Ist gut

Having found a home with Gulla, we now made attempts to settle into life in Germany.

There were some good things:

I loved my new classes. I had chosen to study absurdist drama, and the short stories of Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty.  Kate agreed to study whatever I was doing, given that there were no courses available on Latin in literature.  The work was interesting and we learned a lot.  All the classes were in English, as everyone could speak perfect English which put my non existent German to shame.

The university library was amazing, and also held massive amounts of books in English, which we were free to take out.  That was the summer I worked my way through all of P.G. Wodehouse and all of Sylvia Plath simultaneously.  No wonder I’m a bit messed up.

We had an awesome teacher who was an American professor called Rick. He was a lovely man and a brilliant teacher and I developed a massive crush on him, as I tend to do when I come into contact with anyone who has a brain the size of a planet.  I think I loved him even more because he wasn’t Call me Klaus.  He invited us round to his house once and I fell in love with him all over again on the strength of the contents of his bookshelves.

It turned out that the Germans were obsessed by ice cream. There were two, huge ice cream parlours in town where you could sample an array of flavours that would put Baskin Robbins to shame.  We made it our mission to eat our way through the entire menu.  There was also a fantastic stand that sold Mr. Whippy style ice cream but that you could have dipped into either chocolate or strawberry sauce that then hardened into a thin layer on top of your soft ice cream.  It was ice cream heaven.

We got some cash through and the strike finished.  We could now afford to eat in places that weren’t McDonalds.  We found some places that didn’t just serve dead pig or American burgers, and life became a lot more tolerable.

Now that we were not having to be in for ten o’clock every night we could start having a social life.  We found a place where the university held discos, and me and our friends Bev and Martin, who were studying German would go to these while Kate did more cultured stuff or came along and looked after us.  We would dance like freaks while the Germans plodded about exhibiting a worrying lack of rhythm and occasionally taking their Birkenstock off to clap over their heads in a rock ‘n’ roll style.  I do not recall a single German I met who did not own and wear Birkenstock at every occasion.

We could also start travelling further afield and planning weekend trips etc.  We went to Prague for four days, and apart from nearly being murdered by a gangster we had a great time.  We went to Berlin, which I found cold and boring, until we discovered East Berlin on our last day and then I wished we had had days more time there.  We also did day trips with our fellow students who were being catered for way better in the German department than we were in the English department.  We went to Leipzig, and everyone but me went to Nuremburg.  That was the day I had such a terrible hangover from attending a ball that Kate abandoned me in disgust and went without me.  She was already furious with me because I had gotten lost and she’d had to call the fire brigade to try and track me down (it’s what they do in Germany. Don’t ask me. I didn’t call them).  While they were hunting for me I had gone home to die on my air mattress.  I was not popular at all.

We went to lots of interesting local places with Gulla, who had taken us under her wing.  It was through her that we got to see the hidden beauties of Bavaria, gorgeous little towns and villages, lakes for swimming in, fantastic restaurants tucked away in the middle of nowhere.  We were very lucky to have found her in the end, for so many reasons.

Gulla, despite the scary start, turned out to be extremely good company in the end, and remained our friend for years afterwards until we finally lost touch with her.  I think that the turning point in our relationship came when we found Gulla watching Monty Python one night, laughing her head off.  Our shared love of absurd humour helped bridge a lot of the cultural gaps that loomed between us.  That and our shared love of a good feed.

The weather was amazing.  It was so hot the roads were melting, and we spent a great deal of time at the local lido, eating ice cream and sunning ourselves.  One time there was an amazing summer storm, where we had sheet lightning, bolt lightning and a real ball of lightning.  That was the night the lounge window nearly fell in and we spent the whole time mopping up the floods of water pouring in through the knackered window seals.  Happy days.

There were a lot of municipal fountains in Germany.  Bayreuth had hundreds of them.  In the boiling weather they were very tempting and in the end we gave in to temptation. Many is the night we plotted our way home to the flat via a route of fountains we would take a dip in.  It became a bit of a mania, and nobody ever caught us and/or told us off.  Nor did we pick up any hideous, water borne diseases.

All this was good.

We find a home in Germany

The second night in the Gulag was comparable to the first, and we agreed that we needed a room somewhere else pronto if we were going to survive our time in jolly Bayreuth with any sanity intact.

We redoubled our efforts at finding a room.

It was not going well.  We found several places, most of which were a long way from the university.  We didn’t want to be any more cut off and isolated than we already were.  It didn’t really matter, as the landlords didn’t really want us either, due to the fact that we were only going to be there for four months.

We were getting truly desperate.

Then the one and only pair of jeans I had bought for my entire four month stay, split right across the arse.

It’s the little things really, but this just about finished me off.  I didn’t have any other trousers to wear and it seemed like the end of the world.  Kate very patiently took me on a shopping trip where I spent a huge sum of money on some jeans.  The problem was that the fashion at the time in Bavaria, was for stone washed denim sprinkled with teddy bears picked out in Swarovski crystals.  I could not do this to myself and ended up having to buy Levis, just to avoid the teddy bears.

My economy was in rough shape.  At this point we were ekeing out our money by living off of McDonald’s burgers. Luckily we weren’t spending money on public transport because there wasn’t any.

We went back to the university for a crisis meeting.  We were getting no joy from the Welsh end of operations.  My mother, who is a terrifying woman when roused, had rung the head of English and ripped strips off her.  She had said: ‘Oh dear’.  She had called Call me Klaus and said: ‘Do something’ in a plaintive voice.  He had ignored her.

Eventually someone introduced us to a woman called Gulla.  She had a flat and had a room to rent.  It was quite a strange flat and she was struggling to get people to rent it from her.  She was about as desperate as we were.  She agreed to take us for a few nights out of pity.  We ended up living with her for the duration of our stay.

We arrived that evening with our stuff to find that the flat was at the top of an enormous, crumbling building topped by pediments on which wobbled knackered plaster figures of draped Grecian ladies. Several weeks into our stay, one of these plaster ladies fell down and nearly killed someone, missing them by a whisker and leaving a huge dent in the pavement.  The whole building was like this.

Gulla’s flat was five flights of rickety stairs up.  She shared a landing with another flat, whose owner we never saw.  The toilet was outside the flat on the landing, in a cupboard. It was shared with the flat next door.  It was very strange, and was the first time I’d ever seen one of those two tier toilets which leaves your pooh sitting on a little pedestal while the wee drains into the bit below.  It’s amazing the things that stick in your mind when you are a world traveller.

Once you went into the flat you were confronted by a hallway in which nestled the  bathroom sink, replete with mirror and tooth brush holder.

To the left was a lounge with an enormous half moon shaped picture window which was the entire end wall of the room.  You could step out of it onto the world’s smallest balcony, where you could stand amongst the wobbly Grecian statues waiting to plunge to your death below.

Next to that was what would be our room. It was enormous, and empty except for some shelves and an oil fired boiler.  The obligatory bare wires hung from the ceiling.

To the right of the sink was the doorway to the kitchen.  In the kitchen was a small cooker, a sink, two cupboards and a gigantic shower.  Yes. A shower.  There was no bathroom in the flat and everything had just been put wherever it would fit.

Next to the kitchen was the dining room, and then Gulla’s room.

Gulla made it clear that she hated people.  She hated sharing and hated being disturbed.  It was only economic necessity that forced her into renting a room and she wasn’t happy about it.  She told us that we could only stay if we were quiet, if we never disturbed her when she was sleeping, if we cooked every night so she had hot food when she got home from work, and if we walked her dog every day.

Bazi was Gulla’s dog.  It looked like a shrunken version of Dougal from the Magic Roundabout and had the temperament of Goebbels.  Bazi was on a strict diet and was not to be allowed to eat anything off the pavements or be given any snacks.  He was also to have his poop scooped when we took him out.  We had never heard of this before, and the thought was frankly horrifying.

We agreed out of sheer desperation and moved in.

Someone who had taken pity on us had provided us with a blow up air mattress, a regular mattress, two sleeping bags and a lamp.

We lived with these furnishings, and a table and two chairs someone else gave us later on, for four months.

Things go from Bad to Worse

I last left you as we headed towards the university.  We had tiny flickerings of hope in our hearts that someone would take pity on us and throw us a bone.

We met with the chap who was supposed to be co-ordinating things from the German end.  I forget his name. This is probably a good thing.  He reminded me of my fourth form tutor, ‘Call me Joseph.’  ’Call me Joseph’ thought he was hip and trendy and down with the kids because he taught sociology.  This was not true. He was a middle aged man in a pakamac who lived with his mother and was unfit for society.  He claimed to be everyone’s friend, except that if you asked him for any assistance whatsoever he would shrug, smile and walk off to leave you firmly on your own.

Call me Klaus was cut from the same cloth.  He just could not see that there was a problem with our homeless state, and did not want to help.  In Germany everyone sorts out their own university accommodation we were told.  All well and good if you’re going to be studying there for three or four years.  Not if you’re only going to be there for four months.

He showed us the notice board that offered accommodation.  We had to translate  all the offers, work out which ones to visit, tour them, apply for rooms, pay for them and move ourselves in.  We had no idea where the bus/tram station was or which parts of town to avoid.  It was a nightmare.

With a little help, not from Call me Klaus, we fixed up a few appointments.  Then we met with our friends at the bank to open our accounts.  This was much needed as we were running short on cash by this point.

There were several important things we learned at the bank. The first was that the opening an account took ages.  It would take several days for our money to come through, and even then it would not be straightforward. At that point there were no national banking chains in Germany like there are here.  Banks were for your town only.  If you needed money because you were visiting another town, you had to plan ahead because you couldn’t get any cash out of bank machines in other towns unless you held an account with the other town’s branch.  Everything was very provincial and hard, hard work.

The most important thing we learned that day was that we had arrived on the day when huge strikes were taking place all over Germany. The bank would be going on strike, which would slow things up. The post would be going on strike, which was bad news for us because it was beginning to look like our parents would have to send us envelopes of cash, and worst of all, the public transport system would be going on strike.

We were tearing our hair out.  We had flats to go and see and no way to get to see them.

We headed back to see Call me Klaus. We asked him what we should do.  He said: ‘Buy a bicycle’.

We pointed out that we had limited funds and no way of getting any more cash for the foreseeable future.  We also pointed out that as we were only going to be living in Germany for four months, we didn’t really want to buy a bike.  He said: ‘That is what you do in Germany.  You can sell it when you leave.’

Eventually we found someone willing to give us lifts to see some of the flats.

The first one was a revelation.

In Germany, when you buy or rent a flat they are all unfurnished. Nobody would dream of renting you a flat with furniture in it.  This was a problem.  Now we had to buy a bike each, and furniture.

Not only that but they even take out the light fittings.  You get a hole in the ceiling with bare wires poking out of it.

You do not get curtains even.

It is just four walls and a floor.

We had not expected this.  We were told that we would have to buy everything we needed and then sell it before we left.  We pointed out that a) nobody had told us we would need enough funds to furnish a flat and b) even if we did this, what would we do about selling our stuff, given that we would need beds and transport etc up to the very last day of our stay, and if we sold it sooner we would be fecked.’

We were told it was our problem and that German students had to deal with it, so we should quit moaning and deal with it too.

By this time I was utterly, utterly despairing and remember having a fierce argument with Kate because I wanted to go home, as it was clear that we were about as welcome as herpes.  She wanted to stay as she firmly believed things would get better.

Short of returning to the gulag to find that someone had nicked all our stuff, she could only be right.  I agreed to give it a couple more days, but on the understanding that if things didn’t pick up by then I was going home, either with or without her.

Things get bleaker in Germany

In my last post, Kate and I were weary, dusty and full of despair and terrible aeroplane food, standing on the platform at Bayreuth station, abandoned by all and sundry.

I was all for getting on the next train home and giving up.  After eight hours lugging an army back pack around Germany I had already been delighted enough.  Kate counselled patience.

Eventually someone from the university turned up.  They drove us to the local Youth Hostel and checked us in.  They then went away to ‘fix things’, saying they would pick us up later on and take us out for the evening as a consolation prize.

The Youth Hostel was fierce.  The woman on the desk cracked her knuckles and scowled.  There were many rules.  I had not been in a Youth Hostel since I was eleven, stuck in the Derbyshire Dales with my class mates and some very unforgiving nylon sheets.  I did not feel that things had improved in the intervening years.  Not only that but we had to pay for our own accommodation, which was a bloody liberty all things considered, and it was already taking chunks out of our emergency funds.

We had been told that we would have to open German bank accounts as it was a cash society and banks were the way forward.  We had very little actual money on us because we were going to be opening accounts.  Kate had an emergency credit card.  It was next to useless, as at that point Germany really was a cash society and unless you were in a major city, nobody took credit cards at all.

If you offered them a credit card they looked at you as if you had just admitted that you liked licking small children.

We were stuck in a dorm with six other people and brusquely told that there was nowhere secure for our luggage.  This was not brilliant news as all our important documents etc were stashed away, and it would have been just our luck to have had them stolen to add insult to injury.

There was however, nothing to be done.

We shoved our bags in the communal hallway, which was the only place they would fit, and sat on our bunks disconsolately waiting for the woman who had dropped us off to pick us up again.

Several hours later she reappeared.  Her name, and I kid you not, was Heidi Wunderlich (which means wonderful).  She was extremely annoying and flicked her hair about a lot.

She was about as far from wonderful as you can get. She was mostly unsympathetic, very brusque and had no concern for our plight whatsoever.  She made it clear that she just thought we were whingers.

Which was nice.

She invited us to go into the town centre to meet our friends.  The knuckle cracking guard announced that the doors to the Youth Hostel would be locked at ten o’clock and if we weren’t back by then we would be sleeping outside.

We were not feeling the love, to be honest.

We went into the town.  Our friends all had places to stay and were all having a wonderful time.  This only made me more morose.

We pumped Heidi for information.

She said that there was nobody to put us up and that we would either have to stay in the Youth Hostel, or find our own accommodation.  If we had a problem with it we could go and talk to someone at the university the next day, and that was that.

Obviously we did not have the first clue about finding out how to go about getting our own accommodation.  At university in England they help you find places to live or offer you a place in halls.  They don’t just throw you out into the wilderness and tell you to get on with it.  Then there was the added complication of the fact that I spoke no German, and Kate only spoke a bit.

We could not even drown our sorrows in alcohol because no sooner had we been allowed out, we had to go back to the gulag, so we could get our beds and not end up sleeping in a municipal flower bed, at which point, given the warm welcome we had already received, we fully expected to be dragged into the town square and shot.

We had a terrible night’s sleep thanks to municipal snoring and the fact that we were worried sick about our luggage, our homelessness and just what we had signed up for.

The next morning we set off for the university to try and sort things out.  We also needed the use of phones.  We had called our parents the day before with instructions to get help from the Welsh end of things, but these were the days before mobile phones, and the pay phones were eating what little money we had left.

We paid up for another day at the Gulag as it was clear that whatever happened we were not going to get any quick answers and even a dorm room was better than nothing.

 

I go to Germany. The Germans are not ready for me.

Ages and ages ago I promised my brain twin, Mrs. Jones that I would blog about the time I lived in Germany.

Now, while I am trying to ignore the domestic chaos and general levels of plague that beset me, seems a good time to start.

I didn’t live there for very long, four months in all.  It felt longer it has to be said.  As is the case with most things I do, it did not go smoothly and it put me off being an achingly hip and cosmopolitan world traveller for life.

Disaster follows me like the cloud of filth that follows Pig Pen from Peanuts.  These days I am consoled by the thought that it will all make good blogging material.  At the time I had no such consolation, and all was a bleak wilderness of dead pigs and arcane German by laws.

I should have known it was going to be complicated.  Like the time my dad decided to make us go to Italy on a coach with a male voice choir to save air fares, it was not a straightforward deal from the get go.

The university that I attended, St. David’s University College, Lampeter, was very odd.  Originally it started life as a theological college with only a handful of students.  By the time I arrived in 1990 it was a humanities university.  You could study things like Church History, Latin, Swedish and Welsh.  You could study Islam in great depth.  You could do History and English and German.  You could do Geography.  You could not do maths or chemistry or art or anything scary with numbers in.

When I was there we had less than 1000 students.  It was smaller than my school. This was because very few people wanted to go to Mid Wales to study Latin and Welsh in a place so small it made Broughton Astley look like a throbbing metropolis.  Most people ended up there through clearing, which is the process by which everyone who failed to get the right A Levels scramble to university.  They ring every university with places left to fill, confess that they have a CSE in woodwork and a 25 metre swimming badge and then sign up for a degree in environmental issues because they can.

It meant that it was rather an unusual place to study.  I was fine with this.  I spent three years mucking about with my mates learning to grow up and not really feeling too much pressure. Admin, rules etc were very lackadaisical and it was all a bit come day, go day.

The university had links with the university of Bayreuth, deep in the Bavarian heartland. All the students studying German would be packed off there to do their   year abroad.  For some reason, in my second year, the powers that be decided that they would strengthen the links with the English department at Bayreuth. It was decided that two students from the English department would go to Bayreuth and study there for a term as a gesture of goodwill and wondrousness to all men.

They advertised for students willing to go.  There was only me.  And my friend Kate, who wasn’t actually studying English. She was studying Latin and Church History, but fancied coming along.  As we were the only ones who volunteered, it was agreed that we could both go and Kate would do a term of English with me.

Mainly we decided we wanted to go because we were sharing a flat with three other friends and things had become rather intense and strained.  We wanted out, and thought that Germany would be the best place to go to.

I felt reassured because Kate had done A level German.  I don’t know if Kate felt reassured by the fact that I was very good at poetry.  I doubt it.

We set off one fine spring morning, waved off by our parents.  We were due to meet a group of students from our university who were all going out at the same time, and hook up with them to sort out where we were living etc.  It was all going to be brilliantly organised and executed with German efficiency.

Except we forgot to calculate how much our Anglo/Welsh crapness had interfered with things.

We flew into Frankfurt airport and then had to get two trains to Bayreuth. We staggered on under the weight of our luggage.

Bayreuth is famous as the birth place of the composer Wagner.  There is an enormous opera house there where they have a Wagnerfest every year for which the waiting list for tickets is (and I kid you not) ten years long.  Other than that it has very little going for it.  I am not a huge fan of Wagner, and I hate opera.

Oh dear.

We arrived at the railway station in the middle of somewhere similar to my local market town, but with more houses that look like gingerbread cottages.

There was nobody to meet us.

We had been told that the people who had been allocated to put us up at their houses would be there, as would the rest of our group.

The platform was deserted.  It remained deserted.

Eventually we found a phone number for someone who might know what was going on.

Kate rang it.  I listened while she hung onto the pay phone, grimly saying ‘uh huh. I see. O.K.’

It turned out that the German contingent had not heard from the Anglo/Welsh contingent about us.  They had therefore decided that there had been no takers and had cancelled the whole thing.  Nobody knew we were coming.  Hence nobody to take us on to our waiting accommodation.

There was no waiting accommodation.

Woe…

Domestic Despairs

Last night the washing machine stopped working in the middle of a cycle.  It has a full load of washing inside, and the water will not drain out.  It will do nothing except click and whir and flash little red lights at me no matter what I do to it.

I tried re-booting it, starting it on different cycles, spinning it, draining it, shouting at it, pleading with it, having a small weep while I knelt on the kitchen floor.

Nada.

I wanted to try hitting it wiv an ‘ammer (it is the way of my people), but the machine is wedged in under the work surface and the kickboard does not have the little clips you need to remove it.  I know you can remove it, because it is a very unstable kick board.  I just know that if I attempt to remove it in my usual cack handed fashion, I will be paying deposit money for a piece of grey laminated chip board far beyond what it is worth.

Despite my destructive urges, I have left it well alone.

The effort is nearly killing me.

I have tried ringing the rental agent this morning.  They deafened me with their muzak, and announced they were too busy to take my call and could I leave a message.  I could.  It was a message of quiet, domestic despair.  I am hoping it works.

If they don’t ring me back within the hour, I will send another, louder message of despair.

The good thing about a rental house is that it is their responsibility to fix it.  The bad thing about a rental house is that they can take their time if they feel so inclined.  I am clinging to the knowledge that the last time we had a problem, they were very prompt, and the agent is usually very helpful, as is the landlord.

Had this been the Mansion of Doom I would be wailing, gnashing my teeth and locating the nearest stream where I can go and bash my smalls on a rock.

As it is, I have had another cup of coffee, cancelled my visit to see Mrs. Roody for lunch, and eaten a  chocolate banana muffin as a consolation prize.

In further news, Tilly slept and slept and slept and has only just woken up.  I called the school and told them she would be awol today. They were fine. Nobody wants the chance of the spread of yuletide lurgy.  It’s just not festive.  She looks less grey.  She still looks sleepy.  I predict she will spend large parts of the day comatose.

I envy her.

I went to bed at ten last night. After the day’s events and a shocking night’s sleep the night before I couldn’t keep my eyes open.  I must have fallen asleep almost immediately, and then spent the entire night in the same position.  I have woken up with a very stiff neck and a headache.

I am fine as long as I don’t want to look at anything to my right.

I spent the school run this morning shouting ‘ooh ya!’ a lot, and the rest of the time shouting at the children.

Tallulah has lost all her school cardigans. Again. She claims they are locked in the washing machine.  As I was up to date with all the washing at the weekend, this is patently untrue.  I have sent her to school with no cardigan on.  I am so sick of the word cardigan I could scream.  If I never see another navy blue cardigan in my life it will be too soon.  The irony is that at the rate my two go through them this is likely to happen in the next few days.

Then she proceeded to wipe her cereal encrusted mouth with the sleeve of her school shirt, despite the fact that there was a large stack of napkins sitting on the table.

Oscar has all cardigans and gloves intact today, but just as we were going out the door he decided he needed the toilet and it could not wait.  He decided he needed a pooh, which we found out because he left the downstairs bathroom door wide open and then proceeded to re-enact the highlights of the school play complete with songs for our entertainment, all whilst astride his throne.

The cat was mesmerised.

I was fairly annoyed.  I am now finding it amusing.  At that point in proceedings I was just aware of the time ticking by and the traffic building up on the main road and had a massive sense of humour fail.

I will be fine when the caffeine, sugar and ibuprofen have hit my system.  Just fine.

 

 

 

Plague all about us

I have had a very nice day today.

It’s a shame about the others.

Jason had to go and see a consultant at the hospital today. He has a ganglion, which weirdly is on his ankle. Most people get them on their wrists.  He has had his for years, but every now and again it swells up and is excruciatingly painful.  It swelled up about six weeks ago, and it was massively sore.  He has had trouble driving and walking about, so he went to see our friend who is an osteo, and also our GP, who is a twat.

The GP wouldn’t even touch it and immediately said that Jason would have to go for surgery.  How he knew this without having at least touched it I don’t know. You can have ganglions drained if they swell up, and this is the usual procedure before hacking someone’s ankle open.

Hacking someone’s ankle open is a kind of last resort.  Unless you are our GP, where it is something you undertake lightly, and frivolously with no discussion or forethought.

As you can imagine, Jason is loathe to have surgery. It is not a small operation, and it would mean that he might be laid up for weeks.  As he has six more days at work before he is out of work, and he is frantically job hunting, it is not the best time to be laid up and unable to drive or attend interviews.

Jason is still seeing our osteo friend who is working hard to maintain Jason’s mobility and help him have as little pain as possible.

In the meantime we decided Jason would at least see the consultant at the hospital because he might be willing to shed more light on the whole thing, and talk to Jason like he was a real human being, and help him make the right decision going forward.

The consultant, it turns out, was related to the G.P. because he was also a twat.

Not only did he barely speak to Jason including the pleasantries like; ‘hello’ and ‘please sit down’, but he was abrupt to the point of rudeness, refused to discuss anything at all, and after prodding it with a needle, pronounced that the only way forward was surgery.

Jason tried to talk to him about this.

He refused.

Jason left in agony, and fury.

I am going to persuade him to go and get a second, private opinion.

In the meantime he is with our friend the osteo, talking to him about how to go forward and whether it is possible to live with this without surgery as there is a risk, even with the surgery, that the ganglion could come back anyway, which makes it truly the very last resort.

Then, just as I was getting back from a lovely day out with my brother, perusing the boutiques of Oakham (a pretty market town in the Vale of Belvoir), and having lunch together, I got a call from Tilly’s school to say that she had fainted in  the choir concert and was complaining of being sick and dizzy,and  could I go and pick her up?

I scooped her up. She looked grey, and lank and interesting.

She is currently asleep, having told me that she’s perfectly alright now really, except that she has been asleep since the minute we got home, and I had to wake her to check her temperature and give her a glass of water.

It does not bode well.

I must dust off the yellow flag.

Highs and Lows

Another tale from the archives of my rapidly depleting memory bank to amuse myself on this soggy December day.

It didn’t start out soggy. We got up to find it was snowing, proper big flakes of lovely snow.  Derek was going insane, scratching at the French windows.  She has never seen snow before. I think she thought it might be mashed potato.

I let her out and she was both exhilarated and hysterical with anxiety, dancing about in the snow trying to catch the flakes.  It was excellent.

Shortly after that it began to rain and now all the snow has melted.

Boo.

Boo too says Derek.

My story today has absolutely nothing to do with snow or cats.  I just wanted to write that bit down before I forgot it.  The rest of the day needs forgetting.  Tilly is back from her first teenage sleepover with sleep deprivation and stomach ache from eating too much crap.  Oscar and Tallulah hate each other, and we had to go to Tesco this morning.

All bad.

No, my story is about Tallulah when she was very small.  I think she must have been about three, because we didn’t have Oscar then, but she was definitely full of words and motion.

Jason had decided, as he sometimes does, that we would have an impromptu family outing.  We decided that we would go to Cadbury World.

It would have been very stupid to tell the children this, as we had not booked ahead and there was a chance we wouldn’t get in, so we just told them we were taking them out for a surprise.

This drives them mad.  They are such creatures of habit.  They want to know everything you are going to do and in what order, at least a day in advance, and if you give them a time table they invariably keep coming back to check that things are happening at the right time and in the right order.  Surprises melt their tiny brain.

I remember once we decided to go out for a drive in the dark. Don’t ask me why. It’s just what we do sometimes.  The children are usually dead keen on what they call a ‘dark adventure’.  This was when Tilly was very small, and she just had a complete melt down about five miles from our front door. She got so upset we had to stop the car.  When we asked her what the problem was she said: ‘I don’t know where we’re going.’  We said: ‘But that is the point. It is a dark adventure.’  She burst into further floods and said in a rising wail: ‘But what if we fall off the end of the world?’

Something we had to admit that had never occurred to us might happen.  Particularly given that we live in the middle of the country.

That’s the thing with children. They can be amazingly narrow in their thinking and yet completely open to any possibility.  Invariably when you are trying to judge which way it will go, you get it wrong.

Back to our day trip.

We headed towards Birmingham which is where Cadbury World is situated.  On the way Jason suggested we stop for something to eat to save ourselves the eye watering prices that we were bound to encounter at Cadbury World itself.  We pulled in at a motorway services about ten miles from our destination and flooded to the Burger King stand.

I must have been pregnant with Oscar at the time.  I craved double Whoppers like nobody’s business all through my pregnancy and I have never eaten in Burger King so much before or since.  I do not usually like burgers at all, but I must have eaten about my own body weight in them during that time.  The children were very happy when I was pregnant.  Junk food heaven.

As we sat eating our burgers Tallulah said: ‘Where are we?’  Jason said: ‘We’re in Birmingham.’

She squealed with delight and shouted: ‘We’re in Birminton! We’re in Birminton! I love Birminton! What a excellent surprise!’

We should have cut our losses at this point, enjoyed her joy and gone home after lunch.

Instead we carried on to Cadbury World.  There was plenty of room in the car park, so we parked up and told the children where we were really going. They were over the moon.

We got our tickets and were standing in the foyer working out where to go next when Tallulah burst into floods of tears.

We asked her what the problem was.

She said: ‘You said we were going to be at Cadbury World.’

We explained that this was Cadbury World.

She howled: ‘But where is Wally Winker? Where is the Chocolate Factory? Where is the river of chocolate!  This is not like the film.  This is rubbish.’

All the photos we have of her during that day show her scowling miserably at the world through the most disillusioned, cheated eyes imaginable.

How very dare we?

 

Hons and Rebels

I have just finished reading the book; ‘Hons and Rebels’ by Jessica Mitford, given to me as a gift by the lovely Wendy, who reads my blog and knows of my long term obsession with all things Mitford.

I shall give you a brief resume.  The Mitford sisters: Nancy, Diana, Pamela, Jessica, Unity and Deborah, were really the Kardashians (not that I follow their doings, just trying to think of a parallel you understand. I cannot tell one Kardashian from another.  For which I am very grateful) of their day.  But with better pedigrees and educations.  From an English aristocratic family they cut a swathe through pre war society and drove their parents hairless by appearing in the newspapers with alarming regularity, usually for things which shocked and scandalised the nation.

You may have heard of Nancy because she wrote the delicious Love in a Cold Climate and The Pursuit of Love.  Diana because she married Oswald Mosley and caused a bit of a stir due to his fascist activities, and Unity because she became a Nazi sympathiser, idolized Hitler and shot herself in the head when war was declared.

All in a day’s work.

Deborah, who is my favourite, went on to be, and still is, Duchess of Devonshire and saved Chatsworth House for the delectation of the nation.  Pamela spent a lot of time breeding animals in the country, and Jessica became a communist sympathiser and ran off with her cousin to take part in the Spanish Civil War before moving to America where she eventually got involved in the Civil Rights movement and became an investigative journalist.

Just a regular family then really.

Jessica’s book is her own memoir of growing up, running away and the first year she spent in America with her husband, Esmond Romilly.  It finishes as Esmond goes to Canada to sign up for the war effort, leaving her in the USA to wait for him. Sadly he was killed in action in 1941.

It is a fascinating book because she came from an eccentric family who were never, ever dull.  It is fascinating because it charts her dawning understanding of the immense wealth and privilege she was born into and her discomfort with the presuppositions her family made about how her life would map out.  It is fascinating because she gives you personal insights into her relationships with her sisters, particularly her love hate relationship with Unity and how their dawning political beliefs drew them apart from each other.

It also intrigues me because of the frankness with which she writes about her life and expectations in relation to her political beliefs and gradual understanding of the wider world.  Her excursion to Spain is punctuated more by parties and hunting down the next bottle of champagne than it is by any skirmishes at the front.  Her description of her life in London with Esmond and how she could not afford to eat at home because the only cook book she owned called for things like a pound of lobster and a quart of double cream, so they had to eat out in restaurants, or how they went on the run because they didn’t realise you had to pay for electricity and water for your house, is at odds with her descriptions of local communist meetings and the lives of the ordinary working class people she meets.

Yet she criticises Nancy when Nancy gives up her flat and independent living because after a week she was wading through underwear because she didn’t have anyone to clean her things or put them away.

It is truly another world.

I loved the book, and was sad it ended when it did.  It just suddenly stopped abruptly with the news of Esmond’s death.  I would really have liked to have had her take on her later life in which she obviously became much more reconciled with her life and found a path that suited her.

I bet she wrote rude letters to the school as well.

 

Anarchist lunch box

It is clear that I have problems with authority figures: doctors, policemen, lawyers, teachers, the pope, David Cameron, the woman on Listen with Mother who wanted you to sit comfortably.

My immediate reaction is either to say a flat out: ‘No!’ (and I wonder where Tallulah gets it from), or ‘Why?’

It’s not always that I really don’t want to do whatever is being asked of me, but I do hate being herded down a road I might not want to go down, and at least saying no buys you a few minutes to think about whether you actually want to do what is being suggested or not.

I am not a total anarchist.  Far from it.  As I was discussing with May earlier. I am an anarchist with liberal leanings.  I think you should do what you want as long as you retain some kind of moral code, take responsibility for what you are doing, and try not to hurt other people.

I also, as discussed in an earlier blog post in the week, think you should try to be a polite anarchist if you’re going to be one.  Saying excuse me before you punch someone in the face, and then offering them a hankie to soak up the blood. That sort of thing.

I have sympathy with all types of protesters, even if I don’t agree with what they are protesting about.  I have an innate respect for anyone who doesn’t just lie down and take it, or who questions the status quo. (That Francis Rossi. He’s always laying down the law. Bastard).

I hate thoughtless obedience to the letter of the law as much as thoughtless disobedience.

It is a good job I am a pacifist because if I weren’t I would have been court martialled in the first week of joining the army for my continual questioning of orders and my inability to do anything without wanting a damn good reason for it.

It is this inability to blindly follow instructions that drives my children crazy, as the most interaction I have with authority other than my own, is with schools and other organisations the children belong to.  They dread coming home with any message for me.  They invariably get the third degree, and I usually refuse to do anything they tell me the school, or brownies, or choir say they have to, unless there is written evidence.

Even then it is not a given that I will do as required.  I am an inveterate letter writer.  The children hate it when I write letters.  Their hearts sink.

Disgusted of Broughton Astley etc.

I know that as they grow, my behaviour will push them in one of two ways.  Either they will embrace their own anarchist leanings (as I did under my mother and maternal grandmother’s excellent tuition), or they will join the army, vote conservative and have life sized posters of Margaret Thatcher in every room.

Such is life.

My latest concern/question/musing is with regard to school dinners.  It doesn’t affect me enough to make me want to go on a crusade (yet), but it is puzzling me.

My children have hot dinners at their primary school.  The school works hard within some ridiculously restrictive government guidelines to provide balanced meals under the circumstances.  The money allocated for such meals is pitifully little and the whole thing is largely controlled by County Hall.  Their hands are, for the most part, tied.

A friend of mine lives in a fairly affluent area where the parents are for the large part health conscious and well educated about nutrition.  They have banded together to subsidise their school to provide a working school kitchen with real cooks who cook real food.  I am amazed and impressed.

I doubt that it would happen in our school. I truly do.

Most school kitchens these days are just places where the meals get delivered and the dinner ladies heat up the food that is provided from big, refrigerated lorries.  I think this must be a fairly soul destroying and frustrating job.  I am sure they would prefer to cook from scratch. I know I would.

I have a lot of sympathy with Jamie Oliver and his school meals campaign.  The health service and politicians rage about the problem of obesity in this country but the fact remains that the nutritional value of the food served in most schools is extremely poor, and processed food is still standard.

Children are not taught to cook anything properly. Cookery classes are a futile exercise in arranging fruit salads so that the schools can tick a box to say that the child has done cooking, but  there are thousands of children who don’t know one end of an aubergine from the other and think of cooking as an exercise in warming up things from the freezer section of the supermarket.

Vegetables which have been pre cooked, pre frozen and pre prepared are still very much the norm in most schools and add this to the fact that whatever smidgeon of nutritional value is left in those vegetables is destroyed in the cooking and re-heating process, the children might as well eat mush.

The schools my children have been to take great pride in the fact that they only serve chips once a week as a treat for the children.  No mention is made of the fact that potato wedges are generally served every day.

In Tallulah’s last school they made a great deal of the fact that they didn’t allow the children butter on their jacket potatoes.  Like this was going to save them all from imminent death from obesity.  The fact that the jackets are generally microwaved, and jackets are absolutely disgusting if you don’t have something to take the dryness away is by the by.

Which is the other thing I do not understand.  If you don’t want children to be obese, teach them to cook properly and teach them about nutrition.  If you want them to eat healthily you need to make the food taste nice. Even I would take a turkey twizzler over a dry, nuked jacket potato any day of the week.

And you cannot tell me that the meat that is provided for the children is anything other than the absolute dregs.  I only buy organic meat, and I know how expensive it is.  School meals cost £1.95 per day for the entire meal.  There is no way they are buying anything other than intensively reared animals pumped full of chemicals.  I’m sure they would love to provide healthier meat, but the economics are against them.

You may wonder why I continue to make my children eat the meals the schools provide, knowing what I do.

It is selfishness on my part. It is not about making packed lunches, because it’s the work of five minutes every morning at most.

It is because my children have such a finicky attitude to food.  I want them to appreciate what we have at home and how different it tastes from what they get at school.  I also use it as a weapon in my arsenal in a different way.  Quite often they beg me to allow them to have sandwiches every day instead of hot dinners.

I have said that they can have sandwiches at school every day when they start eating everything on their plates at dinner time at home and prove to me that they can eat healthily.  Until such time they are to keep having hot dinners.

Mean, I know, but when the argument comes up it guarantees me at least a week of good plate clearing action before they forget and go back to being their usual challenging selves at the dinner table.

I have ranted about this kind of thing before.  The reason it is in my mind this week is that on two days this week my children had to be provided with packed lunches because they were going to the pantomime and wouldn’t be back at lunch time.

On the day Oscar went I gave him cheese sandwiches, a packet of crisps, a satsuma, some apple juice and three Maoam chews.

Maoams, for those of you who do not have your finger on the pulse of the sweet world, are small fruit chews that taste a bit like petrol with strawberry essence.  My children love them.  I do not understand why, but that is because I am forty and not hip.

Proven conclusively by the fact that I used the word hip.

When I went to pick him up, one of the classroom assistants, who by the way is absolutely darling, and who puts up with me and Oscar with the patience of a saint, handed me the Maoams I had given him and said: ‘I’m sorry, but we don’t allow the children to have sweets in their packed lunches, so he will have to eat them now that the bell has rung.’

I thanked her for explaining it to me, and gave Oscar his chews to eat while we were waiting for Tallulah to come out.

On the way home I suddenly had a thought.  Every lunch time the hot dinners children have pudding.  They have biscuits, and pies, and custard and cakes. Every single lunch time.

So why can’t children have sweets in their packed lunches?

I am already in enough trouble at the moment, and as my children eat hot dinners anyway it really doesn’t matter, except that it does, because it niggles me, and it doesn’t make sense at all.  What is the difference between three, small fruit chews and a doughnut, for example? The doughnut is almost certainly more calorific, and as well as sugar will be dripping with saturated fat.

I asked my mum when I went to her house the next morning before school.

Apparently the children who take packed lunches can take doughnuts, or biscuits, or fruit pies.

They just aren’t allowed sweets.

This makes even less sense to me.

Truly, my head was in a spin.

What is the difference? What?

My mum said it was because the school found that some parents were just sending their children to school with bags of sweets as their packed lunch (see my previous statement as to the hopelessness of getting parents to pay for proper meals?)

Which is fair enough, except that cakes and biscuits are just as bad for you, and in some cases worse.  Do these clearly nutritionally challenged parents not just swap  bags of sweets for cakes?

Maybe they don’t.  Which raises a whole load of questions in itself.

I understand the rules about not letting the children have nuts in school. So many children these days have nut allergies, and children are a nightmare for tasting each other’s food or swapping outright.  You really do not want to be jabbing stray ten year olds with epi pens every five minutes.

But this just seems bonkers.

Mum suggested I join the PTFA.  I looked at her like she was insane.  I would be drummed out quicker than you could say ‘annoying bloody parent.’  I would be the poster child for universal hatred in the school.  Still, I suppose it might bring the parents and teachers together in blissful harmony.

I don’t think my blood pressure could stand it.