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.