Saturday 29th November – Bah Humbug

I have just returned from a rather trying day in Birmingham.  It was supposed to be very nice.  Jason was looking after Oscar, and the girls and I were pottering to Brum on the train, meeting with my friend and two of her kids beforehand for a spot of lunch, doing some shopping, going to the theatre, eating some tea and coming home.  All very lovely.  It has been planned for ages.  Train tickets bought, theatre tickets bought (Lion, Witch and MFI Wardrobe), food decisions made (Chinatown for lunch, ice cream parlour for tea).  Nice.

These are some things I learned:

Never trust British railways to work properly on a weekend. 

Our train was cancelled.  There were no replacement services.  We spent an hour at Leicester station, which is not good.  I spent nearly ten pounds in the hideous cafe buying three buns and three drinks and trying to spin them out long enough not to have to freeze to death on the platform.  We visited the toilets twice, two different branches of W.H. Smiths and were just contemplating an arrangement of baguettes when the next train hoved into view.

The next train, a whole hour later, was only three carriages long and was already full when it came in to Leicester.  We stood for over an hour in a corridor jammed up against a woman and her lover who were surgeons and were comparing medical notes in between fondling each other’s arses (EWW. EWWW and EWWWWWW) I fell over a Polish man and there were two Jamaican people doing fairly rude things to each other in another corner.  GET A ROOM PEOPLE! I thought we were all supposed to be buttoned up and repressed and stuff.  Especially in freezing, foggy conditions.  But no! My two children and I were in the sex pest train from hell with added surgical interludes.

It was a stopping train.  Its penultimate stop was at some suburban Birmingham based hell hole.  Three teenage girls got on, despite the fact there was no room.  One of them barged into the kids, rested her bag on Tallulah’s head and shrieked about how horrible it was.  She shoved and pushed and squealed and moaned all the way to Birmingham, which although only ten minutes down the track, felt like a lot, lot, longer away thanks to her.  My children didn’t complain, didn’t argue and stood beautifully for an entire hour.  She couldn’t manage more than thirty seconds without whinging.  I felt like saying something, but knew that if I opened my mouth I might well go postal.  I stared hard at her ear lobe and imagined her excruciating death in intimate detail.  It helped to pass the time.

Someone farted two minutes before the train pulled into the station.  It filled the carriage with noxious fumes and was a real belter. By now it was unbearably hot and stuffy as well, so you can imagine what a pot pourri of delight it was.  Yum.

We were due to meet my friend at the station at midday.  We got there ten minutes early, she got there fifteen minutes late because there was fog on the roads and the car parks were chocka.  We stood for twenty five minutes in the main concourse of New Street Station after having to pay thirty pence each just to have a wee, feeling very sorry for ourselves.

Never have a spiral perm, a face like a pig’s bum and pale pink knee length cowboy boots with rhinestones in them.  It’s a bad look.

Never take your faddy children to Chinatown for lunch.

We had Dim Sum.  We had many dishes.  My children didn’t eat any of them.  My children ate boiled rice and looked on aghast as my friend’s children attacked everything with gusto.  They drank tap water and ate boiled rice.  Other people looked at me as if I were doing it on purpose.  The sort of people who shuffle their bosoms into a well known phrase or saying and look down their nose at mothers who are gaily tucking in to steamed buns and paper wrapped spare ribs while their children are chained to their chairs eating thistles.

Matilda begrudgingly tried a piece of spare rib.  In the process she bit her thumb and made herself cry.  Even more bosom shuffling ensued.

Never say; ‘Hey! Let’s walk through the German market, it will be fun.’

It will only be fun if every other person in Birmingham is stuck in a traffic jam in spaghetti junction.  It was heaving.  It was like a giant sea of faces.  You couldn’t get near any of the stalls, the children got swept up by random bodies about every thirty seconds and we had to form a human chain just to get them through without any of them going under and never coming up again.

Never buy a boiled wool, felt Pixie hat in navy blue with pink spots if you are a middle aged man with corduroy leisure slacks and a wind cheater on.  It doesn’t make you look appealing.  It makes you look like a twat.

Never go and see The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe at the Birmingham Rep unless you are under ten or have very low theatrical expectations.

The four children were played by two menopausal women with fake plaits, a forty five year old man with a bald spot who was the tallest man in the world, and a bricklayer called Kevin.  Aslan was a man in a lot of ginger fun fur with a hole in his arse where you could see his ‘real’ clothes poking through.  My friend thought Mr. Tumnus was quite buff, but he got turned to stone ten minutes in, so that was the end of him.  The witch was played for comedy panto laughs.  The unicorn was a man in white fun fur with a felt horn on his face.  He had his hands behind his back in the manner of a speed skater to show that he must really be a magical unicorn because he didn’t have hands!  He galloped about, whinnying like a six year old girl in the playground, and used his ‘non’ hands to flick his moulting wool tail behind him.  AND. AND. There were songs, lots and lots of terrible songs.  Here are some samples:

‘I’m going into the wardrobe,

Yes, a wardrobe,

A wardrobe which smells of mothballs….etc, etc…’

or Tallulah’s favourite:

‘Turkish Delight, Turkish Delight, Turkish Delight,

Sticky pink cubes of Turkish Delight.

Yummy, yummy, pink Turkish Delight, etc, etc.’

Add to this the thicky foreigner school of acting:

‘HA LLO  PE TER  I (points to self) HAVE JUST COME BACK FROM NAR NI AAAAHHHH’

‘OH! HAVE YOU? WHERE IS THAT THEN?’

Nice one.  I dozed through chunks of it and was mercifully spared the slaying scene and other such delights.  The children loved it, thankfully.

Unfortunately I wasn’t allowed to sleep through the first half due to several things.

• People randomly texting in the audience.
• People randomly, actually, quite unbelievably, having phone conversations in the audience.
• Children crying, talking, demanding Pokemon cards, screaming, eating pork scratchings, crisps and gravel and other noisy food stuffs.
• One child actually shitting her pants in our row and being carried, arse akimbo down the row by a very embarrassed mother.
• Both of my children needing to go to the toilet.  We were on the back row of a full theatre, right in the middle of a row of eighty seats.  My we were popular.  Not as popular as shitty child mother.
• But most amazingly of all, someone actually listening to their iPod throughout.  I could hear it, but I couldn’t see them or I’d have been forced to go and snip the wires on their headphones just for some light relief.

It was hell.  Sheer, unutterably horrible hell.  TWO AND A HALF HOURS of hell.

On the upside:

• I got to see my friend.
• I got to eat Dim Sum, and a lot more than I bargained for due to my children and their faddy ways.
• We went to Selfridge’s ice cream parlour and pigged out on ice creams as big as our heads.
• Jason felt sorry for us and came and picked us up in the car.  It took us just over thirty five minutes to get home.  Hooray for him.

The things I do in the name of Christmas bloody fun.