Katyboo1’s Weblog

It is my best friend Rachel’s birthday today.  Happy birthday chick.  Sorry I forgot to post your present.  I promise I will do it tomorrow.  You know that I am crap, but I love you just the same.

There.  Now normal service can be resumed.  Today was again a day of much leisure, as mum and dad very kindly kept the girls amused until tea time and then dropped them off so we didn’t have to come out.  The girls were delighted.  They got to watch what they wanted, eat what they wanted and nobody shouted at them all day.  It is as much a holiday for them as it is for us.  Granny is their saviour, and mine.  I might put her up for a sainthood, or an Oscar at the very least.

Talking of which,  Oscar has been very happy all day with both parents not as tired as usual, and devoted to his every whim.  He has paid us by deciding to suddenly start walking.  This is our reward for custard creams, regular meals and milk on tap.  Jason is very relieved.  I knew this is what would happen.  Tilly was a real trier, she did everything 150% when she was a baby.  When she was learning to roll over she made such a fuss about it you’d have thought there was a deadline she had to meet.  She was a driven, corporate baby.  She’s eight and she’s burned out.  Maybe that’s why she’s just so random and vague all the time.  She peaked too early.  She tried, tried and tried again.  She would have made that spider proud.  She just kept on plugging away at it until she got there.  The same with walking.  She was very dogged and persistent.

When I had Tallulah I thought that she would be the same.  Quite the contrary.  She would watch Tilly do something, give it a go, and then if it didn’t work she would just stop, and not do it again for weeks and weeks.  In the meantime she would be thinking about it and working things out, probably using blue prints, computer read outs and algorhythms.  She would then try again, adjust her charts, and generally by about the third time she would be perfect at whatever it was she had set her mind to.  Oscar has been a bit like this, only more laid back and laconic.  This morning he got up and just wandered about casually, stopping for a chat, doing a little dance, flirting with his toy cat.  It was as if he’s been able to do it since birth, but has only just gotten around to being bothered by it all.  He can’t really see what all the fuss is about anyway.

Because he’s been walking about he’s been quite tired in his more restful moments.  This has meant two full strength naps today, which I had begun to fear were a thing of the past.  It has been wonderful.  He has slept for about four and a half hours today, and as we were awake this meant that we could do things.  Jason has a good book.  He started it yesterday and I knew it was good because he said that he wasn’t sure about whether to read or to watch television last night.  Normally there is no contest and the telly goes on.  This time the telly won, but only because I had put off watching my Amazon Vine video about cocaine smuggling in Miami, and now really had to get on with it.  It turned out to be actually rather good, so consequently Jason started reading his book and then put it down after about ten pages, as he was sucked into the drama that was unfolding.

It was a fascinating story of murder, mayhem, drugs and bad Eighties hairdon’ts.  The music was even done by Jan Hammer who did all the music for Miami Vice, so it was very retro.  The only thing that let it down was the appalling cinematography.  If you had given the material to someone like Kevin MacDonald the guy who made Touching the Void and One Day In September, it would have been awesome.  As it was there were times when I had to look away, not because it was too graphic and violent, but because it did spend a considerable amount of time looking like a rather bad pop video.  Nevertheless, this is only the second thing that Amazon Vine have sent me that I have enjoyed, so I am feeling quite chipper, and more than a little relieved that I can actually write something other than my usual; ‘two stars, this was terrible and here’s why’, kind of review.  I was beginning to feel like the harbinger of doom.

Today I had to move on to much more intellectual pursuits.  My Shakespeare course starts next week, and if I want to be ahead of the game, which I do, I really have to crack on.  I was supposed to plunge into it last week, but was so enervated by all the dung I only did a little bit and messed about a lot reading sad tales of the old days instead (Blake Morrison’s, ‘And When Did You Last See Your Father?’ - heartrending, but good).  I have been working away at the Shakespeare since Friday, and have made pretty good headway so far, although I really must keep up the momentum and not sit back on my laurels giving myself pats on the back while Rome burns, to mix many metaphors.

I finished reading Germaine Greer’s OUP A Very Short Introduction to Shakespeare. It was much, much better than I anticipated.  I have always found, being rather a fan of the Late Review, although not so much since they threw Tom Paulin off for being too politically naughty, that a little of Germaine Greer tends to go a long way.  She’s a lot like parmesan cheese in that respect.  I have never read The Female Eunuch, as I always found the title rather off putting, I have never wanted to be or know about female eunuchs.  It seems rather messy and a bit tasteless. 

Consequently I approached this book with great trepidation.  I was amazed that not only is it good, but that she is not half so annoying on the page as she is in the flesh.  I think it’s because she’s got those fierce eyes that bore into you and demand that you confess all, and you just don’t feel compelled to tell her how you stole a cherry off a market stall in 1979, but you’re really sorry about it, when you’re reading her book.  This was a relief.

I have also sorted out all my paperwork to do with the course.  I have logged on to the forum and said hello to people.  I have organised my books into a well known phrase or saying and have made a significant start on one of the set texts.  I am so good that my halo is choking me.  I am not feeling too virtuous however, as there is still masses of work to do, and Andrea is at least a week ahead of me, if not more.  She too has vowed to get her act together on this one.  Whether it will last for either of us is questionable.  We’ve got a hot few weeks of theatre going coming up, and that usually tends to do us in because we’re too busy enjoying ourselves to get any work done.

We’re studying Taming of the Shrew and Romeo and Juliet.  We’re currently debating taking a trip to Leeds in March as the theatre there are staging Romeo and Juliet.  Andrea rang me about it last week and said that if I wanted to book it I should let her know the dates.  I feel that this is really passing the buck.  We both hate Romeo and Juliet.  The last trip we took to see it together we were fourteen.  It was a school trip to the Young Vic in London.  We were hideously late because the entire of central London was bunged up with the emergency services.  It turned out that it was the night of the Kings Cross Fire.  We spent hours in traffic, missed the entire first half and then ended up wishing we had missed the entire second half because it was done in modern dress and Romeo had a shiny suit and a dodgy Kevin Keegan perm.  We have been nervous about it ever since.

I have seen a good production of it since then, with Tim McInnery (Percy from Blackadder) as Tybalt.  I believe my mother came to see it with me.  It was in full Elizabethan rig, which she approves of.  She doesn’t like these newfangled attempts at theatre where everyone dresses as Isoceles triangles and so forth.  She loves a good codpiece and that’s that.  She was very impressed with this production and came out announcing that she wishes she had known about the name Tybalt when my brother was born, and she would have called him that.  I know he is glad she didn’t.  To be honest, even if she had of known, I think my dad would have had something to say about it.  She wanted to call me Isolde (a la Tristram and Isolde), but as I ended up Katy, I feel that prudence was the order of the day.  There are not many things I am truly grateful to my father for, but that is one of them.

I am worried that if we book this trip to see Romeo and Juliet, a similar fate will befall us and we will end up stranded in Leeds for days.  This is not such a bad thing, as they do have some fantastic hotels and restaurants, and the shopping is very good.  There are worse places to be stranded.  It’s just that Jason will panic if I’m not home to put the children to bed, and Andrea has a new baby (calf), called Disraeli (all her boy calves are named after prime ministers. Gladstone’s up next!) who is taking up a lot of time and energy.  We worry for the children…and we don’t really want to go and see it.  Mind you, it might be a revolutionary production that completely changes our mind about the rubbishness of Romeo and Juliet and turns it into our best ever play ever.  This is highly unlikely, unfortunately.

I spent the rest of the day cleaning like a fiend.  I have only done a bit here and a bit there over the past week, and I really couldn’t live with the squalor any more.  The whole house is now lovely and clean and I’m absolutely filthy and need a good bath and a scrub with a wire brush.  I have even changed the bedclothes.  This is called tempting fate.  It is absolutely certain that one of the children, who have all been perfectly fine all day, will now wake in the middle of the night and then vomit copiously over all the sheets.  I nearly didn’t do them, but I was afraid they would rise up in the middle of the night and kill us, so I have capitulated.  It’s all a bit depressing really.

I’ve also got to go and parcel up Rachel’s present and Peter’s, bless him.  It’s mum and dad’s birthdays the week after next.  It’s very inconvenient knowing so many people with birthdays so close together.  I might write to them with alternative dates, just for my purposes.  ‘I know your birthday is really January 27th, and that’s absolutely fine, but do you think I could pencil you in for March 25th, as that suits me much better and will give me a nice long lead time?’ kind of thing.  Mind you, knowing my luck I would be suddenly inundated by people giving birth to cute babies who absolutely demand presents in March, and we would be back to square one.  The only thing I can think of is to get them all to have their birthday on that odd day in the leap year and buy everyone a huge present once every four years, with the rest of the time to save for it.  That would work, probably…