Congratulations

My house now comes with a bio hazard warning on the front door it is so disgusting.  It is, let me tell you, virtually impossible to dust in those hard to get to corners while one is chained permanently to the CLD (TM).  My body is still falling apart, two trips to the dentist in the last two days and one to the osteopath have been my jollies.  The less said about my hair the better, and I still sound like Bonnie Tyler.  I also managed to nearly kill myself this afternoon, driving back from the osteopath’s in a world of discomfort and totally not realising there was someone behind me as I cut them up on a roundabout. I fully deserved the f**ing and blinding that I was subject to as they overtook me on the next straight bit.  I felt sick to my finger ends.

I am a disaster area.

And yet, there is something sparkly on the horizon.  ‘What can it be, o plaguey lady,’ I hear you cry?  Why, tis the dulcet sound of an award winging its way to me from the esteemed hands of Mrs. Jones her very self.  I am  truly honoured.

It is for prolific blogging.

I think I qualify.

What I lack in quality I make up for in quantity.

I have never been good with dates, but at a rough estimate I have been blogging now for about two and a half years.  During that time I have, according to my faithful back room statisticians, posted 1,430 posts.  That’s quite a lot.  That can definitely be  called prolific, no?

As with all blog awards, there are rules.  I must nominate seven other bloggers whom I esteem.  This is not easy.  There are lots of bloggers I esteem.  Lots of the bloggers I highly esteem, and sometimes even revere, such as Belgian Waffle, Liberty London Girl , Non Working Monkey and Whoopee are bloggers I have nominated and esteemed before, and although I would love to give them more fulsome praise, I feel that lots of other people probably will too, so I will find seven other bloggers I love just as much, but whom I have not nominated for anything before.  They are, in no particular order:

Grit’s Day

The Age of Uncertainty

The Hairy Farmer Family

Auntie Gwen’s Diary

Mantua Maker

Pinklea

Some Mother’s Do ‘Ave ‘Em

Now, I am supposed to go round to each of these people and tell them about their prize.  I probably will, eventually, but time is ticking by and I need to go and engage with the horrors of real life now, so if I nominated you and you find out here first, apologies. We all know I much prefer virtual life to real life, it is much neater for a start, but sometimes real life will impinge.

Taking the Tour

There is a play by Peter Shaffer, who is most famous for Amadeus (big hair and harpsichords) and Equus, (that one with horses in which Harry Potter gets his kit off).  This play is a lot less well known.  It is called Lettice and Lovage, and it holds a special place in my heart.  Lettice Douffet is a lady of a certain age whose job is as a tour guide around a fairly dull stately home.  As the play progresses and we are witness to several of Lettice’s tours, it becomes clear that Lettice is so utterly bored by the dreariness of the true facts of the history of the house, that she is freely inventing things just to spice up her life, and entertain the crowds.

I have always been enchanted by this idea, and my partner in crime, Andrea and I, had an idea that one day we will run Lettice tours of London in which we embroider the facts freely and with great verve and vim.  It will be great.

On Sunday morning, when I was in London all alone, I happened to find a place called The Wallace Collection.  It is in Manchester Square at the back of Marylebone High Street.  It is, and I quote: ‘ a national museum in a historic London town house.’  It is free to get in and open 7 days a week.  It houses a rather eclectic collection of oil paintings, bronzes, armour and enormously scary pieces of furniture.  None of this is particularly my thing, but it was a) free, b) previously unvisited by me, and I am nosey, and c) had a lot of chairs where people of a fragile health can sit and quietly cough their lungs into a napkin whilst pretending to like ‘big art’.  I went in.

If you like majolica plates with overblown paintings of hydrocephalic youngsters on them, Dutch paintings of windmills executed in brown on brown, and big fuck off scimitars, this is the place for you.  It is stuffed to the rafters with these things.  There are famous paintings in amongst all the windmills.  There is The Laughing Cavalier, there are a few Rembrandts, quite a lot of fat cherubs which looked familiar and a several paintings by Fragonard.  More of which, later.

So, I was crawling about woefully, looking like something the cat dragged in whilst doing a lot of sitting and the occasional bit of leaning, when I caught wind of a voice drifting through the rooms.  It was the dulcet, North London tones of a very posh lady of a CERTAIN AGE.  The little snippets I was hearing led me to stagger nearer, and I caught up with her in a rather grand drawing room affair.  She was holding forth at an escritoire the size of a small bungalow, with her group of bemused and bewildered tourettes around her.

She was fantastic.  I am not saying that she was embroidering the facts, far from it, but her delivery was exceedingly eccentric, wonderfully droll and had me in absolute stitches.  She was dressed in a rather Barbara Woodhouseish style, i.e. a Sloane Ranger who has been let loose in a tweed factory.  She wore a headband.  Need I say more?

I paraphrase wildly now:

Mrs Tourguidehouse: ‘Now then my dears.  Gather round, do.  Yes. That’s it.  Now cosy up to this magnificent writing desk.  Yes. It IS rather large isn’t it?  And might I just say, frightfully, frightfully vulgar…Oh, you think it’s quite tasteful do you? Well, yes. Mmmm. Of course it wouldn’t have looked just like this back in the day you see. Oh heavens, no.  You see this inlay here?  Well it wouldn’t have been these dull colours you see before you.  No. No. No! It would have been bright as day.  Well, positively garish in fact.  Not AT ALL THE THING.  I very much suspect ladies and gentleman, that if you had been given this frankly monstrous piece of furniture that you would have had to put it in the garage it would have been so frightful.  Oh yes! Well…If any of you had a garage that big, obviously…

You see, now just pop your head in here (she rams a poor man’s head into the workings of the escritoire, sideways and with great vigour).  Can you see now? Can you? Hmmmm? Can you?  Yes.  Those would have been the colours on the outside too don’t you know?  Dreadfully vulgar.  Quite too bright…

Ahhh…ummmm…Is anyone here an expert on wood?(huge, whistling silence) No? Well, my brother is ladies and gentlemen.  He is a world expert on wood.  Although he lives in America now.  Good thing really, he’d have been a crashing bore about the whole thing, and if we’d gotten out in under three hours it would have been a miracle.  Anyway, yes. Well.  There’s lots of different types of wood in this writing desk.  He’d be able to tell you all about them.  Still, as I say, probably better he’s not here.

At this point I decided to move on as I could not keep my face straight any more.  I caught the odd sentence as I shuffled with great decrepitude about the place:

‘…I’ve been working here for twenty three years, or is it twenty two?  Maybe, twenty one.  Anyway, twenty something.  And in the beginning I used to have to get my mother to come over with me and bring me sandwiches at lunch time.  A marvellous woman, ninety three years old you know…’

etc.

Eventually I caught up with them properly in a room housing their most famous painting, Fragonard’s The Swing, which if you click on the link will take you to a picture of it.  If you can’t be bothered, it was painted in 1767 and shows a young, aristocratic woman, dressed to the nines in a pink frothy confection, being pushed on a swing by a bloke who looks a bit cheesed off.

Here is Mrs Tourguidehouse’s take on things:

‘Yes! Well! Ladies and gentlemen, doooo gather round and admire our most well known picture, Fragonard’s ‘The Swing’.  It was commissioned by X (I can’t remember what she said), and was considered a rather risque commission.  Shocking in fact dear ladies and gentlemen, positively shocking.  It was of his mistress you see.  Oh yes, indeed.  Not only that my dears, but the man pushing her on the swing is her husband, a vicar no less.  Yes! X didn’t like the man or the church and basically decided to commission this painting, not only to show everyone how lovely his mistress was, but how little he cared for the church or marriage.  Shocking isn’t it?  He offered the painting job to Y (I forget) who turned him down on the grounds that the subject was far too immoral for him, but he suggested that Monsieur Fragonard, who had all the morals and scruples of an alley cat would do the job.  And he did, ladies and gentlemen.  He did!  And a lovely job he did of it too.

Now then.  As you may know, in those days ladies did not wear knickers.  The eighteenth century ladies and gentlemen, was a knicker free zone.  And now when you look at the angle the painting was painted from, and where that naughty Fragonard would have stood, and what an eyeful he would have had, you can see why he might have had quite a jolly time painting the picture.  I’m sure he was concentrating more on seeing the knickerless state of the beautiful lady than anything else.  Now isn’t that the most marvellous fun?

And it is.

When I am well, I am going back to take the full tour, but only on a day when that lady leads the party.  And I shall donate at least twenty pounds, because that’s as good a performance as any I’ve seen on a stage in the last few years.  Absolutely first class.

We’ll Call Him Shaun

I took the girls for a trim earlier in the week.

They usually hate going to the hair dressers, always having been obsessed with the idea of having incredibly long hair.  They fear the shears and the snip, snip sound as hard won inches are cast to the floor.  Despite the fact that them having long hair is a gigantic pain in the arse, always clogging up the hoover (I prefer to hoover their heads. Brushes are so 20th Century), and shedding everywhere, not to mention the nit problems, I am usually tolerant of their desires to have the smallest amount choppped off.

We went along and Tilly sat in the chair first.  I expected her to say, just an inch please.  Instead she held her hand to her shoulder and went: ‘Could you cut it to here please?’  The hairdresser and I were both stunned.  She turned to me.  I nodded, and off we went:

See the amount of hair on the floor?  That’s enough to make a new child.

Then Tallulah hopped into the chair and said blithely: ‘I’ll have the same please!’

If anything, Tallulah’s is shorter, because her curls mean that her hair scrunches itself up.  I have no picture of her in the chair, because Oscar was trying to work out the inner mechanisms of a humidifier at this point and my attention was elsewhere.  I do have a picture of how much hair they shed between them though:

It’s a shame it’s not worth anything.  I thought of trying to sell it on Ebay to a wig merchant, but it’s full of grass and jam and other horrible childlike things.  I expect it wouldn’t be worth the effort to spin it into proper hair, or whatever wig makers do.  My gran used to trim her hair and throw the ends out to the birds for nests.  Using this idea we could supply a small bird housing estate.

In the end I left it to the hairdresser to dispose of.  I didn’t think either Jason or the Dyson would thank me for wandering home with a carrier bag full of hair, which I would then undoubtedly put in a safe place, forget and then rediscover only when the children had decided to make themselves false beards to play spies with.

The girls look beautiful by the way.  They always look beautiful.  But they look especially cute with their newly shorn locks.  Tallulah in particular, looks even more mischievous than usual. 

God help me.

The Pen is mightier than the sword, if you can find one

On the way home this afternoon Matilda was looking worried and nervous. With some trepidation she asked me if it was alright if she walked down to the post office when we got home and bought a black pen with her own money. I pointed out that we have a house full of pens and unless it was a very special pen I didn’t really understand why she wanted to waste her money on it.

She looked stricken, and then confessed that it had to be the right kind of ‘school pen’, which they apparently stock at the Post Office.  When I asked why she needed it, she explained that she had a school pen in her pencil case, but when she went to get it today the pencil case was open and the pen had gone.

I asked why she didn’t just ask the teacher for another one.

She explained that the Head Teacher had read the riot act and said that no more pens will be given out because Year Six are using too many.

Is it me, or is this utterly ridiculous?

This is a school, where they teach children to read and WRITE.  A school where they have a curriculum which is based in the main around WRITTEN work.  How do they expect the children to write if they won’t provide pens?

Not only that, but this is a state school, funded by money which I, as a tax payer have provided.  I have paid for this school’s stationery budget once.  I do not see why I should have to pay for it again.  Every year the head teacher gets a sum of money towards the upkeep of the school, and has to budget accordingly.  The fact that she has not budgeted enough to cover writing implements up to the end of the school year is not and never should be my problem, nor the problem of my child.

I told Matilda to ask the teacher for a pen tomorrow when she goes in.  Matilda looked stricken.

I explained that I had already paid for pens, and should they expect written work to be done, with specific pens, then it is their obligation to provide them.

She looked more stricken.

She is now upset that the pen has been lost/stolen, and even more upset that I will not allow her to sneak off to the post office and pay for another one.  She is also upset because she feels another one of my letters coming on.

This is quite, quite stupid and I am really bloody annoyed about it.  Why, why, why should this issue even have to come up in the first place?  Does the school deliberately hunt down the most stupid, pointless things to get children worked up to fever pitch about?  I’d be more worried about the fact that half the bloody school doesn’t know what to do with a comma, or how to capitalise their letters properly.

I have a lot on my plate at the moment, and I really do not need to spend precious hours soothing the fevered brow of my first born because of a misplaced biro.  I know she is a sensitive little flower and a worry wart, and that most children in her situation would either have a) stolen someone else’s pen, or b) asked the teacher for a replacement straightaway or c) taken the opportunity to relish not having any work to do, but this is all part of her rustic charm.

It doesn’t half give me a bloody headache though.

Quilts

I am still poorly.  And I have a hole in my tooth for which I must visit the dentist tomorrow.  In the last three weeks I think that I have been to just about every type of health professional known to man now.  Instead of me telling you how ill I am, I think we will ignore it until something changes for the better. How’s that?

So.

On Saturday I met up with my very old and extremely bonkers friend Gina, and we visited the new V&A Quilts exhibition.  If you are interested in quilts, which I am, then I highly recommend it.  If you are not, avoid it like the plague.  It is just quilts, quilts, quilts all the way.  There is a fantastic selection of them, but they basically are all quilts.  There were some from the 1700′s right up to the present day with offerings from Tracey Emin (a spectacular four poster bed) and my very best favourite, Grayson Perry. Sadly there was no hint of the Walthamstow Tapestry, which Gina and I are both desperate to have a look at, but I suspect that it was because it was not a quilt, and the entry regulations seemed very strict.

You were not allowed to take photos, and sadly, the offerings in the shop in terms of posters and postcards were poor.  I had hoped to be able to show you a few of the amazingly lovely things we saw, but no.  You will just have to use the eye of faith.  They were not all twee, Laura Ashley style offerings by any means.  There was a fantastic quilt made by the inmates at Wormwood Scrubs with a fascinating film of their attempts to learn to quilt and what it gave them.  There was a quilt made entirely out of money.  There was one made of the most minute scraps of paper, each one representing someone who had been killed in the war with Afghanistan.  There were quilts made by men as well as women, some pretty and decorative, some with great meaning within a specific family, some made as acts of political rebellion.  It was amazing to see how many quilts represented something other than a simple means by which to get warm.

We were most amused that there were only us, about two blokes and forty thousand women of a certain age.  These women were quilters to their fingers ends.  They moved about in large, predatory gaggles, taking notes and peering.  There was a huge amount of peering going on, and a fair bit of jostling.  Sharp elbows these avid quilters.

You could tell which were the most popular quilts due to the sea of grey heads bobbing about in front of them and the fact that all the alarms kept going off because they had to just get that little bit nearer, just that bit nearer, oops! I have been to several exhibitions at the V&A and even worked there for one hellish six month stint, and I have never, ever heard the alarms go off as much as in that one hour ensconsed in a darkened room with lots of quilts.  The guards looked absolutely knackered.  There was no point in them sitting down really.  They should just have kept circulating like a bobby on the beat, ready and eager to remove certain aged noses from 300 year old fabric with pepper spray and batons.  Fierceness is all.

I was glad to see that I had as much affinity with the building as I ever did.  I was supposed to meet Gina on the front steps at eleven.  I decided to use the tunnels from the tube station rather than crossing Brompton Road on a Saturday morning.  I came up the wrong rabbit hole and emerged in the classical scultpure section, miles from the front entrance.  When I worked there I regularly used to get lost.  If you understand that there are about fourteen miles (I kid you not) of corridors in that building, you may be a little more sympathetic.  I was always getting into horrible trouble.  They thought I was skiving, I was in fact power walking in a hysterical daze.  For some reason I always used to end up next to a fourteenth century sculpture of Jesus on his donkey as he rode in to Nazareth.  On Saturday I did it again.  We  clearly have an affinity.  I think it’s more likely to be with the donkey than with Jesus, myself.

They had really gone to town in the gift shop, having the cunning idea that everyone who went to this exhition would be a fervent quilter, or have been turned into a fervent fledgling quilter by the time they left. You could buy bundles of patchwork squares in some absolutely glorious fabrics, as well as ribbons and buttons and all kinds of quilting paraphernalia.  The prices were, I have to say, somewhat optimistic.  If there is ever a time you catch me paying £2 for six safety pins, just shoot me there and then. I will clearly have lost my marbles.

You’re on a Promise

I am back.  I had a lovely time. I was very poorly. I am still very poorly.  I am blogging to prove I am not dead, but it is not an exciting blog entry. It is merely an announcement that my heart is still beating, just. 

It was a very eventful weekend and I made lots of notes, most of which will undoubtedly turn up as blog posts in the next few days.  Just not today.  I got home last night and fell into bed. I woke up this morning and have been trying to take it easy all day due to the fact that I sound like Bonnie Tyler in Total Eclipse of the Heart and if it weren’t for the recent hair crop I would look like her too.

Just to whet your appetites I saw over the course of my weekend:

• A coven of witches at St. Pancras Station.
• An extremely large lady with no bra dressed in a hot pink and brown horizontal striped sixties go go dress and a hat walking down New Bond Street.
• A man with  a phone ring tone that sounded like a goat bleating and which weirded me out quite a lot after I had imbibed half a bottle of wine.
• A granny wearing tweed M.C. Hammer pants with white tights and ballet pumps on the Fulham High Road
• A lady who may have been Vivienne Westwood at the Wallace Collection Cafe.
• A woman who definitely was Jo Whiley having coffee on the door step of an office block three doors down from Daunt Books on Marylebone High Street.
• Richard Griffiths getting into a car by the South Bank, wearing a daffodil yellow shirt and looking considerably less rotund than he did on stage.

It was all very exciting.

I must also tell you about:

• Delinquent middle aged ladies at the V&A Quilt Exhibition.
• The tour guide at the Wallace Collection.
• My total and utter humiliation courtesy of the stupid concierge at the Radisson Edwardian Berkshire on Oxford Street.
• Crazed Americans at Le Truc Vert.
• My lovely time at the National watching London Assurance
• The delicious melt down of my economy drive
• The fact that Tallulah came home today with an advert to see some Wrestling in her school book bag (what next? Badger Baiting for the Under Fives?)

Relentlessly Optimistic

This cold surges backwards and forwards more times than the tide.  I have felt like crap again all day.  I am very, very bored of it now. So bored I am considering immolating myself tied to the CLD.  I should either bugger off into the ether and get my harp and wings or get better. I do not want to fuck about for the rest of my life being feeble.  I am not feeble of mind.  If I were, there would be no issue.  I could  moon about all day, coughing gently, drooling into my porridge and kissing the odd turnip.  Instead I soldier on hatefully and being hateful.

Nobody likes me, everybody hates me, think I’ll go and eat worms…

That would be the theme tune of my life right now.

I am hating being economical.  I am hating slaving away over a hot stove.  I am hating being prepared and filling in forms and getting on with things.  I cannot decide which I desire more:

a) to lie on the floor like Violet Elizabeth, kicking and flailing and screaming and screaming until I am sick

b) to run amok in Selfridges with a particularly buoyant credit card flinging caution to the winds, only to escape to a ritzy hotel where I can wallow in my selfish purchases

c) to go to bed for the rest of my life and have someone poke cheese sandwiches under the door with a stick while a drip feeds me coffee intravenously

d) all of the above.

I should not be grumpy really.  The children were lovely this afternoon.  We made banana bread and chocolate chip muffins, and they wrote stories and played at making dens and being spies and were nice to each other.  I am also going away tomorrow to London, sans husband and children.  This is one of the things that was booked and paid for pre-economy drive.  I am spending tomorrow at the V&A looking at the quilts exhibition, shopping with my friend and hopefully eating at Wahaca on Mrs. Jones’ recommendation.  I am staying in what purports to be a nice hotel, The Radisson Berkshire on Oxford Street, and I have until Sunday afternoon entirely to myself before I meet Andrea and we go to see London Assurance at the National.  It will be awesome.

At least I hope it will be.  Right now I am alternating between crying, taking pills and wrapping myself in blankets.  My face hurts, my head hurts and I’ve had to wash my hair already, despite only having been to the hairdresser’s yesterday.  This means it will go back to its usual Wurzelesque wanderings but with more added strangeness because it is a new and unreliable style.  If I make it as far as the V&A without dropping down dead on the Piccadilly Line, my friend probably won’t recognise me and will wish she hadn’t even if she does.

As I always say.  It’s being so cheerful that keeps me going.

I will be back on Sunday.  If I am not back by then I will either be:

a) dead

b) dead

c) hiding out at the Savoy wishing I were dead

I’m not old. It’s my glands

My mum let me borrow one of her wonderful pieces of ephemera last week.  It is a copy of the Naturist Magazine from 1956.  I will be guest blogging over at her pad later about it properly.  It is, I might add, terribly tasteful.  None of your Jordantastic shenanigins in 1956 let me tell you. 

What I wanted to share with you here is a marvellous advert over on the back page.  I shall simply transcribe it.  I was going to scan it but I think it will be too small to read.  There are also pictures, but I will insert appropriately similar images at the correct times so that you get the full pleasure of its claims.

A MAN IS AS OLD AS HIS GLANDS

How old is this man?

and how old is this?

They are both 55!

Mr. A. looks prematurely aged, and is losing his hair fast.  He is short of breath, tires easily, and lacks concentration.  He is only half the man he ought to be, and so misses half the fun of life.

Mr. B. is a different story.  He is fit, full of the joy of living, with a spring in his step and a twinkle in his eye.  Life is good to Mr. B, offering enjoyments that he relishes in full.

In short, Mr. A’s glands have let him down while Mr. B’s glands are healthy and full of life.  Don’t be a Mr. A, and don’t despair! Science has provided a simple course to rejuvenate our glands and restore the whole system to full blooded activity.

Ever since 1929, British Glandular Products Ltd. , have specialised in regenerative compounds which have a fine record of success.

This glandular treatment, harmless and non habit-forming, works naturally on your system, gives 100% endocrine efficiency, thus restoring your tissues and filling you with a new source of vital energy.

Don’t lose your birthright of normal man’s full, vigorous life.  Send this coupon today: it can mean new hope for you!

If only I were a man and had 15 shillings and 6d to spare I’d send off for this like a shot.  I’m sure a hearty injection of rejuvenating glands would do me the world of good right now.

Hair Today

I’m pretty sure this is what they call ‘working the look’ right?

Bite Me

Tilly will leave primary school forever at the end of this term.

Hopefully she will go to the secondary school of our choosing in September.

This all rests on the jolly appeal, which is much like the Nuremburg Trials only grimmer by all accounts.  It kicks off on the 24th of May.  Ho hum.

I have already decided if we do not get through at the appeal stage I am going to make such a bloody nuisance of myself that they will wish they had relented months ago.  I have many things in mind, so I am not in the slightest bit bothered about the official outcome.  She will go.  I have faith. Much like in Wayne’s World II.

While I am putting together my case for the trial, Tilly is concentrating her efforts on the upcoming leaving concert.  She has decided to perform.  I am terribly impressed.  I would rather gouge my own eye out with a spoon than get up on stage and do anything.  She is not worried, she just can’t decide which song to sing.

She has been whittling it down and has progressed from something by the Black Eyed Peas to something by Vampire Weekend.  She prefers the eponymous first album to Contra, and has been working her way through the tracks with the song lyrics in hand.  Last night I was doing something upstairs when I heard her belting out Oxford Comma.  She was word perfect.

I was impressed.

Then I was horrified.

exhibit A:  The First Line

‘who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma,’

I hurtled downstairs, nearly breaking my neck in the process.  I fell through the kitchen door panting: ‘You can’t sing that at the leaving concert…’

To which she looked sheepish and said: ‘I’ve just worked that out mama!’

Bless her.

Still, part of me wishes she would.