Sunday 7th September – The Gnowl

Not really in a blogging mood today.  I’ve got a good book. I’m reading: ‘Grayson Perry; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl’ by Wendy Jones.  It’s fantastic.  I love Grayson Perry.  I’ve blogged about him before, but for those of you who weren’t around then, he’s the transvestite potter that won the Turner Prize a few years back.  I first saw his work on an OU course I was doing last year, and then had the great good fortune to go to a talk he did with the ceramics expert from the Antiques Roadshow, Lars Tharp.  Perry is funny, clever, articulate and makes some stunning things.  He also has a fixation with a teddy bear called Alan Measles, and you can’t say fairer than that.  What I particularly love about his pots are the fact that from far away they look so serene and graceful, and it’s only when you get up close and actually look at the pictures that it melts your mind.  It’s not often you see a Ming esque vase with a picture of people pleasuring themselves with hoover attachments on.  Not something you’d want to show your gran, probably, unless she was extremely broad minded.  I find it quite refreshing, not pleasuring myself with a hoover attachment, that just seems rather painful and unneccessary.  I don’t do painful.  I do comfortable.  I do hot chocolate and snuggling in giant blankets.

I’m supposed to be reviewing a book for Amazon Vine, but I left it at my mother’s yesterday after a particularly chaotic visit and Grayson Perry was just lying around begging to be read.  The vine books is about necrotic demons rising from the ground to suck out peoples’ souls, so I was easily swayed towards hoover attachments.

My parents have my aunt visiting from Italy.  She’s not a favourite aunt and can be quite a challenging house guest, as illustrated by the fact that my brother caused a stir yesterday having quite an interesting fight with her.  I took the children down the garden and we went to inspect the new gnome house that Tilly had built in the pouring rain whilst I avoided questions about what all the shouting was about.  I don’t know why I have to qualify the statement about outside activity with the words ‘in the pouring rain’ given the fact that it has bucketed it down almost solidly for the last week.  Let’s take it as given that any outdoor frolicking will be of the wet variety. 

The kids didn’t let it put them off.  Tilly has been building gnome dwellings for several weeks now.  She naturally gravitates towards using cardboard as a building material.  Both my mother and I have pointed out the pitfalls, but she persevered until yesterday when her third house ended up in water logged clumps.  She then moved on to a kind of wattle and daub mix, but thankfully without the pooh, although I did offer her the contents of one of Oscar’s nappies.  Eventually she settled on some bubble wrap that she found in the garage.  She also fashioned some of the bubble wrap into a kind of nineteen fifties style retro-future headscarf.  What with her ankle length, rather sensible coat and wellingtons, she looked like an Eastern European peasant about to start queueing for cabbages.  When her coat was too wet to wear anymore, she swapped it for her dressing gown (they all have their own bedrooms at grannies, complete with clothes, etc. And they have a playroom with a t.v. which is more than I ever had when I lived there!).  She looked decidedly eccentric, but she was having a lovely time and who am I to criticise? My parents never said a word when I took to wearing men’s pyjamas with the fly sewn up and vintage bowler hats.  There are some things that are just best accepted.

As you may know the kids have these gnomes at my mum’s house.  They have one each, which ‘mysteriously’ appeared in the garden.  Every time we go over, mum and dad will have moved them, which the children think the gnomes have done spontaneously.  On the way there in the car yesterday my dad was spinning Tallulah some yarn about how he had seen her gnome doing back stroke across the lawn! She was quite impressed.  Anyway, yesterday they were amazed and astounded because an owl has now joined the gang.  I have threatened my mother with death if any more statuary appears.  As I pointed out, when she’s in Shady Pines and the house has to be sorted out, it’s going to be me adopting four hundred tonnes of garden masonry.  She was unrepentant!

The owl is a gnome owl or gnowl as Tallulah called it.  My mum says that it’s called Wol.  Tallulah says that it is called Bill.  She won.

Aunty Squirrel came round and Hopi’d up my ears for me.  Apparently I have to have it done three times in a week to see if it’s really going to work.  I’m booked in to be candled again on Tuesday for my sins.  It didn’t hurt.  It was strangely soothing in an odd way.  There’s never going to be too much normality attached to having foot long beeswax tubes stuck into your ears and set alight.  Thank god we didn’t do it to Tilly, her head scarf would definitely have melted.  My sinuses were agony all day yesterday and all night.  Today they are a little better.  I await the further results with bated ears.

Our friend Peter came round after Aunty Squirrel had taken her leave.  He had been put in charge of his two daughters for the day while his wife Caron went up to London for the first time since the youngest was born in May.  He coped admirably, but was looking a little tired by the time he reached us.  A few hours of watching the eldest run round the lawn covered in bubble wrap and helping Tallulah wash tea towels by stirring them with a stick in a wicker basket soon set him back to rights.  Mum and dad have a verandah all across the back of their house.  It is deep enough to be able to sit out even when it is pouring with rain, which is what we did for most of yesterday.  I love their verandah.  I have verandah envy.  It’s especially good for reading your book on whilst watching your children squelch around in the rain.

So a soggy day, a busy day, but a good one.  We got home at about half seven, threw the kids in the shower and then let them have a play swordfight to work off the last bits of their energy before bed.  We only had one unbroken sword left, so the others had to have war hammers, but they coped admirably and made a hell of a row.  Mercifully nothing was broken except the sound barrier.

Today the girls have been at their dad’s all day and are not due back until Tuesday morning.  It has been very quiet.  We have done very little.  The laundry got me in the end, although I have managed to put it off since Friday and it was quite pressing then, so much kudos to me.  We bought a new kitchen bin, because we snapped the lid on our old one.  I’m going to use it in the garage for recycling storage. 

Our council are quite enlightened.  We get a weekly bin round where most people in the county only get a fortnightly one.  We also get a plethora of recycling bins which are collected fortnightly, one for paper and card, one for glass and one for tins and plastic.  Unfortunately these are quite small and we fill them in a few days.  Up to now I have just been using the regular bin once I fill up the others, but reading Mrs A.’s blog has pricked my conscience somewhat and I have decided to turn over a new leaf.  I have commandeered some containers in the garage for overflow recycling and we are going to make more regular trips to the tip.  I am also going to try not to buy any more magazines.  As I am a bit of a magazine fetishist this may require me to have extra doctor and dentist appointments so I can get a regular fix, and I’m not promising I won’t fall off the wagon, but we will see how we go.  I don’t know.  I might have to stop reading that woman’s blog altogether.  She’s turning me away from the dark side dammit.  I’m not giving the cape back though.  They’ll have to prize it out of my cold, dead hands first.