odds and ends

Let me tell you some good things I have discovered so far on my travels:

Salt Spring Island Coffee – this is good. Very, very good.  Not only that, but we have a fabulous little corner shop/deli at the top of our road and they sell it there, not just in packets to bring home, but in huge, steaming cups, on site, so you can sip as you shop.  This is so civilised. I love drinking coffee while I am buying groceries. It may turn out to be one of my favourite things ever next to sex and books.

Chukar Cherries – This is a company we discovered in Seattle at Pike Place Market.  Their stuff is delicious.  Truly delicious.  I am not usually a big fan of dried fruit, but this is in a league of its own.   They do fruit, and chocolates. The chocolates are also amazing.  I bought a bag of No Sugar Added dried cherries labelled Totally Tart. They are exactly that, and unbelievably moreish.  I love tart tasting fruit and I have had to ration myself with this bag for fear of giving myself colic.  Mmmm.  I also bought a bag of their milk chocolate pecans and they are also mmm.  Hideously expensive, but worth every single penny.

Beacon Books – A second hand bookshop in Sidney, about three miles from our house.  They are brilliant because they not only have an awesome selection of books, but they also have a guard cat, a log fire, an excellent children’s section, complete with miniature chairs and tables and an overflowing toy box, but today and tomorrow they are offering 25% off on all stock.  Get there if you can.  They also offer a fantastic buy back scheme where they take back the books you have read and give you money off the next ones you buy.  We have already done a staggering amount of reading and traded in six books today which gave us a starting pot of $20.    Even after that, and with discount we spent $80.

Red Barn – These are small supermarkets scattered about Vancouver Island where the food is locally sourced where possible, organic where possible and delicious all the time. I think I mentioned them last time we were here, but they are so good they are going in again.  They also allow you to sip and shop if you are a coffee fanatic, and most of them have prize winning deli counters.  Well prize winning for us anyway.  If you are sick of what the regular supermarkets offer here, or just alarmed at the frankly tiny selection of organic produce in them, try Red Barn.

Fish on Fifth – A fantastic fish and chip restaurant on Fifth street in Sidney. Very small, in a kind of shack, and with limited seating, but well worth a visit.  The food is all freshly caught, freshly cooked and brought to your table steaming hot. There is an excellent seasonal selection of fish, and as well as fish and chips they also do more exotic fare.  It is always busy and you cannot book, so get there early if you can, and be prepared to wait if you can’t.

The Panorama Recreation Centre – Just outside Sidney, this is our local pool and leisure centre.  Since we last came it has been torn down and rebuilt to a very high standard.  There is a long water slide which goes outside the building, a lazy river, a great toddler pool, lots of toys and floats and a decent sized lap pool for serious swimmers.  You can get entry for a month for $20 dollars if you are an adult, which is a steal.  Only downside being you have to have your photograph taken for your pass.  And if you’re me this makes you cry.  Otherwise you’re sorted.

In local news:

• Oscar spent a happy afternoon filling his buckets with shredded tourist leaflets and pretending he was at the seaside.
• Tilly is feeling much better. She is only light grey now, her appetite is coming back and her fever is finally gone.
• Oscar and Tallulah created an homage to Canada dance which looks much like all their other dances and involves a great deal of shaking bottoms and giggling.
• Jason cooked his first pancakes complete with maple syrup and whipped cream.  The verdict was ‘not bad’.
• I did not cry all the time, and in between concentrated bouts of self-loathing and weeping I am having a lovely time.  I took lots of photographs this afternoon and eventually I will work out how to load them for your viewing pleasure.

I see

I was dreading my opticians appointment dear internets.

I hate not being able to see.  Really hate it.  Bordering on paranoia.  If I weren’t such a gigantic wuss I would definitely have saved up and gone for laser eye surgery by now, but I can’t like it.  The thought makes my stomach go wibble.  And that’s a dangerous thing in itself.

This hating having eye tests is one of the reasons I don’t do it very often, and why it has now come back to bite me on the behind.  So this morning I was apprehensive and eager both, which was an unpleasant experience which smacked far too much of having a baby for my liking.

My optician was very reassuring. A lovely lady who was calm, collected and thorough. It took over an hour to do, which considering you’re in and out of Vision Express in about twenty five minutes was fairly amazing. 

The good news is that contrary to my belief, my prescription has changed so little that she considers it would be a gigantic waste of money to get new glasses.  This is, in a way, awesome, as it means that all the squinting I have done at the internets over the past three years has had no lasting ill effects. Well, to my eyes anyway.  Last time I went they were also the same, which means that my prescription has now been stable for nearly ten years.  There was a point where it deteriorated quite rapidly and which probably instilled my fear of waking up blind.  So it is good to know that I am alright.  Not only that but my eyes are healthy.  Positively glowing apparently.

The reason that I have been struggling with my glasses is simple.  Well it is when a non hysterical, professional optician tells you about it anyway.  Mostly I wear contacts.  They snuggle round the eyeball and track with me when I move my eyes around, thus meaning that my vision is deep and crisp and even all the time.  My glasses however, do not do that.  The only time they work perfectly are when I am staring straight ahead.  Usually I wear my glasses at home, in bed, when I am reading, consequently I only use them to look straight ahead.  Or I did, until over a week ago when I branched out into wearing them all the time and swivelling my eyes about like billio.  So I cannot see properly to the sides and up and down, where I usually have good vision, but this is normal for glasses.  Phew.  Still bloody annoying though.

The bad news is that new gas, permeable lenses will take over a week to come here, and I will probably have to go back for several fittings.  This means that I could leave Canada without properly fitting contact lenses.  She, quite rightly, doesn’t want to take that risk.  So she trialled me with some new soft lenses designed for people like me, who have astigmatism.  They have to cling to your eye in a certain way which she described to me, but which is too boring for me to go into here.  Anyway, the ones she tried didn’t want to cling to my eye in that way and it was rather unnerving and a bit like being at sea.  So she has sent away for some new ones to try.  They might come in before everything shuts for Easter. They might not.  I am praying they do.  If they do, and they fit and don’t make me feel like I am in a force ten swell, she will give them to me for free, so that I have lenses to wear for the month I am here until I get home, and can see my own optician for my gas permeable ones again.

Yay.

I left the opticians and burst into tears on the path outside.  I am doing a lot of crying at the moment.  I think it’s a release of tension thing in general, and relief at not going blind yet in particular.

I am still hating my glasses.  I just can’t reconcile myself to them. They are uncomfortable and steam up all the time, and I can’t read road signs properly and I just can’t wait to be back with lenses again. 

And at the moment I am going through a huge self-loathing thing. I hate my hair. I hate my face. I hate my skin, my glasses, my shape and everything about myself. It is rather like being a teenager all over again.  I get dressed in the mornings without looking at myself in the mirror and when I had to have my photograph taken today so that we could have a month long pass for the local swimming pool I cried again because I looked like a cross between the Pilsbury Dough Boy and someone’s aged aunt Hilda. 

Really I do not look any different than normal.  I know that.  Apart from the glasses.  But I feel different.  And it sucks. It shall pass.  And it is saving me a fortune in clothes, as I cannot bear the thought of being in a state of partial undress anywhere except my own house, so changing rooms are definitely out. 

My initial urge is to rush out and get a radical new hairstyle ,etc, etc, etc.  I am resisting.  This way lies madness. It is never a good plan to do a radical makeover when one is plunged into despair. That’s how come I let some trainee hair dresser cut all my hair off in a circus tent in 1989, and I still bear the mental scars.

I am sure it will all be better if I could just get these lenses and they work. So please dear internets. Pray for me.

I am not a doctor

The children are coping remarkably well with all the changes going on around them over the last few days.  I am always fascinated to see how they adjust, mainly because I am rubbish at it.  As I said, I am not a natural nomad. Over the last few days I have been tearful, tired and excessively grumpy. I do not cope well if I cannot have some downtime where I just get to be me, and being on the road for four days with four other people, three of whom never shut up, has more than done my head in.  The incessant noise has meant that my head has just filled up to bursting point, and what with no internets for me to dump on, I have been going rather mental.  All of which culminated in me bursting into tears over my disgusting lunch yesterday and weeping into my scrambled egg in a pathetically juvenile way.

Oscar has managed most beautifully, only having broken nights when he woke up underneath the bed and wondered where the hell he was.  Most understandable I feel, and had I done the same I would have made just as much, if not more noise than he did on waking.  He has remained phlegmatic, totally unphased and generally sunny.  Although he doesn’t have a clue what is happening. He is still not sure if we are in Canada and does not agree that we are on holiday yet, because he has not had a chance to use his new bucket and spade.  These, these are the things that make a holiday you see. 

Tallulah has been much better than I imagined, although quite restless at nights.  The only time she got really upset was when she discovered this morning that she hadn’t packed as many pairs of socks as she would have liked, and ended up flinging herself into my arms and sobbing her heart out for half an hour.  After which dramatic outburst she has got on with things beautifully and has been sunshine itself ever since.

Poor Tilly has been poorly.  She has had tummy ache on and off since we flew on Thursday morning.  It seems to be some kind of stomach flu, and yesterday she woke up with a crashing headache.  We nursed it as best we could but the travelling was all too much for her, and by eight o’clock last night she had a raging fever and was the colour of an old sheet.  She was a little better this morning but lunch with her nana was as much as she could handle before she took a nose dive, and she has spent all afternoon wrapped up on the sofa, watching telly and drinking tea.  She is very cheerful about it, as long as she doesn’t have to do very much, so we will make sure our schedule is very slack this week, and we do lots of pottering around the house and gardens until she is fully recovered.

The children have done their usual charm assault on every adult we’ve met, which has made our progress through life so much easier.  They are fantastic in public, funny, charming and polite, and so very English that we win friends and influence people left, right and centre.  We, as parents, are somewhat of a let down, but you can’t have everything.

Oscar and Tallulah were playing something loud on the boat from Port Angeles yesterday.  Oscar was being a doctor and making Tallulah better.  Knowing Oscar and his scatalogical obsessions which are rampant at the moment, it was undoubtedly a bottom related disease, probably having something to do with farting.  Anyway, one lady asked him if he was playing at being a doctor.  He looked up at her and said in a very indignant tone: ‘Lady. I am not a Doctor. I am a Professional.’

I am a nester not a traveller

Sunday we left Seattle for Vancouver Island.

There are many ways to get from Seattle over the border into Canada.  One is to fly.  We had had quite enough airborne activity for one month, so that was out. Then you can drive down the highway for about three hours and cross over into Canada that way, going via Vancouver. Then you hop on a boat and across to Vancouver Island, which is where we are staying.  We decided that we didn’t fancy motorway driving much, so we opted for the scenic route. 

This meant driving out of Seattle to a place called Edmunds.  Once there you sit in a queue of traffic to get on a tiny ferry for half an hour to a place called Kingston.  Not in Jamaica. No. It’s much wetter than that.  Apparently it rains for two thirds of the year in Washington State, which would explain a) why it is so green and b) why it reminds me so much of Wales, just on a grand scale.  From Kingston you drive for about an hour and a half through some frankly stunning scenery, with a gigantic national park on your left, and the coastline on your right, until you come to an unholy place called Port Angeles.  Port Angeles has two redeeming features: 1) it has an excellent bookshop which has a superb mix of new and second hand fiction and a cracking children’s section, and 2) it has a ferry port which allows you to leave the U.S.A. and more importantly Port Angeles.  Under no circumstances follow the ticket clerk’s advice when you buy your ferry ticket, and eat at the Country Diner. It’s inskusting, although nursing your indigestion will help pass the time on the hour and a half ferry crossing.  Although if you’re lucky, like us, you will sit next to three lovely ladies who had just been to a huge crafting and jewellry making convention and were keen to tell you all about it and laugh at all your jokes.

Getting into Canada was a breeze and a half.  We drove up to the window of the customs booth, showed our passports, said we were here on holiday, swore up and down that we had no firearms, bananas or pot plants, and that was that.  Hoorah! Colour me impressed.

We docked in Victoria and had a twenty minute drive to our house which is in an area called Saanich, just outside of a lovely town called Sidney by the Sea. 

The house is bonkers.  I will explain more on another day, and possibly with photos, should I find the right wire which will allow me to upload them from my camera.  Anyway, for now all you need to know is that it is huge and entirely impractical for children, stuffed as it is to the gills with antiques and slippery flooring.  In fact the dining room has caused me so many nightmares that we have simply blocked it off with chairs.  We would have shut the doors, except they haven’t built those yet!

We threw all our luggage in the house and then galloped off to Sidney to the local supermarket which is called Thrifty.  This name, by the way, is a big, fat lie.  There is nothing thrifty about it at all.  Food is exorbitantly expensive here. Much more expensive than at home. You cannot, for example, get a packet of biscuits for under a pound, and the price of coffee nearly made me weep.  We ended up spending $370 dollars in groceries, which is obscene.

By the time we got back, recovered from the shock and unpacked, it was about half past eight at night.  We had been on the go since six thirty in the morning.  It was quite a long day.  Nevertheless, by the time I fell into bed I was happy.  I have discovered that I do not like being a nomad.  I like having my house and my things around me, and that nothing gives me more pleasure than a well stocked book shelf and a well stocked fridge, both of which are now in my possession.  Just opening the fridge door and surveying the wonders within makes me go all relaxed inside.  I am a simple soul at heart.

Today has been spent watching the rain lash down and visiting with the children’s grandmother, who very kindly took us all out for lunch and bought Oscar his longed for bucket and spade. Not that he could use it today.  It is not beach weather. It is monsoon weather.  The rain has dripped off every roof and pooled round every gutter. As my granny would say: ‘It’s not stopping to rain’ it’s raining that much.  It’s a good job we didn’t visit for the weather.

We are surrounded here by lush gardens that back onto woodland.  Even when it is dry it is wet, if you get my drift. There are huge ponds in the wood beyond and there are two ponds in the garden.  The area is rife with frogs and they sing all night long.  I love the sound. Jason has taken to burying his head under the pillows.  He hates nature.  We have two families of deer apparently, who wander through the garden, although they have been too busy scuba diving to visit us in the last two days.  There is a Siamese cat across the way called Mocha, who has sat and called to us from her porch in a plaintive manner.  I am sure once it is dry enough for me not to worry about the children doing a Doctor Foster, they will be chasing her hither and yon and she will wish she had never bothered.  There is a suicidal Jay bird who has taken a fancy to one of the living room windows and has spent all day trying to break its neck by dive bombing it.  We have attempted to stop it, but it will not be denied.  I am hoping that if it kills itself, Mocha eats it before the children discover its lifeless corpse and I am forced to perform the funeral rites.  This is nature, red in tooth and claw.

Tomorrow I have my appointments at the optician’s. I am so excited.  Wearing my glasses for best part of a week has made me realise how out of date this prescription truly is and I am fed up of not being able to read road signs until I am sitting on them, and feeling vulnerable because I can only see what is a foot in front of me.  I am having new glasses and new contact lenses, and damn the expense.  It will be a day of celebration, even though I will still have to wait for the prescriptions to be made up, the end will be in sight, and I will be able to see it.  Yay!

Seattle

We flew into Seattle on Thursday evening, mainly because it was considerably cheaper to fly into Seattle than it was Vancouver, although given the palaver over security, we will not be doing that again in a hurry. I’d rather pay the extra fifteen hundred quid and not be jumped through so many hoops next time.

We’ve never been to Seattle before, and I have to say that first impressions were not fantastic.  It was bucketing it down with rain when we drove out of the airport, so hard in fact, that the water was bouncing off the roads and you could hardly see anything.  The road systems are chaos and the traffic is really, really heavy.  It didn’t help that the sat nav kept cutting out every time we went under a bridge or there was a particularly fierce rain drop.

Mostly things looked grey. Grey and industrial.  Our hotel, a bog standard, beige block by the side of a busy road and opposite a working boat yard, with the freeway running at the back, did little to cheer us.  Particularly as they had not made up the kids’ bed, supplied extra bedding of any kind, nor extra towels.  Even when we asked for bedding so we could make the kids’ bed ourselves, it still took them twenty minutes to bring any.  Any consisted of one pillow and two cotton sheets between three children.  Jason went down to get some in the end.  It was quicker.

There was no restaurant and no room service either, which meant that once the kids were asleep we were left with a bunch of take out menus to supply our needs.  By this time I was ready to cry.

Luckily the menu we plumped for served delicious food, albeit after a long wait and two phone calls over the money because we only had hundred dollar bills and they were suspicious.

The food was the only good thing about the entire night.  Oscar rolled under the bed in the night and woke screaming at three, totally disoriented.  That also set Tallulah off.  By the time we calmed them down we were both wide awake.  Then everyone woke up for good at half past five.

Jason, who is either a saint or demented, took the children to the hotel pool at quarter to six.  By quarter to seven we were having breakfast.  The hotel did actually serve breakfast, and it wasn’t too bad at all, contrary to what we had been led to believe from the woeful service of the night before.  The children were incredibly impressed because they had waffle irons so you could make your own waffles.  So, jetlagged to the nines and scratchy eyed I learned to make waffles in the dull, Seattle dawn.  It’s a skill.

We set off, fortified with waffles, to explore Seattle.  I was not hopeful, but throughout the day I was won over, moment by moment, until I was charmed.

First up was the market at Pike Place.  I thoroughly recommend it.  It’s a lovely, Victorian covered market selling everything from fruit and vegetables to antiques.  Each stall is owned and run by family businesses, and no corporate business can operate from there.  The architecture is wonderful, the stall holders are all delightfully friendly, and happy for you to try their wares and there is something for everyone.  Plus they have a giant shoe museum.  It was closed while we were there, but they claim to have a shoe from the tallest man in the world, and an impressive collection of clown shoes.  And I don’t doubt it for an instant.  There is also a fabulous bookstore on the bottom level of the market, run by a really friendly guy who knows his customers inside out. He tried to sell Oscar a copy of a book called ‘Everybody Farts’. Smart guy.

All the streets around the market are full of quirky little shops of all descriptions.  There is a cheesemakers, where you can actually go in and watch them making the cheese before you buy, cheek by jowl with toy stores and vintage clothes shops, and all the sort of places I love, and that you don’t usually find in large, American cities.  We had a fantastic morning pottering about, buying fruit and sampling home made jams and chutneys.  There is a huge tulip festival taking place in Washington State at the moment and the flower stalls were a riot of colour.  I love tulips and the temptation to buy a few hundred blooms was quite overwhelming.

At lunch time we headed to the  famously designed Music and Sci Fi museum by the architect Frank Gehry, which stands next to the Space Needle, a classic Seattle landmark.  We didn’t go up the Space Needle because I hate heights and Jason hates paying over inflated prices for tourist attractions, but we did go to the museum.  I have to be honest and say that it wasn’t my cup of tea.  I love the outside of the building, but the exhibits were fairly blah, and it was really expensive to get in.  In the music side there were lots of hands on exhibits, which could have been fun if most of them hadn’t been broken and the rest hadn’t had large queues outside of them.  The Sci Fi side was mainly traditional in that it was just wandering around a great many glass cases looking at things.  There was the odd interactive exhibit, but I was surprised at how few there were given the fact that it was about Science Fiction and the future.

The best part of the day was when we decided to go on a Duck tour.  Ducks are armoured vehicles which are a car and a boat, and were used in WWII.  They do Duck tours in London too, so if you fancy one you won’t have to hop on a plane to Seattle.  But if you happen to be here you really should go on one.  Your driver takes you around for ninety minutes, about an hour on land and the last half hour on the water, and you visit Seattle’s landmarks while they do the usual history type speeches.  But then it’s all livened up by the fact that you have to sing, and dance and have quizzes and all kinds of fun stuff.  The kids, and us, absolutely loved it.  Our driver was called Captain Johnny Throttle, and had the largest collection of novelty hats I have ever seen.  It was huge fun.

Saturday we headed to the oldest part of the city, Pioneer Square.  Someone had recommended that we do the tour of Underground Seattle which kicks off from there every half hour.  It was fantastic, and I highly recommend it.  Basically Seattle, when it was first settled was built on a plain which got flooded by the sea, and all the sewage that the first settlers poured into the sea, twice a day. This made it quite an unsavoury and rather squishy place to live.  Then in the late 1800′s the whole of Seattle burned to the ground after an unfortunate incident with a vat of hot glue and a spark.  This gave the founding fathers a chance to rebuild the city at a higher level.  The plan was to blast all the earth from the surrounding hills, and then build on that.  The building was going to take ten years, and the business owners who already lost their businesses in the fire, refused to wait ten years to re-open them, on the grounds that they would starve to death in the mean time.  So they built their businesses, and the city fathers built the streets around them.  This of course led to some difficulties. Like the fact that the ground floor of the buildings were between 8 and 33 feet lower than the street level.  People kept falling down holes and killing themselves a lot, which wasn’t great for business either.  Eventually they filled in all the holes and evened out the levels, but this meant that there was a whole chunk of the city which was underground.  And it’s still there.  And in the nineteen sixties, a newspaper man and keen historian, Bill Speidel, started tours round these underground areas, which you can still go on today.

There was a bit of the tour where the guide was telling us about how they had a terrible rat problem, when people started dropping all their waste into these underground areas and it became a breeding ground for the rats.  Apparently the city hall put a bounty on rat’s tails and for every rat’s tail you produced you got ten cents.  It all went horribly wrong when unscrupulous people started breeding rats and cutting their tails off for extra funds.  Then they noticed that the rat’s tails grew back so they could use one rat for many bounties.  A chap who was on the tour with us got terribly confused and thought she had said that if you cut a rat’s head off it would grow back and insisted on asking her lots of questions about it.  Jason and I had to back track into another area of the tunnels while this was going on, because we were crying with laughter.  I thought I might actually pee my pants at one point, or at the very least be sick.

In the afternoon we went out of town, about half an hour down the highway to an outlet mall which some friends had recommended.  We like to shop, and we love a bargain, so all went well, and Jason bought me a very nice Marc Jacob’s watch for a ludicrously small sum of money.

By our last night we were quite sad to leave.  There were lots of bits of Seattle still left to explore and we had almost trained the hotel staff.  Plus we had had excellent food while we were there and there was no shortage of coffee. I do love a city where every third business tries to sell you caffeine.

So, overall impressions, much better than we first thought.  Atypical of American cities, quirky, fun, subversive and excellent coffee.

I’m Back…

The eagle has landed. 

Yes, we are here.  In one piece, and with multiple pieces of luggage, all of them our own.

The internet connection is not brilliant, but it is an internet connection, for which I am entirely grateful.  I had visions of having to light fires and waft blankets in order to communicate with you all.

It is also wireless.  It is temperamentally wireless which is how come I am typing this perched atop the kitchen counter with one elbow out of the window, but at least I am not hitch hiking down to an internet café and handing over my life savings.  Things could be worse.

We have had a very eventful few days, and it is quite difficult to know where to start after so long away.  I have made copious notes, most of which I have lost in transit, or have found again, only to look at them in baffled amazement and wonder when I took up writing in code.

Let’s start with the flight. The flight itself was fine, surprisingly enough.  The children were incredibly well behaved, and we did not have to resort to drugs or disciplinary hearings for any of us.  We had a fabulous steward who was as camp as Christmas and who had the most expressive face I have ever seen.  He was fantastic value for money, and oohed ,and aaahed his way through the entire nine hours, discussing air sickness with an elderly lady to such a vivid degree half the cabin was heaving by the time he had finished empathising with her.  He was not impressed by the strike action at all, and kept talking about it sotto voce with lots of expressive quotation marks flying from the ends of his fingers.  He decided the plane we were on was also a disgrace and marched up and down shouting: ‘Oooh! Look at that! Will you look at that! It’s a mockery of a sham.  This plane should be CONDEMNED. CONDEMNED! Yes! I’ll put that on my list.’  He was brilliant, and much better than watching Twilight New Moon on endless repeat.

I sat next to a lady from Idaho who turned out to be an avid quilting fanatic, and we had a lovely chat for about two hours all about craft and quilting, and how we had both lived in Oxford, which was also fun.

The only thing that put a damper on the whole experience was the American’s fanatical obsession with airport security.  It meant that once we had passed through the regular security checks at Heathrow we had to empty out all our hand luggage and go through a physical pat down before we boarded.  This included the children, which was tedious, annoying and frightened Oscar and Tallulah who thought they were being arrested.  Once we disembarked at Sea Tac airport we then had to stand in line forever to go through passport control.  We were waiting for over an hour, because now they finger print and retina scan you as well as all the usual palaver and all the systems were running slow.  Then we picked up our luggage only to have to hand it all in again after customs control while they checked it yet again, and made us pick it up from another baggage carousel.  In all it took two hours to leave the airport, which I thought was totally unwarranted considering what we had already been through at Heathrow.  The children were so exhausted by the time we left, they were grey.

Still, we made it, which was the main thing.

Stay tuned for the next exciting instalment of What I did on my summer holidays…

Laters…

I have failed utterly, woefully and miserably to take mighty Grit’s advice and pack light.  We are packing heavy. So heavy. So very, very heavy.

Much shame.

I think trying to get the Chaise Longue of Death in a Karrimor Rucksack was what tipped me over the edge.

Never travel without one.

I may just have to stick wings and a small outboard motor on it and reinvent the plane.

Gah.

So. I worked like a Trojan yesterday, sorting out paperwork, reviewing things that had hairy, scary deadlines, finishing off my last, enormous essay, which is now done, but rubbish, and will need much editing and tweezing when I get home. But at least it is done.  I felt an enormous sense of relief when I finally fell into bed, that thanks to my efforts, Boo Villas would not fall into the sea during my absence and all would be well.  Then I woke up at six this morning with an unholy migraine.

Bollocks.

I dosed myself up, went back to sleep for another two hours and woke up hoping to feel better.  I felt the same.  This was somehow not fair at all.

Oscar and I had a long, splashy bath, which I hoped would help to untighten some of my rigid muscles and relax me.  Ha! Never have a bath with a three year old who is obsessed with playing the ‘water piano’ to you, if this is your goal.  It did not go well.

Then we walked into the village. I had several errands to do. I reasoned that doing them would a) get them done (very sound plan this) and b) help blow the cobwebs away and maybe relieve the headache.  We achieved a), but b) was not playing.

I got home, grey faced and feeling sick.  Mum and dad came round for lunch.  They were very sympathetic.  Even more so, when an hour later a very nice man who is our next door but one neighbour came round to say that his auntie had been in the village and picked up my purse.  She had it at her house, but couldn’t drive because of a broken wrist. Would I like to go and get it? Would I! I burst into tears of pain and gratitude and went round immediately.  I hadn’t even noticed it was gone I was that spaced out.  She was very lovely, and not only that but I was incredibly lucky as it was all in one piece.  No need to cancel cards etc.  When I get home I am going to take her round a very large bunch of flowers.

This time, when I got home, I was shaking with pain.  Mum sent me to bed and sorted out my laundry, washed up and got the children from school.  I am nominating her for a sainthood at the very least.

By the time I got up at four I had yellow instead of grey skin. This was a big improvement.  That and the fact that I could stand upright and open both eyes.

Since then we have been in a frenzy of packing.  I thought we were doing quite well. It turns out we have packed everything except the vegetable rack, and will probably be able to buy Terminal Five with the amount of excess baggage we have to pay.  I don’t care anymore. I just want to be there.

We are flying with BA.  The chances of being there are looking more and more remote.  Our plane is due to set off at the right time, but there will only be snacks for nine hours. The children are delighted because they hate airline food. I am hysterical, and wondering if I can make a hat out of sandwiches.

It will all be fine once we are underway. I am very phlegmatic under pressure. I just cope. It’s the worrying beforehand that gets me.

Anyway my dears. I will be away for the next few days while we are en route.  The house in Victoria promises internets. I hope this is true or you will hear the screams of a woman going cold turkey coming over loud and clear.

We get to the house on Sunday. Probably.

Laters….

Oscar turns into Alan Partridge

Last Friday afternoon, Oscar got into his first confrontation.

I picked him up from nursery at 3.00 p.m. as usual.  Then we wandered round to the school to pick up the girls.

Mole was in the playground, and he and Oscar zoomed off to play some elaborate game  with some cones that the teacher had left out after P.E.

It was all going swimmingly until a bigger boy, who should still have been in class, wandered over.  He has a reputation as a trouble maker, and Mole’s mother and I kept a weather eye out, unsure as to what the boy was doing. He started to pick up the cones. We relaxed a little, assuming that the teacher had sent him to pack up.

Then I noticed that Oscar was right up in the child’s face, talking very earnestly.  I paid closer attention, but nothing else happened except that the bigger boy looked faintly bemused.

Children started pouring out of classrooms and I called Oscar to walk round to pick up Tallulah. As we were going round the corner I tuned in to what Oscar was saying. I thought he had been singing, but no.  He was hollering:

Buggerhead!

Bugger HEAD

You are a BUGGERHEAD!

I asked him to stop swearing and reminded him that swearing was not allowed.

He looked at me very earnestly and said:

But mama.  That boy was being horrible to Mole.  So I just had to stand up and say to him: YOU ARE A BUGGERHEAD! Because he was hurting my friend.

I never realised before what a peculiarly aching sensation the mixture of pride, shame and amusement was.

The buggerhead thing made me laugh, because it is his entirely new invention.  It reminded me so much of that sketch in Alan Partridge where he has the political debate.  If you forward it to about eight minutes you’ll find it:

you, you, you…..buggering…..shit

Nice weather for ducks

In this country we talk about the weather. A lot.

It is not a stereotype.  Well it is.  But it is a true thing.

We have a lot of weather, and even though we have had a lot of weather since time immemorial, it still takes us by surprise.

So we chat about it.

And we watch weather forecasts, even though we moan about them because they are almost entirely erroneous and I  could do better with a pine cone some seaweed and a false beard.

But we persevere.

For many years we also had very little television.  Until I was in my early teens we had only three television channels.  Then we had four, but only for some people.  Then everyone got four.  Then we had five, but only for some people, and then everyone had five.

Then there was a televisual revolution and we had gazillions of channels ALL THE TIME.  Which now means that if I want to watch: ‘My Gigantic Breasts are Killing Me’ or ‘I had a Tumour the Size of Sussex’ at three in the morning all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.  I don’t know how I ever managed before frankly.

Anyway, back in the olden days everyone watched the same things, because there wasn’t anything else to watch.  And there were a batch of regular weather forecasters who we became somewhat obsessed by.  They were what we now call, National Treasures. 

There was one chap called John Kettley:

and another one called Michael Fish:

Note his groovesome weather forecaster sweater.

Michael Fish was particularly famous for erroneously forecasting a particularly bad hurricane style wind storm, as nothing more than a light breeze.  He has never lived it down and I saw him interviewed recently and boy, is that man bitter about it.  Bless him.

At one point in my teens there was a band called A Tribe of Toffs who produced a superb ditty called very appropriately: John Kettley is a Weatherman.

Here it is for your audio pleasure:

The chorus goes as follows:

John Kettley is a weatherman

 a weatherman

a weatherman

John Kettley is a weatherman

and so is Michael Fish.

As you can imagine it is a timeless pop classic, and I shall be having it played at my funeral.

This morning Jason wandered solemnly into the kitchen as we were eating breakfast.  He kissed the top of my head and said, totally straight faced:

John Kettley is a weatherman.

I kissed him back and said, equally straight faced:

And so is Michael Fish.

And we were very happy together.

And this readers, is another reason why I love him.  For who cannot love a man who makes references to obscure pop songs before a molecule of caffeine has passed his lips?

Tallulah said:

Who is John Kettley?

to which we replied:

A weatherman.

Tilly said:

Who is Michael Fish?

To which we replied:

A Weatherman.

Oscar said:

I think it was him who was making all those noises in my bedroom this morning. He woke me up.

So, Michael Fish. 

You have more than just the mis-prediction of the storms in 1987 to atone for now.

A discovery

Oscar on getting ready for bed this evening:

Daddy! These slippers smell just like diamonds!’