Friday 30th November – Adrian Mole and Exploding Wigs

Dear readers. I think I might be turning into Adrian Mole.  This is disconcerting for a number of reasons, not least of which are the facts that he is, a) fictional and b) a half-witted man.  Nevertheless I fear it may be true.  Bear with me while I count the ways (Elizabeth Barrett Browning): 

·        I come from Leicester.

·        I write a diary.

·        My life is quite ordinary yet I insist on sharing its intimate details with random strangers

·        I too wore red socks to school.

·        I too write execrable poetry.

My main reason, which is beginning to worry me however, is that I am developing an insane fondness for cheese and beetroot sandwiches. I know it was Bert Baxter who was into beetroot, but it’s near enough isn’t it?  I was tucking into one with great gusto yesterday lunch time and mourning the fact that I have eaten the whole family-sized jar of beetroot in less than a week (sorry Lee.  I bought it for him for when he comes home!) when it struck me.  I can’t be pregnant (I’m all tied up downstairs), so I must be turning into Adrian Mole. It’s the only logical solution.

I might write to Sue Townsend (perturbed of Glenfield), and ask her what she thinks.  She will probably think I’m a bit of a looney, but on the other hand, she might invite me over for tea and cakes (or beetroot) and adopt me.  I might quite like to be adopted by Sue Townsend.  I think all her children have grown up and left home, so it might be lovely and quiet.  I’ll think about it over a nice beetroot sandwich.  Mmmm…..

Mind you, I did have a slight obsession with beetroot at another time in my life.  I was revising for A levels, way back in the mists of time, and a lady came to school to tell us that if we wanted to eat whilst revising we should eat healthy food and not crap.  I decided that she might have a good point as I was actually beginning to topple under the weight of the amount of Biscuit Boosts I was consuming and my teeth hurt.  Consequently I decided that pickled beetroot was the way forward (a no brainer when looking for the healthy option I find!).  I ate an entire jar during one particularly gnarly session with Hamlet.  I totally forgot about it until about three o’clock the following morning when I went for a pee and thought I was dying.  I screamed the place down, convinced I was bleeding to death.  It was only when I had succeeded in turning my mother’s hair white and called for an ambulance that I remembered that large quantities of beetroot does have the side effect of turning your pee bright red.  You have been warned!

The ongoing saga of Tallulah’s school uniform continues.  Last night I upped the ante by giving her all the clean uniform and telling her to put it in her room in plain sight, so that in the morning all would be well.  How could it go wrong?  I cleverly (or so I thought) gave her the power over the rainment.  She was to be made to feel ‘responsible’ and ‘adult’, so that she could learn to help herself and take pride in her own abilities.

I obviously hadn’t factored in the Miss Othmar (see yesterday’s blog) effect which was still going strong, and my trombones were parping away.  I realise now that what I should have said was ‘Mwaah, mwaah, mwaah, mwaah’ instead of what I obviously did say, which came out as: ‘Take these random old rags and burn them.  When you’ve done that, toss the ashes out the window and forget that anything was said between us.’

This morning whilst taking Oscar down for his breakfast, I passed the bedroom door only to hear the plaintive wail: ‘I don’t have any pinafores to wear Mama!’ and she then burst into floods of tears.  I patiently pointed out that I had in fact pressed said pinafore into her hot, sweaty little paws and charged her expressly to put them somewhere useful.  More tears and a honk of: ‘But I just can’t ‘amember stuff like that Mama.  I am too small.’  At this point my motherly instincts failed me totally and instead of being sympathetic and reassuring her about her ability to be a tiny genius child, I snapped: ‘Well, what do you expect me to do about it?  Find your clothes this instant.’ And marched downstairs to peel bananas for the King of the Swingers, the Jungle VIP aka, Oscar the Librarian.

Ten minutes later she came down, pinafored and unrepentant.  We scowled at each other over the Shreddies whilst I devised the next plan, which is to staple said uniform to her chest as she climbs into bed.  If that doesn’t work I’m thinking of having her tattooed with an indelible uniform which will save time, money and me doing laundry.  It could be the next big thing.

No matter how vile Tallulah is, and she can be really, really vile, she always redeems herself with her magnificently quirky take on the universe.  Today we had dropped her sister off and were walking over to the infants’ classrooms when she saw a disused rabbit hutch.  She pointed at it in great excitement and pronounced: ‘Look mama! It’s a mouse kennel!’ I said that I thought that mice lived in mouse holes, at which she looked quite incredulous and pointed out that it was very difficult to live in a hole because holes are usually empty.  You can’t argue with that kind of logic, so a mouse kennel it is.  I didn’t ask how big the mouse was that lived in the kennel.  I wasn’t feeling strong enough.

My friend Caron lives with her partner Peter (stay with it, we’ll get to the point eventually), and amongst other things such as a daughter and a lot of power tools (Peter is always building things.  It’s a compulsion), they also own a grand piano.  Peter is quite posh, and inherited the grand piano from someone else in his family who is (or was) very posh.  It’s a beautiful object and truly something to treasure.

Peter however, has been known to get quite distracted when he is in the throes of his creative genius, and after a particularly strenuous day with his circular saw and a drill, he realised he hadn’t covered up the piano and it was rather dusty.  In fact it looked like a sculpture of a grand piano called ‘Sonata in Brick Dust’.

At this point in the proceedings he got quite hysterical about the strain that several pounds of finely ground wall were putting on the piano innards, and decided that action must be taken.  He also decided that he wasn’t going to be the one to take the action and that Caron, who at this stage was only lying around the house cooking, cleaning, and gestating a baby needed a task to stop her getting bored and restless.

She pointed out that despite being a fully qualified surgeon, it might be a bit beyond her to do an amateur dry cleaning job on an antique grand piano, and that perhaps a professional piano tuner type person might be called.  Peter laughed in the face of adversity, refused to pay a piano tuner because he wanted to buy more pointy tools and said that as she had tiny hands, she would be perfect for the job.

Now, here’s where I would have swept in with the argument that both midgets and three year olds also have tiny hands, but nobody in their right mind would feel that these minority groups were going to be naturally talented at cleaning brick dust out of pianos. Victory! Sadly, Caron was tired (due to being kept awake by a baby kicking the crap out of her, and falling masonry landing on her head) and just bowed to the inevitable.

She consulted many people on the ins and outs of cleaning a piano, and came to the conclusion that if she didn’t want her hands sliced off at the wrists by two hundred tons of piano wire being released under pressure when the brillo pad sawed through it, that she should leave it to the professionals.  Peter was undeterred by this argument.  He’s always been a positive thinker!  She must do it.

When we were having coffee a few days later, she asked me what I would do.  This should indicate to you the level of desperation to which she had descended, given that what I know about pianos, grand or otherwise, and their care, can be summed up with the phrase: ‘It’s probably best not to use Nitromors on them’.

By this time she had experimented with several different methods including feather dusters on sticks and trying to attach a straw to the hoover pipe.  They were both too wide and unwieldy, although I like to think she should be given ten out of ten for innovation.  I’d have put some Flash in a bucket of warm water and sluiced it through, perhaps lightly running a hairdryer over it later, and to hell with the consequences.  Actually that isn’t strictly true.  I’d have rubbed the top layer off, trusted to God that he wouldn’t look any deeper, and that he wouldn’t want to belt out Moonlight Sonata any time in the next twelve months, shut the lid and lied through my teeth.

I come from the my granny school of fixing things. The telly blew up one Christmas eve, just as we were all sitting round watching Roger Moore about to be ripped asunder by the evil Jaws in Moonraker.  It was very dramatic, the explosion, rather than the film (although if he had actually succeeded in ripping Roger Moore limb from limb, I’d have enjoyed it more) and we were all terribly impressed.  My grandfather carefully peeled the back off the television and waved away the clouds of smoke.  He crouched down to get a closer look.  At this point my gran disappeared into the kitchen, where we all assumed she’d gone to get a torch.  She came back with the hoover, because she said it was very dusty and it was no wonder that it had exploded.  Apparently all it needed was a good vacuuming out!

Anyway, back to Caron and her dilemma.  We supped our drinks and pondered awhile on what we could get that would be small and flexible enough to get between the piano wires, whilst also having enough of a soft surface to gather dust in the meantime.  I came up with what I thought was a superb idea; dwarf Russian hamsters. (see – mice kennels. I told you we’d get there. It might not have been worth the effort, but we did it in the end).

Now, you’d have to have quite a lot of them, as they’re very small indeed (think cotton wool balls and you’re about there), and one on its own would probably die of exhaustion half way through cleaning a grand piano.  We don’t want the RSPCA on our backs now do we?  So, you have a troupe of dwarf Russian hamsters.  They are also a bit skittish, so rather than having them scurrying about, missing the corners because they’re all congregating over by middle C, you want some kind of control mechanism.  I suggested crocheting some tiny reins and keeping them in formation, rather like a husky team.  You could have a tiny whip with a feather on the end to tickle them into submission.

You would have to keep your eye on them, because even with reins they’re bound to be a bit muddleheaded.  They are after all, animated fur balls, rather like the Tribbles on that very peculiar episode of Star Trek.  You’d probably have to crouch on the keyboard with the top of the piano up and orchestrate from up there, but with a bit of practice I reckon it would be a fantastic solution.  In fact, I expect that’s what piano tuners use anyway, which is why they’re so expensive to hire in the first place.

Oddly Caron didn’t buy the idea.  I think she thought it was a great idea, but she didn’t want to go through the months of gruelling training to prepare them for the big event.  Perhaps teaching them to thread their way through the spitty bits of a harmonica first, moving up to a harp and then on to the final push, the piano itself.  It’s quite a job, and there’d be bound to be casualties, where an over eager hamster gets sucked into Fsharp and is never the same again.  You’d have to be strong.

I used to work with a woman whose son had two dwarf hamsters.  He, as all children do, got bored of them within a nanosecond of having them, and bequeathed them to his mother.  She was squeamish about small wriggly things covered in fluff and didn’t like touching them, which made life a little awkward.  She also hated cleaning them out.  One day when she was doing her chores she looked at the nozzle for the hoover, you know the attachment you use for doing the stairs?  She put two and two together and came up with a hamster massacre!  She decided to just give the bottom of the hamster cage a light hoovering to suck up all the pellets of pooh.  She figured she wouldn’t have to get the hamsters out because they were tucked up asleep in bed.  Sadly she didn’t reckon on the violence of her hoover’s sucking mechanism and sucked one of them right into the hoover bag, and the other one into the attachment where it got stuck half way and broke its leg.  Unfortunately dwarf hamster legs are about the size of a dwarf cocktail stick, and it couldn’t be splinted.  Exit two hamsters.  Enter one parent, guilty of hoovercide.

Caron never did tell me what happened with the piano.  I expect she chucked a bucket of Flash over it, shut the lid and prayed that Peter wouldn’t decide to take up a career in a cocktail lounge.

As for the rest of my day, the pregnant lady is still pregnant.  This is disappointing for all of us, as she admitted that despite being scared out of her wits she was secretly praying this was finally it and she could get on with preparing for Christmas without having to worry about the fact that if she bent down to put the turkey in the oven, she might never get up again.

Those of us who had rushed to her aid felt disappointed that we hadn’t been instrumental in bringing a new life into the world, albeit using only a bumper box of tissues and a glass of water.  It’s hardly Doctor Kildare is it?

There is something terribly appealing about the idea of helping someone give birth.  I expect the reality is absolutely hair-raisingly hideous for everyone and involves a lot of leaping about and screaming on both parts.  The Romans used to cut the umbilical cord of newborns with crusts of bread!  It doesn’t say much for their baking skills, but I have a nightmare that if I had to do anything like that I’d be left with one of those Hovis crustless jobbies and be forced to use my teeth.  It wouldn’t be so bad if I had dentures.  At least I could take them out and give them a good scrub afterwards.  They might even need a good hoovering, or at the very least, a swift run through by a dwarf hamster.

When I was due to have both my girls I used to hover round the book stacks in Borders praying that my waters would break in a dramatic turn of events, and that while I was surfing my way towards the non-fiction section they would give me a year’s free supply of books as a gesture of good will.  The only thing that happened was I looked fat and furtive and invariably fainted due to the fact that my internal thermostat was permanently on the fritz.  They got sick of hauling me into the car park in the end and I promised never to go back if I had a third.

Consequently when I was pregnant with Oscar I used to lurk around the Gap comfy nighties section.  Still to no avail I might add.

I decided that if I am going to be a writer (I would say a ‘serious’ writer, but it would truly be a misnomer in my case), that I needed to sharpen up my observational skills.  So, as the immortal Roy Walker from Catchphrase would say: ‘ Just say what you see’.  So, here are some things that I saw today:

A ferocious lady in very sensible Wellington boots, stamping around on the roof of the church hall poking the guttering and shouting.  I presume that she wasn’t actually shouting at the guttering itself, as it tends to be surly and uncommunicative at the best of times.  It was wildly entertaining though.  Maybe she was hoping the leaves would unblock themselves if she gave them a bit of sound advice.  Sadly she had gone when I returned that way several hours later, but I am hoping for a repeat performance soon, preferably in full evening dress.

A miserable looking woman running a hot chestnut stall.  I thought she was wearing a bad wig, but it turned out to be an unfortunate looking hat.  She had a sign at the front of her stall which said: ‘Warning! Exploding Chestnuts!’ in big red writing, which seemed very exciting.  If she had indeed been wearing a wig, this would have explained everything.  A chestnut could have exploded and landed in her elaborate, Amy Winehouse style coiffure.  With hair that big it would have smouldered away gently for several hours before she noticed, by which time it would have been too late.  It might also have explained the hat.  Perhaps it was a protective measure to ensure safe hair carriage.  Thank God she wasn’t wearing an eye patch.  A hot chestnut travelling at sixty miles an hour could easily take your eye out.  Sadly I watched her for several minutes and no explosions took place, so my theories will have to remain just that.

 An old lady in a wig looking very excited by a photo booth in a shopping centre.  I know she was wearing a wig because it was hovering several centimetres above where a regular hairline would sit, and despite being a very windy day it was rock solid.  It was also made of 100% finest nylon.  I presume she had it mounted on a plinth protruding from her cranium to stop unfortunate slippages.  I don’t know what she was so excited about.  Most people look like they’re wearing a wig when their passport photos are developed.  Maybe she was hoping that it would work the other way around and that beauteous photographs of her with gorgeous Timotei stylie natural hair would come spewing out of the front of the machine.

Maybe she’d been having sex in the photo booth with a tiny man who was obsessed by wigs who hadn’t yet emerged from the photo booth.  She was about eighty mind you, but it’s not beyond the realms of possibility.

It was a bit of a coincidence to see two wig related items in one day, but what can I say?  I’m just blessed I guess!  It’s lucky that the real wig lady wasn’t standing near the fake wig chestnut lady just as one of her chestnuts exploded, because if her hair had caught fire it would have been disastrous.  Melting nylon is not a pleasant sight.  I once threw a festive sock on the fire when I was nine, in a fit of over exuberant undressing, and it went up in smoke in about a nanosecond.  The thought of scraping a melted nylon wig lady off the floor of a shopping centre is just not that appealing really.

They were my three best things.  There were many more, including the inside of a very nice restaurant where my friend Nicki and I ate fish pie and sickeningly calorific desserts whilst setting the world to rights.  She once sat next to Donald Sutherland at dinner.  She said he was very groovy. Of course he was, he is Donald Sutherland.  You just know he’s not going to turn out to be a man obsessed with accountancy and the pre-war stamps of Nicaragua.  I once got drunk with Matt Lucas from Little Britain before he got famous.  Sadly I don’t know whether he was very groovy, although I expect he was.  We were both very, very drunk.  I do know we didn’t talk about accountancy though.  I hate sums.

Good job I honed by observational skills chaps, because it was time for Oscar’s weekly pooh in the bath, but with my eagle eyes I spotted it immediately and disaster was averted.  Lucky me!