Sunday 5th April – Happy Birthday to me

It is my birthday in four days.  I will be thirty seven.  This could explain the recent miasma of depression. Having said that, the sun has been shining for the past two days and this, plus excessive amounts of cake and chocolate have helped to cheer me rather. 

On balance I do feel rather older than thirty seven.  I feel about ninety four.  I think back wistfully to the days when I was pregnant with Matilda and some old ladies on a train harangued me when I got on at Kentish Town because they thought I was a gym slip mother. Sigh.  That was nearly ten years ago.  Ten years is a long time in parenting.  I think they ought to treat parenting years rather like dog years.  For every child you have your age goes up exponentially.  That’s how it feels anyway.

Today we had my birthday treat.  I wanted either a) a digital camera or b) a trip to Bicester Village.  Bicester is a nondescript town about ten miles outside of Oxford.  Many moons ago they opened one of those cut price designer retail outlets there.  Over the years it has grown and grown like Topsy did and now it is very grand indeed.  Not only that but it is rather posh.  Unlike other retail outlets you go to where they have M&S bargain basement and a Cadbury’s mis shapes shop this has real designer outlets.  They sport such names as Dior, Anya Hindmarch, D&G, Versace etc.  It is quite shiny.  Plus, if you get hungry they have a Carluccios and a Villandry. As you can imagine it is the place I would quite like my ashes scattered, and I do like to make a pilgrimage there at least once a year if possible.

You can guess that I didn’t get the digital camera.  I got the trip to Bicester and £200, which I am feeling was distinctly the better deal.

We have Tilly’s second best friend staying with us for a few days on an extended sleepover.  She came with us and oddly this worked brilliantly.  She has four brothers and sisters, so for her having only three other kids around is a bit of a treat.  She is the oldest of her brood so she is very good at dealing with small, evil children, and because she has been brought up in a gang she doesn’t expect preferential treatment.  She is a dream.  And my kids love her to bits and try to impress her by being nice to each other and vying for her attention at all times.  Consequently Jason and I had to do minimal amounts of shouting and rounding up, which was rather splendid.

I bought two things. I got a rather gorgeous dark grey, pinstripe woolen skirt from All Saints and a beautiful dove grey A line sack dress in silk from Jigsaw.  I fell head over heels in love with the most gorgeous pair of pale grey suede Alaia shoe boots, but at £350 they were slightly over budget, which was a bit of a shame.  I tried on a gorgeous green pleated dress with huge puffy sleeves in Alice Temperley which was only £140, but Jason said it made me look fat and slightly dead.  I didn’t think this was a look which worked for me unfortunately, because it felt like heaven and I would love to own a bit of Alice Temperley.

I fell madly in love with three black A line dresses in Paul Smith at £350 each and the most amazing dark green evening dress in Matthew Williamson for £650.  My budget was coming under severe attack, so I decided to skip  quite a lot of shops because I knew I would be tempted too much and I absolutely would crack under pressure.  I had to be dragged past Mulberry crying, and avoided Alexander McQueen on the grounds that I already did very well with one pair of trousers and daren’t risk coming out of there having blown the budget and maxed out my credit card on more.

It was a fabulous morning and I highly recommend it if you like shopping and fancy an indulgent day out.

In the afternoon we took the kids to the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.  It is actually two museums, a natural history museum in front and a museum of anthropology at the back.  It is free and it is entirely wonderful.  The natural history museum was built by those crazy Victorians and is a monumentally beautiful edifice in glass and wrought iron.  Every pillar is made from different stone, all the stonework is carved with plants and animals and birds and all the girders which hold up the glass roof are made to look like palm fronds and painted with beautiful designs.  It is a truly glorious building and that’s before you get to the exhibits.

They have lots of stuff you can touch and poke and drawers you can open.  There are free workshops and talks and neverending amounts of things to see and do.  We had a fabulous afternoon stroking small stuffed Shetland ponies, staring at star nosed moles and elephant eared shrews and drawing giant dinosaurs.  It was great fun.

Even though I love this part of the museum it is absolutely nothing to the anthropology museum which lurks behind it.  It is a cavern of delights and is literally stuffed to the ceiling with things to amazet you.  There are cases of Japanese Noh masks, witch doctor fetishes, exquisite costumes from all over the world, totem poles poke up into the sky, canoes swim above your head and there is so much to see in such a small space you could spend every day there for a year and still find new things.  Under all the glass cases are drawers which you can open to reveal hundreds and hundreds more artefacts.  It is one of my favourite places to be in the whole, wide world.

Unfortunately it is shut until May 1st.  They are renovating it with money from the lottery heritage fund.  There will be a grand opening in May and I have promised the children we will go back and see things then.  I am as excited as they are.

After our stones and bones afternoon we walked over the road to Little Clarendon Street and spent a happy, sticky hour in George and Davies ice cream parlour.  This is a wonderful place and should definitely not be missed if you should ever visit Oxford.  They make all their own ice cream and always have amazing flavours.  They have a suggestion box for flavours and introduce new ones regularly.  Today they had green tea ice cream, which I tried and which was delicious.  I also had scoops of Brazilian coffee flavour and creme anglaise.  It was delightful.

All in all, a thoroughly lovely day, and I still have a hundred quid of my birthday money left to spend.  How good is that?

It was one of those days where everything just clicked together beautifully.  The kids have been angelic all day.  The sun shone, we got parking spaces straight the way, even in the middle of Oxford and we were home in time for tea.  So despite feeling like a nonaganerian I cannot complain about one of the nicest birthdays I’ve had for a very long time.  Lucky me.

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