Have a Jolly Holiday with Katy

The car is packed to groaning point. I am trying to save us some of the tedium of the first holiday shop by sticking olive oil, bottles of wine, washing powder etc round the cheese grater and tea towels.

I have visions of us arriving at a well stocked Waitrose in a foreign clime, and pleasantly waltzing round the supermarket picking fine cheeses and other perishables, all of which will fit neatly in one, hand held basket and laughing at other people laden down with day to day boring things.  I will be congratulating myself on my foresight and planning, and the children will be cherubim sent down from on high.

The reality is that we will drive ninety eight times round an impenetrable one way system, where we can see the supermarket, but not find any human way to reach it short of constructing a new road out of the car’s floor mats.  By the time we arrive we will be fraught beyond belief and the children’s swearing vocabulary will have come on alarmingly.

Once there we will fail to do even the simplest thing without conflict. We will fight and argue our way round the aisles like warriors planning a surprise attack, badly.  There will be disagreement over everything from what kind of cheese to buy to whether pink milk is necessary for our survival.  Oscar and Tallulah will be shouting the equivalent of ‘rip their bloody ‘eads off,’ to nobody in particular. Tilly will be saying: ‘I’m sure everything is very nice really.’  I’ll be saying: ‘I’ve got a blinding headache. I’m going to lie down until the weather’s better.  We’ll do it tomorrow.’  There will be a great deal of noise and skirmishing.

I will be constantly on the defensive as the children furtively try to fill the trolley with Haribo Star Mix, and I empty it out on one side as the children throw it in the other.

At one point, someone will weep.

It will probably be me.

I will find three thousand things that are necessary to my survival and buy them all, despite probably being given a kitchen the size of a broom cupboard, and it already being full of stuff I have bought with me.  We will then spend the next six days tripping over small, artisanal jars of rouille, just because I thought it looked tasty, but have nothing to cook it with.

We will get to the house, only to find that I can cook a three course meal with no difficulty whatsoever, but the children will be forced to wear pairs of pants tied together with baler twine to adequately cover their naked, shivering forms because I will be bound to have forgotten crucial things like clothes.

In the meantime I have crossed off nearly everything on my list.  The fridge has been detoxed. The bread bin has been emptied.  I have taken the bins out.

Hopefully nothing will rise up and kill Derek while we are away.

Except Granny, who has been left with the onerous task of looking after her in our absence.

Granny will be popping in, several times a day to feed and entertain Derek and keep her litter tray from melting.

Granny is already worrying that Derek will be lonely.  I do not worry that Derek will be lonely, because I know granny of old.  Granny will start off with a little light visiting, and by the time we get back next Friday, Derek will be astride a small, hand crafted throne at granny’s house while grandad brings her chocolate brioche on a silver tray, and Robert slaves away in the kitchen preparing carpaccio of beef for her next course.

Then, when Derek realizes she has to come home with us, the people who only feed her cat food, there will be a revolution and possibly a siege, with granny and grandad being held hostage while Derek roams the ramparts shouting; ‘You’ll never take me alive.’

That is how it will go.

Right. We’re off to the wilds of Gloucestershire my darlings.

I may or may not be blogging while I am away.  They say they have Wifi.  This does not always mean that they have Wifi, and until Jason arrives on Monday night it will be largely irrelevant anyway, as I am useless with technology, even when it is there.

Ten things

I have been tagged in a meme.  I love a good meme and Mummypinkwellies has thrown me over the challenge of telling you ten things you don’t know about me.

As I am very old in blogging years and I blog a lot, about every damn thing that happens to me, I find it hard to believe that there are still ten things that you don’t know about me that I would be comfortable to share with you.

Nevertheless, as I am waiting for the washing machine to finish so I can put the laundry out before I go to bed, now seems like an excellent time to think of some stuff.

I know I’ve done this meme before, so if I’ve told you any of this previously you are allowed to cut me some slack.

1. I have a comfort blanket, like Linus from Peanuts.  I have had one ever since I was a baby. It is not the same one, as it wore out in fairly short order, but it has the same spirit. I sleep with it. It helps a little with the raging nightmares and teeth grinding anxiety.  I still get them, but I get them worse when I don’t have my blanket.  It seems a small price to pay.
2. I don’t like long fingernails on men. I find it slightly disturbing and creepy. Sorry if I have just offended any long fingernailed male readers.  My first thought is always ‘cokehead’. My second: ‘Ewwww.’
3. I always wanted to be called Lisa when I was a kid. I didn’t thank my parents at all for calling me Katy. It seemed like a weird name.  Then I grew to love it.
4. I was once questioned by police when they were doing a house to house check because a lady on the next street along got murdered.  This was when I lived in Oxford.  They got very, very excited when I told them I had walked past her house on the night in question. Sadly I was as drunk as a newt when I  had gone past and was so drunk I could remember absolutely nothing useful whatsoever, bent as I was on not falling in the canal and drowning myself.
5. I once had to find twelve antique chairs on a wet Saturday afternoon in Lampeter, mid Wales, when the touring company the head of English at my university had booked to delight us with their rendition of Under Milk Wood, turned up without props.  The whole thing was a nightmare of epic proportions, ending with the extremely rotund gentleman who played Captain Cat splitting the seat of his chair and buggering it up royally.
6. I used to have a mortal fear of pontoon bridges when I was small. I was convinced I was going to fall between the slats and drown to death.
7. I won a £60 scholarship at university writing an essay on why sex on television is not good for you.  Mine started: ‘Sex on television is not good for you because they are very narrow and slippy and you are quite likely to fall off during intercourse and do yourself a nasty injury.’
8. When I lived in Germany I got so drunk at a very terrible ball that I staggered outside to throw up, got lost and ended up walking home in total drunken bewilderment.  My poor friend Kate, who I was sharing a flat with at the time, and who I had gone to the ball with in the first place, was utterly convinced I had been murdered and requested the emergency services search for me.  They sent a fire engine.  By this point I was passed out, stone drunk on my air mattress in our flat.  She nearly divorced me the next day.
9. I had a poltergeist experience staying in an inn in the Liguria in Italy on my honeymoon with UE. It scared the living crap out of me and I didn’t sleep a wink all night.  He on the other hand, slept like the proverbial dead, and was of no use to me whatsoever.
10. When I was a child one of my ambitions was to swim the channel. Now my ambition is to never swim the channel. So far I am doing really well at it.

And that’s all folks.

If you want to do this meme, I would be delighted. Let me know by sticking a comment in the box and I’ll come over and read all about it.

In the meantime I am off to poke the laundry.

Barefoot and chained to the garden

After our escapades with monkey charming we went one mile up the road to Trentham Gardens to try the Barefoot Walk.  Both girls have been before, with my intrepid cousin.  It was a first for the rest of us.

For all five of us to get in cost £26.50 for a family ticket.  Considering how big the acreage of the gardens are, and how well equipped and cared for they are, I didn’t think this was too bad at all.  You can get a yearly ticket, which works out very reasonably if you plan on going more than four times a year.  We have so many things still on our UK wish list that we decided against it for now.  If I lived nearby I would certainly get one though.

There is a huge lake, and you can hire boats, I believe.

There is a fantastic children’s play area which has a zip wire, which is always a hit in our house. I was more impressed by the tiny, asphalt roads and miniature cars that children could drive round in.

There were a series of small gardens, much like the ones you see at Chelsea, all showcasing a different kind of garden from a potager:

To a beach garden:

and an eco garden.

Where they had used lots of coloured glass in a kind of homage to Dale Chihuly, which didn’t entirely work, but did make for some quite trippy photos.

The highlight for the children was the barefoot walk.  I confess to being quite disappointed with it myself.  So disappointed that I didn’t even join in.  It was too cold to strip off for anything less than perfection.

I had been hoping that it would be beautiful, and there would be things like patches of chamomile lawn to walk on, or moss, or other more natural surfaces.

I was also hoping there would be interesting, sensory planting down the edges of the paths so you could also touch, and feel and smell your walk:

Instead it was a raw path through the trees, and the surfaces you walked on were things like wet straw, foam coated in plastic, wooden shingles and various types of block paving.  It seemed, to my untutored eye, a painful, cold and soggy experience:

The highlight of which was wading calf deep in soupy mud trekked through previously by thousands of strangers:

According to the girls, this was the best bit.  Oscar agreed with me that it wasn’t, and got ankle deep on one leg and then abandoned the whole experience as ‘icky’.

I cannot say I blame him.  We were both more impressed by this very gory statue of Perseus slaying Medusa.  You cannot really see properly here, but he is holding up her severed head, and standing on her headless corpse, with wriggly neck entrails poking out of her stump.

Now that’s rock ‘n’ roll.

After this exciting morning we were in need of a little lunch and tlc, and as the Bridgewater factory was only four miles away it seemed rude not to pop in, relax in the kitchen garden, make a few minor purchases and eat our packed lunch.

It more than made up for the mud.

Monkeys in the Fog*

Today Uncle Robber and I took the children to Stoke on Trent, or to be more precise, Trentham Monkey Forest.

We’ve been wanting to go for a while, and as we are busy this holiday, ticking things off of our wish list, we decided it was now or never.

It is in the grounds of Trentham Gardens, just on the outskirts of Stoke, and consists of 60 acres of forest in which 140 Barbary macaques are allowed to roam freely.  The monkeys live as close to the way they would in the wild as possible.  The monkeys are studied, and there is also a breeding programme.  Macaques are an endangered animal, with only about 10,000 left in the wild.  The monkey forest’s aim is to help boost numbers and eventually find a way to release the monkeys safely back into the wild.

I was slightly concerned, when we paid a fairly hefty sum to get in, that we would not see any monkeys.  It doesn’t take 140 monkeys very long to spread out across sixty acres.  I had visions of us spending all day hunting for monkeys and coming home with three, very traumatised children who would have to end up having ‘lack of promised monkey therapy’ at more vast expense.

The monkey people have figured this out.  They have staggered feeding times for the monkeys in various sections of the park.  Each family of monkeys likes to have their own territory, so you see different family groupings at each feeding time, and as they are quite keen on their grub, they are usually out in force.

They are rather wonderful.  They are very close knit, and even the males help out with the babies, so you can never be entirely sure who is on nursery duty at any one time.  They were also very chilled out by the presence of people. You are advised to stay about a metre back from them, which is a respectful distance. If they are nursing babies, you need to get further back, as they are very protective of their offspring.

There were several tiny babies, who were clinging to their parent’s fur. But there were also teenage monkeys who were intent on having an excellent game of running away with each other’s fruit supply and then shinning rapidly up trees before falling out spectacularly, but to no apparent ill effect.

There was the classic, boingy branch flinging them hither and yon routine, and the exciting, this tree is like a fireman’s pole routine which kept us amused for some time.

Although the monkeys have sixty acres to roam in, your path as a visitor is proscribed, and we spent about an hour getting around the whole of the park that was available to us.

The monkey forest is in two sections. The first part has a children’s play area, a cafeteria, gift shop and toilets, all of which looked very nicely built and cared for. When you want to see the monkeys you head to the next area of the park which has gates to stop the monkeys hanging out on the swings and pinching children’s ice creams.

Once you have bought your ticket you can go in and out between these two areas as much as you like. This takes the sting out of the prices rather. Adults cost £7 each and children £5.  We had a voucher entitling us to one of the children going free, which also softened the blow.

A mile away there is the entrance to Trentham Gardens. This is a huge stately home and acres of parkland, which has a sensory walk, and a maze, and all kinds of other things going on.  You can buy day tickets which allow you to access both the Gardens and the Forest, but because we had our discount vouchers it was cheaper for us to do it separately.  If you buy the day ticket, you can move between both the gardens and the forests as many times as you like, and I would recommend this if you’re thinking of going for the day out.

* The post is called monkeys in the fog in homage to my best friend Rachel’s mum.  When we were teenagers I was round at Rachel’s house one day and her mum said: ‘Oooh. I’d love to go and see that new film that’s out.  You know, ‘Monkeys in the Fog.’

Rachel waited a beat and then said, absolutely straight faced: ‘I think you mean ‘Gorilla’s in the Mist.’

Awesome.

Task Avoidance

I should be packing.

I haven’t packed one, single, solitary item for our holidays which starts tomorrow.

I am not one of life’s organised packers. I don’t see the point of working my fingers to the bone for a week before my holiday, ironing and sorting and organising and making lists (not that I iron anyway, ever).  It just makes you need the holiday more, and means you waste more time unwinding because you got 150% more stressed the week before you went.

We pack the night before we go.  If there is anything we forget, we either buy a replacement or go without.

The day we get back from our holiday we unpack completely before we do anything else.  My ex husband used to be a great one for unpacking over a matter of a month, and sometimes, if he was going away shortly after getting home, never really unpacking at all.  It totally did my head in.  At one point we had three half unpacked suitcases littering the hall.  This was in the phase where I was going through the delusion that if I didn’t unpack them for him, he would eventually get around to unpacking them himself.

Ha!

Luckily Jason is in agreement with my philosophy of ninja packing and unpacking.  Yes, the night before the holiday is stressful.  But it’s only one night.  And anywhere you go for any length of time with small children and suitcases is stressful, so if you can either a) condense or b) minimise or , better still, c) both that stress, it’s all to the good.

I have started writing a list of things I mustn’t forget. It is reasonably eccentric.  The most important thing is to remember to set Sky Plus to record the new Dr. Who on Saturday. Missing that would be a major downer.

I am deliberating as to whether to take a mug.

And no, my Emma Bridgewater obsession hasn’t spiralled that far out of control. It is for a far more practical reason.

I really hate drinking out of cups. Not that I have anything against cups per se. They can be beautiful. My beef with them is that they don’t hold enough.  I hate having to trek backwards and forwards to the kettle to refill my cup three times as oppose to filling it once for a mug.

It was, for a long while, the norm in holiday let cottages that you would find your kitchen cupboard stocked with cups and saucers instead of mugs.  This would invariably drive me mental, and our first day would be spent buying me a mug, which is not much fun when you would rather be doing something else.

These days, with my Bridgewater compulsion, it would probably be far more entertaining, but everyone else would rebel.

I should probably err on the side of caution and take one.

The other things I am thinking about taking, that I have been stranded without before are:

Sharp knives that actually cut things like fruit and vegetables rather than mangle them to death until you are so pissed off you give up and go to the chip shop.

A colander that isn’t really a dwarf sieve in disguise.

A saucepan that is actually big enough to cook food for at least four people in, instead of the usual sorry ass excuse for a saucepan that would just about feed one person if they were on an invalid diet.  I feel about nests of cheap saucepans (Ikea I am thinking of you here), the way I feel about nests of tables: ‘What is the bloody point?’

Tea towels of any description at all.

A cheese grater.

A tin opener.

You would think that if you were paying for a self catering holiday cottage that these things would come as standard. Obviously you are renting a house/cottage because you intend to cook at least some of the time. Not having basic cooking implements kind of defeats the object.

But this failure to provide objects of culinary worth is fairly standard.

I would much rather, when you are looking at websites or brochures advertising cottages you may wish to stay in, that instead of telling me that they have en-suite bathrooms and dvd players, they would give me a basic run down of their kitchen cupboards so I know what I have to bring.  It would be so much easier for everyone concerned.

But perhaps that’s just me being weird.  I don’t know anyone else who complains about this stuff.

Maybe I just cook in an odd way.

It’s not beyond the realms of possibility.

Speaks volumes:

Baking Blind

The highlight of yesterday, was of course, watching; ‘The Great British Bake Off’.  My new drug of choice.

Yesterday’s episode was all about pastry.

We were talking about it at dinner.  After I had finished all my jobs and being a taxi driver we didn’t get home until late. Consequently dinner was also late.  I plonked it on the table at 7.15 p.m. and said: ‘If you’re not finished by 8.00 p.m. I’m leaving you all here.  Nothing stands between me and Sue Perkins.’  There’s nothing like being brutally honest.  I am from the Gordon Ramsay school of charm.

The children, as we ate at record speed, recommended that I audition for the Great British Bake Off for next year.  I pointed out that my forte is edible, not beautiful, and that although I make a passable cake, the other areas of bakery are hit and miss.  More miss than hit.

Particularly pastry.

When I was a lass, back in the olden days, we had real cookery lessons instead of the exercise in arranging fruit salad that counts for cookery these days.  This meant that we learned about cuts of meat, and how to make a Roux sauce, and we also learned forty seven different types of pastry making.

I was uniformly shocking at all of them.

Until I did pastry classes, the family myth was that I would be an excellent pastry maker.  The reason for such misplaced confidence was the fact that my hands are always freezing, due to the fact that I have a knackered circulatory system.

When you are working with pastry, it needs to be cold or it all goes to hell in a hand cart.  The colder your hands, the easier the pastry is to work with, and the better the pastry.

It turns out that when I even touch pastry my hands immediately heat up to boiling point and everything I handle turns to molten lava.

This is an extremely useful skill were I to be freezing to death in the Arctic with only the ingredients to make short crust pastry with me.  Or even, in these days of modern conveniences, stuck with a roll of ready made sheets of filo pastry from the freezer section in my back pack.  I could just encase myself like a giant choux bun and wait until Ray Mears came to rescue me.

It is not extremely useful if you’re trying to make quiche under pressure and a fierce Irish woman who is gunning for you is leering over your shoulder as another pool of pastry dissolves before your eyes.

So pastry and I have a traumatic history.

It seems pastry and some of the bakers yesterday also have a traumatic history.

The first challenge was to make a ‘signature quiche’.  This quiche was supposed to sum up your personality in quiche form, whilst also being original and having complementary flavours of pastry and filling.

They don’t want much do they?

The lady who did so well last week, and who weighed all her cup cakes before she baked them, made a pesto tart for which she bought a small forest of basil plants so she could harvest the leaves by hand.  You could hardly see her for a sea of green.  The quiche also turned out to be a virulent green colour, and Mary and Paul were not terribly impressed.  It sort of looked like Kermit turned into a quiche.  I wondered what this said about her personality.

It got quite Freudian for me at this point.

Ian, who wears pink and white candy striped shirts and never gets a speck of cake mix on him, and who is also as gay as ninepence, was trying to create what he called a ‘manly’ quiche.  This seemed, as Sue Perkins so wonderfully put it, ‘a contradiction in terms.’ I could not disagree.

Ian does a blinding line in pastry though I have to say.  He is a pastry ninja.

I wondered what my signature quiche would be, were I ever to be forced at piping nozzle point to make one.

I decided it would be ground glass and chilli pastry with a valium filling.

The technical challenge this week was Tarte Au Citron.

Nom. Nom. Nom.

It was another one of Mary Berry’s recipes and required super thin pastry and a lightness of touch.

That was me finished before I’d even started.

I did feel for one poor woman, Jo.  She did brilliantly last week at cakes, but pastry and her were just not getting on.  She ended up having to patch her tart and shore up the ruins.

It reminded me of one of our cookery exams (yes, we had cookery exams, practical and theory), in which we had to make pastry.  I was making something sweet, which totally escapes me now, but I can almost guarantee turned out to be inedible and which my mum would have thrown to the birds when I got home.  My friend Denise was making a savoury quiche at the table next to me.

We had to work in silence, under exam conditions.  It was supposed to be super tense and stressful.  By this point in the cookery proceedings, three years in, we had given up on our table of four miscreants.  We knew we were never going to be the next Delia, and that we could drop cookery the next year.  We didn’t care.  There was a lot of giggling in our corner, which didn’t go down well.

Denise got to the bit where she had to lay her perfectly rolled pastry into the pie dish, which she did.

It promptly turned into a string vest, as giant holes appeared.

She had no more pastry made.

She managed to communicate this to me in a series of muffled squeaks and with much waving of a palette knife.  I passed this on to the other two girls at our table.  We all stared and giggled, giggled and stared.

Then we worked out via a series of elaborate mimes that between us we had enough different sorts of off cut pastry to patch Denise’s quiche.  So we did, and she made a piebald quiche of many colours and flavours.

The weird thing was that not once did our cookery teacher actually try any of our dishes. She would only mark us on our method and presentation, so she never found out that half of Denise’s quiche was made with sweet pastry.

Hooray!

Sadly for Jo, Paul Hollywood and Mary Berry have eagle eyes and are sticklers, so she didn’t get away with her pastry fortifications at all.

The final round involved making twenty four sweet, miniature tarts, the sort you see waiters twirling around on trays at important events where you mustn’t spit caviar into your napkin or stand on people’s hems.

Up to this point, Rob, the Genoese sponge disaster boy from last week, had been going great guns, despite cutting everything a little fine with the timing.  The success had clearly gone to his head, and everything that could go wrong with his miniature tarts that were supposed to look like jewels in the crown of pastry baking, did go wrong.

He over cooked his pastry in the blind bake. Then a whole tray of tarts wouldn’t come out of the tray and just fragmented as he tried to chisel them out onto the work surface.  At this point he should have given up completely and decided to go off piste and make a pastry jigsaw, but he manfully soldiered on.

Then his creme patissiere went tits up and he lost the plot completely.

What he handed to Paul and Mary at the end looked like something Derek would have made with a blindfold round her little furry face and oven gloves on.  Even I, mistress of pastry doom, could probably have made something slightly more appealing (only slightly).

Paul was not best pleased.  He started to look a bit Rumpelstiltskinish.  I swear I saw sparks coming off of his beard at one point.  It looked like Rob, the rock ‘n’ roll baker, was for the chop for sure.

Then Mary Berry stepped in.  As Paul was hopping about shouting things like: ‘Unacceptable’ and ‘Disastrous’ and even ‘Insulting’, and clenching his fists while a vein popped in his forehead, she turned into ice woman and led Paul off to the mediation tent for a pot of tea and a stern talking to.

When they got back, some other poor blighter got the chop and Rock ‘n’ Roll Rob lived to fight another day.

I don’t know what Mary said, but Paul was not a happy master baker.  I think she has the dirt on him.  I envisage her saying to him: ‘If you don’t let Rob through I will tell everyone about that time you put too much bicarb in your Victoria Sponge and gave Elton John the hiccups just as he was getting to the chorus of Candle in the Wind.  Suck it up, Hollywood!’

That’s almost certainly what it was.

Next week it’s bread, which will be interesting, as this is Paul’s speciality.

Gawdelpus.

 

real life intrudes

Yesterday was quite stressful.

Queen Derek had to go to the V.E.T. for her second lot of jabs and to be micro chipped.  She was very good considering that the surgery was heaving, and she spent forty minutes sitting on my lap in a cardboard carry case while various dogs, rabbits and a cat the size of a pit pony came and went.

She didn’t bite the vet, for which I was profoundly grateful.

She sits quietly on the table and waits to be ministered unto. I have never had another cat who has done this, ever.  She takes tablets like a dream. I have a theory that this is because she will eat absolutely anything and this is just coded as another meal for her.  But she also sits still for her jabs, including the one for the micro chip, where the needle was about 5mm thick and looked depressingly blunt.

The only time she got excited was when the vet donned her stethoscope.  Again, I think it is a food thing. She thinks it is some kind of noodle, and is approaching it in the hope of being given sustenance.

The cat was chilled out. The children were pestilential nuisances of the first water.

They are much better now than when we first had Derek, but they still, on occasion, treat her more like a toy than an animal, and they are also on a very steep learning curve about tough love. Yesterday, because they were worried about her, and were imagining how painful it would be if they had a jab, they spent a lot of time squeaking and fussing and wanting to maul her about.

Although Derek coped ably with the vet. I wondered how long it would be before the children administered one ‘stroke’ too far and she turned round and smacked them one.  The last lot of jabs she had made her sick and groggy for twenty four hours, and she hadn’t been drilled with a giant bodkin then either.

We dropped Derek at home, and to give her some peace and quiet and save the children from lacerations, we went to granny’s and from thence to Mrs. Roody’s.

Yes. I know. I am all about the self sacrifice.

While all this was going on, Jason had been at the dentist.  He had come home the night before with an aching tooth, in a great deal of pain.  He must have been in a great deal of pain because he actually volunteered to go to the dentist.  He is dentist phobic ever since he had a fit in the dentist’s chair about two years ago, so he only goes when he absolutely has to.

It turned out that he had an infected nerve in his tooth and needed root canal work, which they did straightaway. In some ways this was good, because it didn’t give him time to back out or panic for long. In other ways it was fairly scary.

He did say, when he got home yesterday that it didn’t hurt as much as he thought it would, and he was feeling generally more chipper about the whole thing. Mainly because he’s not crippled with toothache.

Needless to say, he didn’t join us at Mrs. Roody’s, which was absolutely heaving at the seams with people.  Mainly lots of babies and their accompanying mums.  It was lovely to see it busy.  It was also lovely, purely from a selfish point of view, that it wasn’t my children who were the ones making the loudest noise for a change.  It rarely happens this way, so when it does, it is important to bask in the glow.

The strangest thing happened to me as I was standing in line to pay, and buy a piece of emergency cake for Andrea, who has been stuck on a combine harvester for the last week, and who has consequently missed out on all manner of fun and games (Mrs. Roody’s chocolate cake is a fair consolation prize).  A lady behind me said: ‘Are you Katyboo?’  To which I had to reply; ‘Yes’.  It turns out that she recognised me from my blog, which she reads.

It is the first time this has happened to me, and it was a very surreal, but not unpleasant experience.

She also blogs, so a big virtual HELLOOOO to mummypinkwellies from me.

We could not spend the whole afternoon at Roody’s, which was a shame, as that would have been the perfect way to spend the rest of the day. We had to go and drop Tilly at a friend’s house, so they could squeak and listen to terrible music and do what proto teenage girls do.

We sought refuge at granny’s house while this was going on. The two little ones professed no interest in what Tilly was doing without them at all, until we were on our way home when they bombarded her with questions in an interrogatory and accusatory manner.  They were very fierce indeed and poor Tilly was not allowed to leave out a single second of material.

It was quite frightening.  It made me feel sorry for when she gets her first boyfriend. Not only will he have to worry about Jason and his shot gun collection, he will also be stuck under the spotlight every time he sets foot over the door step by two enthusiastic trainee interrogators.

It’s probably good that she’s still in the boys are icky phase all things considered.

Out of the mouths of semi crazed, exasperated mothers

I did a post recently about things you never think you will end up saying until you have children.

I have something to add to it.

When we were in Coventry Cathedral the day before yesterday, and the children went to light their candles, they started squabbling about who was going to have the one and only taper first.

I was reading a plaque at the time. It was only when the scuffling and squeaking noises started to drown out the organ recital in progress that I turned round to see what was going on.

They had each other in a kind of headlock style scrum under the tiered rows of the choir stalls and were beginning to put the boot in.

There was a look of fierce concentration on all three faces as they struggled for supremacy.

I strode over to them, taking the first two elbows I could see and pulled children off each other.

I leaned down.

I hissed:

‘WHAT DO YOU THINK JESUS WOULD SAY IF HE SAW YOU FIGHTING LIKE THIS IN HIS HOUSE?’

As the words were spilling out of my mouth, the non crazy, non parent part of me was standing back, pointing at me and laughing her head off and saying:

‘IF YOU DON’T FINISH YOUR DINNER YOU WILL STAY THERE ALL NIGHT. THERE ARE STARVING AFRICANS WHO WOULD KILL FOR A MEAL LIKE THAT.’

Which is what my mother used to say to me when I was a child.

I would look at her sullenly and think:

‘Well, they can bloody well have it then, you loon.’

Which is the same sort of way my children looked at me thinking:

‘We don’t care what Jesus thinks, you crazy woman, and anyway, he’s not here is he.’

Sorry, I forgot his bus was late there for a moment.

Oscar’s Top Holiday Tip

We are off on holiday on Friday.

I have done nothing. My house is a shit heap. I kid you not.

We have eaten everything in sight. I only had groceries delivered on Friday.

We are busy messing about for the next two days.  How I am supposed to pack and sort everything out in the half an hour I have free between now and Friday morning I have no idea.

Still it will all come good in the end.

In the meantime, Oscar and Tallulah have been practising going on holiday together this afternoon.

They tied their bikes together with skipping ropes so that Tallulah could tow Oscar round, and simulate going in a caravan.

Then they took a canvas bag each and went to pack.

They dragged these bags up and down the garden, wobbling along with their precarious caravan train.

Then they made elaborate dens with all their packing.

We were at granny’s at the time.

The condition of this game was that when it was time to go home, they put all their stuff away.

This was readily agreed to at the beginning of the game. Not so readily at the end.

Oscar moaned and lugged, lugged and moaned.

On about his third trip I heard him say:

‘I’m never packing bricks again in my luggage when I go on holiday.’

Sometimes his wisdom is so inspiring.