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.