Penguin Blog

Picture from here

A new blog for me and maybe some of you, the Penguin blog

The most recent post is very pertinent, as a mother of a mixed race child, I too was struck by how Obama has been firmly compartmentalised as Black. More surreal for me was that when I was in Hawaii in 2001 it was rumoured that Clinton was looking to give the islands greater autonomy, the resulting cutting loose of the 50th state could have prevented Obama ever running for office! of course Bush soon put a stop to that. The rest is history.

Leyla too falls into this no mans land, we have decided to focus on her Turkish roots so that she can have a balance of where she lives with where she is from. She has been raised a Muslim, which slightly jars on me as both my other girls are Christened, but these were decisions I made when committing to Mr Muslim, and when she is old enough she can decide for herself.

Just to make this post totally random, my father went through a phase of collecting first edition penguin books, he started with numbers 1-100 and soon moved on to numbers 1-10 of the various esoteric editions they did including Pelicans etc. He was an addictive collector, in the first instance it was stamps, but when my mother found out that he had nearly bankrupted us chasing bits of sticky paper he was made to sell the collection and think of something cheaper. And what larks we had, we were as keen as he was. I have the bulk of what he collected languishing in the loft of my previous home. God knows what state they were in, but sometimes the fun is in the hunt rather than the kill.