Katyboo1’s Weblog

I am ashamed to say that we have yet more illness in the house.  I really don’t know what to do any more.  Someone has been suffering from some plaguey disposition in this house since the second week in October.  I know that I do have a tendency to exaggerate, so I mustn’t be too melodramatic.  I mean to be totally fair, we do have the odd day off here and there for good behaviour, but I can probably count them on the fingers of one hand.  I am loathe to do it in case I discover a latent case of leprosy and all my fingers drop off, but you know what I mean.

I keep a clean house.  I feed my children fruit and vegetables (despite their squeaks of protest) and try to buy organic when I can.  I make sure they get exercise and stimulation that doesn’t revolve around the Nintendo Wii, and I am a firm believer in fresh air.  Apart from the Vicks Vaporub I always observe sell by dates (we cannot be sure about the Ralgex so I will give myself credit for that one).  When we had the house surveyed I made sure that it wasn’t built on the Hell Mouth (although Tallulah would make an excellent Slayer). Where am I going wrong dear readers? 

This morning it was two of the clock when poor Tilly staggered into the bedroom to announce tragically that she had been sick all over her duvet and was feeling very poorly indeed.  I lumbered into action, stripping beds, showering small children and dispensing large plastic bowls in case of emergencies, and so the night wore on in its relentless and inevitable fashion.  Oscar was a little jealous that someone else was getting all the attention so he roused himself at about three for a jolly good squawk for no apparent reason, and off we went again.

I am working on two theories at the moment.  One is that the universe is trying to tell me that I am in the wrong career, and that I should give up all pretensions of fledgeling authorhood and enrol in medical college immediately.  The other is that I should abandon all attempts at health and hygiene, use Waynetta Slob as my role model and incarcerate the children in a sunless cellar, poking them with twigs and feeding them turkey twizzlers until their ears fall off.  Surely they can’t be any worse off?

I am inclined to go for the Waynetta option because  it would be easy to implement, relatively cheap, and on some days I feel that temperamentally I am half way there already.  Going back to school seems like an incredible amount of hard work and I wouldn’t see any profits for years.  I can’t cope with a life of no heating, futons and Tesco Yellow Label Beans any more.  Once I could kid myself that it was fun and edgy (and even if I couldn’t I didn’t have the funds to change any of it), now I would just moan about my bad back and have to raid the Damart catalogue.  I am too old to relinquish my vain dreams of middle class aspirations.  We own a VW Touran for goodness sake.  I have Emma Bridgewater mugs (admittedly none of them match, and I bought them all of Ebay, but you get the idea).

My friend is in medicine, and she spends all day looking at people’s piles and examining their bowels.  They pay her quite a lot of money to do this, but my feeling is that they would have to.  I only have only had three lots of bottoms to wipe and nurture in my lifetime, but that seems like three too many frankly.  I look forward to the day when I can burn the novelty frog potty and relinquish my shares in Pampers.

I know there are other areas I could specialise in, but there aren’t many that are appealing to a woman of short temper, terminal lack of patience and a fairly low squeamishness threshold.  Perhaps I could be a fingernail doctor, although couldn’t deal with them when they were hanging off or anything.  Maybe I really mean, ‘nail beautician’.  I hear the pay is fairly poor mind you, and I’ve got a very shaky hand for any close up work that is required.  All in all I feel we must abandon that idea in its infancy and move on.

Tallulah has just come galloping in on her hobby horse saying that she must just say goodbye to me before she leaves.  Apparently she is going to Australia by horse this evening.  She is wearing a nightie and a pair of pink plastic mules with feathers on.  She tells me that she is thinking of abandoning the footwear as it is unsuitable for riding.  I asked her what she would wear instead.  She tells me that flip flops are the thing.  I wonder if that was Frankie Dettori’s secret of success?  He definitely doesn’t look like a feathered mules type of guy to me.

She thinks she might be back for Christmas because there are rumours that Santa has agreed to her getting a Barbie (not a prawns on the, a blonde bimbette).  She has packed her rucksack with an old fruit pastille that she has unearthed from the bottom of her toybox, a pair of pants, and a picture that she has done, which I thought was one of the three kings, but she has just informed me is a three headed beaver (how could I have been so blind?), so she will be well provided for.  Oscar is going with her, but apparently he is too young to ride a horse, so he is going on foot (well, all fours, as he is now refusing to walk again.  He did it once and he really doesn’t know what all the fuss is about).

As you can tell, Tallulah is much better after the hysteria of yesterday.  She has spent most of the day at the local farm park with my aunt and cousins.  Apparently Jesus was there too (he likes the ducks).  The camels were parked outside his bedroom, and it took them ‘years’ to get to him, so she tells me.  They were lucky not to miss him.  He gets very booked up around Easter.

Tilly has spent the day wanly coughing on the sofa and being miserable because not only has she only had one crust of bread and some water to eat and drink today, but she also missed the trip to the farm park, which she has been looking forward to all week.  She is currently watching The Simpsons mournfully.  I watch The Simpsons mournfully too, but only because I am probably one of the few people on the planet who really don’t find them that funny, and I watch it on sufferance because everyone else thinks it’s hilarious.  Jason has taught the girls to sing: ‘My Baloney Has a First Name, It’s H - O - M - E - R’, which Tallulah was singing this evening when she had exhausted all the songs she knew about Noah.  I do confess that I prefer it to songs of the religious persuasion, but only marginally.

There have been high points today.  Everyone went for a nap this afternoon except me, which was beautifully peaceful.  I managed to finish a book on Buddhism that I have been reading.  It’s for my course.  I’m still doing Burma, but thought I ought to find out about Buddhism, as the majority of people in Burma are Buddhists and it is a major influence on life there.  I have decided two things since reading the book (A Very Short Introduction to Buddhism: Damien Keown): 1) I am not temperamentally suited to be a Buddhist, and 2) the Burmese must be very odd Buddhists to have the human rights record that they do.  Perhaps they’ve mixed up Buddhism with the manual on how to be a torturing fascist bastard.  It’s an easy mistake to make.  They’re probably written by people with similar names, right next to each other on the shelf in the library.  Who knew? Doh!

I am now feeling very smug that I have finished reading the book, and very nervous that I will undoubtedly be reborn as an earthworm if they do happen to be right about this whole reincarnation thing.  I have none of the natural skills that Buddhism requires such as compassion; reverence for all life (I hate ants, and I hate nits even more.  I am responsible for a veritable nit/ant genocide all by myself); and the ability to sit still for five minutes in meditation without a) making a shopping list or b) falling asleep. 

I have decided against a career as a theologian as well.  It’s too worrying.  I’m not pre-disposed to be good, virtuous or moral in any way, and although I’ve never sold my soul to Satan, I get tired at the thought of all those bring and buy sales and relentless goodwill to all men.  I can’t even take in a parcel for the next door neighbour without starting a blood feud and wishing she would fall down a mineshaft.  This is definitely not good karma in this life or the next.  Why don’t they invent a religion for irritable people who scowl a lot and like gossiping and eating cakes?  I’d join, as long as we didn’t have to meet up on a regular basis.

My ex-husband was very keen on the idea of creating his own religion for a while.  He is very impressionable and he had read a few books about Osho, the crazy mystic guy who stockpiled four hundred Rolls Royces, had sex with everyone and built himself a huge gun collection in his desert compound before his tragic and inevitable demise.  He liked all the bits except the inevitable demise. I on the other hand was not so keen. 

I don’t like Rolls Royces.  I think they’re vulgar (give me an Aston Martin any day), and I really don’t want to live in the desert.  I think there might be a lot of ants there, although it may be too dry for nits.  I expect there are worse things than nits however, and that many of them live in the desert.  A Rolls Royce would be no consolation for galloping chiggers, or some other such infestation of hideousness.

I think the only thing that stopped him starting one (if you see what I mean) was his failure to be able to work out a mathematical equation which would identify to the minute that point where it goes from being ‘Wa Hey, look at me! I’m the incarnation of the godhead, and I’ve got a stack of cash.’ to ‘Oops! Please don’t kill me.  I’m just a bloke called Dave from Wigan with pretensions to grandeur.’

I caught him chatting to a bloke at a friend’s wedding about this one day.  He too was quite enthusiastic about it all (everyone wants to be a deity these days.  It’s so now), and they had got onto the subject of premises.  They decided that the best thing to do was to start small, probably with a shed, as you didn’t want your overheads to escalate before you’d got enough followers to pay for everything.  This chap admitted that he had in fact been scoping out possible church/sheds in B&Q and you could get a reasonable 8ft by 12ft shed for about eighty quid.  He reckoned you could get at least half a dozen medium sized followers in there, as long as you were prepared for them to be near enough to be within touching distance of the hem of your robe.

I left them to it shortly thereafter as the conversation was making me feel rather nervous.  He tried to bring up the subject again several times after that, claiming that it wasn’t, as I had claimed; ’sheer lunacy and ego mania’ on his part, as he now had proof that other people had looked into it as well.  He was convinced it was going to be the next big thing and that if he could only get in on the ground floor we could be multi millionaires within five years.  I, as the wife of the charismatic leader, could be in for half the loot. 

I borrowed some books on Jim Jones and the Aum cult from the library, made the unsurprising discovery that it would doubtless all end in tears, swore off religion forever and decided to go back to my futon with my beans in hand.  Luckily Jason only wants a shed so he can have a peaceful fag and play online poker without me giving him a Paddington Bear hard stare, so I think I don’t have to worry about the Glenfield Compound any day soon. Knowing my luck I’d be put in charge of the field hospital anyway, and the only vehicle I would ever see would be the bloody ambulance.