Katyboo1’s Weblog

I am in mortal agony and it’s all the children’s fault!  Tilly had a temperature again last night, so I threw them all into bed at seven o’clock on the grounds that I couldn’t be doing with them all being poorly over Christmas because my goodwill simply doesn’t extend that far.

I was going to watch some television with all my extra free time, but the effort of flicking my eyeballs around was too wearing, so I made myself some tea and lay down on the sofa to think about things.  Jason had gone to see Lee (who does actually have a flat of his own, for entertainment purposes only you understand), so I could have it all to myself and took full advantage of the spreadability factor.

I woke up two hours later feeling incredibly disoriented and ashamed for having confirmed my descent into middle agedness so appropriately. I wrenched my cheek from where I had welded it to the pillow with dribble.  I drank my cold tea in a reflective mood, trying to decide whether I could be arsed to have a bath before I went to bed or not. 

Usually I do the shower thing, as the bath is on the kid’s floor and if they hear the taps going they tend to need to come and have fourteen wee’s each while I’m having a bath and try to engage me in existential chit chat, thus making it far less relaxing.  Jason had recommended a bath because I’d had a stiff neck for the last couple of days, probably due to the fact that I carry Oscar round all day and he weighs as much as a Shetland pony. 

I have nothing against baths, in fact I love having baths, but I do like a nice ambience. We have quite a nice bathroom, compared to others I have owned (particularly the one up six flights of stairs fitted into a cupboard full of galloping mould), but I like to imagine myself surrounded by Diptyque candles and up to my ears in Jo Malone scented bath grains.  The reality is me sitting with my head butting against a large plastic box with Tinky Winky leering out of the top at me and eyeball to eyeball with some spitty Disney toothbrushes. 

The Disney toothbrushes are electric ones, and an incentive to get the kids to be more thorough about brushing their teeth.  Their concept of brushing for two minutes is rather elastic and they turned the toothbrushing timer I gave them into a time machine, so I thought this might work instead.  As it is I caught Tallulah in there the other day carefully brushing her teeth but without the electric bit.  I pointed out that the electric part was to help her teeth get properly brushed and asked why she wasn’t using it.  She said: ‘I don’t like to turn it on because all the toothpaste just comes rumblin’ off the brush.’ And carried on brushing sedately.  Another cunning plan foiled. 

When I was a kid someone bought my brother and I an electric toothbrush each.  This was the early seventies so they aren’t the glorious pieces of technology they once were. In fact they were the size of a giants alarm clock with a wire and a toothbrush attached.  I was amazed and astounded by this piece of kit, and desperate to try it.  When my mother showed me how to work it I turned away in disgust.  I was so disappointed.  I thought that because it was electric all I had to do was open my mouth, turn on the toothbrush and the toothbrush would creep into my mouth, creep out again and turn itself off neatly.  I was outraged that I was still expected to hold it and move it up and down.  Absolute rubbish!

Anyway.  I had just decided that I was so tired I really wasn’t going to have a bath and wake myself up all over again.  I felt good about this executive decision.  I sat feeling smug that I had been forthright and had put my good decision making trousers on, when I realised that I had been idly scratching my head for the last five minutes.  My immediate thought was: ‘Oh God! Nits!’ 

This focussed my attention quite sharply and had the added bonus of shocking me into alert wakefulness (much like hearing a noise in your sleep, and waking to the utter conviction that there is a mass murderer helping himself to your comestibles).  I hurtled into the kitchen, dug out the dreaded nit comb and pulled it through my hair.  At this point my neck muscles seized completely and locked my neck into a rictus of absolute agony. 

I was, as I’m sure you will imagine, quite cross. I rent the air with my choice language about small children, nits and the unfairness of life in general, and my life in particular.  The only good things to have come out of the whole debacle was the sure knowledge that I didn’t actually have nits, and that I would definitely have something to write about in my blog, although at the time this too seemed strangely unfair. 

I then had to have a bath in order to try and unlock my rigid neck muscles enough for me to even attempt to go to bed.  I crept about like a crab, trying not to swear too much and wake the children up.  The last thing I wanted was for them to sympathetically offer me a glass of water.  I thanked my lucky stars I had made Tallulah get up for a wee earlier, as the thought of shinning up the ladder to her cabin bed and giving her a fireman’s lift down to ground level was enough to make me cry.

I had an unsatisfactory and entirely unromantic bath, covered my neck and shoulders in Ralgex and retired to bed with a hot water bottle, smelling like an old lady and not at all like Jo Malone.  Bah! The only things that would have made me smell more like an old lady was the aroma of cat wee and tannin.

I really don’t like the smell of Ralgex (it smells like something I should be putting on a car engine, and not all over my skin), so I had the cunning plan of putting a blob of Vicks’ on the end of my nose, thus blocking out the smell of Ralgex.  Cunning eh? It was the only thing I had to hand that was smellier than the Ralgex.  I couldn’t be bothered to creep downstairs and get the Marmite which was the only other thing I could think of.  Also, I was worried that if I rolled over I would stain the sheets and it would be hard to explain the next morning.

 I was lying there in agony, bored out of my mind and tired to death when I decided, just for fun, to read the label on the tub of Vicks.  Turns out its use by date was 2005!  This sent me into a total panic in case it was now going to eat through the end of my nose and I would wake up looking like The Elephant Man.  I rubbed it off as best I could, but I still stank to high heaven, so I had to accept that the damage was probably already done. 

This set off yet another unpleasant train of thought.  I realised that when I’d grubbed the tube of Ralgex painfully out of the back of the bathroom cabinet, it hadn’t got a lid on.  Now at the time I was in too much agony to care, and just casually slapped it on.  But with this new, and possibly horrifying news about the Vicks, I was forced to rethink my blasé attitudes and crept crablike into the bathroom where I had to crouch on my knees to get to the appropriate level of the Ralgex related shelf without having to turn my head.  I found that it had no sell by date on at all.  This was probably on the packet the tube came in, which I had thrown away in a carefree moment when I had been tidying up some time long, long ago.  This meant that I had no idea at all if the Ralgex was going to kill me. 

I lay in bed and worried about it for another hour, intermittently being burned by the hot water bottle which I was trying to manoeuvre between my ear and shoulder for the best possible pain relief.  By this time I stank of both Vicks and Ralgex.  I had hot water bottle burns all over one side of my neck and head.  My hair was looking like medusa’s dreadlocks where I had taken a more than casual approach to drying it, due to the fact that every time I touched my head with a towel it felt like someone was trying to rip my head off.  My pyjamas were as ever, held up by bits of baler twine, and I had rings under my eyes that made me look like I’d lost a nasty fight. 

I spent the next hour worrying about what Jason would say when he got home, and interspersed that with generalised worries about what would happen if we got burgled while he was out.  I felt that although I couldn’t possibly tackle the burglar to the ground in my current condition, and the smell would give me away before I even set foot on the stairs, my strange crab-foetal approach and wild eyed demeanour would probably be enough to frighten him away. 

Then there was the problem of the pillow.  When I first met him, Jason was the proud owner of a Tempur mattress.  For those of you who aren’t blessed with encyclopaedic knowledge of the world of mattresses, these are the Rolls Royce of the mattress world and cost ten guineas an ounce.  They were apparently developed by Nasa, and are what the astronauts sleep on when they’re zooming off to bring back some more drab bits of rock from alien worlds.

Jason suffers from a bad neck and shoulders (many years riding motorbikes and hunched over a PC, nothing too exciting) and our friend Peter, who is a wizard osteopath, suggested that he invest in a Tempur mattress to help him sleep better.  Now it is an investment, as it costs about as much as a small car and weighs about as much as a Volvo estate car.  Next to his BMW M3 (which has, much to his chagrin been replaced by a series of increasingly sensible family friendly cars and an ever dwindling sense of manhood and virility), it was Jason’s pride and joy, and certainly in the early days, if he were forced to choose between me and the mattress I’d have been stalking the inventor of the mattress with a view to revenging myself on him for my failed romance. 

We also have a strange Tempur pillow which Jason got as a free gift for being such a wonderful customer, and which for some reason I have inherited.  It is a very odd sort of flattened S shape and is supposed to be wonderful for dodgy necks etc. I dug it out the bottom of the wardrobe, using a bit of the slatted window blind that had fallen off, so that I didn’t have to crouch, swearing the whole time (I am turning into my own grandmother, and will soon start develop a fondness for Dick Van Dyke and deposit small bags of cat litter under my bed for no apparent reason). 

I spent a considerable time thereafter trying to figure out how to use the pillow effectively.  I tried it both ways up, fat part of the S first and then thin part of the S.  I tried it sideways and back to front.  Then I tried throwing it across the bedroom whilst swearing violently, and I have to say that I felt much better after that.  Perhaps I have found its true purpose after all. 

It took me until one o’clock to get to sleep.  Oscar started to stir as soon as I turned the light out, with the use of his preternaturally acute hearing for such matters as light switches and snoring parents.  He woke fully at precisely ten past one with a raging temperature which we did battle with until five thirty this morning when he and I passed out in an exhausted Calpol strewn heap. 

I should have known that this was going to happen.  He has been eating nothing but fruit for the last three days and hasn’t wanted to bite down on anything harder than a grape.  It’s usually a sign that he is either a) turning into a fruit bat or b) his gums are rumbling.  I was just in denial about the possibility of more days of childhood illnesses coming my way.  God, it’s depressing. 

As you can imagine, I was a little bit tetchy when I woke up this morning.  I had a billion things to do today, mainly because I’ve spent the weeks I should have been doing them looking after poorly children instead.  I felt that life had truly wrestled me to the ground and smashed me over the head with a particularly unattractive vase.  I hadn’t even had time to pick the bits of plaster out of my hair before the day got hold of me.

 Tallulah announced at breakfast that she thought Oscar had ‘angel delightis’, which was why he was so poorly.  Tilly poured scorn on this theory because: ‘You are an idiot Tallulah.  Angel Delight is a pudding and nobody is ill from a pudding.’ (I declined to mention the Christmas she ate three helpings of pistachio kulfi when we went out with my friend Rita, and cried all the way home).  Tallulah said that she meant the thing where your tonsils hurt.  Tilly flicked her hair scornfully, pronounced: ‘Toncilitis. Toncilitis. Toncilitis.’ and left the room, superiority of older sister fully intact.  I quite like the idea of angel delightis though.  It forced me into buying a packet of Butterscotch Angel Delight when we went to the Co-op this afternoon, just for old time’s sake.

My dad came over at lunch time because he rang me to see if I wanted anything from the farmer’s market and the girls put in an order before I even got to the phone.  He is much more obedient to them, and turned up forty minutes later with crusty bread and sausage rolls bless him.  He’s still making plans for his ginger pig and has now found the recipe on the internet, after mum bought Nigella’s book and couldn’t find the recipe in it.  You have been warned.

We commandeered dad to take us out to do our chores today as it was foggy and freezing.  He took us to the farm shop down the road to get some veg and bought some brussells for his christmas lunch.  Tilly looked at them and said: ‘Grangrad?  Mum says that brussells smell and taste like old people’s farts.  What do you think?’  He looked at me wearily and said: ‘Well Tilly.  Your mother has always had a way with words.’

As it is Christmas they are advertising turkeys left right and centre at the farm shop.  When we were leaving we passed a field with a load of low level horse jumps in it.  Tilly said: ‘Is that for the turkeys so that they can exercise?’  I bit my cheeks and said: ‘yes’, to which she said: ‘It’s so that they don’t get so fat that they explode isn’t it? Is that why you have to exercise too grangrad?’  The poor man!

Oscar has been poorly all day.  In between he is very cheerful, which is one of the good things about babies.  They don’t know they’re supposed to be miserable while they’re ill and it makes life so much better for everyone.  He’s a very cheerful boy, although he has no right to be and I am expecting a one a.m. wake up call anyway.

My shoulder and neck are regaining some mobility, which is why I am now talking to you instead of wincing about moaning like an old fart.  The world is gradually returning to as normal as it’s ever likely to for us, and I have done my christmas cleaning, changed all the bedclothes and done the laundry.  I feel good about this, but that it heralds disaster, and we are likely to get hit by a tsunami, or a giant mudslide tomorrow, because surely things can’t be allowed to go this right for this long?