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The future does not involve kangaroos

SarahAlderson

December 29, 2011

John and I are discussing our future and where we might end up living in said future (in 4 or 5 years’ time people don’t panic we’re not quitting Ubud yet.) We’ve agreed the next stop we call home must be hippy, progressive (though the only place filled with more crazies than Ubud must be the Pleidian mother ship itself), multi-cultural, near water, hot but not humid…and John is saying something now about conscious living and I hear the words but at the same time I’m zoning out because over his shoulder, just blurring at the corner of my vision, is the dessert menu.

Apple panna cotta or Cherry pie? I think to myself whilst nodding with my serious face at John.

We are sitting on a wooden deck overlooking a lovely lake. It’s idyllic – the sky is blue and cloudless, the grass is verdant, the wine glasses are full of bubbles and pink happiness, the plates of manchego and marron (look it up) have been cleared away, the food baby is gestating. We’ve spent two hours eating and talking about life and our plans for 2012 and expressing gratitude in a very Ubud Deepak Chopra way for all the experiences of the last two years (can you believe it’s been two years?). Of course, you’ve probably guessed by now we’re not in Bali – wine…cherry pie…manchego…ain’t happening in Indonesia. We’re in Australia of course.

Remember we came here last year? To Perth? A great place to retire or wait out the apocolypse I think I remarked back then (certainly the outback seems like a remote enough place to sit and chill whilst the zombies rampage unless the kangaroos get infected too – goddamn I read too much YA fiction). My opinion remains. I love it. It’s beautiful and the weather is heavenly and there are supermarkets selling cherries and wine and goats cheese and oatiflakes and there is so much SPACE that even the sky seems ginormously enormous. I like it here I do, but I couldn’t live here. Despite the oatiflakes and the WINE and the cleanliness and the amount of six-package on the beaches and the WINE and the amazing bloggers who love my books and the awesome sunshine and the WINE.

For a start we couldn’t actually afford it. Are the Australians the only people on earth right now with actual money? They certainly don’t seem to be recession hit. I on the other hand am having my own financial melt down given the cost of just about everything on this continent. Books are about twenty quid a pop. I mean – seriously? How is that possible? On the other hand am hoping I see a royalty cheque from Oz soon – I mean that’s got to be good given a 7% royalty here is probably the equivalent of 100% royalty elsewhere.

Alas though Australia, despite your luscious desserts and empty deserts, we are just not meant to be. Unless the zombieapocolypse starts soon.

I am so done with driving in this town

SarahAlderson

4 comments

December 13, 2011

There’s a campaign in Ubud to stop the tourist coaches coming into town and clogging the narrow streets up. Of course this being Bali where organization, foresight and planning are low down on the list of priorities nothing changes. The buses continue to belch their way into town to deposit their tourists outside the market so they can buy penis bottle openers and over-priced wooden Buddha statues.

There are seemingly no rules to the road in Bali whatsoever. If you like you can drive on the left. I’ve never seen a bike pause at a stop sign and look both ways before pulling straight out into traffic – they always just pull straight out. It’s like they’re born to play Russian Roulette and have no care whatsoever that they might DIE. I can’t figure it. As a driver you have to be totally on your toes. It’s like playing space invaders. 3 people a DAY die on the roads in Bali. 3.

The one rule that is pretty much always observed (other than don’t wear a helmet) is that if your side of the road is blocked by a car or other obstacle you have to give way to oncoming traffic until the road is clear to overtake.

So I’m driving up the hill into town. On the other side of the road is a long row of parked cars and bikes. By rights anything at the top of the hill has to wait for me to pass before it can go. And then I see the FO sized coach at the top of the hill. I narrow my eyes and think to myself ‘don’t you dare you fucker’ but does he telepathically hear me or does he just think…I’m going to crush you sucker?

Yeah, he thinks the latter.

He comes steaming towards me. Seeing that there is no way in God’s universe a Coach – a fricking coach – can pass me without crushing the car whole I slam on the brakes.

I ram the car into reverse, checking my mirrors. A woman on a bike is staring blankly at me, as I beep her to get off my bumper and back up. She doesn’t move. I honk again. She stays staring gormlessly as the coach descends on us. I reverse so I’m touching her wheel. She still doesn’t move. By which point there are now about fifty bikes and three cars all up my arse …THERE’S A FRICKING COACH IN THE WAY – I’m yelling at them all. None of them seem to figure it out. BACK THE HELL UP!

They all start trying to overtake me instead. Of course they do. This is Bali.

I sigh and put the handbrake on and let the coach meet me face to face.

Now what? I think. I can’t go back and he can’t go back. I can’t climb the curb as it’s about a foot high. And he has parked cars and bikes on his side.

This is when the six men with whistles come flying down the hill, arms waving, cheeks puffing. I roll my eyes heavenward. If you read my blog regularly, you’ll know how much I love these traffic guys. I mean how on earth would I know which way to turn the wheel without them to show me?

And now they start in earnest. They’re a swarm. All I can see is flaying arms and agitated faces. A man on a bicycle joins in. A western tourist starts taking photos. A motorbike tries to mount the curb to overtake me. Three men start banging my bonnet and telling me to turn the wheel – one this way, one that way, another man at the front tells me to back up. Yet another starts screaming at me to come forward. A fifth man tells me to stay put.

I wind the windows down.

‘Can you all shut the hell up?’ I shout. ‘You’re all telling me different bloody things! YOU’RE NOT HELPING.’

This sets them to cursing out each other.

I wind the window back up. And then the coach starts moving forward.

‘What the fuck?’ I think to myself. There is just no way that coach is getting past without taking off the side of the car. I watch it bear down thinking that this just cannot be happening.

I close my eyes.

It squeezes by me leaving not a millimeter to spare. And then it gets stuck by the wheel arch. Really? You don’t say. That was UNEXPECTED.

The coach driver doesn’t give a crap about my car. It just cares about getting its coachload of tourists out of Ubud and back to Kuta. I want to get out the car, smash down the driver’s door, grab hold of one of the wooden penis bottle openers no doubt on board and do serious damage to him with it but unfortunately you can’t even slide a piece of paper between my car and the coach. I am wedged quite literally inside.

Eventually ignoring the gesticulating whistle blowers I slam my car up the curb, jumping it about a foot and the coach scrapes my wheel arches and then thunders off.

Sodding, sodding coaches.

I am such a teenager

SarahAlderson

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December 4, 2011

‘You always do this’

‘Do what?’

‘Act like this’

‘Like what?’ I ask – though in my head I know full well what he is talking about. John is suggesting I’m acting like a teenager.

I shrug, huff, cross my arms over the chest. ‘I’m coming aren’t I?’ I ask slamming the car door.

I follow this with a silent yet dramatic – ‘But don’t ask me to be happy, because that was never part of the deal.’ Then I giggle to myself at the fact I’m now quoting lines from my books – Evie says this in Fated. (Ahh the fuzzy lines where fiction and real life blur…now if they could just blur a bit more and land me with the skills of my protagonists to hurl car shaped missiles at people’s heads and decapitate demons with circular saw blades).

Anyway, I digress. I’m huffing like a teenager not because I still am one but because John is dragging me up a bloody volcano at 7am. Last time I went up mount Batur was a year ago and then I swore on someone’s grave that it was the utter last time EVER as in EVVVVVEEEEEERRRRRR full stop for all eternity poke my eyes out and slap me around the face if I’m lying. Mainly I swore like this because as soon as you get out the car in the crater you’re hit by a swarm of flies so thick you finally understand what a corpse might feel like if left for a month on a body farm. But here I am having to go up the Volcano again because John has signed us up to a tree planting expedition which apparently he claims will be great fun. He mutters something else about how important it is for us to take part in things like this. I hear yada yada community yada green yada something but already I’m thinking ‘this sucks balls.’

Let’s reforest the volcano.

‘But why?’ I ask.

John stares at me sideways and shakes his head in mute disgust.

‘What?’ I ask, ‘I mean seriously, Batur is still a live volcano so isn’t it kind of pointless to plant trees which in all likelihood are going to be directly in the path of the next lava flow?’

And indeed when we get there we’re planting little saplings in lava rock. Lava rock left behind from the last time the volcano spewed out a little stream of molten fire. Just forty odd years ago.

I trudge in my flip flops over the caustic rock, having borrowed a pair of sunglasses from one nice man and got a second to carry my trees for me. ‘We don’t have a shovel,’ I say to John, ‘How are we supposed to plant these things?’

John holds up an old tree branch. ‘We’ll dig with this.’

I want to hit him over the head with it.

The other people laugh and take photos when I start scratching at the dirt to dig a hole. This is apparently as momentous an occasion as Will & Kate’s balcony kiss. John actually films me on my hands and knees. Someone cracks a joke about my nails.

I think sadly of twelve hours before where I was reclining on a day bed by a pool overlooking the beach down south drinking cocktails. I am THAT girl. I am not THIS girl. I make no pretences.

However I do plant all my trees. Then I take Alula’s hand and march back down the volcano to the car, filled with dead flies.

On the way back home John stops the car and buys a wooden table.

Just saying.

Now who’s the bad guy?

Primal me

SarahAlderson

1 comment

November 28, 2011

What is that?

It’s a rose quartz. It’s to help clear my sacral chakra.

Oh.

I need to use it when I meditate.

OK.

Now, I bet every penny in my bank account (which isn’t very much just in case you were thinking of taking me up on that bet) that you’re reading that thinking I’m the one saying Oh and OK whilst silently screaming ‘oh jesus…I’m trapped talking to a freaky bliss ninny’ and glancing surreptitiously sideways for the exits.

Well you’re wrong. I’m the one holding the rose quartz.

I gave you a few stunned seconds to absorb that. For the last two weeks I’ve been embracing the esoteric in an effort to finally kick the back pain caused by two herniated discs into submission. Rather than take the Max Mosley route I have undertaken the following:

– three sessions with an amazing energy worker / osteopath

– watsu

– pilates

– chakra cleansing (yeah you heard me right)

– a pedicure (does that count?)

The pedicure was done with a cheese grater – and the pain it caused momentarily distracted me from the pain in my back. So in that respect it worked.

The three sessions with the energy worker were the equivalent of taking a hit on a bong the size of Denpasar. I was floaty good for hours after. Needless to say I think I’ve developed a dependency issue on the man doing the treatment and am worried that my body subconsciously will refuse to heal because that will mean no more floaty good. Kind of like how people get addicted to pain relief.

The Watsu – let me explain – you get in a giant Jacuzzi shaped pool wearing only a bikini and a man spins you around. It’s rather like how I imagine a piece of lettuce in a salad spinner feels, or an old sock stuck on a warm wash delicate cycle. If you were going all Ubud about it, you could describe it as a ‘symbiotic relationship resonant of floating in the warmth and safety of the womb of the universe.’

I kind of squirmed mentally at the idea of being in a womb but I did like the idea of being in space. It was a bit like floating in space. If space were warm and didn’t make your eyeballs explode that is. It was strange and alarming and evocative and at the end I felt seasick and collapsed heaving against the side before sinking to the bottom and letting out a scream. Very primal of me.

The English in me was very embarrassed about the primal in me and apologized to the lovely man who’d been swirling me for an hour. He told me that some people did all sorts of crazy. I was quite tame by comparison apparently. Meeting him in a social setting will be somewhat awkward though I imagine. ‘Hello, remember me? I screamed in your swimming pool and almost threw up on you. Remember?’

Pilates – I’ve been doing this for a year now and I have to say I’m loving it. More for the endless gossiping I get to do than for the astonishing realization that I have pelvic floor muscles and can squeeze them on demand – though put away your ping pong balls – I’m not that advanced.

And finally with the chakra cleansing – which was part of a birthday present – and also meant I could check off ‘start meditating’ on my list of things to do in 2011. So I’ve been meditating every day now for COUNT – three days – 3 whole days – admittedly not all day but always whilst clutching my rose quartz stone and imagining I’m sitting in a ray of golden light. Ergo, this should mean I’m fully enlightened by now. However in the car earlier dealing with the usual numpty-headed muppets on the roads of Bali Alula turned to me and said, ‘mummy why are you calling that man a wanker?’

Not quite so enlightened then. But Deepak does say it will take 21 days.

And as for the herniated discs. They’re still herniated.

Thanksgiving belatedly

SarahAlderson

2 comments

November 26, 2011

This time last year I wrote a Thanksgiving blog post where I went all Ubud and listed all the things I was grateful for. I think it included things like not having to commute, not having to manage people any more, living in Bali, living in Bali, living in Bali.

And even though I’m not American and I still am not entirely sure what Thanksgiving is about (though I do know it involves pilgrims and turkey and not as John believed the civil war (which I think he was confusing with the American War of Independence anyway because unlike me he’s never read a Bernard Cornwall novel) I’m going to do it again for 2011. It’s easier than doing NY resolutions because I just have to say thank you – I don’t have to give up chocolate or try to meditate or learn Indonesian.

This year I’m giving thanks for the following:

Living in Bali…sorry I have to include this again. I mean…can you believe it’s been this long already? And no I’m still not bored.

Bali Buddha – for delivering sometimes as much as three times a day to my house.

Friends – I have made so many amazing friends since I moved to Bali. Truly wonderful supportive hilarious adventurous inspiring incredible people.

My kindle! Thank you John. This has truly revolutionized my life, more than the humble french fry, throne toilets, chocolate and Spotify. It has also bankrupted me.

A husband who lets me go to the Gili islands. Actually he didn’t just let me he insisted I go, sensing quite rightly that if he didn’t I might try to discover whether I could fly from our balcony.

The fact that Alula is no longer acting like a child possessed. Thank you GOD. This year has tested me to the limits of human endurance – Bear Grylls can take his amazonian arctic public school boy adventures and stick ’em in the file marked tame. He’s never had to go vs. Alula. But it appears that this Omenically terrifying phase is now over. Bring on the teenage years. I’m now ready for anything – piercings, pregnancies, expulsions, arrests… I laugh in the face of such things.

The universe once more. Because I love you universe. Two years ago I had almost finished writing my first book having been partly inspired by watching Generation Kill and quite liking the bit when Alex Skarsgard took his shirt off and ran around pretending to be a plane. Today Hunting Lila is actually for sale in actual bookshops being bought by actual people. AND my friend who happens also to quite handily be a beautiful and successful actress met Alex Skarsgard’s best friend the other week whilst in LA and told him all about Hunting Lila and the character Alex and how the actual Alex Skarsgard was the inspiration which makes me come across as some huge author stalker and I’m half expecting a restraining order any day but let’s not think about that and let’s think about the fact that quite clearly the universe is slowly slowly pulling me towards the inevitable conclusion of a casting couch and Askars sitting beside me with no clothes on showing me his best plane impression.

believe it.

How exciting to contemplate what next year’s thanksgiving list will include…

Coconut Conspiracies

SarahAlderson

1 comment

November 21, 2011

It feels like we are just cycling North. North north north. Does this island ever end? I thought it was only 3km long but it feels more like 30km in this intense heat with the bicycle wheels burying themselves every five metres into Saharan sized sand dunes.

And then somehow we are back where we started.

Circles.

Amazing.

Islands are round it turns out.

My sense of direction is bad it turns out.

By the time we stagger senseless from the bicycle seats (there had been a looooong stop at a bar shack on the way) and find our way into the sea we find we cannot find our way out of the sea. I wish we could order cake and coconuts. Maybe they could bring them to us right here. Where we float like star fish near the shore.

But this it turns out is just a daydream.

On shore we ask if there are coconuts.

No coconuts we are informed.

We’re on a desert island coated in palm trees and there are no coconuts. We ponder the strangeness of this. Maybe it is a coconut conspiracy. Lindsay tries to get the waiter to find us a coconut and bring it to us.

I think to myself Lindsay was clearly a queen or a pharoah’s wife in a past life. Or else she’s seen that scene from Withnail and I too many times – the one in the cake shop – WE DEMAND CAKE!

We demand coconuts. And despite the fact Lindsay is so effortlessly beautiful and gracious and doesn’t really demand but asks so sweetly that I’m surprised all the men on the island aren’t slathering to find the nearest tree and shimmy up it to sate her demand for coconuts – tidak ada. There are no coconuts.

It’s Monday, I say to Lindsay. M-ON-D-AY – I roll the word around as though it is foreign on my tongue. Once upon a time Mondays heralded commuter hell and the start of the working week. Now they herald leaving the kids with the husbands whilst we hop a boat to the gilis, hire bicycles, eat croissants with our feet dipped in the sand and get baked in the sun.

Ahahahahahaha.

YOU ARE FATED TO BUY THIS BOOK

SarahAlderson

3 comments

November 15, 2011

Out January 5th….in the UK and in Canada and Australia…my latest epic. This one isn’t about people with mind powers or crushes on their brother’s best friend. No. This one is about a demon slayer. Think Buffy but with some children of the corn type action thrown in and way hotter boys. Yes, hotter than Angel (cos let’s face it he got a bit jowly towards the end didn’t he?)

This I hope will tide you over until the sequel to Hunting Lila is released in August next year.

The silence of the pigs

SarahAlderson

no comments

November 10, 2011

I sit bolt upright in bed. I am squished between John and Alula who has her legs thrown over my stomach in five year old abandon.

‘We are leaving!’ I announce scuttling like a crab across the bed and flicking on the strip light. John sits up sighing loudly. ‘What time is it?’

‘It’s midnight and we are leaving! I can no longer take that mosquito. The mosquito has won.’ There is no blood left in my body. I am anemic. I am hovering on the abyss of madness. One more zzzzzz in my ear and I will smother myself with my own pillow.

We are trialling a house. We have done this a few times – spending a night in a house we are thinking of renting. John wonders aloud whether we might start to be the house trialling con artists of Ubud…moving from villa to luxurious villa -every night a new place ‘trialling’ out potential homes none of which will ever mysteriously make the grade. It would certainly be cheaper than paying rent in this town where money grabbing Bule middle men keep hiking the prices to infinity.

It is only down the road from our current house this mosquito filled house. It has a pool though, whereas ours just has a paddling pool filled with stale rain water in which float dead geckos and bugs. This was the main attraction (the swimming pool that is). But when we first came to look around this swimming pool house, the sounds of pigs having their throats slit disturbed the serenity of the surrounding rice paddies, silencing the frogs.

Thinking it might just be on account of an upcoming ceremony that said pigs were being slaughtered I questioned the girl showing us around. ‘Babi?’ I asked, drawing my finger across my throat and making a stuck pig squealing noise and sticking out my tongue. ‘Ada Upacara hari ini?’ (Is there a ceremony today?)

She stared at me in wide-eyed confusion and shook her head as though she didn’t have a clue what I was asking. But she did.

‘I bet it’s a pig farm next door,’ I whispered to John.

But we’re back trialling the house anyway. So far no pig noises. But I don’t think they slaughter pigs at night so that means nothing. John and I go for a skinny dip in the pool (is that too much information?) but we didn’t have any swimmies with and it was dark.

We’ve just dared the bracing cold when the pig chorus starts up.

‘Pig farm!’ I splutter, ‘She WAS lying. I KNEW IT.’

‘Shall we go home?’ I ask.

‘We may as well stay’, John answers, ‘think of it like a little holiday.’

The same way as Clarice Starling thought of hanging out in an underground cell block with Hannibal Lecter was a little holiday.

We climb damp (we forgot towels too) into the bed with Alula. The pigs go to sleep. The mosquito starts up.

Half an hour later we are all piled into our bed at home. I squirrel under the covers, looking through the hazy mosquito netting listening to the croak of frogs and chirrup of crickets.

‘I love our house’, I say.

Trick or healthy treat.

SarahAlderson

2 comments

November 2, 2011

It’s trick or treat time. Being British I’m faintly disturbed by this tradition; squirmish about the concept of fancy dress (the effort involved seems commensurate with axing the trees to light your own funeral pyre), cynical of the commercialization of yet another pagan / christian ceremony and also mightily stressed out by the following email, which begins:

Come in Costume, laugh and smile a lot!

The British in me rears up like a dragon. Not only do they expect me to wear a costume (a costume!) but they also are demanding I laugh and smile? PER-LEASE. Who are these Americans? So crass. So happy all the time…

OK, I’m just a little envious. I’ve grown up in the land of Malcom Tuckers. I don’t know how to be happy and laugh all the time. I know how to be sarcastic and wry and cock one cynical eyebrow all the time whilst complaining about the weather.

We’re asked to bring healthy food for the pot luck and healthy snacks for the trick or treat, as environmental as possible (this is after all at Green School – the greenest school in the world or something).

I spend all week online googling manically for healthy Halloween recipes. I have visions of extravagantly costumed parents holding out little cupcakes with monster faces on whilst I lurk in my jeans and a t-shirt at the back handing out Haribo. The shame is too great and spurs me into action.

I head into the metropolis of downtown Denpasar to buy an oven and a little Chinese black box to make it work, which made a percussive sound when shook like one of those kid’s maracas. Though a child’s musical toy would probably not have exploded in quite the same spectacular fashion.

Annabel Karmel can make brain mush muffins. Well whoopppeee dooo Annabel.

Jamie Oliver can make fruit gums using real fruit. Congrats Jamie.

I however can make nothing because my oven has exploded. My NEW oven which cost me an arm and a leg plus the ‘fine’ that we had to pay for being foreign and driving a car past a policeman.

Secretly I’m quite glad that the oven exploded because as soon as I unwrapped it I felt a deep sense of foreboding, rather like when you were a kid and unwrapped the giant present under the tree convinced it was going to be the Barbie house you’d been hoping for for three years but was in actual fact a flower press. And you had to slap a face on you and act happy for the rest of Christmas day when all you wanted to do was go upstairs and hide the flower press at the top of your wardrobe and kick something really hard.

That’s how I felt about the oven. But I had to act happy and like I hadn’t just sentenced myself to a life of stress and drudgery. My inner monologue went something like WHAT WERE YOU THINKING?

Anyway I woke up on Saturday morning, the day of the trick or treat thing, and decided that I was done with pretending (I know, I know I’ve said this about ten times on this blog) that I was a yummy mummy domestic goddess. I closed down all those google windows displaying images of mummy pizzas and googly eyed fruit salads and instead pulled out my phone and speed dial rang the pizza place, ordering three pizzas and five packs of cookies. They’re spelt flour – that surely qualifies them as healthy?

Relief has never felt so good let me tell you. I might have been $80 poorer but I was a million dollars worth of happier.

Then we get to the trick or treat village. I have to ask a passing Canadian what I’m expected to do when the kids come knocking. She looks at me weirdly and tells me I should compliment them on their costumes and hand out the cookies.

OK, I think, I can manage that. I hand out all the cookies, eating seven myself as I wait. (It was stressful, running over my lines.)

Alula arrives beaming with the shopping bag I’d given her filled with goodies. We empty them out.

Every single treat is a plastic wrapped one cent sweet from the local supermarket.

The unbecoming of a domestic goddess

SarahAlderson

3 comments

October 26, 2011

On my list of things to do in 2011 I have the following written:

8. Give up cooking.

So I’m not sure why I’ve just spent $100 on an oven.

(You can tell it’s a good oven.)

It actually just looks like a giant toaster. But with a spit thing in the middle just in case I fancy spit roasting a piglet (a whole pig wouldn’t fit) for Sunday brunch.

I’m not sure why I’ve bought an oven. I think if I stopped to analyse it, which I’m frightened to, I’d discover the reason was: because the ghost of Nigella haunts me.

Buried deep in my subconscious is the need to be a domestic goddess with an enormous bosom, even though the chances are nil to subnil of this actually ever happening (being a domestic goddess or growing boobs bigger than an A cup.) I mean I don’t clean or make my own Christmas decorations either. Perhaps too is the idea that if I can cook I will redeem myself in John and Alula’s eyes as being a worthy wife and mother rather than a half-hearted one.

If I can fill the house with the wafting delicious smells of baking cookies and fresh bread then — God I don’t even have the ability to finish that thought. I still don’t know why I bought an oven.

I told John I wanted to roast vegetables. But then I looked at the chopping board and the pile of veg in the fridge and was like, ‘But damn, I have to peel them first. How tedious.’

I bought Alula a baking cupcake tray. But now I’m thinking ‘Damn I have to buy an electric whisk cos no joke I’m not stirring that by hand.’

But then it all became a moot point. Because I got my hundred dollar oven back home (spit roast and all) and then remembered that last time someone plugged in a kettle they almost blew up our house.

I study the box. It has a lot of numbers and letters on it. I sigh to myself. Maybe I should have paid more attention in physics. Is this even Physics? I don’t know. I don’t care. That’s what dads are for. I have a fleeting thought that what will Alula do when she finds herself in a similar situation in twenty years? John certainly won’t have a clue. A generation of boys has grown up clueless of DIY and physics and my daughter will suffer as a consequence. I’m supposed to think something feminist at this point about teaching her about Wattage or amps and how to change a plug because why are we X chromosome holders relying on the Y people? Haven’t they already proved to us they’re useless? But really? Do I have to? She’ll figure it out soon enough on her own. Can’t I just teach her how to use google?

Or maybe she’ll phone her granddad, like I’m doing.

‘Dad,’ I say. ‘I have a problem.’

I switch the skype camera on and turn the lens to face my oven.

My dad asks me ‘What ampage do you have in the house?’

‘Huh?’

My dad sighs. I can’t read minds but I know he’s thinking ‘why’d I bother spending all those hours when she was 15 tutoring her through GCSE Physics? For what end?’

‘Do you know what a fuse box looks like?’ he eventually asks as a last resort.

‘Yeah!’ I answer rushing out to look. I’m just relieved he’s asking me something I actually know the answer to.

I return and tell him 240W.

‘That’s not an amp,’ he says in his patient voice, ‘that’s a wat.’

‘What?’

Eventually we figure out that the ‘interevertor’ – this plastic box which my driver bought me and which he assures me he uses to turn on his tv (No, not a remote) without blowing up his whole village – is actually an ‘invertor’ and that Chinese manufacturers from the 1970s just couldn’t spell.

I plug the oven into the black box, plug the invertor into the wall and then praying fervently, turn on the oven, whilst simultaneously shielding my face from any explosions that might occur.

The oven heats up. Nothing explodes.

I suffer a long-lasting pang of remorse because this now means I actually have to start using it.

Urgh.