Monday 17th March Britney Spears and the Orthopaedic Shoe Disaster (Nearly)

I had a very disturbing dream about Britney Spears last night.  We’re back to the ‘I dream of celebrities’ routine, which is also quite disturbing in and of itself.  I dreamed that she got in with a bad crowd and ended up being tortured and murdered on a beach before being set alight and her remains being buried in the sand.  It was really horrible.  I was with her mother and sister and had to help them cope with the grief ( I think I must have been a personal assistant type person, who knows? I could have been a flying banana honestly for all the sense it made).  At the funeral Jason was there, crying his eyes out, and when I asked him why he was there he accused me of being insensitive and not ever recognising the fact that Britney was his twin sister.  He then broke down into more  floods of tears and wailed about how he wasn’t going to be able to live without her.

I rang him at work this morning and put this idea to him, i.e. that he might be Britney Spears’ long lost twin.  He seemed rather baffled, and decided that he’d rather not thanks.  He doesn’t want her coming round to our house in her current state of befuddlement.  He thinks she might prove to be a somewhat tricky house guest.  I have to agree.  She looks to be very demanding.  I also think she sheds a lot of hair, and is likely to be rather messy.  She looks rather messy.  I don’t need any more mess in my life thanks.  I had to clean the whole of the ground floor of the house again this morning, and we’re only at Monday.  My feet were sticking to the kitchen floor in fairness.  It was not an anal cleaning type fetish this morning, more the fact that if I didn’t dislodge the gunk from the kitchen floor I would probably not be able to go out again and would starve to death within only inches of the fridge.  A cruel and unusual fate, I’m sure you will agree.

Back to the Britney thing.  I’m sure that on top of the difficulties of her sanitary habits, Jason won’t like the paparazzi shadowing his every move.  He likes to relax in his shorts at home, and that will never do if he’s going to be in Heat magazine every week.  He’d have to invest in a whole new calibre of short for a start.  None of this nylon with loose elastic if we’re going to be in the news.  It will have to be Calvin Klein and Ralph Lauren all the way.  We can’t afford her.  She’d ruin us within a matter of weeks.  Apart from that, those paparazzi are fiendishly cunning.  They’d be hanging out of the branches of the apple tree and climbing out of the recycling bin.  They’d probably even try to hide in the garage and that would piss him off as well.  As it is there are only enough chairs for him and Lee.  They’d have to dust the camping chairs off, which is no good at all.

So, that was a bit weird, and after I’d taken the girls to school I had to come back home and scan some celebrity gossip sites on the internet to make sure that I hadn’t had a premonition.  I would have been really freaked out by that.  I’d hate to have premonitory dreams.  It would be such a responsibility.  Surely they can’t all be premonitory?  Some must just be your normal, run of the mill weirdy ones.  How would you tell?  You’d feel honour bound to report every last detail in case you were negligent, and the day you decided that the Chief of Police didn’t need to know that Shane Richie was going to be killed by a low flying toblerone and he was actually killed, you wouldn’t be able to live with yourself.  No thanks.

It was quite a stressful morning altogether what with Britney’s phantasmagorical demise and the fact that Tallulah had her singing head on today.  Tallulah loves singing, and spends large parts of her life warbling away in discordant but cheerful voice, massacring songs left, right and centre.  She is, as you may know, particularly fond of singing a popular tune or five, but amending them to include the words wee and pooh every so often.  At the moment this has been edited to, wee wee, and pooh pooh head.  She likes the rhythmic nature of the repetition.  Her last great performance was Old MacDonald with the animals and their noises being replaced by various bodily functions and their noises.  She is incredibly creative for a four year old, but it’s a shame that she can’t always show off her talents in public.

As it was, this morning’s offerings were scatalogically unscathed but were just loud and monotonous.  She had gone in for wholesale droning over her Shreddies.  This advanced to random gibberish as she was supposed to be brushing her hair and putting her shoes on.  I asked her nicely five times to be quiet before I had to shout quite loudly and startled everyone, including myself, with the vehemence of my request. I really couldn’t be doing with it this morning.  Monday’s are bad because it’s dinner money day, and I’ve never been particularly gifted at addition.  It also involves trying to find the chequebook, which is a random nightmare which can drag on for a good half an hour depending on which safe place I have chosen to hide it in. 

Today I also had to send a letter to Tilly’s teacher because she has to go to the dentist on Wednesday morning (Tilly, not her teacher.  That would be weird, unless I were also her teacher’s mother, which I’m not.  Thank God.) and because I need to remind her about the work books Tilly has to take on holiday with her.  I also had some forms to give the office secretary, which I had the great foresight to have photocopied yesterday, and the great bad judgement to put them in a different safe place than the cheque book.  All in all it was complicated, and listening to a midget singing tunelessly, repetitively and with great gusto really didn’t help at all.

The day picked up when they were all packed off and the floors were clean once more.  My mum came over and we went into Leicester to get some lunch.  We accidentally stopped off at the new TK Maxx which has just opened.  I was very good, and despite wanting to spend several thousand pounds, came out with nothing.  Mum treated herself to a new pair of shoes and a very sensible bottom sheet for the bed.  I suggested she didn’t try to wear them together, as I don’t think peep toe wedges go well with Egyptian cotton, particularly not of the fitted variety.  There’s too much puckering at the edges and one is likely to get ones toe caught in the corners and come a cropper.  I speak from bitter experience (the great peep toe disaster of 1954).

We ate far too much lunch and sluggishly made our way back home.  By the time I got back I was dormouseish and Oscar was comatose.  I put him to bed and started on the other big task of the day, baking.  Now, we discussed baking in depth yesterday so you will know that I am trying to avoid writing an essay by baking my way to freedom.  There were less cinnamon buns today, and there were also the dungeons and dragons brigade visiting, which meant that baking would be entirely appropriate, and not as much of a lame excuse for lack of momentum with essays as previously.  I have to admit that I did go slightly overboard though, as is my wont.  Half measures availed us nothing.

I made a huge quantity of ginger cake, a slightly smaller but still massive amount of flapjacks, and a coca cola cake because I was curious about what it would taste like (chocolatey, not too rich and very, very moist.  A winner).  The role players still love me and my master baker crown is very much intact.  Glued to my head with quantities of treacle today.  I also made another curry as a sop to actually eating food with vegetables in, rather than eating food with cake crumbs in.  This time it was a Burmese curry from the Slimming World recipe book (excellent curry book by the way.  I don’t know why, but there you go).  This last week I have done a Mauritian curry, a Keralan curry, a Thai curry and a Burmese curry.  Who knows which curry/geography hot spot we will hit tomorrow.  I might right a book about travelling the world by curry.  Then again, I might not.  I don’t have time what with all the manic baking going on.

Oooh! I forgot to tell you the superb thing that happened to me today.  I got a parcel.  I have to admit that this was actually one of the things that stressed me out this morning, but which definitely turned out to be a good thing and not a bad thing.  When I got up and went downstairs I spied a huge cardboard box on the drive.  I thought we might have left it out of the garage when we did a tip run yesterday, so I went out to put it back in the garage for the next tip run.  Turns out it was a new box and it was full.  It was also addressed to me.

This was the point at which I started to panic.  I have a slight addiction to internet shopping and have now banned myself from visiting ebay because I cannot resist buying random amounts of stuff.  Things I have bought from ebay include:

1. an extendable fork (telescopes out to nearly 60cm, awesome for stealing food)
2. A pair of stilts in the shape of luminous green plastic feet,
3. A hammock,
4. A concierge’s bell
5. A bugging device

So you can see why I have had to curb my enthusiasm.  As it is I am still not cured of my Amazon addiction.  Problem is, I had no recollection of ordering anything recently, and certainly not something in a rather huge box.  I looked more closely at the box which claimed to be from an orthoepaedic shoe factory.  This was when I started to go into hysteria overdrive.  I did wonder whether in the middle of the night, seriously perturbed by my nocturnal wonderings about Ms. Spears, I had gone downstairs to the study and ordered several hundred pairs of orthopaedic shoes in my sleep, as a kind of displacement activity for my grief.

My first thought was: ‘Jason is going to kill me.’  My second and third thoughts were very similar, and I decided to drag the box inside and then ring him and confess before anything else weird and possibly terrible happened.  I rang him and blurted out: ‘I didn’t do it.  It wasn’t me.  I’m really sorry.’ before launching into a garbled explanation.  I then followed it with the whole; ‘Britney Spears might be your long lost twin’, routine, at which point he had to go for a lie down and called me back.

Turns out that it was alright because he had ordered the parcel for me, and it was in fact my birthday present.  I was allowed to open it today because we won’t be in the country on my birthday and it was too big to hide!  Plus, I had already found it.  I have to admit that as I opened the box I was still slightly perturbed due to the footwear issue.  Luckily it turned out that the company had clearly found the box and just used it because it was big enough.  It turned out to be twenty pieces of Emma Bridgewater crockery (black toast design), which just made my day.  It would have taken me about ten years to collect all that at the rate I’m going, so Jason very kindly gave me a head start.  Hooray for kind and generous husbands who don’t buy you orthopaedic shoes for your birthday, and who actually listen to what you want instead of listening to what you want and then buying you some random old tat because it was easier.  Hooray, hooray indeed.