Nablopomo: phew. It's over.

So. It's over.

Thank goodness.

I've completed NaBloPoMo. Does that make me a better person? It seems mainly to be making me a tired person, although I'm not entirely sure that if I wasn't staying up blogging, I wouldn't be staying up tweeting.

I'm glad I've managed it, though. I feel like perhaps I do have the capacity for discipline after all, even if it's just for short spells. So, maybe, just maybe, I can write my novel after all.

And maybe that's the point.

Things that have made me smile this week...

... Yes, this is a real blog post on my real actual life. I'm tired, so this is the best I can do, sorry...

This week, I have smiled because:

- I felt inspired with my article: "a single girl's survival guide to weddings". (Now all I have to do is put it into practice...)

- We had a great training session at Church, about helping people to see patterns of what God has done in their lives (known as "timeline".) My life was used as an example and it was great to think about how God has been with me in my pain over the years and His hand has been with me.

- Finally got to see "New York I love you". Although, don't bother.

- I had my now-weekly twitterfest with Josh Malina

- Said Twitterfest was about my second favourite topic: grammar

- And I turned out not to be completely wrong

- And then, he called me sharp and funny! No one has ever called me that before! Especially not anyone as sharp or funny as Josh Malina.

- Someone in Dallas checked my blog. So did someone in Pasadena. So did someone in LA. All of which is quite exciting.

- I finished my article on The Good Guys and a twitter friend of mine said she loved it. Which is good, because I wasn't sure. Just felt I could have said so much more. But oh, what fun I had researching for it. Reading and writing about Bradley Whitford and getting paid for it.

- I finally got to see some of the election debate, though I really would have preferred it if I hadn't missed the first half when my dishwasher tripped my electrics. David Cameron made me laugh too, with his "I don't know what country Gordon Brown thinks he's prime minister of"... He.

- A really good lesson today with my Amnesty group - lots of discussion, mainly led by them. And one of them even knew about the Tea Party. I was so impressed with them.

- A pleasant few seconds' eye contact with a not unattractive young man at a random metro station. Fine, call me shallow. It's been a while, that's all.

- Oh, and Radio Four Comedy. Definitely the best thing about this election is the daily Vote Now show. I've been laughing out loud a lot. People look at me strangely on metros, but to be honest that is nothing new. I'm often laughing - at the moment, that's at "the World according to Bertie" by Alexander McCall Smith.

Bed beckons. That, too, is a pleasant thought.

An introspective look at blogging

As April chugs to its much-anticipating end, I've been asking myself why? Not why as in the meaning of life, though I have had some deep, existential thoughts of late. I mean, why do we blog anyway?

I know I've taken why I've taken up nablopomo (National Blog Post Month for the uninitiated): as a discipline thing. Yes, discipline: that thing that is sadly lack in all areas of my life, especially internet-, money-, sleep- and west-wing-related areas. I thought it would do me good, and it kind of has. I also thought I needed to up my daily word count if I'm ever going to be any good at this writing thing. You can be the judges of whether that's worked, but please be nice.

But why blog in the first place? I mean, why not just write things down in a pretty notebook like people used to in the old days? Come to think of it, like I used to in the old days?

Is it a product of being an external processing extrovert who lives alone and works for herself? Well, yes, that's true for the venting posts. But I don't know if you've noticed, I haven't vented in a while.

Is it general helpfulness to the expat public? Maybe.

Is it so that all my friends back home can follow my, ahem, adventures? Well, if it is, I've failed: most of my readers seem to be in America. (Including Dallas, Pasadena, LA and New York. Some of you will know why those places are exciting. The rest of you can ignore this little aside.)Also, as you've probably noticed, reading this blog will actually tell you very little about my life and how I'm living it, other than that I'm writing a book and that I love the West Wing. Hopefully, anyone who has ever spent five minutes with me will be well aware of both of those things without having to log in to anything.

Is it because I sometimes want other people's opinions, as on my Sarah Palin dilemma? (I've solved it by the way - a sticker that says "my other book is Obama's"... I don't normally deface books, but think I could make an exception with this one.) Welllll, yes, but only if their opinions do not diverge too greatly from my own. As my oboe teacher said yesterday, referring I think to my reed, "she doesn't like to be resisted".

Is it because, as stated elsewhere, I have the fragile ego of an aspiring writer? That it occasionally needs stroking?

Hmmm. I suspect there may be a little more in that one than I'd care to admit. My obsessive checking of statcounter and comments would support this theory. Although I'm always surprised by what people actually do comment on, and it's invariably not the things I hope they do. (All comments gratefully received, though. Really.)

Fellow bloggers, tell me. Why do you do it?

Oh Claire...and you claim to be a grammarian?

See, that's the thing. I do. I do claim to be a grammarian.


And a good one.


And, when it comes to it, one to whom you would actually want to pay money to help improve your own language skills.

So why can I not work out what is structurally wrong with the following sentence?


"It wasn't me who baited him this time."


(This is quite beside the point, but I feel the appropriate response to this tweet would have been "I am most proud of you for your sudden maturity".)


Now, in the sentence "It wasn't me" - I thought me was a direct object. Whereas in the sentence "I did not bait him", the word I is clearly an subject. Which makes it all very confusing. How can I be a subject and an object at the same time?


But. Once I'd torn myself away from twitter, I practised saying "It was not I who baited him" in a posh British accent (my own) and I have to say, it does have a certain ring of, well, rightness to it.


Somebody called @blabbate quickly picked me up on my subject/object issue, which I had foolishly assumed would silence the critics, dizzying them with all my jargon. But oh, no. @blabbate said:. "Direct objects do not follow linking verbs. Subject complements do. In this case, a predicate nominative. In prescriptive English you must use the nominative case, which is "I". However, a descriptivist will tell you either is fine."


Ha! I would say next. See. We are both right. Even Wikipedia says so.


Except that, like Josh Malina, I *am* a prescriptive grammarian. There are elements of my "descriptive" grammar textbook which make me wince when I am supposed to teach them. Such as the lie that "whom" does not exist anymore. Don't be ridiculous! Of course "whom" exists.


This appeared to be one of those moments, like being twenty-three and having a degree from Cambridge and realising one has been spelling "forty" wrong all one's life. Why did no one ever tell me it wasn't "fourty" till I worked in a bank? (If only that had been the worst mistake I'd made there. But anyway...) Shame on me.


These points, in my defence: And yes, Josh Malina, and yes, Safari spell-check, I do mean defence with a C. We are not all American, you know.


- I was not wholly focused on the task in hand. I was, in fact, teaching a French lesson. But as previously discussed on this blog, I am unable to ignore tweets from certain people, whatever the time of day or night. Still, I do feel a little guilty about this, and I wish I could say it would not happen again.


- I was also a little dizzy with the excitement of being engaged in two of my favourite activities at the same time: grammar, and bantering with Josh Malina.


- We Brits in our 30s did not have any grammatical knowledge imparted to us at school. The reason for which I know some is my Belgian education. This whole "It is me" thing does not apply in French.


In fact, there it is. That's the reason. Mother tongue interference. "C'est moi qui". Never "c'est je qui".


Yet, here I am again, late to bed because of twitter, and standing duly corrected, duly rebuked, duly ashamed. At least now I have a posh-sounding excuse for it.

Desert island discs...

As I cast my eyes around my flat yesterday, desperately looking for the fourth and fifth thing to take to my desert island, I realised that music is one thing that would be difficult to live without. Hence, I suppose, the whole guitar thing.

Brits among you will be familiar with Desert Island Discs, described by the BBC's website as "one of Radio 4's most popular and enduring programmes... each week a guest is invited to choose the eight records they would take with them to a desert island". (The use of the word "record" is, I suppose a product of this being the BBC, and the programme having been invented in 1942.) You learn an awful lot about people through the music they listen to, almost as much as you do through the books they read. (Does anyone else think this ought to be part of the current prime ministerial debates?)

So, here we go. Eight songs (yes, songs - not whole CDs!) that would define me.

1. I would need something by Jean-Jacques Goldman. The vast majority of you will have never heard his name, but he's an iconic singer who arguably defined pop music in the 1980s and 1990s in particular, in the French-speaking world. His words are incredibly clever and he sings about all kinds of things including his Jewish faith and test tube babies and communism. Sometimes it's poetry, sometimes social commentary, sometimes he cleverly blends the two.

I'll just pause here for you to have the obligatory laugh at the expense of French pop.

Now you've got that out of your system, I will say this: give me Jean-Jacques Goldman over insipid English romance-obsessed music any day. There. I've said it.

Anyway, the song of his that best captures my life would have to be Puisque tu Pars (because you're leaving) but it still stirs up some emotions in me that I don't always feel like dealing with. Ditto Veiller Tard (staying up late - hmmm, not quite the same ring), a haunting piece about the things that go through our minds when we can't sleep. Or Confidentiel - about adopting a family for yourself. There are too many nerves that are still raw even after all these years. So I'll go for Elle a fait un bébé toute seule - She made a baby by herself - the aforementioned test tube baby song. It's an upbeat 80s tune, so singalongable, and I have great memories of some people I love very much, singing this in a minibus on the way down to the South of France for the best holiday I've ever had.

Wow. I don't think I'll write this much for all the songs, or I'll have lost all of you.

2. For good

Okay. I'll try and be briefer. This one is from the musical "Wicked", and I love it - it made me cry, in fact, thinking about the same kind of people who I sat with in that minibus singing Jean-Jacques Goldman at the top of my lungs, and how their friendships have changed me. For good.

It also expressed perfectly the theme of my novel, "inevitable": because I knew you, I have been changed for good. So it would be useful to have along for inspiration.

And, it also reminds me of Josh and Donna on the West Wing. 'Nuf said on that one.

3. Rutter's Requiem

I fell in love with this at the beginning of my journey into an interest in classical music which has since come to a screeching halt, but which began in my second year at King's College, Cambridge, whose choir had recorded the piece not long before. I know it's not cool to pick this one: you should really curl your lip in disgust and spit out "popular classical music" just afterwards. But I love it. It's beautiful; it's haunting. It transports me to another place, which could be useful after six months on the same island, and brings back for me the musty, incense-filled smell of King's College Chapel. Nostalgie quand tu nous tiens...

4. Atrapados en la red, by Tam Tam Go

Chances are, none of you will have heard of this either. A catchy, happy little piece about online dating - from the days when online anything was still a novelty. Yes, more nostalgia. When I hear this, I find myself back on the Spanish beach on which I spent much of '99-2000 and in the place - I refuse to call it an internet café - where for an outrageously high fee I could send half an hour eeking out an email on telnet to my friends in Russia and Spain and France on their Year Abroad. Anyone remember telnet? None of my twitter friends will. You're all far too young. Sigh.

5. Para no verte más, by La Mosca Tsé Tsé

Another catchy little Spanish number that was being played everywhere that year. If there was one song that defined my time in Cullera (close to Valencia), this was it. It's not the nicest of lyrics - I will rip up your photos and burn your letters, that kind of thing - but when I mix it with a Spanish accent, some sunshine and a little sangria, somehow it still makes me smile.

6. Marseille, by Patrick Fiori

Another one nobody will have heard of. Sorry about that. This one is relatively recent - my fond memories of French pop are mostly from my childhood - but it was key in my whole rediscovery of Belgium as my home. The lyrics basically talk of someone who went far away to find himself but never forgot where his home was, just like when you find a faded photograph and it stirs up happy memories. I first heard this in my adopted big sister's kitchen, and it may have been key to calling me back here.

7. Better than life - Hillsong

It's hard to choose just one worship song, and so many of them have difficult emotions associated with them. This one, though, is associated in my mind with what were, for me, the early, happy, hopeful days of ChristChurch London. It was a firm favourite, with just Rhys strumming his guitar in the upstairs room of International Students' House, and with good reason: better than the biggest dreams in my heart, better than getting what I say I need... No matter when I hear it, it's always a timely reminder of the incomparable greatness of the love of God. Plus, there's a chance to correctly use an apostrophe in better than the sound of my friends' voices...

8. Jesus, my only hope

Another great song, associated with the same sunny summer, my first in London. It has a catchy tune, and a harmony I could at one point actually master. But most of all, lyrics that are wonderful for the soul, and during which you can actually hear people singing louder. (I dont think it's just me.) When Satan's accusations make my poor heart afraid, I hear my King declaring: Father, that debt is paid!!

I could, in particular, have chosen many more soppy love songs (I'm a sucker for those...Vonda Shepherd's Ally McBeal soundtracks for example), and, of course, Bang Bang by Dizzy Gillespie and Body and Soul by Billie Holliday. (West Wing fans will know why, and if not, they should either hang their heads in shame, or hurry up and watch Season Seven.)

Jack Johnson and Norah Jones and Newton Faulkner are all on a constant loop, and I love my Notting Hill and Love Actually and Snuffy Walden CDs. So I guess if I could take eight albums, the answer would be completely different. But those are not the rules, so I've chosen eight songs that could be used on the soundtrack in the film of my life. (You know, the one where Melissa Fitzgerald or Lauren Graham plays me, though I've had a recent revelation that Liza Weil would do a great job of "capturing my essence". She does the ranting and raving so well. Anyway, that's another topic for another day.)

On that note (bad pan fully intended), I'll let you get back to whatever I interrupted with this longer-than-usual blogpost. Do feel free to tell me what songs you would take, though. It's not as easy as it sounds!

Five Things...

The Writer's Idea Book is providing me with much inspiration for blog posts - thank you Jack Heffron. Today's is this: what five things would you take to a deserted island? I came up with some things which surprised even me, leaving aside the obvious, like suncream and a boat, and assuming it's a low-tech island, with nowhere to plug in a coffee machine or my laptop, or connect to the internet, so that endlessly watching the West Wing and tweeting about it isn't an option, nor is Skyping all my friends to make them jealous of my wonderful (if enforced) holiday.

1. My Bible.

What can I say? A great opportunity to deepen my relationship with God.

2. My guitar.

Yes, I know. I've never mentioned my guitar before. In fact, I hardly ever remember that I own one. But under a sunny sky, with no one to hear me except the odd bird, and lots of time to kill, I'm sure I'd be eager to reacquaint myself with it. Maybe even write some songs. Who knows.

3. Reams and reams and reams of paper and many, many, many pens (I hope it's not cheating having these two things count as one).

With none of the aforementioned high tech distractions, I might actually get Inevitable written. And who knows, maybe its sequel. And The Muffin House. And some poems and short stories. If I'm going to be there for a really long time, I could even get going on my autobiography. Well, I'll be famous after I return from my long stint on a deserted island, and I'm sure everyone will want to read about it: day after day after day of the same thing - what's not to like?

I wonder, though - would my ideas run dry, with no real life or real interaction to fuel it? Or is it really true that writing begets writing?

4. Scrabble.

Yes, okay, I may not have thought of this if I hadn't been looking around my lounge for inspiration. But the thing is, Scrabble would be a good way to keep my brain active, and to set myself some measurable challenges. And then I could use the words I come up with as writing prompts, which obviates the problem mentioned in the last point.

5. Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

I am assuming Amazon.com do not deliver to this island, so if I am going to take one book, I may as well choose a long one that will make me feel virtuous, and that, let's face it, I would never get through unless I was stuck in that exact place for a very long time, with no West Wing DVDs.

How about you? What would you take?

Delusions of Grandeur, part two

I must have signed a million of these. My publicist shakes her head, says no, only a hundred and fifty-three, but the dull throbbing in my wrist has given way to numbness and my cheeks are smile-weary.

"Hi," he says, and my heart breaks into sprinting mode, responding before my brain has the chance to. I know this voice. Know it so well that I hardly dare look up and let the illusion be shattered.

He hands me the book; Anna clears her throat, reprimanding me, reminding me I am supposed to be making eye contact with these people who have queued for hours. (Publicists like to exaggerate. It's minutes, at most.)

"Hello," I say, swallowing hard as I allow my eyes to meet his: the moment I had been so sure would never come. Except, of course, in my dreams. Hundreds of them. "Has anyone ever told you that you look a little like Rahm Emanuel?"

There they are: the dimples. I'm being assailed by all those clichés about freeze-framing the moment.

He chuckles gently. "For someone with such a British accent, you know a bit about American politics."

"Well, you see, there was this TV programme..."

"24?" He prompts, teasing me with a furrowed brow, as though he too were having trouble remembering.

"Yes," I say. "That must be it."

I must remember to stock up on Strepsils for Anna. She seems to need them.

"You write beautifully," he says, in all seriousness this time, chocolate eyes finding mine.

"Thank you," I say. I've remembered just in time that in America, it is the done things to accept compliments gracefully, rather than mumbling Well, you know...

"You're not exactly my target market, though." He raises an eyebrow. "I mean, in that you're not a woman in your thirties..."

"I know. But it's dedicated to someone with the same name as me. And the main character sounds like he might look like me a little. So I was intrigued."

"Funny how life turns out, isn't it?"

"Yes." He catches my eye again. Why is the security guard not closing this Barnes and Noble to allow me to be alone with him, to bask in this moment? Seriously.

"You're busy," he says, nodding towards the queue, and I wish I could hear more regret in his voice. But then he hands me a card. "Call me when you're done. We can have dinner if you like."

"Really?" The word squeaks out before I have the chance to screen it through my professional-writer filter: suddenly I'm a teenager again.

"Well, I've never had a book dedicated to me before," he says, and slips away.

"Wow," says the wide-eyed next woman in the queue, stepping forward, forgetting for a moment that I am the one she is meant to be star-struck about right now. "Was that..."

I shake my head. Technically not a lie: more of a nervous twitch. "Just someone I used to be in love with."

"Oh," she says, disappointed, but nevertheless smiling when I hand her the book back. In which I've scribbled,

to Corrie, who may have just witnessed the moment my life changed.