Peter Pan

Oscar and I are having another chat in the bathroom.

‘Mama. I don’t want to die.’

‘I know Oscar. Nobody does.’

‘Yes, but everybody has to you know?’

‘Yes, Oscar, I know.  But you will not die until you are a very, very old man (unless you persist in riding your bike off the top step of the decking), so you have lots of years ahead of you to enjoy first.’

‘I know mama.  But when it is the end of days that is it, and you have to die.’

‘I know Oscar.’

‘I don’t want it to be the end of days. I want to stay here with you and dadda.’

(I make a small sound. It is the sound of my heart breaking for my boy)

‘Me too. I know it is sad.’

‘Yes. I am sad about the end of days, and so I am going to stay being four forever, and not have any more birthdays, and that way the end of days won’t ever come will it?’

He looks at me so trustingly at this point I can hardly speak.

‘No Oscar, they won’t come.  And you can spend as long as you need to being four.’

And then we leave the bathroom.

He goes to watch Ben Ten, and I go to sob my heart out in the kitchen for my poor baby, who is so clever and brave and resourceful and logical and lovely that I wish he really could stay four forever.

Cruelty to animals

Oscar and I wander into the bedroom to get him dressed for the day.

He looks stricken and says:

‘Oh dear mama. I have forgotten to turn my bedroom lamp off.’

I say:

‘That’s alright Oscar. You will remember next time.’

To which he replies in anguish:

‘No, but it’s too late now.  I have killed another animal.’

I say soothingly:

‘No. No. I think you have misunderstood what the girls were saying.  It’s alright.’

He shakes his head in woe:

‘No mama. You don’t understand. Tilly says every time you leave your bedroom light on, a polar bear dies.  Now I have killed a polar bear.’

It takes half an hour to reassure him that no polar bears were killed in the turning on of this lamp.

Hanging in the balance

Oscar bursts into the bathroom where Jason is going about his ablutions.

‘Dadda! Dadda! How much does this knee of mine weigh?’

‘Ummm. I don’t know Oscar.  Why don’t you stick it on the scales and see?’

‘O.k. dadda. That’s a good idea.’

He solemnly balances one knee on the bathroom scales.

They stare at the numbers together.

Jason says:

‘Well. How much does it weigh then?’

Oscar ponders for a moment and then says firmly:

‘It weighs two.  Let’s see how much the other one weighs.’

He swaps knees, and they repeat the process.

Oscar says gravely:

‘It only weighs one.’

Jason asks:

‘How much do both knees weigh together.’

Oscar stands up, dusts himself off and leaves the bathroom with the definitive answer ringing in Jason’s ears:

‘They weigh….different.’

Bother

It’s been a slower start than usual today.  This was the weekend that UE was taking the girls to Center Parcs, and they are not back until this evening. 

I was, as you know, rather nervous about them going there.  It is the first time since we split, six years ago, that he has had both girls on his own for a holiday, and I believe that this four day period will also have been the longest time he will have had them for full stop.

I waved them off on Friday morning with a certain amount of nervousness, it has to be said.  My parenting instinct was dialled all the way up to ‘preternatural’, and I spent all of Friday resisting the urge to ring them every ten minutes to make sure they were all right.

UE was actually very thoughtful, and by Saturday morning I was receiving regular mailings of the girls doing various activities.  Tallulah went horse riding while Tilly went rock climbing, and so on, and so forth.  They had smiles on their faces, and had all their limbs.  This was lovely to see.  I note that Tallulah, taking after her mother, had the widest grin in the picture where she was just about to tuck into a chocolate laden dessert as big as her own head.

They called me on Saturday and Sunday evening.  I was very grateful for this. I had decided that I simply would not call at all, as I did not want UE to feel undermined when it seemed like he wasn’t doing a bad job, and I didn’t want to seem like an interfering shrew.

The calls were a delight. It was hard to tell exactly what had been happening, as their words were spilling out of their mouths so quickly and at such a pitch that it was rather like listening to a particularly noisy waterfall full of bats.  I was able to pick out quite clearly the words ‘awesome’, and ‘fantastic’ though.  Apparently they did a treasure hunt and won a prize for coming first, and Tilly was most excited about fulfilling her dreams of holding an owl. Nay several owls.

I knew this was on the cards, as it is one of the activities you have to book.  UE called me last week and asked me which of the activities I thought the girls might like.  Unsurprisingly this was one of the ones I chose. 

I have been in trouble with the girls all week for calling it owl fondling.  When they called yesterday, Tilly was squeaking about owl handling and I could hear UE in the background shouting out; ‘more like owl bothering.’

Sometimes things like that remind you why you loved someone all those years ago.

Sadly, I have not received any pictures of the girls bothering owls, which is a shame, as they are the sort of thing I would definitely have framed and put on the mantelpiece.  I expect the owls were being bothered enough without flash photography dazzling their beaks.

I bet the real pictures would turn out to be a disappointment though, and not half as wonderful as the images I am making in my head.

Thank You

Last year, when I went to Canada, I found a gorgeous print by a woman called Eli Fenger Benwell.  It is a silhouette of a papercut picture. It shows a whole host of children in an apple tree, and it is just lovely. It is simple. It is clean. It is graceful. It is a picture I have had framed, and even here in the MOD where there are not enough nails in the wall for all my art to hang up, I have made sure it is up on the wall.

I look at it every day, and every day it gives me pleasure.

I wrote about it at the time, and months afterwards I received a comment from Catherine Fenger Benwell, who is Eli’s daughter.  She had recently lost her mother, and had been googling her out of curiosity to see whether there was anything about her mother and her art on the internet, which is how she found me.

She offered me some of her mother’s other works, which was an entirely generous, kind and unexpected thing to do.

I said; ‘yes please’.

Today her parcel of prints arrived, all the way from Denmark.

I am so utterly touched by the grace and kindness of this woman I have never met.  It has gone a long way to redress the balance of all the horrible things that have happened to me this week.

But Catherine is not the only person to show me kindness and generosity. Far from it.

People often ask me why I blog.  They think that I am too incautious, that the world is a horrible place, filled with bad people and that talking to, and meeting with people you connect with on the internet can only lead to violent deaths and worse.  They have bought into the popular assumption, promoted by the newspapers and media that the internet is a breeding ground for pornographers, rapists and murderers, all waiting to do you in.

Well, there is a case for that, but in my experience it is a small percentage of the population who do and want to do these things, just like in real life.

Yes, there are people who write horrible comments in the comments box, but there are many, many more of you who write lovely, kind and supportive things. 

There are people who I have met from my blog writing who have turned into real life good friends, and who I am pretty sure will continue to  be so.  There are people who I have not yet had the chance to meet, who are also good friends and who I am pretty sure will continue to be so.

I have been astonished and privileged to have the friendship, support and goodwill of hundreds of people in the years I have been writing my blog. I have had gifts, and good wishes, and kind thoughts and random acts of generosity sent to me from all areas of the globe, at all times of the day and night, and I count myself truly blessed for everything that this blog has brought into my life.

So to Catherine, and all the rest of you who have thought of me, written to me, sent me things and extended your friendship, kindness and love towards me during the good times and the bad, this is for you.

Thank you all from the bottom of my heart.

And, as Tallulah would say:

From the bottom of my bottom.

Book Recommendations – some more

I am, as you may be aware, rather limited as to what I can talk about at the moment.  I hate not blogging though, so we will fall back on an old favourite, the subject of books.

I have three recommendations for you this time around, all of which are very different to each other.

Firstly I must be allowed to wax lyrical about Deborah Devonshire’s autobiography ‘Wait for Me’.  There was never any doubt that I would absolutely love this book, as regular readers will know that I am a committed Mitfordophile, and I do think that after much thought on the matter, Deborah is my very best favourite of all the Mitford sisters.  She is such extremely good value.

The book is all you could want really.  It is funny, properly, laugh out loud funny. There are so many wonderful anecdotes, vignettes and remembrances scattered through the pages, they light up the whole book.  It is fascinating, as befits one of the most well connected women of this and the last century.  How could you not be fascinated by the stories of a woman who has had tea with Hitler and was friends with John F. Kennedy to name but two?

It is also poignant. Deborah’s life has been touched by tragedy, with the betrayals and fanaticism of her sisters, untimely deaths and heartaches.  It is never self pitying. She never wallows and she never gets over sentimental. A few sentences speak louder than a thousand pages though, and this book really touched me in ways I never imagined it would.

There is a great selection of pictures too, and the whole book is utterly absorbing and thoroughly enjoyable from beginning to end.  If you are interested in the Mitfords at all you will love it.  If you’ve never read anything about or by them and are looking for somewhere to start I recommend you start here. You will fall in love. I promise.

My second recommendation is something that Amazon Vine sent me.  It’s by Mark Diacono, who is the head gardener for Hugh Fearnley Whittingstall at River Cottage HQ down in Devon.  It’s called; ‘A Taste of the Unexpected,’ and it is the most wonderful and fascinating practical book about gardening and growing your own fruit and veg I have ever read.

It is a gorgeous thing. The production values are high, the pictures glossy and beautiful in their own right, but it is the little things I love.  Diacono takes time to help you plan your gardening and planting. He addresses simple but useful things like plot size, weather conditions etc.  He warns you about pitfalls that enthusiastic amateur gardeners always make when first approaching growing fruit and veg, and gives you tips on how to avoid them.  He also has an excellent index and stockist list.

You will need the stockist list, because the most glorious thing about the book is that it does not deal with your regular apples and potatoes and the like. It deals with obscure, specialist and unusual fruits and vegetables and helps you to navigate how to grow them in a normal, U.K. garden.  He not only tells you everything you need to know about how to go about getting and growing the stuff, but also has suggestions on how to eat it and store it, and what to do if you get a glut of produce.

It is brilliant and lovely, and if I had a garden of my own to work in right now I would already be sourcing the wonderfully named Egyptian Walking Onions.  How could you not want to grow them?

My final recommendation is for the absolutely marvellous; ‘The Selected Works of T. S. Spivet’ by Reif Larsen.  This is Larsen’s first book and I am so excited by it, I cannot wait to see what he comes up with next.  This is an intriguing and beautiful book.  I read it a few weeks ago now, but I cannot stop thinking about it.

It tells the story, in his own words, of twelve year old genius, Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet.  Living on a ranch in Montana with his eccentric family, all touched by the tragic death of T. S.’s younger brother in a shooting accident a year earlier, T.S. enters into an odyssey across America to get to Washington D.C.  where he is being awarded a prize for his scientific drawings.

The problem is that The Smithsonian, who are giving him the prize, do not know that he is only twelve, and T.S. decides to go on his journey alone and without telling his parents, thinking that they might be better off without him, as he will always remind them of the other son they have lost.

Intertwined with T.S.’s story of his journey which is wonderfully expressed in prose, are beautiful maps and diagrams in the margins of the book, all of which are by T.S. and show his obsession with mapping and drawing every moment of his existence.

This is a unique, clever, touching and brilliant book and you should definitely read it.  So far, and I know it is only January, it is my hot contender for the book of 2011.

You heard it here first.

Charity Begins at Blog

As a blog writer you get a lot of spam. 

A lot.

Usually WordPress, which is the blogging site I use, are pretty good at filtering it for me, but occasionally they accidentally filter something good or useful by mistake, so I regularly check my spam to make sure that I am not missing the opportunity to get  free cake for example.

That would be terrible wouldn’t it? If one accidentally missed out on the opportunity to gorge on cake.

The woe.

Anyway, yesterday I received a really hilarious bit of spam.  It made my day.

Most spam is crap.  It is also annoying. Crap and annoying are two things that should not be allowed to exist together in my opinion. Things should either be crap or annoying, but not both.  It is not fair.

Usually blog spam purports to have actually read your post and be genuinely commenting on it.  Here are some useful phrases should you be thinking of sending some bloggy type spam yourself.

‘This is a very interesting post. I like it very much because it is so interesting. My you are very interesting.’

‘I like you. This is very informational to me.’

‘I am thinking that this post is very useful and that you would like my blog post about the same thing’ (this with a link to ladies with big bosoms and vajazzling aplenty when I have written about garden gnomes).

‘You are very wise. Your wisdom is so wise that I have put you on my blog roll.’

etc, etc,

only usually not with such good spelling or grammar.

This is the spam that really annoys me.  It annoys me even more than the spam that just lists sites to Asian babes with big bangers or all you can eat poker smorgasbords or cheap Canadian drugs (I was in Canada for nearly six weeks last year and I never found any cheap Canadian drugs. Their pills are expensive. I’m telling ya’).  I hate the fact that it is pretending to be from a real blogger, and yet they have made so little effort.  It’s pathetic.

Anyway, yesterday’s spam was just wonderful. 

It started out like those spam e-mails you get.  You know the ones:

Dear friend in Christ

I am a little old lady with one leg who lives in Nigeria.  The Holy Spirit has told me that I am soon to die and I have decided that you are the person I should share my immense wealth with.  You have a kind face.  Please give me all your bank account details so I can bless you with riches beyond your wildest dreams.

Blessings be upon you.

That kind.

It started well:

‘Dear Friend,

I am a poor African man.  I am very poor.  I live in Africa. I am a man.’

So far, so standard.

Here’s where I started laughing:

‘Because I am so poor, and I am a man, and I live in Africa, I am hoping you can help me.  I would like to become richer.  You can help me by selling my viagra for me through your site.

Love from a poor African man who lives in Africa, who is poor, and a man.’

Fantastic eh?

I love that.

Bob Geldof would probably order his viagra mountain.  Clearly this is an enterprising, poor, African man.  A man who has somehow stumbled upon an enormous Viagra harvest in his back garden, quite by chance, and has sensibly spotted a massive marketing opportunity.

Good luck to you, poor African man.  That’s what I say!

A Sense of Place

Tallulah’s school is twinned with a school in Chicago.  This is most unusual.  This is not the sort of town to indulge in twinning activities with major US cities.  This is the sort of town that twins with places like Swindon’s one way system, or a sewage plant in the Balkans.

Most years the school do some kind of exchange visit, usually only for the teachers.  They know their limitations.  Taking thirty five suburban kids from the East Midlands to the Windy City would fill even the most adventurous heart with fear.  You will note that Ray Mears rarely takes primary school aged children on his expeditions.  There is a good reason for this.  He is all about the survival, not about the being lynched in a strange land when a bunch of eight year olds go on the rampage in Walmart after indulging in too many Krispy Kremes.

Tallulah’s interaction with her Chicagoan counterparts mainly takes the form of letters.  There is a pen pal programme that she has just joined, and she is very, very excited about it.

Hardly anyone has pen friends these days.  The demise of snail mail and the rise of the internet means that the ancient art has now all but died out.

Thankfully.

I remember the heady excitement of getting pen friends when I was in my early teens.  I had several. I had at least two from Italy, one from Germany and one from Japan.  The Japanese one was the weirdest of all.  After about two letters each we gave up.  Hers read very much like those slogans you get on foreign t-shirts where the words are English, but the sentences don’t actually make any sense.  You know the sort of thing:

‘I wear kumquats when I have my vest.  Happiness abounds!’

I expect my letters back made as much sense to her, and I never even tried to write in Japanese.

I got bored of the pen pals after a while. Mainly I received postcards of their home towns, all of which seemed eminently more beautiful than mine.  I never sent back a postcard of the municipal council offices, or the Nineteen Eighties shopping centre which were considered the subjects fit for postcards of my town.  I was far too ashamed.

The other thing they did, apart from send me pictures of their homes, was ask me when they could come and stay with me.

This alarmed me greatly.  I could totally see the point of wanting to visit Siena or Cologne.  I could not see the point of wanting to visit Hinckley.  I found it hard enough to find things to do on my own or with my English friends, what would I do with a cultured Italian used to tripping over Carrarra marble fountains every day?

Plus, as their letters got increasingly more boring to read, I realised that we had almost nothing in common, and should I invite them to my house for two weeks we would have to talk to each other.  If their conversation was as good as their writing style, I would be dead of boredom inside half an hour.

Then there was my mother’s sense of hospitality to contend with.  I knew if they came, I would be forced to entertain them with traditional English pursuits 24/7 while we both learned to hate each other in the international language of total disdain.

I curtailed my pen pal activities fairly quickly after this revelation.

In hindsight this was very wise of me, after the utterly abortive attempts at two French exchange visits in my middle teens proved my fears were entirely justified in every way.

So, we will see what joys and new found international co-operation and understanding we get from Tallulah’s communications with a seven year old from Chicago.

It should prove interesting.

While we were talking about this over the dinner table, Oscar seemed terribly impressed.  More impressed than any four year old boy had the right to be about the act of writing a letter to another child and lobbing it in a post box.  I was perplexed.

All became clear when it transpired that he believed that Chicago was actually a planet in space, and that Tallulah had been communicating with alien life forms.  This was apparent when he said in a puzzled way:

‘Why don’t you just stop writing letters to them and ask them to get in their space ship and come down and talk to you normally?’

Good question.

I left them just as Tilly was trying to persuade Tallulah that she was Prince Philip’s pen pal.

Oscar said:

‘Have you been to Buckingham Palace then, Tilly?’

Tilly said:

‘Yes. Of course I have.’

Oscar looked mournful and said:

‘I would like to go to Buckingham Palace.  I’ve always wanted to meet Mickey Mouse.’

Lunch

I am taking refuge from the horrors of life in food, mostly.

I don’t mean that in a bingeing sort of way. I am not a bingeing sort of woman.  I mean in a way that means that when I am feeling out of sorts I like to buy, cook and serve better food than usual.  Food is always important to me, regular readers will know that, but it becomes more important when life seems somewhat out of kilter and everything else is hard work and mean and dispiriting.

Having something delicious to eat always seems to make life that little bit better, sunnier and generally easier to deal with.

There is a new Waitrose supermarket that has opened about ten minutes drive from where I live.  I suggested to my mum and brother that we go and check it out.  I am not a foodie alone. We are a foodie family.  Watching LibertyLondonGirl talking about her family considering it a fantastic day trip to go to an oriental supermarket and shop for groceries and eat dim sum really spoke to me.  It’s the kind of thing my brother and I have always done with our parents.

I think it’s why I consider it so important for my own family to break bread together when we can.  We are not a family who eat dinner while watching the television.  Sharing food is a hugely important emotional and social event.  Making sure you have nice food to share, and preferably shopping for it with people who are as interested in it as you is also important to me.

My children are some of the fussiest eaters alive, and their pedestrian eating habits frustrate me greatly until I remember that until I was in my teens I was just like them, and like I do with my children, my parents just persevered, introducing me to new tastes and letting me develop my palate over time.  I cook everything, they try everything.  They don’t always like it, they don’t always eat it all, but every now and again we have a break through in the culinary department which makes life worthwhile.  And at least I can take them to restaurants without being embarrassed by them and their behaviour, and they know where all their food comes from.

So, today we went to Waitrose and indulged ourselves.  We were all starving, and we went not because we had to get specific things of practical value, but because sometimes, instead of going to a restaurant we go and pick up a little bit of what we fancy and take it home and share it in a kind of pot luck supper sort of way.

We bought salmon smoked in Lapsang Souchong tea, Lincolnshire Poacher cheese and quince jelly; duck pate blended with raspberries, freshly baked bread, sushi and a big bag of crumbly butter fudge.  We took it home and washed it down with Fever Tree lemonade made with Sicilian lemons.  It was delicious.

We chatted about this and that; ships and shoes and sealing wax, cabbages and kings.

It was a delightful way to spend the day, and I relaxed properly for the first time this week.

Still alive – just

It has been a rough few days. 

Ever since Thursday I have been in negotiations about this house.  I don’t really want to say more. I will say that I am not happy.  We are not happy.  It is frustrating and horrible and completely unnecessary, which is mostly why we are unhappy.  It is also mostly taking up every waking moment I have, which is rubbish.

We will move on, however, and talk of nicer things.

Some things have been good.

Sunday was good for example.  On Sunday I saw my first theatre of the new year by getting to see Rory Kinnear’s Hamlet at the National.  It was the best Hamlet I have ever seen.  Really, it was.  I say that, and I have seen Mark Rylance, John Simm and David Tennant as Hamlet in the past, so there was stiff competition for the title.

It was the unexpurgated version.  We went in at 2.00 p.m. and came out at ten to six, and apart from a slightly numb coccyx to remind me how much time had passed I can honestly say it did not feel like we had been in there for nearly four hours.

I would suggest you try for tickets, but I have a feeling it won’t be easy.  Kinnear won the Olivier award for this performance last year and tickets have been like gold dust ever since.

In other theatre news, I managed to bag tickets to see David Tennant and Catherine Tate doing Much Ado About Nothing at the Wyndhams in London in August.  Tickets went on sale on Saturday morning but I didn’t find out about it until Sunday, and didn’t get a chance to try to book tickets until Monday.  I was lucky to get them.  I am so excited.  When I had booked them I actually danced around the kitchen.

I know. I know.  I am a sad, theatre loving geek.

Just humour me.  It has been a grisly few days.

I went out for dinner with a friend that I haven’t seen since November.  That was nice.  She had good news to tell me.  I can’t tell you what it is. I am very happy about it though.

The Emma Bridgewater, Black Toast design gravy boat my parents bought me for Christmas arrived today.  I love it.  It says Quite Saucy! on it.  This made me smile a lot.  I have never owned a gravy boat before.  I think this means I am officially middle aged.

Andrea and I had an ice cream party, trying out all the flavours I had made with my new ice-cream maker.  That was awesome.  If Jason ever leaves me, I shall marry my ice-cream maker in a heartbeat.  My favourite was the maple pecan, Andrea went for the mint choc chip.  It was all good.

I went to Melton Market with Oscar and my dad yesterday for the first time in months.  There wasn’t much there, because of the weather, but on the very last stall we came to I hit pay dirt.  I got two, beautiful old bottles used for storing chemicals, the ones with the ground glass stoppers.  I shall take photographs and bore you with them another time.  I have always wanted some, so I was very excited about them. 

I also picked up four tiny green glasses decorated in silver. They are like half sized shot glasses, and very fine.  I finished off by buying a Spode Copeland bowl.  It’s rather old and rather lovely, and I wouldn’t have been able to afford it if it didn’t have a crack in it, so I thank my lucky stars I buy things because I love to look at them and hold them, rather than being precious about their value.  It’s blue and white, and just so pretty.

I promise pictures will follow when and if things become calmer.

I have rather lost heart people.

This stuff is grinding the joie de vivre out of me, inch by inch.

Anyway. I know this is a crap post and I haven’t replied to anyone’s comments for days.  I will get back in the saddle, and all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.

Just not today.