Sunday 31st May – I Praise Norfolk – Blimey

We have returned.  It is late.  I am tired.  I also seem to have put on about six pounds in the last forty eight hours, which is nice. I have put on my baggiest pyjamas and am shortly going to hide under a large blanket. This will help me ignore it for the forseeable future.  I may cut a hole in the blanket and wear it to school tomorrow.  That will be nice too.  I am aiming for the ‘floating head’ look.  I think it will work.  I’m hoping it will carry me through the summer and well into the Autumn/Winter collections when I might change the blanket for a winter weight duvet.

The children are in bed and are all prepped and ready to go to lovely, lovely school tomorrow. Homework has been done etc, etc. I am feeling very virtuous about this.  It isn’t really virtue. It is desperation to see them safely ensconced  in a place where I don’t have to think about them or feed them for large swathes of the day.  If we hadn’t been away for the weekend I would have started prepping them yesterday, at about dawn.

As it was I was winging my way to London instead, which was even better.  Andrea and I went to see Dido, Queen of Carthage at the National.  It was, it is fair to say, rather strange.  It is the first piece of Marlowe I’ve ever seen on stage, so I’m not sure whether the strangeness was the play itself, or the way the play was staged.  It was staggeringly odd, but quite entertaining.  I am too incoherent to share more than this with you about it.  I shall brood, and report back later.

You may recall that despite being allowed my freedom for the day, my penance was to hot foot it to Norwich from London, meet my husband and the brood, and then make our way to his mother’s house.  It was penance for many reasons, not least of which was the fact that I had to get from the National Theatre, which is on the South Bank, to Liverpool Street, which is not, in the space of an hour.  This was not easy.  I had confided in several people in the know, and they had guffawed at my foolhardiness at even thinking that this might be possible.  I had more chance in catching the moon on a stick.

If you have ever been to the National you will share the general miasma of incredulity.  It is like a multi-storey car park which has been conceived by an idiot savant and then built by a load of blind monkeys with spanners.  It is charmless, graceless and almost impossible to find your way around.  It is also insanely busy, particularly at weekends.  I reckoned on it taking me at least ten minutes to get out of the auditorium, with another fifteen for getting my bag out of the cloakroom (they make you check in any bag bigger than a pixie’s knee cap), ten minutes to fight my way out, and another ten to orient myself once I realised I had come out of a door I never even knew existed and stumbled my way to a point of reference I actually recognised.

Then there’s getting anywhere on the South Bank on a hot Saturday afternoon.  The place is heaving with mime artists, mariachi bands, avant garde sculptures festooned with small children, sun bathing Londoners, graffitti artists, skate boarders and the like.  I had to get to Embankment so this also involved crossing the river via a bridge full of Japanese tourists taking pictures, people selling fake Rolexes and middle class families with buggies so complex they have their own post codes.

Once at Embankment it is necessary to take the Circle Line.  This is my least favourite tube line, as I am convinced it is run on entirely arbitrary lines.  It splits off hither and yon, and rather than going in a Circle, as its name suggests, it sometimes seems to spiral out of control, or decide on doing an interesting dog leg style u-turn.  You can wait twenty minutes for the right train, despite the fact that trains regularly appear, and they all claim to be going round in a circle, thus theoretically getting you to all the stops, except they don’t.

At Liverpool Street I had to find a fast track ticket machine and enter a pin code whilst simultaneously remembering which piece of plastic I had paid for my ticket on.   I then had to find the right platform for Norwich.  I have only ever passed through Liverpool Street as a tube destination.  I have never actually used it to go anywhere overland or extraneous to London.  I had no idea how big it was and whether the platform I required might be in another district, say Haringey.

The odds were most definitely stacked against me.

You will be amazed to know that I actually made it. I made it with ten minutes to spare.  And no. I did not meet David Tennant in a side corridor of the National and step into his Tardis of joy.

The theatre we were seeing our play in was The Cottesloe, which is the smallest of the three at the National.  It also turns out to have its own separate exit and entrance, a very small number of seats, a very lax bag check in lady, who let me go in with a bag the size of Cumbria and never complained, and is actually on the right level of the South Bank for hare brained sprints to Embankment Station.  This meant that as the curtain call finished I was out the door and at Embankment within ten minutes.  I was so proud of myself, despite nearly breaking a shin on some random steps that just sprang out from nowhere and hit me.

Then I only had to wait four minutes for a Circle Line train that was actually going to Liverpool Street.  This has never happened to me before. It will never happen to me again, but let us be thankful for small mercies.  I had a small moment of terror at Aldgate when the train stopped for five random minutes without any announcements.  I was just beginning to sweat blood when we started up again.

Liverpool Street turns out to be inundated with Fast Track ticket machines, unlike Leicester which has only two, both of which were broken than morning and necessitated a fifteen minute wait in an irate queue of people who thought they had beat the system.  I also failed to get my card eaten, which given the fact that I had found out that morning that I was hideously overdrawn and that if nursery get paid tomorrow it will be a bloody miracle (Jason is most disapproving of my dismal money management and screwed his face up in a monobrow ‘I am very disappointed in you’ fashion, which made me shake), was most gratifying.

I had a slight moment when the board for Norwich refused to impart which platform the train was leaving from, despite all the other boards being quite happy to fess up.  I collared a helpful looking guard, who turned out to be so helpful that he was actually standing in front of the right platform and let me go through immediately. 

I found myself sitting on the right train, in the correct manner with all the right bits of information and ten minutes to spare.  How good is that?

The train got in on time, and Jason and the kids were actually pulling into the station car park just as I was alighting from my chariot.

Serendipity.

Anyway.  We did our jobs, secured the house against burglars, thieves and murderers and came away this morning in the glorious sunshine and took the kids for the day to a tree tops theme park called Bewilderwood.  It was great fun.  There were zip slides through the trees and lots of very cool slides, rope ladders, swings and old fashioned tree based fun to be had.  It wasn’t tacky, it wasn’t terribly commercial and today it wasn’t very busy so we hardly had to queue for anything at all.  There is a great place for picnics if, unlike us, you decide to take your own food, but should you be disorganised I can recommend the food heartily.  Most of it was organic, lots of it was locally sourced, and it was all fresh.  They didn’t get too optimistic about what they could do, sticking to basics and having a good balance of kid and adult friendly fare. And the coffee was brilliant.

 We had a lovely day getting more and more filthy, lichen stained and leafy.  It was, and I say this with hand on heart, the nicest day I’ve ever had in Norfolk.  The kids were really well behaved and not at all manic or bad tempered and we all had a good time.  If you are ever trapped in Norfolk or thereabouts, I recommend it highly as a way of forgetting where you are.

Friday 29th – Why I am Not a Professional Cake Icer

As promised, yesterday afternoon proved sticky and eventful.

We were running very late with our schedule thanks to Matilda taking nearly two hours to make mashed potato fingers a la Margeurite Patten in WWII.  She was so late with lunch that Tallulah and I agreed that if we had hired her as a cook during the war we would have had to sack her before we starved to death.  Rationing would have been the least of our issues.  Still, I suppose it was edible and one has to smile, smile, smile and do ones bit for Queen and country.

We had only just finished scrubbing mashed potato off the furniture when granny hoved into view for our grand cake decorating event.

It was hideous.  Oscar and Tallulah ate Barbie sprinkles by the desert spoon full and spent much of the afternoon licking lumps of icing and hiding under the table eating the fairy cakes they were supposed to be icing.  I did get them to pose for you:

This was shortly before they ran around shrieking like hoodlums.  Tallulah made me this:

Which I had to throw in the bin secretly when she ran off, mainly because I saw her giving it a crafty, once all over lick before she decided that it would be her gift to me.  How special.

Tilly, as predicted, ended up covered in icing.  Not only is there now navy blue grouting on my kitchen floor, but she also had green feet and legs from where she ‘accidentally’ tipped the piping back upside down:

We went from this:

to this:

via this:

Which took about two hours and involved showers for everyone and a steam cleaning of the entire kitchen.

Kirsty made it look a lot easier.

Thursday May 28th – Zombies ate Jane Austen

A brief post because the troops are calling, and today’s agenda includes prototype birthday cake decorating, whipping up nutritious potato based recipes from WW2 (Tilly’s homework) and more ruffle sewing.  On top of that we are also going on a sleep over to granny’s house, so there is very little time to sit around idly chatting to you. Unfortunately.

I am happy today.

I know.

Don’t tell anyone.

• I am happy because I finished reading my Amazon Vine book, (The Piano Teacher by Janice Y. K. Lee. Not recommended) and can read my own books again.
• I am happy because yesterday as we were galloping through Waterstones I saw a book called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. It looked amazing.  It was £11.  It didn’t look that amazing.  I looked it up on Amazon today and they have it for £3.60.  It definitely looked £3.60 amazing.  I am very excited about it. I know it will be bad, but I am hoping it will be bad in the same way that Heat magazine is bad.  I like Jane Austen, but have often thought there weren’t enough flesh eating monsters in it, and now that issue has been addressed, life is good.
• I am happy because I have had two brilliant breakthroughs regarding the cake decorating:

1. I am going to buy some fairy cakes from the supermarket so that I can minimise the mess this afternoon, not having to bake my own cakes before they can destroy them.  It also means we won’t have that waiting time between the cakes cooling down and the icing being applied where the children go insane with boredom.

2. Granny is coming over to help so I will not be alone with cochineal daubing the walls like a fight in an abbatoir.  She is feeling quite cheerful about this.  She embraces messy crafts, which is why my kitchen looked like hell when she decided to come over and teach them to make sweets at Christmas.  She is much more patient than me, particularly when such activities are not taking place in her own kitchen.  I don’t care whose kitchen they take place in as long as I have another pair of hands.  This is particularly important given Oscar’s recent enthusiasm for the lavatory. I know I will be up to my elbows in blue food dye just as he announces that he needs to slay more zombies.  Yesterday when we went for lunch he went to the toilet four times in fifteen minutes.  I cannot say no, just in case he reallly means it.  I was just grateful that I was eating salad.

• I am also happy because my period has started.  This does not usually fill most people with glee, but it is nice to think that I have been so utterly miserable all week for a reason.  Plus, I am doing two long train journeys on Saturday and I am glad it has started today and I have forty eight hours to get the worst of it behind me, before I have to launch myself into a deep and meaningful relationship with British Rail toilet facilities.  Every cloud etc.
• Oh yes! And I have found out something else that makes my heart swell.  Glenfield apparently has a charity shop.  Tilly revealed it to me last night as we were walking home from her friend’s house.  I am so excited. I love charity shops. I cannot help myself.  I am an absolute sucker for a bargain, specially if it’s something I never knew I wanted before I went in.  Plus I am still dining out on finding that bit of Poole Pottery for ten pence which turned out to be worth £150.  I dream of doing that again.  We have a Loros shop.  It is hidden in a corner of the village and Tilly is going to take me there today when we go to buy fairy cakes.  I am more excited than Ray Mears going to the source of the Nile.
• Finally I am happy because I was able to pinch some time this morning once Oscar had gone to nursery and before Tilly woke up (Tallulah was greedily watching all the television programmes she is not allowed to watch once Tilly wakes up) to start on my version of Much Ado About Nothing.  I thought I was never going to get round to it, but am now hoping that by Monday we will be ready for action.  I have read the play, but I find it helps if I watch it too, so sat down in the wee small hours and watched the Kenneth Branagh version on DVD.  For some reason we had it on the shelves and it was not mine.  I quizzed Jason about it and he said sourly: ‘I think it came free with something else.’ Disgruntled because it wasn’t ‘Much Ado About Nothing Except for the Big Flesh Eating Zombies’ no doubt.  Anyway, I am happy to report that he watched it with me, and he actually laughed on several occasions.  Not cynical ‘Gah! This is a load of old bollocks laughing either, genuine laughs.’  Which should tell you something about why this is one of the most enduring and most often performed of the plays.  If it can make Jason laugh then it really is funny. Oh yes!

Wednesday May 27th – Abbatastic

I’m giving up on kids theatre.  Tonight we didn’t even make it to the foyer.  Jason is really poorly and came home looking grey and interesting.  I am staying in to help him.  Whether I am helping him any is unclear.  He may have preferred it if we had all buggered off.  Unfortunately that wasn’t an option.  I’m not sure what is exactly wrong with him, but I would quite like to be on hand if he explodes, and he was clearly in no fit state to be chasing a two year old round while I painted the town red with the blood of unrepentant mobile phone users.

The kids took it very well.  I think it helped that today has been a good day and that we have all had a nice, and much less stressful time.

We went to town for the day and took Tilly’s friend with us.  Our mission was to purchase booty with which to make Abbatastic costumes for the girls to go to their Abbamania gig next week.  This involved visiting the fabric stall on the market and investing in lots of flammable, sparkly material and then visiting the local charity shops and to find things to attach the sparkly material to.

We came home with a fine haul and have spent the afternoon parading around in startling shades of lurex.  Well, they have.  I have sat hunched over my embroidery frame like The Tailor of Gloucester, sewing ruffles on anything that moved and giving a running commentary on the sartorial efforts of the entire Abba years.

Tallulah is going for a heady mix of pink and purple.  We found a size 14 t-shirt in black with luminous pink and purple swirls which makes a perfect dress.  We found a pink sparkly belt which I have Gokked.  We have added a purple sparkly shrug from Top Shop.  I cut half the arms off to stop her tripping over them.  Tilly is wearing those bits as leg warmers (recycling too, see!)  I have then sewed turquoise and silver spotty ruffles on the remaining sleeves and neckline to startling effect.  We have tied the whole thing together with a virulent yellow orchid clipped to her non-existent bosom.  I don’t remember Anni or Agnetha wearing any such costume, but it is in the true spirit of Abba, tasteless, a fire risk and noticeable.

Tilly did a lot of her own costume, the basis of which was the pillow  case with holes in that we used for a toga on ‘go to school as a Roman day’.  She has cut the bottom off and turned it into a headband which she has painstakingly, but accurately stitched the word Abba onto with grey wool.  She looks a bit deranged and rather like she has a nasty head injury.  To try and hide the ragged hem of the pillow case she has sellotaped blue string fringes to the bottom.  I fear this will be disastrous before she even hits the first chorus.  On top of this whole thing she has sewn a sparkly black and gold vest and this is as far as she has got.  She has tied it together with a foot wide gold belt.  It’s a look.

To be fair to her, it’s a valiant effort on her own.  I had to spend most of my time stopping Oscar from stabbing himself and sewing Tallulah’s ruffles.  I have promised Tilly I will leap to her aid with some interesting gold fringing we found.  It may help.  It may not.  It’s one of those leap in the dark intuitive fashion moments.

Tilly’s friend made sparkling bracelets for everyone which was much appreciated.

Oscar ran round in his pants a lot.  He also did lots of wees.  At one point he told me that he liked having a wee so much because there were vampires in the toilet and that when he wee’d on their heads they went away and left him alone.  He didn’t seem in the slightest bit bothered by this.  It was delivered in much the same style as a handy household hint from a magazine.

Hmmm!

Must go. Half term is very relentless and my presence is required for the unveiling of Madagascar Two, as an ‘I’m sorry you’re not going to the theatre’ sop.

Tuesday May 26th – I think I stabbed a Unicorn

I promised Saj I would write some very cheerful posts this week for her, as she is having an incredibly stressful and horrible time at the moment.  I am very sorry to report that I am now going to break that promise, because one can only write cheery old posts when one is feeling cheery oneself, and I am not cheery.

The morning was good. Oscar slept in late, until ten o’clock in fact. So late that I was getting twitchy and checking the baby alarm in case it had broken sort of late.

The girls didn’t come back from UE’s until half nine and I woke at nine.  Usually this would mean half an hour of coffee drinking to get my day properly started.  Today we had guests coming, guests who sometimes turn up quite early on in the day.  I walked downstairs to face the fact that the dishwasher stank, the bin stank and the laundry pile was so high it was blocking the light.  Things had to be done.  I spent my thirty minutes of grace rectifying those things and had only sat down with the coffee pot as they pulled up.

My friends didn’t arrive until eleven in the end, which was fine, and meant that I also had time to get other jobs done and down an entire pot of coffee.  Time well spent.

The kids all played together nicely and it was dry enough (although not warm enough) for a trip to the park.  We waved them off at about four and that’s when things started going a bit wrong.

One of the kids lost his Harry Potter cape that he had bought to show us, which only came to light as they were leaving. We spent a frantic fifteen minutes turning the house upside down looking for it.  Eventually we found it.  I also found, as I threw back Tallulah’s duvet cover to see if it was inside her bed, that she has clearly wet the bed some time in the last few days and just not bothered to tell me.  UE reported to me today that she has also wet at his house over the last couple of nights.  She had stopped doing it.  Now she has started again.  I expect it is the stress and upheavel of the last few weeks.  I don’t know, because she won’t talk about it, and I was too annoyed about the fact that she had concealed it to spend the time to talk softly and kindly to her.  I sent her away to strip the bed and decided to deal with it later.  I was gutted and cross. Which is always a winning combination.  I really thought we’d cracked it.

Shortly after this I got side tracked by another winning Tallulah moment. They had been playing makeovers at one point during the day.  Tallulah looked like Robert Smith from the Cure on a very, very bad day.  I asked her to go and take her makeup off.  She didn’t want to because she wanted to look ‘beautiful’ when we went to the theatre.  I suggested that she take it off, and that I would help her reapply it before we went to the theatre as a special treat (she is never usually allowed out the door with even a hint of lip gloss on).  She agreed, went upstairs for ten minutes and came down looking exactly the same.

I gave her the benefit of the doubt and suggested a more vigorous relationship with soap, and a check in the mirror.  She came down ten minutes later, dry as a bone, looking exactly the same.  I was fiercer this time.  The same thing happened.  When she came down this time I exploded properly.  She has gotten into a real habit of lying recently, but lying over things that are so easy to prove otherwise that it is painful.  Even when confronted with evidence to the exact contrary of what she is doing she carries on lying bravely into the jaws of death.  It is never, ever over something important and it is unfailingly a giant ball ache because lying is not tolerated unless it is amusing and involves tales of pygmy hippos raising them as babies etc.  Punishment was doled out.  Wailing ensued.

Then we had tea time.  I explained we were on a tight schedule because we had to go to the theatre and could everyone look lively so we didn’t miss the show.  They all nodded and slowed down measurably. Tallulah is also a sod for taking at least an hour and a half to eat everything from a sandwich to a malnourished pea.  It took her over an hour to eat two new potatoes, 3 carrot rings, six peas and a quarter of a pork chop. I pointed out that if she didn’t finish her dinner she couldn’t come with us.  She welled up, but continued to sit with a lump of potato in her mouth staring into the middle distance.  I pointed out that I could probably live without seeing kids theatre about World War One and that it was supposed to be her treat.  She carried on meditating with her potato.

Oscar is going through a rebellious phase and keeps getting down from the table announcing that he is full and then wanting to get up when pudding or fruit appears.  I am being hardline at the moment.  Children at our dinner table stay there until they are full and ask to get down.  Oscar is not aware of this and during the great food go slow of 2009 trailed about happily while we ignored him.  Then I swept his dinner into the bin when he announced for the fourth time that he was full and didn’t want anything to eat.  Then he had hysterics.

The meal was a delight and I didn’t even want to cook the bloody thing in the first place.

By this time Jason had arrived and we had to go.  Tilly was sent upstairs to get something.  Five minutes later Jason called up to her to see why she was taking so long.  She was reading her book.

I burst into tears. 

By this time I hated them all, wished I’d never suggested having our friends round for the day, or going to the park, or going to the theatre, and that I’d just locked them in the coal cellar we don’t have and beaten them with sticks.  I’d have felt better and they couldn’t have been any more bloody.

Jason said: ‘Sod it! They don’t deserve to go. Let’s all stay in.’  I was sorely tempted and then said: ‘No. I’m sure it will be fine now. Let’s go.’

We went.

I should have listened.

They were fine, but I got into a fight with some totally retarded, socially inept cretin woman who was sitting two seats down from me.

She spent the entire first half of the play texting someone.  I let it slide the first three times and then got really cross. I leaned across to tap her on the arm and she turned away, so I put slight pressure on her arm, and I’m talking slight here, to get her to look at me.  She then told me to stop touching her as it was harrassment!!! I said that if she didn’t stop using her phone I would call an usher (which in hindsight I should have done immediately). She was incredibly rude and said that she couldn’t hear me because she was watching the play.  To which I replied that she clearly wasn’t watching the play or she wouldn’t be texting someone and repeated what I had said.  All of this in a furious whisper.

Five minutes later she got her phone out and started texting again.

I got up, found an usher, explained my problem and she came over with me and asked the woman to stop using her phone.

At the interval the woman then started talking in a loud voice about how I was so rude and had harrassed her and how I was having a proper tantrum and how she couldn’t believe I had such well behaved children given how horrible and rude I was. 

I didn’t shout, but I was firm.  I pointed out that my children had better manners than her and they were five and nine and that her constantly irritating behaviour was tedious and juvenile.  Then I threatened to complain.  She said: ‘Do it! Do it! Do it! You touched me and you’re not allowed and if your children weren’t here I’d show you. I’d like to see you try to report me because I’ll report you.’ At which point I felt myself beginning to effervesce and knew that if I didn’t leave I would do something horribly more regretful than I had already.

I walked out and reported her to the manager.  Luckily he was not very happy about her behaviour or her assertion that I had basically mugged her in the middle of a packed theatre with my two children watching.  By this time I was much calmer and more rational.  I suggested that either she move seats, or we move, or if he couldn’t stop her from being so aggressive that we come back another day if he wasn’t prepared to remove her.

He went off to deal with it.  When he came back he told me that he had found the usher having a word with her about her behaviour and then he also had a word or two.  She wasn’t prepared to move seats, but wasn’t going to play up anymore. I pointed out that I couldn’t trust that but that it would be a shame for my kids to miss the rest of the show, so they re-seated us and gave us a theatre gift voucher for £25 for our trouble, which paid for our seats.

If I could have been bothered I’d have gone to speak to her at the end of the performance to thank her.  The staff were excellent, the customer service was superb, our relocated seats had much better visibility and we made £25.

On the other hand, I do hate confrontations.  I was cross I had lost my temper and wish I had had the dignity to get her into trouble without lowering myself to insult her.  On the other hand I didn’t rip her head off and nail her to the wall which is what I wanted to do.  And I made a stand against all the fucking annoying, ignorant little shits who haven’t got the decency to think about other people when they go to a public performance and use their phones.  I really, really do not understand, when theatre tickets are so expensive, why someone would bother to come and see a play and then not watch it.  And not only not watch it, but make it impossible for other people to watch it as well.  I’m wondering if it’s just a Leicester thing.

The theatre was not even half full and quite a few of the people we were sitting near were also letting their kids talk during the performance, not loudly, but audibly enough to be distracting.  And they weren’t little children.  Tallulah was probably the youngest one there, and she knows not to talk unless it’s urgent, and that if she has any questions she has to wait until half time. I find it so depressing.

So, I came home upset and miserable and stressed beyond belief.  I told Jason the story, expecting him to have been proud of me that I reined in my legendary temper and resolved the problem without traumatising the kids too much, that I went back inside, even though I didn’t want to, and that I made some money as well.  He just went: ‘Well you just can’t go around hitting people. No wonder she was aggressive. Why didn’t you just call an usher and not let your temper get the better of you?’  I had hysterics.  A perfectly ugly afternoon had just turned into a vile evening.  

Which is why I haven’t blogged until now because mainly I have been sitting on the sofa sobbing at my feelings of guilt for having had an argument with someone while my children were watching, and for not being a very fab parent altogether today and repeatedly wondering why I just didn’t spend the money on that coal shed and some pointy sticks instead of theatre tickets, and maybe I can trade in my voucher for a B&Q one instead.

It turns out by the way that I was so inarticulate when I came in that Jason got the wrong end of the stick, which is why he thought I had hit her.  It has taken us two hours for me to calm down and for him to explain and for us both to apologise to each other.

I am meant to be taking the kids and their friend out for the day tomorrow, and then again to the theatre tomorrow night. I am now thinking that these are the things I would least like to do in the world and that some malevolent force is out to get me and has me in their sights.  Further compounded by the fact that on Saturday Jason wants to go back to his mum’s house in Norfolk to sort some things out.  I am going to London to the National to see Dido Queen of Carthage, where I pray that nobody is going to be cretinous enough to use their phone.  I am still allowed to go, but have to then run from the theatre to Liverpool Street and take a two hour train ride to Norwich where Jason and the kids are going to meet me so we can spend the night in his mother’s unspeakably horrible house.  I knew half term was going to be stressful but I hadn’t bargained on this much grief.

Too old for lust

I am so old.

I have just been horribly reminded of how old I am whilst watching the DVD of Twilight with my daughters.

For those of you not hip to the latest teenage groovings, or forced to watch such things by small children with tastes way above their age, Twilight is big news.  It is a film based on a series of books by a woman called Stephanie Meyer.  It is a kind of new generation Buffy The Vampire Slayer but without the humour and the pom poms.  Tilly has wanted to watch the film forever, so I rented it like a good mummy, and we sat, and we watched it.

I must admit to being curious because a) I read and review a lot of kid’s fiction. It is one of my specialty areas.  I have the book but have not gotten round to it yet. I thought the film might be an acceptable substitute, b) I am actually a fan of things vampiric and c) I had heard huge amounts about the male lead in this film, whose name I believe is Robert Pattinson. 

He was first bought to my attention several months ago by the delectable blogger Red Shoes, who lives over at the fabulous Mme. Guillotine.  She confessed that despite being happily married to her wife for many moons that even she had a slight frisson when faced with his phiz.  She was at the forefront of the trend for adulation by women who should know better, and it has even been mentioned in The Times, of all places.  Not just her frisson, by the way.  He seems to have captured the imagination of women over thirty the whole world over.

He looks like this:

I admit that from the photos it did not seem like he would be my cup of tea.  Here I think about things like:

• He is only ten years old
• I think he might have a monobrow and have to wax a runway down the middle
• He looks like he has problem skin
• He looks like he gets about as much sleep as I do
• He looks like he might need a good scrub
• Surely he is inarticulate, possibly gangling, and maybe with knuckles that reach the floor?

These are not thoughts I have when overcome by a tidal wave of lust and longing.  I can just about see where others might be coming from, but it is too far of a stretch for me.

I thought watching the film might help.  Never let it be said that I do not try to embrace new trends and become more ‘street’ for the sake of my children. I hate to be left out.

I had hoped that he would be such a good actor that his vague air of melancholy would ooze from the screen and send me to jelly.  That his wounded, doe eyes might oer brim with feeling and that I would suddenly forgive him all his perceived shortcomings and fall at his feet in a frenzy of worship.

You can guess, from the title of this post that this just did not happen.

Nope.

Mostly here are my thoughts about the film:

• God! I wish they’d stop doing that whole jerky camera angle thing. It’s like watching MTV on amphetamines.  It’s making me feel a bit nauseous. Remind me not to go to Alton Towers anytime soon.
• Blimey it’s dark! Is the telly on the blink? Maybe it’s my eyes? Perhaps I’m not supposed to see what those things are.  What are those things? That’s really bugging me now.
• They’ve gone a bit overboard with the white face make up haven’t they? That bloke looks like a dodgy version of Orlando Bloom in Lord of the Rings.  They’re very anaemic looking aren’t they, even for vampires?  Joss Whedon wouldn’t approve. 
•  I don’t like the way they’ve dyed his hair.  Look at the state of his roots. What has being a film star come to in this day and age? Tsk.
• Why are they all looking like that? Oh! I think it’s meant to be teenage/vampire angst.  Mostly they look constipated. Yes. That’s what it is.  They look like arthritic, constipated vegetarians who’ve been practised on by the apprentice hair stylist on pensioner’s Wednesday.  I thought vampires were supposed to be cool and glamorous.
• Nice house. Kevin McCloud would love that.  Hmm. Looks like a bigger version of that house in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.  What an excellent film that was.  Why aren’t we watching that? That’s what I’d like to know.
• God! Is it still on? I want a cup of tea and a bun. 

So there you have it.  I am too old to fancy Robert Pattinson who I’m sure is a lovely bloke and the shortcomings I have listed are obviously peculiar to me and me alone.  Not that I think he’s worrying himself an awful lot over whether I love him dearly.  In fact I’m sure he’s delighted that I don’t.

I do realise that this is probably a stupid post to publish abroad and that my site will now be deluged with angry Robert fans trying to kill me for saying that he’s just not my bag baby.  Sorry about that.  Try to think of it as one less body to climb over in your race to catch and keep him in your trouser turn up.  Remember, I am sure he is fanciable, it is just me that is too old to appreciate it.

I’m just going to have to go back to lusting after Daniel Craig with his gimlet eyes and his firm mouth and his way of looking at you like he’s very cross, but might secretly be quite pleased that you’re there after all.

Monday 25th May – The Perils of Public Transport

 Antonia over at Whoopee has done an exquisite (as always) post about National Express and road trips in general.  She has a fondness for such trips.  I loathe and detest them.  Reading her paean only made me remember my own painful experiences of the past.  A few days ago I mentioned that I would be sharing my pain with you.  Well grab your bus tickets and climb aboard while I tell you four excellent reasons why I never, ever, ever go on long haul bus journeys anymore.

 Trip The First – Coalville to Italy

 When I was about fourteen and right in the midst of my teenage, scowling angst phase, thus hating the world, everyone in it and all it had to offer, mainly because I hated myself, had terrible glasses and a very bad hair cut, my dad decided that we would go on holiday to visit his sister.  I was not pleased, even though underneath I might have been.  At that time I was not pleased about anything much except Philip Schofield and Morten Harket.

 

My dad’s sister lives in Italy.  She is staunchly English and only ever did two daring things in her whole life, the first of which was to marry an Italian motor mechanic, and the second of which was to move to Italy with him.  After that the novelty of being brave wore off and she reverted to being staunchly English in Italy.  You would think it would be very, very wonderful having an aunt who lives in Italy, in a beautiful, undiscovered part of the country where everything is very rustic and fabulous.  You wouldn’t if you knew my aunt.

 

She makes a virtue of wearing a corset and cardigan buttoned up to her nasal passages every day, even in heat that melts the tarmac.  She does not eat nice Italian food because it gives her heartburn, and despite living in a gorgeous country with beauty all around, she dreams of shopping in Primark and only goes outside when prodded with a giant stick.   When visitors come, she makes no concessions to her troglodytic way of life and one must adapt or die. 

 

Anyway, my dad decided it was time we went to see her, come what may.  I do not know what inspired this decision. I will however point out that we have never made the trip again.  Once was enough.  My dad does not believe in wasting money unnecessarily on things like aeroplane tickets if cheaper options are available, like packing everyone in the back of a lorry, feeding them Slimfast and providing a bucket for toilet stops.  He is what’s known as a ‘thrifty’ traveller. Or ‘maniac’.

 

He had heard that there was a local male voice choir down the road in Coalville (where everyone sleeps with their brother and has nineteen fingers on each hand), who were twinned with the choir in my aunt’s town.  How he heard this I do not know.  It is never the sort of information I am privy to, but he is a strange man who moves in mysterious ways and we must accept that he did.  Anyway, he heard that the UK choir was planning a trip to go and visit the Italian choir and that they were going on a coach.  He hatched a plan of unparalleled genius and cunningosity.

 

He got in touch with the choir master and enquired if there were any extra seats on the coach, and whether we might fill them for a token fifty pence and a bag of grapes.  Unfortunately the choir master confirmed that indeed there were and that he dreamed of grapes.  Which is how we ended up on a coach for two days with a bunch of men who would not stop singing in close harmony.  Medleys of Gilbert and Sullivan, my dad’s insistence in the quiet bits of supplying the drivers with the greatest hits of Chas ‘n’ Dave on tape and French motorway service toilets all combined in a heady miasma of horror which blighted my already angst ridden teenage soul and led to me quietly weeping tears of blood.  And then we had to do it all again in reverse.  Gah! 

Not only that but on the way there we made a stop for the night in a small Italian town.  When one sees small Italian towns on the television they are unfailingly picturesque and quaint, full of cobbles and peasants wielding vats of ragu and flagons of wine.  Our town was like Swindon on Friday night after the pubs had shut.  Not only that but our hotel was a bargain.  It was a bargain because it was situated by the local freight depot and trains rumbled through every twenty minutes all through the night. One could saddle the cockroaches in the bathroom and the smell.  Well, least said, soonest mended.

  

Trip The Second – Birmingham to Stranraer

 In Sixth form, when dinosaurs still roamed the earth and we all lived nestled inside giant tree ferns I had a boyfriend.  He was my first true love and I adored him with that kind of spiky, anguished teenage love that makes it hard to breathe and makes everything you do without the object of your passion seem very grey and lifeless.

 

He lodged at our house, because his parents had decided to give up their executive jet set life style and move to a dilapidated old farm in Scotland right in the middle of his A Levels.  We offered him a room, and I fell in love.  Eventually with enough badgering and persistence he fell in love back.

 

He invited me to go up to Scotland to meet his parents properly during the Christmas holidays.  We had to go on the bus.  At that time our only option was to go from Digbeth bus station in Brum to Stranraer.  It took seven hours and the only bus left at 11.00 p.m.  At the time I readily agreed.  I was young, I was foolish, I was in love. It helped that I had never been to Digbeth before.  Seven hours on a coach with no Chas ‘N’ Dave or close harmony singing seemed like a piece of piss.  It would be fine.

 

My dad agreed to drive us to the bus station.  All would have been well had he not had far too much confidence in his own ability.  He was convinced that he didn’t need to leave any time for emergencies, because he didn’t have emergencies.  This was shortly before we broke down in the fog, fifteen miles outside of Birmingham on the hard shoulder of the motorway.  This was at a time when nobody had mobile phones, and we had to hike through the fog to find a roadside phone.

 

The eleven o’clock bus was the only bus for twenty four hours.  We rang the bus company and pleaded.  They agreed to wait.  What seemed like about five years later we were on our way again.  Then my dad got lost.  He does not do Birmingham well.  If I tell you that now he always goes by train, you can see what I mean.  So, about an hour later we finally got to the stygian pits of hell that was the bus station.  The bus was full of extremely pissed off students all waiting to go home for the holidays and not happy with us at all.

 

In the atmosphere of choking exhaust fumes and hatred, we stumbled onto the bus and set off.  My boyfriend fell asleep almost immediately. I was not so lucky.  A couple of hours into the journey it started to snow, and we ploughed on in the hypnotic whirl while the bus driver grumbled to his mate about the shocking conditions.

 

Shortly thereafter a man came up from the back of the bus to talk to the driver.  He seemed very anxious.  He said: ‘Excuse me, but I think we have a bit of a problem.  There is a man at the back of the bus who has taken all his clothes off…..AND……he has a gun.  He seems quite agitated.’

 

I’ve always loved the fact that he didn’t mention the gun part first.  Nudity being much more dangerous than weaponry to impressionable young souls.

 

The driver and his mate then had a huge row whilst weaving through the blizzard about what they were going to do about the naked, gun toting maniac.  Eventually the driver’s mate reluctantly wandered down to the back of the bus to ‘do’ something.

 

Minutes which seemed like hours passed.  I was doing my bat impression, listening for the first sounds of gunfire and trying to wake my boyfriend, who was sleeping through the whole thing.  Eventually I decided that as he was being bloody useless, should there be a gunfight, I would use his recumbent body as a human shield and save myself.

 

The driver’s mate came back and sat down.  The driver said; ‘Well? What happened?’  The driver’s mate looked a bit sheepish and said: ‘Ummmm, at least I managed to get him to put his shirt back on.’  Oh well! That’s alright then.  Nobody is going to die of shock from seeing his manly nipples.  A shame we’re all going to be murdered by his big, shiny gun though.

 

They argued and argued some more until we got to a services, where thankfully they were united in making an unscheduled stop.  Everyone flooded off the bus, including the semi naked man clutching a weapon.  Because he got off, I got back on the bus, figuring that this was the wisest option.  Boyfriend was still asleep.

 

About half an hour later everyone flooded back onto the bus except the gun toting nudist.  It turns out that someone had finally phoned the motorway police. They had screeched up, chased him round the car park for several minutes, whereupon he had finally gotten bored and given himself up.  It turns out that the gun was a replica and he was just mildly insane.  Which was nice.

 

Boyfriend slept until we reached Stranraer and flatly refused to believe my story until he heard the bus driver telling a colleague that ‘at least he would have a good story to tell his grandchildren.’  Then he got shitty with me for not waking him up so he could take part in the action! 

 

Trip The Third: Stranraer to Birmingham

 Twelve months passed since the man with gun incident, and by now I was a seasoned traveller on the Stranraer run.  I had my own patch of tramp’s urine in the bus station and had worked out that I had just enough time to nip to the loo at Preston bus station as long as I sprinted.

 

By this time I was at university in Wales.  My boyfriend did not go to university.  He was in Scotland helping his parents to do up their farm and waiting to go into the Navy.  We had not seen each other since the summer and I was pining for him.  I hot footed it up there as soon as possible after giving my mum her festive supply of dirty washing.

 

After a couple of days of staying with him I started to feel a bit under the weather.  I thought I had the flu. I was cold and shaky and miserable. My hair hurt.  It was a bit of a downer.  I was finding it very hard to be upbeat.  On the morning I was due to leave to come home I woke up covered in Chicken Pox, absolutely smothered. I felt like shit.  It was two days before Christmas, everyone had plans.  I had to go home and my only option was to get back on the bus of death.

 

I rang my parents and told them what had happened.  My dad promised to come and pick me up from the bus station.  Normally I would just hop on the train, but I was ill, remember?

 

My boyfriend’s parents packed me off with sandwiches, pain killers, lots of love and a bag of spinach for my parents.  I could have done without the spinach frankly, but it seemed rude to say no. 

 

I sat on the bus for days, leaning my hot head against the window to cool it down, shaking and sweating and itching, and clutching the bloody spinach.  Eventually, after about a millennia I got down from the bus at Digbeth and went to look for my dad.  Nobody was there.

 

At that time Digbeth bus station was semi-underground.  It had really poor ventilation, and every few days they would evacuate all the passengers and make them wait on the pavement outside because the levels of carbon monoxide were so dangerous that people would begin to get seriously unwell.  I got there in time for a mass evacuation. 

 

Digbeth was a singularly unpleasant place at the time.  It was full of empty buildings, tramps, urine and seedy dives.  Directly opposite the bus station was a twenty four hour, all you can eat, porn cinema.  I sat on my kit bag, clutching my spinach, watching filthy old pervs scuttling backwards and forwards to the pornorama.  I cried.

 

Then I found enough money to ring my mum, and a phone box that worked.  My dad had set off hours before.  He was lost.  I cried down the phone. I cried all over my spinach.

 

Eventually my dad turned up and took me home.  I spent all Christmas and New Year covered in spots and calamine lotion having a thoroughly miserable time.  And it took me years to eat spinach again after that. Years.

 

Trip the Fourth – Victoria to Amsterdam

 When I first started going out with UE I was a lowly secretary on a crappy wage, and he was a high up project manager with a taste for the finer things in life and money to burn.  At that time in my life I still had principles and tried to pay my way (these principles fled after six months of relentless socialising when my bank account went into meltdown) fairly whenever we went out. 

 

He used to travel to Amsterdam for work two or three times a week.  Sometimes if he had meetings there on Friday and Monday he would stay over for the weekend and go out to play.  On one such weekend he invited me to go too.  Obviously I couldn’t fly out business class with him, but he did offer to pay for my air fare.  I said ‘no thank you. I will pay for myself.’ (Why? Oh why? I was a fule.) and then promptly had heart failure when I looked into the air fare.  It would not do.  I had to find another way.

 

I looked at bus fares.  This was more like it.  I paid for my ticket and off I went on my grand adventure.  I took the Oxford Tube bus to Victoria and then got on the coach at Victoria to go to Amsterdam.  I was so pleased with myself until approximately half an hour into the journey when it all started to go hideously wrong.

 

The whole bus, as I should have realised, was full of pot heads and fledgeling pot heads going to Amsterdam to spend the weekend getting stoned out of their minds.  They knew they couldn’t smoke on the bus, so they had filled their giant Adidas sports bags with lager instead, which they proceeded to drink copious amounts of.  Now, pot smokers are fine with me.  They blether, they are not to be trusted around Chunky Kit Kats, and they can get a little bit paranoid, but apart from that they are mostly lovely, gentle creatures who love the world and sweet shops in particular.  Lager louts are the opposite.

 

By the time we got off the boat and were trundling towards the Belgian border things were getting really shouty, the smell of cheap lager was now mingling with sweat and piss, and it was altogether horrible.

 

I was also starving.  I had bought Dutch money with me. It had never occurred to me that I might need French and Belgian money too.  We stopped only at French and Belgian services. I had no money and no credit card.  I was starving to death and utterly miserable.

 

As I was losing the will to live we came to Schipol which is Amsterdam’s airport.  The bus stopped there for lots of the lagers to get off.  Schipol is quite a way outside the city, obviously, being an airport.  One of the lagers went mental.  He had booked to stay near Schipol because it was cheaper than staying in the city, thinking that he could walk into the city centre from the airport.  He had now woken up to the fact that this wasn’t going to happen.  He was not happy.

 

Instead of accepting that he had been a muppet, he accused the bus driver of wilfully deceiving him (by moving the airport out of the town square?!!!) and refused to get off the bus.  Eventually the bus driver shrugged and carried on.

 

Lager lout sat at the front, spouting on about how he would be fine because he was going to go straight to the Red Light District and find a prostitute who would fall in love with him and allow him to stay with her for the two nights of his stay.  He then enlarged on the details of how he was going to make this poor woman fall in love with him, in between looking scrofulous, belching and picking his spots. 

 

By the time we got to Amsterdam I was in shock, malnourished and hysterical.  I never took the coach again and accepted UE’s offers of plane tickets greedily, although I have to say the return coach journey on Monday morning was much, much quieter.

 

 The moral of the story: Never think that coach travel is cheaper.  There is always a price to pay.  Always.

Stop Moaning Woman and Get a Grip

Right. Too many whingish thoughts.  Hard to stomach from a woman with three rather delightful children, few money worries, no job and an understanding husband who turns a blind eye to her exceedingly frivolous and copious spending habits I know.  Part of the blog purpose is to make me count my blessings, not want to slit my wrists with a Jacob’s Cream Cracker.

So, will update you on the progress on Tilly’s school, because, like a total special person wearing a hat with a strap and a propellor, I forgot, despite all my stress of Wednesday morning.

It was lovely dear readers, if there are any of you left putting up with my emotional schizophrenia and typing squits.

The school was just what I wanted it to be.  The only fault I could find is that it isn’t round the corner from my house.

Weird isn’t it? Not the round the corner thing.  The fact that this school is slap bang between a rough area and a nice area, much like where I live myself, yet this school is a bloody marvel, and all the secondary schools round here are totally shit. I don’t get it.

Anyhow.  Let me fill you in a bit.

The school is called Jonathan North. I would link you to the website, but it is a  very dull website and doesn’t show the school in all its glory, so I won’t bore you any more than necessary.

It is a girl’s school, which is good, because knowing Tilly she will accidentally get pregnant at 13 and I want to make sure the odds are as low as possible.

It is a state school, despite being a girl’s school.  No fees. Yay!

They claim to specialise in art, science and maths.  I was very excited about this because Tilly wants to be an artist.  My friend pointed out that the school we went to as teenagers claims that it specialises in Science.  What it actually specialises in is going into special measures and people playing the French Horn.  Not so good.  Nevertheless the tour of this school showed absolutely tons and tons of fantastic art by the pupils.  There was everything from jewellry to clothing to glass and ceramics work to standard fine art.  The work was high quality, beautifully displayed and everywhere you looked.  The art studios were wonderfully equipped.  I was ecstatic.

The other subjects seem equally well covered. There is a good library.  They have library lessons every week and have to do projects on different genres of books.  They also have to do ten minutes of private reading at the beginning of every lesson, plus the teachers also read to them from more advanced or challenging books.  We are talking literature books here people, not just the subject being taught.

We spoke to some of the kids in the science labs and they were articulate, polite and confident.  It was a regular school day, not something put on just for us.  This was good.

For year seven pupils, which is what Tilly will be, they have separate toilets so they don’t have to get to grips with puberty until the last minute (seems wise).  They also have a mentoring scheme run by staff and pupils.  Year seven’s get ten minutes extra lunch hour every day so they can get down to the canteen and work it all out without being killed in the rush.  Everything seemed very well thought out.

The school also seems to win everything. They have just won an Enterprise Business Design award and are going on to compete at a national level, they win every sports trophy going and there are lots of community endeavours and incentives and stuff happening.  They have a whole scheme to encourage gifted kids and stretch them.  I forgot to ask about struggling kids, but I  can’t believe they will be left out.

The facilities were amazing. There is a drama studio.  There is a dance studio complete with mirrors and barre. There are tennis courts and an aerobics studio where they have those interactive dance mat things for the pupils.  They have lessons in street dancing! Amazing eh?

It was all very wonderful and really, really encouraging.

What’s more, we talked to the woman who was giving the tour about the fact that Tilly is not automatically eligible to go to the school.  She said that they do everything they can to help pupils and parents who actively want to get into the school and that if the city admissions turn us down we must go to them and they will fight our corner.  She assured me that they have a fantastic success rate and that she is almost certain to get in if we want her there.

We do.

Isn’t it marvellous?

So proper good news.  Frabjous day, calloo callay.

Another marathon whinge. Please ignore. I am just trying to stop myself murdering my children

Christ Almighty riding a bike.  What an absolutely hideous day.

This is judgement on me for having a nice day yesterday.  There is always a price to pay.  You just heed my wagging finger, oh yes!

Jason is still scamping.  By this point I am totally, utterly 100% pissed off about it, which is very unfair, but there you go.  Nobody said life was fair.

Here’s the thing:

Scamping only happens four times a year during the scamping season, when all role players who like to ease themselves from the Dungeons and Dragons table and go outside and play in the sunshine like blind, naked, mole rat thingys frisk about.  This wouldn’t be so bad except that for some reason, probably because most of them are socially inefficient drivelling idiots, most of these four times take place in a huge clump over the space of about a month.

It used to be that there were two long weekends back to back, which nearly killed me.  Now even the naked mole rat people have realised that this is a monstrously stupid idea.  So they have separated those two long weekends with a week in between.  How kind.

They set up camp on Thursday.  They take camp down on Monday.  That is a long time to be naked and moley and blinky in the cold sun’s rays.

As we know, Jason is a fair weather mole.  In theory this should be easier for me, because it means that I do actually get to see him on occasion during the Thursday to Monday extravaganza.  In practice this means that he staggers home to bed between half three and four in the morning.  He will usually get up with the kids to allow me a lie in, which is very nice and not to be sneezed at.  As soon as I get up he has his breakfast and goes back to bed until lunch time.  Then he gets in his car and goes off to be orcish until half past three in the morning once more.

So in reality I see him for about an hour a day.  This is nice, in that an hour a day is better than nothing.  This plus the occasional lie in is good.  It still means that I spend far too much time on my own with the children.

I really shouldn’t moan because he does let me have my days out at the theatre.  In fact, the next several Saturdays will be days in London, which will be fab.  They are however, only days, and on some of those days I still do breakfast and sometimes bedtime routines if the timings allow.

I know I am being an ungrateful cow, and that yesterday was a gift, but today I am tired and crabby and the children are annoying and I have had enough.  Plus I have not slept in for the past few mornings because my stress levels have been insane and sleep is not my friend.  Not his fault, but it all adds to the mix.

I think my annoyance is mostly because a) I really am not sleeping well at all. I have been up till 2, 3.30 and 3.00 in the morning for the past three nights. b) It has been a hell of a few weeks with two weeks in Norfolk, one week frantically running around at home, a lovely holiday and then lots of visitors for the week following.  We have a birthday looming, and the threat of having to go back to Norfolk and to Cornwall in the next few weeks. The children have only been in school routine for three days and now we have half term.  I am done with children and distant relatives and complex time tables.  I yearn to get back to the ordinary hideous grind rather than the extraordinary hideous grind.  It has been a hard slog and it feels like I have nothing left to slog with today. 

I want Jason to come back home and share my misery.  Actually I want him to take my misery whilst I run for the nearest coffee shop screaming like a girl.  At the same time I realise that he has had a much worse time of it than me, and that with all the stresses of work it is an excellent thing that he is having a few days of total escapist fun in the sunshine, even if he does have to prance about in a stupid costume to do it.

The children have been no worse than usual.  I just have no tolerance left at all.  Tilly was totally Kevinish this morning.  Her father was coming at ten to take her out for the day.  This is her birthday treat from him.  It is early in the month because he is leaving the country in a few days and will be gone for aeons.  I woke her at nine. She was gruntish.  I asked her to get ready.  At quarter to ten she was still upstairs.  I politely asked her to come down and asked her what she had been doing.  She had been reading her book.  Not so good.

She had to be press ganged into having breakfast.  While she was sullenly eating yogurt she asked me when I thought she could have a mobile phone.  After yesterday’s debacle with the computer passwords, the phrase: ‘When hell freezes over,’ nearly tripped off my tongue.  I merely suggested that a) she had to find a way to pay for one and b) she had to learn to be more responsible and then we’d see.  She was not impressed.  Then she also got cross because I made her brush her hair and her teeth and wouldn’t let her sit down and watch the Incredibles with the others.  By the time her dad came I was glad to see the back of her petulant little phiz.

Tallulah is jealous that she is not going out with her dad, even though he is making a return trip from outer mongolia or wherever the hell he is going, to take her out in a few weeks.  She was sulky and miserable for quite a lot of the morning.  This took the form of shrugging a lot and fighting incessantly with her brother, who gave as good as he got and gave up being a whipping boy half way through the morning to take on a more dominant role of trying to kill her.

I had kind of guessed this might happened so I gave in to their demands for television, and put the dvd’s on they asked for. At which point they ignored the television entirely in favour of ripping each other’s faces off.

After my third shriek of the morning I hauled them off for a bath, which sometimes calms them down.  It worked briefly until lunch time when they were both uppity about the food that was served and the lack of dainty tid bits to titillate their palettes. 

Tallulah got into trouble because she kept going on and on about how nice she was for buying us all presents yesterday.  She must have brought it up twenty times since breakfast.  Every time she explained how nice she had been she waited expectantly for me to faint with gratitude for my ‘free’, ‘broken’, Hummel figurine.  The novelty wore off.  It is very, very hard to be grateful for something when someone is reminding you just how grateful you should be every twenty minutes.  I got exceedingly cross and banned the subject.  She was not pleased.  I pointed out that I do not bang on and on incessantly about all the presents she gets, nor the fact that I scrub her pooh from the toilet bowl on a regular basis and nobody is fainting with gratitude on the hour for my services above and beyond in the catering department.  She pursed her lips.  I was not popular.

We did nail painting, which was fine but only lasted five minutes.

Then we did crafts.  They wanted pen and papers to make photographs.  They got it.  Then there were complaints because there was no glue and scissors.  There was peace for ten minutes.  We moved on to making masks.  These were a novelty for another five minutes.  Then that was boring and they charged off to play shouting at each other until their ear drums bled.

At this point I was hanging on by my fingernails. I have taken Oscar up for a nap.  I suggested Tallulah might like a rest. I was going to let her play on her computer while Oscar was napping, but didn’t want to mention it in front of him.  When I said the word ‘rest’ she went bonkers and kept pestering me about what exactly was a rest and why did she have to have one and it wasn’t fair.  I asked her to drop it.  She wouldn’t.  I walked away to sort out Oscar.

He was talking to his sister. She was ignoring him. I asked her not to ignore him. I hate it when people ignore each other. It is the height of rudeness.  I expect my children to acknowledge each other, even if it’s only to say; ‘fuck off you annoying little shit,’  She was deliberately obtuse and kept talking to me about how she couldn’t understand him so she couldn’t speak to him, even though he was standing next to her and talking as clearly as you or I.

At this point I flipped.  She is in bed having her rest.  Unfortunately for her it is now a proper rest and there is no sign of any computer access on the horizon. 

I am ready to run out the door and abandon the lot of them.  I thought blogging it out might help.

I just have to hang on until seven o’clock when UE is coming to take Tallulah home with him and have both girls until tomorrow morning.  I can do it, surely?

Sunday 24th May – Awards and Memes

I have been given an award by Henri over at Really Should Know Better.  This means rather a lot to me as Henri writes like a dream, reads excellent books and is not averse to cake.  A fine pedigree I’m sure you will agree.  I am gratified beyond belief.

 

The award, as you will see, comes with a meme.  Now, this may sound churlish and rather luvvie, but it is not meant that way. You see, I have been given this award previously, which was also rather lovely.  I am never going to turn down adulation.  It is bread and meat to me. I am but a dried out husk without it. 

 

On the other hand I feel that having stepped up to the plate meme wise that I am going to cherry pick which bits of it I do this time.  Thus I am not going to nominate anyone else, as I have already done that bit.  I am however going to write about five addictions again.  Mainly because, being an addictive kind of girl I have five new things to write about.

 

The Mitfords

 I know I keep banging on about this book of letters, but it really is one of the best things I have read in years.  The sisters wrote to each other nearly every day for eighty odd years and apparently this 800 page epic only represents about 5% of the letters the editor had to sift through. A labour of love indeed.  Nancy Mitford’s wonderful books, ‘Love in a Cold Climate’, ‘The Pursuit of Love’, ‘The Blessing’ and ‘Don’t Tell Alfred’ (must reads if you are a fan of I Capture the Castle  and Cold Comfort Farm) are just glorious, and all highly autobiographical.  The letters between the sisters are a kind of extension and enrichment of that bizarrely privileged and long gone life that Nancy writes about with such wit and fervour. Even better, the letters are much more acidic as they seem to spend the entire time falling out and making up with each other.

 

The letters are full of the best sorts of ridiculous slang and the private languages the sisters used between themselves, which for me, make them so very addictive.  I have taken to using the term ‘looming’ instead of visiting and things which are amazing are now simply ‘extraorder’. Do admit.

 

Then there’s the fact that Unity Mitford was a huge fan of Hitler, and keeps writing letters about what a sweet, misunderstood, humanitarian lambkin he is, which is both baffling and fascinating.  Diana, married to Oswald Mosley spends a lot of time being jolly about fascism and how it’s the only way, and in general it’s all very bonkers and alarming in a totally fascinating way.

 

Crap Celebrity Biographies

 This is all Lucy Fishwife’s fault.  She has confessed to reading Anthea Turner’s biography and I feel that someone with her extraordinary pedigree regarding literature who has admitted to such a heinous thing has opened the floodgates for me too.  I find that these days O.K. and Heat magazines are no longer enough to feed my need to read inconsequential drivel about D list people who I am never likely to meet.  I have fallen back on my vice for biographies. 

 

I have been reading them for years in secret, wrapping them in brown paper and hiding under the bedclothes with a torch.  They are not all rubbish.  I recently read Francis Osborne’s ‘The Bolter’, which was fascinating and well written.  On the other hand I have also read the complete biographical outpourings of the Spice Girls, and Jordan.  The shame, the utter shame.  Currently I have on loan from the library Graham Norton’s life of celebrity excess and Clarissa Dickson Wright (one of the Two Fat Ladies) spilling the beans.  I am nothing if not eclectic, having just finished Nikki Sixx’s The Heroin Diaries, which was, like many biographies about heroin, grubby and tedious in the extreme.  How many times can someone write about thinking midgets with shotguns are coming out of the shrubbery to kill him without it losing its shine?

 

Crumpets

 I am in one of those very rare moods at the moment when I am not terribly interested in my food.  This is very unusual for me as I am usually the first to the trough, head down and inhaling dinner through all available facial apertures.  At the moment it all seems a bit tedious.

 

I think about what to have for a meal and the idea of crumpets springs to mind and refuses to dislodge itself.  Crumpets, so hot you can hardly touch them, covered in salted butter which drips down your chin when you bite into it.  Preferably eaten naked in the bath so there is no shame about the floods of butter, and no dry cleaning bills to worry about.

 

I had to stop myself from buying more yesterday in the supermarket, as I destroyed an entire packet in two days.  They are lovely, but it will come as no surprise if I die spectacularly of a lard related heart attack in the next week.

 

Hotel Chocolat

 I have recently had the great good fortune to be gifted Hotel Chocolate goodies three, count them, three times in the last few weeks.  A friend bought me round some of their milk chocolate bars, which are exquisite and literally melt in the mouth good.  Then my best friend sent me an extraorder Easter Egg for my birthday which was treasure indeed.  Just as I had finished that and was sobbing, a parcel arrived containing the most exquisite box of chocolates I have ever received, again Hotel Chocolat, from my sister in law.  I am now on the last layer and in fits of anxiety for the time that I finish them.  I am itching to go on their website and just order myself a little something.  I am concerned that given my lack of willpower around both spending money and good chocolate, that it will be game over and Jason will arrive home to find me both bankrupt and the size of Augustus Gloop.  I am trying to tell myself that this would be a bad thing.  It is not really working.

 

Who Do You Think You Are?

I am a sucker for random television programmes that I get totally hooked on, love with a passion, watch furiously and then drop like a hot rock.  This is what happened with Trinny and Susannah, and Diarmuid Gavin and Ray Mears.  Now it is the turn of Who Do You Think You Are?  For those who are not sad enough to watch such things, this is a BBC documentary series about genealogy.  Every episode sees a celebrity and a team of researchers looking into their family tree and unearthing interesting secrets, hopefully.

 

I started to watch it because when I was deep into my Alan Measles epic (which has to be resumed shortly) I needed something to watch which I could also listen to, and which it wouldn’t matter terribly if I took my eyes from the screen so that I could unstitch Alan from the hem of my skirt etc.  This filled the brief perfectly.

 

I am a latecomer to this programme.  My parents are devotees, and have been watching for years.  They have told me about it on many occasions and I have stifled a yawn.  Now I am got, and got good.  They repeat an episode every night on a diabolically crap digital channel called Blighty.  I have set Sky Plus and devour them wholesale.

 

I have discovered something interesting.  It is not the celebrity choice that makes the programme.  Often it is the most unpromising people who are the most entertaining to me.  It is the fact that they take it all so seriously and get all wrapped up in it.  Everyone cries at some point about little Johnny who died down a mine of consumption and being trodden on by a pit pony, even if it was in 1794.  My favourite was Jeremy Paxman, who was so rude and hopeless and seemed to have been press ganged into being on the programme due to a bet gone wrong, and who shed tears and got interested despite himself and then got all flustered and annoyed.  It was fantastic television.

 

So, that’s the current five.  Sad but true.