Sunday 13th January – Growing Old Gracefully by Nude Skiing

It’s no good.  The kettle has had to go.  I was prepared to live with it, as long as I only looked at it from the corner of my eye, but Jason decided that it was too menacing with its blue glowing exterior, and he couldn’t put up with it any longer.  I suggested turning its face to the wall.  He said that the glow bounced off of the cream tiles.  I suggested wearing dark glasses.  I have been banned from making any more helpful suggestions.  He’s got no staying power that boy.  He’d be rubbish if confronted by alien life forms.  Once they started emitting an unearthly glow that would be it, game over.  He’d demand his money back and go home to sulk.  As for the kettle, he packed it back in its box and drove it back to Currys this very afternoon. 

He returned with a bog standard stainless steel kettle which is entirely unremarkable, doesn’t glow and is free of gadgets and which, I might add, makes an excellent cup of tea.  All in all a triumph for the workaday object I think.  It will be a long time before we stray from the path of conventional tea making in this house.  There are some things you just can’t mess with, and this is one of them.  The wonder spigot must remain a dream of the far future.  Perhaps someone will start putting them in science fiction films.

And you can sod the Japanese and their fiddly tea ceremonies.  My mother nearly divorced my father last week because he had the audacity to bring home a box of Yorkshire Tea instead of PG Tips.  She said that if he’d bought Typhoo she actually would have left him.  Nearly forty years of marriage sundered over the wrong type of teabag.  That’s serious stuff.  If he’d have bought some Gunpowder tea and a whisk we’d probably be picking him out of the river with a sieve about now.

I can’t make my mind up if I’m having a hot flush or the weather is getting milder.  I’ve turned the heating off and packed my hot water bottle away in a drawer.  It’s all a bit worrying really.  I expect it’s entirely physical (’It’s my hermines’ as a friend of mine used to say),  and the children will wake up with icicles hanging from their noses and double pneumonia, whilst I gad about in a fur lined bikini and a stout hat.  Jamie, my ex-husband always had a theory that you could ski comfortably in the nude as long as you had a good hat.  He reckons that as about 80% of your body heat is lost through your head, that you’d be o.k. as long as you kept moving. 

I don’t ski, so it’s not going to be me that tests it, but I’d like to see the Youtube clips from when they do.  I don’t do dangerous sports.  I don’t even do non dangerous sports.  I think Crown Green Bowling looks a bit risky.  You can’t be too careful.  I am fully in favour of apres ski, but I like to do my apres ski before, during and apres.  That way it’s much less confusing for everyone, and I don’t have to worry about the threat of imminent exercise, or bashing my brains out on a large snow covered rock.  It’s so much less stressful that way.  Apart from the impending threat of death that hurtling down a mountain on designer toothpicks, there is always the fact that ski gear makes everyone look about five and slightly retarded.  Padded dungarees are not for everyone.  In fact they’re hardly for anyone.  Even Kate Moss looks a bit stupid in them, so what chance do us mere mortals stand?  None, none whatsoever.  A veil must be drawn.

Jamie is, at this very moment, skiing with his brother in Whistler.  He’s out there for a month.  I’m going to suggest that the children write to him and remind him of the nude skiing theory, in the hope that he might give it a go.  Not because I want to watch.  God forbid.  I just think it would be nice for the kids to know that their father was famous for something, even if only briefly, and coldly.  It would be a; ‘Whoops! There he goes…’ type moment, but which would live in the memory forever.  I remember the last time he went skiing with his brother he came back with a bloody nose, a smashed up arm and mangled sunglasses, and that was when he had clothes on…

I thought that if I chatted about winter sports and snow for a bit I might cool down, but it hasn’t worked.  I’m hotter than ever, and not in a good way.  I hope I’m not developing the lurgy.  I could really do without it.  I’ve got so many errands to run from the last few weeks when I’ve put everything on hold to nurse the lame, the halt and the blind, I haven’t got time to be ill.  I shall just put it down to hormones and hope for the best.  I am allowed to put everything down to hormones these days.  It’s a bit like when you’re a kid and you’re absolutely convinced you’re dying of some hideous disease and your mother just says: ‘Oh! It’s just growing pains.’ and sends you back out into a howling gale for another three hours to get some fresh air.

It’s sad that I’ve reached that stage in my life.  I know it’s only downhill from here on in and soon I will be perspiring freely in howling gales and creating my own weatherfront.  I shall have to learn to develop that puffing face thing and the flapping of excess material round my armpit regions that middle aged women so often do.  I look forward to getting the menopause over and done with so that I can grow my facial hair in peace and slide disgracefully towards death with a well regulated thermostat.  Osteoperosis and heart disease is a small price to pay.

I’d rather face the menopause any day than go through the trauma of growing up again mind you.  I recall adolescence as an agonising tundra of embarrasment and crippling social inadequacy.  Still, it only lasted until I was about twenty eight.  Then I had kids.

Tallulah made me laugh today.  She and Tilly were talking about how it wasn’t fair that I wasn’t letting them use the sofa as a pretend gymnasium.  I had just caught them stacking the cushions and the pouffes (is that how you spell that? I have no idea), so that they could reach the ceiling and then jump off onto the rug, from which they had removed the anti slide grip mat.  They were very disappointed that I put paid to their most excellent indoor game. 

Tallulah shrugged and said: ‘Don’t worry Tilly.  When we’re grown up you can come and play emnaseums at my house and we will eat chocolate until we’re sick!’  Tilly agreed as long as she could watch as many episodes of The Simpsons as she liked.  She is somewhat obsessed at the moment and keeps going round saying: ‘How could a father not love a pig in a hat?’ and laughing uproariously.  She gets mortally offended when we don’t join in accordingly.  As we have not seen The Simpsons Movie it is a tad difficult to empathise, and as she has said it on average four times an hour since breakfast, even if it was funny at eight o’clock this morning it was definitely wearing thin by tea time.

So there you have it.  The joys of being a grown up include being able to bounce on the furniture until you’ve created head shaped dents in your ceilings and being able to eat as many sweets as you like whilst watching cartoons until your eyes fall out.  I have to say that I have grown out of the desire to bounce on the furniture and watch cartoons, but the sweetie thing is still a pretty powerful justification for growing older.

Tilly caught me eating a chocolate biscuit at about half past ten this morning.  She asked me why it was alright for me to do that when she couldn’t and I came out with my favourite line of the moment: ‘Because I’m thirty-five.’  It’s way better than just: ‘because’ or: ‘because I’m your mother.’  As they think I am an ancient crone anyway, it has given me total freedom to cash in on my decrepitude.  Brilliant!  My mother used to drive me mad by saying: ‘Do as I say, not as I do.’  I’m hoping the; ‘Because I’m thirty five,’ line will be just as infuriating for my children, although they seem to have accepted the whole, you can be a total anarchist when you’re grown up thing pretty well.  Tilly said: ‘When I’m thirty five can I do that too?’  To which I replied: ‘You can do whatever you like as long as you don’t live with me.’  She seemed very happy with this answer and went off to plan all the things she would do.  I’m hoping that the list accrues so quickly that she will be off as soon as we’ve taken down the ‘Happy Birthday’ bunting on her sixteenth.

Now, I know I’ve mentioned this before but Tilly has decided that she doesn’t want to live in a house when she grows up.  She wants to live in a tent.  She and Jason have had long discussions about paying bills and taxes, and she has decided that if she lives in a tent she will avoid all these inconvenient monetary nuisances.  We have tried to explain the practicalities of life in a tent, but she is convinced that if she is only allowed to do it her way, all will be well.  Today she has been pondering the issue of home security.

I think this is because Jason took it into his head to show her how to use the burglar alarm.  I have no idea why.  I think this is totally insane, but I bit my lip and went off to the kitchen to let Oscar juggle some knives and Tallulah play with the lawn mower.  Tilly was very touched that he has trusted her with this information.  They have bonded over security codes.  She feels that the future security of our home is in her hands.

I know that she looked bright and perky when he was telling her, but if the time ever comes again when she has to actually put it into practice, that we will rue the day.  She is worse at remembering these kinds of things than I am, and I am terrible.  Tallulah would be a better bet.  Apart from anything else, Tallulah would be really aggressive if she were actually confronted by a burglar, and would probably karate chop them in the wind pipe and render then senseless before the alarm even had time to go off.  As for the Tilly situation,  I am pushing it to the back of my mind in the hope that we will never have to find out.

In the meantime she  came wandering downstairs and asked me if I thought that it would be alright if she put a padlock on the front of her tent when she finally got it.  I said that I was sure it would look very nice.  She looked most affronted and said that it was supposed to keep her safe.  I said I thought it would make a statement which might deter some people.  She wasn’t satisfied with my answer (bright child), and demanded to know why I was being so negative.

 I asked her what tents were made of.  I asked her if she thought that a padlock would deter an eager burglar with a sharp knife and a working knowledge of how it slices through canvas.  Apparently I am a very unsupportive mother, and I will not be invited to the grand tent warming come the day.  I might try and sneak in through the back with my trusty Swiss Army Knife!  It’ll come in handy for cutting bits of cake up with as well.