Lovely libraries

I am genuinely excited by libraries. This because I read a lot. In the recent cutbacks, I heard a lot of pro-government supporters announcing 'but really, who uses libraries?'. Well, me. All the bloody time. And I'm tardy too, so they get extra funding out of me in the form of late fees.

But yes. I get through a minimum of a book a month, depending on this or that, and the size of the book. Gone With The Wind took me 9 weeks, but it is an astonishing work of fiction and well worth the time. I thought it was going to be floppy-flappy namely-pamby fiddle-dee-deeing (just to be clear, I do really like the film, too), but it was really a Proper Book. I have yet to recover from the siege of Atlanta.

There is a thing I love best about libraries. I often catch myself standing looking at two volumes of something with an internal monologue going 'but what if I don't like it? I'm not sure it's my sort of thing. And do I have time to read both of these in 3 weeks?' until suddenly my brain kicks in and I realise - IT'S FREE! I can have both! It doesn't matter if I get halfway through it and can no longer be bothered. I have a copy of The Girl With Glass Feet on my Kindle which I just can't be bothered to deal with any more, and I feel terribly guilty about it sitting there, the great waste of money. But libraries? I've list count of the books I've lost interest in and returned early! And I don't care! Because they were FREEEEEEE!

Now, of course, I have a baby, and so off we trot to get something fresh to read because I can now recite Little Kitten, and 123 What Can You See is suffering from addendums ("They are gifts for you all frOm me to help you learn your ABC 123!" "Thank you, Frog, you patronising git, what a wonderful treat!"). I neither want, nor can afford, nor can fit in my house, who rafts of 'That's not my noun, it's noun is too adjective' books, but the library? They have loads, and I think a fortnight in the company of That's Not My Bear/Tractor/Robot is just enough before it can go back and our copy of That's My Tiger becomes interesting again.

I know that I'm trying to concentrate on lovely things, but this is where the government's literacy strategy is wrong. You don't encourage literacy by memorising lists of words- you nurture it quietly through a love of story. And libraries are just one whole temple to that. Which is why they are wonderful.

Lovely Rich Fruit Cake

It's that time of year - the time of year that is as a red rag to a bull to fans of baking. I'm not particularly good at baking (I can't really make things look beautiful, even though they taste nice), but I do love the traditional celebratory fruit cake, laced with brandy and clothed in marzipan and Royal Icing.

The naked Christmas cake, 2011.
It will be iced sometime between the 20th and the 24th, I imagine.

As a child, decorating the Christmas cake was one of my favourite activities of the festive season. There was a set manner in which the cake was decorated - the Royal Icing formed into low peaks (easier than trying to make it completely flat),and then piped with those funny little coloured flowery splodges around the base (I think they're called  drop flowers?). Every year I encouraged my mother to more and more violent colours. I definitely convinced her to do the whole thing mint green one year (it'll be very big in fashion next season), and I think we may even have done a black one. Well, we used black icing; I think it came out a sort of sludgey grey in the end.

Now I am a grown-up, and I get to do my own Christmas cake. It's definitely a thing to be done sparingly - who really has the time to bake something in the oven for four and a half hours more than once a year?

The Cake, 2010.

But I like the time it takes. I like the preparation up to the point where you declare it Time To Do The Cake. I like the way I find myself announcing how I Must Feed The Cake, as if it is some ancient demonic presence in Tupperware that will wreak havoc if I do not mollify it with weekly supplications and brandy.

Getting married is another occasion when you get to eat The Cake. It's also one of those odd times when you are suddenly required to have opinions about things you don't care about. Providing swatches of bridesmaid's dresses so the flowers can match exactly, for example. Cake, however, we found we had Opinions on. My husband insisted that the cake should be round, and that no other shapes were acceptable.

"How about doing a sponge layer for the people who don't like fruit cake?" our cake bakey lady said.

"No!" I intoned, with all the tolerance of Jeremy Clarkson at a Greenpeace meeting. "If they don't like fruit cake then they don't have to have any."

The Cake, 2008

So yes. I love the foolish artistic endeavour of the Christmas cake. It is a lovely thing, and I look forward to icing it, accompanied by festive swearing at a) Delia Smith and b) the electric mixer when I am yet again trying to make the damn stuff form peaks. It's a tradition, after all.

Lovely Gaga

As I go about this week thinking of lovely things and not being so grumpy, let me start by extolling the virtues of Lady Gaga.

Of course your hat doubles as a telephone. Of course.

The video for Marry The Night was released this week. And boy, do I have a strange fascination with her videos. I can lose hours working my way through them, providing someone is on hand to hold the baby. Only Gaga has the nerve to produce a video for a 4 minute song that lasts 13 minutes. At least the video for Alejandro pretended it was about the music with a strung out, extended version of the song (while at the same time providing some form of fetish- based checklist. Uniforms! Smoking! Boys in heels! Leashes! Rubber! Nuns! Rubber nuns!). But Marry The Night takes it onto a whole new level. It's a 13 minute video for a pop song in which the song doesn't start until you're 9 minutes in. You've gotta love the chutzpah of that.

Still from 10.46

But the thing I love about Lady Gaga is that she is, quite simply, terrifying. Look at other popstars - Beyonce, Pink, Katy Perry, Rihanna- they all churn out catchy pop, but their whole thing is to be sexy. It's like the videos aren't aimed at women, they're aimed at the 16-24 year old male. Britney used to get described as the 'Princess of Pop'; Gaga gets described as 'the high priestess' (this month's Marie Claire, I think). Ok, so take the Marry the Night video- there she is in rubber crop tops and skirts hanging out of cars, or in glittery boob tubes writhing around in a dance studio. But sexy? I don't think it is. Frankly, this is a woman who can prance around in a thong and fishnets in the video for Telephone, and you get the sense that she is doing it to wilfully market herself as the object of the gays rather than be sold as the object of the gaze. She's not in Nuts magazine. Somehow, she has crossed the line to a place where wearing your bra and pants is about power. Maybe it's got something to do with the 6 inch heels the dancing boys also have to wear in Alejandro.

The ChapDad asserts that it has something to do with creative control. When Pink made Stupid Girl a few years back, while the message was valid (What happened to the dream of a girl President/she's dancing in a video next to 50 Cent) you get a sense that someone else pitched the video to her and she agreed to it. Gaga appears to insist on having creative control of her brand (hence the Haus of Gaga), so everything she does has a really strong theme that can be linked back to her - the big hats, the big hair, the rubber, the crucifixes, the shoes. My God, the shoes. Her work is incredibly distinctive. I've said it before and I'll say it again - it's like Bjork done right.

So yes, hurrah for Gaga, for the fairies that fly out from under her skirt, for her pretentious use of French, for the self-indulgence of the stab wound in her back ina song about being dropped by her record label, for doing dance routines in fabulous Louboutins while everyone else is wearing trainers, for makingus all wonder if wearing the contents of a packet of Cheerios could really be a good look. Hurrah for you.

And, of course, we all now know that mint will be very big in fashion next spring.