Wednesday April 30th Nazis Make Baked Beans on Toast in Full Colour

I passed yet another hideous night. Oscar woke at 2.00 a.m. with a full nappy and a winsome look in his eye which clearly meant; ‘You and me mum. Let’s rumba the night away, and damn the expense.’ and not: ‘Oh mum, thank’s so much for changing my nappy and as a gesture of my deepest gratitude I’m going to go right back to sleep now.’ He chuntered on for about forty minutes by which time I was wide awake, and stayed that way until 5.00 a.m.  I should be thankful that he took my rejection of his offer kindly, and merely trundled about in the bottom of the cot chatting to himself rather than screaming his lungs out and hurling his dummy at my head I suppose.  He’s being quite amenable to being left to his own devices in bed recently, although he did get into a terrible snit last week when he managed to take the bottom sheet off the cot and wrap it entirely round himself.  He seemed quite happy for a while until he couldn’t get out from his cunning mummifications, and then went barmy.  He was very offended that I laughed at him, and when I’d unwrapped his head, he eyed me with great suspicion and annoyance.  He tried to look dignified, but his hair really let him down.  He looked like a slightly rumpled cockatoo, bless him.

The one good thing about being awake was that I managed to finish my book, Michael Chabon’s ‘The Yiddish Policeman’s Union.’ I bought it as my special book shaped treat to take on holiday with me and didn’t get it finished.  To be honest I was very disappointed in it.  I loved Kavalier & Clay, which is one of my all time favourite books, but this just didn’t cut the mustard.  I soldiered on, but at over 400 pages it was very hard going and spending a couple of hours in the middle of the night finishing the bloody thing seemed like a small price to pay so that I could put it away and get on with something more rewarding, which in this case is a short introduction to Renaissance Art.  It’s not like I’d have been doing anything else, except moping about, pulling my feathers out and being resentful about being awake. 

My dad and Jason are great ones for watching television in the middle of the night when they can’t sleep, but I hate it.  It seems so defeatist.  The only time I’ve ever resorted to television in the wee small hours is during pregnancies when my brain has turned to mush, the baby is kicking the living daylights out of me and I was too enervated to read.  I used to watch Open University Programmes, which is how come I know a fair bit about geological rock formations in Derbyshire and statistical use of cinemas in the early to mid nineteen eighties. Not together in the same programme obviously. It’s not the Flintstones.  I’m also a bit of a dab hand at the anthropological implications of overfishing in Alaska, and the issues native tribes have with ice floes during the spring months.  This was when I only had terrestrial channels you understand.

Now we are spoiled for choice with Sky, but the television is still awful.  I would like world cinema and documentaries about the arts.  What do I get? The Nazis in Full Colour and Killer Squid: Will They Take Over The Earth? Like I care, unless they’re going to put new staff in the Co-op Cafe, and then I might be able to drum up some enthusiasm.  Frankly even the Nazis in full colour couldn’t do a worse job of serving beans on toast.  Getting back to televisual matters, I also don’t give a toss what drunk people in Ibiza who think that a love bite and vomiting into your shoe is the highest romantic accolade they could award you, do when they’re not giving each other love bites and vomiting.  Nor do I want to see The Third Man for the eighteenth time, despite the fact that it is a classic, thanks Dad. Although even I have to admit that the chiascuro is inspired.  That leaves you a bit short of options unless you want to watch the news repetitively for twelve hours or buy a lot of diamante jewellry and some tupperware to put it in.  I might write a letter to Cath Kidston and suggests she joins forces with Tupperware.  Surely it doesn’t have to come in such boring and functional colours? After all she did marvels for that camping shop.  Her floral tents nearly made me want to go camping, except for the fact that they were let down on the inside by the lack of lifts and chandeliers.  I did once spend an evening in a tent with a hostess trolley and a Birds Trifle, but that’s another story.

I have got Wim Wenders, ‘The Wings of Desire’ film to watch which I bought four years ago and haven’t plucked up the courage to see yet.  Pathetic isn’t it? I bought it because I watched that film whose name escapes me, with Meg Ryan and Nicholas Cage, where he’s an angel and she’s a mortal and he falls in love with her and gives up his immortality to be with her just as she is killed in a hideous road accident.  It was so tragic. I cried for days.  I loved it.  I was at the time going through a heavily morbid phase where I watched anything that could reduce me to tears and wallowed cathartically all over the place leaving giant snot trails everywhere.  It was very therapeutic.  Anyway, someone told me that this film was a Hollywood remake of the Wim Wenders film Wings of Desire and if I loved that I really should see his film because it was way better, and way, way more sad and heart rending and would make even a beans on toast making Nazi in full colour fall to their knees and blubber like an infant.  Naturally I was sold, and bought it at vast expense, because all arty films are always way more money than regular ones. 

About two days after I bought it I snapped out of my morbid phase and haven’t had the guts to watch it since.  Nobody else will watch it with me, 1) because none of my friends are morbidly obsessed with death in the same way that I am, and 2) none of my friends wants to see me turn into a blubbering cabbage faced snot monster because they’ve all got better things to do.  Plus they don’t generally come round to my house at two in the morning saying: ‘Why are you wasting your time reading that crappy book? Let’s get Wim Wenders out and cry until we make ourselves sick.  That’s a much better use of our time at this crazy hour of the morning.’

When morning proper finally rolled around I looked like I’d been trampled on by several hedges before being dragged backwards through them, and felt like it.  Poor Tallulah got short shrift when she started crying because she couldn’t find her uniform, which was right in front of her.  She was determined to wail because then she started crying because her tights didn’t fit her, except that they did.  Then we had trauma over her hair being too curly to be brushed, and her shoes being on the wrong feet.  In the end Jason lost all patience with her and said that he didn’t care what feet she put her shoes on as long as she got out the door pronto, so she hobbled off to school sniffing.  I sent them with Jason because I didn’t want to be responsible for pushing them under a speeding car on the three minute walk to school.  It was a wise move.  He came back looking quite disgruntled but was too fed up to tell me what further idiocies ensued.

We had great plans.  We were going to go out for lunch for a Thai Curry and all sorts.  What did we do? We fell asleep that’s what.  I woke up at half past twelve, admittedly feeling much better, which was splendid news, but by the time we’d done some boring errands we only had time for coffee at Borders before we had to hurtle back to pick up the kids.  Still, I did do some crucial birthday type shopping for various people who had the temerity to be born in May, and I accidentally bought Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boy as well, so it wasn’t a complete washout.

I am feeling somewhat improved today.  It’s a slow process but we’re getting there.  Thank the lord I’m not a frequent flyer.  I’d be insane by the end of a month, if I even lasted that long.  They’d find me in the departure lounge eating tissues and weeping gently into a spittoon.  Today I’ve made the great improvement of being actually hungry at the right meal times, although not for the things that are put in front of me.  It’s a start I suppose. 

I made an executive decision to do jacket potatoes today because even I could face throwing some potatoes in the oven and leaving them.  What’s more I didn’t grate any body parts into my dinner, or anyone else’s.  And I managed to get all the potatoes in and out without burning myself, which is quite a feat.  My thumb is healing nicely and my mind has been taken off my thumbly ailments by the fact that my chin has decided to grow a spot the size of a tenpence, which is just dully throbbing under the surface in a mumbling, resentful, teenage kind of way, without doing anything, but just hurting quite a bit.  I’m so busy examining my chin every twenty minutes I hardly have any time left to think about my thumb, so that’s good.

Tuesday April 29th – Magical Pie Tins

Woe, Woe, Woe (I know that shouldn’t be capitalised, because there aren’t any full stops, but it’s pretty damn serious, hence the use of capitals). I still have jet lag and am now bored of the whole thing and tired, which is a rubbish combination. Afraid and bored is also a terrible emotional combination.  I know this because that’s how I felt after seventy two hours in labour with Matilda. Before that I never knew you could be bored out of your skull and crapping yourself at the same time.  I suppose I have her to thank for that revelation. It may well come in handy some day, even if only to say the time honoured words: ‘I told you so!’. 

To get back to the subject in hand, my hideous, horrible jet lag. When will it end? When? When? Pooh ha! That’s what I have to say after serious contemplation of my condition. It’s rubbish.  Actually did sleep last night, but had hideously weird half dreams where nothing finished and everything started and it was all very busy and shouty and completely unmemorable, but just frantic and horrible, rah, rah, rah! Then when I woke up I was tired, my jaw hurt from where I had clearly been grinding my teeth again in my sleep and I had a huge headache all up the side of my face from all the grinding and the dreaming and the jet lag and shit and stuff. 

Everything is all very and stuff at the moment and I don’t like it. I don’t like it at all.  If I could think of someone to write a letter of complaint to I would, but I don’t think there’s an official jet lag complaints department.  Maybe I should write to someone and demand that there should be.  That might help a bit.  A ranty letter from ‘exhausted of Glenfield’.  That’s the ticket.  I’ve got to have someone to blame for the fact that I sat at the kitchen table for an hour this evening trying to motivate myself to make soup for tea and trying not to cry about the fact that I really didn’t want to make soup because it was just too difficult and I was aweary.  Then when I finally got around to making it I accidentally grated my thumb into the soup pan with the very sharp microplane because I got it confused with the bit of ginger I was holding in my hand which I did intend to grate with the microplane.  Then I cried properly because I was quite fed up with the whole thing.  I think the tears and blood really added something to the soup, but I had quite gone off it by the time it was ready.  I didn’t tell Jason, he gets quite squeamish about such things.

That’s the other thing that’s really annoying me at the moment, the fact that my body clock is all over the shop with regards to meals.  I don’t wake up in the middle of the night having devoured my bed socks dreaming of lasagne or anything like that.  It’s just that I am not really very hungry, even though I know I should be, and then when I force myself to eat things, because if I don’t I fall over and go all wibbly, even though I eat nice things, they taste like crap.  This is a very stressful experience for a seasoned eater like me.  It’s a lot like being pregnant.  I really hated that.  You’d go to tuck into something that you really loved to eat under normal circumstances, the alien being possessing your innards would take one sniff at it, reject it wildly and instead of tucking into King Prawn Dhansak you’d be vomiting into the Naan basket and crying with frustration.  Then you’d develop ridiculous cravings for something you normally hated which would be even more confusing.  One time when I was pregnant with Tallulah and it was Christmas, Jamie took me to the local Sainsbury’s and said that I could fill the trolley with all the food I loved as my special Christmas treat, because I’d been having a rough time of it up until then.  I came out with a bumper pack of savoury mini eggs and some lucozade, which I then proceeded to eat in the Car Park.  It was officially one of the most depressing days of my life.  Carte Blanche and I end up with bloody Scotch Eggs.  There’s no justice in the world.

The kids are driving us insane. We are counting the hours until tomorrow when we have managed to get Oscar an extra day in nursery and the girls will be in school.  It will be the first time we have been alone together in weeks.  We intend to squander our time frivolously doing not much at all and just enjoying the silence.  You never appreciate silence properly until you have children that take it in shifts to ensure that there is never a moment’s peace from one day’s end to the next.  Those rare moments when everyone goes quiet are worth their weight in gold.  Unfortunately we are not being blessed with one of those moments right now.  Tallulah is in the bath singing a song whose refrain goes: ‘Wave your bottom in the air’ and Oscar is joining in by making farty noises, occasionally banging a spade on the side of the bath and shouting ‘din nah’ at random intervals.  Matilda is humming and occasionally nagging in between trying to learn the Brownie promise for Friday when she is to be invested in the Brownie hall of fame.

Invested is such a strange word isn’t it?  I can’t help it, it always makes me think of vests, due to having the word ‘vest’ in the middle of it probably. I’m nothing if not predictable. It does tend to lead the mind to wander.  I start thinking about what kind of vests one should be invested in or with.  Do you bring your own, or is the point of investiture to be rewarded with a special vest of your own? Should there be a special provision for string vests, which are after all rather strange things, and I’m not really sure what they’re actually for, due to the fact that they are a piece of clothing which doesn’t keep you warm and doesn’t really cover you up, and when you lie down or rest against it you get weird webby patterns all over your skin?  If you’re hairy all your hair pokes out in clumps which is singularly unattractive, ditto spare bits of flesh and/or nipples.  Ten points to the person who can tell me the reason why one has a string vest and who invented it.  Answers on the back of an e-mail.  Replies guaranteed.

Apparently I have to provide her with a magical pool for the purposes of said investiture. Vests and pools don’t really go together either do they? I’ve never seen a garden gnome in a string vest, and they hang around by pools a lot, whether they’re magical ones or not is debatable.  This pool, it says in my letter can be a ‘tin pie tray with some greenery and stones’. What’s magical about that pray tell? I have no idea.  Sounds a bit rubbish to me.  I don’t remember having a magical pool all those years ago when I was invested.  We had a Brownie horse shoe made of paper trefoils and tea lights, provided by the management I might add, and not by my mother’s fair hand.  I must now go out and source pie tins in my spare time or Matilda will be sorely disappointed that I let the side down in her moment of triumph.  It’s a great responsibility this parenting thing.  Nobody tells you that you’ll have to provide magical pie tins at short notice when you sign up.  Somebody should.  I’d have thought twice I can tell you.

Tilly’s golf practice wasn’t needed after all apparently.  When I asked her how her day had gone, she was very nonchalant and said: ‘Oh! We didn’t actually play golf.’ Thus begging the question; ‘What the bloody hell did the letter I signed giving permission mean when it said ‘inter school golf competition’? Perhaps it was secret code and they’re training her up as the next Slayer of Glenfield.  I did wonder whether we might be living on the Hell Mouth.  When I enquired further into this matter she informed me that they ‘played golfish games’.  That was all I could glean.  They’ve obviously been teaching her obfuscation techniques.  I would pry further, but I don’t think I care enough.  As long as she had a good time I don’t really care if she was playing golf or learning to stab the undead through the heart. At least she didn’t want me to join in, and that’s the main thing.  I’d only have cried about it today.

Monday April 28th – Necropolis Birdbath

Can I just say that I am now officially an old fart?  I have been reading about how fabulous it is that Madonna is nearly fifty and how her new single is so marvellous etc, etc, etc.  Now I am someone who was around in Madonna’s first incarnation, and I have to say that I have always been a fan, on and off.  She does put out some dreadful drivel every now and again, and she was frankly wearisome when she kept spouting about sex all the time and chewing leather riding crops, but you have to admire her chutzpah. 

I have decided as of today that she can keep her chutzpah, preferably all to herself.  I just went on Youtube to have a stare at her new ponderings.  Four minutes? I managed one minute 30 seconds before I decided that it was one of the most boring things she has ever done. And you can keep that Justin Trousersnake as well while you’re at it. I’m in full agreement that he has improved immeasurably since he left N-Sync or whichever pile of crap boyband he was in.  Things looked even more up after he dumped Britney and shaved his head of those ridiculous cherubic curls, but ever since he started doing random duets with anyone and everyone and grabbing his crotch whilst staring soulfully at the camera watching him just makes me lose the will to live.  As for her madgeness or whatever name she is operating under at the moment, if she wanted to sound just like everyone else she has achieved her goal, but it was just a load of meaningless, repetitive noise and people deep breathing the words ‘uh huh’ if those can actually be classified as words and not some sub-neanderthal grunting.

So, God help me! It’s official.  I am now too old for pop music.  I realise this when I was scandalised by this latest offering and then had the revelation that if I were fourteen, I would probably have hot footed it down to my internet corner shop and down loaded it immediately onto my ipod if that is indeed what the youth of today do with their music.  As I am now so radically unhip, radically unhip enough to use the words radically unhip when I should probably say something like zinging pondercherries or whatever the latest jargon is, I have probably also made a terrible faux pas about the ipod thing too.  I expect people now just have these things randomly injected into a chip in their left earlobe and can access the tunes they want by grinding their teeth in binary patterns or something.

I did make an important decision today however. I have decided that if I were to be a late bloomer into the world of pop music that I would style myself as Necropolis Birdbath, which I feel is an inspired name.  If I had a band they would be called The Pocket Normans.  I may have blogged about this before.  Pocket Norman has been a name I have held dear for many years, at least fifteen at the last count.  I have known many people in fledgeling bands and have proffered the name around in the vain hope that someone would do something creative with it somewhere, and that one day I may actually be able to purchase a t-shirt with the legend ‘The Pocket Normans – Stormin” on the front.  Sadly nobody has taken me up on the offer as yet, but I feel that it is important to be prepared.  There is still time, although I may be a pensioner by then.  As it is I would like the designer of the t-shirt to remember that I like long sleeves and v-necks for preference, although I could live with scoop neck.  It may also be important as regards the lettering to realise that I have rather a hefty bosom and I don’t like my letters to stretch, thanks all the same.

I have yet to decide what my name would be if I were to become a film star or a novelist. I’ll keep you posted.  Some random application on Facebook has decreed that my pornstar name is Angel Firehoney, which sounds much more like my name if I were to become a Mills and Boon writer.  Taking the standard pornstar equation of your first pet’s name with your mother’s maiden name, my pornstar name would be Boots Oxford.  I sound more like an address label.  Obviously my career as a pornstar would be a short one.  This would be good for everyone, particularly me.  I have eaten half a dozen chocolate digestives today, so it is definitely not a day for stripping anything except the paint off the front door.

I do like making names up though.  Here are a few random ones if you need a pseudonym in a hurry:

1. Manfred Vandemar (German Private Eye, or possible romantic book hero/baddie)
2. Kittiwake Milhamer (Someone who works behind the scenes in the US film business)
3. Gethsemene Mildew (Dominatrix, possibly)
4. Loveday Golightly (Romantic heroine)
5. Miriam Smee (Evil Librarian of uncertain age)
6. Valerian Filch (Creepy Uncle, heir to dodgy fortune)
7. Butch Crimplehorn (school bully)
8. Stingo Lurch (evil butler or possibly captain of the school hockey team, hard to say)
9. Mortimer Feegle (crazy inventor)
10. Tandem Sourbrush (Slightly disappointed middle aged woman, blames her life’s failure on her parents inability to name her decently)

As you can tell, not much has been going on in my life today.  Quite a lot has been going on in my head though, unfortunately for me.  I slept in until half past twelve today.  Jason got up and got the kids to school for me, as I was up for three hours in the night.  It was very nice of him to let me sleep, but I woke up slightly hung over and feeling rather peculiar and have felt that way for most of the day, which has been a bit unpleasant.  I felt very dizzy when I got the kids home from school and then burst into tears because when my parents came round to say welcome back I was too dizzy to make them a cup of tea.  I don’t know why this was tragic enough to deserve tears, but it was.  God help me when we get to the menopause is all I can say.

The kids had a blast at school and returned with deer antlers and all, as the conquering heroes of the day.  The novelty will no doubt have worn off by tomorrow, but they were absolutely full of it when they got home this afternoon.  Apparently Tilly has spent the day making fruit salad and playing football.  Tomorrow she’s going to go and take part in a golf tournament all day.  We never did such exotic things in my day.  She spent an hour after school putting a plastic ball on an upturned bucket and hitting it with a broken stilt in practice.  Her uncle in Canada is a golf pro.  I expect that’s how he started off as well!

 

Sunday April 27th – The Repointing Kind of Blog

It’s now quarter past three, in the morning, for those of you who think I’m making a big fuss about the fact that it’s tea time.  I’ve eaten my banana, drunk my tea and am still not asleep enough to be asleep, but just asleep enough to make everything hideously hard work.  I can hear Oscar chuntering away upstairs.  Everyone else is dead to the world.  I’m going to carry on ignoring Oscar in the hope he will chunter himself back to sleep.  If the volume rises I may have to take him downstairs and play with him until he submits, but I’m hoping that it won’t happen.  I don’t mind being awake alone in the wee small hours because I’m not expecting myself to be cheerful or competent in any way.  I begrudge being awake with others, especially short people who want me to read them stories and play cars.

This is going to be short and more for the sake of filling in gaps than anything else.  Think of it as a repointing kind of blog, making sure that the bricks don’t fall out and kill you.  After all, there isn’t much to say about an uneventful night flight of nine hours and a trip home on the M40.  I suppose one thing of note is the fact that we came home with our luggage, and it was in fact the shortest amount of time I have ever spent at a baggage carousel, particularly given the fact that the flight was almost full and we had six pieces of luggage, five suitcases and a travel cot.  I had visions of sitting weeping on the carousel, six hours after everyone had gone home, destined to watch the one lone sports bag that nobody wants to claim circling like a crap buzzard for the entire of eternity.  Luckily for us we had everything in the first ten minutes.  Couldn’t quite believe our luck.

My dad picked us up.  He was on time, didn’t get lost and was amazed because Terminal Five is giving two hours free parking to short stayers at the moment, so he didn’t have to pay.  All the luggage fitted in and so did we, and after a couple of hours and a sandwich break we were home.  My parents, bless their cotton socks, had stocked our kitchen with enough food for tea and basics like bread and milk, and my mum had nipped round with a duster which was very splendid of her indeed.  Coming home to a clean house and not having to rush out to the Londis is a brilliant treat.

Jason is a stickler for unpacking and sorting ourselves out straight the way.  It’s one of the things I never fail to give thanks for.  When I’m home from holiday I like to be home from holiday.  I can’t bear that half unpacked state that can linger on for weeks.  It’s like suffering from some particularly unpleasant disease that you are almost better from but not quite.  We got home around half four and by eight o’ clock the suitcases were unpacked, everything was put away, including the cases in the loft, and the laundry was in the washing machine.  The kids had been fed, bathed and were all prepared, ready for school.  We stuck them in bed and propped ourselves on the sofa with the digestive biscuits and Gavin and Stacey.  It was one of the nicest evenings I’ve had for ages, despite the paralysing tiredness and the fact that although I’m here physically, my mental self is somewhere over the ocean, cruising at 39,000 feet and I won’t feel normal until the two have joined forces again.

Got home to find that I passed my R&J essay with sixty six percent. Not brilliant, but enough to have passed the course, which is excellent.  I’ve got my Leo books and my new tutor, so I’m taking a couple of days off, and then it’s back to the grindstone again.  Andrea has been on a ticket booking spree while I’ve been away, so I’ve got to collar dates from her, as apparently she’s finally booked us to see Timon of Athens at The Globe this summer and a few more things to keep our hand in, bless her.  She’s off to Madeira in a week, so I’m hoping we’ll get to eat lunch before she goes away.  Knowing her she’ll be covered in dust all day (her job is very stressful and dusty) and tripping the light fantastic all night, in between looking after her new calves, so I’ll just have to see if she can fit me in to her busy schedule.

The kids are really excited about going back to school.  So am I! School might not be, but I do like to keep them on their toes.  Tilly spent large parts of the evening polishing her deer antler. Jason finally relinquished and let her bring it.  I’m so glad they didn’t stop us at customs.  I would have been so annoyed if we had been arrested over a deer antler.  Knowing Tilly she will probably come home tomorrow with one less eye, and that will be the end of the antler forever…

Saturday April 26th – boutique hotels, my arse

It’s really the early hours of Monday morning.  Oscar woke up about twenty minutes ago grumbling about needing milk, and although he’s drifted off back to sleep I am wide awake.  I hate this jetlag malarkey.  I didn’t sleep on the plane, I didn’t sleep when I got home.  I forced myself to stay up to a reasonable time in the evening and eat at UK meal times.  By rights I should be tucked up in bed sleeping the sleep of the wise and just.  Am I? Am I buggery.  I’m sitting here at 2.30 p.m. with raging indigestion, wide awake and yet totally knackered.  What a Bastard as Gene Hunt would probably say.

So, what does a girl do in these situations? Well, a girl makes herself a cup of tea, eyes a banana suspiciously thinking that eating one will do her good, but that she doesn’t really want to.  Then she deals with some impending postal issues and turns to her blog.  Dame Melvyn of Guilt has been hovering, waiting to chip in with some very pressing reasons why I shouldn’t be asleep and why I should be hard at it, so I’m going to give in to his demands.  Then I’m going to put in an Ocado order so I don’t have to spend the rest of the week living on cheese thins and hovis.

So, back to what happened on Friday/Saturday then.  We arrived in Vancouver Friday afternoon after catching the 1.00 p.m. ferry by the skin of our teeth, and when I say skin I mean four minutes before the ferry was due to sail! We were the penultimate car on the boat and it was only by us shouting and crossing our fingers that there was any room on that sailing at all.  We were very lucky.  The crossing was calm.  We spent most of it in the cafeteria eating food that was so disgusting I couldn’t finish mine,  but which the children considered a grease laden paradise.

We got to the hotel by about four.  We would have been there earlier except we were slightly confused and tired coming off of the ferry and ended up on the highway heading to Seattle.  Much as I would like to visit Seattle we decided that it wasn’t really the time or the place.  Actually it was the place I suppose, after all, if you want to be going to Seattle, heading there on the highway is probably ideal.  Nevertheless, we turned around and then spent an hour stuck in hideous traffic.  One thing I won’t miss is the geriatric approach to driving in North America.  I know that I shouldn’t really criticise, being a non driver but I get furious passenger rage, spurred on by Jason’s vitriolic swearing from behind the wheel.  What is this need for ludicrously safe speed limits and the persistent need to avoid traffic flowing by shunning the world of roundabouts and just going for a series of stop lights every three hundred yards? No wonder North America is grid locked up the yin yang.

 You know that stuff you see in the movies where Mel Gibson speeds his car through the streets of San Francisco (which is probably actually Vancouver in disguise anyway) burning rubber, pursued by hundreds of devil may care cops? It’s bollocks.  I don’t know how anyone speeds here, ever. On the motorway the top speed is 90k.  That’s fifty five miles an hour.  Even my mother, who hates driving, drives faster than fifty five miles an hour on the motorway.  Here, as Morrissey would say: ‘every day is like Sunday’, full of people driving like pensioners out on a nice Sunday ’drive’ with four hundred weight of tupperware in the boot and some plastic rain headgear obscuring their view of oncoming traffic.  The rule of thumb for driving anywhere in North America is to think of the time it would take you to go anywhere in the UK then double it and add a bit.  Nobody overtakes much here either, so make sure you factor that into your journey.  No wonder they have to have forty seven cup holders.  You need to pack sandwiches just to go out and buy sandwiches.

Right, rant over for now.  It may be resumed later, who knows? I might just fall asleep at the keyboard and wake up in time to take the kids to school with the legend ‘QWERTY’ stamped to my forehead. Anyway, we made it to our hotel.  It was described as a ’boutique’ hotel.  Now, as a partaker and approver of the world of luxury travel I would like to say that I think the word ’boutique’ is now becoming slightly overused.  We stayed at the ‘Le Soleil’ hotel on Hornby Street.  There was nothing wrong with it.  In fact, I would recommend it if you want to stay in downtown Vancouver.  It’s far enough away from the nasty parts of down town and the staff are friendly in the extreme.  It is not however, a boutique hotel.

A boutique hotel to me is something classy, with Bose or B&O stereo equipment, luxurious toiletries, fabulous bathroom facilities and usually something rather strange to eat that they consider posh, which you get free but which you wouldn’t ordinarily eat in a hotel room, or anywhere else, for that matter, something like a complimentary dish of rose petals preserved in aspic, that kind of thing.  What a boutique hotel isn’t is a lot of faux regency furnishing, some quirkily packaged condoms and some overpriced ‘diy’ oxygen in your mini bar, and those weird office tile ceilings in your minute hallway.  This was just a clean, functional hotel room with the lights turned down for dramatic effect.  It was only two hundred dollars for the five of us, for one night though, so what the hell.

We spent the evening getting lost finding somewhere child friendly to eat and ended up in the presence of yet another ‘White Spot’.  Even the kids were getting slightly sick of eating grilled cheese sandwiches and fries, although it didn’t stop them from giving it their best shot.  I couldn’t face another burger shaped meal, so opted for their prawn and scallop risotto.  It would have been fine if they hadn’t called it risotto.  It was cheesey rice with some scallops and prawns on top.  That’s another thing I couldn’t live with in North America.  If you go to your average Italian, or eat Italian in an average restaurant they seem to think it is de rigeur to flavour anything with pasta with hundred weights of cheese, no matter what other flavours it purports to have.  Now, I’m a bit funny like that, but to me, fish risotto should taste of fish and not of cheese, penne arrabiata should taste of spicy tomato sauce and not of cheese.  So I guess what I’m saying is ‘for god’s sake, lay off the bloody cheese for two minutes. It won’t kill you.  I might, if you don’t’.  It’s old fashioned, it’s being a stickler for the details, but there you are.  At least it didn’t taste of fries.

We were going to take a drive through the beautiful Stanley Park after dinner.  It was too early for the kids to go to bed, and our suite was too small for anything except sleeping in.  Sadly we got caught up in throes of some accident management and although we drove into Stanley Park we got caught up in a diversion which drove us promptly out again and over Lion’s Gate Bridge, into Kitsilano.  As we were in the neighbourhood we drove up Grouse Mountain.  Jason wanted to see if Capilano Suspension Bridge was still open.  Tilly was delighted when it wasn’t.  We then drove to the base of the cable cars to go up the rest of Grouse Mountain, but Oscar was getting whingey so we didn’t go.  Tilly was very pleased.  I can’t say I was too upset.  I’ve been on that cable car before.  It’s very, very high and very swingy.  I can do it, but I really didn’t fancy being calm in the face of Tilly’s hysteria and Oscar and Tallulah’s need to run from one side to the other to see how much they tilt.  I don’t know how long I would have lasted without being sick down someone’s neck or just having hysterics of my own.

We passed a disturbed night and then went to Denny’s for breakfast.  By this time we were even sick of Denny’s.  We all left pancake on our plate, which you definitely wouldn’t have seen at the beginning of our holiday.  Jason took Oscar back to the hotel room to have a nap and the girls and I went for an explore.  This involved finding a large branch of Chapters which is Canada’s Borders, and spending a lot of time in the kids book department where I broke my vow to Jason to not buy any more books this holiday.  it also involved going to Vancouver Art Gallery to see a fabulous exhibition of early photography where I broke my second promise to Jason and used my credit card.  I had to.  I’d spent all the cash on books! This did not go down well back at the ranch, or ’boutique’.

In the afternoon we went to the Science Museum.  This is excellent fun if you have kids and are stuck for something to do in Vancouver.  It’s also excellent fun if you don’t have kids, although you will probably get a few weird looks from protective parents, as the place is heaving with small people.  It’s rather like that part of the Science Museum in London which is designed for hands on stuff.  It was tremendous fun.  They have big runnels of water where you can build damns and divert streams and push plastic balls into rapids.  They have air guns for firing balls and parachutes and stuff.  There is a virtual harp where you can play it by breaking light beams.  I loved it.  They had hundreds of cool things to do.  We played for hours, all of us.  If you are going, it’s a good idea to take sandwiches.  The only food outlet is burger related and tastes of wood chippings covered in dill.  Fact fans.

After that it was time to head on out to the airport.  We killed a couple of hours eating hideous airport food, which is probably why I’ve got wild indigestion now, after two days of eating deep fried cardboard one’s digestive system is bound to rebel eventually.  We got boarded fine, the plane set off fine and landed fine and the children slept most of the way home, which was amazing and very welcome.  I didn’t sleep, but I did get to read about naughty Amy Winehouse in the Daily Mail, so that mroe than made up for it, I’m sure you will agree!

Friday April 25th – Waterproof books, Stun Guns and Starbucks in the Hall

It’s a bit early in the day to be blogging but frankly the nuns of guilt are descending like vultures round a particularly smelly carcass and I just want to get the damn thing over with so I can go and feel slightly sea sick on a ferry for an hour and a half knowing that the onerous duty is done.  I don’t want Mother Superior Melvin to feel that I’ve let the side down.  Now here’s a thing I was discussing with someone only the other day.  How come they have nunnery’s but they don’t have monkery’s?  And how come they have catteries, but not doggeries?  What is going on eh? Answer me that now?????? (Sorry about the question marks.  I know I’ve probably got my apostrophes all askew so I’m using multiple question marks to create a diversion.  Cunning eh? See what I just did then? I’ve gone and done it again.  Damn cunning that…)

I am all alone.  Oscar is sleeping after being very, very upset that I wouldn’t let him eat a family sized packet of ready salted crisps.  I’m so unreasonable like that.  I thought his petulant flinging himself bodily onto the floor and flailing his arms and legs around whilst wailing ‘frips! Frips! ooohhhhh Frips!’ and emitting snot bubbles was probably a sign that he was somewhat over emotional and rather tired.  It’s only taken me nine years to become an expert in the subtleties of reading baby body language.  I am Desmond Morris of the baby world.  I may write a best selling book about it, with diagrams and photographs.

Tallulah and Tilly have gone with Jason to buy black bin bags, a non pink bathmat and as predicted by your ever faithful reporter yesterday, a new suitcase.  They may be gone for some time.  I have been left at home to make sure that Oscar doesn’t wreck the joint and that all the evidence of baby scribbles on the floor in green crayon have been obliterated forever.  I am also doing two loads of laundry, pouring bleach down the toilets and finding hundreds of random items that I never remembered using but which now mysteriously seem to need washing up.  It’s a tedious old life. 

What I really want is a good cup of coffee, four hundred pancakes and a lie down in a darkened room with some pain killers.  The curse of all ladies has come upon me today.  This is because we are in travel mode and my body clock is set to: ‘Find the most inconvenient time to erupt and then produce as much bodily fluid as you can as quickly as possible, preferably whilst making your driver feel slightly nauseous and like she has been kicked in the stomach by a particularly grumpy mule.’ It’s spot on.  It happened on the way out here as well.  I’m so lucky, lucky, lucky, lucky and all that Kyliesque guff.  I should thank my lucky stars that I can predict such happenings by not the phases of the moon (which is good, because I am rubbish at astronomy), but by important events and long and difficult journeys.  Calloo Callay, Frabjubous day as the indomitable Lewis Carroll would say.

We’re at that stage of the proceedings now where I wish that someone would hurry up and invent travel by magic wand.  I think it’s a damn shame that governments are putting so much effort and money into researching weapons and efficient ways to kill each other when they could be attending to jobs which are so much more important.  Here are some things I would like to see invented:

1. As already stated, travel by magic wand.  Not teleportation.  I think all that wibbling about while your molecules dissolve into the ether would be particularly unpleasant and nausea inducing.
2. Self cleaning toilets for the home.  Not like those scary public ones that flip you upside down and douse you in Cillit Bang if you take more than three milliseconds to squeeze out a pooh either.  Sophisticated, gentle ones that play nice music and soothe your fevered brow.
3. A hot water bottle belt where you can have warmth round your girth at all times without having to hooch about endlessly rearranging bits of hot rubber to suit.
4. Swimming pool changing rooms that don’t have small puddles of unidentified but horrible looking water all over them and clumps of matted hair from people who you never wanted to share clumps of matted hair with in the first place.
5. Flexi time in schools to suit parents.
6. Any form of baby medicine that isn’t so viscous you could stick parts of the space shuttle together and not have to worry about it melting off during re-entry.
7. An instant cure for stiff necks (see magic wand)
8. A way of making spaghetti sauce (or indeed any tomato rich sauce or stew) which means that your sauce actually stays in the pan while it’s cooking and doesn’t, no matter what temperature you cook it at, erupt like Vesuvius all over the splash back, the front of your t-shirt and the kitchen floor.
9. Some kind of hair brush which doesn’t make children scream, or some kind of children hair which doesn’t tangle. I don’t care really, whichever is the easiest.
10. A way to convince Starbucks to open a branch in my hall.

So, there are a few things to be going on with.  Probably not in order, as they just randomly came to me, not that you would ever guess.  And, the minute I post this there are bound to be fifty other really crucial things I might like invented even more.  Ahh! As we speak I think of one which I was discussing with Jason only the other day.  A way to waterproof books without making them too heavy so you can read in the shower and the bath without having to worry about crinkly pages in the bath, or the total dissolution of your book in the shower.  That’s massively important that is.  In fact if you could just invent a way that I could read my book all the time without it actually interefering in my day to day life at all, that would be marvellous.

Jason wants a device that will temporarily stun a child’s vocal chords when they’re either whinging or having a full on tantrum.  He says it shouldn’t hurt them, it should just interrupt them long enough to shock them into stopping and just getting back to being their normal hideous selves, instead of their extra hideous selves.  Me, I think that’s quite a good idea, especially after the great ‘frips’ trauma of 2008.  It would be very cool if you could make it look like one of the stun guns on Star Trek for that authentic retro feel.  That way you could feel cool and powerful all at the same time.  You would need to keep them on a very high shelf or have them come with voice recognition though, otherwise the kids might take the law into their own hands and seek revenge.  It would be anarchy, but you wouldn’t be able to tell anyone about it! Nightmare…

Thursday April 24th – Packing Dodecahedrons

We’ve packed two suitcases and have several more to go.  Lucky for us we’ve got all day tomorrow to arse about, catch a ferry and get to our hotel in Vancouver so we’ve decided that today is a two suitcase day and tomorrow will be plenty of time to see to the rest.  We’re probably kidding ourselves.  We will no doubt faff about and end up making the ten p.m. ferry by the skin of our teeth, but what the hell.  I’m not doing any more packing tonight so that’s that.  I hate packing to come home almost as much as I hate packing to go.  It’s a different thing, but just as stressful.  What I’ve found is, even if you don’t buy anything on your holiday.  Even if you give stuff away to beggars in the street, you will still find that what you went away with, and what fitted perfectly in your suitcase is now twenty times larger than your suitcase and shaped like a dodecahedron mixed with a kitten.  This means that you work twice as hard to pack.  When you add all the random shite that we’ve accumulated over the last three and a half weeks it’s a feat worthy of Mensa.  I might well be on the Mensa packing hotline to them tomorrow.

It’s so weird what random detritus you accumulate on your holidays.  I was thinking this as i was trying to fit a pair of arm bands, some pink sequinned slippers for a large footed bear and some stacking crayons into a suitcase in a cunning tetris like way and failing miserably.  In the end I went for the ‘bugger it, I’m just going to heap it all in and sit on the lid approach.’  It seemed to work, but I am almost certain that one of Jason’s jobs tomorrow will be to hot foot it to Walmart and purchase a canvas hold all to stuff with all the rest of the randomly weird junk we have that will refuse, positively refuse to go in the rest of the cases.

Today we bought more towels to replace the pink towels that we dyed and have also added random pink dyed towels to our extra luggage allowance, as I don’t care what colour my towels are as long as the children get dry.  It also seems a shame to bury them at the bottom of the garden to hide the evidence.  Jason has pointedly refused to allow me to pack Tilly’s one deer antler, so I am going to have to do either some serious diplomatic talking or some shouting at her tomorrow.  Probably, my gut tells me, a fair bit of both. 

They will all be hideous tomorrow because of the packing.  Particularly Oscar, as we packed most of his toys tonight.  This will mean that he will automatically loathe and detest the things we left out for him, and will either  want to a) play with dangerous knives and the cut glass punch set which is in one of the cupboards just at baby height and which he has so fair failed to spot, or b) unpack all the rest of the luggage as we pack it.  What is most likely to happen is that I will get home to find that I have no pants, but that I have an ornate crystal punch set that I don’t really want as the last time I drank punch it was 1978 and at a christmas party.  I thought it would be nice.  It was in fact rather boring and was rather like a soupy fruit salad.  I believe someone may have put some banana in it, which didn’t work at all.  Bananas that aren’t covered in ice cream and chocolate sauce are just wrong.

We went to Spinnakers for a farewell to Victoria lunch.  The children decided to be difficult today so this meant that rather than go for something that she knows she likes, Tilly went for something that might be horrible.  She chose the three cheese pizza, but horror of horrors they had put herbs in the tomato mixture, so she ate half a slice and then sat looking stricken and sniffing gently into her orange juice, which was cheery.  It was like having lunch with the albatross of doom, rather off putting and quite, quite annoying.  We went to the bookshop to do our last book swap.  This of course meant that Oscar did a spectacular pooh in his nappy yet again, although I did manage to get the last Ian Rankin in trade paperback for six quid, so I was very happy thanks, despite the hideous aroma.

We went to our friend Janet’s for dinner.  She had made a huge effort for the children and bought them some really lovely toys to play with; she had also rented them a dvd and cooked them a child friendly tea of macaroni and cheese with sausages.  This meant of course that there were bound to be problems.  Tallulah took violently against her dinner and had a temper tantrum worthy of the terrible twos because we said that she couldn’t have one of the gorgeous cakes Janet had bought for pudding if she didn’t eat the miniscule amount of dinner on her plate.  If she had been a sensible girl and even had a couple of forkfuls it would have been fine, but instead she gave a real belter of a performance which meant that Jason ended up taking her out in the car and driving her round the block for half an hour while she howled, wailed and generally thrashed around.  It was a real shame.  Tilly and Oscar polished off their dinner and got cup cakes with giant icing roses and sparkly rings in with ice cream.  They were most pleased with themselves.  Tilly had a beard made almost entirely from lavender coloured icing and cup cake crumbs.

By the time Tallulah came snivelling back in they had made a start on watching Toy Story in sugary anticipation.  We took Tallulah’s cake home with us, but she was so evil on the way home that she lost cake privileges tomorrow as well, silly girl.  Sometimes when a girl has to have a full on tantrum she just has to, and that’s all there is to it.  It’s good to know that her lungs are still in full working order, although my ears are ringing somewhat.

Wednesday April 23rd – Swimming Sausages and David Bowie

We made a momentous decision today.  We are coming home early.  We should be flying home next Thursday, arriving next Friday, but we have had enough of our holiday and want to come home.  We are all holidayed out.  We have sand in our beds.  We have made enough crab graveyards.  We have eaten enough pancakes (although don’t tell Jason I said that.  He could divorce me on the grounds of pancake blasphemy).  We are tired of fresh air, wide open spaces and enough salmon to choke an ox with.  We have seen enough maple leaves to last us a life time and it is now high time we were back in grim old Glenfield planning our next excursion into the unknown and becoming reacquainted with the Ocado man and the foibles of the Open University system.

We are now flying on Saturday and arriving on Sunday.  We are all very excited about this.  I think it is incredibly cool and am totally impressed of us.  Don’t get me wrong.  We’re still having a lovely time, but we talked it over last night and figured that we would have more of a lovely time if we came home a few days early, recovered from jet lag and sent the children back to school and nursery so that we could have some time alone before Jason has to go back to work.  I’ve done this bunking off from your holiday a couple of times before and it is very decadent and has always been utterly brilliant, particularly the time my brother and I accompanied my parents to a deserted backwater in the Spanish mountains where my mother had hideous vertigo and refused to go anywhere high (in the mountains!), we got flooded out of the village we were staying in, and my brother and I had to share a bedroom with pink satin eiderdowns.

We talked about it last night but decided to sleep on it first.  This morning we agreed that although we felt a weird amount of guilt at coming home early, it was entirely illogical, and that we were actually really excited about some of the things that I mentioned in my earlier listy type blog, mainly sending the children back to school, and getting to sleep in our own bed.  We’ve had three and a half weeks here, and in the main it has been great, but it’s been enough.  If the weather were a bit more gorgeous and we could go on the beach every day it might be a slightly different matter, but today has been a mixture of gales, sunshine and torrential downpour.  It can’t seem to make it’s mind up for more than twenty minutes at a time, which is entertaining, but no basis for planning outdoor events.

It only cost us two hundred quid to change our flights, which is probably what we would spend on a week extra of eating out and entertaining children anyway, so we decided that fair exchange was indeed no robbery and booked it.  My mother is very excited and is already planning a trip out for egg and chips as we speak.  Tallulah is very excited because we can catch up on Doctor Who and his activities.  Tilly is very excited because she is missing her daddy Jamie.  Jason, as described, is fantasising about his bed, and watching Gavin and Stacey.  Oscar doesn’t give a toss where he is as long as someone has a year’s supply of biscuits nearby, so he’s as happy as a sand boy regardless.

Jason has taken the children swimming/bobbing, to a new pool just down the road from us.  They have an after dinner, fun swim, with games and activities, the thought of which bought tears to my eyes.  Tallulah left the house with squeaks of joy, as we bought her a wet suit with floats in it and this is the first time she’s had to try it out.  Jason made them get ready before they went out and put their pj’s over the top of their suits.  Tilly looked normal.  Tallulah looked like a miniature incredible hulk and was laughing so hard she nearly peed her suit.  I have visions of her jumping into the water and being so buoyant that she merely pings back out again and concusses herself on the diving board.  We shall see.

So, apart from planning our early escape from the Canadians, what did we do today?  Well, we went for lunch with Nana and Auntie Lindsey at a place called Jamesons Restaurant in downtown Victoria.  It promised to be child friendly.  Loosely translated this meant that they had high chairs and an annoying server who stuck her face up the childrens’ noses when taking their order (I think this was supposed to relax them.  It seemed to startle them quite a bit.  Understandable as she had a face like a boiled tennis ball and a voice like a band saw going through concrete).  There were no crayons, no children’s menus and only half portions on about three different items.  It took the woman fifteen minutes to serve half of us with glasses of iced water.  This obviously wore her out so she then had to go and have a lie down for another ten minutes before she came to take our real order.  She then went out for a jog around the block before forgetting to bring me my drink.  After she’d read a chapter or two of her latest book she bought us our lunch, but only half of it.  She then finished painting her toenails and sashayed over with the rest.  Mine was stone cold and slightly burned.  I have had raging indigestion ever since and blame her entirely.

It has to be said however, despite their shortcomings and the fact that it would go on my top ten list of restaurants I’d rather poke myself in the eye with a pickle fork before visiting again, it had many benefits over yesterday’s outing:

1. It wasn’t on a beach
2. No sand was involved in the making of this lunch
3. It was warm
4. The company was good
5. It was nana’s treat

After lunch Nana took us down to Fisherman’s wharf.  This is a very cool place I haven’t been to before. It’s on the harbour in Victoria and it’s a kind of floating houseboat village. It was incredibly surreal because in Canada houseboats actually just look like real houses bobbing about on the water, whereas in the UK houseboats actually look like boats that people live in.  It was like looking at a housing estate that had escaped and was trying to make a new home somewhere else.  The houses were all beautifully painted and really quirky with odd carvings and random sculptures and stuff.  There were a couple for sale at absolutely hideous prices.  One was nearly half a million dollars.  This would be fine except that it’s a tourist attraction, so you have to put up with people staring in your windows and commenting on your taste in begonias, home decorating and wall paper (which is exactly what I was doing, which is how I know everyone else would do it too).  It is also really noisy as it is in the area of the harbour where all the boat planes take off and land.  So if you don’t mind a teeny weeny floating house where you’re permanently on display to the general public and deafened every twenty minutes, it’s the place for you. 

I have to say it was really, really cute and that if I had oodles of cash I’d buy one just to play in.  It would be like Marie Antoinette and La Petite Trianon.  I’d just go there to slum it amongst the peasants and have a flock of tame seagulls to herd about whilst wearing a dirndl skirt and some rustic schoon.  It would be most picturesque.  Or picture skew as my mum likes to say.  It would be as long as nobody tried to cut my head off for it, although I’d never say ‘let them eat cake’.  I’d be the one scarfing down the cake and making damn sure everyone else got French Sticks, or possibly an old supply of Battenburg and Bakewells that I just didn’t want.

They have little floating shops at Fisherman’s wharf as well.  They have an ice cream parlour and some eateries.  They also have a fishmongers where you can buy buckets of fresh fish to feed to the seals that beg off of the decks and walkways.  As an aside, the word monger is strange isn’t it?  You can have fish mongers and iron mongers, but not bread mongers.  I once heard an American in a very expensive restaurant talking about a cheese monger, which made me laugh quite a lot, particularly the way he said the ‘monger’ bit.  It made him sound slightly special and like being a cheese monger was the equivalent of going to school with a hat with a propellor on it and an elastic band round your glasses.

Back to the world of fish. The kids got through three buckets of fish and the seals, which were also very cute (I would probably have some of those as well, to ride to work, obviously) were in fish heaven.  Naturally there was a runty one, which was utterly hopeless at catching the fish and which all the seagulls bullied.  Jason fought its corner, ensuring that it got fed at least twice as much as the cunning ones.  There was also one with one milky eye, which looked rather like David Bowie would if he were a seal.  An interesting thought I’m sure you will agree.  Oscar didn’t know quite what to make of the whole affair.  First he thought they were dogs and got terribly excited.  I soon disabused him of this notion, at which point he took it into his head that they were swimming sausages, a firm belief from which he could not be swayed.  He thought the sausages were very exciting indeed and wanted to take one home.  Thankfully the buggie’s safety straps held out a treat and he neither drowned nor got savaged by a seal version of David Bowie.  Phew!

After about twenty minutes of being denied a pet sausage he got rather annoyed and so we adjourned to a less watery and dangerous place where nana’s supply of seagull friendly bread came in handy.  Oscar whirled about in a blizzard of gulls having a marvellous time trying to tempt the birdies to come and nest in his armpit.  They weren’t convinced, despite his alluring calls and interesting hand movements.  It was to his credit that he remained cheerful in the face of adversity and didn’t give up.  He knew with a shining certainty that given long enough he was going to lure one of those delightful birds into his clutches and take him home forever.  Sadly I got bored long before that time and we had to carry him screaming to the car where he fought like a mule to resist the evil straps of the car seat and get out to continue his bird tempting activities.  We are truly evil parents…

 

Tuesday April 22nd – The Manifold Delights of Eating Sand

Either the children have been marginally less annoying today, or we have one of two options: 1) I have been feeling calmer, or 2) I have spent less time with them.  I can’t believe that they would be any less annoying.  After all, that is their raison d’etre until they get old enough to become surly.  Surliness trumps annoyingness because it is both annoying and boring whereas annoyingness (which is a word I realise I have probably made up, or at least appropriated from someone else who made it up) can sometimes be mildly entertaining as well.  I think it may well be a combination of 1 & 2. 

I think I am calmer because I did get to finish Neil Gaiman last night without any interruption.  Not that it helped in my quest to read the one I got from the bookshop because Jason has shimmied off with it into a corner and keeps going out onto the verandah for a ’smoke’, with the book, appearing half an hour later looking owlish and slightly blinky.  I also got a reasonable night’s sleep last night, which has helped to soothe my fevered brow.  I also got to spend less time with them because they all went for a nap this afternoon leaving me to finish Rumpole of the Bailey by John Mortimer, which I’ve been reading to pass the time until Jason unhands the Neil Gaiman.  He’s still not finished so I’m now onto Andrea Cammilleri.  Not really a complaint because I like his books too.

The kids went for a nap because Tilly had to get up at the crack of dawn this morning to go and experience the joys of a Canadian school, and after that we went to the beach so they could have a picnic with their new cousin.  This involved eating sandy sandwiches in a howling gale for two hours, and was very exhausting.

Apparently the difference between Canadian schools and English schools is that they call break time ‘recess’ not break time, and they are allowed to have snack time.  Other than that Tilly can register no discernible differences whatsoever, despite the fact that the school she was invited to go to was a French Immersion school! So.  No differences there then.  Actually, to be fair to her, they had a whole load of visitors today who all spoke English.  They’re celebrating Earth Day here, which involves very earnest people in spectacles and rainbow coloured Kagoules coming to tell you not to put a plastic bag on a salmon, and try not to do too many poohs.  Don’t get me wrong. I think environmentalism is very important.  I’m quite keen on having a world for my children to grow up in.  I do think however, that if less strokey beardy people with socks and sandals and a penchant for waterproof rainwear and hemp based products were involved in the marketing, things would look up a bit in general.  It strikes me that the same criteria could probably be shifted wholesale onto the how to make Christian fundamentalism more attractive too.  I realise that I am probably in danger of getting stoned to death here, or at the very least receiving some rather snitty e-mails, but hey, I’m approaching middle age and one should walk on the wild side at my time of life.

The picnic, I have to say, in complete and utter honesty, was hideous.  We all know I’m not a naturally outdoorsy person.  I think camping is God’s way of punishing people for not getting with the programme and buying a house.  I happen to rate picnics that don’t involve Aston Martins and hampers from Fortnum and Mason at about the same level.  Unfortunately for me this was about as far removed from a Fortnum and Mason afternoon in close proximity with Daniel Craig as a trilobite is from a human being.  It was lovely to meet up with family again, but I’d much rather have done it in a warm restaurant.  I’d have even considered doing it in a McDonald’s Play Barn (which will underline for you how desperate it was).  In fact, in a car, by a pile of loose gravel chippings at the edge of the M25 was beginning to look attractive after about ninety minutes, when I lost the feeling in my fingers and my nose was set to perpetual ‘run’.  The views of Mount Baker from Willows Beach were lovely if you could look directly into the wind that was blowing sharply off the sea for long enough.  It was scant consolation.

Oscar decided that he hated having sandy toes.  Matilda decided that she was a ’sand mole’ and promptly made a huge sandy burrow, or ‘hole’ as I like to think of it, which she excavated by kicking more sand over the picnic blanket.  Tallulah then jumped into the mole hole just to annoy Tilly.  She buried herself in it, which dislodged more sand onto the picnic blanket.  By then Oscar had rolled his banana in the sand.  I was resigned to it by this point as he had already crunched his way thoughtfully through a sand and tuna sandwich.  When Jason finally put his foot down and said that it was time for Oscar to have a nap, the kids were hysterical.  They were having a lovely time.  This meant more tears and more snot as we had to forcibly evict them from the beach with Oscar howling like a banshee because he was totally exhausted and sick of the sight of sand.  By the time we left, not only could I not feel my fingers but I had one of those cold headaches, just like the ones you get from drinking too much slush puppy (or slurpee as they are called here) too fast.

The  car on the way home was full of sand and miserable children, but I didn’t care.  Half way home I began to thaw out.  By the time we got back and they were in bed I was ensconced on the sofa with Rumpole, a large coffee and some ibuprofen the world was a brighter place altogether.  Don’t get me wrong, the day would actually have been quite nice were it not for the weather.  Willows Beach is beautiful.  The views are stunning, and there is also a lovely park, a tea room and some public toilets which are actually clean and functional.  If you had to take your children to the beach you could do a lot, lot worse.  The sun was shining today, unfortunately it seemed to be shining from the Arctic.  Twenty minutes and a trip to the tea room for chips and steaming vats of coffee would have been acceptable, two hours in a sandy hell hole, even with some delicious home made shortbread was not so good.

Right.  I have to go and fish Oscar and Tallulah out of the shower where they are playing the eternally popular bucket game.  Tilly is trying to chase Jason across the verandah to tie him up and torture him (the bear ears have gone missing again!).  Being tied up and tortured interferes with his intensive reading programme, so he has now locked her out on the verandah in the cold and is sitting in the warm in the lounge reading his book.  He has just gone to open negotiations to let her back in, but she refuses to relinquish the idea of torture, so I feel I may have to smuggle a blanket out to her for later on.

Monday April 21st – Nine things I hate about you…

Why is it, when you’re counting every minute until bed time, the time deliberately grinds exceeding slow?  It’s that watched pot syndrome I suppose.  Whatever it is, it’s driving me nuts.  The kids are being irritating, no more irritating than normal I think, but I am very sensitive to being irritated today and consequently we are not bonding and our parent/child relationship is being compromised in psychobabble speak.  Here are some of the things that have annoyed me about them today:

1. Tallulah wiping her spaghetti hoop laden face repeatedly on her sleeve despite being told every day for the past two years that sleeves are not appropriate receptacles for food, snot, dribble or any other sort of extruding facial matter.
2. Tallulah peeing her pants in the car on the way home from shopping despite ninety seven pee breaks.
3. Tallulah giving herself a nose bleed by repetitively picking her nose until it bleeds and then having hysterics because she thinks she may be dying despite the fact that she has been doing this every morning for the past two weeks, and any other time she can get her finger firmly up her hooter when she thinks nobody is looking.  She is constantly amazed by the fact that she has nose bleeds and has told me that: ‘I just don’t understand it mama.  I’m worried!’
4. Oscar waiting until we were in the bookshop which has no toilet to fill his nappy with foul smelling excrement.  He has now done this three times in one week in the same shop.  It is now officially a pattern and if he randomly comes to that shop when he is an elderly man, despite having no recollection of this visit, he will randomly fill his pants with shit, just like Pavlov’s dogs, only stinkier.
5. Matilda and Tallulah pestering me for the past three weeks to do one of the grown up jigsaws that is on the shelf by the fireplace.  Me finally making time to do it with them this afternoon and them failing to listen, failing to care and then hating doing jigsaws but only after we had sorted 1000 small pieces to find the edges.  And I have a really good book that I would much rather be reading.
6. Matilda pretending to be me and running around most of the day trying to get her sister into trouble by being hideously passive aggressively maternal and saying things like: ‘Tallulah, I’m so worried about you.  You really shouldn’t be doing that.’ Just as I am passing.
7. Matilda sulking wildly because not only does Tallulah get punished for whatever stupid and ridiculous thing she happens to be doing at that particular moment, but so does Tilly, for being a sneak and pretending to be thirty six when she’s just nearly nine.
8. Oscar throwing his spaghetti hoops at the window.  Oscar throwing his fish and pasta at the window and missing and hitting me instead.  Oscar throwing his shreddies on the table and then massaging them into a fine paste which then stuck to the table.  The only benefit of this was the fact that he couldn’t then throw these at the window because they were welded to the varnish.  It took me ten minutes of scrubbing to get them off.
9. Tallulah thinking that the definition of sharing is: ‘I’ll have yours, I’ll have mine, I’ll have everyone else’s and if there’s anything else left, however horrible and skanky it may be, I’ll have that as well.’

I should think of ten to make it nice and even.  To be honest, if I try I can probably get it up to fifty on the strength of this afternoon alone, but just recalling those nine has made me pretty down in the dumps as it is, and I am meant to be on holiday.  Not that you’d think it today.  Mostly today I have felt chained to the grind stone of drudgery, household chores and repetitive shouting that is the lot of housewives and mothers everywhere.  I expect if you compare my blog to that of a woman in Uganda with three children it would be remarkably similar in many ways.

Apart from that, we’ve been having a lot of weather today.  We had torrential rain this morning.  Once this cleared up we had a fantastic bank of fog which swept down the whole of the stretch of water in front of the house and obliterated everything for miles around.  It then swept dramatically away in the space of about ten minutes, whereupon it started to snow.  Since then it has behaved itself and I am now sitting with the verandah doors open, enjoying the last rays of a gorgeous evening sunset over the water and the mountains.  It can be difficult to know how to dress in these extreme weather situations so we tend to go for easily off and onnable layers and a boot full of random extras that may or may not come in handy.  It’s worked so far.

We visited the bookshop again.  Jason and the man at the bookshop are now the best of friends.  Jason has exhausted John Grisham, and apart from the odd foray into my pile of books he is now going through Robert Ludlum which he says is interesting.  My Gran used to read Robert Ludlum, can’t say I’ve ever indulged.  I’m reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman.  It’s brilliant.  I hope I finish it tonight because I made the bookshop man’s life happy by getting four on my own account today, and one is another Neil Gaiman that the bookshop man said was excellent.  It’s ridiculous really.  I know I shouldn’t be buying books to take home.  They weigh a ton, but so far we must have bought about twenty or thirty, most of which are mine and most of which will undoubtedly be coming home with us.  I can’t help it milud.  The addiction is getting worse and with seven bookshops on the doorsteps things are not likely to improve soon.

We went to a pub called Beacon Landing for lunch.  It’s on the waterfront in Sidney, just down from the Rum Runner where Jason and I went on Friday.  The food was fine, the service was good and Oscar got terribly excited by the sea gulls wheeling outside the window.  Maybe that’s why he threw his fish at them.  He obviously mistook me for a fellow gull.  Despite our love of animals I have failed to track down the hummingbird mixture the kind lady who e-mailed me last week recommended. I daren’t make my own in case  I either get it wrong and kill them, or get it wrong and wake up to find them all welded to the feeder with rock hard sugar solution.  It’s not easy being responsible for flocks of hummingbirds.  I worry…

Jason has gone to the casino this evening.  This may be why the children are more difficult to herd.  We are after all, one hand down.  I don’t begrudge him his fun, specially if he wins.  Plus he’s been out with all three of the little varmints on numerous occasions this holiday, leaving me to have some peace, so it’s only fair he gets his go at pretending to be child free.  Mind you, if he pretends to be wife free I shall be forced to cut his bits and pieces off.  He has borne that in mind, which is wise.