Whiiiiiiiiiinnnggeeeeeee

Oscar has reached another interesting milestone in his developmental path.

It is called: ‘The whinging phase’.

You won’t find it in Penelope Leach’s ‘Mother and Baby,’ but I am telling you, it happens to every child, as sure as eggs is eggs.

In some ways I am quite glad he has moved on from the would be dictator phase. That was quite wearing, for us, for him and the carpet on the naughty step.

I think his anal retentive phase is one that is going to last approximately eighty odd years, so there’s absolutely no point worrying about that at all.

Quite often you will hear someone older and wiser than you look sagely at your child as they are doing something spectacularly inappropriate.  They will nod, suck their teeth in the manner of one looking at a car that needs repairing, and say: ‘It’s a phase they’re going through.’

What they fail to tell you is that one phase morphs seamlessly into another phase.  There is no time at which your child, my child or anyone else’s child is not going through some kind of phase or other.  The best we can hope for as parents is variety and entertainment.

Sadly for me, the whinging phase is not very entertaining.

It consists, as you might expect, in a great deal of whinging.  This whinging must be carried out in a kind of high pitched, keening whine, much like the sound of a dog being ignored trying to get your attention.

What they are whinging about is largely irrelevant.  It is more the sound quality they are after, that piercing, relentless noise that shatters  calm and means that you must have nerves of steel and preferably be stone deaf for it not to get on your tits in the largest way possible.

At first, you think that it is important to find out what the child is whinging about. After all, you reason, if I find out what the matter is, then I can fix it, and the child will stop moaning.

Do not fool yourselves.  It will not happen.  You will fix whatever the problem is, and they will just be annoyed that you have removed their ability to whinge.  It will take them anywhere between thirty seconds and ten minutes to find something else to whinge about so that they can do what they originally set out to do, which is bug the living crap out of you in the name of their perverse entertainment.

Oscar, yesterday for example whinged:

‘Maaaa maaaaaaaaa! Ta looooooooo laaaaaahhhh says that Derek put her claaaaaawwwwsss in my baaaaaaaaack’.

This said at a pitch designed to make bats drop out of the sky thanks to the disruption of their sonar, and in a sing song sort of way which made it almost impossible to understand the first time around.

I will not respond to any noises made in this way, so this necessitates me saying: ‘Pardon’, several times until he gets the message and then speaks to me in something like a real human voice.

I said: ‘Did Derek have her claws in your back?’

He looked at me, shocked to the core that I would ask such a thing and not just go and laser beam his sister to death on the spot as he had so clearly requested by the power of the unspoken word.

I said: ‘Well, did she?’

He said: ‘Noooooo, but…..’

At which point I said:

‘This conversation is now over.’

And pointed him to the door.

This was not how things were supposed to go at all, so he had to come back several times and have another try at it, all of which met with equal failure.

Resistance is futile.

I’m wondering how long it’s going to take him to find this out.

Probably the duration of the summer holidays I reckon.

I shall buy ear plugs on Monday.

Wound

When we were doing our pottery painting at Bridgewater on Friday there was a lady and her three small children painting at the table opposite us.

For the duration they were there they had me and my mum in fits of giggles.

I’m afraid we were very irreverent.

After they had gone I got a fantastic backhanded compliment from my mum.  She said: ‘Well. She made you look very relaxed didn’t she?’

I will elaborate.

Children, as you may have heard in the newspapers, can be quite messy.  Particularly around art and craft equipment.  It is a little known fact that babies do not arrive on the planet with the inbuilt ability to colour in the lines and create harmonious colour groupings.

Mostly they like to go for the more is more approach I have found, in my twelve years at the coalface of child rearing.

I had decided, when we undertook our own pottery painting project, that as long as the mess was kept within reasonable bounds, i.e. on their persons rather than on passersby, and they didn’t actually smash or destroy any bits of pottery, that this would be a good thing and I would be content.

I did urge them at the beginning to think about things like colours and designs, and was also quite fierce about them listening to what the kind lady who helped us set up was saying.

After that it was every man for himself.

Which is why we ended up with pieces like this:

I admit that I have had to learn this from bitter experience.  Matilda was a great one for doing forty seven crafts before breakfast when she was a toddler.  Her painting approach might best be described as ‘all inclusive’.  She did spend six months of her young life stripping herself naked and painting her entire body all over with what she called ‘watches’.  She would start at the wrist with something approximating a wrist watch, and then get steadily more frenzied, clearly possessed by some kind of Dionysical spirit, until she was jet black all over.

I used to try and run damage limitation.

Then I just put down a lot of newspaper and looked out the window.

The lady opposite us had clearly not laid her demons to rest like I had.

She was very insistent that each child produce something of great beauty.  She knew exactly how she wanted each piece to look, and by golly it was going to happen, even if she had to snatch the thing off the child and paint it herself.

The poor children looked totally perplexed.  The outing had clearly been sold as something that would be fun, yet every time they tried to have fun mama went insane and vetoed it completely.

Some of the best lines we heard were:

‘If ANYBODY puts a dirty paintbrush in that palette again there will be trouble.’

‘You are NOT ALLOWED to mix those paint colours together.’

‘WELL. If you want something horrible then go ahead.’ This was followed by a snatch and swoop manoeuvre which prohibited any chance of them making anything horrible at all.

My favourite one was:

‘If anyone else gets the paint water dirty we are going home.’

At the end of forty five minutes of artistic anguish, she trooped out triumphantly with three mugs, beautifully decorated, with nary a smudge or clashing colour to be seen.  The children followed sheepishly behind her wondering where their afternoon of fun had gone to.

The irony is that when they arrive at her house, after they have been fired, she will display them proudly as something her children made that is so very special and perfect because it is an expression of their inner souls, and a wonderful momento of a lovely day out.

zoom zoom

Today started off reasonably leisurely, and then picked up increasing speed.

Jason didn’t start off at leisure. He had to get up at 5.30 this morning to be in London for 7.00 to sit a long, horrible and tedious exam.  An exam he had to pay for, and which if he passed would make him number one superstar in terms of would be employers slavering to get their mitts on him.  It is an investment in our future.  Having it would take him through the glass ceiling he currently works just under, into the realms of the big boys.

No pressure then.

He passed a restless night last night, studying too late and then spending the night wheezy and asthmatic.  He claims this was brought about by a surfeit of Derek. I claim it is stress.  I only claim this under my breath. Quietly. When he is not looking.

Derek is saying nothing.

The children and I got up quite a bit later than 5.30, to my eternal and everlasting gratitude.  We breakfasted and then pottered off to granny and grandad’s.  Tilly needed to be at her friend’s house at eleven o’clock this morning for a day of teenage maundering.  The rest of us wanted to go to Liberty London Girl’s mama’s garage sale and a) meet Liberty London Girl who is an all round top bloggess and extremely lovely person, and b) find treasure.

It turns out that LLG’s mama does not live very far from us, which was why we had decided it would be a nice thing to do this morning.  The sun was shining, the birds were on the wing, tra la, and all was good.

Granddad took charge of Tilly.  Granny and I set forth with the TMs (trainee murderers) in tow.

It was a lovely drive, and we received an equally lovely welcome when we arrived.

The children were entranced by the dogs, particularly Billy, who deigned to let them treat him like royalty.

In the background is Maudie. She suffered their attention from afar, but was mourning the loss of her mama, who was too busy serving people to have time to attend to her every whim.

Posetta Baddog was out of bounds to small children as she has a tendency to bite (I sympathise with her on this), but we promised Tilly, who was devastated to be missing dachsie related shenanigins, that we would take a picture.

Here is LLG, shrouded in dachshound:

I am in love with Posetta’s eyebrows. She has clearly stolen them from Denis Healey, and I think they look far better on her than they ever did on him.

In between dog bothering, and chatting we purchased treasures.  Granny came away with an armful of books.  Oscar was exceedingly pleased with a bicycle pump. He claims it is so that he can help Tilly pump up the tyres on her bike, but so far all I’ve seen him do with it is use it to make farting noises with, but he is delighted, so I shall not quibble.

Tallulah bought a particularly fine handbag, embroidered with birds, which she proceeded to stuff with all the belongings that had been in her previous handbag, right there and then.

Sasha (LLG) had very kindly put aside a Bridgewater cereal bowl for me, knowing my predilections already.  I also bought a rather lovely tea cup and saucer:

which I am terribly pleased with.

After that we ate lots of banana cake, chatted to some charming people, and then left before the natives got restless and the TMs disgraced themselves.

On the way home we popped into a very strange shopping village type thing called Heart of the Shires.  Someone had recommended it to me as a good place to purchase Bridgewater, so we stopped and had a look.  There is indeed, a magnificent cook shop there, stuffed to the rafters with all kinds of culinary things you never knew you needed, including Bridgewater.

Other than that, it was an odd place, full of strange little delis, gift shoppes and boutiques selling things you would never normally buy except in airports when you are very jet lagged, all at exorbitant prices.  Oh, and a pet shop that sold enormous sacks of hedgehog food.  Not something you come across every day. Perhaps Northamptonshire is stuffed to the rafters with voracious hedgehogs.  I am agog.

We were going to have a sandwich and a hot drink before we left, but the one place which stocked both made us gasp when we read the menu to find they had cheese sandwiches for £5.99.  This was cheap compared to their most expensive sandwich was £8.00.  It claimed to be a meal in itself.

It would have to be.  I am no stranger to excess, and I do love a bit of luxury on the food front, but I quibble at £8.00 for a sandwich in a restaurant that had wipe down menus with typos.  I may be a snob, but I really didn’t feel that if I had paid the £8.00 I would have been delighted with what I had purchased.

We left, bemused.

Just as we were leaving Jason called to say that he had passed his exam. Yay!  He also called to say that his train was not going anywhere as there had been a points failure at everywhere north of Luton.  Boo!

Eventually he went from Euston to Kings Cross to see about getting a train to Leicester (he was coming into Rugby originally. We are equidistant from the two).  Everyone else had the same idea.

Sadly everyone else who had been stranded at Euston had the same idea. Eventually, sick of waiting on a crowded platform in the broiling heat he gave up any ideas about coming home in a straight line. First he went to Luton.  Then he went to Bedford.  Finally he came to Leicester, where I picked him up, after he had called me at every juncture to see if I could pick him up from wherever he had landed next, just in case he couldn’t get any further.

I spent much of the afternoon poised to leap into action. Then when I did pick him up from Leicester I had to drive him over  to Rugby to get his car.

It was a long afternoon.

Now he is asleep on the sofa, while I cook tea and then go to pick Tilly up from her friends.

I’m off to London in the morning with Andrea.  Thankfully she is doing the driving.  I am very grateful.

Derek pondering her pact with Satan

That is all.

 

The wonders of Nature

I took lots of pictures today.

About two hundred.

I will not bore you with all of the pictures of ‘wot I did on my summer holidays’, but I cannot resist sharing some of the ones I took in the kitchen garden today at Bridgewater.

The colours were stunning:

These are a type of frilly poppy, I’ve never seen before.  I loved this lilac, but they were also blooming in a deeper purple:

Even the heads look gorgeous:

This pear tree is being espaliered against the wall. I love the contrast of the greens against the old brick:

There were a riot of sweetpeas, which are the most beautiful flowers, and my favourites were the ones they picked to go in this jug:

I love this tangle of planting:

and the way they mixed edible plants and flowers in the beds:

Was transposed into the flowers they brought indoors:

As you were all such a help with the Catalpa tree, points to anyone who knows what this is:

and finally, my favourite shot of the day.  A fantastically sculptural looking denuded flower head:

A Grand Day Out

I really must go to bed, but I had such a nice day today, and I can’t wait to blog it until tomorrow!

It is the first day of the holidays so far that I have thoroughly enjoyed, and so have the children.

And granny.

Although I can’t comment on how she felt about the rest of her summer holidays so far to  be truthful.

Today we went to the Emma Bridgewater factory in Stoke on Trent.  I had promised myself a day there where I did not have to rush home for school based emergencies, grumpy husbands or anything else.  I promised the children pottery painting.

I promised granny all of the above and pottery nirvana.

Oh, and cake.

We had an excellent time.

All week they have been running circus skills workshops in the courtyard outside the factory.

Not today, sadly, but our disappointment was more than made up for by the lovely Laura, who whisked the children away to have their faces painted about three minutes after we got through the door.

This meant that granny and I were able to luxuriate on the huge, squashy sofas with coffee, while the children were beautified.

When you have three children, you become a bit of an afficionado of face painting.  There are those who think a wipe round with an old sponge and some red paint is sufficient unto the day, and then there are the artists.  Laura was an artist.  It took about an hour and a half to do all three children, and they looked fabulous.  It cost the princely sum of about a fiver for all of them.  A steal.

Oscar was spider man complete with hanging spider in the corner of his webby cheek.  The girls were decorated in beautiful petal type patterns with gold and silver highlights.

They were all thrilled.

After this, we went on a tour of the factory.  Adults pay £2.95 each for this, but if you buy stuff in the shop afterwards (which, in my case, is inevitable), you can redeem it back against your purchases.  Children go free.

A very sweet man called Chris took us round the factory and showed us everything.  It was fascinating. It was particularly interesting to see how little the methods of making pots have changed since the 1800′s.  Pretty much all the work in the Bridgewater factory is fairly labour intensive, and a lot of it is done by hand.

This chap is making pasta bowls. Behind that round disc of clay is Oscar, who was helping him.  A proud moment in the Wheatley household.

These women are sponging the designs onto the plates.  This pattern is called Sampler.  It takes 90 seconds on average to sponge all the polka dots  onto a half pint mug. It takes something like 555 seconds to sponge the Sampler pattern.  It is meticulous, methodical work, and they are amazing at it.

We know this, because after lunch:

we had a go at doing our own sponge ware, and it’s not half so easy as they make it look.

It was about fifty times more fun though.

We had an absolute ball.

Here are our offerings:

Tallulah’s plate.  Do bear in mind that the colours change after glazing and firing. They give you charts so you can see what your colours will come out as afterwards.

This is Oscar’s plate. He got terribly over excited by the number of different shaped sponges he could play with.  There were hundreds of them.  Most of them stored in beautifully decorated two pint mugs:

This is granny’s:

She got very enthused about chickens.  There is a cottage garden there, and they also keep chickens.  We fell in love with them. Particularly the bantam cockerel whose name is Spike:

You cannot really see it here, but Spike suffers from the wonderful disease known as ‘Frizzle’.  Apparently this means that his feathers will not lie flat, much like my hair in the mornings. Consequently Spike bustles everywhere looking like he has recently exploded.  Granny loved him.  We all loved him.

Here is Tilly’s work:

It is in progress. I did take a picture of the finished article, but I have lost it.  She is here, deep in concentration, making a personalized Bridgewater cat bowl for Derek. Yes Sharon, it has come to that.

Here is mine:

I have called it; ‘The Birds and the Bees.’  It is not rude.

We had a fantastic time.  I think it was excellent value for money.  You pay for the shape and size of item you use.  Prices range from about £8 to £90, depending on what you choose.  You also pay a small fee of about £3.00 per person. This covers paints, sponges, glazing and firing.  At the end of it you come away with something personal, unique and a great memory of an excellent day out.

After about two weeks they are ready to be collected, or you can have them posted to you. Postage is £7, whether you have 1 item or 10.

We indulged a little in the shop before we went home, and on our way to the car park the children were already planning what they were going to make when they come back.

Result.

Oh Wasp! Where is thy sting?

When I was a child my parents were a bit ‘The Good Life’. I have mentioned this before in several posts.  We had a huge vegetable plot, which they were forever cultivating, and we mostly lived off real, healthy, home cooked food. We knew exactly where every mouthful of our produce came from, and I personally have picked enough greenfly out of lettuce to win some kind of award from the Dalai Lama.

Was I grateful for their prescience in nurturing my young soul to be healthy and organic?

Was I buggery.

I yearned for things that came out of freezers and were lashed to the gills with e numbers.

What we didn’t grow we went to farms to get.  My dad was a huge fan of pick your own.  We picked virtually everything that was available to pick.  There was always the sense that the more we had of whatever it was we were picking, the better.  It was never enough to come home with a punnet of strawberries.  We had to come home with fourteen acres of strawberries, all in small, cardboard baskets.

As you can imagine, we had a large freezer, quite a wide range of preserves and some interesting dietary and culinary choices during the winter months.

As a result I am not enamoured of the resurgence of the Pick Your Own phenomena.  It does not make me go dewy eyed with nostalgia.  It makes me think of cat scratches in the raspberry canes and a bad back from squatting over slug infested strawberry plants.

And the fact that blackcurrant bushes smell like cat wee.

Thomas Hardy I aint.

My children, on the other hand, imagine pick your own farms to be nirvanas of wonder, where they can frolic, clad in gingham headscarves through a fruity idyll.  They have been begging me to take them for about two years.

Last week a friend texted me to ask me if the Pick Your Own place about five miles from my house was any good.  I had no idea.

Yesterday I decided to take my children and find out.  It was near to home. I envisaged myself sitting under a shady tree while they gave themselves the trots from stuffing down too many over ripe fruit, and then going home, having knocked the idea of fruit picking firmly down a peg or two.

We drove there.  The sign clearly said: ‘Fruit still available.’  I was aware it was pretty late in the soft fruit season, but with this weather we were still in with a chance.

We queued to get our punnets.  And we queued.  The man at the kiosk was hopeless and let everyone in ahead of us, and then wandered off for a chat.  About three days later he came back to serve us.  I asked for raspberries.  He said: ‘Not really any on the bushes. Not worth bothering with.’

Fine.

I asked for strawberries.  He said: ‘Not many left.  A few at the bottom of the field probably.’

I took our punnets with resignation.

A nice lady said, just as we were setting off. ‘Don’t go too far down.  There’s a wasp’s nest down there.’

Joy.

We got down as far as the wasps, which we could see, lazily feasting on plants thick with berries.

We moved up to avoid them.

There were about eighty strawberries to an acre of weedy soil.

We picked for twenty minutes.  It seemed like an eternity.  Wasps kept wandering into our path.  Oscar kept panicking that he was doing strawberry picking right and insisting that I inspect every last pip on the entire four strawberries he deigned to pick.  Tallulah picked green ones, red ones, mouldy ones and stones, all with gay abandon.  Tilly and I got down to it, but in the end we managed one small plastic tray between us.

We gave up, paid an extortionate amount for them.  Took them home and stuck a tea towel over them.

We agreed that picking our own was not all it was cracked up to be, frankly.

I heaved a huge sigh of relief.

We went to see Mrs. Roody for solace:

Her place looked like this.  It is the aftermath of an afternoon spent baking and decorating cup cakes with babies.

Yikes.

We sat far away from the stickiness and drowned our woes in cake.

Then Tilly went and had her ears pierced.  This was a seminal moment in her life. She is a self confessed wimp.  She has wanted her ears pierced for a bajillion years.  Yesterday she siezed her courage in both hands and went for it.  She was very brave, but it did make her jump.

We had to go back to Mrs. Roody’s for a cup of tea and a lie down afterwards.

Then we took her newly perforated ears to show granny.

Where we found another wasp’s nest in the garden.

It was probably a sign.

I’m hoping it was a sign that we should stay away from Pick Your Own, and stop trying to recover the days of yore.

This must be true, because when we got up this morning all the strawberries had gone mouldy.

The wasps probably put a hex on them.

Pigs before the eyes

On Wednesday, when I was quite poorly and not fit for much, my mum and brother stepped into the breach and whisked me and the children off for an outing for the afternoon.

I got to sit in the back with the kids, while my brother drove and my mum navigated and kept us all entertained.

We went to Staunton Harold, which I’ve mentioned squillions of times on this blog.  Sometimes we go and we absolutely love it.  Sometimes it doesn’t really float our boat.

Although there were nice things to see:

and do:

It wasn’t really working for us on this particular day, so we moved onwards and upwards…

to Calke Abbey.  Mum and Robber are both National Trust members.  When we got there they had stacks of stuff going on for small people, so I joined our family too.  We hope (health permitting) to do quite a lot of historical jaunting this holiday and it really does save a great deal of money in the long run.  There are five of us.  Membership for the year is £88.  This gives us access to 300 properties and sites.  Paying for a stately home x5, it doesn’t take long to break even.

As our membership was effective immediately we took advantage of it and joined in with some activities.  The grounds and tea rooms etc, are available to everyone if you pay the small car park fee. The house and everything else costs extra.

They were having an archaeology week.  We got there late on in the proceedings but still managed to do some tile painting, using aspects of the house, and things that have been discovered there and dug up in the grounds as our inspiration.

Well, it was meant to be, but we came back with Oscar’s portrait of daddy, Tallulah’s picture of a butterfly and Tilly’s montage of various things that had nothing to do with archaeology or neo classical buildings.  Still, we had fun.

Then we went round the house. The children had a treasure hunt to do, spying objects in various rooms. This meant that our progress was what you might call break neck.  I have to say that by the time we got back to the car I wasn’t in the best shape, and was eyeing up one of the mobility scooters at the exit wistfully.

There were lots of things I saw the edge of, out of the corner of my eye, that I would like to go back and see again when I’ve managed to put the children in leg irons to slow them down.

I’ve taken pictures of some of the random things that caught my eye as we whirred past in a cloud of stuffed birds and pencil shavings:

Oscar listening for ghostly horses in the stable block.

A Wemyss (pronounced Weems) pig.  Apparently the Queen Mother collected these.  You can tell she liked a drink, no?

A rather handsome blue flask, randomly attached to a door panel.  Perhaps it contained the gin you needed to down to appreciate the Wemyss pig in all its splendour.

The collection of fire hoses you need to put out the fire you have started to get the image of the Wemyss pig out of your mind.

I didn’t have time for many more, luckily for you.  I know you will never see pictures like mine in any glossy advertising brochure right?  It’s a skill I’ve got.

And now I’m a fully paid up member I can go and take pictures like this whenever I like.

Mwahahahahah

My pinter is half empty

Last night Andrea and I went to see our first ever Harold Pinter play, in the flesh, so to speak.

It was Andrea’s very first time ever at the Harold that is Pinter.

I did a short course on him when I was at the University of Bayreuth in South Germany in the early Nineties.  I can’t say he floated my boat much, but reading a play, or even seeing a play on telly is never the same as seeing one live, so we trotted off to Stratford, thankfully only 40 minutes away, to cop a load of Pinter’s play: ‘The Homecoming’.

I had the great misfortune to have one of the worst seats in the house, despite being in the front row.  I was directly behind a chair, on the stage, which was occupied by an actor’s behind at least 50% of the time.  It did not help me warm to the play.

The actors were good.  The play had some very funny moments, and some very bleak ones, but I have to say this.

WHAT THE CHUFFING HECK WAS IT ABOUT THEN, EH?

I have no idea.  Two hours of my life to laugh at some patter about a cheese sandwich.

It’s not enough Harold. It’s just not doing it for me.

I am too old to ponder the vagaries of your mind now.  Plus, I don’t think I’d mind so much if it didn’t appear that you were a rabid, woman hating so and so, and probably quite difficult to get on with.

I imagine life as your wife:

‘Good morning Harold dear, would you like eggs or kedgeree for breakfast, this morning?’

‘You slag.  You utter tart.  You slag.  Where is my tennis racquet? Is the next train to Bridlington a sleeper?’

‘Quite right dear. Eggs it is then.’

‘Bitch. Second guess me would you? You’ll feel the back of my hand…

and….

like…

it.

You cow.’

‘Quite.  You’ll be lunching out again then dear?’

It’s all quite ridiculous.

What with that and Ibsen it seems as if we’ve hit a bit of a theatrical dry patch recently.  I got home to find I’d missed an evening of programmes about Rattigan on BBC4.  That was quite annoying.

If it weren’t for cake and pop on the terrace:

and a good old chinwag with me old mukka beforehand, I’d have been about ready to cut my own throat with a spoon.

 

Laverrley Lahndahn

When I went to London with Andrea a few weeks ago, we had the unexpected pleasure of being early for our theatrical event, and were able to do a little exploring.

We are very likeminded about exploring. We are happy to wander about with no fixed agenda and just see what happens.

We walked round the back end of Marylebone, skirted by Regent’s Park and ended up in Soho.

Here are some of the sights we enjoyed along our way:

I love that they have managed to insert the ‘only twin’ line here.  Good work.

Unsurprisingly this was the front door step of a restaurant called L’Escargot.

This looked very forlorn, all alone stuck to the hot pavement.

Some beautiful stonework at the side of the Royal  College of Music.

Where would life be without upstairs pie rooms?

and tins of beans for giants?

A prize if you can tell me what this tree is?

I don’t know if you can read this swirly writing, but this business is a gold and silver lace maker.  Thank God I do not have to get up every morning and sweat for eight hours over my lace. I’d be fired after the first day.

Beautiful railings for Andrea. She can’t get enough of em.

And finally, what’s not to love about a city where everywhere you turn it can surprise you with views like this?