Monday 3rd December, Beehives, Fire Engines and Flutterin’

I Woke in a cold sweat this morning because I’d forgotten that the nursery fees would come out of my bank account today and was hysterical because I didn’t know if I’d actually left enough money in my account to pay them.  I also had to write cheques for dinner money, beetle drives, one man balloon attempts and all the other random items that schools think up to squeeze hard earned cash out of harrassed parents with.  I had visions of having to send the girls into school with potted meat sandwiches and lots of excuses.  It was horrible.

I have a very fluid relationship with my monetary funds (or the lack thereof), which leaves Jason tearing his hair out (somewhat difficult at the moment, what with the hats and all) and gnashing his teeth.  He is very organised when it comes to money.  He saves for things, and knows what goes where and when.  He checks his balance every day and understands things like compound interest and life insurance.  For the record, he is by no means a boring man, and doesn’t wax lyrical about the fact that the Halifax has a 3% better rate on mortgages than the Alliance and Leicester or anything.  It’s more of an intuitive thing, like my affinity with cakes.

I on the other hand, am completely crap at sums of any kind.  When people start talking to me about numbers I have my very own Miss Othmar moment (Falling interest rates, ‘mwaah, mwaah, mwaah’, etc.) but with more sweatiness and panicking involved.  It feels rather like being trapped in a fast plummeting lift, knowing you’re going to be squashed to jam, while the teacher you hated most at school asks you questions about trigonometry to calm you down.  So, we are agreed that it is quite unpleasant, and frankly unneccessary.

I usually veer manically from feeling incredibly rich and indulging in feats of capitalist piggery (like buying my very nice Ghost handbag, thank you very much), to feeling completely broke and buying Co-op own brand tea bags whilst weeping into my fingerless gloves. (It’s weird how fingerless gloves can either be a) Dickensian b) what misers wear or c) a hideous Eighties nightmare).  These feelings usually bear no relationship whatsoever to the reality of what is in my bank account.  I have on occasion, dear reader, and this will no doubt amaze and astound you, knowing as you do my pragmatic and unflappably sensible nature, been known to throw my money around with ludicrous generosity on the days when I have absolutely no ready cash to hand at all.

It is on these days that I operate under what is known in our house as the ‘magic bean’ syndrome. Magic beans are a very flexible source of currency which have a long and dignified pedigree (just ask Jack), and which work incredibly well.  The only problem with magic beans is that once you hand them over in payment for your goods, you never can be sure what will happen.  Some people are more than happy to be paid with said beans, and are game for taking a gamble on what they’ll get out of it. Other people come back grumbling about ‘bloody weeds’.  It’s a risk worth taking, especially if it’s me that’s doing the taking. Luckily for me, the bank account is just hanging on by its fingernails, and considering it’s nearly Christmas and a lot of shopping got done last week, I am feeling justifiably proud. 

Jason just looked at me sternly, wobbled his bobble cap in my direction and went to work.  He is such a good boy.  He didn’t get home from London until 10.45 p.m. last night.  He walked into the house, waved in my general direction and then headed straight for the bathroom where he spent the next hour recovering (a very polite euphemism) from being poisoned by a bacon double cheeseburger (sans cheese – he hates cheese.  Cheese is a plot designed to make his life more complicated apparently) purchased from a Burger King emporium on the M1.  Then he went to bed, got up this morning and went to work very stoically.  It could have been more appealing than staying at home with me and Oscar frankly.  I’d probably go to work if you told me I didn’t have to sing my way through several verses of Michael Finnigan, just so that he would stay still and let me change his nappy.

 If I’d spent my weekend working like a dog and then spent the rest of it being poisoned and infested by nits, I would have had an almighty bout of hysterics and repaired to bed with some smelling salts and a novel, never to be seen again.  I certainly wouldn’t have diligently ironed my shirt and gone back for more punishment.  I did notice he didn’t wear his bobble hats for work.  I feel this may have attracted too much attention, and too many complex questions where the answer would have led to a lot of shrieking, and possibly a lot of shunning.  This dedication to order is probably why Jason has a job and I don’t.  I am too busy being dramatic to fit in such piffling trifles as a job (all part of my ongoing ‘relaxed’ relationship with finances).

The nit saga is still ongoing, as is that of the school uniform.  Luckily for me (I don’t know whether it can really be counted as lucky mind you), the nits took precedence this morning, with the uniform thing being a mere pale imitation of itself.  Tallulah did find all her school uniform intact and in its rightful place, pinafore included.  She decided this morning that she could no longer dress herself and came downstairs with her uniform festooned about her neck decoratively, sporting only a pair of pants, which she had taken care to put on sideways, for maximum dramatic value. She stood quivering in the middle of the kitchen, asking plaintively how to put on her t-shirt.  Callously I suggested that I didn’t really care how she put it on, and was perfectly happy for her to go to school naked if she couldn’t manage.  I got on with foraging for wildlife in Tilly’s hairline while Tallulah very begrudgingly got dressed, a millimetre at a time.

She was also disappointed to find that she still didn’t have any nits. I dropped her off at school and popped in to have a brief word with her teacher to explain that if Tallulah announced that she did have nits, to ignore her as she was just hoping she had nits.  The teacher seemed totally amazed and said: ‘Does she actually know what nits are?’ to which I replied: ‘Yes, but she hates to feel left out of a family drama’, at which she was rendered speechless and went off to do something complicated with sugar paper and a staple gun.  I expect she was fantasising about stapling Tallulah’s head to the wall.  I know I do.

I didn’t get a chance to see to my own hair this morning, so I put it up using some random bit of string I found in my pocket (probably part of a McDonald’s toy, that’s what usually falls out my coat pockets during a crisis), and hoped the wind wouldn’t blow any insect life onto the other mothers in the cloak room at school.  They gave me a few funny looks, but then they usually do.  If it isn’t my hair it’s the fact that I go to school in my pyjamas, or I have half my glasses dangling off my face, or the fact that Oscar is covered in snot and lipgloss.  Any taboos you need breaking (apart from sexual ones. I can’t be doing with all that.  It’s far too tiring), just give us a call, and we’ll have either already done it and compile you a report, or at least be willing to give it a crack.

Last night I combed my hair through and large lumps started to break off in protest at its brutal treatment.  It was slightly distressing to say the least, although I was very restrained and only shrieked a bit.  I threw tea tree oil and leave in conditioner on it and abandoned it to its fate.  I thought about encasing it all in a shower cap and hoping that the heat would do something useful.  I decided against it because a) upon further inspection we don’t actually have a shower cap, b) I thought it might rustle a bit too much in bed and keep me awake and c) I thought it might make the nits more frisky.

I did have a horrible thought just before I went to sleep (which is the time when all the best sorts of horrible thoughts assail you) that the two liquids might have catalysed into a horrible hair eating acid and I would wake up bald.  God, that would be so depressing.  The only woman in the world to have self induced alopecia and nits simultaneously (although they’d be a lot easier to track down with the alopecia thing).  Luckily, before I could get too hysterical about the whole thing I accidentally fell asleep (more like plummeted into a coma) and forgot to worry.

I did have a very strange dream about Amy Winehouse though, my third in the last few days.  I suspect it is because I am so in awe of her enormously straggling bee hive do and it impressed itself deeply on my subconscious.  I was probably thinking: ‘Thank God I don’t have to get a nit comb through that!’  You can bet your boots she wouldn’t be able to sit still for more than five minutes either.  Look at her, she’s as skinny as a racing whippet. Mind you, if she really is doing heroin, you could clamp her down when she begins to nod and get a fair bit done then I suppose.  It always helps to look on the bright side in these situations.

My mother apparently once sported a fetching beehive in her teenage years, when she still had the time to spend three hours hanging upside down off the end of the bed to perfect the look.  Nowadays if she did that she would either fall off and give herself brain damage, or get up, have a funny turn and plummet down the stairs, thus giving herself brain damage.  Either way, it would be bad.

She advises against the beehive on the grounds that it is in her words: ‘unsanitary’! I think that we can tell that by looking at the state of Ms. Winehouse, who although she has the voice of a divine diva jazz goddess, looks like she needs taking in hand and giving a good scrub down with a stiff brush (mum: ‘She ought to be ashamed of herself.  Nothing a bit of soap and water wouldn’t cure. Or a slap on the back of the legs…’).

My mum used to do her beehive using sugar water, which she says also made her a martyr to wasps in the summer.  As if things weren’t bad enough.  I suspect that La Winehouse is perhaps not a drug addict at all, but looks so harassed and unwell because she spends the best part of her life being chased around by hordes of excitable wasps trying to get at her towering barnet.  Perhaps all her problems would be resolved if she invested in a sturdy pair of roller boots.

Now my mum was something of a hairstyle anarchist in her day.  She did try to grow her hair in a particularly beatnik style at one time, but my grandma wasn’t having any of it.  In a moment of intense cruelty to the teenage psyche she dragged my mum to Woolworths and installed her in the photo booth, whereupon she took pictures of her looking ‘callow and scruffy’.  She then bundled her off to the hairdressers, forced her to have a lovely, ‘sensible’ do and took her back to Woolworths to have the after shots.  She used to show them to me on a regular basis during my own teenage years, probably as a stern warning against the folly of frivolous hair based fashions.

I think this was a bit harsh on the part of my gran.  Who was not at any time in her life what you might call a conventional woman.  She once had a family party where someone stole all the doors from the house, and nobody noticed until the next morning!  She also got arrested for roller skating down Brighton Pier with my granddad, because the policeman thought they were drunk in charge of three small children.  So making your daughter have a respectable hair do was clearly a bad day for her on the parenting front, and a highly unusual manoeuvre.  Perhaps the neighbours complained.  Perhaps she did it as revenge for something evil my mum had done previously.  We’ll never know.

My mum looked spectacularly surly in both sets of photographs, bless her!  A true teenager even then.  The Sixties Kevin and Perry!  It didn’t stop her experimenting further.  In fact I think it spurred her on to new heights, as she then decided to dye her hair green just before she was due to go out dancing with her mate Marlene.  Now, as any fule no, dying your hair on a whim, with a shop bought packet of dye, is a fraught experience at the best of times.  Doing it just before a bit night out on the Tizer, is hazardous to say the least, and fraught with peril, specially if it’s a revenge dying.

Of course, things went spectacularly wrong.  Her hair was naturally black, which was never going to take the dye well in the first place.  It came out as a kind of gothic halo of hideousness, transforming her face into a milky greenish moon, which as we know, most men find immensely attractive in a young woman.  To add insult to injury, the dye then washed out all over her skin and clothes in a rainstorm on the way to the dance.  Trauma!  Still, top marks for carrying on regardless. I’d have gone home and shaved my head, becoming a proto-Buddhist and being both hip and groovy, but probably still a little bit green.

I confess to having my fair share of hair based disasters.  I did go through a particularly odd time of being very experimental with my hair.  I was a spectacularly ugly teenager and decided the only way to deal with it was to go with the flow and just be as outrageous as possible.  Consequently I let some student hairdressing freak cut my hair off in a tent at a steam rally (thanks dad) for £3.50 when I was sixteen.  I looked like a convicted child murderer and it took months to grow out.  I kept being called ‘squire’ by strangers, which was a bit depressing to say the least.

 I went through a goth phase of having three inch spikes on top, but everything else shaved.  I used to get my hair shaved every week at the local barbers, who liked me because I had breasts (the other customers who also had breasts were just a little bit disturbing)!  Consequently he used to sing to me and, more importantly give me a discount.  This was very useful, as the weekly cuts, along with the four hundred tons of mega fierce hairspray was crippling me financially and explains why I worked at the Little Chef (scaring the crap out of old age mentioners who just wanted teacakes for two) for so long.  I gave up that style in the end, mainly because my lungs were packing in from the toxicity of the chemicals in the spray.  I’ve got the lungs of a seventy a day smoker thanks to that!

When I was a child I had quite a penchant for cutting my own hair, which resulted in threats of being sent to an orphanage if I didn’t stop.  I once cut my own fringe, thinking how easy this hair cutting thing was, and how I couldn’t understand why more people didn’t do their own.  I neglected to understand the basic rule that hair is longer when it’s wet.  Consequently I went round for several weeks looking like a teenage version of Richard III contemplating murdering his distant cousins.  My mother refused to take me out socially ever again if I took a pair of scissors to my own scalp while I lived under her roof.  Looking back at the photographs I can quite see why.

After that I moved on to razor blades, as I was banned from scissors.  Ingenious eh?  I decided that I really didn’t like those wispy sidey bits of my hair, and so the only thing to do was to just slice them off like so!  Unfortunately I also ended up slicing off half of my left cheek in the process.  Apart from the agony of having my mum pour half a bottle of neat Dettol into it to ‘clean it up’, but really to ‘get revenge’ for another trauma I’d put her through, I had to endure weeks of Al Pacino jokes, which was just mortifying!

The fascination with hair mutilation started early.  My aunty Liz was responsible for the most traumatic hair incident in my life barring nits.  My brother used to have a big toy fire engine when we were kids.  It was one of those ones with a kind of traction device inside it.  You know the ones that when you pull back then drive forwards for a while before stopping?  It used to make a kind of whirring sound, and she showed me and my brother how to pretend that it was actually a razor, and how to shave off our ‘chin pie’ just like dad.  Brilliant eh?

Problem was, I was a girly girl with long flowing hair.  I was busily shaving in a manly way with the fire engine when a strand of my hair got caught in the device that propelled the engine along.  It wound and wound, and kept on winding until it had chewed up my hair, and I now had a large, red fire engine clamped to my scalp.  It was, I recall, extremely heavy and no amount of vicious tugging would dislodge it from its perch atop my bonce.  The only solution was to run round screaming: ‘There’s a fire engine in my hair! There’s a fire engine in my hair! Aarghh!’ and holding onto the bottom of it so that the weight didn’t pull my head off.

My mother was extremely cross about it.  Looking back I find this a little odd.  If one of the kids came to me with a large red fire engine clamped to their scalp I would be hysterical with laughter on the floor.  I might even have cause to laugh myself physically sick before I would be able to extricate them from its clutches. Mind you.  I always had an impeccable sense of timing with regard to such matters so I expect I came shrieking along just as she was a) reaching a crucial bit in the Archers or b) just about to have a lie down.

It turns out, the fire engine had wound the hair so tightly that there was no room to wield scissors without tearing a large, bloody lump out of my head.  I expect this appealed greatly to her, but fearing that this would then become infected and she would have to nurse a suppurating head wound along with everything else, she resisted the temptation.  Eventually she found a razor blade and scythed a large lump of hair and one fire engine from the side of my head. I looked somewhat odd to say the least, and my punishment was having to go to school with a great divot in my head for the next few weeks until the hair grew back.  I only got teased unmercifully for it.  I estimate it has taken about six months of therapy to erase that mental scar alone. 

I won’t bore you any more with the endless tales of my hair don’ts as I like to think of them.  I’m sure we will have occasion to talk about hair later on in our acquaintance, so just steel yourselves.  Now, as long as all the hair stays on my head I will be happy.  It’s amazing how simple life gets as you get older.  You spend years worrying about crimping, dying, straightening, roots, perms etc, and then think: ‘Sod it!  It’s still on my head.  Winner!’ 

Tallulah is very happy that she’s having such extensive interest paid to her hair.  Up until about a year ago she hated having curly hair with a vehemence that was frankly frightening.  Because her hair is so unusual, and because she is frankly rather charming looking when she’s not being hideous, people comment on it a lot.  I used to absolutely dread this.  As soon as they pounced, shrieking: ‘Oooh! Hasn’t she got lovely hair?  Haven’t you got lovely hair? Oooh! She has got lovely hair hasn’t she?’ etc., she would point at them and shout vehemently: ‘Just shut up lady! I hab not got lubly hair! I hab got horrible curly hair.  I hate you!’ and I would die the death of a thousand mortifications and shame, shame, shame.

Tallulah thinks that having wet hair means that her hair will be straight. In order to get the nit comb through it twice a day she has extensive washings, which mean that she lives in perpetual hope of waking up with straight hair.  I caught her sitting on the bottom step of the stairs, tugging her hair with the brush and wincing.  I said: ‘Why on earth are you doing that Tallulah?  It looks so painful.  Why don’t you stop?’  To which she replied: ‘No mama.  I am just sittin’ here pullin’ my brains out with this brush to get it straight!’  I didn’t want to disillusion her, and it kept her quiet for ages apart from the odd wince, so I left her to it.

Here’s the last tale before I go.  At dinner this evening she was telling us about the school play, which we are going to see her in on Wednesday.  She is going to be an angel, as regular readers will no doubt remember.  Lee asked her (he has extended his stay.  We had roast beef and Yorkshire pud for dinner!) what she was going to do in the play and she said airily: ‘Well, I’m just goin’ to be flutterin’ my wings mostly.’ Top tip for angel emulation.