Tuesday 7th April – Chillaxin’

The house is empty of children. My wonderful cousin came at dawn to take the girls out for the day. Wonderful nursery had a space for the boy and wonderful husband insisted I take it and he pay for it so that I can chillax.  How nice is that?

My excess birthday money is now gone, which is a relief. The smouldering in my pockets has now died down and I can get back to my normal useless financial juggling without the burden of knowing there is excess cash for treats tormenting me every millisecond until it is spent. The idea of saving is a bit of a foreign concept to me. It just seems immoral given the fact that I may swoon under a bus tomorrow.  Better to spend it all now and have no regrets.

I was quite cunning. I went to the lovely remaindered bookshop so my craving for yet more books I will never have time to read was sated and appeased by both quality and quantity.  I bought a giant sack of books which I heaved around town, thus also ensuring I had my exercise for today.  I then went to TK Maxx in the hope that they would mysteriously have imported the Alaia shoe boots I wanted from Bicester and dropped the price by a cool three hundred quid.  They had not, but I got frivolous Rocket Dog wedges in a kind of Cath Kidston style print of pale blue with tea roses.  These made me happy.  Then a pair of tailored Sticky Fingers black wool trousers, a grey Billabong spaghetti strap smock and a black Calvin Klein vest, long enough to hide any lumpy bits.  Nice. Nice. Nice.

I have bought more Easter eggs for the children, after having eaten all the other ones I bought earlier. I am going to hide these ones better and pray they last until Sunday.  Now it will be like the days when the tooth fairy is too monged out to to her job and forgets to collect stray teeth.  This time the Easter bunny will forget it is Easter until the last minute and then spend four hours of its small and hoppy life running frantically round the house saying very unEasterish things like: ‘Where did I put those fucking eggs? Gahhhh!’ I know I won’t eat these eggs because the lovely chocolate goddess, Justme, has sent me a huge bag full of the most exquisite eggs for my very own self.  They were sitting on my doormat when I got back from shopping and I am going to indulge myself later when the children are in bed.  That woman is a chocolate genius.

I went to Boots. I needed shampoo and conditioner. I needed spray in conditioner for the kids so that they don’t get galloping head lice (it does work as long as you keep changing the brand).  I needed a new eyeliner after my last one finally gave up the ghost and I ended up looking like Robert Smith and trying to get bits of splinter out my eyelashes.  I needed new perfume.  I wear Stella McCartney, the original. I have to wear it. It is the perfume I wore when Jason and I were courting.  He likes it.  He gets funny if I smell like anything else.  This is a shame because I also love Bvlgari’s Green Tea and Coco by Chanel.  I am not allowed to smell like these things anymore.  He cries.  Luckily I still like Stella McCartney. I just pray she doesn’t change the recipe or go out of business or Jason may have to either assassinate her or get a new wife.

By the time I had got all my goodies I had spent more in Boots than anywhere else, ever.  This is why I try not to go into Boots very often.  It doesn’t matter what I go in there for I never come out having spent less than fifty quid.  It is insane.  I think they put something in the air, you know, like the supermarkets that smell of warm bread even though they don’t have a bakery section.  It’s something that convinces you that you can’t live without pink gingham tweezers at twenty quid a pop and an exfoliating wand in the shape of a weasel etc.

While I was paying and weeping a little old man wandered up to the tills and promptly crashed to the floor.  He just crumbled.  He crumbled straight into a display of cheap perfume which he knocked over as he fell.  He ended up on the floor surrounded by floral stench, bits of glass and blood.  Luckily for him he was unconscious at this point.  The Boots staff were crap.  It took them five minutes to get a member of staff who was a first aider.  In the meantime he had about fourteen women flapping around him uselessly.  When the first aider arrived she was ten and terrified.  It was at this point someone suggested calling an ambulance.  This was the only sensible thing they had done for the duration.  He was just coming round as I left.  Poor bloke.  Remind me never to swoon in Boots.  i hope they rinse him down in the hospital. That perfume smelled truly vile.  I already had a headache when I went in.  It was exacerbated by shrieking women and floral effluvia. Blee.

After seeing this and thinking that it could have been me, and how lucky I was, I had to go and have a relaxing sit down in Starbucks where I accidentally on purpose inhaled their rather lovely new milk chocolate and hazelnut muffin range.  Then I treated myself to a taxi home.  It was so nice not to have to worry about being offered drugs or being mistaken for a pensioner. It was positively decadent.

I am now going to finish reading the Masqueraders in a very hot bath before the kids get home. I am hoping the second lot of painkillers will clear this nasty headache. I woke up with it, and although I have bravely battled on, it is making me go all frowny in a very thoughtful and unlovely sort of way.  The bath/book/drugs combo  is the final decadence of the day before the normal bedlam ensues.  My cousin is very outdoorsy.  She used to be in the army and is good at running about in mud.  This means the children will come home reeking and vile, but very happy.  This is why I’m going to steal the bathroom now while it is clean and has no interesting stains on it. I am so wise.

Monday 6th April – I Make an Effort

I would just like to use this fleeting moment in between chasing children round and round endlessly to publish a disclaimer. It is not that I think that being 37 is old. I don’t.  Nor do I fear ageing.  I have many fine plans for when the children finally decide they no longer want to be my best friend and leave home to live in a squat with bearded hippies and vermin.  What I do object to is feeling old before my time.

It may not seem like it from the pages of this blog, but there was a time, not so long ago either, when I didn’t even really think about ageing or feeling old.  I just got on with my life.  I do not spend lots of money on anti ageing products. I do not dye my hair because I fear the grey bits. I dye it because I get away with more idiocy being blonde than I did when I was naturally brunette.  I was relatively fit when I wasn’t having babies, and apart from being rather mental, relatively healthy.  If I went to the Doctors more than twice a year it was a cause for alarm.

In the last year, as documented right here, things have changed,  and I am up and down to the doctors fasther than a whore’s drawers.  It is very wearisome and not being able to do the things I used to take for granted has made me feel old.  This has made me look at my upcoming birthday in a rather more pessimistic light than usual.  Normally I would be making a gigantic fuss, demanding treats and drawing up lists weeks in advance.  There would be much hullabaloo and general all round cheer.  This year has been somewhat different and this is new and not entirely welcome.  Hence the whingeing, low level petulance and moaning.

Today however, I have to say that I have felt much better.  This, despite having been kept up all night by Oscar repeatedly vomiting all over the bed clothes and us having to drag the cot into our bedroom in the wee small hours because we were worried he might choke, but not worried enough to have him in bed with us where he might a) vomit into Jason’s beard and b) vomit all over my Egyptian cotton sheets.

Today I made a pact with myself that I would make more of an effort and that this might help me not to feel so much like an AP (aged parent for those non Swallows and Amazons fans).  I got up and made time to slap on some foundation and blusher. I actually checked that I had brushed my hair before we went out.  I didn’t just automatically go straight to the jeans drawer for my clothing. I wore my new All Saints skirt and a lovely John Rocha silk top.  I eschewed trainers for tights and three inch black patent YSL rip offs.  It felt nice.  I felt more like the old me.

Then I spent the day doing the following:

• Changing shitty nappies
• Having sand based feasts forced upon me by snot ridden toddlers.
• Running around the garden after small children on tricycles
• Scrubbing floors
• Pushing swings
• Cooking
• Knocking over viscous liquids that stain
• Getting my heels stuck in gratings
• Scrubbing lumps of mashed banana off of household implements

I remembered why I usually throw on jeans and a t-shirt.  On the other hand, despite the fact that my dry cleaning bills are going to be massive and I may be forced to wield an iron for the first time in about ten years, I have decided that I will continue to try and make an effort.  Having nice clothes and not wearing them for fear of reprisals is rather like having beautiful china and saving it for best. I don’t do that.  We all eat off my Emma Bridgewater pots on a daily basis, and despite wincing a lot, we have been lucky so far. I shall persevere, although I may have to go for remedial lessons in running in heels.  Thank God we have a friend who is an osteopath.

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.

Saturday 4th April – Such Is The Fashion Of The Times…

Being somewhat historically minded over the last few days due to:

 

1. Watching endless episodes of ‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ in a weirdly obsessive compulsive type way
2. Reading historical fiction (i.e. Georgette Heyer)
3. Watching historical drama live on stage

 

Has led me to ponder a few things that I would like to see reintroduced to modern daily life and which I believe could be the answers to world peace, economic prosperity and free false teeth for all.

 

Herewith my list of things I want to see happening soon on a street near me:

 

The extensive use of the word ‘fie’ to signify woe, slight ennui, fuck off, or the direct correlation to the French use of the word ‘helas’, depending on the amount of emotion appended.

 

The crinoline, because I’ve always wanted to have a go with one and hide bags of biscuits, pet monkeys and string quartets under the dome of my skirts. Plus, as long as there was adequate corsetry and much cinching I could get as fat as I liked and still have a fabulous hour glass figure.  And you’d never have to shave your legs again because nobody would see them.  It would be a hairy forest of biscuit crumbs, monkey pooh and stranded violin players, but just think of the fun we’d have.

 

Songs which use phrases like; ‘Hey nonny nonny.’  Just because it would be funny to hear Fiddy Cent rapping: ‘It’s getting hot in here, hey nonny non, so take off all your skirts (crinolines obviously) and get your Morris on. Hey nonny nonny. Hey nonny yeah, bee yatch’ etc.  Or something more traumatic by Snow Patrol: ‘I slit my wrists, hey nonny nonny/ I wear black jeans/ hey nonny no / I stick my lip out / with a farradiddle / I look to the side and sigh/ hey nonny non.’ Etc for five hundred million years.

 

Compulsory hat wearing for everyone over the age of five.  I mourn the day wearing a hat went out of vogue.  Plus it will finally get shot of the hoodie phenomena altogether.  Those persons still clinging to their outmoded and clearly dangerous hoods will be penalised by being made to wear deer stalkers with the flaps down no matter what the weather.  Offending girls will be forced to wear berets pulled right down with the little tag at the top sticking up like a stalk thus making them look like Victoria Wood when she is looking for her friend Kimberley ”Av’ you seen ‘er?’

 

The use of fans in courtship rituals and/or assassination attempts. Apparently the Victorians wrote books about how to communicate love messages with fans and I quite fancy having a go at this.  While the Victorians were getting frisky the Japanese were way ahead of them and would sharpen the edges of their fans in order to use them rather like razors to re-enact an oriental version of Brighton Rock.  You could have one fan fit for both purposes and then if it turns out that Daniel Craig rebuffs your fan message of ‘fancy a quick knee trembler behind the bike sheds’ you can slice his boyish handsomeness off to remind him not to trifle with your affections.

 

Swooning.  Not because it is elegant or particularly fun, but it was more acceptable in bygone days and I seem to be doing a lot of swooning whether I like it or not at the moment, hence a quick resurgence of its popularity would make me feel less like a twat when I crumple in the cheese aisle of the Co-op and have to be revived with a bit of Stinking Bishop.

 

The use of monkeys as a fashion accessory.  See exhibit A for the defence: The Masqueraders by Georgette Heyer (p.30) ‘She was ensconced now in her house in Arlington Street with fat Marthe to watch over her, a monkey to sit in the folds of her skirts, as Fashion prescribed…’ Now you don’t get that in Vogue anymore. Bugger Valentino and his mahogany face dictating asymmetric hemlines and off the shoulder military ponchos.  Bring on the dancing spider monkeys in tiny sombreros.  That’s the way fashion should be going.

Friday 3rd April – Exeunt Pursued By Bear

I am feeling rather better this morning, in mood if not in deed.  Things seem a little less shit.  Which is nice.

I am hoping this mood continues throughout the day and I really make the most of these few hours of peace, for it is the dreaded last day of term, shortly to be followed by two weeks of frenzied Eastertide goodness.  All this and three children.  I can hardly wait… Even sadder is the fact that Oscar will only get half a day at nursery next week because Friday is Good Friday and therefore a bank holiday. Curse those nursery workers and their need to have time off from giving parents sanctuary from their offspring. Fie and fie.

It turns out that The Winter’s Tale was actually the highlight of yesterday, which was good. 

It is not my favouritest play.  It is one of those plays I think Shakespeare wrote because his dishwasher broke and he needed the money to get a new one.  It isn’t really what you’d call coherent in any way.  The story is lameness personified and it seems to have been made by breaking up a flotilla of other stories with a hammer, putting the pieces in a bag and letting Old Drunk Arthur the Mentalist pull bits out randomly: ‘Beginning! Middle! End! Aside! Random bit with alien pig creatures? Nope? Oh, O.K. then. How about random bit with giant, man eating bears? Excellent.  My work here is done.  Let’s drink some more petrol to celebrate.’

To elaborate:

Leontes is King of Sicily.  He’s married to the stone fox, Hermione.  She has already shoved out the prince and heir whose name sounds like this mmmemememfffmfyhfnandns.  It is such a complicated name for such a small child you hope he will die early so they won’t have to keep mentioning him. Plus we don’t aime child actors, so the less we see of them, the better, frankly. In the meantime Hermione is rotund with child number two.  Everyone continually mentions how big she is.  Unlike most heavily pregnant women she takes this well and does not rev up the electric carving knife in a menacing manner.  She clearly isn’t adopting ponchos and slimline trousers to make her look smaller.  Does she not read Grazia?

It is Christmas. There is much feasting, quaffing and joshing.  Leonte’s bezza mate, Polixenes, King of Bohemia (a good Bohemian name, Polixenes) has come over to pull crackers and watch The Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special. 

They have now got to the traditional part of the Christmas festivities where everyone is a bit too overserved with brandy and they’ve moved on from ‘I love you.’  ‘But I love you more.’ ‘No! You don’t understand. I really love you.’ etc. To the; ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ ‘If you eat that last chestnut I’ll kill you. You can clearly see it had my name on it. Bastard.’

Leontes wants Polixenes to stay for another week so they can wax lyrical about the old days when they were Whoreson Dogs and it was all hilarious.  Polixenes wants to go home, drink some Resolve and vow never to come back until the memory wears off.  He never did like mince pies and his paper hat is askew.

Leontes persuades Hermione to persuade Polixenes to stay.  She threatens to make him stay by putting him in prison, but in a nice way.  He concurs. Like he had any choice.  Clearly Polixenes is a bit of a weedy girl girl and not worthy of the name king. He should have produced his axe, chopped their heads off and scarpered for the coast before the rozzers could nab him.  Else what’s the point of being a king if a pregnant bird can just boss you around? Gah.  Polixenes school marks for kingship: ‘F’.

Leontes who got an ‘A’ in kingship with an ‘A star’ in being a tyrannical bastard, with the benefit of wisdom shaped by alcopops and indigestion, decides that Hermione has only been able to persuade Polixenes to do anything because she has been shagging him senseless behind the Christmas tree while all their friends watched.  He has been a fool to himself.  Clearly there wouldn’t be any other reason why he would obey her. She is only a girl and not even a king. She is therefore rubbish.  He also extrapolates from this fantastic piece of logic that even though Polixenes has been in Bohemia with his wife and child, he must also have managed to sneak off after work and nip on a fast camel to Sicily where he has impregnated Hermione, so the child she is carrying is a bastard whoreson swine.  Hoorah! Death to the infidels.

In the space of about five minutes Leontes has a total nervy B, instructs his manservant to murder Polixenes and not give him any of the green triangular Quality Streets (that’ll learn him). He denounces Hermione for the heavily pregnant strumpet that she is, casts her asunder and rampages around with his cock out, making himself look like a gigantic tit (to mix sexual metaphors).  He does quite a lot of ranting, some wild eyed staring and some frothing for good measure.

Polixenes escapes with the servant who decided not to do what Leontes said due to the fact that he has turned into Geoffrey Dharma.  In the meantime Hermione goes into labour in prison and produces a small princess by chewing on the bars and refusing an epidural.  One of the servants is sent to show the princess to Leontes in the hope that this will make him see reason.  This is not the best plan Hermione has ever come up with, but we must let her off because by now she is feeling a bit tired and emotional.  As with all deranged men faced with babies who look like Winston Churchill chewing a wasp, Leontes is not convinced.  He instructs his other manservant to take the baby into the wilds and abandon it to its fate.  One has to take a hard line with babies right from the beginning.  That’s what Super Nanny says.  This is the Spartan version of the naughty step.

Leontes is persuaded to send to the oracle at Delphi to see if his suspicions are true before he hangs draws and quarters his wife and eats her with fava beans and a fine Chianti.  He bows to pressure but his inner tyrannical dictator is very much outer now, and he is impatient to get started.  He is clearly on a roll, so he starts the inquisition anyway.  His dander is well and truly up.  He rants about shouting things like; ‘Harlot! Slut! Tart!’ and frothing at the mouth, while Hermione bleeds gently and looks martyred and pissed off, but in a very dignified way.

The messenger returns from Delphi.  Unlike every other Delphic oracle in the history of oracle reading this one does not say: ‘The birds have flown. Make sure the octopus is wearing a nightgown.  The leaves are pink in July.’  Oh no.  This is the idiot’s oracle.  it says: ‘Leontes is as mad as a bag of frogs.  Hermione is a righteous dudesss.  Sort it out!’  Leontes is still not convinced and decides to murder her anyway, just to be on the safe side.  It is foolproof.

At this point, Apollo is quite rightly pissed off.  He had his oracle working overtime to produce this masterpiece and doesn’t like to have his Godly time wasted by imbeciles.  He strikes down Leontes by killing off prince mmmfmfmdmdmsmsm (hooray!)  It is at this point that Hermione decides that she has probably had the worst day of her life and things are not going to get any better.  She drops dead just to learn ‘em.  As soon as her bleeding corpse hits the floor Leontes realises the error of his ways.  Talk about shutting the stable door.  He sits weeping and plucking entrails.  Gibber gibber, cluck, cluck etc.

We then move on swiftly using the power of the ‘theatah dahlink’.  Servant 2 with Winston Churchill baby is now in the wilds of Bohemia.  A storm is coming.  Animals are raging.  There is howling aplenty.  He decides this is the perfect venue in which to leave a small,  helpless baby.  He tucks it in for the night and abandons it to his fate.  He is then chased and eaten by a giant bear.  Which just shows you what will happen if you don’t look after your children properly.  The giant bear wants you for his friend.  Remember that.

A mad old shepherd and his retarded son drool by.  They find the baby.  They decide not to eat it.  They raise it with their sheep in the forest. Baa! By now the forests are absolutely stuffed with bucolic peasants raising the heirs to various thrones around the world.  There is absolutely no room left for the bears, which is why they are staging protests by eating everyone.  It’s all very NIMBY.

Father Time descends from the clouds.  He is wise and beardy; ‘Feel my beard. Feel my beardy wisdom.  Ha! While you were feeling my beardy wisdom I have magically spooled time forward sixteen years. You can hardly see the join. Yes. I am that good.’  He scarpers, throwing pixie dust around with gay abandon.

We are still in Bohemia.  Winston Churchill child has the great good fortune to grow up to be a Page Three Stunna called Perdita, it being a more suitable name for a girl than Winston.  Sheep dung is obviously very good for the skin.

She spends an extraordinary amount of time frolicking in the forest with a disguised prince called Florizel.  Florizel is rather like Fotherington Thomas, and very ‘Hello Birds! Hello Sky!’ Florizel also, rather cunningly turns out to be Polixenes’ son.  Florizel and Perdita are having a sheep festival to get engaged, as you do.  It is incredibly rustic and bucolic.  There are lots of Morris dancers and quite a lot of ‘Hey Nonny Nonny’.  OK magazine have the rights and there will be another issue next week when they honeymoon in a shearing shed in Australia.

For some reason we also see a lot of a disgraced nobleman called Autolycus who roams around nicking everyone’s cash and being the Arthur Daley of the woods.  He is ‘Comic Relief’.  He is very good at selling ribbons to peasants in a hilarious manner.  His catchphrase is; ‘You ain’t seen me, right?’

In the meantime Polixenes decides he wants to know what Florizel is doing abandoning his princely duties to hang out with people who smell of dung and keep cheese in the bath.  He disguises himself and runs off to the engagement feast.  He eats their cheese, dances with their Morris men and abuses their hospitality by ripping his beard off at the crucial engagement moment and announcing that he hates everyone, his son will not marry a girl who smells of sheep and he’s going to hang everyone so that they will behave better in future.  He has been having remedial classes in kingship since the Leontes disaster of 1245.

Everyone runs away onto a ship bound for Sicily.  They all turn up en masse at Leontes court, where he is still sitting in the ashes of his own despair refusing to snap out of it.  He is rather surprised. After being shunned for sixteen years this is rather unexpected and there are not enough Hob Nobs to go around.  A bit of warning would have been nice.

Before Polixenes can string up his relatives all is revealed and everyone is happy except Leontes who is still feeling a tad guilty about the fact that he murdered his wife, but only after cruelly persecuting and torturing her for a bit.

They all troop off to visit the statue of his wife so he can bleat about how sorry he is and they can wash its feet with tears.  As he does this the statue magically comes to life and climbs of its pedestal.  After a mild shock everyone is absolutely fine with this and accept the frankly lame back story that Hermione only died a bit, and has been passing the time hanging around for the last sixteen years on a pedestal waiting for Leontes to come to his senses.  Instead of battering him to death and eating his still beating heart, she weeps a bit and forgives him instantly, thus making us lose any sympathy we might have once had for her.  She is clearly of feeble brain and deserved everything she got.

Everyone goes off to have a party.  There is dancing and sheep.

Fin.

So you see, a good and plausible story.  This man is the most revered playwright in the English language for why? Remind me again?

Anyway. The staging was very good.  Lots of people dressed up as books and danced around with giant wooden dildo penis attachments.  The bear was made out of cunningly woven bits of paper and there were a huge amounts of false beards and false beard removals. I do like a good false beard.  There was also quite a bit of unexplained Welshness, but we will let that pass.

You should have been there.  You would have loved it.

Thursday April 2nd – Did I mention that things were a bit shit?

The most exciting thing to be said about today is that I have eaten the new Covent Garden soup of the month.  It is something like Gobi Vegetable (yes. I was paying absolutely no attention).  It was alright.  It stopped me falling over.  We like this in a soup.  Not because it was  glutinous and therefore welded my feet to the floor, but because it was full of healthful, life giving vegetables and therefore gave me the strength to go on.

The sun has gone in.  This is shit.

The doctor’s surgery is still a long way from my house.  This is shit.

I had to go and talk to the doctor again today. She is very nice and extremely helpful, but can’t fit me in to see if it is glucose which is making me fall over and dribble until next Wednesday. Apparently to get the right result I need to starve for twelve hours. This is shit.

Not only that, but I thhen I have to walk the long way to the doctors with three small children in tow because it is the Easter holidays.  This is shit.

I cannot decide which is more shit, falling over all the time, or having to be stoic and stalwart and keep on sitting in the doctor’s waiting room all the time, in order to have one pathetic test at a time so they can save money instead of taking me in for a morning, poking me with enough holes to turn me into a cheese plant and releasing me back into the wild in one big hit.

I only went today because I didn’t want to fall over for the entire duration of the Easter holidays and have to go to the doctors with the children.  Even though I went precisely because of this, administrative wheels grind exceeding slow and it looks like this will happen anyway. This is shit.

I am pre menstrual. I am due to start being menstrual tomorrow.  I have put on four pounds this week.  Today it feels like someone has been smashing my bosom with a sack of hammers.  This is shit.

I am going to see The Winters Tale at the RSC tonight.  This may well not be shit.  I am hoping to be awake enough to tell you.  I am holding out for this to be the highlight of my day rather than the adequate soup episode.  It is not good when the best thing you can think of to say about a day is that the shop bought soup you bought because your hands were shaking too much for you to risk wielding a chopping knife was adequate. 

I made a vow this morning that I wouldn’t shout at Tallulah over breakfast.  She got into trouble for eating her tea at a pace that would make an arthritic tortoise look speedy.  Then she got into trouble for trying to get everyone else into trouble. Then she got into trouble for making a fuss about going to bed.  Then she got into trouble while she was asleep because when I went up to get her up for a wee her room was like a death trap of small plastic toys which I had specifically asked her to pick up before she went to bed.  The only thing that made me not kill her was the fact that even though she got up for a wee and had her eyes open for the duration I could tell she was still asleep when she pulled her pyjama trousers down round her ankles and hopped onto the side of the bath for her wee instead of onto the toilet.

So, this morning I vowed to be nice.  This vow was broken after approximately two minutes when she started her morning by shouting down the stairs some violent tale of woe and self-righteousness concocted entirely to get her elder sister into trouble.  She then splashed her cereal round her mouth like a random cement mixer despite me having to ask her to shut her mouth while she chewed on four separate occasions.  After this she failed to do any of her chores and turned up with unbrushed hair, unlaced shoes and all her collars (blouse, jumper,coat) askew claiming to be ready for school.  And there was no book bag in sight.

I felt particularly annoyed because really none of it, except the trying to get everyone else into trouble thing, was very important and if I were more awake, less evil in the mornings I could let it slide.  On the other hand it does beggar belief that a child of nearly six, who can overacheive at school at everything and consistently get awards and praise showered upon her like rain, still can’t be bothered to eat, sleep, wash and dress herself in any kind of consistently useful manner.

I felt particularly annoyed because I stayed up until one in the morning sewing what will eventually be the front of a new Alan or Tabitha as she is to be called, on her behalf, following the strict instructions and colour coding she has insisted on because I love her.

Bah.  This is shit.

You are old Father William

Jason suggested that today might be a good day to do nice and happy things, to make a change from the horrible and difficult things I had to do yesterday. He said it would reinforce the positive learnings and make me happy to be going back to do more horrible things next week.  I am not sure, but I am never one to turn down the invitation to do something nice, so I concurred.

Oscar and I went into town, where I haven’t been for a while in a bid to stop myself bleeding money out of my finger ends.  We went to John Lewis because he wanted to play with toys and I decided to indulge him at the beginning of our trip in the hope that he would be nice to me for the rest of the day.  He was in a very lovely mood.  On the bus he had already regaled me with stories of how granny does not actually work in a school. Apparently she works in a pancake shop and is a mouse shaped granny who comes out of her mouse hole to offer the general public her pancake wares.  I think she would like that better than working in a school, so I readily agreed.

On the way home he took a violent dislike to a particularly petulant looking small girl.  He refused to look at her straight, snaking his eyes sideways and pointing at her.  He said: ‘I do not like that girl.  She is horrible.  She stinks of pooh and has poohy, stinky, pants.’  I changed the subject quickly before we got knifed, but I have to say that I think he probably had a point.

After that he sang several versions of the Wonderpets theme tune in which Jason was saved because he was a beardy animal stuck in a castle who was crying because he couldn’t get out.  It was preferable to the stinky girl comments, but after three hours on heavy rotation it is beginning to wear a bit thin.

We spent quite a long time playing with the toys. It is a nice toy department. I quite like playing with toys in nice toy departments myself, so I didn’t mind. I had a lovely time with the pop guns and pressing all the buttons on the plush Makka Pakka.  It was lunch time by the time we finished.  The John Lewis fooderama was just across the aisle (near the sporting goods, which is deeply ironic). We decided to try it. I was a little dubious, but also starving.

It was, and I say this in all sincerity, fantastic.  I had a rather marvellous smoked salmon and crayfish sandwich ensemble.  Oscar wanted tuna sandwiches.  There were no tuna sandwiches. The woman behind the counter heard me debating this with small, grumpy boy.  She came round the counter, leaned down to Oscar’s level and asked him if he would like her to go and ask the chef if he could make a tuna sandwich. He would very much it turns out. It also transpires that he prefers white bread with no crusts. I made the unpopular decision that crusts would be left on, but other than that he got his way within minutes.

We went to stare at cakes.  I had passion cake. Oscar wanted strawberry cup cakes with pink icing and white chocolate sprinkles. The chap behind the counter introduced himself, commended Oscar on his fine choice in cakes and then carried our tray to our table for us and made sure we had everything we wanted.  What fantastic service, made even better by the fact that the food was lovely.  Hooray, hooray, hooray! It was a thoroughly satisfying lunch on all counts.

After lunch we went to the market.  We had a fantastic time.  We bought limes (8 for 50p – what a bargain) and passion fruit and fabric samples in big bags for craft projects.  We bought bags of buttons and ribbon and came home with bags of goodies for not very much at all, which had the added bonus of making me feel very virtuous and very spendy all at the same time.  Excellent stuff.

We dropped by the one local charity shop which is still any good and bought some new books (can’t go shopping without coming home with books). I got a gorgeous skirt and dress for Tilly, both Monsoon, both cheap as chips.  Oscar got a tool kit for £2 and spent happy times mending things all the way home.

It was good. Really good.  The sun shone, Oscar was lovely, there was no stress, it was delightful.

Then, on the bus we were sitting opposite a man who was eating a McDonalds.  He had some chips and offered one to Oscar.  Oscar shook his head.  The chap leaned over and said: ‘Well, if you don’t want to take it from me, perhaps I can give it to your granny and she will feed it to you,’ and offered it to me.

I was mortified.  I ignored him and carried on.  At least he was trying to be nice.  On that bus most people would tear your eyes out and dance on your grave rather than exchange words with you. I didn’t dare upset him.

I wept secret internal tears all the way home.  I stared at myself hard in the mirror for five minutes upon returning and felt more depressed because I look healthier today than I have done for a fortnight. Shit!

I have passed that landmark moment.  There is no turning back now, as I totter towards the grave.

It reminded me of that terrible day in a supermarket where a mother told her children to get out of the way of the lady and I realised that ‘I’ was the lady.  Arghhhhhh.

I must buy some new foundation.

Wednesday April 1st – Woe may not be me after all

Yesterday I went to see a private counsellor type person.  She does something called EFT.  It is a kind of rewiring technique for emotional stuff that is supposed to clear trauma.  I read about it years ago and have actually got a certificate in it somewhere.  When UE stopped drinking and taking drugs he turned to mending his brain with a passion which has carried on unabated ever since.  This is how come he trains people in NLP (like Derren Brown and Paul McKenna do).  It is howcome I too have qualifications in NLP although I have never used them and remain highly dubious.

When we first met he insisted that if he was interested in something then I had to do it too because we were a ‘team’ and we were on a ‘journey’ together.  This is why I have spent a large period of my life in various halls and hotels doing strange things with even stranger people.  Some of it was fun, some of it was horrid, most of it was expensive.  Thankfully a lot of it was highly amusing. I note for the record that we rarely did any of the things that I was interested in as a ‘team’.  At those times he had special dispensation to do other more important things mostly.

There were times when I drew the line, like when he decided that in order to reignite the passion in our marriage that we must go on a week long, intensive flirting boot camp. My inner British puritan came out and I was so embarrassed and horrified I never even looked at the form.  He was very disappointed in me that day.  I expect he charts the eventual breakdown of our union to that precise afternoon stuck in traffic on the North Circular when I screamed; ‘Over my dead body!’ in tones that could shatter glass. I remain steadfast about this particular avenue of teamly exploration.  I watched a programme about the particular bootcamp he wished us to enrol in some months later and emerged sobbing with sweaty palms and a nervous tic that has plagued me on and off ever since.

Similarly I refused to go to the Anthony Robbins freakshow circus, where you pay four million pounds to stand at the back of Wembley Stadium for forty eight hours whilst Anthony feels your pain, cures you of all ills and hypnotises you into coughing up twenty grand to go to his mastery university in Hawaii and meet Deepak Chopra.  The highlight of this weekend apart from piles, cramps and a severe case of wishing to assassinate overenthusiastic American life coaches who look like Jaws in the James Bond films is that you do a ‘fire walk’.  You and forty thousand of your closest friends get to line up outside Wembley Stadium and take it in turns to walk barefoot over a yard of hot coals.  This apparently is supposed to be a life changing and cathartic experience where you realise that Anthony is your one true lord and master and you do really want to remortgage your house so he can buy his second private island and helicopter landing pad.

I was unpopular because I refused to join in with the adulation of Anthony, who I like to call ‘Anthony Arsewipe’. I was even more unpopular when I refused to sanction the release of funds for the trip to Mastery University because I wanted the derelict house we lived in rebuilt before the birth of our first child.  Call me picky. I know. I just have ridiculous standards, but hey.  Them’s the breaks.

EFT was one of what I call those ‘Man on a bus’ moments.  UE never, ever listened to me about anything, ever.  It didn’t matter what I said or when I said it, if I said it it was enough for him to pat me on on the head and carry on as if nothing much had happened and my opinion was as insignificant as a mouse fart four doors down.  For example, he would complain about some digestive tract issue.  I would suggest that wheat may be a problem and that he should have allergy tests, or at least cut out wheat.  He would pooh pooh this suggestion as nothing short of ludicrous.  He would go out, eat a bakery, come back in agony and carry on.  He would go to work, meet some random weirdo on a bus/train and they would get talking.  He would explain how come he was in crippling agony etc.  Weird bloke would say: ‘It may be a wheat allergy. Perhaps you should be tested.’  UE would come bounding in and knock the door down with his enthusiasm to rush home and tell me about this amazing bloke he met on a bus, who had this fantastic insight into his condition.  He would then confess to having spent four bajillion pounds on a comprehensive blood testing lab which would be being choppered in to the back garden that weekend.  And could I read the manual, build the lab and pay the delivery man because he had to go out and do something very important.

So. He met this man who did this thing called EFT and it was great. It was going to be the next big thing.  It was going to solve the eternal cycle of relentless, bickering bloodshed between nations and make children love sprouts etc, etc.  We had to do it.  We would have been fools not to.  His line at this time was that we had just had Tilly and I was insane.  He reckoned doing the EFT would stop me from going insane and to precis his words, stop me from passing this insanity on to my first born child.  He had me right there.  How could I say no?

The idea was that this chap wanted UE to promote his services, so he would run a special, day long workshop at his house where we could go and learn EFT ourselves, be cured along the way, have lunch and bring the baby as well.  No problem there then.

It was, as you can well imagine, disastrous.  I was mutinous and miserable.  I had a small baby who was just beginning to crawl to take care of, and UE was being obssessive, enthusiastic and about as much help as a wet weekend.  The trainer’s house turned out to be a flat  which you had to climb up a fire escape to get in and out of.  We walked inside and my heart sank.  It was nick nack central.  The man was one of ‘those’ alternative enthusiasts.  There are people who are keen on alternative therapies and new age stuff who are normal.  They live normal lives and are otherwise totally rational people. Then there are the other sort.  This man was definitely the other sort.  The sort who wore gaily patterned scarves as a kind of uniform and thought that pixies lived in his radiator.

His house was a shrine to unicorns, fairies and unspeakable amounts of tat.  Everything was down low in a kind of faux Japanese styling which meant that all such precious nick nacks were mere milliseconds away from the grab of my deeply inquisitive child who decided that fairies covered in small glass beads were simply delicious.

We squatted on a futon surrounded by sparkling debris trying to blend in.  I spent approximately every three minutes taking something out of the child’s mouth/fist/ear.  Then there was feeding and changing her.  UE and the man meanwhile got on with things as if I wasn’t there.  Which by this time I really wished I wasn’t. 

I learned three fifths of fuck all, except that pixie citadels are probably not a good place to bring up human children and I really don’t know why the fairy folk ever bothered with that whole changeling thing, it must have been a bloody nightmare.

At the end of the day it was my turn to experience EFT.  This involved the man invoking the mother of all panic attacks in me, whereupon I broke down in a hysterical mass on his futon.  He clearly didn’t know what to do then, waved his magic wand and said ‘piff paff poof’ and sent me home.  It took me a week to recover and we had very glittery nappies for quite some time after that.

So why go back to it?

Well. Since then I have heard good things from rational people who don’t dwell with the faerie folk in halls made of purest cubic zircona from QVC.  The UN endorse this method and used it very effectively treating post traumatic stress disorder and other stress related trauma after the war in Kosovo. 

Then a few weeks back Andrea heard about in on a radio programme on Radio Four.  Apparently the general consensus was that it works, but nobody knows why.  She rang me and mentioned I might want to look into it as an alternative to years of counselling which have so far done not much at all except forced me to read Civilisation and It’s Discontents by Freud.  Shortly after Andrea said this I had coffee with my homeopath and good friend Kim, who was brimming with enthusiasm about an EFT therapist who she had just been to see who was absolutely fantastic and who lives just down the road.  It felt like too much of a coincidence.  I booked a session.

Yesterday was D Day. You have two, two hour sessions a week apart.  It was the longest two hours of my life and I came out feeling totally and utterly battered.  On the other hand I feel like I made significant progress. It wasn’t pleasant, but then it was never going to be.  I did however, feel that things are beginning to change.  I’m not sure exactly how that will manifest at the moment, because I am still absolutely drained, but I am optimistic.  The cool thing was that we discussed how I felt when I got there.  I decided that as I was paying large sums of money that honesty was probably the best policy.  I explained that I felt stupid, that I wasn’t really sure if it was going to work and that I was in absolute dread of talking to her about my ‘problems’ because just talking about them makes me freak out.

She said: ‘That’s fine.  You don’t have to think it will work.  It’s o.k. to feel stupid and if you like you don’t have to talk to me about it at all.  You can just hold the thoughts in your mind and work that way.’

That was pretty cool. 

Within five minutes of starting I was sobbing like a baby. By the time we finished I had that total calm, washed out feeling you get when you have watched an indescribably sad film and sobbed out all your anxiety in a huge cathartic crying jag.

I shall be returning next week.