Not exactly a spoiler to say there’s a scene in the Doctor Who Christmas special (which I watched, not in the approved behind-the-sofa position, but on the edge of my seat hanging on every word, oblivious to the wet Boxing Day unfolding around me) in which Eleven discovers that there are fish flying around in the fog and says something like:

“Who invented boredom? Ridiculous. How is anyone ever bored?”

Reminds me of “So high, so low, so many things to know!” from Sherkaner, in A Deepness in the Sky. This universe! The attention to detail that went into it! Fantastic. Would choose to live again!

Sarah, who is, in fact, my sister: Did you think of a holiday achievement plan with checklist items like “Play mahjongg,” “Drink Bailey’s” or “Loll around aimlessly”?

Me: …um, no?

Sarah: So basically, you set yourself up to fail.

Me: I’m sorry, but have we MET? Do you even KNOW ME?

5.30am: Woken by jetlag, exuberant offspring. Authorize watching of TV. Turn over, go back to sleep.

8.30am: Scalding shower, followed by leisurely bacon and eggs.

10am: Father arrives to whisk us away to sister’s house.

11am: Elevenses. Lemon sugar crepes with stone fruit salad.

12noon: Three games of mahjongg, in which I prevail mightily.

1pm: Swimming, watersliding, gossiping with mother and sister, getting royally sunburned. Exuberant offspring noticeably more confident in the water this year.

3.30pm: Ice creams and film (“Despicable Me”) at the Playhouse. Resolve to be more evil, execute more cunning schemes.

6pm: Three games of mahjongg, in which I am hopelessly defeated.

7pm: Dinner straight out of Enid Blyton or C S Lewis. Roast chicken, ham, eggs, four kinds of salad. Mince pies, Christmas cake, shortbread, chocolates. Lashings of tea.

8pm: Three games of mahjongg, in which my empires are overthrown and my enemies revel in the lamentations of my women.

9pm: Exuberant offspring bathed and shoehorned into their pyjamas.

Metres swum: 400
Words written: 500

And so to bed.

Words: 500. This is hard.

“Mama!”

“What?”

“You can’t eat Julia.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t you love her?”

“Yes! And I love ducks, too. They’re delicious.”

“Don’t you love her to hug and kiss?”

“…you could hug and kiss a duck.”

“Mama you can NOT EAT JULIA.”

“I thought you said she was really annoying?”

“She is! But that doesn’t mean you can eat her!”

“I think the real question here is, Do you love your baby sister?”

“…yes.”

“To eat?”

“No!”

“To hug and kiss?”

“…yes.”

“Even when she is REALLY annoying?”

“…yes.”

Kilometres run: 1.5
Metres swum: 150
Words written: 506

“I’ll most likely kill you in the morning.”

Claire, as we prepare to get off the plane: What does feminist mean?

Me: Oh my god, Claire. Feminism is the belief that women are human.

C: …but women are human.

Me: *expressive shrug*

C, firmly: People who don’t think so are crazy.

Me, risking stinkeye from fellow passengers: We don’t use that word, honey. It’s not fair to people with mental illnesses to liken them to non-feminists.

In Sydney. It is, as everyone has already said, way too cold to be Christmas. Best moment so far: Ric saying “Lovely to see you too.”

The beautiful old house has been sold and we are staying in the flat, which is full of pleasingly familiar furniture and paintings, and also offers far less plummeting scope to (for example) five-year-olds with no sense of their own mortality and absent-minded people who just turned eight. (I find this lack of peril restful. Our family has a strict no-pummeting policy.)

Oh, that reminds me, new blog feature.

Q: How should I invest my retirement savings?

The eight year old replies: Why not just retire straight away?

Email your questions to yatima@gmail.com. Happy Doctor Who Christmas Special Day to all!

This is one of the nicest things you’ll read on the Internet. Maybe ever. I am the starfucker that zooms through with a bottle of Bailey’s at 8:06pm. Keep reading; it gets even better after that.

We miss you, Douglas Adams.

Once there was a girl. Isn’t there always? When this one was very young and not very clever at all, she thought she wanted to be very truly run after, like Old Man Kangaroo. She was a little bit lazy and a little bit vain. She thought it would be nicer to be loved than to love, because somebody else would be doing all the work. When she was only a little bit older, along came a person who did all the running, just like in the story. He chased and chased and chased.

But despite everything she wasn’t sure she wanted to let him catch her. She had noticed that his jokes were a little bit too angry and his unguarded expression a little bit too sour. She was always trying to cheer him up, and it started to tire her out. Still, flattery counts for a lot. And he chased and chased and chased her, which no one else had ever done. And she was actually quite lazy and quite vain.

When things were going well for her, she tried to be sweet to him. And then for a while things went very badly for her. And he was still running and running and running after her. And when she fell over, he picked her up.

She was very tired indeed by that time, so she didn’t run away.

It took years to clean up the mess.

All those years later, when she finally reached a clear patch in her life, she was walking across a mall between two office buildings one day, and she said to herself, What do I want now? A face came into her mind. Its jokes were not angry at all. Its unguarded expression was one of keen interest.

This time she was quite sure. And that’s when the good part of her life began.

Don’t plan an overseas trip with two children right around Christmas; don’t do it. I’ve done this often enough now that my words should carry some weight. I was doing all right until yesterday, when things blew up at work, and now I am numbly swathing toys in three-year-old wrapping paper, drinking tea and contemplating the task of packing for three weeks in another hemisphere. It is 10.15pm.

The ultimate first world problem is probably the anticipation of missing one’s bad-tempered fourteen-year-old cat. The Germans have a word for that, right? There’s nothing wrong with her except her long-standing anger issues and her regular winter gimpiness. Her coat is good, her eyes are bright, her teeth are sharp and she is as curious and opinionated as ever. But she is nearly fifteen, and one day she will die, and I will be inconsolable.

Worse things happen. I know.

This is kind of a weird one for me because I try to drip-feed the donations all year rather than scrambling to find cash at Chrimble. But! If you do get a wodge of checks from rich aunties, here’s where I’d send ’em were I you:

Partners in Health

Oh, God, Haiti: earthquake AND cholera? Please try to stay out of trouble in 2011. Paul Farmer’s organization was the first medical team on the ground. Your money will SO not be wasted here.

Fred Hollows Foundation

Yes, I know, I don’t like what he said about gay men either. But he’s dead, and his organization can restore sight to the blind for $25.

Kiva

What I adore about Kiva is that the entrepreneurs PAY ME BACK. My original donation to Kiva has increased about fivefold. Suck on that, puny S&P-linked index fund! SUCK.

TBfriends

In hard times, luxury goods are the first to go; even when the goods in question have a brain and a pulse. 2010 was a terrible year for horses. Joe Shelton runs the most admired, humblest, most efficient and effective rescue in Northern California.

EFF

When the geek rapture transcends us all and I am finally re-instantiated as software that is able to grok group theory, EFF will take the place of all the above organizations. Until then think of your donations as a sort of digital 401(k).

Also, find your local hospice. One day you or someone you love will need it. (This year my local hospice turned out to be in Florida.)

Also consider getting on the Bone Marrow Donor registry. My darling friend Jen’s badass donor dude is doing the do on the 28th, so keep her (and him!) in your heart.

Also, if you’re a person who can give blood you should give blood, especially if you’re a special snowflake O Negative like meee!

Another no-contest. A Place of Greater Safety is crazy-wonderful and amazing, but Wolf Hall was the first. About 200 pages in, I was no longer Rachel sitting in front of a novel. I was Thomas Cromwell walking to the Palace to meet the King.

That, in case you’re wondering, is why I read.

The life so short, the craft so long to learn.

All ladybooks. And it’s not like I didn’t read dudebooks all year; I did. It’s just that the ladies were all, oh, freer and looser and madder. They were all resurrecting the dead and overthrowing the state and having relations with animals. They were appropriating true stories and speaking with the voices of drunks and historical personages and even First Ladies! They were taking bold risks and those risks were paying off! Dudes are going to have to step up if they want to write like the ladies. You should read any of these but ideally all of them because they are each of them intricately constructed WORLDS UNTO THEMSELVES. So brilliant! Kudos, ladies!

Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

A Japanese photographer assigned to Nagasaki after the bombing said this of the scene he surveyed: “I tried climbing up onto a small hill to look. All around the city burned with little elf-fires, and the sky was blue and full of stars.”

Blame

Patsy MacLemoore came to on a concrete shelf in a cell in the basement of the Altadena Sheriff’s department. Her hair had woken her up. It stank.

She had said she would rather die than come back here. She’d said that both times she’d been here before.

A Place of Greater Safety

The child particularly presented an insoluble problem. It seemed inaccessible to the processes of legal reasoning. He smiled at it, and it learned to smile back; not with the amicable toothless grin of most infants, but with what he took to be a flicker of amusement. Then again, he had always understood that the eyes of small babies did not focus properly, but this one – and no doubt it was entirely his imagination – seemed to look him over rather coolly. This made him uneasy. He feared, in his secret heart, that one day in company the baby would sit up and speak; that it would engage his eyes, appraise him and say, “You prick.”

The Haunting of Hill House

The only person in the world she genuinely hated, now that her mother was dead, was her sister. She disliked her brother-in-law and her five-year-old niece, and she had no friends.

The Little Stranger

I wasn’t a spiteful or destructive boy. It was simply that, in admiring the house, I wanted to possess a piece of it…

Niagara Falls All Over Again

Though both men are rotten marchers, they make it to the altar, where a minister opens a Bible in a chiding way; because there’s no good reason to be late to your own wedding, even if the bride is a pony. Which she is, a chubby, sway-backed roan pony whose hindquarters keep shifting – she’s not thrilled about the match either.

Bear

She sucked in her breath and waited; then, when they were close to the dock she saw that what she had thought was true: the house was a classic Fowler’s octagon.

“Wow,” she said.

“Pretty fine, isn’t it?”

“It’s not mentioned in the textbooks. There’s an index of houses like that.”

“Oh, we’re pretty cagey, up here…”

Blackout / All Clear

For a moment after the siren started its up-and-down warble, Polly simply stood there with the stockings box still in her hand, her heart pounding. Then Doreen said, “Oh, no, not a raid! I thought for certain we’d get through today without one.

We did, Polly thought. There must be some mistake.

American Wife

Have I made terrible mistakes?

Room

Eggsnake is more longer than all around Room, we’ve been making him since I was three, he lives in Under Bed all coiled up keeping us safe.

I read some stinkers – Solar was self-pitying crap! I Don’t Care About Your Band actually made me feel sorry for some douchey dudebros! That ain’t right! – but this was no contest.

…the bestselling books in the world are poorly written, erotic fan fiction that a man wrote about himself.

Ugh.

As usual, the number ten is completely arbitrary. Honourable mentions go to Logicomix, Plenty Enough Suck to Go Around, The Indian Clerk, A Final Arc of Sky, The Marketplace of Ideas and Imperial Life in the Emerald City. But the following are all GREAT BOOKS.

Somewhere Towards the End

If you don’t have an old lady friend who is willing to be completely honest with you, that is a great misfortune, but this no-bullshit memoir by Diana Athill should fill some of the void. She is excellent on sex, race, writing and the indignity of growing old. She also wrote this unsparing article on her decision to move to a nursing home. It is all essential reading for aspiring crones.

River Town

I raced through everything else Peter Hessler has written this year as well, and consider him my most reliable informant on China – Country Driving is especially awesome on the manufacturing towns – but River Town is the place to start. Hessler’s two years as a Peace Corps English teacher in Fuling, on the Yangtze, sets the context and introduces some of the characters who will reappear in his other books. Peace Corps sounds like murder, by the way. In a good way. Sort of. My friend Fred and his wife Susan are in Armenia right now. Something to think about for my post-sprog, pre-crone years?

Mountains Beyond Mountains

Do you like yourself? Do you feel good about your place in the world? Mountains Beyond Mountains will fix that! I have an occasional series on my professional Twitterstream (yes, I have a professional Twitterstream, I told you my life was absurd) called Inspirational Badass of the Day. Farmer’s schtick is the preferential option for the poor – ie, that we should treat all human beings as if they are human, not just rich people. REVOLUTIONARY STUFF. Between the earthquake and cholera, Farmer – whose Partners In Health was the first medical organization on the ground in Port au Prince – has amply earned his title of Inspirational Badass of the Year. He’s kind of an asshole, and a wiseass, too: one of his books on institutional poverty and the collusion of Western powers is called The Uses of Haiti. I love him. Go give some money to PIH. God knows they could use it.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks

OH HOLY FUCK this book made me sob like a little kid. Gender, race, cancer, grief, Big Science, poverty, families, the reporter’s responsibility to the truth, our responsibility to each other. My America, in all its fucked-up glory, from Wired to The Wire.

The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters

My America’s dark mirror. Progressives who suggest that there is nothing to choose between America and North Korea (yes, such people exist) find themselves on my shit list in short order. The USA is unquestionably fucked up, but there is no possible excuse for ignorance of conditions in North Korea. If you think you’re a hero of the resistance because you launched a DDoS attack on Mastercard? You really need to swallow your fucking ego and study some survivor testimony. Just sayin.

Nuclear Rites

What a surprise and pleasure this book was! Exemplary, imaginative anthropology field-work in the early nineties in Livermore. The nuclear test as a rite of passage for nuclear scientists. An anti-nuke activist turns himself INSIDE OUT trying to understand his own dark mirror. In my opinion this is what our great big monkey brains are FOR.

Songs of the Gorilla Nation

The much better neuro-atypical memoir about animal behaviour; also magnificently insightful on sex work, orientation, gender identity and parenthood.

The Language of Blood

The book that had me sitting at my favourite table in Atlas Cafe, waiting for my mechanics to finish an oil change, with tears running unchecked down my face, crying my guts out for a South Korean housewife I never met.

Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers

I really am a death-obsessed little crypto-Goth, no? I can’t believe it took me this long when everyone I know adores Mary Roach. With good reason, as it transpires! Her little asides crack my shit up. Funniest book about human remains since The American Way of Death and The Loved One.

Winter Season

Department of Redundancy Department! See also Joan Ryan’s Little Girls in Pretty Boxes, for the gymnastics and figure skating side of the All Beauty Is A Tool Of The Patriarchy story. Oh, young girls and your aspirations! Like Chum in shark-infested water! Christ.

Today we will learn about feel. This is another important skill in riding that I have been wrong about all my life. Turns out it’s not about keeping your hands still relative to the horse’s withers. It’s about keeping your hands still relative to the horse’s mouth.

Play along at home! You will need:

• 1 seven-year-old girl with long hair, or similar

If you don’t have a seven-year-old girl, find your most over-scheduled and under-slept friend and borrow theirs.

Now, take your seven-year-old girl. Pick up a strand of hair from each side of her head. The strand should be about the thickness of a rein (that’s 15mm for civilized people, five-eighths of an inch for Americans.)

Ask your seven-year-old girl to throw her head about like a cantering pony.

You need to maintain the exact same gentle, consistent pressure on her hair. Too loose and the pony will run away with you. Too tight and the pony will get angry and buck you off (and your seven-year-old girl will speak sharply to you, or cry.)

You may notice that this is impossible, and requires precognition! Keep working on it. I am.

Jeremy: “Obama will have betrayed us all if he doesn’t declare a National Day of Mourning for Delicious.“

God-daddy G: “i don’t know why she needs a godfather when she already gets advice like “there has to be a way to overthrow the plutocracy without being a horrible rapey douchebag”. You HAVE TO LEAVE ME SOME WISDOM SPACE!”