"The Little I Saw of Armenia"

Since I have returned safely from Yerevan, a few background notes might be in order for anyone planning a trip there:

Armenians are an ancient, charming and deeply cultured people whose mountainous homeland lies in a strategic location in the South Caucasus. Consequently, they have spent much of the past 2,000 years having the cr*p kicked out of them by their larger and more aggressive neighbours. But do they hold a grudge? Well, yes, actually. Few conversations pass without one's interlocutor checking that one accepts the Armenian Genocide of 1915 as a historic fact. Dropping the (true, in my case) fact that one's grandfather served at Gallipoli is a useful ice-breaker, surprisingly.
"You mean your grandfather killed Turks?"
"Yes."
"You are friend! Have brandy!"
Do not, under any circumstances, order Turkish delight.

The Armenian population consists of delightful, exquisitely groomed women and larcenous looking men who always manage to achieve 2-days' stubble. The men turn out on the whole to be super chaps once you've had a drink with them and clarified your position on the Armenian genocide, however. Men and women alike stay strikingly slim through a combination of a traditional diet, chain-smoking and inadequate public transport.

Armenia's economy consists of two main activities - making alcohol so strong it can strip paint, and generating nuclear power. In an earthquake zone. I said it was nice, not safe, OK?

Yerevan will be a beautiful city when they get round to finishing it. Until then, a combination of large areas of building site and strong mountain winds mean that walking through many of the streets gives a passable impression of what it's like to walk through a desert sandstorm. One slight surprise was the affection that people feel for the Soviet Union. Many of the older buildings still proudly display the hammer-and-sickle logo of Cap Scott 'Scottie' Scott's personal masseuse*, and I even saw the red banner flying at one location. One of my Armenian colleagues explained the background to this as being that after the genocide, the choice offered to the Armenian people was "Join glorious Bolshevik revolution and stay alive for foreseeable future" or "Have a Turkish pasha drink raki out of your skull." Your live skull.

Actually, one possible reason for the long-term oppression of the Armenians did appear - their habit of putting the pepper in a shaker with a single hole and the salt in one with multiple holes. one can imagine a Turkish governor, having just put pepper on his chips once too often, flipping out.

Armenians drink. In their favour, they produce excellent brandy, exquisite red wines (Areni is rather pleasant) and very passable beers (I recommend kalikia for drinking with food and kotayk for achieving rapid oblivion**). So when one goes out with Armenians, what do they order? Apricot vodka; which - as its name suggests - is made from apricots and industrial coolant. And they don't just drink, they toast. "Let us drink to our foreign guests" (glasses clink, vodka goes down in one, there is a collective gasp of pain from the foreign guests and a struggle to focus). "Let us refill our glasses and drink to world peace!" (same routine again). "To the beauty of women!" (etc etc - I trust you'll forgive me if I fail to remember some of the later toasts). Then you all start calling each other "X-jan" which either means "dear-X" or "gullible British berk" depending on what impression I made on them.

I am already angling to go back at the earliest opportunity...

* See Dr Linstead's "The Wounds of Capt Scott 'Scottie' Scott" (Delhi, 1947) Vol 38 - "Superficial-Metaphorical-Political (Treasonous)-Blonde ladies in uniform"
** Old Russia hands will be pleased to note that Baltika is also available, though the billboard adverts for it pose an interesting semiotic conundrum - they show a baltika bottle and a young Russian lady with her blouse partially unbuttoned. The message could be either a) "after twelve bottles of baltika, all women will appear like this!" or b) "after twelve bottles of baltika, you too will be incapable of doing up buttons like Svetlana here!"

The precocity of my offspring - 3

Do other parents have conversations like this?

"Do you want me to read you the synopsis of Act II of Goetterdammerung, or a baby book?"
"Act II of Goetterdammerung, then a baby book, Daddy!"

This came out of the fact that when I picked her up from school the other day, Act III of Siegfried was on Radio 3 and took her fancy (the bit where Brunnhilde wakes up and starts going "Heil dir Sonne, heil dir Tag chiz chiz" like some demented soppy girl in a Molesworth story). Anyway, I went to the bookshelves and found dusty and long-untouched copies of Ernest Newman's 'Wagner Nights' and a Wagner biography which had a synopsis of the Ring cycle, and started reading an act a night as part of the bedtime story session.

And yes, The Ring makes a great kids' story. My mind started wandering (just call me Der Wanderer...) and imagining what Beatrix Potter, Enid Blyton or Dr Seuss would have made of the plotline. Doubtless my attempts at extracts will follow at some point.

Why all Western women are total rubbish...

Ooh - got your attention there!

I write in a rare state of suppressed fury and burning indignation, hence my willfully provocative massive overstatement of a title. In my defence, I have been provoked:

Last week in one of the papers there was an article by some Canadian bint complaining that all British men are rubbish. Today it's the Daily Telegraph saying all men are boring:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/portal/main.jhtml?xml=/portal/2008/06/11/ftmen111.xml

Now the Canadian woman I understand and almost sympathise with; she had evidently come to London having built a fictional London in her mind based on Jane Austen's books and Hugh Grant's films, expecting to be swept off her feet by some Darcy-esque man, only to discover that fictional characters are, well, fictional. But having said that, it's still her fault that she had unrealistic expectations. She probably was also labouring under the common misconception that the mere exoticism of her being Canadian was going to count as a big plus. Now while I like Canadians as a general rule, including some of my own relatives who live there, her hopes were probably a bit on the high side.

The Telegraph article is, however, a piece of blatant sexist fundamentalism. And I do realise it's meant as a provocative opinion piece to generate discussion, incidentally. This woman starts from the arguably true but trivial notion that men and women communicate differently, and instantly leaps to the conclusion that therefore men are wrong and inadequate for, umm, being men.

Why is it always us who are deemed to be wrong, automatically and without right of appeal?

Now personally, I have opted out of the whole morass of social crappiness that this woman describes by marrying an Asian woman. This means several things:
1) I can be appreciated for my few adequate qualities as a husband and father without an endless list of unmeetable demands being laid on me;
2) My social life revolves largely around Indonesian and Anglo-Indonesian families, who don't go for the 'boy-girl-boy-girl' seating plan interminable dinner party. Instead, we have large free-form buffets with tribes of kids charging around, and the women chatting in one room while the men chat in another. Try it some time - it's a far pleasanter experience than having to chat to a crashing bore that a well meaning hostess has plonked next to you. And yes, prattling women are as boring to us as we are to them.
3) I don't have to listen to some wretched Bridget Jones-ish British woman whingeing on me endlessly as a fixture of my home life.

There used to be a certain stigma attached to white men with Asian wives. Perhaps there still is and I've just given up noticing. Anyway, it used to be a commonly held belief that white men acquired "mail-order brides" (which, incidentally is not a true description in our case or any of the mixed couples we know, but there you have it...) because there was something wrong with the men concerned, rendering them incapable of having a functional relationship with a western woman. I am increasingly drawn to the conclusion that this is not the case; it's the general inadequacy and over-demandingness of western women that lead the men to 'opt out' of being continually told how crap they are by marrying a foreign woman who actually appreciates the good qualities of British men (and we do have some, after all).

Discuss. :oD

My boy's first word...

Young Guthlac has made me a proud man by saying his first word in Black Country dialect.
"Ah-goo!" he burbled at me the other day.
"Bostin'!" I replied promptly "How long ah-goo exactly was this, then?" but alas, answer came there none.

I am currently at work on a Bank Holiday Monday, but to my delight it is cold, grey and drizzly. *That'll* serve No Good Boyo right for going off on holiday...

But soft, who is this...

... running in a crouch behind a screen, evidently hoping that he can leap out and surprise me at the end? 'Tis No Good Boyo, of course, being the only person of my acquaintance who would think for more than a millisecond that a glass screen would hide his movements.

The words 'Yacky da, Boyo' are already on my lips as he leaps lissomely into what, unfortunately, turns out to be an ornamental pot plant.

Still, it passes the time, eh?

The reckless courage of guinea-pigs

As my regular reader knows, I recently lost a large tree. During the removal of the stump, a curious fox turned up to check out the proceedings. Now we've known for some time that we have foxes living in the woods at the top of our garden, and on one occasion we even saw it after dark examining the guinea-pigs' hutch outside our back door; but this was the first time we'd seen it in daylight. Our friendly neighbourhood stump remover offered it a sandwich, which it ate from his hand.
After that, it wandered over to say hello to the guinea-pigs. It has evidently done this a few times before, since the guinea-pigs showed no fear and came out to face it down from behind the safety of their bars. This raises an interesting issue of security versus freedom. Is it cruel to lock small animals up in hutches? Wouldn't it be better to allow them freedom to become someone's lunch? I trust you will now forgive me keeping them securely locked up.
I would not expect anyone to believe this story without photographic evidence:

Where have I been?

This is doubtless a legitimate question. Where have I been these six weeks?

In my defence, may I point out that I have gained a baby son and lost a tree. Young Guthlac Belvedere Pogenpohl "Thieving" Byard (not his real name) was born on 12th March, and has spent of the intevening fortnight soundly asleep or feeding, the sterling little chap. He is a fine boy aside from mis-matched ears and an unbelievably hairy back (the curse o'they were-boggy, young marster...Oi'll bring the torches). Mrs Byard survived the experience well and is now wandering around with the vaguely zombified expresion typical of the mothers of newborns.

As for the tree, one of the things which particularly caught our attention when we first viewed our house some years ago was the presence in the back garden of a beech tree at least 100 years old. The thing was so large around its trunk that three adults with arms outstretched and hands linked could just about manage to encircle it. It stretched over much of our garden and large parts of both next-door neighbours' gardens, rose to a height of over 50 feet, and weighed several tons. So you can imagine the mess the thing made when it fell over in high winds last Saturday, taking down a couple of smaller trees and parts of my garage with it.

Any mad woodcarvers interested in some enormous chunks of timber for free please add a message below...