Books, Books, Bookety Books

I’m dithering.  This is quite a normal thing, but I am finding it rather tragic and poignant tonight.  I’ve got the evening to myself.  My friend Squirrel came over for tea this afternoon (her real name is Nicole, but she prefers to be called Squirrel and I’m very liberal about such matters.  I have no leg to stand on having called my daughters Matilda and Tallulah), but went home after chasing the children round the garden with her mad dog for several hours and patiently sitting with Tallulah through another three rows of knitting.  It might not seem much, but three rows is a long time in the life of an amateur knitter and her teacher.  Especially when the amateur knitter is prone to temper tantrums and used to be called ‘Gurny baby’ by said Squirrel because of her permanent scowl.  The lesson passed peacefully, much to my amazement and we have now progressed from pink to orange and made the first stripes of what I am assured will eventually be a handbag.  My feeling is that I will probably be too aged to appreciate it when it is finished, but I am trying to keep those pessimistic thoughts to myself, and you of course.

The kids are now firmly ensconsed in bed, despite Matilda’s desire to spend her whole life on Bin Weevils on the computer so she can amass enough points to teach her bin weevil pet to juggle.  I have forced her into bed with the threat that if she doesn’t rest her eyes sufficiently she will be blind by morning.  Shock tactics often work best in these situations.

Jason has gone off to play poker.  He has been winning small amounts recently and the home improvement plans have had to go on hold for the time being.  I am not making plans to jack in the day job and hire a nanny and a chef just yet.

So, the house is as quiet as it can be when four people are residing in it.  I am in charge of the television controls.  I am in charge of the internet.  I am in charge of the bookshelves.  I fancy reading a book.  I don’t know what to read.  This is the source of my dither.  This is also the source of my shame.  I buy books like other people buy pints of milk.  I have a permanent collection of my favourite books and give away all the others that I read, yet I buy them faster than I read them.  Eighty percent of the hundreds of books in my house are on my ‘to read list’ and yet I still regularly visit and use the library, and buy books like someone is about to ban them and I need to stock up for the nuclear winter.  I also review for Amazon Vine, who send me books every month, at least four, sometimes more.  I accept loans of books from friends.  I read books the children recommend.  I read books to the children.  My life is full of books and there are so many lovely, juicy ones waiting to be read I just can’t decide.  I am paralysed by a kind of book avalanche style inertia.

I have one of my Vine books left to read, but finished another one today and am three chapters into the last one.  It’s okay, but it’s not gripping me.  Because I am already making headway I decided that I would have a break and treat myself, but where to start?

I am ashamed to say that I have books sitting by the side of my bed that have been there for two years now.  We moved house a year ago.  I boxed them up from the bedside table in the old house and merely dusted them down and stuck them back by the bedside table in the new house.  These are all books I have started, but never quite gotten round to finishing.  I finish one out of a horrified sense of guilt about once every six months and then add two or three new ones to the pile just for the hell of it.

Last week I took delivery of several books from Amazon.  I had treated myself because I was feeling rather under the weather.  I decided that I must not buy any more books after that because things were getting out of hand.  I went to the Co-op the next day.  They have a large set of bookshelves by the photo machine.  These shelves are full of books from a local charity.  They put them there, allow you as the browser to choose what grabs your fancy and then you stick the donation of your choice in the collection box nearby.  I promised myself I wouldn’t look.  Then I looked.  I came away with War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells and Geraldine Brooks’ The Year of Wonders.  The week before I got the Arden Titus Andronicus and a bumper Rumpole anthology.

I took the kids to the library.  I promised myself I wouldn’t get any books.  Then I saw the Ben Elton book about the First World War that both my parents had said was excellent.  I borrowed it.  Then I borrowed the latest chick lit offering by Marian Keyes, ‘This Charming Man’ (I’m not proud) and a factual book about the Eurovision Song Contest by Tim Moore called Nul Points (I read his book about The Tour De France because someone lent it to me once.  It was very funny).

Yesterday when we tried and failed to go to the cinema we ended up in Borders.  I was very fierce.  I was determined I wouldn’t buy any books.  I was left alone for too long and my husband was sympathetic.  I bought Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson.   It’s by the exquisite publishers Persephone.  It cost twice as much as a regular paperback.  I couldn’t resist.  I am a full blown addict.

I thought that if I wrote about it it might a) remove the cloud of low lying guilt, which is never going to be removed by not buying books because I have proved beyond shadow of a doubt that I am physically incapable of not buying books and I love it too much, and b) I might be able to choose.  I’m not any closer to choosing.  I have narrowed it down slightly from about five hundred possible choices during the course of this monologue.  Here are my choices:

1. The Ben Elton book – It needs to go back to the library soon
2. Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day – It looks delicious and rather Nancy Mitfordesque.  I love Nancy Mitford but I’ve read all her books and she’s dead so this is my only hope.
3. The Snack Thief by Andrea Camilleri – excellent old fashioned detective books about a Sicilian police inspector
4. N.P.  by Banana Yoshimoto – A brilliantly lyrical, contemporary Japanese writer.  I bought this book with my christmas book tokens and still haven’t gotten round to it yet.
5. American Gods by Neil Gaiman – I only discovered Neil Gaiman this year and have read a lot of his stuff.  Brilliant, dark and funny fantasy writing.  I’ve just finished the prequel to this and loved it.
6. I am Legend by Richard Matheson – The film was great. The book is a sci-fi horror classic, way ahead of its time.  I’ve owned it for years and somehow never got around to reading it yet.
7. Fair Play by Tove Jansson – Yes she wrote the Moomins. No her adult books are nothing like the Moomins, but they are still brilliant. This is the latest of her novels to be available in English.
8. If on a Winter’s Night A Traveller by Italo Calvino – I read his book Invisible Cities and loved it. I didn’t understand it, but it was fabulous.
9. Exit Music by Ian Rankin – This is the last Rebus. I want to read it.  I daren’t read it because then it will be over and Rankin might not ever write anything brilliant again.
10. The Ongoing Moment by Geoff Dyer – Dyer is a journalist.  He writes about all kinds of things.  He wrote a fantastic book about WWI called The Missing of the Somme.  This is about photography. I’m interested in photography, I love Dyer’s writing.  It will be fabulous.  When I get around to it.

I’ve got them all spread out in front of me.  Now I’m nearly too tired to choose and it’s bed time.  I’m going to close my eyes, wave my fingers about and choose one.  I’ll let you know tomorrow.  I’ll probably be asleep before the second chapter. Let’s hope the first chapter lives up to expectation.

Thursday 31st July – A Brief Moment of Respite

This morning I would like to announce that I had a whole half an hour of freedom without children.  Fanfare please.  The girls were at their dad’s last night.  This morning I managed to get Oscar up and off to nursery at a reasonable time and came back to an uninterrupted, peaceful breakfast before he brought them back to blight my day.  I suppose I should just be thankful that someone else is going to spend the morning dealing with Oscar’s pooh obsession.

It was an oasis of calm in what is turning out to be a more than unusually depressing day.  I drank my coffee.  I ate my Shreddies.  I read a crappy celebrity magazine, which despite my vows to Jason that I was going to ween myself off, due to the fact that OK is now £3 per copy, which is daylight robbery, I couldn’t resist and bought anyway.  I boggled over the pictures of Jodie Marsh’s new frock, if it can be called such a thing, held together entirely with tit tape and the power of clenched buttocks.  She looks like she either a) ran into a curtain or b) had a nasty fight with an ancient Greek and came off best.  I had a fleeting few moments of tranquil happiness contemplating the fact that I have never had to worry about sellotaping my bosom into my dress.  I’d be bound to do it wrong and end up with sellotape marks and chafing, which would never, ever come off.

 

I’m glad this precious moment happened.  I have had some time off from the kids this holiday.  Most of it has been with Jason, which has been lovely, but there are times when it is just nice to sit around alone, doing exactly what you want, even if what you want is to suck your teeth and think hyper critical thoughts about Z list celebrities whilst forking Shreddies into your receiving mouth.  My needs are few and simple, which is why I am slightly surprised that they don’t get met more often.

 

The kids are super feisty this morning.  After about twenty minutes of being home, after they had described to me in vivid detail a visit to some friends to see their cats, a nail biting game of Connect Four, how to buy a pet on Bin Weevils and the plot of The Spiderwick Chronicles, and despite my dire warnings, they had a big argument about who was in charge of the television control.  I settled that with minimal shouting and went about my business.  Five minutes after that they were fighting over who had the most cushions from the sofa.  I have separated them and warned them of death by imminent shooting if they argue again in the next hour at least.  They hate me and are sitting at opposite ends of the lounge scowling and watching Art Attack in a resentful way.

Now we are having to put all the lights on because the sky has clouded over and it is teeming down.  I was going to give them a picnic in the garden at lunch time.  Unless I have time to whittle a raft I don’t think this is going to be a viable option.  Nor is the trip to the library I had planned for this afternoon.  If it was just normal rain it wouldn’t bother me overmuch.  I did spend three years living in mid Wales, but this is that sort of rain that is so fierce it interferes with satellite reception and sends rivers snaking down your garden path.  Unless we’re planning on shooting the rapids I don’t think it will work.

 

My luck really isn’t in with trips at the moment.  Last night Jason really wanted to go and see the new Batman film at the cinema.  He doesn’t go to the cinema much.  He likes to wait until things come out on DVD and then watch them in the comfort of his own home with cups of tea, packets of ginger biscuits and regular trips to the loo.  He says that our sofa is more comfortable, our television screen is nearly as big as a cinema screen anyway, and at home, as long as the children are in bed, he doesn’t have to sit next to mindless riff raff and their incessantly brainless chatter. He has a point.

 

He only goes to the cinema when he really, really can’t wait.  So this was quite a big deal.  He was so excited that granny had agreed to babysit.  We set off for the cinema in high spirits.  He even bought a family sized bag of Minstrels.  Oh yes! We were prepared.  When we got there it was bedlam.  The cars were jamming the car park and the people were queueing out of both doors of the cinema, down the block and round the corner.  I’ve never seen anything like it.  We were suitably depressed.  There wasn’t a hope in hell of getting in.  We went to Borders for coffee instead and ate all our Minstrels under the table.  We were home an hour and a half after we went out.

 

The last time granny agreed to babysit so that we could go out I had a migraine and vomited all over the house, thus cancelling our trip.  We did make it to Birmingham for our twenty four hours of freedom by the skin of our teeth, but only just, and there was hell to pay when we got home.  All this is making me rather twitchy.  I am going away for the weekend with two of my oldest friends.  We are going to London to meet up without children for the first time since we had them.  I am now nervous that something will go hideously wrong.  When you factor into the equation that we each have three kids, this is more likely than not.  Who can predict that nine children will behave themselves all weekend?  I’m not a betting person, but even if I was I wouldn’t be putting money on that one.  It will be a bloody miracle if we all manage to meet in the right place at the right time unencumbered.  We have great plans for if we do.  If it does happen what’s the bet we will be in bed by ten, safe in the knowledge that nobody is going to be sitting on our chest, prizing our eyelids open in the morning?  Still, that in itself is not a bad plan.

The Highly Abridged, very late late, extraordinarily late question time

This question and answer session is now so late that another one is beginning to queue behind it and make tutting noises.  You will know if you are a regular reader, that life has been somewhat full on recently due to potty training small boys and building a wildlife sanctuary with small girls.  Sorry about that.  It is only just over three weeks now until school reconvenes and normal routines can be resumed.  I am crossing off the days.

 

Until then, here are the answers to last week’s questions you posted.  Two more people have been searching for information on alien fizz pods by the way.  I still have no idea, and I am still waiting for someone to mail me with some further clues.  Get to it poppets, and if there is enough meat on the bones, further blogs will be dedicated solely to the world of the alien fizz pod, whatever it may be.

 

It’s a very short one this week.  I’m under time trials for the under two’s international shit shovelling team and it’s eating into my blogging time.

 

Celebrities who wear full dentures.

 

• Nookie Bear (he also has glass eyes.  Shocking but true)
• Lassie (a very nasty nip)
• Tony Blair (he wears two full sets simultaneously)
• Jodie Marsh (made entirely of diamante and Swarovski crystal)
• Ernest Hemingway (post mortem)

 

What goes with gold shoes?

 

• A yellow flag, a bell and a hair shirt.
• A t-shirt bearing the legend, ‘shame, shame, woe is me.’
• A sandwich board with the words: ‘Take pity on me. The end of the world is nigh.’
• An uncle Fester high necked robe with a floral rubber swimming cap and flying goggles.
• Nothing. Nothing could compete with the glory of gold shoes.  You should just go naked and wear your shoes with pride.

 

Glazed over eye in cats.

 

Stop reading them ‘A La Recherche du Temps Perdu’ then.  That’s just mean.  Cats hate Proust because he used to force feed his cat Madeleines when all she really wanted was a bit of cat nip and a feather on a string.  They are animals with simple needs.  Cats hold grudges and they find French literature really boring.  Try them with the letters page of FHM.  That should perk them up a bit.

 

Who is the crazy lady of Glenfield?

 

That would still be me, I’m afraid.

 

Did Philip Glass have anxiety?

 

Only when he’s composing classical music or weaving humidors out of lollipop sticks and string. It’s part of his ongoing therapy sessions.  If he composes something that gets accepted for air play by Henry Kelly on Classic FM, he gets to move up to painting and whittling his own chess pieces.

 

Why is Katy so obsessed with pooh?

 

You merely have to read the blog entry entitled Flash Saviour of the Universe to answer that one.  I will say no more on the subject lest I accidentally on purpose slit my own throat with a melon baller.

 

Hallucination cabbage juice.

 

Well there have to be some benefits to your house smelling like an old people’s home and nobody wanting to be your friend.  What do you hallucinate?  That you are a really fat caterpillar feasting on delicious treats who then miraculously turns into a butterfly?  Or that you’re hideously trapped inside an old people’s home that smells remarkably like farts and vegetables that have been cooking on a low heat for the last decade?  No wonder it’s not very popular on the streets.

 

Things to ping.

 

• Pong
• Knicker elastic
• Things that make you go wooh wooh wooh yeah
• String
• Bells that go ding

 

Am I anywhere close there at all?

 

How to get Celine Dion’s hairstyle for my son.

 

Why? Is the word that springs to mind.  He must have done something really, really awful to upset you. Nevertheless you cannot be allowed to continue your chilling plan.  If you look closely at the UN documentation for the Commission on Human Rights it quite distinctly says in paragraph 12, subsection P under the heading: ‘Forcing your offspring to look like celebrities’ and I quote: ‘…there are no conceivable circumstances, no matter how heinous the crime against them, when a parent has the right to force their child to look like a) Elton John, b) Dale Winton, or c) Celine Dion.  In such times as this code is found to be breached Supernanny will be called and the parents will be labelled as ‘unassettabull’.  Their child will be taken away to a place of safety and the parents will be punished by being made to live in the Sunshine Home for Z List Celebrities with the entire back cast of the Big Brother House.’  You don’t want that now do you?

 

Dirndl men cross dress.

 

Wouldn’t you if you were called Brian and were forced to wear a Dirndl skirt?  You might even consider it if your name were Monica and you were forced to wear a Dirndl skirt.  It is a well known fact that the only person in the whole history of western civilisation who has ever managed to pull off a Dirndl skirt successfully was Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music and that was only because she had three make up vans, fourteen stylists and a lot of Vaseline on the lens.  It is to the world of fashion what Morris Dancing is to the world of hard core drum and bass.

 

Gravy browning drug.

 

It’s called Breen.  It’s what you get when you mix all the colours in the paintbox together in a fit of pique.  It is dried, ground into a fine powder and then added to distilled Worcester Sauce. A few drops are added to each packet of gravy browning to give it an hallucinogenic kick.  In 1873 the Commissioner of Drains for Greater London blamed it as the one thing that was funding the entire criminal underclass of the Outer Hebrides.  The French had fin de siècle decadence and absinthe.  We had the smell of damp whippets and gravy browning. Unfortunately these days it is at such a weak potency that you would have to ingest thirty packets of gravy browning just to get a mild buzz.  The equivalent would be brushing your naked ankle against a live electric fence.  It’s hardly worth the time and expense, not to mention the overwhelming smell of gravy.

 

Celebrities who wear orthopaedic shoes.

 

• Basil Brush
• Emma Bunton
• Darth Vader
• Des Lynam (he wears four pairs.  He’s actually a quadruped)
• Una Stubbs (but only when she’s dancing with Lionel Blair)

 

30th July – Flash. Saviour of the Universe

I am being held hostage by a small boy’s bottom and it’s very, very depressing.  I am at the end of my tether, and if I was a drinking sort of woman I would be reaching for the gin about now.  As it is I have cracked open a bottle of sparkling water and daringly mixed it with a shot of Vimto cordial.  My decadent behaviour knows no bounds.  One day at a time as me old mate Bill Wilson said, slugging back his Tizer.

One of the things you forget about parenting (should you be wise enough to have them reasonably spaced apart), when you embark upon child number two or any multiple thereof, are the hideous months of potty training that you went through with your first child.  People tell you when you wonder why they bothered having number X of Y when childbirth is clearly such an horrific ordeal, that you forget that bit as soon as you hold the child in your arms and the endorphins of lurve kick in.  I beg to differ.

I had three hideous pregnancies, each one worse than the last and entirely memorable for different reasons, albeit all horrible reasons.  I had three vile births of which the first was so very traumatic that a) it nearly killed me and b) I actually went for counselling after six months because I was still having nightmares about it.  I lost quite a few babies in the process of having the three I’ve got, and also nearly died doing that.  I have spent significant amounts of time in and out of hospital, with more in than out, all with pregnancy and childbirth related issues and nothing will ever wipe away the memories of bleeding up and down the corridors of some of North London’s finest hospitals, wearing a backless gown and paper pants, no matter how many endorphins you give me.  It’s something only a fully fledged Pete Doherty style heroin addiction is ever going to manage to fix and I don’t like needles, so I’m doomed.

Just in case I did mellow with age over the whole thing, the fact that I have three caesarean scars along with exploratory camera scars and ectopic pregnancy exit hatch scars from various failed attempts at childbirth along the way means that staring at myself naked in the mirror (something I try not to do very often.  I’m already as short sighted as a mole. I don’t want to go blind) is a sure fire way to bring the memories flooding back in glorious technicolour.  A maternal visual aid.  Luckily nobody is trying to poke me with a pointy stick on stage in front of hundreds of people, but sometimes when I’m very depressed about my failure to break into the nude modelling market, they might as well be.

But potty training is something that I did forget about.  I’m not sure now whether I blotted it out because it was too horrible to remember and my brain had finally learned how to delete this stuff.  I’m not sure whether all my traumatic memory room in my brain is already full of childbirth stuff and there was simply no room for Pampers Pull Ups and blue plastic potties emblazoned with cheery frogs.  I just don’t know, but I wish someone had shot some film and shown it to me before I succumbed to the lure of getting jiggy with mr biggy to make child number three. I may have thought about things very differently and it would have saved Jason having to swap the M3 for a VW Touran.

Everyone told me that boys were much slower to potty train than girls and that I wasn’t to expect miracles and it would be a marvel if he were actually even aware that he had a willie until he got to school etc, etc.  I didn’t mind this.  I have never subscribed to the draconian school of potty training anyway.  My mother used to know a lady who tied her children to the potty several times a day and kept them there until they had produced a satisfactory bowel movement.  She would then release them, chart the contents of the potty in a notebook and continue merrily on with her day.  I wouldn’t have been surprised if by the time they were two she was ringing a bell and they were poohing scale models of the Vatican on demand.  It all seems a bit problematic to me. As is Jason’s mother’s assertion that he was fully potty trained by the time he was twelve months old (a world class flautist and an active player on the stock market as well no doubt).

The thing is that I am not really that interested in bowels and their movements.  Having read this far, and also bearing in mind the considerable number of mentions of pooh in my blog to date, you wouldn’t necessarily believe this.  I would however say that my interest in the world of pooh is reluctant and has been forced upon me by the demands of three children.  I feel there is no point in being squeamish and coquettish about something which takes up such a large part of my daily life and sanitary routines, and so I manfully get on with it.  A misery shared is a misery halved, which is why you all have to hear about it too.  As a friend said to me last week, when she had looked at my blog for the first time: ‘You do talk about pooh a lot don’t you?’ to which the only fair answer is ‘yes’.  I also talk a lot about wee, snot, vomit, sleep deprivation, calpol, death, Cbeebies and cake.  Welcome to my world.

I was always of the opinion that left to their own devices and given some encouragement a child would potty train themselves eventually, and as long as I was willing to keep buying nappies and creating a carbon footprint to rival Godzilla razing Tokyo to the ground in the meantime, all would be well and all manner of things would be well.  My theory is based on the fact that it is almost unheard of for a child to start school who is unable to actually tend to their own bodily functions, albeit in an unorthodox and entirely haphazard way.  This is what happened with the girls, both of whom took their own sweet time about potty training and approached it in entirely individual ways.

Tilly used to like to wear a leopard fur hat with ear attachments and hide behind the sofa on her potty shouting: ‘Go away! I are bein’ private!’ to all and sundry.  It is much harder to explain the idea of a potty to a child when you only have one, by the way.  Children learn by repeating what they see and hear.  A potty bears no resemblance whatsoever to a toilet and unless you do diagrams and a flip chart they have absolutely no idea what to do with it.  I thought this through and decided to show her myself.  Hence 28 year old woman bent over a potty on the kitchen floor with fascinated child staring wild eyed in amazement crouched by her side, just as husband walks through the door after a hard day of big shot project management and power lunch.  It probably contributed to the deterioration of our marriage.

Another top tip is that under no circumstances should you encourage the child to get enthusiastic about the world of potty training by buying her a doll with a potty, which is another one of those mistakes I only made once.  I waltzed upstairs with a pile of washing, thinking ‘Ahh! Isn’t she playing nicely?’ having only heard encouraging noises over the baby monitor, to be faced by the sight of a small girl, crouching over a brimming, doll sized potty of wee.  I got there just in time to watch it cascade neatly over the sides into the cream carpeting (this is the third house I’ve owned with children and cream carpets.  You think I’d have learned by now.) 

Tallulah was more contemplative about her approach and just got on with it, thank the Lord.  Although her wiping skills still leave a lot to be desired on days when she is more interested in getting back to wreaking the mayhem that constitutes playing in our house, than she is in accuracy of sanitary procedures.  Luckily, watching her sister, meant that I didn’t have to wreck marriage number two by being discovered atop another pee filled plastic container.

Oscar is bucking the trend of being a disinterested party and is full on for starting potty training despite me trying to put him off any way I can think of without actually rendering him anally retentive..  He set his own agenda and has been merrily widdling all over the house like an overenthusiastic labrador for several weeks now.  The house is awash with potties, toilet rolls, wipes and economy sized bottles of Dettol.  This weekend he decided that he wanted to move up to the world of big toilets.  The problem is that he is too little and keeps falling over, falling in and falling off.  On Sunday morning when he demanded to use the big toilet I popped him on and kept a firm grip on his thighs to stop him disappearing down the ubend.  He promptly peed all down my cleavage, which was directly in the firing line. I moved only for him to drench my skirt, my shoes and the freshly laundered mat below.

We hared off to Mothercare and bought those seats that fit over the regular seats to save your child being flushed into the nearest reservoir.  Oscar is very proud of them and has tried to wear them as hats on several occasions.  He likes to flit between potties and the big toilet depending on his mood.  As he is an expert at pee, he cannot be left without a nappy either, as he has the endless capacity to widdle at will and will spent half an hour on and off the toilet, only to then happily go and wee all over the lounge floor where he will be found paddling merrily away.  He doesn’t like his nappies any more though, so we have to hide them with big boy pants over the top.  It is costing a bloody fortune and it is driving me mad.  I have never, in my whole life, been on such intimate, yet unrewarding terms with male genitalia and it has no end in sight (no pun intended), unless you count starting school, which is in three years time.

Today has nearly killed me.  He was really tired and refused lunch except for hurling a few desultory grapes at the washing machine in a half hearted manner.  I scooped him up for a nap. By this time he was down to a nappy anyway because the entire hour before lunch was taken up with flitting between the toilet and the potty and one entirely naked outside wee where he escaped my clutches for a nano second.  Jason is at home working.  He has set up office outside on the deck and I found Oscar when an anguished shriek from Jason saying: ‘He’s bloody well gone and piddled all over my sodding cabling now!’ helped me locate him with my unerring maternal instinct.

I threw the boy into bed and went downstairs to wash everything down and have some lunch.  I could hear Oscar chuntering away over the baby monitor.  He sometimes does this for a while and then settles down, but this time it was all getting louder and more anguished.  After twenty minutes I went upstairs.  He had disembowelled the cot and was sitting atop a huge mound of waterproof sheets, pillow cases and naked duvets, stinking to high heaven and looking rather sheepish.

I galloped him downstairs into the bathroom and started running a bath (after I had evicted the latest batch of kamikaze moths).  He had wound himself round and round so that he was covered in pooh.  I held him with my fingertips and started scrubbing him down.  He announced he was tired.  He sat on my knee.  I was wearing beige jeans.  They now had a large bottom shaped pooh stain on.  I stripped off whilst trying to hold him still with one hand.  He wriggled free and draped himself over the bathroom mat.  I grabbed him and tossed him gaily into the bath.  I scrubbed me, the bathroom and the boy.  He announced he needed another pooh and wanted the big toilet.

I hoiked him out and dried him off.  He poohed in the big toilet.  While I was flushing he grabbed the potty and poohed in that.  I flushed it away and cleaned that.  He sat down on the potty again and did another pooh.  I cleaned it. He poohed on the floor.  I cleaned it. He climbed onto the big toilet and did a wee.  Then he got down and did another wee in the potty.  He then did a wee on the floor.  He was extremely cheerful and very, very proud.  He saves his pooh and wee in bite sized chunks so he can really, really get the practice.  I was practically weeping by this stage.  I was still naked.  I was covered in Flash.  I remained positive through gritted teeth. 

While I was rinsing myself off, he escaped before I could put another nappy on him and piddled on the landing carpet.  He splashed about it in until it sank in.  I cried.  I put another nappy on him.  I took him to his room.  I rebuilt his cot.  I put him in it and shut the door.  I lay slumped against it, naked, smelling of pine and rather depressed.  I came to talk to you.  What else is there to do.

Tuesday 29th July – Feed the Birds, eighty quid a bag…

Do you have any idea how many varieties of birdfood it is possible to purchase these days? Well, do you?  Until yesterday afternoon I had no idea.  I was safe in my cocoon of ignorance.  Now I am stunned, amazed and slightly traumatized.  As advertised in yesterday’s blog, Granny arrived just before lunch and we all swept off to the most expensive garden centre in the Western hemisphere.  Garden centres in Monaco are probably less pricey.  Hand made, Theo Fennel silver spades with mink lined handles which have been personally embossed by Vivienne Westwood are probably less expensive than a standard trowel from this garden centre.

Not that it really is a garden centre, not in the way that you or I, dear reader, grew up understanding garden centres.  Boring places, full of begonias and leilandii that smell of potting compost and Percy Thrower’s shed.  The only places that were ever open on a Sunday, and which your parents dragged you to when you got too annoying to be safely contained at home without fear of them killing you and burying you under the rockery (rockeries were all the rage in the seventies).  No, those days of the simple delights of a place where you can merely buy plants are long gone. 

Our garden centre is an uber consumer hub of sensory delights.  Our garden centre has an integral florist, a coffee bar, a toy shop which sells Brio train sets at prices which make all your hair fall out,  a branch of Thorntons (I kid you not) and a restaurant.  It has a place to buy tropical fish.  Until recently it had a pet shop, which has, much to the children’s dismay, been dismantled to provide extra space for the ride on lawnmowers of joy.  It also has a deli where you can buy air dried parma ham at fifteen quid a slice and a crockery shop that is the only place in the county where you can buy Emma Bridgewater pottery over the counter.  The plants are incidental, a mere blip on the radar of garden centrey delights.

We had lunch in the restaurant.  We are nervous of the coffee bar.  We fear it. It is a new addition.  It pretends to be Starbucks but it is run by people from the nearest village and we happen to know they are all inbred, incestuous, webfooted people with twelve fingers on each hand and we are not sure how they cope with the concept of frothing milk and we know they can’t spell latte.  They also pronounce it latty.  It may be brilliant.  We will never know until one of us is brave enough to breach their ranks and become the test case for all further ponderings on the coffee bar.  With three small children in tow it wasn’t worth it.  We walked away.

After lunch we wandered over to the bit which said: ‘Garden Wildlife’ in big, green, welcoming letters.  I don’t know about you, but I had envisioned upon promising said bird feeder that there would be a choice of two, one in plastic, one in metal, and a bit of a dither over whether to buy peanuts, sunflower seeds or a heady mixture of both.  I fondly cast my mind back to days of yore and Blue Peter showing you every year how to make a bird seed cake out of lard, bits of bacon rind and seeds, to help your feathered friends through the winter.  It was all very simple.  As with the days of garden centres which just sell plants these days are now long gone.

It is frightening just what one needs these days in the way of tempting wildlife into your garden.  It is also slightly odd, as my parents spent most of my childhood tempting wildlife out of our garden and into next door’s garden, so that said wildlife could eat their seedlings instead.  Now the tide has truly turned.  Here are just a few of the choices in simple birdfood that I was faced with yesterday afternoon, in the sweltering heat, with three small assistants and Granny on hand:

• Buckets of frozen meal worms, which are apparently a tasty, crunchy, treat for birds of all makes and models.
• red skinned peanuts
• Peanuts without skins for sensitive birds with arthritic claws
• sunflower seeds with husks on
• sunflower seeds with husks removed for hard of thinking birds
• sunflower seed nibbles for birds with denture style beaks
• Big bird seeds (didn’t investigate too much.  Do they mean emus and the like? Not sure what constitutes a big bird.  A gryphon? An albatross?)
• Small bird seeds (had a picture of a robin on the packet.  Check!)
• Wildlife bird seed for birds with Asbos
• Domesticated bird seed for birds who wipe their feet and say please and thank you
• Emergency bird seed (what kind of avian emergency would require a kilo bag of emergency bird seed I wonder? A grievously wounded pigeon?  An escaped parrot? The mind boggles)
• Mythical bird seed (this is where the gryphons come in) Actually I made that bit up, but you get the drift.

This is just a small sample.  There were hundreds, literally hundreds of types of bird food, and bird food holders, including Blue Peter style bird cakes in coconut shells.  It was frightening.  You can even buy squirrel proof coverings for your bird feeders.  You can buy copper stakes with curling branches, rather like an avian hat stand, on which to hang the fruits of your purchases and cover all your birdy bases.  In the end I bought three different string bags of bird food and a pound of assorted wild bird food mix, despite the childrens’ insistence on an elaborate series of culinary treats for all the birds in the world.

Bill Oddie, he of the Scoma Vole scare in an earlier blog, has his own brand of bird food and bird food holders.  HIs bird food is bagged up in very chi chi looking containers.  It has his face emblazoned on one side looking like the legendary twitcher he now is, complete with spectacles and a pair of binoculars draped about his bevested chest, which is just visible, rising from the folds of the bag.  It has pictures of the birds that each bag of overpriced millet is supposed to attract, and a picture of said millet complete with little arrows and text that tells you just what each lovingly, hand selected seed will do for the health of your bird population, including beak strengthening properties and the ability to make them fly at the speed of concorde breaking the sound barrier.  It doesn’t mention the fact that they will undoubtedly shit all over your clean washing and your newly polished windows.  Good marketing.

Underneath Bill’s shelves of delight was the more serious wildlife luring apparel.  You can buy a bat box for a mere £25.  It looks just like the disastrous bird boxes that we were forced to make in woodwork all those years ago, and I have no idea why they have the right to gouge you for twenty five quid for it.  Especially when the bats seem to be doing just fine without hand whittled bat hotels, at least round our way anyway.  One flew into our lounge only the other night, had a lovely look around and then went off to seek pastures new. It was probably bored of its latest, high tech, deluxe bat box with surround sound stereo and HD telly and wanted to see how the other half lived.

You can also buy wood louse emporiums, squirrel hotels and old people’s homes for voles.  You can buy hedgehog palaces.  They even had one with a model hedgehog in to show you how versatile and easy to use it is, just in case you couldn’t work it out for yourself.  It’s amazing really.  The children were very upset that I didn’t succumb to their pleas to be allowed to buy an entire olympic wildlife village and set it up in the garden.  We left with our three paltry strings of nuts and three sulky children.  Apparently I am heartless and just don’t care about animals.  I do care about animals.  I just don’t want to be chief gravedigger at the wildlife graveyard which will undoubtedly spring up right next to the olympic wildlife village.  I am not ready to sing Abide with Me on heavy rotation just yet.

Monday 28th July – We recreate the last days of Pompeii

It is ten in the morning.  I am still not dressed.  I have run out of deodorant and will have to borrow Jason’s manly deodorant until I can rustle up the troops and go to the shops.  I have milk powder in my eyebrows.  I am not really sure why I have milk powder in my eyebrows.  It is very, very sticky and disconcerting, and at one stage I must have also have rubbed it into my eyes as my eyes are very itchy.  I hope I don’t come across a tragic news story in my trawl of the current affairs websites. I may cry milk.  Unfortunately, unlike those statues of Ganesh I will probably not be carried through the streets on a silken palanquin and feted with rose petals and awe.  I will probably just get really sticky eyes and a nasty case of conjunctivitis.  Life is not always fair.

 

I have just had to separate the children.  They were playing pillow fights at Tallulah’s instigation.  Before I came upstairs to drink my second cup of coffee in peace I did warn them that things might get ugly and they might like to think of something less violent and hitty to play.  They looked at me scornfully.  They raised their eyebrows in an incredulous fashion.  They laughed, ‘Ha! Ha!’ in the face of danger.  I shrugged and scuttled off upstairs.

 

Ten minutes, ten minutes was all it took to turn it from a casual, Enid Blyton type jape that anyone with a public school education and a hilariously old fashioned name would find refreshing, to a blood bath of hitherto unimagined proportions.  As usual it was Tallulah rolling around on the floor screaming as if the hounds of hell were pursuing her.  Apparently, if you repeatedly beat Oscar over the head with a cushion whilst capering about laughing and taunting him, he gets the idea really quickly and then batters you to the floor with the cushion of his choice before sitting on your chest and pulling your hair.  Life is so very, very unfair.

 

I pointed out that girls who instigate such games and then do not listen to the prophetic, Cassandra like warnings of their mothers, deserve everything they get and that she shouldn’t dish it out if she can’t take it.  I then pointed a fierce finger at Oscar and demanded that he be a bit more jenkin.  They all looked at me in outrage.  Their enmity now commingled against a common foe, me.  I created a distraction by announcing that I thought it was time for Horrid Henry on CITV and I was amazed that they weren’t watching it.  I scarpered back upstairs to my now tepid coffee.

 

I need to get dressed.  I need to make a shopping list and I really, really need to do something about the middle bathroom.  I cleaned furiously at the weekend, but for some reason, which I’m still not quite sure about, I failed to clean the kids bathroom.  As it is disgusting every day it gets a lick and a promise all the time, but it needed that deep seated cleaning that only parents dedicated to not having to take their children to the tropical diseases clinic at Kings Cross will appreciate.  It never got it.  I just somehow never got round to it.  I was probably side tracked by bigger problems with my potting compost.  I don’t know.

 

Anyway, I went in there this morning and it is like a bug graveyard.  There are hundreds of tiny fruit fly type things dead in the bottom of the bath.  The windowsill, which is usually awash with blobs of toothpaste, has toothpaste with fruit flies stuck into them, much like a recreation of the last days of Pompeii but with toothpaste as lava and fruit flies as the tiny, fleeing Pompeiians, if you can picture the scene.  There are moths lying abandoned on the rug and something that looks rather like a praying mantis scuttling about the dado rail.  I hope it isn’t a praying mantis.  Tallulah is very concerned about the issue of mosquitos invading Glenfield because of global warming.  She’ll be hysterical if I have to confess that there is a praying mantis in the bathroom.  She’s never been the same since we went to that bug zoo on holiday.

 

None of the other rooms in the house are like this, even the other bathrooms.  What is going on?  Perhaps Matilda, in one of her mad inventing sprees has invented a sonar pulse that emits messages of hope to dying insects and invites them to a final resting place, in much the same manner as an elephant graveyard.  I expect she hasn’t told me about it because it is an accidental discovery, and she was actually trying to make one of those blippy things they have in submarines for her flying boat car, The Kingfisher.  Perhaps there is something in toothpaste that is so irresistible it works on fruit flies in much the same way that light bulbs work on moths.  It could be a pheromone thing.  Whatever it is, it is gross and I have to clean it up.

 

We are going out with granny later on.  We are going to the very posh garden centre near where she lives to have our lunch.  I have promised the girls that we will buy a bird feeder.  It will no doubt be seventy quid and I’d be better off buying one from the pound shop, but a promise is a promise.  They are becoming keen ornithologists.  We have a robin that lives in the garden.  He is rather outraged that we are actually using the garden.  It is his wasteland and he brooks no interference from johnny come lately interlopers.  He spent much of yesterday sat on the handles at the top of the slides, looking disgusted.

 

The girls have called him Charlie.  They have bird boxes which we bought ages ago.  Tilly decided not to use hers, but to make one.  She has made one from cardboard.  It has carpets and a feeding tray and all sorts of mod cons.  I tried to explain that birds weren’t that interested in carpets but she was having none of it.  I gave in gracefully.  It will disintegrate in the next rainstorm anyway, which will save me the bother of having to console her when the birds avoid it like the plague.  Tallulah has hung up her bird house.  She has stuffed it to the gills with bits of torn up bread.  The birds are going to have to eat their way in from the outside as the doorway is also blocked with bread.  She thinks this is a good thing.  A bird feast.  I’m not so sure.  Charlie looked horrified.  I think it’s going to take more than a pink glittery carpet and a cubic metre of bread to get him to the point of tameness they require in a pet.  I think of their previous idea for a chick hotel and shudder.  I have sent telepathic thoughts to Charlie as a warning.  I don’t think he needs it to be honest.

 

Tallulah has just come upstairs to tell me that she would like to save up her money for a small television that she can hang on her bed.  Then apparently she can watch television all morning without having to get dressed and I can bring her breakfast in bed on a tray.  ‘That will be nice mama, won’t it?’  I nodded dubiously.  She turned to leave and then said over her shoulder: ‘Actually I could have breakfast in bed without the television couldn’t I?  I’d like that.  You could do that for me on a special tray couldn’t you?’  She didn’t stop to catch my reply, which is a very good thing as I believe it is not the done thing to swear at your children before midday.

Can I have some more please sir?

I am starving.  I don’t know what I want to eat.  I just know that I want to eat.  I also know that what we have in the house is absolute rubbish.  I am wondering if I had a psychotic break whilst putting in the Ocado order last week.  Why, why, why did I clearly order someone else’s shopping instead of my own?  You think, ordering and paying for food I would have managed to take delivery of something, one thing that I actually want to eat.  It appears not.

It’s a very sad state of affairs.  I have scoured the kitchen several times in the last couple of hours, mooching around like a persistent wasp.  Every time I open the fridge door I pray that there will be something fabulous there that I didn’t see before.  It hasn’t happened yet.  I haven’t even gone through to that magical realm that Sigourney Weaver found in her fridge in Ghostbusters.  This categorically proves beyond shadow of a doubt that our fridge is rubbish.  The most rubbishest fridge in the world.

I don’t even want any chocolate, although I have managed to nab a bit out of the sweetie jar every time I have wafted through the kitchen on my search for that thing, the essence of that food that I will put in my mouth and that will make me feel sated and replete.  Now I feel slightly sick and as though I’ve got a mouth ulcer brewing, but I am still hungry.  It’s a sad day when even the chocolate covered malted milk biscuits of delight that I usually save for just such an emergency don’t work.  What? What am I going to do?

This is why I am writing another blog.  I thought that if I blogged about it it might help a) because my freestyle riff on the state of my appetite might make me put my finger on exactly what it is that I want to eat and b) because the study is on a different floor to the kitchen and might save me from eating another half a dozen malted milk biscuits just to check that it really isn’t them that I want.

All that has happened since I dragged my weary body upstairs is that Tallulah has gotten her knee stuck in the bedframe and woke up screaming because she thought she was being eaten by a shark.  Then she found that she wasn’t being eaten by a shark, but that it was painful anyway, so she carried on screaming for a bit and then thrashed around moaning that she was stuck and would never get out.  When I finally managed to get her to lie still, she was free in ten seconds.  I expected gratitude.  I got a ‘good’ and a huffily turned back as she went back to sleep.  Oscar then started screaming because his bedroom is on the top floor of the house and he is too hot and had gotten himself all tangled up in the sheets, despite the fact that I draped them over the cot bars to stop him doing just that.  After he had finished screaming and wailing and I had come back downstairs to my patient blog, Matilda arrived with the complaint that her new wobbly tooth hurts when she wobbles it.  I asked her if it hurt when she didn’t wobble it, she said ‘not as much.’ I felt like Louis Pasteur when he developed his first vaccine.  She has gone to bed to try to learn not to wobble her tooth.  If she fails, and cannot sleep I have promised her calpol.  My bet is that the minute she lies down and forgets to wobble it she will be out for the count.  I am waiting with eager anticipation the final outcome of my finest experiment.  If it works it could be the first time the house has been quiet since eight thirty this morning.  Praise the lord.

I know, by the way that I haven’t done my weekly question blog yet.  I haven’t got the energy.  I really need to think about it and currently my only free thinking time occurs at about two thirty every morning.  I tend to reserve it for sleeping, so my schedule is slipping somewhat.  Normal service will be resumed when the children stop trying to murder each other long enough for me to utter a single sentence without having to interrupt it to break up midget carnage.

Nope.  I’m still hungry.  Right, I’m off to do my fiftieth lap of the kitchen.  Wish me well.  I will save you a malted milk biscuit.

Sunday 27th – I am Percy Thrower’s Bastard Love Child

Today I have been a woman of the soil.  Actually I have been a rather cheaty woman of the soil, so I don’t think Diarmuid Gavin will be welcoming me with open arms to his next miraculous ping pong ball garden at Chelsea just yet.  Still, as long as all the plants don’t die, I don’t really care.

As previously stated, our garden is more of a building site with grass seed gaily thrown atop it.  It’s fine when the children want to hurtle up and down it, and Oscar wants to pee on it, both of which things happen on an alarmingly frequent basis, but it is rather bare and short on charm.  We had the decking done.  We have had a base for the forthcoming shed put down.  We have hung a bird box in the apple tree and bought a composting bin.  We have filled the rest of the garden with swings, trampolene, slides and other assorted random plastic tat from Toys R Us.  There is, apart from the withered and decidedly patchy grass, a distinct lack of anything that might be called plant life.  Apart from the vast profusion of dock leaves that seem to be sprouting under the trampolene that is.

I decided I wanted to create some borders.  I decided this yesterday when we were hacking our way through B&Q in search of a new hose reel and some bamboo matting to hide next door’s revolting wall from our eyes.  My main reason was that they are doing a special on potting compost and you can get four truckloads for a fiver or some such nonsense.  I had a cunning plan.  I really don’t fancing hacking into all the rubble and hewing out some borders.  With my lack of attention and the children’s help, it is likely to take me until I’m fifty and I’m not that into gardening.  I’m more of a light pruning with a trug sort of gardener.  With potting compost being such a bargain I decided that raised beds were the way forward.

We decided to do a test bed.  After all, no matter how much of a bargain the compost is, you still have to buy the stuff to contain it and all the plants.  We measured a two metre area at the bottom of the steps by the decking.  We zoomed off to B&Q with tape measures in hand.  We bought tons of stuff.  We sweated and wrestled it into the car.  We zoomed home.  We all stopped and had a lolly because we were knackered and hot.

Jason decided that if he refilled the paddling pool Oscar would be distracted from helping.  It now appears that it takes more than an inch of icy water in the bottom of a plastic pool to stop a boy from wanting to have a jolly good hammer and a poke at everything with daddy’s wire cutters.  The only time he was distracted from his mission to heave the lump hammer onto daddy’s toe was when we sent Tilly off to fill the wheelbarrow with compost.  Our compost is not much of a success, consisting mostly of windfall apples and grass clippings.  It stinks to high heaven and is absolutely heaving with insect life.  Tilly’s shrieks were so alluring that Oscar just had to go and help poke sticks into things and squelch about in half rotted apples for a while.  Nice.

We watered the feeble excuse for grass.  We aerated it with the garden fork.  We forgot gravel for drainage but decided to carry on regardless.  We threw down a layer of stinking compost type matter.  We poured soil on the top.  Jason hit his thumb with the hammer.  Oscar ate a lot of compost.  Tilly swirled the earth around professionally and Tallulah sulked.  We made a great team.  I ran from whichever person was having a crisis at the current time to whichever person looked likely to be having a crisis next.  This mainly involved wresting the hammer out of Oscar’s grasp and assuring Tilly that there were no witchety grubs in her hair, and yes it probably was illegal to shoot kookaburras in the UK. 

Our handiwork is a bit wonky.  It’s a bit home made, but it’s done and the plants are in and everything is watered.  Apart from Jason’s thumb there isn’t any casualty work to be done.  It looks nice.  I am very happy with it.  I want to do it all now.  Jason has advised caution.  He says we must wait for about a fortnight to see if the plants actually survive our ministrations and our rubbish soil before he’s going to hit his thumb any more.  He’s got a point.  Plus the fact that I have had to heave Oscar out of the beds at least half a dozen times already and he got really cross when I wouldn’t allow him to flick potting compost down the back of Tallulah’s neck.  In a fortnight we may well be back to a sere plain again. 

I have earth on my knee and I am exhausted.  I want to watch rubbish telly and I really, really want the children to go to bed now.  Tallulah, in between sulking, has spent the whole day doing sums and being amazed by the numerical world.  At ten o’clock this morning I thought it was charming and was really pleased that she was enjoying numbers.  I was impressed that she was making progress with academic work in the summer holidays.  Nine hours later and I’m just irritated to death by the whole thing.

While we were all running around like Percy Thrower on amphetamines, Tallulah remained aloof.  She got into her swimming costume, covered herself in sun cream and spent the afternoon sulking in a boingy fashion, or shouting insults over the fence at the doo bobs.  She needed to save her strength for her interview as the next Carole Vordemann on Countdown.  Judging by the number of ways she can come up with to make six, she’s a shoo in, as long as we don’t go past thirty four.  She announced very solemnly today that thirty four is her limit and that’s all she’s prepared to go to at this time.  It’s good to know your boundaries.

Saturday 26th July – Ma Mere Adore Le Soleil Mais Je Prefere L’Ombrage

It is a beautifully sunny day today.  I can tell this, even from my position, arse upwards, scrubbing the kitchen floor. How can I tell this?  Because it is filtering through my filthy kitchen windows, reminding me just how much of a slattern I am.  I keep meaning to go outside and teeter on the steps to clean them, but as we front the road, if I do this with the children in tow, Oscar will be mowed down for sure and Tallulah will undoubtedly tread in dog pooh.  Oscar will be mowed down just as I put the final polish to my gleaming windows, only to have them splattered in his infant blood, and Tallulah will walk dog crap all over the freshly cleaned cream carpets.  It is not worth it.  I must find a window cleaner, and soon, if this weather is to continue.

 

The French windows are wide open and I thank the lord for the fact that we managed to scrape together enough moolah from behind the sofa cushions for the decking.  It really does do what it says in all the interiors magazines.  It provides that extra indoor/outdoor living space.  It’s brilliant.  Oscar is currently riding his bike around the deck, shouting about being a cheeky moinkin and Tilly is lounging about on a load of cushions looking like a scruffy Bedouin princess.  I don’t care what they’re doing as long as they’re not masticating shreddies into the freshly cleaned kitchen floor.

 

This morning I finished reading my friend, Robert Mighall’s book.  It is called Sunshine and it is about what he calls being a ‘helioholic’ or sun worshipper.  It’s one of those ‘here comes the science bit books’ but without the annoying flicky hair of Jennifer Aniston to accompany it.  It’s science, but not in that dull, dry as dust, ‘look at two frogs copulating and now survey my wondrous Venn diagram’ type way. It combines everything you ever wanted to know about sunshine and the cult of sun worshipping with his personal story of finding a way to justify his need to have lots of lovely sun filled holidays every year.  When the boss signs off his fourteenth holiday claim form of the year and says: ‘So, Mighall, you have now taken three years holiday allocation in one summer, what do you have to say for yourself?’  he can throw this book in his lap and say; ‘I think that about sums it up sir,.’ before running amok in the Ambre Solaire department of his local branch of Boots and hitching a lift to Granada via Easyjet.

 

Here is the link to his site.  He is also on my blog roll which you will find situated between aisles C and D, with emergency exits to the front and rear.  His site contains a link to Amazon in case you too wish to purchase his book.  I won’t put a link in here, because I expect if you link from his site Amazon probably give him more pennies, which means more donkey rides and ice creams for him.

 

As a nod to his passion, and the fact that he’s managed to write an entire book about it, I decided to write my own potted history of what sunshine means to me.  I’m not as enthusiastic as him, so a single blog post will suffice.

 

I used to love the sunshine.  My idea of heaven was some tropical island for a fortnight with just some swimwear, some non scratchy towels and a pile of books.  I’ve never made it, due to lack of funds and enthusiastic partners.  Now I’m not so sure I’d even want to go.  Although if I got a golden ticket in a box of Mr. Kipling French Fancies I wouldn’t turn it down.

I’ve never been particularly good at tanning.  I do go brown, but I am so pale (I think my skin tone on the Dulux chart would be called ‘minus lard’) that it takes weeks and weeks, unless I burn like a sausage on the grill of a feckless barbecue enthusiast in the first week and then gradually unpeel to a decent shade of brown.  The only time this happened to me was in Wales of all places.  The summer before my best friend and I went away to uni we had a fortnight in Wales with her family at a tiny seaside village called Aberdovey.  The weather was glorious, scorching every single day. 

 

We had picnics, we played cricket on the beach.  We lazed, we swam, we mucked about.  There was no rain at all, not once.  We went horse riding and crabbing and took crazy trips on rackety trains to places like Harlech Castle and Barmouth estuary, where we whooped about like The Famous Five.  I got so sunburned on day three that I was in total agony.  I couldn’t even bear the feel of the sheets on my throbbing red thighs.  I remember making two piles of books, one on each side of the bed, inserting myself between them and draping the sheet over it.  It worked fine until I turned over in the night and knocked Jane Austen onto my crispy thigh.  I shrieked a lot.

 

By day five I had unpeeled enough to go a beautiful shade of brown.  I did like it, but wasn’t sure it was worth the effort.  I’ve never managed it since, not even two weeks in Las Vegas last year at 113 degrees managed to give me more than a few freckles.  I think it would take six months of weather like that to render me brown without giving me skin cancer.  It’s such hard work I really can’t be bothered.

 

Plus, sunbathing is boring, unless you’ve got a book.  I love reading books, but I don’t’ like reading books when my hands get sweaty and the book keeps falling out of my mitts.  I don’t like reading books when I have to keep adjusting my body into ever more acrobatic poses so that I don’t end up with pale, book shaped oblongs on my shapely torso (hem hem).  I also hate applying sun cream, although I love the smell.  And, I hate the feeling of sand in my wrinkly bits.  Urghhhhh!  It’s worse now that I have a lot more wrinkly bits.

 

Apart from that, and the fact that unless I take anti histamines I get bitten to shit by sand fleas, it’s great.

 

In his book, Robert talks about how sunshine is intimately associated with our ability to remember things, and that many of our memories have this sunny quality to them.  He suggests that we remember our childhoods being sunny, not because they necessarily were really that sunny, but because we remember what is unusual or strange more vividly than that which is mundane.  This is why I remember having scampi in a basket in a pub in Charmouth in 1976, not because it was a sublime taste experience, but because it was bloody odd.  It was also rather hot, the weather, not the scampi.  I have strong memories of scampi, scratchy wicker work and the smell of Ambre Solaire mixed with tomato sauce.  Classy… 

 

So, here are some of my most vivid heat related memories from childhood:

 

1. Going to see my brother in hospital when he was first born.  This is probably my earliest ever memory.  I was two.  It was 1974.  It was exceedingly hot.  My grandparents took me to the private maternity hospital.  We were early for visiting time and there was a huge swing (probably regular sized in real life) on the grass outside the hospital entrance. My grandparents let me have a go on the swing to pass the time.  The matron came out and told us off.  Apparently the swing was for ornamental purposes only.  I was terrified to go in after that in case the matron ate me.  With a great deal of coaxing I finally made it to the ward to meet my brother.  I was hugely unimpressed.  He was naked except for a nappy, in a see through plastic container.  It was broiling hot, but I remember being disgusted that he wasn’t wearing a hand knitted layette complete with pixie hood and bootees.  Nor was he in a real cot.  I didn’t care if he boiled in the bag.  I just wanted a proper baby brother.  The stress of the two incidents so closed together caused me to have hysterics and I had to be carried home in a sweating, screaming heap.

 

1. Going on a caravan holiday when I was three.  It was ridiculously hot.  We went to Bourton on the Water.  I remember playing in the stream that ran through the town with a little boy, trying to build a damn and running under the bridge where the shadows of the sun on the water made weird, rippling curves on the underside of the bridge.  I had never been under a bridge before.  It was excellent.  Sharing a tiny caravan with my parents and my endlessly screaming one year old brother was not so great.

 

1. The holiday in Charmouth.  I was four.  It was super hot.  There was an outdoor swimming pool.  I had never seen an outdoor swimming pool before.  I was stunned. Stunned and amazed.  I remember the pool being absolutely freezing and having to get out and lie on the hot slabs round the side of the pool, covered in a towel because I kept going blue.  It was very impressive.  What with that and scampi in a basket it was a wild ride that holiday.

 

1. Our first holiday abroad.  I was eleven.  We went to Gran Canaria.  I can still remember walking out of the plane doors onto the stairs to reach the tarmac and that blast of hot air whipping across my face.  It smelled so very foreign. Storm drains and heat and sand.  That was the best bit of the holiday. The sulphur in the swimming pool ate all the elastic in my swimming costume and it disintegrated.  The disco kept everyone awake all night, and there were cockroaches as big as pit ponies on the bathroom floor.

 

1. One day in the summer holidays when I was eleven.  We had invented a new game with the paddling pool.  We filled it to the brim, dropped a li-lo on top and left the hose running on it.  We had a very long garden.  We would take a massive run up and launch ourselves onto the li-lo. The running water would help it shoot off the pool and skid down the rest of the garden.  It was a brilliant game, until my brother skidded the li-lo into a rose bush and it popped.  The li-lo, not the rose bush.

 

Later memories include:

 

1. Sunbathing on the balcony at my aunt’s house in Italy while everyone else had siestas.  They thought my friend and I were mad.  We were just resolutely English.  We lay there in a pool of sweat for two hours.  It dripped off us, absolutely dripped.  We suffered for beauty!  I think now, sadly, of that lost opportunity for sleeping.

 

1. Baking at the lido when I lived in Germany.  I had only been to English lido’s twice.  Both times it was freezing.  It was an intensely hot summer. There was a freak thunderstorm where the rain poured through the windows of our flat and left the carpet squelching.  There was a huge fireball of lightning and two people died.  The next day it was sweltering again, as if the storm had never happened.  Apart from the carpet.  That summer it was so hot that the tar on the roads melted.  That summer was the first time I ever swam in a lake.  It was vile.  I resolutely decided that I was no longer in the Famous Five.  I like luxury too much. I don’t like mud between my toes and I like to see the bottom of the pool please.

 

1. Being given a week on the Costa Smeralda in Sardinia as a wedding present (my first marriage).  We used it as part of our honeymoon.  We couldn’t afford to do anything except sunbathe and swim because the resort was so expensive.  The whole week ricocheted between being so hot you couldn’t sit on a chair for fear of burning your arse, and the most stupendous storms where the water bounced inches back off the ground and the drains swam.  We lived off sandwiches, and the local corner shop sold champagne next to pints of milk, neither of which we could afford to drink (we blew all the money staying in a Tuscan castle and a Roman villa in Florence the week before).  My husband bought me a tiny bikini which cost about a week’s wages.  I was skinny.  I hadn’t had kids.  I kept it for years before I finally realised my days of size eight bikinis and no chest were gone forever.  That was when summer was probably properly over for me.  I felt like Tithonus in the poem by Tennyson.  ‘Me only cruel immortality consumes…Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
   I earth in earth forget these empty courts.’, but with a more unwieldy bosom.  I don’t think Tithonus ever had to visit Rigby and Peller as a matter of the greatest urgency.
   

 

1. Going to Las Vegas for the first time.  It was mind bending.  The heat shimmered off all the hotels like giant mirages.  We had a suite at the Bellagio and lived in decadence.  We drove into the desert and it blew me away, moving from hot and cold running room service to the sheer emptiness of it all. I fell in love with it, but not in a Ray Mears type way.  I always went back to the room service.  It pulled me like a lodestone.

 

1. Going to California for the first time.  I’d never wanted to go.  I didn’t know what to expect.  I thought I might like it despite myself (which is what happened with Vegas).  I hated it.  It was hot, sticky and unpleasant.  The smog was vile.  The roads were impenetrable.  It had no soul.  It was like Milton Keynes with the thermostat turned up.  Even breakfasting on the beach in Malibu didn’t do it for me, despite the sunshine.  It’s a place where they have so much sunshine it’s totally worthless and they’re all bored to death of it.  We booked for the week, and left after two days.

 

Now the sun makes me uncomfortable.  I like it, don’t get me wrong.  I like the fact that when it arrives you don’t have to pack trunk loads of clothes with you and can walk outdoors without a coat and fear of drowning.  I like having all the doors and windows open.  I just don’t like baking in it any more.  My thermostat has been totally screwed by having three small children and sitting in the direct sun for more than twenty minutes is a nasty warning of what a hot flush is going to be like when the menopause finally takes me by the throat and strangles me.  No thanks.

I am a pound shop millionaire

Today we went to the pound shop.  Tallulah has been agitating to make puppets out of wooden spoons for about a fortnight now.  I have had to hide my serious, culinary style wooden spoons away in a lockbox with a code only I know in order to stop her commandeering them for her own nefarious art attack style purposes.  I have been promising her that we would buy some, but with one thing and another (both one thing and another being vomiting children), it has been quite hard to fix a date for the great expotition of 2008.

Despite the late start this morning due to ungrateful number one son sleeping in, I still managed to leave enough time between lunch date, cinema date and going home to pick up son from nursery deadline to go to the pound shop of joy and purchase spoons and other things.

The ‘other things’ are why I try not to go to the pound shop very often.  I cannot resist the siren call of a really good pound shop, even though I know that most of the things in there are absolute tat and will disintegrate about thirty seconds after purchase, and am highly suspicious of the things that aren’t tat.  If for example, I recognise a brand of food that is available from said pound shop I will immediately think that it has either a) fallen off the back of a lorry, b) been driven over by the back of a lorry or c) been sourced from a small town downwind of Chernobyl and upon being eaten will kill us all in our beds.  It is probably not true, or there would be a significant dearth of pound shops as they all had their asses sued off by ambulance chasing style insurance grabbing lawyer types, but it is what I think.  I would even, and this slays me to say it, even avoid Mr. Kiplings’ French Fancies if I were to come across them in the pound shop, just to be on the safe side.

There are some things which aren’t tat, and which you buy because they’re so cheap that you can’t resist them, but which clutter up all the drawers in your kitchen for a million years afterwards and which you never, ever use.  This is why the odds and ends drawer in our kitchen has ten disposable lighters, two packets of mini screw drivers (for those midget DIY emergencies) and a box of those little brass butterfly clip things that are so needful in a totally useless kind of way.  This is along with four bajillion hair bobbles in assorted colours and styles, lots of random batteries that only fit one appliance which is now broken and gone to live in Cheezus’ junkyard in the sky, some hairy blu tack, some packets of seeds that my mum got free in a magazine and gave to me because her odds and ends drawer is full, and a lot of very important bits of paper that Jason says I must not throw away. 

These are the bits of paper that drift down the back of the odds and ends drawer every time it gets too full and I just shut it anyway because I can’t be bothered to sort it out.  The bits of paper that drift into the cupboard below where I keep all the unbreaky kitchen things that I let Oscar bash when he wants to play cooking. The bits of paper that Oscar sometimes plays cooking with and eats and then I don’t tell Jason because I feel guilty, but then he never notices that they’ve gone anyway, and I wonder just how very, extremely important they were after all.

So, on my pound shop odyssey today I bought:

1. Two packets of wooden spoons.  There were five spoons in each packet, of varying lengths, sizes and spoonular complexity.  They have rubber grips on the end.  I don’t know whether this is a good thing in the world of spoon puppetry or not.  The children seemed quite delighted. Perhaps it stops those nervous sweaty hands from slipping during a particularly angst ridden performance of the spoon Hedda Gabler or indeed the spoon Ring Cycle.
2. Ten exercise books which were a real bargain because, yes, you guessed it, they were only a pound.  Why I needed these when this house is awash in sheets of paper, and notepads and random paper rains down on you from every cupboard you open, remains unclear.  They are very lovely though.  I stroked them.
3. A packet of permanent marker pens.  I bought these so we could colour in faces on the spoons.  Secretly because I wanted them myself because they come in all sorts of lovely colours that you don’t usually get marker pens in.  I snuck them upstairs and wrote some notes with the purple one. It’s too furry and splodgy, all the ink bleeds so you can’t read what you’ve written, and it went through four pages in one of my new exercise books.  It also smells funny.  Apart from that, they’re brillliant.  I must lock them in the kitchen because no matter how rubbish they are, they will not, ever, ever, ever, come out of the cream carpets on the hall, landing and stairs. I was a fool to myself.
4. Some very exciting looking, extremely dangerous glue that comes in two different squeezy tubes marked A and B.  These must be used together in a complicated ’stick flap a into flap b and hold’ style, which it explains in serbo croatian on the back of the packet.  I bought this so we could stick fabric and wool to our spoons.  I know from bitter personal experience that we will be sticking small children to small children, or in my case, fingers to radio alarm clocks.  The doctor will undoubtedly have to be called.  Especially because it is the sort of glue that must be used in a five acre field to stop everyone from having mass, glue induced hallucinations, and I can’t get the kitchen windows open because I am a weedy wet.
5. A box of fifteen paintbrushes.  I love paintbrushes.  We have loads.  I buy myself new ones and then the children eat them.  I buy more.  This is to replace the last lot the children ate and the ones Oscar used to brush his hair, brush his teeth and jam into the u bend of the toilet.  I intend to keep them for myself.  This will last for a week until one of the children discovers where I have hidden them and decides to build a scale model of a schooner with them.  Nice try, no cigar.
6. A box of acrylic paints.  There are fifteen tubes of paint.  Fifteen tubes of acrylic paint for a quid?  Are you ‘avin a larf?  The paint shop which is three doors down sells one tube of acrylic paint for a fiver.  I could buy enough paint to redecorate my downstairs loo from the pound shop for that.  Good quality? I think not.  Non toxic? I think not.  Good job the doctor will already be here because of the glue inhalation.
7. Some curtain tasssles.  I don’t actually know how you spell tassle properly.  I’m not a tassell kind of person.  Is it tassell or tastle or tassle?  I don’t know.  Anyway, I was so impressed by their potential in puppet spoon crafting that I bought two packets in nasty pink and nasty silver.  If the worst comes to the worst I could glue them to my nipples with my highly toxic A and B glue and learn to swing them in different directions while we’re waiting for the ambulance.  I hear burlesque is still quite fashionable in the provinces.

So you can see that it was quite an impressive haul.  Nine pounds well spent.  I came out feeling like a king.  it’s probably the same kind of feeling Victoria Beckham gets after a particularly gruelling session at Marc Jacobs new boutique.  I might write to her and ask.  I bet she’s never sampled the heady delights of the pound shop.  She’s really missing out there. It’s the new black I’m tellin’ ya. They’ll all be doing it soon.  Interviewing Paris Hilton mincing down the red carpet at the opening of another Vegas night spot, her being asked where she got her latest clutch bag only for her to blush and say: ‘Poundland actually darling.’ before mincing off to drink Cristal out of her ShoeFayre stilettos.