Saturday 31st May – Katy’s Blingtastic Criborama

I’ve been watching quite a lot of MTV Cribs recently and apart from Alex James from Blur, whose house was fab, I have to say that I haven’t been very impressed with the things people buy when they are stinking rich.  It made me think about what I would buy if I were stinking rich.  This is the showy, ostentatiously ‘me, me, me’ stuff you understand.  If I were disgustingly rich I have lots of plans for charitable stuff and helping people out, as I’m sure most of us do.  Except those idiots who say that their life isn’t going to change and die bloated on takeaway pizzas in front of thirty years worth of Bill episodes on Blu Ray, obviously.  So, take it as read that I will be kind to the planet, animals, people with one leg and all me mates.  Here is the list of outrageously selfish things I would buy if I were as rich as Bill Gates

 

On Cribs they always show you their cars.  Here is what I would have:

 

• A retro Morris Traveller Van thingy, you know the ones with the green paint and the wood panelling.
• A purple bubble car just big enough for me and a packet of hobnobs
• An ordinary Morris Minor for every day purposes
• A tandem
• A really old car, like Brum, made big.  I don’t care what type it is really, I just think they look lovely with big old headlamps and stuff.
• A penny farthing (just for a laugh)
• A routemaster bus (and all the outfits. I want to work the ticket machine)

 

No twenty four inch rims or industrial sized Hummers for me thank you very much.

 

They always show you their fridges too.  I have a pale blue Smeg fridge which I love.  It’s wildly impractical, but I love its bulbous shape and its general pale blueness.  If I were rich I’d get them to make me a bank of blue fridges and freezers which would mean they were actually big enough to hold all the food, but would still look funky and retro.  I would also have an ice dispenser, because I like ice and I like having it dispensed.  I always feel decadent when someone dispenses ice about my person.

 

Inside the fridge they always have either:

 

• Organic food pre-prepared by their chef who follows their every move in his own customised Bentley
• Disgusting amounts of junk food, sausages on sticks and t.v. dinners
• Only drinks
• Nothing at all because they never eat in

 

My fridge would be a walking advert for Ocado and Selfridge’s food hall.  There would be a lot of San Pellegrino, because it’s very nice.  There would also be a lot of food. I mean, a lot of food.  I like food A LOT.  It would all be nice food (Jason and the kids can have separate fridges), but I would be going for quantity AND quality.  People would win competitions to come and nibble things out of my fridge, that’s how good it would be.  I’d have an ice cream maker too because I’ve always fancied one of those.

 

There would be no fridge magnets of any kind.

 

Alex James has a library.  It looked like a great library.  My only problem with it was that it was rather small.  I would like a library, but when I have a library it will be an actual library, with a librarian, and fires and big step ladders and huge chairs and bean bags.  There will be no television of any kind.  It will not just be full of old books, it will be full of every kind of book.  There will be an Amazon delivery every hour.  I will definitely have the entire Oxford English Dictionary for starters, and not on CD Rom.  I’ve always wanted to own the OED.  That would be so cool.  I will have a separate kids section with smaller shelves and chairs for midgets.  I will leave the library to the nation when I die.  It will be fab.  I will have library stamps too.  I like the idea of doing the stamping.

 

I’m definitely having a pantry too.  A big one with slate floors and interesting looking cupboards full of stuff that you might want to snack on in the night.  It will have a big table with a marble top in case I want to roll pastry, or make cheese, or just lounge about on a big marble topped table in my Manolos, wearing my Philip Treacey hat.

 

My kitchen will not have granite work tops I don’t care how fashionable they are.  I think they’re naff.  I’m having real tree wood, gently oiled by my horny handed gardener and man about the estate.  As far as oven’s go. I’ll have whatever Gordon Ramsay’s got thanks.  We won’t bother with a separate dining room, we’ll just have a huge fuck off kitchen which would be the size of most people’s houses.  There will be sofas and comfy chairs and a big no nonsense wooden table, none of these round circular things with matching napkins and plates the size of Mars.

 

There will be a huge integral tea urn with hot water on tap for endless hot beverages, sod the Kristal champagne.  There will be mugs for everyone (except my best friend Rachel who prefers a cup and saucer).  There will be much Emma Bridgewater.  It is likely there will be quite a lot of Nigella.  There will also be extensive trips to that lovely cookware shop I can’t think of the name of which is now on Marylebone High Street but which is also near Bibendum (Ah! Divertimenti).  We will need a lot of cupboard space.

 

There will be lots of paintings and arty stuff.  I may even get Tracey Emin in to do an installation in the hall, as long as it doesn’t upset the children.  Andy Goldsworthy can sculpt the garden and Diarmuid Gavin can prune the hedges into the shape of space ships.  I want a daguerreotype, preferably that one that Chuck Close did of Kate Moss if it’s available.  I’d also like a Stanley Spencer because they’re very soothing.  I’d like that Epstein sculpture of Jacob and the Angel, but I don’t think that the Tate have finished with it yet.

 

I’m having an artist’s studio so that I can give it a go.  I want one of those potter’s wheels and a potter to teach me how to pot as well.  I had a go once, it was brilliant.

 

I detest the gym, so we’re not having one of those.  I am having a proper swimming pool though.  An indoor one with non hairy floors and lots of fun stuff.  I’d quite like one like they’ve got in the Sanctuary in Covent Garden.  It’s got a swing over it.  How cool is that?

 

In Cribs there are invariably rooms for show where nobody actually goes in them.  These always seem to be dining rooms.  We won’t have that problem as we always use every room in every house we’ve ever lived in, usually for several conflicting things, all at once.  We will have lots of useless furniture though.  I am mad for Charles Rennie Mackintosh, although I prefer his painting to his furniture.  I do love his chairs though, even though they are bloody uncomfortable.  I will have to have some of his chairs so that we can all avoid sitting on them.  I might have a chaise longue as well in some ridiculously expensive material.  It won’t matter about the material, because you can’t actually sit on them properly anyway.  They just look louche and fabulous.

 

I will have a walk in wardrobe.  I know it’s very common, but there’s something brilliant about the idea of having whole rooms devoted solely to your extensive clothing collection.  Mine will have lots of lovely things in it including:

 

• Lots of Dior by John Galliano
• Lots of Alexander McQueen
• Lots of Armani
• Ozwald Boateng suits
• Philip Treacey hats
• Christian Louboutin shoes
• Manolo Blahnik Shoes
• Paul Smith everything (and some carpets and stuff)
• Alice Temperley things of great beauty
• Ghost exquisiteness
• Coast and Fenn Wright and Manson just for mucking around in
• Hundreds of pairs of Fat Face socks
• Mulberry handbags
• Undies courtesy of Agent Provocateur

 

I don’t do jewellery so you’re safe from my list of blingtastic stuff.

 

I’m having a big bathroom but you can keep your whirlpool jets and gold taps thanks.  Jason and I once stayed in the suite at the Malmaison in Leeds which has a giant square bath bigger than a king size bed which is so deep you can almost swim in it. You had to fill it with a big stand pipe thing and it had huge shower heads in the ceiling in clusters.  I’m having that one.  It even had waterproof pillows.  I’m having those too.

 

I’ll have another bathroom with a huge roll top bath in it for the days when I feel like being Victorian.  I’m also having another bathroom with one of those baths I saw when Boy George had money and wasn’t selling t-shirts down the market.  He had a huge copper bath that looked a bit like the one in the painting The Death of Marat.  And I’m having a wet room and a Hammam and loads of Jo Malone stuff to put in them.  In fact I will be known as that batty old lady with a hundred bathrooms but who still smells of wee and Yardley Lavender.

 

They always have cinema rooms in Cribs.  Given the fact that Jason has spent the last twelve months cannibalizing our living room into a cinema it is inevitable that we will have one too, despite my lack of enthusiasm.  I’m decorating it though.  I want it to look like a Fin De Siecle Paris brothel, but with comfier seats.  That’ll learn him.  I think we’ll have a theatre too, and invite travelling theatre troupes to come and perform Ibsen after breakfast.

 

We will have a branch of Starbucks just off the hall, where most of the Cribsters seem to put their non usable Versace themed dining rooms.  I will not have Versace themeing anywhere.  I think Versace is cheap and nasty.  Nor will we be having any Swarovski crystal anywhere in the house.  Instead we will have one wall of the downstairs loo painted in that blackboard paint and a box of chalks handy so people can write down their thoughts as they pooh.  It will be very therapeutic.

 

One of the other loo rooms will be wallpapered in tube maps of the world.  I like to think of travelling while I am on the toilet.  It helps to pass the time.  My mum and dad have their downstairs loo decorated in ordnance survey maps.  It’s very restful.

 

Floors will be stone and wood, not shiny.  I don’t do shiny.  I like hand woven rugs.  Kilims are nice even though they aren’t very fashionable any more.  I don’t care.  I’d like some Bill Amberg leather flooring as well, with underfloor heating.

 

Other important features of the house include:

 

• High ceilings
• Lots of windows and light
• Secret passages (but not naff old fashioned ones, cool, Napoleon Solo type ones)
• An underground lair
• Underground passages to access underground lair
• Swings indoors (but not in bedrooms, just for mucking about purposes)
• Corridors you can ride a bike down for when it’s wet outside
• A room with a bouncy castle and a trampolene in it
• An orangery, one with real oranges in it, and pineapples and lemons and ferns and cool, hairy plants, with glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly.
• A Bat pole
• Some kind of slide for when the hips are too knackered for the Bat pole.
• An indoor stream with loads of pretend ducks and sticks for hooking them out.  I like those themed ducks.  We’ll have one of each.
• An entire soundproof floor of the house for the children
• A ballroom with a great sprung floor and fabulous acoustics where I could have nights of excessive dancing.  It must have a glitter ball
• A sound proof room with the biggest drum kit in the world in, so that I can take drum lessons at last.

 

Outside the house would be:

 

• Woods with wildlife
• An entire play village like Petit Trianon at Versailles
• Lots of watery based stuff
• Walled gardens with a secret garden for the kids
• Orchards
• Organic fruit and veg
• A herb garden I can wander around with my trug wearing my Philip Treacey hat and waving secateurs.
• A huge playground for the kids with tree houses and dangerously cool stuff like they used to have in playgrounds when I was a kid
• A sculpture park
• A potting shed where Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall and Diarmuid can plan their next move.  Hugh will be my advisor on the estate and provide me with piglets and chicks and such like.

 

And that’s just for starters.  It’d be so cool they’d have to do a week’s worth of Cribs just on me!  It’d be awesome, and I’d invite you round for tea if you asked nicely.

 

Friday 30th May – The Twilight Zone of Half Term

I believe I may have set a world blogging record by mentioning every single day for a week how tired I am.  Today is no exception.  Today I have been so tired that I could hardly stop yawning all day.  I think I may have been bitten by a rogue tsetse fly, which given the warm, humid conditions is more likely than a lot of things I can think of.  The children didn’t wake up until nine thirty this morning, which is normally a substantial lie in for me, but to be honest I don’t think I’d have been any more awake if they’d stayed asleep until tea time.  My eyelids feel like bags of cement and every time I’ve sat down I’ve started to nod off. 

You know things are bad when everything you look at starts to resemble a giant pillow even when it’s a big, pointy spike.  I don’t get days like this very often any more.  They used to be quite a regular feature and having endured today I wonder how I managed not to lose the children or fall headfirst into a threshing machine or something.  It makes me believe in fate a lot more than usual.  Someone must have been looking after us all, and it definitely wasn’t me.  I have survived on willpower, keeping moving, caffeine and chocolate.  I also ate one of the new Bach Rescue Remedy lozenges which I am road testing for times of crisis.  After I’d eaten it I managed to do six of the Telegraph cryptic crossword clues in ten minutes.  Given that I have done six in the last six months I feel pretty confident it was the power of the lozenges working through me.  I can’t honestly tell yet whether they do a lot for trauma, but if you’re stuck on six across it’s worth giving them a bash.

My friend Sam was supposed to come and see us with her lovely baby son this afternoon, but Oscar was still poorly and I didn’t think it was fair on her to take the risk.  I would feel terrible if Oscar was a harbinger of plague.  I feel bad enough when he points at people and shouts: ‘Naughty!’, so if he gave them spots as well it would just be intolerable.  His spots are receding, which is good, although I don’t think he actually could have gotten any more spotty without actually having an out of body experience or mutating.  He is still very hot and has lovely, sticky eyes which when I try to clean them he wriggles and hits and shouts: ‘Jenkin!’ which is his way of saying ‘gently’.  It’s like trying to put an bandage on an eel.  It hasn’t stopped him running around the undergrowth hunting for beetles and being slightly disturbed by ants.  He loves a good beetle, but resolutely backs away from ants looking rather worried. I don’t get it.  I’m hoping when his vocabulary expands he will be able to explain it to me.  Maybe I just don’t want to know.

My mum rang up to see what we were doing.  She doesn’t mind about spots and snot and stuff so she invited us over to her house for the day when she found out that what we were doing was chasing beetles round the garden.  It was an absolute godsend as she cooked like a demon and I just had to field the children and sit around eating someone else’s food.  This was a good thing, particularly the roast chicken dinner with roast potatoes, and the home made minestrone soup.  I’ve been meaning to cook like that all week, but we have invariably ended up with spaghetti hoops on toast or pasta.  I feel that my adventures in half term have been an abysmal failure which could only have been made worse by the death of a close friend or relative.  My report card will surely say: ‘Could do better if tried harder.’

The kids have actually been really good for the last two days, which is typical.  They have just got the hang of being at home all day only to have half term end.  This probably means that next week will also be hellish as they adjust to the rigours of going back to school.  This I believe is what is known as ’sod’s law’.

I have many things to tell you.  There have been some lovely stats questions this week, the kids have made me cry with laughter today and apart from being a walking snore I have been in a much better mood.  Unfortunately I am too tired to tell you any of it, and am going to leave you with this very dull filler blog, in the hope that I will feel much perkier tomorrow and will be able to write wondrous tales of joy and happiness.

Things that Have Amused Me This Week

Given that it is half term it explains why this is a very short blog entry…

• My shopping list for Wednesday read as follows:

 

•  
  1. Stuff for Tilly’s sandwiches
  2. Crusty bread
  3. Mini sausages
  4. Short introduction to Socrates

 

Excellent stuff.  I used to live with a bloke who when I wrote a shopping list would hijack them and write: ‘sweets for Bryn’, ‘helicopter for Bryn’, at the bottom of every list.  Obviously his name was Bryn and he wasn’t just being philanthropic.  It used to make me laugh.

 

• My mum told me that apparently if you bang your elbow hard enough you can black your own eye.  I asked her if she had ever seen it, or seen it being done to someone, she said no, but someone told her it could happen and it sounded cool.  We then discussed whether we could get one of the kids to ‘accidentally on purpose’ do this so we could check it out.  This led to a discussion as to whether sneezing with your eyes open makes your eyeballs fall out.  I’ve always been too nervous to try, but I’m willing to pay someone a tenner to give it a go.

 

• The RSS feed on the BBC news website one day this week had the headline: ‘Satellite sends back historic pictures from Mars.’  This made me laugh so much I snorted coffee down my nose.  I know what they meant but I had visions of the satellite beaming down pictures of men in stove pipe hats and monocles, and women with crinolines holding up lumps of Mars’ surface and looking sternly into the camera.  In sepia, naturally.  Look. You know I don’t get out much.  Just bear with me.

 

• The lady on Radio Four last night who got very hot under the collar and accused Burma of not sharing very nicely with others.  The understatement of the century and let’s face it, they’re a military junta with a fifty year history of despotic rule and torture.  They’re hardly likely to be frightened into good behaviour by some American woman whinging about them not playing well with others and needing the naughty step are they?

 

• The fact that Tallulah said that one of the reasons that she liked hearing the stories about Nicholas so much was because he was, and I quote: ‘A silly sod!’  It had nothing to do with my influence on her, naturally.

 

• When Oscar got given a piece of chocolate caramel shortbread this afternoon and he chewed it very thoughtfully for a few minutes before making a disgusting hawking sound, spitting it into his palm and giving it me back claiming it was ‘too sticky’.

 

• The man on Springwatch this week who was trying to big up stoats by claiming they were ‘the tigers of Britain’.  Bless him for being so enthusiastic and committed to the world of stoats and their pr, but despite being fierce little warriors they’re hardly lithe six foot cats with teeth the size of sabres now are they? They are in fact about the size of an average sausage and come up to your ankle.  Yes they could give you a nasty nip, but you’re hardly likely to see one scurrying off into the undergrowth with your first born clamped between their jaws.

 

• Tallulah cheerfully telling my friend Caron’s sister that she thought that I was probably at least seventy years old today at lunch time.  Thanks for that.  That’s what half term will do to you.  I was only thirty six when I started.

Thursday 29th May – How To Go Out for a Treat With Your Friend

Most people, when going out for treats with one of their best friends have a lovely time.  They go out and do treaty things like eating dinner and having cool chats and not having their children around them and going to the theatre.  Sometimes, if they are very lucky they buy shoes as well.  They may even purchase books.

Here is what I do when I go out for a treat with my friend (and just because, you understand, I like to be different and a bit avant garde…):

You run round like a blue arsed fly all day, trying to entertain your children so that they will love you because it is half term and because it will make you feel better about going out later.  It all goes horribly wrong and they hate you and can’t wait to go out with their father and leave you (see yesterday’s blog entry for full and frank details).

You spend a lot of time before going out mopping up baby sick, administering Calpol and wondering if you’re being too blase and if in fact when you get where you are going on your treat your husband will ring you to say that your child has had a fit and is now dying in the back of an ambulance on the way to hospital and IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT YOU HEARTLESS COW.

You push said thoughts to the back of your mind, stuff your child in bed for a nap whether they like it or not and get on with the three hundred tons of mountainous laundry which has randomly appeared in your kitchen and is threatening to block all the exits if you don’t do something about it.  You spend a lot of time swearing about the nature of small socks and laundry in general. You dye the pale blue bathmat pink.

You forget that the Ocado man was coming and go to the toilet just as they arrive, thus meaning lots of hammering on front door, lots of you shouting: ‘I’m coming! Just a minute! Yes! Yes! I’m coming for God’s sake.’  You then trip over the bottoms of your own trousers, but don’t actually kill yourself and manage to get the door open and the order in with dignity still vaguely intact.

You wonder why you ordered yet more bleach when you already have six bottles in the cupboard under the sink, which is also where you keep your alcohol because it is the only cupboard in the house with a lock on, and much as you don’t want your kids to drink bleach, you also don’t want them to down a bottle of Raspberry Stoli either thanks very much.  You wish you had ordered more wine instead of more bleach because even though you don’t really drink, you could kill a glass right now.

There’s somebody at the door.  You think it’s Andrea.  You think you’re late.  You panic.  You look at the clock.  It’s half four. You’re not late.  You go to the door.  It’s not Andrea.  It’s your dad.  He wants to eat all your Rice Works lovely soy sauce nachos.  You let him, thinking of the hideous sweet chilli nachos incident of last week and smirking inwardly.  You tell him all your woes.  He wishes he hadn’t come.  He eats your crisps anyway and then buggers off.

Andrea arrives and when Jason gets home from work you bugger off too, leaving a cross man in charge of a cross baby for the evening.  You don’t care if they’re cross because frankly you’ve had enough of the lot of them, and just sitting in a car with no kids is paradise enough.

You change your mind when you and Andrea get stuck on the A46 bypass near Longbridge for three and a half fucking hours due to flooding which you can’t see, but which necessitates you missing the play that you were really looking forward to.

You are very grateful that you had a wee before you came out.

You are very sad that you didn’t pack some of the Ocado order in your bag because the lovely dinner you were supposed to be eating at The Dirty Duck is now being eaten by Andrea’s mum instead and you are stuck next to a Pet World lorry with your stomach rumbling in the manner of storm clouds massing over Kilimanjaro.

You listen to an extraordinary amount of Radio Four.  You decide that you like Mark Lawson, despite the fact that he’s a bit sceptical about Klimt.  You are sorry that Beryl Cook is dead.  You don’t really like Barbara Pym, even if Penelope Wilton is reading it (Andrea does like Barbara Pym.  We agree to differ).  You are in agreement that Burma is not very good at playing with other children and needs to learn to share nicely.  You hate the travel news cut ins and local radio announcers quite a lot, and Schubert is wank.  Schubert is in fact Poohbert.

You arrive in Stratford five minutes before the interval.  You are outraged that three teaspoons of chicken noodle salad with sesame seeds on is a fiver.  You pay for it anyway and eat it in ninety seconds along with a large slice of chocolate cake, a curly wurly and fourteen pints of black coffee.

You confess to the woman behind the counter that you don’t know the exact ingredients of a Curly Wurly, but that they are very moreish anyway, and you think that your fillings can stand the strain.

You meet Andrea’s mum, who didn’t enjoy the first half much due to the fact that she was worried her daughter would be spending the night camping on the A46 Longbridge Bypass, and it distracted her rather.

You watch the second half of the play sat next to a very pleasant man, who nevertheless trumps like a steam train throughout the duration of the rest of the play and leaves you feeling rather nauseous and regretting that Curly Wurly after all.

The play is terrible, thanks to the fact that the producer decided to concentrate on playing it as a misogynistic male rape fantasy with people with cod Brummy accents and some inexplicable Gendarmes.  The only decent one in it was Michelle Gomez from Green Wing, who acted her little socks off, but it didn’t really make up for it. You wish you had missed the whole play and gone out for dinner and a bottle of wine instead.

You are amazed because Dr. Legge from Eastenders makes a sudden appearance in the last act, and you thought he was dead.  It seems that he is not dead, he just has a limp.  You wonder if this is a comedy limp to reinforce a misogynistic male rape fantasy with gendarmes, or a real limp.  You ponder this for some time.  It stops you falling asleep on farty man’s shoulder and gassing yourself to death.

You walk to the car park in the rain with Andrea who agrees with you about the play and decide you will not book a return visit to see the first half.  You get back to the Longbridge bypass only to find that the bit you need to go down is now closed, and there are no diversion signs.  It is eleven o’clock at night and you are aweary.

You park in a layby with a map and poke about the A roads with your fingers pretending to be knowledgeable.  You then confess to each other that you haven’t got a bloody clue, but rather than spending the night in a layby it would be a good idea to set off and see what happens.

You circulate round Warwick’s ridiculous one way system wondering how they can signpost the castle, the car parks, the bank, and the women’s institute, but if you want to get to Leamington Spa you might as well whistle.  You agree that when you get out of this mess you will write a strongly worded letter to the council.

Eventually you end up on the A46 near Coventry, more by luck than judgement.  You get home at half past midnight after an interesting discussion about creationism versus evolution with reference to Aristotelian philosophy, Richard Dawkins and W. B. Yeats.  You think you must be very tired because normally you have conversations about badly fitting bras and cake.

You have to have a cup of tea before you go to bed and a calming rest because you’re reeling from your conversational acrobatics and your mind is on overdrive due to the fourteen pints of black coffee you ingested earlier.  You are amazed that you don’t have a headache because you’ve worked really hard for one.

You decide never to go out for a treat again.

Wednesday 28th May – Why I hate Sainsburys Cafe – the bastards…

Thank God it really is Wednesday today.  Not only that but I really do think it is Wednesday and not some other random day of the week.  I’m firm, I’m focused, I know what day it is.  I am impressed with myself.  I heard Terry Pratchett being interviewed on the radio by John Humphries the other week and he was talking about his Alzheimer’s diagnosis.  He was saying that we all make jokes about it when we have those moments where we forget things, and it’s because we’re all scared that it might be true. 

I know one thing’s for sure.  I am so terribly disorganised and my memory is so very, very appalling that if I do turn out to have Alzheimer’s nobody will know about it until the very last minute anyway.  I shall live a relatively happy life if that’s the way I finally shuffle off this mortal coil because I really am used to that stuff.  I read about Iris Murdoch in that book by her husband where he said that one of the things that most upset him was the fact that as the illness progressed she really liked watching Teletubbies.  I think that would upset me too.  I loathe Teletubbies.  Maybe I’ll take that as my benchmark.  Once I start sitting down with a nice cup of tea and thinking; ‘Hoorah! Teletubbies.  How very soothing.’ That’s when we need to call the doctors.  Up to that point I shall just galumph about as normal forgetting my phone number, wandering into random rooms eighteen times before remembering what I came in for, never knowing what day it is and not being able to find the words to finish any sentence other than: ‘Put that down!’ or ‘Don’t do that!’

I decided today that we would go out regardless of the weather, the political situation in Afghanistan and the state of my bank account.  I could no longer stomach the thought of being stuck in the house with three small children, trying to keep them entertained and finding new and ever increasing ways of explaining why the television does not follow us from room to room in the on position.  I watched an MTV Cribs once where some footballer and his soap wife had a television on a swivel stand in their kitchen so whatever they were doing they could watch it.  The thought of it made me want to weep.  The children think that it is the most brilliant invention of the century, other than having small screens inserted into the palms of their hands that is.

I was very unpopular in my decision to get active because I actually got Matilda out of bed before ten thirty this morning.  She’s a real night bird.  She is allowed to stay up in the evenings as long as she stays in her room and amuses herself.  Unlike during the day when she spends most of the time in a coma of ennui and boredom if you don’t prod her with a stick, she is perfectly happy to entertain herself all night if needs be.  She reads, she writes, she creates ‘things’ out of cardboard and string.  She listens to CD’s and enacts one woman plays of epic length.  On school nights we usually force her at gunpoint into bed by about half past ten.  During the holidays she can stay up until we got to bed, as long as she doesn’t wake her sister.  This means that she usually likes to sleep in until about eleven in the mornings.  This morning she sat at the breakfast table with a face like a smacked bum, demanding to know why she had to go and get dressed.  She’s clearly in training for her teens which are now only a few short years away, god help us.

In the meantime, Tallulah has turned into Silas Marner.  She has managed to persuade Jason to open her piggy bank for her, in which is the princely sum of forty four pence.  Since then she has been extorting money with menaces from whoever passes by and keeping it in a pencil case.  She managed to get twenty five pence out of my dad yesterday, which I was most impressed by.  She has also conned her dad into coughing up some change.  This morning the first sound I was actually aware of was a repetitive jingling motion.  She was keeping herself busy by pouring all her money on the floor, putting it in stacks, pretending to count it and scooping it back into her purse.  And repeat. Endlessly until mum gets up and begrudgingly serves breakfast.  She then spent the entire of breakfast discussing how much money she had, how much more money she could get, and what she might spend it on whilst still keeping exactly the same amount of money.  I might buy her some fingerless gloves and a tea bag on a string for her birthday.

Oscar is poorly.  He’s been cutting a tooth all week.  Yesterday he showed me that it had finally come through the gum and so I foolishly thought that the worst was over.  Clearly, after all these years of trraining I know nothing.  It’s only just begun as the horribly stick insectish Karen Carpenter used to warble.  He woke me six times in the night and Jason twice (I was clearly dead to the world at this point as I never heard a thing).  His bed is now a morass of Calpol infested sheets, and this morning when he finally arose from his pit he was smothered from head to foot in spots, including all over his face and in his hair.  He refused breakfast, demanded milk and then vomited it all over himself, his newly dressed sister and the cream sofa in spectacular fashion, ten minutes before the taxi arrived to take us out.  It was bedlam.

I can’t make my mind up if it’s an important rash, or just one of those rashes that Oscar gets whenever he gets hot.  It’s definitely not chicken pox, as I am a world expert at chicken pox, but it coiuld be almost anything else from Dengue Fever to Beri Beri, to the effect of too much calpol being rubbed lightly over pyjamas for eight hours.  I really don’t know.  I’ve decided to stop worrying about it and just get on with it.  Because we were going out I scraped him down, threw clean clothes on him and went.  My theory being that he can be ill almost anywhere because he’s very portable, and he might as well be ill out and away from my cream sofa than in and near to it.

He perked up remarkably in the taxi and made brumming noises and danced to the radio, so I feel that we can probably cross Dengue fever off of our list, which is nice.  In Sainsburys’ where we had to go because Matilda needs a packed lunch for her trip out with her friend tomorrow, and I only found out after I’d placed the Ocado order, he played happily and tried to snatch all the cakes from the shelves as we went past, which I thought was another good sign.  I decided to feed the kids in the cafe at Sainsburys because they do this cool kids lunch deal where they can choose five items for a packed lunch and the kids really like it.  We were going to Borders straight afterwards to play and eat cake, but they don’t like Starbucks’ sandwiches, so I thought this would avoid trauma.  How wrong I was.

I hate Sainsburys’ cafe at the best of times.  Here are things you can always guarantee about it:

1. It’s staffed by the same people who supply staff for Glenfield Co-op.  Job opportunity workers who don’t know one end of a slice of bread and butter from the other.  Consequently, ordering hot food is more than your life is worth.  If you want to wait forty five minutes for a jacket potato which is burned on the outside and raw in the middle, be my guest.
2. The coffee machine is always broken and they have to apologise to everyone because they can’t make a latte, or indeed anything that doesn’t involve Nescafe and a tea spoon.
3. The woman who works the till knows no more about working the till than me (and when you consider that during my ill fated career as a waitress I once charged two poor pensioners twenty four pounds for two tea cakes and a pot of tea, you will see what I mean).
4. There is always a queue and it is always the longest, slowest queue in the entire world.
5. They run out of things.  You make your mind up to have ‘x’ and they say: ‘I’m sorry.  We’re out of ‘x’.’ and you think: ‘Bloody hell! This is a supermarket for  pity’s sake.  How can you run out of bread/jam/sausages in a supermarket? Hop across the tills and get some more you lazy peasant.’  Well, you do if you’re me anyway.
6. It’s shit.  It’s always shit.  It never gets any better.  It’s always utterly, utterly shit.

So.  With this in mind, we get there only to find that they have completely changed their approach to fun kids’ meals.  Now, they bag them up for you and choose what sandwiches you’re going to have in them.  You would think, given the peculiarities of small children that they would pick something like ham, or cheese, or either.  Nope! You could have chicken and sweetcorn with mayonnaise or egg and cress with mayonnaise.  My children hate these sandwiches.  They are hysterical with loathing at the thought of these sandwiches.  All except Oscar, who has seen food and is now going mental because he’s hot, he’s spotty and he is starving because he’s vomited the contents of his stomach all over my sofa.  I can’t back out now because otherwise Oscar will explode with rage and I am trapped.

I make an executive mum style decision.  I announce that we will have one packet of salmon sandwiches and one packet of BLT sandwiches.  I announce that the brown bread will not kill them (they already hate me.  See yesterday’s blog).  I announce that I will pick all the greenery and reddery out of the sandwiches.  I say that they only have to eat half of the sandwich anyway because Oscar will share the salmon with Tallulah (they both like salmon) and Tilly will share the bacon with me (I don’t like it, but I’m going to eat it anyway because I hate everything by now).  We get smoothies (which doctors say are now going to be responsible for the entire generation of children growing into adulthood now having blackened stumps for teeth and that we should let them eat Mars bars instead) and I bribe them with the promise of cake in Borders.  They look stricken.

There is only one other woman in the queue in front of us.  It takes the woman at the till ten minutes to serve her one cup of coffee (‘you’ll have to have instant.  We can’t do lattes).  She rings it into the till only to find that the woman in front of me is also slow and was waiting to announced that she wanted another cup of coffee for her friend.  Ten minutes later, cup number two hoves into view a la Mrs. Overall, i.e. half is now in the saucer.  It takes another five minutes to pay.  After all, whilst waiting for twenty minutes at the till why would you actually get your purse out, or even know where it was?

In the meantime Tilly is in virtual tears over the thought that she will have to eat a brown bread bacon sandwich.  Tallulah is dubiously telling me how nice salmon sandwiches are (thus trying to talk herself into it), but also flapping about undressing in the aisle for some unknown reason, and nearly killing a pensioner by throwing her coat in the air and nearly blinding the poor bloke with her buttons.  Oscar is going completely insane because nobody is letting him anywhere near the food that he can see and smell and he’s starving.  He has tears running down his spotty little cheeks and is raising his arms in supplication shouting: ‘Out! Out! Din nah!’  The idiot woman at the till who is still fumbling with her purse is throwing me filthy looks as if to say: ‘Can’t you control your children better? You reprobate mother you.’  I am seething with fury and internally weeping into my bosom, wondering why we didn’t just stay at home and watch television.  I am very glad that guns are not legal in this country now, because my trigger finger is itching uncontrollably and the red mist is starting to descend.

After I had paid for lunch and we were all sat down,  the hideousness continued.  Tilly choked on every miniscule mouthful, threatening to vomit, gagging, sighing, rolling her eyes and crying.  Tallulah, who was entranced by Tilly’s bad behaviour merely pretended to nibble her sandwich whilst not actually eating it, and Oscar sat in a sicky smelling bundle on my knee, devouring everything that came near him.  I was very, very, very depressed indeed.  After twenty minutes when they had barely eaten anything and Oscar had wiped his plate clean, I herded them out with a stern lecture on what was the bloody point of it all, and no sweetie time for you (which sadly meant no sweetie time for me either, which was most aggravating) and we stomped to Borders.

I did think about not going to Borders either, but as I had already been punished with a crappy lunch and miserable children and was not getting cake either, I decided that I’d suffered enough and we would go anyway.  Luckily they were having an activity day, so the kids were kept amused and I could sit on a small stool and read without having to run round the shop herding them like weevils.  They made spy passports and spy notebooks (It was a James Bond theme day), and had a brilliant time with glue and glitter.  I was happy because they were rubbing glue and glitter into someone else’s carpet and not mine.

Then there were some people doing experiments and they got to make snow and watch an indoor volcano explode.  The kids were very impressed.  I’m not sure what this had to do with James Bond, unless this was the bit where they showed you how to do all the cool, evil villain gadgets and that they were then going on to show you how to build your underground lair under the recently exploded volcano.  All I know is that it kept them amused for an hour before we went home, which was more than I could have hoped for, despite the fact that we weren’t very popular because Tallulah collapsed the marble run game and the woman had to spend forty minutes crouched on the floor putting it back together.

When we got home I threw them all in the bath.  This is usually my fail safe. When they are all being scratchy and awful a bath usually helps a lot.  They calm down and play nicely together.  They also really needed a bath due to being covered in paint, glue and glitter from their spyware, and the fact that Oscar still smelled of sick.  I had of course failed to factor in the fact that Oscar was feeling poorly.  He barricaded himself into the end of the bath and threw things at the girls.  I had just sorted this out when there came the hideous cry of: ‘Oscar’s done a pooh! Urghhhh!’ and so they all had to come out while I scrubbed the bath.  It was at this point that I sat on the floor and thought: ‘How bad can the television be?’  I got a whole half an hour of peace before the girls dad descended to take them out for the evening, the marvellous man.  Not so marvellous because he’s bringing them back at half eight in the morning, but it’s a start.

Oscar is now in bed, wearing Tallulah’s sun hat, which he has taken a violent passion for and refuses to remove.  I tried to wrench it off his head on the way up there on the grounds that it was bound to make him more hot and uncomfortable, but he screamed blue murder until I put it back on.  Jason will kill me if he overheats in a sun hat, but I have tried my best, and frankly I can do no more.

Andrea is coming to pick me up at five o’clock.  We’re going to the theatre for the first time in ages.  We’re off to the RSC to see Taming of the Shrew.  I’ve been looking forward to it for weeks, and now I’m so tired I really don’t want to go.  I’m not going to be defeated though, as I have a sneaking suspicion that Oscar might be doing the whole ‘I’m ill’ thing to ensure that I never leave his sticky little side again.  So even if I have to drink fourteen espressos to keep awake I’m damn well going.  You’ll hear me.  I’ll be the one snoring in the front row and sticking to the chair.

Tuesday 27th May – Why You Can’t Eat the Bag of Minerals Nana Gave You from Mineral World…

I thought I was doing really well with half term.  I was just congratulating myself on how easy it had been and I’d hardly wanted to kill the children at all really, and wasn’t it brilliant that it was already Wednesday, which meant that half the week was already done.  Then I had the hideous realisation that today is actually Tuesday, which means I’m not doing half so well as I had thought.  It’s so depressing when that kind of thing happens.  It happens to me at least once a week.  My internal regulator is sadly awry and left to my own devices, living a nomadic existence without the aid of technology I’d probably go bonkers and die after my first week with three Tuesdays and four Wednesdays in it.  I clearly need that shrinking device and Ray Mears if I’m ever going to weather a post apocalyptic nuclear winter with aplomb and style.

Today I have mostly spent wishing that I knew where Jason had put his Bose stereo headphones.  Not because I want to listen to the Fifty Guitars of Tommy Garrett or any such nonsense, but because these promise to cancel noise.  The children bounded in from their fathers’ house at half past nine this morning and haven’t shut up since.  They like to talk at volume eleven, preferably simultaneously and whilst holding at least three different conversations at once.  It has been seriously doing my head in today.  I can’t think straight when they’re all wittering at me, especially when Oscar joins in.  It could easily be classified as some kind of torture, and I’m seriously thinking of writing to the United Nations about it.  I have not done a single thing today without being interrupted ninety seven times, which means that now the two most evillest ones are in bed, I have at least fifty unfinished jobs awaiting my pleasure, all of which I started today and none of which I actually finished.

My friend’s baby was poorly last week and I rang her to see how he was.  She was just telling me something crucial when Tallulah bounded in.  She knows she’s not supposed to interrupt when adults are on the phone, except in dire emergencies. She said; ‘I can’t wait mummy.  I really need to tell you this thing.  It’s very important.’  I put my friend on hold for a moment, at which point Tallulah announced: ‘Daddy Jamie said he was too busy to brush our hair for us and you have to do it for us now.’  They had already been in the house for two hours at this point, so you can see just what a terrible, life threatening emergency it was.  It sums up the entire day.  I have spent most of my day asking one of them to wait while the other one finishes speaking, or while I finish speaking etc, etc, etc.  In between I have had to ask them not to shout at me as if we were on a trawler in the mid atlantic in a howling gale being as how we are usually never more than three millimetres apart from each other.  I have also spent an extraordinary amount of time asking them to stop poking their brother in the head and telling them it serves them right if Oscar pulls their hair, because if they didn’t spend so much time poking him in the head he wouldn’t be able to get near enough to their hair to pull it in the first place.

Other topics of conversation today have included:

1. Why you can’t eat the bag of minerals that Nana let you have at Mineral World on holiday even though they are the same minerals that people have in ‘vitamins and minerals’, and what I would do to them if I caught them sampling small lumps of rose quartz even if they do look just like sweeties.
2. Why watching forty seven episodes of Horrid Henry back to back is not good for you even if Horrid Henry is the most brilliant television programme in the whole history of the planet ever, ever, ever and it’s just not fair.
3. Why it is much more preferable for them to learn to brush the tags out of their own hair rather than still foolishly pretending they’ve done it and hoping I won’t notice they haven’t, even though they look like they’ve been attacked by a tribe of rabid voles and clearly haven’t been near nor by a hairbrush for at least twenty four hours. And why I shan’t be at all sorry if I have to take them down to the Barbers and get him to put his clippers on 2 and give them a once over, because I don’t care if they don’t look like beautiful princesses as long as I don’t have to put up with the great hair tragedy of 2008 every day for the rest of the year.
4. Why I don’t think that two small girls arguing at the tops of their lungs for twenty minutes over a tatty piece of string constitutes: ‘Go away and leave me alone for five minutes so I can finish the Ocado order.  Surely you have something to do to keep yourselves amused?’  This is then followed by why it’s really not a good idea to tie the string to the bannisters at the top of the stairs to make a trip wire, even though you weren’t doing something that wasn’t at neck height like got banned yesterday, or bungee jumping things down the stair well, which got banned the day before.  And yes.  Life is so unfair…
5. Why I recycled all the empty boxes and cartons in the house even though I knew that Tilly needed to make a Viking settlement (because I forgot and nearly killed myself on an empty Pampers box, thus speeding up my need to recycle or die).
6. How come I spend a lot of time shouting (Duh! I have no idea).

They are stir crazy.  The weather is still terrible and we’re short of funds thanks to our spectacular trip to Canada.  They spent the morning racketing round the house announcing how bored they were and pouncing on my elbow every three seconds to ask me if they could watch television and how come I didn’t let them watch television all day, and how about watching some television, and why was television bad for you?  Thus precipitating the Horrid Henry conversation.  As I hate Horrid Henry and all he stands for just as much as I loathe Barbie, Jacqueline Wilson and the plastic prostitutes that are commonly known as Bratz, it’s rather difficult for me to be tolerant about Tallulah’s Henry obsession.  She does have Horrid Henry books and cd’s because I am of the opinion that what you resist persists, and also that it’s preferable to taking up dissecting mice or injecting crack into your eyeballs in the grand scheme of things.

My dad arrived at about half eleven because we were going for lunch with my parents and then to my mum’s for the afternoon.  It was a real life saver.  Obviously the toys they have at mum’s house are way more entertaining than the stupid, rubbish, boring toys they have at our house, so this was good.  Everything at granny’s house is one hundred times brighter, shinier and more entertaining.  It still didn’t stop them hanging on to my elbow every thirty seconds to tell me that, or to ask me how come they aren’t allowed television upstairs at our house (there is a television in granny’s playroom because my Dad can’t stomach The Tweenies downstairs).

When we got back to our house they complained about the state of tea (only brown bread, horrendous deprivation and torture, despite the fact that they didn’t just have brown bread.  Granny would never make them eat brown bread), the state of the television (they were allowed to watch, but fought solidly the whole time about who was to watch what and how loud it was), and the fact that I made them tidy their bedroom(Tallulah was so naughty about this that she is now in bed with no story time and no cd).  I have to admit to losing my temper over the tidying the bedroom issue as this is the new way Tallulah has found to rebel from the oppression of family life.  This is mainly because there is no school this week so she can’t make a hysterical fuss over putting her uniform on.

She is always horrified when her cunning plans for world domination backfire and she ends up with punishment.  You do think that there should be a time in the learning curve when she works out that she might as well give up and knuckle down like everyone else.  I also wonder why she picks first thing in the morning and last thing in the evening as her optimum times to play up, given that these are my busiest times and I have even less patience than my usual microscopic allowance.  Having just said that, it probably figures that given that children code any attention as good attention, in the times when there is the least attention to spare, it is the one who makes the most noise who gets most. Cunning little bugger.

My stance has become hardline since I realised that she waits until the last possible moment and then expects me or her sister to do things for her.  Now if she doesn’t tidy her things away whatever is left on the floor goes in the bin.  As what she thinks are crucially important treasures are usually scraps of newspaper and endless bits of paper with hieroglyphics of her own devising written on them I don’t feel so bad, as when she is out at school I usually do a minesweep through this stuff at least once a fortnight anyway, and she never notices that it’s gone because she’s too busy at school creating more of the damn stuff.  It’s just this time she gets to watch me do it, instead of me sneaking about on my eyebrows in an evil manner.  It’s no fun, but there are two options I’m banking on either a) as with the school uniform stuff she will eventually get bored and move on to something else or b) we will run out of toys because they’re all in the bin and she will be living in a minimalist cube anyway, so it won’t matter.  We’ve got two chances.

 

 

Monday 26th May – Accidents Will Happen

I think my spate of overenthusiastic blogging may well have dried up now. I’m finding it hard to muster up the will to do even one and if it weren’t for my everlasting fear of kneeling on pencils I’d be off to lounge about on the living room carpet and doze off because now the heating is on it’s lovely and warm.  As it is, the show must go on and the pencils must stay firmly in their boxes.  Oscar and Jason are watching the Tweenies and pretending not to fall asleep.  The girls have gone to their dad’s house for the night and I am up here making the most of the peace and quiet.  I don’t feel at all guilty letting Jason watch The Tweenies.  It’s not half as soul destroying as Carrie and David’s Pop Shop, and he’s been away for three days, so it’s definitely his turn.

Yesterday it tipped it down with rain and howled a gale all day.  I did think about wrapping the children up like polar explorers and sending them out into the garden anyway.  They seemed quite keen, but just as I approached the French windows the lid of the sand pit bowled by and crashed into the fence and I saw waves on the top of the waterlogged sand.  I decided against it.  If it were my childhood my mother would have insisted that ‘the fresh air would do me good’ and sent me out anyway.  I would then have spent half an hour cowering in the porch and moaning.  Then I would really have got into it and just as my wellingtons were completely full of water and sand and I was fully into my role as Nancy from Swallows and Amazons striding across an Arctic tundra, my mum would have called me in for tea and I would have got a bollocking for getting wet wellingtons.

I decided I didn’t want my children to get wet wellies.  Nor did I want to scrub sand off of the hall floor for the third time this week, so I moved swiftly on and didn’t mention Swallows and Amazons once.  For a while they kept themselves amused using some string they’d found to play bungee jumping bears down the gap in the stair well.  That was fine when Oscar was napping, but when he got up I had to put an end to such things as I really didn’t want them to either a) attach him to the cord just to see what happens or b) give him ideas.  He catches on much too quickly for my liking and it would have been a matter of mere minutes before he was hurling things over the bannisters willy nilly.

I got all the craft stuff out and they continued making books for their real dad this time.  Tilly’s was a cookery book and Tallulah copied her, which caused no end of trouble.  I settled on the fact that a man could never have enough cookery books, which made Tallulah happy and Tilly fume, but then they got on with things.  Tallulah decided she needed help spelling absolutely everything, which drove me crazy, because she writes sideways across the page and then when she runs out of space stacks the letters neatly wherever there’s a gap, and she also fails to listen.  Trying to phonetically spell the ingredients for chicken soup is not easy.  I was glad when she got bored half way through and just went for pictures.

While all this was going on Oscar ate three crayons, hit Tallulah repeatedly in passing and made me read Topsy and Tim Get A Dog eight times.  We’re practising saying: ’sorry’ at the moment.  He really wasn’t keen at all and refused point blank to say sorry after he’d given her a particularly vicious belt.  He only relented when I confiscated his dummy and looked him firmly in the eye.  It still took an hour.  He was hideous.  He’d got a tooth coming which meant he was hot, cross, tetchy and had nappy rash and an upset stomach.  Tallulah never knows when to back off and will insist on touching his head, rubbing his face and poking her hair near his mouth.  Then she’s surprised and upset when he pulls her hair and wallops her.  It’s tricky.  I sympathise with him, but I can’t let him get away with it or we’ll have to call the Supernanny hotline.  I end up disciplining both of them.  This meant yesterday afternoon was a blur of naughty step activity and being firm.

After the  books were done the girls decided to do some regular drawing.  Tallulah drew a green dot and a red dot on her page and then said to me: ‘Look, mama!’  She pointed at the green dot. ‘That’s an ordinary bogey.’ Then she pointed at the red dot: ‘And that’s a bloody bogey.’  Nice!  Tilly was so impressed that they got into a competition to see who could draw the most disgusting bogey and then tried to sellotape them to each other’s fronts.  It was quite hideous, but Oscar thought it was most exciting and ran round shouting ‘Bogey!’ a la Dick and Dom and generally having a fine old time.  I gave up because at least they weren’t trying to kill each other and it meant I could read a chapter of my book while still keeping an eye on them as they whizzed past in ever decreasing circles.  They run around rather like whippets.

Bogeys and noses are all the rage in our house.  Oscar likes to give your nose a good pinch and shout ‘Honk Honk’ if he’s in your arms and feeling a bit bored.  If he’s feeling very, very bored, or just creative, he will also try to stick his fingers up your nose just to see what’s going on, in the spirit of exploration.  Tallulah had a spectacular nose bleed at nursery last week, which the teacher assures me was not just because she was having a crafty pick.  Tallulah was very impressed with herself and keeps telling everyone about it in much the same way that she dined out on the story of the boy who stood on her chest at Adventure Kingdom for six months when she was two. 

Yesterday, after the great bogey drawing escapade of 2008 she came solemnly over to see me and announced that she was very absolutely sure that she still had the nose bleed from school in the week and did I want to take her to hospital.  I said that I was almost as very absolutely sure that she had nothing of the kind and that the last thing I wanted to do on a rainy bank holiday Sunday in May was take her to the hospital thanks.  She assured me that there were ‘buckets of blood’.  I asked her to show me, and she was rather nonplussed that she actually had to produce evidence.  She went away to think about it.  She hasn’t come back to it yet, but that doesn’t mean that this epic tragedy is over yet.  It probably means that whatever plan she is contemplating is just way more dastardly and complicated than usual.

I was very accident prone myself yesterday.  i didn’t have a nosebleed I am very happy to say.  I did burn my finger and my arm in two separate culinary incidents which caused lots of swearing and Tallulah to offer to take me to the hospital if I wanted.  It’s making me very nervous that she seems to be so keen to go to hospital.  Especially because she doesn’t seem to mind that it isn’t her being cast in the starring role as the afflicted one.  This probably means that she will be happy to smash Tilly over the head with a saucepan at some point in the next few days just so that she can get a trip out to her heart’s desire.  I’m going to have to watch her even more closely than usual.  God knows what she wants to do when she gets there, but I wouldn’t trust her with the drugs cart and a wheel chair.

On top of my burns I also nearly broke my neck getting dressed.  Oscar had flung something horrible and sticky on my trousers at lunch time so I went upstairs to change.  There were a pair of jeans on the floor and thinking that they would do, I struggled into them, only to find a spider cruising out of the bottom of the left leg as I was stepping into it.  I panicked and hoicked them into the air, forgetting that I was partially still in them and nearly smacked the back of my head on the very sharp edge of the bed as I went down.  Bugger! Anyway, after I’d finished shaking I checked my trousers were completely de-spidered and carried on as normal.  I had a slight headache but nothing more, and the children were so busy making a row downstairs they didn’t hear the thud, so I didn’t have to explain to them what I was doing semi-conscious and half dressed on the bedroom floor.  One has to be grateful for small mercies and the fact that Tallulah doesn’t know that 999 is the number for the hospital to come to you.  She would be treating it a bit like pizza delivery and then we would be in trouble.

Apart from that I got a lot more reading done.  Since yesterday lunch time I’ve read Lord of the Flies, which has been on my to do list since I was about seventeen (horrible, but very good).  I’ve also read the last two things for my Amazon reviews, The Good Plain Cook by Bethan Rogers I think her name was. This was rather odd and a bit???? but not bad.  I also read Sold by Patricia McCormick which was about a Nepalese girl sold into the sex slave trade, which was as horrible as it sounds, but incredibly well written and very compelling, although mercifully short and to the point.  So now I’ve got no excuses, and I’ve been carrying Plato round with me for two hours now.  I really must read it instead of hoping that the simple process of osmosis will jam it all into my brain just because I want it to.

Sunday 25th May – Killing a Nun with Peppermint Creams

The children are downstairs and I am upstairs.  This is a state of being devoutly to be wished. Luckily the sound proofing in this house is non-existent and so I can hear every word and imagine the rest.  I am also a ninja at running downstairs in an emergency, which is very useful.  Although I am thinking of getting a Bat pole installed if Jason wins big on the poker next time he goes.  Not for speed purposes, but because I’ve always fancied sliding down a Bat pole, but I’ve never really had a reason to before.  I reckon that saving the children from slaughtering each other is as good as an excuse as I’m likely to get at this stage.  Although in later life the words: ‘It’s a lot faster than a Stannah Stairlift’ might fit the bill perfectly.  Having said that, as my friend who once had a go on one readily attests to, saddling the cat and riding it downstairs is a lot quicker than a Stannah Stairlift.  Having said that, I really, really still want a go on one.  Now though, not when I actually might need one.

I really should be down there with them, reading my book while they are watching television.  Unfortunately I am not very good at concentrating while the telly is on.  It’s a bit like a giant, attention sucking magnet.  Consequently I find myself drawn inexorably into the stultifying world of childrens’ television whether I like it or not. Mostly not.  This morning I mostly hate Carrie and David’s Pop Shop with such a passion that I have had to come upstairs to get away from it.  I am though, very impressed that Carrie can do star jumps in four inch heels, so fair play to the woman. We all have a skill, and this is obviously hers.  I can’t even do star jumps in bare feet without having a lie down and a think about it first.

I am delighted to announce that I am not feeling as comatose as yesterday despite the fact that I didn’t get to sleep until two thirty this morning.  It was nobody’s fault but my own.  I was tired but I just couldn’t get to sleep.  It was incredibly windy last night, and I do wonder if that had something to do with it.  I always find it harder to concentrate on things when it’s windy.  My mum says the kids at school are just the same.  I might be like Van Gogh in the mistral, but without the paint, the agony and the need to drink turpentine.  In the end I gave up and came downstairs to drink tea (because it’s nicer than turps) and read my book.

I am grateful in a way because it meant I have finished one of my review books in a day (‘eighteen stone in a day!’ Thank you Peter Kay).  This was the book I ordered from Amazon Vine (see Amazon Whine blog) which I didn’t really want at all.  It was called The Bloomsday Dead by Adrian McKinty.  I thought it was going to be horrific and gritty and incredibly political.  It turned out to be horrific and hilarious and I don’t think it was meant to be so funny, but it kept me amused beautifully.  It was right up my street.  Edmund would have been so proud.  The anti-hero had a prosthetic foot, which cheered me up no end, specially when he caught it in a cattle grid at a moment of great dramatic tension.  Imagine Heather Mills but male and working for the paramilitary and the mob and you’re just about there!

Last night we had proper story time before bed.  The girls are getting so big now that most nights they don’t want story time.  They want computer games or to read by themselves or to listen to books on CD, but last night they were obviously feeling young and snugglish and we read some of the books we got from the library.  We were reading a picture book by Chris Riddell called ‘Horatio Happens.’  Chris Riddell writes the Edge Chronicles with a guy called Paul Stewart and a whole load of other books which my children love, including the sublime series about a young girl called Ottoline who lives with a hairy bog person called Mr. Monroe.  Anyway, Horatio is a small creature created magically from all the junk under a young boy’s bed.  Horatio makes a wonderful universe under the bed, but one day the boy’s mother decides to clean up and sweeps Horatio out of the window.  The rest of the book is a quest to find Horatio.

Oscar was absolutely entranced, bless him.  He thought Horatio was wonderful and has now swapped chanting the word ‘bug gah!’ for ‘Haysho! Haysho! Haysho!’ (thank God!) and looking under all the beds.  He kept himself happily amused for half an hour doing this while we read some more stories. This is brilliant, because Oscar is a very active participant in story time.  He likes to sit on my belly and bounce while I read, and if he thinks a book has gone on for too long (anything after the second page can be classified as ‘too long’ as a general rule of thumb) he tries to rip it out of my hands and toss it over his shoulder in a cavalier fashion shouting ‘finisss BOOK!’  It does make story time rather wearing, so I’m delighted he’s now obsessed by Haysho, and have ordered him his own copy from Amazon.  This will undoubtedly mean that he will now take a violent dislike to the book and never want to read it again.

Matilda is now frantically counting down the days to her birthday (6th June). This morning she shambolled out of bed and instead of saying ‘good morning’, as she usually does (she is far more polite in the mornings than her mother), she said: ‘Did you know it’s only twelve days to my birthday? Or maybe eleven? Or possibly thirteen?’ To which I honestly replied ‘No. I didn’t.’  She then shrugged happily and went downstairs to torture her siblings into relinquishing the television control so that she can watch some terrible derivative pap on The Disney Channel like Hannah Montana or some other such bilge.

I may already have told you this, so if I have just skip this next bit. She has asked for a set of hair braiders for her birthday.  I foolishly said yes, thinking that this would be easy, and not at all like trying to find a Wii two days before Christmas as some parents have to do.  I was really pleased with what I imagined to be such a simple request.  I should have known that there was no such thing as a simple request (as my mother who invariably had to go to our local record shop with a list of obscure bands and a frown will attest to.  Frazier Chorus anyone?) I have scoured the town (there was no point in scouring Glenfield), I have asked all my friends.  I have enquired within.  All to no avail.  Until yesterday I thought they were actually extinct as the general reply was: ‘Well.  We used to stock them. Didn’t we Doreen? Yes. That’s right. We did.  But we don’t now.  Have you tried Argos?’

Of course, our branch of Argos is bloody miles away in one of those depressing out of town shopping sites which also sells ugly beds, ugly sofas and giant American fridges, which means that unless you want these things there is no point in going out of your way to go to them.  I have been steeling myself for a fortnight to make this odyssey.  I hate Argos and everything it stands for.  I hate it’s shiny laminated pages and those stupid little pencils.  I hate it’s dodgy fluorescent strip lighting and the fact that the staff have the collective IQ of a lobotomized chimp that’s been dead for six months.  That and the fact that the place is awash with nylon track suits, sovereign rings and spiral perms, all belonging to people called ‘Liam’ and Chanel’.  It brings out my inner Nazi snob with a vengeance.  I really, really, really have to need something before I will set foot in Argos.  I think the last thing I bought in there was an ironing board under protest in 2003, and I don’t even bloody iron.

Yesterday I had a brainwave and worked out (‘duh!’) that Argos have a website.  I visited.  It was soothingly quiet and relaxing.  I was so glad I did.  Turns out that they don’t have hair braiders.  Apparently they used to stock them, didn’t they? But now they don’t? And have I tried Boots? (Yes! I bloody well have!)  I spent several more precious hours of my life tracking down hair braiders which will undoubtedly have broken within ten hours of festivities having commenced.  I found them in Toys R Us, which thank the sweet lord, also has a website and delivery service.  These are Hannah Montana hair braiders, which will bring me lots of kudos.  I didn’t want Hannah Montana hair braiders, especially not because if you also buy the Hannah Montana hair colouring kit they will give you the free Hannah Montana trailer trash home tattoo parlour to go with it.  Nevertheless, I was so desperate at this stage that I would cheerfully have accepted the Herman Goerring Hair Braider Kit if it meant that I didn’t have to look for them any more.

Anyway, they’re coming hot foot to my door within the next week at some exorbitant delivery fee which I was only too happy to provide as long as I don’t have to think about it any more.  I expect they will deliver it while I am out, thus ensuring a lovely trip to the DHL delivery centre which is in the next county and is only open in October between the hours of three and seven thirty a.m. on a Wednesday, just for your convenience.  Luckily it also happens to be on Jason’s way to work, so he can get them.  I am already hating this birthday thing and I haven’t even started cooking yet and we still have the issue of the cake to go into.  Every year she picks a cake out of my vast selection of recipe books.  Every year I diligently cook it and decorate it, and every year she goes: ‘I didn’t really like that cake much you know, it was too fruity/chocolately/malteasery/full of wombats…

On the subject of cooking, the only book Tallulah chose to bring home from the library that was acceptable yesterday (i.e. not too heavy, not one we had read before, and not in Swahili) was a cookery book for children which claims to be a chocolate and sweet cookery book.  She is now clamouring to make things from it.  Luckily for me, when we looked at it this morning, ninety percent of the items contained within its pink, glittery pages, are made with fruit and/or nuts, and she doesn’t like them.  She would quite like to make peppermint creams.  I am mulling this over.  It was the first thing I ever made at Home Economics class when I was at the dreaded convent and I have traumatic memories of it.

There were only four nuns left there when I arrived, and only three of them taught actual classes. One of them was merely the headmistress.  The kind of headmistress who made that flying nun in The Blues Brothers seem benign and relaxed about discipline.  Sister Noella taught needlework, which invariably involved shouting in an Irish accent, jumping up and down and distributing slaps to the head left, right and centre (she was very old school), which explains further why I am no more likely to sew a fine seam than I am to propel myself to the moon using only the power of leg warmers.  Sister Aidan taught maths, and for a nun, was very patient with me and my failure to understand how to count to five.  Sister Magna taught home economics and was responsible for us doing peppermint creams in our first lesson.

Sister Magna believed that cookery was a serious subject which should not be taken lightly.  You were, for preference, to cook in total silence, and if you had to say something it would usually be prefaced by the words; ‘Please Sister Magna..’ Of course, this did not go according to plan.  My friends and I got a hideous fit of the giggles because I had made my peppermint cream mixture too watery and it was sticking to my hands and arms in large pepperminty strings which resembled a cross between ectoplasm and toothpaste.  The more stuck I became and the more she frowned at me, the more I wanted to laugh and eventually I exploded, and tried to stop laughing out loud by bringing my minty hands to my mouth, thus causing more general hilarity as the contents of my hands stuck to my face.  Sister Magna was not amused and I had to stand in the corner for the rest of the lesson.  I was so bored I ate all the mixture off my hands and face.  I ended up with dire punishments, no peppermint creams to show for my pains and stomach ache.  Two weeks after that Sister Magna died of a heart attack.  I always did wonder whether I had driven her to despair and beyond.  Consequently I have always had mixed feelings and strange residual guilt over the issue of peppermint creams.  I might just make a cake instead.

Saturday 24th May – I am the same crap mother I always was

Today I am tired because I have had some sleep.  The last two days I was tired because I hadn’t had any sleep.  I really don’t think that’s fair.  If I could be bothered I’d have a tantrum about it.  As it is, I’m too tired, and Oscar is using up all the tantrum time today.  He’s spectacularly mardy and has been since the moment he woke up this morning.  He’s had two naps because he’s been so horrible, and because he keeps rubbing his eyes and demanding ‘ilk, which is a sure sign that he’s not faking it.  I daren’t let him sleep any more or I will be tired tomorrow because I had to spend all night watching television with Oscar.  It has been one of those Dantesque days on the whole.

The only things Oscar has wanted to do all day is to brush his teeth (his new hobby) and watch television (his favourite thing to do in the whole world).  A man cannot live by toothbrush alone, but he is not convinced, and is very cross when I keep taking his toothbrush away from him.  He bangs on the bathroom door and howls like a dog.  It’s quite odd.  I’ve never had a child who has been that obsessed by teeth before.  He also likes to drag your lips apart and count your teeth in a very brusque fashion.  Remind me never to watch Marathon Man with him.  It will only give him ideas.

Jason wandered home from scamping at three o’clock this morning, which was nice.  He toddled off again after lunch to stab people with swords and get wet.  It’s only raining because he’s put up a tent.  It will only rain all the rest of the week because it’s half term.  It will definitely rain the week after because we’re having the decking done.  I’m hoping to get all inevitable rain based issues out of the way before the summer holidays.  I think I’m being a fool to myself.

I’ve finished reading about Aristotle. It didn’t improve.  Actually, that’s not fair.  The book was probably as easy as a book is ever going to get that deals with Aristotle, unless they bring out the Aristotle colouring book for bright five year olds, it’s just that I am mentally challenged over philosophy and find it all impossible.  it’s like stringing beads onto a thread with no knot on the end.  I think I’m doing quite well, but I then realise I’m not making the connections.  I think: ‘I’ll just pop back into my brain and have a look at that’, only to find I’ve got lots of skiddy beads around my feet and a nude bit of thread.  I don’t think being tired helps.  I’ve got a book to read on Plato next, but I’m giving myself a couple of days off to let my poor, battered brain recover.  I’ve decided not to become a philosopher when I grow up.  It’s too hard.  They don’t philsophise over anything useful either like if a cake is eaten in the forest by a hungry bear, is it still a cake?

The only thing I can remember from the entire book about Aristotle is that he discovered that Octopi have a bifurcated penis.  Good on him, say I? But it’s not going to help me to understand the Aristotelian world view so that I can write an essay about whether Leonardo was a medieval or renaissance thinker now is it?  I’m hardly likely to be able to weave into my cunning argument the fact that it all hinges on whether or not you believe an octopus has a bifurcated penis or not.  I’ve read quite a bit about Leonardo and as far as I’m aware he never, ever even did a quick drawing on a napkin of some octopus shag fest.  I’m stuffed.

I’ve also finished reading ‘The Outsider’ by Albert Camus.  I like it because it’s short.  I like it because I actually like Albert Camus, and thought ‘The Plague’ was brilliant.  It is a very sad and horrible book, as many books are which tend to be cited as classics.  Nevertheless it was really good and well worth a read, particularly as at about 115 pages you’ll probably get it read in a few hours and have something impressive to talk to people about at dinner parties.  I don’t have dinner parties any more so I don’t need to bother really.  I have to talk about things like how is Tallulah going to get the screws undone on her money box using only a spinning top, and whether a penny is enough to buy daddy the new Indiana Jones dvd when it comes out, including suitable answers to: ‘But why not? It’s a whole penny. Look!’  I’m just shoring up against the day I become a fabulous socialite and need things to talk about.  Existentialism’s always a good one, especially if you want them to fall asleep in their soup so you can steal their bread rolls.

Other than that we have been to the library where the children had a huge fight over a computer that none of them can use, and Oscar smashed a cd case, but we stuck it back in the rack and hoped that nobody would notice.  Tallulah got cross because I wouldn’t let her bring home fourteen books that we already have.  This is her thing at the library.  She likes to read books that she knows the story of so she can pretend to be reading them herself.  I don’t see the point of carrying home bags of heavy books we already have.  We invariably have a few sharp words.  She then decides to bring home ‘War and Peace’ because she likes reading what she calls ‘wordy books’.  She also likes hard backs best, which she calls ‘banging books’.  She then puts the wordy, banging book on a shelf and ignores it for three weeks until we have to take it back.  The moment I get it out to give it back to the lady she will then cry because she wants to read it. 

Tilly is usually quite good in the library but will only read books for fives and under for some reason.  She also likes book tapes, but even if they have proper books that she wants, is reading others in the series of, and is capable of reading by herself, she won’t get them out.  She purses her mouth up all funny and refuses to do it.  I’ve given up with the whole bloody lot of them.  They’re all mad.  The woman in the library was cross at me because I let Oscar in eating a banana.  I took the banana off him voluntarily after a minute of being in there.  Then she was cross at me because the only rubbish bin is outside the front door of the library.  I left Tilly in charge while I hurtled through the front doors to deposit the banana, turned round and came back. In that time, they had started the great broken computer row of 2008 and the woman was looking at me with a face like a smacked bottom because a) I had left my children alone in the library for thirty seconds and who knows what would happen to them (we were the only ones in there except for two librarians) and b) I had allowed them to have a row.  I hate her.  Pooh to her! I don’t understand why librarians are librarians, most of them hate books and hate people who try to read them.  It’s a conspiracy, that’s what it is.

Anyway.  I managed to get two books I wanted before I had to pull them out as Oscar had filled his nappy, Tallulah wanted a wee and Tilly wanted to go on the broken computer and thought that if she mentioned it enough times things might be different.

We then went to the Co-op where we bought lots of craft things so that the kids could make books for fathers day presents.  We bought card and glue and lots of lovely paper.  They calmed down by the time we got home, all except for Oscar who demanded pens, bananas, cbeebies, ‘ilk, toys and bed in quick succession before I’d even got him out of his buggy.  I put him to bed after he’d tried to stab a banana with a ball point pen and then screamed because I took it away from him. 

After that things were lovely and peaceful for a while.  I read stories to them while the girls got on with their project and actually did the things you only really read about in books like sharing nicely and saying please and thank you, and actually doing something creative rather than chopping the shit out of everything with a pair of scissors, sprinkling glue and glitter over it and then saying: ‘There! I’ve finished! Can I watch the television now?’  Tilly has made a book all about ‘frobscottle’, which is the pop that the BFG drinks which makes him fart.  She felt that Jason would appreciate this.  I feel that she is probably right.  Tallulah has done a book about sweets, for the very same reason.  She has also made him a card with Darth Vader on.  Unfortunately she has lost her black pen, so he is a brown vader.  I said I thought Daddy wouldn’t mind.  I may have to prep him on this because it’s exactly the sort of thing he’s likely to point out, and she has worked very hard.

I have scrubbed all the floors downstairs, cleaned bathrooms, windows and other things.  I have polished my kitchen until it gleams and caught up with and put away all the laundry to the point where I’m now washing all the rugs just for fun! That’s the kind of exciting life I lead.  It is now tea time.  This means that within the next half an hour the house will look like it’s been taken over by a tribe of neanderthal cave dwelling thugs with pooh on their shoes and it will all have been a total waste of time.  What a lucky woman I am.

Tilly was explaining to me the purpose of her toilet roll tube collection earlier. Apparently she needs to collect four so that when she turns into an alien and gets four eyes she will be able to make herself some alien binoculars with ease.  I pointed out that as ‘bi’ meant two, she would have to call them ‘quadroculars’.  She was very impressed with this, and I am now top mum for knowing such things.  Tallulah went and spoiled it by saying that she was going to be an alien with sixty eight eyes and how many was that ‘oculars.’  Naturally I was slightly stumped by that one and she is still firmly of the opinion that I am the same crap mother she’s always had and am probably not likely to change any time soon, unfortunately for her.

 

Things You Should Never Do…

• Lola says that you should never, ever eat a tomato.  I don’t actually agree with that, but I do think you should never ever eat the evil edamame bean, lentil and pomegranate salad from Sainsburys.  My best friend Rachel also advises quite strongly against the cous cous salad from Tesco which has sultanas in it.  She felt so badly about it she even sent me a text message from work.  You can’t say fairer than that.

• You should never buy your children cabin beds until you have worked out that they are fully capable of getting up in the night and going to the toilet unaided.  Otherwise you will spend several unhappy months/years teetering around on ladders with comatose children in the middle of the night, swearing and treading on badly put away bits of lego.  You will be even more sorry when you fail to get them up in time and have to spend several minutes of your life wrestling with a fitted sheet covered in wee, six feet in the air in the dark.  Probably if you were in the circus this would be fine (as long as you weren’t a performing midget).  If you are a bog standard housewife it’s not so good.

 

• You should never leave any biro in my immediate vicinity and wander off thinking that it will still be there when you get back.  I moved all my stuff from my fab Ghost handbag into my fab Charlie and Lola rucksack the other day only to find that I had six biros in varying designs, colours etc.  I only recall actually buying one of them.  I am very pleased with the latest one that I have ‘found’ on my desk, which seems to be advertising ‘Simoes Automotive’ in Vancouver.  Not only is it stolen, it is a well travelled pen.  It is good because it is blue (I prefer blue and recently I’ve been stealing a lot of black ones), and because it has one of those comfy grip things, that oddly, makes it comfy to grip.  Simoe, if my car ever broke down in Vancouver I’d bring it to you mate.  And it wouldn’t matter how much you charged me for fixing it, because I’d probably already have stolen enough pens to recoup the loss.

 

 

• You should never ask me what my phone number is in one of those casual chat type moments.  Even though I’ve had the same one for at least six years I will forget it, and come across as a total spanner.  I was in Pumpkin Patch in town this week, buying some clothes for Tilly’s birthday.  I like it there. I shop there quite a bit.  The woman asked me if I wanted one of their catalogues.  I said no because I already had one thanks.  She said: ‘Can I update your details on my computer?’  I said: ‘Sure.’  She said: ‘What’s your postcode?’ I looked at her blankly and had to confess that I couldn’t remember.  She thought I was lying and trying to sneak out of being a good customer.  She looked at me in a funny way.  I panicked.  I burbled.  I acted like a complete spanner, and that wasn’t half as complicated as my phone number.

 

• You should never buy Ainsley Harriot cupasoups Although they can be quite useful if you’re stuck for a tombola prize for a charitable group that you don’t particularly like. They (the soups, not the charitable groups) are evil and taste like ditchwater with chives sprinkled in them.  My mum and dad tried them.  My mum spat it out after the first mouthful.  My dad soldiered on, even though every mouthful made him shudder.  He is very, very strange and oddly stoic.  I don’t get it.

 

• You should never tell your mother that you have cleaned your bedroom and put all your toys and clothes away only for her to find at half past eight at night, when she thinks it’s all over and is looking forward to tea that you haven’t, and that you were in fact lying through your tiny teeth.  You should definitely never try to wiggle out of then tidying up by bursting dramatically into tears, announcing that you are very tired and that your fingers are too worn out and that you need some help. 

 

If you do this you will get more help than you bargained for.  This help involves your mother ranting about the bedroom for an hour, extricating socks from extraordinary places, throwing many things that you thought were precious but she has now refiled as ‘broken crap’ in the bin and you going to bed with no story and no music.  So let that be a lesson to you young lady.

 

• You should never be even vaguely tempted to eat three quarters of a packet of Rice Works excellent sweet chilli nachos, just because your husband ate some earlier and then when you wandered past they smelled really, really nice and you just couldn’t help yourself, and then you ate them all up, every single last one.  I would hazard a guess that if you were the kind of stupid, greedy person to do this, not only will you have to spend the next three hours imitating a grassy knoll so that Gillian McKeith doesn’t shoot you down dead, you will also have indigestion and be ridiculously thirsty.  And who would want that to happen eh?

 

• You should never be fooled by the first chapter on a book which tells you it’s going to explain to you all about Aristotle into thinking you know what the bloody hell he’s going on about.  What you have failed to realise is that this is in fact ‘the introduction’, and is just breaking you in gently, and that by the time you get to chapter seven you will have had no idea what he has been talking about for about the last six chapters and you will want to cry because you feel so very stupid.  I bet you’re the sort of person who would eat three quarters of a packet of Rice Works excellent sweet chilli nachos without thinking it through too, aren’t you?

 

• You should never marry a man.  My granny told me this when I was a child.  I was slightly puzzled because she had married a man and had three children.  I pointed this out and she nodded sagely, rolled a fag and went: ‘Precisely darlin’, and look what happened to me.’  A salient lesson, well explained.  Anyway, she said that all men were aliens which is why it made them impossible to marry and explained why babies looked so funny.  There may well be something in it, although I liked marrying a man so much I’ve done it twice now.  I confess to liking it the second time better than the first. Perhaps he’s from a better class of galaxy.

 

• You should never volunteer.  My mummy told me that once, and I believe that she’s right.  Otherwise you might end up being Brown Owl, and that would never do.