Sometimes I Pay Attention to my Children

You may be able to tell that I am in a ‘sleep is for the weak’ phase at the moment.  Although my motto should read: ‘sleep is for the non freak’.  I am having a few days of full blown panic attacks in between all the jollification.  I am glad that I have had to schedule them last thing at night, so that they don’t interfere with my otherwise busy life.  I know why I am having them.  My life is full of complicated and life changing events, most of which are positive, none of which I am really at liberty to blog about right now and my head, as one of my friends says, is well and truly in the wok at the moment.

I am just about to leap into a hot bath with a pint of gin (I don’t think that’s the cure for what ails me actually, before you think I am about to tell you I am having a baby.  I am not.  Nor is it because I am getting rid of it with a hot bath and a pint of gin.  At this point it would have just been easier to delete that last sentence wouldn’t it?), but thought I ought to briefly fling the children into the blogging mix.  They are, after all, one of the reasons I started this thing in the first place.

So, to news of the demented midgets:

Tilly took the news about the failure of the school appeal very well considering.  Wobbly lips and wet eyes notwithstanding we were able to put a positive frame on things, helped not a little by three hundred crispy duck pancakes.

Tallulah claims she is nearly able to do the splits.  Apparently ‘C’ at school can do them already and she is tutoring Tallulah.  God help us all if it goes horribly wrong. I have no idea how to apply a tourniquet to a ruptured, prepubescent vagina.  I may have to have Dr. Christian Jessen on speed dial.  Watch Embarrassing Bodies on Friday to see if we make the final cut, as it were.

Tallulah has been put in for her yellow belt at karate in two Saturday’s time.  She is as pleased as punch.  So are we.  Who knew she would make such a good ninja assassin? (hem hem)

Tallulah lost her second front tooth last night.  Not only did I help her pull it out (I hate this bit of parenting so very much), but I also remembered to wake up the tooth fairy and kick her sorry ass into prompt action.  No grovelling letters of apology necessary this week.  Nor will I make Tallulah eat corn on the cob like my mother made me when I lost both two front teeth simultaneously.  Ha!

Oscar is still very impressed with his manly bits.  Today while we were in the garden centre he needed a wee.  The toilet was a good few hundred metres away.  He spent the whole walk there saying in stentorian tones: ‘It’s great being a boy mama, because when you’ve got a willy and you need a wee, you can just pinch the end like this see?  And that stops all the wee coming out and flooding my pants.  Big men can do it too you know?  They’ve got willies too.  They just pinch the end like this, etc, etc, etc’ past four hundred middle class grandmothers holding onto their wisteria for dear life.

Unfortunately Oscar is still not tall enough to get to Disneyworld yet.  He thinks he’s having issues with his knees.  I shall keep you abreast of all progress on this front.

Oscar on the lizard monsters in Doctor Who: ‘They’re not real monsters are they dada? No.  I don’t think so, because they’ve got eyes you see.  Real monsters don’t have eyes do they?  No, and they’re not real anyway.  Spiders are real though, and they’ve got eyes, haven’t they dada?  But they’re not monsters, because they’re just spiders, with eyes. etc,etc, etc.’

Matilda has invented a story involving a comedic, crime fighting duo known as Twadger (a very stupid badger apparently) and Caterpillock (a very stupid caterpillar).  I cannot possibly comment on who helped her come up with the names, and advised her not to mention them to anyone in authority.  The first story she has written about them is excellent, and includes illustrations.  If I can find it I promise to post it on the internets stat.  There is a second story in progress.

Tallulah went on her school trip to the botanical gardens in Oadby last week.  Apparently she caught three newts while she was pond dipping.  It was a minor disappointment when they made her put them back.  Her tree  recognition skills are excellent (species rather than, ‘Look! A tree! Watch out!), and her insect squishing skills are coming on apace.  Today as we were picking up Beech nut cases and collecting goose feathers, she philosophically picked a lump of goose pooh out of her hair, and said: ‘I expect everyone in the whole world has trodden on an ant at some time or another.’  I found this very Zen.  Later she was staring at a red spider, which Tilly told her fed off of people’s blood and said darkly: ‘I think Nature is very fascinating. It is full of Interesting stuff,’ and glared at the spider.  I do not know whether to be worried by this.  I am monitoring things.

Oscar was explaining to me today how his bedroom light is brilliant because it is full of ‘trickery’ or is it ‘tricity’ mama?

The children have invented a new game.  It consists of Matilda being a chicken called Patricia, who pretends to be a children’s nanny, lures people onto her plane (???) and shouts: ‘Fly CHICKEN AIRWAYS!’ very loudly.  This then causes all of the children to dissolve into hysterics.  Tallulah invented a game called ‘Chinchilla’s Bum’ this afternoon.   I tried not to pay too much attention to what it was about.  I doubt that it had very much to do with chinchillas, and quite a lot to do with bums, which is why I went away swiftly.

Which is what I am going to do now.

Luvverly

The kids and I went to Staunton Harold today.  It’s a country estate just inside the borders of Derbyshire, about forty minutes drive from our house. I think I have blogged about this place before.  If not, I should have. It is one of my favourite places in the world.  It came up for sale a few years ago. I wanted to buy it.  Sadly they sneered at my offer of 50p and a bag of grapes.  No vision some people.  Anyway, it looks like this:

You can just make out the enormous house, peeping through the trees between the church and the gateposts. The pretty poor website says that the majority of the buildings that are currently on the site were built between 1760 and 1778, which makes them Georgian, and very Georgian looking they are too.  The estate itself has been around considerably longer than that.  The church that you can see on the banks of the lake was built in 1653:

as it says on this door plaque, which you probably can’t read:

I love this church.  It is very unusual in its design, particularly the interior.  When you go in and look up at the roof, instead of elaborate frescos on plaster, it shows a William Blakeish painting of chaos and the heavens swirling around on wooden roof beams that rather resemble the bottom of an upturned boat.  The whole thing is done in deeply dramatic browns and creams and thunderous blacks. Some of the clouds of chaos have Hebrew characters painted into them, and it is a truly spectacular and dramatic thing to see.  I tried to get a postcard of it, but they didn’t have one, and there were lots of guides about, so I couldn’t take photos inside.  If you click on this link however, you can see a great photo of it.

I heard somewhere that the church was spared during the Reformation through some tricksy behaviour on the part of the Estate owner, and that the wealth, in terms of relics and candlesticks and the like, were saved by being hidden in a tunnel that passes under the church.  Whether this is true or not I really can’t say.  It is a fabulous story though.

When I first started visiting Staunton Harold you could go into the main house as well.  The top half was a Sue Ryder Hospice where the terminally ill saw out their days in glorious splendour, and the bottom was a charity shop and tea room style affair.  Now it is privately owned, although you can still wander freely round the grounds and lakes:

like so:

We had a great time, climbing hills, looking at the old ice house, feeding moorhens and rolling around in goose pooh.  Well, the children rolled around in goose pooh and I laughed, until Tilly slipped on a stray bit of goose pooh and nearly ended up in the lake.  First I was mama ish and told her off.  Then I laughed some more.

The other good thing about Staunton Harold is that at the back of the main house is what they call The Ferrer’s Centre.  In all the old outbuildings they have now created some gorgeous shops, a tea room and a garden centre.  There is a deli, a pottery, an art gallery, a black smith, a model maker, a painter, a photography studio, a jewellers and even a hair dressers, although I have been millions of times and never seen it open.

Most of the shops are based around a courtyard which presumably used to be the old stable blocks.  There are tables and chairs where you can sit and drink tea.  There is a giant chess set where you can play chess with giants.  Sometimes they have sculptures there.  It is a lovely space:

and:

and:

We had lunch at the cafe, and pottered around the shops, stopping to buy salted caramel truffles and milk chocolate with sour cherries in.  We sat eating them in the sunshine watched over by this fellow:

We finished the day off with a trot around the extensive garden centre, which sits in the old, walled vegetable gardens that used to belong to the house, and which contained beauties like this:

 and this:

 and these:

And I resisted spending £160 on a fabulous bench in the Bothy shop, which is new, and sells vintage garden things and hand turned wooden furniture, and even with the self denial it was quite the nicest bank holiday Monday I have spent in a very long time.

Smitten Kitten

Did I ever mention how much I bloody hate Bank Holiday weekends?

Actually I probably have.  Repeating myself is one of my favourite past times.  I am practicing for when I am old.

I hate all holidays which mean that children are off school, and particularly ones in which everyone else is off as well, and the only things you can find to do are the same things that nine million other people have found to do along with you.  Gah! I am joining my friend David in the grumpy old bastard rant.

Yesterday we spent the day with my brother, drifting around Leicester, trying to find Tilly a new coat.  I have never understood this seasonal shopping malarkey.  Why do people stop selling swimwear in the winter, when they know perfectly well that most people bugger off to Lanzarote every time there’s a cold front?  Why do people stop selling coats in the summer? Particularly in the U.K.  I cannot remember the last time we had a summer that lasted longer than three days.  Sometimes I wear more clothes in the winter than I do in the summer.  It is insane.

Fed up of failing to buy coats we ended up in an all you can eat Chinese buffet place in High Cross for lunch.  I hate those as well.  I hate food which sits in a bath of what looks like pond scum, steaming gently and becoming increasingly inedible.  And although I am a keen eater, I am not one of those people who can wallop down twenty quids worth of food just so that I can get my money’s worth.  Still, the children loved it, and Tilly in particular ate her own body weight in crispy duck pancakes.  I ate crispy pancakes and filled up on the Mr. Whippy ice cream machine they had to entertain the children who don’t like lychees.  I do love Mr. Whippy ice cream.

On the way home my brother had a genius idea.  He suggested we go and have a wander around the RSPCA centre which is about half a mile away from our house.  I tend not to go there very often.  I am a sucker for the lame, the halt and the blind.  I will come home with anything that nobody else wants, on the grounds that I feel sorry for it.  On the other hand, I do love looking at furry critters.  The children also love looking at furry critters, and it was free.  And the fact that it smells of dog pooh puts a lot of the usual crowd of holiday makers off.  We do not care if it smells of dog pooh.  My children are all filthy beasts anyway.  It is just one more unpleasant aroma in a sea of existing unpleasant aromas.

I was doing quite well, with only mild pangs of sadness for a Staffordshire bull terrier called Betsey, who was crying in the corner because nobody loved her.  Then we got to the cat cages.  I was lost.  LOST.  I wanted them all. The fat ones, the baldy ones, the ones with boss eyes, the fat ones, the skinny ones.  They were all needful and lovely.  I was in bits by the time we were three quarters of the way down the pens.  Then at the end there were two pens full  to bursting with kittens. 

I turned into a total and utter girl within seconds.  If I could have jemmied open the door I would have left, pockets bulging.  They were sooo cute.  I eventually narrowed it down to three that I decided I could not possibly live without; a teeny, weeny tabby who looked just like Tom Kitten when all the buttons burst off his blue blazer, and who was clearly incredibly naughty. 

Then there was an indolent silver, grey specimen, who was just lying across the top of a scratching post as if the whole world was waiting to do him homage, and an insane little marmalade striped one, who just went round pouncing on all the other kitten’s tails and whiskers, and being a juvenile delinquent.  He’s bound for cat Borstal eventually, but he would be such fun.

I came home with none.  I was so very sad.  I could not get any for our house because Jason hates cats and is actually allergic to them.  I could not persuade my brother to have any, and we agreed that mum and dad would kill us if we brought them any more.  Their lives are made miserable by the cat I left with them two break ups ago.  They do not trust my choice in felines.

But if anyone would like to adopt them and let me come round and play, pop round to the Woodside Animal Shelter on Scudamore Road in Leicester and I will send you a bag of IAMS every week in deepest gratitude.

I wish I could cleanse a leper

On Saturday I had another one of my days of illicit pleasure, running away with Andrea to London town for theatre and hi jinks.  I am so glad I booked and paid for a great deal of theatre before the economy drive hit.  I am going to be able to go on my jollies until August, and then I will be plunged into deep and lasting gloom unless I find some twenty pound notes amongst the fluff and hundreds and thousands down the back of the sofa cushions.

We met up with our old friend David.  We were all at school together from the age of 14.  Our paths diverged around the time of university, Andrea and I staying in touch sporadically until I settled back in Hinckley and became her bestest theatre friend and companion in all ill considered ventures, David losing total touch with all of us until the invention of Facebook.  I may not be entirely a fan of Facebook in all its guises, but I am very grateful that it delivered David back into our lives.  He is a delight.

We are all total theatre heads.  Andrea and I like things with nice frocks, stuff that is full of language, and the odd bit of toilet humour, comedy vicars don’t go amiss.  David likes things set in coal scuttles starring disenfranchised Jewish homosexuals who saw each others legs off for pleasure whilst delivering state of the nation speeches.  Despite this we occasionally venture into each other’s dramatic territory and have a wonderful time anyway.

David is very clever, scarily clever.  He has two firsts, in chemistry and law, a Phd in something frightening and is currently setting the legal world alight.  He likes things to be precise and organised and logical.  Why he hangs around with us I don’t really know.  Last time I met him I told him the wrong railway station to meet me at, which caused us half an hour of total chaos, for which he then very gallantly apologised.  Then we were laughing so much at lunch we were late for our matinee performance and had to sit in the hall like naughty children until there was a suitable break in events.  He told me that he has never in his life been late for a play before.  There have been times when Andrea and I have been a fortnight late for a play.

The second time I met him up in town, Andrea and I explained all about Rigby and Peller to him in graphic detail over lunch.  I think beads of sweat actually rolled off his forehead during that one.  Still, he has never forgotten it.  In fact he mentioned it on Saturday in a nervous way, probably worried about what we might start talking about next.  Luckily I’d already discussed Embarrassing Bodies with Andrea in the car on the way there.

This Saturday we were off to the Panton Street Comedy Theatre, situated between Leicester Square and Piccadilly, to see Felicity Kendall in George Bernard Shaw’s play, Mrs. Warren’s Profession.  David has been to this theatre lots of times.  We agreed that he would pick the lunch venue and we would meet him there before the matinee.  He chose a place called The Washington Mayfair Hotel on Curzon Street behind Green Park tube station.  They had a £10 for three courses lunch available through Lastminute.com.  We arranged to meet at midday, prompt.

We would have been prompt only we went the wrong way up Curzon Street.  We were having such a lovely time exploring we didn’t keep a timely eye on a) street numbers or b) times.  We did however find two or three of the excellent elephants which are currently dotted around London; the bookshop where Nancy Mitford used to work, the hairdresser to the court; Master Geof. Trumper, and a lot of Heyerish houses.  We also found the Third Church of the Christian Scientists, which was quite exciting.  It had an enormous coat of arms thingy carved over the doorway and promised to: ‘Cleanse the lepers; Raise the dead; Heal the sick.’  I’ve always fancied a go at cleansing a leper.  Sadly there were none available. I expect they have a very high success rate with leper cleansing.  After all, it’s not like you see any anymore.  Probably makes up for their woeful track record of raising the dead.

Eventually we found the right place and fell through the door, only fifteen minutes late.  David was very gracious about our total hopelessness and we went through to the as yet untold joys of Madison’s Restaurant.  I confess to misgivings when we were parked next to a six foot bronze sculpture of a rooster on a stick while we were waiting for someone to help us.  When the woman finally tripped over and asked us if we wanted a table for breakfast, our collective hearts sank.

Still, we are nothing if not brave.  I may not be famed for paddling down the Amazon on a toothpick and finding a cure for cancer, but I am willing to go to extremes on the trail of a good cosmopolitan blog post.

Hearts could not possibly sink any further when after she had seated us, she scooted off and reappeared with three laminated a4 pages.  This was the lunch menu.  Not three pages each, one page each.  Wipe clean menus always trouble me when they rock up in unexpected places.  Fine in Little Chefs, Harvesters and transport cafes.  De rigeur in fact.  Not in swanky hotels in Mayfair though.  Oh no.

Starters consisted of a choice between:

1. Homemade soup of the day
2. Thai chicken salad
3. Pineapple, pea and potato salad.

By this time, David had whispered ‘sorry’ about twenty times, and we were all in fits of hysterical laughter.  We decided to try one dish each, so we could experience the full glory of the menu.  You may have thought that the soup was the safest option until you realise that as she handed us the laminated pages of joy the lady said: ‘I’m afraid we don’t know what the home made soup of the day is yet.  I will just go and find out.’  As it was now nearly half past twelve, and for something to be home made it really needed to have been cooking for at least twenty minutes, this was not a comforting message.

She returned.  It was apparently leek and potato soup.  David plumped for this.  Andrea got in quickly with the Thai chicken salad, thus leaving me with the pea, potato and pineapple salad.  The mind boggled.

When it came, it looked like this:

It basically resembled a pile of cat sick dressed with frisee, and balsamic vinegar.  It tasted like half a tin of pineapple chunks, badly drained, mixed with a handful of leftover peas from last night’s dinner service and some tinned new potatoes.  The pineapple juice had leaked into the mayonnaise causing it to split slightly, and the whole thing repeated on me for about twenty four hours afterwards.

The whole meal was like this.  David’s leek and potato soup was brown, and tasted neither of leeks, nor potatoes. The waitressing was painful.  One of the options for dessert was chunky apple tart.  David asked if it came with cream or ice cream.  The woman simply shrugged and said: ‘Neither. We heat it up on a plate.  That’s it.’  The only thing that could have made it more perfect was if she had had a fag hanging out of her mouth while she said it.

It was all very Acorn Antiques.

Luckily we found the whole thing very, very funny indeed, and despite getting indigestion which cost us a tenner, we had a fantastic time.  I would not recommend going if a) you like food, or b) you do not have some very game friends with you.  It just wouldn’t be the same.

On the way to Panton Street we got stuck in a torrential downpour. Poor David had dressed for summer in a floral cotton shirt and pale linen jacket.  He was absolutely soaked to the skin, so we took to Green Park tube station, even though it was only one stop, mostly so he could dry off in the up draught from the trains.  Then the train was late.

He hates being late, and then hated the fact that it was too late to walk, and we were stuck waiting for the train no matter what.  Andrea and I were very philosophical.  This sort of thing happens to us all the time.  Our total failure to get our knickers in a twist wasn’t helping, and when the train finally did arrive he blew off steam all the way to the theatre having a grumpy old man rant about people failing to walk in single file on the left, old ladies with shopping trolleys blocking the aisles in supermarket and stupid haircuts in the under twenties.

The play was very good.  I love Felicity Kendal.  I have a huge soft spot for The Good Life and every time she exited stage left I kept waiting for her to shout: ‘Tom! Tom!’ and dash off to put a red cashmere sweater on an ailing piglet.  She did not however, and I think that despite my frisson of disappointment, the play was better for it.

At half time, David came over to talk to us about what we thought of it so far.  For some reason he got onto the subject of rats in the underground stations.  He said: ‘I know that rats have a bad rep for spreading plague and petulance…’ At which point Andrea and I actually fell of our chairs laughing.  I thought I might actually rupture myself.  It was so silly, and we had been laughing for hours by this point, and this was just the icing on the cake.  I just kept imagining these rats, hands on tiny, rat hips shouting: ‘I AM NOT playing with you ANY MORE.  My bat.  My ball! Now bugger off.’ and then stomping off in a huff down the platform.

We had only just recovered when the lady next to me, who had only just sat down with her tub of ice cream, squeezed the tub too hard.  The lid popped off, sailed backwards over her head, and landed on the lady behind’s lap.  That finished us completely.  I laughed so hard I was actually a bit sick.

I spent the second half in a stupor of exhaustion, weakened by my extreme hilarity.

Afterwards we were just a collective limp rag.  Still, tea in Jermyn Street replete with buns set us up for the journey home.

I am Traumatised by the Television of Today

Now, as we know, my house is a hotbed of intellectual fermentation at all times.  Dorothy Parker, we spit on your frivolous ways.  Sartre, you are an uter wet and a weed. etc.

But every now and again one has to have a few hours off from the relentless pace of philosophizing and the grind of thinking deep thoughts like:

• Whither the pair to my favourite purple sock/s?
• Why woodlice?
• Wheretofore the knobbishness of the local council?
• What is the point of Garibaldi biscuits when I haven’t seen anyone voluntarily eat one since 1980, and that was in a power cut, so I expect they thought they had got something much more interesting instead?

Friday night was not for dancing.  Nope. Jason was scamping chez orcs, Tilly was at a friend’s house, and the other two were in bed.  I had the lounge all to myself.  This happens for approximately 3 days per year, so I like to celebrate by watching absolute hogwash on the television.  Hogwash of my own choosing rather than hogwash desired by others.  I had, sadly, caught up with Glee (I LOVE this programme.  I want to marry Sue Sylvester.  She is a triumph and a goddess), and I was experiencing a patch of the doldrums before Gok’s Fashion Fix came on.  I started channel surfing.

I HATE people who channel surf.  I detest it.  Jason does it occasionally, and that, and the fact that he leaves his dirty socks in peculiar places, are probably the only two things we might ever divorce about.  The children do it incessantly.  It drives me mad.  Pick something and watch it for Cheezus’ sake.

Anyway, I thought that I would give it a go as I was alone.  I thought I would try to work out why people seem to enjoy it so much.  Sadly (or not. I couldn’t really decide), I only made it three channels up when I came across the programme Embarrassing Bodies starring Dr. Christian Jessen. OMG! OMG! WTF! OMG!

I know. I know. I am late to the party.  Everyone else I have spoken to about this has already seen it and grown weary of it.  I say in my defence that it was my first time.  I had, until this point, been entirely in ignorance of this programme.

For those of you who have not had the experience (I will not say pleasure), I will explain.  It is an hour long programme, shown at prime time on a Friday night on ITV, which is one of the major UK channels, which means everyone in the entire country can watch it should they so desire.  The premise is simple.  If you have an embarrassing illness, condition, physical problem, you simply rock up on PRIME TIME television and talk to Dr. Christian Jessen about it.  Dr. Christian then strips you down, ON PRIME TIME TELEVISION, allows the cameras to roam around freely, exposing your intimate traumas to the ENTIRE nation, and subjects you to a bunch of tests, probes and other invasive procedures, all of which are filmed.  Eventually they pronounce their verdict and off you go.

Now, I know I am not the sharpest pencil in the box, but I really, really do not understand this.

On Friday there was:

• A lady with inverted nipples who could not breast feed and who thought she was a freak.
• A lady who smelled so badly of rotting fish every time she had a period that people on buses actually moved away from her.
• A man with intense pain in his scrotal area, who thought it was affecting his ability to be a good bus driver.  He had been silent about this pain for SEVEN years.
• A lady postman who could not control the urge to pee and had been wetting herself several times a day for three days, mostly on her post round.
• A man with bad scarring on his back that embarrassed him so much he had not taken his top off in public for three years.
• A man with a big pus filled warty thing on his forehead.

All of these people were absolutely mortified with shame about their conditions, and yet rocked up on telly, whipped out their parts for inspection, and allowed cameras to film the most intimate parts of their life, all while Dr. Christian stood there, snapping his latex gloves and looking like a 1980′s shirt model for Next Directory.

I happened to switch channels just as cameras were ferretting about in Mr. Bus Driver’s scrotal region.  I stopped, mesmerised, mostly unable at first to work out what the hell I was looking at.  Then, when I realised what it was, I was pathologically unable to stop looking at it.  I kept shouting internally: ‘Look away! Turn over! Hide your eyes in case your retinas burn.’  But no.  It was like rubber necking at the site of a particularly horrible car crash.  I was transfixed.

Why? Why do these people, who I felt nothing but utter pity for, decide that after seven years of hiding in cupboards and self mortification, that the only way to resolve their problem is to whip it all out on telly? I’d rather poke my own eyes out with a stick, frankly.  I thought Britain’s Got Talent was bad enough, but this, this took the biscuit AND the tin.

I can only conclude that either:

a) they pay you shitloads of money

b) it bypasses a great deal of ridiculous faffing via the NHS

c) they pay you shitloads of money

d) they promise you can meet Ant and Dec in the ITV canteen afterwards

e) they slip mind altering drugs in your tea so you don’t remember anything about it

f) they pay you shitloads of money

It was just terrible.  Terrible. Terrible. Terrible. 

I cannot decide if my worst experience was:

a) the bus driver’s scrotum

b) watching pus being squeezed out of the man’s head boil

c) Dr. Christian’s teeth clashing with the brightness of his shirts

d) the fact that they had another doctor called Dr. Pixie something or other.  How could you trust your wonky nipples to a woman called Pixie for God’s sake?

e) the fact that I saw more flaccid penises in one hour’s worth of television than I have in the rest of my life. 

I can only thank the Lord that I do not have HD television.

Bookzzzzz

I am currently reading Under Heaven by Guy Gavriel Kay for Amazon Vine, the reviewing group that Amazon invited me to be a part of.  I have probably mentioned it before, but basically, Vine is a wonderful thing whereby twice a month Amazon drop me a newsletter into my in box and invite me to pick two items from it.  Once I have done that, they post said items to me with alarming speed, and I review them.

It’s not just books that I get sent.  It’s usually a fairly mixed bag.  A couple of months ago I got a very handy power drill with which Jason drilled many things in ecstasy.  Before that it was hair straighteners.  I’ve had everything from wireless routers to audio books.  Mostly though, I tend to pick books.  Books are my thing.  I cannot really get too excited about a wireless router, and let me tell you, writing a coherent review about one if you are as technical as a spoon, is a hard job, but I do get very excited about books.

Quite often I get things that I have had on my wish list, or books by authors who I really rate.  I got to review Hilary Mantel’s excellent Wolf Hall, several months before it started winning prizes.  I have recently finished Nicola Barker’s Burley Cross Postbox Theft.  I love Nicola Barker, and this did not disappoint.

There are often duffers, don’t get me wrong.  It’s not all award winning authors and thingst that make the strings of my heart go zing.  No. Sometimes pickings are lean, or books are incredibly unfortunate.  But in the main I am very, very lucky.  Free books is always for the win in our house.

The Guy Gavriel Kay thing was an odd one.  When we were on holiday in Canada, we struck up a warm friendship with the man who owns the most excellent Beacon Books in Sidney.  He has various bookish passions, one of which is the writing of Guy Gavriel Kay.  Now, I haven’t read any of his books since I was a teenager and was heavily into my fantasy fiction, but I love it when someone else talks to me with passion about a book or an author.  It makes me want to either a) read them or b) re-read them in case I’ve missed something.  The man was most fulsome in his praise about the book Under Heaven, which is a standalone novel (Gavriel Kay usually does epic series of books), based in a kind of fantasy approximation of feudal Japan.  This awoke my interest.  I absolutely loved Lian Hearn’s Across the Nightingale Floor sequence, which is the same kind of deal.  I decided to keep my eyes peeled for this book.

The day after this conversation, Amazon sent me my Vine shopping list and Under Heaven was on it! I decided it was a sign and an omen, an omen of a sign.  I ordered it.

I have been trying to read it ever since.  I am puzzled by this book.  It is well written.  It is pacy.  It is interesting.  Yet I read two pages and fall asleep.  It is utterly soporific.  I have no idea why.  I have read other, much less interesting books and managed to stay awake through them, but there is something about this book that just sends me.  I am a quick reader.  I can polish off six hundred pages in a couple of days at a push, even with children and life interrupting me.  Yet I have been reading this book for weeks and weeks, and am not even half way through yet.

What is it about this book? I am beginning to wonder if the pages are infused with Nytol or something.  And what do I say in my review?  ‘Do not read whilst operating heavy machinery or driving!’

Pooh news

This deserves a post of its own, because it is contaminated and horrible news and I do not want it to spoil anything else I write about.

We got a letter today saying that Tilly is still being denied a place at the school we want to send her to because the appeal board do not think our reasons are strong enough to warrant sending her there when they are three children over their quota this year already.

I am really, really devastated about this. Luckily, Tilly is not as yet, as she is at a friend’s house for the weekend.

I have allowed myself today to get upset and annoyed (only when I think about it), and have decided as from tomorrow that we will go to plan eleventy.  I shall contact the Council and tell them to make sure her name is still on the waiting list.  I will contact the school, who have always been sympathetic and supportive, and explain our circumstances.  I will also let everyone know that I will be home schooling her as from September until a place arises. 

I understand that the admissions board have to make tough decisions.  However, having three children over the quota hardly seems like a good reason to me.  There were very few people appealing this year to get into the school, and the final numbers for the intake are only estimated so far, because numbers shift and change right up to the first day of term.  I am not having my child turned down for a place on such narrow margins, and with such flimsy reasons.  The reasons why I want to send her there are way more compelling than the reasons that they want to turn me down, and I have a lot more fight than they do.  They just don’t know that yet.

But they will.

Shit I tell you about

I do not use Twitter.

I am tweetless.

I feel I should.  I expect I should thoroughly enjoy it.

I worry about my addictive personality thing regarding Twitter.  I expect I would soon be a sixty a day woman at the very least.  It is all too alluringly easy.

I ignore the children enough as it is.  I don’t have time to take up any more bad habits that demand attention I should be giving to real, live human beings in my immediate vicinity, instead of real, live human beings who are a bajillion miles away from me.

So, mostly I try to ignore the whole Twitter thing.  If I ignore it, and feign ignorance of it, I will not be called upon to give it a try.  Do not knock this kind of philosophy until you have tried it by the way.  I am thirty eight years old, and I can count the number of things I have ironed in my life on two hands, and that includes that pair of P.E. knickers I cremated in 1983.

Anyway.  Sometimes, as you know, Amazon sends me things to review.  Last week they sent me a book by a guy called Justin Halpern.  It is called Sh*t My Dad Says.

Halpern is a guy whose disastrous love affair meant that he moved back home to San Diego and his parents at the age of 28.  While living back at home he realised that his father was a kind of profane Zen master of pithy sayings that were both philosophical and hilarious.  He started a twitter feed called Sh*t my Dad Says.  Every day he posted things his dad had said.  In short order the feed had a huge following.  Now it is being made into a t.v. series starring William Shatner (the mind boggles), and this book has appeared.

In the book there are tweets that Halpern has presumably already posted, but so you feel you have your money’s worth, there are short chapters, each one a story illustrating a pivotal point in the relationship between Justin and his dad.

I was hugely sceptical when I first picked it up.  Mainly because the covers spent a great deal of time and energy telling me how hilarious what was between the covers was.  My inner polarity responder wanted to come out and play.

Anyway. It is indeed hilarious.  It is so funny that I got chucked out of the marital bed the other night and had to finish the book sitting in the bathroom instead.

It almost made me want to start my own Twitter feed.

Almost.

But not quite.

There’s No Place Like Home

I made a very important discovery today.

I am not very good at driving.  I knew this already.  However, by doing empirical tests I have found that I am even worse when I am driving in four inch patents.  They are not a good driving accessory for me.

I should have given this some thought before I set out.  I sort of did, in a vague and woolly type way.  Then events overtook me, and I found myself driving in unsuitable shoes.  The whole time I was driving I was thinking: ‘These shoes are very unsuitable.’  It became a kind of mantra.  Not a positive, life affirming mantra.  More of a: ‘We’re all going to die,’ type of mantra.

Here’s the thing. 

I had several key things to do today.  Firstly I had to go and see my friend for coffee this morning. This may sound trivial, but I have not seen her since I got back from Canada. We only live down the road from each other, and we are usually in and out of each other’s houses all the time.  Stupid events have meant that other than briefly waving at each other in the playground during the school run, we have not managed to get together.  There is lots of news to impart on both sides.  We were hoping to get together in the half term holiday, which is next week.  Now she has to go to a family wedding in London and will not be back until next weekend.  This morning was our only chance to grab some time together.  It had to be done.

She was supposed to come to my house, but then her husband asked her to wait in for a parcel, so she asked me if I would go to hers. This was fine, but it meant that I had less time to organise myself.  From her house I had to go to town for an appointment at the solicitors.  The solicitor’s office is at one end of town.  An hour later I had another appointment at the other end of town.  I had to dress smartly for the second appointment.  I chose a trusty outfit and realised that the only thing I had to go with it shoe wise, were four inch patents.  It was too traumatic to hunt for another outfit and I was running out of time.

I also had a load of paperwork to gather together.  I threw it all together, checked that I had everything and hurtled to the car.  It was only when I was driving round to my friend’s house that I realised that I probably should have put some trainers on to drive, which I then could have changed out of in town.  Too late.

Hence the drive of death.

On the way in, to mask the thoughts of impending doom, I decided to worry about where to park instead.  Neither place I needed to be had Boo friendly car parks, i.e. empty, and the size of a football pitch.  I fear parking with a passion once reserved for all aspects of driving.  I decided that as either car park would not be suitable for the other appointment I would choose neither.  Instead I chose the John Lewis car park on the following grounds:

• I can park there with minimal stress
• I knew how to get to both places I needed from there
• I could cut through John Lewis and buy a pair of flats for the return journey, and the hellish walk to both my destinations.

It seemed like a plan of utter genius.

The only problem being that by the time I had parked etc, I had roughly ten minutes to spare.  I hurtled down to the shoe department and surveyed the flat shoes.  Now, as we have previously discussed, I am a half measures availed us nothing type of girl. I either wear trainers, or four inch heels.  I do not particularly warm to flat shoes proper.  They are not my thing.  I just wanted a plain pair that would be a) comfortable, b) suitable for running/driving in and c) not too ugly.  I picked up a pair I quite liked.  They were £120.  £120 for a pair of ‘meh!’ shoes.  I don’t think so.  I picked up the only other pair in the entire shoe department I could have lived with.  They were £70.  I put them down again.  I staggered out of the shop in my ridiculously high shoes and proceeded to hobble/gallop/slither to the solicitors.

I arrived.  I was sweating, knackered and in pain.  I sat down with the solicitor and huffed and puffed like I was about to blow her house down.  Just to add insult to injury, I went to pull out my phone to put it on silent, and instead pulled out a pair of binoculars in the shape of the Penguins of Madagascar that Oscar had left in my handbag.  Winner.

By the time I finished there I had very little time to spare.  I hobbled/galloped/slithered to my next appointment. I crippled into a sandwich bar on my way there and wolfed down a sandwich.  I strayed into Fenwicks shoe department, which happened to be on my way.  The shoes were uniformly hideous.  I left sans shoes.

I arrived at my second appointment like someone who has just finished their first marathon after doing half an hour’s training and watching Chariots of Fire.  They were very good, considering.

After this meeting I had an hour before I had to get home.  I could not contemplate driving in the infernal shoes.  I could barely contemplate walking.  In fact the action that my feet were undertaking could hardly have been called walking.  I fell into T.K. Maxx on bleeding stumps and dragged my way round the shoe department.  I had already tried Faith, Schuh and Clarkes by this point.  I ended up falling gratefully into a pair of scarlet patent ballet flats with black bows.  I look like Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz.  I don’t care.  They were twenty quid. I can live with them, and more importantly, I can drive in them.

I did try clicking them together three times and wishing.  But the magic had worn off.  What can you expect for £20?

Victory of sorts

Yesterday, not only did I have to go to the dentist and have my mouth filled with eeewww. I also had to go to the doctors.  The doctor at my practice who is brilliant, only works on Thursdays and Fridays.  Not only this,  but I am not the only person who thinks she is brilliant, hence the incredibly long waiting list to get an appointment with her. Given the health disasters I have suffered recently, coupled with the doctor disasters, and the ever looming presence of the CLD (TM) I felt that the wait might be worth it.

I nearly cancelled when I realised the day before yesterday that I had written my dentist appointment down on the wrong day.  When I filled it in for the right day it became apparent that a doctor’s appointment at 10.50 in Glenfield and a dentist appointment at 11.40 in Barwell, which is a twenty minute drive away, was going to be a tight squeeze.  This added to the fact that it meant I would have to drive to the surgery, where parking is insane and there are frequent driver issues acted out amongst the snot filled handkerchiefs and left over prescriptions, and similar occurences at the dentists, made me feel a little stressed to say the least.

In the end I decided to brave it.  The doctor’s is five minutes drive from my house.  I gave myself 25 minutes.  There was one parking  space in a really tight corner.  I sweat into it, using the power of perspiration. 

I checked in.  The  doctor was running ten minutes late.

Arghhh.

I finally got in there and sat down.  I poured out my tale of woe, very, very quickly.

She was a marvel.  It was such a positive experience, even though when she checked my blood pressure it was 170/98, when it is normally normal, it was worth the pounding heart, sweating palms and added dentist/driving anxiety.

The upshot is that I am being sent for an MRI.  Having two or three headaches a week, plus migraines, plus persistent chronic sinusitis is not good apparently.

And I am being sent for a whole raft of blood tests to make sure that there are no other underlying nasties.

In the meantime I have antibiotics in case the sinuses are infected.  I also have a drug called Imigran, which is part of the quite scary Triptan family, but which should help when a migraine attack becomes apparent.  I believe it is a vasodilator.  I don’t care if it’s crocodile pooh.  If it works I will kiss its hem and wash its feet with my hair.

Praise be.