Britney’s Sale of the Century

According to the BBC News Website Entertainment section, Britney Spears is going to be auctioning off her wardrobe soon.  Not the actual wooden one with full length mirrors and integral cedar coat hangers you understand, but the contents of said wardrobe.  Now, as I am not one of her biggest fans, particularly in the fashion department, I’d be much more likely to bid on the actual wardrobe rather than the clothes, but I am sure that there are enough partially sighted, colour blind people out there with a few bob or two left to spare our Britters to make it a worthwhile event.

I’m not quite sure why she’s going down this route.  I mean, I can see why she wants to abandon her wardrobe, and that it would be nice to make a few bob out of her misguided, but ultimately pricey fashion disasters, but to me, the shame of having them paraded around an auction room in Sothebys, or modelled by some Britneyalike reminding me of my grotesque fashion choices over the years would just add insult to what has been ultimately a mortifying couple of years of my life.  If I had the choice I would be putting them in a sack with a stone around its neck and dropping them off a high bridge into a deep river at midnight, in disguise.

As, thank the good lord, I am not, and am never likely to become Britney Spears (unless I do eventually get sucked up into the womb of the Mother ship for experimental purposes and then who knows?  I think I’d prefer to be George Formby actually), it is not my choice that we are plumping for.  Consequently, the woman who would probably piddle in the gutter for someone with a fiver and a telephoto lens if they promised to print it in the parish magazine is going ahead with the auction in the spirit of the true taste and dignity that marks the new chapter in her life.  The one where her dad writes the story and allows her £2.50 pocket money per week, as long as she brings home the receipts.

So, anyone who wants to look like a trailer trash ho’ but with less style, please queue here.  Specialities of the day include:

• Bras that look like they’ve had one too many goes round the spin cycle and that make the woman who owns Rigby and Peller cry, every time she sees one.
• t-shirts that clearly haven’t passed the Persil Challenge for quite some time. Fag burns and ringo stains to suit.
• A wide variety of articles of clothing either pinched from a blind elder brother or a much smaller, younger sister with aspirations to be a street walker when she grows up.
• An assortment of ‘trailer trash through the seasons’ micro label by Versace
• Fourteen pairs of Pamela Anderson’s sweaty, cast off Uggs from the third season of Baywatch
• Some holey tights a tramp left in a dustbin.
• Six hats from the Morrisons Deli Counter (blue hair net optional), assorted colours.  Bring your own haslet
• Four hundred metric tonnes of the finest cubic zircona QVC has to offer
• Enough asymmetrical leotards to recreate the cast from Fame in the privacy of your own home.
• A double wide trailer load of Juicy Couture tracksuits with belogo’d bottoms, sporting such legends as: ‘I’ll have fries with that,’ ‘Dogs or kids, you decide!’ and ‘I left my brain on the draining board, but don’t worry because I’ve got fags and booze.’
• Some evening dresses that got booed off Strictly Come Dancing for being too bling
• A pair of Justin Timberlake’s y-fronts with Homer Simpson eating a sausage on the front.
• Enough hair extensions to weave a deluxe hammock for two.
• Ten gallons of fake tan (streaks optional), colour: ‘Envy by David Dickinson’.
• Quite a lot of handbags that look like dead dogs.
• Some small, dead dogs that look like handbags.

Unfortunately if you’re looking for underwear you’ll be sadly disappointed…

Bring your own vacant expression and four gallon cup of coke

Wednesday 6th August – Discombobulations

I am discombobulated.  The world has turned upside down and unlike Lionel Richie who seemed to be very au fait with ‘Dancing on the Ceiling’ I have just fallen off into the soup.

Oscar had a bad night last night.  He got tangled up in his cot bumper; he hid under his pillow; he took his nappy off and piddled all over the sheets; he woke up in the hideous hours of the night screaming because his thigh was trapped between the cot bars like a fat, unwieldy twiglet (again).  He woke again at some point for some reason that I was far too tired to keep track of.  He squeaked at seven this morning.  I got up, fetched him a bottle and threw it into the seething pit of his cot.  I turned and went back to bed, knowing full well he’d had sucked it to a dry husk in twenty minutes and would be clamouring for Shreddies, but that in that blissfully quiet twenty minutes I could lounge about horizontally and feign sleep.  I wasn’t even sure I would get that long because Tallulah usually creeps in once she hears me get up.  She didn’t today, and just before I conked out I remembered that she is at her granny’s for a special sleepover and it would be hard for her to creep fifteen miles to my house, especially when Granny serves Cocoa pops for breakfast and encourages second helpings.

This was when things went wrong.  I woke up with a start to hear him shouting for me.  I reached for the clock thinking it would be about half past seven.  It was in fact quarter to eleven.  I am not entirely sure what happened.  I was stunned, amazed and rather confused.  I had planned to be in town buying plimsolls and Norfolk proofing devices for next week by then.  What was going wrong?  I mean it was a good thing really.  The last time I slept in until quarter to eleven was so far back in the mists of time I can’t recall it without a dream like haze around it.  I may even have false memory syndrome about it and in fact have never slept in this late.  The only thing that makes me doubt this is the fact that I was a student for four years and it is physically impossible to go through an entire career as a student without sleeping all day at one point.

Nevertheless I cannot recall it in recent memory.  I expect I was probably ill at the time.  Nobody in our house gets to sleep in that late unless they are mooching about on death’s door, tentatively pressing the bell and really hoping that nobody will be in.

I should be buoyant with joy.  I should be leaping about the landing shouting; ‘Calloo Callay!’ and ‘Frabjubous day!’ Am I?  Am I bugger?  It appears that I am not good under pressure of extreme confusion when it comes to an upset to the usual order of things.  It feels like I have the hangover from hell and I just cannot get started on anything seriously.  Here are some things that have been too hard today:

• Going out
• Staying in
• Eating normal meals
• Brushing my hair
• Finishing the cleaning
• Buying plimsolls
• Putting on socks
• Following the plot of In the Night Garden (I actually had to leave the room my head hurt so much)

Once we were vaguely, and I mean vaguely dressed, we sloped off downstairs in a guilty fashion and spent the next hour having breakfast because we weren’t sure if we were supposed to be having breakfast.  I even let Oscar take some toast into the lounge while I sat and thought about it.  It was damned fishy.  It’s that limbo, brunch time, but I didn’t have anything brunchy, so we just arsed about with some Shreddies and toast as usual but in no particular order and with no real aim in mind.

My friend Nicky called and asked if it would be alright if she came to have coffee because her house move was getting rather oppressive and she was traumatised because she had run out of black, plastic bin liners.  I mumbled my assent along with something along the lines of ’still eating Shreddies’ and ‘haven’t brushed hair.’  Apparently this was nothing compared to the trauma of your living room being taken over by giant boxes and having no bin bags, so she came anyway.  We sat over a pot of coffee and pondered our woes.

Round about lunch time plus I made Oscar some spaghetti hoops.  Despite being very excited about this and prancing round the kitchen singing a song about it; which went something along the lines of ’spaghetti, tra la, spaghetti, tra la la, hooooppssss! Spaghettihoops, spaghettihooops, spaghettihooooopppps, tra la!’ he then decided that they were the worst spaghetti hoops in the history of spaghetti hoops and it was my fault.  He kept scooping them up onto his fork and flicking them at me shouting: ‘No like ‘em hoops.  No like ‘em spaghetti hoooppss. No. No. No!’ and then crying when I took them away from him.  He also did this with some grapes and a further bowl of Shreddies.  Lunch time was as much of a disaster as breakfast time.

I needed to eat something once I had scrubbed the floor, taken him to the toilet eight times and scrubbed the floor again.  My stomach was furious that its rhythms had been disrupted and I just couldn’t sit down to lunch.  I ate two chocolate chip cookies, four pickled beetroot, a packet of cheese and onion crisps, a ritz cheese cracker and some cold toast, all whilst running around after Oscar who was colouring.  You would think that colouring was a fairly sedentery pursuit, but Oscar is very keen on a kind of Jackson Pollock style ‘action’ colouring.  He was doing ‘dots’.  This involves jabbing the writing implement of your choice furiously at whatever harmless bit of paper you have taken ‘agin’ recently and reducing it to pulp.  Unfortunately he had chosen crayon pencils with which to do this delicate operation and kept breaking the leads, which meant much sharpening and much sweeping of small, sharp pencil leads into the bin.

About ten minutes ago he was demanding ‘mink’, ‘blankin’ and ‘dummy’, which is a sure sign he is tired.  I couldn’t quite believe it, considering how much of the day he had slept away already, but it appears to be true.  I put him down and he turned over without a squeak and went to sleep.  Now I am really concerned.  He is either a) having another growth spurt or b) sickening for something.  The growth spurt would be easier, although he is already only a head shorter than his five year old sister and weighs only marginally less and I am worried that if he keeps on like this we will have to buy a house with higher ceilings.  If he is sickening for something I hope it is something short that can’t be caught.  I do not want to be stranded in Norfolk with three ill children next week thank you very much.  Roy has probably got a monopoly on pharmacies, but it doesn’t fill me with confidence.

I am nervously going to go downstairs with my book and sit on tenterhooks waiting for the next development in the saga.  He will probably be up till dawn, tangoing across the rooftops with the owls, pushing me ever nearer to the edge of a mental breakdown.  Apparently flexibility is key for dealing with small children.  I think I just snapped.