University Daze

I’ve been thinking quite a bit about my university days recently.  Not in a nostalgic, sepia, big hatted kind of way you understand.  It has more been thrust upon me by the indecent number of people from university who have recently sprung, mushroom-like into my life once more.  I blame Facebook.  Actually, I don’t blame it at all.  I kind of enjoy it, because I’ve always been a nosey bugger, and I just want to look at everyone’s photos and wonder how someone managed to go from turning up dead drunk at lectures on Minoan civilization to selling photocopiers in Reading and wearing a tie.

Looking back, I realise I haven’t changed that much.  I mean I have more money and I can no longer be affable about the thought of either a) pot noodles or b) sleeping on a futon, but mentally I’m still the same idiotic woman I always was.  The same things still make me laugh.  I have some of the same friends, all the ones that count the most.  I’m still not sure what I want to be when I grow up.  I still resent the idea of having a proper job.  I still want to get paid for muckin’ abaht and having a laugh.  I still have the same indecent capacity for stuffing down hobnobs like there’s just about to be a ban.  I can’t drink as much any more, which is probably quite a good thing.  I definitely can’t get by on no sleep any more.  I’ve gone up a cup size and down a dress size, which is the way to go about things.  I’ve got more cellulite, I’ve gone blonde and I still hate James Joyce.  Hmmmm.  Not sure what that says about me really in terms of progress made.  There’s probably a quiz about it somewhere.

When I was at uni I was in a kind of a gang.  We had a lovely time, when we weren’t hating each others guts and screaming a lot.  We enjoyed our gang.  Looking back I expect we enjoyed the falling out and screaming bits just as much as the good bits.  Life isn’t real unless there’s a bit of angst in there, specially when you’re in your twenties.  Angst is de rigeur. It’s the new black.

There were five hardcore members, me, Rachel, Kate, Rosalind and Justine, and then there was Alice.  Sometimes Alice was in our gang, sometimes she was in someone else’s gang.  Alice was hard to pin down.  We were fine with that.  She could drink us all under the table.  She was a young farmer.  You don’t mess with young farmers.  You let them get on with it and stand well back during times of crisis.

The thing about our gang was that we were not at all cool.  Nobody else wanted to be in our gang.  We were fine with that.  We shared a warped, twisted view of the world, we liked muckin’ abaht, and that was it really.  We met in the first few weeks of first year and were pretty much glued together until the end.  We had fallings out and fallings in, we flirted with other gangs, we brought men along, who were mostly bemused and wished they were elsewhere until we gave them biscuits.  We were very loud.  We thought we were hilarious.  We were to each other.  We probably weren’t to anyone else.  We didn’t really care.

Being in our gang consisted mostly of the capacity to drink endless cups of tea or coffee, and the ability to eat confectionary at the drop of a hat.  We virtually stalked the local Spar and while everyone else was buying cut price Dutch Lager, we were emptying the shelves of jelly babies and hob nobs faster than you could say knife.  We drank, oh yes! We drank.  In fact we drank obscene amounts, but we also ate.  Eating was key in our gang.  If someone passed you the biscuits and you said: ‘Oh no! I couldn’t possibly have another.  I’ve already had five.’  You would be out, tied to town pump and thrashed within an inch of your life.

Apart from that we shared a rich and warped fantasy life.  We used to watch people.  It was our thing.  We knew about everyone.  In the first year, we would sit in Rachel’s room because it had the best view of the lecture hall and the Student Union, and we would spy on everyone.  We would spy on people in the library and in the Spar, and almost anywhere you care to mention.  Eventually we got to know most people, it was a ridiculously small university was Lampeter.  It was a pimple on the bum of mid Wales.  When we arrived there were less than a thousand students. My school had twice that many kids.  Really knowing people wasn’t that important though.  What we didn’t know we made up.  We created lives for people that were way more fantastic than their own.  We embroidered a mythology, a pantheon.  We had our heroes and our villains and we made them into a kind of living soap opera.  I managed to persuade Rosalind once that this bloke Bob, who we used to watch wandering around in bare feet all the time, varnished his feet to keep them tough and supple.  She believed me for ages until I confessed in a drunken stupour.  I don’t think she’s ever forgiven me for that.  He was always known as varnished Bob after that.  Then I met him properly and found out that he was obsessed with Ralph McTell.  I thought that was slightly more improbable than having varnished feet and told him so.  He was very offended.  Turns out he was actually, really, really obsessed by Ralph McTell.  Apparently he’s a legend in his own lunchtime.  Who knew, apart from Ralph’s mum?

When you weren’t drinking, or in lectures there wasn’t a lot else to do, being that we were in a Welsh village, miles from anywhere.  It was one place where the old adage of ‘making your own entertainment’ really came to the fore.  We took this to heart.  We all liked mucking about with writing and drawing and glueing and sticking, so we would make magazines featuring stories about our favourite characters.  We created secret clubs within secret clubs, some of which I have mentioned in previous blogs (the Banana Band and the Jelly Baby Mutilation Society) and enacted bizarre rites of passage.  It helped to pass the time.  We were, as also previously blogged, totally obsessed with Take a Break Magazine, which was our holy grail.  We hunted down pictures of Jeremy Beadle and Chesney ‘Cheese’ Hawkes.  We sent them to each other as billets doux.

In our first year we decorated our entire corridor with pictures of our student union president’s head which we had cut out and stuck onto various festive figures.  We made strings of Father Christmas’ and snowmen and snowflakes.  I think we were going for festive.  We ended up with macabre.  Our president that year looked a lot like Jesus with a twirly, circus ring master’s moustache.  Imagine him leering out of a jolly santa and you will see where we went wrong.  We thought it was quite endearing.

At halloween we couldn’t find a pumpkin for love nor money.  Someone assured us that swedes would work just as well.  We all gathered in my room for this endeavour.  My room was the hub of the creative process.  I don’t think anyone else wanted glitter on the carpet.  I didn’t care.  I was sorry about the root vegetables though.  We had a swede, a parsnip and something else that was hideously odiferous.  Only one of us had a sharp knife.  Her name was Charlotte.  She was a member of our gang in the first term until she ran away to Paris and never came back.  I expect she was repelled by the swede.  Charlotte’s knife was about an inch and a half long and slightly sharper than a dinner knife.  It was disastrous. Rosalind, as our most artistic member, drew the faces, we took it in turns to whittle.  It took hours.  The smell of swede was totally overwhelming.  We all had blisters and were sick to death of it by the time the swede was done.  We abandoned the rest and went to the bar.  When we came back drunk, we decided to light the swede.  I can tell you with hand on heart that the aroma of warm, sweaty swede and candle wax after six pints, really does make you feel quite unwell.

Then Fran, another member of our gang who left after she got chicken pox from a girl called Splasher at the Christmas party, got some jumping beans.  They were real jumping beans with real little jumpy maggoty things in.  We loved them.  We named them after members of the English Department and used to race them about the corridors.  Lawrence got ill and died, so we had to go in mourning for him and would stare sadly at the real life Lawrence in lectures wondering if he knew how well he had jumped and how much we were going to miss him.  Much more than the real life one actually who we had decided was actually Nosferatu because he had very long, slender fingers.

Other things we did included making full sized paper mache models of a man and woman eating a christmas dinner, which we hoisted onto the dining room roof in time for Christmas Dinner day.  I was particularly proud of the turkey, which I modelled on back episodes of Tom and Jerry.  We also dressed the statue outside the chapel in a pinafore one year, which nearly killed us.  It takes a lot of hard work to steal a twenty foot ladder and run across a boggy field with it.  I liked dressing up like the Milk Tray Man more than I liked stealing the ladder.

We weren’t insular.  We mingled, we partied, we gatecrashed other people’s bedrooms and stayed until dawn.  We socialised and vomited into other people’s shoes.  We were not exclusive, but we always drifted back in the end.  We weren’t the only ones doing odd things.  At the end of our first year, someone invented a game called shoe golf.  You had to play it in the dark and the course was laid all over campus.  Kate and I used to wander around for hours chatting to the golfers, who were all dedicated to their art.  I remember discussing in great detail the possibility of launching a Lampeter olympics.  We were going to have shoe golf, obviously.  Also walking across the pipe which spanned the stream from the Student’s Union.  It had to be done drunk or it was no fun.  We had previously played extensive games of football with bara brith and thought that something could be done with that if we could get a more dense cake recipe.  It was going to be good.  Somehow it just never happened.

Someone painted pink spots all over a very pretty white house where a lot of the religious studies students lived one night.  That was good.  A bloke called Ralph used to have a wind up gramaphone which he dragged through the halls sometimes playing The Teddy Bears Picnic.  A chap called Bart used to run a coffee bar and jazz club in his room, all night, every night for several years until the holy spirit found him for a sun beam.  I once had a fascinating conversation about a halibut for several hours with someone at Bart’s place.  One year he lived in one of those mobile cabins they called a terrapin.  You could lift up the roof tiles and climb through into people’s rooms.  You’d be sitting there, innocently talking about fish, when the roof tile would pop out and someone would leer down at you.  It was a bit unnerving.

Other people were way more ambitious than us.  There were a group of people who regularly stole and decorated shopping trolleys in different themes and left them in people’s gardens.  There were people who had access to re-enactment costumes and would wander about dressed as Cavaliers playing odd games with bits of wood.  There was a bloke called Max who was a great friend of an ex boyfriend of mine who liked dressing as a Franco Prussian Military dictator and blowing things up.  There were fictional societies which were on a much grander level than ours. My particular favourite was The Pickling Society which had a stall near us at the Fresher’s Fair in second year.  They dressed in brown shopkeeper coats with hankies on their heads and demanded a joining fee of tuppence for the purposes of pickling things throughout the year.  Oddly I never did receive my copy of pickling news, first for pickles…

I found being there a great relief after the initial shock had worn off.  I didn’t think that there were many people like me in the world, and then I went to school with several hundred of them.  It changed towards the end.  It got more accessible.  Serious people started coming and it turned into a proper university, which was a shame.  When I went there it was just a playschool pretending to be a university.  People still worked, people still got degrees, but they really knew how to mess about.  I loved that.  I still do.  I still look for those kinds of people in the world.  People who wonder who asks the Queen if she isn’t getting a bit above her station.  People who think, ‘I wonder if I’m ever going to spot the transvestite alien in Glenfield Co-op?’  They’re my kinds of people.

Where are we now?  Alice died of breast cancer a few years ago, leaving a very small son and a step daughter, a distraught husband and family and lots of very sad friends.  Justine has always been notoriously bad at keeping in touch.  The last time we met her was about five years ago.  The last time I spoke to her was about three years ago.  She lives somewhere in Surrey and was working as an archivist, something she had wanted since Uni.  As far as I know she is not married, or with child, although with Justine anything is possible.  She was always really quiet at uni.  When we shared a flat in our second year, our landlady used to feel sorry for her.  She thought that we oppressed her and would run up the stairs of our flat calling ‘What have you done with Jacinta?’  and tearing the place up.  Of course, we had no idea who she was talking about, because she insisted on calling her Jacinta, so we just thought she was mental.  We ignored her and got on with things.  She would eventually find Justine, usually in her room, reading the Guardian, eating Rich Tea biscuits and drinking endless cups of tea, and would throw her arms around her and say things like: ‘Oh! Jacinta! I’ve been so worried about you.  Are you alright?’ whereupon Justine would blink at her in total bewilderment, wondering who the bloody hell Jacinta was.

Rosalind lives not far from me.  She’s still married to the guy she met at uni, and they have four children.  I see her quite often.  Kate has three kids, Rachel has three kids, they’re both teachers.  We still see each other and all our kids play together.  We still eat a lot of hobnobs.  We don’t have as much time to muck abaht these days, but we’re passing the skills on to the next generation.

The Penguins Think James Joyce is Chick Lit

If you join the Penguin Books group on Facebook they start to offer you chances of free books if you review them for their site.  When I first signed up they were running such an offer, something snappy like; ‘Review a Penguin Classic,’  I got quite excited.  There were hundreds of Penguin Classic’s I’d not read.  I love getting free books.  I like writing reviews.  What could go wrong?

I failed to anticipate the fact that although they snap your arm off as soon as you write in, they send you you what they want to send you without enquiring whether you’ve actually read that book first.  They sent me a cheery e-mail to announce that my copy of D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers was in the post and could I review it asap, please.

I was a bit depressed.  I like D.H. Lawrence.  I enjoyed Lady Chatterley, although only on the second time of reading.  The first time you read Lady Chatterley’s Lover can never fail to be disappointing unless you are a nun or someone who has been shut in an attic for thirty years with only back copies of Bunty to read.  I read it for the sex.  The sex was rubbish.  The sex was about as sexy as the sex in that manual; The Joy of Sex, which apart from Lady Chatterley and the Haines Manual for the 1978 Mini Cooper S, is the most unsexy book in the history of books about sex, and cars.  The thing about the Joy of Sex, apart from the most tedious descriptions of sexual activity in the world, descriptions which use the word ‘comfortable’ and ‘kind’ and which intersperse such sofa like words with mechanical descriptions such as ‘fold flap A firmly into Flap D and hold’, is that it has line drawings of two repellent gurning hippies making ‘lurve’ to demonstrate said origami like manoeuvres.  It is troubling.  It troubled me then.  It troubles me now.

The thing about Lady Chatterley is that Lawrence was too wrapped up in making sex sound mythical and godlike and phallus worshipping to think that what most people would find a turn on is more likely to be found within the sticky pages of back issues of Razzle.  He was turned on by having his women think of him as a deity with a giant, ginger knob.  Everyone else was turned on by nipples like chapel hat pegs and lady gardens.  Unfortunately for Lawrence, never the twain shall meet.

If on the other hand, you read Lady Chatterley’s Lover as a fantastic model of the dawning age of modernism, taking in the death of the agrarian way of life and the adoption of the nihilistic, war like, modern age of steam trains, electricity, Swiss Sanatoriums and jazz collections, it’s all good stuff.  My favourites of his books are The Rainbow and Women in Love, although I could do without the film of Oliver Reed wrestling in the nude thank you very much.  Again,  too much of the love me, love my giant godhead penis, and not enough chapel hatstands and lady gardens.  Too much of Oliver Reed without stout y-fronts on.

Unfortunately I hated Sons and Lovers and spent six months painfully wading my way through it.  Its basic premise is that every man secretly wants to shag his mum and kill his dad (so Freudian.  So last century) and we must hack our way from the coal face to the art gallery and watch everyone around us die like flies while we show every available lady our wanger in a bid to break free from stultifying, death bringing social convention and become a true artist.  We can only be a true artist when our mum dies of consumption, leaving us free not to feel so guilty every time we flop our knob on the tea table and say: ‘Cop a load of that then!’ to a load of previously buttoned up ladies with big hats.  If they swoon we can feel free to slap them round the cheeks with penis if so desired.  Sex and a good beating were never too far away from each other in Lawrence’s mind, or writing for that matter.  The ladies will be grateful that we have shown them the error of their monogamous, lie back and think of England ways.  They will then make us tea, tell us everything we do is marvellous and turn a blind eye while we shag ourselves stupid in the name of ‘artistic genius’, and all will be well, until we too, ironically go mental and die of consumption etc, etc, etc…

So, as you can see, I didn’t feel that I could write all that on the Penguin site.  On the other hand, I was committed.  I prepared myself for the worst.  I awaited my parcel.  It never came.  I breathed a huge sigh of relief and forgot about it.  I assumed they would never ask me to do anything again, because I had so dismally failed to step up to the mark the first time.  I was wrong.

Last week they sent me a cheery mail which said: ‘Hi! Come and review our Penguin Summer Reads.’  I signed up.  They sent me an e-mail.  I expected it to say: ‘Dear Katy, No chance you loser.  What happened to Sons and Lovers?  We hate you.  Penguins everywhere shit fish into your hat.  Farewell forever. Mwahhahahhahaha (evil Penguin laugh).’  It did not.

It said: ‘Dear Katy, you lucky old sausage you.  Because us literary Penguins love you so much we are sending you a copy of James Joyce’s The Dubliners for you to review as part of our Summer Read extravaganza.  Read, inwardly digest and report back asap.  Fishy love, The Penguins.’

Part of me, the part of me that still stands outside the window of the children’s party, pressing its tiny nose against the cold glass and wishes it were playing pass the parcel with the other ‘included’ children, is really pleased that the Penguins still love me.  The other part of me thinks; ‘Bugger me! James Joyce.  What a goit…’

How, how, how can anyone think that James Joyce constitutes a ’summer’ read?  Marian Keyes is a Summer Read.  Diary of a Nobody, Cold Comfort Farm, Love in a Cold Climate, all summer reads.  James Joyce?  He scores Nul Points on the giant European scoreboard of top Summer reads, even if he is a literary genius.

I’m sorry, but I’ve waded my way through Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.  I’ve bought and sold more copies of Ulysses than most people have hot dinners.  It took me nine years of reading the first hundred pages of Ulysses before I could finish it.  Nine years.  People get less for manslaughter.  Now I’ve got to read the bloody Dubliners.  Still, it could be worse.  A) I could have read it before, and b) It could have been Finnegan’s Wake…

I know that people think that James Joyce was a genius.  I sort of get where they’re coming from.  His description of kidneys frying in Ulysses always makes me feel physically sick.  It’s so well done I can actually smell the hot urine, spitting on the stove.  That’s brilliant writing.  It really is.  The thing is, the thing they forget to tell you is that he was a tortured, filthy bastard.  And he likes to share.

There was a bloke at university.  His name was Colin Hanson.  He thought James Joyce was a genius.  He dedicated large swathes of his life to informing everyone of James Joyce’s genius (the swathes when he wasn’t too drunk to speak that is).  There was something slightly ethereal about Colin.  We used to watch him quite a bit (it was one of our hobbies), not in a stalking kind of way, just in a habitual kind of way.  We worked out that he never actually put one foot in front of the other when he walked, like ordinary people do.  He hovered, rather in the manner of a short, dark dalek with rumpled clothes.  He didn’t open his eyes much either.  I think he feared the light.  I always imagined him, hovering over his copy of Ulysses, sucking in the words with his index finger, like a little, literary alien.  I think it was his affinity with James Joyce that allowed him to do that.  I have never been able to hover.  I blame it on my failure to appreciate James Joyce.  Perhaps The Dubliners will turn it all around for me and I will hover back from my holidays in Norfolk in a Colin Hanson type way.  It will all be thanks to the Penguins.

A Bag of Shame for You

I am having a crisis about carrier bags.  They’re such small things, things that we take for granted, but at the moment I find myself worrying about them at regular intervals throughout the day.  I’ve never known them to be so troublesome.  There have always been a few simple rules about carrier bags:

1. The nicer the shop and the more you spend, the nicer the carrier bag and the more you want to keep it, even though you don’t really know what to do with it once you’ve emptied it of your shiny baubles of joy.
2. Primo carrier bags are the paper ones with card reinforced bottoms and string or ribbon handles
3. The worst carrier bags are the blue and white striped ones from the market that are about as useful as tissue paper in a rainstorm and which have a nasty habit of cutting your wrists to ribbons just before they disintegrate into a big heap on the floor.
4. You should never stick a carrier bag on a child’s head and leave it in the corner of a room to amuse itself while you go off and have a cup of tea.  The NCT does not approve of this.  They get tetchy.
5. You should never throw one on a canal towpath in case a swan tries to take one shopping and ends up strangling itself.  The Queen will chop off your head.

So, until a couple of weeks ago, there you had it.  The definitive owner/user Haines type manual for the carrier bag man or woman about town.  Now everything has changed because of our increasing awareness of the fact that we are killing the planet and our carbon footprint makes Godzilla’s smashing of Tokyo look like a session at tumbletots.

So, now carrier bags are a hot topic.  Plastic bags are bad.  Very, very bad.  If you have them in the house they get up in the middle of the night while you are sleeping and rifle through your underwear drawer, sniggering.  They play at bowls with your Jersey Royals and a kumquat.  They lurk in corners and fiendishly plot the downfall of the Western hemisphere, drawing maps on your kitchen table using tomato sauce.  There is no end to their devilish ways.

Ocado have been reclaiming and recycling their own carrier bags for months and claim that shopping with them is as green as walking to the shops.  I am unsure as to the veracity of this statement, but anything that reduces the teetering mountain of carrier bags, stuffed inside carrier bags, inside carrier bags in the Escher sketch end of the kitchen is good with me.  Ocado are the Child Catcher of the carrier bag world.  Thanks to them I am redeeming myself slightly, despite my haphazard attempts at recycling, the peat in my gro bags and the permanently whirring tumble drier.

The big problem is that shops are now beginning to withdraw their supplies of carrier bags and replace them with energy efficient ones made of Ray Mear’s home made string and bird spit.  You can still get plastic ones, but they keep them in a giant box with a grinning skull and some denuded trees worthy of a Paul Nash painting of the Somme on it.  If you ask for one, they charge you for it, and then they point and jeer and show you pictures of deformed babies that you will be responsible for, while Ray Mears sits smugly knitting in a corner with all the rosy cheeked, healthy children he has saved.

Don’t get me wrong.  I think that sustainable carrier bags are fantastic.  Some of them are even quite pretty.  The TK Maxx one with orange flowers and trees on is lovely.  The one from the Co-op with blue flowers on is quite nice too, despite its dodgy handles.  The problem is me, not the bags.  It is costing me a bloody fortune.  I have hundreds of these things.  I see them when I’m out.  I buy them and think; ‘That’s a brilliant idea’.  I get home, I put them away safely and then invariably leave the house without one.  I get to the shops.  I buy four million things that need a safe home.  I buy another sustainable, hand woven cotton bag with a picture of Rolf Harris petting a wounded deer on it.  I feel smug.  I get home.  I put it somewhere safe.  I invariably leave the house without one…You see my dilemma.

Today I forgot that I had put my kind, friendly eco bags in Oscar’s nursery bag.  I carefully left it at nursery and then went shopping.  I opened my handbag to pull out my hairy bag of eco happiness only to remember seeing it sitting on a peg in nursery, six miles away, having a lovely time with duplo.  I couldn’t face the thought of buying another cotton bag.  I plumped for the still free in that shop carrier bag.  I tried to make amends by jamming as much of my shopping into it as humanly possible until the handles began to go all white and stringy.  I still ended up at lunch with four carrier bags.  Four carrier bags of shame.  Four more deformed children and a lifetime of Catholic guilt.

I now have about two hundred quid’s worth of sustainable carrier bags lurking around the house, bristling their tiny raffia strings at me and hiding every time they hear me say: ‘Shoes on troops…’  In a few months I will have spent so much on cotton bags I will have been better off buying myself a Louis Vuitton trunk on wheels and strapping myself to the top so I can’t forget to leave home without it.

Thursday August 7th – I want to be alone

Today I have scraped up enough magic beans from the back of the sofa to afford to send Oscar to nursery this afternoon as well as this morning.  This has meant a whole day without children.  It is an unexpected and highly delightful pleasure.  Tilly is still in Minehead with her best friend, Tallulah is out for the day with our friend Zoe, who used to be her nanny and who she loves passionately, and Oscar is currently wreaking havoc with some Duplo I expect.

I have been somewhat challenged by doing things all week, and decided that left to my own devices I would probably get things done much more quickly and with much less anguish.  I decided this yesterday when Oscar tried to help me make our bed and we just ended up playing half an hour’s worth of the Roly Poly pudding game instead.  I finally made the bed at about 11.30 last night, just before I fell into it.  This is what prompted me to scuttle about collecting pennies and ringing nursery nervously to see if they had a place. 

I have just got back from town where I managed to buy school plimsolls (check), new trousers for Oscar (check) and new perfume (check).  These were the three key items on my list.  My perfume supply was perilously low due to the fact that Oscar and Tallulah like to help me get dressed in the mornings and have taken a shine to it.  They wander round all day looking like Dickensian urchins, but smelling like Stella McCartney.  Oscar is also partial to the Sanctuary body butter (thanks to my friend Squirrel, who got me some as a present last week), although I have to monitor him with it, as he likes to rub it into his shoes to make them ’shiny’.

I was going to get a couple of family friendly DVD’s for our trip to Norfolk next week, for the time when the heavens will inevitably open and we will be stuck in the house with a television that can only pick up BBC 2 and S4C.  I don’t know what it is about holiday cottages, but they always seem to have the ability to pick up S4C no matter where in the country you are.  I once spent a week on a cottage in a country estate in Devon and was forced to watch Pobol Y Cwm through a cloud of static snow.  It doesn’t seem fair somehow.

Anyway, I didn’t get any DVD’s because HMV was very busy and I am a bit off the general public today (I’d better brush up on my Welsh later then).  I am rather hormonal, in that; ‘look at me in that way and I’ll take your head off with the clasp of my handbag and spit down your neck’, sort of way.  I am not, as my mother puts it; ’suffering fools gladly.’  I am fine alone, or with people who know me very well (i.e. they read the signs and will steer clear of dangerous subjects.  They also feed me cake).  I can just about hold it together for strangers who are polite and/or intelligent.  Everyone else is fair game, unfortunately for them.  Wittering and petulance are my top two annoyances today.  I just can’t be doing with it.  I hope this has worn off by the weekend or Wroxham will be a bloodbath after we’ve passed through.  If I don’t make it, think kindly of me and don’t put up a statue in my name.

I cheered myself up slightly by doing a detour into TK Maxx, which was blissfully empty of people.  I floated around and got myself a pair of Killah Jeans, two Red or Dead t-shirts, a ChunkyMunky t-shirt and a Donna Karan jumper for fifty of your English pounds.  I thought that was a bit of a bargain.  Admittedly I only really needed jeans, but I was passing the t-shirts and they called to me in that way (Odysseus with the Sirens, that kind of mythical, deep, spiritual thing.  The same way that cakes call to a person).  The jean situation was getting a bit troublesome. I have short, stumpy legs and buy jeans because I like them and not because they fit me in the leg.  This means that  I usually have several yards of spare jean, which rather than adjust I trample all over until the jeans unravel around me.  I have two pairs which are now near to death and I am very sad about it.  Why can’t it be my crappy, they’ll do in an emergency Gap jeans that are dying?  No.  It is my very, very beautiful Diesel and Miss Sixty jeans which are dying.  Probably because I wear them all the time and avoid my emergency jeans until there is actually an emergency, which is why they are pristine.  Jason will probably go mad, but he’s playing poker this evening and then he’s got a whole week without me and the kids next week, while we trudge about Norfolk and he lounges about, luxuriating in the comfort of our freshly made bed.

I met Andrea for lunch.  It’s the first time for weeks we have lunched without children in tow.  It was great.  She avoided contentious issues, she bought me cake.  We sat in the sunshine and talked about things that weren’t to do with children.  I like the fact that our conversations are never predictable.  I think that’s why we have been friends for so long.  Today, hot topics of conversation included e-publishing, Clement Freud, war memorials, The Duke of Wellington, the history of the Balkans, the Peninsula War and how to be an absolutist monarch.  We also spent quite a bit of time getting very excited that we are going to see David Tennant in Hamlet in a few weeks.  We were a bit dubious, but the reviews so far have been pretty good.  We’re agreed that as long as the audience behaves itself we should be in for a good night.

I’m running away now to have a shower all alone for the first time in a week.  Nobody will be sat at my feet making Cillit Bang (if you make it the right way mama, you can save the entire universe from destruction.  Thank you Tallulah), or trying to pumice my knees (thank you Oscar), although they could probably do with a good pumicing.  After that I may well drink some tea, alone, and read my book, alone.  I like this alone thing very well.  I think it suits me.  In this mood it definitely does.