Katyboo1’s Weblog

Today has been very quiet, which in my world is an unusual and highly welcome thing indeed.  It has been so quiet that I spent a large part of the morning being suspicious until I managed to relax into the whole chillin’ type vibe.  It almost felt like I was on holiday.  I have drooped about like a wilted lettuce, starting many sentences and finishing none, sighing and staring into space and occasionally snoring into space.  Sometimes I have sat for ten minutes at a time doing absolutely nothing.  Excellent.

The reason for this great quietness is the fact that my mum and dad have taken the girls away for their regular sleep over at granny’s house.  When Oscar is more human and less like a rotating munchkin he is allowed to go too.  Until the day that this comes to pass we are taking care of him.  This may not sound like much of a holiday, but when you are used to having three children at any one time, whittling them down to one, particulary one who likes to take day time naps, is quite exciting and restful.

The thing that always strikes me when the girls are away is how quiet the house is.  There is no rustling of grass skirts, no screaming, no Tilly trying to be quiet and sounding like a troupe of overweight elephants in pit boots as a result.  It’s quite eerie for a while until you get used to it.  My most difficult time to adjust is in the evenings.  While we are sorting out the younger kids Tilly gets free reign with the remote control for the television.  This usually means The Simpsons dripping down the walls and blowing the speakers.  This evening, nothing, nothing at all.  I also have to get Tallulah up for a wee at about ten thirty most evenings, and I notice that I still get twitchy at that time even though there is nobody to water.  We are such creatures of routine.

Jason kept on coming up to me in the house at various points throughout the day and just going; ‘Isn’t it quiet?’ and wandering off again.  I imagine it’s a bit like what going suddenly deaf feels like.  I know I should be hearing things, but they’re just not there.

It was a bit like being in slow motion all day.  It took us until lunch time to get dressed.  We had breakfast at eleven and lunch at twelve thirty because we were too vague to get our act together earlier in the day.  Actually Oscar had his breakfast at the regular time.  He is not one to be denied regular meals.  He had another breakfast with us and then some lunch, so he was a happy boy.  He has a new word which is ‘bitgit’.  Bitgits are not as exciting as chocklik, but they are still pretty good.  He has decided that his favourite biscuit in the entire world is currently the good old custard cream.  He rotates his wrists like a Balinese dancer on speed and shouts ‘Bitgit!’ excitedly when he sees the packet.  It is so brilliant that he can get that excited about a biscuit.  To be fair, I get that excited about biscuits too, it’s just that I’ve learned to hide my enthusiasm under a layer of world weary cynicism and sophistication!

In the afternoon we went to see some friends.  It was our friend Peter’s birthday, as I blogged earlier in the week.  I was very impressed that I managed to get him a present and a card.  This was the main reason for our visit.  Unfortunately we were so laid back we left them both on the desk in the study and turned up shame faced and empty handed.  This means I must now post them to him.  I am hopeless, absolutely hopeless.  Still, he should be used to me by now.  It’s not like I used to be brilliant and now I’m crap.  I’ve always been quite crap and have just got progressively crapper what with the children and old age creeping up on me and then subtly beating me to death in a dark alley.

Peter’s hobby is building.  He is currently rebuilding his entire flat around his family while they all live in said flat simultaneously.  It looks like hell on earth.  I felt ashamed at the crunchy nature of my house as we were leaving.  I felt deeply guilty the other week when we spent all the money we had saved for house improvements on a holiday in Canada.  After I had been to Peter’s house I felt relieved that we couldn’t afford to knock down walls and re lay floors.  I felt blessed at my crunchy house with its random and unexplainable sticky and yet still fluffy bits.  I thank Peter for this epiphany. 

I have realised that I am just not ready to live in a building site yet.  Maybe next year will be a better year for building.  Maybe the thrill of living in a house which works and looks half decent when I can be arsed to clean, will have worn off by then.  It definitely hasn’t now.  When we got home I fell on the sofa and rolled luxuriously around being very grateful that I couldn’t see any power tools or large boxes from Screwfix Direct.  I know his flat will be beautiful when it is done.  Probably more beautiful than our house.  I don’t care.  I’m just glad that’s not me eating brick dust and trying to explain to Oscar why it’s not a good idea to play with the circular saw.

When we were looking at houses last year we found the most magnificent house in Nottingham that we were absolutely desperate to buy.  It was a huge, three storey Victorian house with six bedrooms, a massive cellar and a lounge that was about thirty two feet long with ceilings twenty foot high.  Everything was on a grand scale, everything was beautiful and it still had loads of original features.  The woman who had bought it had run out of money to finish doing it up and was selling it.  She had done loads of the really fiddly things like roofing and damp proof courses etc. 

We were so tempted.  All the fireplaces had to be put back in, the skirting boards needed re-attaching, the floors needed doing.  There were loads of jobs but they were all quite little, except for the fact that the house was monstrously huge.  Even with a step ladder I couldn’t have changed a single bulb in the downstairs rooms.  You would have had to either use a giant, or bungee elastic.  I didn’t dare ask her how she managed.  You would also have had to buy completely new, very large furniture, as regular furniture would just have been swallowed up and disappeared.  I learned that from watching Grand Designs.  People move from a regular house to a minimalist cavern, but still keep the same furniture and it just looks stupid.  Always remember to change your furniture if you’re doing something avant garde.  You can’t be avant garde with a three piece suite from World of Leather.  It just doesn’t work.  Dali didn’t do it, and neither should you.

We debated long and hard.  We both wanted it passionately.  We talked ourselves into the fact that Oscar would be happy to roam about in a playpen while we did the work.  Then we slept on it and woke up to the harsh reality that this was one of the most ridiculous ideas we had ever had.  Oscar would have been up every chimney (they were definitely wide enough for child chimney sweeps, even after a few custard creams), the kids would have killed each other falling down the cellar steps.  It was just not going to work.  We were absolutely gutted.  It’s at times like these you wish you had a time machine and could whiz forward a few years to when the kids would be old enough to be gainfully employed.  It was not to be.

We would really like to do a Grand Designs one day.  We watch all those types of programmes and take notes.  There are two things we are going to do when we are old and decrepit.  We are going to buy an enormous American motor home the size of a bungalow on wheels and drive it round the world.  Then we are going to get back and build ourselves a massive house.  I want an indoor swimming pool, but a proper one, not one of those crappy little ones that looks like a bath with pretensions to grandeur.  I also want a library, again a proper one with a roaring log fire and ladders that you can climb up to get the books with.  Not a leather sofa though.  We had one once when I was a little girl, a proper leather library sofa with wheels and loads of buttons.  You sat down on it and it shot off into the distance.  You managed to get perched and it would either eject you onto the floor because it was so well sprung and so very, very shiny, or it would squeak interminably.  It was like sitting on a large box of very frisky mice.  Rubbish.

Jason wants lots of wonder bathrooms with walk in showers with ninety six shower heads and steam power and benches so you can sit in them for weeks at a time.  He also wants a giant bath, like the one in the suite at the Malmaison Hotel in Leeds.  I agree with him on this point.  Any bath that is big enough for two people to lie comfortably full length side by side in, is the bath for me.  I would like a place to hold my book and a cup of tea as well though.  That would be an added extra, rather like alloy wheels, although they would look bloody stupid on a bath, unless it was a specially converted chariot bath.

We both want a verandah, and good soundproofing for if the children decide to come back.  I want a sculpture park as well, but I haven’t broached that idea with Jason yet, or the art gallery.  I expect this will be a trade off.  I will have to allow him a luxury garage with room for his extensive collection of cars as well as a sofa and other luxuries for ease of smoking purposes.  He will most definitely want a home cinema room as well, of that there is no doubt at all.

Lee is going to live in a separate house in the grounds apparently.  If he gets rich first it will be the other way around and we will live in the house in the grounds.  I don’t mind, as long as I get to decorate where we live.  Jason is too fond of beige for my liking.  He likes neutral colours and calm, tranquil living spaces.  He is a tasteful kind of man.  I don’t always know why he married me when I think about it too hard.  This may be one of the reasons I try not to think at all.

I like colour, and lots of it.  It doesn’t all have to be in the same room mind you.  In my house in London I had Yves Klein Blue paint in my bedroom, which is actually a rather startling kind of purplish blue, but very bright indeed.  I loved it.  We had huge abstract oil paintings by Jamie’s friend on the walls, and everything else was cream.  Most people were quite frightened by it, but it worked for me.  In the next house I went for dragon’s blood red, which we teamed with cream and silver.  It was quite womblike, medieval womb mind you.  Again, it was an aquired taste.  My study was Yves Klein Blue with a wooden floor which I painted bronze.  The living room was racing Green with gold mouldings, and the kitchen was cream, but had a bright blue ceiling.  Jamie’s study was painted a kind of deep aubergine purple.  Jamie said it was the same colour as Milton Erickson’s pyjamas.  Apparently this was deeply symbolic.  It still didn’t stop people taking a step back when they went into the room.

Jason hated all this and made me promise that he wouldn’t have to live with such arty farty nonsense when we had a house of our own.  I have been very good, and true to my word.  It was easy really.  The whole house was freshly decorated in very tasteful and clean magnolia.  Apart from where the kids have added certain embellishments with biro and a lip gloss, it remains tasteful and magnolia.  While it looks o.k. it’s hard to get too worked up about repainting it.  When you’re replacing woodchip or nineteen fifties wallpaper with interesting tomato patterns on it, you can get to grips with painting, otherwise you should just let it lie.  After all, where am I going to get the time to repaint the house?  I don’t have the time to repaint my nails at the moment.

As a compromise Jason has let me put up my pictures, even the ones he doesn’t like.  There is one particular painting by John Singer Sargeant, which is very chocolate boxy, and not my normal thing at all, but I just love it.  It shows two little girls in a garden at dusk with giant paper lanterns.  He hates it so much that we had a bit of a tussle about hanging it.  He finally agreed that I could hang it round the corner from a very obscure bookshelf in the study, so nobody else can really see it except me, and Lee.  Lee can see it because his bed is in the study.  Luckily for me he hasn’t stayed over for ages, and when he does he hasn’t professed any undying hatred of small girls with Japanese lanterns, so it is safe for now.  It would have gone in the loo, but Jason likes to read his book in there and didn’t want the girls to look at him while he goes about his business!  Apparently their eyes follow you round the room…