I had a virtual date with some Viagra and all I got was this lousy Chlamydia

The other hot news I have to report from my ceaseless trawling of the Beeb this week, apart from the draconian laws in Sweden regarding birthday cake usage in the under tens, is the fact that figures show that the number of sexually transmitted diseases in the over 45’s has doubled in recent years. It was one of those shocktacular headlines with a deeper, hidden message.  The deeper hidden message that I will now kindly translate for you.  Hem, hem:

‘ARRGHHH! URRRGHHHHH! EWWWWW! OLD PEOPLE ACTUALLY HAVE SEX. HOW RANK IS THAT?’

That’s what that particular headline is really saying.  Now as a woman who is nine years away from being 45 myself, I can quite see the fact that people of that age and older might actually want to have sex with each other, because now I’m actually in my official middle years, I don’t actually feel very old at all, and (children, block your eyes), I’m still quite in favour of sex as a hobby.  I’m not ready to move on to gardening just yet.  In fact in terms of feeling old, I feel much the same way I did when I was eighteen, only less terrified, less paranoid and more shouty (about things in general rather than specifically about sex).  Although I’d like to swap my eighteen year old body for my current model, you can keep the mind thanks.  I wouldn’t go back if you paid me gold bars.

But I do remember distinctly being quite a lot younger and being horrified at the idea that anyone over the age of forty might want to do anything so disgusting as getting undressed in the presence of another human being and getting jiggy with Mr. Biggy.  I think it was something to do with the fact that as a youth the age of forty seems so very far away, and so distinctly ‘that’s how old my parents must be’, that it was too disturbing.  If you could imagine forty year olds having sex you could invariably imagine your own parents having sex, and that was too horrifying to contemplate, hence the total denial acting as a human shield in a Batfink kind of way.

I had visions of myself at forty, wearing Bianca Jagger style cream trouser suits, eating croissants and doing the Times Crossword in under six months.  I was going to approach middle and old age with dignity, panache and no stains.  It was going to be very cerebral, and there was certainly going to be no hanky panky of any kind.  As I had also envisioned myself having children I don’t quite know what I’d done with them in this vision of a utopian idyll, or indeed how they had actually arrived in my life.  Perhaps I’d ordered them off the internet and then had them lightly varnished and propped in a cupboard.

Now half the over forties in the land dress like sixteen year olds, have tattoos and piercings and spend their weekends reliving the rave scene at Butlins in Minehead aided and abetted by bottles of tequila and a panoply of class ‘A’ recreational sweeties that we’re going to pay for in round the clock Alzheimer’s care in our old age.  Half the sixteen year olds look like forty year olds and will probably be found in wine bars quaffing Shiraz and discussing the philosophical conundrums of A.J. Ayers before indulging in a spot of light Sudoku and the Shipping Forecast before bedtime.  The world has gone mad.

I blame Radio Four.  Apparently there were complaints the other week because they have been making Book At Bedtime too racy.  No wonder chlamydia rates have shot up.

According to this report the guilty parties are actually twofold:

1. The increase in sales, and presumably use of Viagra
2. The boom in online dating

I wonder whether middle aged men with erectile dysfunction are emboldened to start online dating because they’ve endured six months of night school classes on how to enjoy the World Wide Web just so that they can buy cheap Canadian Viagra and think, ‘Fuck it! In for a penny…’ and sign up for a dating service while they’re there.  I don’t suffer from erectile dysfunction, but I do get lots of spam trying to sell me viagra.  I wonder if once you’ve signed up for some your details are passed on to affiliated  dating services who then send you knock on spam saying: ‘Go on! Go on! Go on!’ in their best Mrs. Doyle font.  This could be why they end up six months later with Doris from Wapping suing them because what she thought was chafing from seventeen hours of tantric palaver due to the Viagra actually turned out to be raging genital warts and a cold sore.

I might stick with Bianca Jagger and the Times Crossword after all…

I hate you, and you’re not coming to my party, in Sweden…

I promised I would start writing about more topical themes last week, to get in training for when Jeremy Paxman invites me to replace him as the embittered, cynical host of Newsnight.  I didn’t write any over the weekend because there wasn’t much to inspire me and I didn’t have time, but lucky for me I found a couple of corking items over the last couple of days, courtesy of the good old bbc news website.  Here is my first roving report.

A man is being hauled before the courts in Sweden because his child failed to invite two of his classmates to his birthday party.  Apparently when the teacher saw the invitations being given out and realised that two of the children had been left out, she confiscated all the notes and took it straight to the head who has then chosen to prosecute the parents under Swedish discrimination laws.  As an interjection at this point, may I just say what a vile and unpleasantly nosey woman this teacher must be, and how I’m glad that she never had the pleasure to teach me.  I certainly wouldn’t have invited her to my party.

The father, who is acting as spokesperson for his child argues that his child didn’t have to invite all the children if he didn’t want to.  His reasons for not inviting the two outcasts were that one of them hadn’t invited his son to his party, and he didn’t get on with the other one.  It’s going to court in September.

I’m stunned.  I’m stunned and amazed.  I’m terrified in case they bring in such draconian party based laws in this country.  I’ll be breaking rocks for eternity in that case.  My kids were only allowed two friends each to their own birthday parties, and that includes choosing from friends they don’t go to school with.  Tilly had one friend from her class and one old friend, Tallulah is having two friends from her class, and Oscar isn’t allowed to have anyone from nursery at all. 

This might sound draconian in itself, but I’ve always made a point of trying to keep birthday parties from being the extravagant, money fuelled excesses that other parents host because I think it’s just getting ridiculous.  We tried it one year and it was hideous.  Hideous and expensive.  We hired out the Whacky Warehouse at vast expense, invited thirty children who all hated each other at the end of two hours fuelled by face paint, blue smarties and fruit shoots and ended up with hundreds of pounds worth of pointless toys as presents that Tilly never wanted in the first place and rarely played with.  I loathed most of the children, who despite me shelling out the best part of two hundred quid so that they could eat reheated chicken nuggets and take home bulging party bags at my expense, never said please or thank you and their parents, who for the most part behaved much worse.  It was exhausting and horrible, and Matilda burst into tears on the way home in the car because she was completely wired.

These types of parties are more of a punishment to be endured than anything to be enjoyed in my ever humble opinion.  I let other parents host them and allow my children to go to them, but that’s as far as it goes in Katy’s world of philanthropy. Our parties consist mainly of close friends and family coming together to eat lots of food and have a laugh.  Because there are usually half a dozen children at the most, they all get lots of attention and we invariably end up having water fights or playing old fashioned party or garden games with them, which they love.  We start just after lunch and amble on into the evening, and apart from the odd hiccup they’re usually lots of fun for everyone, which I think is the whole point of the exercise.

I can only imagine that Swedish schools have much smaller class sizes than they do in the UK.  The average class size at the girls’ school is about thirty kids. What would happen if a judge ruled that I had to invite thirty classmates to each of my childrens’ birthday parties, along with all the people we usually invite? I’d be catering for around fifty people per event and we would never be able to afford to go on holiday again.  They’d start to resemble the outrageous cost of getting married, but every year, three times a year.  I refuse to go to debtor’s prison just to assuage Jacinta’s fragile ego and superhuman appetite for cake and goody bags.  Death before dishonour, even if it does mean being pricked to death by cheese and pineapple on sticks.

Plus, why should your child invite someone who regularly sits on their chest, thumping their head against the concrete floors and stealing their dinner money, just because if they didn’t the other child would feel left out?  Shouldn’t they learn that if they don’t want to feel left out then roasting people alive over the school barbecue pit isn’t going to help them to bond with the gang? I feel that the other twenty nine kids should also have their chests sat on and their dinner money robbed too, so that they can know what it is to feel included.  If after that everyone still wants to pretend to like each other over marmite pinwheels then fair play to them and I’ll buy them all party hats myself.

It would be lovely if everyone liked each other, we all joined hands harmoniously and sang glorious songs of yore whilst skipping through the daisies munching twiglets and planning world peace, but it’s bollocks.  It’s certainly not going to happen because someone beardy old geezer in a courtroom who clearly hasn’t been invited to a party in forty years and when he did was made to be the donkey in pin the tail on the donkey, says it must.  It’s certainly not going to happen if people can’t accept the fact that you can’t like everyone all of the time, particularly when you’re eight, and you’re not keen on yourself half the time, and that it’s brutally unfair to expect such people to share their hedgehog cake with equanimity.

I wonder if they have the same rules for adults who have parties? I’m so glad that I never had to throw open the doors of my bijou flat in North Oxford to four hundred of Thames Valley Police’s finest officers.  I may have been fulfilling the law in terms of equal rights, but they’d probably have nicked me for half a dozen health and safety violations, only after they’d drunk all the vodka mind you…

I am the shape of a cumberland sausage

Last week I blogged about these new wonder slimming pills that make a person slim by killing them dead.  Being dead is apparently an excellent appetite surpressant and there are virtually no fat dead people at all after a while.  I decided against using them.  It may seem defeatist, but there you are.  Everyone has their line in the sand, and this is mine.

Anyway, I have now reached the upper level of my own personal comfort zone re: weight and body shape, which is nice, just as it has turned to shorts and vests weather.  Spurred on by this and the fact that ever since we got back from Canada our eating habits have become steadily worse due to the entire family pining for Denny’s pancakes and overcompensating with chips I decided to sign up for Slimming World again.  I joined when I failed to shift my baby weight after Tallulah was born and found that it suited me very well.  I’ve done my own version on and off ever since, but in recent weeks have found it hard to motivate myself to eat well and decided that actually paying my money and having to turn up every week to be weighed in a room full of strangers would be an excellent slimming aid.  I hate to fail, particularly when I’ve paid good money to do it.

I would have tried the buying a designer suit thing again, which is how I worked it the first time, but I already have a Ted Baker slip dress that I have only worn twice, and that is absolutely gorgeous.  It is rather clingy, and I tried it on over the weekend only to find that it looks rather less gorgeous when it is to be seen being sported by a woman whose body shape rather resembles a Cumberland Sausage.  I’ve dusted it off, pinned it to the front of the wardrobe and went to the Scout Hut yesterday to pay my dues.

I think it is the law of slimming clubs everywhere that they hold them in the most unpleasant public buildings they can find, in the hope that this will spur people on to get on with it so they never have to come back again.  The Scout hut fits this rule perfectly.  It is liberally festooned with cobwebs, painted a kind of bile yellow colour and even in the heat of yesterday still managed to smell like the damp interior of a long forgotten and deeply unloved p.e. kit.  It was very, very busy and I bumped into one of the mums from school whose daughter is in the same class as Tallulah.  This morning when I dropped Tallulah off we saw the daughter, who said in a very loud voice: ‘I saw you at FAT CLUB yesterday didn’t I Tallulah’s mummy?’  What could I do but bow gracefully to the inevitable?  I rolled my vest up, grabbed my belly and made it say: ‘Yes, you did! See you next week!’  When I looked up, lots of mothers looked suitably horrified, but I felt that I had done my bit and had nothing to be ashamed of.  After all, when one has worked so hard at achieving the cumberland sausage effect, one should enjoy it while it lasts.

I now have my book and my chart and my stickers and all the other paraphernalia.  It’s quite comforting actually.  I know what I’m doing, and I know it’s going to work.  I also know it should be reasonably quick because I only want to lose half a stone and then I’ve got a hot date with the M&S Simply Fewd woman and a trowel.  In fact, and this is quite tragic to admit, I woke up this morning actually feeling rather excited, and dare I say it, motivated?  This is not like me at all.  I did wonder if the aliens from the library had snatched me away in the night and replaced me with someone else.  If they have, and my true self is floating thousands of miles above the earth in the mother ship being experimented on, can I ask the supreme leader not to reverse the process until I’ve lost at least half a stone?

The other thing that made me think this was the fact that Jason got the Wii Fit out of its box last night and when I got home we all had a play with it.  I usually hate computer games, and the thought of playing computer games that might also be good for me, really did my head in for a while, which is why we’ve had it for two weeks and I’ve shunned it and stuffed it under the sofa.  It actually, and I hate to say this, turned out to be rather fun.  I particularly enjoyed virtual hula hooping, which was most amusing.  I am crap at step aerobics and a pensioner when it comes to jogging, but they were quite fun as well.  I’ve not changed that much though.  I still enjoyed watching the others doing it more than doing it myself.  Tilly jogged so hard that she accidentally ran into the mantelpiece which served her right because she was insufferable after the Wii controller voice had told her that she was practically perfect in every way.  She kept bounding up and down shouting: ‘I’m perfect! I’m perfect!’ and trying to show us all how to do everything.  Now she’s got a dent over her left eye she’s not quite so perfect as before and it seems to have knocked some of the bossiness out of her.  That machine really is quite impressive…

Tuesday 1st July – How I soldiered bravely on…

You can tell my life has been busy by the fact that I’ve been rationed to one blog a day since Saturday.  It’s not that I’ve got less things to talk about, it’s just there seems to be less time to talk about them.  This is due to the fact that my life has gone into one of those frantic social whirls that sweeps me off my feet every couple of months and reminds me that I am not in fact a sad old hermit lady with pendulous breasts who lives under a stone and only comes out to wave my fists at passers by, and I have friends.  I have friends who because I don’t drive and I have sticky children, are kind and agree to come to my house so that they don’t have to shout at me about the fact that their designer flock wallpaper is now covered in the residue from Dairy Lea cheese triangles and snot, and what am I going to do about it?

It’s also very warm, and in a bid to make the best use of the whole three days of summer so far, we are now making great use of our deck and practically living outside.  As discussed, my only typing options are crouched by the tumble drier or in my eyrie on the middle floor, neither of which are very helpful while your children are lashing each other to the climbing frame with skipping ropes and trying to balance boules on the end of their noses.  One has to be constantly vigilant at such times.

Our new furniture has now been tested to the max.  I say hooray for B&Q and their fabulous furniture offer.  Their chairs are very comfortable. If I had to make one complaint it would be that you should avoid slatted tables in combination with small children who like jelly.  The only way I found of getting jelly out of the slats in the table was to use the watering can filled with hot, soapy water.  Top tip there.  I may write in to Woman’s Realm.

Saj came to see me yesterday.  She mailed me today to announce her disappointment that she had not appeared in the blog when she checked in this morning.  This was due to further rafts of visitors arriving and me being too busy partaking of tea and rustling up nourishing luncheons.  I will endeavour to address the issue immediately.

Saj likes to be fashionably late on most occasions.  She texted me to say that she would be with me by midday and would I like to go out for lunch.  I hedged my bets and said I would decide when she arrived.  I would have hated to have starved myself on a rice cake in eager anticipation of her arrival only for her to turn up at three o’clock.  She would have hated it too, as I would undoubtedly have killed her.  I get very, very grumpy when denied regular sustenance.  She arrived at about twenty past twelve, which is excellent for her.  She tells me that she is making more of an effort to be punctual.  I think she is afraid of my steely gaze! 

I really don’t mind her being late that much.  Once I know people are fashionably late types I merely carry on as if they aren’t actually coming and then if they do come I am pleasantly surprised.  It’s when I don’t know that they’re the fashionably late type and my dinner curls up in the oven waiting for them that I have the urge to stab them with a hat pin.  Luckily I don’t know many people like this any more, due to the fact that most of the ones I did know are now dead from hat pin related incidents.

We decided to go for lunch.  We decided that we wouldn’t have time to do anything else and so we took Oscar, but not the buggy.  We ate our lunch in twenty minutes flat and had time to shop.  In hindsight we should have just shopped for cake and come home to eat it.  As it was we attempted to shop with Oscar, no buggy and no reins.  It was fairly stressful and ended with me thinking I’d lost my phone on one of my many dashes to stop Oscar escaping out the door.  We retraced our steps.  The stupid woman in Boots asked me if I’d considered ringing myself.  I pointed out that I thought that would be an excellent solution if I hadn’t lost the phone that I was supposed to be ringing myself on.  She looked rather crestfallen.  I looked horrified as she was a qualified pharmacist.  She is licensed to dispense drugs and medical advice to the general public.  No wonder people are dropping like flies.

Anyway, I finally found my phone in a side pocket of my bag that I don’t usually use, where I had stuffed it in a panic after Oscar either exploded one of the displays in Gap or exploded one of the make up counters in Boots.  He’s a big fan of make up which he calls ‘PINK!’  He particularly likes Clarins, which is good because Saj needed to buy some flash balm there (don’t ask.  I’m lucky if I manage to apply lip balm these days) and wrecking their display kept him quiet for ages.

In all the chaos I did manage to buy Oscar some ‘big boy pants’ or ‘bee bop pants’ as he calls them.  He has been obsessed by pants for some days now.  He has been waking me up in the morning, banging his bottle along the cot bars and singing a song which goes; ‘Pants! Pants! Pants! Pants! Bee Bop Pants!’  We bought three potty’s at the weekend, one for every floor of the house.  I have no desire to leave a boy with a full bladder alone while I hurtle up to whichever floor the potty was on last, only to come down and find a puddle on the tufted rug.

He loves his pants.  He has pants with aeroplanes, and pants with cars, and pants with lizards on.  He doesn’t mind what’s on them actually.  He dons them proudly and then widdles through them all.  My friend Kate, who came to visit at the weekend said she thought he was too young for potty training.  I know he’s too young for potty training, but who am I to thwart a boy and his passions? If I don’t embrace his enthusiasm fully he will probably grow up anally retentive and explode in a shower of bottled up pooh on his twenty fifth birthday.  I must roll with the punches, and the pee.  I’m just glad the weather has perked up.  Widdling his pants on the decking is not half as stressful as widdling his pants on my cream sofa.  I am practicing being relaxed and enthusiastic about it, for the third and hopefully last time in my life.  What joy!

Saj’s visit was topped by a trip home to pick up the girls from school, and eating Victoria sponge in the garden while the girls gave her a make over.  I would have helped but I had a crippled hand due to the fact that she shut the car window with my hand still in it, and only realised what she’d done after the third time I went; ‘Ow! Bloody Ow! Open the fecking window!’  She specifically asked me not to blog about that, but it’s far too good to pass up and I will dedicate a whole chapter in my memoirs to how I soldiered bravely on despite having a malformed claw.  I may never be able to play the violin again!