The Path of True Love Never Ran Smooth

Oscar has an admirer.

There is a little girl at nursery who absolutely adores him.

She is a bit older than him and moved up to the big class about six months ago.  Now that he has also moved up there they have had a blessed reunion.  She is delighted about it all.  He is a boy.

She follows him around a lot, calling his name and trying to embrace him.  He stumps about, head down, busily examining the carpet and pretending that he has no idea what is going on.  It is all too much for him.

She is absolutely exquisite. Huge, liquid brown eyes, dark curly ringlets and a mouth like a cupid’s bow.  She is a delicious looking child. 

He does not care.

He does not dislike her.  It is just that she does not really register as important to his life.

I feel that this is a shame, because if he decides that girls are his thing, she will undoubtedly turn out to be a stunning young woman, and by the time he is old enough to fall for her, she will not be in the slightest bit interested in him with his breaking voice and bum fluff and teenage acne.  It is a missed opportunity.

On Thursday when I dropped him off for the morning she flew over from what she had been doing and tried to hug him.  He shuffled away.  She called his name and followed him eagerly.

I hung his bag on his peg and turned to say goodbye.  At this point she was bending over to kiss the back of his neck.  He stood stock still like someone faced with a charging rhino and knowing that there was no hope but to pretend they didn’t exist and think calm thoughts.

On Friday afternoon we were cooking tea and I asked him if he liked this girl.  We will call her Felicity.  He was very non committal about it and did the whole Gallic shrug number.

Jason asked if he liked kissing Felicity.  He stared at us sideways, managing to look slightly horrified.

He said, after a huge amount of thought: ‘Nah!’ in a very diffident voice.

Jason asked him if he liked kissing anyone else.  Another long silence, a bit of toe scuffling and then ‘Nah!’ once more.

After that he looked up and said:

‘I like Jake best!’

Jason said: ‘Do you like kissing Jake?’

To which he giggled and said: ‘Nah!’

Another pause:

‘Jake is my favourite. Jake is good.’

Jason said: ‘Why is Jake your favourite?’

To which Oscar got very animated and said, his face shining with joy:

‘Jake is my favourite because he is the best at running and he is really, really fast like this!’

And zoomed off to show us just how fast his favourite person was.

So you see, running is way more fun than kissing any day of the week and if more boys remembered that there would be significantly less teenage pregnancies in years to come I feel.

Saturday 13th June – Hope Springs

I have to confess that on paper today did not look good.  My friend Andrea with whom I am subsidising the resurgence of popular theatre in the UK, had bought tickets to an amateur production of Return to the Forbidden Planet for us and my girls as their birthday treat.  For those who don’t know, Return to the Forbidden Planet is a musical which uses both the popular hits of the fifties and sixties and the plays of Shakespeare to tell a story about true love, aliens and rock ‘n’ roll in deep space.  It is quite bizarre at the best of times, at the worst of times it could be terrible.

To the threat of amateur theatrical disasters was added the fact that this extravaganza was in Birmingham, and that we were going there by train.  All manner of things could have gone horribly wrong.  Plus, I was feeling like crap and the kids have been playing up all week.

If you had given me the option of the day above or being poked with pointy sticks in a coal cellar with commentary by Tony Blackburn I’d have had to think long and hard before making my choices. I was not optimistic.

Nevertheless, in the Boo household we rise to a challenge, so we did.

And all things considered we had a great day.  It was just one of those days where everything aligned beautifully with no effort at all.  The queue for the tickets at the train station was manageable and swift, the train was early into the station with plenty of room for us and actually left on time.  Even better, when I stopped at the coffee stand to pick up something drinkable before boarding, the bloke took a shine to the girls and gave them a free ice cream each.  We were astonished, astonished and grateful.

 Andrea was meeting us at a station further up the line, which had the potential for all sorts of disaster but actually went swimmingly.  The kids were really well behaved and didn’t whinge or run about screaming.  In fact things went so well that to begin with Andrea and I were even more convinced that it meant that pure evil was sure to await us further down the line.

We got there with an hour to spare, found that the theatre was two minutes walk from the station and actually managed a very profitable half an hour in Borders and then a trip to Hotel Chocolat where the kids got free chocolate to boost their by now dipping sugar levels.

At the theatre they got given more free sweets, three times in fact, and were offered more, but by then I had to draw the line because they were beginning to get a bit beady eyed.  I expected protest but even they realised what an exceptional run of luck they’d had and decided to keep schtum.

The play was hilarious for all the wrong reasons, but the kids loved it because they didn’t see all the terrible bits and we loved it because we did.  It was fantastically bad on the grandest scale and provided two hours of stellar entertainment to the point where I now have bruised ribs where Andrea nudged me so many times.  It was just the ticket, and by god you had to give them points for enthusiasm.

Afterwards we schlepped off to Selfridges food hall and spent a delightful hour filling our faces at the Morelli’s Gelato outlet eating ice cream sundaes as big as our heads.  Tilly ended up with a chocolate moustache to rival Dali and Tallulah was practically nose down in hers, happy as a pig in muck.  We adults behaved in a much superior fashion, eating and eating and eating until we felt sick.

When we were suitably sticky we upped and trotted round Pedlars, The White Company and Cath Kidston making covetous noises and wanting lots and lots of lovely things.  I sometimes despair that my children will ever be civilised, and then I spend a day like this with them and I have hope once more. Not for long, but just enough to keep me going until the next time.

An unexpectedly fabulous day

Friday 12th June – First, Freeze your Rodent

I have spent my day sighing on the Chaise Longue of Death, coughing consumptively and wincing.  Occasionally I have staggered to the kitchen to eat chocolate covered malted milk biscuits and drop crumbs down my cleavage.  This is mostly all.

I did think about doing things, then when I actually did something, like make a nourishing tea for the children I was so hungry and greedy I burned my mouth on a bit of garlic bread and have given myself a blister. This is a valuable life lesson. I should have thrown the takeaway menus and a tenner at them and given them a taste of what it will be like when they move out.  I certainly should not have attempted to do anything.  I was a fool to myself.

Nothing exciting has happened.  I have read another three hundred pages of Hilary Mantel.  I have watched Michael Woods waxing lyrical about Beowulf in the British library.  I have dozed.  It was a spectacular day.

Just to show you that even when the CLD is calling I still remain eagle eyed and eared for the delectation of my readers I must report that dropping Tallulah to her classroom this morning was a most singular experience.  One of the mother’s had brought in a frozen baby mole in a tupperware container.  It appears that she thought this might be of interest to the teacher and her class.

Naturally it was of almost obsessive interest to the class. The teacher looked about as enthusiastic as if someone had offered her a gilded turd.  The mother picked up on this general aura of disapprobation and said in a very fierce voice: ‘It only came out of the freezer this morning!’ like that made all the difference in the world.

I was quite impressed by her brio.  Tallulah wanted to take her stone collection in this week and I said no, fearing it would be too stressful for all involved.  I may have to reassess the situation now that it seems all the rage to wander into school with rodent shaped icicles.  I hate to miss out.

Oscar’s new class at nursery has a guinea pig called Elvis.  I wonder if they would miss him?

Thursday 11th June – HIPY PAPY BTHUTHDTH THU HDA BTHUTDY.

I am feeling crappy.  My throat hurts, everything tastes like bog and I feel like someone has carefully been shrinking my head, but leaving my brain the same size.  I have several theories as to what this is:

• One of my infrequent and always unlooked for bouts of hay fever which I get when the pollen count is stratospheric.
• A healing style crisis bought about by intensive therapy followed by floods of tears and 2lb of best Australian chocolate, neat.
• Man flu.
• Real flu.

I am undecided.  I don’t really care.  I would just like it to resolve itself and leave me alone in peace with my other 2lb of best Australian chocolate.  I clearly have important things to do. I must not be diverted in my quest to be heavier than I have ever been just as summer demands skimpy and ridiculous apparel and there is nowhere to hide.

I am taking every pill I can find and doing a little light moaning.  It is helping a bit.  It will help more when the children are in bed and I can commandeer the television controls.

It has made today quite hard.  I had things to do. I went to town after dropping the kids at their various institutions in order to do these things.  I did most of them, although it seemed to take forever and I spent large amounts of the morning standing in queues dreaming of cups of tea and a little lie down.  I got home feeling reasonably pleased with myself only to find that I had forgotten to go to the railway station to pick up tickets for Saturday when I am taking the girls to Birmingham.  Arse.

The kids have been vile, viler and vilest.  I am so unutterably weary of their crimes I cannot even be bothered to go over them with you.  I am just shutting that part of my brain down.  They have now been banned from speaking to each other as they cannot seem to even have a shower without trying to rip each other’s heads off and spit down their respective necks.

One of the things I did manage to do was chip away at some more of Tallulah’s impressive and slightly surreal birthday present list.  She has written it in pale grey pen on white, otherwise I would scan it for you.  As it is what I need now is for someone to invent a font called ‘child’s handwriting’ with lots of backward ‘s’s’ and ‘z’s’ so that you can appreciate it in all its glory.  As it is I will transcribe it.  All notes are my own work:

Tallulah’s Birthday List:

make up $et ($ = backwards ‘s’.  I am not convinced.  There is still nail varnish on the skirting boards and the last time she was let loose with eye shadow she went mad with the navy blue and looked like she had a black eye for a week)

A new bu$h babby (these are the cuddly lemur things from Madagascar.  She has three. She takes them everywhere. She wants more.  She is planning to decorate her entire bedroom with them eventually and burrow into the middle like a giant but vicious mole)

fake earrigs (At first I read it as ‘earwigs’, obviously glad they would be fake, but still not keen.  Then I got it. All earrigs will be Mrs. Jones’ department. She also does real earrigs for those who prefer them.  She is very talented, she may well be able to make earrigs in the shape of earwigs should you so desire.)

some jallry (I believe this is jewellry. In my book this comes under fake earrigs, but she may have different ideas.  I have not elicited what this random jallry is.  I am afraid to find out.)

cd (she doesn’t care what it is apparently.  She just wants one.  I’m thinking Proust, maybe a little light Sylvia Plath. Something cheering and suitable for small children like the Rach 3, or Sousa Marches if she prefers music)

pot (not weed. I asked what she meant by pot.  She just threw her hands in the air, gave a gallic style shrug and said: ‘well, y’know, like pots and stuff. Nope.)

Clodz (this means clothes after a five minute interrogation, again, no further instructions seem to be necessary. Anything will do)

Shoze (shoes for your fiyt, that go with your clodz)

ptend shop (thank God she doesn’t want a real p’tend shop)

pencil and pot (apparently granny has a gorgeous pot in which she keeps pencils. I have been instructed to view and buy the same. I am passing this particular duty onto granny, as no doubt it came from a box of misc at a local auction and is both vile and utterly unique).

toy cat (this started out life as she was describing it to me as a ‘fake’ cat.  I asked what a fake cat was, thinking it was bound to be a) on the telly, b) electrical in origin, c) crucially important to get the right one and d) wildly expensive.  It turns out that she just looked at me witheringly and said: ‘I think you know what a furry toy cat is don’t you mama? Which is why she changed it to toy on her list.  One must throw the odd crumb or two to the aged p)

sallatape (made out of recycled cellars, or sellers)

sisas (to cut the sallatape with)

dollys (unambiguous until you realise that I will undoubtedly pick the wrong one. See toy cat above. No further information was forthcoming.  She was very bored of my questioning by this point)

She knows she will not get everything on her list.  She very generously told me that she has given me a lot to go on because she knows it might be quite difficult to get everything (at least I can be grateful for a get out clause).  I can farm some of the stuff out to relatives who have more time and patience for these things than me, but I did feel obliged to try quite hard to get some of the things.  I managed clodz and sallatape and the toy cat.  This is good.  I am impressed.

It goes from the ridiculous to the gorblimey in this house.  Tilly’s list is utterly precise and Tallulah’s is so vague as to be worthy of a politician’s speech.  I don’t know which is worse.  Actually I do, Oscar has been insistent for the last week that when it is his birthday he is having a drum.  I asked him if he wanted anything else and he just said: ‘No. Drum. Drum. Drum.’ At least I know where I stand.  Apparently he is not happy to have his drum but keep it at granny’s house either (damn). I have until October to divert him.  I am not hopeful.

Wednesday 10th June – Chocolate Caterpillars

Today I have been to my new counsellor again.  She is brilliant.  This is why I feel like I have fallen into a combine harvester and cannot string sentences together.  I have also gone through the Glenfield tissue mountain and come home refusing to cook.  Jason has gone out to buy chips to sustain us through my long dark night of the soul.  He is a good husband.  He is being kind because I suffered Metallica Guitar Hero on the Wii at volume 11 without complaining.  I now know all the words to Enter Sandman and am developing a peculiar fixation for Lars Ullrich.  Not because I think he is handsome, just because I cannot seem to get him out of my brain.  Still, it is preferable to thinking about flooring again.

On a brighter note, I got a High School Musical dressing up box extravaganza with all the tags still on from the local charity shop for £2.  This is going into the Tallulah birthday fund and will ensure approbation from middle child and husband.  For different reasons obviously.  I know you have seen photos of him dressed as a school girl but even he draws the line at cheerleader with pom poms.

On an even brighter note, Sharon’s amazing, spectacular parcel of chocolatey goodness has landed, all the way from Australia.  I don’t know if I am more impressed with the interior of the parcel which is packed full of chocolatey goodness and some lovely books for the kids, or the exterior which is a collage of Christmas stamps all emblazoned with the glowing face of Cheezus himself.  It is absolutely brilliant and there is hardly an inch of space left on the parcel.  I am so delighted with it, I am seriously thinking of chopping the front of the parcel up and framing it.  It is superb.  So thank you, thank you, thank you, o wonderful lady for your benificence.  Plus the card you made is absolutely beautiful.  I am feeling very blessed indeed.  And I know that Cheezus is smiling on me, because I can see him from my desk.

Update on the caterpillar front.  They have arrived.  Luckily they come in a container with airholes which also has enough food for them to turn into chrysalids without me or Tilly having to engage in caterpillar handling.  I am very grateful.  We have five teeny, tiny caterpillars which all converse in much the same voice as the ant on the bus earlier in the week.  They are currently residing on the top shelf of one of the many bookshelves in the study.  This is because they must not be traumatised, shaken, turned upside down or exposed to strong sunlight or eager siblings.  This is the safest place we could find after Tilly vetoed my idea of letting the neighbours keep them for us.

The five caterpillars have been christened.  They are called , Albert, Jennifer, Sylvia, Colin and Tiger.  I don’t know why Tiger is Tiger and not something sensible like Cedric, but there you go.  Colin is the hot favourite at the moment as he is very athletic and keeps trying to climb up the sides of the jar and make a bid for freedom.  The others are just sitting in their food at the bottom of the jar desultorily weaving caterpillar silk and thinking sad thoughts.  We have three to five weeks depending on temperature until the chrysalid moment takes place.  Tilly got excited and thought that Colin might be an early developer and be starting already.  I pointed out that it wasn’t three to five minutes.  That Colin is going to be trouble.  I have my beady eye on him.

Right, the chips are here and I am going to eat and cry and eat and cry and eat some more.

But in a good way, right?

Tuesday 9th June – What may possibly be the most boring post in the world ever

I have housewife’s brain today.  It is a rare condition,  in this house it is anyway.  I am hoping I will be recovered by tomorrow.  I don’t know if it’s catching.  Best not to come round until I am sure. I don’t want anyone else getting it.

Housewife’s Brain is a horrible disease where your mind loses the ability to think about the fact that you’d really like to see Juliet Stevenson and Henry Goodman in Duet for One and maybe you can steal someone’s pension money for a ticket.  Or it fails to get excited about the fact that there is a new series of Supersizers Go… starting next week and you are going to Sky Plus it because you have a little crush on Giles Coren AND Sue Perkins.  Or the fact that you are now finished this batch of library books and can get back to reading the very excellent, ‘A Place of Greater Safety’ by Hilary Mantel.  No. No. No.

Instead of that your brain starts to spend hours of its spare time thinking about things like, ‘what constitutes an appropriate floor covering?’ when there are five of you in the family and four of you think that wandering about with jam and dog widdle on the undersides of your shoes is perfectly acceptable, nay an ordinance from Mount Olympus.  I have decided, after hours of heated internal debate that the perfect floor covering for voluminous and adhesive families has not yet been created.  How do I know this? 

I know this because as I have pottered around the confines of my life today I have been thinking about it, and every time I have tried to think about something else I have ended up by bringing the subject back round to flooring.  In fact the only time I wasn’t thinking about flooring was when the evil boy from two doors down stood on his shed roof and dropped two water bombs on Oscar while he was innocently using the trampolene and I nearly burned the dinner because he had hysterics and I thought he had burst his bladder and was dying.  Then I had a murderous rage and an inner sneaking respect for evil boy from two doors down.  I decided not to act on the murderous rage and merely rescued the child and the dinner while sending Jason round to speak to the boy’s mother and let her find an outlet for her murderous rage.

Otherwise I have mostly been thinking about floors.  I am going to share my thoughts on the rivetting world of floor coverings now.  You will probably be as bored as I am by the whole thing, but the difference is that you can go away and read someone else’s blog whereas this is what it is like inside my head.  Worrying no?

Floors As I See It – Katyboo B.A. Hons (not in flooring)

Wooden flooring is good until you realise how much dirt accrues on the surface and has nowhere to hide.  The only place it has to go to is on the soles of your feet, which leads to crunchy floor syndrome, which is just as annoying as Housewife’s Brain, but more crunchy.  Hence the name.

Carpeting is better, as it only crunches under exceptional circumstances.  The problems with carpeting are that once you have had wooden flooring you realise how many acres of crap gets mulched into the weave on an, in our house, hourly basis, and how lounging decadently on the floor will never be the same again.  There is the other problem in our house that I only really like cream carpet.  I do not have to even begin to explain what a foolhardy undertaking this is.  The only suitable colour of carpeting for gargantuan families is what is known in the trade as ‘Student Housing Brown’,  swirls are optional.  Carpets are good on stairs because they deaden the noise of the largest, heaviest footed family in the world thundering up and down three flights of the damn things.  On the other hand, hoovering the stairs is second only to cleaning welded pooh out of the toilet in my top one hundred list of household jobs I would rather gouge my eye out with a spoon than undertake voluntarily.  You see my dilemma.

There was a time when jute and sisal and other floor coverings made from old grass clippings were all the rage.  These were an acceptable shade of brown, due to being ‘natural’.  They were also quite funky looking and promised to be hard wearing.  Hard wearing for people who use hover boards to get around, as I found when I delved deeper into the murky world of woven grasses.  Hard wearing if you accept the fact that they stain at the drop of a hat, that they go mouldy if you so much as drink a glass of water within a five mile radius of them, and that they require specialist care in much the same way as say, hair extensions.  Add to this that it is more comfortable to sit on a pile of gravel chippings at the side of the M25, that the weave imprints itself on any surface it comes into contact with, including granite, and the fact that it cost roughly £800 per square metre, and you will see that it is in fact as practical as covering your floor in say, baby rabbits or rolled gold.

Linoleum also had a revival a few years back.  Linoleum, the hideously flecked, wierdly springy floor covering beloved of hospitals, lunatic asylums and wipe down S&M clubs up and down the land.  Fancy a fifties revival night? Buy some linoleum.  I remember Kevin McCloud waxing lyrical on the ‘new, improved’ linoleum which you could have dyed four thousand different colourways and inlaid with the grinning faces of the dead presidents of America, or the entire Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles including Splinter, should you so desire.  It was new, it was old, it was crazy fun on a roll.  I refer you to the problem of being £800 per square metre and the fact that I have never met anyone under the age of 85 who actually owns even so much as a square centimetre of the stuff.

If you don’t like linoleum you can always go for vinyl flooring.  Vinyl flooring, which comes in all shades of the rainbow as long as you want it so shiny that looking at it leaves you with retinal scarring and a strange sense that the floor is undulating.  Very bad if you are drunk or very tired, both default settings for new parents.  Yes, vinyl flooring is both inexpensive and wipe clean.  It is also ugly, flammable and invariably seen in that chequerboard pattern that people hope will turn their house into Blenheim Palace.  It doesn’t.  If you drop a hot sausage on it you are done for.

Stone floors are nice.  Stone floors are lovely as long as you don’t mind spending your child’s entire toddlerhood in A&E fending off aggressive social workers and having to eat off of Tupperware for the next fifteen years.  If they are nice stone floors they also require a measure of TLC which is astonishing given the fact that stone is one of the hardest substances in the world and usually has to be blown out of quarries with lumps of semtex.  I vetoed terracotta flooring when I realised I would have to spend more time on its beauty routine than mine, and as for limestone or slate, let’s not even go there.  They should have stone floor spas and respite centres where weary owners can drop in for a break from the relentless round of polishing, feeding and nourishing that they are required to undertake nine hundred hours a week.

Tiled flooring is an option.  It is an option if you hate your children and want to see them slip up in a mighty ‘whoops! There go my bloomers!’ style way, shortly before exploding their craniums all over it.  Tiled floors are fine as long as they don’t get slippy.  Small children, rather like piglets, are born slippy and stay slippy, except when they are sticky.  The solution to having tiled floors successfully therefore, is to cover them in jam before treading on them.

I thought about the rubberized flooring they have in Leisure Centres up and down the land, with its creepy texture and its grippy, yet gritty qualities.  Just thinking about it made me think of  verrucas, and then I was a little bit sick in my mouth. No.

Then there’s Flotex.  Flotex was all the rage when I was a young whippersnapper.  They used to show adverts for this wonder carpet in which some crazed housewife would nonchalantly throw four tins of minced Spam, some gravy and a dead dog on the floor, poke it with a stick, jump on it, and then be amazed as with a mere wipe of a cloth this delightful mixture would just spring up from the floor like a vampire repelled by garlic.  It was a miracle of carpet innovation.    I was always suspicious due to the fact that it was always sold in shades of Student Housing Brown with swirls, presumably to hide all the spam stains that actually liked it in the flooring.  When I was a teenager we moved into a house which actually had Flotex carpet in the kitchen. It was absolutely rancid and actually smelled of dead dog.  It had the texture of a plug of matted hair you find in the drain of the shower when you stay in a boarding house, and frankly it was so grim I’d rather have stood on raw sewage.

Then we get to my favourite type of flooring.  Leather.  I once watched a programme where the uber effete interior designer Laurence Llewellyn Bowen persuaded a couple to give him several thousand of their English pounds to purchase leather flooring.  Laurence couldn’t quite believe his luck when, because he was intimidating them with his flicky hair and they were nervous because they were on telly they said yes.  Before they could change their minds he hot footed it up to Bill Amberg’s shop somewhere in deepest London, and bought yards and yards of leather to lay all over the floor.  Bill himself, although slightly stunned, rose to the occasion magnificently, pointing out that although it was £2000 per square metre you could look on it as an investment really, and the good thing was that leather responds well to brutal treatment.  He showed this by pouring a glass of red wine directly onto a leather floor and inviting us to look with awe at how the wine stain in the shape of the Cape of Good Hope merely patinated the flooring and made it more loveable.  He adjured LLB to rush back to his hysterical clients and invite them to defecate on their new flooring and then scratch it with rakes to make it look more lived in.  Success.

This, this is the type of flooring I need.  Unfortunately cladding every floor in Mr. Amberg’s leather would be slightly over our budget, although just the job should we ever become insanely rich, or just insane.  So as we are neither it is not an option.  I did think about moving into a cow, but as the leather is on the outside this is no good either.  Plus it might be a bit dark and then I would have to start thinking about lighting.

Oh God! Please do not let me spend tomorrow thinking about crap lighting.  I am very bored of having housewife’s brain and am hoping that I will be better by tomorrow.  Apologies for the post, but a problem shared etc.

Monday 8th June – I Want a Penguin Licence

Today has been a day of jobs and chores, chores and jobs.  Nothing exciting to report except that I remembered to pick up Branagh’s Hamlet and Pride and Prejudice with Zombies from the sorting office. When I will actually get around to viewing them with a critical eye is anyone’s guess.

Rather than list the tedious chores I thought I’d give you vignettes of my day with the children.

• Oscar is rather lovely today.  He has now caught the King Julien fever the rest of the family has been exhibiting for some time.  He is also an excellent mimic.  He has responded to most things today by striking a pose and saying: ‘You silly billy penguins!’ in a perfect King Julien voice.  It has made me laugh every time.  So, of course, he does it more.
• Tilly is brewing a new obsession.  UE bought her an unsuitable birthday present, as is his wont.  He decided that what a ten year old girl needs most is a double cd of Monty Python The Final Rip Off.  I don’t mind actually, as I’d infinitely prefer to be subjected to Monty Python than Jacqueline Wilson for example.  We have been listening to some of it this afternoon and if she isn’t accusing me of ‘repressing her’ in the next few days I will eat my hat.  She was also entranced by the Fish Licence sketch.  I have to confess to laughing out loud to this one.  I haven’t heard it in about ten years, but for me anyway, it hasn’t deteriorated at all.  I feel that many things in Tilly’s life will now be named Eric.  Still it can’t be as bad as when she went through the Goon Show phase and insisted on calling everyone Bluebottle.
• Tallulah took great pleasure today in telling me that a dog came into the playground at lunch time and everyone stood round and watched it take a dump by the drain pipe.  She is so impressed by this story that it was the first thing she told Jason when he got home from work.  He was as impressed as me.  When the tale didn’t quite have the impact she had hoped for in terms of ‘wow’ factor she waited for a few moments, chewed her sandwich thoughtfully and then said: ‘It was so good, all the teachers came out to watch as well.’  There you have it.
• On the favourite Boo theme of pooh, Oscar needed me to escort him to the toilet to kill some vampires today.  After a particularly hefty grunt followed by a resounding plopping noise he giggled and said: ‘That sounds just like thunder!’ He was very impressed with himself.
• On the bus on the way home from town today Oscar spent most of the journey telling me a very long and involved story about an ant who was coming on the bus with us and who needed to buy a ‘teeny, tiny, ant ticket’ so that he didn’t get thrown off the bus, presumably by the dictatorial ant bus conductor.  It was excellent.  I was particularly impressed because it actually had some kind of vague narrative thread, and he did all the ‘teeny, tiny’ ant voices as well.  It was much better than listening to all the vicious thugs and crack addicts complaining about their social workers and was the most tolerable bus journey I’ve had all year.
• My best friend e-mailed me this morning to tell me that she is sending me some live caterpillars through the post.  It is not because I upset her (we are in times of economic crisis.  Nobody can afford horse’s heads these days), but because she is sending Tilly a butterfly hatching kit for her birthday and she has ordered some live caterpillars to go with it.  At first I was slightly hysterical about this, although very glad of the warning.  I cannot imagine opening a box of live caterpillars at the breakfast table without being forewarned, except to say that it would not be very soothing to the nerves.  Then I remembered the trauma of receiving the antarium or whatever it is you keep ants in.  We had it.  We had no ants. Cue Katyboo spending the afternoon with her arse in the air, clutching a teaspoon and chasing ants round the garden for four hours.  Horrors.  No. Much better to receive your caterpillars docile and contained in a postal type way.  I am just not up for caterpillar hunting at the moment.  I have not told Tilly what is winging its way towards her.  Needless to say, given her extreme clumsiness and penchant for emptying things down her sleeve, I am going to be opening that particular parcel when it arrives.  Spoilsport? Yes. Insane? No.

Sunday June 7th – Partay PLUS JEWELS

Eight o’clock and I’ve just finished scraping the last bits of coleslaw from the kitchen table and hoovered up the crumbled remains of a secret stash of Nachos from between the armchairs in the lounge.  Lucky for me I discovered the abandoned plate of prawns under the sofa a few hours ago or things would be getting pretty desperate about now.  The party is over.

This is a good thing.  It has been nice, but I need to lie in a darkened room and never to think about icing again.

This is the first year that I can remember that the day of Tilly’s party has been wet.  By wet I mean monsoon like with torrential downpours all night and for large parts of the morning.  Properly wet.  Not even the hard  core barbecue enthusiast would go out in this sort of weather. 

This proved somewhat problematical at first.  Our house is tall but not large.  When more than three children come over I solve this problem by throwing open the French windows and moving out onto the deck and into the garden space.  Nachos and prawns are much easier to dig into flower beds than out of cushions.

The children were beginning to mount up and there was nowhere to put them.  I had visions of them rampaging around my bedroom, which is VERBOTEN, but not really being able to do anything about it, due to my need to be crouched over a hot oven cooking mini pizzas and swearing.

Jason saved the day.  He got out the Wii and the microphones and let them massacre the greatest hits of Hannah Montana and High School Musical.  They loved it.  It was hideously loud, but it kept them all contained in one space long enough for me to finish the catering and barricade the bedroom doors.  By the time they had all contracted laryngitis, the lawn was beginning to dampen off and they all hurtled outside.  It was a rather squelchy solution, but better than having them squashed cheek by jowl in the kitchen with the grown ups.

There were lots of presents, lots of catch ups, lots of food and the kettle was on a constant boil.  I always feel I haven’t got enough food.  Then when it’s all laid out I’m convinced I will be eating picnic eggs for the rest of my life (and I don’t even like them).  Then, by the time everyone leaves I survey the carnage and realise it was about right after all.  This year was no exception I am pleased to say.  My friend Saj is convinced I am part Indian because of my compulsive need to feed everyone until they burst.  I’m down with that.

I started cleaning bathrooms at ten this morning.  By eleven I was onto the kitchen and preparing food.  Everything was on the table for one o’clock.  The last guest left at half seven.  It was good.  I am satisfied.  More importantly, number one daughter is satisfied.  But I am now partied out.  This is a shame because I will have to do it all again in a month for Tallulah.  Still, I will no doubt have found my secret party reserves by then and all will be well.  Thank God Oscar was born in October.

Tilly was a very happy birthday girl.  All the presents worked out wonderfully and she was utterly delighted with everything, including the dungarees and the red cardigan, which I have been having my doubts about ever since the fateful day I laid out cash for them. 

It has to be said that her favourite items were the jewels we purchased from the ace blogger and all round top jeweller Mrs. Jones.  Mrs Jones has a totally awesome website where you can purchase her jewellry.  It also has the best name ever, The Venerable Bead is so very brilliant.  It always makes me smile because it reminds me of the excellent book 1066 And All That in which the Venerable Bede is constantly referred to as the Venomous Bead.

Anyway, as you may recall, Mrs Jones offered to help out when I was bemoaning the lack of lovely clip on earrings, and how expensive the few pairs I could find actually were.  It turns out that because she makes every pair of earrings on her site herself, it is but the work of a moment to replace a pair of backs for pierced ears with backs for unpierced ears, and thus all the pairs of earrings on her site were ours for the taking.  Plus, if you can’t see any you like (very unlikely given her huge range), or you have ideas for a pair of your own, she can also help by making you your own pair of custom made earrings.

As I had already bought earrings, Granny decided that this would be her gift to Tilly and she and Tilly spent a delectable hour ‘oohing’ and ‘aaahing’ over all the shiny goodies.  Tilly was convinced she was going to design her own pair until she actually looked at the site and realised that she drawn up a shortlist of about fifteen possible pairs already and had only got to the third page.  In the end she chose a classy pair of Amazonite and Fresh Water Pearl drops and another dangly pair decorated with the most glorious sea green glass chunks that looked almost edible.  It did cause her total agony to have to choose and we  were all consulted.

Mrs Jones was an absolute star.  We got a choice of two different kind of clips, and then the earrings were dispatched post haste.  I put the order in on Friday night, she posted them on Saturday morning and they were with me on Monday morning, beautifully presented and gift wrapped in such a way as to delight Tilly’s heart.  The whole thing has saved my bacon because even though granny paid, it was my cool friend who made the bling.  I have kudos once again, even though I am basking in reflected glory.  I am not proud.  Plus, Mrs Jones was also kinder than kind and sent Tilly a stunning necklace to go with her green pair of earrings as a birthday gift.  She has been wearing it all day long and has been changing the earrings on a rotating basis so that she can revel in her total glamourous grown upness and has been telling everyone about her jewels and her jeweller.  She could definitely get used to this kind of life.

So, top birthday party achieved thanks to Mrs. Jones and Hannah Montana, two names I never thought I’d hear myself say in the same sentence.  Life is full of surprises.

Saturday June 6th – Happy Birthday

It is my daughter’s tenth birthday.

Ten years ago today I was a first time parent, weeping and ill in a hideous London hospital wondering what the hell I had done.  Too tired and afraid to be proud of the momentous and long waited for miracle that squawled in my arms.

Roll forward ten years and I am exhausted, bewildered, the owner of two other children and still wondering what the hell I have done.  I am not too tired to think that I should mark this day however, this day of her making it to double figures when I was convinced I would drop her and break her before she reached the age of one.  This day on which I can take a little time to celebrate that miracle after all.

Matilda is a delight and a joy.

She is clever and funny and sweet, when she’s not practising to be a teenager.  She is mature in so many ways (mummy, how do I know how much tax to pay when I get a job?), naive in others (mummy, do you think I will get a mobile phone for my birthday?) and a constant source of agony, angst, amazement and throat stopping love, all at once. 

She lives in Tilly World, which is a lovely place in her head where she makes Fotherington Thomas (hello birds, hello sky) look hard hitting and practical.  Sometimes she comes out to visit us, but not very often and not for long.  Tillys’ shun the real world and prefer to live in a world of flying cars made out of old boxes, families of small shrews and a place where cheese is a viable material for making trousers with.

She already has early onset Alzheimers, being incapable of going upstairs and remembering that you have asked her to brush her teeth for example.  This is distressing now, but very handy for later on in life where nothing will be a shock or a surprise and she will be completely geared up for living in a fictional make believe world with rotten teeth and smelly trousers.  For Tilly the practical things in life are not half as important as sitting down to have a well deserved think, or drawing a picture or singing a song.  There is always time to spare in Tilly world.

She reminds me very much of a foal at the moment as her arms and legs are growing at an astonishing rate.  She is all elbows and knees, gangling about the place.  Because of this, and the fact that she is not au fait with the physical laws of the world in which we live, she is rather clumsy.  She trips, falls, rolls and plunges her way through life, filling her sleeves with ketchup, wiping grease down her front and sitting in clumps of icing.  She is the female equivalent of Snoopy’s friend Pig Pen.  As my mother says: ‘She will never be able to go to tea with the queen’. The only time she is graceful and lithe is when she is climbing, which she does with consummate ease, like a monkey.  The rest of the time she is a danger to herself and everyone around her.

She is still a delightful mix of girlishness and tomboy, climbing trees, riding bikes and getting scabby knees, all dressed in a pink tiara and dangly earrings (more of which later).  She eschews the world of fashion, preferring her own eclectic style which she puts together herself with a very firm idea of what works and what doesn’t.  No matter how odd the outfit she always manages to pull it off because it somehow captures the essence of who she is.  I hope that she retains this individuality, confidence and chicness throughout her life.  I love the fact that she doesn’t follow the herd.  Her own path is not always one that I would choose, but she has integrity and self belief and that is wonderful to see.

She still loves to play games and run around just as much as she likes to watch Hannah Montana and play computer games.  She will soon leave all that behind, which is why I am writing it down now, aware that it will fade away over the next few years as she discovers boys and expensive trainers and iPods and comes to think that games are silly.  I love that she still believes in Father Christmas and the Tooth Fairy and all that stuff, even when her friends tease her.  She knows how she wants things to be and she prefers to keep her sense of miracle and wonder and a belief in a world in which magical things really do happen all the time.  Who can blame her?

When she grows up she wants to be an artist.  She is busy putting together a portfolio of her work and saving for Art School.  So far she has about £5.60.  At least she will be able to afford a couple of pencils.  She has wanted to be an artist for as long as I can remember.  It used to be an artist and a cleaning lady.  Now it is just an artist, just as well given the state of her bedroom.  She will definitely not make her fortune as a housekeeper.  I hope that she attains her goal, as long as it makes her happy, or that whatever she does with her life she does it because it will make her happy. I hope it would never occur to her to do otherwise.

So my lovely girl.  One day when I am very old, you might just get around to reading this, and I want you to know that even though your wicked old mother went out for the day on your birthday and didn’t come home until half past ten at night, I thought about you, and loved you and wish you the happiest of birthdays now and every year.

Apologies

That last post was also my enfeebled attempt to write something lovely about baby animals for Red Shoes who is recuperating at home in bed and needs soothing with lovely words before I soothe her by saving up my pennies and sending lovely chocolate.  Gift wrapped baby krill.  It doesn’t work does it?

I am a failure.

I cannot write lovely, soothing, nice things about cute animals.  I just can’t.  Sorry about that.

I try, and then I start wittering about antiques and jam and it all goes pear shaped.

I am unskilled in the ways of nice.

This is probably why I laughed out loud when I saw a woman in the school playground this morning carrying around a prodigious bosom (her own), emblazoned with the legend: ‘Prone to Mood Swings’ written on it in hot pink neon writing.  It made me laugh because the bosom was swinging nicely as if to illustrate how the moods would also swing.

Clearly she has not read Boo Fashion Law number 931 which states: ‘Women with breasts like bowling balls are prohibited from wearing t-shirts with any form of writing on that undulates across the fleshy hills of their bazooms.’  It causes eye strain and distress in pensioners.

Even more clearly she has never been lured into the arms of Messrs. Rigby and Peller and should proceed there immediately without passing go.  She will probably need £200 though.  Possibly per breasticle.

I’m really rambling now.

I need tea.