Thursday 27th December

I’m not even going to bother whisking you in a time machine back to yesterday and writing up an entry for the day.  I prefer to blot it out of my memory for the forseeable future.  I may want to revisit it in about twenty years just for the sake of completion, but even that is highly unlikely.  The children finally got their revenge and I believe I have caught whatever horrible infestation they have been suffering with for the last few weeks.  I woke up throwing up and spent most of yesterday the same way. 

Needless to say, I didn’t get my trip to Borders and I didn’t get my trip to my mum’s boxing day party.  I got a trip to the toilet, and another and another.  I shall sum up my experience of the whole day with the childrens’ favourite battle cry: ‘It’s not fair!’  Having got that off of my chest, we shall draw a veil over the events of the past twenty four hours and move swiftly on.  The only good thing might be that I’ve lost a few pounds, although knowing my luck I shall venture in trepidation to the scales only to find that I have put half a stone on.  Perhaps my body clock is working backwards and it’s time to crack open a lard sandwich and stop messing around.

Today I am feeling slightly less vile, although a bit like I’ve been in a washing machine on spin cycle for a few hours.  I am now waiting to see if I wake up tomorrow covered in spots from head to toe.  This is what they call: ‘Something to look forward to,’ apparently! This is what happened to the kids, so I keep leaping in front of the mirror, whipping my top off and inspecting my stomach ferociously in the hope that I can catch them unawares.  Quite what I am going to do when I find them is another matter, and one which I haven’t given much serious thought to.  It’s not as if I can round them all up and send them packing is it?  I might look up random folk remedies on the internet for curing itinerant rashes.  There’s bound to be something strange and horrible that you can do with ordinary household implements such as an oven glove and a cheese grater.  It would help to pass the time, since I am refusing to leave the house until the January sales are over.  Anyone who wants to get up at six in the morning to go and stand in line to buy Next underpants is certifiable in my book.

One of my friend’s ex-husband used an internet method to try and sort out his grumbling gall bladder.  He was on a waiting list for the hospital to have it seen to, but as these things are not considered urgent, he had been on the list for many a long month and expected to be on it for considerably longer.  In the meantime he was suffering a great deal, as these things may not be urgent, but they are extremely uncomfortable.  My friend suggested he see if there was anything he could do, probably because she was fed up of him lying around the house grumbling and littering up her lounge every day.

He found an absolutely hideous remedy which involved lying on his side, propped on a pillow and then drinking down the juice of several lemons and a litre of olive oil (you had to be propped on your side, to help the glorious mixture percolate through the gall bladder properly).  After this you had to lie and wait for it to flush through your system, at which point you needed a clear path through to a dedicated toilet for about three days while it worked its magic. 

Now you would have to be totally desperate to give this a try, in my humble opinion.  And it is testament to his manly willpower, and presumably how much pain he was in, that he did indeed do it.   He didn’t fall at the first post and vomit the greasy lemon mixture all over the carpet, which is what I would have done.  He manfully chugged it down and then galloped away for the next three days, wearing a small track in what had been a very expensive carpet.  After all that time he had passed about eighty gall stones (they look like black olives.  He showed me them in a jar! Gross.) and felt totally brilliant.

Now all this time he had been suffering the poor man had been surviving on Oliver Twist type gruel, because anything you eat that doesn’t taste like wallpaper paste apparently aggravates the crap out of your gall bladder and makes it hurt even more.  So when he felt better he decided to treat himself and eat some proper food.  On day four he sent out to the local Chinese takeaway and ate an entire feast for four people by himself.  About eight hours later he was rushed to hospital in dire agony and had to have his gall bladder removed.  Turns out he hadn’t read all the instructions on the DIY gallstone removal page.  You’re supposed to do a detox diet for three weeks after the initial flushing so that your gall bladder has time to recover.  It clearly wasn’t ready for crispy duck a la MSG and had registered its disapproval accordingly.

So, be warned.  If you’re going to do crazy home health experiments on the internet, make sure you read all the instructions first, or you will be very sorry.  Also be warned.  Very few of the remedies that are recommended are friendly, if you see what I mean.  You can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of remedies that require you to have: ‘a nice cup of tea and a sit down’, and there are not words to describe how many of them start with the words: ‘First boil your Brillo pad’, etc.

Someone very strange once told me that if you had a headache you could cure it by grabbing hold of a chair and wishing the headache into the chair!  If only it were true.  They were convinced of the efficacy of this cure.  I have to say that in sheer desperation I did try it one day (mainly because it was one of the few that I’d heard of that didnt’ involve sharp instruments.  Trepanning anyone?).  Oddly enough it didn’t work, which is probably why I haven’t seen it recommended in any first aid manuals recently.  It did distract me momentarily from wanting to cut my own head off though, so if you fancy a bit of a break, it may be worth pretending for a little while.  I found that after a couple of minutes what I really wanted to do was throw the chair at the head of the stupid person who had recommended it in the first place.  I was only stopped by the knowledge that I had been both stupid enough to believe them and try it in the first place.  Shame on me.

Other weird remedies recommended to me for various things have included: sticking warm bits of garlic in your ear for earache.  I have never tried this because of the smell and the logistics of how you would get it to stay there.  Presumably you use some kind of glue, or perhaps a little bit of melted cheese!  Someone else recommended warm olive oil.  I didn’t try this because knowing my luck I would either set my ear on fire or tip too freely and end up pouring a litre of the stuff straight into my brain cavity.  How would you explain it to the Doctor? It would be completely mortifying.

 A friend of my parents used to get bad earache and one day he decided the only thing to do was to screw up bits of tissue paper and stuff them in his ears (like you do!).  He went to sleep like that, rolled over and lost one of the bits of paper in his ear.  He had to go to the hospital to have it extracted, which made his earache worse than ever.  He had a thing about ears.  He used to stick breadsticks in his ears when he was drunk, and had to go to hospital quite a few times for that as well. I expect it was all the grissini crumbs in his ear drum that gave him the earaches in the first place, that or his wife slapping him repeatedly round the head for being such a dullard.  I would have suggested glueing earmuffs to his ears after a bit, just to give the hospital a rest from his total idiocy.

Someone else I know had a big thing about drinking their own wee.  They were positively evangelical about it.  They would have to have been really, to try and recommend it to someone like me.  It wasn’t for any specific ills, it was more in the nature of a pick me up and general cure all.  Apparently, if your diet is healthy enough your wee shouldn’t smell bad at all, and it is perfectly safe to drink (I think we can safely say that chocolate panettone and a daily Terry’s Chocolate Orange do not constitute a healthy diet, so that’s me out, sadly!).  She recommended a hearty glassful twice a day to see you right.  I always thought twice about kissing her hello after this, and she did invite us round for dinner a few times, but sadly I was always too busy.

I have heard about this before.  It is quite a popular health remedy as far as extremely odd health remedies go.  Nevertheless it will be a cold day in hell before you find me quaffing a pint of finest wee, mine or anyone else’s for that matter.  I still wrestle with the fundamental biological fact that wee is a waste product, specifically ejected by the body because it can’t cope with all the nasty toxins that are in it.  If wee were good for us, surely kidneys would be purely ornamental?  As this is not the case, I feel that the money for the subscription for ‘wee drinkers weekly’ would be better spent elsewhere.

I mean if you’re that keen on the stuff, why stop there?  Why isn’t anyone recommending the beneficial, health giving properties of munching pooh?  I know there are websites out there that deal with that, but apparently those things are more for pleasure than for health, although I’m hard pressed to say why frolicking in pooh should be the least bit exciting.  After eight years of nappies I feel that I am more qualified than most to comment on the pleasure giving qualities of a fine pooh, and I can honestly say that it has never done anything for me, other than make me feel a bit queasy that is.

 Jason is just pleased that I am better today.  He has had a day of role playing booked for ages and was nursing me feverishly all day yesterday in the hope that I would rally round and release him from his nursing duties today.  He hates being Florence Nightingale at the best of times, and refused to kiss me yesterday in case I passed the lurgy on to him.  When we were first going out and one of the kids got Chicken Pox, he moved in with his best friend for a few days until his mum could dig out his vaccination records to see if he’d had it or not!  He does love a good illness, from about five miles away.

Yes, ’tis true dear reader.  Jason is a role player.  He is an IT consultant, internet poker player and role player.  Cut him in half and read the word ‘Nerd’ running all the way through him like a stick of Blackpool rock!  Luckily for me he doesn’t come across as a nerd at all, which is both very impressive and one of the main reasons I agreed to marry him.  If he had a serried rank of pens in his top pocket (including integral pen protector), some jumbo cord trousers and some iron on patches on his denim safari suit it is an absolute certainty that Oscar would not be here today, and neither would I.  When I made my wish list of desirable qualities in a man, having an extensive knowledge of the world of fantasy role play (not the sexual kind, obviously, although that too strikes me as a bit weird, matron.) and the ability to understand binary were not on it.

I was always fascinated by the idea of Dungeons and Dragons when I was a teenager. I read fantasy books avidly and was convinced that if I didn’t live in the middle of nowhere I would be able to join a D&D society and it would be unspeakably brilliant.  I thought it would be ‘cool’.  Quite why I thought this now escapes me.  When I got to university there was a D&D society and I went along to chat to them at Freshers Fair, in order to fulfil my ambition.  When I got there I was completely overwhelmed by the plethora of terrible hair styles and tweed jackets.  I turned and fled, never to venture there again.

Always at the back of my mind however, was the sneaking suspicion, that if I could find some cool D&D’ers who didn’t frighten the life out of me, I would love it.  When I met Jason it seemed like this possibility was likely to become a reality.  One year he had a tabletop marathon at our house, and a load of his mates came round to play a three day  game.  I was quite excited, thinking this would be my chance.

After watching them take half a day to set the bloody thing up I had lost the will to live.  I fell asleep on the sofa with the sheer boredom of it all, and was only roused when they had a particularly fierce battle.  I will tell you now that this is not as exciting as it seems.  It turns out that any table top gaming requires the ownership of hundreds of dice, of which none of them have less than a quadrillion sides, a sharp pencil and a good head for maths.  A battle merely involves lots of dice throwing and feverish adding up.  It is RUBBISH!  There is no blood, which disappointed me after the hours of tedium I had been subjected to.  There’s nothing like a bit of wanton blood letting to cheer you up on a dull day.

Luckily Jason doesn’t expect me to share his hobby, which is a good thing, as in the summer he does live role play re-enactments (known to the initiates as Larping) and goes camping in a field for three days dressed as a troll and fighting people with plastic swords.  He always tells me what brilliant fun this is, and I always beg to differ.  I have agreed that I will go to one of these events on the strict understanding that my tent have hot and cold running water, a chandelier and an escalator (and no beetles in the ground sheet), and until that day you are more likely to see me subscribe to ‘Wee Drinkers Weekly’ than you are to see me dressed as an elf, prancing round a field up to my eyebrows in mud. 

The kids are desperate to go with him.  Tallulah calls it ’scamping’, and both she and Tilly both have their characters developed.  Tilly is going to be a vampire with special wings and powers.  Tallulah is going to be a fierce princess.  They even have a cache of weaponry which they have been steadily collecting.  Tilly has a war hammer.  When she got it I explained to her that in Viking times they took their weapons very seriously and considered them to be an extension of themselves.  With particularly cherished weapons they even gave them names.  She went away and thought about this, returning to the kitchen twenty minutes later to announce the fact that her hammer was now called; ‘Frappuccino’ (a girl after my own heart!)

I am going to be a stay at home mummy, which is a role which I normally chafe against, but faced with the alternative, seems wonderful.  The kids have gone to Jamie’s for the afternoon for some kind of festive lunch type event.  Jason is doing his role play at Lee’s (see.  For entertainment purposes only), and Oscar is asleep.  I am going to sneak off and watch a distressing DVD about monks being slaughtered in Burma.  It’s all go in this house.