Friday August 1st – I am comatose

Just to let those of you who are chewing their fingers off with suspense at what book I chose last night.  I ended up with Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day by Winifred Watson.  I’d never heard of it before, but apparently it’s coming out as a film with Frances McDormand later on this month.  I love Frances McDormand.  She’s in a lot of the Coen brothers films.  I thought she was fantastic in Fargo and still quote the line: ‘You have no cause to get snippy with me, sir’ at people.  As hardly anyone else I know remembers it, it is completely pointless, but it always makes me happy, and that’s what counts.  You have to take your pleasure where you can.

I enjoyed reading the first few chapters of the book before I fell asleep, so I may well make another hot date for the cinema.  I feel that Andrea and I will be going to this one.  I can’t see Jason queueing for it somehow.  He’s not a chick flick kind of guy.  Unless it’s the kind of chick flick where they’re all toting uzi’s and blow each other’s heads off in a weltering pool of gore.  I used to share a flat with a Brazilian girl when I lived in Oxford.  We sent our boyfriends out to get us a video so that we could have a film night in.  She wagged her finger very fiercely at them as they left and said: ‘Remember to get us some films as well.  You can’t just have man films you have to get chicken films too!’

It was a long night last night.  Oscar woke about six times between 11.30 and 2.00 a.m. which is very unlike him.  So was me singing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star at his request at 1.30 this morning.  By that stage I would have done almost anything  including a Dick Van Dyke tap dance routine if he would just stop squawking.  He finally dropped off at about two.  I didn’t relax for ages because I was so used by that stage to being roused from my crappy slumbers about every twenty minutes I kind of kept waking myself up in that horrible, jerky kind of way.  The kind of way when you’re sitting in a business meeting and the sun is beating in through the window and you keep nodding off, even though you know you shouldn’t, and you’re so afraid you’re going to dribble down your cleavage you keep waking yourself up in sheer horror.  That kind of thing.

Then there was a torrential downpour which was so loud it woke me up.  I gave up at that point and picked up my Amazon Vine book, which it turns out after a shaky start I am really rather enjoying.  It’s called The Last Days of the Lacuna Cabal by a Canadian author called Sean Dixon.  It’s very strange and has an odd narrative style which you have to perservere with, but once the story hooks you, it’s really rather good.  It’s all about a kind of anarchic women’s book group who meet in abandoned warehouses and who start to reenact the myth of Gilgamesh, interspersed with comments on blogging about the Iraqi war and stuff.  Not your normal fare, but surprisingly good at keeping your mind busy while the entire world’s water supply falls down your guttering and keeps you awake.

I finally got to sleep around three this morning, which is why I have spent most of my day wandering around in a zombified haze.  I have stared at a lot of coffee cups, failed to take the children anywhere useful, done no chores and spent most of the afternoon watching Pretty Woman with the girls and realising how unsuitable it is for a five year old.  This was after she asked me what a hooker was.  By then I was in too deep.  I feel many more breakfast conversations are to follow.  It is my own faulty entirely.

The girls are being really good today for some unknown reason.  They have tidied their room, made those scooby bracelet things by the yard and donated most of their cast offs to me.  They have eaten their lunch without a murmur and they have formed a band called The Sock Monkeys.  The Sock Monkeys’ first rehearsal was a somewhat fierce affair as it appears we have two very opinionated band leaders and not many people willing to sit at the back banging away at cymbals.  I tried not to enquire too deeply, but did find Tallulah sat at the top of the stairs scowling into a mirror and blowing on a recorder which she had on a string round her neck at one stage.  I asked her what was the matter and she announced that Tilly was too bossy and wanted things her way.  I asked Tilly if she was alright and she said that Tallulah was too bossy and wanted things her way.  I’m just glad that Oscar is in nursery.  I know his musical leanings are now firmly of the Twinkle Twinkle variety and he really isn’t very good at taking direction so there would have been three factions competing.  As it was I suggested that they go and practice in the garden.  It’s a good job I don’t really like the neighbours.

They are currently crouched by the gro bags arguing gently over who has the most plants and who has the biggest flowers.  It seems that they are ok to agree to differ, mainly because they are both cheerfully agreed on one important point, that Oscar’s radishes are a disaster.  This has cheered them up no end.  It’s great when they unite against a common cause, as long as that common cause is not me.

I am hoping for a second wind.  I am thinking that soon I might wake up and leap into action.  It will probably happen just as I am supposed to be snuggling down for the night.  Still, never mind.  At least I have some good books.