Katyboo1’s Weblog

There was much frenzied activity in the house this morning.  It is the last week of term (half a week actually, for some reason they break up on Wednesday), and the big festivities start today.  Both girls had their Christmas party to go to, and their Christmas lunch.  Thankfully I didn’t have to do anything except pay for the lunch, which I can just about live with, but the parties required some effort on my part. This meant having to get up half an hour earlier for school, which did not go down well at all with any of us, as for once in our lives we all slept like the dead last night, and I was untroubled by dreams of celebrity hangers on and the like.

Tallulah’s teacher, in her infinite wisdom had decided that nothing could be easier for the infant class than to hold a pyjama party.  Now this would be fairly straightforward if they were to actually go to school in their pyjamas and come back again clad in their pyjamas, but no.  Someone from on high has decreed that it would be unacceptable to have small children wandering around in their night attire all day, so we had to send them to school in their uniform with a bag containing their nightwear.

I don’t understand this at all.  Why can’t the children go to school in their pyjamas?  It’s not like they’re modelling for Damart, or even Victoria’s Secret for goodness sake.  Any sick pervert who has a mind to find small children attractive isn’t exactly going to be making a list of fashion do’s and don’ts are they?  And children’s pyjamas are not particularly ravishing at the best of times.

In my day they were usually baggy, a bit grey round the edges and the elastic had invariably gone due to them being third hand cast offs from your cousin’s auntie’s best friend.  This meant that you were forever hitching them up to stop them falling down round your ankles and killing you as you shuffled to the toilet in the night, but because they were usually at least three years old they would also be way too short and make you look like the extra member of Star Trek who was about to be killed at any moment when you did pull them up.

Perhaps it was a health and safety issue.  Most kids nightwear tends to be made out of nylon and petroleum derivatives with frills on.  Maybe they’re afraid that if they run round in them all day, the chafing of the material against each other will cause the entire infant year to spontaneously combust, and the parents will go to pick them up to be confronted with a lot of ash and some shrivelled up bits of Barbie’s head.  That’s more like it.  They just don’t want to start a fund for a memorial garden.

Now I thought this idea was lunatic when it was first launched, and sadly I was proved right. The teacher is a lovely woman, the kids all adore her, and she is brilliant at her job, but this is her first job, she is young and she has no children of her own.  She is a complete novice at the dressing and undressing of small children, and will never make this mistake again in her entire school career.

Mind you, you think she would have learned by now, having had to supervise an entire term’s worth of p.e. classes how hard it is to get small kids in and out of complex clothing combinations in a short space of time without a chair, a whip and a staple gun, but somehow she hadn’t joined the dots. 

Consequently there was her and two teaching assistants manfully trying to coerce thirty five small children into changing into their various night apparel whilst at the same time making sure their modesty remained intact by keeping their pants firmly on, and ensuring that they all retained the vital bits of school uniform that they came with.  This is not as easy as it sounds. 

Some children will be roaring their eyes out before they’ve even taken their cardigans off.  Others will have stripped naked in the first thirty seconds and be running round the classroom making aeroplane noises and showing everyone how far they can stretch their willy if they pull it like this, and the rest will be climbing in and out of their and everyone elses’ clothes with gay abandon.  In the middle of this someone will undoubtedly have wet their pants and have to have the nasty, grey emergency ones out of the bottom of the lost property box, causing another round of weeping and wailing, and someone will have lost a small boy called Matthew completely and spend the rest of the afternoon looking for him, only to find him asleep in the Home Corner just after the police have been called.

The changing room is not so much a room as a corridor made for midgets with hundreds of pegs attached to the wall.  It is drafty, difficult to access and right by the toilets.  It’s bad enough going in in the morning, and we have fifteen minutes of leeway to get them there and at least one adult per child.  It must have been sheer hell this afternoon. 

Then they filled them full of sugar, introduced them to Santa (who Tallulah informs me, is the real santa, and not like that pretend one at the Christmas fayre), and played raucous games with them until ten minutes before home time when they made the foolish mistake of expecting them all to be able to clamber easily back into their uniforms. 

Naturally this did not even come close to happening.  It all went a bit Pete Tong, and when the bell rang, the kids streamed out en masse, sweeping the teacher up in the melee, who was last seen wandering round in her dressing gown wondering what her life had come to (welcome to my world!).  

Now I had been quite clever, and actually sent Tallulah to school in sensible pyjamas made of winceyette with long sleeves and stout buttons, proper, fierce pyjamas.  Other parents who had not thought this through had sent their children in shorts and t-shirts and the pyjama equivalent of bikinis, and are now reaping the whirlwind, trying to change their clothes in the shelter of the hedgerow, or having to hit their frozen forms with a shovel when they get them home frostbitten up to the elbows. 

Now, it was not my turn to pick them up this evening, so I managed to avoid a first hand experience of this hell.  Their dad is back from Thailand, and he is bravely taking them ice-skating in the outdoor ice rink in Nottingham this evening as a special treat.  I know about the bedlam because he turned up on the door step ten minutes ago asking if they could come in and change before they set off.  Even the stoutest of pyjamas are not the sort of thing one should set about ice skating in.  Nobody saw Torville and Dean practicing Bolero in Spiderman pyjamas now did they? 

Now you do have to be careful what you wear when you go ice skating you know.  I once had a terrible mishap at an ice rink in Solihull which has haunted me for the rest of my days.  I was fifteen and went with a bunch of friends on a coach trip for this wonderful treat.  We got there early and were all booted up, but waiting to go on the ice.  There was the end of an ice hockey practice match going on and we clustered round the barriers to watch.

Around the sides of the rink above the barriers, was some netting which was supposed to stop the puck flying off the rink and out into the audience, killing innocent bystanders.  A good idea I’m sure you will agree.  There we were leaning, leaning, going ‘ooh!’ and ‘aaah!’ at the speed and dexterity of the hockey players.  There we were leaning, leaning as they skated off, mad with excitement because it would be our turn on the ice next.

There I was, being dragged round the rink and off my feet into the air, because my coat button had got caught in the protective netting, and it was now being drawn up mechanically into the ceiling so we could all get on the ice.  Nightmare!  I was dangling with my boot tips just touching the floor, slowly being garrotted by a giant fishing net while my friends rolled around on the floor wetting their pants laughing.  I couldn’t do anything to help myself because I had no leverage by which I could unhook myself, so I just had to wait until they realised that the netting wasn’t ascending ceilingward and someone came to unhook me.  I still dream about it occasionally when I’m not dreaming about pop stars and psycho killers.

Tilly didn’t have a pyjama party, which is good, as she is the queen of inappropriate clothing choices, and would no doubt have chosen to go in an assortment of sequins held together with masking tape and tinsel.  She once had hysterics because I wouldn’t let her go to a funeral tea wearing an angel costume (even I thought it was a bit much.  If it had been my funeral fair play, but the other mourners would have been a bit upset.  Better than going as the grim reaper I suppose), and her idea of warm clothing is a hat (just a hat). 

Her favourite ensemble as a two year old was red Wellingtons, a nappy, a Dr. Seuss ‘One Fish Two Fish’ t-shirt and a cape.  She wore that for about six months solidly.  After that she was a nudist for about three years.  In fact my friend’s mother asked me if she went to nursery naked as she had never actually seen her wear clothes.  When she did deign to get dressed during the wilderness years she would only wear pink and only wear skirts or dresses.  Apparently everything else was for boys, even socks, and especially jeans.  I pointed out that I wore socks and jeans, and she just looked at me, sighed and said: ‘Yes mama, but you are very old!’ which seems to be the theme tune of my life at the moment.

This was the time in her life when she was so obsessed by Scooby Doo that she also changed her name to Daphne and refused to answer to Tilly at all.  She was madly in love with Fred (I’ve always thought he was gay, but I didn’t like to mention it to her).  It was a dificult phase, which she moved out of into her next difficult phase.  Apparently my mother tells me she should stop having difficult phases when she gets to be about thirty.  I look forward to it.

This changing name thing must run in the family.  Tallulah went through a time when she insisted that we call her Rose Episode (her name for Billy Piper in Doctor Who - because she used to ask: ‘Is this a Rose episode?’ as oppose to a Martha episode), and wouldn’t speak to me for a week because I didn’t have the foresight to christen her Rose.  My cousin Tom (Wizard) also went through such a phase, although he didn’t want to be called Rose, thank goodness.

He developed a deep passion for tractors at about the age of three, and decided that he was going to have his own ‘beast yard’.  The man who lived down the road had a ‘beast yard’, which is what he called his cattle farm, and Tom was extremely impressed.  He was so impressed that he followed him about everywhere, and changed his name to Derek in emulation of his hero. He refused to speak to you at all if you called him Tom, but was very cheerful and accommodating if you called him Derek, as long as you wanted to talk about tractors or beasts.  Otherwise, no dice!

Anyway, Tilly’s party was a regular one, but we had to provide food.  Tilly had volunteered to provide sandwiches, much to my chagrin, as I was rather hoping for a bumper pack of Hula Hoops and some Party Rings.  We couldn’t make them last night, or they would have been too curly, and the only thing worse than curly sandwiches is soggy sandwiches.  She decided that jam sandwiches were the way forward, and so we spent our extra half an hour this morning up to our knees in butter, jam and crumbs.

She is messy at the best of times, and this as Dickens would agree was the worst of times.  She was stuck up to the eyeballs within two minutes of getting the jam lid off, and I spent twenty minutes after I’d got home from school this morning unwelding jam off of the chair legs with Oscar’s expert help.  There were crumbs everywhere, because not only had she decided on jam as a filling, but she’d also decided that these sandwiches must be cut into festive shapes using pastry cutters.

I confess that after ten minutes I actually went and hid upstairs with a cup of coffee because I had lost the will to live.  Tallulah and Oscar were under the kitchen table fighting over an angel cutter and Tilly was using half a loaf to make one small star shaped sandwich which not only stuck to every available surface, but looked about as much like a star as I do.  There were jammy crusts everywhere, and Oscar had to have his hair washed and a clean pair of socks put on before we went out.

Eventually we exited, pursued by a bear (not really.  I just felt a bit Shakespearean.  More like some wasps with the amount of jam around) and one plate of hairy jam sandwiches badly wrapped in clingfilm.  She was charged with not dropping them before we got to school but nearly lost everything when she tried to wave at the lollipop lady going round a difficult bend.  I despair of ever getting that plate back in one piece.  Although no doubt Tilly would find a way to glue it together with the remains of the jam.  She is very creative.

My mum came round to see me today.  Apart from our emergency meeting at the hospital last week, we haven’t seen each other for ages, and it was lovely to have a coffee with only one child in tow.  Oscar loves his granny passionately and smothered her with spitty kisses whilst trying to shove half a chewed malted milk biscuit down her cleavage to show her how much he had missed her.  I don’t know if his undying affection is a blessing or a curse.

Mum tells me that dad has got his Christmas recipe obssession going again this year.  This is a great worry.  My dad is a terrible cook.  His signature dish is cheese and potato pie, which should say everything.  It’s a bad day back at the ranch when he tells me he’s cooking cheese and potato pie.  It’s usually code for the fact that my mum has torn a strip off of him for not doing enough around the house, and he’s trying to avoid being evicted in favour of a younger model.

The only exception to the classic cheese and potato pie dish is his Christmas extravaganza.  I don’t know whether it’s the smell of pine needles that sets him off, but it’s generally about this time of year that he suddenly decides that he has latent cheffing abilities which need bringing to the surface with a fantastic recipe that will wow us all.  With this he will silence his cheese and potato pie critics for eternity and a new star will be born.

This year apparently it’s the ginger ham he saw on Nigella Express last week.  Now I’m a big fan of Nigella, and her cakes and biscuits are a lifeline in our house, but if she is responsible for the break up of my parents’ marriage I will be writing to her and giving her custody of my dad, so you have been warned!

Apparently, to make this festive ham you need seven litres of ginger beer in which you boil your ham for at least a week, and voila, gingery ham.  My dad set out on a mission today to purchase the ginger beer.  I asked if they had a saucepan big enough for this quantity of ale, to which my mother replied: ‘I have no idea’.  I asked if it would fit in the oven even if they did, to which my mother replied: ‘I have no idea’.  I get the feeling she’s just humouring him.  She may even be secretly wishing that he will blow himself to kingdom come as his seven litres of fizzy pop reach an unfeasibly high temperature and explode all over the kitchen.

My dad however, will probably be fine and it will be my mum who is scraping caramelized ginger pig off of the ceiling for the next twelve months until he has another culinary brainwave.  Either that or she’ll be out in the garden digging a roasting pit, a la Heston Blumenthal, while my dad watches from the verandah, because of his bad back you understand!

Jason, as an aside, has banned me from having the new Heston Blumenthal book, because he’s too afraid that he will come home to find that Oscar and I have dismantled the Dyson to make a chapatti oven or some such nonsense.  I feel deprived, but that he also has a good point!

I expect my dad’s ginger pig to be a huge disaster.  I am not being unfair here.  I’m just going on his past track record.  He made pork pie one year.  It looked lovely (as lovely as pork pie can, which I hate), but was entirely raw from the pastry case inwards.  He made lamb curry another time.  It took three days to cook and tasted like wood chip wall paper with dead dog in it.  He has also made chutney.  I never found out how that tasted because it looked so evil it stayed in the jar and was avoided by everyone round the Christmas table like he had presented them with home made pooh in a dish.

I can well and truly say that the joys of the festive season are truly upon us.  I am now going to worry about what I am going to cook for tea, and try not to think about the children slicing their hands off or biting their own tongues out in the name of ice skating glory.