Wednesday 19th December, Musicals and three types of salmon

It’s nice to know my life has a theme.  Everyone should have a theme, and then they wouldn’t get all confused over what they’re supposed to do with the rest of their lives because their theme would tell them.  I’ve decided that my theme is illness, more specifically the illness of my children.  I’m far too busy to be ill myself.  My theme tune therefore would have to be the music from Casualty.  I believe there’s a rave version out there somewhere, which would be slightly more contemporary and in line with the modern, cutting edge life I lead.  I am, after all, the proud owner of both a blog and a facebook account.  I am well and truly riding the zeitgeist, albeit in an ambulance. 

Talking of theme tunes.  I had this idea the other day about where the musical genre came from.  I’m not a big fan of musicals.  In fact there are only three musicals in the known universe that I like; The Sound of Music (because I used to watch it with my gran every Christmas and it reminds me of her), Cats (because I am a girl) and Grease (because I am a product of the Seventies, and it is the first LP I ever owned).  Even with these three offerings I am fully able to admit that they are absolute shit, but I have a fondness for them because I am a sentimental old fool.  I wouldn’t expect anyone else to love them.  It’s a bit like how you feel about that moth eaten old teddy bear with one eye and its stuffing falling out, or even Jack the Ripper.  Only a mother could love him. 

I can tolerate Cabaret because it’s quite grim and downbeat, and because it’s based on the brilliant book; Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood, but once was enough.  Liza Minelli looks like a man called George (which is probably why she is such a drag queen idol).  In fact she looks more like David Gest than David Gest, which is a bit worrying given the fact that they married each other.

Other than that I loathe them all, in particular Paint Your Wagon (after a very unfortunate amdram performance I was forced to see in 1987) and Carousel (which is vomitworthy in all respects).  

I feel I can say this, because I have in fact tried them and found them wanting, rather like the works of Jeffrey Archer.  I don’t approve of people slagging things off they haven’t even tried.  I once had a fierce argument with someone over the literary merits of the book Lolita by Nabokov.  She announced it was disgusting and that the authorities should ban it because it was a veritable handbook for paedophilia.  I was intrigued by this because I had read it and felt that Humbert Humbert did quite badly out of the whole thing and came out of it looking like a shady pervert who was not only despicable but also rather crap and spent the whole novel humiliatingly being given the run around by a teenage girl.  Not the sort of thing you want to go down in history being remembered for. 

If it is a handbook for anything it is a handbook for how to be a dismal failure as a paedophile and a snivellingly awful member of humanity. I pointed this out to the woman in question and she said: ‘Oh. Well you would say that because you’ve read it!’  I said that I would indeed, and that I felt reading it gave me rather an edge when it came to talking about it.  She said that she couldn’t bring herself to read it because it was too perverse, and then wouldn’t speak to me for a week because I had! 

Anyway, back to musicals.  My big problem with musicals remains the crucial issue of why people would want to burst into song at key emotional moments of their lives.  Not only song, but also dance routines.  It’s all I can do to honk out a few incoherent words whilst snotting into a hanky and collapsing into a comfy chair when I’m at my emotional nadir.  The thought of managing four verses with matching chorus and a musical interlude whilst sustaining an outpouring of deepest grief and doing a chirpy dance routine is beyond even the most stoic of people, and makes a mockery of the tortured croonings of the musical hero. 

Because the words of the songs have to tell a story they are usually fairly dire, rhyming couplet type stuff reminiscent of the worst excesses of Medieval ballads and Victorian epic poetry.  This also means that the emotions expressed are falsely limited by the fact that they have to rhyme with something else, and it’s hard to find rhymes for words like pompous or wistful without mangling the English language to within an inch of its life: 

I am so melancholy

Sitting underneath this giant tree

You said you were confused

Did it have anything to do with booze? 

The easy rhyming words are even worse because they sound like Helen Steiner Rice greetings cards set to music: 

I feel so low

How can you go?

I am so sad

You were so bad etc 

This is easily gotten around when it comes to the world of Opera, where most Operas are written and sung in ‘foreign’.  Anything in foreign immediately sounds much more dramatic and compelling than if it were in your own language, even: ‘Did you put the cat out?’ sounds vaguely romantic in Italian, and very threatening in German. 

The rule of thumb with operas is never to go to an opera if it’s in your native tongue.  I once went to a performance of Madame Butterfly in English and it was an unmitigated disaster.  Just as the heroine was reaching a crescendo of tortured angst she bursts into song and the whole thing falls apart: 

‘Mr Pinkerton! Piiiiiiiinnnnnkerrtooonnnnnnnn, etc (for several hours.  Rule of operatic thumb.  Never say someone’s name once normally when you can sing it for forty minutes like Mariah Carey on helium)

‘Yeeesssssssss.  Whhaaattt doooo youu wannnnttt?’

‘I am so sad, so very sad, so very, very, very sad, sad sad.’

‘Are you sad? Are you sad? Isn’t that sad?  It’s quite tragic.  I feel bad for you?’

‘That’s nice.  But it’s not nice enough for me, at this late stage, stage, stage. At this late stage. The stage is quite late.  The lateness of the stage is part of what is making me so sad.’

‘Oh dear.’‘I might have to kill myself now.  I am thinking about it.  Yes.  I have decided, although it is so sad.  I have decided that this is what I must do.  Goodbye.’

‘Oh bum, bum, bum.  Don’t go! Goodbye.’

‘Urk!’ (I’m paraphrasing here.  This bit takes about an hour.  It’s very operatic)

‘Arrghhhh. She has gone etc, (for the next four million years…) 

So.  There you have it.  A potted history of opera through the ages.  Now back to the musicals again.  Yes, so this juxtaposition of the mundane and the terribly exciting is my big problem, and I wondered who on earth had thought of the idea of: ‘What we need right now is a good song and dance routine’.  Then it came to me.  It was a parent. 

I had this epiphany the other day as I was jigging about the kitchen trying to pacify Oscar into waiting for his dinner to cool (another bloody annoying thing.  You cook a child a dinner so that they aren’t killed by e-coli, and then spend the next twenty minutes flapping about making it cold again.  Madness) so that he could eat it.  He is a child of hearty appetites and he hates this waiting bit most of all.  I had tried all my usual tricks; toys, crayons, a bit of bread and butter to be going on with, funny faces, all to no effect.  In desperation I started singing to him: ‘Oscar! Your dinner is coming.  Hang on young man. Now just hang on! Try not to cry’, etc. for ten minutes until the dinner had cooled sufficiently for him to be able to fling it at the wall without burning himself.  I realised that I do this with alarming regularity, and in all except the most extreme of cases it works.  Case closed. 

Anyway, for those of you still with me, we were initially talking about illness way back when the day was still young. You will be pleased to know we are not dealing with serious illness today, just minor and irritating illness that throws all my plans askew without it actually being worth it in any way.

Jamie was taking the girls to school this morning and then dropping their things off with me.  Luckily I had set my alarm for eight thirty a.m. instead of the usual ten to eight.  It isn’t good to be caught unawares and snoring by your ex-husband at any time. I don’t want him to see me in mismatched pyjamas and bed socks any more.  Although he lived with me for nearly ten years I like to foster the illusion that I now wear Dior Palazzo pyjamas and bound out of bed smelling like roses.  Clearly he doesn’t believe it, but I have no intention of providing factual evidence.  I prefer to sustain the glimmer of illusion.  I look like a bag of hammers (ones which haven’t slept properly for eight years) fully dressed and I have to retain some dignity. 

Oscar however, decided that despite having a night on the town last night, more of which later, he was going to get up at ten to seven this morning come hell or high water.  I ignored him until seven thirty, and then as the squeaking increased in intensity I had a horrible vision of the pooh fest that greeted me yesterday and leapt into action in case he was running ‘Pooh – The Revenge’.  Luckily for me he wasn’t.  Unluckily for me I wasn’t going to get him back into bed. 

I’d had this beatific vision of getting up at half eight, getting dressed in a leisurely way and being able to relax with my book and a cup of coffee before Jamie turned up just after nine.  I was convinced Oscar would be far too exhausted to stir before half nine.  Hah! 

As it was he decided he was feeling feisty today, threw his grapes all over the kitchen, tried to shove squares of toast down his trousers and emptied his milk up the sleeve of his clean t-shirt all before eight o’clock.  My coffee went cold and my book remained resolutely unopened. 

I’d have been scuppered anyway.  Jamie rang at eight to say that Tilly was running a temperature and was complaining of a headache. He’d given her some Nurofen but it hadn’t come down and what did I suggest.  I resisted the urge to suggest we have her adopted and get a new, healthy child who would go to school, and mentally resigned my day to the bin, saying she would have to have the day off and come back to me.  It was the last day of school as well.  Admittedly I would have still had Oscar at home anyway, but I had planned to do my final, final Christmas shopping today (see I told you.  Bastards!) and now it was all going horribly wrong. 

She turned up mournfully on the door step, but after twenty minutes of watching telly and playing with Oscar seemed absolutely fine to me.  I suggested the idea that she might like to saunter into school to say goodbye to everyone, but apparently her head was just too sore, so she stayed.  I tried to think charitable thoughts and failed. 

So, I have cancelled my lunch date with Andrea.  She has troubles of her own.  She has no children, but she has just become the proud mother of a new calf called Ermintrude.  Apparently Ermintrude is scouring (I believe this is pooh related), which is not good, and Andrea has been up most of the night with her, cajoling her back to health.  She seemed quite relieved that we didn’t have to be ladies what lunch, and I was quite relieved that I don’t have to look after livestock as well as children. 

I found a list of things I had carefully written down which all needed to happen before Christmas, but which I had been avoiding one way or the other, and which are now dramatically urgent.  I couldn’t face public transport today so we were very profligate and flashed the cash in a taxi.  I had pictures to take to the framers, perfume to buy for mother in laws (who have chosen the most difficult to find perfume in the known universe, and which took three hours of hunting to track down), photographs to get copied which are already supposed to be winging their way to Canada, but which are sitting in Jessops sulking.  I also forgot to get anything for the children to give each other.  It was hell on earth. 

I feel that Christmas has beaten me yet again.  Last night Jason and I made the alarming discovery that we had committed our Christmas tree, Derek (he was a much loved family member) to the grave when we moved house.  I thought he might be hiding in the loft (stage fright) but it was not true, and we had to do an emergency dash to get a tree before all that was left was a bunch of malnourished pine needles for an exorbitant sum. 

We went to Sainsbury’s in the vain hope that it would be easy.  There was a little lady being helpful in the doorway to the store.  She was very funny.  Jason asked her where the trees were.  She told him, and asked him if he knew where she meant.  He said that he did indeed and that she had been very helpful.  She then said; ‘Oh please let me come with you.  Come on.  I’m coming with you.’ And proceeded to abandon her post and jaunt merrily round the shop with us.  Clearly being a meeter and greeter wasn’t her first career choice. As we were proceeding to the tree aisle she was desperately trying to sell me all the latest seasonal offers: 

Lady: ‘There’s half price on salmon you know.  It’s a whole salmon for £3.99.  That’s good isn’t it?’ 

Katy: ‘That’s very good indeed.  Yes.’ 

Lady: Proudly: ‘Yes it is, very good.  And they’re all suitable for freezering as well you know?’ 

Katy: ‘Goodness! Are they?’ 

Lady: ‘Yes they are! And, and they’ve got all three types of salmon…’ 

Katy: ‘Really?’ 

Lady: ‘Yes! They’ve got smoked salmon (big pause) and (big pause) the other one….(trails off, clearly having no idea what the other two are and expecting me to leap in.) 

Katy: ‘Oh good.  Well thanks for letting me know.’

Lady: Abandoning the idea of salmon altogether: ‘Yes. Well.  They’ve got half price on Stilton as well.’ 

Katy: ‘Ummm. No thanks.’ 

Lady: ‘No, really.  They have.  You can make Stilton and broccoli soup with it you know?’ 

Katy: ‘Right.’ 

Lady: Sad that I’m not enthusiastic about this thought: ‘I’m not lying you know.  You really can make soup out of it, even though it’s cheese.  I’m not lying.’ 

Katy: ‘I know that.  It’s just that I don’t really like Stilton thanks.’ 

Lady: Bit more cheerful that her veracity is not being called into question: ‘Ah! Well they’ve got half price handbags too.’ 

By now I was biting my cheeks trying not to laugh and Jason couldn’t look at me.  Luckily we had reached the tree aisle by this stage and she reluctantly left us with lots of ‘half price’ drifting back towards us as she scuttled back to the door. Sadly the trees were not half price and they only had white ones left.  Jason tried to sell me the idea of a white one for ease of purchase but I insisted that if we had to have a fake one, I at least wanted it to look green.  This meant a trip half way across the city to Homebase where we became the proud parents of a seven foot tall Christmas tree that puts Derek to shame.  We have not named him yet, and he is merely known as son of Derek.  Oscar has already tried to climb up him twice and I fear that once the decorations go on it will be game over.

To add to this my sensible eating plan went horribly wrong today.  It was too cold in town, and I was too fed up of the children, christmas shopping and festive cheer to face another bloody banana, so we went and had tons of pasta and cheesecake and icecream for lunch.  It was brilliant and I have made an executive decision that if the bra explodes I will just go back to vest and pants and claim that I’m being retro.