On goose herding.

The Star has always enjoyed chasing pigeons. They are gratifyingly slow to grasp that properly flying away will remove them from the vicinity of the small but very determined toddler harrying them from one end of the park to the other.

He used to go after rooks. The move more slowly, but have a habit of laconically heading for a high branch at the first sign of trouble, from where they sit and sneer at the frustrated two-year-old underneath. The Star has decided they are more trouble than they are worth.

Sparrows and such are too fast for him. But he does enjoy watching them. You suspect he is analysing their weaknesses.

Recently, however,  he has found a new bird to terrorise.

Geese.

For some reason, the Star has decided that geese should be found only on water, not sunning themselves on the banks of ponds.

So if he finds a goose relaxing after a hard day’s hissing at young children and pecking the bread out of their hands, he will rush energetically towards them* shouting at them to start swimming.

If they do not respond quickly enough, he gives them a gentle but firm push in the right direction.

As he approaches, the geese turn to look at him, their natural prey, with uppity stares of outraged disbelief. You find this quite funny. The fact that so far, the Star has won all encounters you are putting down to the sheer surprise of the attack. This is good. Particularly as geese scare the pants of you.

Next stop, swans.

You are planning to tuck the Star under your arm and run away very fast in that eventuality.

*Followed very closely by his Mama, who does not fancy fishing him out of the lake if he overshoots.

On submissions for a Bilingual Blogging Carnival

So, slightly unexpectedly, I am hosting the February edition of the Blogging Carnival on Bilingualism. You can see some of the previous carnivals and more about them in general here.

If you would like to take part, please send me your posts on bi/multilingualism, bi/ multiculturalism, language learning or teaching, or any other topic inspired by bringing up children bi or multilingually by noon on Sat 5th March. I hope to get the carnival up and about on Monday 7th March*. My email is s (underscore) solnushka (at) yahoo (dot) co (dot) uk

Please include the URL for your post, the URL for your blog and your name and the blog’s name.

I’m really looking forward to hosting my first Bilingual Blogging Carnival. I’ve enjoyed reading the others so much. It’s great to find out that there are others out there suffering the same triumphs and celebrating the same setbacks as my family does in our attempt to bring my son up as a hopefully fairly balanced English and Russian speaker.

Any questions, don’t hesitate to ask me at s (underscore) solnushka (at) yahoo (dot) co (dot) uk

*I do appreciate this does make a bit of a mockery of the idea of it being February’s Carnival, but hey ho.

On getting in touch with his feminine side

In honour of the fact that it is Defender of the Fatherland Day, otherwise known to one and all as Men’s Day in Russia, you feel that you ought to catalogue the ways that the Star is exploring his feminine side.

I mean cars, dirt, headbutting other children in the stomach and a tendency to fling his clothes willy-nilly all over his bedroom aside, there is the aforementioned fondness for pink. He got particularly excited over one of his little girlfriend’s pink fingernails on Tuesday. You are thinking the pink tights are not cutting it any more.

And lately, he has started to really enjoy dancing to classical music. Admittedly he tends to stomp rather than waft, no matter how twinkly the tune is.

Most striking is his new enthusiasm.

He has passed through his shark phase, necessitating taking every book on sharks out of every library in the surrounding area, drawing sharks, making sharks out of playdough, studying every puddle for signs of sharks and being quite convinced he sees one in the Thames every day, as well as telling himself bedtime stories involving wolves being chased by sharks (and bees).

Now, however, he is into flowers.

You spent a good five minutes yesterday handing over the flowerbeds at the end of your street admiring the pretty purple blossoms that have just been planted. Picking daisies, dandelions and any other passing weed with a petal is also a must on any outside trip. And he persuaded you to buy a clutch of daffodil stems in the supermarket a few days ago, which he  goes over and sniffs proudly first thing every morning. As for the seriousness with which he took your trip to the garden centre to buy some primroses for the window boxes, well, I know colour schemes are important in gardening, but he changed his mind at least three times about the precise shade of yellow he wanted for his look.

Of course, when it comes to the actual planting, you suspect he will revert to type and fling mud all over the balcony, his Mama and himself, but still. You are taking pride in raising a well-rounded balanced individual nonetheless.

On Masha i Medved

You most favourite Russian cartoon is a modern one called Masha i Medved, or Masha and the Bear.

Masha and the Bear is a traditional fairy story about a little girl who gets lost in the woods and is eventually restored to her loving grandparents by a friendly bear.

This isn’t that story. Not quite.

But it does cover (rural) Russian culture quite nicely. Fishing, jam making, ice skating, celebrating New Year, wolves, the obsession with the works of O. Henry, samovars, gardening, football, that sort of thing.

You presume they are saving the topics of mushroom picking and having a shashlik for later.

However, that’s not the reason why it is your favourite Russian cartoon. It’s your favourite Russian cartoon because whoever is making it is clearly channelling the Star. Masha, quite frankly, is the Star, albeit in a pink headscarf.

Here is a sample. It helps to know that another famous fairy story includes a fisherman catching a golden fish and being granted three wishes in exchange for chucking it back again.

Warning: anyone expressing the slightest interest is in danger of having a DVD, complete with homemade translation, thrust upon them. You would quite like the cartoon makers to keep getting paid so they can make more episodes. Your Christmas presents had a  certain… sameness… to them this year.

On Nu Pogodi!

Nu Pogodi! (Just you wait!) is your second favourite Russian cartoon. Which is disappointing, as there are some truly great sensitive and artistically worthy Soviet cartoons out there. And this isn’t one of them.

The series was made in the 1970s and 80s and is the story of a wolf trying to catch a hare.

The wolf is a very disreputable sort. He slouches around, doing no work, thumbing his nose at authority figures (behind their backs), smoking, drinking and wearing really quite hippified clothes. And worse! He is scruffy!

Russians don’t really do scruffy.

The hare is much more like it. Bright eyed, cheerful, joins in with cultural activities, waters his flowers, wears very neat little outfits. That sort of thing.

He really doesn’t have the same cachet as the wolf.

The wolf is clearly the real hero of the cartoons. And yet he is the very epitome of what good Soviet people were supposed to revile. You’d have banned it like a shot. Which just goes to show how much you still don’t understand about Soviet Russia.

Of course, it’s still wildly popular today.

You like it because it shows all sorts of scenes from contemporary mainly urban life. The museum, the fairground, the stadium, at a concert, at New Year, at the Olympics and so on. You find it quite fascinating. The music is pretty evocative too.

And because they are a welcome relief after the terminally sanitised shows on kid’s TV these days.

You recommend episodes 1 -16. After that, they are the modern versions and even the Russians balk at having their children’s icons smoke.

On green-eyed taxis.

The Star likes to join in when his Papa sings this song.

Controversially, he has decided that the words are ‘BANANA! Banana, banana, banana. BANANA! Banana. Banana, banana. BANANA!’

He also sings it in a very peculiar rock growl, although that might be because he his trying to copy his Papa, a man who cannot hold a tune and who is rhythm deaf.

You are perplexed.

Mainly by his taste in music.

On wishing you were back in the Cold War

It’s three am and you can’t sleep*. You can distinctly remember the last time you felt this distressed by weather related unpleasantness. It was in Berlin in 1989.

One of the fringe benefits of belonging to orchestras in your youth was that they went on tour. Not as often as you’d have liked. There was a peculiar phenomenon back then that every orchestra you joined stopped their regular jaunts abroad for virtually the duration of your membership, but you did get a few trips in before they realised you were there. Mainly to Germany and central Europe. You went to Maarstrict before the treaty, Prague before it became fashionable for stag nights, Saltsburg well after its heyday and Berlin before the wall came down. Also Kolm/ Cologne. There is a river in Kolm, which is virtually everything you remember about it.

Anyway, the thing about being in a Youth Orchestra is that when you go on tour it is also most definitely a jolly. An educational jolly, mind, which accounts for the fact that you were staying with a German family in a flat. No, an apartment. You, the girl from darkest suburban semi land, were most impressed, particularly by the high ceilings. And the bidet.

There were also a lot of outings to places of interest, nearly all of which turned out to be related to Nazi atrocities. In fact, the whole visit seemed to consist of an extensive apology by your hosts for the second world war, which you can only hope was because your group were British. ‘We’ve got some Brits coming to stay,’ you hope someone asked, ‘what would they like to do?’ ‘Watch us heap sackcloth and ashes upon ourselves in many and varied ways. You know how they are about the war. They’ll never get over it until they beat us at football again.’

And of course, whenever the German exchange students came to your school back in the UK, they always got taken to Coventry.

Now it could be that the war was more constantly uppermost in the average Berliners minds at that time because they were living in an enclave in East Germany with a dirty great wall across their city. Enough to turn the strongest constitution to history, that. And the wall, or rather, Checkpoint Charlie, the place where East and West met and occasionally crossed over for the historically challenged among us, was where it happened.

You were defecting to East Germany. For the afternoon. To see what was either an exceptionally the dull museum, or an exceptionally dull art gallery. You actually can’t remember anything about it. I think you had all been expecting James Bond to come crashing round the corner at any minute though, so anything else was bound to be a let down when that failed to happen. Anyway. To get there meant going over the wall, which meant having you and your companions’ passports grilled, which meant waiting, which meant sitting in a coach on a hot day with the engine, and thus the air conditioning strictly switched off.

So there you all were in a metal box on tarmac in the full blaze of the sun with a full load of sweaty teenagers.

It was hell. It was particularly hell because you did not know how long it would last although you suppose now it couldn’t have been much more than thirty minutes. Long enough for your resin, the tree sap that string players use to make their bows sticky, which usually looks like that a polished stone, to liquefy, you do know that.

Since that time, this has been your benchmark for feeling unhappy with heat. And believe me, you are ever unhappy with heat, so it’s not like you haven’t made comparisons. No longer. Today the smog has descended again, and in a spirit of solidarity you stayed at home with the Star. With the windows shut.

It was thirty-nine degrees outside today. It was thirty-five degrees inside the flat and, because of the number of showers you all felt the need to have, humid. The Star actually weathered it quite well, but then he doesn’t seem bothered by physical discomfort. He does have a nasty heat rash although you are blaming that in part on the number of times you have had to wash him this holiday. The Star’s skin does not take kindly to being overwashed. Or being ill and having antibiotics.

You on the other hand would probably have thrown off all your clothes and gone and danced naked under the street tap the builders used if they hadn’t shown Howl’s Moving Castle in TV at 5pm. Even then, as soon as the Star drifted off to sleep you went and sat on the balcony, in defiance of the smoke, and cooled down enough to contemplate taking your place by the Star’s windowless side.

Unfortunately, you woke up in a pool of your own sweat about an hour ago and have had to come into the kitchen to get a breath of burnt tasting air. It’s probably about time you went back though.

Thank the Gods you are going home, well, tomorrow* it will be now.

*Or not. See What I did on my holidays part 1.

On unrampant capitalism

So you woke up this morning* to find that the smog had irredeemably settled thickly over your block of flats and that taking the Star out, or even opening the windows was clearly not an option. You therefore fled the flat, leaving the Star to the tender mercies of his babushka, and went to the Tretyakov Gallery, the Twentieth Century version.

You had the place to yourself, almost literally. It’s not all Soviet Realism and paintings of St Alin. Some of it is Kandinsky, for goodness sake. There are baffling and slightly disquieting installations. And it’s particularly interesting, because all of it is Soviet, in the same way that the Old Tretyakov Gallery is interesting because all of it is Russian. Kandinsky on his own is less interesting than Kandinsky with all of his peers, the people who were thinking the same way, trying out the same things. Or rejecting that group’s vision. It’s not about whether the pictures are any good or not, it’s just about seeing the way people of a particular type of society thought and developed themes through art.

That said, in contrast, for you the Old Tretyakov is about the paintings although you lost the ability to tell if these are any good or not a long time ago. You’ve visited the gallery so many times that you just enjoy seeing some of your old favourites. And in doing so you seem to have absorbed some of the cultural optical baggage that Russians pick up in doing so. You feel right at home with sentimental forest views now. Birch trees. Luminous green colours. Bears. Bears hugging the birch trees. That sort of thing.

The ones in the gallery itself are rather better than these**.

You distinctly remember being somewhat snobbish when you first saw such scenes represented in hack artists work for sale on souvenir markets all over Moscow. Now, suddenly, you look at them almost fondly. Although you do wonder if they really sell as well to foreigners new to the genre as pastiches of iconic Soviet posters made over as adverts to McDonalds.

But such thoughts show that although you might think you have soaked up some cultural sensitivity, you have clearly been spending too much time away from the wellspring of the deep Russian soul.

So it should come as no surprise that what you found most shocking about the Tretyakov, Old or New, is the woeful lack of determination to strip the last tourist dollar from visitors. There is a pretty extensive selection of luscious looking art books. For the regular punter, however, there are a few mugs inscribed with various artists’ signatures, some coasters with one or two of the more iconic images on and one type of headscarf with another, but that is pretty much your lot. They don’t even offer a particularly good selection of postcards any more. In fact, in the New Tretyakov didn’t even have that, because both small memento kiosks were closed for your visit. Considering that the shops in the big art galleries in London are always busier than the rooms with the paintings actually in them, you feel that it’s an appalling waste of fund-raising opportunities.

You are quite disgusted. You wanted a T-Shirt of his namesake for the Star at least.

The Three Bogatyrs by Viktor Vasnetsov

*Or not. See What I did on my Holidays Part 1.

Also here, here, here, here, here,  here, here, here, here, here, here, and here.

** I give you Shishkin. He does like the bears though.

On bilingual blogging again

So the latest Bilingual Blogging Carnival is up again here.

At least you contributed this time.

On animal rights.

There was a time when people would avoid wearing fur on the streets of Britain, for fear that some animal rights enthusiast would leap out and fling red paint all over them whilst shouting ‘baby seal murderer, baby seal murderer.’ Or somesuch.

This seems not to be the case any more. Perhaps people feel that recent winters now justify it. They need something to keep the biting zero degrees centigrade out while waiting for the train stopped by half an inch of snow after all.

But you are here to suggest that people might feel like reconsidering. If they are planning to sit in front of the Star on a bus, at any rate.

Because a person who is sitting in front of the Star on a bus wearing fur will have their collar felt, and a very loud voice will chant ‘Cat! Cat! Cat ! Cat! Cat! Cat! Cat!’ in their ear for at least five stops if they do.