Another visit to the Estonian embassy. Sleet showers this afternoon made me very happy about my newly-bought umbrella. No Internet this afternoon/evening (it only came back 5 minutes ago) and I felt totally cut off from the world!

Minor panic this morning as I found out that Ingrid’s passport won’t get here in time for our trip to Sweden. Then a frenzy to figure out some way to fix this, and a visit to the embassy.

As time goes by, I seem to be gravitating towards simplicity and purity, without expressly having decided to do so. It just happens naturally and slowly, as small choices accumulate.

I’ve been a vegetarian for over 14 years. (For a while I occasionally ate seafood, but haven’t done it more than once a month or so for the last few years.) While I was never a heavy boozer, I used to have a drink now and again. Even before the pregnancy I had become less fond of alcohol, and the pregnancy gave me a reason to stop completely. Since then I haven’t had any drinks, apart from a small dash of sauternes on my ice cream once, and half a cup of glögg. I don’t miss it at all.

A few years ago I used to wear perfume regularly, and sometimes even a little bit of make-up. Almost-empty bottles of my two favourite perfumes have been languishing at the back of the bathroom cabinet for years. I don’t have the heart to throw them out, even though I never use them. I last wore make-up for a friend’s wedding in 2003. For a long time I used to think of getting a tattoo; now I cannot even imagine piercing my ears because I feel it would break something that is currently simple and clean.

I am less and less fond of buying and owning things, of being surrounded by things. Every time I have to buy something that then has to take up space in our flat, I do so reluctantly. I feel an urge to purge, to throw things out, to give stuff away. (Not books, though. Books are different. And plants are good, too.) I think this may be part of the reason why I like digital things – a blog instead of a diary, digital photos, a digital job. It doesn’t clutter up my surroundings.

I don’t really know where I’m heading with this post or what to make of this… I’ve just been thinking about this for a while and wondering where this is going. Maybe I will end up living on a deserted island or on a mountaintop, surrounded by lots of nothing. And books.

Went to Spitalfields market with mother and Ingrid; bought dried apples and mangoes. Hunted for a fresh copy of the Sunday Times for her on the way back. Mum cooked home made canelloni for dinner for us.

I have a weakness for funny movies about con men and audacious heists: The Italian Job (the new one), The Thomas Crowne Affair, Ocean’s Eleven, Catch Me If You Can etc. I haven’t read any books of the sort, as far as I can remember – until I read The Lies of Locke Lamora.

I found the book via the Stockholm SF bookshop’s listing of new books, totally unaware that it was voted the top SF book of 2006. I guess I should take a look at the rest of that list.

Locke Lamora is a thief who steals because he enjoys stealing and just plain likes to cause mischief. His career starts at the age of 5, and by the time he’s adult he is the head of a small gang of thieves. All the other gangs believe them to be normal small-time thieves, but in reality they plan and execute large and complex scams to trick the rich. The gang has amassed far more money than they can spend on anything, especially since they make sure to keep a low profile. Partway through the book Locke accidentally attracts the attention of the wrong kind of powerful people (who are also fighting each other) and spends the rest of the book struggling to survive.

Even though Locke is a thief, he’s got a strong moral sense and it is not at all hard to sympathise with him. It helps, of course, that he is daring and funny and inventive, has total confidence in his abilities, and always succeeds. Other characters get relatively little attention. Character isn’t the book’s strong side: it’s all about setting and plot.

The setting is the lively city-state of Camorr. It’s a fantasy city, but relatively similar to our world. It’s sort of a mixture of Venice and Sicily and Victorian London: highly-organised gangs of crooks in a city of islands and canals. Shark-infested canals. For local colour, add a dash of alchemy and a lot of violent entertainment.

The plot is tight and fast-paced. I found the beginning chapters a bit annoying because Lynch cuts frantically between Locke’s childhood and the present time. It was too chopped-up, MTV style, for my taste. I kind of got the impression that Lynch was unsure if he could keep the reader’s attention otherwise. (He shouldn’t have worried.) On the other hand, several reviewers really liked this structure.

The entire book is a page-turner, in the very best sense of the word. I could hardly put it down because I wanted to find out what would happen next – and it was always something inventive. The action got very violent and bloody in places, yet unlike Follett Lynch doesn’t go overboard when describing these scenes, and they do fit in with the general atmosphere and the plot. And he balances these scenes with with abundant humour.
He also adds some very nice details about the city and the society, and pays great attention to detail, making even the slower sections very interesting to read.

Some plot turns are a bit hard to believe: just as in heist movies, Locke succeeds and survives where he really shouldn’t, but that’s forgiveable because otherwise there wouldn’t be a sequel. But now a sequel is very obviously on its way: some issues that seem central to Locke’s life are left unexplained, and others will need resolving and avenging. Nevertheless the book is fully enjoyable on its own: where some books leave you hanging at the end, annoyed that the sequel isn’t available yet, this one just made me glad that I have more to look forward to.

My favourite passage, that excellently summarizes both the tone of the book and the character of Locke:

“Some day, Locke Lamora,” he said, “some day, you’re going to fuck up so magnificently, so ambitiously, so overwhelmingly that the sky will light up and the moons will spin and the gods themselves will shit comets with glee. And I just hope that I’m still around to see it.”

“Oh, please,” said Locke. “It’ll never happen.”

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

Preparing for my imminent re-entry into adult society, I sorted through my clothes today and packed away everything I had bought for the pregnancy.

Even though my weight is down roughly where it was before, it seems to have been redistributed somehow: more than half of my clothes were too tight around the waist and hips. But luckily the remainder fits, some of them even better than before. So I have at least enough business-casual clothes that I can go to work without a desperate shopping trip: two pairs of trousers and three skirts. And most of my shirts still fit as well.

The question I am asking myself now is, is this permanent (which would necessitate some shopping in the medium term)? And if not, when will I revert to the old shape – when I stop breastfeeding, or when I start getting some exercise again? Oh how I look forward to some cycling and yoga…

Ingrid had her first night with a single meal (not because she didn’t wake more, but because I’ve decided that she doesn’t need more. My mother is visiting and we all took a long walk to Tate Modern to see the the slides at Tate Modern.

Inspired by The Happiness Project, I’ve created a new category for quick mini-summaries of my days. If I keep them really really short, I should be able to post one every day without much effort.

Five months yesterday.

What have we done this past month? Ingrid has chewed and licked on a lot of things, above all. Hands. Toys. Spoons. Front bar of buggy. Empty milk carton.

In order to be able to chew on things, she has learned to grip them and take them to her mouth. That’s still very much a hit-or-miss procedure – her hand literally misses the thing she wants to grab, or misses the mouth and hits the ear instead. But she understands the concept, she just needs to practice. For now, it isn’t her preferred approach: she would rather dive with her mouth towards the toy than bring the toy towards the mouth.

For a while she was also interested in her feet and was pulling at them all the time, as soon as I lay her on the play mat. But then suddenly lying down became BOOOH-RING!!! and now she only accepts it grudgingly for short periods. She really wants to sit up all the time. And not in the same place all the time, please – she wants new things to play with or look at. Unfortunately she isn’t really able to sit up for very long without being strapped into something or other. Her toys, on the other hand, are not strapped in and tend to fall to the floor rather frequently, so sitting and playing in the highchair can be rather frustrating for both of us. But when I put her down to sit on the floor, where she can reach her toys, she sort of scrunches up into a little uncomfortable heap, and then topples. Sometimes head first and crying, sometimes just slowly and inexorably. Either way she ends up lying down, where she doesn’t want to be.

All this activity is upsetting her stomach – and it doesn’t help that she folds far forward (putting pressure on the tummy) as soon as she is sitting without some sort of support in front of her. She spits up food so frequently that I’ve stopped giving her a clean bib (and myself a clean skirt) after every mess. She gets two bibs a day. My skirts escape some of the messes and last a day or two before they get totally smelly.

Since the world is so new to her, the simplest things can be fun to watch. Me hanging up her nappies to dry. Me folding laundry. Me eating. The plants standing still and doing nothing. When she’s tired and I want her to wind down, I can park her in front of the washing machine, and she watches the clothes go round and round and listens to the soothing sound effects – or I put her in the bathroom and she listens to water gushing into the bathtub.

On the other hand, I believe she’s beginning to get bored with her limited range of toys, and I don’t have much else that she can play with without hurting herself or the object. It needs to be easily grippable, small enough that she can grab any random part and get another part to the mouth, and have no sharp points or edges. Some of the local leaflets and booklets here advertise toy libraries, which I guess work just like book libraries. I think I’ll try to get to one next week, and see what they offer.

I read in a blog that today is Mother Tongue Day (emakeelepäev) in Estonia.

I feel my mother tongue slipping away, ever so slowly, as I get little daily exposure to Estonian. It used to be that I didn’t ever need to think about grammar or wording. Now I find myself unsure. Can I say this? Is this a real Estonian expression or am I just translating from Swedish or English?

And all those new words they come up with all the time. “Jätkusuutlik”, and “tasalülitus”. Or perhaps they always existed but I never read texts with such fancy words as a teenager?

Nevertheless, at some very deep level Estonian remains my mother tongue. I couldn’t speak any other language with Ingrid without it feeling forced and false. I am Estonian; it is natural that I speak Estonian with my child. I hope she grows to like Estonian and won’t find it frustrating that she has to speak a different language with me.

Resolution: I will start commenting regularly on the Estonian blogs I read. I will pipe up as soon as I can think of something (anything!) to say.