Women Beware Women and Deaf Old Blokes

I can’t leave that last blog post up there all weekend gathering dust, so even though I am  tired and not exactly at my best, it is time to blog about something less icky.

Last week I went to the National with Andrea to see Women Beware Women, a play by Thomas Middleton.  Middleton was writing shortly after Shakespeare I believe, around the time of Ben Jonson.  I had never seen anything by him before.  His most famous play is probably The Revenger’s Tragedy. 

Women Beware Women is typical of the era.  It is tragic with a capital T.  It is gory, violent, ridiculously overblown, complicatedly sexual and lusty and full of the drive for revenge.  It also has rather cross priests in it.  I think the cross priests were an afterthought to tidy things up at the end.  The Christian version of the Deus ex Machina.  I’d have preferred a Deus ex Machina, perhaps Apollo sweeping onstage on a milk float, that sort of thing.  Maybe in the next adaptation.

The play is also very, very long and rather complicated.  Not as long as Morte D’Arthur, but not far off, and way more complicated because everyone will insist on swapping sexes, heads, masks and lovers left right and centre.

The National staged it in a kind of louche Italian bordello style with lots of mirrors and rusty scaffolding, a torch singer and stacks of running up and down stairs looking stricken.  I thought it was quite good fun. 

Harriet Walter was in it, who I have wanted to see on stage for a very long time.  She was excellent and all you would expect.  I have had a soft spot for her ever since she played Harriet Vane to Edward Petherbridge’s Lord Peter Wimsey on television hundreds of years ago.  You might know her better as Fanny Dashwood, the evil sister in law in Emma Thompson’s Sense and Sensibility.

Apparently she was once asked why she played so many evil women.  She puts it down to her bone structure, which is exquisite.  And apparently evil.  She presumably gets this off of Christopher Lee, who is her uncle.  Thank you Wikipedia for that fascinating nugget of celebrity gossip. I shall make sure I use it wisely and well.

She is a formidable actor on stage and has done a great deal of work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, including a stunning Cleopatra to Patrick Stewart’s Antony, which Andrea had the great good fortune to see, and which I missed.  So I was very pleased to be able to finally cross her off my list of people I need to see before I am too old to sit still for that long without piddling my pants.

What really made the performance for me though, were the family sitting in the row behind us. 

Audiences are as worthy of critical appreciation as the plays themselves most times.  I prefer an audience of mutes who do not eat, breathe or move if at all possible.  This is unlikely to be granted me, until I finally figure out a way to become world dictator.  Mwahahahah!

So, if you’ve got to have a rustling, fidgeting audience it is best to have an entertaining one, and this lot certainly weren’t letting the side down on that front. 

Andrea and I worked out that it was probably a middle aged, married couple who had brought her parents out to the theatre as a treat.  I surmise that they were her parents by the fact that she was being very vocal and bossing the parents around, and he was staring into the middle distance rustling his sweeet wrappers and trying to look like he was really at a football match.  In a different country.

The parents were both very elderly, and had hearing issues.  The National has hearing loops fitted in the auditorium, and if you are having difficulties you can have a pair of headphones which amplifies the voices coming from the stage.  Both the elderly man and his wife had them.  The man also had a large, inflatable cushion to sit on and about half of Boots pharmacy stashed under his seat.  As we were sitting down, the daughter was shouting: ‘NO DAD! IT’S THE LEFT SIDE.  NO! I SAID THE LEFT.  THE LEFT.  IT’S ON THE LEFT. NO! NO! YOU’RE TURNING IT DOWN.  TURN IT UP.  IT’S….ON….THE….LEFT.’

It was like being at a pantomime for the hard of hearing.  The urge to turn round and shout: ‘IT’S BEHIND YOU. ON THE LEFT.’ was very strong.

All the time he’s going ‘eh? what? eh?’ because of course he’s turning himself down every time. 

His wife then weighed in and started slapping his arm and shouting at him from the other side.

It didn’t bode well for the performance.

The husband who wished he was at a football match seemed to be mining sweeties from the bottom of the deepest halls made of cellophane.  For the first twenty minutes you could hear nothing but the rustling of plastic.  I turned round.  Andrea turned round.  The woman next to me turned round.  In the end even his own wife had had enough, and gave him a wallop.  Obviously skills she had learned from her mother.

Half way through the old man fell asleep and started whistling down his nose whilst breathing stertoriously, some of which was being picked up by his headphones, which were slipping down.  That was nice.

At half time he woke up with a jolt and demanded to know if the play was finished yet.  When his wife told him it was only half time he was really fed up and said in a very loud, creaky voice: ‘Dashed long these sorts of plays! We’ve had a lot of it already, surely.  I think it’s time it was over now.’

Assured that he was there for another hour and a half at least he collapsed in on himself like a deflating meringue, accompanied by the noise of his inflatable cushion giving up the ghost.

Then his daughter came back to rearrange him and ask him in a voice that could be heard in the Gods if he needed to go to the toilet, five or six times.  I did think about asking her if she’d just like to pop into the middle of the stage and really project it out.  It might have helped. 

Anyway, they soldiered manfully on and afterwards we scarpered before they could decamp, blocking the whole aisle and the exit and shouting about bloody, silly plays at the tops of their voices.

I was left wondering why the middle aged couple had decided on this play to take her parents to.  It’s clear he was no lover of Jacobean tragedy, and they didn’t seem particularly enthused.  Maybe they won the tickets?  I was really baffled by it.  Me, I’d love my kids to take me to see something like that.  God forbid that they’d try to take me to see Les Miserables. I’d have to drown myself in the ice cream tub at half time.   But surely, when they were sitting in the best seats in the house, and staying there for over three hours, you’d have thought they’d have checked it out first to make sure that they might actually enjoy it?

Whilst I was trying to piece all the family history together by staring round like a demented emu during the interval, I noticed that Fenella Fielding was in the audience.  I got terribly excited and pointed her out to Andrea, who went; ‘Who?’

She was in some of the Carry On films in the sixties and seventies.  You might know her best for her role in Carry on Screaming.  She had a very distinctive breathy voice and a rather amazing hair do:

I have rather a soft spot for her.  I once saw her in a bizarre performance of Pericles where she was dressed as a member of the French Resistance wearing a trench coat, beret and plimsolls.  I never did really understand it all, but it was jolly good fun.

Anyway, she must be incredibly old now, but she still has exactly the same hair do.  In fact that was what I recognised first.  I saw the back of her head and thought: ‘She’s got hair just like Fenella Fielding, fancy!’ and then she turned round, and it was Fenella Fielding, fancy! So, even though nobody but me will probably recognise her or care, I thought I ought to write it down, because living in Glenfield you don’t get to spot  celebrities every day, unless you count the transvestite in the Co-op.  He looks less like Amy Winehouse now and more like a cross between Robert Smith from The Cure and early Marc Almond when he was still into torch songs.  Nice to know he’s retaining a hint of diva, even if he has dropped the beehive.

I recount a humiliating episode. you may wish to look away

I am drinking wine at lunch time.  This is a bad plan.  Never mind.  It’s too late to worry about it now, but if there are some more heinous than usual crimes against spelling and punctuation, please bear this in mind.  It also puts me in the mood for being confessional.  So anyone of a queasy disposition should probably go away now, sticking their fingers in their eyes and shouting; ‘la, la, la! I can’t see you.’

Last time I went to London for the weekend I remember that I promised to tell you all about a totally humiliating experience I had, which was also rather funny.  And then, oddly, I forgot.  Today, as I print out my hotel reservations and gulp down the dregs of my glass of wine, I am reminded of it, and think: ‘What the hell!’  This is what a diary is for, right?  Not just the neat and tidy bits.  Dutch courage and all that?

Usually when I stay in London I rent one of those apartments you can book by the day instead of a hotel room.  They are about the same price and you get loads more space.  When Andrea and I stay down there together it is a no brainer.  Last time though, when I stayed on my own I found the place where we usually stay had put the prices up, and suddenly, for one person it wasn’t quite so much of a bargain.  I used Lastminute.com, which I usually avoid like the plague, but found a good Top Secret deal for about £85.  I ended up in a Radisson at the back of Debenhams on Oxford Street.  The complete mouthful, Radisson Edwardian Berkshire, to be precise.

Chain hotels don’t really do it for me, unless they are unbelievably swanky.  I prefer something a little bit more chic.  But beggars on a budget can’t be choosers, and as I was not actually going to be in the room for very long I reckoned that it just had to be clean, inexpensive and somewhere I wasn’t going to get stabbed.  This place fit the profile, so I booked it.

It was fine.  Quite a large room for a London hotel, oodles of hot water and clean towels, decent sheets and not too noisy.  I was happy.

You may recall that I wasn’t feeling too well that weekend.  In fact, ghastly was the description I would use.  I had planned to go and see a show that Saturday night, but opted for a new book from Daunt, a punnet of raspberries and some sushi in my room, and an early night.  I was asleep before ten.  I planned on lying in, having a hot bath and then making my way to the fantastic Le Truc Vert for brunch.  All good.

Then I woke up at four, feeling evil.  I got out of bed and went to the loo, only to find that my period had started early.  I looked like an unfortunate extra in a scene from Carrie.  It was not my finest moment.  As it had taken me by surprise I was totally unprepared.  It doesn’t happen very often any more, but boy is it inconvenient when it does.

I showered and changed and dealt with things as best I could given my total lack of resources.  I dozed on and off until seven in the morning when I felt it was fair to ring the concierge.  I called down to the desk and spoke to him.  Yes. HIM.

In these enlightened times I really didn’t think that talking to a man, particularly a concierge in a hotel  about my need for sanitary towels/tampax, would be problematic.  How wrong could I have been?

IT WAS A NIGHTMARE.

Firstly I tried explaining in the most non graphic terms I could what the problem was.

The man tried to send me up some bath towels.

I tried again.  I elaborated a little more.  I used brand names and biological terms.

He kept sternly telling me that he had sent housekeeping up with some towels.

I explained that this would not do.

I asked if he could send someone out to a chemist for me.

He said:

‘Boots doesn’t open until eleven on a Sunday.’

I asked if there was a corner store or a Tesco Metro.

He said:

‘There’s a Tesco Metro up near Primark (this is about ten minutes walk away, right near Marble Arch).’

I asked if someone could go there and get me some tampax/sanitary towels.

He said:

‘No. You will have to go yourself.’ Big pause ‘Anyway. It doesn’t open until eleven.’

Check out was eleven.  It was now twenty past seven in the morning.  I do not have girly, pathetic periods. I have PERIODS.  There are, as my mother so politely puts it: ‘BUCKETS OF BLOOD’.  It just wasn’t happening.

I tried to explain this to the concierge. 

He said, very crossly:

‘I have offered to send up more towels.  Just what is it you want?’

I was at the end of my tether.  I burst into tears and shouted:

‘I am sitting here in a pool of blood.  I cannot leave this room unless someone helps me.  You are not helping me.  I cannot think of any more ways to tell you about the fact that I have my period.  I am not a Thesaurus.  Please, please, please can you let me speak to a woman member of staff.  I implore you.’

There was a stunned silence, and he fetched a lady who asked me what she could do to help.

I said:

‘I have my period. I do not have anything with me because it is early. I cannot leave the room. Can you help me please.’

She said:

‘Leave it to me. I will call you in five minutes.’

Five minutes later she called me.  They had nothing in the entire hotel.  Nowhere was open because it was Sunday.  But she had staff coming on shift at eight.  She had called everyone who was coming in, and one of the ladies was bringing some Tampax with her for me.

I burst into tears again.  This time, tears of gratitude.  I sobbed about how helpful she had been and how I had begun to think it was all a horrible nightmare because the concierge had been so unhelpful.

She said:

‘Oh, honey! He’s a man!  That’s what they do.’

I do not always concur with this point of view.  But in this case I felt that she was entirely justified.

When she trotted up to my door at ten past eight, she got a rather large tip.  She was wonderful.

My advice, if you want help there? Ask a woman.

This weekend I am also staying in a Radisson.  This one is by the British Museum, the Radisson Edwardian Kenilworth. I am hoping, nay praying, that I will not have to have such intimate dealings with any members of their staff.  Unless there is a dire, medical emergency, in which case I shall be asking for an ambulance, I am pretty sure that I will not have to.

At the time it was pretty horrible.  However, using my writer’s head I cannot help sniggering about his fanatical insistence on repeatedly sending house keeping up to give me clean towels. 

E for effort.

With a little help from my friends

Today I am preparing to run away tomorrow for three days to London.  This is quite exciting.  Jason is busy for the next three weekends, and the summer holidays are creeping on apace, so excuses to run away into a giant bottle of wine must be created and opportunities grabbed with both hands and shaken until we are all slightly sick.

As ever I shall be patronising a theatrical event.  This time I am going to see After the Dance at the National, a rarely seen Terence Rattigan play (he also wrote the excellent, The Winslow Boy), which has been revived to much hooplah and critical acclaim.  This is how I shall be spending my Sunday afternoon.  Before that however I am meeting up with some blogging friends.  This promises to be great fun.  I have some lovely, lovely virtual friends, and the chance to meet some of them in the flesh should not be missed.

Tomorrow lunch time I am meeting with the ever lovely Keith from Zen Mischief, and possibly his fantastic wife Noreen, if she  can get away from work on time.  In the afternoon I am meeting my friend David, who I have blogged about before.  He has promised not to make me eat any more potato, pea and pineapple salad, and I have promised not to tease him about petulant rats, so all should be well.  He is just finishing his law exams and is going out on the lash with the bright young things to celebrate.  He has suggested I  come along.  I am terrified at the thought.  Two  glasses of wine and I am face down in the risotto, snoring.  I am a total lightweight.  I think that we will have sedate tea and buns and then I will go my way and find something else to do.  Probably falling asleep in a cinema, or possibly a theatre.

On Saturday I am meeting my fairy godmother friend, Justme, who has been so wonderful in guiding Tallulah  through her karate choices and supporting her.  Last week, before the big yellow belt test she sent Tallulah some padded guards for when she had passed and could do contact karate moves.  Tallulah was so proud and I’m sure knowing that Justme, and all you other, supportive people were rooting for her, helped her achieve it.

Justme is also excellent at mailing emergency chocolate in times of need.  This is a skill she needs to put on her CV.  She has been going through some truly hard times recently, and so I think we plan to drink and eat and make merry and be VERY, VERY ALIVE, so we  can spit in the face of misery.  I am all for that.

I was going to see All My Sons in the evening, but my plans collapsed like a rather disastrous souffle.  This means that I have freedom on Saturday night and Sunday morning.  I am rather relishing it and have lots of things I could do, but if anyone is around and thinks life might be illuminated by a little Katyboo sparkle then please let me know and I will see what can be done.  After all, I seem to be in gregarious mood so advantage should be taken.

In the summer holidays I am also thinking of taking a road trip to Kent.  I have wanted to see Derek Jarman’s cottage and garden at Dungeness for years.  Derek Jarman is one of my heroes.  Now I  can drive I have suddenly realised that this is possible, and it should be done, and it will be done. 

Kent is rather a long way from Glenfield, and so I intend to try and stay for a few days and hang out in Kentshire.  David lives there and has given me some suggestions for things to do.  Anyone else with ideas should stick them in the  comments box please, and I will let you know as the plans shape up what makes the final cut.  I will be bringing the three miscreants with me, so pole dancing clubs and badger baiting evenings are out, but otherwise I am open to all suggestions.  Any suggestions for reasonable accommodation would also be welcome.

For Grit – A Present

Grit, who is an excellent bloggess, and who writes about her adventures (and I use this word advisedly) in home schooling with her three girls, Tiger, Squirrel and Shark, often has cause to lament people’s ignorance over the issue of home schooling.  She has chosen a hard row to furrow.  Not because of the long hours and the relentless smell of chalk dust in her nostrils, but because of the high levels of general ignorance about what home schooling can be that bombards her on an almost daily basis.

There is a lot of negativity about home schooling and home schoolers. Particularly from main stream educators and the government, who seem to equate the words home schooling with things like:

• paedophilia
• witchcraft
• torture
• child abuse

and not with things like:

• education
• education

ummm

• education

oh

• and loving your child as an individual and choosing what is right for him/her rather than what ticks society’s boxes.

The fact is, as Grit so eloquently puts it in her blog, which I urge you to read, even if you don’t have kids or wish to home educate, just because it is beautifully written, people in the U.K. have to provide their children with an education, but that does not mean that it has to be in a school setting.  The law states that as long as your child is being educated, you can do it any way you like.

You go through nine months of bodily discomfort to give birth to your child.  You sacrifice months of sleep, your health, your sanity and your best china, so that you child has the best possible start in life. You coddle them through teething and growing pains and the thousand ailments and indignities that life heaps upon small human beings, and you love them.  You love them with a fierceness that beggars belief.  You know that should a rabid bull charge your child with the intent to gore it to death, that you would not hesitate for an instant to step between it and the child in order to save it.  You do not even have to think about it, your love is that strong, even, and this is the amazing thing, even when they are being aggravating little shits and have just made your best face cream into a magic potion and smeared it on the cat.

Then it comes time to send them to school.  And the bizarre thing is that lots of parents do not give this a second thought. They send their child to school with a Pavlovian reaction worthy of a dog treat.  They do not think,’Is this the best place for the child of my bosom, that I have shed blood to keep safe’?

Parents that do give it a second thought are usually conflicted.  Generally, unless you are very lucky, the school that suits your child is fourteen days away by pack mule, or has school fees of £20,000 per year, or only accepts girls and Kevin just won’t pass.  Unless you have bags of fight, or are very, very fortunate indeed, your child’s schooling, with the best will in the world, ends up being a lottery. And you feel guilty, and torn, and you do your best with what you have.  And sometimes what you have is just not good enough and you nurse your child through the darkest days and try to find something positive.  When you find yourself saying: ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,’ things are rough.

And sometimes they are joyous, and the school gets it right, and your kid thrives, and learns things, and usually not the things you think they’re going to learn, or that the school set out to teach them, but that doesn’t really matter, and they are eager to go to school, and things are good.

And mostly it’s a see saw between the two and the term compromise gets bandied about a lot.

But sometimes, for whatever reason, your child doesn’t fit into that pattern of doing things or the way that society has deemed life is supposed to be lived, and sometimes you don’t.  And sometimes the darkest days are too dark, and the joyous days never come, or there is too little too late.  And that’s when you have the option to home school should you so desire, or be brave enough.

Now, as regular readers will know, I did not choose to home educate.  All my three children are in some kind of mainstream educational facility (rather like prison, but with worse food).  I did  think about it though.  I was one of the parents who thought long and hard about what I wanted for my children, about what might be right for each individual child, and then reached a compromise between what I wanted in an ideal world, and what I knew I could cope with in the real world. 

I was lucky, my parents did it for me and my brother.  It never occured to me to do differently for my kids.  My brother and I went to different schools from each other at several times in our lives.  Our needs were very different and my parents wanted to make sure we went to schools which were suited for us as individuals rather than just packing us off to the nearest place that would have us.

 The two girls go to the local primary school.  We have our ups and downs with it.  I fight when I think it is appropriate.  I question everything. I interfere all the time. It drives the kids mad because they are pretty happy with school on the whole. They like going to school more than I like sending them.  Tallulah, who I thought would be problematic in main stream school, actually thrives there. She had to have the day off on Monday because she was ill. She was desperate to get well so she could go back on Tuesday, which is heartening.

With our failure to get Tilly into  the high school both she and we want for her though, I am suddenly renegotiating the idea of home schooling. 

We did not put a second choice down on our schools application form. There wasn’t one for us.  There is another school in the area which people tell us is ‘good’. It doesn’t matter. The school we have chosen is the school we want.  More importantly, after visits and thought and discussion, it is the school Tilly wants. 

When they asked us what we would do if she didn’t get in, we said ‘home school’.  There was a collective intake of breath from the panel at the appeal board. 

Jason thinks that one of the reasons we were rejected was because we said this. He thinks they thought it was us trying to back them into a corner, blackmailing them into saying ‘Yes! We’ll give her a place, but please don’t home school! Anything but that!’

He might be right.

I don’t care.

Her name remains on the school list until a place comes free, and in the meantime she and I will embark on the adventure of home schooling together. 

And the point of this long winded post?

I have received nothing but positive support from everyone I have spoken to about this decision.

It surprised me greatly.  I was expecting to have to screw my courage to the sticking post and fight the good fight.  But I haven’t even had to raise my voice.

Instead I have been inundated with offers of help, ideas and guidance from everyone from the blogosphere down.  I have been amazed to tearfulness by people’s generosity and optimism and the support they have provided.  Now it may be because at this point the home schooling choice is only a temporary one, who knows? But it is just lovely to hear people be so positive about it regardless.

In particular I have been overwhelmed by the response from the school we have chosen.  I blogged briefly about the message the deputy head sent me about giving me material to help me, so that Tilly will be learning the same things as the children whose year she would be in, well I had a proper chat with her yesterday about this.  What impressed me was that:

• She offered me the material, but said that she understood that one of the joys of home schooling was that Tilly and I could learn about what we want in the way we want, and that she knows there will be a balance between what they require and what we WANT to do, and she is totally fine with that.
• She has offered to help find me a maths tutor, because maths is our collective weakest subject and when we were planning an outline of how we would do things, the whole family agreed that a tutor, who was not emotionally involved in the trauma of mathematics would be the way forward.
• She has said that should they have after school events or weekend events where Tilly’s year is involved she will try to make sure that Tilly is invited, so that when the transition happens, she will have already had contact with her peers. She also said it might be nice for Tilly to be able to have that social, group time, given that she will be missing it, having been a part of a mainstream school environment for so long.
• She knew about local home schooling groups and their activities and had nothing but praise for them and the work they do.
• She told me that the school has had girls from a home schooled background come to them on several occasions before and that they have  always done excellently, been very well adjusted and have been a ‘credit’ to the home schooling system (her word, not mine).

It was not at all what I expected and I was completely surprised, in the nicest possible way.

Not only has it made me more confident that Tilly and I can do this together, but it has also made me more confident that when the time comes to send her to this school, that it is absolutely the right school to send her to. 

Not everyone has the energy, money, time, dedication or skill to home school, even if they think it’s a fantastic idea. When parents are in that situation it is good to know that there are still schools out there that are open minded, pro-education in the best and broadest sense of the word, and committed to the welfare of the children rather than the welfare of the government and all the little boxes that need to be ticked.  Of course, it is a shame that they aren’t all like that, but it gives a little glimmer of hope for the future.

drama

It’s hideous o’clock and I’ve just got back from Stratford. I drove. YES. I drove. I picked Andrea up and drove all the way there. We went to see a play, and then I drove back. 

It was pretty stressful. 

It is not far, but it was dark, there were motorways and I was really, really tired.  I did o.k. but when I got out of the car just now, I realised I had parked so close to the front door that it is a good job it opens inwards.  If it opened outwards I would have had to get back in, reverse and then try again.  As it was I just abandoned it.

The play was Morte D’Arthur, based on the books of the same name by Thomas Malory. They are all the stories about King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, but with a large dollop of Roman Catholicism added to try and make them less pagan and weird.  It really doesn’t work.  It just makes the pagan bits seem weirder and the RC bits alarming.  I read them at university.  I didn’t think much of them frankly.  I find the whole notion of chivalry as they understood it rather wanky, eminently male and rather tedious.  Its episodic nature coupled with the relentless justification of anything and everything they did because ‘Jesu’ was smiling on them made me want to hit them with a spade.  All of them.

I went to see the play because:

a) I love the Courtyard Theatre at Stratford and I haven’t been for ages.

b) I wanted to see what the hell they would do with such a peculiar choice of book

c) Greg Doran was directing it.  I love a bit of Greg.

Mainly I was left with the impression that it was long.  So very, very loooooonnng.  It started at 7.15 and finished at just gone 11 p.m.  There were two intervals, but one was only five minutes.  It was epic.

As for the rest, it was very true to the books, which I didn’t find to be a bonus, because I didn’t like the books.  It was rather confusing, very long winded and could have done with a genealogy flow chart, a great deal of pruning and a lot less people dressed as prancing stags.  The jousting bit was far too much like pantomime for my liking, I prefer it when they stick to the pared down stuff and the puppetry of previous productions. 

I did like Greg’s excessive use of gold material.  He does like a bit of bling does our Greg.  I think whenever Michael Boyd asks him to direct something, the wardrobe mistress is immediately on gold lame alert.  I really liked the set piece where Gawain gets seduced by the devil dressed as a kind of S&M Kabuki dancer.  That was quite fun.  I didn’t warm to Arthur, which is a bit crucial, as he’s quite important.  Mordred was quite cool, a kind of Proto – Richard III with a Geordie accent and a nice line in greasy hair.  Forbes Masson was in it as Merlin.  I love Forbes Masson.  He’s in a lot of stuff for the RSC and also played the Fool in the Young Vic’s Lear starring Pete Postlethwaite. 

Greg was in the audience taking notes.  I bonded with him mentally over the fact that he has Farrah Fawcett Majors hair, only dark.  And now, thanks to the vagaries of my hair and its interactions with the low weather fronts over Glenfield, so do I.  I think Greg does his on purpose though.  Mine was by accident.  Andrew Marr was at the bar at half time apparently.  Andrea spotted his ears.  I missed him, being in the fourteen mile tail back which was the queue for the toilets and the queue to buy a bottle of water.

So, not a palpable hit.

Never mind. It was a bit of culture, and that never goes amiss.  Particularly after a day spent buying Oscar new shoes, new wellingtons, birthday presents for a friend’s party at the weekend, father’s day presents and doing a million jobs.  I got in from town at about 2.30, hot, sweaty and broke. 

Just before I set off to do the school run I  rang my old university in Wales.  I had applied for transcripts for my first degree weeks ago. They assured me that it was all routine. I filled out the form and payment details, sent it off and waited.  It said that it would take fifteen working days.  This week I should have received the transcripts.  By today I was getting twitchy. I rang them when I got in from town.  It turns out that they had not received the form and so had not done anything at all. 

It was so annoying. Not their fault perhaps, the form could have been lost in the post.  But they were quite bolshy about it initially.  I finally made headway, but only after two hours of to-ing and fro-ing on the phone.  They have agreed that they will get something to me in the post by the end of the week.  This would be brilliant.  I will not be too devil may care about it until the paper is actually in my hand though.

I should have asked Greg to do it.  He probably would have written something with a swan’s feather dipped in crimson ink on sheets of beaten gold.  That would have been much more fun.

Our Alan

I watched an old South Bank Show last night.  Sir Melvyn of the nasal twang interviewed Alan Bennett.  I love Alan Bennett.  I love many things about him.  The fact that his hair always looks slightly like the hair of a mannequin in a gentleman’s clothier’s circa 1976, his shiny, apple cheeks and his absolute refusal to be anything but Northern, but with a hint of starshine thrown in just to discombobulate people.  Then there’s his writing.  His wonderful, exquisite, excellent writing.  What a total legend.

At one point he was talking about The Lady In The Van, a novella and play that he wrote about a real life incident where a lady who lived in a dilapidated old van, moved on  to his drive for what was supposed to be about six weeks, and ended up staying there for about fifteen years. 

Melvyn asked him why he had chosen to write about something so personal, something which in his diaries he sometimes got quite aerated about.  His answer, which I shall now mash up out of all recognition, was fascinating.  It went something along the lines of:

Well, I finally realised that there were two ways of looking at it.  The real Alan would get irritated by this bloody annoying old lady, and the writer Alan would stand back and take notes, because some of the things she said and did were really marvellous.  I didn’t want to write a play about the real Alan, but I was quite happy to write a play about the writer Alan.

He explained it best with this wonderful example.

When the old lady was really ill one day, he found himself feeling very sorry for her.  He went out of his house and offered her a cup of coffee.  She said: ‘Oh! No! Really! I don’t want to put you to all that bother…’ huge pause: ‘So just make me half a cup.’

The real Alan was cursing her.  The writer Alan was busy taking notes.

Now, I don’t claim to be the female Alan Bennett, or anything like, but I have to admit a total sympathy for that situation.  I find myself in those split personality moments quite a lot.  The real me is tearing her hair out.  The bloggy me is rubbing her hands together and finding the back of an old receipt to take notes on.

I recommend it.  I’ve found life much, much funnier since I started to blog, and it’s not that it wasn’t that funny before, it’s just that I hadn’t got my writing material radar switched on then.  The joyous thing is that when you switch it on, you notice more and more as time goes by.  The world truly is a most bizarre and inspirational place.  How anyone could be bored in it beggars belief.  My only worry is that I won’t have time to write it all down.

It’s Normal

A friend of mine’s sister has just had a new baby.  Progress reports via my friend suggest that this woman is worrying herself into an early grave over the baby’s welfare.  My friend is somewhat stunned that her sister cannot be more relaxed. I believe she may have pointed to me as an example of relaxed parenting.  I do not think this helped.  I am more like the posterchild for slothful parenting.  And the less said about the anti grinding device clamped to my molars the better, under the circumstances.

This conversation is quite a common one.  Another friend had it with me only a few months ago about her best friend who has just had her first baby.  She was less charitable than my friend with the sister.  Her verdict was that her best  friend had gone ‘totally mental’ and was heading for early incarceration in an insane asylum.  She said: ‘You’re not like that are you?  What do you think?’

So. Here is what I think.

All parents go totally mental when their first child is born.  It is the law.

I remember having a friend from uni over, just after Tilly was born. She sat, gingerly holding the baby like it was going to explode into a million pieces at any moment, and nervously said: ‘It’s a good job you’ve got that mothering instinct, because I haven’t.’

My reaction internally was to go: ‘Are you FUCKING MAD? I do not have the first clue what I am doing. I’ve been waiting for the mothering instinct to kick in every second of the last four weeks and I’m chewing my finger ends off in the horrified knowledge that I am now responsible for another life. Another floppy little life.  And yesterday I showed my left breast to the postman when I forgot I’d been breast feeding and the door bell rang, I left my purse and house keys at home the first time I went out with her, and three days ago I smacked her head on a bird table in a pet shop and me, the baby and the pet shop owner all cried over the cat biscuits.  It’s BLOODY HORRIFIC.’

In real life I just smiled weakly and put the kettle on.

Nothing prepares you for parenting.  Nothing.  No amount of books, classes, borrowing other people’s babies (with permission, obviously), having nieces and nephews.  It’s all rubbish.  You’d be better off going out with Ray Mears on a survivalist course for fourteen days in the Norwegian Fjords frankly.  Or going to a luxury spa for six months, slathering yourself in overpriced unguents and sleeping like a dormouse in a teapot, because you aint never doing that again, girlfriend.  Make hay while the sun shines, that’s what I say.

Here are some of the things you worry about:

• They’re too fat
• They’re too thin
• They’re not growing quickly enough
• They’re growing freakishly quickly
• They don’t sleep
• They sleep too much
• Are they really asleep? They might actually be dead.
• How does the bloody car seat work again?
• Why are their heads so floppy?
• Why have they gone rigid?
• Is their pooh too runny?
• Is their pooh too hard?
• Is there enough pooh?
• What happens when there isn’t any pooh for days?
• What happens if there is so much pooh it shoots up the back of their baby gro into their hair?

You get the picture, right? Only it’s endless.  All the time.  You dream about this stuff like if you cracked it you would be given the Nobel Peace Prize. You wake up every thirty five seconds in case they aren’t breathing.  Then you start to worry about something else. You fall asleep in mid worry.  You dream about the fact that you think you might be worrying about something but you can’t finish worrying about it properly because you keep falling asleep. 

In between all this, if you’re me, you cry.  You cry over everything.  You cry because you’re happy, you cry because you’re sad. You cry because you are so damned tired you have no idea what day it is.  You cry because the baby is crying.

At least the tears help wash away the sick, and all the other things that ooze out of their body, and yours.  You had no idea that that much ooze could be squeezed into that small a space.  You wonder if that is normal?

You spend your whole time going: ‘Is that normal?’  You should have it permanently tattooed on your forehead. 

Because it doesn’t seem normal. 

And the books don’t help.  The books talk about ‘the baby’.  The baby.  Not your baby.  Your baby who wees in the eye of Penelope Bloody Leach and Annabel Sodding Karmel.  Your baby who wouldn’t love an organic pureed avocado if it was studded with diamonds and topped with whipped cream.  So what if Annabel Karmel’s children lapped it up? They can buggering well have it then can’t they? Eh? Eh?

People tell you all the time that this is normal, and that is normal, but surely a baby who takes eight nine ounce feeds every twenty four hours is not normal if it doesn’t have a pooh for three days.  THREE DAYS.  That clearly isn’t normal.

Except that it is.

I have this theory that after six months you hit critical mass as a parent.  You either crack and go under, forsaking the children for the basket weaving department of the local mental hospital, or you learn to be more relaxed and go with it.  You throw caution to the wind.  You learn to look at the virulent green bowel movements that your first born is emitting and shout: ‘THAT’S NORMAL’ even if every molecule of your body wants to run away shouting: ‘URGH! THAT’S SO NOT NORMAL.’  Then, because you will it to be so, it will be normal.

You learn to throw away that bloody stupid red book that the health visitor gives you with percentile charts and flow diagrams and helpful notes like: ‘By this time your son should be a virtuoso on the spoons and able to play the Rach Three by hitting Farleys Rusks off the back of his father’s head.’ and just accept that if he’s forever going to eat crayons and blow snot bubbles the size of Jupiter, that you must embrace those skills and love him all the more for it.

Whatever it is that your baby does is what is normal and the sooner you learn to accept it and make yourself a life that works for you as a family,  the happier you will be as a parent, and the more relaxed your parenting will be, and the happier your kid will be.

Recently I’ve been a little stressed about my parenting techniques.  A friend made a casual remark about the fact that I don’t really play with my children.  It bothered me, a lot.  It fed into all those little niggling worries that you have as a parent.  The guilt of the fact that maybe that early evening feed is perfectly timed for the opening bars of Hollyoaks for example. That kind of thing.

I have been chewing over it for a few days.  Getting all bristly and defensive.  Then getting all maudlin’ and thinking that no wonder they do this and that and the other when I don’t play with them. I must make more effort to play with them, etc, etc.

Then this afternoon I was sitting with the kids, working as they played around me.  They were playing beautifully.  They were making cardboard houses for their bears, and showing me all the designs they had drawn on them, and the modifications they had made.  I helped them chop out some of the door and window spaces, and then they furnished them with things out of the toy box.  They played for about two hours.  I suddenly thought:

I’m mad to flagellate myself about this stuff.  My kids aren’t perfect.  Nobody’s are, but my kids are kind, intelligent and funny. They are creative and thoughtful.  They can sit happily with a cardboard box and some pens and play for two hours together.  They certainly don’t lack in imagination. 

They are my normal. Not anyone else’s normal, and I don’t want them to be anyone else’s normal. That’s why I burned the red book and chose my own way, and that’s what I’m trying to teach them to do.  I don’t know whether I will entirely succeed but I do know that even now I can be proud of them, and proud of myself for helping to shape them into what they are today, even if I didn’t spend every waking moment of the day playing with their toys with them.

And the more I’ve parented to suit myself, the more relaxed I’ve become as a parent and the more fun I’ve had with them and the more fun they have become to be with.

So I have decided that I will keep on not playing with my children in the same way I have done for the last eleven years, and I will relax and shout: ‘It’s normal!’ at anyone who dares to question my authority.

I wish I’d have done it from the beginning.  It would have saved a fortune on kleenex for a start.

Random Bilge

I’ve got a lot of things to write about, but no energy to write them. It’s going to be a random collection of bilge flowing straight from the tiny, prehistoric nugget of brain I have left onto the page with no interference.  Sorry about that.

Tallulah got her yellow belt at karate yesterday.  This is a big deal for Tallulah and for us.  I was so proud of her I actually cried.  We nearly didn’t make it.  They changed the venue at the last minute and we got hideously lost. They started without us, but just managed to squeeze her into line.  Then I had thrown the registration slip away, thinking it wasn’t important because it was just the bit of paper with the old address of the venue on it.  I got told off.  Then I got told off  because I didn’t realise there would be a fee and had to borrow £25 from Jason to pay for it.  Still, it was worth it.

We finished building the raised beds and put in all the evil conifers.  They already hide the worst bits of the fence. By next year they will be bringing planes out of the sky and harbouring spider monkeys in their own tree top eco system.  We will be so popular. I don’t care.  As long as I don’t have to see the evil little blighters from next door boinging over the fence on the trampoline anymore as I stagger down to the washing line in my undies, looking like Ken Dodd I care not.

The Ocado man came this morning.  We have food.  This is brilliant news.  We have been subsisting on chips and Love Hearts all weekend and I have gained five pounds and permanent indigestion.  He liked my kitchen, and he didn’t drop my eggs.  A man of taste and distinction.

I got a message today from the deputy head teacher at the school we want Tilly to go to in September.  She went to the council education department and appealed on our behalf, even though she didn’t have to.  How sweet is that? I was bowled over. It’s a good job we didn’t speak on the phone. I would only have cried all over her. I am very emotional at the minute and it would just have set me off.  Surprisingly (not), it didn’t do any good. The council (recidivist bastards) stand firm.  However, it was above and beyond of her to try.  She has also spoken to all the teachers who would take Tilly in the next academic year, if she gets in, and got them to compile a list of things we need to cover with our home educating, to make sure she is up to speed when she does get a place.  Pause while I weep in gratitude yet again.  Hopefully I will have stopped snivelling by the time I have to speak to her tomorrow.  I feel like Gwyneth Paltrow giving an Oscar’s acceptance speech at the moment. It’s hideous.

The children have all been delightful today. They have played together beautifully, been kind and thoughtful and funny and I have decided that I will keep them for another week.  I shall send them back next week instead.

The first episode of True Blood season three aired in the US last night. I know what I’m doing this evening. Oh yes!

It is the last episode of Glee this evening too.  This is good because it means that I might actually do something fruitful with my evenings now instead of swanning about singing show tunes and Googling where Kurt got that really cute hat from.  Yes, I can try Googling where Brix Smith Start got that stunning gold nail varnish from instead.  It’s all progress.

I actually managed to get some work done for mum and dad today.  I have put tonnes of things on Etsy for them.  I had great fun writing ridiculous storylines to go with all the vintage knitting patterns. It’s one of the perks of the job.  I like to think of them as my undiscovered masterpieces.  Some day, someone will be looking for a pattern for a v necked sweater and come across a tiny epic of cathartic drama as a bonus gift.  it’s a bit like spending over £400 at the Chanel counter and them giving you a free mascara fit only for a piglet’s eyelashes.  That kind of thing.

Tallulah came home from karate yesterday complaining of a headache. I just thought she was dehydrated and put her to bed after making her drink lots of water.  She woke up at midnight burning with fever and complaining of a crashing headache. Cue the theme tune from Casualty while I rolled a glass over her stomach and glued myself to her hair with Calpol.  This morning she was listless and didn’t want to get out of bed.  I did the school run and deposited Oscar in nursery. I had planned to work all morning, but had decided that it clearly couldn’t happen. She is usually rather melodramatic and time consuming when she is ill. Actually she turned out to be lovely. She just sat in bed and coloured and drew pictures while I worked and we chatted.  Then, when Oscar got home she started to feel better, and they played delightfully all afternoon.  I was amazed.  She seems fine now. 

Oscar was so funny.  While I dosed her up this morning he was supposed to be putting his shoes on. I heard him fighting with Tilly donwstairs.  She said: ‘But why do you need to go upstairs Oscar? ‘ To which he replied: ‘Tild.  It is very important. Tallulah is having medicine and I need to see acos it might be very interestin”.

I had to do Tallulah’s homework with her today. You know this makes me seethe.  As usual it was a festival of adult learning.  I now know that the mosquito is the deadliest insect in the world and that I never, ever want to catch dengue fever thank you very much.  Is this ever, ever going to be of use to me unless I go to work in the PR department for the Mosquito Marketing Board.  I think not.  I remember having to do questions on mosquitoes in G.C.S.E. biology when I was sixteen.  It asked for three different ways that you could combat mosquitoes.  I distinctly remember writing 1. DDT powder 2. Long sleeved shirts and 3. Elephant Gun.  I had lost the will to live by then.  It was a mockery of a sham.  I got an A.

Oscar and Tallulah were drawing with the chalks this afternoon.  They were sitting on the floor by my desk so we could chat while I worked.  They were busily drawing away. Oscar did a lovely multi-coloured squiggle.  He looked at me and said: ‘Look at that mama. That is my dignity.’  Quite.

Twewiffic

On Thursday morning I had another hot date with my dentist.  The dentist who is making me an anti-grinding device to stop me ending up as a toothless, mumbling old crone.  I had to have several reasonably uncomfortable and intrusive procedures so that the dentist could create a three dimensional model of my jaw and how it articulates.  He then built the device to fit this Boo jaw and I had my first fitting on Thursday.

With the amount of faff and technical jargon involved in its creation I think I was expecting something of Heath Robinsonesque proportions, possibly powered by an army of tiny mice.  Definitely a propellor somewhere.   You know the kind of thing.

It was kind of disappointing then, when he unveiled this:

It’s basically a boxer’s mouth guard.  Instead of being made out of rubberised material, it is made out of perspex, and is as hard as a rock.  Which I suppose is good, because I once had anti grinding gum shields from a previous dentist and I actually ground giant holes in them because they were just rubberised stuff.  I expect I could grind through this one, but it would take longer than the number of years I have left on this earth.

It has been sculpted to fit the exact and crooked nature of my teeth, and so I have to click it into place.  This is reasonably unpleasant, and all I can say is that I am glad that I do not have a very sensitive gag reflex.

Once it is in, it is as comfortable as you can imagine when you look at it.  The side effects of wearing it include:

• the inability to stop drooling for quite some time
• an impressive lisp.  Shuper!
• the feeling that my tongue is way too large for my mouth and must be got rid of immediately.  I think of it as grinder’s twitch.  I cannot stop waving my tongue around, much like a hyper active lizard in a field of gnats.
• the loss of whatever sex appeal in the bedroom department I might once have had.  Bearing in mind three children, a marsupial like pouch where my belly used to be and the fact that I wear pyjamas whatever the weather, you might think that there isn’t a lot to lose.  I think I should have been allowed to hang on to whatever smidgeon of desirability I had left, personally.  Jason is beautifully non-commital on the subject.  Bless.

I am supposed to get used to the infernal device by wearing it in the evenings while I am ‘relaxing’, so that it becomes more normal for me to go to sleep with it in my mouth.  I lost it under a pile of paperwork on Thursday night, so that was handy.  On Friday night I had had such a busy and at times horrible day, that I did not want to wear it during one of the nicer parts, i.e. when I was alone with the box set of Glee.  I wore it half an hour before bed, and ineffectually dribbled around the house doing my chores and swearing lispily.

I woke at seven thirty and took it out.  I could not bear it any more.  I had a lie in while Jason fended the children and slept without dreaming that someone was trying to make me eat a roll of carpet.  That was relaxing.

I went to put it in last night only to find that there is a sharp angle on the perspex just where my last molar meets my jaw line and I must have rubbed it raw on Friday night. Just clicking the Infernal Device into place made me cry.  I have banished it to its box where it will stay until I can get round to the dentist’s and he can polish it smooth for me.

There are two plus points to the whole thing:

1. I will not end up a toothless old crone.  I will be a toothy old crone.
2. I got a glam rock box to put the ID in.

It is a pink, sparkly Barbie style denture box.  It is so kitsch and truly horrible that I kind of love it, in an awful sort of way.  In the sort of way that a serial killer’s mother has to love him, because she gave birth to him.  There is a great deal of shame and horror mixed in there along with it.

I might customise it with some Swarovski crystal and a bit of swansdown and send a picture to Jordan.  Who knows, she might decide to go into manufacturing them and give me a share in the profits.  My future is assured.  Or asshhhured, if I have to keep wearing this sodding thing.

The Many Faces of Alan Titchmarsh

We have spent large parts of the day wrestling with the garden. I am glad to report that up to now, we seem to be winning. It could all go horribly wrong later, as nature has ways of making her presence felt.  Ways which include hiding clumps of rosebay willowherb in my borders, and making the lawn 80% dock leaves, 10% moss, 5% buttercups, 3% mud and 2% grass. That sort of thing.

We have scythed all the weeds, polished the moss and started building a raised bed along the bottom fence. Eventually this will contain trees.  Not nice trees like cherry and acer and maple.  No, huge, bushy evergreen affairs that grow like the clappers and hide balding grass, dodgy fences and next door’s unfortunate looking children. 

Underneath our scabby grass lies four hundred metric tonnes of builder’s rubble from the last hundred or so years.  Because we are planting trees, I had to actually dig, as well as fill the bed with compost.  I now have navvy’s muscles, several blisters and a mangled looking thumb.  I am also the proud possessor of 8 and a half house bricks, a quarter of a glazed Victorian tile and a lot of bits of broken glass.  Time Team it aint.  The children bounced over my head as they flew by on the trampoline shouting cheering words like: ‘Dig faster mama!’ and; ‘If there is treasure will the gold coins be made of chocolate?’

Today’s little effort also required another two car trip to B&Q and the distinct possibility of another one tomorrow.  Luckily because it is the World Cup, the shop was 3/4 deserted and we were in and out in twenty minutes, which compared to an hour, cheek by jowl with most of Leicestershire last time, was very welcome.

B&Q have roped in St. Alan of Titchmarsh, hallowed ex-presenter of Gardener’s World, and face of the Beeb’s coverage of Chelsea Flower Show since the invention of talking pictures, to be the face of their garden centre.  Here he is, beaming out like a beacon of hope from a giant display stand:

That probably isn’t the reflection from my flash in the background. It’s the lambent glow from his halo made of green twine.

Not everyone is quite as reverent at the sight of St. Alan as we are.  Some are positively frivolous in his presence, and have gone so far as to make certain additions to his sainted form.

What I particularly like about this is the fact that someone hasn’t just nipped by and drawn one of those curly, biro moustaches on a passing whim.  No.  This tache has actually been drawn out, coloured in, with shading and individually detailed hairs, cut out, and then stuck lovingly on Alan’s top lip.  Someone really thought this through.  I applaud their dedication.

This, on the other hand, seems to have been done quickly, and possibly in frustrated rage:

If you look carefully, you will see the tiny, vampire teeth that have been added by punching out sections of the stand, presumably with a garden fork, or possibly a pair of secateurs.  I expect it was someone who had their hostas ravaged by snails and just wasn’t in a forgiving mood.

I can sympathise with that.

I leave you with beautiful images of the poppy’s I grew, which bloomed earlier this week like so:

I managed to take this picture, and this picture:

shortly before the torrential rain and thunderstorms we have endured for much of the week battered the living crap out of them.  Poppies are hardly stayers on the blooming front. You’re lucky if you get a week out of them at most.  We got twenty four hours before they ended up looking like a dog’s dinner.

It’s enough to want to make you deface a picture of Alan Titchmarsh really.