My Imperfect Day

I had to go into town today.  I did not want to go into town.  Town is a bus ride away, which is not so terrible except that it is a bus which goes through one of the most horrible parts of town on its way to the nice bit with the shops in, and so every bus journey has the potential to turn into a knifing or bus ride with a police escort, which kind of keeps me on my toes.  I recall blogging previously about a trip to town with the children before we went on holiday where we were trapped for half an hour with a drunkard who insisted on telling the children that dormice lived under his television, and breathing stale beer in their faces.  On the up side, it did keep them remarkably quiet.  I may have to count my blessings, hunt him down and invite him to babysit on the nights I have a headache and want to go to bed in peace.

The other thing is that I only needed to go into town to put a cheque in the bank for Jason.  There are no banks in Glenfield, which is very inconvenient.  The thing is that I know that if I go to town only because I have to do something sensible like put a cheque in, I will invariably end up doing something nonsensical, like spending all the money I’ve just deposited in the bank, because it seems a shame to go all that way and not make a bit more of an effort, which is exactly what happened today.  I will now be in terrible disgrace because I am a weak willed woman who can’t pass a shop without saying: ‘oooh! Shiny! And spending fifty quid on the spot.  Especially when it happens to be the M&S food hall which I really did need to visit because we didn’t have anything for lunch, but which I probably didn’t need to spend forty pounds in buying things because they looked nice and I was fed up.

Today I’d got one eyed Tilly with me, as well as Oscar for my sins.  Conjunctivitis is actively frowned upon in schools, as it is virulently catching and the headmistress gets really antsy when half the school is absent due to being glued to their pillows.  Tilly was really, really chirpy for a girl who only hours previously was at death’s door and didn’t know how she was going to get to sleep because her eye hurt so much that it was almost unbearable.  This was at ten thirty.  When I went up to bed at eleven I had to shut the bedroom door because her snores were rattling the energy saving lightbulbs in the hall.  It was, I believe, a snore of pain.

I was not terribly chirpy.  I was and am the opposite of terribly chirpy.  I am obliterated with tiredness. Last night was rather trying in parenting terms.  Tallulah got sent to bed without a story for doing something heinous, heinous and obviously deeply boring because I have no recollection of her crime whatsoever.  She then decided to try and eke out her bed time by having hysterics about the fact that she had lost her purse full of cash, despite having put it in a very safe place.  She came to see me, half pyjama’d, bawling her eyes out.  She had fat tears rolling down her face and I was convinced that she must have at least cut an artery. but no.  It was the lost purse of doom!

I pointed out that it was quarter past seven in the evening, she was going to bed, all the shops were shut, and as her room was a seething pit of degradation I expected that her purse had only been temporarily mislaid and would turn up in the morning.  Apparently this was the worst thing I could have said and only proved what an unsensitive and heartless bitch I was.  This utterance brought forth more wailing.  Wailing of such a quality that if she were only to start rending her hair I could lend her out as a professional mourner and make cash to buy her any number of purses.  Unmoved by her plight I sent her to bed and said that if she needed to cry I was a firm believer in the maxim ‘better out than in’, but could she keep the noise down because Oscar was asleep.

She cried herself noisily to sleep, despite Jason’s best attempts to reassure her that her purse would indeed turn up in the morning (which it did, I might add).  It was just one of those occasions where she was determined to wring every last drop of pathos out of the situation come what may, and trifles like cold facts and parents were not going to get in her way.

We had just recovered from the lost purse trauma when Tilly came into the lounge, lips quivering to announce her impending blindness and ask whether conjunctivitis was deadly.  It took me half an hour to talk her down from planning the funeral, although at least Tallulah would have felt useful if it had gone that far.

I believe we then had a whole hour to ourselves until Oscar started.  He had a nightmare about the door in his bedroom.  What it did I can’t be sure, but him screaming ‘DOOR! DOOR! ARRRGHHH! DOOR!’ convinced me that I had hit upon the right diagnosis for his ills.  It took until about midnight to settle him, because he kept falling back to sleep and then waking up screaming about the door again.  It was a fantastically relaxing evening, and although I slept, I woke up feeling like someone had been poking me in the eye with a particularly scratchy sack and not being able to believe the fact that it was quarter to eight and not in fact half past two in the morning, which is what it felt like.

So, having perky kids on a fraught bus journey was really the only thing I wanted to do with my time this morning, as you can imagine.  We got to town just as the heavens opened, and I had only dressed us in cardigans because I foolishly believed it was summer.  We walked to the bank in the teeth of a howling gale with the rain blowing horizontally into our eyes and then queued up for fifteen minutes to put this bloody cheque in. 

The queue was horrible as I managed to position myself in front of a complete nutter, who kept dropping out of the queue to count his money and then pushing back to his place accusing all the other people in the queue of being ‘queue jumping buggers.’  He then decided that there weren’t enough staff on and that he wanted to complain.  He made me agree (by shouting at me and looking like a mentaller) to look after his shopping trolley on wheels and went off to find the manager to complain.  When he got back he engaged me in a conversation about ‘bloody windmills’ which I still have absolutely no clue about, and which convinced me that he probably had an exploding windmill shaped bomb in his wheeled shopper and when it went off I would be under suspicion as his suicide bomber accomplice side kick.

When I finally made it, sweating with fear and tiredness to the counter, they informed me that as it was a cheque from Canada, I couldn’t just deposit it like that.  Apparently if I come back with an entire chemical blood analysis, a portrait of Jason rendered entirely from armpit hair and a letter from Anne Frank’s only surviving relative I can do it, but not today.  Lucky old me.

After dragging about in the rain buying eye drops, new school shoes and something to eat for lunch we flogged home.  I chose a taxi as I had lost the will to live and had a throbbing headache.  I still have a throbbing headache, a girl with gummy eyes, a boy who is hot, cross and wearing his sister’s pants on his head and smacking everyone because he is sleep deprived from his door nightmares, and about four hours to go until I have to go and see some Shakespeare in a big top.  That is if it hasn’t been washed away by the rain.