Katyboo1’s Weblog

Bugger! I think I did the date wrong yesterday.  Still, at least it wasn’t the day.  I don’t really worry about what the date is.  I can’t get that complicated, and it is to do with numbers which are my bete noir.  The IFA man, lovely Lee (not lovely Lee our firstborn son, who has by the way gone AWOL at the moment.  Probably doing something horrible that his mother shouldn’t know about), came round last night so that we could write our will.  He asked us lots of questions about dates and numbers and things, and I got nearly all of them wrong.  What cheered me up is that Jason can’t remember what date we got married either, so there will be no surly looks over the toast when that day rolls around again, whenever it was/is.  Phew!

I decided on cremation by the way.  I’m still not sure, but I needed to fill the blank bit in on the form so I could get down to the serious business of having a cup of tea and worrying about whether I’d seen the Location, Location, Location we had got on Sky Plus, so I went for that one.  Lee assures me that should I wish to I am at perfect liberty to change my mind.  I’m wondering if I can donate my body to Damien Hirst.  He could cover me in diamonds, cut me into slices and stick me on a canvas in the shape of dots.  I could be the missing link, unifying all his projects.  He used to have a restaurant as well didn’t he?  So it would be poetic justice if someone ended up eating me at the end of it all, although it would be wise to pick out the diamonds, because as I said to Oscar only the other day, ‘you’re probably going to choke on that, young man.  Take it out of your mouth this instant.’

The will was actually incredibly quick and easy, mainly because we don’t have anything.  We have carefully decided to divide our nothing between the children equally, so that none of them feel left out.  I did ponder putting in some strange bequests, like leaving a small feather duster to the next door neighbour just to weird them out, but it was late, I was tired, and I was full of snot, so I really couldn’t be bothered.  I am willing to revisit it for the sake of eccentricity and the added annoyance of my executors at a later date, so watch this space.

I am, dear readers, quite depressed.  This is not because I have made my will.  This didn’t make me depressed at all actually.  It was quite liberating, and it made me feel unusually grown up for a change.  It’s a very adult thing to do isn’t it?  Mind you, when I was a child, my death obsession (compulsory for all children, see previous blogging)  took the form of constantly writing wills for about six months and leaving them round the house. I remember leaving my pet fern to my best friend (sorry love, it’s now dead, so you’re not doing well there), and my Sindy house to someone whose name I can’t even remember.  It just shows you that it doesn’t pay to be too specific about these things. I must have made about fifty altogether before the novelty wore off.  I was a macabre child.

This was not helped by the fact that we lived in a village that consisted of about four roads, three street lights and a pub.  The only other place of merit was the local church.  We used to cycle down there regularly and hang around in the grave yard, playing games, sticking flowers in the vases of those people who didn’t have any, and nicking those weird shiny stones that people used to pour into grave sites for a while.  We used to pretend that these were jewels and pirate treasure and I had pools of them all round my bedroom and spilling out of my pockets.  My mother, as you can imagine, was delighted.  Not half as delighted as she was when I found a sheep’s hoof in the pasture, and brought it home for my nature collection.  She was very firm about that one.  No wonder I’m thwarted.  It wasn’t as if the sheep was attached to the hoof.  Apparently that was the problem, although she wasn’t much more delighted when I brought an entire tortoise home, so you just couldn’t win with her.  A very unreasonable parent, much like myself!

The church was locked most of the time, but on the odd time it was open we used to try and sneak in unseen and nip over to the bell tower.  It was our greatest ambition to swing on the bell ropes like small but determined Quasimodo’s.  Unfortunately the caretaker made eagle eyed Action Man look like a speccy four eyes, and we never made it past the first tentative grab at the rope.  Looking back I think this was probably for the best, but at the time it was very frustrating indeed.  I’d have probably ended up like that poor parachutist in The Longest Day who ends up stranded next to the bells and spends the next four years of his life shouting ‘What?’ and being shot at by Germans.

Anyway, back to the cause of my depression.  It is mother’s day next weekend, as I am sure you all know.  This is fine in the case of my mother.  My mother, like me, is one of the easiest women in the world to buy things for.  I bought her present, and because we are both very busy over the next couple of weeks I have already given it to her.  She liked it (silver earrings with amber drops), and she even liked the card (hand embroidered by blind people with three toes in Sri Lanka during a monsoon.  This is why it cost more than the earrings).  I am a good daughter.

No, the big problem, dearest ones, is the mother in law.  My mother in law is an incredibly difficult person to buy presents for.  When I tell you that I would rather go out and buy a present for my dad, I think you will appreciate the levels of difficulty that we are talking about here.  It’s rather like attempting to climb Mount Everest using cocktail sticks and dental floss.  You don’t really want to go there, even if you are Brian Blessed, and jolly enthusiastic about such things.

I have now been surfing the interweb for about the last hour and a half and have drawn a blank.  Actually, this is not entirely true.  I have been  driven mad with consumer desire and now have a random wish list that runs into about six pages.  I will have anything off of the Emma Bridgewater site, quite a lot of things off of the Cath Kidston site, 9 billion books from Amazon, Derek Jarman’s entire back catalogue, all Jane Packer’s flowers, most of Jane Asher’s cakes and the entire contents of Heals please.  That would just get me warmed up.  Jason wants a Ferrari, which is not helping a bit, and Matilda and Tallulah have spent the entire evening pretending to die and telling me that they have always loved me.  They’re not helping much either to be frank.  Thank God I didn’t tell them about the will.

I really don’t think I’m getting anywhere with this.  She is very particular about her wants, and what she wants are things that she either already has, or that are incredibly difficult to get.  She likes plants a lot, but she likes specific plants, and if you buy her the wrong ones, she can be quite scathing.  I once bought her a fig tree from the Gluttonous Gardener website, which she did actually want, but then it died, and I got into trouble.  So you can’t win really.  I didn’t kill it by the way, although if it had been left to my tender care I surely would have.  I have the exact opposite of green fingers (or a green thumb if we’re being European).  I have The Black Spot!  It’s a terrible curse.  I will never take up a career as a plant sitter, not unless I was an evil megalomaniac who decided that killing everyone’s plants was the way forward to world domination anyway…

Jason is trying not to think about it, despite the fact that it is his responsibility to think about it.  He bought an exercise bike, and he’s upstairs hammering it together with an old shoe and cursing.  He already says he’s had so much exercise putting it together that he won’t actually need to ride it for at least a week now.  So that’s good.  I’m just looking at it as another place to drape my clothes when I can’t be bothered to stuff them in the wardrobe.  The rowing machine I had which did that job went when we moved house, so I have been bereft of healthy clothes horses for quite some time.