Katyboo1’s Weblog

Isn’t it odd how Sundays are kind of Sundayish no matter where you are in the world?  You wouldn’t think they would be like that over here really, everything is open, nothing shuts at four o’clock, it’s just like a regular day, except it isn’t.  There’s still a miasma of Sundayishness creeping over everything no matter what.  I’m not a big fan of Sundays (you may have guessed I’m not a regular church goer. I like to think of myself as a lapsed atheist with apathy issues), which probably explains why I’ve got a spectacular headache brewing and am going off to soak my weary bones in a terrifying Japanese bath quite shortly.  Sundays just tire me out.

I don’t think it was helped by the fact that Tilly had a hideous nightmare in the wee small hours and woke me at 1.00 a.m. to inform me of the fact.  I gave her some rather sleepy words of fierce wisdom, such as: ‘Oh dear! You’ll be fine.’ and gave her a hug before shoving her back to bed.  Twenty minutes later I woke from a near coma to hear a strange howling noise.  I thought it was a wild animal in the garden and was fully prepared to get Jason and his high powered torch galloping about on the decking.  Then I realised it was coming from downstairs.  Poor Tilly was sitting in bed, roaring her eyes out and looking totally terrified.  We are reading a book called Skulduggery Pleasant by Derek Landy at the moment.  She chose it because her teacher is reading it to her at school and she’s going to miss the end.  Despite the fact that she’s already read the chapter we had as a bedtime story last night, she was frightened because the story was all about a strange man smashing through some french windows to catch a little girl, and she was convinced someone was going to do the same to her.  It took me a good twenty minutes to calm her down enough to get her back to sleep.

Naturally by this time I was wide awake and spent the next hour lying in bed cursing Skulduggery Pleasant quite virulently.  Having just maligned him I have to say that it is quite a good book, although not one suitable for reading to impressionable eight year olds just before bed time.  Tallulah however, is made of sterner stuff.  She never bats an eyelid about possible intruders through the French windows, and snored soundly through Tilly’s abdabs, so it just goes to show what a fierce disposition can do for you.

Despite its lack of effect on ebullient four year olds, we are now reading Skulduggery during the day (which is how I managed to get through Salem’s Lot, Carrie and The Amityville Horror, before I gave up on horror as a genre altogether.  It was just too exhausting), and sticking with Nicholas by Goscinny and Sempe in the evenings.  Nicholas is an absolute blast.  They’re stories about a bunch of French school children, written in the fifties or sixties I think.  I used to read the books when I was a kid, and Phaidon have just reissued them.  They’re beautiful things, unfortunately 12 quid each, but it had to be done, so there you go.  They are so funny, the kids love them, mainly because they’re all about naughty school boys fighting with each other.  Until I started reading them to the girls I had forgotten about Cuthbert, who is probably my favourite character.  He is top of the class and teacher’s pet.  All the other kids hate him, but they aren’t allowed to hit him because he wears glasses.  Every time he has to take his glasses off for whatever reason, they all pile in to punch him in the nose.  He spends a lot of time rolling around on the floor moaning about how unfair life is and how he’s going to tell his mum and dad.  Bless him!

So, the interlude in the early hours probably explains why I’ve had the makings of a crashing headache all day and have spent about five hours this afternoon yawning so much I look like one of those toothbrush adverts where the man has a flip top head.  The fact that Oscar is absolutely vile at the moment and is spending all his time wrecking things, smashing things and hitting things when he’s not throwing his dinner at the walls and screaming is probably also a factor in the headache department.  All he really wants to do is sleep and eat vanilla yogurt, and any attempt to make him do anything else is met with the staunchest resistance, which is a bit of a shame.  I think he’s going through a growth spurt, or turning into a psychopath.  It’s hard to tell the difference at times.

Today the girls spent the afternoon with their Nana visiting various beaches.  Tilly found a couple of dead crabs and spent several hours making a crab graveyard, which seemed to give her enormous pleasure in a macabre sort of way.  Tallulah got stuck in a giant tin fish in a playground and landed on her head.  It doesn’t seem to have done her any noticeable damage, although how would one know?  Her rampant curls do cushion most blows to the head, which is a bonus.  They came home sandy but happy.

We did more house hunting with Oscar the grouch.  Today wasn’t so much fun.  We didn’t find anything we liked, so much so that despite there being several open house events, we didn’t even get out of the car to look.  We also went to a new development called Bear Mountain.  It really is a mountain which is being filled with swanky looking houses and golf clubs and a light railway.  It’s very posh and very tasteful, but rather beige and a bit like Marks and Spencers in housing form.  Some of the houses are immense, and all carry an immense price tag, but what we found weird was the fact that none of them had more than about a patio’s worth of garden.  What is the point of having seven bedrooms and a playroom the size of Denmark if you can’t send your children to the bottom of the garden to ‘play’, while you have a large urn of tea, a fag and a soothing listen to Radio Four?  I don’t think I can cope with being that foreign.  It’s too demanding.

One other thing I find slightly troubling is this half bathroom business.  Quite a lot of house details advertise 3 and a half bathrooms.  What is half a bathroom?  I imagine half of everything with the other half sawn away and obviously given to the house next door.  If you want your full bathroom facilities you obviously have to get friendly with your neighbours otherwise you’ll be peeing all over half a candlewick pedestal mat for the rest of your life.  Urgh!

The final thing that was very weird to us was the concept of paying nearly a million dollars for a house which not only has no garden and only half bathrooms, but which is so close to your next door neighbour you can see him using the other half of your bathroom.  Why?  Why don’t they have a need for privacy or personal space?  Maybe it’s because the country is so vast that they’re afraid if they live more than ten yards from another person’s armpit they will be lost in the wilderness forever. It could be Tallulah’s fear of being eaten by bears writ large.  I think so.

So.  That was our day.  House hunting, a bit of light shopping, mardy children and a headache.  Just that Sunday feeling.  Roll on next week.