I decided to go with something quite anodyne for this blog post title as, having reviewed my notes below, there’s quite a collection of nonsense but it is the time of the year when one should be reviewing the past and looking forward to the future. Every newspaper article, radio programme, or podcast episode is either looking back on 2024 or looking forward to 2025 in some contorted way or another. But not this blog! This blog post will really be a series of disconnected rambling thoughts that I have noted down over the past few days. But I will start with the Ava-Jane highlights and work my way through the rambling thoughts and then any of you can jump ship at any time.
Ava-Jane Highlights!!!!!
Well the main Ava-Jane highlight to report is that she has been in fine fettle since we last checked in when AJ was flat out on a hospital bed and struggling for air. She is a whole lot better than she was back then and really firing on all cylinders – and she is such fun to be with when she is on good form. She hasn’t had a seizure for a good few weeks, so her brain is in much better shape, so she is on constant transmit mode, quite a lot of the time just shouting randomly but at other times, totally focussing on getting some complex point across and if we can’t understand it, that’s probably our loss.
Being the Grinch that I am, I don’t like to get going on Christmas too early. I mean, there are some people, some very dear to me, who are already hitting the Christmas thing from December First onward – this is a bit much for me. For me, Christmas begins with our North Buckinghamshire Down’s Syndrome Association Christmas party. There’s no Christmas party, like a Down’s Syndrome Association Christmas party. It’s the kind of Christmas party where people aren’t wearing Christmas jumpers ironically, they’re wearing Christmas jumpers because they love Christmas jumpers. Teenagers are wearing Christmas jumpers and loving it. We’ve been going to this party for years now. Ava-Jane is, by age, one of the senior citizens and there are always new people coming on board to welcome.
Ava-Jane was again one of the snow people to be wrapped up in toilet paper, which is great as it makes her the centre of attention – something she enjoys immensely.
My Ava-Jane highlight was going to the panto with her yesterday. Fo and I had a bit of a mix up on the tickets – I saw that Craig Revel Horwood, yes, that Craig Revel Horwood, he of Strictly Come Dancing Fame, yes, that Strictly Come Dancing, Ava-Jane’s absolute top number one, absolutely top fave show, was appearing in panto in Milton Keynes, yes that Milton Keynes, the cultural Mecca where we, like, literally live. So, I was like, “Fo, we absolutely like, 💯 % need to get tickets for this show!” And she was like, “We have already got tickets for this show, I got them in February.”
So yes, Fo had bought tickets for me and AJ to go to the panto last February, shortly after I had been to the panto with AJ that January and had had a bit of a last-minute-ticket-purchasing nightmare, precisely so as to avoid this last-minute-ticket-purchasing nightmare. She is clever like that, my Fo.
It was great! Ava-Jane likes any live show, Craig Revel Horwood was pretty wooden and I am not sure that Ava-Jane associated the guy up on the stage in the flamboyant pirate outfit with the judge on Strictly but there was enough singing and dancing to keep her entertained and some genuinely funny gags that tickled my fancy.
And Christmas was a highlight for Avallain-Jane and for all of us. We had a bit of a family melding, which can, of course, go horribly wrong but sisters-in-law and widowed parents all buggered along admirably.
Ava-Jane does love Christmas, as a sociable soul she thrives at these times when we allow our more social natures to flourish. She’ll say “hello” to any random passing stranger at any time of the year but at Christmas, they’ll say “hello” back.
Magical realism on screen
In theory this blog is supposed to be about Ava-Jane but as even a casual reader will have noticed, I do like to go off on a little political rant now and then. We have also had quite a little bit of cricket and no doubt some general sports coverage, probably mostly football and probably mostly about Atlético Madrid. Atlético Madrid, incidentally league leaders in Spain as we go to press at the turn of the year. Oh yeah, get in! I obviously can’t really transmit how I was saying “Oh yeah, get in!” In written form but it was meant humourlessly laconically rather than a proper “Oh yeah, get in!!!!!! Bro!” But what we haven’t had on this blog to date, and probably no doubt to everyone’s great relief is an exploration of the leading Latin American literary genre, namely magical realism.
So buckle up, I have had some thoughts and I have nowhere else to explore them, this will not become a trend I assure you and skip the next bit if you will.
Magical realism on screen really doesn’t work in my very humble opinion. There, I have gone out and said it. And this at a time when TV adaptations of seminal Latin American magical realist texts seem to be having something of a heyday and by heyday, I mean there have been two, but hey, thats two more TV adaptations of seminal Latin American magical realist texts than you would ordinarily expect to see in a calendar year. We had Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Paramo earlier this autumn. Juan Rulfo was so obscure that he himself gave up writing shortly after writing his great novella, Pedro Paramo. And just before Christmas, Netflix has dropped One Hundred Years of Solitude, the most celebrated of all Latin American novels. Both of these works have been considered unfilmable, and quite rightly.
If you have ever seen, The House of the Spirits, or worse still, if you have ever seen the film The House of the Spirits having read the book, The House of the Spirits, you will probably empathise when I say that this is a literary genre that does not lend itself to being rendered on the harsh realist medium of celluloid. Both these recent Netflix series are far superior to that film, I can assure you.
Magical realism is a genre that expects the reader to be active and to engage with the story for themselves.
Jorge Luis Borges only ever wrote short stories, and a few poems and a whole load of essays but never wrote a full form novel. Umberto Eco, on the other hand, wrote a whole load of novels and very good they are too. The Name of the Rose is a very great novel without doubt but it is essentially a Borges short story stretched from five pages to three hundred. Eco fills in all the gaps that Borges expected your imagination to fill.
And that’s the problem with putting magical realism on screen, it’s a genre that expects the reader to put a great deal of themselves into the act of reading, you are not supposed to be on receive when you engage with these works. Julio’s Cortázar, another Argentinian who liked a short story, wrote a story, “The Continuity of Parks”, where the reader is killed by the protagonist of the story they are reading. The reader had brought death upon themselves by engaging in the act of reading too passively. Cortázar again, wrote a novel Rayuela, or Hopscotch that gave the reader the choice of reading the book in two entirety different ways, either in a linear way from Chapter One onwards or to follow a hopscotch route though the chapters.
And what gives me the right to opine on Latin American literature you might well ask. Well a 2:2 in Comparative American Studies, I might well answer. I did then stagger on to get an MA in Latin American literature through a haze of smoke in the early 1990s. So, yes, my forays into a deep critique of magical realism are not exactly fresh. And given that I barely read any fiction at all anymore and a lot of what I do read is a lot of poo – lots of historical novels with the accent heavily on the “novel” rather than the “historical” where men are invariably standing in a shield wall of one type or another, be it Anglo-Saxon or a Greek hoplite phalanx, I wouldn’t take my lead or anything literate very much.
If you have read this rubbish, that’s on you. If you have read this Latin American drivel, that’s on you – I think I gave you fair warning above.
I make notes for potential inclusion in the blog as I go and I had got as far as penning a potential title for a blog thusly:
What if she stood up and recited Shakespeare?
It was a random thought that amused me at the time but just imagine if Ava-Jane really did stand up and recite a Shakespeare sonnet – that would be pretty bloomin’ magical realist, wouldn’t it? It’s the kind of thing that would totally happen in a Gabriel Garcia Márquez or Isabel Allende book.
But OK, we are in Buckinghamshire and on the “pages” of a blog rather than the paper and ink pages of a novel and that ain’t going to happen, but Ava-Jane’s speech really is striding forward and she is trying to communicate so much that it’s hard to keep up. Where previously she only had a few things to say, e.g. loo, milk, walk, bed, book, Peppa Pig, it was quite easy to work out what she wanted even when she wasn’t communicating it very clearly but now she has a far wider range of commands, and I am often at a loss to really grasp what she is trying to say.
Elf on a f***ing shelf
Well this section is at least seasonal
Is anyone else fed up with those endless memes around this time of the year, that go “You’ve heard of Elf on a shelf, now get ready for…” with a picture of two apparently unconnected things that must rhyme if you could only just work out what they were. Such as this one (please forgive the punctuation):
I find them far more frustrating than I should, so I thought I might wreak vengeance and just make them up so other people could spend a few fruitless moments trying to work out what’s going on.
Below is one of mine:
It’s “crusader on a wader”, I won’t make you scratch your heads on my account. And is this only funny if you have a basic understanding of religious warfare and littoral ornithology, or indeed, whether it is funny at all?
However, if these are your thing, here’s a bunch more from the internet that meant nothing to me:
You are free to guess if you will – I did get the first two.
Ava-Jane or Francisco Franco for a bummel?
I do like to walk the dog listening to a podcast and this morning was going to go for a walk with Ana and Franco – I am listening to a series on Francisco Franco, Dictator of Spain as part of the Real Dictators podcast – but realised that AJ hadn’t really seen the light of day for a while so opted to go for a walk with Ana and AJ instead. This was probably a wise decision for my mental health – Ava-Jane is a much more pleasant walking companion than General Francisco Franco.
We sang the Grand Old Duke of York as we went up and down hills on our way; Ava-Jane insisting that I do it again and again, with her chiming in with the “Downs” (appropriately enough, I suppose). It did then occur to me that I was the 10,000 men in this scenario with Ava-Jane taking the role of the eponymous Duke flogging his poor men up and down dale.
So, if you aren’t acquainted with the word “bummel”, in the title of this section, which I wasn’t really until a couple of hours ago when I was doing the general knowledge crossword and read the clue: “Word, notably used by humorist Jerome K. Jerome, for an amble, dawdle, leisurely journey or ramble” and then remembered that we had actually published a Jerome K. Jerome book called “Three Men on the Bummel”. It had probably only lodged in my memory because it sounded like “bum” and I am very, very immature.
But be that as it may, Ava-Jane, Ana, and I went out on a fine bummel this afternoon. We bummeled up and down dale, as previously mentioned, singing as we went.
And really, I cannot think of a finer way to spend these few days when there really is very little to be done. Ava-Jane is a great companion for downtime – she can be a little tricky when it’s all a bit hurly-burly and various plates are spinning but during those few days of the year when you can truly allow yourself to go at her pace, and remember her pace means that she will say “hello” to people when they have long since passed her, so going at her pace means not being in a hurry, giving yourself and her time and space to communicate together and to be together.
Misliterature 