I forgot my gel-filled bicycle seat cover this morning and couldn’t be bothered to unlock two doors and walk up 4 flights of stairs to get it. So I went without, and it wasn’t comfortable at all. To think that I managed to do this daily for years. Middle-age softness is taking over.

Ingrid is now indeed back to her happy self, except with more walking and talking. Well, more moving around and making noises, in any case. Even though what she does looks nothing like what I would describe as crawling, she really is reaching the stage where I cannot leave her unattended for long because she can easily end up in a place that I hadn’t planned, chewing on things that really shouldn’t be chewed on. More work for me, less frustration for her. (Although an endless stream of “No, you really cannot chew on that” and “No, don’t play with that” might get frustrating after a while as well.)

This happened faster than I thought. Most of the changes in her habits have happened faster than I was prepared for, really. Eating solids. Going to sleep without crying. Standing up. Moving around. It’s rarely a smooth process – one week she doesn’t, and the next week she suddenly does.

Oh, and I almost forgot: I believe she realised today for the first time that she can pull herself up all on her own by holding onto things. Not quite to standing yet, just onto her knees, but she laughed with joy. (Until now I’ve pulled a bit and she’s pulled a bit and together we got her up.) Of course she picked the strangest time and place for this discovery: in the bathtub, during her evening bath, pulling on the FAR edge of the tub… slippery and unsafe, and very un-ergonomical for me, but apparently a lot of fun for her.

It is so lovely to see her joy of discovery.

Ingrid was more talkative than ever today. She has been rather quiet until now, no babbling like I would have expected from a baby. But tonight she was making all kinds of new sounds all the time.

She has been really dissatisfied for the last few days, whingy during the day and sleeping lousily during the night. A phase, I thought to myself, hopefully a short one. Perhaps this language explosion puts an end to that phase.

For almost 10 years now, we have been keeping track of all our expenses. We started with a single Excel spreadsheet but in 2001 we switched to an Access database. Later I added an Excel front end to it so I could get some nice charts, and this year I wrote a new front end in .NET for easier data entry.

Geeky? Yes. (We’re talking about an accountant and a programmer here, after all.) But also useful and interesting. Which probably just proves the point about geekiness.

This chart shows our total spending on absolutely everything. You can see when I graduated and we moved to London in 2001… our costs more than doubled. More interestingly, though, we seem to have found a steady state since around 2002. Our salaries go up and down (mostly up, luckily) but the annual total expenses have been surprisingly stable.

We group all the individual items into around 25 categories. The tall dark red bars in the middle are for rent and utilities (insurance, electricity, heating). This category accounted for around a quarter of the total in Stockholm, and for around half in London. London is expensive.

The turquoise bars near the top are for travel. This is almost exclusively made up of holidays and flights, not local transportation. This category also grew a lot after we moved, because we could now afford holidays, and also because of our trips back home, of course. It would be noticeably larger if bicycles weren’t our main mode of transportation.

The cream-coloured one-off chunk in 2002 is our wedding, and the pale purple at the bottom of 2006 and 2007 is a category titled “baby”. The dull pinkish red at the bottom of all previous years is entertainment – movies, exhibitions, concerts etc. The baby category has almost pushed the entertainment category out of existence, both in this chart and in real life.

I find this data useful because it helps me think about what we would and could do if our income suddenly dropped – if one of us had to leave our current job, for example. We could cut our expenses by 15-20% by not travelling. We could instantly cut another 7-8% by not buying music, movies, or books and by cutting out entertainment. Move to a smaller and cheaper apartment, and we’d be close to a zero monthly balance again.

It also helps me put things into perspective. Some categories are so tiny that you cannot even see them in this chart. This tells me that I can completely stop worrying about how much I spend on them, because no matter how I splurge, that spending will be dwarfed by the real black holes. Furniture? Bought so rarely that it adds up to a minimal amount. Snacks? Costs nothing, so ignore the cost and buy the juiciest-looking cake.

Another hot day, must have been 30 degrees in the afternoon.

Had lovely juicy fresh mango for dessert.

Bought some new clothes for the first time since Ingrid was born, including new pair of trousers. I have been looking for trousers that (a) fit me and (b) have colour, for about two years now. (Black, white, grey and beige do not count as colours.)

Bought a potty for Ingrid. She often poops just after a meal, and I thought it might be nice to not get that in a nappy every time. She totally hated sitting on the potty… not what I had expected.

This weekend we offered Ingrid some baby food with chicken. She accepted it with great pleasure, and ate with more enthusiasm than she has shown towards my lovely vegetable purées recently. I have given birth to a meat eater!

(I have been a vegetarian for almost 15 years now, and Eric well over 10 years. I may eat a piece of fish occasionally, especially when we’re abroad and vegetarian food is hard to find, but that happens maybe once a month on average.)

The chicken smelled kind of gross, actually… I don’t think we’ll be buying that again any time soon. She can eat all the meat she wants at the nursery, but I’m not going to let any of that stinky stuff into my house if I can help it. This first time was only because the nursery staff will not experiment with food: they won’t feed her any kind of food that she hasn’t tried before. Now that she has tried chicken, she can eat some of their standard lunches. Once we’ve tried fish and pasta at home, she’ll be able to eat most (if not all) of their baby menu.

I wonder why she liked it so much, though. Possible explanations:

• They put some mysterious addictive substance in the baby food, that isn’t on the label. Like sugar.
• She just likes meat.
• She liked the more complex flavour. That jar contained more ingredients than three of her home-made meals do together.
• She liked the spices.

I think it may be time to get a bit more adventurous with her food. Mix it up, add some spices.

Picking elderflowers in Weavers Fields for some home-made cordial.

My first encounter with David Mitchell was Cloud Atlas: a strikingly unconventional and well-written book.

Black Swan Green is nothing like Cloud Atlas. This is a conventional book telling the story of a normal young boy: Jason, aged 13, living with his parents and older sister in a village in Worcestershire (in the middle of nowhere, that is). It deals with the usual early-teens anxieties: growing up, fitting in, the puzzling creatures called girls, etc. There is also a fair bit of English 1980s nostalgia, with references to pop music and other products of that time.

Jason struggles more than most boys at his age. He starts the game with two handicaps – he writes poetry, and even worse, he stammers. (But he only stammers if the word begins with an N or an S, so he thinks one sentence ahead and rephrases it to avoid those words. Which, of course, doesn’t work when he is asked in maths class how much 9 times 11 is. When that happens, Jason chooses to appear stupid rather than stammer.) The struggle to be popular, or at least not get beaten up or called gay or laughed at, takes up a lot of his energy. The petty cruelties of his friends are compounded by the equally petty quarrels of his parents. But the tone of the book is nevertheless positive, and Jason is never whiny. Throughout the book he slowly matures, growing a backbone and some character.

It’s not a fabulous book, but still a pretty good one. There is a believable character, easy to sympathise with, a fair amount of humour and a lot of raw honesty. There is enough happening to keep the story interesting, and it’s well enough written. But on the whole it just seems relatively… ordinary.

The main shortcoming was the boy’s “poetic” descriptions of things around him. He jumps too abruptly between teenage slang and this overblown self-conscious lyricism. On the other hand, that may be exactly what a 13-year-old with literary aspirations might produce. I don’t really know, I haven’t read anything actually written by a 13-year-old with literary aspirations.

Here’s a representative sample:

In my parents’ creamy bedroom I sat at Mum’s dressing table, spiked my hair with L’Oréal hair mousse, daubed an Adam Ant stripe across my face, and held her opal brooch over one eye. I looked through it at the sun for secret colours nobody’s ever named.

Salon’s review told me something about the author that I didn’t know:

… the autobiographical tone of “Black Swan Green” could be false, another one of Mitchell’s uncanny impressions, but it writhes with a loathing that would be mighty hard to fake.

[…]

All this amounts to a damning portrait of the pettiness of British middle-class life and an excellent argument for why a sensitive, aesthetically inclined young man might run off to Japan (as Mitchell did). Though it’s less playful and complex than his earlier books, it also feels more emotionally rooted – even if the emotion it’s rooted in is a still-raw disgust.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.