Katyboo1’s Weblog

It’s four o’clock in the morning and I’ve just woken up from an extremely odd dream to find that my sinusitis has flared up again so that it feels like my cheekbones are falling off, and I’ve got a mangled arm where I’ve been leaning on it funny.  I decided that the only thing to do would be to get up and have a nourishing cup of tea and some ibuprofen before attempting to get some more sleep.  I am aware that the ravening hordes will be awake in another three hours, but when your face is being held together by the pressure of snot there’s not a lot else to be done.

I dreamed that I was taking the kids for a picnic with my grandad to some tranquil, typically English riverside location.  We had set up our blanket in some kind of gorge by some overhanging elders.  It was lovely.  The sun was shining and the water was plashing away.  My grandad suddenly announced that it would be entirely possible to swim to Afghanistan from here, and that if we put the kids on our shoulders we would be there in a couple of hours.  Apparently the only thing we had to worry about was the water being a bit icy further up stream due to the run off of snow melt from the Himalayas!

I took him seriously and decided that the only thing I was worrying about was that I didn’t have enough sun cream in the picnic bag to last three small children if we were going to be in and out of the water that much.  I don’t remember being at all disturbed that me and a now deceased sixty odd year old with emphysema were going to take three small children to Afghanistan by swim power alone.  I also don’t remember being at all bothered by the idea of what we were going to do once we got there.  Perhaps we were going to join a small gang of freedom fighters in the foot hills.  I’m sure they wouldn’t have been at all perturbed by the sight of five white people clad only in swimming costumes dripping towards them.  All perfectly normal.  Nothing to see.

We decided that we would do this, but that it was probably sensible to let our sandwiches settle first.  After all, you don’t really want cramp when undertaking such an epic journey, although apparently it is all rubbish about getting cramp from eating before swimming.  I read it on the BBC News Website, so it must be true.  We agreed that the kids could splash around in the river to get used to the water. 

Matilda then found a load of broken shards of pottery which turned out to be from a mosaic on the floor of the river which was slowly being washed away by the force of the current.  When I inspected the pieces they had pictures of the Tombliboos’ from ‘In The Night Garden’  on them.  They were very old bits of mosaic, and it turned out that the Tombliboos were in fact ancient Roman Gods which everyone had forgotten about, but who we still had some ancient predisposition to worship, hence explaining the surprising success of ‘In the Night Garden.’  We had discovered the site of one of their first temples.  Awesome…

At that moment my aunt and cousins sailed by on a galleon, announcing they were going to search for missing treasure and did we want to come.  We were just about to decline on the grounds that we were going to swim to Afghanistan when I woke up.  All very strange.

I can trace some of the elements, but not all.  Oscar was very keen on ‘In The Night Garden’ earlier in the day and watched it completely entranced.  He was most amused when the Pontipines went for a walk on the Tombliboos’ washing line and I remember being grateful because I could read a chapter of my book uninterrupted.  He likes me to sit next to him while we watch television, but usually gets very miffed if I dare to read and not give his televisual viewing choice my full attention. He reminds me of this by slapping my hand away from the pages and squeaking ‘oook!’ The only time I get to sneak in a few pages is when he is truly ‘in’ his programme.  It doesn’t happen very often, so I expect that’s why the Tombliboos got so elevated in my mind.

The ship was probably something to do with the fact that I’ve been reading a fair bit about Shakespeare and for some reason everyone likes to talk about The Merchant of Venice ad nauseam.  There are a lot of ships in this play, most of which end up coming to grief spectacularly carrying everyone’s money and causing a lot of upset.  I don’t know why they just don’t choose to travel by Tallulah’s secret ambliance.  Apparently it’s a miracle of modern science and technology, much like The Millennium Falcon.

The Afghanistan/grandad bits are frankly mysterious, and I expect if it weren’t four in the morning and I wasn’t nursing a sore head I could probably come up with some suitably spectacular and psychologically sound explanation which would no doubt involve nudity, ladders and a pig playing a banjo.  As it is I shall just draw a line over it and be grateful that it didn’t involve my usual chainsaws and buckets of blood.

As you can see by the fact that I am writing this now, I was very lax during the day, and had actually decided to give myself a day off from blogging.  I know that a writer should practice every day to hone their craft, but I spent most of the day wishing I were the Dormouse in the teapot, and that Alice would just wander along and put the lid back on so I could go to sleep.  It was one of those days where Oscar decided that naps were for girls which just added insult to injury and I wandered through the day pouring tea into my shoe and generally behaving like a total moron.  I was in bed by quarter to nine and asleep by half past.  I don’t remember the last time I’ve done that.  It was brilliant!

That’s not to say that it wasn’t a nice day.  It was just a long and winding day.  Good things did happen.  It’s my mum’s birthday tomorrow.  She’s celebrating by going to work in the morning and is then spending three hours of her afternoon in the dentist chair having her tooth, which fell to bits at the weekend, grafted back together.  She is naturally quite depressed about this.  As she freely admits, she is no longer of the age and temperament to expect wild parties and balloons, but even for her this would not be the way she would choose to celebrate.

We decided to do a queen like manoeuvre and give her two birthdays, so she had one with Oscar and I in Borders.  We ate smoked salmon sandwiches (very queen like also - a homage), and cake and mucked around for a bit.  She was very pleased with her presents, which was good, because I spent a lot of time in Monsoon on Sunday agonising over a dress for her.  I made the decision, got it home and then spent several hours wringing my hands over it, having decided that she would hate it and think I was trying to insult her. As it was, when she unwrapped it she was so pleased with it she had her clothes off so fast I hadn’t had time to close the kitchen blinds!  I hope the neighbours across the way weren’t trying to stare in at our squalid existence…

Another nice thing that happened was that Andrea has booked us on a load more jollies.  We’re out twice this week to see Henry VI parts I and II, next week we’re seeing Henry VI part III and Richard III, then we had a bit of a lull until March.  She got a brochure from her work yesterday announcing that they’re having a week long arts festival at the end of Feb (she works for a university), and did she want some tickets to see arty stuff.  We are now booked to see a frankly ludicrous number of things, all of which are on at bizarre times of the day.  She wanted to get there before the rush so she has booked them before I have bribed random acquaintances to babysit, which could prove problematic.  She has great faith that we will work it out.  I believe her!

We are going to see Jean ‘Binta’ Breeze, a poet who wrote one of my favourite poems ever, called ‘Spring Cleaning’.  I am quite excited about this.  We are also going to see Mark Thomas talking about the arms race, which should be that difficult combination of funny and upsetting.  I might tell him about my Afghanistan dream and see what he thinks.  I’m sure he would be so impressed!

We’ve got tickets to see Sue Townsend, who I’m probably going to ask for tips, suggestions and an introduction to her publishers (In truth I will probably rush up to her and inarticulately say: ‘You’re brilliant you are!’ whilst dribbling on her shoe).  We’re going to see the poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, who I’ve only read a bit of, and mostly only his prose.  I shall need to polish up on some of his poetic oeuvre.  We’re also going to see Grayson Perry, which I am very intrigued by.

Grayson Perry is an artist who works in ceramics.  He won the Turner Prize a few years ago, and we studied some of his ceramics on my last OU course.  He is also a transvestite.  Apparently when interviewed he said that it was about time a transvestite potter won a prize and that there just wasn’t enough of it about.  He does have a point!  He’s going to be chatting to Lars Tharp from the Antiques Roadshow.  I haven’t told my dad about this one because he would explode in a welter of contradictions.  He loves the Antiques Roadshow and all it contains.  He deals in antiques and does collect some ceramics.  I’m almost certain he won’t have heard of Grayson Perry (he’s just not dusty enough), and I’m just not sure how he’s going to get his head round the whole transvestite thing. 

It’s not that he would be particularly bothered, but that he would be bound to ask a question, because he’s just like that, and it would be bound to come out all sideways.  He wouldn’t be consciously bothered about dress wearing man, in fact his conscious mind would probably fail to register it, in much the same way he doesn’t notice that my mum has had her haircut until three weeks after she’s been to the hairdressers.  Nevertheless, the unconscious mind has a funny way of playing tricks with us and he would just blurt out something like: ‘Oy! man in a skirt (a bit tourettish)! How do you dress your clay?’ or something else.  It would be a total ‘too many words’, ‘I’ll get my coat’ experience, on which he would dine out for months afterwards. 

He does love mingling with the stars bless him. He managed to milk the fact that he was on Car Boot Challenge with Angela Rippon for about six months.  It would drive us all insane.  Apparently my mum was unimpressed by Angela.  Her hair was too stiff and a woman of her age should not wear tight, white trousers on the television, or indeed anywhere.  Her disapproval went hand in hand with my dad’s increasing infatuation with the becoiffed Rippon.  If he mentions it she just sniffs and raises her eyebrow.  These are danger signals that he fails to pick up on, much the same way that he would fail to pick up on a man in a skirt!

Having said that, his only brush with men in drag went rather well as I recall.  When I was still married to Jamie we went to the Birmingham Hippodrome one night to see a play called ‘The Play What I Wrote’, which was about Morecambe and Wise.  It had won rave reviews and had something complicated to do with Kenneth Branagh so we thought we should give it a go.  My dad came with us because he loves Morecambe and Wise.  As it turns out it was terrible, and we left after the interval, while my dad soldiered on bravely to the end.

While we were waiting for him we went out to the Chinese quarter for dinner and had an exceptionally spicy, and delicious meal.  This was my mistake.  I had had stomach flu for about three days prior to our trip and still wasn’t quite on the mend.  I was however starving hungry and fed up that I’d wasted good money on terrible theatre, so I threw caution to the winds and ate everything.

We were in the car on the way home, driving through a particularly seedy part of Brum when my nemesis struck.  I had to find a loo, and quick.  Jamie found a dodgy looking pub and sat outside with the engine running and my dad, very chivalrously, escorted me into the pub, to make sure they didn’t string me up by my thumbs and lynch me.  I didn’t pay too much attention to the clientele, speed being of the essence.  Although I did notice that for a spit and sawdust saloon, the toilets were rather clean and full of bunches of flowers.  When I got out, twenty minutes later, my poor father was hunched up at the far end of the bar drinking mineral water with men in skirts and a lot of leather!  It was, bless him, a gay bar.  As we left he was quite proud of himself, announcing that he thought he had blended in rather well because he had had sparkling water, and bought some raffle tickets!