What I am like on the inside:

Permanently

I wonder if I could get this on a t-shirt?

or a Mexican wrestling mask?

The Caring Profession

I am currently reading Happyslapped by a jellyfish: The words of Karl Pilkington.  I had never heard of him before I picked up the book, but I liked the title, so I took it home from the library.  He seems to be a mate of Ricky Gervais.  I wasn’t sure if this was a good thing or not.  The Office makes me cringe in ways hitherto unseen except when performed by professional contortionists at a freak show.

I’m glad I did pick it up though.

It is very amusing.  Odd. But very funny.   It is a mix of crap poems, stories, travelogues and rubbish drawings.  It is silly and appealing.

I laughed my socks off the other day when I read about his experiences with injury when he was a small boy.  His parents and my parents had a very similar attitude to caring for small children with self inflicted wounds:

‘I was once choking to death on a Mr Freeze ice pop.  Me face was red, me lips were purple, me eyes were rolling into the back of me head, and all I could hear was me dad shouting ”That’s what you get for being greedy.” ‘

Happy times…

Mind you, that’s the kind of thing I do myself.  It seems it is genetically implanted and bursts into life as soon as you get to be a parent yourself.  When Oscar drove his tricycle off the top step of the decking last year, after I had picked him up and unplugged his nostrils where they were full of grass, I said: ‘That’s what you get if you will drive your tricycle off the top step of the decking you silly boy.’

I did cuddle him too, by the way.

no.1 super guy?

It’s amazing what four hours sleep and some industrial strength coffee can do for a woman.

Sorry about yesterday’s blog post.

I can’t bear to look at it now.  Who is that whinging, self-indulgent woman?

Was it Rosemary?

the mild mannered telephonist?

Was it Spot?

the janitor’s cat?

Was it Hong Kong Phooey himself:

or was it a hormonal, crazy ass woman masquerading as a human being?

A moment of extreme self doubt

I am tired.

Properly, properly tired.  Of almost everything.

I am a woman who clings very precariously onto the edges of her sanity at the best of times, and today I feel that things are slipping, and not in a good way.

It may be something to do with being very hormonal and this being the first day of my period, which is never fun at the best of times, and these aren’t the best of times.

It may be something to do with the fact that I am fully aware that I have taken on far too much lately, and there are times when I am floundering. Today is one of those days.

It may be due to the fact that Mercury is in retrograde (I have no idea whether this is true).

It may be a winning combination of all of those things.

Nothing really terrible is happening by the way.  I just feel terrible.  I have the first world luxury of being able to indulge my feelings rather than having to have a stiff upper lip while I go out and milk the goat in sub zero temperatures with raw and bleeding hands for the sake of the children.

Whatever.

I just know that today has been hard work and that I feel that I have failed in ways large and small, but consistently, which I suppose is something.

I keep bursting into tears this evening.  I have sat on the sofa, honking like a goose, and crying.  We watched Grand Designs in an attempt to feel more cheerful.  I usually love Kevin and his doomish little ways.  But no. Today’s episode just made me cry even more, because it was about a woman and her husband who signed up for Grand Designs just as he was diagnosed with stomach cancer.  He then died, and she struggled on to build the house they had dreamed of together, alone, except for her two tiny children.  I cried so much I thought my chest would split open.

I wasn’t going to blog, I felt so miserable, but it is bed time and I am still crying, and I just want to go to sleep, but my head won’t let me.  So here I am.

This is my therapy.  Do go and stare at fish or drink gin while I deal with this.  You can come back later.

So, things with Tallulah are still rocky.  We seem to take two steps forward, one back.  Things are never entirely easy between us, but the summer holidays were pretty terrible in places.  Things improved when school started, then regressed, then improved, now they have regressed again.  Not in a huge way, but just enough for me to feel that things are futile and pointless and that I am doing everything wrong.

And today I did everything wrong.  Where I shouldn’t have explained things I explained myself and everyone else into a coma.  Where I should have walked away, I didn’t.  Where I should have remained calm I screamed and ranted and raved.  Where I should have been accepting I was accusing.  Where I should have been loving, I was mean.

I shouted yesterday too, although it was nothing compared to today.  The thing that she did today that really got me to the point of no return, was lying.  Not over big things, just over stupid things.  Stupid things that were easy for me to spot immediately.  Stupid things that she has lied about before, and which she knows are wrong, and which just made me want to lay down and give up. 

Only she is my child, and I can’t.  I can’t just give up, or turn a blind eye, or say that it’s alright.  It isn’t alright.  Lying is not good, and recently it has become quite a habit for her.  What might be forgivable in a seven year old (and not really then), is not at all forgivable in a teenager or an adult.  It has to stop.  Or, she has to get better at it.  I don’t really care which of these options she takes at this point.  I’d just like her to stop doing my head in for a bit.

We are getting help with her, by the way, before anyone very kindly suggests it.  We are not struggling on alone.  There is progress too, it’s just too slow for me on a day like today, when I have no capacity whatsoever to deal with her and all the devious ins and outs of whatever hang up she has decided to air this week.

I am ashamed that I failed to deal with it well.  I am ashamed that I find it really hard to like her at times like these, even though I love her to bits.  I am ashamed that I feel resentful that dealing with her nonsense eats into so much of my time, and time is very precious to me at the moment.  I feel ashamed that today I did not want to be kind or understanding or helpful or sympathetic.  I just wanted a laser gun, or a large piece of two by four.  Instead I used my tongue.  And that was cruel.

She is only seven.  She is doing her best.  She is working hard most of the time to change her more challenging behaviours.  She is working harder than I would have done at her age under the same circumstances. 

I feel frustrated that positive praise and rewards seem to do very little, and that when I lose my temper and lay down the law like a Victorian villain we get results, and that tonight was a night of ultimatums along the lines of ‘do this or I will tie you to the railway tracks and put the signal on green,’ because I had run out of kindness and empathy by eight o’clock this morning, about a nano second after the discovery of the first lie.

I mean to try again tomorrow with a clearer head and hopefully a kinder heart.  Whether I can keep that resolution remains to be seen.  I am aware that some of the problem is perpetuated by me, because of the way I deal with her when I am not at my sparkling best.  We fall into old, familiar, and ultimately unhelpful patterns.  Patterns which she is too young to recognise and which I am sometimes too tired and stressed to have the strength to break.  I am resolved that I will break them, even if it kills me, which it probably will.  If I change, she has to change.  It’s one of those laws of physics type things.  And change needs to happen, and it has to be my job, because I’m not seven, and I’m in charge.

Rats.

Oscar has been rather challenging all day.  This has not entirely helped matters.  He wanted to stay in all day and lie around  watching television and dashing around in just his pants.  In retrospect I realise I should have given in and let him.  But because we didn’t get out of the house yesterday, I insisted we go out and get busy.  This meant he dragged along all morning, an unwilling participant in our plans, and moaned and fretted and behaved like a frustrated three year old, which he is.  Our morning was a series of ill conceived, ill executed visits to places none of use were particularly enthusiastic about, all conducted with low level whinging, in the pouring rain.

It did nothing to improve my mood.

The pottery class was a tranquil oasis.  I had several pieces of luck there.  Firstly, my pottery dragon did not explode and Oscar was so impressed with it that he actually helped me paint it, and he also decided he wanted to make something to fire himself.  Then I hit upon the idea of making Mr. Men, who are his new, favourite thing in the world.  By the time I had executed Mr. Sneeze in the medium of clay, Tilly had been able to get on in peace and I had won more mummy kudos.

Home schooling is doing my head in a little bit folks.  I have every admiration for people who do it all the time, but it is not something I can see myself doing permanently.  There are subjects I am really struggling with, and I cannot seem to establish a successful rhythm of teaching that fits in with other stuff.  The rest of my life just doesn’t seem to fit into the neat slots that are clearly required for home schooling to be an out and out success.  I think it must help if you have all your children at home, but having some in nursery, some in school and some at home is not an easy mix, and I am forever running hither and yon.  I always feel that I am behind and that I just don’t know enough.  I am having severe home schooling doubts, despite the fact that I would rather cut my arm off than give in and send her to the schools I have worked so hard to avoid.

I am pinning hopes on our move, for which we still don’t have a firm date.  I am sort of working towards the end of October as our goal.  I now need to call County Hall and execute plan 43 and a half, which involves me visiting the two or three middle schools that may be worth sending her to, scoping out whether I can get her to one of them and Tallulah to a primary school somewhere completely different both at the same time, and reassessing the situation with the relevant information to hand.  I have already ascertained that the local nurseries are parlous, and that the primary school, which is good, does not do an intake in January, so even if I get Tilly settled in school, I will still have Oscar with me, but full time until September.  But at least I won’t have to help him work out how to do prime factors.

Mr Grumpy I can do.

It’s everything else I can’t…

Hannibal the Cannibal

After a few false starts today we seem to have actually achieved quite a bit, one way or another.

Our trip to Sainsburys was quite successful. The only thing I didn’t get was lollipop sticks, but I substituted them for a white chocolate and raspberry sponge cake and felt that I had done well.  Andrea will probably be swayed into not beating me about the head when I produce cake instead of sticks. 

Redeemed.

The kidney dissection went well.  I was the only person who cut myself.  Ironically I cut myself on the plastic wrapping when I was trying to get the new knife out of its protective casing.  Otherwise there were no injuries, and considering one of the kidney dissectors is three, and has a blatant disregard for his own or anyone else’s safety, I think this is excellent news.

We surveyed the kidneys, we poked them, we smelled them (wee and blood. Nice), we weighed them and drew pictures of them.  We read about them, we measured them.  We chopped them up and drew diagrams in cross section.  We were very scientific.

Then we messed about.  Once more you have to take it as given that there are much better pictures of Tilly.  One day when she is an old, wrinkly lady she  can have an exhibition called: ‘Photos my father never showed you,’ and unveil them all.

In the meantime you can console yourself with pictures of me wearing kidney earrings:

Sporting a dammed fine kidney  ‘tache:

and doing a Hannibal Lecter:

The fava beans and the bottle of fine Chianti are in the background. (I know it was liver, but they only had small strips at the butchers, and lamb’s kidneys seemed much more gruesome today).

We were going to cook and eat one of them, but the smell made me feel very unwell indeed, and we decided that we would be brave another day.

Tilly made a piece of offal art that Damien Hirst would be proud of:

and then we bundled it into a bag and stuck it in the fridge to take to granny’s house where we will offer it to the  cat.

She will be unimpressed.

It will end up in the bin.  But at least we tried.

Tilly announced it was the best science lesson she has ever had, and I won kudos points for Andrea and I by regaling the tale of the time when we had to dissect a bull’s eye for G.C.S.E. biology and we squeezed too hard, the lens popped out and we had to retrieve it from under a bench covered in fluff.

Winner.

We have three mackerel in the fridge for tomorrow’s dissecting pleasure.  Although they have been gutted already (I am quite grateful), they still have heads, eyes and brains, which will make Oscar very happy.  He is exhibiting a worrying preoccupation with brain tissue.

Tilly has moved on to volcanoes now. We watched a programme about them yesterday and she was incredibly enthusiastic.  We have a ‘Violent Volcano’ making kit in the cupboard, so we may have to break it out later.  If you hear a dull boom in the vicinity, I suggest you run for cover.

I confirm my status as a grumpy old woman

One good thing about being a home schooler is that you don’t have to put up with the more ludicrous dictates of the school and their latest batch of ‘genius’ ideas for the children.

Sadly, being a woman who indulges both in home schooling and has children in mainstream education, I do.

This seems very unfair.

So far this term we have already had ridiculous judgements par excellence, from the Lord High How’s Your Father of the school, including:

More nonsense about the correct style and wearing of cardigans.  This head teacher is absolutely fixated by the world of cardigans.  You would honestly think that she knows something on the downlow that everyone else doesn’t, the amount of fuss she makes about them.  Perhaps she has had dispatches from secret government scientists who have found that not only is the colour of the universe breen (the colour that you get when you mix all the colours in a paintbox together, or indeed all colours of play doh or plasticine together), but that its fundamental fabric is in fact a nylon/wool mix in the exact ratio used in her official school cardigans, and that if she gets enough children wearing them at the same time, we can repair rips in the space/time continuum.

Further nonsense about the correct style, colour and filling of water bottles for all children in the school, including how many times a day they are allowed to fill them, and the fact that Tanqueray Ten is preferable to Gordon’s Gin if you’re going to give them gin and tonic, because we are a school with aspirations.

More outrageous demands for money for tedious school trips that show a singular lack of imagination and which cost a bloody fortune. To whit, one trip for one day to the New Walk Museum in Leicester (which my children and every other child in a forty mile radius have visited infinite times to the power of infinity and beyond) to see the Egyptian displays.  It will cost £6.40 for this trip.  We live three miles away from the museum.  Entry to the museum is free and always has been.  The children have to provide their own lunch/snacks/cocktails, and the people accompanying them are all volunteers. 

The displays have not changed (and I kid you not) since I was a child in the Nineteen Seventies.  Most of the exhibits are grubby with the paw prints of thirty odd years of children’s fingerprints.  Last time I went there (less than a month ago) about a third of the exhibits had been taken away for cleaning, and nearly all the hands on exhibits were broken.  The entirety of the Egyptian section takes up a space roughly equivalent to the size of my hall.

When a friend of mine who was equally outraged about the cost of the trip enquired as to why it was so expensive, she was told that it was the cost of transport, and the time for a curator to explain things to the children.  I  can just about live with the curator explanation, but as the Number 94 bus is readily available and goes past the school every fifteen minutes into town at a return cost for a child of less than £2, I am stunned at the transport costs, and if they go in anything less than a platinum coated Lear jet I will be writing a letter of complaint.

Don’t talk to me about Health and Safety. I know. I know.  But for goodness sakes, I never had any health and safety and I still have all my own limbs and teeth, and it didn’t cost me £6.40 to see a plaster of paris mummy with its finger broken off.

The yearly farce that is the harvest festival rumbles on apace.  Yet again we have absolutely no education going on whatsoever about the purpose or origins of a harvest festival.  This year we simply got a letter asking for tins to be donated. I have ranted about this in previous years, but why are we shocked that most children have no awareness of where their food comes from or the concept of seasons in terms of food production, or indeed of farming and its major importance to our diets, when they spend twenty minutes singing songs about conkers in a room full of elderly people surrounded by four hundred tins of kidney beans that are past their sell by date?

My final rant of the day concerns charity events.  This year, as well as demanding tins for the harvest festival, they are also asking for money for the flood victims in Pakistan.  This is fine, as far as it goes, but it is the way they ask for it that drives me bonkers.  Rather than saying: ‘We have a donation box in the classroom for flood victims of Pakistan, we thought it would be a nice gesture if the children could donate some money, please bring in what you consider to be an appropriate amount,’  which I think would be acceptable, they have to turn it into a novelty event.  The letter last week explained the plight of the poor flood besieged people and then said how nice it would be if the children could each find a small box, tube or receptacle which they could fill with money in an interesting way, and then bring into school.

I know I sound like the world’s grumpiest old cow (because I am), but honest to God, do you think that some poor, bedraggled woman, sitting on a pile of wet mud that used to be her home is going to give a rat’s ass whether the money you collect is in a shoe box, or a toilet bowl or arranged in the shape of the sodding Arc de Triomphe? Of course she’s not.  And do you think that children really think that it is more fun to give money away if it is in a Smartie tube or in a tupperware container? Of course they don’t.  It is a sop.  It is supposed to soften the blow of giving away money that they would rather spend on a DS game, and make it look like it’s cool. It doesn’t.  Firstly it isn’t their money that they are giving, it is mine, and I don’t need to be enticed into giving it away into the shape of anything. I’m nearly forty years old. The novelty has long gone.  And if I want to give money to a sodden refugee, I will do it gladly and freely without needing it to be turned into some version of ‘It’s a Knockout’, thanks all the same.

Secondly, I really wish they wouldn’t twist people’s arms about charity in this way.  Tallulah kept going on about how her teacher had managed to cram £9 into a Smartie tube and how she wanted to do the same.  Bully for the teacher, but this is a ridiculous amount of money for a small child to bring to school in anything at all.  And I know this will sound mean, as £9 is a piddling amount to someone who has lost everything in a biblical flood, but it is a lot if you’re a parent on a budget with multiple children, and in these difficult economic times.  I know they’re not expecting everyone to bring that kind of money in, but it does set an unrealistic expectation and children ARE competitive.  I think it puts unfair pressure on families who may not have that kind of money to spare.  £9 is a week’s dinner money for one child, to put it into some perspective.

Or indeed, what about families who might feel sorry for the flood victims of  Pakistan but prefer to give their money to equally well deserving charities concerned with other people and their plight?  As Tallulah was explaining to me how terrible it was that these people had nothing (and it is), I had to gently remind her about people in this country who have nothing, or people who are still rebuilding their lives after Hurricane Katrina, or the tsunami, or the earthquake in Haiti.  Or are they no longer fashionable or newsworthy enough for us to fill Smartie tubes for?

Anyway.  I feel much better now I’ve got that lot off my chest.

And yes. She is going on the school trip, and she did take a box full of money to the flood victims of Pakistan, and several tins of yummy groceries to the pensioners for Harvest Festival.

So even though I am a grumpy old cow, I still allow her to join in with it all, just like my poor mother did for me, because that’s the thing isn’t it? They’ve got you over a barrel.  She’s my daughter.  I love her.  I want her to be happy, and if it makes her happy to fill a box with pennies, I’m going to let her do it.  Although it doesn’t mean I can’t have a little rant about it here to make me feel better.

Although they can take a running jump over the cardigans.

It’s getting to me a bit

Today we were supposed to be going on a field trip.  Our activities have been curtailed by the fact that someone is going to come and stare at all our mountains of crap and work out how much money it would take for them to shovel it in a van and drive it fifteen miles down the road.  They couldn’t have come in the morning, which would have still allowed us our trip, or the afternoon. No, they are coming slap bang in the middle of the day.  Hoorah.

I have reshuffled our itinerary.  We will do a field trip tomorrow morning before we jet off to the pottery class to see if my clay dragon has exploded, and to tie Oscar to a chair while Tilly has more fun on the potter’s wheel.  Such is the life of a disorganised home educator.  You have to go with the flow.

It all gets a bit messy though, at times.  I feel that I am constantly balancing the different aspects of my life and not always doing very well at it.

So, today we are going to speed off to Sainsbury’s in a mad flurry of activity before I have to get back for the removal firm.  My shopping list reads as follows:

• Pyjamas for Oscar and Tilly
• Strong plain flour to make bagels for Tilly’s bread project
• Lollipop sticks because Andrea said I had to get some. Apparently they are very important in the world of physics. Perhaps Mr. Whippy is a quantum physicist?
• Kidneys so that we can chop them up and be biological
• Craft knives so we can chop kidneys up without reducing them to pate
• Piriton, because my sinuses are hurting

This is a very strange list.  If I get stopped by the police on the way home I will produce this blog post as evidence of the fact that I am not some evil genius mastermind plotting the downfall of the world from my underground lair.

They’ll never take me alive…

I shall throw slippery kidneys in their path in much the same way that people used to squirt oil on the road to make the pursuing car skid into a bush.

MWAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHHAAH

We really wanna see those fingers

Jason has commented that all we ever seem to do is talk about history in this house.  He is convinced that we do no other subjects, and lay about all day eating biscuits and thinking about Norman hair cuts and Anglo Saxon gold. 

This is not true.  We do other things.  Today Tilly did some maths, some biology and some French.  We did a bit more on the Romans, which is technically geography, but not really.  But we also did some stuff on the Anglo Saxons.  We tolerate the other subjects, but we are enjoying history mightily.  We are having great fun, which is why we bombarded him with stories of the olden days when he got home from work.  We couldn’t summon up quite as much enthusiasm for:

‘Ou est le parc?’ 

‘La bas.’ 

‘Oui?’ 

‘Oui, C’est vrai.’

‘Merci.  J’aime bien le parc.’

etc, etc, etc.

So, our idiosyncratic and highly colourful trail through history continues.

One of the things we have noted from our reading is that quite a few medieval paintings have one thing in common.

Regard:

and:

and:

Have you guessed what it is yet?

Yes. It is the fingers.

Matilda and I have become somewhat fixated by the weirdness of medieval fingers and the drawing thereof.

Today, after we had finished making a Roman Standard with the Roman Eagle replaced with a Glenfield Owl (we can use it when we invade Glenfield later), we had a ‘finger off’ in our down time.  This was a frenzied competition in which we both made a set of medieval fingers and vied to see whose were the longest.  I cannot show you Tilly’s, which is a shame, as hers were excellent, and came with a film explaining why super long fingers were important if you were a member of the aristocracy.  This quite literally made me cry with laughter.

I can show you mine though:

Here I am.  Queen Grumpypants of the Glenfieli Tribe:

Here I am again, surveying my domain:

and thinking sad  thoughts of the days of yore.

Highly moving, I think you will agree.

I am reading again

I have been reading all the time actually, but I stopped posting what I was reading in my side bar because it was taking me so bloody long to finish anything I was getting depressed at the sight of the same old books just sitting there and sitting there like Patience on a Monument.

I found myself particularly resenting Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory book. I started it before the summer holidays.  Then I had to stop reading it when my neck clicked and I could no longer pick it up without damaging my vertebrae.  Then I couldn’t take it anywhere I went because it was 800 plus pages long and in oversized hard back, so it weighed about as much as Oscar.  I was not happy. Not happy at all.

I finally finished it yesterday, along with some other things that I had had to review that had also been lingering about like a bad smell.  I decided to celebrate clearing the decks by posting up my new list of things to read.

I cannot recommend the Schama by the way.  I loved his book on The Power of Art.  I thoroughly enjoyed his book on The French Revolution.  I only enjoyed bits of this one, and for a book that long, bits is not good enough.  If you have to study the impact of our understanding of landscape as a culture, this book is for you.  If you’re reading it because you’re a devotee of Simon and were lulled into a false sense of security by his other books, I would resist.  Unless you have been taking weight lifting classes.

Having moaned about the heftiness of Simon’s tome, I must confess to having replaced it on my reading list with another, equally monstrous epic, Dominic Sandbrook’s ‘State of Emergency: The Way We Were: Britain, 1970-74′.  It is not a small volume either, rocking up at 645 pages in hardback.  Still, I am very excited about it, in a totally nerdy way.  This is the third volume in Sandbrook’s history of the Twentieth Century, starting in the Fifties with ‘Never Had it So Good’, moving onto the Sixties with ‘White Heat’, andd now this one.  I have read both of his other books and thoroughly enjoyed them.  He is erudite, witty and manages to write factual information in a way that makes it comparable with reading a very gripping novel.

I thought I would have to wait for this latest volume to come out in paperback, but luckily Amazon Vine offered it to me as a review copy, so my cup runneth over.

Then it spilled over some more when they also offered me Auntie Mame by Patrick Dennis, which I had only just put on my wish list after having read India Knight’s glowing recommendation on her posterous site.  It looks like a total confection of a read, and just the antidote to four years of searing social history.

So, I am finally reading books I actually want to read, rather than books that I feel I have to read.  I still have to read some too mind you.  If I don’t brush up on my Anglo Saxon and Medieval history pronto, our history lessons will suddenly become much more sparse, but that’s not too bad.  I actually enjoy reading history books.  Bloody good job mind you.

Talking of which, I must go and find out what happened to Eleanor of Aquitaine.

Laters.

Where has all the money gone – quick time passing

It has been a weekend of shopping and chores.  We have a clean house, a full fridge and an empty bank balance. Two of these outcomes are welcome, one less so.

It is Oscar’s birthday in a fortnight. I am chipping away at some kind of present buying.  Everything is a bit random.  He wants everything in the universe that isn’t pink and sparkly.  The only clear facts I can elicit are two alarm clocks in the shape of footballs (I do not know why two, nor why alarm clocks. He cannot tell the time), and a funky hat.  This is not entirely helpful.  I am currently in the process of making it up.  I am buying more than I need while I have some flexibility of funds, so that I can salt some stuff away for the dreaded ‘C’ event.  That is fairly depressing.  It is another thing in my life that looms.  There are a lot of looming things on the horizon.

Eek.

Oscar left his trainers out on the grass one night last week.  Overnight they got soaked. I stuck him into his shoes while we were waiting for them to dry. He was in agony.  His feet have grown AGAIN.  At this rate he will be eleventy million metres tall by next year, and reduced to wearing clothing made from sails and corrugated cardboard.  Yesterday we had to fork out for new trainers and new shoes.

Tilly needed new winter boots.  We waved goodbye to fifty more of our English pounds.

Tallulah seems to have had a visit from the pyjama stealing imps.  She only has two pairs of pyjamas at the moment, where in the holidays she had about half a dozen.  She has more tops than bottoms, which is slightly alarming.  Nobody knows where they have gone.  When she models the two remaining whole pairs, it is clear that she has grown taller.  She looks like she has been living on a desert island for about a hundred years.  I bought four new pairs of pyjamas for her.

I got Oscar dressed for bed last night and realised that none of his pyjamas fit either.  He will have to wait until funds allow me to buy him new pairs.

As it is, I had to make Tilly pay for her own karate outfit this week. I had enough for the lesson, not to order the outfit, and she has her yellow belt grading coming up in a fortnight, so she really needs it.  She was very patient about it, but I hate owing her money. At the moment I am in the hole to the tune of £30.

My hair is not coping well with the transition from summer to autumn.  Last week it managed to be dry, frizzy, oily and unmanageable all in the same week, and by Friday when I went to the hairdresser, my head itched so much I actually combed it for nits before I left.  I have a horror of being refused entry to the hairdressers thanks to nit infestation.  Luckily it was not nits, it was just crappy hair and an intolerance to my usually perfectly fine shampoo.  I bought heavy duty shampoo and conditioner at the hairdresser.  It works beautifully.  It should for £30.  Still, at least it is behaving itself, sort of.  I managed to wash, dry and straighten it  into a vague semblance of what the hairdresser lovingly did to it on Friday today.  It took an hour of my time and my arms and patience were worn to the bone by the time it was done.  Then I caught sight of myself in the hall mirror as I passed.  I reminded myself of someone.  I could not place who.  Then I had the epiphany:

Yes. I have gone from looking like Yvette Fielding to Emo Phillips.  I don’t think this is necessarily a good thing.

Still, a change is as good as a rest.

Right?