Katyboo1’s Weblog

Blimey it’s been windy today.  I don’t mean to complain.  We’re very lucky.  I don’t think one fence panel blowing down constitutes a trauma of epic proportions and I’m not about to demand Red Cross parcels or anything.  But it is damn windy.  Naturally this is the day that Oscar has had a bee in his bonnet since breakfast time about going for a walk.  He has spent most of the day tracking down my coat, dragging it to me, standing by it and pointing fiercely shouting; ‘Walk!’  As you know, I am not keen on exercise at the best of times, and battening down in a hurricane and pretending we’re in some disaster movie seemed infinitely more preferable to me than going for a jaunt.  It definitely wasn’t the best of times.  He was however, fairly adamant despite me trying to distract him with a biscuit and by blowing raspberries on his tummy.  Serious stuff then.

I was resolute until after lunch when I was as bored as he was and we set off to the Co-op, because a) it’s only five minutes away, b) I wanted some eggs and c) we didn’t have to pass by any barren cliff tops, moorland or any other unprotected form of landscape on the way.  I could also pretend it wasn’t really a walk, and that I was actually going shopping.  Obviously not quite as thrilling as popping into Armani to look at their latest Autumn/Winter collection, but one has to cut ones cloth according to ones means, and my means are very mean at the moment.

Despite feeling that the planned trip was the safest one I could devise other than a quick jog around the garden and a poke at the fence panel, we still nearly got blown into the path of oncoming traffic twice on the way there.  It was easier on the way back because I’d put all the groceries in the buggy basket and it provided extra ballast to keep us on the straight and narrow.  I did feel like Bear Grylls by the time I got home though.  As the last time I saw Bear Grylls he was pissing on his own t-shirt and eating a live scorpion for sustenance, this was not a good thing.

I’m glad we only went to the Co-op mind you.  Even Oscar was cured by the time we got home.  This was probably because his eyebrows were now nesting on the top of his head like a pair of startled grebe and his hat had blown clean off into the road.  I looked even worse mind you.  I went to sleep with wet hair last night, and as the hairbrush was two floors down I couldn’t even be bothered to drag downstairs and get it.  So not only was it wet, it was wild, and not in a sexually compelling sort of way.  More in a wet string sort of way.  Consequently when I woke up this morning I had the mother of all frizzy do’s going on.  I looked like Farrah Fawcett when she was in Charlie’s Angels, but when she had been wired up to the mains by an evil genius intent on world domination.  It was not a good look. 

After I’d been blown to the supermarket in eighty mile an hour gusts I looked even more peculiar and my hair was radiating horizontally out from my head in a kind of crap nimbus effect.  Oscar was quite scared of me when I came round to the front of the buggy to get him out.  I don’t blame him.  I caught sight of myself in the reflection from the kettle a few minutes later, and that was enough to make me jump.

The first thing that Tilly said to me when she met me out of school was: ‘Bad hair day mum?’  I thought I’d sort of got it under control by then, but clearly not.  This explains the hurried glances all the other parents were giving me, and the very wide berth we were given by the crossing lady on the way home.  Still, it was a lot less crowded than usual and I am thinking of deliberately trying to recreate the look during the January sales for example.  It just might work.  In the meantime though it is a bit of a disaster.  I finally rang the hairdressers in despair.  They must have seen me as I blew past earlier on on my way to the Co-op because they were very sympathetic and booked me in for Friday.  Usually there’s at least a fortnight’s wait for an appointment.  I expect I got the emergency one they use for triage cases.  I wouldn’t be surprised.

So, apart from being blown about like a paper bag and having terrible hair, what have I done with my day?  I have spent most of it avoiding Romeo and Juliet.  In fact I have been so successful at it that I am now thinking of avoiding it by ironically writing my first book, a factual number entitled: ‘Things you can do to avoid Romeo and Juliet on £5 per day.’ I just can’t like it, as Tallulah would say.  I have tried.  I really have.  It’s just not my cup of tea, or anything else for that matter. 

I am now mired down somewhere in Act 4 with the actual reading of it, which is good, because it means that I am nearing the bitter end and the blissful moment when they finally drop dead and stop pestering me.  I am also making copious notes, for which I am half way through act 1, which is not so good.  It is such a bloody annoying play, that’s the problem.  It’s a bit like that Harry Potter book where he turns into a moody teenager whinger and you just want to lamp him one with a hat stand, despite knowing that he’s probably going to turn out to be the saviour of the human race and a jolly good egg all round, as long as you can resist murdering him for another couple of years.  Perhaps this is training for when my own children are teenagers.  I should try and look upon it as less of an essay and more as a life lesson.  I honestly don’t think it will help today though.  I am just mardy, mardy, mardy with the whole thing.

This is why I ate five chocolate biscuits before half past ten this morning and then spent until lunch time feeling as sick as a goat who had just eaten a washing line.  This is why I rashly booked me, my first born and my mother three tickets to go and see A Midsummer Night’s Dream (a play I don’t have a problem with), in August at vast expense.  This is why I spent an extra thirty six quid joining the RSC for a year (also if Andrea divorces me I won’t be able to use her membership any more.  Not that there is an impending tiff on the cards, I just like to think ahead). 

This is why I spent several hours this afternoon making banana and pecan bread, chocolate loaf cake and helping Tilly make her first ever batch of shortbread.  This is why I cooked Nigella’s Forever Summer, Mauritian curry, instead of doing beans on toast.  I also cleaned two bathrooms.  Jason and the children are very pleased that I am doing Romeo and Juliet because the cooking is on the up and the house is very clean, but I am rather depressed.

I have just spent another hour flogging away at the coal face of Elizabethan literature.  I have come upstairs to decompress and do something completely different, but I will have to go back down there in a minute and pull myself together.  I can’t let a couple of puling, love sick teenagers beat me by God.  What would my mother say?  Actually, she’d probably say: ‘Fair play love. It’s a real stinker.  Have a cup of tea and another bit of banana loaf.’  because she’s a fair minded sort of woman when it comes to Early Modern theatre and its ilk.

So. I’m now going to go back downstairs and take my punishment.  Probably accompanied by a bit of banana bread.  I am also going to spend some time thinking about cooking a Pavlova, because I really want one, and there’s only four hundred weight of sticky desserts in the house as it is.  This would be overkill until you realise that I am going to be descended on by hordes (or at least one horde anyway) of hungry role players tomorrow night, and that all that will be left on Friday morning will be a few feeble crumbs to taunt me until next week’s baking day.