He's just not that into you

I've never understood men. I was brought up in a very female dominated family and while I get women, I've never 'got' men. I don't understand what motivates them, what they are trying to communicate or any of the secret signs that some women seem to have an implicit understanding of.

So I was rather interested when a friend gave me a book called 'He's just not that into you' by Greg Behrendt and Lisa Tuccillo. Both authors have worked on 'Sex and the City' as writers and it's a frothy piece of work but the basic premise is that you should not waste your life and efforts on a man who basically is 'just not that into you' or think you can change a man to make him 'into you'. It just ain't gonna happen, so don't even try.

Three of us have read this book and all of us have had 'problems' with men. None of us is ugly (I flatter myself) and one of us is a shameless and incorrigible flirt who gets a lot of male attention as a result. I think I am the world's most useless flirt but find that I accidentally attract people I'm not interested in, whereas those I am don't even seem to know I exist.

The book tells you that if a man says he was too busy to call you, it's not because he is terribly under-pressure and important (I've made it sound rather English here but it's actually more New Yorkish) it's because - yeh, you guessed it 'He's not that into you'. If a man wants to be your mate, then again you are not going to convert this into a passion for you as if he was 'into' you, he would want to be more than your friend. Don't be fooled either by the 'I'm not ready' one because if he was 'into' you, boy would he be 'ready'. It also tells you not to ask a man out (as if!!) as if a man is 'into' you, he'll ask you and then you know he is.

I couldn't decide whether the book was depressing or liberating. It's depressing to think that it's all done and dusted in the first interractions and there is bugger all you can do about it. But it's liberating to think that you can save a lot of time and stop agonising about situations that are not going to reap dividends for you. Greg Behrendt spends a lot of time reassuring his female readers that they are beautiful and special and deserve to be treated well and should not twaste their time on men who don't treat them like they're special and gorgeous.

As someone who has spent not months but years on someone who didn't consider me special in any way at all and who I erroneously thought I could change by being somehow better myself, this last thought is attractive but somehow I can't quite believe it's possible. I can't imagine anyone at the moment thinking I was special or gorgeous. Indeed last night I dreamt that someone was in love with me (no one I knew) but he was constantly sneering at me and telling me that I wasn't doing well enough. At times he wouldn't even speak to me and I wondered if he was 'into' me at all. So you see, Behrendt's premise requires a huge paradigm shift for the walking wounded such as me.

His co-author Lisa Tuccillo definitely thinks the theory works:

'There is something great about knowing that my only job is to be as happy as I can be about my life, and feel good as I can about myself, and to led as full and eventful a life, so that it doesn't feel like I'm just waiting around for some guy to ask me out. And most importantly, it's good for us all to remember that we don't need to scheme and plot, or beg anyone to ask us out. We're fantastic.'

I am thinking I might bring out a rejoinder to this book called 'You're just an arsehole: what women are really saying'. If a woman buys you aftershave and deodorant she's telling you that you stink, if she offers you a mint or some chewing gum it means your breath smells, if she asks you if she looks fat in something, she wants you to bolster her confidence not look her up and down and tell her where her flabby bits are. Oh and if she says 'I'm really flattered that you like me but.....' she's 'just not that into you'.

Happy Birthday Patrick xxx

Patrick is 15 today. I remember the day he was born very clearly still. I was due on the 3rd January and spent Christmas looking like Babapapa. On the 4th the labour pains started and 24 hours later on the 5th Patrick was born by Caesarian section. It was a difficult and prolonged labour and I was exhausted but full of joy at bringing into the world such a beautiful baby boy. From day one he was a sweet natured, pearly, contented baby and he continued to be such and still is.

But at 15 he is also that hormonally deranged creature a teenager. So sometimes my lovely boy disappears and in his place is a grumpy, challenging slug who only a mother could love. And she does because I always know that this is just a phase, as hard as it is, that the boy I love so dearly and who is so special and precious to me is under there and will dispense with the slug. Today he kicked a hole in the wall and incurred my wrath (slug territory) but he also talked to me about Macbeth and enjoyed sledging down the hill in the snow. He is a conundrum but there seem to be lots around like him.

So we got together this evening and enjoyed a cake Flora and Mum made in the image of the moon on The Mighty Boosh. Patrick lit the candles (astonishingly the first time ever he had struck a match) and then in a moment of macho display put them out with his hand. I felt this said everything about boys of his age - the playfulness but the need to show that they are manly and tough. The challenge for me as a mother, particularly as a mother without a man in the house to help me bring up a boy, is to support and guide him so that these two sides to his character are melded in a way that will make him a good man who can love properly, live well, make the most his abilities and overall be a happy and contented person. As we lit the candles these were my wishes for my darling son.

L I N E and Y N EN J play Scrabble

Last night, somewhat unwisely as I was under the dual influence of alcohol and MSG, I challenged my friend Neil, who was visiting, to a game of Scrabble. I love Scrabble and feel I ought to be good at it. I have a reasonably good vocabulary and love words but the sad truth is I am a poor Scrabble player. For Scrabble, it seems to me, is less about words and more about seeing the opportunities and I'm usually too busy thinking about the nice words I could make to see that points mean prizes.

Thus it was that Neil had a less than thrilling Scrabble opponent, particularly as my brain was somewhat addled. While he was making words like 'it' and 'on' and getting high scores, I was struggling to score over 5!

There is a shaming precedent for the absolute trouncing I received last night at Neil's Scrabbley hands. A few months ago we took to playing one another at the online game. The beauty of this is that you can go away and think about your 'go' , playing for time in a way you couldn't possibly do in real life. After all you have such an amazingly exciting and full life that you don't have time for online Scrabble for goodness sake. Why, you have the supermarket to visit and may even have to go to the toilet.

The other beauty of the online game is that you can 'test' your more unlikely words as the programme will reject them if they are not bona-fide words. So if, for instance, you think 'mig' could be a word (or at least you think it bloody well ought to be as you have M I and G on your rack) for say the hairs on your arms ('Oh my, I was that afraid my mig stood right up'), you can just plonk it in and see what happens. The other joy of online Scrabble is that there is the potential for, shall we say, educating oneself in the privacy of one's own home, ie: having a quick peek at the dictionary without your opponent knowing (tee hee). Neil however was soon on to me, particularly when I started coming up with Arabic words for wombat urine, dialect words for agricultural implements and two letter words for fish spleens.

Despite my tendency to use the online game as an opportunity for 'self-improvement', I still lost to Neil on almost every occasion. Though it pains me to say it, he's a much better Scrabble player than me but what care I? I made mincemeat of him at Pictionary. My stick drawing of Kate Winslet on the Titanic will go down in gaming history - a triumph of communication over style.

Miss A needs to live for a day

I've been reading a wonderful book called 'Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day' by an author called Winifred Watson. It was published in the 1940s and is the story of how a dowdy spinster and unsuccessful governess Miss Pettigrew has her life changed in one day by a chance meeting with nightclub singer Delysia Lafosse. It is charming, frothy, beautifully written and insightful, one of those books which entertains so effortlessly that you hardly know you are reading it. I'd compare it to 'Cold Comfort Farm' or 'I Capture the Castle' - two of my favourite books.

Much is made of Miss Pettigrew being, oh my goodness, forty. At forty and not married it's clear that she might as well be in her coffin for all that is left of her life. There is much made of her age although in the end she finds happiness in a surprising way. Being over forty myself and feeling, yesterday at least, a bit washed up Miss Pettigrew chimed with me.

I was having one of my 'what will become of me?' days yesterday. I decided on a solo walk in the countryside to cheer me up but it had the opposite effect. I would have taken the children but taking Flora would have involved preparations akin to turning a tanker round and Patrick simply gave me one of his new withering looks. So it was that I found myself on top of the Downs in my wellingtons. I did enjoy my walk but unfortunately it did not empty my mind in the way that I hoped and I started to ruminate rather badly on the fact that I was a woman in her forties, on her own, unloved and undesired etc etc etc.

So I went home, cried a bit, read 'Miss Pettigrew' and took one of my tablets! Her Cinderella story seems a little unlikely but it did cheer me up. Perhaps I won't meet a nightclub singer who will transform my life but you never know, maybe this will be the year when Miss A lives for a day!!!!

Knitting - my New Year's Resolution

My relationship with the art of knitting has been a complicated one throughout my life. The experience of trying to learn to knit as a child was mainly an unhappy one yet I have always enjoyed watching others knit and harboured a desire to be able to master knitting myself.

My first exposure to knitting was the knitting sets an aunt used to send my sister and me. They comprised of a plastic container - more often in the form of a beehive (what else, bees are known the world over for their knitting prowess) - bendy plastic needles and some yarn. I would diligently try to learn but was hampered by my innate cack-handedness. Another aunt was an extremely good knitter, one of those people who take knitting to a more artistic level. However, not a patient teacher, she was frequently frustrated by my lack of dexterity. Her own daughters were, and are, very talented needlewomen and my aunt could not understand why I couldn't get it. The only person who could show me was my little Welsh grandmother. Her knitting was functional at best but she had the patience to show her awkward granddaughter what to do and found my clumsy attempts amusing rather than irritating.

What really put me off knitting were the knitting lessons at school. In hindsight, I suspect they only went on for a term but to me they felt interminable, an ordeal of humiliation and stress to be endured rather then enjoyed. The lessons were run by a stern old teacher called Miss Lyneham, who seemed extremely tall and rather forbidding to me at the age of nine. We were first told to select some yarn. I was a jolly but not terribly pushy child and found myself at the back of the queue for wool so that by the time I came to choose, all that was left was something stringy and off-white.

I gamely tried to knit my first square but it was clear from day one that I possessed no natural ability, unlike my friend who was on to a teddy while I was still trying to knit a decent teacloth! The lessons were purgatory, with Miss Lyneham inspecting our work and stalking around the room in predatory fashion as we sat there clicking our needles in silence. We were allowed to take our work home and every week I would bring mine to my mother who would undo my raddled knitting, wash the wool in a saucepan on the stove (I found the lessons so stressful that my clammy little hands would turn the already off-white wool a delightful shade of grey) and then knit it up again adding a few extra rows, though she herself was no great knitter. Every lesson, Miss Lyneham would look down her glasses at me and ask if my knitting was my own work. One only needed to look at the difference in quality between the my mother's knitting and the work I did in class to see that it patently was not! However I guiltily said it was and prayed not to be found out.

It was in my twenties that I really fell in love with the idea of knitting. Kaffe Fassett appeared on the television and I had an epiphany. Knitting is transpired could be artistic, edgy, a mode of self-expression far removed from my awful knitting lessons at school or the booties my aunt churned out for the latest baby. Kaffe may have been somewhat ambitious role model for a woman of my limited abilities but, optimistically, I was soon asking my grandmother to help me learn again. Inevitably my old knitting problems resurfaced. As I started to knit my work became tighter and tighter until only a pneumatic drill could move the stitches off the needle and I dropped so may stitches that quite often it looked more like crochet than knitting! I took to taking my knitting around with me, fancying myself as Kaffe of course. The result? Complete strangers would take pity on me and take my knitting from me to sort it out. So even if I didn't quite master knitting, I had some good conversations and quite a few rather nice rows added to my knitting. It was like Miss Lynham's class all over again!

In my thirties, my desire to knit resurfaced and again my grandmother tried to teach me. This time my knitting was a little better although still very tight. Eventually though I became despondent and gave up. So here I am a month shy of my 44th birthday and determined to knit once again. My dear Nan died a few years ago so I can't ask her to help me anymore. Last night my mother's friend, a very accomplished knitter, helped me. I was pleased to see that some of my Nan's lessons had stayed with me but it's clear I'm going to need plenty of practice, not least to loosen up a bit. I'm also taking advice from other knitting friends. Knitting has had a bit of a renaissance lately and is actually rather trendy. So again, I am seduced by the image of me sitting there with my knitting looking rather boho and folksy and in with the noughties zeitgeist of shabby chic and making your own. Anyone hoping to see me make something though will have a long time to wait. So far my knitting is a lumpy affair, all in garter stitch with a fair few holes! But who knows, by the time I'm 50 I might just be a proper knitter. Send your orders for scarves now but don't wait up!

This wonderful website proves that knitting really is an art-form.

When Jenny met Violet

It is a truth, universally acknowledged, that meeting someone you've only ever known via the internet is both foolish and dangerous. However, that's exactly what I set out to do on Monday this week. To put it in context, I didn't feel as though I didn't know the person. I've been in virtual contact with Violet Fenn for a few months now - sharing our thoughts on this and that, our experiences of life, the things that hurt and concern us and having quite a few laughs in to the bargain. Added to this I 'knew' her from Bad Mothers Club and Facebook and felt that if she really was a psychopath, she'd gone to enormous lengths to create an identity for herself (or even himself)! And what an identity; a highly imaginative, individual person with a delightfully different take on life, the universe and everything. I reckoned that designing a fake persona that included making the wackiest soft toys ever and enthusing over hyperbolic crochet and vintage fabrics was too much for even the most determined loony.

So it was that I suggested we meet at Birmingham New Street. I was incredibly excited about meeting Violet and as I stood waiting for my train I wondered if she'd look as I'd expected (I'd seen plenty of photos of her), what her voice would be like and began to panic that I'd invented a Violet I liked and that the real person I was about to meet wouldn't be 'her'. We exchanged a few excited texts from our respective trains and the Violet who was texting certainly sounded like 'my' Violet but my heart was thumping and I wondered how people coped with internet dating. At least the person I was meeting wouldn't have any of those expectations of me!

Violet arrived slightly before me as my train was delayed. As the train stopped for the third time outside a station, I fell into conversation with a young man opposite me. I explained what I was doing and he asked if I would recognise my friend. I told him she had a mohican hair style which was the cue for Violet to text me to say 'don't look for the mohawk'. I needn't have worried, I recognised her immediately and was so overjoyed to meet up at last that I flung my arms round the poor woman.

It was soon as if we had never not met. We talked ten to the dozen (we both talk far too fast) and spent the next few hours getting to know the real people behind the internet personas. Except the internet personas were the real people in our case and I really did feel I was meeting someone I already knew. The sort of person with whom I could admire lampshades , grope Anthony Gormley statues and try on the worst wigs ever (one that made me look like a sort of demented version of Vivienne Westwood - no bad thing in my humble opinion).

I didn't forget though to ring my mother to inform her that Violet was not a murderer bent on tricking me into meeting her/him at a station and whisking me to a den of vice and violence. Violet equally rang her partner to inform that, contrary to worries the day before, I was not a 20 stone trucker called Brian.

Knowing Violet 'virtually' had already enriched my life but knowing her properly has put the tin hat on it! We both said that one of the wonders of the internet is that you make friendships with people that a) You might never have met - certainly true in our case and b) You might not ordinarily have become friends with. We felt that, had we met in the conventional manner, we would probably have liked one another but there are so many people that you do end up liking that you would never have thought of as a potential friend before.

Of course this is the beauty and equally the danger of the internet. Just as you can be judged for what you say and think rather than how you dress and present yourself, there is also the potential for people to be something they aren't at all and trick the trusting or naive. A very dear friend was caught out in this way in spectacular fashion and this certainly preyed on my mind as I made the trip to Birmingham. But overall, making 'virtual' friends has been a boon and if nothing else makes you realise that there lots of people out there thinking and feeling the same things as you, enjoying the same things, laughing about the things that make you laugh, suffering and enduring in the same way and from whom you can learn a great deal and really open up your world. Provided of course they don't try to murder you first!

Aaaah humbug!

Dunstable, it has to be said, is not the most forward thinking or exciting town in the United Kingdom. At times I feel as though I've been mysteriously transported back to the 1950s or at best the early 80s. A friend says she can almost hear the duelling banjos. However, if there is one thing that Dunstable does really well it's the lighting of the Christmas tree ritual in the Square.

Children from the lower and middle schools attend with their choirs as well as community choirs like the Priory Church Boys Choir and Dunstable Ladies' Choir. They all 'process' from the Priory Church, through the Priory Gardens to the Square. In a rare show of people power, the police close the A5 for a few precious minutes to allow them to pass; I always find this bit rather moving as for most of the year our town is dominated by the inexorable activity of the A5.

Next we all sing carols with the Salvation Army band and then comes the lighting of the tree and the appearance of Father Christmas (thankfully not Santa Claus - I refuse to acknowledge him!). Every year we sing the same carols, every year we all cheer for our local schools and every year the Christmas tree 'fails' to light up and we have to repeat the countdown.

Come rain or shine, crowds of people turn up each year to do exactly the same thing and for many, including me, it's the start of the festive season proper. Many a year I've stood in the Square with rain dripping off my nose and soaking my carol sheet enjoying myself despite my soggy condition. Then I look around me and everyone is making the most of it, a rare sight these days.

Last year the event was made more 'exciting' by the addition of a celebrity to turn on the lights - a real life, bellowing celebrity in the shape of Brian Blessed. I have to say he was good value for money and probably louder than the two celebrities we had this year in the shape of Letitia Dean (Sharon from EastEnders) and Sooty. Now Sooty really needs to up the ante in the bellowing stakes, he didn't say a thing you know! Whether he was the real Sooty or a stand-in Sooty I can't say but the children present seemed to find him acceptable.

My days of attending the lighting are fast coming to and end as Patrick refuses to come with me anymore and Flora will soon grow out of it. There may come a time where I'll have to borrow a child to give me an excuse to go along. For the moment though I'll continue enjoying this very traditional start to Christmas time, which is one of the few things of which Dunstable can be justly proud. Indeed, it almost almost makes up for the awful shops (many closed down and festering with pigeon droppings), terrible traffic, lack of entertainment, chavvy nightlife and Arctic weather. Well almost!