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…