes, I think I would. I may not be a dance expert, but I'm fascinated by daily life in Argentina. And if Tangocherie cares to deliver some bite sized morsels now and again on this area I'd be happy to make the trip over.

Rating out of 10:At the moment, probably only a must-read for the fanatical tango enthusiast, but pepping up the design and including more general content will do a lot to broaden its appeal to the non-specialist reader and turn it into an all-round fascinating read.