The Wisdom of Tallulah

Tallulah is an interesting child.  When she is not telling you the entire plot of the last episode of Buffy that she watched, or counting her ornaments that is.  She has a most unusual turn of phrase and a curiously philosophical approach to things, which can be richly rewarding to listen to.  These days we don’t get much time to chat as I am either asleep, running away or fielding more than one child at once.

Today was the first time in a long time we have spent alone and engaged, rather than me being vacant.  Every time she said something I thought was noteworthy I texted it to her father so that I would have a record (I forgot to bring pen and paper).  He thought I was insane, but I didn’t want to miss it.

Here goes:

‘Your face is the most important part of you mummy, because it holds your neck on, and that’s very important.  It’s much more important than your feet.  They don’t have to hold anything on.  So it’s best to have your feet chopped off and not your head.’

‘If you don’t ever think about things it makes you poorly.  And you can’t learn anything because there will be nothing inside your head, and that means that you can’t do anything, or even go to school.’

me: ‘Have you ever tried to think about nothing Tallulah?’

Tallulah: ‘No. I think about things all the time, even in my sleep.’

Big pause:

‘Still. I don’t know what those things are though because I’m asleep.’

When we were in Carluccios they gave her crayon pencils so that she could do some colouring in.

‘Mama? You could stake a vampire through the heart easily with these, and they’re even sharpened!’

Quite.

It’s a Rich Man’s World

I have to confess that this week I have been morose. Yes. Morose is the only word I can find to describe my mood.  I don’t know whether I was on a post London weekend comedown or just a more general malaise connected with being surrounded by swarms of children for large parts of my waking life. I don’t know and I don’t really care.  All I know is that I have spent the last few days struggling to do the most basic of things with any cheerfulness at all and have battled the entire week with the urge to shout ‘Fuck You Buddy!’ to the universe and run back to bed.

It’s not even that the week has been particularly ghastly.  Admittedly there have been ghastly bits, but there have been times in every day where I have hooted with laughter or shared some wonderful times with friends or family or even, shock horror, my husband.  Yet it seems that I have managed to code many of these things as negative, or just delete them from my brain entirely and have been wallowing, positively wallowing in grief, stress, inertia and misery.  Which is a bit wank.

Today after waking up feeling that the weight of the world was on my shoulders and spending an hour hunched over the coffee pot contemplating armageddon and other such cheery matters I made a decision.  I decided to try being a bit more upbeat and see what happened.  A revolutionary idea, I’m sure you will agree.  But sometimes, us derring doer’s who just live on the edge need to embrace the possibility that there is something over the edge, and it might be o.k.

Now, I’m not going to tell you that Tallulah and I spent the day rapt in Zen like meditation, hitting cow bells and reaching a higher state of consciousness, because it wouldn’t be true. No. We adopted the much more fundamental and entirely girly approach to the woes of life.  We went shopping.  We went shopping with a bit of a vengeance.  I have done more damage to my credit card.  Frankly, I don’t care.  We arrived home twenty minutes ago, laden with bags, and although I can’t say that I’m jumping for joy and being grateful for every breath of air, I am considerably more relaxed and normal than I was eight hours ago.  This has got to be a good thing.

Tallulah had twenty pounds from her birthday stash.  I was a bit nervous about this.  Tallulah’s approach to money can be frightening.  She likes to hoard it, steal it or spend it faster than me, and I can spend.  When she’s on a spend it kick it is terrifying.  She wants everything.  Park benches, clouds, old ladies wearing tartan slippers.  She is utterly indiscriminate in her approach as long as she can spend faster than anyone else.  It can be exhausting.

I have to say however that today she was a dream.  She was relaxed, happy and totally chilled out.  We browsed, we pottered, we poked about.  She spent her money, every single last red cent, but didn’t complain when she couldn’t buy a Sylvanian Families retirement home (rrp £89.99) for £2.50, or moan when her money was gone.  She only bought things she wanted and she actually made some proper choices instead of falling instantly in love with the first thing her eye landed on, regardless.

I am almost afraid to say it, but I think she is growing up.  She has changed hugely in the last three or four weeks.  It seems to be linked to the last time she got into heinous amounts of trouble and I had a long, dark, tea time of the soul thinking that I had somehow ruined her entire life.  I made a decision to change my way of parenting her.  I realised that because she is quite grown up in lots of ways, that I was over estimating her emotional maturity and that if I started thinking that she was more on a par with Oscar emotionally than Tilly, that it might help.  It seems to have worked.  Although how much is down to me and how much is down to her just getting stuff out of her system and moving on up is debatable. 

Anyway, for a girl who was renowned for spectacular temper tantrums, no outward signs of affection other than the odd knee hug, and a morbid obsession with the afterlife, she has actually blossomed into a kind, thoughtful hug friendly child who came back downstairs the night before last because she had forgotten to kiss us goodnight.  She never does kisses.  We were stunned, and rather tearful.  Long may it last.

Today was a real pleasure.  She was a delight.

We pottered round the shops, bought sandwiches and sat outside amongst the pigeons and ate them (sandwiches, not pigeons), pottered round some more shops and then went to Carluccio’s for cake before staggering home on the bus.  I never had to raise my voice once. 

Tallulah bought:

• Pottery fridge magnet with a bird painted on it
• Marbles (assorted)
• A lamb hand puppet
• A soft fluffy dog toy complete with chi chi carry bag in lurid purple
• A bottle of pillar box red sparkling nail varnish
• A small clay dove with a scroll in its mouth which allegedly contains a message of peace and goodwill to all

Her choices. I did not interfere.  Her current obsessions with ornamental kitsch of the lowest quality and forests of stuffed toys is somewhat troubling but I am hoping she grows out of it before I am forced to go and live with her when I am elderly and infirm.

I bought:

Four new bras.  Due to expanding bosom issues thanks to comfort eating I cannot wait for a return trip to Rigby and Peller and my expansive new cake bosom keeps falling out of the balconette Rigby and Peller, leaving me one ‘good’ bra and one ‘emergency’ bra which is so bad I actually threw it away today when I got home.

A box of Bobby Brown eyeshadows which were ludicrously expensive and which I bought entirely on impulse.  Most days I hardly run a brush through my hair, so quite what I was doing when I bought this I don’t know.  Surfing on adrenaline brought on by overspending on bras probably.

A pair of Miss Sixty jeans.  These were only a fiver from the charity shop.  They barely fit thanks to the comfort eating again.  On the other hand, they make my legs look super skinny and as long as I suck in my muffin top and hold my breath they are fabulous.

The book; ‘The Shanghai Union of Industrial Mystics’ by Nury Vittachi.  This has been on my Amazon wish list as an experiment for twelve months. Because it might be crap I keep putting off buying it.  Then, as I was sailing past the book section to pay for my jeans I saw it in the charity shop for £2.50 and splashed out.

A copy of Heat magazine.  I am trying to give it up, honestly.

I also had to buy presents for various children’s parties we are being forced to attend in the next few weeks.  Gah!

I was not completely excessive however.  I did not buy a polka dot dress in Hobbs that caught my eye.  Nor did I buy the most gorgeous, green leather bag in T.K. Maxx which was reduced from £350 to £130, even though I picked it up twice.  I did not go into Schuh and buy Red or Dead fifties glamour shoes with four inch heels.  I avoided Waterstones like the plague, which was positively heroic of me.  And instead of eating all our lunch at Carluccios, we had sandwiches from the bakers and only had pudding at Carluccios.  You see. I am aware of the credit crunch.  Sort of.

I also, ahem, spent money at home as well. Oh yes! I am so skilled at it, I do not even need to set foot outside the front door.  I am a shopping ninja.

I have been theatricalising again.  Next week in Northampton, The Royal and Derngate theatre, which I have never heard of, are staging the Alan Ayckbourn play, ‘Man of the Moment,’ to celebrate his fiftieth anniversary of being a theatrical lovie, darling.  It is rarely staged because it requires the set dresser to build a swimming pool on stage.  I am quite excited about this as I have been hooked on Ayckbourn ever since we saw the fantastic ‘Round and Round The Garden’ trilogy last Christmas.  I managed to get tickets for ‘Man’, even though it’s all been a bit last minute.  We are going on Wednesday.  I’ve also got tickets to see As You Like It at the National on 22nd August, and tickets to see The Pitmen Painters when it goes on tour in October at Milton Keynes.  Yay me!  Now if only I can wangle a trip to see Troilus and Cressida at The Globe before the season finishes I’ll have done everything on my wish list so far this year.  Not bad eh?  Standing tickets for Troilus are only a fiver, but it’s a question of time rather than expense.  I’m too damn busy.

It is official. Spending money on things you don’t need is as good as heroin and involves less criminal activity and no needles. What’s not to love.

We Aft Gang Agley

I think that I need to give up any notion of structure or planning for the duration of the holidays.  It is just an invitation to be disappointed.

Last night Tilly went off for another sleep over with her best friend from school.  She is doing this for at least two nights a week at the moment. It is good.  She enjoys it. They love having her and it means only two children to corral and prod and whinge at for me. Bonus.

Oscar has nursery on Thursday mornings, which because it is private and we pay, still continues throughout the holidays, which was even better because it meant that another Thursday morning rolled around where it was just me and Tallulah.  We discussed our aims in a civilised manner.  She wanted to mooch round the house in her pyjamas and watch Hannah Montana. Then she wanted to do some sewing and then do some drawing.  I approved.  Apart from the sewing she doesn’t expect me to join in.

My plans were to finish reading the Stieg Larsson book and bomb through a book that Amazon Vine have sent me, all while sitting in the bath with a cup of coffee.

We were both very pleased with ourselves.

Oscar was happy to go to nursery and all was well with the world.

We had been back at home for an hour when the phone rang. It was nursery.  They thought he might have a water infection.  He had been piddling a lot all morning and it was making him cry.  Because water infections are not infectious to other small individuals they were fine to keep him there, but how can I lounge about reading books and being decadent when my boy is crying and in pain?  I called the doctors and booked an appointment, got Tallulah to get dressed and we flooded out to get him.

By the time we got to nursery he was looking pale but calm.  We went home for half an hour in between that and the doctor’s appointment.  Tallulah solemnly chewed breakfast and Oscar gained momentum and enthusiasm for life as every minute ticked by.  By the time we had done the twenty minute walk to the doctors he was positively glowing with health and vitality.

Half an hour waiting in the doctors playing buses under a cheese plant, including various trips to the toilet where he piddled with aplomb and nary a squeak confirmed my opinion that we were utterly wasting our time. Still, it’s not often you get a doctor’s appointment on the day you want one and it would have been a shame to waste it.

The doctor agreed that he was hale and hearty and full of vim and vigour. He gave me drugs just in case the situation declined to the point where we needed the bed pan of death and we all boinged off to the chemist to fill the prescription. 

The only thing that cheered me up about the whole affair was when Tallulah, who is practising her very advanced reading skills, practised on a leaflet about regenerating your love life by dealing with erectile dysfunction, at the top of her voice. There was only me and one other woman in the whole chemist and we were both laughing so much we had tears streaming down our faces.  Excellent.

By the time we had enacted our medical emergency it was lunch time. I took them for lunch at the Co-op cafe, and as we chewed the black clouds started massing over Glenfield. On the way home it hailed and thundered all over us before the heavens opened. 

What a top morning.

This afternoon the insurance claims assessor came round.  All the render is falling off of our house. The new buildings insurance which we are required to have will not cover it because the company is being dodgy and has done something cretinous regarding our insurance which means we are involved with the FSA, the insurance ombudsman, an IFA and the kind man who built our house and who is helping us, despite the fact he sold us the house two years ago and doesn’t need to.  He feels guilty that it is his fault the render is falling off.  To be fair, it is his fault the render is falling off.  The mixture is too sandy, and it wasn’t keyed to the bricks properly.  He is doing everything in his power to help us though, which sort of makes me feel better.

We had thought the regular house insurance would cover it.  The man from the insurance company he say ‘no way’, albeit in a very nice way.  It looks like it’s going to cost us big time.  Our best estimate so far is two weeks, unbelievable amounts of mess and four grand.  Four grand we just don’t have.  Plus it has to be done in the dry weather or it will all come off again.  I cannot remember the last dry day we had here.  What joy.

As for the children, I have now given up entirely. They are running round naked, smeared in chocolate and with square eyes from watching so much television and have incurred more strains from doing ridiculous death defying acrobatics on the trampoline.  They are happy. I don’t care any more. I have finished my Larsson book.  Twenty pages have taken all day. 

It’s about now I should be reaching for the gin, but I expect it would only make me cry.

Oh good. More rain.

I am tired and cranky.

Yet again it has absolutely pissed it down all day. The girls went to their dad’s again last night and came back with danders up. To save a repeat of yesterday’s ear boxing I togged them out in wellingtons and we went for a walk.  This lasted ten minutes. Tilly couldn’t wear her wellies because it transpires they are now too small. She wore her trainers. It turns out that these have previously undiscovered holes in the bottom.  I totted things up.  She needs new wellies and new trainers as well as new school shoes and new plimsolls for school.  I am not looking forward to that trip to the shoe shop.

After ten minutes not only were Tilly’s feet soaked through, but we were all soaked through. It was lashing it down.  I am British. I do weather. I lived in mid Wales for three years.  I do rain.  If you don’t do rain in Wales you become agrophobic.  But this was serious rain.  It is beginning to hack me off a bit quite frankly.  This summer holiday sucks.  It’s not that I want to spend every day sunbathing, but it is actually quite hard to keep small children entertained on a budget if you are locked in your house all day watching the road wash away.  I had certain craft projects in mind to help the holidays go with a swing, but we have done most of them already and we are only three weeks in.  I might start making them learn the Highway Code if this continues.

After a brief period of drying off in the charity shop where we purchased one Transformer that turns into some kind of motorised wolf, a small teddy bear and a china sheep (their choices, not mine), we sogged home to change our clothes.

This afternoon we had my friend and her five children round to make bread.  It was absolute bedlam.  Not something I particularly recommend if you need to feel soothed and tranquil.  We made four loaves, two white and two brown. They were all amazed and devoured an entire loaf between them in a sitting.  That was good.  I heartily recommend the simple bread recipe in Nigella’s How to Be a Domestic Goddess.  How easy?  And you don’t even need a loaf tin.

Cleaning up, cooking tea and cleaning up was not so much fun.  I finished at quarter to six.  My driving lesson started at six.

Instead of going round all the little back roads, today we went on all the big fuck off roads and roundabouts that surround my house.  Which was nice.  In the pouring, sheeting rain, with lots of traffic.  I hated it.  We were back to the blind panic of lesson one all over again.  I sweat so much I had to wring my hair out.  I came home and cried and cried.  Then I booked two double lessons for next week.  You have to give me A for effort.  Let it never be said that I let my paralysing fear and utter stupidity get in the way of blind perseverance. Oh no!

That has been my day.  It has not been my favourite day really, all things considered.  I don’t even think it’s going to rank in the top one hundred.  No. Not at all.

The Perils of Taking Drugs

My children mostly wanted to kill each other today.  Which was nice.  The girls didn’t get back from their dad’s until the middle of the morning, but within half an hour of turning up the front room was like a bear pit and there were tears.  What started out as a playfight got way out of hand and ended up with Oscar punching Tallulah in the ear.  She was howling because it hurt.  He was howling because he was utterly shocked at his own strength and Tilly was stuck between them covered in snot and tears.  I was not very sympathetic as I’d already broken up that fight three times before the inevitable, ‘It’ll end in tears’ ending. 

I then spent the rest of the morning regrouping them as minor and not so minor skirmishes broke out up and down the house.  I have decided that I do not want a job as a general or a military tactician.  It is thankless work and everyone ends up hating you, and still battering the crap out of each other.

Granny and Grandad arrived to take us out for lunch and the children were delighted. Utterly sick of me, they had new, and more fun friends to play with.  Tallulah showed them her Punch and Judy show, Oscar showed them his muscles and Tilly kissed everyone from head to toe and they’d only just stepped into the hall. It was like a Wall of Sound spectacular.

We headed off to the pub and loaded them with carbs which did nothing to slow them down, and we spent the afternoon on the deck watching them swing, ping and trample each other across the garden shouting ‘Look at me!’ and taking surreptitious swipes at each other when they thought we weren’t looking.

The girls dad came round at three to take them away again until tomorrow.  He had forgotten to have lunch, so by the time I had given him sandwiches and tea, and established that he will be unable to see them again for weeks because he is off on various round the world jaunts yet again, it was four.  He left, granny and granddad left, and then Saj arrived bearing chocolate cheesecake and needing sustenance.

We ate sandwiches, set the world to rights and decided that what she needs more than anything else in the world is a bed in the shape of a giant Jimmy Choo sandal.  We wonder why you can get novelty beds for children and not for grown ups.  Life is just not fair like that sometimes.

Shortly after that there was another one of these freak storms, which heralded the arrival of my second driving lesson.  Yippee!

It was less terrifying than last week, partly because I seem to have found a terror level that can accommodate me actually functioning with some ability in a car, partly because it stopped raining half way through, and partly because the instructor has finally grasped the depths of my ignorance and has geared his teaching accordingly.  I have not managed to look at the Highway Code all week, and only got my computer to play the hazard and theory test discs yesterday, after which I shut them down immediately and went to watch True Blood.

I only stalled twice this week.  I did not cry.  I still have not thrown up, and I did not come home and throw all my toys out the pram.  This is progress of a kind.  I still have terror based indigestion and am exhausted with stress to the point where I am totally typing this on auto pilot out of habit rather than any structured thought pattern.

I’ve got to do it all again tomorrow.  And the children.  We are making bread.  With five other children.  It was my idea.  Sometimes I worry about my ideas.  I wonder if secretly I get up at night while I am still asleep and smoke crack.  This is the sort of idea a person would have while smoking crack surely?

Drugs really are bad for you.

Isn’t London Great?

It is nine o’clock at night and I have been trying to write a blog post since about half past eight this morning.  From this you may surmise that the day has been rather busy.  Busy in a cleaning, revenge for having the weekend off sort of way.  Busy in waiting for the electrician, the postman and a man who came to buy our old fridge off us from Ebay sort of way.  You know the kind of thing. Dull, but necessary.

I had a wonderful, wonderful weekend though.  I like to think of it as decadence on a budget.

I managed to get a first class train ticket to London for twenty quid, and actually achieved the nigh on impossible, a very quiet carriage.  In an hour and fifteen minutes I motored through a hundred pages of The Girl Who Played With Fire, the second Stieg Larsson book in the Millennium trilogy, which I’ve been saving for a time when I might actually get a bit of uninterrupted reading in.  It was fabulous.

Then, my bad.  My friend, David, who I had arranged to meet with after twenty years of sporadic e-mailing (we were school friends) was due to meet me at the station.  I mailed him that I was coming in at Euston rather than St Pancras and the poor chap had to do an Anneka Rice type sprint across North London to meet me.  He actually apologised for me nearly giving him heart failure and sweaty arm pits, bless him.

After twenty years you’re not always sure if you’re going to get on with someone, but we got on like a house on fire and it was like we got our ‘A’ level results yesterday instead of at the dawn of a different epoch.  We pottered off to Sarastro (Drury Lane) for lunch and then hunkered down for a double bill at the Duchess.  Thanks to the fact that we (I) was gabbing so much, we missed the first ten minutes of the first play, but they snuck us in at the back and we were very punctual thereafter.

It was a pair of plays by Ronald Harwood about the nature of collaboration during the second world war.  The first play, ‘Taking Sides’ was about a German conductor, Furtwangler, who managed to work throughout the war years in Germany and who was grilled by the Americans afterwards to try and find out if he had been a Nazi sympathiser or just a nice man who thought that art would heal the world and make all the bad things disappear.

The second play, ‘Collaboration’, was much the same philosophically but dealt with the relationship between the Austrian, Jewish writer Stefan Zweig and the composer Richard Strauss and how their working relationship was torn apart by the war and its ideologies.

They weren’t easy plays and there weren’t a lot of laughs, but they were interesting and pretty well cast.  If you’re interested in that kind of subject matter, which I, as a macabre sort of person definitely am, then I recommend seeing them.  We got absolutely bargainous tickets at £12 per show for seats in the second row, on Lastminute.Com.

It was a great day and I retired to my cubby hole well satisfied.  I stayed at Kings College halls of residence on Great Dover Street.  They’re about three minutes walk from Borough Station and a single room with a bathroom the size of a wardrobe is £40.  It’s not bad as long as you can put up with crippling mattresses, strip lighting and a distinct lack of mod cons.  I prefer chandeliers and my own private escalator, but I am very adaptable when needs must.

On Sunday morning I went on one of London Walks London walks.  I love them.  I’m nosy and I am besotted with London, so finding out more and getting to poke around in places I probably wouldn’t normally dream of going is my idea of heaven.  I got there in bags of time, had an hour in the park with my coffee and my book and then spent £7 to find out all about Jewish London.  It was utterly fascinating and we got to visit the Bevis Marks synagogue which has been in continuous usage for three hundred years and is the oldest synagogue in the country.  We went from the City into Whitechapel and then through into Spitalfields where we all scattered to the four winds. 

I really felt that I got two tours for the price of one, because not only was my tour guide very interesting but there was an old American couple on the tour and the man was a delight and a treasure all in himself.  He was teeny, weeny, and about 100 years old.  He was clearly very pleased to still be alive and was terribly enthusiastic but consistently got the wrong end of the stick and showed a total lack of knowledge about absolutely everything.  He was also completely baffled by the idea of time.  As in, the fact that history goes back a very long way in this country.  Now this might sound stereotypical, but I have met a lot of Americans and count some of them as my very dear friends, and I’ve never encountered this time blindness before so it was all new to me.

I can’t decide if my favourite thing was when he erroneously told his wife that the Gherkin building was a synagogue or when he asked who Jack The Ripper was because he’d never heard of him.  He was amazed to find out that people traded in stocks and shares during the Victorian times, because clearly everyone traded in animal pelts and brontosaurus steaks then.  He was also the master of the blindingly obvious question which was hugely entertaining.  We came across a beautiful Art Nouveau frontage for a building, and inscribed in the stones were words like ‘Jewish Soup Kitchen for the Poor.’  The man stuck his hand in the air and said: ‘So! Was this where the poor Jews came to get soup?’ Fantastic!

After this I scuttled off to sample the delights of Bodeans, a restaurant the very wise and all knowing Mrs. Jones recommended to me many months ago and I only just got the time to squeeze in to my schedule.  They serve a lot of what I think of as American food from the Deep South, ribs, jerk chicken, pulled pork etc.  Basically meat. Huge chunks of meat, slapped between bits of bread and served with fries, fries or fries and gherkins.  Bloody lovely it was too.  They have branches at Tower Hill, Soho and Piccadilly if you feel the need to eat lots of barbecued meat, which I did.  I made huge amounts of mess.  They don’t bother with napkins. They give you whole rolls of kitchen roll.  How sensible.

Afterwards I rolled off my chair and decided I needed more exercise.  I walked the Thames Path from The Tower of London down to the National Theatre on the South Bank.  It was glorious.  I can honestly say I have not felt so joyful in months.  What London does for me is indescribable, in a good way. I cannot imagine ever not wanting to be there.  I love everything about it, the squalor, the noise, the crowds, the concrete. I also love the fact that you can stand at the end of a road and see a 21st century building next to a 13th century building and every century in between, all nestled cheek by jowl. I love the fact that I can walk through the courtyard of a dull hotel and find 100 metres of the Roman wall which marked the boundaries of the city just standing there, not doing anything.  It’s amazing.  I never, ever get bored.

I arrived a sweating, happy blob and managed ten minutes at Foyles and a naughty book purchase. Well, not a naughty book as in Tales of a Degraded Schoolgirl, naughty as in I really shouldn’t be buying one.  Then I met Andrea and her mum and we went to see J. B. Priestley’s Time and the Conways at the National on the £10 Travelex deal they’re doing at the moment.  Seats in the third row, this time. 

I enjoyed it. I like Priestley, but I think they were trying too hard after the success of Stephen Daldry’s souped up, An Inspector Calls. It had all these wierd Chemical Brothers induced video montage stuff going on between the acts that I thought was totally unnecessary and just gave me a nasty headache.  But the acting was top notch.  Francesca Annis was really good and there was a fantastic actor I’ve seen before in The Pillow Man called Paul Ready, and he was superb.  At three hours long it was a bit much.  By then my legs were beginning to kill me, and the seats in the Lyttleton are not the most comfortable. Still, I managed to revive afterwards with dinner in Strada (I recommend their warm chocolate fondant with ice cream), and then Andrea drove me home to bed.

What a satisfactory weekend.  I’m off up again in a few weeks and am just wondering if I can fit in some of the things I missed this time around.  Paul Smith is doing something clever with sweetie wrappers at the Design Museum. I’ve never been to the Design Museum and I’ve always wanted to go. I love Paul Smith and I love sweets, so I’m hoping it’s still on.  I also failed to get to Laduree to buy macaroons and see if they really are as fabulous as everyone says they are, because I was at totally the wrong end of the city for most of the weekend.  These are the most pressing things.  I’m hoping I can tick them off my list, and then I only have about another thousand things left on it for the time after that.

Easy peasy.

Hoorah. Burn the Yellow Flag

I am revived. Like Lazarus, I am back from the near dead.

Turns out that I either had a trapped nerve in my neck or a migraine, or possibly both.  At about half past six last night, just as I had finally given up the will to live I suddenly started to feel better. An hour later I was absolutely starving and then spent the rest of the evening feeling hungover. This is what makes me think it was a migraine.

Migraine are rubbish. I get them every so often, and as I grow older they change in their complexity.  I used to get them regularly and it was always very simple. I would start a headache. It would progress to mammoth proportions.  As it progressed my sense of smell would get more and more acute until I could not bear anything at all because everything smelled too smelly. Eventually, not being able to escape the fundamental smelliness of life I would throw up spectacularly, crying all the time because my head was going to fall off. Then I would start to feel better.

When I got pregnant they changed and I would get horrendous pain in my neck, which would shoot up into the top of my head and then grip like a vice round my eyes until I would throw up.

After babies I started to get wierd ones where I would experience strange visual distortions and hallucinations, where the edges of my vision would start fraying and I would see strange opaque flying things.  Which was nice. Then I would throw up.

The main thing was the throwing up and the excruciating head pain.  The neck and ear pain yesterday were new.  Which was nice. The rest was same old, old.  Luckily I don’t get them very often any more. I am very grateful.

Today I feel much better, although I still have a sore throat. I am sure this is down to the weather.  It has been boiling hot, overcast, windy and sullen by turns today along with the odd torrential rainstorm and a freak thunderstorm.  There is, even by English standards, a lot of weather happening at the moment.  A lot of weather in very rapid succession.  My sinuses are in a constant state of revolution because of this. 

Don’t get me wrong. I like weather. I don’t like staying in places where the weather is static very much.  I like visiting Las Vegas for example, but the thought of the relentless sameness of the weather does nothing for me.  I like to visit for a couple of weeks and then go home to our seasonal fare.  I do like my weather to remain the same for several hours at a time though, preferably in day long slices.  I seem to spend all my time at the moment when I am not herding children like One Man and His Dog, changing clothes, sweating, freezing or drenched.  It is all very tedious.

As is this post I realise.  I am turning into an old fucker aren’t I? What did you do today dear? Well mostly I talked about my health and the weather.  I shall be posting pictures of my scars next, and then the jig will truly be up.  I do mention my age a lot too, don’t I?

I’d best finish with something feisty and a little bit controversial just to stop myself from falling into a boredom induced coma at the ramblings of my own brain.

Here is my top tip for the week.   If you own a television you need to tune in and watch True Blood.  It is the best thing I have seen on television for years.  Imagine if you will Buffy the Vampire Slayer crossed with Six Feet Under and the Sopranos.  It is epic. It is violent.  It is hilarious.  It is full of sex.  It has a very cute vampire in it.  You cannot. I repeat, CANNOT watch this with elderly or infirm relatives, children or your parents.  Other than that, knock yourselves out.

It is about a mind reading waitress working in a wine bar in the deep south who meets a vampire and falls in love, just as everyone around her is being murdered in spectacular fashion.  It sounds simple and juvenile. It isn’t.  It is by Alan Ball who created Six Feet Under and has all the crispness of dialogue, the superb black humour and grisliness but with bags more oomph.  You have to see it.  You’ll be sorry if you don’t.

Right. I’m off to dust my Oyster card and find my A-Z.  I am off to London tomorrow morning.  I will be back on Sunday night.  Be good when I am gone.

Plea

I am feeling grotty.  My ears ache. My throat hurts and my neck is sore.  I wanted to go to the library this afternoon.  When I thought about walking all the way there (ten, whole minutes), it made me want to cry.  That’s not so good.

I’m hoping I have a summer cold. I have been feeling a bit punk for the last few days but just put it down to tiredness, stress over driving and small children.  I do not want to have Swine Flu, or any other kind of flu.

I was supposed to be having friends round this evening for a takeaway and a film.  I have cancelled it.  I do not want to give them the lurgy if it turns out that I am contagious.

Please, please, please Nathan, Cheezus and all other deities, can I be better by tomorrow? I am going to London for the weekend and I will be alone, without children.  I am meeting up with a friend I haven’t seen for twenty years and I am going to see three, count them, three plays.  It will be nice.  I want to go.  It is my treat.

I know it is selfish, but I have been a good girl. I have done driving, which I don’t like.  I have looked after children, even when they are vile.  I have cooked and cleaned and everything.  I have not shirked my duties and run off to hide under the duvet until September.  Even though that is what I would like to do.  Even today, feeling like pooh I still managed to do drawing, colouring, going to the park, sewing and feeding of small, grouchy people.  That is good, no?  I have Brownie points surely?

I would like to redeem them for a twenty four hour bug followed by a clean bill of health.  I feel a twelve hour bug would be pushing it a bit, but you never know.

I Don’t Like To Be Beside The Seaside

Amazingly we made it to the ‘beach’ today.

While we were there it did not rain.

This is the only time it has not rained.  But I am not complaining. Some time without rain is better than no time at all without rain.

We did not make it onto the sand, but we did get to the beach.

Nottingham city centre has an extremely capacious town square, in front of a very grandiose town hall.  Usually it is full of people shopping, today it was full of people who live a long way from the sea trying to pretend they didn’t.  They have made a beach and a very shallow, small ‘sea’, and surrounded it with stalls selling buckets and spades and food.  Around that are fairground rides and Punch and Judy shows.  This is all very good.

When we arrived there at ten this morning there was hardly anyone about and I was delighted. Someone had told us that not all the kids in Nottingham are off school yet. I had visions of a couple of hours of uninterrupted play and very sandy, happy children.  Sadly this was not to be.

They had cordoned off the beach area and were only letting pre-approved children in.  My children were not pre-approved and the beach was not open to us filthy public until twelve.  Try telling this to an over excited two year old. It did not go down well. 

I managed to appease them with a trip to the local pet shop, a trip to T.K. Maxx to buy towels that I had forgotten to pack and lunch courtesy of a smorgasboard of delights from Waitrose deli.  We schlepped back to the beach for about one.  I reasoned that by this time lots of people would have decided to go for lunch and we would be able to pick a nice spot.  How wrong I was.

The place was heaving. I mean heaving.  There was not an inch of sand.  There were people fighting to queue to get onto the sand.  You could not see the water at all.  The fairground rides had a bonkers system whereby you could not pay for the rides there. No. That would be too easy. You had to go to a central booth and buy tokens with which you paid for the rides.  There was a scrum around the tokens booth.  We came away after I refused to fight for the right to sit on a patch of artificial beach with a load of people with tattoos and cans of Carling.  The children were even more unimpressed.

I felt very, very sorry for them.

I took them to Waterstones and read stories for forty minutes.  I then promised to try once more for beach time, and if it was still rammed I declared that the day would be an utter failure and we would go home beaten.

We got there and it was a little less packed.  They had one go each on a ride at some exorbitant amount of money.  Then I found an alternative to the beach, which was still chocka.

Next to the beach is a new fangled arty, farty water feature.  It is large and has lots of shallow runnels of water, long slabs of water running over stone and lots and lots of shooting fountain jets.  It was crawling with kids.  It was so big there was room for my kids, and lucky for me, there was no sand.  I hate scraping sand off of damp kids at the best of times, and by now it was half one and I was knackered.  I stripped them off and set them frisking into the fountains where they spent a glorious hour going blue and shivering until their teeth rattled.

I bundled them up, stuffed them into Starbucks for hot chocolate with whipped cream to thaw them out and then we went to daddy’s work on a tram, which was all terribly exciting and saved the day.

Thank god.

My advice.  Never go to the beach in the Midlands.  It’s more trouble than it’s worth.  That’s probably why God never put the sea there in the first place.

Driving Myself Mad

I have survived my first driving lesson.

I know I have had other lessons, in the past.  But you have to remember one vital thing when we are discussing my failure to drive.  One of the reasons I find it so hard to drive is that I seem to have lost all the sticky velcro bits of my memory when it comes to anything to do with motor vehicles and their ambulatory proceedings.  I remember nothing, nada, zip, zilch.  It is as if it never happened.  This is not an exaggeration.  I exaggerate a lot.  It is my natural state.  But in this moment there is no need for exaggeration.  I am the end point of what it means to have total blackout when it comes to driving.  There is nothing else after me.

You know when two people who should know better meet clandestinely to do the nasty, and afterwards they look at each other in that way and say things like: ‘This never happened.’ and ‘Let us never speak of this again’ etc, etc? Well, this is how things go with me between driving lessons, whether they be one week apart or six years apart.  I remember nothing.  It is the same for alcoholics in blackout I believe.  If only I could blame it on the gin.  I could try blaming it on digestive biscuits, which I have been mainlining furiously to soothe my nerves since about half past eight this morning, resulting only in a layer of blubber, indigestion and crumbs in the bed sheets.

I had the same driving instructor this time as I had four years ago, which was when I had my last lesson.  He is a nice man. I like him.  He did not fully grasp the extent of my memory loss.  His first words as I was reluctantly prodded into the car by my nearest and dearest were; ‘Yes. It’s a new car, but it’s o.k. because it’s just the next model up. I’ll talk you through the changes.’  When he had to tell me for the third time where the indicator stalk was, it finally sunk in that I had no idea what he had been talking about so cheerfully for the first ten minutes, and that I had just been nodding and smiling in tights in a kind of hysterical fear reaction.  He could just have easily been saying: ‘So, you know, I just chopped her head off with a blunt axe, and used the same recipe as when I did that stuffed marrow. Four hours on gas mark three and it was delicious.’  I would still have been nod, nod, nod, smile, smile, smile so that my teeth hurt.

It did not help that it was absolutely pissing it down with rain, and I mean hammering.  Nor that because he had clearly overestimated my powers of remembering and any ability I might once have had, that he took me through the labyrinthine rat run of roads at the back of our house.  The roads which had vehicles parked on both sides of the road simultaneously, people walking their dogs, playing with their children (in the fucking rain),and moving house in them.  The roads which had people who clearly knew what they were doing and were in a tearing hurry, sashaying behind removal vehicles at the speed of light while I stalled and quietly peed my pants in abject terror.

I hated it.  I hated every single fucking second of it.

I had convinced myself, prior to sitting in the driving seat that it would be better than last time.  That I would maybe remember what I was doing after a few minutes and become more at ease.  That safe in the knowledge that once I have passed my test I can drive to Bicester village and go mad, or pop to London to the theatre every three seconds, that I would somehow, magically realise how beneficial to me driving can be.  But no.  It was a howling wilderness of terror, misery and complete panic.  I would rather drink a cup of cold sick than sit behind that wheel again.  But hey, next week I have two lessons booked. Lucky, lucky me.

I sat there, and in between fucking up every three seconds and then going totally blank, and I mean totally blank at times of crucial importance when I should have been firing on all cylinders and was instead staring, slack jawed and drooling at an oncoming Ford Fiesta in a bilious shade of green, I realised that I am the proverbial fish on a bicycle.  This stuff is alien.  Properly alien. I cannot, ever, in the history of ever, imagine a time when I will not feel like a fraudulent imposter sitting behind the wheel of a car.

So I did my lesson.

Then I came home and shouted and ranted and threw all my toys out of the pram, which is my default setting for anything I cannot do instantly, or ever.  Because of course,  I should be brilliant.  It is not good enough that I can write books about boring birds.  I must also be James Hunt, and that is that.

Jason listened to me patiently, then pointed out that I am setting my standards too high.  I do not think the standards are too high when all I really want to be able to do, after twenty years of albeit intermittent, lessons, is to sit behind the wheel of a car and not have to fight all my inner demons and run away screaming.  He pointed out that I did not run away screaming. Nor did I kill anyone, or myself, and that the instructor’s wing mirrors are still intact.  This is o.k., particularly given the high terror levels in the car at the time.

I then cried all over him.  This is the next thing I do in these situations.

He gave me a bar of Dairy Milk and a coffee and sent me away to blog.  Now I have indigestion.

Apart from that, all is well.

Tomorrow I shall regale you with tales of our trip to Nottingham.  I am taking the kids for the day.  Nottingham town square has been turned into a beach with beach huts, and sand and paddling.  I think it will be big on the paddling.  Torrential rain is forecast.  We are going anyway.  There is nothing else to do and the kids are driving me crazy indoors.  Knowing my luck we will have to call the life guards.  Still, at least I won’t have to read the Highway Code.