In this strange complex of time and space anything can happen

Very neatly, wig tagged me for this meme on LJ, and TAFKAK tagged me for it on Facebook on the same day last week. So I shall answer it in both places, but obviously LJ lends itself better to nice formatting and having space to make some actual comments about the books. I have taken the concept of the books 'staying with me' seriously, and thus listed ones which both meant a lot to me at the time of original discovery and to which I have returned regularly since. They are listed (as best as I could remember) in the order in which I first encountered them.

L. Frank Baum (1900), The Wizard of Oz
This stands for the whole series, of course. I was certainly quite obsessed with them by the age of six, and indeed a picture of me reading one of them to my friends on that birthday can be seen here. The 1939 film was important too, of course, and I'm pretty sure I had seen it by that age, but there were more of the books, with far more wonderful characters and adventures than the film could deliver. Dad used to read the books to me as bedtime stories, I used to read and re-read them myself, and of course there was a great deal of dressing up, playing at being characters from the books and so on with the very friends shown in the picture, and especially hollyione. A lifetime love of fantastical stories was to follow...

Alison Uttley (1939), A Traveller in Time
Did loads of other people read this as children? I don't hear it mentioned very often as a children's classic, but it was another big favourite of my childhood, and has literally stayed with me in the sense that I still have my copy of it. I haven't done that for many of my childhood books - though the Oz series are another exception. Doubtless one of the attractions all along was the fact that the main character, a young girl from the 20th century, is called Penelope. But also, time travel! While staying in a Tudor manor house, she repeatedly finds herself slipping back to its early days, and interacting with characters from the reign of Elizabeth I. Clearly at the roots of my love of both fantastical time travel stories, and the real-life dialogue between present and past.

Bram Stoker (1897), Dracula
Ha, I hardly need to explain this one right now, do I? See my dracula tag, passim, for details. First read, as far as I can tell, in early 1986, when I was nine years old, on the back of having seen the Hammer film the previous autumn. Left me with a love of all things Gothic, which has waxed and waned but never really left me ever since. As the wise inbetween_girl once said, you never really stop being a Goth. At best, you're in recovery. Or perhaps lapsed, would be another way of putting it.

Diana Wynne Jones (1977), Charmed Life
Initially read via a copy from the school library aged 9 or 10, this came back and 'haunted' me with memories of a book of matches, a castle and a strange magical man in my early 20s. By then, the internet was advanced enough to have forums where I could ask what the title of the book I was remembering might be, and to deliver an answer within a few hours. So I bought a copy, swiftly followed by copies of the other Chrestomanci books, and then copies of multiple other DWJ books (see my diana wynne jones tag for details). As an adult, I can see that the real appeal of DWJ's writing lies in the combination of her light yet original prose style, imaginative vision and sharp understanding of human interactions, but as a child I'm pretty sure it was all about the unrecognised magical powers and multiple interconnected magical worlds. As per the Oz books, I really love that stuff.

Gene Wright (1986), Horrorshows: the A-Z of Horror in Film, TV, Radio and Theatre
In 2010, Mark Gatiss presented a documentary series called A History of Horror, during which he held up a book about horror films which he had owned since childhood, and explained how it was his personal Horror Bible, which had opened up to him the wonderful world of the genre. From the reaction on Twitter, it instantly became clear that everyone who had grown up loving horror films before the emergence of the internet had also owned such a book, and this is mine. I bought it at a book fair in about 1987 or 1988, devoured it greedily, and have been faithfully ticking off every film in it which I have seen ever since. Of course, the internet has long rendered such books obsolete, and insofar as this one was ever comprehensive at the time of original purchase, it certainly isn't now. So it is utterly meaningless to tick off all the films in it, as though somehow the end goal is to tick off every single film in the book - at which time, I don't know, a fanfare will sound and a man in a rhinestone suit will pop out to tell me I've won a prize, or something? But I still add a tick each time I see a new film from within its pages anyway, because heck I have been doing so for 25 years, and I'm not going to stop now. Besides, it's not like I care about horror films made after 1986 anyway (I struggle to care about those made after 1976, TBH), so it doesn't matter to me that it is enormously out of date.

Douglas Adams (1979), The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
First read c. age 11, and read at least another 8 times since. I know this because I have kept a tally of how many times I read it in the front of the book - classic geekish behaviour, of course. Once again, it's basically all about travel to wondrous other worlds, but this time instead of being magical (Oz, Chrestomanci), historical (A Traveller in Time), or supernatural (Dracula, everything else in Horrorshows), they are in space! It's not actually like I discovered adventures in space for the first time from Hitchhiker's, because of course I was also watching Doctor Who on a regular basis in parallel with all of this reading material, with which of course Hitchhiker's is intimately linked. But yeah - given everything else which has already appeared on this list, it is no big surprise that I loved Hitchhiker's.

C. Suetonius Tranquillus (c. AD 120), The Twelve Caesars
And now my list radically changes tack, because having established that I love stories about the fantastical, the rest of it is made up of books which mark key stages in the emergence of my academic interest in the ancient world. I am not, of course, unaware that this in itself also basically boils down to yet another interest in a wondrous other world, albeit one which actually existed in this case. Really, the mode of engagement is very similar - we have little snippets of information about the Roman world (texts, objects, places), just as we have little snippets of information about fictional fantasy worlds (texts, screen portrayals, merchandise), but there is also so much we don't know, and are at liberty to extrapolate from what we do. Plus the similar-yet-different qualities and the opportunity to compare and contrast can let us think about our own world in ways that just don't open up if we only think about it directly. And so I found a way to apply the thought-patterns and approaches I'd been developing from early childhood to something which grown-ups thought was admirable and serious, and which it was possible to acquire prestige and eventually even money through studying. As for Suetonius himself, he is here because he was one of the earliest ancient authors I really came to feel familiar with and fond of, mainly during A-level Ancient History. Tacitus may well be clever and sharp, but there is always a judgemental, sanctimonious undertone with him that I don't very much like. The things which interest Suetonius, by contrast, make him seem so utterly human - but there are also all sorts of clever structures and allusions to discover in his text on close reading, which together make him incredibly rewarding. I once literally hugged my Penguin copy of Suetonius to my chest as a sort of talisman when feeling alone, upset and in need of comfort. I can't really imagine anyone doing that with Tacitus.

J.B. Ward-Perkins (1991), Roman Imperial Architecture
One of the first books I bought about ancient material culture (as opposed to texts), in the context of a module on Roman architecture which I did in (I think) my second year as an undergraduate at Bristol. While strictly about buildings rather than cities, it nonetheless includes a lot of material about how those buildings fitted into the urban landscapes where they were located - unsurprisingly, since Ward-Perkins himself was really interested in cities first and architecture second, and wrote one of the earliest English-language books on the subject. So it is to this book which my interest in Roman urbanism can really be traced, and I still turn to it occasionally when I need to get to grips with a new (to me) city.

Christopher Hibbert (1987), Rome: the biography of a city
This one is from my third year at Bristol, and the best undergraduate module I ever did - Responses to Rome with Catharine Edwards and Duncan Kennedy, which was all about post-Classical responses to ancient Rome from the medieval period to the present day. I sat in those classes falling in love with Rome, and then went home to pore through this book and the wonders within. I still return to it in order to refresh my memory of medieval myths about the city's ancient past, Grand Tourism or fascist appropriations, all of which I have needed to do in the past few years.

Greg Woolf (1998), Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul
And finally, the book which I consulted most frequently while writing my PhD thesis. It had utterly redefined thinking about the relationship between Rome the state and its provincial populations, killing off tired old paradigms of 'beneficial imperialism' (think: What have the Romans ever done for us?) for good, so would have been important no matter what province I had used to look at the relationship between Roman ideas about the urban periphery and the reality on the ground in a provincial setting. But since I had chosen Gaul as my own main case-study anyway, it was gold-dust. Fifteen years later, it remains at the forefront of scholarly thinking on the topic, and thus still features regularly on my module reading lists, amongst my recommendations to research students, and indeed in the bibliographies of my own published works.

I'm not tagging anyone, because pretty much everyone in the world has done this meme already by now - but feel free to take this post as a prompt to do it yourself if you haven't and want to.

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OK, last meme entry. And again, although Boxing Day was awful, thankfully Christmas Day itself was all right, so I can describe it fairly normally.

I actually began Christmas Day at my sister's house in Warwick, because she had invited me and her old sixth-form friend Duncan over for the evening to keep up our old tradition of toasting in Christmas together at midnight. We had a lovely evening of canapés, drinks and chat, and did our little toast together at midnight (me with raspbery and cranberry juice), even though we were all yawning by that stage. Then Duncan and I bid them goodnight and headed off in my car, under a bright starry sky and taking care to avoid the (very few) other cars and people whom we saw pursuing their own rather drunken-looking paths home. I crept quietly into my parents' house with the benefit of much practice acquired during my teenage clubbing years, and sank into bed.

The next morning, we all got up, had breakfast, got ready and headed back over again to my sister's house in Warwick for Christmas Day itself. We arrived around 11am, and sat down with a round of coffee while we showered Eloise with presents. She is one and a half now, and has very definitely become a little girl rather than a baby:



She also genuinely manages to get even cuter every time I see her. The picture doesn't begin to capture that, because so much of it is about her lovely smiling animated face and her increasingly eloquent chatter, and nor does it even really show off the growing mass of blonde curls hiding at the back of her head. But I hope it gives some idea at least.

( Eloise's presents )

( Christmas dinner )

( Adult presents and Christmas TV )

A decent day all told - and a jolly good thing too, given what followed. :-/

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As foxy76 pointed out yesterday, the original list which I gathered for this meme had a repeat of day 16's question listed for day 23, so I Googled around for some similar memes, found a different question which I liked instead, and am using that.

The answer's pretty simple for me, though. I had a fair number of Dr Seuss books as a child, but the Grinch never crossed my radar until 2000 when the Jim Carrey film came out. Scrooge, meanwhile, I've known about properly since we read A Christmas Carol at school when I was about 11, and in a general cultural references way for longer than that. So his story has much deeper roots in my psyche.

Besides, I've always absolutely loved all the different ghosts and spirits which appear to him - I remember being absolutely fascinated with the description of Marley's chains, and his face appearing in place of the door-knocker the first time I read the story back at school. Clearly gearing up to be a proto-goth right there.

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I'm answering this for my parents' house in Birmingham, because that's where I have always usually spent Christmas Day - although in fact this year we won't be doing so, as we are going to my sister's house in Warwick instead. I don't normally decorate my own house, although I did buy a wreath for the door last year, and will probably put that up tomorrow.

We usually have a tree in the front hall, standing on top of a side-table which is there throughout the year. This gets set up and decorated by me and my sister on Christmas Eve, except in the years when we have hosted a Christmas party, when we set it up in time for that instead. On the same day, I go out into the garden to collect sprigs of holly, ivy and other ever-green shrubs or winter-flowering plants, and then slot them into holes drilled into a log for me by my Dad, which is then set up on top of the mantelpiece in the lounge to create a wintry display. As it happens, I took pictures of both our tree and the mantelpiece display in 2006, so can show you what those look like:


My Dad also has two sets of those Swedish candle bridge style light sets, which he likes to set up in the windows half-way up the stairs and on the upstairs landing, and which do a great deal to make the house look cheery and festive from the outside. The upstairs landing window doesn't actually have a proper sill for them to stand on, so this involves some quite elaborate jerry-rigging with string and blocks of wood to support them. But in all honesty, I think that inventing clever methods to get the lights to sit where he wants them to in defiance of the design of the house is half the fun of those lights for my Dad.

Other than that, we put cards up on bookshelves, dressers and plate rails, occasionally put a wreath on the front door, and that's about it really. We did have some streamers and other paper decorations when I was a child, but those have long since outlived their natural lives, and I don't remember any member of the family protesting when they were quietly retired some ten or fifteen years ago.

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I get the impression it is more of a north American than an English thing. Our trans-Atlantic cousins' equivalent to mulled wine, I suppose. In fact, the only time I can recall actually drinking any was at a Christmas party hosted by the lovely redkitty23, who is indeed American. It seemed OK, but I haven't felt inspired to track any down since.

In the course of a quick Google to remind myself of what is in it, though, I stumbled across something called the Eggnog Riot, which was apparently sparked off in 1826 after some hot-blooded young cadets smuggled whiskey for making eggnog into an American Military Academy. I do feel that knowledge like that ought to be shared.

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Day 09's prompt was 'Best holiday traditions', and I was really pleased about the plural form of 'traditions', because it meant I could just list everything I liked, and didn't have to choose. Now, I do have to choose!

So I have looked over my previous list, and with due consideration I am going to nominate the process of getting all the presents out from under the tree and sorting them into big piles for each person as my absolute favourite moment.

In part, I'm sure I still like that bit simply because as a child the presents were very straightforwardly the most exciting bit of Christmas, on a basic "yay new stuff!" level, and that excited child still lives within me. But I can appreciate the more adult aspects of the ceremony now, too. Like the fact that piling up the presents signals the start of a good two hours where as a family we are all basically focused on expressing our affection for each other and making each other happy. That's nice. And I've always liked the way they come from under the tree, too, like a sort of magical fruit which has grown there over the previous few days.

I'm sure things won't be anything like so ordered this year, with a one-and-a-half-year-old running around the place making mischief! But I'm pretty sure she will be her own compensation. :-)

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Well, obviously this has varied between different stages of my life, but I can identify things which were typical in different periods.

As a child of course it was all about the excitement, finding myself shut out of rooms where parents were hastily wrapping presents, and not being able to get to sleep because I was too busy listening out for Father Christmas.

Later, from my mid-teens onwards, I quite often went out to pubs or clubs with friends on Christmas eve. This was a particular favourite activity of a guy I got together with shortly before Christmas in the year that I was 17. I think joining in on his typical Christmas eve out with his mates at the various rock pubs in the centre of Birmingham was one of our first or maybe second dates. By the next year, we'd broken up, but were still friends (occasionally with benefits), so I went along for the same thing - and at that age, something you've done twice already feels 'typical'.

I've pretty much lost touch with the guy since, but I've been out for drinks on Christmas eve at various other times since with different friends or my sister, so it was definitely reasonably typical for a while. I've always been mildly surprised by how few people seem to be out doing the same thing, but then again I haven't done it myself either for a fair few years now, so maybe more people have started going out on Christmas eve than I realise. Anyway, I always liked the feeling of liminal, non-standard time, with all normal activities on hold and a free rein to just sit around, drink and relax, and also the feeling of weaving my way home half-sozzled through the cold dark evening, ready to creep ever-so-quietly to bed and then wake up to Christmas in the morning.

In my mid-twenties, we began hosting family Christmas parties at my parents' house, at least one of which was on Christmas eve itself - though more often they ended up being held on the 23rd. Three got written up in my LJ, here, here and here, but they stopped in 2007 because shortly after that my Mum got cancer, and it became too much for us to manage after that. At least twice we also went to a carol service on Bournville village green on Christmas eve itself.

But in parallel with those traditions, and still continuing to this day, is the habit which my sister and I have developed of staying up until midnight on Christmas eve and toasting in Christmas together with a little drink of something. I'm not sure when we started this, but it has definitely become an annual fixture now. In fact, this year I will be driving all the way from Birmingham to Warwick and back on Christmas eve just to share it with her, in spite of the fact that I'll then be returning again the following day for Christmas itself (which we are holding at her house for the first time ever). But I think I will enjoy the epic journey through the still, cold wintry night as an experience in itself, and I am certainly looking forward to some (very restrained) toasting in front of her wood-burning stove. After all, Santa will just stay home if we don't raise a glass to him on his way around the world.

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Firstly, many thanks to the people who commented on my last entry in the 25 days meme to suggest effective charities working to increase access to education in the developing world. I haven't had a chance to reply to your individual comments yet, as I went to bed soon after making the post and have been either working or worrying about sofas all day today! But your suggestions have all been really helpful. It's probable that I will go with one of the_alchemist's suggestions of the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative or Deworm the World, for their combination of proven effectiveness and joined-up thinking about people's needs, but I haven't looked through the other ideas properly yet, and want to give them all a fair hearing before I decide for sure.

Meanwhile, today's entry is going up a little early, as I am going out this evening. But I'm not sure I have a massive amount to say about it anyway! Obviously I try to make gifts look reasonably enticing and attractive. I usually choose purple shiny wrapping paper if possible, though at Christmas I may go for something a bit more seasonal-looking instead. E.g. this Christmas I'll be using one roll of black paper with a pattern of white wintry trees on it, and another silver-grey one along much the same lines. I wrap the gift itself as carefully as I can, though my habit of giving a selection of chocolatey treats and candles to each member of my family each year makes this difficult. Those things are too small (in value and often size) to be wrapped individually, but they are also of different sizes and shapes, so they make for awkward bundles to wrap. I'm pretty rubbish at remembering to buy gift-tags, so my gifts often have the names written on the paper instead - but hopefully now that I've written about that here I will remember this year!

And I think that's pretty much all I have to say on this fascinating topic.

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Oh, plural form of the word 'tradition' in this title, how I love thee! Because now I can just list all my favourite traditions without having to choose between them. Here goes:

• Buying everyone candles to mark the Saturnalia, because I can, and people indulging me over it.
• For the thirteen years that we did it, the annual Christmas dinner with my Bristol buddies.
• Decorating the family tree with my sister while listening to CDs of cheesy Christmas music and trying to stop the cat chasing after all the decorations.
• Going out into my parents' frosty, wintry garden to find sprigs of greenery, berries and winter-flowering plants, slot them into a log drilled with holes which my Dad made me for the purpose and make a winter display for the top of the fireplace.
• Helping to host a Christmas party at my parents' house, including taking charge of the mulled wine, singing carols and enjoying getting all dressed up and into the festive spirit.
• Staying up until midnight on Christmas eve to toast in Christmas with my sister.
• Putting sherry and mince pies out for Santa, which I still do even though we stopped having stockings any more in 2005. I'll say more about why I do that when we get to day 15, 'Do you still believe in Santa Claus?'.
• Bringing the presents from underneath the tree and into the lounge, sorting them out into piles according to who they're for, and then taking turns for each member of the family to open one present at a time, while sipping delicious coffee and eating chocolates.
• Having angel chimes on the table during Christmas dinner.
• Everything about the dinner itself.
• Setting fire to the pudding! I'm not sure when this became 'my' job, but it is now, and I love doing it.
• Sitting around afterwards with a roaring fire in the grate, drinking more coffee and playing with new presents.
• Watching Doctor Who.
• Staying up late after everyone else has gone to bed watching TV and catching up on other peoples' days, and opinions of Doctor Who via the internet.
• Going to see my oldest friend Amy and her family on Boxing Day.

Now wouldn't it have been a pity to have to choose just one of those?

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Obviously, in context, this means 'favourite Christmas memory'. And as other people doing this meme have said earlier today, it's a difficult one to answer, because it is in the very character of Christmas that you repeat the same things every year. That repetition makes it difficult to distinguish specific individual memories, and distorts the picture by merging different years' experiences into one.

I've always enjoyed the parties which my parents have held on either Christmas Eve itself or the 23rd December, for example, but I think the memory of those which is now in my head is a sort of amalgamation of all the best bits of all the parties we ever hosted. Since that was a good five or six of them, I don't really want to nominate any individual one of those parties as my favourite Christmas memory, because I am far from sure that the experiences I'm remembering really belong to one individual party.

So I'll go for a distinct moment which I really can remember, in large part thanks to it being recorded on my LJ. It's a quiet one, featuring me on my own, sitting up late after everyone else had gone to bed and watching Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone while wrapped up in a quilt just in front of a television turned down as low as possible in order not to disturb my mother in the bedroom immediately upstairs, while the embers in the fire sank slowly into the grate and there were copious chocolates lying on the lounge floor around me, all within easy reach.

That might not seem like a very sociable memory, but I've chosen it not just for the moment itself, but for the fact that the reason I enjoyed that experience so much was because it came after a really lovely family Christmas day, and indeed several days of festive jollity with all sorts of different family and friends beforehand. Sitting up late by myself at the end of it all, surrounded by warmth, comfort and indulgence, gave me the chance to look back over the previous few days, hug the memories to myself and appreciate how good it had all been. I was wrapped not just in my quilt, but in a hearty dose of the Christmas spirit - and that is why that moment now stands in my memory as a place which I aspire to get to at the end of every Christmas.

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