Shiny

While I was pretending to have no children on Saturday I whiled away some of the hours when I wasn’t selling angling magazines to total strangers by taking pictures of some of mum’s lovely stock.  Naturally I want it all, but Jason would kill me, so I have to live vicariously through photographs.

Here is the front cover of an envelope of Kodak negatives from the 1920′s:

I know I am a Luddite, but I do think advertising and packaging were so much more elegant back in the day.  Compare this to a lurid yellow Snappy Snaps bag and there is no contest.

Here is the back cover of a delightful book on how to make children’s party costumes from crepe paper, also published in the 1920′s:

I love this book. It has a pantone chart in the middle for hues of crepe paper, and then pages of the most exquisite costumes you can make.  They are beautiful.

Here is a brochure which claims to teach you how to swim with skill and grace.  Judging from the picture I can believe it:

Or how about this rather cute Mabel Lucie Atwell Hovis recipe book:

Or if you prefer more serious stuff, this is an iconic picture of a soldier from a 1950′s magazine:

or some German propaganda magazines from the 1930′s.  This one shows a fierce eskimo:

I’m not entirely sure whether this was supposed to be propaganda showing that the eskimos were angry that national socialism hadn’t got to their part of the world, or whether he was just fending off a rabid walrus. It’s hard to say. Still, I liked it anyway.

Belated Party Pictures

I promised to post some pictures of the feast we enjoyed on my brother’s birthday a few weeks ago, and because I am slovenly I have only just gotten round to doing it.

You may recall our family motto: ‘Never knowingly under-catered’.

Here is the proof:

Firstly the all important wall of cakes.  Much like the wall of death but you are likely to die slowly by diabetes than quickly due to your motorbike falling off the wall while you are rotating like a loon at 100 mph.

Please note the cupboard bulging with very important paper, things and stuff.  Aunty Wainwright may have been tamed, but she has certainly not been vanquished.

Here is the more savoury end of things, although there are little plates of cake squirrelled away here and there, should you begin to feel that you have not received sufficient in the way of a sugar fix from the wall of cake.

Note the table extension where we ran out of room on the previous, eight seater dining table.  Tsk! How careless.

I did not manage to take photographs of the table in the kitchen, which was also laden with bread, cakes and the ghost of Marie Antoinette.  I had reached sensory overload.

To finish I will include a rare shot of my father attempting to get dish pan hands:

Don’t worry, nobody fainted with shock, and we were all sitting down.  It’s quite safe.

Shhh! Things may be getting better

Apart from a blistering headache all day, today has been much improved, in large part due to my discovery of Chambord Black Raspberry Liqueur, which is very nice indeed with  a little soda water, a lot of ice and Tulameen raspberries dropped in it. The drinking didn’t happen until the sun was well over the yard arm, so I can be a little fuzzy headed and entirely guilt free.  Now I cannot feel my head to know if it hurts, so it’s a big thumbs up from me.

The house cleansing continues at a more leisurely pace today. I have top brownie points from Jason because I was in when the scaffolding man came to take the scaffolding away, and I took all the bags that were cluttering up the garage to the charity shop.  There was an entire car full, and more to follow.  I also entertained the children all day, ruthlessly tore apart two bathrooms and various other squalid areas of the house, and cooked two meals, so I am back on track for my housewife of the year award.  I shall be too mentally scarred to collect it, or care, but you can put on my grave stone: ‘At least she made an effort.’

The house viewing was irritating, as it was at an awkward kids tea/bed time.  We busted our chops to get rid of the last vestiges of dinner time and sent the kids to the garden to play, then escorted the people up hill and down dale for half an hour, only for them to finish the viewing by confessing that their house wasn’t on the market, and they weren’t entirely sure whether they were ready to move yet.  Thanks for that.

Still I have the cleanest bathrooms I have ever had in my life, and the children’s rooms are unrecognisable. I should be grateful.

But I’m not.

This morning we finally managed a get together with the lady across the road and her three girls.  She is absolutely lovely, and we are shockingly anti social neighbours.  I bumped into her in the supermarket a few weeks ago and we got chatting. She mentioned that she home schooled her daughters and when I told her about Tilly, offered for me to come over and pool resources.  This was a lovely way of saying come over and steal all my ideas, as I have next to no resources to pool.  Anyway, then life took over and I haven’t managed to see her since.

Yesterday we bumped into the girls on the street and invited them over to play this morning.  The off the cuff approach worked for all of us, and the kids had a delightful morning together while we grown ups sat and chatted about text books and websites and resources and she gave me details of what sounds like some amazing art classes.  It was really, really nice and she could sympathise with my housing trials and tribulations. She and her husband have been renovating their house for six years, and living in it, with their kids.  She is more than a little bit fed up now, but she is way more patient than me.  I’d have been in a hotel at least three years ago.

Not only was it nice to meet them properly, but the whole support with home schooling/pooling resources thing was a huge weight off my mind.  There’s only two and a half weeks to go now until school starts again and I have to take on the mantle of teacher.  I have been doing great at blocking out the whole thing up till now, but there have been a few sleepless nights recently when I have allowed my thoughts to drift that way.  Now at least I have someone I can run across the road sobbing to.

We’re off to mum and dad’s tomorrow for a few days. I’ve got meetings in town all day for work, and they’re babysitting the kids for me, which is a huge help, so I am repaying them by helping them clear out a small room upstairs in their house they call ‘the leap’.  I have no idea why it is called the leap.  Even when it is empty you certainly wouldn’t be able to leap anywhere in it, it is too small.  Not that size makes any difference at the moment, as it is so full of stuff you have to whip the door open and stand back to wait for the crash as things spill out all over the place.  Maybe that is why it is called the leap, it is you who have to leap out of the way.  Anyway, blogging will be sporadic to non existent once more.  Apologies for the lapses in service recently.  I blame the children.  That is why I had them after all, so I could blame them for everything.

It’s only fair.

In which I come to a new appreciation of people who live in the same house for fifty years

Today has been very stressful.  I am thinking of having that phrase printed on a t-shirt actually, and when someone asks me how my day has been I can just unzip my cardigan and wave my logo enhanced bosom at them.  I still have two good bras that keep me sturdy, so I’m sure Gok would approve.

As you know, our housing/emigration plans are in full flood thanks to the unflagging enthusiasm of my husband.  Last week I dealt with renderers who drank Glenfield dry of tea, a painter who insisted on showing me his wonky ankle bones (where he fell 30 feet down from a ladder and things did not go well) at breakfast, complex scaffolding demands, and an estate agent who was taking photos as the paint was still drying.  It was not the easiest of weeks when combined with the needs of work and school holidays and I did not do well on the patience and serenity fronts at all.

Yesterday the house went on the market.  By lunch time we had two viewings booked already.  This is very positive, except that the first one was at eight o’clock last night.  I was in Staffordshire selling postcards to Russ Conway obsessed bacon chefs and not due to get home until seven.  Jason’s sister was visiting for the day for the first time since Christmas, and he had the children to deal with as well.  It was not ideal, and why it had to be then I really don’t know, but I did not volunteer, and I had run away, so I have no leg to stand on.

I had left the house tidy on Wednesday afternoon when we left for London, but not show house tidy by any stretch of the imagination.  Our trials and tribulations on Friday meant that we did not get home until eight o’clock and did not get the children settled until half ten.  We did nothing with the rest of our evening except sob and watch Poker Stars respectively.  To say we were unprepared for a house viewing would be a gross understatement.

Jason is very, very good at being pro-active and he does many things superbly, but cleaning and tidying under pressure turns out not to be one of his skills.  He rang me in the afternoon to ask me what the priorities should be in terms of showing a house.  My answer was: ‘Clean the toilets, hoover the stairs, empty the bins and make sure there are no funny smells.’  He replied in the affirmative and I left him to it.

I fell in the door just after seven, starving, exhausted after twelve hours on my feet and only two hours sleep the night before, and looking forward to a cup of tea and a snooze in front of the television.  I was greeted by a hysterical husband, filthy children and a house in various stages of being ‘decluttered’.  It was madness.

I wolfed down a sandwich, and while everyone else tucked into Chinese takeaway I took a look around.  The kitchen was virtually empty.  The estate agent had suggested we declutter the surfaces.  Jason had taken this literally, and the place looked like it had been comprehensively burgled.  None of the bathrooms had been touched.  The bin was full, and funky with it, and the stairs were covered with the footprints of several feverish hours of vigorous ‘putting things away’.  I could have wept.  And the terrible thing was that it was clear that they had all been working like dogs, so I couldn’t even go ‘rah rah rah,’ which was really what I wanted to do, a lot.

In less than an hour I cleaned three bathrooms, wiped all the surfaces in the kitchen and tidied Oscar’s bedroom.  The others set to, and hoovered and emptied the bins.  By eight o’clock it smelled better.  Whether it looked better is anyone’s guess, frankly.  We were all too buggered to care by that stage.

The people who turned up to look seemed distinctly unenthusiastic, which made all the effort seem that much more pointless.

We have another viewing tomorrow night at half past five.  Today we have been trying to be more organised in our approach.  This morning I mostly spent hunting down all the crucial kitchen implements that Jason had put away yesterday.  I found the vegetable bouillon perched on some bubbles in the craft cupboard and half my cafetiere in the baking cupboard.  The olive oil was rammed behind the saucepans, and so it went on. It was like a culinary treasure hunt, but not fun and with no prize for the winner.

I wanted to buy some flowers to make the kitchen seem less ransacked.  I can’t because Jason put all the vases in storage yesterday.  I shall think of something, possibly employing an old wellington and making a feature of it.  I don’t really know at the moment, but I’m sure inspiration will strike.

Everything is taking longer because as well as hiding all our junk we have to sort out the cupboards we wish to hide it in, and decide what is going into storage.  Because the boxes we store we might not see again until we go to Canada we have to be very careful what we store, and because we don’t want to spend several thousand pounds of shipping costs storing fourteen assorted bobble hats, three broken jelly sandals and a dog eared vest, we need to sort out everything into sensible piles for the tip and the charity shop as well.

It is a huge undertaking.  Bits of it are quite satisfying, but most of it is annoying and hard work and something I really don’t want to do right now.  Today I have cleared out the cupboard under the stairs, the craft cupboard (for those of you with children you will understand just what a hideous undertaking this is), the kitchen cupboards, the girl’s bedroom and Oscar’s room, including all cupboards, toys and clothes, and the airing cupboard.  Then I collapsed in a heap on the floor.

Tomorrow I deal with the bathrooms and our bedroom.  The study will have to wait.  Most of my side is already tidy.  Jason’s side is a tip of monstrous proportions and as well as teetering heaps of paperwork there are also boxes of things from his mother’s house that we cleared out last year, and that he has still to look at.  I note that in all the chaos, where he has whipped us into a frenzy and galloped about, he has not so much as lifted one sheet of paper from this mass of stuff.  Today he asked me what he could do that would be helpful.  I suggested he tackle the study.  He looked at me bleakly and said: ‘Later’ in tones that made it clear that the subject was not to be discussed further.

On Sunday evenings he goes out to play with his friends.  I do not begrudge him this, particularly not after yesterday when he let me go without so much as a whimper.  I did however, curse the air blue at half past five this evening when I went to shut the French windows to ensure the children did not run out into the garden to escape tea time, only to find that the door was stuck.  I could not get it shut properly and it took twenty minutes of struggling to realise that I wasn’t going to get it shut properly because it is stiff and I am a weed.  In all this time the children managed to flick bean juice all over the table and floor, which did not help my mood any.

Still, it is now midnight, the garage is full of black sacks which have to be deposited at various destinations, and the house looks much more sparse, which can be considered a good thing.  The French windows are finally shut and I am beginning to thaw.

It is at times like this when I wonder why I volunteered.  When I was about ten I flirted briefly with the idea of entering a convent and becoming a nun.  Sometimes it seems entirely wise that I gave up that idea after about six months.  At times like these I am not so sure.

Play Rusty for me

I did not go to London in the end.  Things were far too stressful and I was not in the mood for complex theatre which required me to think.  Instead I had about two hours sleep and woke feeling like crap.  I texted Andrea and disappointed her, dooming her most apologetically to a day of trying to fix combine harvesters and bring in the harvest, and went to spend the day with my mum and dad instead.  They are quite patient and don’t mind me crying all over them every five minutes, so it seemed wise.

They were standing at an antiques fair this weekend, so I went along for the day and helped my mum with her ephemera stall. I didn’t help my dad with his carnival glass stall, because I just can’t like it, and I simply cannot summon up the wherewithal to sell it to people with enthusiasm when I have no enthusiasm for it myself.  Mouldy old bits of paper on the other hand, are right up my street.

I had a lovely time watching the world go by, selling the odd magazine on Meccano, manuals on how to build your own loom, and the Utility furniture spotters guide.  There were no children (at least none which belonged to me), no dramas and nothing required from me other than to find the right change and provide carrier bags.  It was about all I was capable of yesterday.  It was almost meditative in its simplicity.  I might compose a small pamphlet entitled: Zen and the Art of Selling Antiques.

I met mum and dad’s friends, and took lots of pictures of all the shiny things they had to sell, which I will post up here at a later date along with all the other photos I keep promising to upload.  I was very good, and despite being tempted by a £260 art nouveau green glass vase and a £120 jade bowl I only spent £15 on a pretty Victorian bowl and an early 19th Century tea cup, which I could not resist, and which I am looking at as I type.

One of the ladies who buys regularly from mum came and asked if she had any sheet music for the piano featuring tunes by Russ Conway.  Russ Conway, for those of you who have not had the great misfortune to hear him already, was very famous for his rendition of a tune called Side Saddle.  It is like speeded up lounge music, thusly:

It is not my favourite, or even my second favourite type of music.  Not at all.  In fact, the phrase: ‘I would rather stick red hot needles in my eyes,’ comes to mind when faced with the question of which Russ Conway tune I would rather listen to.

This lady wanted it because she loved Russ with a capital L for Lurve.  Not only that, but her husband was a pianist and she made him play Russ Conway for her.

She told us that he prefers to play Gershwin (as would any sane person), but that if he wants his dinner he has to stick to playing Russ or she stops cooking.  She announced that they were having bacon that evening, and if he didn’t play Side Saddle, he wouldn’t be getting any.

How fierce.

I can only imagine the scenes of piano related sadism in their house.

I had to hide behind a stack of magazines to cover my smiles by this time, because she was very serious about it.  Russ is no laughing matter I’ll have you know.

I’m glad I don’t live with her, I only ever mastered chopsticks and a wheezy rendition of God Saved the Queen as long as my granny put the right stickers on the keys for me.  I’d have been dead of starvation in a fortnight.

London with children – the reprise

We’ve just got back from two days in London with the kids.  It has been something of a roller coaster.  We have had some spectacular highs and some equally spectacular lows.

We have had a fantastic time at London Zoo, where the highlight for the children was seeing two monkeys scratching each other’s bottoms.  They also, more tastefully, liked the meerkats and the bats who ate oranges.  I enjoyed it, and was glad we went but will warn you if you are thinking of taking your children, that even with the discount I got with my family rail card, it cost me £60 just to get in for me and three children.  Lunch, because I was not at all prepared with a picnic, cost a further £25, and that was just sandwiches and a drink each.  It is also a fair trot from the tube.  Chalk Farm is your nearest, which is ten minutes away, although you do get to walk through Primrose Hill (pretty) and Primrose Hill Park (very pretty), as compensation.

We ran about Primrose Hill park in the sunshine, which I loved.  It is one of the first places I ever visited when I came to live in London and the view from the top still makes me want to cry (in a good way).

We had lots of fun at the The Tower of London, and pretended to have our heads cut off, and tried on armour and failed to tempt ravens with packets of raisins.  Because we got there as it opened we did not have to queue for anything at all.  The entry price was a much more reasonable £29 for all four of us (with discount for rail card), compared to the zoo.  Plus, lunch was the same price as at the zoo but a thousand times better (I had some delicious quiche with Greek Salad and pea pod salad, mmm), plus we got cakes with this. Oh yes.  By the time we left at half one, they were queueing round the block to get into everything, including the loos, so if you’re going, go early and leave early.  You will have way more fun.

We also managed to squeeze in a trip to Potters Fields which I had never been to before and which was a delightful park by the edge of the Thames Path between Tower Bridge and the Hays Galleria.

We found some interactive fountains, like the ones they sometimes have on the balcony at the Royal Festival Hall, but bigger and more and greater and wetter. The children had a blast playing in them and I have some wonderful photos.

We had a poke around Bermondsey and loved it.

We visited the Fashion and Textile Museum and found out all about Horrockses dresses which we loved and Tilly took five million photographs of.

We visited Hays Galleria, which is basically a glorified shopping centre with some fun bits.  We drank lime presse while watching the huge metal ship/clock/fountain installation and cheering on some fanatical boule players.

We ate lots of chocolate cake.

Oscar got chatted up by a lady dressed as a vampire selling tickets for the London Dungeon.  He thought she was wonderful, particularly because she gave him a leaflet with a picture of a flesh eating zombie on it.

Everyone got chatted up by some crazy Japanese girls dressed Harajuku style, who were advertising Yo Sushi! and their outdoor sushi bar in the pouring rain yesterday. We got so many free balloons we nearly blew away Mary Poppins stylee.  Luckily we also got so many free badges they weighed us down nicely.  Then Jason stopped all worry of being whisked away by showing the kids how to make their voices go all squeaky with the helium from the balloons and we walked from The National Theatre to Blackfriars sounding like a gang of Disney Mice, much to everyone’s amusement.

We walked across Tower Bridge. I did not think this was very exciting, but the children were absolutely obsessed with it, and when I said we could do it, they screamed with delight.  I think they were secretly hoping it would open up while they were in the middle of it, and they would hang off the edges like Harold Lloyd on the big clock face.  Needless to say, it didn’t happen, but they still thoroughly enjoyed walking across it anyway.

We went on the carousel on The South Bank in the rain and had huge amounts of fun, even Jason, who thought it was silly until he tried it, and was then converted.  We love carousels.  When I am crazy insane rich I am going to have one in my garden.  Or possibly two.

These were all good things, and we took millions of pictures, some of which might even find their way on here eventually.

On the negative side, I had screaming sinus pain (for a change) on Wednesday night which necessitated a ridiculously early night and me being very short tempered because it felt like someone was trying to drill the side of my face.

We have had all kinds of issues with Tallulah which will no doubt be resolved but have left me feeling sad, absolutely crap as a parent and entirely at my wits end.  She is not feeling much better it has to be said.

We have vowed never to share a studio flat with a partition for a bedroom wall between five of us ever again.  Particularly not one at the Limehouse end of The Commercial Road.  It’s rather lively and we truly are not good at communal living in a very small space.  Sleep was not one of the highlights of the last couple of days.

Jason’s hatred of London is not improved by having to share his downtime with four other people and a television with no CBeebies option.  We will never accompany him there again when he has to work.  We will rent a big house and go on our own for a week like last year when we had lots of fun and lots of time to have it in.

So, a mixed bag, but we will aim to remember the great times and vow to never repeat the grim ones.

Pictures to follow.  Not tomorrow though.  I’m off to London again, but this time for the day with Andrea, and we are only doing food and theatre.  Mostly I am looking forward to the no children bit.

That is all.

Leicester in Photos

I had to go out today for several reasons:

• The children were driving me bonkers mental, and it is much easier not to kill them in public than at home in private
• I was bored of making cups of tea for the painter, who seems to run entirely on PG Tips
• I needed to go to the bank before they repossessed my house and sent the bailiffs round

So we went out.

The children were rather less horrible because

• They had things to focus on other than ripping each other’s throats out
• I had bribed them with treats for good behaviour
• Like me, they are soothed by images of shiny things in shops

So today was tolerably successful.

While we were skulking about we noticed that Leicester City Council has come up with a good idea (for once).  There are lots of empty shops in the city centre at the moment, much like there are in all towns and cities I should imagine.  Mostly they look sad and depressing and take those of us who are old enough back to the riots of the early Eighties and the tune ‘Ghost Town’ by The Specials.

The Council have employed local artists to make some art installations in the windows of some of the shops and created a Leicester City Art Trail.  Some of it is quite fun.

Tilly was practicing with her new camera which I have gifted her. I got a new Kodak one to test from Amazon Vine.  I liked it well enough, but not as much as my old one, so she has the Kodak and has been roaming the streets mostly taking pictures of pigeons and her brother and sister pulling gruesome faces.  In the meantime I took some pictures of my own.  Some of them are of the shop art installations, some are of bits of Leicester architecture I like, and some are of shiny things in shops. 

So here we have my own little homage to Leicester:

More London Tales

You may recall that several aeons into the latest wrestling match with the CLD ™, I managed to crawl to London for a long awaited weekend alone.  Well, alone apart from meeting up with the delightful and feted blogging superstar Ms. Belgian Waffle for lunch on Saturday that is.

I promised to tell all and then singularly failed, due to still being a Victorian consumptive, and also having a life that moves faster than Jensen Button round a hairpin bend.

Well, I am going to London on Wednesday, this time with Jason and the children in tow.  Jason is going for work and has accommodation which will squeeze us all in, as long as we don’t mind stacking ourselves to the rafters.  He is going to be slaving away until Friday, and we are going to go and play at being tourists en famille, and meet up with him after work for feasts and frivolities. 

I suddenly realised that if I didn’t tell you about all the nice things I did on my last trip, I would run into a traffic jam involving all the things I am about to do on my forthcoming trip.  So here, is a very potted version of what I did on my truncated summer holidays.

Firstly I went to the British Library, which is somewhere I have been meaning to go for years and years.  I was meeting Ms. Waffle at the London Review Cake Shop in Bloomsbury, which is about ten minutes walk from St. Pancras, where my train arrives.  The British Library is on Euston Road, which is literally two minutes walk from St. Pancras.  I took an early train, came out of the railway station, turned right and spent a diverting two hours in the library before continuing on my onward journey.

It was lovely.  I highly recommend it, even though it looks a bit like a gymnasium via The People’s Republic of China.

There are statues by Anthony Gormley, a cake shop by Peyton & Byrne, which I tested and which passed the test of having extraordinarily good short cake.  There is a wonderful book shop, which you would expect, being as how it’s the British Library and all.  There are also lots of free exhibitions, one of which, Magnificent Maps, was exceptionally interesting and amongst other treasures, had a huge Mappa Mundi by the ever glorious Grayson Perry.

In the main exhibition space you can see The Magna Carta, stunning illuminated texts from the major religions of the world, original drawings from Alice in Wonderland and other fabulously mouth watering literary specimens.  Some of the displays also have listening stations where you can hear the authors reading from their own works. 

The building is well thought out, beautiful and intriguing and I could easily have spent the rest of my day there.  If you have any interest in books or manuscripts at all you will love it.

With time ticking on I trotted through Bloomsbury to the London Review Cake Shop, which is right next to the London Review Book Shop.  Not wanting to be late I was in fact a few minutes early and succumbed to the latest Tove Jansson, Travelling Light.  It is a beautiful, independent book shop full of the little gems that independents seem to do so well.  Through an arch in the History section you move through to the cake shop, which is also fabulous.  We drank wonderfully scented Jasmine tea out of divine, Japanese inspired glass tea pots on little wooden stands, and I can vouch for the deliciousness of their smoked salmon sandwiches.

In the afternoon Ms. Waffle had to drift off to hob nob with some fashionistas.  I limped over to Covent Garden for a spot of retail therapy before heading off to Marylebone, where I just had to pop in on Daunt Books to make sure they weren’t missing me too much.  I ended up having dinner at Cafe Luc on Marylebone High Street, somewhere my friend Bronxbee had sent me details of, asking me if I could check it out.  Ironically it is a Belgian bistro, given who I ate lunch with.  In her honour I ate delicious Moules Marinieres with crisp, salty frites, and had salted caramel and speculoos flavoured ice cream for dessert.  It was delicious.

My hotel was just off Gloucester Road, and I won’t recommend it, because it was distinctly average. Clean, functional and quiet, but nothing to rave about.

On Sunday, with the whole day to myself I decided to go to the Museum of London, as recommended by Mrs. Jones.  I had a fantastic time. It was one of the most interesting museums I have been in for years and years.  I particularly liked the art installation in the foyer, which was a wall of tweets and text messages from Londoners, all sent within a three mile radius of the museum.  The Roman and Medieval galleries were spectacularly good, and another art exhibition I liked was one in which the museum curators had paired up old paintings of London with new London artists and asked them to reinterpret the work using their own knowledge of contemporary London.  The pictures were hung side by side in the gallery and were really fascinating to study.  It was a genius way of displaying their art collection and I was thoroughly impressed.  Their cafeteria passes muster with good carrot cake too by the way.

I lunched at Dishoom, a place in Covent Garden which claims to be just like a Nineteen Fifties Bombay cafe.  I don’t know whether it was, as I’ve never been to Bombay, particularly not in the Nineteen Fifties, but the food was good and the concept was quirky, which I liked.  I ate black dahl, with freshly cooked chapattis and it was lovely.  I also loved the big pile of multi-coloured bicycles they had outside to draw in passers by:

After lunch I went to the Design Museum on Shad Thames, somewhere else that has been on my to do list forever.  It was expensive to get in, at £8.50 for a ticket, but I thoroughly enjoyed it.  The first floor was an exhibition of the competitors in the Brit Insurance Designs of the Year, which ranged from Fashion to political activisim to furniture design.  The top floor were showing an exhibition by a man who has taken photographs of all the  capital cities of all the countries in Africa, and another exhibition about sustainable eco designs in cities.  It was really interesting, although I wouldn’t recommend it if a) you aren’t truly passionate about design, because it isn’t one of those places you will enjoy if you are only slightly interested, and b) if you have children.  There were no hands on exhibits, no kid friendly corners and no places to sit down or corrall them.

On my way back across Tower Bridge I popped into a church, All Hallows by the Tower.  Mainly I was hot and fancied a sit down in peace and quiet.  It turned out to be an excellent place to sit, and then have a tour, for free, by an extremely knowledgeable and friendly tour guide.  I think I enjoyed it more than all the rest of the weekend put together.  It is a truly rich experience if you are in the least bit interested in history.  The church was bombed during the blitz, and when they were reconstructing it after World War II they were able to uncover literally thousands of years of archeology, which they have preserved as much as possible of.  You can stand in the crypt on the remains of a Roman pavement and be surrounded by two thousand years of archaeological material.  It blew my tiny mind.  They have everything from rare Anglo Saxon stone crosses to the marriage certificate of John Quincy Adams, and birth marriage and death records that go back to the 1600′s.

I had a fabulous weekend which was all about me, me, me and I loved every minute of it.  This week things will be a little different. The bank will be broken for a start.  The children and I are doing London Zoo on one day, at the most staggeringly expensive ticket prices known to man, and The Tower of London another day.  Tourist meccas I grant you, but perfect for children.  Tilly is worried about the dungeons.  I am worried Oscar will fall into the architecturally award winning penguin enclosure.  That is, if we get that far after Tallulah has inevitably tried to smuggle out a spectacled bear and we have all been arrested.

The Horror

It is the halfway point of our summer holidays and we have celebrated by having the day from hell.

Which was nice.

I only had two children to wrangle today. Tilly’s birthday party involved a sleepover and being picked up this evening, so I was not too trepidatious when I woke up, apart from the fact that the house painter arrived earlier than planned and required me to park my car on the road, which, before coffee was a mini adventure all of its own.  

As I have often commented before, when you have multiple children, the removal of one of them from the mix usually makes things more harmonious to some degree.  I was looking forward to this because we could not go out anywhere except to the corner shop today.  Not only was the painter around, but some people were coming to fix the new fence posts in the garden as well, and their estimated time of arrival was ‘after midday’.  As it was they were all done and dusted by half two this afternoon, but by then much blood had been shed and I had made the executive decision that we were going nowhere.

The only thing Oscar and Tallulah could agree on today was the fact that they hated each other.  The love in of last week is now officially over.  I have had to separate them four times and at one point they were banned from speaking to each other for an hour.  Oscar has spent several trying moments on the naughty step, and Tallulah ended up in bed for half an hour when she was caught out telling whoppers.  Lying has become one of her new past times over the last few weeks.  It wouldn’t be so bad if she were any good at it, but she is abysmal at the whole thing.  She is generally found out within ten minutes of the ginormous fib issuing from her mouth, and then the drama begins.

I have tried distraction by television.  I have tried distraction by crafts.  We cleaned out the brimming craft cupboard and did painting both with brushes and with fingers.  We have made cardboard televisions so that Tallulah can watch High School Musical via the power of shoe box in her bedroom.  We have coloured in endless pictures of The Backyardigans and glued things to other things.  It was all rubbish until I gave up and put everything away, when there was the universal wail; ‘But I wanted that!’

Tallulah decided to do some more on her homework project on Egypt by not reading the books she insisted we get from the library, or finding out anything at all and just basically making up badly spelled, half remembered nonsense and not really being arsed whether she spelled even the word Egypt properly.  Then she  had a major melt down when she produced the work for my approbation and cries of wonder, and I proclaimed myself unimpressed.  As she was the one who decided to do the work in the first place and I had made no mention of homework it was particularly galling when we had to spend the next hour with her justifying why it was alright for her to do the work without actually doing any of the work and how she had really TRIED and how I was HORRIBLE and I JUST DONT UNDERSTAND.  The conversation revolved around the ideas of taking responsibility for your own behaviour and learning the live with the choices you make and not inflicting your annoyance on other people when they fail to be impressed by your lame ass efforts.  It did not go well, but as I was in the middle of making my twentieth cup of tea and trying to make lunch at the time it was doomed to fail from the start.

Typically they decided only in the last hour before Jason came home that they liked each other again.  He came through the door, tetchy, after an annoying day at the coal face and fired off multiple questions about the fence, the paint, the scaffolding etc, none of which I could answer, because short of pushing cups of tea through the letter box at regular intervals I have been too busy shouting and breaking up fist fights to worry about such trivial things as house renovations.  Of course because Oscar and Tallulah were happily playing ship wrecks and hugging each other by that point, my story about how horrendous the day had been was met with a little incredulity.  It’s always the way.

Tilly has come home exhausted to the point of tears and with a crashing headache from forty eight hours of no sleep and subsisting a diet of cocktail sausages on sticks and forty different kinds of cake. 

We are all having an early night.  I’m hoping it lasts a couple of days and we wake up refreshed and re-invigorated on Wednesday.

That would be nice.

Partaaaaaaaaay

Well, the social event of the year is now over.  It was very fun indeed and we all had a lovely time, but I am delighted to be in my own home, with nothing but an evening of lounging about in my pyjamas watching Sherlock on my to do list.  I am so glad I am not fashionable or famous, or belong to a set where dinner parties and social happenings are de rigeur.  One big bash a year is about as much as I can take before I have to go and have a 364 day lie down.

I have photos of the gargantuan amounts of food we managed to plough through, and when I can be bothered to go downstairs and get my camera I will post them.  In the meantime you can take my word that we ate, drank and made merry.  Tilly’s cakes and biscuits were the star turn, and I could have had her adopted several times over during the course of the day.  I am storing the names and addresses until she becomes a shruggy teenager and then I’m going to send her off with her backpack and a copy of How to be a Domestic Goddess to every name on the list.

Robert did rather well for birthday presents and got several bottles of champagne, which I am rather hoping he might see fit to share with his sister, along with some other goodies.  I had a birthday present brainwave for him this year.  Usually we don’t bother getting each other present presents.  We prefer to take each other out for a meal, but this year I bought him Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall’s Meat Book.  Uncle Robber is a huge fan of meat, as you would have been able to tell yesterday from the several kilos of medium rare roast beef, an entire ham and a slow cooked shoulder of pulled lamb that he made.  When he proudly showed me his new meat thermometer I knew I was on to a winner.

The children galloped about from dusk till dawn.  All the children who were invited came in fits and starts throughout the day so there was always someone to play with, and the fortuitous spacing meant that there were very few personality clashes and no fights.  I thought there might be tears before bedtime as it was an open house event where the first guests rocked up just after one in the afternoon and the last guests left just after ten, and my kids were there for the duration, but actually they were delightful.  They trotted off to bed at about half ten, at granny’s, thanks to mummy having succumbed to a few glasses of Merlot later on in the evening.  I had fond thoughts of them sleeping in this morning, which were rudely shattered, for granny, when Oscar arrived at her bedside at quarter to seven this morning trailing his beloved blanket and a handful of Mister Men books.  Ah well.  I would not have been half so sanguine if it had been me required to read Mr. Messy before dawn, but luckily I got to lie in until half past eight, which was much more the thing.

I think we would have all lounged around granny’s house in a stupor of post prandial excess today, had it not been for the fact that Tilly, ever the social butterfly, had another party to go to and we had to get back.  She had just enough time to swap one lot of party clothes for another and flurry about with more cards and wrapping paper before we had to go again.

The two littlies were absolutely exhausted by lunch time and quite happy to sit and watch films while I whirled about setting my own house to rights. What with being haunted by the Chaise Longue of Death, having work, holidays, baking and parties to see to, our house has been woefully neglected recently.  When I walked across a floor encrusted with days old cake mix and had to blow a fine layer of icing sugar off the kettle before I could fill it, I took it as a sign.  It had gone past bearable, bypassed ‘the eye of faith’, and plunged into ‘oh my god!’  When Jason made disparaging comments on the state of the downstairs bathroom I knew things had reached their nadir.

So now, seventy squillion hours later I feel I can invite you all round to partake in what is left of the birthday cakes (surprisingly little, given how many we made), but it is an offer that is time limited.  By midday tomorrow it will be back to the regular pigsty of doom.  Hurry while stocks last.