Katyboo1’s Weblog

After yesterday’s flurry of blogging excitement we are back to normal once again.  I don’t know what came over me yesterday.  I was seized with a kind of blogging zeal.  I hope it doesn’t happen too often.  It gave me a nasty headache, a slightly twitchy eye and blurred vision.  I was in bed and snoring by 10.30 p.m. which is completely unheard of for me.

Don’t you just hate it when you get a twitchy eye? I get them sometimes when I’m really tired, those little muscular tics which make you feel like Blakey from On the Buses.  They’re probably not noticeable to the general public, but when you have one you feel like you’re wandering around leering and lasciviously winking at people while they get all hot and bothered and call the police.  It’s really unpleasant.  I wonder why it happens to the eye and not other parts of you.  It’s not like when you get a bit sleepy your left hand suddenly starts playing air piano now is it? Another one of those great unsolved medical mysteries that I will no doubt be puzzling over for many a year while my eye gently twitches in the background.

I should be reading Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Lives of the Artists’.  As you know I have been attempting to read it now for about ten days.  So far, dear reader, I am on page forty.  This is not good, not good at all.  I have now removed all other books from my bedside table to avoid temptation.  Despite this I am finding it very difficult to get going with it.  It’s not got a plot, which is a bit of a downer for a start.  I always cope much better with a plot, or a few gags.  I did get quite excited when I looked it up, because the Amazon reviews said that it was a bit racy and had lots of gossip in.  Don’t mock me for being naive.  I was prepared to suspend disbelief.

Now I read Suetonius’ The Twelve Caesars once, and this claimed to be racy and full of gossip too.  I was sceptical, as you would be when faced with a book written hundreds of years ago by a marble bust and printed in Penguin Classics.  You’re not expecting Jilly Cooper are you? Well, it turns out that Suetonius was a fabulous read.  It’s funny, it’s naughty, it’s salacious, it’s probably full of whopping lies, but it’s like reading the Roman Emperors Special of OK Magazine.  This experience made me very hopeful indeed about Vasari.  I should have known better.

I’ve just finished reading the section on Giotto.  It’s a grovelling wonderfest of how marvellous he was, with a giant list of paintings I’ve never seen, which according to Vasari are either ‘beautiful’ (his favourite word) or average.  There is nothing in between.  At the end are some anecdotes about Giotto’s hilarious wit and repartee.  The problem seems to be that in order to find this stuff ‘hilarious’ you either have to know everything about Renaissance Florence, or you actually had to have been there at the time.  Me, I don’t fall into either of these categories.  Consequently the rib splitting story about how he humiliated a poor soldier by mocking his snobbery by painting armour on his shield when what he really wanted was a ‘coat of arms’, boom boom! Left me waiting for the punch line.  I’m still waiting and feel I will have to wait many hundreds of years.

Clearly I have much more in common with the barbarous and addled decadence of the classical Roman emperors than I do with sixteenth century painters.  It probably explains why Glenfield is a seething pit of immorality and impropriety, particularly on our road.  I am hoping that the gossip quotient picks up soon, because I’ve got five hundred pages left to read and so far no motivation at all.  It reminds me a bit of reading Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, which I thought would be a rollicking romp through the Grail mysteries with lots of fighting and heavy on the romance.  I was picturing Olivia De Havilland and Errol Flynn and lots of palfreys.  It was actually a long list of jousts, quite a lot of religion and not much else.  I have a feeling that ‘The Lives’ will be very like this, without the jousting. It’s basically a lot of dates and a lot of lists of paintings I’ve never seen.  Bum.

My next chapter in the text book is on Leonardo and Earth Sciences.  As far as my limited brain understands it, this means geology (or hitting things with rocks).  My tutor is a specialist in Earth Sciences, and wrote this chapter for the text book.  So, this means that I actually have to read it properly, rather than skim read it and make the rest up.  Luckily I’m three weeks ahead with that particular part of the syllabus so I’ve got a while to limber up, and more importantly wake up.  Despite my Floradix and many visits and phone calls I am still feeling rather comatose.  I need to wake up properly and I can’t keep relying on coffee.  I’ve had three cups today already and I’m still falling asleep over the keyboard.  Something must be done or I won’t have to worry about what to say to Paul Weller on Monday due to the fact that I will be asleep on his shoes.

My friend came over for coffee this morning.  She’s tired too because she’s got a teeny, weeny baby who is waking up lots in the night.  We were perfect company for each other as we nodded off over the cafetiere, jerking awake every now and again to say: ‘Hmmm!’ and ‘Really!’ so we could pretend that we were awake and functioning members of the human race.  I met her at the school after I dropped Oscar off at nursery.  I popped in to check on Tallulah to make sure that she had everything for her eagerly anticipated school trip.  The note said that although they had to wear their school jumpers so that they could be rounded up in an emergency, they could wear jeans if they wanted.  I packed Tallulah’s jeans yesterday when she went to her dad’s for the night, along with sun cream and sun hat and hundreds of other weather related items. 

When I got to school this morning it was raining gently and the ground was just beginning to get nice and slippy.  I was congratulating myself on the fact that I had actually packed suitable clothing for her.  Then I caught sight of her in her summer frock with her frilly white ankle socks and stopped dead in my tracks. When I asked her why she wasn’t wearing her jeans she skipped up and down looking mightily pleased with herself and announced that daddy had said that she didn’t have to wear them if she didn’t like.  Aaaarghhhhh!  This means that I will undoubtedly have to throw the socks in the bin when she gets home, and I’ll be surprised if the dress survives as well.  Bloody hell.  Another trip to Sainsburys at the weekend.  Curses, curses, curses…

It’s been one of those days really.  Nothing dramatic, just the slow erosion of stuff that was fine and perfect and now isn’t.  Oscar wouldn’t eat his breakfast properly and due to the over zealous application of fromage frais had to have his clothes changed before nursery.  I knew I should have given him his breakfast in his pyjamas.  It’s just no good trying to be organised.  The tide of events is against me now.  Then Lee got up late for work and in his hurry to get somewhere on the M25 put the milk in the fridge sideways.  I was only aware of this when I opened the fridge door to get something for lunch and a litre of Rachel’s Organic milk (at ten guineas an ounce) poured onto my feet.  It was in the ham, which he had carefully laid it across (why?) and had filled the little veg containers, which meant I had to give my spring onions a bath.  There is nothing quite as unpleasant as the smell of curdling milk, so I had to strip out the whole bottom half of the fridge and wash everything before I could get lunch.  This is when the washing up liquid ran out and I realised that the bottle I thought I had under the sink was in fact a phantom bottle that I had just made up to reassure myself.

I did my best and got the milk slick under control.  I was by now a little wobbly due to lack of lunch (I go all funny when I’m denied regular access to food), so this was how I managed to cut my finger trying to open a packet of feta cheese in a hurry.  Hoorah!  I ate my lunch with my finger in the air to staunch the blood flow and treated myself to a bar of white chocolate which I’d been keeping hidden from Jason and the girls for just such an emergency moment.  It helped quite a bit, and I’m going to write to the ambulance service and suggest that they keep them in their trauma kits, just for patients like me.

Right, I’ve got two hours before I have to go and pick the kids up.  I’m going to get some socks (it’s bloody freezing, and my new sandals don’t look half so nice now.  It’s because my blue toes clash with the green straps. Trinny and Susannah said so), and snuggle down with Vasari.  This actually means I’m going to get some socks and snuggle down for a nap, but it sounds better.  I must remember to set the alarm clock or the kids will think I’ve abandoned them…