Happy Birthday Tallulah

I can’t believe it’s already your birthday again.  It comes around with such alarming regularity and yet always seems to take me by surprise. 

And now you are seven.  It’s been quite a ride to get here my girl.  Some days I wonder if I will make it through another year with you, you are so wild.  When you fix me with those eyes and you get that implacable wrinkle on your forehead I think: ‘This is it. She’s going to kill me stone dead now. Say your goodbyes.’  But somehow we always make it through.  Even though you frighten the bejeezus out of me, I love the fact that you live life so fiercely, with such passion.  Sometimes I wish you would live it next door, and that I could just pop in and visit you, but it’s certainly never dull.

So what’s new for you?

Well, you are now the budding karate queen of Glenfield, and I am so pleased you love it, and that you finally have a place to go where you can legitimately shout and kick people in the shins.  I am thrilled that it also seems to be teaching you other, less murderous qualities, like respect for other people and what they have to offer you, camaraderie and a tentative sense of quiet inside that busy head of yours.

You have less teeth now.  Unlike when you get old, this is a good thing.  You look so cute with your two front teeth missing it will almost be a shame when they grow back.  I am impressed that you are not interested in boys yet. When grandad inspected your teeth and asked you who you’d been kissing, you wrinkled your nose and looked horrified at the thought.  Keep that up a bit longer won’t you? I don’t need any more worry lines just yet.

And your hair.  Your lovely hair that you used to beg not to have cut is now the most adorable bob, and makes you look like the very mischievous girl you are.  I love it. You love it too, and it has not lessened your considerable charm one whit.  You are gorgeous, truly gorgeous and I love the fact that you are growing more and more comfortable in your skin and really enjoying being you instead of fighting it all the time.

You are so clever it takes my breath away.  I enjoy utterly your vision of the world and your sense of your place in it.  I love your ridiculous sense of humour and wonderful comic timing.  I love that you sing to yourself when you are happy, and that I can hear you doing it  in bed in the evenings when I am working.  The stories you write and tell me are a great delight and I hope you keep writing them forever.

In short, you are lovely.  I worry myself sick over you.  I tear myself into knots about your welfare and your spikiness.  I panic that you will always fight the world and find it a loveless place, and yet you are beautiful my ferocious child and you deserve all the joy the world can spare you, and a bit more. You are heart achingly sweet and fascinatingly complicated and my life is richer for having you in it.  I would not change a single, solitary thing about you, not for one moment, not even in your darkest moments.

I hope that in the next year you relax into being you and enjoying who you are even more than you did this year and that you continue to blossom into being the spectacularly perfect girl you are.

I love you baby.

Happy Birthday.

Drinks Party Etiquette

I’ve just been talking to my mum on the phone.  She’s coming later on to help us celebrate Tallulah’s birthday, but we like to talk every day (usually several times a day) anyway.  Tomorrow she’s going off to the depths of Norfolk to do an antiques fair.  I think she is very brave. I am allergic to Norfolk.  It managed to knock Lincolnshire (sorry Dotterel) off my list of least favourite English counties several summers ago.  So rather her than me.

Usually they stay in a Travel Lodge.  Not because they particularly love them, but they are cheap, clean and usually very convenient.  Typically there are none in the area of Norfolk they are going to, and they have  been reduced to staying in a bed and breakfast.  I also commiserated with her over that.

Now some bed and breakfast accommodation is lovely, truly lovely.  But it remains my contention that a great deal of it is truly terrible.  It seems to bring out the eccentricities of the British character like nothing else.  Even in these interior design enlightened times you can still find candlewick bedspreads, avocado bathroom suites with crinolined, crocheted dolls hiding peach tone toilet roll and other such delights.

I once stayed in a bed and breakfast emporium in York where the woman who owned it was obviously a huge fan of the classical world.  The entire, three storey Victorian dwelling was bedecked with three foot high plaster effigies of Greek and Roman goddesses and the like.  It wouldn’t have been so bad if they weren’t set against a background of giant overblown rose patterned wallpaper with gold dado rail and cornicing.  Trying to get up and downstairs without being either knocked down by Aphrodite or overwhelmed by giant cabbage roses was a feat.

Apparently the lady who owns the bed and breakfast that mum and dad are staying in, rang to say that she had ‘forgotten’ to mention that they have to share a bathroom with the other guests.  Not only that, but if they do not arrive between 3.00 p.m. and 4.00 p.m. sharp they will have to lounge about on the lawn until she gets back from her evening meeting at 7.30 p.m. because there won’t be anyone else to let them in and she leads a very busy life.  Another reason I’m not keen on this type of accommodation.  If I’m paying to stay in a room I expect to be able to get in it.  I don’t think that’s too unreasonable.

We were chatting about this and other bed and breakfast related traumas when we got onto the subject of pot pourri.  Like candlewick bedspreads it is something which is now no longer in fashion, but which seems to linger amongst the bed and breakfast population like the bad smell it so often is.  Give me a nice lavender bag any day, but those awful bowls of chemically dyed wood shavings that smell worse than Febreze mixed with a healthy dose of cat wee, really turns my stomach.

It reminded me of a wonderful story a friend told me years ago.  She and some family members had been invited to a drinks party at the extremely chic mansion of a wealthy family that a member of their family was marrying into.  It was one of those get to know each other type things, presumably to break the ice before the wedding.  My friend’s uncle, who had also been invited, was a practicing alcoholic and therefore rather unpredictable in his behaviour.  He arrived to this drinks party already the worse for wear.  He plonked himself down on a sofa next to an occasional table, and as the conversation flowed he proceeded to eat an entire bowl of pot pourri which had been sitting on the table next to him.    He then asked for a drink, citing a dry throat and uttering the immortal line: ‘I don’t think much to your snacks.’

I wonder whether it helped to break the ice, or increased the froideur?

More please sir

Oscar is feeling better.  This is good in many ways because yesterday his lustre definitely lacked, and although it was very useful to have a small boy who just wanted to lie around on the sofa in his pants all day watching telly (already training to be a man), it was also quite unnerving. Sort of like when you wish they would go away and play, and then, when they do, and all is quiet, you start to panic.  It is at times like these that I always experience that great parental dilemma.  Should I just carry on and have a cup of tea before I go and see how many limbs are missing, or should I hurtle upstairs with the First Aid Box?

Today he has been full of beans and bounce.  Mole and his mum came round in the morning, and Mole and Oscar hurtled round like loons, squeaking and shouting and singing, while we sat amidst the wreckage and watched in mild amazement.  I am always astonished at how noisy small boys are.  I mean the girls were no shy, retiring violets either, but he really does have quite a bellow.   His ability to run round like a greyhound chasing a rabbit is also quite impressive.  I feel tired just watching him. 

At lunch time we went to granny’s house.  I needed to do some work, and I had promised to cook risotto.  I was supposed to stop off at the supermarket (another thing I forgot), and take some things to mum’s.  I failed spectacularly to do either.  I did get some work done and cook risotto though.  Oscar had two helpings, which was another sign of impending wellness, and fuel for more bellowing and galloping, galloping and bellowing.

We drove home, picked the girls up from school and then promptly headed out again to Sainsburys to buy the things I had forgotten earlier in the day, and earlier in the week, and possibly last year. I also needed new wellingtons for Tallulah to keep at granny’s house, which I was reminded of when I got to granny’s at lunch time only to remember that the new wellingtons I bought for Oscar yesterday to keep at granny’s were still on the hall floor at home.  Bugger.

We drove back. I cooked tea.  It lasted about a hundred years.

It has been a very pedestrian day, which has utterly worn me out.  I have absolutely no reserves of energy left, and with Oscar getting back to fighting weight again I need to be more alert than ever.  I wish I could send him to nursery tomorrow.   You are supposed to keep them at home until the pox have scabbed over.  They have nearly all scabbed over. I am so tempted.  On the other hand, it would be very naughty of me to infect an entire nursery of children just because I want to lie in a darkened room and snore.

And realistically that’s not going to happen.  It’s Tallulah’s birthday tomorrow.  The excitement levels will have been cranking since dawn and we will be full steam ahead by breakfast.  I just need to grit my teeth, think of England and have the  cafetiere on a constant low boil.

I have other things to tell you. Grisly family tree things, Quentin Blake things, book things.  I cannot do it.  At best I can stretch to mundane and tedious recountings of my day.  I am sorry.  Be thankful that I have not told you anything about French polishing. I am right off French polishing, and I wasn’t even that on it in the first place.

I was going to write that I will try to be more compelling tomorrow.  I got stuck on ‘I will try to be more…’

I think that’s good enough really.

Oscar defies death

At dinner time Oscar was arsing about with the food on his plate.  He started throwing big forkfuls of peas into his mouth, tipping his head back and kind of gargling them down.

Jason: ‘Oscar. Stop doing that please.’

Oscar: ‘But dada.  It is a brilliant thing to do. Look…’ (gargle, gargle)

Jason: ‘Oscar! You need to stop doing that right now, or you will get a pea lodged in your wind pipe and choke to death.’

Me: ‘Yes! And I couldn’t do the Heimlich manoeuvre in first aid class because I was too pregnant with Tallulah and they were afraid I would burst. So please don’t do it.’

Oscar: ‘Mmmmmm.’

Two minutes passes in relative peace.

Then Oscar does it again.

Jason is just about to tell him off very fiercely when Oscar turns to him with an angelic smile on his face and says:

‘Look dada! You see. I have no peas stuck in my pipes at all.’

It’s only a rough guideline

I am extremely tired. It’s one of those horrible tireds that makes me slightly weepy and very, very thick headed. I cannot get my words out properly. I have resorted to gesticulating and saying the word ‘thingy’ a lot.  This is never great.  Stupid tired. Lovely. 

I am not getting on with my anti-grinding brace guard thing.  I wore it the night before last, and at some point in the night, which I don’t remember at all, I obviously decided it was rubbish, and took it out.  I woke up sans guard.  I put it in last night and it hurt my gum again. I immediately took it out.  I must ring the dentist and take it back for him to grind at some more. Only I don’t really want to, so I didn’t do it today.  Which is very naughty.  It has cost me £300.  It could be the most expensive and ugly bit of plastic I will ever own.  I will give myself a stern pep talk and do it tomorrow. Honestly.

On top of being bothered by the anti-grinding guard, Oscar has been waking up with nightmares and being too hot, and I have been working until the wee small hours.  I am surviving on about five hours sleep a night at the moment.  It is beginning to catch me up. I need more.  About a week I think.

This morning I also realised that I should have gone to the doctors yesterday for my MRI scan results.  Only I forgot because I was with son of chicken pox, the revenge.  I rang them to apologise and she said: ‘but your appointment was for Friday,’ to which I replied: ‘Well, I cannot blame my son for that because he didn’t have chicken pox then. I can only apologise for being a half wit.’ Luckily she was fine with me being a half wit and told me over the phone that my scan results were normal, so I don’t have to go in anyway. Phew.

I worked last night.  I worked on and off again all day.  I do not like this work thing.  It is far too regular and demands that I be articulate and functioning and organised.  This is very, very hard for a woman who has developed scattiness to a fine art over the years.  I feel like a husk.

Oscar is still sprouting the odd pox.  There is absolutely no hope that he will be in nursery on Thursday and Friday.  I am very sad about this.  There is only one more week to go before the summer holidays and then I will not get any time off from the children again.  Because I will be home schooling Tilly for the forseeable future  I am doomed. Doomed I tells ya.  I’m hoarding up the time I have off and writing everything down. Soon it will be but a dim and distant memory.

In other news I did make myself laugh today.  Every week I religiously buy a bunch of delicious ingredients from Ocado and have them delivered.  Every week there is no plan, no forethought, nothing.  I just go: ‘Oh that looks nice!’ or ‘Oh! That’s on offer.’ etc.  Then depending on how hungry I am I either order loads of stuff or not enough stuff and so it goes.  Yesterday I had a huge order delivered but totally forgot bread, bacon and olives.  Three things that we eat rather a lot of .  Today I realised I am down to the last dregs of washing powder, again something we use a lot.  Hopeless.

On the other hand I did buy some duck breasts because they were on offer.  I have cooked duck approximately twice in my life.  The first time I made a kind of oriental casserole from Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries (my favourite cookbook ever).  It was marvellous, except that I didn’t realise that my casserole dish did not do hobs as well as ovens, and it exploded all over the top of the hob and I nearly ended up with a large shard of ceramic tureen embedded in the top of my head.  The second time, I cooked it again. This time with a proper casserole dish, and it was fantastic, rich, aromatic and toothsome.

This time I had no idea what to do with the duck.  Hence me rummaging around the cookery book shelf at six o’clock this evening muttering and cursing.  I ended up with a recipe from Gordon Ramsay’s Sunday Lunch (a surprisingly good book).  It was for duck breast with gooseberry sauce and wilted greens.  I thought: ‘that will do’, and set about it.

Firstly I realised I didn’t have any gooseberries.  I did however have some cherries.  I de-stoned them, plonked them in a pan with some honey and balsamic vinegar and reduced them.  You were supposed to use sugar and red wine.  I didn’t have any of those things either.

Then I realised I didn’t have any Szechuan peppercorns to make a crust for the duck.  I substituted ordinary, common or garden peppercorns.  I sliced the duck into bite sized pieces like it showed you in the photograph, only to read that I was supposed to do this after I had roasted it down in its own fat in the oven.  Damn!

I threw the jigsaw of duck into the bottom of the roasting pan, sprinkled it with salt and pepper and whacked it in the oven.

I then came to the startling conclusion that I had no spring greens.  I sent Tilly down the garden to forage amongst the lettuces.  We had four sorts of lettuce and some pak choi.  I wilted them in butter instead.

We had it with baby new potatoes and peas.

It was bloody lovely.

And nothing at all like the recipe.

I do this all the time.  I think that the recipe books are mostly for kindly tips and a bit of off hand guidance.  I cannot remember the last time I had everything for a recipe out of a cookery book, even when I have on the rare occasion actually decided to make something and then gone out specifically to buy the ingredients.  I always forget something.  Always.

Still, they ate it and nobody has yet died.

A cooking seal of approval, no?

We sell out to the corporate pig dogs

Oscar is still gaining spots.  Not rapidly, which is a good thing, but sure and steadily in the manner of a hearty trencherman.  He has them from his hair to his ankles. I am quite impressed by this.  No stone has been left unturned, no body part left out.  It is all very fair. Very fair and rather annoying, for there is no part of him that is not smothered in calamine lotion, and he hates the smell.  He is not very keen on the whole staying still while I paint him thing.  Nor am I. At bed time this evening we had a wrestling match.  The calamine lotion won.

On the other hand he is quite amenable the rest of the time, and really I think I am getting away with it rather lightly, unless he takes a turn for the worse tomorrow.  I suspect that by merely suggesting that things are o.k. I have jinxed myself and will be forced to march to A&E carrying a three year old pustule on the morrow.

He could not go to nursery.  He was very glad about this.  Although he loves going to nursery, and I am not just saying this to make myself feel better.  I have spied on him many times, watching him happily playing and having a high old time, he does love to talk about how he doesn’t want to go to nursery.  We have endless discussions about which day is nursery day and when I am going to pick him up.

Usually he tolerates Mondays best because he only stays until 11.30 a.m.  Although the last few weeks when I have picked him up he has been most disgruntled because he liked the look of nursery lunch more than what was on offer at home, and I got roundly lambasted for dragging him away.  Even on Mondays we have to discuss it ad nauseum all through breakfast.  This morning I was thrilled to get the last word when he looked at me plaintively from the depths of the bedcovers and said: ‘Mama…..Do I really have to go to nursery today?’  The answer ‘no!’ was wonderful.  He looked shocked to the core.

By eleven o’clock we were both stir crazy and he had absolutely had enough of watching television.  I tried to think of places we could go where we wouldn’t infect too many people.  I ended up packing a picnic and taking him on a pilgrimage to a local cemetery where I know two lots of great grandparents are buried.  It’s only ten minutes drive from my house.  I have the receipts for the graves with the plot numbers on, and I have never been.  I thought that a visit might throw up some interesting information that might unclog a few geneaological dead ends I’ve managed to wander into.

Oscar was just excited to be driving about the town with biscuits (when they are poorly I turn into lax nutritional mother).  We arrived at the cemetery.  Apart from us there were some workmen in high visibility jackets fixing some fallen headstones, and the birds.  It was sunny, it was peaceful, it was rather lovely. For about ten minutes.

Oscar is absolutely fascinated by graveyards.  He stomps about shouting: ‘Who’s that?’ ‘What’s his name?’  and ‘Are they down there?’ pointing to dents in the grass.  It is all good, clean, macabre fun, usually.  After about ten minutes of dragging about after me today he got very bored indeed.  I suggested he sit down in a grassy spot in the middle of the area we were in.  I could see him and he could sit and eat his snacks and watch me toiling away.  He wasn’t having any of it.  He sulked about after me shouting: ‘Who are you looking for?’  ‘Why do you want to see them?’  ‘Why don’t you ring them and ask them where they are?’ (this last appealing to me greatly), and ‘Well, what are you going to say to them when you find them, eh?’ To which I did not have a sufficiently compelling answer.  There was a great deal of tutting and annoyance and the peace was well and truly shattered.

I found one set of great grandparents, who rather disappointingly had a crappy little stone urn with a chunk of masonry on the top, and their names inscribed on it. No dates, no clues, nothing.  I took a picture and marked their final resting place as a 4 out of 1o. Could do better if tried harder.

It was the next plot I really wanted to find though.  My great-grandfather Arthur James Watts.  Here he is soldiering in WWI:

 I have the receipt from his funeral expenses and he really went out in style.  He died in 1942, and his funeral cost £15 15 shillings, which was a huge amount of money in those days.  There was a hearse, two cars, mourners with plumes, engraved handles on his coffin and a swansdown cloth to wrap him in.  From this I was expecting a fifteen foot pyramid shaped grave that shot water from its apex and lit up.  I found nothing.

There was also an anomaly which I was hoping could be cleared up.  I have two receipts for the same grave plot, one in the name of S. A. Watts, and one for Arthur James.  Nobody in the family has ever heard of S. A. Watts.  It might be a mis-spelling or it might be someone new and interesting that didn’t turn out to be a turnip wrangler or a ditch digging, scrofulous peasant like the rest of my forebears.  I needed to know.

Eventually I got bored of hunting, and dragged Oscar off to speak to the men righting the graves.  They were a bit snarky at first, pointing out that some of the  grave stones were unsafe and that Oscar shouldn’t be there. Then they realised that they had taken down all the signs that said small poxy children should not frisk amongst the graves, and I wasn’t to know any better.  I was forgiven.  They produced a map with the plots marked on it and we tracked Arthur James down to a blank bit of earth with a broken stone urn on it.  It had no words. Nothing.

Oscar said: ‘This is a rubbish adventure AND a rubbish picnic.  Let’s go to the toy shop.’

So we did.  Well, kind of.

By this time we were both hot, cross and dying for a wee.  We stopped at a nearby Starbucks to use the facilities and have a drink.  We tried to stay out of breathing distance of everyone else we came across.  I know, I know. We were very naughty, but we were also parched adventurers and we promise we didn’t lick any newborn babies. Honestly and promisedly.

So yes. In the battle between family history and exploitative, expensive coffee products, the coffee products won hands down. Sorry ancestors.  If only you had thought to install a drive through Starbucks next to your memorial stone we would have been much more enthusiastic about you.

Barbara Poppins and her Carpet Bag of Delights

Regular readers who have too much time on their hands, might remember that a few months ago I ventured to my friend Kim’s house for a makeover afternoon courtesy of the lovely Barbara von Ow Hulme and her bag of Mary Kay delights.  Barbara is rather like the Mary Poppins of the makeover world.  She arrives at your house with her carpet bag and parrot headed umbrella, and within a matter of moments she has sorted you out beauty wise.

When the afternoon was finished I was tempted to run through the streets of London with Dick Van Dyke, shouting ‘Come back, lovely Barbara. You cannot leave us now,’ in a cod East End accent, cor blimey.  I should coco.

I do not often do things like Tupperware evenings or Ann Summer’s Parties or weird fetishist Tupperware/Sex toys parties (you can pop them in the dish washer, and they all come with matching lids. Apparently).  I have never been keen, but I have to say that Barbara’s brilliant help and great products impressed me so much I found myself volunteering to host a party at my house.  Jason, as you can imagine, was utterly horrified.  So horrified he sought refuge at a friend’s house to play Dungeons and Dragons and drink hot, sweet tea to recover.

Barbara had the slightly more important job of giving birth to another baby to do first (so very selfish! What can you do?), but as soon as she was back on the Mary Kay trail she called me, and we had our evening on Monday last week.

You know that thing, that thing where you experience something and tell yourself it was really good and enthusiastically evangelise, and then you invite loads of people to experience it with you, and both you and they all go ‘oh!’ in that way, because no matter how good it was, the fact you’ve been banging on about it endlessly for months means that unless Jesus himself came roaring in on a Harley and dispensed the miracle of the eternal size eight frame to all and sundry, it would be a bit of a disappointment?

Well, I thought that might happen.  Specially as it was a kind of party.

At my house.

And I am not good at parties unless it involves the under eights and lots of cake.

Well.

It was not like that at all.  In fact it was ten tonnes of fun, in a rainbow of fruit flavours.

We drank chilled raspberry Stoli with wedges of lime for a start, which is never to be sniffed at.  We squirted and squibbed and sniffed and tested and generally oozed glamour, all under Barbara’s expert and kindly tuition.  There was also quite a lot of giggling.  Which always helps.

I ended up buying some amazing, ‘Extra Emollient Night Cream’.  It is fantastically rich and is doing wonders for my summer knackered feet.  I am now wearing sandals without shame or fear of being stoned in the streets.  I also succumbed to a lovely, pressed mineral facial bronzing powder, which actually suits my pale and lardy skin, and makes me seem like I might actually be alive.  I was going to stop then. Honest I was, but then I saw the tinted lip balms.  You may recall that I am lipstick phobic. I love the idea of them. I hate the feel of them on my lips.  I wear it, and then spent time psychotically fantasising that I look like Krusty the Clown from the Simpsons.  I do suffer from dry lips though.  The tinted lip balms are genius.  They don’t feel weird to wear, and give me just the right, subtle amount of colour to make me feel rather like a real woman, instead of a small girl, trapped in the body of a dessicated granny.  I bought the one in poppy for me, and the one in rose for Tallulah’s birthday (good mama. Tick makeup off the list).

It felt like Christmas I tells ya.  And I got £10 off my products because I hosted the party, so I also felt virtuous (a bit).

All my friends bought stuff too, so it wasn’t just me waxing lyrical.  In fact, I would say that if my friend B buys something you know you’re on to a winner.  She is the makeup queen, and usually swears by MAC, so the fact that she went home with a bag of things to hide from her husband too was a glowing endorsement.

There are lots of things I like about Mary Kay:

• It is not intimidating to try new things because you are in your own home, or the home of a friend, so you’re not being sniffed at by some eighteen year old with cheekbones you could pare cheese on while you try to mask the latest batch of wrinkles and/or acne outbreaks.
• You can spent decent amounts of time trying things, and things you want, rather than things the sales lady wants to push.
• You are never pressured to buy anything at all.  If you left empty handed you would be treated with as much courtesy as if you had bought the entire shop.
• The products are good.  Really good.  Not fashionably good, but solidly, usefully good, like tools should be.
• And you are allowed to get drunk while you shop.

Which is never a bad thing.

And before you speculate that all this bonhomie came from a drunken stupor, I was not drunk.  I was the designated driver of the party. It does not do for the hostess to vomit into the pelargoniums, in her own house. Oh no. Heaven forfend. etc.

A couple of days after the party I received a parcel from Barbara, with a lovely note thanking me for hosting for her, and a really generous freebie.  I got a grown up sized pot of soothing eye gel, to help my tired eyes as I beaver away at the keyboard.  I tell you, it’s been a life saver these last few days.  Without it I swear to baby cheezus that I would be looking like gollum now:

and that’s never a good thing.  Isssss itttt my preciousss?

A Glittery Plague Upon Both Your Houses

Put up the yellow flag.  Find the bell and pay someone tuppence to run through the streets tolling and shouting ‘UNCLEAN!’

Oh yes.  We are even more unclean than usual. Which is saying quite a lot.

As I was greeting the morning in my usual, bleary eyed way I noticed that Oscar had a red mark on his front.  I loped towards him to wipe it off his person/inspect it/spit on it and rub it with my elbow, only to find it was a chicken pox.  Eek!

This explains why he was miserable and slightly under the weather earlier in the week.  He has been spreading disease up and down the Midlands with gay abandon since the wee small hours of Monday.  Oh joy.

He was very sad.  We were meant to be going to Abbey Park (once the home of Cardinal Wolsey, now the home of a boating lake and a pavilion that sells egg and chips and strawberry Mivvis.  Oh, how the mighty have fallen).  They were having some kind of multi cultural festival today in which food was going to be a feature.  Mole and his family were going and had invited us along to share the fun.  We were all keen.  None so keen as Oscar.  Mustard would not be keen enough for him.

As it is we have stayed at home counting his pox and cleaning.  We know how to live. 

Apart from the oozing sores he seems remarkably sanguine.  He hasn’t got many, which helps.  The weather is also considerably cooler today, which is a mercy, because most of the ones he does have are in his hair, and having a sweaty head does not help when you need to itch like a bear faced with a particularly toothsome tree.

He is quite interested by his illness.  He calls them chicken pops.  He told me he couldn’t eat his lunch because he thought he might have a chicken pop in his mouth.  I asked him if it affected him when he ate biscuits.  He got the message.  Lunch was devoured in moments, despite the mouth full of pops.  He hasn’t mentioned it since.

Tallulah has been out all day with my cousin.  It is another family tradition.  My kids get days out with various family members as their birthday presents. It saves us having to annex the Sudetenland to store toys and makes for lovely memories, and grateful parents.  All good.

We took advantage of the Tallulah free state to make birthday cards and gifts by ransacking the craft cupboard, just after I had cleaned.  Everything is now clean but has a fine coating of PVA glue and glitter. Situation normal.  We have also made jelly.  I suspect it may be full of glitter.  Someone should invent a glitter magnet. I would pay good money for one.  I suspect they will find that cancer is caused by inhaling too much glitter mixed with PVA glue.  I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

We are having toast and jam for tea.  I am on strike. I cannot stand being a housewife/nurse/copywriter/part time single parent any more.  If we all get scurvy I will take the rap.

I ain’t doin’ no bird though.

I quit while I’m ahead

I feel the need to post, which is stupid really.  It is ten past twelve, and my teeny, weeny primitive dinosaur brain, the one that says things like ‘EAT!’ and ‘PEE!’ and ‘BREATHE!’ is the only thing standing between me and a coma of exhaustion.  I have finished the work I had to do, but it has nearly finished me.

I worked four hours last night, from ten till two this morning, then went to bed afflicted with what I call ‘washing machine mind’.  You know, that endless hamster wheel of thoughts that just won’t bloody turn off, even if your eyelids are drooping and your left leg has already gone to sleep? 

I picture those thoughts speaking to me in a kind of breathless, excited, new puppy sort of way: ‘What about this? Have you thought about that? You really shouldn’t think about that? No! No! Arghhhh! It’s too late.  Think happy thoughts. Happy, happy, happy.  Are we happy yet? No? Why not? Shall we get up? What do you mean that you are physically paralysed from the eyelashes down? La la lalalalalalalalalalalalaalalalalalalal’ for about nine hundred of your earth years.

Bastard.

I was awake until at least three o’clock.  Then I woke again in a muck sweat at five o’clock wondering where the hell Jason was (he is in London.  On a course.  Very, very dull).  Then I went back to sleep until just before eight when Oscar’s wavering voice reached me across the landing and layers of coma: ‘Ma MAaaaaaaaaa! I neeeeeeeeed a poooooooooooooh.’

And so the day begins.

Hello birds! Hello sky! Hello ibuprofen. 

Yummy.

In between breakfast, laundry, karate lessons, making jelly with small boy assistance, cooking lunch and shouting, I worked.

In the afternoon we went to my mum’s, where work was not possible.  This was a relief.  I sat, surrounded by family photographs on the verandah while the children played with their new, gnome bowling set.  Yes. I know.  It is gnome central out there in the hinterlands.  I was too distracted to take photos of gnome bowling today, but I promise you an episode later.  Oh yes.  Who could resist gnome bowling after all?  I’d quite like to try it alongside dwarf hurling and leprechaun baiting.  I expect there’s some kind of mythical creature olympic games post brewing somewhere too. 

After tea we drifted home in the late evening sunshine.  We went the pretty way home, past the village I grew up in.  It looked idyllic.  The sky was that wonderful, gunmetal blue, and the sunshine belted down to create a kind of super saturated Seventies style look to the landscape.  Swallows flitted in the sky and the countryside seemed to go on for ever.  The horse chestnut trees in the field by the church were all smothered in baby conkers, and the branches were so heavy they swept the ground.  Grasses shivered in the breeze and the sheep noises, like old men in a pension queue, poured across the fields.  I wanted to keep those moments forever.

I detoured and took the children to some of my old haunts. They were terribly impressed at being able to put visuals to the soundtrack of me telling them about the time uncle Robber and I split the sledge underneath us as we flew down a hill, and where the bouncy tree was where we all made the smelly boy sit on the bit where the cows wiped their bottom.  Oh yes. That’s real history.

I have decided to go back on another beautiful day and take lots of photographs.  When I die they will all be thrown out by the children who will no doubt wonder why I have a load of dreary pictures of fields and trees in my possession and who have forgotten the mythology that went with them.  This is the cycle of life.  Helas.

I got home, and apart from throwing things in the laundry and wiping sticky children down and throwing them into bed, I have worked.

I’m not quite at washing machine brain yet, but I’m not far off. I think it’s time to go now, before it’s too late.

The world traveller

I have been playing at family trees for most of the day, and have just been informed that I need to write eight hours worth of copy by Monday.  Jason is away all weekend on a course, and we have also found out that we might have to wait at least a month for definitive news about our visas.  So all in all I am a little distracted and not really in the mood for blogging today.  I have been meaning to tell you all about my lovely makeover party all week, but it has just never happened.  I will get around to it, but not today folks.

On the family tree front I have found out that I am distantly related to a lock keeper, which makes a change from a long and unwearying line of agricultural labourers, worsted wool spinners and bricklayers.  This is quite cheering.  What was ironic was finding out that I am, on my mother’s side, also related to a French polisher.  A shame I have no aptitude for channelling the dead, all my copy writing worries would have been as naught.

I have bin bags of photos and family documents that various members of the family have chucked at me as the unofficial genealogist of the family.  This is quite nice, but not very tidy.  Today I attempted to hew my way through some of it in the vain hope that I may be able to create order out of chaos.  Sadly for the order thing I got totally engrossed in what I was doing and am now sitting in a room that looks like an explosion in an archives factory.  On the other hand, I had fun.

It turns out that my dad’s parents went on a rather exciting pan European jolly in the 1950′s when their offspring were old enough to be abandoned without another thought.  There is a whole stack of photos of them looking like people from the Midlands in any number of exotic settings.  I knew they travelled extensivel.  My grandfather used to own a travel agent’s at one time, and took full advantage of the discounts, but I hadn’t really come across the older photos before.  There are plenty of them on cruise liners and in Disney World (they didn’t even bring us a pair of mouse ears. Gah!) in the shiny seventies and eighties, but these older, black and white photos are just lovely.

I thought I would share a couple with you, both of Paris.  This one I think is just ouside the Sacre Coeur:

They aren’t in it, by the way.  I love this photo.  It’s so chic.  It’s so Parisian.  The fashions are exquisite too.

This one is slightly more surreal:

It shows some chap with a large metal bin standing by a puddle of water while a fish flaps on the dry cobble stones.  Very odd.  Entirely French I am sure.

Digging about I also found a couple of shots of New York that I took when UE took me on a long weekend away there just after Tilly was born.  I thought about tying her to the railings with only a bowl of water to sustain her, but my parents agreed to have her in the end, so all was well.

I had never been to New York before.  In fact, I don’t think I had ever been to the States before.  I was amazed by the tallness of the buildings and how it made the perspective down the streets seem odd in comparison to home:

You don’t see that in Glenfield, let me tell you.  Still, they haven’t got a Mary Winehouse transvestite impersonator at their Co-op have they? So it’s a bit swings and roundabouts really.

I took this because I was deeply impressed by all the birds strung out along the traffic light pole thingummy:

So very cool. So very un Glenfield.

And finally, here is me, a few months after Tilly was born.  Tilly is in the photo, but as she is about three months old I hardly think you are going to build one of those identikit facial models to track her down and eat her:

What amazes me is that I look so young, and even though I was dog tired in this photo, compared to the levels of tiredness/haggardness I have achieved in the eleven years following, this is a mere bagatelle.

Yikes.