Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

It still doesn’t quite feel like we’re actually moving. Normally, with two days to go we’d be in a packing frenzy, but in a magnificent stroke of luck the new job pays not just for moving men but for packing services as well. So all we have to do is winnow and wait.

Busytot is well into the spirit of things. “Guys! Moving Guys! Guys put all our stuff on the moving truck!” he says, and then comes up with some random exception. “But not the eggbeater/ cushion/ stingray/ rocking chair…” Every day something different. I don’t know what’s going on in his head. Does he want to transport one precious item himself, or leave something behind as evidence that we were here?

After something like a dozen moves in the last ten years, I’m really really enjoying not having to box the whole house up myself. Anyway, it’s karma. We’ve done more than our fair share of packing and unpacking recently. Back in New Zealand last August, we had two major tasks to take care of, both of which involved boxes by the dozen.

First up, we helped my father-in-law move out of the sprawling old family home and into a smaller yet airier house in a retirement community. Then we had to address ourselves to the huge pile of boxes we had billeted in Aunty Betty's garage when we set off overseas – for what was meant to be a short trip – ten years ago. Despite Betty’s kind protestations that our cargo was no trouble at all, we’d guiltily tried and failed several times to sort it out and slim it down.

Months later, I'm still reeling a little from the sheer focus it took to first pack up and move one life, and then unpack and discard another, all the while walking the line between efficiency and emotion. Packing someone else’s stuff is always easier, so the first job looked to be a relative doddle. We hopped off the plane and hit the ground running with only a few days to pack up before the Moving Guys came.

My main task was to box up various papers belonging to my late mother-in-law, Shirley Maddock, in a roughly archival fashion so they could be easily stored and easily accessed when necessary -- and by papers, I mean a vast quantity of research notes, letters, radio scripts, book reviews, and an unfinished book or two (one of them a beautifully written memoir that Shirley asked me to prepare for publication).

It was a big job, not just because there was so much material to identify and sort into folders and file boxes, but also because the temptation to stop and read was so strong. I kept encountering fragments of history that came alive in my hands.

Provincial repertory theatre in England in the early 1950s, all gas fires, greasepaint, and improvised costumes. New York in the late 1950s, with loving descriptions of hats and department stores. The excitement of starting New Zealand television from scratch in the 1960s. Pictures of Shirley signing her books in Whitcoulls. Accounts of literary spats and scandals. Baby photos of my husband. Reassuring e-mails from the two of us dated September 11, 2001.

(The latter were among the last of the papers, chronologically speaking. Shirley died a month after that day, just two weeks before her first grandchild was born.)

Very late on the last night in the old house, almost cross-eyed from my exertions, I finally dug down to the last layer and found a folder of radio pieces that Shirley had written twenty-two years ago. Magically, the first page that came to my hand was an account of moving into the very house we were just packing up. She wrote, in words both nostalgic and prophetic:

There can't be many less enviable tasks than packing one's wordly goods and transporting them even a small distance away. I could never have married into anything as restless as the navy, a bank or a troupe of strolling players. On our recent move, four strong men with two enormous vans laboured from seven in the morning until the opposing hour at night and, as the last item – a clothes drier – had been manipulated, to the sound of graunching metal and splintering wood, through a doorway from which the door had been unhinged – I determined that never again would I budge until the children insist their parents go meekly off into an old folks' home. And the children can pack.

And we did.

Then, having settled my father-in-law into his new pad -- not so much an old folks’ home as a handsome wee house in a well-appointed community of folks who happen to be old -- we addressed ourselves to the other pile of boxes, lurking balefully at the back of Aunty Betty’s garage. Oh dear.

Ten years was exactly the right length of time, I think, across which to gaze upon our former lives with clear and impartial eyes. What we saw was a pretty tragic time-capsule of student frugality (and prodigality) circa 1993. Shonky old pots and pans. Threadbare sheets and scungy towels. Acid-washed jeans and too vibrant silk shirts and jerseys. The sort of things you think, as you pack them up, "Well, might as well; wouldn't want to have to go out and buy new ones when I get back."

But most of it by far was books and records. Books by the thousand, and records by the dozen. I barely recognized the owner of the book collection, whose name (my name) was inscribed in most of the books. This made it easier to sell them -- you’ll find many of them at the Hard to Find Bookshop -- whereas once upon a time you couldn’t have pried a single volume from my cold dead hands.

Some I saved: vintage children's fiction, now ten years more precious, as well as books I could remember buying (or obliging people to buy for me). As for the vinyl, we saved everything local and special, and turned the rest into filthy lucre. To my shock, the Marillion and Pink Floyd I had scoffed at all those years turned out to be a secret goldmine.

All told, we whittled the pile down to six small boxes representing our pre-1993 lives. After all that deferral and denial, it was much less traumatic than I had expected. I think the time lag made it feel more like sorting out someone else’s stuff, someone I knew a long time ago. And, perversely or predictably, it was exhilarating and exciting too -- like getting all your hair chopped off and discovering you’ve got fabulous cheekbones.

And here we are again, shuttling bags to the bookstore and the thrift shop, palming off old toys on younger friends, shredding half the contents of the filing cabinet, recycling my awesome stockpiles of magazines (there's a year's worth of the Listener for anyone who can pick it up before Friday... or indeed, anyone who can pick it up, full stop; heavy stuff, paper).

It is a grimy, grubby affair, all this packing and unpacking, shifting and shedding, accumulating and dispersing a caravan of stuff. At the end of it all, there is dust in your hair, dirt under your fingernails, and a little bit of grit in your heart. Yet strangely, there are exactly as many things in the world as there were before, they’re all just in slightly different places. Isn’t that one of the fundamental laws of physics?

The clock is ticking here in Busytown. In just a week, we're leaving Manhattan and moving north. Only one and a half hours up the line, but to a much smaller town where, instead of simply stepping out the front door and saying "Bring it on!", we'll have to learn to make our own entertainment again. Like we used to. I’m sure it will all come back to me.

Living here is its own entertainment. The city has a way of coming right up to meet you, and then some: trespassing on your borders until it’s in you as much as you’re in it. If there’s a soundtrack to life here, it’s not Frank bombastically spreading the news, but The Jam -- “In the city there’s a thousand things I wanna say to you” -- or the Blams, “Don’t Fight it Marsha, it’s Bigger than Both of Us,” or the Ramones cover of that old John Denver schmaltzfest, Annie’s Song: “You! Fill! Up! My! Senses! Comefillmeagain!” (this last one tragically never recorded, nor indeed, as far as I know, performed).

It’s really in your face. You don’t need a big red arrow on a map to tell you: You Are Here. And then you leave, and the space where you were closes over immediately -- or is filled by a fresh-faced new arrival whose delighted gaze will descend, over the course of a year or two, from the lovely heights of the buildings and their stately water towers, to the gritty street, just as their first weeks and months of epic roving travels across the five boroughs eventually diminishing to maybe ten blocks in each direction. Even in the city, we’re all villagers to the end.

And yet to be a villager here is to be a citizen of something other than the nation the city is ostensibly part of. You’re an inhabitant of an idea, an experiment in mass civility. For the duration, anyhow. The city is yours, but you were never its; leaving is a one-sided breakup where you move out with a suitcase and the lover keeps everything.

I’m anticipating a period of, shall we say, adjustment. Maybe a year or so.

There are lots of helpful books about moving to the city, but not so many about how to leave it (fiction seems to be the preferred medium, or memoirs about the newly discovered joys of rural life). I’ve been looking for house-moving books suitable for Busytot, and found one particularly galling one in which a little girl and her dog move from a perfect little Rockwell town to the dark satanic metropolis, which they eventually come to love. What-evah! Of course they do. What’s not to love?! We need the opposite book, but it doesn’t seem to exist, the presumed desirability of small towns not being in question.

In the end, I made do with a Berenstain Bears number, in which the bears move from a small dark cave (come to think of it, not unlike our first New York apartment -- where the sun only shone between March and November, a sliver of light on the wall, there and gone in half an hour) to a truly spectacular turreted treehouse with a special room for Small Bear. I hope our small bear is not disappointed when he sees that his new house is merely a common or garden gingerbread Victorian with dormer windows and a detached tree out the back.

But life is change, and change is good. We’re not so much losing a metropolis as gaining a back yard, proximity to the ocean, and a kitchen almost as large as our last apartment. In fair exchange for bucolia, neighbourliness and fresh air, Busytot will have to wait all week to see his beloved garbage truck. On the other hand, no longer will I look up from the keyboard at eleven each evening, hearken to the infernal graunching and smashing noises from the street below and say, as I do every evening, "Ooh, eleven o'clock garbage truck, time for bed.” Our own little Lullaby of Broadway (more catchy versions here)... It drives me crazy, and I’ll miss it so.

And anyway, we’ll be back, now and again. Last year I was lucky enough to catch a one-woman play by Susana Lei'ataua (perhaps best know as a star of The Strip). Susana, who moves between New York, New Zealand, and London, has a stellar stage presence, and her poetic, impressionistic semi-autobiographical narrative of a woman living in a small East Village apartment far from home was riveting. "The old will be new again on the return journey," went the refrain that opened and closed the performance, and as someone on a sort of open return ticket, I think I know what she meant.

First task of 2004: seeing The Return of the King. I wanted to catch it as soon as it came out, but believe me, you have to call in a mountain of babysitting favours to see a three and a half hour movie, especially if you want to grab dinner as well. Thank heavens for the very understanding babysitting collective, who galloped to the rescue like the Riders of Rohan.

Assuming that the film was still playing to full houses, we did a cunning thing, and decided to see it at the Magic Johnson Theater complex just up the road in Harlem (opened in mid-2000 as part of a drive to commercially revitalise 125th St), instead of down at Lincoln Center or Times Square. This turned out to be a totally brilliant idea, for at least three reasons.

Firstly, with the enhanced orange alert still in place, 125th St seemed like less of a likely target for rascally terrorists. It’s not exactly crowded with tourists, especially at nighttime, and besides, the theatre is over the road from the excellently named Nation of Islam-run restaurant No Pork on My Fork.

Secondly – eschewing the porkless fork -- we could fortify ourselves for the long film ahead with the best fried chicken and fried pork chops in the world, or at least this part of it, at the charming M & G Diner on the corner of Morningside Avenue and 125th St. The corn biscuits are heavenly and the lemonade delish, but the jukebox and the sweet serving ladies are the best.

Thirdly, the brisk twenty-minute walk between our place and the theater was just the ticket for getting our wiggles out before we sat down, and for reviving our immobile legs afterwards.

Then there was a fourth effect I hadn’t bargained on: a totally different viewing experience from last time. Although we didn’t know this when we prudently booked tickets online before the show, we had the place pretty much to ourselves. The audience seemed to be mostly kids, including a very excitable pair in front of us, of whom more later.

When the lights went down, instead of the usual witty little film about switching off your cellphone, we were treated to a personal message from Magic himself, welcoming us to the show, reminding us to "respect our community theater," and stipulating no hats, no (gang) colours, no guns.

The admonitions seemed ridiculously outdated – as far as I know, the latest gang shooting in the neighbourhood was a strictly, er, family event at an Italian restaurant in East Harlem, when one chap objected to another chap hectoring the after-dinner soprano.

Still, Busytot’s dad sheepishly removed his black fedora, and I checked my pockets while having a flashback to the time we crossed the US-Canadian border and the customs guys asked if we were carrying anything “for our personal protection.” Er, tampons? I offered, while my companion muttered something about condoms. Turns out they meant hardware, if you know what I mean.

Hats doffed and weaponry stowed safely under the seat, we sat back to enjoy the show. Everyone else sat forward. Unlike the reverential hush you get downtown, with plenty of supplementary shushing for anyone who dares utter a word, this small crowd had plenty to say. It was like being in amongst the enthusiastic groundlings at the Globe Theatre, and once I got used to it, I loved it.

It was partly that people were explaining events to anyone who hadn't seen the first two films (or like me, couldn't remember much of them), but there was also a fair amount of ongoing backchat. Gollum was a particular favourite for derisive or approving commentary, but when brave Eowyn (spoiler alert!) heroically hacked off the head of the naughty Nazgul, the theatre went wild: “You go, girl!” And later, when Sam beaned Gollum with a handy rock, the kids in front of me collapsed in hysterical giggles. “You see that?!” They were stoked, and at the end, couldn’t stop talking about it. “Oh man, I thought this film would suck! But it was excellent!” they enthused. “Damn, I might have to go read the books now!”

Note: minor spoilers follow – just thought I’d better warn the three people in the world who haven’t yet seen the film or read the books.

I enjoyed the film as much as the kids did, especially the stirring pre-battle speeches and the set-piece fighty bits. Interweaving Pippin’s plaintive song with the massacre of the Rohirrim was a particularly gorgeous and Kurosawa-like touch. Cackling, mood-swinging Andy Serkis as Gollum continues to give the definitive onscreen portrait of toddlerhood. Once again, lots of excellent 70s hair on display (as noted here a year ago, and recently by Anthony Lane in the New Yorker and Charlotte O'Sullivan in the Independent), but frankly Aragorn wasn’t nearly as hunky once he got his hands on whatever shampoo it was that Arwen was advertising in her slo-mo soft-focus moments.

And yet. It feels deeply unpatriotic to even whisper a criticism, but certain scenes rang hollow for me -- like, say, the tower that tumbles and collapses in on itself at the end of the film. Yes, that’s generally how tall buildings fall down, but there’s no denying that it is a horribly familiar visual echo. Somehow, if it’s a bad (black) tower and there’s only one of them, it’s meant to be all right?

As Jonathan Romney points out (also in the Independent), either you buy this black-and-white universe of stark good and evil, or you don’t, and Peter Jackson has given us the gospel according to Tolkien:

The meaning of Tolkien's Manichaeism has been much commented on since the trilogy was first published, but given the mood of our own age, there's something not quite palatable about all these intrepid, largely beautiful Europeans boldly fending off the nameless, numberless hordes from the other side of the world, legions of dark-skinned sans-culottes with tribal drums. Hearing Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen) giving his rousing God-for-Harry speech before battle, calling the "men of the West" to stand firm, you feel that either this is a very nasty film altogether or that, more likely, Jackson simply isn't interested in the overtones.

More than once I found myself thinking, would it have killed the film-makers to render up a multi-hued Race of Men? Some elves of many colours? I know, I know, Tolkien’s Middle Earth is inescapably a ex-post-facto myth of Albion, but you don’t always have to be a total slave to period authenticity. If the hyperbolically inauthentic faux ancient Greece of Xena, Warrior Princess could regularly feature resplendently un-Aryan Valkyries and warriors, and stage productions here regularly cast good ol' Charlie Brown as a black man, you’d think Middle Earth and its audience could manage a dark hobbit or two. Possibly even a pretty orc here and there.

I also could have done without the drawn-out return to the luridly bucolic Shire, especially all that buxom heterosexual business of winking and smirking and fiddle-playing and generally settling down and getting hobbit mortgages. Poor old moony Frodo, throbbingly yet triumphantly abased, like the exiled Oscar Wilde, moaning in extremis “Either that ring goes or I do,” while writing the Ballad of Mt Doom and stroking his unhealed wound in a kind of masochistic rapture... but with no-one in the Shire to appreciate his particular damaged glamour. No wonder he has to hop a boat for the west with twinkly old Gandalf and the ambiguous elves.

Oh sure. Frodo’s not in the least bit gay and neither, of course, is Elijah. In fact, there are no sexual subplots at all, let alone secret diaries about them.

(Actually, on a related note, I’m still grumpy about the potentially very sweet Love, Actually, which didn’t manage to come up with a single plotline that was not totally straight or driven by male desire – and, come to think of it, whose only self-actualising female character is pretty much indistinguishable from Shelob, the comically voracious

giant spider in LOTR:ROTK. Grrr! At least Phillipa Boyens and Fran Walsh admit to being fully and humorously aware of the dodgy sexual politics of the LOTR source material they had to work with).

But I digress. Indisputably, the film works beautifully as spectacle, and there are some cute film in-jokes: there's a visual reference to The Good Son, the cheesy kiddie noir film Elijah Wood did with Macaulay Culkin quite some time ago; and the bit where Sam clocks Gollum with a rock was straight out of Heavenly Creatures.

And I did shed a tear of pure empathy at the scene that really makes this a classic New Zealand film. Not the lighting of the signal fires along the Southern Alps, with aerial shots recalling that 1970 split-screen classic "This is New Zealand" with the uplifting Finlandia soundtrack. I'm talking about the moment that wraps up what I think of as the brain drain sub-plot.

The conquering hobbits, having traveled to the ends of the earth and saved the world from certain destruction, are celebrating with a quiet pint in the pub -- when suddenly their achievements are totally eclipsed by the arrival of an impressive vegetable. Such a familiar scenario: there you are, fresh off the plane, downing a cold one with your old mates, modestly admitting to having cured cancer or taught yoga to Madonna or climbed Mt Everest while you were away, and suddenly everyone’s all “Oooh, look at the giant pumpkin!” ...

It's Christmas Eve in New York as I post this, and pouring with rain outside, but the outlook for Thursday is promising: seasonal flurries of snow. Even a teensy icing-sugar dusting of flakes would do the trick. This year is a special one for us, as every other Christmas we've managed to be out of town, and next Christmas we won't be living here any more. So this is our first and last celebration of the day itself in NYC, and we're going to town.

I must say, Christmas with a two-year-old is crazily good fun. Last year Busytot was largely oblivious to the fuss, but this year he's Santa's little helper, especially now that he knows the drill in our online-shopping, far-from-relatives, postie-dependent household. Greet the delivery man or postie-lady at the door, grab the parcel, shove it under the tree, then run in circles round the lounge caroling "Big Surprise! We got a Big Surprise!"

The sacred tree in question is a small, perfectly formed spruce, which cost a bloody fortune and which Busytot worships like the good little pagan that he is. O Tannenbaum, indeed. Every morning he greets it reverently, offers it a drink of water, and ceremoniously switches on the lights: "Shall we shall we shall we shall we turn it ON?" It's lovely. The highlight of our evening walks is tree-spotting and admiring the coloured lights wound around the fire escapes and in the windows -- last night Busytot serenaded a star made of fairy-lights with a piping rendition of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star -- and then we get to come home to our own little twinkling tree.

Christmas dinner this year will be a highly ecumenical affair, a Kiwi-American-Jewish-Pakistani spectacular, with a roast lamb at the centre of it all -- that's something everyone agrees on, or at least everyone of a carnivorous persuasion -- and for afters, the diplomatic triumph of both a pumpkin pie and a passionfruit trifle. We may be on orange alert (actually, the city never went off it, so what are we now, neon orange?) but we can still enjoy ourselves, dammit.

And now a present for you, dear readers: some gorgeous seasonal writing to mull over with that cup of mulled wine or glass of chilled beer. Set aside time to read Chris Cole Catley's moving and astonishingly vivid reminiscence, fifty years on, about the sober Christmas of the Tangiwai Disaster -- be sure to have tissues at the ready. And Zadie Smith pulls a magical riff out of a crumpled, stained old black and white photo of Christmas past (since it's in the NY Times, free registration required). Over in the Guardian, Helen Simpson whips together a contemporary Christmas Carol, and Michael Morpurgo has penned a bit of a weepie, supposedly for kids but I enjoyed it.

Happy holidays all round. May you spend them with the ones you love, and love the ones you spend them with.

The question is, what kind of a self-respecting spider-hole hideaway doesn’t have any books in it? Not even some old Readers’ Digest Condensed Books, or a pile of desiccated New Yorkers from decades past, or a couple of well-thumbed paperbacks featuring one of the Jameses, Bond or Herriot? I’m appalled.

Well yes, there were some books upstairs, according to the Washington Post: "a book on interpreting dreams, volumes of classical Arabic poetry titled Discipline and Sin, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment," the latter surely a plant by some well-stocked soldier or journo with a sense of humour. But no reading matter in the hole itself, which is where you'd really need it. (Strangely, in the kitchen, among everything else -- eggs, cucumbers, marmalade, spam, and Lipton tea -- some "kiwis." Were they Zespri, do you think, or some northern hemisphere brand? Just another postmodern branding opportunity...)

Anyway, if you’re lining up your own reading list before settling into a snug holiday hidey-hole, the year-end lists of Best Books are showing their seasonal colours. The avid book fiends over at LeafSalon have some good links to various lists, and the Listener has a long and eclectic list of its own. Tooting my own horn for a second, a few of those recommendations were written by me, as was a recent review of four books by New Zealand writers.

Actually, as originally written, that review began with a rant about treacly, meaningless, or downright stupid back-cover blurbs (not unrelated to Chris Hunter’s sharp piece on book cover design a few months ago). It's my little hobbyhorse -- more of a Shetland pony really -- but honestly, in this batch of books there were a couple of corkers that really set me off. I know it's not always easy to wrap up a book in one tasty paragraph, but it shouldn't be that hard. Between underwhelming boilerplate, typos, and utter howlers, the authors are playing uphill from the get-go: "An unashamed celebration of family, friendship, and above all, hope" -- oh thank goodness, not another ashamed celebration of etc. "A delightful story of pain and loss" -- look, who writes this stuff? And how can we make them stop?

The thing is, most of the front covers were lovely, Kelly Ana Morey's Bloom especially. Gorgeous piece of design, that, and a fine novel.

Speaking of righteous curmudgeonliness in the book department, I was moved to hear that wizard of the hour Sir Ian McKellen always reaches for the Good Book when he arrives in a new hotel, as reported (free registration required) in the New York Times:

Sir Ian took a puff of a Marlboro Light and smiled like a serene party host. "I can't wait to get into bed," he said. One aspect of his hotel room already felt like home: he had ripped the anti-gay passage Leviticus 18:22 from the Gideon Bible, a ritual that lets him sleep more soundly.

What a naughty old bugger he is, and I mean that in a wholly affirming way. While applauding his direct action approach, I wouldn't necessarily advocate book vandalism myself. Sometimes the best answer to language that offends is, precisely, more language -- rather than censoring idiocy, let it stand and add your own marginal notation to the conversation. On the other hand, I once had a rather terrifying encounter with someone who had done just that to an innocuous library book I was reading, and had filled the margins with increasingly chilling and paranoid comments of a misogynist and child-hating nature. Ick. Hard call.

Alternatively, if you have a lot of time on your hands, a picture is worth a thousand words. Remember making little animated flipbooks by carefully drawing a stick figure in the corner of each page of a paperback, so that when you rapidly flip the pages, the little person turns a cartwheel and disappears off the edge, or explodes, leaving behind only a speech bubble saying “HELP, I’m a raving homophobe”? The Gideon Bible and hotel-room ennui were made for such idle, rewarding pleasures.

Some more best books, rewarding pleasures all. Busytot and I have been enjoying Bob Kerr’s sublime picture book After the War. It’s not new -- it was first published in 2000 -- but it is timeless and ageless, and every home in New Zealand should have a copy of what is, in effect, a pictorial history of the postwar years. The deceptively simple story tells of a tree planted by the narrator’s father when he returns from the Second World War. Meanwhile, the clear and charming pictures, labeled in five year intervals from 1945 to 2000, depict the tree growing as the world around it changes and the soldier’s daughter grows up.

Every time I look at the book I notice something new: the soldier’s grandson fixing up the old car and driving off (to university?); the slips in the deforested hills, which are eventually replanted with pine; the city expanding on the distant horizon. The interior scenes are especially delightful, with tiny changes in the kitchen mirroring larger changes in the world: home-made preserves give way to wine glasses and bottles of olive oil; the kettle changes shape and a microwave appears. And each time I get to the page where a storm fells the tree and the old soldier disappears from the story, I have to wipe away a tear.

There are subtle ambiguities that enrich the book: is the soldier Maori? And what about the boy the daughter brings home? It’s not clear. The endpapers show the landscape of the story before European settlement. It is a densely forested place with a pa in the distance (on the scoria cone that becomes a quarry in later years), and perched on a branch in the foreground is a perky saddleback -- the same bird that will appear on the supermarket calendar for 1999, by then a near-extinct icon of nativeness. Still, the book ends on a hopeful note, as the family plants a kowhai tree that tempts the tui back.

I also just finished Terry Pratchett’s newest novel, Monstrous Regiment. If you twig to the allusion in the title, then the book’s many revelations won’t come as a complete surprise, but you’ll still find much to ponder on and plenty to admire in this cunning satire on the art of war. Pratchett’s idiosyncractic alternate universe grows ever closer to our own, and this book is his most serious yet, without sacrificing his trademark wit.

If you've never read Pratchett, his

particular genius is in following a bunch of amiable characters through a major development in modernity -- the printing press, the police, the death of religion, the forced democracy of urban life -- in the process producing a stealthily brilliant people’s history of the last thousand years or so. This is not satire designed to outrage -- he’s not proposing eating anyone’s babies -- but one that illuminates and defamiliarizes conventional pieties. He also writes lines to make you snort coffee out your nose ("Klatchian Rare Roasted! When a Pick-Axe Is Not Enough!"), which is always a good thing.

I did a fair amount of coffee-snorting while reading No Touch Monkey: And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late by Ayun Halliday. Last year, Halliday blew the whistle on parenthood in The Big Rumpus. A fringe theatre veteran who found herself up the duff and off the job market, she nailed the masks of comedy and tragedy above her new domestic life and carried on regardless. The parenting book is equal parts slapstick and heartbreak, always with her amiably klutzy, try-anything-once, what–the-hell self at centre stage.

In this new book of cautionary travel tales, it becomes voyeuristically clear that Halliday earned her staunch parenting stripes on the backpack trail. Who could be fazed by a barfing, wailing infant, or the stress of ferrying two toddlers through the wilds of Manhattan, after having survived a beating at the hands of a mad madam in the red light district of Amsterdam, or battling fierce thieving monkeys while working off the effects of ganja milkshakes? The travel war stories are all good, and this gal has been -- and been in trouble -- everywhere, from Romania to Rwanda, Kho Phangan to Kashmir.

What I liked most, though, were the author’s wry reflections on the

pursuit of the authentic tourist experience (a contradiction in terms if ever there was one). Long after the fact, she laments stocking up on Trade Aid style wooden salad servers in Tanzania, instead of pouncing on a solitary soup ladle made from a can of name-brand toilet cleaner. True, the latter would have made a more memorable souvenir; and yet she still has the story, which is in the end the thing you want to bring home with you. Definitely a book for the incorrigible traveller —- current or recovering -- in your family.