Number 9 Dream

I’m trying to keep up with my blogging, because I’ve got so much going on this week I really don’t want a backlog to overwhelm me next week.  Hence the late posting.

I cannot promise quality, but I am all about volume.

And the fact I need to write things down because I have an absolutely shocking memory.

This is a very short post, sponsored by nobody, about David Mitchell’s Number9Dream, a book which has been on my Amazon wish list for a while, and which I was excited to find in the library just before we went on holiday.  I have become a convert to the ways of David Mitchell this year after reading and loving The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet and Black Swan Green by him.

I was really, properly, nerdily excited about Number9Dream.  It is set in Tokyo and I have a small but enthusiastic thing about books set in Japan or by Japanese authors.  I have a major love for Haruki Murakami, ‘The Wind Up Bird Chronicle’ is one of my favourite books.  I also love the work of Banana Yoshimoto, a Japanese woman author who writes novellas about modern Japan which are all about connection with the ghost of the past, and which are beautiful and haunting.

The synopsis for Number9Dream reads much like a Murakami novel.  The protagonist, Eiji Miyake travels from a small Japanese island to Tokyo to track down and confront his birth father after nineteen years of being passed from pillar to post by grudging relatives.

The story is told in 9 sections, which is presumably a reference to the title of the book, and veers from straightforward narrative to a much more surreal reading experience with dream sequences, symbolic coincidences, the gratuitous addition of cats, a mystery and some very Joycean mid sections.

I should have loved it.

I did not.

All the way through it I kept thinking; ‘Murakami does this better. Why repeat the exercise?’

It references modern Japanese literature and I believe it may be an homage to Murakami, or an answer to one of his works, but it just never worked for me.  I was so, so disappointed.

If you haven’t read Murakami first, you might love it, is the best I can think to say.

 

Journey’s End

I am over being cross now.

I think it helps that it is Tuesday.  Monday is now behind me, even though it’s only 11 minutes behind me.

That’s far enough for me.

Jason made it to Tilly’s eye test, which is good as even with his help the small children were like locusts.  Locusts wearing many pairs of glasses.  Oscar put on a set of sunglasses and hogged the new video yourself in your glasses machine doing Pete Townshend air guitar solos, much to the amusement of a middle aged man who had just wandered in to check out the frames.

Tallulah found a pair of glasses that made her look like Edna from The Incredibles and wandered around saying: ‘So dahlink, do you like this? Do you? Do you?’ in her Edna voice, before getting bored of that and putting on three sets of glasses simultaneously and then lying on the floor.

While one of us was fending off the wild beasts, the other was shepherding Tilly round as she chose her frames.  She has gone for some nice ones with black rims and funky green arms that were comfortable and which look good.  It was hard for her to choose the right pair and she got a bit overwhelmed and tearful at one point.  I hate choosing frames.  It is so exhausting, so I totally got where she was coming from, bless her.

Still, she is happy with her choice and goes back next Monday to have them fitted.

After the eye test Jason took them all home to eat my stew, which went down rather like a fire in an orphanage as far as the small people were concerned, but which made my husband very happy.  He needed fortifying after a day buying a car.  He found one. No blood was shed.  He picks it up on Thursday.  It is a Renault Megane estate.  He is underwhelmed.

As long as it is warm, reasonably reliable and drives from a) to b) it will be fine.

Andrea and I went to see Journey’s End at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry this evening.  It was my first time driving there.  I have driven in Coventry before, but in the day.  This time it was dark and raining and we were going to a part that the sat nav doesn’t really like.  I managed it with no more repeat trips round the one way system than Andrea does, so I felt this merited some kind of award.

I loathe the Belgrade theatre.  The seats are uncomfortable.  The theatre is old fashioned and has a very high stage which means that unless you are at least three rows back you have to crane your neck, and the acoustics are not of the best.

The audience in Coventry can also be quite troubling at times, and tonight was no exception.  One person’s phone went off.  Several people seemed to be dying of bronchial flu, and the woman two seats to the left of me did some high level texting right at the denouement of the play which I could see out of the corner of my eye, due to the fact that her screen lit up like a christmas tree.  It was most annoying.

The play was very powerful.  It is a claustrophobic little number, set in a dugout in a trench towards the end of World War One.  The action focuses around a small band of officers who share the dugout, and takes place over a few days before the final push which they know they are not coming back from.

It should be tense and atmospheric and absolutely grinding to watch.

It wasn’t.  This was partly due to the audience.  It was also partly due to the cast.  They were not bad, but they were patchy, and there were times when I found myself not being able to believe in the peculiar closeness of their relationship.  There was also quite a bit of ‘shouting’ going on instead of emoting.  At times like these I found myself dispasssionately assessing how much Rowan Atkinson and Ben Elton had pinched for the making of Black Adder Goes Forth.

The answer was ‘quite a lot.’

What I would really have loved to have seen was the cast of Black Watch that we saw earlier in the year, doing this play.  They had the perfect camaraderie on stage and were amazing at emoting that ice thin peace that erupts at any moment into violence that comes when men of war spend too long living together.

I did enjoy the play though. It was one I have been waiting to see for a very long time, and the last time it was on, starring Ray Winstone, many years ago, I missed out on a ticket by a whisker.  I still regret not seeing that production. I have the feeling it would have been amazing.

If you get the chance to see it (it is a touring production), I would go.  It is a powerful play with themes that are still relevant today and which does not fail to send a shiver down your spine as the inevitable end comes.  The finale is also rather wonderful.

Grrrrr Monday I Spit on Your Dog

Today I am mostly being cross.

It is nothing in particular, and everything all at once.

Firstly it is Monday, which is never great.  It is also the first Monday back at school after half term.  And it was dark when we got up.

Not funny.

It is also the first official day when Winter uniforms have to be worn at primary school.  This involved Oscar and a tie at 6.45 this morning.  I don’t really need to go into any more detail do I?

Tallulah came downstairs wearing grey.  I said: ‘Why are you wearing grey?’  She said: ‘The only other uniform I have is navy.’  I said: ‘That is because navy is your uniform.’

I know this because I had thought she had to wear grey, and then had to go out and buy navy the week before half term because it turned out to be navy.  I sent her back upstairs to get changed.

She came downstairs looking like someone had used her hair in a controlled explosion.  I suggested she might want to brush it.  She looked utterly affronted.

I gave up.

It is not worth it.  What do I care if she goes around looking like a bird’s nest? She is eight.  That’s what children used to look like in the Seventies before they became all pre teensy about things.

At least she’s wearing navy, right?

Jason is off work today.  He was supposed to get up and come with me so that he could go out with my dad and buy a new car.  He has sold his super, shiny best beloved Audi and it is being picked up on Friday.  He is buying an old heap so that we can begin to be frugal.  It has to be bought today.

I predict disaster.

Especially as he fell back to sleep and conveniently ignored the strangling of the ties, and the birds nesting of the hair and the editing of Oscar’s p.e. kit which had to occur before we went to school.

When I got home from the school run he was just having a leisurely cup of tea.

Gah.

and also Bah.

He has now gone off to look at cars.  If he is back before midnight I will eat my hat.

I need him to be back  at tea time, because I am going to cheer myself up this evening by going to the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry to watch Journey’s End, with Andrea.

This is why I am cooking beef stew at ten in the morning and am already on my second lot of laundry.   There will be no time after school, especially because Tilly has her first ever appointment at the opticians.

She confessed a couple of weeks ago that she could not see the white board very well at school and was borrowing her friend’s glasses to read it.  I wondered why she did not mention this before.  She said she had forgotten.

I wondered if this was to do with the fact that she didn’t really want to wear glasses.  It turns out that she is mad keen to wear glasses and she desperately doesn’t want contact lenses.  She made me promise that she could have glasses.

Strange child.

Not that there is anything wrong with glasses mind you, it’s just that it’s not usually the top of twelve year old girl’s wish lists.

Unless you’re Tilly.

We have a four o’clock appointment.  If Jason is not there, we have a four o’clock appointment with Tilly and two small children who find everything that she does an endless source of fascination and anthropological discussion.  It will be hell.

Specsavers will be a shivering ruin by half past four.

And so will I.

I did think that writing all this down would make me feel better about things in a cathartic sort of way.  It hasn’t.

I am going to finish the stew, find the theatre tickets and then I’m going to abandon the house in favour of hunting round my favourite charity shop.  It might soothe my fevered soul.

Grand Designs – Adam and Nicola

I saved Grand Designs to watch with Jason when he got home from scamping.  I have forgiven him for taking part of my double boiler with him on his adventures. It turns out he just thought it was an odd shaped saucepan that I wouldn’t miss. He has all the culinary flair of a door knob, bless him.

I managed without it in the end.  I forget that this house comes with a microwave. We don’t have one of our own and I never, ever use it, so it has become like a glorified shelf.  Turns out to be quite handy when you want to melt chocolate to make brownies and your husband has nicked off with half your double boiler.

Who knew?

Anyway, back to Grand Designs.  It’s always best to watch it with Jason.  We watch it in the way other people use Twitter when programmes are on.  We suck our teeth a lot and say: ‘Naooohhh!’ and ‘Arrghhh’ and ‘They’re not going to do that are they? Oh my God, they are!’

It is very enjoyable indeed.

This evening we watched Adam and Nicola who had bought two engine houses that held the pumps that stopped mines flooding in a 19th Century Cornish mine. Adam grew up in Cornwall, and one of his fondest memories was of his dad taking  him to see an engine house renovation when he was a child, and it had been his dream ever since to own and renovate one to live in.

There were all sorts of problems with the build.  Firstly the site was an ex mine head.  Mines are not brilliant places to build houses.  Engine houses were often situated right at the lip of the mine shaft, so they could be more effective pumping out.  There was a chance that the house could simply fall down the mine shaft, which they estimated went down several hundred feet.

Nice.

Then there was the fact that it was grade two listed, because Cornwall is rather proud of its industrial heritage. This meant that although Adam could change the interior of the building, the exterior of the building had to look as close to the original building as possible.

Firstly the planners, quite wisely in my opinion, insisted that they locate the actual mine shaft and cap it off.  There was only one 100 odd year old drawing to go on, which was not entirely helpful.

And, as they got in an earth mover to shift six metres of dirt to find this mine shaft entrance, they also had to have an archaeologist on site to make sure they weren’t digging up anything valuable, and/or disturbing the rest of the site.

After digging six metres down, they found absolutely nothing.  At this point I would have been questioning the drawing they were working from which basically looked like something Tallulah had knocked up, and which said old pit head, with a big X to mark the spot.

I probably would have tried poking around the rest of the site just in case I’d got the location of the shaft wrong.

They decided against this, and just filled the six metre deep pit with £12,000 worth of concrete, in the hope that it would stop their future home sliding into a huge crack in the earth.

Hey ho.

I can’t say I was reassured. Kevin wasn’t entirely satisfied either judging by the vibrations emitting from his hair.

The main problem, as ever, was cost.  They had £200,000 to renovate both engine houses.  One was to live in, the other would be a holiday let that would give them an income.  They could not access the second £100,000 until they had successfully completed the first house and used it as security on the second £100,000.

£100,000 to build a house inside four crumbling walls ten metres high is a daunting prospect.

I’d have given up and gone home.

But no. Adam persevered.

Luckily Adam is a stone mason and general whizz kid when it comes to building. He also has experience of working on listed buildings and restoration projects.  It was a good job, because he needed every bit of luck he could muster.

He was also owed favours by the world and his wife, all of whom turned up to do this job and that job for him in exchange for things he had done for them.

He gave himself a year off work to build the house and even Kevin was impressed by his sheer commitment.  He worked like a slave on it, and what he achieved was near on miraculous.

Sadly it was not miraculous enough, and after a year, the money had run out, the house was not even half finished, and Adam had to go back to work.

At the end of the programme Kevin visited for the final time.  It was September of this year, and they had been working on the house since 2008.  They were still living in a caravan in the grounds.  Adam reckoned it was almost there, and another year would see them in.

I believed him.  Kevin did too.  There was none of that eyebrows shooting up into his poll that he does when he thinks they’re deluding themselves.

Adam and Nicola were another Ed and Rowena type couple.  They spent only as much as they could afford.  They worked hard.  They didn’t get impatient.  They had a clear goal and steadily worked towards it, knowing that they would get where they wanted to be eventually.  I absolutely admired that about them.

But it was the first house of this series that I did not like.  Inside, the rooms were too small. There was one room on each floor, with a double height picture window and mezzanine on the top floor.  On the ground floor they had made the most of the fact that the planners had allowed them to build two lean to’s to add to the original structure.  The space just would not have worked at all without it.

The main issue was the stair case.  The building being listed meant that nothing about the exterior of the building could be added.  They had wanted to build an external stair case, but were not allowed.

The stair case being inside the main body of the building meant that the room spaces became even more like corridors, and the fact that health and safety regulations required them to box the staircase in, as it was their only means of escape should a fire break out, meant that the hulk of the staircase was just monolithic on some floors.

I loved the outside of the building.  The stonework was amazing. I love industrial buildings, and would much rather live in one than a conventional house.  I say this not having ever tried it, but I tell myself I would.

In this case though, the stair case and mine shaft thing just didn’t float my boat.

Still, there’s always next week.

Vegetablist.

Just a quick post about Oscar.

I tweeted this already, but for those of you who don’t, and I can’t blame you for not doing it, I had to share this.

We have been baking and cooking today.  We started off making jelly, which Oscar loves, and which is nice and simple. Plus he can do almost all of it himself, which is good for his learning.

He was chopping the pieces of jelly up into the bowl prior to pouring the hot water on them, and chatting away to me:

Oscar: ‘I had a friend at nursery and she had to eat jelly every day for her pudding because she is a vegetarian.’

Me: ‘Oh. So that was so that she didn’t have all of the meat puddings right?’

I was waiting for him to call me on this.  He just carried on snipping and said:

‘Yes. She can’t have those because she’s vegetarian.’

After a pause for us to add the hot liquid, he started stirring and said thoughtfully:

‘She is a vegetarian because her mum and dad are vegetarians, so she has to be one, like them.’

Me: ‘Mmmm?’

Oscar: ‘Yes, but she doesn’t speak vegetarian.  She speaks just like me.’

 

Beeny’s Restoration Nightmare -Series 2, ep 1.

Last night, just before I went to bed I watched Beeny’s Restoration Nightmare.  Then I was too tired to blog it.  I should have had a coffee, stayed up, and blogged it.  I dreamed about it all last night in one weird form or another.  First I was helping Graham (Sarah Beeny’s husband) saw down a tree that had fallen across the road.  Then I was helping to rescue one of the tenants from the tied cottages (there are none in real life) who had fallen into the quarry pool (again, no quarry in real life).  I remember a distinctly odd sensation of swimming down through peaty water.  At one point in the dream there was some talk of relocating the hall from just outside Hull where it currently stands (in real life) to just outside Paris.

Very troubling.

So, coffee in hand, bleary eyed I am now exorcisin’ the demons, because I’d quite like to get on with my day without being haunted by Sarah Beeny.  Not that there’s anything wrong with her.  Far from it.

Every single article about her always starts with some reference to her fecundity and the amount of children she has.  The poor woman must be sick of being held up as the poster child for fertile women with careers in television.  Sadly, I do want to mention it, but I promise that after this it shall never be mentioned again by me in print.

One of the reasons I admire Sarah Beeny is not how pregnant she gets.  That is, after all, as much to do with her husband as her.  Nobody’s going round saying: ‘You know that Graham Swift? He’s got Sarah Beeny pregnant four times.  He must have a cock like a steam hammer.’  Nor do they mention it in terms of his career.  ’He’s got four children but he can still load a brush with paint can’t he? God love him.’

No. I admire her because she has never let pregnancy stop her doing anything, despite the fact that for most people it can get a bit debilitating, even when things go smoothly. She staggers about on scaffolding, drags herself round building sites and just gets on with a life that would tire me out and make me want to weep into my wellingtons on a normal day, all while she is growing a child.  She makes it look reasonably easy too.  That’s not to say there aren’t days when you watch her and think blimey, she looks knackered, but that’s cool.  I like the fact she doesn’t seem to mind being filmed looking knackered or a bit stressed, or frazzled.  That’s what life is like.

And as a woman who spent the entirety of her three pregnancies fainting, bleeding, throwing up and falling over, I am in awe of anyone who just gets on with things.

This series, the second which shows Sarah and Graham doing up their 200 year old, 97 room property, Rise Hall, is the first show for a long time in which Sarah is not pregnant.  I wonder if she is a bit sad about that, but it certainly made it easier to lie on the very high scaffolding and paint the intricated moulded ceiling in the dining room they were restoring last night.  With any kind of bump she would have been wedged fast and had to have been incorporated as one of the cherubs.

If you haven’t watched the programme before I will recap.  Graham and Sarah bought the property ten years ago for about 450,000, which is a steal for a 97 room property.  The reason it was a steal was because it was disintegrating.  The best you could say was that it had ‘potential.’  It is grade two listed, so all repairs are bound by listing regulations.  As they said.  Whatever money you throw into it, you’re never getting it back.

It is a Georgian money pit.

Sarah and Graham live there part of the year, and were gradually restoring it bit by bit, but the cost of the restoration and the time they could spend on it meant that it was crumbling faster than they could shore it up.  They either had to sell it or sink everything into it and find a way to make it pay.

They chose to find a way to make it pay.

There is a lot of controversy around this series, and the house itself.  At the end of the last series, Graham and Sarah had restored enough of the property to be able to run weddings from it.  The series ended with the celebration of the first wedding.

It was also the last.

The local planners have since jumped all over the project and raised all kinds of objections to Graham and Sarah’s plans.  You can read Graham and Sarah’s version of the planning issues here if you are interested.

In this series the focus is on two things, the ongoing restoration of the hall, as Graham and Sarah tackle the main state rooms on the south side of the building, and try to get all the 30 odd bathrooms and bedrooms finished.  It also deals with the planning argument.

I don’t know enough about planning to be able to quote chapter and verse on planning law.  I have been reading about it on the internet, and certainly a lot of the people commenting on the articles that have appeared in the newspapers seem to know about as much as me, but aren’t afraid to wade in with an opinion. So here’s mine for what it’s worth.

The main criticisms online seem to be based on the idea that a) they’ve got too much money, more than us, and so they deserve whatever trouble they get, and b) isn’t it nice to see that lady from the telly who tells other people how to do it getting her comeuppance.  You would have thought she would know all about planning law.

Well. Firstly, as you can see from her career, and possibly her husband’s although I don’t know so much about his, they obviously work like dogs to earn the money they have, and as such, given that they have earned it legitimately, they can spend it on whatever the bloody hell they like.  And if they want to spend £150 a roll on hand blocked wallpaper, it’s up to them.  Nobody asks you to justify what you spend your money on, and if you don’t like what you earn, work harder or get another job.

If you want to get affronted at people spunking money up the wall, may I draw your attention to Paris Hilton and her jewel encrusted chihuahuas and her inherited millions before you start having a pop at people who are trying to save one of Britain’s beautiful buildings.

In answer to b), I’m sure Sarah does know all about planning law, and I doubt that she thinks that because she is ‘off the telly’, she is going to get more privileges than ordinary mortals.  In fact, if I were Sarah I would be acutely aware that as I’m ‘off the telly,’ I’m going to come in for more scrutiny, and have to be more transparent than anyone else, because her whole life is pretty much documented by the media.  If you read her planning statement, which I have linked to above, it seems reasonably straightforward to me.

Although I admit that it would, given that Sarah and Graham have written it themselves, but I hardly think they’re likely to be taking the fight into the public arena if they weren’t reasonably sure of their ground unless they were hoping for the headline: ‘Beeny gets a good drubbing.’

So, that’s my ha’porth. And I am afraid that I am very partisan in cheering for people who prefer to restore 200 year old houses that are beautiful, rather than, as some troubled commenter suggested, knocking down the hall and providing jobs by building an estate of Barratt houses.  Right. Because we don’t have enough new build housing in this country standing empty because nobody can afford to move into them in the current climate.

The main joy of the programme is watching them restoring the faded dignity of the house and allowing it to live again.  I love Sarah’s passionate belief in it as a kind of dinosaur that needs nurturing back to life, and filling with people who will love it and use it as a home and a community space rather than a mausoleum.

The regency dining room was the focus of attention yesterday, as they spent five weeks painting the elaborate plaster ceiling and trying to make an affordable replacement fire place to mimic the one that was stolen and sold to the States for £90, 000 at auction just before they bought the property.

As the lady chimney sweep, wonderfully named Mrs. Bumby, rodded a gazillion birds nests out of the chimney Sarah got tearful at the thought of the small sweeps who would have been sent up there originally to clean the flues.

Graham got excited about his wall paper, and it was amazing that they were able to track down, by accident, the exact hand carved block that had made their original wall paper and use it to make new paper in the traditional way to repaper the room.  I’m sorry, but I’m a bit of a nerd about these things. Who wouldn’t get excited by that? It was fabulous.

They finished the room by the skin of their teeth, holding a Regency style dinner in celebration, and to raise funds for a local charity that supports disabled children and their carers.  It all looked super grand, despite the fact that there was no power to the kitchens and they had to jerry rig yards of cabling.

My favourite bit though, was when, just as the toasts were being toasted, the cat broke in and tried to do a shit in the newly restored fire place.

Rock ‘n’ roll restoration.  Just how I like it.

 

Great British Bake Off, Revisited

Last night I watched the final episode of The Great British Bake Off on iPlayer, due to the fact that my television had a small melt down in the week and failed to record anything I actually wanted to watch.

I suspect Jason’s hand in this somewhere as I noted, after struggling to fix the telly last night, that it has totally recorded all the poker he wanted.

Gah.

This last episode was a bit of a cheater to be honest.  It sort of reminded me of those Grand Designs Revisited things, where it’s everything you saw before but with ten minutes of new material at the end, which was all you really wanted to watch.  I don’t know why they don’t just call them ‘Grand Designs Bite Sized’ and release them in the ten minute format, freeing up the other fifty minutes for programmes about Wiccan bee keepers, obscure Dutch films of the Seventies, or why everyone keeps banging on about Gary Barlow all of a sudden.

Gary, for the record, they can keep you mate.  I didn’t get it then. I don’t get it now.  You do not have the cheekbones of Rufus Sewell, the culinary abilities of Nigel Slater or the double digging technique of Monty Don.

And I don’t need you to tinkle my ivories.

Talking of which, one of the interesting things about looking back at The Great British Bake Off is how much Paul Hollywood has changed.  The changes are subtle, but there if you look.  He now has sharper tailoring, a more discerning hair dresser, and someone has had a word about the fact that knitwear is not that becoming on the television.

Look what it did for Frank Bough and John Craven.

We don’t want that.

Someone has taken him in hand.  I wonder if Mary had a word and sorted it out on the sly.

There was certainly a lot less flirting between Paul and Mary last year.  Paul did however, get fairly fruity with the banter with the lady contestants.  When he was trying Ruth’s Boy Bait in the puddings round it’s a wonder he didn’t just lick her on the face he was that keen.

I suspect he has had to rein things in a bit due to Health and Safety being concerned that lady contestants might swoon into their Kitchen Aids and blend their own faces off with lust.

Yep. That must be it.

The programme galloped us through the last series highlights and introduced us to all the previous contestants. It would be totally tedious of me to recap the entire series in one blog post, so I shall just share with you my favourite of the highlighted highlights.

My favourite contestant of the whole series was Mark.  This was a shame, as Mark went out in round one.  Mark was enthusiastic but fairly hopeless.  His signature cake, a marmalade loaf, was what he considered would be the high point of his weekend.  After twenty minutes in the oven it had sunk in the middle and he was forced to make a kind of Italian sunken garden Blue Peter tribute cake, but with pooled, melted marmalade where the fish pond used to be.

Then he cried a lot.

He cried so much that Sue Perkins was drafted in to cheer him up, but even remarking that his tie was perky and that it was time he bucked up, made him cry.

He was an absolute disaster and I loved him dearly.  I think they should have him on every show.  He really did put his whole heart and soul into it, and I admire that in a baker.

Plus he could have cried a pool of tears for everyone to have a swim in when they were waiting for their bread to prove. A kind of Great British Bake Off Caucus Race if you will.

I would pay good money to see Paul Hollywood’s swimwear.  I vote for the Victorian stripey all in one, in navy and white please.  Speedo’s would be too off putting.

The best technical challenge they showed was the scone making round.  The scone making was a super big deal because this was the scone recipe that Paul Hollywood had used to make scones for the queen.

As Sue said: ‘Get it wrong and the wrath of the Silver Fox will be upon you.’

And the queen might pop round and kick your ankles too.

The amount of collective sweat that went into those scones must have made them fairly inedible no matter what anyone else did to them.

Other favourite moments included Jaz not realising she had to divide the Cornish pasty mix between all the pasties and overfilling them to the point where they looked like clown shoes and extra ovens had to be drafted in using Army Chinooks (I made the extra ovens bit up btw), and David who made bread because it was manly, buggering up his girly souffle by totally leaving out the egg yolks so that they looked like exploding paper bags.

At the end it was nice to see that a lot of the bakers had actually used the programme as a springboard to change their careers, and that quite a few of them had changed it to baking rather than taking holy orders or a vow of abstinence.

And that, my dears, is that.  Although Paul Hollywood has let it be known that the week after next a Great British Bake Off for children will start.

This, I have to see.

 

The Young Orc About Town

On the way to granny’s house this evening Oscar decided we must talk about Christmas.  His birthday is now officially over, and although Halloween and Bonfire Night are cool, they do not offer as many exciting gift opportunities as Christmas.

Although never underestimate the impact of unlimited access to sweets and the possible blowing up of the self to kingdom come that these other two feasts allow.

We talked about my idea for making more christmas presents this year, and what he might want to make his sisters and his dad.  I had a bit of a brainwave when I suggested that we make Tilly an owl head band.  She is mad about owls, as you know, and she has a collection of headbands that have various animal ears on that she has collected over the years.  Her favourite are a pair of bear ears which she wore every day for about six months solid, much to the utter disapproval of Jason.

It only made her wear them all the more.

He will never learn.

Anyway, owls don’t really have ears, but I’m sure we can come up with something suitably owlish, or probably, if owls become too challenging, we could move on to the world of bees, which she likes as much.

We were very pleased with this idea.  We workshopped it about the car for a bit, and as we were driving along in a kind of self satisfied glow I had a bit more of a brainwave.

Jason is always looking for costumes for his scamping/orcing/prancing about activities.  It is never easy.

Menswear on the whole is extremely dull.  I confidently predict that the 2oth/21st century will go down in history (should the planet survive that long) as being the dullest era for men’s clothing in the history of history.  Even animal pelts had more panache than a Burton’s suit and Primark shirt.  And do not get me started on board shorts.

I mourn the passing of the dandy greatly.  I do not see why only women can be allowed to dress up outrageously and preen like peacocks.  I admit that tailoring has been getting a little more exciting in recent years, but only if you can afford Ozwald Boateng or William Hunt, or you’re going to spend every waking moment rummaging through the racks of Oxfam with a copy of Dandies Weekly, First for Dandies in your hand.

No. In this area of life, men get a bum deal, and it is not fair, particularly if you wish to dress like an Orc, or an 18th Century fop.

Egad!

Also, especially if you are not over tall and are broad of chest and girth.

Oscar and I have decided that we will embark on a wardrobe for Jason’s role play activities.  We are going to run it past the girls in the next few days, but we are absolutely convinced they will love the idea as much as we do.

So far we have decided to try and make him a:

hat

bag

coat

Ambitious I grant you, particularly given the fact we do not own a sewing machine, and we have nil by needlecraft skills in any way that counts.  But we are enthusiastic and blessed with a good imagination.  We also know how to cheat a lot, which helps.

Granny has suggested we also try making him a map case, and I am mulling over the possibilities of some kind of batman style utility belt with added 19th Century reticule.

I know that we will probably have to scale back rather.  I am always put in mind, when I set off on these flights of fancy, of my brother’s teenage woodwork class.  He asked my mum what she wanted him to make.  She said she had always wanted one of those beautiful pieces of wooden fruit that are kind of sanded and shaped with the grain of the wood.  He went off to do this. Eight weeks later he came back with a small, wooden light pull, roughly in the shape of a pear.

This is undoubtedly what we will produce, in a sartorial way.

But we will have great fun trying, and who knows? We might be brilliant at it.

Any ideas for simple but awesome things we could make would be greatly appreciated.

Me and My Boy

Oscar has had a marvellous day.

I have also had a marvellous day, except for the bit where we had to go into town, which was hideous.

It used to be the norm that Oscar and I would spend all our time together. Now, of course, thanks to school, it does not happen very often.  I have missed his company.  Not enough to want him to stop going to school mind you, I am not that masochistic, but enough to make the odd moment we get together  on our own extremely enjoyable.

I have particularly enjoyed today because it is the first time in a long time that Oscar has not sneered at me.  He has become extremely boyish of late.  He has always been a daddy’s boy, but in recent weeks this has escalated wildly to the sort of hero worship that Gary Barlow currently enjoys.  He has coupled this with the need to be rather scathing about everything I do for him, as if I were some second rate flibbertigibbet type of mother (sssh!)  It has been quite wearing to say the least.

I am one of the people, skivvies I think we are called, whom he doesn’t see the need to say please or thank you to, or exhibit any manners whatsoever to.  He also seems to believe that my sole role on this earth is to pick up his mess. If I do something right I get no thanks whatsoever. If me or anyone else does something wrong there is hell to pay.

I find this attitude quite baffling.  I have never, ever been one of these soft hearted parents who believe that children are helpless little angels who cannot be expected to lift a finger.  I have always made my children mind their manners and pull their weight on the domestic front.

Whatever rude behaviour Oscar exhibits, he never gets away with it. His persistence in keeping up with it, and indeed, upping the ante has been rather wearing.  He does not have tantrums like his sister.  He just exhibits a kind of world weary ennui and low level tolerance that makes me want to slap him about the head with a bit of  two by four.

He will grow weary of it eventually, and move on to some other form of child/parent torture which will also make me grind my teeth to stumps.  It is what children do.  It is the way of their people.

Today however, he has been a total delight.  He has been kind, and funny and cuddly.  He has had nothing to prove to anyone else, and consequently has been able to let down his proto machismo mask for a few hours and just enjoy himself.

We have talked about all sorts of things from whether there might not be just a few wild wolves left lurking in the deeper recesses of the British countryside, and whether werewolves really exist (on balance, he says yes), to the best type of ice for skating on lakes and what all the best bears are currently wearing.  We have had extensive discussions about Fat Boy Slim (Oscar’s favourite artiste) and whether he might be fat or slim or neither and whether that was the name he was christened with. Oscar flatly refuses to believe that his name is Norman.

This is understandable.

We have eaten risotto by the bucket load.  We have taken the long way round home from town, just so that we could drive the car through the ford and nearly kill an unwary duck.  We have watched stupid television until our eyes hurt, and when we should have been going to bed we went on an adventure in the dark and drove to granny’s house to eat chips and show her the new addition to the bear family.  Going on dark adventures is one of Oscar’s favourite things to do.

And spending the day with my son turns out to be one of my favourite things to do.

Festive Resolve

I made an executive decision today.

I am not doing Christmas the way the big businesses and marketers want me to.

I refuse.

Partly this a pragmatic decision, and is down to the fact that Jason has his feverish grip around my credit card arm, and nothing is going to release it until I have worked down the salt mines for ninety years to pay it all off.  Mea culpa.

It was fun while it lasted.

Partly this is down to the fact that by Christmas we have to have decided what we are going to do with our lives next.  Jason’s contract for work runs out then, and we have the house until February.  By Christmas we need to have decided where our next abode will be, and how we will be making our future actually happen.

I have a feeling that our future will be a lot more frugal than our current circumstances, and as I am not very good at being frugal, it behoves me to get a run up first.

We have some savings, but not as many as we did before I ran amok with the credit card having a very good summer indeed, and whatever we choose to do next we will need every penny we can get.  Buying people Christmas presents they don’t really want or need does not top the agenda when it comes to ways of spending that hard earned money. Especially when it is not my hard earned money to spend.

The final nail in the coffin though, was driving into Leicester this afternoon to take Oscar to spend his birthday money.

He wanted to go to the Build A Bear Workshop and get some new clothes for his bear, Bubble Gum.  Then he had a £20 voucher for Game that he wanted to spend on a DS game.

I suspected it might be quite busy, so we had a lazy morning at home, made risotto, ate lunch and set off at about 2.00 p.m.  I thought by then that the crowds would have begun to die down, and people might be heading home.

How wrong could a woman  be?

I queued down the road and round the corner for the car park I wanted.  I figured it was easier to wait than drive half way round the city to a car park that wasn’t so convenient, and by now, the less time I had to spend in town the more I was liking it.

When we got into the actual car park it took 35 minutes to find a parking space. I measured it in songs.  Driving around level six to Anarchy in the UK felt very appropriate.

We finally found a place on level 7 of 8.  By then we were on Teenage Kicks by the Undertones.

Then we had to battle through the crowds to Build A Bear where people were buying two or three bears at a time and queues were beginning to form.

My heart sank.

In the end, after much counting and deliberating and working things out, Oscar ended up getting a new bear.  He chose a Pudsey Bear. I didn’t mind too much.  £5 from the sale of each bear goes to Children in Need.  It made everything a bit more tolerable.

He was also lucky enough to be able to afford several outfits and a small boogie board for when his bear goes surfing.  We had to have a very firm discussion in the car on the way home about how Pudsey’s fur is really not going to stand the surf in real life.

He is still not convinced.

I am glad we live a long way from the sea.  I shall also be monitoring the bath taps closely.

After half an hour in Build A Bear when I was really beginning to lose the will to live, we went across the mall to Game, where we joined another enormous queue so Oscar could buy the DS version of the film Hop.  We were stuck behind two committed grunge gamers, both of whom were obsessed by zombies.  It was slightly more entertaining than being stuck in the Build A Bear queue, but not by much.

Then we fought our way back to the car park and out of town.

It’s only going to get worse, people.

I refuse to go back to the city at a weekend, before the end of the January sales.  It is hell.

And it is expensive hell. And it is expensive hell that most people do not want or need.  I was stunned by the overheard snippets of conversations as I passed by.  People were confessing that they didn’t know what to buy ‘x’ or ‘y’ because they have everything, but accompanying this by chucking massive amounts of stuff into trolleys and baskets.  It seems as if the compensation for not knowing what to buy people is just to buy them everything and hope some if it sticks, like shovelling shit up a wall.

Honestly, it made me utterly, utterly depressed, and as you know, I am no shy and retiring wallflower when it comes to excessive consumerism.  I usually love shopping, but this did not seem like shopping, this seemed like gratuitous money burning of the worst kind, and it made me sad.  Properly sad.

I love to receive something lovely, or to find something wonderful to own.  My house is stuffed to the rafters with things that fill my heart with joy.  But I think the difference is that these people today weren’t buying things to fill someone’s heart with joy, they were buying it so they could tick someone off their list.

And in the past, I’ve been as guilty as the next man of doing this.  Don’t know what to get someone? Just get them something.  Job done.

But I am hoping that what I have seen today will make a change in me.  Whatever anybody else chooses to do is fine.  I cannot control what other people do, or why they do it, but I can change what I do, and I really want to change what I do.

This year we are going down a different route.  I have decided that we will all have less as a family, and  we will think more about what we actually want rather than randomly accumulating stuff just for the sake of it.  Not only that but if what is wanted cannot be purchased reasonably, without stress and possible loss of limbs, an iou note will be given until such time as the request can be fulfilled without trauma.

We will also be more thoughtful with our gifts to others.  This, I am afraid, if you are one of our usual recipients will mean recycled, crafted, thrift shopped or simply having to wait until I find something I think you will actually want rather than something that will get to you on one particular day in the year.

I am setting a budget, and I will be sticking to it unless there are some earth shattering circumstances that just cannot be avoided, and as usual there will be no Christmas cards and no wrapping paper.  Regular readers will know of my long held aversion to cards and wrapping paper.

I may not do it perfectly, but I will try, and I think we as a family will feel better for it.  I am not saying that the children are not going to get their heart’s desire this christmas.  We always make sure they get some of the things they want, and that won’t change.  I am not trying to rain on their parade.

What I am trying to do is take Christmas back to something simpler and less stressful for everyone.  We already buck the trend in lots of ways, and every time we have done it, particularly with some long held Christmas tradition, it has been a breath of fresh air, and we have all enjoyed our christmases more.  I am hoping that this year’s resolutions will make things even more wonderful, magical and meaningful than normal.

I’ll keep you posted.