YouWish

If there is a god then, this year, he/she has surely decided to be very literal-minded indeed.  I wished I could have a short break – I was sick with swine flu for three weeks.

I wished not to hear another musical rehearsing for a little while, because for the previous three weeks I had two of them rehearsing in rooms neighbouring my home office – one downstairs, one next door – and the Council pitched up and gave us three days’ notice of some 19 weeks of ’street improvements’.

Among the bracing rhythms of the jackhammers, diggers and angle grinders I regained my appreciation of Sondheim and Lloyd Webber… but my wish for the */=+$?! Council to hurry up and finish their work went unheeded.  I was starting to feel like a character in a Terry Pratchett novel.

So I’ve been a touch cautious about wishing for things of late, except where it was something I could safely wish for on here without bringing down a dose of divine misinterpretation.  I was clearly not precise enough in my other wishes, but I have learned my lesson for the future.  I no longer wish for good weather, because that requires some subjective evaluation.  Instead I wish for a day of clear blue skies, bright sunshine, low humidity and zero precipitation, preferably with a temperature in the mid-seventies.  I’m pleased to report that this wish has thus far been met with divine indifference, so I must be doing something right.

If you think this is a little extreme, you’re probably right, but it’s nothing compared to one American man, who has a very clear wish of his own he would like to fulfil.  The Finding My Goddess web site could be described as a technical specification for the ideal woman the site’s owner, Mark, wishes to find.  It’s extraordinarily detailed, both about the goddess Mark is seeking, and the man himself – possibly more so than is necessary, as I’m sure most potential goddesses don’t need to know he’s a tantra master, for example.

I’ve been watching the site for the last few months, curious to see whether the goddess would be found and, as of September 3rd, it would appear the goddess has indeed been discovered living in Europe.  And yet…

While most of us would confess to having an ideal in mind when discussing a partner, we talk in terms of general traits – hair or eye colour, good sense of humour, level of educational attainment, common interests.  Likewise, whe we post a wish for a product or service on YouWish, we have some general characteristics in mind, certain criteria that need to be fulfilled.  But in most cases, we don’t define it down to the nth degree, not least because that’s closing off other opportunities.  It acknowledges we may not have things quite right, and that we’re open to alternate ways of achieving the same goal, perhaps with a better solution than we might originally have imagined.

So what happens now for Mark and his goddess?  While she apparently meets all his extensive criteria, he’s still soliciting back-up applications.  To date, all we on the outside can know is that she has ticked all the many boxes on his list.  But where’s the fun in that?  Where’s the spark?  I can’t help wondering whether the woman in question has found a lover or an employer, given the nature of the recruitment process.

If we are not open to be surprised, delighted, contradicted even, where is the joy in life?  Pleasure can be anticipated, and may indeed live up to expectations, but to rule out the spontaneity of attraction, whether it be to people, products or services, strikes me as terribly sad.

Fortunately, for the rest of us at least, the god of divine misinterpretation is there to make sure our best efforts to eliminate the unexpected are thwarted.  My swine flu resulted in my husband and toddler son only contracting mild versions of the illness instead of catching a nastier, mutated version later in the year, while I finally got some precious sleep.

The Council effectively closing our arts space down through noise pollution made us fear for our livelihood (and the roof over our heads) but it also allowed us much-needed time to upgrade the spaces and even take on a booking for Woody Allen to film here with Antonio Banderas, which has resulted in more enquiries for future projects.  Even Tower Hamlets Council were prepared to move their diggers elsewhere for the sake of that one week.

No matter how extensive Mark’s list, it can’t encompass the whole of any human being, and even the most detailed of specifications falls short of simple human nature and its ability to contradict both description and prediction.

So let’s wish Mark and his goddess every happiness, but with a friendly word of caution.  I know from his web page that he’s not a rock fan.  So he may not be familiar with a certain Rolling Stones lyric that he might wish to bear in mind: You can’t always get what you want but sometimes, you just might find… you get what you need.

…to my wish for a personal trainer!  3 responses, in fact.  Coupled with my weigh-in at Wibbly Wobbly club this morning, which told me I had lost 5lbs over the last week, and a slimmer, healthier me is starting to look more achievable.

Now that I have three responses, I think it’s time for me to get in touch with them all to see which I feel most comfortable with.  And then bite the bullet.

The one thing that bugs me?  I feel bizarrely guilty that finding a personal trainer may prove to have required so little effort

The May-June period of every year is fraught with retail fear for me. While others are busy buying up their holiday wardrobes, picking up sun block or choosing bestsellers to take to the beach, I’m starting the biggest retail challenge outside of Christmas.

From 17^th May to 11^th July, I have to sort out birthday presents for my son, my brother, a nephew, a half-sister, my Dad, my Grandad and my Mum. Add to that an anniversary present for my husband – and frequently one for me, too, to save his blushes – and sorting out Father’s Day, and this becomes both challenging and expensive.

Harvey, thankfully, is at an age where almost anything with wheels on would do the trick – and long may that continue! My brother can be nudged into updating his Amazon wishlist if I’m truly lacking inspiration. But the rest are more difficult.

Once upon a time, I had the time and the energy to think carefully and in great detail about what would please each recipient most, whether for birthdays or Christmas. I earned something of a reputation for choosing presents people enjoyed, and so people apparently anticipated that, whatever they opened from me, it would be something they liked, whether they had ever thought of wanting one before that or not.

This is obviously not sustainable. For one thing, inspiration can dry up for all kinds of reasons. For another, time and money may also come to play their part. I have married into a large family where they all see each other regularly, so cousins, aunts and uncles all expect presents as well. At the same time, while they all expect presents, not all of them apply much thought to the presents they give –including one lot I’ve caught recycling presents from one year to the next while just removing the sell-by labels – so I have been known to feel resentful of the efforts made when all I’ll get is the equivalent of the metaphorical pair of socks or cartoon tie.

Last Christmas, therefore, with time and money pretty tight, I decided to make presents for the majority of the family, buying things only for parents, siblings and children. The rest were given two different types of chutney, some gingerbread biscuits, some coconut ice and some vanilla fudge. Mr Melanie and I agreed that people would either genuinely appreciate the thought of a handmade gift that took hours to make, or would be too polite to say anything. We won, either way.

This was hugely successful, and it had the added bonus that Harvey was able to help out. And when my arthritis got too much to handle the coconut ice, even my husband got involved, so we could say the presents were truly a family effort. The family genuinely seemed to enjoy receiving something home-made… and I managed to sort out Christmas presents for 30 or so people for £150 total.

Birthdays, however, can’t as easily be handled. After all, Harvey views biscuits as a human right, not a present. My brother is rarely home to eat any culinary gift I might make him. My father’s birthday this year was his 60^th, so jam and sweets weren’t really going to be quite the thing, my 17 year old half-sister is not an easy one to guess at and… you get the picture.

You would have thought, with the advent of the internet, that these tasks became simpler, but it seems that’s just not the case. There are any number of sites that offer ‘present finder’ applications, where you broadly give them gender and age band and hope they come up with something not too hideous, but none of them are doing anything very clever. Also, the results they come up with depend in large part on what they have to offer on their site, which may in fact not have anything you’d want to give the person in question, but by the time you’ve gone through their results you almost feel you have to buy something there, if only to justify spending 20 minutes or more going through what they think a 60 year old male might like.

Findmeagift.com doesn’t really help me much: their ‘men’s gifts’ include such delights as a ‘boob stress reliever’ or a ‘breast mug’ or that other masculine must-have, the swearing parrot key ring. And there’s no way I’m buying Dad a ‘candy posing pouch’.

A question on Yahoo Answers asking about birthday gifts for a 60 year old man elicited such thoughtful responses as ‘three 20 year old girls’, haemorrhoid cream, Viagra or a massaging recliner. Notwithstanding the potential objections my stepmother may have to some of the options, Dad’s a pretty young 60, so off I went again.

There are, of course, various options to get a fake newspaper printed to mark the big day, just as there is the chance to get hold of a front page from the date he was born, but that again seemed to be just rubbing in the age thing, and I couldn’t see Dad glancing at it more than once, so that idea was binned.

In fact, overall, the quality of the recommendations was dire. About the only thing that showed any real thought was a recommendation for a site that produces custom jigsaw puzzles from photos you supply… but even then I wasn’t convinced. It’s not really Dad’s thing. And that’s ignoring all the nasty pre-designed gift packages containing CDs of music from the forties and a low-content history book about 1949 packaged with a photo album or maybe a framed collection of stamps from that year instead.

For all our technology, then, we still seem to have no further advance on finding the perfect gift for someone special. Not in any automated sense. I want to give something that says ‘I care enough to find you something you’ll really like’, not ‘I needed to find you something and ran out of ideas’. Not that I’m averse to a little help along the way, but it seems clear my expectations of what constitutes the perfect gift differ from those of the sites trying to sell me things.

The solution? In the end, I cast my mind back to Christmases and birthdays past. In fact, I had a pretty good track record for getting Dad something he liked, since by his own admission nobody ever bought it for him and yet it was what he really wanted. Callaway HX Hot Plus golf balls. Not exciting, no. But the genuine pleasure on his face said I had, finally, found the perfect gift.

I have a confession to make. You remember that blog post where I decided to post a wish for a personal trainer, just to see whether that might be a way forward for me? I so very nearly did it, but I’m ashamed to say I bottled it.

Was it asking too much of myself, I wondered? Would I really be able to find the time, or would work and life and motherhood get in the way again? Perhaps it would be better to give it another few months, given it’s going to be getting hot outside again soon (I hope!) and such weather wouldn’t be conducive to vigorous exercise for a lady of my proportions.

And you’re absolutely right. These are all cop-outs. The truth is that I sought and in short order found a few spurious reasons to stay away from exercise and ignore the spectre of the diet that really needs to happen if I am to avoid finding my own place in the Guinness Book of Records one of these days.

I am apparently that lazy. And it takes a special kind of laziness to not even bother to lift one’s hand as far as the mouse, click on a link and type a few words in to create a wish, then wait and read whatever results come in. How much effort does that take? It would probably expend about 5 calories, assuming I swung my arm a few times before letting it alight on the mouse.

Except that I’m not, in truth, a lazy person about most of my life: I work, I’m a mum, I cook, I sing, I write, I spend time with friends and there’s rarely a time when I’m not actively doing something. So why should this whole issue of diet and exercise be so different to other areas of my life? Is it because it’s difficult? I’ve done difficult, not scared of that. Is it the money? No – if hubby can justify buying a pack of fags a day, I can spend just as much on a personal trainer without feeling guilty. Do I want to stay fat? Hell, no. So what’s going on?

The fact is, there’s a nagging part of me that thinks any personal trainer I agree to meet is going to take one look at me and, once they’ve stopped crying with laughter, tell me there’s no hope and I should go straight to a gastric band without passing go. Or that if I ring round a few in Yellow Pages or have a look on Gumtree or somewhere, I’ll find nothing but toned and vacuous gym bodies who aren’t into doing clients who need quite so much work as me.

Fortunately, it seems one of my friends has started reading my blog posts on here. She has pointed out that the whole beauty of YouWish is that I get to post what I want and have no contact with people or companies until I’m ready and am sure I’m talking to someone who will accept me as I am and work with me.

No more excuses, then. If you’d like to join me and gain safety in numbers, the wish is here.