I am Brilliant

I have achieved several notable things today. 

I wish I could say that I have brokered an accord in the Middle East, or that I have finally persuaded Simon Cowell that he is tanorexic and sent him to tanner’s anonymous.  Sadly, in terms of world shattering news, my notable things don’t even rate very highly in the free Glenfield paper, which is so interesting I have forgotten its name.

In the tiny world of the Boo’s however, they were magnificent, glowing achievements on a par with discovering the double helix or climbing Everest clad in only a fur lined bikini.

You are going to be so disappointed when I finally quit waffling and actually tell you.

Firstly, I have cleaned out the cupboard under the sink.

This might seem like an easy thing to do, to those of you who have fairly tame ‘cupboards under the sink’, but when you realise what a festival of horrors lurked under mine you may be slightly more approving. 

The cupboard under the sink is the only cupboard in the kitchen which has a safety clasp.  Therefore, all toxic and/or important things get deposited there.  I have for example, decided that it would be a perfect place to stash our frankly paltry amount of alcohol.  We hardly ever drink, so it’s not worth digging out a wine cellar, or even going to wine rack building classes.  As of today we have 1 mostly empty bottle of Tanqueray Ten. One full bottle of Tanqueray Ten. One bottle of Bombay Sapphire, some Absolut Vodka miniatures in 100 assorted flavours (bought before I realised that Absolut tastes like drain cleaner and I much prefer Stoli. The Stoli is in the freezer), a bottle of dubious cider one of the kids won at the school raffle two years ago and nobody will even take away, and a bottle of Chardonnay that someone must have given us because I only drink red wine and Jason doesn’t like wine full stop.

This mixes freely with the drain cleaner, dish washer salt, etc.  It is joined by a large Mag Lite with a broken bulb that we keep meaning to getting around to fixing, but need to keep out of the children’s clutches because it’s one that can stove a burglar’s head in at twenty paces and would be more accurately described as a weapon with a bulb in the end.

At one point I decided that we would be kind to birds.  I bought lots of bird seed.  We scattered some around. Jason went mad because we might be encouraging rats. Then he said that even if the birds did come that it would then encourage cats, and that would never do. And so we gave up feeding the birds. I deposited the three quarter gallon sack of bird food in the cupboard and promptly knocked it over.  I could not be bothered to clean it up, so up until this afternoon the whole cupboard was awash with bits of millett and sun flower seeds, some of which had adhered to the rinse aid when I forgot to put the lid on properly, and a small puddle of brackish water left over from the last time Oscar flooded the sink.

This whole delightful ensemble has then been covered with bin bags, hot water bottles, dustpan and brushes, some child’s sunglasses and an enormous stone garden light, complete with highly combustible lemon scented oil that someone gave us as a a preseent and we haven’t actually gotten round to sitting in the garden long enough to employ.

It was hell.  It was like going into the Heart of Darkness.

Now it looks lovely.  Everything is neatly ordered and tidy and all the bird seed has gone. 

I predict it will last less than a week.

The second great achievement has been cleaning the oven.  Now I don’t mean a cursory wipe round with some Jif. I mean dishwashing all the twiddly bits and rings off the top and the bits from the extractor fan, and covering everything else in Mr. Muscle until we were all wheezing like an asthmatic’s convention and the floor ran with dark brown, chemical excrement that made us all choke.  That kind of cleaning. 

Truly horrible.  It has taken the top layer off.  It has removed the horrible burned lump like a primeval mushroom, sprouting from the electric side of the oven, which I discovered a couple of days ago.  I hardly ever use this side of the oven, mainly because it is crap.  I presume it is actually charcoaled Yorkshire pudding, as this is the only thing I can remember cooking in there for the last six months.  I tried not to think about it too hard.  Mr. Muscle saw it off with nary a whimper.  Mainly because we couldn’t whimper, thanks to the toxic fumes emanating from the bowels of the oven.

I spent about an hour and a half swearing like a navvy and wondering about Sylvia Plath.  Not the most elegant way to go. Clearly she meant it.

The other achievements have been nicer.

I have finally bought myself a digital camera.  Jason has been reluctant to show me how his works.  Then, when I got my new phone the other week (Oscar spat milk down the volume control in the old one. At first I thought everyone had bad reception. Then it dawned on me.), he pointed out that it now has a 5 mega pixel camera, which is better than his digital camera anyway, therefore I don’t need to learn to use it.

I disagree. I want to have a phone that is a phone and a camera that is a camera. I know that you can get things that do all manner of other things these days, but I am very old fashioned about stuff like this.  I know I could make toast with the iron should I so desire. On the other hand, I prefer to use the toaster, because that’s what its designed to do. Certainly we could then throw the iron out, because the only ironing I ever do is those bloody Hama Beads and they’re driving me crazy.

So.  With some of the money Jason gifted me I have purchased a camera.  I sent Andrea to do the research because she is clever, and she knows what she is talking about, and she is clever enough to know how utterly retarded I am when it comes to technology.  I would have asked Jason but because he is a techno geek, he always massively over specs anything gadgety and I end up crying and throwing it at the wall, because when all I want to do is take a picture of one of the children sticking crayon pencils up their nose, it tries to get me to make an award winning short film complete with sub titles. No. No. No.

I have ordered a Canon.  This one.  It seems fairly idiot proof.  I might even be able to take the picture before the kids have buggered off to do something else.  Hoorah.

The other achievement was a stonking piece of luck.  I have been meaning to get around to reading Anthony Powell’s ‘A Dance to the Music of Time,’ for ever.  Keith recommended it to me on this very blog. I knew I had part of it (it’s in 12 volumes fans), but when I searched it out, I had Autumn. (It can be bought in four, seasonal volumes), which is typical of me, and not much use.  I put Spring on my wish list and have been failing to getting around to buying it for ages.  I nearly bought it last weekend, and then forgot that it was Autumn I had and didn’t want to duplicate.  Anyway, on Saturday, when we were a little early for our train, we wandered into a nearby second hand shop for a poke around for ten minutes, and they had Spring, for £1.  A bargain. An absolute and utter bargain.  I am delighted.  As soon as I’ve read my latest batch of must reads, I’m starting it.  It’s fate.

So. A momentous day in the Boo household. Nobody else will appreciate the magnificence, but I am covered in glory and smug self satisfaction and am convinced that when I read this back in twenty years time I will still be bloody impressed with myself.

The Odyssey

We have been away.

We have been daring.

Nothing saucy. Please don’t get your hopes up.

My friend, who lives in Melton Mowbray, home of pork pies, Stilton cheese and badly running trains, has four children and we see them quite often.  All the children get on well, and my friend and I have known each other for nearly twenty years now, so we got on quite well as well.  Earlier in the holidays when we got together we agreed that we would try having a sleepover at her house.  The children were over the moon and badgered us until we finally decided to sort ourselves out and do it. Hence radio silence this weekend while we had our Melton based adventure.

It could have been disastrous. I think we were both prepared to either a) batten down the hatches or b) cut our losses and go to our respective homes if things got too bad.  Amazingly we had to do neither of these things.  The kids got on beautifully and behaved themselves, even in public.  The big kids were kind to the little kids.  The little kids didn’t batter the big kids, and more importantly, everyone went to bed at the right time, in their own beds without a whimper and not one of them got up before morning.  How impressive is that?

Well, we were impressed.

Flabbergasted might be a better description quite honestly.

We had never, in a million years thought it would work out so nicely.

We, the grown ups, actually got to sit down with a bottle of red wine and a curry before eight o’clock.  We didn’t have to share any of our food with our children, and by ten o’clock we were sitting outside in the garden with wine and the chiminea, pretending that it was warm and not nearly Autumn.

This morning we went on a nature walk and collected blackberries and dog pooh (mea culpa!) and pottered about before I dragged my kids off back to the grim reality of Leicester.  It was lovely.  We have said we will do it again, although we have agreed that we may have peaked too early and we won’t be too optimistic about the second attempt.  But at least there will be a second attempt.  Which is, in itself, quite astonishing.

We got back to Leicester at half twelve and I was far too lazy to do anything like go home and cook.  We went to Nandos and ate what my children refer to as ‘flat chicken’.  Then we went to Waterstones and spent lots of money on lovely children’s picture books.  We moseyed home on the bus and picked up some French bread so we could have arty sandwiches, and got home at about half past three.

It is now ten past six and I can hardly keep my eyes open.  I cannot decide whether it is the tonnage of carbs I have scarfed into my face over the last three days, the red wine or the exercise, but I shall probably be snoring on the sofa by ten.

Happy days.

Love’s Labours Lost by Katyboo

Love’s Labour’s Lost is a comedy. I hesitate to mention yet again the whole comedy = dancing rule, as I have rarely shared with you any comedy with a dance in it for your delight.  And this is not about to deliver on the dancing front either, unless you watch the execrable film version by Kenneth Branagh, set in a 1930’s musical dancing hell.

 

Unlike our recent outing into All’s Well That Ends Well, this is not a comedy made of odds and ends. It is a comedy with an odd end.

 

It is a peculiar play, mostly unpopular in these modern times when the furthest contemporary vocabulary inventiveness stretches is to ‘innit?’ and ‘incha’ and ‘fookinell’.  It is a play full of words.

 

Now here you are probably thinking, ‘that Katyboo, bless her, she doesn’t get out much, and too much lemon curd cake was bound to affect her in the end,’ etc.  Yes. I am aware that all the plays are full of words.  Particularly the four hour gallop through Hamlet.  And, if you are choosing your Shakespeare on the length of time you will be required to utilise your sitting bone, this is one of the shortest.  Although I’d advise you not to get too excited. You’re still in for a good two hour trot.

 

On the word front, it is very like the Emperor faced with a precocious Mozart and his love of twiddly bits…’Too many notes…’ and it certainly brings to my mind the disastrous time I persuaded my father to come and watch The Merry Wives of Windsor because it had Bergerac in it.  After three hours in which nary a burgundy sports car or leather bomber jacket whizzed across the stage, and it looked nothing like crime ridden Jersey, my father’s only comment on leaving was: ‘Too many words…’

 

The issue with words in this play is that it is loaded with sophisticated Elizabethan style banter, lots of complex poetry which is meant to be both hilarious and thought provoking, and about four hundred million puns, symbols and other elaborate verbal badinage, most of which whizzes over a modern theatregoer’s head like a low flying mallard.  You just have to bear with it.  A big handicap is the fact that Elizabethans thought that punning was just about the most sophisticated comic device known to man, and we associate it with Ken Dodd and end of the pier variety shows by men wearing bad wigs and shouting; ‘Boom! Boom!’

 

As we know, I do not do puns, banter or tricky poetry that requires Stephen Fry to explain it to our dulled brains.  So we should be fine.  Let’s stick with the facts ma’am and get trucking.

 

We are trucking over to Navarre to the court of King Ferdinand.  Those of you who were paying attention in the last master class will remember the golden rule for all plays with incomprehensible behaviour in.  Make the participants foreign and all shall be well.  This play has taken this rule on board in spades.  We have Navarre and his fellow Navarrians.  We have stupid Spanish people who aren’t from Navarre and foxy French fillies.  It’s all go here as regards entente cordiale and the EU would probably give this play a grant were someone trying to write it now.

 

King Ferdinand is a serious young fellow.  He doesn’t really like being king. It’s all rather tedious and long winded.  And after having stumbled across some of Shakespeare’s old manuscripts in which kings feature heavily he has gone off the whole thing.  Frankly he’s as nervous as a cat in a blender about the whole malarkey.  He has only just had his hair done. He has no wish to lose his head or be deposed by lunatic daughters’ intent on disembowelling and eating him.  He’s never liked witches or blood and he just can’t drum up the enthusiasm.

 

He was a sickly, bespectacled child whose mother refused to let him go out and play rugby with the rough boys.  She rubbed his chest with goose grease, wrapped him in brown paper and monitored his bowel movements using a spreadsheet.  By the time his late father took any interest and packed him off to boarding school to get a spine, it was all too late for Navarre.

 

Instead of a glittering career rowing, rubbing boys tousled heads with his knuckles and drinking forty eight pints of Old Peculiar whilst balancing a glass on his head he joined the chess club and took an interest in Dungeons and Dragons.  His mother wrote a note to excuse him from sports and he could be found on most afternoons curled up in the library reading books with his equally swotty friends.

 

The only reason he didn’t get minced alive by Drummer Harris and his cohorts was the fact that one day he was going to be king and could have them all executed.

 

So now he’s king, and he’s trying desperately to think up a way to wriggle out of banquets, kissing babies and being enthusiastic about native dancing and cheese factories.  He has a mortal fear of hair nets and industrial strength wellington boots, and his palms sweat when he is nervous.  It is all too horrible to contemplate.

 

After several days of hard thinking he comes up with just the ticket. He decides that he will set up an exclusive university with the sole purpose of learning many wise and important things that a good king should know.  In case he gets bored, he will invite his three best friends to join him in the pursuit of wisdom.  He will also create a veritable web of incomprehensible rules regarding the governing of said academy which should neatly get round the chance that any cheesemongers wearing hair nets might want to join for example. It has nothing to do with not kissing babies. Nothing at all. Honest guv’nor.

 

Nobody is taken in by this elaborate ruse.  But what’s to be done?  He’s the king.  While he is busy setting up his ivory tower and persuading his friends that what they want more than anything else in the world is to go back to school, the rest of the country is burying their gold in the garden, writing wills and working out the best way to the border avoiding all main roads.  With this kind of a king, the country is sure to go to hell in a bucket before the next six months is up.  There are rumours that Drummer Harris is massing on the borders and when he takes the throne it will be double P.E. every Thursday and no let off, even if you have got asthma.

 

Navarre is blithely unaware of all this and has just invited his friends to the swearing of their oath of fealty to him and his university.  What fun.

 

His friends, Dumaine, Longaville and Berowne were initially very enthusiastic.  They love Navarre. They are absolutely chuffed to conkers that this is the only kingdom in the entire planet that is being ruled by a geek.  As geeks themselves, and friends to the chief geek, they have been looking forward to all the perks that being the geeky friends of the most powerful man in the kingdom will bring.  They had visions of staying up all night drinking Crème de Menthe frappe’s, not wearing vests and talking about Schrodingers Cat and string theory with women with big breasts.  They don’t care about the fact that the women are only interested in their power and money.  They just want to be near to big breasts. 

 

And up to now it has all been going swimmingly.  Unfortunately Navarre has also been unnerved by the proximity of predatory women with large mammaries.  They are crushing his head.  Add to that the fact that his mother keeps showing him pictures of princesses that look like horses and talking about babies.  All it needs is a picture of a horsey woman in a hairnet eating cheese and clutching a baby and his worse nightmare will be upon him.  He has come to the realisation that he is quite keen on the idea of women, but that the reality is far too alarming and fleshy and must be avoided at all costs.

 

 To this end he has, quite deliberately, put a clause in the oath that in order to be accepted into his university, all of his friends must swear off women for three years.  The idea first came to him on a disastrous all boys together adventure to the Stephen Hawking memorial lecture hall last Thursday week.  Sherries were served at the reception afterwards and after having gotten a little the worse for wear, all the men were rebuffed cruelly by some hot physics babes from the university who laughed at their theories and were not in the slightest bit impressed by crowns.

 

They had retired to the Eldorado cocktail lounge to nurse their resentment over some flaming sambuca and jelly babies when Navarre came up with the idea of the vow of celibacy.  At the time, suffering from collectively crushed egos that looked like the worst horse and cart wreck ever on the main Navarre road it seemed like a brilliant idea.  Now that they are about to sign their lives away and retreat into the pearly gates of academe it does not seem so appealing.  Particularly to Berowne who has a secret crush on Navarre’s mum and gets a bit of a thrill from humiliation.

 

After quite a lot of fierce debate in which Berowne insists on mentioning girls and the lack thereof more times than is comfortable, and Navarre has to raise the stakes with the old, ‘I am the king you know,’ routine, Berowne backs down.  He is not entirely convinced by the king’s promise of raucous nights of entertainment provided by his clown Costard, a crazy Spanish nobleman called Don Adriano de Armado and his pageboy Moth. 

He has also read Shakespeare and is not convinced that clowns are that funny.  What can he do?  His only revenge on signing the fateful oath is to remind Navarre that it’s all well and good to swear off the presence of women within a five mile radius of the court, but Navarre has to meet the princess of France tomorrow on a diplomatic mission regarding the position of Aquitaine and other such royal matters.  He’s got himself into a right pickle now, hasn’t he?

 

Navarre had forgotten this.  He has a Homer ‘Doh!’ moment and then decides that as he is the king and it’s too bloody late to back down now without looking like a right Charlie to his mates he has to go along with it.  He doesn’t care about looking like a right Charlie to the princess of France.  After all, she’ll be at least five miles away and hopefully if he cocks it up, he will never have to see her again.

 

Navarre is now having one of his turns, and keeps visualising bosoms wrapped in cheese looming on the horizon.  He goes to bed with a headache.

 

Navarre wakes up hoping his nightmares about French princesses have been just that.  Unfortunately, before he can toast his morning crumpet and get down to a hard morning’s study about whether black cats in black cupboards exist when you’re thinking about tax returns, the page announces that the Princess of France and her ladies’ Rosaline, Maria and Katherine are at the door.  They are kicking up a right how’s your father, wanting to know why they are not being allowed inside for a cup of tea.  The diplomatic mission has started on the most undiplomatic terms in the history of diplomacy ever.

 

Navarre is a bolshy little blighter and hates to be proved wrong. He refuses to admit the princess and says the best he can do is a four man tent and a groundsheet in the field next door.  They can like it or lump it. 

 

The French team have already heard reports on their journey that Navarre is a somewhat eccentric monarch.  They have sent ahead their steward Boyet, who is as gay as ninepence and totally up for a bit of intrigue and mucking about to liven up the day, to assess how mad, mad is.  He comes back and draws a graph of foxes heads on sticks in which he calculates that Navarre’s madness is madnosity plus with added insanity.  On the other hand, underneath the dodgy elephant cords and the bad glasses Boyet reckons that Navarre is a bit of a babe and probably hung like a horse.  He advises the women to stick around and mess with his head.  Finally free of the rigours of French courtly life and after one too many sherries they agree, and get Boyet to do creative things with the groundsheet.  They hunker down and wait for Navarre to show his face.

 

In the meantime Navarre’s vow of celibacy is not going well.  In a fit of pique since the news of the French babes arrival upset his equilibrium he has forced everyone he has ever known to sign it, including his father’s hunting dog and a man called Cyril who was just passing through.  Costard has signed it in the full knowledge that his clownship is a get out of jail free card and because everyone thinks he’s a half wit he can do whatever he likes.  Don Armado has signed it because he is a half wit and just likes signing things.  Last week he got nicked for vandalising a bus stop in a fit of over enthusiastic signing.

 

Costard has not let his vow of celibacy stop him wooing a big bosomed, come hither peasant called Jacquenetta.  All is going great guns until Don Armado spots her, falls for her ample charms and decides that he is going to have her for himself.  He rats out Costard to the celibacy police and Costard gets stuck in the slammer with bread and water for a week.  Don Armado and his faithful Moth bugger off to woo Jacquenetta, who isn’t really bothered who is wooing her frankly, as long as she gets a snog and a free lunch.

 

While all this is going on in the background, Navarre has finally been persuaded that if he doesn’t want to be the shortest ruling monarch in the history of the kingdom then he needs to stop sulking, change out of his pyjamas and go and make nice with the Princess of France.

 

He takes his trusty geek posse with him and ambles off down to the field, taking the longest route possible, kicking gravel with his toe and muttering about princesses who look like horses under his breath.

 

The princess is not used to this kind of neglect and has determined on revenge.  Boyet, who is the Elizabethan Gok Wan, has been put to full use re-styling the already effortlessly glamourous French babes and turning the field into an Elle Decoration photo shoot.

 

Navarre is amazed.  The last time he came down this way the entire field was full of rotting manure and rusting bikes.  Now it is a temple of elegance. He has only just put his tongue back into his head when the princess of France trips forwards and lays on the charm with a trowel.  Navarre is a dead duck.

 

He is in love. He cannot believe that this woman really is a princess. He is extraordinarily cross with his mother.  All the photos she has shown him up to now have looked like something from Spain’s most wanted lists.  Not a woman under the age of forty five and the best feature among them a hairy wart.  He begins to suspect foul play and resolves to cut the apron strings and send his mother on a long cruise to the Galapagos islands for the foreseeable future.

 

Dumaine, Longaville and Berowne are all equally smitten with the foxy French ladies maids and have to stand behind trees grinning like loons to hide their enthusiasm.

 

The ladies, it has to be said, are equally impressed with the men.  Given the fact that this is the first time both parties have been free of parental supervision it is unsurprising that they are enthusiastic.  The men could have looked like Les Dawson and they would have given it their best shot.  Berowne, who was the least enthusiastic celibate to begin with, completely loses his head and in the space of five minutes has cast aside his lustful thoughts for Navarre’s mother and is now mentally moving in with Rosaline.

 

The men go back to the palace, hearts afluster and all vow in deep brown voices that they were not in the slightest bit bothered about stupid girls and were very thankful indeed that Navarre made them sign that oath.  Or who knows what would happen.  Then they go to their rooms to kick the furniture and fantasise about French corsetry in equal measure.

 

The ladies, who are French and therefore a lot more sophisticated, are utterly delighted with the effect they’ve had on the blokes, and are determined to take the advantage and run with it.  They set Boyet up as their spy and send him off to find out what will happen next.

 

In the meantime, Don Armado’s wooing of Jacquenetta is not going well and he decides that the best thing he can do is free his rival, Costard from jail and then pay him to deliver a love letter to her.  Berowne, who has been up all night writing torturously bad poetry to Rosaline, catches Costard just as he is going out the door and pays him to deliver said poetry to his lady love.  Naturally, in a side splittingly comic turn of events, the letters get mixed up.  A veritable ‘Whoops, there go my bloomers,’ moment.

 

Jacquenetta can’t read.  She takes her letter to the wise Sir Nathaniel and the school teacher Holofernes, who are only in the play because two of Shakespeare’s bezzie mates wanted parts and he promised to write them in.  Sir Nathaniel realises it is the wrong letter and tells Jacquenetta to give it to Navarre.  The jig is up for Berowne. In the meantime, Boyet has realised the love letter for Rosalind is actually for Jacquenetta.  He has no sense of propriety and opens it anyway, much to the hilarity of the whole French camp and everyone wets their pants laughing at peasant lurve in all its lurid glory.

 

Navarre is very cross with Berowne’s oath breaking naughtiness and punishes him until he realises that Berowne has given him the perfect excuse to ignore the vow and get away with it.  At which point all pretence at celibacy is abandoned, and the men set up a poetry factory in the Mills and Boon stylings, and bombard the poor French women with execrable verse and unsuitably naff love tokens by the bucket load.

 

After a week of constant plighting and sighin they decide that the fillies will be softened up enough, and that it is time to visit them and demand kisses and licks.  For some reason, probably the fact that they are all cowardly and cannot quite erase the mental damage of being laughed at by a load of lady physicists, they decide that the best way to go about this wooing is to disguise themselves as a bunch of Russian Cossacks.  That will learn them.  All ladies like visits by Russian Cossacks.  Navarre has heard this from his mother.  Unfortunately he has still not gotten round to taking his own advice and packing her off to the Galapagos islands.  She is taking her revenge and sits in her turret pissing her pants at the thought of her son rushing about the countryside dressed in a large fur hat and trousers that make him look like he’s done a big pooh.  She is convinced that the French princess will reject him out of hand and he will come home to mummy like all good boys should.

 

She has not banked on the wily and cunning ways of Boyet, who is now so in at Navarre’s court he has his own knife and fork.  Boyet gets wind of this ridiculous plan, and being a big soft nancy at heart, he decides to help the stricken men.  He rushes off to the princess and gives her the skinny.  He advises her that if she ever wants true love she’s going to have to go along with Navarre’s foibles and book a one way ticket to the Galapagos islands for his mother as soon as she gets her royal feet under Navarre’s table.  In the meantime there is nothing to say that they cannot see how much messing they can do with kingly heads to pass the time.

 

The men have decided that they will know the princesses because they will, of course, be wearing all the love tokens that they have been shuttling down to the field all week.  The ladies simply swap tokens and wear burglar masks and then allow themselves to be erroneously wooed by the wrong suitors just for a laugh.

 

The men retreat, thinking all went well and they are in like Flynn.  The women go to bed laughing their socks off and spending all night gossiping like fiends with Boyet and trying anti wrinkle creams they got free in a magazine.  Everyone is happy apart from Mrs. Navarre senior, who has heartburn and indignation in equal measures.

 

Navarre wakes up feeling on top of the world.  Things are going brilliantly and he has conveniently forgotten what disasters befall him when he takes it into his head to make plans.  He decides to have a huge party to celebrate his success at being an all round love god and world leader extraordinaire.  He delegates the entertainment to Don Armado, Costard and all the peasants, which news has already given Berowne a nasty tic in his left eye.  Still, nothing to be done.

 

The night of the entertainment rolls inexorably on and all the guests gather together for a final shindig in which Navarre is convinced he will bag himself a royal wife and the others are hoping for a shag at least.

 

It all starts to go wrong when the ladies complain that their lovers are fickle, and too stupid to work out which is their own girlfriends.  It takes a couple of bottles of champagne and an hour of extensive grovelling to make peace.

 

Then the entertainment begins.  It is only as the curtain opens that Navarre realises what a total half wit he has been in letting these people put on a play.  It is too late. 

 

In the middle of the play, which make’s 4C’s modern rendition of the nativity play set in an asylum seeker’s camp look worthy of a Tony, it transpires that Jacquenetta is pregnant by Don Armado.  Costard is not best pleased and a duel looks set to take pride of place as the main entertainment of the evening instead.

 

Just as they are squaring up to each other, Mercade, a messenger arrives from the French court and drops the bombshell that the king of France is dead and that the princess needs to come home to be measured up into forty yards of black bombazine, and there’s no time to hang about.

 

Navarre cannot believe his bad luck.  Mrs Navarre senior is now doing a jig in the vol au vents and downing a swift victory gin.  He tries to persuade the princess that probably having your father die, especially when he’s a king, isn’t so bad really and can’t she just stay and marry him instead.  She is quite clear that the answer ‘yes’ is not an option.  He says he would settle for a knee trembler behind the bike sheds.  She won’t hear of it.

 

Eventually she softens and says that she will marry him on two conditions.  The first is that he send his mother to the Galapagos islands.  The second is that he goes to a hermitage and lives a life of holy contemplation for twelve months before he comes to find her.  If he still wants to marry her after that, she’ll have him. 

 

He agrees with alacrity.  On balance, considering that he was going to spend three years without having any sex, and now after one he might get lucky, he thinks it’s a fair trade off.  He agrees, as do all the other men except Berowne.

 

Rosaline’s demand in return for her hand is slightly more bizarre.  She says that she finds all this dressing up as a Cossack business quite troubling and wants him to get it out of his system.  She asks him to go out every day and find dying peasants and try to make them laugh.  If he succeeds and he still wants her, he can have her.

 

He is slightly baffled by this, as is everyone else.  However, there is no denying the fact that Rosaline is a babe and has a magnificent pair of bosoms.  He’s not going to argue too hard. He agrees and the ladies all float off to France to sit in a dark cupboard wailing for twelve months.  The men don their hair shirts, abandon Navarre to its fate and disappear to their respective hermitages and hospitals.

 

The final shot is Mrs. Navarre senior being tied to a deckchair on board the paddle steamer ‘Big Turtles’, bound for the Galapagos Islands.

 

Fin

Don’t Hit Me …I am full of choc o late

I cannot bend properly in the middle.

Not because I am old.

Not because I have been attempting feats of acrobatic derring do.

No.

It is because I have spent the day being a total and utter glutton.

I am stuffed.

Stuffed to the gills.

I was jonesing for lunch by eleven o’clock.

In fact I was so convinced that it would be at least twelve that I nearly embarked on lunch preparations without checking.  When I saw it was only eleven, and I had in fact partaken of a small smidgen or two of breakfast at about nine, I was ashamed.

I stopped making lunch.

Five minutes later I swept back into the kitchen and rapidly ate half a bar of chocolate, a packet of crisps and an apple.

I went away, convinced that would be all that was necessary until at least two o’clock.

I started making lunch at twelve on the dot.

Then, this afternoon, my friend Aunty Squirrel came round.  She stays for tea and as her contribution she raids her local farm shop and brings things for us to try.  Usually cake. Sometimes preserves.  Today I got two jars of interesting looking chutney and two cakes. I think maybe she’d been thinking about tea as much as I had been thinking about lunch.

We had jacket potatoes for tea. We both love jacket potatoes and we like eating them with the kids because the kids hate their potato skins and we love them.  We ate 1 and a half huge potatoes each with all the trimmings and all the kids potato skins.  Then we tried every kind of cake (lemon curd sponge and coconut and cherry loaf).  Then we felt quite ill.

That was the first time all day I felt full.  Then I felt fuller.  Then I felt a bit fuller.

Now I feel like I’ve eaten a polysterene sofa which is expanding sideways.  I can feel potatoes pushing up under my ribs. I am most uncomfortable.

And large.

Still.

It was worth it.

Yay for food.

All’s Well That Ends Well by Katyboo

All’s Well That Ends Well is technically a Shakespearean comedy.  It should be a comedy because nobody dies in a weltering bath of gore.  On the other hand, there is no dancing, and as we know, dancing is the number one thing in the Shakespearean comedy spotter’s guide that lets you know absolutely that everything is tickety boo and that you have had a side splittingly hilarious time.

 

I think this was one of those moments where Shakespeare had promised that he would write a rollicking fun fest of a play for someone, probably to get enough money to pay for some new doublets or to clear up some sort of scrofulous itch.  It seems clear that he was not high on inspiration and toting a loaded quill when he wrote this play.  I can just imagine him squatting at his table, chewing a roasted swan’s leg, scratching his itch and moodily scribbling down a line or two in between sighing heavily and wondering how many centuries it would be before someone invents Big Brother.

 

It is, how shall I put it? A bit of a lame effort.  Could do better if tried harder. In fact, anybody could do better if tried harder. I could give it a go. Oscar could probably have a damn fine crack at it. 

 

I think that it’s safe to say that it is now a problem play.  Not because it is particularly contentious, although it has its moments. Mostly because it seems to be made up of several other half finished plays which have been torn up, put in a bag, pulled out randomly and stuck together with glue.  I am sure when Shakespeare finally handed it over, the play meister would have looked at it suspiciously like someone had handed him ripe cat turd.  Shakespeare would have been half way out the door with his bag of groats and would have flung back the line; ‘You can hardly see the join’ before hot footing it to the pox clinic.

 

The first thing to note is that it is set in France.  This is short hand for ‘don’t blame me. It’s the French. They’re all bloody mad.  They eat frogs you know.’  The setting of plays in foreign countries is a get out of jail free card for Shakespeare.  He’s banking on the fact that the peasantry think that going to Wapping is an event.  They were naturally suspicious of foreigners and wouldn’t put anything past them, consequently any little anomalies get explained away by the weirdness of the foreign climes.  Fantastic.

 

The Countess of Rousillon is rich and powerful.  She is one of the very few women in Shakespeare who are not either dead, mad or evil.  Obviously, because this is problematic in that she might be able to make a decent fist of her life, he has chosen to surround her with drivelling, witless males to make her life complex and irritating.

 

Her husband has died and left her the care of her terminally selfish, adolescent spawn, Bertram.  Bertram is obsessed by two things, sex and death, death and sex.  His mind runs on these two lines interchangeably and incessantly.  He’s either thinking ‘choppy, choppy, stabby, stabby argh!’ or ‘bumpy, bumpy, grindy, grindy, argh!’ It’s much the same thing.  His ideal date Cilla, would be to slay a field full of heavily armed enemies and then top it off by shagging a few slightly reluctant maidens in the remains of the vanquished.  Lovely.

 

Bertram is proving to be so annoying to the Countess due to the remains of countless headless dogs and cats stacking up in the woodshed and the astronomical number of boxes of Kleenex she’s having to pay for, that she’s shipping him off to Paris to be the ward of the King of France.  As soon as he’s gone she’s going to boil all the sheets and rent out his bedroom in the hope that he never comes back.

 

She has a retainer called Parolles who is a ‘friend’ of Bertram.  This fact alone should set alarm bells ringing up and down the length and breadth of France.  Parolles is like a seedier, less successful version of Bertram.  He has a paunch, a combover, breath that could strip paint off a radiator at twenty paces and no concept of personal space.  He is also under the illusion that he is a big hit with the ‘laydeez’.  He hasn’t had a shag since 1608, but that hasn’t stopped him proferring his wide knowledge of carnal relations to all and sundry, including the Countess’ aged grandmother last Christmas, which is why she choked on that glass of Amontillado.

 

The Countess has decided that what Bertram needs is a protector, to shield him from harmful influences at court.  She has chosen Parolles.  It is nothing at all to do with the fact that she can’t stand the sight of him and has never forgiven him for trying to grope her bosom at her husband’s wake.  Nor the fact that when she squints at his grotesque face across the breakfast table it reminds her that if she doesn’t do something radical soon, this is what Bertram will look like in twenty years time.  The thought never crossed her mind.

 

She packs them off with some sound advice, a one way ticket and a cart load of Pot Noodles.  She retires to the house feeling only marginally guilty at what she has unleashed upon the king and goes to wash her hands after saying goodbye to Parolles.  She has her best clown, Lavatch, to keep her warm.  Lavatch has to be her stud muffin action because he’s about as funny as a fire in an orphanage.  Parolles, who only knows knob and fart jokes is more amusing and he isn’t on the clown pay roll.  There’s definitely some seriously awry in the clown brotherhood in France if Lavatch is the best they have to offer.  The Countess is not too bothered about his one liners.  He’s hung like a horse, and after twenty miserable years with Bertram’s father it’s time to party on in Rousillon.

 

As for the possibility that the king is not going to be utterly thrilled with the gift of Bertram as his faithful retainer, the hot news on the Champs Elysee is that he’s dying of a fistula (a giant hole, usually in an arse, but who knows frankly? Let’s draw a veil over the exact site of the fistula.  Needless to say it was Elizabethan and horrible and MRSA was probably the least of your worries), and won’t be bothered by Bertram for too long, and if he’s got any sense at all he’ll send him to the front and have him murdered before the month is out.

 

The only person who is sad at this state of affairs is Helena.  Helena is young, poor and beautiful.  Her father was a physician who actually managed to cure people, probably by refraining from covering them in leaches and refusing to drain all their blood from their body to ‘help’ them.  He was so good at helping the Countess (probably to bump off her husband, if he was anything like her son), that she has taken Helena into her care and is allowing her to be her servant, but in a nice way.  How kind.

 

Helena seems like a bright girl. She has learned some doctoring skills from her father and is clearly quite clever, except when it comes to picking men to fall in love with.  She has chosen Bertram.  Bertram who is only interested in what someone’s insides look like from the outside, and notching up marks on his bedpost.  That Bertram. Oh dear.

 

The Countess is quite sympathetic to Helena’s plight.  She realizes that she is bloody lucky to have found anyone to give Bertram the time of day given his hobbies, and that if Helena takes him off her hands she will have someone to stitch him up when his leg gets lopped off in battle, and someone else will be in charge of picking up sticky tissues for the next forty years.  The fact that Helena is a penniless servant is by the by.  It is a small price to pay for the fact that she, his mother, will be shot of him. Plus if it all goes wrong she can shake her head ruefully and blame the class system, rather than the fact that her son is a sociopathic pervert.  Disaster averted.

 

When she finds Helena weeping and awash with woe at the thought of being parted from Bertram, they hatch a plot to send Helena to the king as well, on the grounds that Helena might be able to do something about his fistula.  The idea being that while Helena is not packing the king’s hole with a hot bread poultice, she can look alluringly at Bertram and he will be won over by her cool headed, practical charms.  Unlikely given his penchant for Page 3 Stunnas wielding broad swords and draped glisteningly over palfried steeds, but A for effort.  You work with what you have right?

 

Helena trots off to Paris where Bertram has already succeeded in irritating the life out of the king and his courtiers by constantly demanding to know when he’s going to be allowed to kill something, and trying to stick his hand up the ladies wimples.  After Parolles burped the Marseillais at supper last night, the king has used up all his reserves of patience and is getting quite tetchy.  As he has to spend his whole life ruling a bunch of arrogant, sex crazed mercenaries whilst nursing a large hole in his nether regions he wasn’t in the best mental state to start with. This is the final straw.

 

Helena rocks up at court and demands to see the king’s hole.  He’s not best pleased. He’s been being prodded by court physicians for the last ten years and although he has no modesty left, he hasn’t quite sunk to the depths of showing a young peasant his rotting arse just yet.  He demands that she gets out and lets him die in peace, standing up.

 

Helena isn’t having any of it. She rolls her sleeves up in a matronly fashion and tells him to quit whining and whip it out.  She hasn’t travelled on fourteen stage coaches and been propositioned by Parolles to be thwarted at this late stage in the proceedings.  She’s got bottoms to fix and husbands to chase.

 

She makes a deal with the king which is that if she can’t cure him he can kill and eat her and never deal with wayward peasants pretending to be doctors again, and if she can cure him, he must allow her to marry the first young fella me lad at court that takes her fancy.  Cunning eh?

 

The king has been worn down by her rubber gloves and no nonsense attitude and bends over and takes it like a man.  She reminds him of his old nanny.

 

Within a matter of moments (thankfully off stage moments), he is capering about like a young buck and doing the twist again like he did last summer.  He escorts Helena to the court with a hey and a ho and a flick of his shapely ankles.  She is exultant.  She has just won the rollover on the marriage lottery and Bertram is in her sights.

 

Reactions at court are mixed to say the least.  The heir apparent to the throne is utterly cheesed off. He has been practicing his regal wave for weeks and has been balancing encyclopaedias on his head in lieu of a crown. Now the jig is up and it looks like the king will keep on trucking for another twenty years.  He makes a mental note to cancel his ermine stole and sulks off back to his quarters.

 

Bertram is a bit astounded to see his mother’s favourite servant licking the king’s elbow and not best pleased. He has left all his rustic ways behind him and doesn’t want any news of his debauched, axe wielding life style to get back to his mother. He dons his best petulant face and hunkers down.

 

The king announces that he and his royal nether regions are now saved and that he has promised that Helena can have her pick of the eligible young men at court as her reward.

 

The eligible young men are horrified.  Helena is poor, practical and has working knowledge of the king’s bottom.  This is not likely to endear her to anyone who spends their life reading Loaded and partying on down.  It would be like marrying their nanny. God forbid.

 

Helena takes her time, ramping up the tension and enjoying the first bit of power she’s ever had.  She flits from boy to boy (we won’t say man to man) putting the fear of living God into them. She is very nice about it but basically dismisses every one, muttering under her breath ‘small penis, small penis’. Until that is she gets to Bertram and her plan comes to fruition.

 

The king is delighted. The other courtiers are delighted, the collected sigh of relief actually knocks over the under footman.  The only person who isn’t delighted is Bertram. Bertram is horrified and too stupid and ill bred not to mention it.  Running around the throne room shouting: ‘Urgh! Urgh! Girls! Kissing! She’s seen the king’s bottom! Urgh! Penniless peasant! Urgh! Gerroff.’

The king is not amused.  Not even slightly.  He loses his temper and advises Bertram to suck it up.  Bertram, who has by now been convinced that he is the centre of the known universe and who has been enjoying a life of wine, women, song and pulling the wings off flies, is not about to relinquish his nirvana, not even for the king.  He most resolutely refuses to suck it up and tells the king to kiss his arse.

 

Helena is distraught. Things are not going to plan at all.  She tries to pacify Bertram by saying that it’s totally ok that he’s just humiliated her in front of the most powerful people in the land.  All her fault. Big misunderstanding. Don’t worry about it. Can we try again? Was it something I said? Should I wear different nail varnish? Etc.  At which point the entire female population of the world with any spine go ‘Huh?’ in utter amazement and wash their hands of the whole affair.  She showed such promise too.

 

This is too close for kingly comfort, and the king, quite annoyed yet again by the upstart whipper snapper points out that just because he had a hole in his bottom doesn’t mean that he’s not the king and Bertram will marry her or rue the day.

 

Bertram decides to marry her in astonishingly bad grace, and rue the day.  They are married in the most humiliatingly, gut wrenchingly awkward wedding in the entire history of weddings.  Bertram gives a speech.  It consists of him flouncing about vituperatively pointing his finger in a very accusing manner and telling Helena that he can’t stand the sight of her.  She makes him sick and he’s going off to fight in the Italian wars rather than spend another day with her great, gurning, girly face.  He says that the only grounds on which he will consider coming back are if she manages to get his family ring off his finger, which won’t ever happen until he’s dead and clammy with worms wriggling out of his ears, and if she shows him the baby she has conceived with him.

 

Thinking, quite reasonably that this has certainly given her a thing or two to think about and no mistake, he hops on his steed, accompanied by the ever repellent Parolles, and buggers off to Italy.

 

Everyone except Helena is by now so utterly appalled by his behaviour that they are hoping that he will get shot by the first macaroni eating,  big hated Italian he comes across and that Helena will do the decent thing and bugger off to a nunnery to live down the shame of falling in love with such an utter bastard.

 

Time passes.  The Countess hears about her son’s shameful behaviour, blushes and wishes she had never opened her legs on that fateful day.  Lavatch takes her mind off things and we hear nothing more for several months until they come up for air.

 

Meanwhile, Bertram is proving himself an exceptional warrior due to his total lack of imagination, his belief that he is entirely indestructible and his love of big, shiny guns and killing.  He is grudgingly winning the respect of his men on the field, but they all still think he is a morally bankrupt filth monger as regards his private life, and there is much bandying of the phrase: ‘Poor Helena’, while Bertram rogers his way round Italy. 

 

Bertram is by now stationed at a particularly appealing village where there is a lady who has some fine looking daughters, including the virginal Diana.  Bertram has his beady eye on her and is spending every spare moment trying to deflower her in an unashamed manner, totally careless of the fact that everyone else cannot believe his cheek and that Diana finds him mostly repellent.

 

To add to his disgrace, Parolles is parading about pretending to be a big war hero and all round demi God, despite having suspiciously Falstaffian leanings towards cowardice and not doing much of anything at all.  The soldiers all loathe him and persuade Bertram (who is fickle to every emotion except his loathing of Helena), that they can trick Parolles into disgracing himself, ratting out the company and being an utter coward, and that it will be a hilarious jape.  Bertram gives his approval to the betrayal of his friend and gets back to plumping up his codpiece for the lovely Diana.  Which, unbeknownst to him, makes Diana a little bit sick into her mouth every time she sees it.  That and the overwhelming smell of Lynx do not endear him to her one bit.

 

Suddenly, rather like the shop keeper in Mr. Benn, Helena appears in the exact same village.  She has told everyone that she has been on a pilgrimage while instead she has been tracking Bertram with all the dedication of a bloodhound on the scent of a particularly delicious criminal.

 

She bumps into Diana and her mother just as they are discussing quite how nauseating Bertram is, and now that he has won yet another victory, just how massive his ego will be compared to last time, and it was pretty massive then.  Surprisingly Helena recognises his description straight away, and despite putting two and two together and receiving a lurid account of his lascivious behaviour, she is still determined to be his proper wife.  She is now officially in crazed stalker mode.

 

She confesses to the women who she is.  They see the dangerous glint in her eye and the bulging purse at her waist and decide to nod and smile, never turn their backs on her and go along with everything she suggests. 

 

What she suggests is this.

 

She tells Diana to allow Bertram to ooze all over her and agree to meet him later for a bit of rumpy pumpy.  The only proviso will be that he is not allowed to talk to her and he can only stay as long as it takes to impregnate her.  No hardship for Bertram who is probably done and dusted on the rumpy front in under five minutes, and who has no conversation that doesn’t revolve around knobs and big knives.

 

The only price for his five minutes of bliss is the family ring on his finger (oh Helena! You are a cunning minx).

Naturally, unbeknownst to Bertram, Diana and Helena will swop places.  He won’t know the difference because he is an utter half wit and a half, and after he has impregnated her with his babies, Helena will have hit the marriage lottery jackpot yet again.  You would think she might have learned from the first time round, but she’s nothing if not persistent.

 

The plan comes off brilliantly.  Bertram is slightly reluctant to give up the family ring, but thinking about seeing Diana’s nipples finishes him off in under two minutes and he hands it over.

 

While he and Diana/Helena are getting jiggy with it, the soldiers have caught Parolles on patrol and are pretending to be evil, foreign mercenaries who are going to scoop out his brains and eat him.  In the same time it takes Bertram to hand over the ring, Parolles coughs his guts up about everything his army are doing, including inside leg measurements and home addresses.  The soldiers tie him to a tree and leave him to rot while they trot off to find Bertram to show him just what a naughty boy Parolles is.

 

Bertram saunters into camp, fulfilled and happy with his lot.  He slaps his thighs and thinks of rotting carcasses and sings tra la la.  The soldiers drag his unresisting body to where Parolles is trussed up like a chicken and proceed to demonstrate his friend’s utter faithlessness by prompting him to say rude things about Bertram.  It turns out that even Parolles, who has the morals of a woodlouse, is outraged by Bertrams shoddy behaviour and thinks he has the finesse of a tomcat.

 

Parolles is finally shown the error of his ways and is booted out of camp to beg his way back to France in disgrace.

 

In the meantime, Bertram ditches Diana like a hot rock and goes on a victory tour of the provinces before coming back to court where the French king is about as pleased to see him as he would be if his fistula came back. 

 

Helena too has been making her way back to France.  While she has been doing this she has sent a postcard to everyone saying she is dead from grief, heaping yet more shame on Bertram’s unrepentant head, and has also been growing Bertram’s baby.  How lucky he turned out not to shoot blanks.  A mini Bertram.  We are truly blessed.

 

Everyone decamps to Rousillon for the denouement where all is revealed.  Everyone goes, Ooooh and Aaaaahhh and the king wonders when he’ll ever get any peace from all these bloody nuisances and was it really worth it? Surely a fistula was never as much a pain in the backside as all these people aggravating him day in and day out.

 

Bertram has been double crossed so many times he is dizzy.  This does not help his innate stupidity and he now finally gives up trying to wriggle out of Helena’s clutches, realising that if he doesn’t do it now she will haunt him for the rest of his days and he will never get a moment’s peace.  He agrees to become a smug married and Helena does a victory lap while Bertram agrees to love her forever really, honestly. No. I’m not looking at that woman. I just had something in my eye.

 

Fin.

Swings and Roundabouts

I’ve snuck off while the kids are watching Charlie and The Chocolate Factory to write while things are still relatively sane.   I’m hoping that if I do this now, that the tone will remain positive and I can write an upbeat blog post for once.  Actually looking back over the week I seem to be swinging from one extreme to the other. We get a bad day, then a good day etc. I have holiday bi-polar. That’s what it is.  It’s new. It’s crap. It’s for mums.  Yay!

Jason had the day off today.  He let me sleep in, which was wonderful.  I dragged my carcass downstairs at 9.30 after a particularly troubling dream about being stuck on the wrong platform at Bristol Temple Meads station.  As you do.  I was somewhat perturbed to see Oscar still bimbling about in his pyjamas.  Jason had forgotten it was nursery morning and was letting him help rearrange the garage for the four hundredth time.  What is it about men and garages and sheds? I just don’t get it.  He’s not quite at the stage where he’s put that weird peg board round the walls and drawn silhouettes of his tools on it, but I can see it coming.  Give it five years and he’ll probably have a database and trip wires for it. 

We packed the boy off to nursery and Jason came back to continue probing the depths of the garage.  He is doing his long weekend scamping as Tallulah used to call it.  You know, where he pretends to be an orc and prances about in the mud and comes home at four o’clock every morning, despite setting up camp, because he prefers real beds and flush toilets. I can’t say I blame him quite honestly, and after nearly six years of him looming hairily at the end of the bed in the wee small hours I have finally stopped screaming the place down.

He spent the morning trying to pack, the fridge, the sofa, the dvd player and the roof into the back of a VW Touran whilst Tallulah ‘helped’ him.  I drank coffee and stared morosely at the ceiling until my friend rocked up with her three kids.  She was running away from a house full of builders and was glad of the refuge.  Her kids are about the same ages as mine and they are happy to entertain each other.  They rocket through the front door and then we hardly see them for the rest of the day.  This is the sort of child visiting I like.  We had one instant where Tallulah lost her temper spectacularly, but when we merely separated her from the herd and refused to pay any attention to her demands for justice and votes for all, she was fine and went back to play with good grace.

Jason must have seen how close to the edge I was yesterday and before he buggered off to his mud fest he plonked some money into my hand and told me to take everyone out for lunch so I didn’t have to cook.  What a sweetie.  We only went to the C0-op, because there isn’t anywhere else in Glenfield apart from a couple of dodgy pubs, but it was such a relief not to have to cater that it was like being taken to the Ritz as far as I was concerned.

On the way home we took them to the park, and then they wanted to play cinemas with tickets and watch a film, so we said yes.

A marked contrast to yesterday where the children are all that little bit younger and more volatile and constantly need stopping from doing heinous things.  I wouldn’t say it was the most relaxing day my friend and I have ever had, but we actually got to drink hot beverages while they were still hot, and catch up with each other’s lives.  It helps that we have known each other for nearly twenty years now, so we don’t have to be on best behaviour.

They have just left.  My children are sitting peacefully together (I would take a photo but it will probably lead to trouble), there is no welded mashed potato anywhere and apart from putting away a few toys the house is fine.  I do not have a driving lesson later, the weather is clear and I plan to spend the evening reading my book as the Ancestry site is down for maintenance, so even if I wanted to try and solve my genealogical problems I can’t.

The only fly in the ointment today, apart from Jason not being around now until Monday, is that the Ancestry site replied to my ‘help’ e-mail with a useless answer that failed to even acknowledge the question I had asked.  This seems to be a speciality of help desks.  It would be like me asking you if you could lend me a spanner and you saying: ‘No. We don’t have any plums.’  All very frustrating.  All very par for the course. I will try again later. Unless I get to a good bit in my book. Or more likely, fall asleep on the sofa.

FӣSSS%*****!!!ollocks

Now let’s see.  Where shall we start?

Tallulah ripping a huge hole in the netting on the trampoline, and only confessing because she was afraid someone else would tell and she wouldn’t be able to wriggle out of it? Heinous because that netting is there to stop them pinging off into the carefully cultivated nettles, or worse still, next door’s patio set. Doubly heinous because it is my trampoline she ripped?

Or Oscar pulling the airing cupboard door off it’s runners?

How about Oscar going on the naughty step repeatedly for brutalising his sisters? In the end I decided to give him an ultimate warning.  I have told him the next time he hurts someone else I will hurt him back.  I have had to do this once only in all my children’s careers.  A pinch for a pinch as it were.  It reminds them how much hurting someone else hurts. I don’t know if he’s old enough to appreciate the message though. He might just think it is an excuse to beat the living bejeezus out of people because mummy once pinched him on the arm.  I’m still thinking about it.  I might just start putting him back in his cot.  Or cementing him into flyovers.  That’ll learn him.

We could do a riff on Tallulah wetting her pants half way between here and the library (five minutes), even though she swore up and down that she’d been to the toilet before we left. I watched her go in. I watched her come out.  I should have watched her widdle.  How ridiculous. She is six. I don’t want to watch her widdle.  That makes it sound like I did when she was five. Let’s be clear here. Widdle is not my bag baby. Anybody of any age, or indeed any being. Widdle all you like. Just don’t make me watch.

The weather is always a good topic.  Torrential rain for most of the day followed by low lying fog AND torrential rain just as I was doing a two hour driving lesson.  At one point I actually got so stressed that he asked me if I wanted to go home.  What can I say? I dream of going home, every thirty seconds behind the wheel? My swearing reached new levels of vociferousness and creativity.  I believe my best one was: ‘Fuckshitarsewanksoapytitwankfucksticksarse.’

So that covers the driving thing then. I am having a retrograde moment or two. Last week a little better. This week I am regressing. I should be riding a tricycle with streamers on the handle and wearing a large yellow helmet with the words: ‘Be kind. I am special.’ on it.

How about cooking sausage and mash for ten people, eight of whom were under three feet tall and very messy? Cooking for the masses is not my forte. It seemed to take hours and everything was tepid by the time I had finally served it all up.

Or having those eight children rotating round my house in the name of having fun for four hours?  The fun got to such a pitch that we let them out in the garden despite the rain, hence ripped trampoline sides.

We could do dentistry. Oscar and Tallulah had to go for a checkup today while I drove about blubbing into the rev meter.  Tallulah is tres bon.  Oscar’s top front tooth to the left has died where he has fallen on his face so many times it has finally given up the ghost.  This means we now have to check it every couple of days (yeah right) to make sure that he isn’t developing an abscess as the dentist doesn’t want to pull it out now because it might cause him untold psychological damage.  He said to give it two or three years before he will pull it.  Two or three years of checking his gums every other day. Uh uh!  That will cause me untold psychological damage.  I should be grateful he hasn’t got anal warts I suppose. But I’m not.

Then throw in the fact that my lovely, lovely tranquil haven, the family tree, has gone a bit pear shaped today and you will get the general gist.  I have been building my tree online. Someone wise beyond their years pointed out that should the interweb break because of whinging middle aged women filling up the ether with blogs about their bloody miserable lives, I will have lost all those hours of data. I now have 1300 people on my tree and about 200 photographs plus hundreds of sourced documents from records offices etc.  This would be a bit rubbish.

They suggested using a package called Family Tree Maker which is made by the same people who run the website. Thus rendering them compatible and mergeable. Good job. Don’t fancy re writing 1300 records thanks.

It came today.  I uploaded all the data.  Marvellous.  Not so marvellous in that it only uploads all the written material. None of the media files.   I have sought help. I can apparently load media files but I have to do them in a less instant way.  You can copy them across though.

Except I can’t.  For some reason. After hours of e-mailing people and making Jason look even though he’s got a pounding headache and a water bill to be getting on with, it turns out that although I can get to my tree, and people I invite can get to my tree, nobody else can find it, and if I try to search for it except when I am in there working and logged in as me, it doesn’t come up in any search I do.  Hence I cannot search for it to merge the trees from my Family Tree Maker, because I don’t exist.  Except that I do.

It has taken me since 9 this morning on and off to find this out.  I have not done anything useful and I am fucked off because WHAT IS THE POINT PEOPLE?  I have e-mailed for help.  It will take days, and the site is down tomorrow for maintenance. I hate the interface on my desk top package despite the fact that people assure me it is intuitive and wonderful and I have thrown all my toys out the pram because instead of being relaxed and happy I am a homicidal, amateur genealogist.  Not relaxing. Not restful. Just grr making.

Oh. And I had to clean the house because eight small children covered in mashed potato sure do get around.  And they seem to go to the toilet an awful lot too.  I had to clean because there are more of em coming tomorrow and I don’t want to find them all glued to the wall with second hand mash.  No fun. Their mother would not approve.

Counting Your Chickens

Sleep is a marvellous thing.

I wouldn’t know from personal experience as I am being a bit sleep deprived again at the moment, but for the children certainly.  The two littlies went out like a light last night after trying to rip each other’s heads off and spit down their respective necks all day.  It has made all the difference to their behaviour today.  Thank God.

Don’t get me wrong. They’ve not turned into St Francis of Assissi, but their naughtiness has remained within the boundaries of acceptability and not, as yesterday, disappeared over the horizon shooting infernal flames and waving pitchforks.  They have been reasonably polite, reasonably well behaved and most importantly, remembered that it is o.k. to wait for more than thirty seconds for their desires and needs to be fulfilled.

The instant gratification drive seems to go into hyperspaz while they are tired.  Why? Why? Why should I wait for you to finish voiding your bowels before you cook my tea, make me a drink, build me a scale model of the services on the M40 out of tissue boxes and sing me an opera based on the works of Roald Dahl? You are just being unreasonable.  Give me a stool and the number for Childline.  I shall soon put a stop to your lazy, adult shenanigins.

That was yesterday in a nutshell but with a lot more screaming and child to toddler combat, culminating in an all out loggerheads fight on the stairs at seven o’clock last night over a moth eaten blackbird feather that was actually a jewel beyond price and clearly worth shedding buckets of blood over.

Once I had removed the offending feather and stored it carefully in the bin they were united in outrage for long enough to release each other from the Half Nelson they had previously been practising.  When Tallulah, who is slightly quicker on the uptake due to a four year head start on unreasonable adult behaviour, had realised that the feather was not about to rise from the bin like a phoenix from the flames, she was off and making for the French windows, howling like a banshee.  Oscar fled behind her shouting: ‘I just want to be your best friend Tula!’ in a tone that belied his words.  It was more akin to: ‘Come here while I heat up the disembowelling knife and Roger fires up the flaying machine.’  Probably why she did not stop.

He lunged for her just as she was setting foot over the door frame.  He grabbed her leg. She went flying, half in and half out of the door and he went down like a sack of spuds. 

I had thought the howling from the feather incident was skull splitting, but it was nothing to the hell roars that were unleashed as they toppled like nine pins.  It sounded like a bag of cats being put through a threshing machine.

It was at this point that I disentangled them and sent them both to bed.  There was nothing more to be done.

That brief twenty minutes was a precis of how I spent large parts of yesterday from quarter to nine in the morning.  You can see why I had no desire to write about it.  I was beaten.

Today. Better.

Oscar was much more chirpy when I got him up, instead of demanding to know why he wasn’t allowed sweeties for breakfast, he quizzed me as I ripped his wet nappy off and got his clothes on.

Oscar: ‘Whose are these nappies? They are too big.’

Me: ‘They were Tallulah’s from when she was a baby. Now she doesn’t need them any more you can finish the packet for me.’ (I have been saving them in a drawer for the past four and a half years for this very moment.  How wise I am)

Oscar: (in a tone of total disbelief)  ‘Did Tulah be a baby?’

Me: ‘Yes. But she’s a big girl now.’

Oscar: ‘When she was a baby, I was a twink in daddy’s eye.  A twink. A twink. A twink.’ (I must exist forever. I cannot conceive of a universe in which I am not the reason the sun rises every day).

Me: ‘Yes.’ (I will say anything if you let me drink a whole cup of coffee while it is still hot. Anything at all)

Oscar: (Leaning over the bannisters).  ‘Tulah! Your nappies are too big and I was a twink.’

Tallulah: (in a tone of supreme disinterest): ‘Yeah! Whatever!’

Oscar: (outraged): ‘BUT   I   WAS  A  TWINK.’

O.K. then.

Apart from being a twink we have filled our morning with a visit to Melton market with my parents.

Melton Mowbray is slap bang in the middle of prime farming country.  Apart from producing Pork Pies they have a proper market every Tuesday.  You can buy everything from pegs and turnips to a herd of cattle and a ferret on a string.  It is quite fascinating.  My mum and dad go, not for the ferrets, but for the bit that sells antiques and collectibles.  We went along for something to do that didn’t involve shouting and maiming.  It made a nice change.

The kids spent their pocket money on inappropriate bits of tat. I dithered over a couple of pretty watercolours and decided to be good, and then we went and looked in my favourite bit.  There is a whole shed entitled ‘fur and feathers’.  It’s where all the coolest animals get bought and sold.  The children were over the moon.  We found a lady who had box after box of chicks, ducks and turkey chicks that she let them gawp at with love in their eyes.  We saw hundreds of rabbits of every conceivable shape, colour and size, but our favourites were the chickens.

I did not realise how many species of chicken there were.  I fell madly in love with some ridiculously fluffy ones that looked rather like exploded chrysanthemums wearing hats and legwarmers. You could get them in every colour and size and I had almost convinced myself that the soubriquet ‘the mad chicken lady of Glenfield’ was right up my street, when the thought of Jason’s face when he got home brought me back to sanity.  It was a close run thing though.  If someone had offered me a direct swap for the kids I’d have been in there.

This afternoon I have given in on two fronts. I have allowed them to have the television on, regardless of what it will do to their tiny minds and their tiny eyes.  I just don’t care.  They go back to school next Thursday and I will do whatever it takes to get there with my sanity intact.  I have also thrown Oscar into bed for an afternoon nap.  I have been trying to wean him off again lately but he has been getting a bit hitty and violent again in the last twenty minutes.  I have decided to be kind and put it down to tiredness rather than him being an evil troll devil from the planet Urgh.  He is currently singing in his cot.  Hopefully he will soon be snoring.

He will probably dream of chickens.

Honey, I wish I wasn’t.

Horrible, horrible day.

Not because of external factors today, which I suppose is a blessing.

More along the lines of the children loathing and detesting each other all day and no matter what I do they only want to a) stare at the television like zombies or b) gouge each other’s eyes out.

Everything else was a dead loss.  Utter pooh.

Can’t think of a single funny thing to say about it. 

It all ended in tears.

Still. Tomorrow has got to be better.  No doubt at all.

Honey, I’m Home

There is some kind of saying which I think goes something along the lines of ‘Men sweat, horses perspire and ladies glow.’ 

Well, I have always thought I might be more in touch with my masculine side than is good for someone with a bosom and this has been borne out by the fact that this weekend I have sweated like a man, and a pig.  A pig man covered in sweat.

I got home from my London jaunt half an hour ago and am just waiting for the bath to finish running before I go and hurl myself into it.  I stink.  Absolutely and incontrovertibly.  I can smell myself.  It is bad when you can smell yourself.  Especially bad when you can smell yourself and it makes you feel a bit green around the gills.

I love the fact that whenever I go to London recently the weather seems to perk up.  It is a joy to be out and about in glorious sunshine with cloudless skies and only a modicum of breeziness.  It is great except for the fact that I have spent the last two days hauling a rucksack around like a coal heaver’s daughter.

Andrea made an interesting point about our attempts to pack light.  That it is more of a bind because even for one night you need most of the same things as you do for two nights, just less clothes.  But all the clunky stuff, the toothpaste and toiletries and the coat in case it gets cold and the jumper in case it gets jumperish, are all the same.  I have managed to get it down to one rucksack’s worth and a cloth bag for important things like money and the indispensible A-Z, but that’s it.

We didn’t get in early enough yesterday for me to ditch my bags at the hotel and this morning we had to check out, hence two days of dragging a rucksack round and sweating profusely.  Sweating into the small of my back and into my socks.  Nice.  I chose trainers because I always end up doing a lot of walking, and although flimsy sandals are lovely, they are not so lovely when you’re on mile four and keeping going, hence stinky socks.

Despite the smell I have had a good time.  As ever.

I met my friend at Sloane Square yesterday and we wandered off to Bluebird on the Kings Road for lunch.  We sat outside and counted Boden mothers and models (why do models go for lunch? What is the point when they don’t bloody eat anything?).  We had meant to shop as well, but we hadn’t seen each other for nearly six years and there was a lot to catch up on and a lot of Pinot Grigio to wash down and we didn’t really get into the shopping thing, especially after I’d devoured a large helping of Eton Mess and couldn’t move for a couple of hours.  It was fun and I haven’t been to Bluebird for years.

I perambulated myself down to the South Bank where I met Andrea and another friend and we went to see All’s Well That Ends Well.  Hmmm! Apart from the fact that the Eton Mess and the Pinot Grigio had now settled and I was somewhat snoozeish to the point where my friend David had to keep making sure I was not going to fall down the very steep rake (we were in the balcony), like he was taking out an elderly maiden aunt, it was o.k.  I can’t be more enthusiastic than that.  It is another problematic play with unsympathetic characters which unless it is done exquisitely is always going to throw up some disappointments. The set was wonderful, truly inspiring and quite magical and a thing of beauty and a joy forever.  Unfortunately I think they pinned all their hopes on this meaning nobody would notice that they’d made no effort at all to resolve any of the problems.  It didn’t work.  Still for a tenner I can’t complain too much.  I shall be doing my version of the story later in the week when I am less smelly.

I spent the rest of the night falling asleep over my book and dreaming that I went to Ronnie Scott’s to see some free form jazz with Ewan McGregor and his wife in a Landrover.  I don’t know which was more unbelievable, the fact that I might hang out with Ewan McGregor and his wife, or the likelihood of me ever going to volunteer to see freeform jazz.  All very bewildering.  Quite a shock to wake up in a symphony of beige in a hotel in Borough not hearing someone playing the saxaphone in a manner reminiscent of someone dropping a box of cutlery down four flights of stairs.

This morning I was meant to go to the Design Museum.  I woke up feeling very uninspired about it, despite the promise of goodies by Paul Smith. My hip is sore at the moment and the thought of hiking all the way over to Shad Thames just wasn’t filling me with joy.  Andrea was going to meet another friend and we hopped on the same train together to Elephant and Castle and then parted.  I was supposed to change at Embankment and make my way over to Tower Bridge, except that I temporarily nodded off (very unlike me) and went past my stop.

This decided me that I was clearly not meant to be going to the Design Museum.  I ended up getting off at Oxford Circus and wandering over to Marylebone High Street.  I had an absolutely blissful two hours of retail therapy instead.  Jason gave me some money to spend as a treat.  Quite a lot of money.  I have put some of it away, but as I was meant to be doing my retail therapy on the Kings Road yesterday, I slipped £100 into my purse to play with, and then never spent it.  Today however, I spent every last penny. On books. Books. BOOKS!

First I went to the Oxfam bookshop which is about two doors down from Daunt Books, which was my original destination.  I had the most superb time. The bookshop is huge and well stocked. Nice and eclectic.  There was hardly anyone there and the books are all £1, £2, £3, you get the picture.  I had £100, so I didn’t have to really think.  I just went round the entire shop picking the things I would like, the things I might like, the things I wanted, the things I wanted to experiment with etc. It was joyous.  I got tonnes of things and spent £40.

Then I went to Daunt.  There are a million things I want but I decided that I would not buy any of the popular hardbacks on my wish list, because by the time I get to read them they will have probably come out in paperback.  I decided also not to buy things that I could find in a Waterstones or in the library.  Daunt stocks all kinds of glorious little oddities and these were what I ended up spending my £60 on. Childrens’ books from American publishers, short runs from independent publishers etc.  I had a huge list and eventually whittled it down to something reasonable and put the rest back for next time.

I ended up buying twenty five books, which is not too bad for £100.  Then I dragged them all to a wonderful restaurant and deli called Le Truc Vert.  It is on North Audley Street, which is one of the roads off the top end of Oxford Street opposite M&S, should you ever wish to visit, and you should because the food is great.  I was so pleased it was still there as the last time I went was about ten years ago when I still lived in London and I was fairly sure it would have disappeared.  Luckily it is still going strong and the food is delicious.  Andrea and her friend met me there and we had a leisurely two hour lunch and then hot footed it back to the National to watch Phedre.

It was good. Well worth watching it live, even though I’d already seen the ‘live’ screening at the cinema.  It was better because live theatre is always better, and it was better because they had ironed out some of the wrinkles from the beginning of the run and the performances were more solid.  The only fly in the ointment was still the chap who played Theseus.  Theseus the great hero and mighty Greek king.  Theseus the man who sounded like he was trying to buy a pound of wet fish somewhere in Halifax, with about as much emotion.  Still, never mind.  A thumping good performance despite that.

Afterwards we sat in the sun outside and ate cake and watched a very strange woman take photographs of herself lying down on some astro turf for twenty minutes solid.  We left as she was just beginning to photograph herself chewing a tea bag.  Ours is not to wonder why…

And now, the bath beckons before I asphyxiate myself.