ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY

Today is May 18th – well, it is here in New Zealand. Everywhere else it's only the 17th. But here, where I am, it's the 18th and it is my birthday.

Today in history, according to my Book of Days, Napoleon was proclaimed the Emperor of France in 1804. In 1944 the Polish Army captured Cassino, and in 1151 Saint Eric the King of Sweden was martyred. The Order of the Bath was founded in 1725 – that was the ceremony for creating knights, and involved actual bathing as a symbol of purification. Only the Brits could create a chivalrous order named after a bath.

Some significant people died on 18th May. Among them, in 1703, was Charles Perrault, whom we must thank for Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and many other fairly tales. Novelists Nathaniel Hawthorne and George Meredith died in 1864 and 1909 respectively, and Bishop Nicolas Longespee died in 1297. Yes, Longespee. I don't know what the Bishop did to deserve his place in the Book of Days, except possibly thump those who enquired what the record was, and whether anyone could enter.

However, according to the book, no one of note was born on this day. It was published in the fifties, well before celebrity culture devalued everything, so there are no film stars and sports persons mentioned. The day is therefore mine alone. It has usually slipped by unremarked, but occasionally it has been special, and sometimes unexpected.

For example, this day in history, on my tenth birthday, I woke up in Baghdad, in a hotel overlooking the mighty Euphrates river that roared muddily past the windows. That morning my mother, two brothers and I climbed into a rackety aeroplane and leaned against the icy fuselage – there was no heating or air-conditioning, no trolley dollies, no seats, only benches along the sides – for the flight to Teheran, where we would live for two years.

My eighteenth birthday was spent in the misty hills of Sri Lanka. My parents and I were sailing to England from Rangoon, there was engine trouble, we had disembarked in Colombo, and decided to spend a few days up-country away from the humid heat. On my thirtieth-something birthday I was in Kangaroo Valley (London) surrounded by Aussies and Kiwis and the Indians from the flat upstairs. We all went to a real Indian restaurant for a celebratory curry dinner.

On this day perhaps three decades later I was taken to Jade Stadium and handed a can of beer while cheering the Canterbury Crusaders as they beat the Wellington Hurricanes at rugby. I understood etiquette demanded that I throw the empty can at a policeman after the match, but decided instead to leave it in a corner with several others.

Today – memorable or slipping by? Who knows. All together now: HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!

IT'S ALL ABOUT ME

I have been shouting at the television again. I've got to give it up, lie down with a damp cloth on my forehead, unclench my teeth, count to ten v-e-r-y slowly.

The latest cause for angst is all about Me. That is, the Me that bustles to the beginning of sentences where it has no business to be. The Me that something happens to, rather than does. The Me that small children use interchangeably with I until they learn better. The Me that too many people who are no longer children still use in places where they shouldn't.

You hear it all the time. "Me and Frank went to the pictures." "Me and the girls went out for dinner." It happens with we and us too, as in "Us girls had a great night out." There is also the confusion between her and him, and they and them, and much, many, fewer and less.

It's illogical, because the funny thing is that none of the people who are confused, if they are grown-up, repeat the mistake by saying, "Me and Frank went to the pictures. Frank had a coke and me had an ice cream." Neither do they say, if they should go out alone, that "Me went out to dinner and the waiter tipped the soup over I." If Me does something by herself, she never says Me, she says I, as in "I went out to dinner." And if something happens to Me, she says "and the waiter tipped the soup over me." As for "Us girls had a great night out" they don't go on to say, "and us ended up in the cells."

It's simple. I do things. We do things. Things happen to me or us.

We pedants – not us pedants because we are doing something – are fighting a losing battle. We are gibbering in corners over such horrors as "Her and her husband went to Bali" and "there has been much delays" and "I've got less apples than you". If you can, theoretically, count the objects it's fewer, or many. Otherwise it's less or much. As in, less money, fewer dollars. Many delays, much delay. Fewer potatoes, less mash. Less ice, fewer ice cubes. Much rain, many rain drops.

There are anomalies – this is the English language after all. Take rice: much rice, many kilos of rice, much rice pudding, but while you could theoretically count rice grains, you can't have fewer or many rice. But the basics are clear.

However, I've yet to hear anyone say that he has fewer apple juice. But give it time. Things will undoubtedly get worse. Where's that damp cloth ...

BOOK MARKS

Opening a book in this house is to find surprises. Inside there are book marks, and marks in books. Cuttings from newspapers and magazines, not necessarily relevant to the books they inhabit. Reviews of the books themselves. An obituary of the author. An advertisement for a concert now long past. A strip torn off the edge of a magazine page with a note scribbled – no, AJ never scribbled – written on it because there was nothing else handy at that moment when a marker was needed.

Forgotten photographs of people, looking too much younger, slip out unexpectedly when disturbed. Postcards – remember them? They used to arrive from friends and family travelling overseas, before emails and skype made them redundant. Here is a postcard from my brother in Hong Kong, another with a picture of a gracious old ruin of a castle from Northumberland, and here a card from a poet in New Caledonia.

Other memories hide in our books. I found a home-made card from the grandchildren, full of hugs and kisses and hoping that Grandad would soon get better. Another treasured card for me, with a clip-art cartoon on the front and a message saying that they had heard about old people losing their marbles – little monkeys! – but never one that kept losing the dog she was walking. There are bookmarks I've cut from old Christmas cards – colourful, glowing ones – and some of them still have fragments of sentences on the backs: ... remember the ... happy Chris ... to send you ... the view fro ... always kno ... be back ... There are old mugs containing such bookmarks in several places around the house – anywhere that I might settle to read something and need to keep my place.

It's not just bookmarks that I find in our books. AJ would have killed anyone who turned down a corner of a page to mark a place, but he often wrote in the margins. With a pencil, naturally, never in ink. He declared himself to be a member of the Lead Pencil Club, an "informal, international organisation concerned about the influence of computers and assorted electronic inventions on our lives".* AJ's notes and comments were short and often pithy. Even when they were simple marks – a tick, a vertical line, an exclamation point, a question mark – they were his reactions to what he read. I come across these marks all the time as I pick up this book and that, and sometimes add my own – in pencil of course. You can tell which are AJ's and which are mine. His marks are small and neat, mine are big, careless and sloppy. AJ would not have been surprised about that.

* from the back cover of "Minutes of the Lead Pencil Club" edited by Bill Henderson, Pushcart Press, N.Y. 1996

MY NEXT HUSBAND

The list of my prospective next husbands is growing. And my friend and my other friend – who don't even know each other – are squabbling about which one of them is to be my bridesmaid and which my flower girl. That is, when they aren't rolling their eyes. They will have to wait quite a while because the choice has become bewildering.


Cottage Garden Mix

Until recently my requirements were simple: my next husband would have to walk upright and preferably be able to dance. But since the earthquakes began I have been open to other possibilities. A dazzling parade of suitable applicants has visited me during the last two years, bearing clip-boards and often wearing hard hats and hi-viz vests.

They wander through the house and measure things or mend things, they climb onto the roof, they peer into cupboards, they walk round the garden examining the ground, shake their heads at the drunken fences. They are unfailingly charming and kind – really, I can hardly believe my luck. They have set me quite a dilemma that expands as time goes by, although I haven't yet got around to enquiring about their dancing abilities. To slightly misquote from The Beggar's Opera, "How happy would I be with either, were t'other dear charmers away".

The list of required qualifications has grown too. I'm getting more discerning. Ignoring the trifling impediments of currently attached wives or girlfriends (and most of them don't look old enough to have acquired either, but then nobody does to me these days) I tell my friend and my other friend that I have decided on one fellow because of his Paul Newman eyes, only to tell them a week later that he has been superceded by the next candidate because he has absolutely the most enchanting smile and also fixed the TV aerial. Or that the man who came to examine the sopping carpet in the spare bedroom was The One because – oh I don't know, I can't remember now, there have been so many. If it was legal I would marry them all.

To add to the dilemma, now that New Zealand has, with a resounding majority, just passed a law allowing same-sex marriages, the field of potential husbands has doubled overnight. It is now possible – and legal – that my next husband could even be my wife.

YESTERDAY'S ESSAYS

Why write a blog? Why indeed. Sometimes, when the mind is blank or the spirits are low, ideas seem hard to find. Most writers know that they are everywhere, teeming, insistent, bossy and in-your-face, but hunting for them is the surest way for them to scoot under the nearest stone, only to emerge in the middle of the night to thumb their noses at you.

Today's blogs are yesterday's essays. In the old days writers, when they weren't writing books, often wrote essays. These were published in magazines, which snapped them up for their eager, discerning readers. Essays were often many hundreds of words long, they explored a subject, or a thought, in a leisurely way, writers had space to move, and readers had time to read and think. Blogs have to be short, like sound-bites, to catch the attention of readers who have less time and are easily bored.

A blog, like an essay, is a means of experimenting with your "voice". It is a way to have your say about what interests you, and to say it in a controlled and considered way rather than in the hurried blurt of a tweet. It is a forum where you have control over everything: subject, style, content, length, frequency. That means that you can take risks now and again. And take the heat if it goes wrong. No one is waiting to correct or change what you write, or to reject it out of hand. No one is the boss of your blog but you.

A blog makes it possible to paddle in the tiny waves at the edge of the surf and learn how it feels, before launching into the ocean of the real literary world. A blog can be edited, changed or deleted at any time, and the commitment need not be terrifying. Or terrifyingly permanent.

Blog posts should be interesting. I'm aware that posts about, say, my great-grandfather's old immigrant sailing ship Euterpe aren't for everyone, and nor are posts about writing, or earthquakes, or painting or anything else that I might feel like writing about. But if there is variety, and the posts are not totally incompetent, readers gravitate to the site. It takes time to develop a regular readership, and word has to be spread somehow. I'm constantly amazed at how, now and then, there is a surge of interest and the stat-counter leaps for the stratosphere. Something, somewhere, triggers a gratifying spike.

That's why we write blogs – for those tingling moments of gratification.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, BLOKES AND SHEILAS

As an unreconstructed pedant I sometimes get embroiled in matters of grammar and literary style. And it can happen on-line, with strangers. Take, for example, a recent discussion about the word ladies. Which of course got tangled in a to-and-fro about the f-word: feminism.

Few still grimly insist that we always refer to female persons as women, or the horrible wimmin. Yes, language and its uses change over time and no, I'm not a dinosaur, trying to keep language intact and archaic. Try reading Chaucer or even Shakespeare to see where that would lead us. I'm just glad that we now seem to be accepting the word ladies again – surely a sign that we have grown out of the dummy-spitting era of the sixties and seventies.

There are no right or wrong words, only appropriate or inappropriate words. And it depends a lot on context. Someone talking to a room full of women would probably call them ladies if addressing them formally, as in "Good morning ladies." Later she might ask "all the women who work full time" to raise their hands. If it was time for a break she could lighten the tone and say, "right girls, coffee's ready!" Same session, same speaker, different context.

The terms lady and gentleman were once used, even officially, to indicate social status. Not so now. My mother used to say, with raised eyebrows, "ladies don't!" It was shorthand for don't do that, it's bad manners and not ladylike. Ladies and gentlemen behave in acceptable ways – acceptable, that is, for the times and circumstances. To describe them as such is to bestow a particular kind of compliment, one that acknowledges style, dignity and good manners: they don't eat peas off a knife, they stay upright when plastered, and wouldn't dream of dancing on tables at a golden wedding party. Women brawling outside a pub at two in the morning are not ladies.

We know what people mean when they say that someone is no gentleman. He is a man who barges through the door instead of holding it open, or watches his partner struggle with the heavy shopping. A tramp can be a gentleman, a lord can be a cad and therefore not a gentleman. A man wanted by the police cannot be described on television as a gentleman if he is violent and should not be approached.

We pedants are an endangered species. Soon no one will be left to care about the proper use of language and grammar. We will be carted off to our graves still squawking about apostrophes and brandishing our red pencils. In the meantime, and for the record, it's ladies and gentlemen, men and women, guys and gals, blokes and sheilas. But not ladies and men, ladie's and guy's, gentlemen and sheilas.

ON BUYING A BRA

Today this is a women only page – men should probably go and read another blog (but come back soon). Today is a day to venture into the section of a department store that displays lingerie and makes men shy like horses at a paper bag in a ditch. Today we are going to discuss bras, and more specifically the choosing of new bras.

Women tend to put this off because we can find it an uncomfortable, almost humiliating, experience, but like going to the dentist, at some point we always know when it is time to bite the bullet. Only women who are slight and don't really need one enjoy the hassle of buying a bra. They can choose from the huge range of size 10 or 12 tiny bright flirty styles that come in all colours, stripes and polka dots, frills and ruffles. They don't even have to try them on, except when buying their first, because they know the size they want, they only need to choose colour and style.

The rest of us – the vast army of the rest of us – must make more, um, weighty decisions. And our choices are much more limited. For us, the joke goes that there are only four types of bras: Catholic (supports the masses), Salvation Army (lifts the fallen), Presbyterian (keeps them staunch and upright), and Baptist (makes mountains out of molehills). There is also, for the secular woman, the German (holtzemfromfloppen). We must paw through those endless racks of pretty little bras looking for the few, usually near the floor, in black, white or that horrible fawny pink, that are the only ones in our size.

The alternative is to admit defeat, summon a hovering salesperson and ask her to find three or four 18DDs in white or black, no underwire, and bring them to one of the cubicles so we can try them on. Ah yes, the cubicles: searchingly bright lights and huge mirrors that make us look like dugongs the moment we strip off. I think that right there is what makes the experience so unnerving – the mirrors at home are so much kinder. The saleswomen, however, probably know that and don't bustle and poke unless asked but hover outside the cubicle listening for squeaks of distress. Then she can offer help, suggest that she could find more possibilities, or send for reinforcements in the form of the corsetiere.