Tuesday 18th March – Hollywood Diners Glenfield Stylie

I’m still having horrendous nightmares, although thankfully for you I can’t remember the gory details to titillate you with today.  I know I’m having them though because I’m waking up shattered and stressed, with huge half moon cuts in the palms of my hands where I’m digging my fingers into my palms.  I decided to take definitive action and cut my nails today.  If I can’t stop the dreams at least I may be able to save myself the agony of boring holes through my hands.

I have no idea what has brought this latest rash of nightmares on.  Things (touching a forest of wood), are actually going rather well at the moment.  We’re only a week and a half away from our holiday, the kids are just being normally horrible children and not heinously vile children, I just don’t get it.  Maybe its stored up stress from previous times where I’ve been too stressed to deal with all my stress at once and have stock piled some for later use.  I really don’t know. It would be nice not to have any more bad dreams though, please. I don’t quite know who that particular please is directed towards.  The god of dreams perhaps?  It’s worth a try.

Despite the gouged palms today has been quite nice.  Oscar and I pottered around the house this morning.  He had his second shower.  I’ve decided that when we get back from our holidays, he and Tallulah are going to have swimming lessons.  In Tallulah’s case this is very important because she is absolutely convinced she can swim already and that when we help her, we are in fact hindering her from becoming the Duncan Goodhew of the noughties.  Naturally when we let her go she sinks like a stone, swallowing half a ton of swimming pool in the process.  That is also our fault too, apparently.  So, swimming lessons are crucial.  As for Oscar, it’s important that he gets used to the idea of having water on his face, and I thought the shower might start that process. 

He loved it, which was very surprising.  Both Tilly and Tallulah screamed their heads off the first few times they went in the shower.  They were convinced I was trying to kill them and if they’d known how to ring Childline I have no doubt they would have given it their best shot.  Oscar on the other hand is clearly made of sterner stuff, and had a lovely time splashing about in the shower tray trying to drink shampoo and eat pumice.  The only time he protested was when I dragged him out because he was beginning to look a little bit blue around the edges.  I do think blue is a really unattractive colour for skin.  I could never love either a corpse or an alien.  Call me old fashioned, but a girl has to have standards.

We made the bed, which is also excellent fun if you’re either a cat or an 18 month old boy.  When we went into our bedroom Oscar was absolutely convinced Jason was in there, because the duvet was all rucked up, and he thought Jason was hiding under it (they play hide and seek like this).  He got terribly excited and kept shouting for ‘daddy’.  Luckily I was able to counter his disappointment at the fact that daddy was at work by introducing him to the excellent game of bouncing about the mattress in time to songs on the radio.  It took twenty minutes to make the bed and to be honest it didn’t look much better when we’d finished than when we started, but we tried, and that’s all you can ask.

We went to the Post Office and the Co-op to get some sensible, non baking related supplies, and some more yogurts.  Oscar is now a huge fan of Little Stars yogurts and will eat five or six a day if given the choice.  It has replaced fruit as his new favourite food.  I am limiting him to three per day as every time he eats them he has to have a change of clothes, because he won’t let you help him and insists on doing it himself.  He wields a teaspoon with gladiatorial combativeness, and is very dextrous for an 18 month old, but that still means that he emerges from the depths of the yogurt pot looking somewhat like the kraken from Pirates of the Caribbean.

I was just scraping the last layers of lunch time yogurt off of him, the high chair and the walls when my friend Sam arrived with her son Tomas.  Tomas was rather startled by Oscar’s dripping visage, but soon got used to him, and they played beautifully together.  Oscar was thankfully in a very caring and sharing mood.  He was very impressed by Tomas, presumably because he doesn’t get much contact with other boys, and was just amazed that there were other non-pink and glittery individuals in the world.  He was so impressed that he even let Tomas share his new book about Iggle Piggle and the blanket.  I was stunned.  Last time Tallulah went near it, Oscar tried to wrench her hair out of her skull whilst simultaneously gouging her nose.  Luckily for us all, Tomas fared much better.

No baking today.  The kitchen is awash with baked goods, and Sam bought cake as well.  Even I, with my prodigious appetite for all thinks cakey am beginning to feel a little overwhelmed by it all.  No curry either.  I cooked pork chops in tomato sauce and mashed potato for my men this evening.  The girls were at their dad’s probably inhaling junk food, and I went out for dinner with Andrea, so the men very happily tucked into the traditional manly fare of meat and potatoes, potatoes and meat.  Apparently it puts hairs on your chest.  Probably why I’m not too keen.  I have to do enough depilatory routines as it is.

Andrea and I were supposed to be going for dinner to a very fabulous Chinese restaurant I had discovered.  Sadly it seems that I was the only person who thought it was fabulous because when we got there it had closed down to be replaced by a hideous Hollywood style diner, called Tinseltown.  We had tickets for the cinema and not a lot of time to find anywhere else so we bravely went in.  It was hideous, truly hideous.  It was clearly only just open, so I hope that things will improve, but I won’t be returning to find out.

There were about twenty waiting staff to every one diner.  Despite that, the service was what I can only describe as patchy.  I was pleased to see that they took our drinks order straightaway, as it’s one of my pet bugbears about restaurants.  I hate having to wait to order a drink.  I ordered a black coffee and a sparkling water, which you wouldn’t think would be too difficult given that a) Andrea and I were two of about six people in there, b) the order wasn’t exactly challenging in the first place and c) they had hundreds of waiting staff.  Five minutes after I’d ordered my drinks they came to take the food order, with no sign of the drinks in sight.  Five minutes after that, the drinks showed up followed by the food a minute later.  It is seriously worrying to me that it takes ten minutes to produce a cup of coffee and a glass of water, but only five minutes to produce a hamburger and chips.  Surely that’s the wrong way round?

As it was, the coffee came in a cup with no saucer, with coffee running down the side of the cup and a layer of grease on the top of the drink itself.  I flagged down a passing waiter and pointed out that I had just ordered black coffee, and didn’t want the side order of grease.  He muttered something about the machine, didn’t apologise and took it away.  Three minutes later I had a black coffee with no grease, and a saucer, which was quite exciting.  Unfortunately it tasted like engine oil that had been strained through someone’s sock and was deeply unpleasant.  Rivalled only in its hideous qualities by a McDonald’s coffee I once had the great misfortune to have no choice but to drink.

The burgers tasted like the cheapest supermarket burgers and were full of gristle.  I know they were cheap because they didn’t give you a choice about how you wanted them cooked, which in good restaurants they always do.  Here I got them dark brown with charcoal at the edges.  The fries were crisp on the outside but undercooked on the inside, which was interesting, disturbing, but definitely not effective, and the side salad had clearly been prepared at seven that morning and kept under a heatlamp for the next twelve hours.  Well, you know, crisp salad is so worrying, it’s crunchy and noisy, and you might cut yourself on the edges.  Much better to have it limp and warm.  Mmmm, delicious…

All in all it was a spectacularly bad, entirely English meal, with a thin veneer of Hollywood crap thrown on top to make their exorbitant prices more palatable.  It didn’t work for me.  Their speciality is apparently milkshake, of which they have about forty five flavours.  We had one each for dessert.  It was the best part of the meal, but again, roughly on a par with McDonald’s shakes, and twice as expensive.

The manager had dirty fingernails, which didn’t endear me to him one jot.  The staff were badly trained and had that brilliant knack of asking you what you wanted and then bringing you what they thought you wanted, hence Andrea specifically asking for no ice in her drink, the woman writing it down, nodding seriously at her, repeating the words, ‘no ice’, as if Andrea had just cracked the Da Vinci Code, and then bringing her a drink brimming with ice cubes.  They also did that marvellous thing where when you don’t want them, they hung round you like flies on a fresh cow pat, interrupting your conversation every five minutes to ask you if your food was alright, did you want your napkin folding into the shape of a swan etc? And then buggering off to avert their eyes in corners when you actually did want something.  They also kept trying to take the menu away from me, which given the fact that they already had several hundred, and hardly any other diners seemed very unreasonable.  At one stage I had a waiter hovering over it as if he was going to snatch it away.  As it was, I took it off the table and sat on it, so he was thwarted.  It was very satisfying!

Two of the best manoeuvres were forgetting to bring cutlery to the table twice, and then laying the food down in front of us, only to reappear as soon as the cutlery had appeared, to ask if we were enjoying our meal, before we’d even taken a bite.  It cost £26 for the privilege of a thoroughly unpleasant meal which ended up giving me acid heartburn all night and kept me awake until the wee small hours. 

As we were leaving, one of the managers/owners came up and smilingly asked me how the meal was and if I was happy with everything.  My heart was so full of bile that I daren’t open my mouth in case I made him cry, plus we only had five minutes to get to the cinema and it just wasn’t long enough for me to express the amount of loathing I felt, so I just nodded brusquely and we left.  Andrea was very calming, and presumably impressed that she didn’t have to spend the evening bailing me out of chokey for causing an affray in a public place, rather than going to the cinema as planned.  She’d had a crappy day anyway, so I didn’t think it was fair to her.

On a positive note we went to see the film Juno, the one about the American teenager who falls pregnant and decides to find adoptive parents instead of having an abortion.  It has won lots of prizes apparently, and justly so in my opinion.  It was funny and clever and the acting was fantastic.  I loved it, and it was well worth seeing.  It took my mind off my indigestion for a few hours and put me in a much better frame of mind, which is surely only a good thing?  Definitely a good thing because when I got home Jason had been watching the Michael Moore film Sicko, and was being outraged of Glenfield everywhere, ranting and raving about the injustices of the American health care system.  For a conservative man I would say it’s the closest to voting socialist I’ve ever seen him come.  It was two hours before I could calm him down enough to get him to agree to stop ranting and come to bed.  Apparently we’re not moving to the states.  I think Americans won’t be too disheartened by this news.  I know I’m not.