Katyboo1’s Weblog

Today we had snow.  Because we are in the Midlands, which is a bit rubbish like that, we didn’t have inches and inches, but we did wake up to a good sprinkling, particularly on the rooftops, which is always pretty to look at, and thankfully doesn’t seem to stop public transport running on time, although I’m sure eventually someone will use it as an excuse.  Santa probably.

The kids were terribly excited, all except Oscar who was just mightily confused by the whole thing, and didn’t have any understanding of why the girls were desperate to get outside in the freezing cold when there was breakfast to be consumed.  I have to say that I agreed with him.  Appreciation of snow as a form of fun is something that does tend to wear off as one gets older, unless you are a habitual visitor to the ski slopes, which I am not.

When I was a kid we used to get proper winters where we would actually be snowed in.  My brother and I thought this was very cool.  We lived in the middle of nowhere, and my poor mum was forever having to borrow huskies to go and buy milk and bread, or push my dad’s frozen car down the hill to jump start it.  We had a chest freezer crammed full of supplies in case we got snowed in.  We had a small candle factory in one of our larger cupboards for the inevitable power failure (one winter it snowed so much that the power lines sagged down to the ground and my mum wouldn’t let us go out in case we tried to skip with them and came back deep fried).

Rob and I would go through fourteen changes of clothes in a day.  Eventually we would work through all our warm proper clothes, and end up wearing layers of pyjamas and dad’s socks.  Because we didn’t have a tumble drier, mum would mangle (yes, we had a mangle! in the early 1970’s.  We were archaic, and poor.  Mainly poor.) all the worst of the water out, light all the fires and lay the clothes on the hearth.  After one day we would have chillblains on every toe, be naked and blue, and the whole house would be running with condensation.  It was brilliant.  My poor, poor mother.

I used to get chillblains every year without fail.  I hated them.  They were so uncomfortable and itchy.  I used to put something called Wintergreen on them, which looked like dark green crayons.  You melted it and smeared it on.  It smelled vile and was about as much use as colouring your toes in with dark green crayons, but it was something to do, and it used to stop me moaning for about three minutes, which was probably worth it if you were my mum.  My grandad used to say: ‘Pee on ‘em, and thrash ‘em with holly leaves.’  I was terrified in case my mum said yes.  She, and in fact all my family, were great fans of crazy herbal remedies, as we have briefly discussed before.  Thankfully even she thought that this was going a bit far.  I always used to tuck my feet under me when we went round to Grandad’s, just in case he thought of trying it.

Luckily my kids have never had chillblains, which now seem to be a thing of the past.  For this I am deeply grateful.  Perhaps there is now a chillblain vaccine, which they pop into those all in one jobbies they give kids these days, which is why nobody has them any more.  Chillblains and small pox, both thankfully extinct.

Back to our pathetic snow.  Jason valiantly took them outside and scraped together enough to conduct a half decent snowball fight.  He had might considerably on his side, which is why the girls ended up with snow down both their hoods and their trousers.  It all went a bit pear shaped when Tallulah slipped and fell into the abandoned sandpit which had nicely filled up with icy water.  She went in backwards and then couldn’t get purchase, so spent several minutes flailing and squealing like a stranded beetle, while Tilly and Jason laughed and pointed.  She was totally unimpressed.  I was changing Oscar’s stinky nappy at the time, so I missed the whole thing, much to my disappointment.  I too would have been laughing and pointing I’m afraid.  I am one of those people who takes great amusement in other people’s ridiculous misfortunes, cruel though it may be.

My dad used to be heavily into DIY, and one hot summer when I was a teenager my mother bought him one of those paint guns that you use to strip paint from wood and radiators and the like.  He was most impressed with it and insisted on trying it out, despite the sweltering heat, and the fact that it too produced its own sweat-inducing heat supply as it burned forty year’s worth of white gloss paint off the radiators.  We tried to persuade my dad to leave it until the cooler weather, but he had the bit between his teeth and would not be denied.

He decided, in his infinite wisdom to strip to his vest and pants, so that he wouldn’t be so hot while he was fervently burning away.  All was going well, and he had been holed up in the master bedroom, crouched by the skirting board for about an hour and a half.  My mum called up and asked him if he wanted a drink, to which he croaked a feeble ‘yes’, through his heat parched lips.  He went to get up and found that his back had locked solid while he was in a sort of crouching dormouse pose and he couldn’t move.

My mum kept calling him down for his drink and then going off to iron the cat, just thinking that he had gotten so immersed in his burning activities that he had forgotten all about her.  In the meantime my dad was feebly slumped on the bedroom floor, clutching his little ray gun of doom and croaking for ‘help’.  My mother ignored him for about twenty minutes and then went upstairs to investigate.  She found my dad sweating in a welter of paint fumes, clad only in his smalls and covered in a profusion of tiny bits of burned paint.

My dad is not a small man, and on her own my mum couldn’t move him.  By the time she had tried dragging him round the bedroom floor for about forty minutes and succeeded only in covering him in bits of fluff from under the bed as well as curls of burnt paint, they both realised that they had no choice but to take him to the hospital.  As she couldn’t move him, they also realised that they would need help, specifically the help of a burly man of muscular means.  Why they didn’t call an ambulance at this point I don’t really know.  I know it wasn’t life threatening, but awkward isn’t the word…Anyway, they soldiered on.

Mum called a couple they knew who lived round the corner. The husband was suitably athletic and the wife had been a nurse, so this was quite a good call.  They were also in, and willing to help, which was an even better call.  They came round, and it was only when my mum accompanied the husband up the stairs to show him dad’s predicament that she also saw, as they rounded the last bend in the stairs, that dad had put on his thirty fourth best pants to do his DIY in, and as he was now in a foetal position on the bedroom floor, you could see they had a massive hole in them and all dad’s bits and pieces were laid out for everyone to see.  What baffles me is how she had failed to notice this earlier, given the fact that they had spent a fair amount of time together before deciding on a plan of action.  Maybe she had wilfully deleted it from her brain.

As it was, in the best tradition of the British, they all gamely ignored it, and it was only referred to in passing when the husband suggested that dad might like to put on some new clothes before they got him into the car.  As it was, he was so crunched up, that it took them another hour to merely put on a clean pair of pants (even without the gaping hole showing the crown jewels, always a crucial manoeuvre when visiting a hospital), so they gave up with the vest, and any other clothing, except shoes and socks.  They dusted him down for fluff and paint specks, cleaned his glasses and then spent another hour trying to carry him downstairs and position him on the back seat of the car.  It must have been quite some sight.

My mum is a nervous driver at the best of times, so you can imagine how she felt taking my dad to the hospital at ten o’clock at night with him squashed into the back seat curled up like a wood louse en deshabille.  It took them weeks to travel the ten miles to the hospital because she had to keep stopping in laybys for a lie down and a pep talk.  When they got to the hospital the car park had been closed for renovation, so they had to park up, go and find a wheel chair, bring it over fourteen miles of rubble, manhandle my semi naked father into it and then push him back across the rubble without him falling out, which given the position he was stuck in, was not as easy as it sounds.  Add to this the fact that my dad is a terrible patient, and wails and moans worse than the kids.  He immediately thinks that whatever he has is going to kill him stone dead, and this makes him a tragic figure of woe and doom.

He caused such a stir in the waiting room, as people shrieked and covered their eyes that he got ushered to a cubicle very quickly and seen almost straight away.  Contrary to his belief that he was surely dying his muscles had gone into spasm, due to the fact that the last time he had been in that position for that long was when his mother had been incubating him.  They gave him lots of pain killers, straightened him out with a ruler and sent him home with strict instructions not to do any more DIY until he was more bendy.

I had the great misfortune to be away from home at the time, as I would have paid good money to see this particular event unfolding.  As it was, my mother rang me to tell me the next day, and by the time she had finished we were both crying with laughter and my dad was crying because we were laughing at him.  Neither of us are the most sympathetic of nurses, and the problem is that dad is always doing this sort of thing.  He is the sort of person who would actually slip on a banana skin, thus rendering any appalling injuries he might sustain completely comedic and therefore not worthy of any decent sympathy.  It is his tragic flaw.

The time he ran across the road by his office and tripped over a tow rope that he hadn’t noticed between two parked cars is a case in point.  Yes, he broke his arm, which was very sad, particularly as it meant my mother had to taxi him around for several weeks while it healed, which nearly led to divorce, but it was the way he did it.  Everyone in the office was watching as he went flying over the rope and onto the pavement.  He then scrambled up with his glasses askew, blood everywhere and a wonky arm, and tried to pretend that nothing had happened and that anyone in his position would have done the same thing.  This was while his entire staff wet themselves simultaneously at the most ridiculous thing they had had the pleasure to see all year.

I have to confess that he has passed this trait down to me, although in a much more dilute form.  I would say that I have such an accident maybe once every five years, including the time I knocked myself out having jubilantly thrown a pot I had discovered in an ‘archaeological’ dig up in the air to celebrate, whereupon it came down and smacked me squarely on the head.  I do however, realise that there is no hope of sympathy being had in cases like these, and the best possible thing to do is to come round and gracefully laugh at your own utter foolishness. 

My dad has never understood this, and can’t see why when he tells his tales of suffering, everyone laughs at him.  Will he ever learn?  Probably not.  He is a man approaching his sixty first birthday.  There is no hope for him now.  Although there is some hope for us that there are still a few spectacularly silly accidents in store for us in the future.  I am giving mine up for Lent, although I have decided that knowing my luck I will probably struck down by such an accident and nobody will be able to keep a straight face at the funeral, which is no bad thing…