Busytown by Jolisa Gracewood

"I don’t like the little ones," Busytot mutters darkly after spending a couple of hours playing with people approximately half his age (those one and a half year old whippersnappers). When I ask what inspired this Sauron-like pronouncement, he explains: "I just want them to talk proply, like me. Not like ba-ba-ba and da-da-da. Proply, proply, proply, like dat."

The boy’s still got a few language issues himself. He thinks pocket knives are for cutting pockets, and he called a halt to toilet training once he figured out there were no actual trains involved.

But he’s onto something. I like people who talk proply, too. And I wince when people talk, shall we say, malaproply. Which makes this a particularly painful election season.

Today, on the White House lawn, George W. Bush came up with this:

"I understand that -- what mixed messages do. You can embolden an enemy by sending a mixed message. You can dispirit the Iraqi people by sending mixed messages. You send the wrong message to our troops by sending mixed messages."

Got the message? "Ba-ba-ba." So as not to dispirit anyone, the President followed up with a completely unmixed message, a handy potted history of how we got where we are today with all the messy bits left out. It’s pol. sci. for the kindergarten set:

"See, 9/11 changed everything. September the 11th meant that we had to deal with a person like Saddam Hussein. Of course, I was hoping it could be done diplomatically. But diplomacy failed. And so the last resort of a President is to use force. And we did. And now we're -- we're helping the Iraqis.”

See? Or in other words, "da-da-da."

But the alternative isn’t exactly inspiring. I like big words as much as the next almost-three-year-old, but the orotund John Kerry just doesn’t know when to stop. I worry that it’ll end in tears... on November 2nd. Kerry’s speeches are magisterial, grandiose, long-winded pontifications, packed full of redundantly unnecessary verbalizations of a largely superfluous nature. And that’s the short ones.

Kerry has come out fighting in the last few days -- accusing the President of "colossal failures of judgment" -- but who knows if this new-found ability to get to the point will win him back the ears of his countrymen. In a recent piece in the New Yorker, Philip Gourevitch captures the perverse appeal of Bush’s monosyllabic simplifications, their folksiness and their ballsiness. And this piece by Philip James nicely illustrates the vast stylistic gulf between the two candidates.

It’s hard to see how any voter could remain undecided, as if this were a choice between two different flavours of cheese. Kerry is chalk -- noble, firm, unimpeachably white, with a dusty whiff of the classroom -- and Bush is cheese, that bright yellow stuff in a spray-on can that you know contains no nutritional value whatsoever and has to be bad for you in the long run but damn, it is what it is, no mixed messages, squirt it on.

(By the way, if you were hoping to do a taste test on the VP candidates, good luck: John Edwards has all but vanished from view, and Dick Cheney has made an art of eluding reporters, effectively banning representatives of major news outlets -- among them the New York Times, Knight-Ridder, and National Public Radio -- from following him on the campaign trail.)

The choice is not up to us, though, is it? Well, maybe it should be. Writing in the Guardian, Jonathan Freedland makes a modest proposal: that we should all get to vote in the upcoming election.

When George Bush spoke to the UN yesterday, he invoked democracy in almost every paragraph, citing America's declaration of independence which insists on the equal worth of every human being. Well, surely equal worth means an equal say in the decisions that affect the entire human race.

In the absence of a constitutional amendment extending the suffrage not just to emancipated slaves and women, but to foreigners everywhere, we’ll have to get creative: also in the Guardian, John O’Farrell thought it might be worth buying votes on eBay. With no success:

Sadly, in my first attempt to bid for a vote, I lost the auction to someone calling themselves GWB@whitehouse.us.

Still, the winner was kind enough to send me an email. It said: "Nice try, limey, but we've got a lot more money than you and you're not the first person to have this idea. P.S. How do you think I got in last time?"

We can only hope that those who can vote, do. The only US citizen in our household won’t be of voting age for another fifteen years, so I’m encouraging my students -- smart and sensible, every one -- to do their part. I can’t tell them who to vote for, of course, and anyway, “Vote for the home team, you know, the Yale candidate, the one who was in Skull and Bones” doesn’t narrow it down a lot. Although it does rule out Nader, which is a start.

Anyway, you’re not meant to bring politics into the classroom, because, I don't know, it might be educational or something. A literature professor in New Jersey (NY Times, registration required) got in trouble when she attempted to make voting a requirement for students in her classes this semester. Write the essays, attend the lectures, tick the box, or you don’t pass. Her compromise: an honesty box system, with students required to enter the voting booth but not obliged to actually vote.

God forbid that anyone should impinge on the freedom that is, as the current President never tires of reminding us, the Almighty’s gift to all people. He's so keen on it that he suggested in a recent stump speech, perhaps unintentionally, that he'd like to extend more of this precious gift to gynecologists frustrated by the rising costs of doing business:

We need to do something about these frivolous lawsuits that are running up the cost of your health care and running good docs out of business. (Applause.) We've got an issue in America. Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB/GYNs aren't able to practice their love with women all across this country.

Ewwwwww. Excuse me while I postpone my annual exam for about a decade.

But there goes George, practicing his love with voters all across the country. From the same speech (which he delivers almost verbatim at every stop along the way):

THE PRESIDENT: So I had a choice to make at this point in our history: do I trust the word of a madman --

AUDIENCE: Nooo!

THE PRESIDENT: -- do I forget the lessons of September the 11th, or take action to defend this country? Given that choice, I will defend America every time. (Applause.)

AUDIENCE: Four more years! Four more years! Four more years!

And the crowd goes wild.

It’s got a lovely rhythm, though, hasn’t it? Four-more-years! Four-more-years! U.S.A! U.S.A! Ba-ba-ba! Da-da-da!

No wonder John Kerry's starting to spit the dummy.

The new house needs a new motto, we decided after a frenzied, sweaty month of scrubbing and sanding and painting and plastering. On the previous owner’s watch, a sepia-toned Jesus smiled woozily down on the front hall under the catchy Polish phrase “Boze Blogoslaw Nasz Dom” (God Bless This House, more or less). We were thinking “Better than Before,” like the Sneaky Feelings song. But after today’s epic intervention by a team of tattooed plumbers the new top candidate is “There’s No Poo in Our Kitchen Any More.”

When you're racing the clock to get a house ready, and you hear the words “Aw, crap!” or indeed “Holy shit!” from the freshly-painted kitchen, you sort of hope they’re being used metaphorically. At the same time, you know that the new house, being a century and a half old, will have at least one Nasty Surprise up its sleeve, and that it will be both nasty and surprising in entirely unsuspected and unforeseeable ways.

You know those 19th C mystery novels where the genius detective spots some mundane detail and then follows a trail of increasingly incriminating clues back to the scene of the crime, whereupon it all makes sense in retrospect that the fishnet stocking was discarded behind the ironmonger’s by the fleeing orangutan, en route to the opium den?

I’ll spare you every last gruesome detail, but trust me. If one day you find vaguely composty wood floorboards in your 1852 house, in the basement, under the washing machine, after a massive rainstorm, in a spot directly under the kitchen -- discard all the obvious theories and immediately get a search warrant for the obscure sewer pipe leading from the top floor bathroom. (You and your crowbar will find it lurking behind and above the stove, underneath, in order: a fresh layer of primer and paint, new gib-board, elderly plaster, a fireproof metal panel, some wooden boxing, and the original wood paneling and tin ceiling.)

The bastard will be a hundred years old and largely rusted into oblivion, its jagged and decaying remains lashed together with enterprising amounts of duct tape, courtesy of a desperate and dangerous home repair job c. 1964.

Believe me, you really don’t want to think about what’s been coming down that pipe, although you cross your fingers that it was regularly diluted by gallons of bathwater. Soapy bathwater with lots and lots of Dettol in it.

Happily, apart from the Pipe of Horror -- now replaced by good old-fashioned unrustable plastic -- it has been smooth sailing. I confess that most of the really hard work has been done by good old-fashioned immigrant labour of one sort or another: our excellent Brazilian plasterer, Luis, and my Dad. The indomitable Poppa not only slept on the floor in a borrowed, overcrowded, semi-legal sublet, worked for food, and slaved with the paintbrush from dawn till dusk, but paid for his own ticket from New Zealand. Go the deregulated economy!

To be fair, he also enjoyed free jazz concerts on the downtown Green, a fair dollop of summery weather in between the thunderstorms, and the constant attentions of Busytot, who has been keeping insane vampire hours on account of his unsettled residential situation and could thus be counted on to entertain until midnight with stream-of-consciousness monologues (sample: “I used to fly in a special space shuttle... yes I did... oh, about three years ago now…”).

I hope that now that the house is sanitary and habitable again, normal sleeping service will be resumed. Then I can spend the evenings putting the final editorial polish on my dissertation, which, somehow, in the midst of the moving and the painting and the associated chaos, I successfully defended.

Like all solemnizing ceremonies, the defense was transcendent and strangely anti-climactic at the same time. It was a treat to sit in a room with my committee, a trio of serene and benevolent academic goddesses. They prodded and provoked me with astute questions and I gave my best account of myself, while madly scribbling notes for the revisions.

Then I sat out in the hall while they weighed my performance (they should have just weighed the thesis itself, as it was a big fat wodge of paper I gave them – never mind the quality, feel the length!). I gazed down the empty corridor of the grand old building. It looked just like it did when I arrived oh, about eight years ago, with its graceful arches, polished floors, dark wood panelling, and plaster replicas of marble friezes depicting distracted-looking Amazons tussling with hairy centaurs... although I’d never really noticed that glowing red EXIT sign before.

Just as I snapped a picture of the lonely view from the hot-seat, my committee members called me back in and congratulated me. “Let me through,” I squeaked, “I’m a doctor!” All of a sudden, there was my impromptu academic whanau around me, including Lorraine, whom I’d sat next to in my very first class at Cornell and is just about to start work as a professor there, and Alice, who arrived from Aotearoa to see me through and is just about finished herself... And the distinguished head of department -- who had phoned me in Tokyo all those years ago to tell me I’d been accepted into the programme -- materialised out of nowhere to give me a nice congratulatory French kiss (one on each cheek).

And there was my patient partner, looking relieved, and of course Busytot, rampaging cheerfully through the halls of academe in flashing sandals and a Hawaiian shirt. He had the final tearful word in the matter, dismissing thirty years of second-wave feminism, eighty thousand words of academic prose, and the three signatures on my Results of Examination form in one summary bellow: “NO! You NOT be a doctor! You just be a MUMMY!”

Bless his cotton socks. An hour and half a bottle of champagne later I’d pretty much forgiven the little fundamentalist. He’s come around, too, and seems quite chuffed at the idea that I’ll be teaching big kids to write, starting next week, as soon as I dig my syllabus out from under all the boxes. Hey, but we're off to a good start: at least there’s no poo in our kitchen any more. Boze Blogoslaw this house and all who sail in her.

They call it “the closing,” as in closing the deal. It consisted of an hour in a lawyer’s office signing our names over and over again. I scrawled my name and raised my right hand to swear that I was doing so of my own free will, while kicking my co-mortgagee under the table to say “Can you believe we’re doing this?” Meanwhile, the realtor earned his commission by discussing the finer points of the new model Mini Cooper with Busytot, down the other end of the table.

Then the daughter of the former inhabitant arrived, signed the necessary forms on his behalf, and gave us a quick tearful hug. It was a bit like our civil wedding: lots of paperwork and joking, and then a surprising burst of emotion when all was done. And now, the house -- for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, for richer and holy crap please don’t let the market crash now -- is ours. We may kiss the bank.

So much for the honeymoon: our first job was mucking the place out. We spent a very grubby and satisfying couple of evenings dragging things from the shed and the basement onto the verge for the bulk trash collection. Very cleansing it was, too. It’s like having one of those colonic irrigations but without sticking an actual hose up your actual bum.

The previous inhabitant was not a hoarder, really, just a deeply frugal person. You live through two wars and a depression, you learn not to take stuff for granted. Everything had been carefully saved, just in case: the bag of string and shreds of fabric for tying up tomatoes, the pile of stakes and sticks and branches behind the shed, enough glassware on the premises to host a drinking horn, and every curtain that had ever been retired from regular service carefully folded up in a trunk against the day that blue roses come back into style.

There were a couple of choice surprises, too: spunky Smurfette rollerskates with the legend “roller-smurfin’” on the wheels. A picture of the Pope that lights up when you plug it in (as my father-in-law naughtily observed, who doesn’t light up when you plug it in?). A guitar. Not to mention the glass jar of petrol stored not ten feet from the furnace, and a bottle of something equally high-octane but slightly more potable, stashed away handily behind the downstairs bog.

The gas, the grog, and the bag of string went into the trash, but the guitar and the fifties lounge suite will live to fight another day, as will Smurfette and His Holiness. The surplus furniture and crockery, on the other hand, went to a variety of good homes, largely the HQ of a local group dedicated to getting the youth vote out for John Kerry.

As an alien in this strange land, I can’t legally vote or donate money to any campaigns – but if an ancient filing cabinet and a well-loved formica table can help win back the White House, bring it on! And when the posse of very attractive and energetic twenty-somethings turned up to collect the gear, it occurred to me that perhaps what the Democrats need is a new variation on the baby-kissing technique. No point schmoozing the under-twos, they can’t vote – we need to get some of these pierced and tattooed cuties to hand out favours to their wavering peers instead…

The merry-for-Kerry crew pounced happily on a giant brown corduroy monstrosity of an easy chair. Apparently, after a hard day of campaigning, you want a nice sit-down, a cold beer, a vegan kebab, perhaps a shiatsu foot-massage. Based on my own hazy memories of gratuitously libidinal student politics, I wouldn’t be surprised if that cranky old Archie Bunker chair saw some strenuous after-hours rock-the-vote action. Mate! They don’t call them Lay-z-boys for nothing…

Tell you who’s not a lazy boy at the moment, and that’s the all-singing, all-dancing Busytot. He’s growing like a weed, losing his Buddha belly and his toddler totter. “I’m a big boy,” he’ll tell anyone who listens, and to prove it he hangs out with the big boys at the playground – the hard-as-nails five year olds who have taught him to say “Hulp, hulp, I’m going down the toilet!” as he whooshes down the green spiral slide.

He also appears to have the musical gene that runs in both families, as well as the flamboyant Broadway gene that bursts out around two and a half in most children. Every day is opening night, every small task inspires a free-form aria on the merits of, say, bread and honey, or a wistful ode to what might have been, like “Cho-co-late for dinner, that’s very YUM.” Well, helloooo Dolly!

After seeing Ladysmith Black Mambazo performing on the New Haven Green the other night, he’s added a couple of Zulu high kicks to his burgeoning breakdancing repertoire, and I wouldn’t be surprised to hear him sneak a line or two of rhythmic “azum, azum, azum” and some trilling ululation to his word-perfect rendition of the cookie song. “WHOAH! Cookie cookie cookie start with C –yi-yi-yi-yi-yi-yiiiii!”

When he’s not singing, he’s talking. And talking. Like an attentive language student (which I suppose is what he is, really), he’s expanding his conversational vocabulary by taking formulations frequently deployed by the teacher and plugging in his own details. “I’m hungry, by the way.” “I’m really serious about want lemonade, Mummy.” “Have to x, otherwise y” is another favourite, although like Mark Twain’s wife when she tried cussing, he knows the words but he can’t quite sing in tune. “HAVE to spill it, otherwise table get all wet!” “HAVE to jump on the table, otherwise you say NO!” Uh, whatever, grasshopper. Too zen for me.

I enjoy the witty banter but sometimes it’s like hanging out with Groucho Marx, Salvador Dali, and a querulous elderly relative with a touch of dementia, all at the same time. He unreels whole paragraphs of impassioned nonsense, wistful nostalgia, and trenchant social critique, salted with a constant stream of hectoring demands. “I don’t like naughty mice, only nice mice, actually. Mice live in the holes in cheese. You know that? You know Wallace and Gromit? Remember? They ate the moon, it made of cheese. That pretty funny. I want smoked cheese, by the way. On a plate. Get the plate. Not that plate, the green plate. NEED the green plate! NOW! Shriek!”

We have our own version of charades these days: I pause, cup one hand theatrically to my ear and raise my eyebrows. The clock ticks, and he eventually relinquishes a wheedling “pleeeeeeease?” with all the good grace of someone handing over twenty cents to one of those window-washers at the stoplights. I mean, who’s doing whom the favour here? And this is the boy who was saying “thank you” at his first birthday. But all learning is about repetition. He’s Helen Keller, I’m Annie Sullivan, and I’m holding his feral little hand under that running water five hundred times a day while spelling the magic word into the other grubby paw.

To his credit, he plays along with my gentle etiquette lessons. He knows which side his bread is buttered on, plus who buys the bread and the butter and who can open the large and creaky cutlery drawer. Sometimes I even get a frankly sycophantic “Pleeeease... I love you too?” But there was a bit of a glitch the other day when I nudged him for the appropriate word. “Can’t,” came the mutinous mutter. “My pleaser is broken.”

Hey, we all need a break. My blogger is, if not broken, at least temporarily hobbled. I’ll be taking a wee vacation from Busytown to attend to the house, hand in the dissertation, and pay proper attention to my long-suffering boys (yes sir, green plate, coming right up). I’ll be back in August, just as the summer starts to cool down and the election campaigns begin to heat up. You’ll know me by the fancy velvet bonnet with the fine layer of paint and plaster dust on it. In the meantime, check out the links at the right and my fellow Public Addressers for your daily dose of quality prose. See you on the other side!

Another unsung casualty of the War on Terror: my sweet tooth. Yep. The Department of Homeland Security -- not content with kneecapping the academic community by futzing around with student visas -- has now turned its attention to a dangerous new source of anti-American activity: care packages. The guiding motto: "Don't let them eat cake."

One of the upsides of living a long way from home is being blessed with a family that keeps you supplied with treats from home. Every birthday and Christmas, and sometimes completely randomly (but always when you need it most) there’s a fat little package in the hallway, stuffed full of familiar goodies. With missionary zeal, we share them with the natives and have made quite a few converts.

I don’t want to drop particular brand names here -- unless they want to advertise with Public Address, in which case we can talk -- but I’m sure you have your own list of faves. Mine runs to what I’ll call “Pops o’ Toffee.” Also “Nuts o’ Ginger.” And those politically incorrect but tasty edible Inuits in sherbet colours. Ooh and that kind of chocolate that boasts “all the goodness of a glass and a half of full-cream milk” in every family-sized block. The other kind that purports to give you nothing but energy and is the colour of a moonless night on Stewart Island. Orange-chocolate cinema-rollers. Wink wink, say no more. I know you know what I’m talking about: the taste of childhood.

When it comes time for the Christmas box, Mum and Dad go bonkers in the bickie aisle, and we make that stash last for months, rationing the biscuits, standing the golden syrup bottle upside down to get the last lovely drops. And then my father-in-law, a biscuit connoisseur from way back, makes random deliveries. He likes to send full sets of things. All the different kinds of toffee pop – dark, caramel, double chocolate, white chocolate; once, in answer to a particularly intense pregnancy craving, all the different flavours of barley sugar. They looked like an art installation, lined up on the top of the fridge.

So Papa-in-law went down to the Hamilton post office the other day with a well-wrapped package of, I don’t know, perhaps all the different kinds of mallowpuffs (hey, I can hope) -- only to be informed by the staff that America was no longer accepting food in the mail. It wasn’t a joke. It’s policy – check it out for yourself at the website of the Food and Drug Administration. There it is in multisyllabic black and white: you can’t send food through the international mail without obtaining prior permission through a complicated bureaucratic process designed to scare off the average kindly relative.

Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your tastebuds.
I could perhaps understand the policy if it was aimed at beefing up the domestic bickie industry (which, god knows, doesn’t need the help). Food industry protectionism isn’t a new thing in this country, after all. But it’s being billed as a security measure. You know, in case someone wants to use the mail to send some “yellowcake” from Osama’s Crusty Bakery, or some of those spicy anthrax cookies. Cher, like those guys don’t have their own couriers. And like there haven’t been domestic deliveries of dodgy substances -- the Unabomber? So Far Unidentified Anthrax Nut? Hello?

What makes the policy truly odd is that there is an exception for home-made food, "made in the sender's personal residence."

So let’s get this straight. Something pre-packaged and factory fresh, straight from the paws of Cookie Bear himself, untouched by human hands, completely sealed in plastic -- probably a highly dangerous bioweapon, so into the lead-lined bin with it. Uncle Sid’s homemade herbal cookies in a paper bag, on the other hand -- perfectly acceptable, here ya go, postie. Well, maybe the sniffer beagles would snarf the really special herbal cookies. But one way or another, under this new policy you'll have more luck posting Auntie Madge’s irregular dance-party Anzac bickies or a nice foil-wrapped fruitcake with a file inside it, than a good old king-sized bar of chocky.

The more I think about it, the crazier it is. I mean, isn’t something illicit more likely to have been, as it were, “homebaked” in the sender’s own personal “kitchen”, than purchased over the counter? Plus, having carefully wrapped the dangerous item in brown paper and string, can you really see Mr Naughty Badman sitting down and carefully filling in that little green customs form correctly? “Contents: one lovingly hand-made Spotted Dick, or as we call it in the old country, Smallpox Loaf. PS those aren’t raisins.”

Anne, writing from San Francisco, notes: "If anything, I would've thought that the bunches of deprived Kiwis would be more of a threat to national security as we take to the streets in protest." Yeah. Bring it on. "What do we want? Chocolate fish! When do we want them? NOW!" And I'm sure it's not just us lot -- every other household in this nation of immigrants is probably in the same boat. Keep your eyes peeled for a Million Munchie March on Washington.

Not that there's anything wrong with home-made munchies. In a way it’s rather old-fashioned: the care packages sent to our boys at the front eighty years ago probably contained not much in the way of shop-bought goodies, just lots of knitted socks and homemade jam and the odd tin of peppermints. One more way in which history appears to be stupidly repeating itself, even in this brave new 21st century... But hell, there’s something really wrong here. I can’t help thinking: if Bush and Ashcroft take away my toffeepops, the terrorists have won.

Here’s a hypothetical question, though: could you get around the policy by decanting Mr Griffin’s fine products into a biscuit tin with a note saying “I hope you like these, I baked them myself in me own kitchen. Was a bit hard on the old eyes printing my name on the bottom in that very fine type, but as you’ll see I did quite a neat job. Love, Griff”?

I don’t know, but we’ll soon find out. Watch this mailbox!

---

Update: Anne from Palmerston North writes with semi-encouraging news: "It is possible to apply for 'Prior Notice' clearance and then get 'Prior Notice' for the packages -- I've successfully sent some Tim Tams and Toffee Pops to an American friend. It just means spending about an hour wrestling with on-line forms (!)."

She also wonders if the baking exception is because they think Osama and the lads aren't exactly Hudson and Halls in the cookery department. Who knows? I'm off to apply for my prior notice so my sister can slip a bag of Eskimos in the mail...

---
In another update, Robert writes from Southern California:

"I noticed that it's only an interim rule at the moment, and is still open to public comment until July 14th. Maybe if we get enough people pointing out the, let's say flaws, in the proposed rule, they'll work in some kind of exception for small care packages."

Worth a crack, Nigel?

And Gregg, also writing from California, has quite a genius idea: he has vast quantities of unwanted Vegemite sitting in the cupboard, which inspires thoughts of an intra-U.S. care package swap-meet, zinging illicit goodies from West Coast to East, right under the nose of the Dept of Homeland Security. Now all we need is a website to list what we have and what we're after, and some sort of exchange rate mechanism to decide how many Eskimos equal one tube of fizzy Berocca...

I’m still here, albeit buried under a nearly completed dissertation and a small pile of azalea clippings as I attempt to simultaneously doctor myself and the garden at the new house. Yep, we’ve gone and joined the propertied classes. After the house-that-got-away got away, you’ll recall, I was ready to scale back operations and bide my time.

Then another house appeared. We heard about it on a Friday, saw it on Saturday, bid on Sunday, and got the call Monday to say that our bid had been accepted. Sometimes you just have to pounce.

And this place was highly pounceable: a dear wee three and a half bedroom Greek Revival cottage close to downtown, only for sale because the 91 year old owner had finally become unable to manage on his own. It’s on a quiet street, full of houses that are either lovingly maintained by Polish octogenarians, or being energetically restored by international Johnny-come-latelies like us.

An afternoon’s research in the public library revealed that the house we thought was a hundred years old was, in fact, built in 1852. It was constructed for forty-something Hezekiah Linsley, cabinet maker, and his child bride Mary Jane, who had purchased the section for a whopping $350. The Linsleys loved their new home so much that four years later they flipped it to a clockmaker and sometime bookbinder called Roswell Doolittle (What happened? death? divorce? triplets? sky-rocketing demand for downtown real estate causing an irresistible seller’s market?).

Since then, it has been occupied by a handful of impressively long-lived residents, hence its largely untouched interior. Most of them were good solid working families, although I’m particularly intrigued by Charles Curtiss, the patternmaker-turned-grocer who, in the early decades of the twentieth century, shared the house with a succession of widows... a very curious ménåge.

I can also tell you that he got the phone put on in 1915, but moved out in 1920, making way for yet another grocer. Gradually the names change from Anglo and Irish to Polish, not just in our house but all along the street, with a particular surge in the 1930s. It turns out that you can read world history in the phone book, if you know what you’re looking for.

The house stands opposite an imposing and very Polish Catholic church, St Stanislaus, which is distinguished by an impressive Madonna on a pedestal standing guard over the nunnery next door. She is not the doe-eyed sweetie-pie in a blue robe, with a soft bosom and kind smile and babe in arms. Nope: this dame is gilded from head to toe, and like her musical namesake she's a tough cookie.

A cross between Kali the destroyer and the Maria robot from Metropolis, she is depicted casually subduing a devilish snake by grinding it into the ground with her bare foot, arms thrown wide as if to say "Ta-da!"

Baby Jesus must be out with the babysitter somewhere, and he's probably better off out of the way. Even the bold and gregarious Busytot crumpled the first time he saw her -- “Make that lady NOT stand on poor snake!” he sobbed -- so now the official line is that she’s just waggishly tickling the willing reptile with her golden toes.

If the view from the front is all old-time religion and Eastern Europe, the backyard is calculated to charm the secular anglophile. It's bordered by a couple of elegant brick carriage houses with weathervane-topped turrets, and thus feels more olde England than New England. It’s a lovely backdrop for the garden, which while smallish and not overly wild, is a gem.

Right up until last year the owner kept the plants -- and himself -- in tip-top condition (it’s one of those mutually enhancing relationships, or as my exemplary aunty Betty puts it, "gardeners do tend to box on for a good long time.") This one is a sweetly eccentric old-bloke garden, with an abundance of lilac and hydrangeas and spring bulbs, and several sinfully fragrant old roses growing along the picket fence. A vege patch big enough to feed a family of fourteen sits currently unplanted, although there’s a fine crop of rhubarb bursting forth under the peach tree.

There’s also a tiny birdbath hoisted by winged cherubs at the centre of a small paved formal garden, which is planted with herbs and spring flowers. And elsewhere, some whimsical touches: a small flock of pretend chickens pose casually in the middle of the lawn, whirring plastic hummingbirds hide in the borders, and a cheeky goose peeps out of one of the neatly barbered miniature yew trees that march down the garden path. There’s even a (small plastic) snake in this Eden, slithering up the trunk of a lilac tree.

We haven’t taken possession yet -- that’s next week -- but after a few polite negotiations, I’ve been making regular forays over there in the evenings to plant herbs, tend the emerging plants, and prune the odd early-flowering tree. I’d forgotten just how happy it makes me to have dirt under my fingernails and scratches up to my elbows. Busytot putters around while I fight the foliage: the empty vege garden is one giant alluring construction site, while the paved herb garden a network of city roads, and the narrow side-yard is, inexplicably, a limousine (go figure).

He’s really getting into the spirit of it all. There’s a lot to be done inside the house -- old plaster, old wiring, old pipes -- so the last few weekends have seen a procession of building guys (and gals) coming to give quotes. They arrive festooned with sexy equipment like, oh you know, measuring tapes in their pockets and pencils behind their ears, and Busytot is mightily pleased. He is also convinced that a digger will be needed at some point in the renovations, so when I casually mentioned that it would be nice to finally have a piano again, he said, with a gleam in his eye, “We’ll build you one... with a lellow back-hoe.” That will be some instrument. I hope Hezekiah and Mary Jane would approve.

---

And now, a moment's silence for Ronald Reagan. Not for the man himself, but for the astonishing gap between the published tributes to an unrecognisably benevolent Santa figure, and my own memories of Maggie Thatcher's mad boyfriend who hated the poor and was going to blow us all to kingdom come with a wavering finger or a wayward word. He's the reason I can't hear a song by Frankie Goes to Hollywood or Bananarama or the Dead Kennedys, or glimpse a turquoise ra-ra skirt over fishnets and basketball boots, without feeling like there's a nuclear holocaust just around the corner. That's an eighties flashback I could seriously do without, especially now that we have another chuckling apocalyptic homophobe in the White House...