Shopping

This is Ben and Laurence. Ben and I have had a shopping day. This is a kind of dual-culture ritual. Before I came to live here, whenever I'd come over, I had to go to the town centre mall, eat Chinese fast-food at the 'Flaming Wok', buy something from 'Au Coton' - there isn't even one of these in Richmond Centre, go to various other shops we don't have in England.
Now, whenever I'm in Britain I have to head straight for Boots, M&S, Dotty P, WHSmith, again, the bog standard High Street stores.
When Ben or Alex comes over, they too have to do really standard stores, Zellers, the Bay, American Eagle, Old Navy.

Ben is usually fairly reliant on his sister for advice on clothes buying, which is odd, since his part-time job is in a clothes shop. In fairness though, I think he has a sense of his own style without realising it, he wouldn't know, but I think he has Alex's voice inside his head advising him even when she's not there.
But for me, it's nice to be out shopping with either of them. You get a feeling of being important again when you are shopping with a stylish teenager, both of them are striking looking young adults, well-mannered, I'm proud to say and I can be the mum rather than just a past-her-sell-by-date woman on her own.

For the past week I have felt monstrously pre-menstrual. For those of you of the gender who suffer from our PMS rather than your own, this doesn't mean I've felt like a rabbid psycho-killer, but rather a starving watermelon. Bloated and yet noshing anything and everything. It happens from time to time, I'm not sure whether it is connected to Lycanthropy, could be.

However, whilst on the subject of werewolves, and really, does one HAVE to choose between werewolves and vampires, I don't think so, where was I? Oh yes, Ganesh. Yes you do know who Ganesh is, that elephant god that Apu prays to. Now we were watching a National Geographic documentary last night about elephants in must or musth, a frenzied state of adolescent male elephants, where they almost drown in their own hormones and become quite mad, sometimes killing their Mahouts, dismembering them and trampling them. One Mahout survived, saying that he prayed to Ganesh, which made me think, hmmm.... I've always taken for granted the existence of such Indian gods, we used to have a whole set of brass ones that sat on our mantelpiece, remnants of my grandparents' time in India.
But here's the thing, is an elephant god going to put the best interests of humans first, will he or she think like a human, in fact, will they have the same breadth of ability to think as a human does. Now I know that many animals are smarter than we ever realised, even in extraordinary ways, but surely no-one's suggesting that any animal has awareness of its own consciousness as we do? So how does that work for an god that is an animal?
Would it have been an animal once and transcended? Was it already a god just with an animal's head, in which case, wouldn't it feel a bit 'god of lesser children-ish'? I'm having some theological problems with this and now that they're there, they won't go away.

As you know, I have a short list of ideal jobs, so far I have Yvette Fielding's job on my list. But it also occurred to me that writing for the National Enquirer must be pretty cool too. I mean they just make up anything they like about anyone they please and people buy their publication. What an awesome job that must be, I'd love it.

That's all.