Legs 37

Yay me.

I got let off the IFA.

This is great.

Jason has finally realised that there is no point in me being present during discussions of things like fixed rate mortgages and base rates and premiums because I listen very intently for the first two minutes, and then my internal alarm system goes mental, all the shutters clang down and I sit happily dreaming about shoes until everything to do with sums is over.  It is not helpful and I am not particularly ornamental any more, so it is best to draw a veil.

I was allowed to go and have my bath instead, and now I feel slightly less like a truffle hound with flu. This is good.

I have allowed myself to get depressed about my legs though.

I am not looking at my stomach. Therefore it does not exist.  Therefore I do not have to get depressed about it.

I did however, have to do some serious leg maintenance because this sort of weather demands it.

I have pruned them and sanded them and slapped cream all over them.  I have had to get up close and personal with them and it is not good. 

Usually they are encased in denim, or tights, or socks or all three.  This is good.  It means I do not have to examine them.

Today though I wore a skirt.

It was all a bit worrying and I decided that I needed to address the leg/feet thing foot on tonight.

My friend bought me one of those ‘new, improved’ ped egg things.  For those of you who are far too busy having a life to care about such things I will explain.  They are kind of the pumice stone of the jet age.  They are basically a small, egg shaped cheese grater with which you can plane all the dead skin off your feet, leaving them as smooth as the proverbial baby’s bum.  All well and good.  My feet make Hobbit’s feet look like Claudia Schiffer’s pearly toes.  I have a disastrous foot beauty routine. Why I say foot beauty, like I have any other kind of beauty routine, is a bit beyond me really.  Sorry.

If anyone needed a ped egg it was me. Now I have one.  I decided to experiment with it.  I have to say that I think a Black and Decker Orbital Sander would be a better, kinder option for me.  The ped egg is just not hard core enough. It has met its match.  My feet now resemble a piece of aged parmesan which have been attacked by starving rats.  They still look like shit, but it is lumpy, wood chip style shit.  I can’t say it is an improvement.

I also have scars on my feet where my flip flops viciously attacked me last week, and which will probably never heal, especially now they have been rotivated by the Ped Egg. 

I painted my toe nails yesterday. I don’t think it has helped.  I am a total retard when it comes to painting anything, and I specialise in shaky hands when it comes to anything requiring, skill, dexterity and patience. I paint toenails like a hardened alky with the DT’s who thinks a lizard is going to shoot out of his trouser leg at any moment and kill him.  It is not soothing.

After the ped egg disaster I decided to move further up the leg and shave them.  It turns out that I am pretty sure I’ve got the beginnings of varicose veins in my calves, thanks to me sitting like an idiot at the computer for fourteen hours a day with my feet folded under me in the manner of a pretzel.  As my legs are naturally lard white anyway, these veins now shine through the darkness like a homing beacon for the aristocracy and all other blue blooded creatures.

I moved on.  I now have fat knees.  Get this. My legs are not bad in terms of fatness. I mean they’re not skinny, and I already know about the stretch marks on the thighs thanks, but they’ve always been reasonably shapely beasts when suitably reined in under enough man made fibre.  Now I have fat knees.  Just the knees.  I have dimples on my knee caps.  Maybe I’m turning back into a baby.  Maybe I need fat knees again for when I start to crawl round poking jam sandwiches into the DVD player. I don’t know. I do know that it’s very distressing.

I soldiered on bravely, and when I got out of the bath I decided that what might help in this situation was some fake tan.  Some fake tan specifically for my lardy white legs.  Some fake tan which would artificially infuse them with health and life and a sense of joyousness not shared by the rest of my ailing body. 

The fake tan I purchased some months ago in order to be prepared for the summer, has now officially been christened.  It is a new type, well new to me.  You spray it into your hands and then lather it firmly all over your legs making sure it is even and smooth.  Remember this.  Remember also that it takes one minute from the time of the spraying to the time when it is ’set’.  There is not a lot of margin for error here.

Now picture me with my fat, dimpled knees, endless acres of stretch marks that look like a particularly violent weather map indicating a very low front with possible hurricanes to come, and my grated, bleeding feet.  Add to this me hopping about like a loon, spraying virulent orange goo everywhere except where it is supposed to go, swearing a lot and resigning myself to the fact that it has set solid before I’ve even done half an ankle and you will see the whole sorry tale mapped out before you.

It did not go well.  I am a sort of mottled satsuma colour with small, dark circles of tan colour where the aerosoling became a bit violent.  I look like I have a particularly horrible disease.  I feel like I ought to hang a yellow flag outside the front door and do the school run carrying a bell, and shouting ‘diseased’.

I thought beautifying oneself was supposed to be relaxing and soothing to the nerves.  I’d be more relaxed panel beating a Morris Minor after an altercation with an articulated lorry.

No matter what the weather is doing tomorrow it’s going to have to be jeans and socks for me. 

No need to pray for rain. I’ve read the thighs and it’s a sure thing.

Normal Service Will Be Resumed after this pill

I am desperate to do another post on kids’ fiction.  I have a list of things that were suggested by other people with bigger brains than me, and which I had forgotten about and I am keen, keen, keen.  Unfortunately life has been getting in the way over the last few days and I have just about had enough of it.  I need calm, peace and a distinct lack of children to get things done and events are conspiring against me.

The main reason I am not doing anything actually is because it is too bloody hot.  I hate to be a whinging English woman about this, because I’m all for a bit of sunshine and the weekend was rather lovely in terms of weather, but the last two days have been as humid as a stevedore’s armpit and with very little breeze at all.  Plus I seem to have had a resurgence of hayfever, which I thought had buggered off and left me alone for good about ten years ago.  I am convinced that I am specially allergic to something that only comes into flower once every eight years or so, and this is my year.  I am taking anti-histamines, homeopathy, echinacea, dried frog pills and anything else I can think of and still I feel like someone is scouring out my head with sand.  It is rubbish.  I’m fine as long as I don’t go anywhere or do anything, preferably sitting in a bath.  But anything else and I end up covered in snot and sweat and looking like I’ve just watched Truly Madly Deeply for the tenth time in a row.  It’s a bit rubbish.

As a result we are having another bulletin blog so I can go and lie in the bath reading about Michael Wood discovering India and being soothed.  As the IFA is coming round in the next twenty minutes to talk about mortgages and insurance this plan may well have to be postponed. He’s a nice man.  I like him a lot, but not enough to have a meeting with him in my bath.  Especially since I stood on the scales on Sunday and they told me in no uncertain terms that if I don’t shift half a stone pronto I shall not be going to the ball or anywhere else for that matter.

Here is the news:

The chrysalises of doom hatched five beautiful and very non threatening butterflies yesterday.  Tilly released them into the wild in a haze of tears and anguish, but has cheered up remarkably since winning lots of races at the school sports day this afternoon.

Tallulah is riding victorious thanks to being picked to go to a special sporting event at Loughborough university yesterday. I am still unclear as to what happened exactly.  It seemed that she shook hands with a fox and won second prize.  I don’t mind because they didn’t want me to go, and she’s very happy, so all is good.  I asked her about today’s sport’s day and she told me that there were some cups of water on a table.  I remain bemused of Glenfield.

I did not go to sports day.  I am not sorry.  It meant spending an afternoon standing on the barren plain that is the school field in 95% humidity, trying to explain to a small boy why he was not allowed to do anything except sit down and be good.  That was not my idea of fun.  We went out for the day with granny instead.  We were meant to be going out for the day with granny on Friday but forgot that I will be in Norfolk and she will be wrangling recalcitrant relatives who have come to stay by inviting themselves over for a fortnight only to moan about everything and wish they were at home.

Spending the day with granny was good.  She took us out for lunch.  We ate a lot.  This, like the dinner I went out for with my friend last night, the Chinese takeaway on Sunday night and the lunch and dinner out on Saturday, are not doing my ‘I must lose half a stone’ plan any favours at all.  Still, it was delicious.

I enjoyed the theatre on Saturday.  I have decided that I do not like Chekhov, although it is much more bearable when it is being translated by Tom Stoppard.  I think the problem is that I do not understand enough about Russia and its history to know what is going on and so many of the in jokes are lost on me.  Plus everyone has eighteen names.  In a book you can keep going back to check, with a play you just have to go with it.  The cast were very good though and I did enjoy myself.  Not as much as I enjoyed seeing the divine and brilliant Juliet Stephenson and Henry Goodman in Duet for One in the evening mind you.  Fantastic stuff.

Andrea and I had dinner at Simpsons On The Strand on Saturday.  The pre theatre menu that they promised on the website never materialised and we ended up with the eye watering a la carte menu and no real choice but to lump it unless we wanted Burger King instead.  Then I got told off for having an inappropriate bosom and was made to wear my cardigan so the other diners didn’t choke on their Brown Windsor soup.  It was all quite hilarious.  Then it turned out that because they cook everything from scratch, the only thing we had time to eat was the roast dinner because that was a kind of rolling feast, much like a doner kebab.  Hence two hot, sweaty, inappropriately dressed people eating roast beef dinner with all the trimmings on the hottest day of the year so far.  A roast beef dinner that cost £25 a head, more to the point.  Still, it was hilarious.  We upset everyone and laughed a lot, and spent most of the time trying not to snort gravy down our noses because we’d had the great good fortune to be seated next to a table full of Hooray Henry’s on a stag do.  What Ho! It was like being allowed to time travel back to the Drones Club and drop in on Bertie Wooster.  Worth every penny.

Hamlet The Finale by Katyboo

So. To take up the tale of woe.

 

We left for an interval wee just as Hamlet had made the decision to appear to be ‘snooker loopy, nuts are we’ in order to buy some time for him to get his head round the fact that his dead father has just ordered him to take revenge on his regicidal incestuous uncle, and he didn’t just mean writing him an anonymous note from a well wisher.  Put like that it is understandable, although perhaps he would have been better off taking a ‘mental health’ day, or going on a mini break.  Ours is not to reason why.

 

At this point the Polonius family gallop to the fore.  Rather like the Von Trapp family but less musical and with a distinct lack of Nazi’s.   Ophelia is just the sort to wear a dirndl skirt made out of old curtain material. She has accepted her father as her chief advisor on all matters and his fashion sense is, like the Norwegian attempts at pop domination, nul points.

 

Ophelia is now on the brink of a nervy b.  Not only is she wearing recycled pelmets in front of the whole court, but Hamlet has decided that as she has spurned and rejected his sixth form poetry and attempts at growing a beard, that she is the first person he is going to practice on in his attempt to be loon of the year.  She informs her father that Hamlet has been doing a lot of ‘staring’ at her, which as every school child in the Western hemisphere knows, is a sure and certain way of putting the willies up supply teachers everywhere. That Hamlet is a sly old fox.

 

Polonius scuttles off to see Gertrude and Claudius to inform them of the great staring incident of 1605 and suggest that in his learned opinion Hamlet has gone mad because Ophelia has shunned his amorous advances and he has not a hope in hell of getting his end away with anyone else at court because they’re all sick of the sight of him and his moody ways.  He also suggests his idea of lampshades as the hats of the future to Gertrude, but this only confirms her suspicions that he is a horse’s ass and has never even looked at the cover of Vogue.

 

Despite his diabolical fashion sense they feel that Polonius may be onto something with his whole Hamlet is a sex deprived lunatic idea.  They agree to Polonius’ plan, which is that they will force poor Ophelia to return all Hamlet’s etchings to him while Polonius and Claudius hide behind the arras and spy on them, just to make sure he is indeed as hatstand as everyone makes out.

 

In the meantime Claudius has sent for two of Hamlet’s university drinking chums, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to come to Elsinore and spy on Hamlet just in case there is something else going on.  He has achieved this by offering to pay off their student loans and promising that when Gertrude gets five minutes she’ll pop their dirty sheets in with the boil wash, and all will be well.  Two pints of cider later and it’s a done deal.

 

Hamlet, who as we know, is not really hat stand, well, no more than anyone who has spent the last eight years in Wittenburg thinking philosophical thoughts, failing to get a degree, drinking scrumpy and existing on venison flavoured Pot Noodles is wise to their ways.  He ratchets up the madness quotient.

 

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are enthusiastic amateurs when it comes to the whole spying business.  Their idea of subtly probing Hamlet is to leap about like cats on hot bricks, laughing nervously and then shouting: ‘Where are the 39 Steps?’ and ‘Are you really bonkers?’ Hamlet responds by stroking his ‘beard’ and making obscure references to Hitchcock films. R&G are baffled, they did not do media studies. They thought it would be easy. Now they’re worried they’re going to have to confess to their respective dad’s that they have spent all their money on rare bootlegs and a giant bong in the shape of Aristotle.

 

Ophelia in the meantime has been pushed into her meeting with Hamlet by Polonius wielding a giant broom handle and is not happy, not happy at all.  She doesn’t want to relinquish her etchings. The lampshade she is wearing as a hat does not lend her the gravitas she had hoped for and she has just found a spider in her pelmet.  It is hard to follow her father’s instructions to ‘act natural’.

 

Hamlet smells a rat.  He knows Ophelia would not normally be seen dead in chintz with fringing. He suspects Polonius, mainly because he recognises his study curtains.   He can also hear Claudius and Polonius coughing behind the arras, because that’s the one the slatternly maid hides all the dust bunnies behind when she can’t be arsed to hoover the great hall properly.  The cunning plan unravels spectacularly with Ophelia bursting into tears and running away and Claudius and Polonius running away to take an anti histamine and get frowned at by Gertrude for being juvenile.

 

Hamlet has had time to think and has decided that the ghost might have been ‘wrong’.  This would be handy as it would mean he wouldn’t have to summon up his inner, quite reluctant king murderer.  His inner procrastinator suggests this, along with the fact that the quickest way to sort out this whole mess is just to top himself and save himself the bother of coming up with some complex plans and then dying horribly later. Much less effort.  Hence ‘To be, or not to be’.  Because there need to be several more acts, he decides ‘to be’ for now and comes up with a fool proof plan to see if the ghost was in fact real and not a figment of his philosophically charged brain.

 

Some travelling players have come to court.  Hamlet corners them and chats enthusiastically about his lead role in ‘Whoops There Go My Bloomers’ by the Elsinore Strollers last summer.  They are suitably impressed.  He then suggests that they might like to enact a teeny little bijou playette that he has just penned entitled: ‘Claudius you’re an incestuous regicidal maniac and I’m going to kill you.’  It’s just a lighthearted romp.  The players agree enthusiastically.

 

While the play is being enacted Hamlet takes the time to punish Ophelia some more, as if wearing the Venetian blinds from the parlour weren’t punishment enough.  He suggests that she gives up being a femme fatale and gets herself to a nunnery.  She is considering it, merely for the fact that her father won’t be in charge of her wardrobe.

 

The play unfolds and at the moment of the poisoning Claudius claps his hand over his mouth and whispers: ‘You’ll never take me alive copper. Society’s to blame. I ain’t doin’ no bird.’ A sure and certain sign of guilt.  Hamlet is thrilled to bits and dances about shouting ‘We was robbed!’ and wearing his doublet as a hat.  The play ends in chaos and disaster with everyone screaming, crying and running around like girls.

 

Polonius seizes the moment to take charge.  Under normal circumstances this would fill everyone with a deep sense of foreboding, but the tea urn is being wheeled in and everyone is a little distracted.  Polonius suggests that Gertrude call Hamlet to her boudoir and try to winkle the truth out of him while Polonius hides behind the arras as back up if things go a bit pear shaped.  Everyone says yes just to get him to shut the fuck up and he trots away, chuffed to nuts.  You’d think he’d have learned by now.  This is the second arras plan he’s come up with, and the other one was shit.  His obsession with soft furnishings will prove his undoing. You have been warned.  Just look at what happened to Julie Andrews.  She had to marry a man wearing lederhosen and do a moonlit flit from the Nazis.

 

Claudius is running scared.   Now that Hamlet’s going to have his guts for garters he’s having a bit of a mid Evil Genius crisis.  He goes to the chapel to have a confessional moan about how it’s just not fair, and why does this have to happen to him, and where does it mention plays in the Evil Genius Handbook (£49.99)?

 

Hamlet is on his way to see Gertrude when he spies Claudius wailing in the nave.  He is just about to kill him when his inner procrastinator rises up and reminds him that if he kills Claudius now then Claudius will go straight to heaven, because he has confessed.  Hamlet is not impressed with this and wants the eternal fires of torment and wearing itchy hats on very hot days for Claudius.  He moves on.

 

Gertrude spends quite a lot of time telling Hamlet to ‘snap out of it’, convinced it is just a ‘phase’.  Hamlet spends quite a lot of time telling his mother she is being a strumpet.  Things are not going well when Polonius sneezes behind the bloody arras.  You think he’d have learned by now. Hamlet squashes his inner procrastinator and stabs him, thinking it is Claudius.  They unwrap the arras to find it is in fact the booby prize.  The only good thing to be said is that Ophelia’s fashion mistakes will now be hers alone.

 

Hamlet has cocked it up good and proper. He is just about to blame Gertrude when the ghost reappears and starts ‘woohing’ gently in the corner to remind him that Gertrude is the family strumpet and must not be abused.  Gertrude can’t see the ghost and is now utterly convinced that Hamlet is hat stand.  Hamlet then has the devil’s own job of explaining himself.  He manages to get Gertrude to face up to the fact that she is indeed a wanton, feckless man hungry old woman who should be utterly ashamed of herself, and that from now on, no matter how much Lynx Claudius uses she must remain firmly in her most unattractive pants or else.  He leaves her to think on, while he drags Polonius off to meet his maker.

 

Claudius is very cross that Hamlet has killed Polonius.  He had been banking on the fact that Hamlet was an ineffectual effete student with no more ability to kill him than Claudius has to exchange his crown for one of Polonius’s lamp hats.  This spells trouble.  He would like to kill Hamlet, but he is worried that Gertrude won’t do the jiggy with him anymore (little does he know) if he does, and it would be hard to explain to the peasants. 

 

He decides to get Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to take Hamlet to England on a mini break.  He gives them a letter of ‘introduction’ which actually says; ‘Dear Cousin England. Please kill Hamlet. He’s a bloody nuisance and I’m sick to the back teeth of him and his whining ways. Love Claudius.’  After running about doing finger paintings with Polonius’ blood and hiding his body in the broom cupboard as an ironic gesture to the dusty arras’ that festoon Elsinore, Hamlet agrees to go quietly and buggers off with R&G. 

 

On the way to the ferry he bumps into Fortinbras’ (see Sub Plot A) army who are all fighting over a desolate waste land full of turnips and burned out Skodas, all for the sake of honour.  Hamlet who is young and foolish and has yet to grow an adequate beard, falls immediately in love with Fortinbras and his martial ways and vows that when he grows up he is going to be just like him. Le sigh!

 

While Hamlet is wandering round Madame Tussauds and paying £8.50 for hot dogs at Tate Modern, Ophelia is back at Elsinore going proper mad.  She has abandoned all her curtains and is wandering around in her vest and pants singing songs that would make a sailor blush and giving everyone flowers that she has dug up from the palace gardens.  Gertrude is not best pleased, but given the circumstances is prepared to be lenient as long as she doesn’t rip up the poinsettias and keeps her vest on.  She has sent for Laertes in the hope that he can make her put some clothes on and take some dried frog pills.

 

In the meantime Hamlet has gotten bored of London, steamed open the letter from Claudius and decided not to be killed.  He substitutes the word ‘Hamlet’ for ‘Rosencrantz and Guildenstern’ and hot foots it back to Denmark on the first ferry feeling very pleased with himself.  Horatio meets him off the boat and they wander leisurely back to Elsinore through the grave yards of Denmark where they bump into two rustic grave diggers and the skull of Yorick, the finest jester in all Denmark.  They engage in a deep and meaningful philosophical discussion about dying and what to do about the tedious bit before dying.  It is all very wise and Horatio strokes his beard while Hamlet looks on enviously.

 

The grave diggers are bored rigid and get on with discussing that crazy noble bint who fell in the pond and drowned wearing only her vest and knickers.  This is the fate of Ophelia.  Hamlet feels a bit guilty, and even more guilty when one of the courtiers finds him and says that Laertes is home and is not best pleased about Hamlet murdering his family and can he come home now and fight a duel like a real man instead of poncing about playing with skulls and staring into the middle distance.

 

Claudius is furious that his plan to off Hamlet has gone wrong.  He has consulted the Evil Genius Handbook (£49.99) for plan b.  Plan b suggests that he persuade Laertes to put poison on the end of his rapier so that all he has to do is gently nick Hamlet and he is a goner.  He is now convinced that Hamlet is more slippery than floor tiles after a particularly enthusiastic power shower.  He decides to also implement plan b and a half.  He is going to use the rest of the poison (thrifty old bastard) in a wine/poison combo and toast Hamlet’s success. He will pretend to drink. Hamlet will drink, and Hamlet will be your dead prince.  If these plans go wrong Claudius is demanding a refund.

 

Laertes, who is usually an upright kinda guy, has had enough. He has the pox from spending too much time at the Moulin Rouge. The ferry crossing was terrible and a peasant was sick into his ruff, and he has the mother of all hangovers.  He agrees to Claudius’ plan.

 

Everyone turns up for the fight. Nothing good has happened since Ophelia drowned and everyone is bored.  Claudius toasts Hamlet.  Hamlet has decided to take Fortinbras as his model and practice health and efficiency in all things.  He spurns the wine.  Claudius is gutted.  He is even more gutted when Gertrude, who has frankly had one of the worst weeks of her life and is up to here with it all, decides to have a drink.  She dies slowly as the ‘men’ fight each other.

 

This gets Hamlet’s dander well and truly up.  If anyone was going to kill Gertrude it was him.  She was his strumpet.  He fights manfully. Laertes in the meantime has had time to rethink his position on the whole poisoning front. He has also seen that Claudius is a bastard who thinks nothing of poisoning his wife and realises that he may have picked the wrong team.  Too late. Hamlet wounds him mortally. Laertes has a death bed conversion and confesses that Hamlet too will soon die thanks to that scratch in round one and it was all Claudius’ fault.

 

Hamlet finally gets around to killing Claudius on penalties.  He takes a conveniently long time to die himself and manages to write his will, give a farewell tour, kiss the entire court and name Fortinbras as his heir before breathing his last.  Horatio is just tidying him up when Fortinbras, who was parking his steed when he heard his name and a mention of inheriting an entire country full of pigs and lager pops in to try on the crown.

 

The end

I’m Back

I’m back.

And I’m going again in a moment.

Have lots to tell you, but am absolutely shattered and need to lie on the sofa watching Top Gear and digesting a large Chinese takeaway.

I had a fabulous weekend.  The kids had a fabulous weekend and Jason had a fabulous weekend.

I have come back with blisters, hay fever and a stiff neck from dubious pillows, but it was worth it.

I hope you’ve all had a wonderful weekend.

See you tomorrow.

Greek Tragedy and Modern Tantrums

I have hair.

I always have hair.

But today my hair looks like hair.

This is good.

This is a vast improvement on the rest of the week where my hair has resembled a horrible chemical experiment involving nylon, naked flame and a lot of wind.  The word ‘unruly’ has been bandied about quite a lot.

I owe a debt of deepest gratitude to the woman who after only two hours and no noticeable sneering has turned my head into a sleek, blonde curtain of 100% bona fide hair.

It’s amazing how much better I feel about things.

It was very exhausting.  My strength was sapped as I sat there chatting inconsequentially about the weather, small children and holidays past and present with a bright smile on my face.

I came home and fell asleep on the sofa for three hours.  I just could not cope with being someone like Victoria Beckham.  She seems to get her hair cut, coloured and styled every couple of hours.  I would be like the dormouse in the teapot, but very chic.

In other news, Tallulah has just thrown an almighty temper tantrum after an hour of steadily ratcheting up her evil levels until she is all the way up to eleven.  The school disco is in five minutes time.  She will not be attending.  This is insanity writ large.  It is such a shame that to her, the slim prospect of ‘winning’ is way more attractive than giving in and doing as she is told in order to get what she wants.  She gets this trait in spades from UE.  I remember one particular argument in the last death throes of the marriage where he had said something so horrible and patently untrue that even he had the gall to look a bit taken aback.  I said: ‘It’s more important for you to win than to let me be right isn’t it?’ To which he said: ‘Yes.’ What can you say to that?

We both feel awful about the disco, and all the other things we have had to take away from her in the last few weeks, but the promise of ‘having’ things just does not seem to work.  It is all too nebulous for her, or so far away that it loses its lustre against the all important rush of being in charge of the immediate situation and having power right now.  I get it, but it can’t be allowed to flourish unchecked or she will turn into a monster and end up encased in the concrete footings of a motorway bridge.

Phedre was good.  Firstly I understood it.  I am always a bit unsure of myself when I go to see something ‘old’.  In particular this play being a translation from Greek to French and then to English.  Luckily it was translated by the late, great Ted Hughes who knew a thing or two about plain speaking.  He refrained from stuffing the play full of dead stoats and stuffed fish.  This was good.  I loved the language.  It was clear and easy to understand but beautiful and poetic.  I am now really looking forward to seeing it again.

It was a good ensemble piece although I did not like the chap who played Theseus much.  I think he’d taken the Ted Hughes theme a bit to heart and was rather too bluff and hearty for a man who slaughtered the minotaur and stole away with a foreign princess.  I kept expecting him to bang a flagon of ale on the table and demand pie and pud’n.  Helen Mirren was excellent as entirely expected, and Dominic Cooper (who is the latest totty, the boyfriend in Mamma Mia) was much better than I expected.  Although, as Andrea pointed out, I had very low expectations to start with.

The other thing of note was the medium we watched it in.  It was all very experimental.  It was the first ever live broadcast of a play, beamed into cinemas across the globe.  I do not usually like watching filmed theatre.  It just absolutely deadens things for me and I generally avoid it like the plague.  Here it worked as well as I could have hoped for.  There were five cameras, which meant that it wasn’t just filmed ‘flat’, and allowed for things like close ups, which was good.  There was also the noise of the audience at the National, and the audience in our cinema which gave it much more of the live ‘buzz’ that is part of the adrenaline rush of going to see theatre.  I really enjoyed it.

Apparently they’re going to do three other screenings in the future of other plays.  I’m up for it and I really didn’t think I would be.  It was nice to be pleasantly surprised.

I can feel my feeble strength waning.  I must go and find my teapot.

I will be back on Sunday.  Tomorrow I am off to the shiny lights of London for more theatre.  The Cherry Orchard in the afternoon, a light supper at Simpsons on the Strand and an evening of Duet For One with Juliet ‘All Hail’ Stephenson in the evening.  It’s a hard life, I know, but I struggle on.

The Hunting of the OAP

The train to Hamlet has been delayed.  There are leaves on the line.

Maybe, maybe I maybe might be getting round to it tomorrow, but who knows.

Today I have mostly been a) going to my therapist, b) coming back from my therapist and c) recovering from the therapist.

I now have twenty minute’s peace, in the loosest possible sense of the word peace, before the Ocado man descends, and I have to make tea with whatever random things I have ordered from him this week.  Probably tooth powder and worming tablets.

I am going out at five o’clock.  Andrea and I are just popping to the next county to see Helen Mirren doing her filmed version of Phedre.  It had better be good.  The tickets were more expensive than the Travelex offers to see it live at the National.  I am also going to see it at the National, but not until next year, so this will give me about six months in between to work out what the bloody hell was going on.  Nice one.

Today I am being Outraged of Glenfield because Tilly has brought home one of the stupidest pieces of homework ever in the history of ever superceded only by:

• a science project on building your own pipe bomb
• a economics project on starting your own crime family, understanding the drugs and prostitution racket
• a history lesson on how to revive slavery and child labour in first world countries

The school is being rebuilt. 

I know.

It seems like a giant waste of tax payers money to me.  It is a perfectly good school.  Somewhat sprawly, but other than that perfectly adequate.  The class rooms are not too cramped, there is lots of space and the grounds are good. Despite this, they have seen fit, in their infinite wisdom to spend most of next year building a new school on what are currently the school playing fields.  They are then going to knock down the existing school buildings and turn them into playing fields.  I just don’t get it.

Anyway.  In order to celebrate the fact that they’re going to wipe the old school off the face of the planet in a gratuitious display of wastage they have decided to do a project on the old school.  They have sent home a note asking the children in Tilly’s class to go round the village finding old people and interviewing them about what they remember the old school being like ‘in their day’.  They have very obligingly mentioned that parents should accompany the children.

Even Matilda, who is much more socially integrated than the rest of us, thinks that this is a frankly bonkers plan.  Jason won’t even let the kids do Trick or Treating on Halloween because it frightens the elderly.  He’s hardly likely to endorse this.  He doesn’t have to, because I’m not playing.

I have written a note:

We have only lived in Glenfield a short time and we do not know any elderly people who live here.  Nor am I prepared to allow Matilda to go and find any.  Nor am I accompanying Matilda on a random field trip around Glenfield on the hunt for old people.

I feel that this is a very ill conceived piece of homework which some elderly people will find intimidating and which also puts even more pressure than normal on busy parents who have neither the time nor the inclination to trek around the village looking for pensioners.

Gah!

I am such a grumpy old lady, but honestly. It’s bad enough that I have to participate in homework that is normal and just involves me sitting round the kitchen table making the children cry by my failure to see why it is so hard to spell the same word the same way every time you write it down. 

Why would I want to spend what little free time I have roaming around looking for people who are probably going to ask to see my card, call the police or hit me with their stick?  In the worst case scenario I will hunt down all the old people who either a) only moved here last week or b) have alzheimers and can’t remember what happened last Thursday let alone when they were whipper snappers.  They will undoubtedly want to make me tea, which I don’t want to drink.  There will probably be smells as well.  It is all too horrible to contemplate and I don’t want to do it. 

My friend Jo has said this before, but I completely agree with her. It is not fair to get primary school children to do all this homework, because it isn’t primary school children who actually do all the homework, it is primary school children’s harrassed parents who do all this homework.  And the only reason that primary school children in this country get homework? Because our system is so unutterably poor, that the teachers cannot teach reading, writing and arithmetic adequately in the time they’ve got because of all the bloody stupid SAT’s, reports and useless bureaucratic targets they have to reach.  French school children don’t start school until they’re nearly six.  Then they only do four days school a week and spend most of that eating lovely lunches and having a lie down, and they still outperform our children by miles.  It’s all cock.

I’m thinking of declaring Chestnut Road an independent republic and starting my own school at the bottom of the garden.  It will be called the ‘do what you like as long as you don’t harrass your mother and ask her what 8 times 6 is when she’s trying to cook the tea’ school.  Any takers?

I have added to the note that if they want to give her black marks for failing to do her homework they can give them to me instead.  I don’t mind bringing home a bad report.  My parents gave up on me long ago.  I still haven’t had a steady job for more than twelve months and I finished my degree nearly twenty years ago.  I’m a lost cause already.

‘Looming Hamlet – The Interval

Righty.  It’s time for Hamlet Part Deux, The Revenge.

 

I am writing this because I am now finding that having committed myself to print over part one, part two is looming in a Mitfordesque way.  I have decided that Hamlet has loomed over lots of my life thus far and I have had enough.  It is time for the holy exorcism of the internets.

 

There will be several problems with part deux.  The first being that I have only managed to bring myself to sit through the first half of Sir Kenneth of Branagh’s epic five and a half hour slog so far.  I keep promising myself I will watch the rest, but after a hard day at the coal face of child rearing and ignoring fetid bathrooms I find it not as soothing a proposition as it was at eight that morning when I was vowing to be refreshed, invigorated and turn over a new leaf.

 

The second is that I consoled myself with the fact that I have, only a matter of months previously, been to see David Tennant as Hamlet and therefore it shouldn’t be too hard a job to remember the rest of the play.  It turns out that I was deluding myself.  I sat down to think about what I remembered.  Here is the transcript, fresh from the brain:

 

‘Ummm! I wonder if that man really likes Hamlet or he’s just a Sci Fi nerd in a tweed jacket?  Ohhh! That’s quite a good seat.  Thank God! Oh no! I’ve lost my contact lens down the back of my eye.  Aarrrghghh! I wonder if I’ve got time to go to the bathroom before it….Oh crap! No. Shit! Ow! Arghhhh! Oh my God, that’s better! Right, better concentrate on the play.  Ahhh. Nice floor. Glad I don’t have to polish that.  I hope Ophelia has stout pants on because everyone’s going to see them (she did).  Oh! Doesn’t David Tennant look nice in a dinner jacket? He is really rather handsome isn’t he? Oh, Patrick Stewart. Ummm. He’s aged well.’ Etc, etc, etc for about three and a half hours, with a small stop in the middle for cake.

 

So. No joy there.

 

Third thing is that the weather is good and the children are swarming all over the garden smothered in sun cream, bits of dead grass and water.  This is supposed to be the therapeutic bit where I become a relaxed 1970’s mother and sit, drink in hand on the deck whilst they make hay and eat boiled eggs without much supervision.  I have the lap top. I have the drink.  I do not have the peace.  I now wish to throw boiled eggs at their heads and hide in the Buddleia crying.

 

They have clearly not picked up the notes for relaxed 1970’s style living.  So far Tallulah has flooded the kitchen, poured water over one of the chairs and brushed her hair into the paddling pool whilst filling it with rocks and dead worms.  Matilda has refused to go in the water at all and has spent half an hour applying sun cream laboriously only to sit in the shade eating fruit and complaining that I am not letting her eat the right kind of fruit.  Oscar has complained that it is not appropriate for a boy of his stature to go in the paddling pool wearing only pants and vest.  He has squeaked into his Sportacus wet suit and then anguished over having to take it off every twenty minutes when he wants a wee.  He has now abandoned it entirely and they have all flooded inside to watch the television.  I do not have the will power to resist them.

 

It has taken me an hour to type this.  The keyboard is covered in sun cream and I now have to start thinking about tea.  Hamlet will have to continue to loom for the foreseeable future.

Hamlet Part One by Katyboo

Hamlet is long, as those of you who tuned in for the introduction will be aware.  I am also long.  Between us this is fatal.  To save you the bother of having to send out for Red Cross food parcels and Anusol I have chopped it up into bits.  Here is part one. Part two is currently in my head.  I will be extruding it later.

Hamlet is set in Denmark. Denmark, in modern times remarkable only for its bacon and lager, was it seems in Tudor times remarkable only for its incestuous marriage practices and its lager.  It is the general consensus that Denmark is about as much fun as Skegness on a wet bank holiday weekend, and contains about as many drunk people.  It is clear that it did not feature in the Tudor Times list of ten best long weekend destinations.

 

If we take as our base line that nothing, and I mean nothing, nice ever happens in Denmark, all will be well. It seems the Danes may have started all those rumours about the high proportion of suicides, depression and a general devil may care attitude to personal happiness that have dogged the Scandinavian peoples ever since.  It’s probably all that salty bacon coupled with the all pervading damp.

 

We arrive in Elsinore, home of kings, ale and pigs just in time for some royal festivities.  Those of you who have read King Lear and know a thing or two about tragedies will now be plunging your head in your hands and groaning. It is going to be one of those parties; restraining orders, murder on the dance floor, champagne buckets full of vomit and damp party poppers.

 

The old king, Hamlet, died two months previously whilst having an afternoon nap in his orchard.  Given that every stage production of Hamlet I’ve ever seen has emphasised bad weather, storms and snow, it seems that he probably died of pneumonia brought about by being a stupid bastard.

 

As we join the fray, his queen, Gertrude, has just married her dead husband’s brother, Claudius.  There is much congratulating to their faces, and much muttering about syphilis, in breeding, children with ten heads and rueing the day behind their backs. 

 

In those times this kind of dalliance with dead husband’s brother’s was considered to be incest, and was just not the done thing. It is in fact pure filth, but nobody is allowed to say anything because amongst the aristocracy it was de rigeur to have perverted sexual passions.  It was common knowledge that old King Hamlet had a thing about Cox’s Orange Pippins being stuffed where the sun don’t shine. Which is probably why he spent so much time in the orchard.

 

It also helps that the new King, Claudius has the pointiest sword in Denmark, and is of course in charge.  King in Danish translating as: ‘Man who can do exactly what he likes, or else. You ain’t seen me, right?’  The only person who is vociferously standing about in the middle of the room shouting ‘Incest! Incest! You’re all committing incest! You bastards!’ is Prince Hamlet, son of the old king and Gertrude.  Hamlet is not happy, and by God he’s going to let everyone know about it.  Naturally Claudius is not best pleased.  It’s bad enough that he’s inherited a stepson, a brooding malevolent stepson is the icing on the cake.  Serves him right for committing incest.

 

Because of the mutterings about incest, Hamlet making himself a bloody liability and the fact that the proles aren’t very keen on Claudius, security measures have been upped for the celebrations.  On this night the Watch are doing a sterling job of watching, despite the fact that it is absolutely hammering down and nobody in their right minds would even send a dead dog out in weather like this.  They are like Eagle Eye Action Man, scanning the snow, listening to the storm and being beady.

 

Just to liven things up it appears that several members of the Watch have seen a ghost, dressed in full armour and looking very spooky indeed.  They are not impressed at all.  First they thought it was a drunken wedding guest pratting about in a sheet, but now they’re just not sure.  As if they didn’t have enough problems with getting the wet snow out of their halberds.  They think it might be a bad omen.  They’re sharp these watchmen.

 

Marcellus who is a top watch bloke, appears with Horatio who is Prince Hamlet’s bezza mate.  It is not clear what Horatio who is a bit of a toff, is doing hanging out with the lowly Watch in a filthy storm.  It all sounds a bit dubious to me.  Either Horatio has a thing about men in uniform or he’s hoping they have some CCTV footage of the parlour maids getting changed.

 

They all have a bit of a chinwag about the nature of ghosts in general.  They’re clearly devotees of Most Haunted because none of them say; ‘Ghosts! Bah! It’s just a question of too much ale and Danish Blue before bedtime.’  As they are huddled round some snow flakes giving each other the willies, the ghost appears.  Horatio, who is quite manly, demands that it speak to him.  The ghost, naturally ignores him.  It is a ghost, it’s not like anyone can do him any harm now.  After all, what’s the worst thing that can happen? Clearly it hasn’t seen Poltergeist.  It fears no midgets with tennis balls covered in KY jelly.

 

The ghost buggers off, shaking its armour and leaving half the Watch with the urgent need to change their trousers.  Horatio and Marcellus decide that this ghost is the spitting image of old King Hamlet (as I live and breathe) and rush off to tell Hamlet that something’s up.

 

In the meantime Gertrude and Claudius are busy holding forth at their nuptial celebrations.  The carpets have been rolled back, Claudius has done his We Are The Champions karaoke special and his best impression of the Karate Kid standing on one leg with bacon wrapped round his head like a bandana.  They are having a lovely time when Hamlet jnr comes along to ruin things by scowling and being petulant and making jokes about incest and rubbish step dad’s and how they’re not a patch on real dad’s who buy their sons real iPods instead of cheap imitations off the market, etc, etc.  He even sneers at the sausage rolls.

 

Hamlet is one of those smart arse kids who has an answer for everything.  All the hip young courtiers think he’s cool because he can crack a good pun and talks a lot about sex.  He gives everyone over the age of twenty five a nasty headache and the urgent need to be somewhere else.

 

Hamlet has a very large chip on his shoulder.  His father, who he was quite keen on, has just died.  His mother who he used to be quite keen on (possibly in a Freudian way, so watch out for ladders and train tunnels) has now married his uncle, which as well as being gross because mothers are supposed to be too old to have fancy men, is also incestuous, as half of Elsinore continually points out to him, even if he’s only popped in to borrow a cup of sugar, and he hates Claudius with a vengeance. 

 

He has been dragged home from university in Wittenburg to attend the marriage.  His mother hasn’t done his washing because she’s too busy kissing Claudius by the arras and Claudius has refused to pay off his student loan or let him go back to uni, pointing out that it’s time he stopped arsing about with philosophy and drinking snake bite and got a proper job.  Things are not going well for Hamlet at all.

 

Hamlet does not believe in hiding his light under a bushel and seems to be pursuing a fine old career of whinging and moaning, moaning and whinging and generally putting a damper on the festivities when Horatio and Marcellus hove into view and tell him they’ve just seen the ghost of his dad putting the wind up the Watch.

 

We shall leave them there to pursue sub plots.

 

Sub Plot One – Fortinbras

 

Prince Fortinbras is the son of the dead king of Norway.  Old Norway and Old Hamlet had a big fight over a dismal lump of land in the middle of butt fuck nowhere at one point in the distant past.  Norway got soundly thrashed and had to give up the land and any sense of self worth he might once have had as a king.  Fortinbras, who sleeps in armour and thinks that philosophy is for wimps has decided that ‘Death Before Dishonour’ is the only way. He plans to to steal the land his dad lost whilst indulging in a bit of pilfering of other bits of Denmark he fancies.  He hopes everyone in Denmark will be too busy looking up pictures of babies with two heads wearing crowns on YouTube to stop him.  He’s in like Flynn.

 

Claudius is utterly pissed off about this, because what with weddings and dead brothers and recalcitrant step sons he’s got more than enough to deal with.  He’s got four hundred drunken guests sleeping in the spare room and he doesn’t need to be thinking about power crazed Norwegian princes at the moment. 

 

Claudius sends envoys to tell Fortinbras’ guardian (Fortinbras is only twelve. Very precocious child) what he is doing and asks him to smack Fortinbras’ behind and take away his sword for a week.  They’re going to need a bloody big naughty step for this one.

 

More of this later:

 

Sub Plot Two – The Polonius Family

 

Polonius is advisor to Claudius.  He is a pompous twit and a half who uses nine hundred words where silence is preferable.  He has two children, Ophelia and Laertes.  Laertes is, like Hamlet, a student.  Unlike Hamlet, Laertes is a mild mannered boy studying decadent French ways in Paris.  He hates Denmark and just wants to go back to his baguettes and the Moulin Rouge.  He appears, looks fabulous, charms everyone and makes Claudius wonder why he ended up with the duff step son, and buggers off back to Paris.

 

Ophelia has been being wooed by Hamlet.  She totally falls for his saturnine good looks, his naughty tongue and his cheap philosophical arguments.  She also likes the way he looks in pixie boots. She doesn’t get out much and frankly everyone looks like a sex god in comparison with the rest of the population of Denmark, who all smell of bacon.  Hamlet has been to Wittenburg.  He knows a thing or two.  He’s cosmopolitan.  He could show a girl a good time.

 

After the party while Hamlet has rushed off to don his ghost busting suit and remembering not to cross the streams, Polonius finds out that Ophelia and Hamlet have been having a thing.  He is outraged of Elsinore.  This is not good. He is a toady, a lackey and a fawning fool.  He cannot have his daughter shagging the heir to Denmark’s throne.  What if she gets knocked up? He can just see the headlines now: ‘Stepson of Incestuous King Knocks up Palace Totty and She’s not even Posh! I Blame Broken Home Says ‘friend’ of Family!’  Polonius is aghast.  He will not get all his marbles in the jar and Claudius may not allow him sweetie time this week.

 

He chastises Ophelia with a firm hand and threatens to disinherit her and send her to live in a swamp if she doesn’t shun Hamlet immediately.  No more hiding love bites with some toothpaste and some cunningly draped scarves for Ophelia. Being a good girl really, she capitulates instantly and goes off to cry in her room for a week.

 

Back to the Plot Plot

 

Horatio, Marcellus and Hamlet are in New York City library pursuing a ghostly librarian. No. No. They’re in the middle of bleak old Elsinore waiting for Hamlet’s dad to turn up, which is not half so much fun.  Eventually the old king pops up going ‘wooooooohhhh!’ and everyone craps themselves.

 

After the initial shock Hamlet runs off to confer with his spooky dad.  Old King Hamlet (as I live and breathe) finally deigns to open his mouth.  He tells Hamlet that he didn’t in fact die of pneumonia, nor indeed from a nasty incident with an apple.  No. It was worse than that.  It turns out that naughty old Claudius had had his eye on a shiny crown and a woman with big bosoms whose name begins with G for a very long time, and poisoned Claudius by pouring poison in his ear while he was snoozing amongst his lovely apples.

 

This just shows you a) how wicked Claudius is and b) how very dedicated he is to the ways of evil.  He has surely done night school classes? There have got to be easier ways of offing a king than pouring poison in his ear hole. It’s a tricky old business that smacks a bit of ‘It’s late. You’re tired and you’re beginning to show off.’  All that practicing to win the pass the hoop over the wire game without letting the buzzer go off at the village fete has finally been vindicated.  Nobody’s going to call him Claudius the loser and use his arse cheeks as a toast rack now. Oh no!  Nobody suspected the old poison in the ear routine.  Ha!

 

Baby Hamlet is horrified and rather puffed up with his own importance at being right.  He sticks his chest out and struts around like a horny pigeon performing for the laydeeez. His spidey sense has been utterly vindicated.  He is the win.

 

Baby Hamlet then saddles up his teenaged high horse, being utterly scathing about his mother’s total failure to believe him, and to keep her knickers on.  He has behaved impeccably and is above reproach, while she, she is just a strumpet in a wimple. It’s an outrage.

 

He is striding up and down in the snow, pontificating and Old King Hamlet is starting to get a headache, which seems a bit unfair given that he is a ghost, and he’s been murdered.  He puts his ghostly foot down with a clang of armour.  He reminds Baby Hamlet that she might be a bit of a floosy, but she’s their floosy and he’s just going to have to live with it or feel the back of OKH’s gauntlet.

 

Then he drops the bombshell.  He reminds BH that it is his duty, his honour and his homework to teach Claudius a valuable lesson about poisoning stray kings and marrying their foxy wives by murdering him most foully.  He wants a big, dramatic death because not only is being poisoned in the ear frankly quite humiliating, but because Claudius did it while he was recovering from a tete at tete with an orange pippin, OKH died unshriven with all his appletastic sins upon his soul.  This means instead of going to king heaven and striding about on his cloud with all due pomp and circumstance and a bevy of handmaidens, he is suffering agonies of torment in limbo until he can pay for all his scrumpy sins.  He is not a happy camper.

 

This takes the wind out of Baby Hamlet’s sails and no mistake.  He didn’t realise he was actually going to have to do something.  He had envisaged running round the battlements with his chainmail over his head shouting: ‘Ha! I was right!’ and then having a small nap.

 

It turns out that BH is not very good at doing things.  He talks the talk, which is how come he’s doing philosophy, but he is not a walker of the walker.  He is more a lying the lie and having a little snooze before Eastender’s omnibus.  This is why he has been at university for six years already and never handed in an essay.  He is, what is known in the trade as a procrastinator.  This is his Aristotelian fatal flaw by the way, for those of you who have done the reading.

 

OKH is not very impressed with this and demands action, blood, and no lying down at all.  He stomps off back to limbo.  Horatio and Marcellus finally hove into view and find Baby Hamlet in the middle of the biggest ditherspaz of his life.  They decide he has clearly gone mad and offer him a dried frog pill and a lie down.  Hamlet is vehement that he is absolutely not allowed to lie down.  The others are even more convinced he is mad.  They have a dried frog pill even if he won’t.

 

BH comes up with a plan.  He likes the ‘mad’ idea.  It is a ‘get out of jail free’ card.  It means that he can do whatever he likes and get away with it. He wonders why he didn’t do it before.  He will pretend to be mad and this will give him time to work out how the bloody hell he’s going to murder the king when the most physical thing he’s ever done is a bit of light pruning and holding a lady’s scarf.  He swears Horatio and Marcellus to secrecy and they all wander back to the castle for a light nuncheon of four day old vol au vents covered in bits of party popper.

Like the Curate’s Egg, Good in Parts

It has been a day of two halves mostly.  I have spent some of it feeling terribly overwhelmed and unutterably sad, and some of it feeling quite happy after all.  Luckily I am in the happy phase and hoping that the sad phase is fading into distant memory.  It is the way forward.

Tempting though it is just to write endless reams about more children’s books I have found as I have been moseying round the shelves this afternoon I will use my time to catch you up with various ongoing events in the Boo household, mainly so I don’t read this back in thirty years and think, ‘Well! Did we ever do anything about that or not?’

On the Jason front things are kind of o.k. but not really.  The weekend went as well as could be expected given the fact that we knew it would be horrible.  Things were scattered, disagreements were few and muted, and the levels of horror and abysmalness were low lying and all pervasive but manageable.

It turns out that the sheltered housing that everyone has been worrying us with isn’t in fact sheltered housing at all, but is the sort of housing they advised us would suit MP best when we were in Norfolk.  In Norfolk they call it assisted housing.  The stuff where you get your own place but there are medical staff and carers on site 24/7 should you need them.  In Cornwall they clearly don’t call it assisted housing, which is why, when we were asking about it everyone treated us like we were especially stupid and swore up and down that no such thing existed.  It is probably called Poldark or Tin Mine or some other such Cornish Piskie like shite, anyway, who cares?  It exists, it is available, everyone is very hopeful that MP will get it because it appears that he is a ‘prime  candidate’. 

It turns out that the nursing home want to get shot of him because they have seriously elderly people with dementia on waiting lists and can charge more for the room because these poor buggers need more care.  It turns out that the Piskie Housing People are desperate to have him because they’ve got frail old buggers who are a total danger to themselves and everyone else living in their flats because there are no places available in nursing homes.  Another tragic indictment of a failing social care system. Yay!  Still, I suppose if we lived in the States it would be just as horrible but be bleeding us dry at the same time.  In theory it should be but the work of a moment to swap everyone around so that they can live happily ever after, or slightly less horribly than before.  In practice it will take months of arsing about and pointless paperwork.  Still, it may happen in our life time, God be praised.

Jason went back to work yesterday to find that one of the chaps he works with has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer and has till Christmas at best to live.  He is upset because he really liked the guy and he’s young and has a young family, which is horrible in itself.  He’s upset because he’s dealt with enough cancer in the last few weeks and frankly his cancer cup overfloweth at the moment.  He is also upset because they have given him all this chap’s projects to do and his work load effectively tripled yesterday.  As it is he is working overtime every weekend in July to try to claw back some of the money we lost while he was away in Norfolk.  Now he’s resigned to a lot more work and a lot more overtime and did several hours last night and tonight and is doing a night shift on Thursday as well as a full day’s work on Friday.

The good thing is that his job is obviously as secure as anyone’s is in the current climate. 

As if this weren’t enough he had a call last night from the man who is looking after the garden for us while his mum’s house is on the market and needs to look presentable.  When he went over to the house yesterday he was passing the barn and noticed a hideous smell permeating through the doors.  The power supply to the barn had tripped out and the chest freezer had defrosted itself.  Nice one. 

He hadn’t checked through the kitchen window in the house to see if the freezer in there has done the same.  I dread to think. 

Jason was not entirely with it when he spoke to gardener guy.  Then when he tried to call him back about looking through the kitchen window to at least ascertain whether he needs to drive down there to fight a kitchen full of slime and putrescence, the bloke has decided he is not answering his phones.  If we can’t get hold of him by tomorrow we will have to call the Estate Agents and get them to go and have a look for us.

If the power is out, the freezer will need attending to fairly urgently.  Gardener guy has offered to do the one in the barn, because stinky though it is, it is only frozen fruit and can go on the compost heap.  The one in the kitchen has all kinds of things in it.  The weather is now glorious, which is nice in an ironic kind of way.  Just the sort of weather you want to be thinking about rancid water, rotting meat and flies.  Yummy!

I have counselled spending money on a disaster recovery cleaners.  My brother used to work for one and they do this kind of thing all the time.  Jason is not keen on the cost.  I pointed out the eight hours round trip, the festering ick , the smell and the need to transport everything to the tip, which is a twenty five minute drive down twisty country lanes with a car full of putrefying food.  He is coming round to my way of thinking.  Particularly because I am off to London for the weekend and he will have to do it on his own if he needs or decides to go.  Mum has agreed that if he has to go she will have the kids, as the thought of them dabbling around in puddles of mouldy food is not appealing.

I swear to God that every time I think we have managed to get over a major hurdle in this situation and that things will only be mildly crappy and annoying, some other sodding thing pops up out of the woodwork to thwart us.    It is like being possessed, and not in a good way.

Then there’s next week.  MP’s relatives have managed to get time from work to come to Norfolk and collect the stuff he wants.  This joyous event will be taking place next Friday.  This means that Jason has to take the day off work, drive down to Norfolk on Thursday night and spend all day Friday helping to pack the van because he has to go and open up the house and make sure everything goes according to plan.  Another day of lost pay, more work in every sense of the word and more time spent haring half way across the bloody country to somewhere else he doesn’t want to be.  If he has to go there this weekend to sort out rotting crap that will just about be the icing on the cake.

I have said that I will take the children out of school next Friday and that we will all go to Norfolk together.  The kids can frisk about annoying everyone and I will be able to provide another pair of hands to sort out the stuff for the van so that hopefully it will all get done sooner and we can all go home.  After that short of the boiler exploding there isn’t really anything else that can go wrong with the house.  She says, just as we find out that it is the only house in Norfolk built on the San Andreas fault.

So, dark days still ahead of us on that front I’m afraid.  Dark and probably smelly.  Nice.

On the other hand, the sun is shining, the weather is glorious and the paddling pool has been aired two days in a row.  We have eaten outside on both days too, which I love.  In fact, today we have mostly lived outside because I found the mess in the house too depressing.  I decided that rather than stress myself out by slaving away with the mop, I would go outside, turn my back on the French windows and look out at the rank and unweeded garden instead.  Much more satisfactory.

My lost book was found by Tilly.  It was down the back of the sofa.  The same sofa that the day before I had removed all the cushions from to look for my book.  Further fuel to the fire of my belief that spiritual revenge was being taken for my evil treatment of the children over the weekend.  I now have two copies of the book and will be sending one on its first leg of the literary round robin to Henri at some point soon.

Oscar has been a delight today.  He has roamed about the house playing space ships with wooden bowls on his head and space guns made out of bits of the Kitchenaid mixer.  We had lunch on Mars and ate space tuna sandwiches and moon juice.  It was all very satisfactory.  When he got bored of that we took the big lounge rug outside and turned it into caves and crash landing mats, and jungles and all kinds of things.  Then he played learning to drive, which also involved the wearing of bowls on heads for some reason.  He got very melancholy at one point and sat on the bottom step of the stairs plangently saying ‘But I have not got any friends to play with me.’  Apparently I am sub standard as a friend and what he really wanted was Tallulah to magically appear home from school.  Naturally when she did get home from school he roundly ignored her for most of the evening except when he tipped a bucket of water over her head after tea.  She shrieked about this until we pointed out that she had spent the last half hour with her face underwater in the paddling pool attempting to dive for treasure, so it wasn’t like she was any more wet.  Foiled, dammit!

Granny came round for a few hours and we sat in the sun eating chocolate biscuits and being entertained by small children and it was all rather lovely and bucolic.

As long as we don’t get any more emergency phone calls it promises to be quite a nice evening.  Please god don’t let this be a famous last words.

An Epic Post About Children’s Books

Children’s books are probably my favourite type of book to read.  When I was a kid my mum read a lot of children’s fiction and I thought this was really odd.  Why would you want to read children’s books when there were so many interesting looking adult books to read?  At the time I was about ten and moseying my way through Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie and Alistair Maclean, along with four hundred million Mills and Boon books that my best friend’s mother used to bring home from work in carrier bags.

 

That’s not to say that I didn’t read age appropriate books as well, I did.  But let’s face it, ‘Five on Kirrin Island’ pales into insignificance next to ‘The Guns of Navarone’.

 

As I grew older I began to come round to her way of thinking and widened my repertoire somewhat.  Now I think that children’s publishing is one of the most interesting areas of literature and there are some fantastic things being written which are just too good for children, frankly.

 

At the weekend Amazon Vine, the review programme I write for, sent me a book called: The Squirrel’s Birthday and Other Parties’ by a Dutch Author called Toon Tellegen.  It is a tiny, flimsy thing full of exquisite short stories with the most delightful illustrations by Jessica Ahlberg.  It is a jewel of a book.  The stories are whimsical and slightly melancholic, but with a real air of magic about them.  Not wizardy type magic you understand, although there’s nothing wrong with that, just an aura of the fantastic that makes reading them feel like eating syllabub.  They kind of melt on your tongue and remind you of wonderful meals you’ve eaten before.

 

There is something about the stories that reminds me of Tove Jansson’s writing in The Winter Book, which I also love dearly.  Anyway, if you like that kind of writing I highly recommend it, and it would make an exquisite gift for a grown up or a child.  It’s just lovely and I am now in eager anticipation of more of his stuff in translation.

 

It made me think that it’s time for a list.  A list of some of the best children’s books I have read, old and new, that work for me as a grown up.  Whether they’d have spoken to me when I was a child in the same way I don’t know, but if you fancy a cracking good read then this is what I recommend.  This is not an exhaustive list by the way.  It might seem like it, but I bet there’s some absolute belters I’ve forgotten.  I may update it later.

 

I will start by briefly mentioning the two behemoths of kid’s publishing who were responsible for the explosion in the children’s book market, J. K. Rowling and Philip Pullman.  Everyone recommends them.  They’re a marmite thing. You either love them or hate them.  I love them both.  Rowling is vastly underrated by ‘serious’ people in my opinion.  Her books are well crafted, her stories are superbly told, and she deserves every last drop of success.  Pullman is for my money, the better of the two writers.  His Dark Materials is superb, although I thought The Amber Spyglass was a little uneven.  His series of books about the Victorian detective Sally Lockhart are also brilliant.  My only complaint is that he writes too slowly.

 

Oh yeah. And if you like those you should definitely read Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising sequence, because they’re what I used to read before Rowling and Pullman came along.

 

Right, that’s them out of the way.  Now to my other picks:

Skellig by David Almond – Not just one of my favourite children’s books, one of my favourite books full stop.  Almond is a powerful and inventive writer who has a wonderful sparseness to his prose that is almost poetic. He writes about the big stuff, life, death, birth, violence, religion, magic and love.  I love all his stuff, but this is the one that gets me every time.  Hankies at the ready. It is about a young Geordie boy whose parents are spending most of their time in the hospital because they’ve just had a premature baby.  The boy hooks up with a girl whose mother home schools her, and in this temporary family the children discover a man who claims to be an angel living in their garage. I haven’t done this book justice. Just trust me, and read it.

 

Millions by Frank Cottrell Boyce – Cottrell Boyce is a genius.  All his books are fantastic and I was hard pushed to choose between them, but this is the first one of his I read and it blew me away so much that I just had to pick it.  Millions is the story of two young brothers who have just lost their mother to cancer.  They live with their dad who is doing his best to cope, but the boys find their own ways to deal with grief.  The oldest becomes obsessed by becoming a millionaire.  The youngest turns to God and develops an obsession with saints, particularly martyred ones.  He sets up a hermitage in the bottom of the garden so he can become more saintly.  One night when he is down there, a huge bag full of money falls through the roof of the hermitage.  The book concerns what the children then do with the money.  This book is hilarious and heart breaking.  Another one where I found myself crying, but with both laughter and sadness.

 

Love That Dog by Sharon Creech – This is a slim volume that is a kind of poem story. Don’t let that put you off.  It’s another absolute heart breaker of a book. I have bought so many copies of this book because it never comes back when it gets borrowed, and everyone, but everyone I have ever recommended it to comes back to me to tell me a) how much they loved it, and b) how much it made them cry.  It will take you less than an hour to read and stay with you for the rest of your life.  It is all about a young boy at school learning to appreciate poetry and writing about his experiences with his dog.  It’s genius.

 

Private Peaceful by Michael Morpurgo – I have now come to the realisation that there is a theme running through my choices here, heart break.  If you follow my recommendations, do not crack the spines of any of these books open without a box of Man Size Kleenex handy.  This too is devastating.  This is the story of two brothers torn apart by the First World War, one staying at home to look after the farm, and one sent off to fight in the trenches.  It tells what happens when the soldier refuses to follow orders and is court martialled.  If you like this you should also read The War of Jenkins Ear, also by Morpurgo, which tells the story of the friendship of two boys at a harsh boarding school, and what happens when one of them declares that he is in fact, Jesus.

 

Mistress Masham’s Repose by T. H. White – Any book which starts with the words: ‘Maria was ten years old. She had dark hair in two pigtails and brown eyes the colour of marmite, but more shiny.’ Is always going to be a winner in my book.  This is a fantastically funny adventure story about an orphan girl, an evil villain and a bunch of Lilliputians. 

 

All About The Bullerby Children by Astrid Lindgren – Lindgren is most famous for creating Pippi Longstocking, but she was a prolific writer, and as well as creating a flying boy called Karlsson and Emil the naughty boy who got his head stuck in the soup tureen, she wrote a series of books about some Swedish farm children who lived in a hamlet called Bullerby.  The book takes you through the year with the main character Lisa, who describes the exciting events in a child’s life like getting a dog, having a tooth pulled, celebrating Christmas and all kinds of pastoral events. I loved this book as a child. My copy is second hand from the library and is falling apart at the seams because I have read it so much. I still love it now and read it to my kids who also love it, even though it is hugely old fashioned.  It’s out of print and I pray that eventually someone will get around to reprinting them before my copy falls apart properly.

 

Five Dolls in a House and other stories by Helen Clare – This is another ex-library book which I had as a child and is also out of print.  I cherish my copy because these are as rare as hen’s teeth. I really do not understand why it is out of print, because it is so funny and imaginative and just wonderful.  It is all about a young girl called Elizabeth who believes that when the front on her dolls house is shut, that the dolls come alive. One day the toy monkey that lives on the roof of the dolls house tells her that if she wants to go and see the dolls all she has to do is walk down the path, wishing herself small, and when she knocks on the door she will be.  She does, and the door is opened by Vanessa, the head of the household who believes that she is the landlady who has come to collect the rent.  The stories about Elizabeth and the dolls are so funny and the dolls have such fantastic characters.  Lupin is stuffed with cheap material and not very good at standing up. She spends a lot of time slumped over the piano in a blue wool vest.  Vanessa is an old wooden doll with a feather in her bonnet. When she is cross her feather bobs up and down very violently.  Amanda is very naughty, and when she runs off and marries the monkey who spends all his life shouting rude, cockney things down the chimney Vanessa is in uproar.

 

The Children of Green Knowe by Lucy M. Boston – There are a lot of books in this series, although they can all be read out of turn.  This is the first one I read and my favourite, closely pipping The Chimney’s of Green Knowe to the post.  Boston wrote these as a series of children’s ghost stories.  They feature an ancient house called Green Knowe, which really was Boston’s own house and which people can still go and visit by appointment (I would love to go).  The stories are set in the 1950’s (I think) and involve the current children of the house meeting their ghostly contemporaries. Each book deals with a different period of the house’s history and usual has some kind of mystery attached.  They are gentle and old fashioned but also have a darkness which really makes your spine tingle.  In this book the hero is Tolly, who comes to Green Knowe for the first time in the school holidays when his parents are abroad to visit his great grandmother.  The house turns out to be a kind of castle and as Tolly explores he becomes aware of three children who are also in the house with him.  These books are dated but beautiful and a dream to read.

 

The House That Sailed Away by Pat Hutchins – Morgan’s granny has come to stay with the family in London after slipping on some soap flakes in a ball room dancing competition and having to give the first prize (tickets on a pleasure cruise) over to her friends.  The family are trapped in the house with granny one rainy day when they notice that the rain has got so intense that their house has broken away from the rest of the houses in their terrace and is floating down the road.  They eventually end up going to sea and meeting pirates and cannibals and having the most hysterical adventure.  This book used to make me cry with laughter and is still worth a read.

 

The Adventures of Nicholas and the Gang by Goscinny and Sempe – This series of stories about the naughty French school boy Nicholas and his gang of friends have recently been republished by Phaidon in some gorgeous cloth bound editions.  They’re not cheap but they’re worth it.  These short stories are hilarious and my children beg me to read them.  Nicholas is such a wonderful narrator, never quite understanding why all the adults are so exasperated with him, and the cartoons by Sempe are just the icing on the cake.

 

The Eagle of the Ninth by Rosemary Sutcliff – Sutcliff wrote historical novels for kids way before it was the fashionable thing to do.  This is the first in a trilogy of novels about the Roman Empire and its occupation of Britain and is a cracking adventure story about bravery, derring do and retrieving a lost Roman Legion Standard from the wilds of Scotland and its barbaric rebel tribes.

 

Angus, Thongs and Full-Frontal Snogging by Louise Rennison – I bought this book for Tilly and read it to see if it was suitable.  I laughed my ass off and then bought all the others for myself.  Georgia Nicholson is a self obsessed teenage girl with an overactive diary.  Imagine Adrian Mole but more savvy and a girl.  She picks her way through the minefield of school, best mates and dating unsuitable boys whilst dealing with the horrors of being related to elderly people and having small siblings.  Very, very funny.  Mindless, but funny.

 

How I Live Now by Meg Rosoff – This is a strange, unsettling and powerful book about a fifteen year old American girl sent to England to stay with relatives she has never met, just as global warfare breaks out and she and her new cousins have to learn to live in a brave new world.  Set in an unspecified future with an equally unspecified enemy it has echoes of 1984 but with more hope.  Beautifully written, very disturbing and another tear jerker.

So mail me. Tell me what I have forgotten and what your favourites are so I can go out and bankrupt myself immediately.  If it’s Horrid Henry or Jacqueline Wilson please spare me the anguish, otherwise knock yourself out.