Tuesday June 10th – Stupid, Stupid, Stupid

I have spent most of my day being quite stupid, which is nice.

 

The last thing Jason said to me last night before we went to bed was: ‘You will remember to lock the house up securely won’t you, if you go out tomorrow, because the decking men will be around all day?’ to which I replied blithely: ‘Of course!’  So far so good.

 

This morning I staggered out of bed and was doing the usual morning shriek to exercise my lungs (I am unlikely to ever suffer from phlegmy lungs, due to the amount of working out they get on a regular basis) when the decking men arrived.  All was well, as I was worried they would arrive when I was on the school run and bugger off in disgust never to be seen again.

 

I dutifully let them into the garden, gave them keys for the garage and the back gate and went to work.  When I got back from school, I spent twenty minutes thinking about things like damp proof courses etc, etc and went outside sure in the knowledge that I was going to sound professional, and in charge, and like I knew what I was talking about.  They promptly asked me something so simple I hadn’t thought about it at all.  Thus the first thing I said after: ‘Do you want a cup of tea?’ was; ‘Oh! Er! Right…I don’t know.  I’ll have to ring my husband.’ Thus rendering me a simpering fool, as predicted yesterday.

 

My dad called me and said he was coming round for a cup of tea, which was great because it meant that I could rope him into running me into town to do some errands, and apart from my idiocy with the workforce I was feeling good.  Oscar didn’t pooh on my dress, which was a better start than yesterday.  He was too busy using a pink, plastic hair dryer that he’d stolen from one of the girls to hammer on the glass of the French windows, so that he could pretend he too was a decking man.  The good thing about such ‘play’ was that it made maximum noise and caused his mother to go into paroxysms of trauma in case he plunged headfirst through the French windows and had to be taken to hospital with a pink, plastic hair dryer embedded in his nasal cavities.

 

Dad turned up an hour and three quarters after he’d phoned me to say he’d be half an hour.  You do think I’d be used to it by now, but I do get a bit twitchy even so, and start leafing idly through the bit of the phone book that has all the emergency hospital numbers in, in case he’s crashed in a ditch somewhere on the M69 bleeding through his earholes.  It turns out that he got chatting to the gardener and then had to see a man about a manifold somewhere in Anstey and before you know it, there you were.

 

He very kindly took me to the bank where I caused total chaos.  In the new branch of HSBC in the city centre they now have these spangly, all singing, all dancing machines where you load in all your cheques and your paying in slip at the same time.  Turns out that the branch on Hinckley Road in Leicester (for those of you who are tempted to give this a go, should you ever be in the vicinity), do not.  I however, being mostly on autopilot and not really paying attention, shoved all my bits of paper into the machine as per the city centre branch, and caused it to tell me that I had deposited eighty pounds and it had no idea where the other five hundred had gone to.  At which I panicked, leapt around like Bambi on ice and looked for the nice meeter/greeter man on the door.  He had miraculously disappeared in a puff of smoke, leaving me to queue up for a counter person who then officiously told me that the machines I had just described which took all the bits of paper were a figment of my over active imagination and that I was just a total dullard who should wear a huge sign round my neck saying Warning! Care in the Community Project Ongoing…’  I got quite annoyed.  The woman got more bristly and official. Then the meeter/greeter man popped up from nowhere and verified my story at which pompous cow lady didn’t say anything and just got on with serving someone else.

 

Me and meeter/greeter man ambled over to the machine and he took it apart with his official HSBC screwdriver in a jolly efficient manner, which indicated to me that I probably wasn’t the only person to have done such a stupid thing in recent weeks.  He retrieved all my bits of paper, sorted them out and sorted me out, for which I was profoundly grateful.  He was far too helpful to work in a bank and will probably be sacked next week after being ratted out by pompous behind the counter cow bag woman for eating tuna sandwiches over the paying in slips or some other spurious and trumped up charge.

 

By this time my dad had played Oscar the entire ‘Best of Dean Martin’ CD and driven round the block twice, neither of which activity pacified him much, not even a rousing rendition of ‘That’s Amore’ with my dad joining in on the ‘ring a ding ding’ bits, which was surprising.  He had just about given me up for lost when I reappeared looking harassed and we set off for the picture framers where they had made such a beautiful job of my stuff that I felt better and we then drove back to mum and dad’s so I could show off to mum.

 

She had given me some Victorian magic lantern slides months ago, and I had decided to have a go at having them framed because there’s not a lot else you can do with magic lantern slides unless you have a magic lantern, which sadly I don’t (although as they are notoriously unstable and blow up on a regular basis, this is probably a good thing), or you just keep them in a box and forget about them, which I didn’t want to do.

 

I had one framed against a background and one sandwiched between mounts which meant that you have to hang it in a window so that the sun shines through it.  Both of them looked fabulous.  Mum also gave me a gorgeous children’s book about a naughty magpie and his adventures with a greedy shrew. It’s very old and all the pictures are weathered, which has bought out a really interesting depth to the print quality.  The book is falling apart, but I didn’t want to destroy it and use the original colour plates.  The lady in the framing shop and I had a long discussion about in and she said she would use her super fancy colour copier and see what happened.  They came out beautifully and I had three of them mounted in a rectangular frame.  I’m so happy with them, and even happier that I didn’t have to kill the book.  I hate killing books, it’s so sacrilegious.

 

Mum was really impressed with the lantern slides, and we had just dug her box full out of the garage and spread them all over the kitchen table so we could choose some for her to do, when the phone rang.  It was Jason.  Remember I said that he told me to be very security conscious? I was.  I was so good.  When dad and I left the house I double locked the door and put the burglar alarm on.  The decking men had gone to the builder’s merchants to get some blocks.  When they got back and opened the garage door, all hell broke loose because we had forgotten there was a burglar alarm doo bob in the garage as well.  They were holed up in there with their hands over their ears when the police arrived!  They had to ring Jason to sort out the mess and because I wasn’t back and the house was locked up like Fort Knox, one of the guys had to do some clever jiggery pokery to stop the alarm going off all afternoon until I got back.  Nice!

 

I did feel stupid, which considering I had only done exactly as I had been told in the first place was really random, but there you go.   I had just recovered my equilibrium and had helped mum make a shortlist of forty slides that we couldn’t live without when the phone rang again.  It was my ex husband reminding me that I had said I would pick the girls up from school this afternoon while he was at the dentist and feed them tea before he came to pick them up.  The conversation went along the lines of:

 

Jamie: ‘Hiya’.

 

Me: ‘Hello’ in a suspicious tone…

 

Jamie: ‘I’m assuming that you hadn’t forgotten that you were picking the girls up from school this afternoon because of my dentist appointment?’

 

Me: ‘Shit a brick.’ Which is code for YES! YES! I had completely and utterly forgotten.

 

Jamie: ‘O.K. then. Glad I reminded you.’

 

Shortly after this, we abandoned the lovely slides and mum hurtled me home at the speed of light, while Oscar, who was in the middle of a snack at the exact moment of crisis, and couldn’t be persuaded to abandon it, threw lumps of over-ripe pear all over the back of mum’s car.  She was very good about it, considering I was being a gigantic pain in the arse.  Bless her! She said that it didn’t matter because she had to go out and buy an onion anyway! I do love her.  She’s the only woman I know who would take you on a twenty mile round trip and try to make you feel better about it by basically saying that buying an onion in Glenfield Co-op was the only thing she had on her mind that particular afternoon anyway.  She’s a splendid woman.

 

I ran  to school after having shaken Oscar down for lumps of pear, and arrived out of breath, sticky and harassed.  Every hot day there is an ice cream van outside school, and every hot day they ask for an ice cream and I mostly say no.  In the year they have been attending the school they have had one ice cream.  Today I decided to relent and we all had a 99 with chocolate sauce (we used to have raspberry sauce when I was a kid.  We called in ‘Donkey Blood’.  My children had hysterics when I first mentioned it.  Now they refuse to eat red sauce of any kind on ice cream, just in case it is in fact donkey blood!).  It was Oscar’s first 99.  Bear in mind that we live three minutes walk away from the school.  By the time we got home the scintillating layer of pear juice was covered by a thin sheen of melted ice cream, big gobs of which were dripping from his hands, his chin, his elbows, the peak of his sun hat and the straps on his buggy.  We were awash.  He had a fabulous time.

 

He still had half an ice cream left at this point.  By the time I had hauled him out of captivity and transferred him to his high chair with a bowl and a spoon, I too was glistening like a slug and had a large smear of chocolate flake rakishly displayed over my left breast and the inside of my right knee.  My hair was a little stiff and a bit Farrah Fawcett in places.  I brushed the worst lumps out, but will definitely need to have a good shower tonight unless I want to spend tomorrow being the Pied Piper of waspdom.

 

Tallulah’s curls were also coated and Matilda sported an alarming goatee crafted from bits of ice cream cone and lumps of Flake.  I threw them in the shower en masse whereupon Oscar discovered the delights of manhandling his willy whilst having a wee and peed all over his sisters much to their horror.  I left the room, had a good laugh and came back looking very stern and motherly.

 

Jamie turned up in the middle of tea looking very sorry for himself with a lisp and a lot of dribble and dragged the girls off into the night.  I was quite pleased to see them go, it has to be said.  Jamie is definitely picking them up from school tomorrow, which is good because I’m spending the day in Nottingham and then going out with Jason all alone while mum babysits Oscar.  I can’t remember the last night we had all alone.  We shall probably just drive up the road, park in a lay by and fall asleep on each other’s shoulders, but I should hate to be woken up by the children phoning me to see when I’m coming to pick them up from school.