Saturday 7th March – First, Take Your Alien

Hooray! Hooray! It is nearly bed time.  Oscar is staring at the wonder that is ‘Third and Bird’ with glazed eyes.  The girls are upstairs playing on their computers.  Tallulah’s opening gambit being: ‘Come on Tilly.  Since you went away there is a new game.  It is so new that it was absolutely invented today!’  Tilly tried to look bored and nonchalant like that was yesterday’s news.  She picked a fingernail and said: ‘Oh yeah! Is that the yellow one?’ To which Tallulah replied; ‘No! It is way cooler than that…’ at which point Tilly’s nerve broke.  She could not bear to miss out on the chance that there was something cooler than the ‘yellow one’ to which she had not been privy to.  They nearly broke the stair gate on the way up to find out.

Tilly is being a bit Kevin and Perryish; ‘Urghhh! Grrrhhhhh! Aggghhhhhh! Dunno!’ Shuffle, shuffle, flick.  Eyes hooded to the left, vague hand gestures to the right.  Shoulders down to hunchback stoop.  Knuckles occasionally dragging furrows across the carpet.  Pivoting swiftly on one heel to throw hands out in the international gesture for; ‘Whaaaat! That’s so not fair,’ accompanied by the howl of; ‘I hate youuu!’

After the school disco which was fabulous and inspired (they have glow sticks.  You buy them for a pound.  I am sure it is only a matter of time before they’re selling whistles, dummies and wraps of speed, only to fund the new reading scheme you understand), she went home with her ’second best friend’, for a sleepover.  This girl was third best friend the week before last until the sleepover became a concrete fact. She was swiftly promoted.  God knows what has happened to the girl that was previously second best friend.  I expect she has been dissected and fed to koi carp with laser pens attached to their blunt little heads.  To be fair to my rather fickle daughter, first best friend has remained first best friend through thick and thin since they were two years old and attended the same nursery school together.  The rest of the positions are negotiable.  I think I may possibly be four hundredth reserve since making her pick her dirty pants up and put them in the wash basket (’snot fair apparently).

The sleepover was monumental.  It lasted until tea time this evening.  I am very impressed and delighted.  It’s always a holiday when you have three kids and someone takes one away.  It shouldn’t really make any difference but it does.  The two that are left behind seem to somehow become less vile and more delightful both to everyone else and each other.  They positively seethe with the milk of human kindness.  I am also impressed and delighted because second best friend remains second best friend despite them spending twenty four hours cheek by jowl.  This is as much of a test in the friendship courtships of nine year olds as is the test when newly spawned lovers decide to take their first holiday together.  If they come back still holding hands and able to look each other in the eye, things stand a chance.

I do not know why they call sleepovers sleepovers though.  They ought to call them wakeovers, except that it somehow sounds quite Irish and funereal.  At a wakeover you would expect them to light candles and sob the night away into a bottle of whiskey before having a giant fight and declaring their undying love for each other at casualty at six in the morning.  Actually wakeover may be the perfect word as long as you throw in a Wii and a copy of High School Musical just for the hell of it.

She has come back with a pet alien in an egg.  The alien is apparently called ‘Zip’.  Zip is a black alien who is wrapped in a kind of clear, snot like goo encased in the plastic egg.  Once you crack the egg open you can unwrap the goo blanket and expose the alien.  I have it on good authority that if you look after your alien properly it has the ability to give birth.  Apparently aliens do not have babies from their tummy or lady bottoms, they have them from the backs of their heads.  You know if you’re looking after it properly if the crack in the back of its head starts to open.

We have examined Zip minutely.  It seems that Zip is thriving through being handled ineptly by small, dirty hands.  She positively loves being poked and prodded and enduring a liberal coating of hair in her protective goo.  These tender ministrations have done the trick and we have all stared in rapt fascination at the widening crack on the back of Zip’s head.  She could be having a live alien birth by this time tomorrow.  How can we contain ourselves in the meantime?

Tallulah is not at all jealous of the sleepover.  She is however, consumed with the fiendish green devil at Tilly’s acquisition of Zip. She has asked whether she can hold Zip about nine hundred times in less than an hour.  Tilly of course, omnipotent in her ownership has patronisingly explained that Tallulah’s fumbling may compromise the birth process and that she is not allowed.  Oscar was more brutal: ‘Tulah! You can’t hold it.  It’s TOO sticky!’

Zip apparently was only a pound.  Tallulah is now jonesing to rush down to the Co-op to purchase her own alien and demanded to set off immediately with her savings.  She was outraged of Glenfield when I said no.  Denied. Denied. Denied. What if all the aliens are gone by tomorrow?  What if there is a rush on goo covered aliens and nobody makes anymore.  I said I would live with the guilt.  I am now nine hundredth reserve in Tallulah’s best friend list and top of her; ‘People I would most like to jab in the eye with a fork’ list.

As in the fine tradition of all childhood sleepovers Tilly looks like she has slept nary a wink.  In fact she looks worse than me and I’ve been nursing a fine and intricate migraine all day.  I look slightly more festive because we did crafts this afternoon, hence my wan, grey appearance being enlivened with a patina of glitter and a pink feather I found stuck dashingly behind my ear. 

Tallulah has to make portraits with red noses and then pay the school to put them up in the school ‘art gallery’ for red nose day.  I was feeling creative myself and made a particularly splendid picture of Tallulah with a giant lion’s mane of yellow paper hair which I stuck on with PVA glue.  I was very impressed with the result.  Less impressed when Oscar stuck feathers to his elbow and even less impressed when he glued random lumps of tuna into his hair which he had found after my sluttish failure to sweep up properly after a fishy snack.  I did wonder whether feathers, tuna and a liberal application of sparkles, once hardened with glue would make an excellent fly fishing lure.  I may scrape up the resultant mess into an envelope and send it to the Great British Trout Fisherman’s Association, or failing that, J. R. Hartley.  It seems a shame to waste it.

Friday 6th March – Sartoriality

Yesterday it rained. It rained a lot.  Then it did a bit of random snowing, just for the hell of it.  Then that melted and it rained some more.  Oscar was very excited and wanted to go outside and paddle in his new Charlie and Lola slippers.  These are officially the fastest slippers in the world.  We tested every single pair on offer at Sainsbury’s for speed and turning circle smallness (?) and these won.  He was most upset when I refused to let him puddle surf in his slippers.  This morning he wore his wellies to be cunning.  We got outside to find that we had been blessed with a visit by Jack Frost and the ground was rock hard.  He began an almighty tantrum until Tallulah had a brain wave and said that he should do ice skating instead.  Yay Tallulah!  That sort of practical genius is what one meeting of Rainbows will do for you.  It works, by the lord harry, it works!

We bought slippers because nursery asked us.  We do not wear slippers in our house.  In our house we fear slippers.  I have never, ever seen the point of slippers.  Thick socks, yes.  Slippers, no.

In the Seventies my mum used to have a friend who wore those slippers that were actually mules with ostrich feather fluff stuff on them.  You know, retro whore slippers.  She used to have matching negligee sets and silk dressing gowns in a panoply of shocking colours with lots of lace as well.  I thought this was very impressive.  I was particularly impressed because she used to give her cast off whore’s wardrobe to her daughter to play in.  They made excellent princess outfits.  I wanted to know why my mother didn’t wear such items.  She pointed out that we lived in a barren hell hole with an extinct French boiler that nobody knew how to work because the instructions were in French, and we had stone floors.  I thought she was just being difficult in her refusal to lay off the winceyette.

My mum used to wear this rust coloured jumper along with four hundred other layers of clothing as night attire.  The rusty jumper was disgusting.  It was bobbly and beginning to unravel and was shapeless and vile.  I loved it.  When she decided it was unfit for purpose anymore she tried to throw it away.  I wouldn’t let her.  I hid it and then wore it religiously for several years when I was a teenager.  It was about 100 years old by then and even more disgusting, particularly where I had ‘fixed’ it with some turquoise wool.  I used to drag it home from university every term. It would lie on the floor like a skinned orangutan waiting its turn for the washing machine.  At least once during every trip home my mother would try to pinch it and throw it in the bin.  I would diligently fish it out and re wash it. 

I stopped wearing it eventually but I still have it somewhere in the loft.  I think I may be buried in it.  Or I may bury mum in it if she goes first, just to annoy her for making me sad.

When I was a teenager I looked hideous.  You have seen pictures.  These were not the most unfortunate photographs.  Those have been burned.  I decided early on that there was no point in me trying to keep up with fashion and beauty trends.  I didn’t have enough money to be fashionable.  I didn’t have enough beauty to be beautiful.  I decided to be eccentric.  Hence the rusty jumper and the other, what can charitably be called ‘eclectic’ items in my wardrobe.

Because I did not have a lot of money I used to buy lots of my clothes from charity shops and jumble sales.  In jumble sales you have to have a method if you’re going about it seriously, otherwise some vicious old lady with a handlebar moustache, a hat like a brain and a very sharp umbrella will kill you in the first five minutes.  My method was to take carrier bags.  I would scoot along the mountains of clothes and fill them as quickly as possible.  I would choose by fabric.  If I liked the feel or pattern of a fabric  it would go in the bag.  I never checked what it was or whether it would fit, it just went in the bag.  I would fill a bag, show it to the woman behind the mountain and say; ‘How much for the carrier bag?’  It worked a treat. 

Admittedly there were some things that didn’t always work stylistically, but there were more hits than misses.  Things that didn’t quite work either got given to my mum for the eternal patch work quilt of infinity, which she is still working on, twenty years later, or given away to other interested parties.

I also used to freely scavenge through the wardrobes of my family.  I was the smallest one in our family and considered everyone else’s clothes fair game.  I used to wear quite a bit of my brother’s clothing for a while.  Then I moved onto the richer pickings of my dad.  I wore a lot of waistcoats and some cravats he had from back in the day.  Also his old suit jackets rolled up.  I avoided the brushed denim flared safari trouser suit with pleated pockets.  It made me weep to look at it.  And the tan leather boots that made him look like a homosexual builder, but which he loved passionately.  Bless.

My mum’s clothes didn’t work for me quite so much.  Because they were quite sensible on the whole it was difficult to make them look avant garde enough.  She did have some stuff from when she was first married, but it turns out that she was much skinnier than me and I could get into things as long as I didn’t want to breathe.  In the  case of the flared and gathered Pucci trouser suit this was all to the good, as I thought and still do, that it is truly evil and hideous.  With the black and gold brocade column dress a la Bond villainesses, this made me a bit sad.  What outraged me was the fact that she later admitted that she had had two Biba suits as going away outfits for her honeymoon and had thrown them away! Gahhhhhh! I still feel sick about that now.

Once I adapted a pair of my grandad’s red and white striped flannel pyjamas.  That was a happy day for me.  I sewed up the fly and used to wear it as a suit with a man’s dinner jacket over the top and Doc Martens.  Sometimes I’d team it with a hat.  My friends, who all dressed normally, were remarkably easy going about it.  I never got beaten up either, which considering I lived in a very narrow minded town in the midlands was quite amazing.  I think people just thought I was a harmless lunatic.  Mostly I was.

My parents were also very flexible about my sartorial choices which is good, seeing as I believe it was my mother’s refusal to wear coffee coloured nylon negligees with tart’s mules in the seventies and her insistence on picking me up from nursery wearing tie dye kaftans that brought it all about in the first place.  As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

I am only telling you all this because it is the school disco tonight and I am limbering up to be accepting of whatever fashion choices they choose to make.  I swear on the rusty jumper that I shall not snigger, sigh or roll my eyes at whatever sartorial combinations they adopt. I shall be supportive and kindly and probably not mention having to wear a warm vest at all.

Thursday 5th March – Saj’s Blog

Saj is feeling a bit sad.  She thinks a blog entry from me should cheer her up.  This is a terrible burden of responsibility.  Possibly worse than making Alan Measles.  I have no idea what I am going to say.  I am very tired.  I was up until four this morning and got the kids up at half seven to go to school.  I am dead on my feet, and as much as I would enjoy seeing Andrew Davies I think that in this state the best I can hope for is to dribble all over him and snore over everything he says.  Consequently I am sending Andrea to report on the Colin Firth/shirt situation and am shortly going back to bed in the hope that I may get some uninterrupted sleep.

I enjoyed the Tempest.  Anthony Sher is one of those actors who invariably plays Anthony Sher, rather like Michael Caine, who has made an entire career out of being Michael Caine.  Nice work if you can get it.  I can’t help finding Sher a little overwhelming.  In this performance however he did try to get his rampant Sher’ness under control.  He lurked about under a tree a lot, grinning like a demented pixie with his grizzled locks waving in time to the music.

It was a Tempest set around the history of colonialism and South African politics.  It was poignant and a bit wistful.  You ended up kind of feeling sorry for Prospero who ends the play a frightened old man going back to a world that has almost forgotten him, with no magic to protect him.  He’s a Prospero you can imagine sitting on the verandah at the Shady Pines rest home for retired mages, sucking his false teeth and reminiscing about the days when he controlled the airy spirits while everyone else sighs and wishes he’d just stop banging on.

The staging was magnificent and rather overshadowed the performances.  The costumes were inspired by African mythology.  There were serpents lit by lanterns, weaving around painted animal spirits, giant brightly coloured puppets and a dining table in the shape of a raffia chameleon.  It was all go.  I bet the props department had to go on a basket weaving course.  There was an extraordinary amount of raffia.  Probably a health and safety risk.  Thank god they’ve banned smoking in public places, we could all have gone up like a tinder box.

It was a fun evening and even my mum, who we took with us, enjoyed it.  She loves The Tempest, but is not such a fan of new forms of staging Shakespearean plays.  She pines for the days of doublet and hose and thigh slapping.  She likes rich brocades and tightly cinched bodices.  Sadly for her, this is now terribly passe in the world of Shakespearean theatre.  The last Tempest I saw was set in a round glass box and had Pete Postlethwaite wearing a Muu Muu.  The time before that Andrea saw the one with Patrick Stewart set as an Inuit fable in the icy tundras of the arctic.  Apparently in the feast scene, Aerial bursts out of the innards of a dead seal, which is nice.  Something to put on your CV I expect. ‘2007: GNVQ Level 1. Jumping out of dead mammals. Check.’

We went to Carluccio’s for dinner. I had an exquisite duck salad.  It was an excellent salad.  What I like to think of as a ‘man’s salad.’  i.e. it had hardly any greenery and a lot of meat and potatoes in it.  I followed it with raspberry crumble cheesecake and their amazingly thick hot chocolate which is served in an espresso cup and which you have to eat with a spoon.  I love it.  It tastes just like melted chocolate, like I always imagined hot chocolate would taste when I was a girl. 

Drinking hot chocolate for the first time and finding out how utterly weedy and wet it was in comparison to the hot chocolate of my dreams was one of the biggest disappointments of my young life it has to be said.  It was only when I went to Seville about six years ago that I discovered that the hot chocolate I imagined was actually real, available and in a cafe near you (well, as long as you live in Seville, obviously).  It seriously made me think about moving to Seville, that and their obsession with anchovies, which rivals my own.  I could have lived there happily, avoiding salted cod and oranges, spending my life spooning hot chocolate and small salty fish into my gaping maw.  Sigh…

Right.  That will have to do. I need to go and sleep now. My eyes are so gritty they will be producing eye cement if I don’t give in and seek my bed.  Plus, I have to keep my strength up.  It is Tallulah’s first visit to Rainbows (the junior version of Brownies) tonight. She has been on the list for a year and a bit and her time has finally come.  She was so excited about it this morning there was no getting any sense out of her, so I need my wits about me for the chaos which will undoubtedly engulf us once school has ended.

Wednesday March 4th – Mummification

Some days it’s hard not to feel like one of those women the ranters on Alpha Mummy all seem to despise.  Those mothers who are fixated on their children and talk about nothing else.  Even supporters of mothers in general tend to get a bit hacked off about these types of women.  I know I do.  It’s not that babies aren’t interesting, well they can be if you have reasonably winsome, intelligent babies.  And I totally get the fact that new mum’s in particular have parboiled cabbages for brains, are three millimetres away from a nervous break down and have no clue what they’re doing.  Hence their need to verbalise what is going in in their lives in the hope that someone will save them from this roundabout of insanity.

It’s just that there are a lot of other interesting things out there too, things you don’t want leaping out of hedges to surprise you once your children have left home. What is boring is talking about pooh, wee, snot, bowel movements and their timings and consistencies, what brand of nappies you buy, which baby formula you choose, real nappies versus naughty nappies, breast is best etc.  Unless you have tales of exploding pooh, exploding nipples or baby milk which tastes of steak and chips.

We all go there. I’m convinced of it.  Those mothers who say they don’t, are totally lying.  Just like those couples who celebrate their Ruby wedding and announce that the secret of their long marriage is the fact that they never exchanged a cross word in the last billion years.  I want to shout; ‘Liar! Liar! Pants on fire!’ or; ‘That’s because your wife died on your honeymoon and you’re too retarded to have noticed yet.’

I have been feeling a bit mummified myself in the last couple of days.  Not really sure why to be honest.  It’s just a low level cloud of parenting doom that has been sweeping over me.  I decided this morning that this was stupid and that I must do something to restore myself to some semblance of normality, so that I don’t suddenly find myself signing up to ‘Which Mummy?’ magazine in a fit of pique and hand weaving my own nappy wipes.

As I have pressing matters of bear making to get on with I thought the easiest thing in terms of comfort blogging would be to make a list of things I have done in the last ten days or so that are resolutely not to do with being a mummy or parenthood.  This might rip the scales from my eyes and cause me to convene a meeting whereupon I reinstate myself into the realms of the human race once more.

1. I have seen several films in the last week. As well as seeing two Oscar winners, Man on Wire and The Reader, I also saw a French language film ‘I’ve Loved You So Long.’  I was not intimidated by the sub titles.  Furthermore, one of the films was a documentary which required me to think and be pragmatic, and one was at the cinema which required me to get dressed and go out to mingle with my fellow human beings.

2. I have been out for lunch/dinner several times in the last week.  I even managed to eat noodles with chopsticks and not drop them down my cleavage.  It has only taken me nearly thirty seven years.  All the places I went out to eat were not burger joints or chip shops.  We even went to the pub for lunch on Saturday.  The pub! Impressive eh?

3. Friends have been for visits.  Childless friends, with whom I talked about non child related subject.  We have talked about books, art, interior design, the interminable subject of Jade Goody, alternative medicine, Radio Four and what a marvellous invention Radio Four’s Listen Again service is.

4. I have read books.  I have read two books for Amazon Vine and also Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami.  I have been meaning to read Kafka on the Shore for months, so I am particularly proud of this achievement.  I will blank out the number of times I have been expected to read ‘Runaway Roley’ from the Bob The Builder oeuvre, because that would just depress me.  I am pleased to announce that we are now onto Alfie’s New Boots, which is much more satisfactory.  I love Shirley Hughes. I would read these books even if I didn’t have children.

5. I have signed up for my first Open University course since failing to complete the Heritage course last Autumn.  Andrea e-mailed me with the words; ‘There is a new course.  They have written it just for you.’  I e-mailed back; ‘Is it called; ‘Whinging for the Middle Aged Woman?’  Apparently it is not.  It is a third level course on Children’s Literature.  I am over the moon.  It starts in October.  I was so excited I did a little dance.  I may even have cried; Frabjubous day, calloo callay’ or some such nonsense.

6. I have done a lot of sewing.  I am going great guns.  I have nearly finished the front of Alan II The Revenge already.

7. I am going out tonight.  I am going to see the Anthony Sher version of The Tempest at the RSC.  I am excited, even though I am deathly tired and will undoubtedly nod my way through the second half.  It has great reviews.  I am not a huge fan of Sher. I didn’t enjoy his Othello a couple of years ago, but I will try my  best.  It might help that I think The Tempest is a better play regardless of who is in it.

8. Tomorrow I am going to a lecture by Andrew Davies at De Montfort University.  He is going to be talking about how come he is such a whiz at adapting classic novels for the BBC and stuffing them full of sex.  I am hoping for several pictures of Colin Firth emerging dripping from the lake.  This will be good.

I was hoping to make it ten things.  Ten is a good listy type number, but eight’s not bad is it?  I’m feeling better already. 

Right. I have to go and finish Alan’s nose.  He’s only got half a one at the moment and I left him dangling to come and talk to you.  Not very kind of me at all.

Tuesday 3rd March – Law and Disorder

It is nearly financial year end for Jason.  He has begged me not to spend much money this month.  This is, as we know, fatal.  In the last two days I have managed to spend what would last me a fortnight normally.  I have an internal financial polarity responder living in my brain.  It is bad.  I am eating receipts as I type!  They’ll never take me alive.

Today it is freezing cold.  The rain is mizzling down in that half hearted way that means it is not fun enough to tog up in our rain gear and go splashing about, but that if we do venture out we will nevertheless get drenched by slow, agonizing degrees.  It is also rather windy which means that no matter what you wear the rain will still find a way to get in and wet your vest.  It is rubbish.

This morning I was severely tempted to crawl back into bed after half an hour of sitting trying to think of fun things to do that would wear out the king of the dinosaurs.  I was just not inspired.  Some days it is easy, other days my brain has sloped off to have a fag behind the bike sheds and I am left with a quizzical expression  no amount of botox would rectify and the international sign language for ‘Whaaaa?’

Today was such a day.

Things perked up when the postman pushed Justme’s amazing chocolate fairy parcel through the door.  Oscar it seems, is psychic on the issue of what is inside parcels.  He grabbed the envelope and rushed into the kitchen saying; ‘Open my letter mama. It has chocolates in it.’  I was impressed.  Maybe he is my son after all.  We opened it.  Many chocolate eggs filled with scrumptious things in spilled out onto the kitchen table in a riot of jewel coloured wrappers.  Oscar and I stared at them, mouths open with mandatory awe in the face of shiny, chocolatey goodness.  Then we pounced.

We shared a delicious chocolate truffle egg and then found a safe place to hoard the rest of the eggs until the sun was over the chocolate yard arm.  Scrumptious.  Justme is officially a goddess in our house.  Oscar would probably allow her to be Queen of the Dinosaurs now after that fantastic show.  Hoorah.

The sugar rush motivated me to do something useful.  I had things to take to the post office, now that we have a new, unburned down one.  Oscar is keen on letter writing and wrote a long and complicated letter to granny which says; ‘Dear Granny. Come to my party. Love Oscar.’  It may say this but unless I translate she will never know.  It was written with passion and commitment though, and this is all that counts.  I had terrible trouble with him and the envelope.  I taught him how to lick the edge of the envelope and hold it down firmly.  I turned to address a parcel I was sending, turned back, and he had licked the envelope all over to the point where it was about to disintegrate.  We had to start again with less enthusiastic licking.  We got there eventually.

After our postal adventures I decided we would go on the bus into town.  I have made great headway with Alan Measles II, who is going to be pink and green.  I have all the bits for him.  I have decided that Justme’s Alan may be pale pink and chocolate brown and wanted some more stuff for him, so we went back to John Lewis.  Oscar bought two duck shaped buttons today.  He is not King of the Ducks.  That would be stupid.  The ducks are imbeciles themselves and are always moaning and require a lot of attention.  I think he is quite sorry now that he adopted them in the first place. 

We wandered around and bought some new books from the charity shop.  We got a fantastic book about dinosaurs.  Oscar is using it as a kind of Haines manual.  I got a great length of lilac gingham cotton for £1.50 which I am very pleased with.  I don’t know what’s come over me but I actually enjoyed my sewing last night and have been contemplating branching out from felt bears to other things.  I have no idea what those other things might be, but at the moment they will probably be made of lilac gingham.

On the way home on the bus I sat opposite a lady with her young son.  She fed him coca cola and doughnuts and then got cross when he was rather hyperactive.  She ignored him except when she was telling him off.  He wasn’t too badly behaved except every time she rang someone on her mobile he would immediately start shouting ‘Muh Meh, Muh Meh, Muh Meh’ until she threatened him.  One of her phone calls was to a friend about her crack habit.  Which was nice.

On the way there on the bus, two youngish girls got on with their babies in buggies.  The kids were filthy, the girls weren’t much better.  One of the kids started writhing about in his buggy and screaming.  The girl who belonged to the kid leaned forward and hissed; ‘If you don’t shut it, I’ll smash your bloody face in.’  Then when he refused to drink the orange squash she gave him in a filthy bottle she said; ‘Drink it or I’ll call the Old Bill on ya.’ 

Nice eh?

The only positive thing I can think of in the face of this parenting is that it makes me feel better about my own parenting. It makes me feel hideously sorry for the kids though.  It’s a hard life, made even harder by stupid, vicious parents who are no more than children themselves.

I live in the old part of Glenfield, but it’s right on the edge of the village, nestling  cheek by jowl with one of the more unsalubrious parts of Leicester, known as New Parks.  New Parks is full of local authority housing, the smouldering ruins of community centres and teenagers with Croydon face lifts pushing prams containing multiple, filthy children.  The bus I have to catch into town goes on a long and extensive tour of these environs before it reaches the city centre, and it’s certainly an eye opener.  I never go into town on the bus in the evenings.  The one time anyone I knew did it, the bus got ambushed by a bunch of teenagers throwing rocks through the windscreen and had to park up for forty minutes until someone was brave enough to come out with a replacement bus.

It is not a place for the faint hearted.  I am trying to be positive about my children growing up around here.  If they survive it will certainly equip them for surviving the urban jungle.  Even Ray Mears couldn’t do better.  Hopefully we will have moved by then.  Far, far away.

Monday 2nd March – Alan Measles Rises from the Ashes

Yes! I have recovered sufficiently from my last craftastrophe project to embark upon a new one. 

The new one will be remarkably like the old one, but times two.  Firstly I have promised Justme a bag of her own because she is sending me chocolates, and I am a chocolate whore.  Secondly I feel I should make one in case Grayson Perry ever actually wants one of his own.  I shall keep it in a glass case on the landing and should the clarion call ever sound I shall ’break glass with hammer’ and send it off, stat.

Should Grayson’s Google Alert wife be reading this I was joking about expecting artworks in return by the way.  It seems only fair that the original muse for my oeuvre be allowed to have his own small trifle for allowing me to steal all his ideas and not chasing me through the courts with a bull whip.  I should be so proud to have the Measles Sac owned by the Measle’s owner I would faint with pleasure.

As we know the last Alan Measles took months of heart rending effort, sweat and real blood to finish.  I am definitely not a natural when it comes to handiworks.  As previous blog entries suggest, I did know this rationally, but had secretly hoped in the intervening years since I last embarked on a project that was meaningful, rather than a cobbled together effort to appease small children and school inspectors, that I may have had a spiritual renaissance and become an artisan.  Sadly this is not the case. I am more of a cobbler than anything else.  I stick all the bits together and hope it doesn’t fall apart.  This is as much as I can hope for under the circumstances.  It will take months.  This is a given.

Since Alan I wended his way to Belgian shores I have been resting my tattered nerves and thinking deep thoughts.  Today I went to Nottingham and was inspired in John Lewis’ fine haberdashery department into new craft excitements.  Spring is upon us, Easter is pink in tooth and claw and there is lots of shiny stuff that magpies like me must buy irrationally and then find a way of justifying to their husbands.  Consequently we are having new colourways for Alan II and III.  The same basic design, possibly with some modifications if I can quite get my head around them.  I’m thinking pink. I’m thinking green.  I’m thinking gingham and roses.  Oscar was thinking dinosaurs.  He got three very excellent dinosaur buttons while I bought froth. 

I was pleased, he was pleased.  He kept taking his dinosaurs out of his pocket to instruct them in dinosaur ways, for he is and ever shall be, king of the dinosaurs.  Long may he reign.  There was a great deal of ‘rrahing’, quite a lot of low level growling and some gesticulating in a claw like fashion.  Each of the dinosaurs is called; ‘Dinosaur-Dinosaur-Dinosaur.’  With a hyphen. I asked how he was going to tell them apart.  He looked at me sternly and then turned his head away.  I was beneath contempt.

What was quite sweet was that in amongst buying dinosaur subjects for the dinosaur king to lord it over, he also fell in love with a large, navy blue rose made out of silk and turned into an alarming brooch.  He wanted it passionately and kept making me move the buggy closer so he could stroke it.  I was rather touched by this emanation of his sensitive side. I was going to buy it for him until I found out that it was ten quid.  Ten quid and plug ugly.  Two and I might have been swayed, but ten for something that the king of the dinosaurs will either end up masticating between his mighty jaws or stabbing his sisters with was too much.

So we have returned from our sojourn and I will be spending my evening squatting over my embroidery frame once more.  I am quite excited about it now.  I shall have gone off the whole thing by tomorrow.

The S Factor

So I pinched a meme from Hails over at Coffee Helps.  She did a meme where you get assigned a letter of the alphabet around which you must construct a blog post.  You need to find ten meaningful things beginning with that letter.  She offered free letters to anyone who likes a good meme. Naturally I signed up.  I got the letter ‘S’.    I have been mulling it over for the last few days and getting nowhere fast.  Today however, being an exciting day where we have done things like defrost the freezer and go to the tip, seemed an ideal day to do the meme.  Doing these horribly mundane but necessary chores is bad enough.  Blogging about them just adds insult to injury.

SHOES

I love shoes.  I have not always loved shoes.  I spent large amounts of my teenage years wearing Docs.  Black ones, purple ones, green ones.  I wore them with everything for every occasion.  I graduated wearing my Docs.  In the summer when it was mostly too hot for Docs I tended to go barefoot which is why I have such shockingly horrible feet.  They are the horny handed feet of a peasant, used to hacking their way across the turnip fields in all weathers.

It never occured to me that there might come a day when I would eschew the wearing of Docs.  They were surely the perfect shoe for all occasions, particularly if you needed to start a far right Neo Nazi kickathon unfortunately.  How I got from there to lusting after Louboutins is anyone’s guess.  I think it was a gradual thing, much like evolution.

I have some lovely shoes. I still don’t have my Louboutins, but it doesn’t really matter.  I rarely wear the lovely shoes I have.  It is very hard to run after a feisty two year old in killer heels.  Mostly I wear Skechers for that. You can pick up a fine turn of speed in a pair of Skechers and a trusty bra, let me tell you.  But one day I will wear glamorous shoes all the time. Oh yes.  I will be eighty by then and no doubt snap my hips through ill advised wearing of Manolos, but what a way to go.

RONALD SEARLE

Ronald Searle is a cartoonist. He did all the original St. Trinians’ cartoons and to my eternal and everlasting gratitude was the co-author of some of the finest books ever written.  He was responsible, along with Geoffrey Willans for the Molesworth Tetralogy.  If you have never read this book then you owe it to yourself to rush out and buy it immediately.  It is one of those books which never fails to cheer me in moments of gloom and despair.  I discovered the books when I was about twelve and have been reading them on and off ever since. 

Molesworth is a schoolboy in a 1950’s boarding school and the books are his musings on school life and the world in general.  It is written in his appalling schoolboy hand, which makes it all the funnier, and is accompanied by the most glorious cartoons from the pen of Searle.

Here is Molesworth on poetry:

Peotry is sissy stuff that rhymes. Weedy people say la and fie and swoon when they see a bunch of daffodils.

and History:

History started badly and hav been getting steadily worse.  It is like racing really when peason and i have a modest fluter thro the under gardener.  All the favourites go down.

and Divinity:

David sa yar boo sucks to goliath and buzz a brick at him. goliath fall stunned and wot david did then no giant could ever forgive him i.e. he did him.  Some old girl whose name I canot remember also did a chap with a tent peg a very nasty business when he was asleep.

So you see, it’s brilliant.

SAUSAGE SANDWICHES

Sometimes, when all is grey and there appears to be no light on the horizon, a sausage sandwich is just the thing.  I am a peasant, as we have previously mentioned. I do not like fancy sausages full of herbs and meat and things when I have a sausage sandwich.  I like bog standard greasy spoon evil sausages with white bread,  no butter but plenty of brown sauce.  This is the business during times of woe.

SEASONS

There are many reasons why England is not a sparkling jewel in the crown when it comes to living here.  Nevertheless there are a few things I would miss if we were ever to plant ourselves on foreign soil and one of these things is the seasons.  I like a bit of variety in my weather.  I am not one of these people who craves 365 days of sun per year. It would drive me round the bend.  In particular I would miss Autumn.  I love those days when the skies are impossibly high and impossibly blue and the air smells slightly frosty with that tang of leaf mould.  I like crunching through leaves and wrapping up warm.  It’s nice.  Plus, I do not have the body for a bikini any more.  I have the body for a full length snood with eye holes.  This is not convenient where the sun shines relentlessly.

SARCASM

This is something else I would miss terribly if we ever moved.  I believe the French may actually do a fine line in sarcasm, but my A level French is not good enough to get it, so it is wasted on me.  North America however seems to be a veritable wasteland when it comes to levels of wit, sarcasm and all round revelling in irony.  I am resolutely English in my need to express myself in these unflattering lights.  If we travel to these climes I go mad after a fortnight of everyone being nice to me with no edge to it, and people’s total failure to understand that just because I am not telling knock knock jokes I might actually be being funny.  This could of course be a cruel reflection on the fact that I am not actually being funny, but I just don’t buy it.

STANNAH STAIR LIFTS

I am mildly obsessed by Stannah Stair Lifts.  For those non UK residents, a Stannah Stair Lift is just a particular brand of those automatic chairs that are fitted to the bannisters of someone’s regular stairs and allows an elderly or incapacitated person to ascend the stairs upon a motorised throne.

I have always wanted to have a ride in/on a Stannah Stair Lift.  I have it on good authority from my friend that they are incredibly slow and not half as much fun as they look, but it has not dampened my enthusiasm any.  The key to my desire is not to be going in/on one when I actually need one, but just to be having a ride in a mood of devil may care anarchy.  If anyone knows anyone who has got one and is willing to come and let me ride up and down their staircase until I am bored, please let me know and I will love you forever more.

SLEEP

I love sleeping. I hate going to sleep, but once I am asleep I generally love it.  I particularly love waking up naturally (i.e. without small children bouncing on my head), knowing I have nothing to get up for and being able to turn over and go straight back to sleep.  That is possibly one of the best feelings in the world.  I used to think sleep was very over rated.  Now that I am hideously middle aged I have done a total volte face on this issue and am prepared to defend my right to sleep to the death.

SCULPTURE

Regular readers will know how many times I have begged for someone to buy me Jacob and the Angel by Jacob Epstein, but I love lots of different types of sculptures too. I love Anthony Gormley’s work. I particularly like his room full of people like modern terracotta warriors.  I love Henry Moore’s sculptures. I mostly want the one of the king and queen sitting on their thrones on a hillside somewhere.  There is something so tactile and needful about sculpture that I can’t help wanting to just run my fingers all over it.  It fascinates me that someone is skilled enough to work out how to get those gorgeous shapes out of those giant blocks of stone or sheets of metal and end up with something graceful and in proportion. 

SCANDAL

I love a good scandal, some gossip, some unresolved issues to thrash over.  I adore reading trashy magazines like Heat far too much.  I am a broadsheet reader with the appetites of a Sun reader.  I like trivial, pointless information.  I like to know if someone collects stamps rather than whether they vote Conservative.  I like to know what colour pants they wear rather than their thoughts on global warming.  Hopeless, shameful but gloriously pleasurable nonetheless.

SEX

Isn’t sex brilliant?  Sometimes it’s better than cake.

The ‘C’ Word and The ‘F’ Word

One of the mum’s at school and I were chatting a couple of days ago.  She was saying that the kids all seem to be particularly gruesome at the moment.  I wholeheartedly agreed with her.  We put it down to general malaise over the hideousness of February.  She then said: ‘And I just don’t understand all this swearing in the playground.  It’s ridiculous.’

I was completely unaware that there was a swearing epidemic sweeping the playground.  Plus I am honestly and promisedly not that bothered about swearing in the playground. I have just kind of accepted that the playground is the first place all children learn things about deviant sexual practices, colourful swear words and intricate skipping manoeuvres as previously featured only on Malcolm McClaren videos.  Then there’s the fact that I am sweary parent, and Jason has managed to teach Oscar to say ‘fucky fucky’.  It’s a bit like shutting the stable door after the horse has bolted.

Nevertheless, my friend was clearly quite bothered, which is no good. I asked her about it in more detail.  It transpired that her daughter had come home a couple of nights previously demanding to know about ‘The F Word’.  Apparently one of the girls in her class had been saying it to everyone.  My friend was shocked. I was rather shocked myself.  I know this supposedly sweary little girl and her mother and it is not the sort of thing that her mother would say let alone tolerate her five year old daughter saying.  I said this.  My friend said no! Apparently this kid is not saying ‘Fuck’.  She is going around the playground saying; ‘The F Word’, because my friend’s daughter wanted to know what the ‘F’ in ‘F Word’ actually stood for!

I thought this was hilarious.  My friend clearly did not.  Saying ‘The F Word’ and thinking it is a powerful expletive is almost as bad as saying ‘Fuck you mother fucker!’ in her book. I bit my cheeks because I did not want her to think I was laughing at her. Everyone has their standards of child rearing and I fully understand that mine are unacceptably low down on the moral high ground chart. 

Then my friend said; ‘And what’s all this ‘pooh plop’ business as well? Where do they get these words from?’  At which I looked away into the middle distance as if searching for my muse.  In reality I was trying very hard not to make direct eye contact.  I know full well where ‘pooh plop’ comes from.  It comes from Katyboo Towers, Glenfield, that’s where it comes from. 

I can’t feel too guilty about that one though. In my universe nobody is going to hell for saying pooh plop, even if they are only five.

But it is official. My shoddy parenting techniques are currently bringing down the moral fibre of the school.  That and my disregard for official uniforms being the saviours of the western hemisphere. Damn them and their smug cardiganned ways. I shall continue my path of evil nonetheless.  I am committed now.

On the same subject, we were in the car at the weekend when Tilly suddenly said:

Tilly: ‘Mama? I thought you said that they weren’t allowed to say the ‘C’ word in pg films.’

Me: ‘That’s right Tilly. They’re not.’

Tilly: ‘But I’ve seen one where they say it.’

Me: ‘No Tilly. You must have misunderstood. That’s not possible.’

Tilly: Indignantly; ‘I did! I did! When daddy took us to see Bolt! last week, they said it then.’

Me: Incredulously: ‘They can’t have Tilly.’

I was just about to qualify this with the words; ‘Are you sure they said cunt?’ which would really have thrown the cat amongst the pigeons, particularly as Oscar and Tallulah had their beady ears wide open and were drinking this all in in rapt fascination. Luckily Jason had his psychic radar on and could sense the impending disaster.  He cut right across me.

Jason: ‘Which ‘C’ word are we talking about here exactly?’

Tilly: ‘Crap! They said crap in the film daddy.’

We looked at each other, Jason smug in having prevented disaster, me stunned and relieved.

Me: ‘Ah! That ‘C’ word.  No! No Tilly. They’re allowed to say that.’

Jason; ‘Even though it’s not very nice and we’d rather you didn’t say it thank you.’ (although fucky fucky is completely acceptable obviously)

Tilly and Tallulah in unison; ‘So which ‘C’ word can’t you say?’

Me: ‘I’ll tell you when you’re twenty one.’

Thursday 26th February – A fool for school

Tallulah has won a Head Teacher’s Award.  She is being given it for being ‘Hand Writer of the Week’.  She is very proud of herself.  I am very proud of her, although my inner anarchist wanted to say: ‘Fuck the system! Buck the trend! Deny their stupid hand writing rules.’  But I am putting that down to hormone surges.  I resisted and just nodded enthusiastically.

It fascinates me that Tallulah is so good at school.  She is always winning awards for this and that. She gets merit marks all the time. She does her homework and she is unfailingly neat, polite and orderly.  The only time she rebels is in her insistence on wearing tights with her shorts when it comes to getting changed for P.E.  It was P.E. this morning.  This is the morning that parents are expected to stay and help their children get changed, even though they have P.E. at other times of the week when the children are perfectly capable of getting changed on their own.  Even though I think it is an utterly stupid idea I still stay and help. I don’t know why. I am working up to rebelling and making her do it on her own.  Boundaries need to be pushed.

This morning I stayed and helped because I had already upset the apple cart when I refused to fill in the questionnaire about what parents think would make the school better.  The form consisted of a lot of tick boxes where you had to rate pre chosen ideas from one to eight in order of preference, and a tiny gap where you could write your own thoughts.  I hate this pre chosen idea malarkey and my inner polarity responder, which is never very far from the surface, always rears its ugly head at this point.  I got particularly mardy when I spied the fact that they had put adherence to rules on school uniform as one of the choices for making a better school, more Cliff Richard on the telly and world peace.

I know there was a space to write my own thoughts but it was one of those things where I knew that if I got started I wouldn’t actually stop.  When I was looking at educational options for my children I had boiled it down to two choices, home schooling or Steiner schooling, both of which I believed would nourish my children and allow them the creativity, flexibility and growth as people I wanted for them in their educational careers. 

There were several problems.  There were no Steiner schools within a fifty mile radius of my home.  There still aren’t.  This is a nuisance.  I don’t drive.  Even if I did, a two hundred mile round trip every day does not suit. It does not suit at all.  Then there’s the home schooling.  Unlike the wonderful Grit, for whom I have the most profound admiration, I know I would make a terrible, terrible home schooler.  I even hate doing homework with my children.  I know how it should be done.  I just can’t do it.  I become Hitler on steroids when homework time rolls around.  The children now wisely choose to do most of their homework with Jason who is kind, patient and resourceful, three skills which consistently escape me when faced with having to teach a nine year old their eight times table.

So we found the least horrible and most convenient state school and try to inculcate in them enough anarchy, independent thinking and creativity to counter the negative effects of cardigan wearing smug faced fascists of the educational system.  I didn’t think I could write all this down, so I ripped up the forms.

The girls were horrified.  Apparently the head teacher had announced that this was parents homework and that it was mandatory.  This incensed me even further.  I ripped it into smaller pieces, made a valedictory speech about the fact that at the age of nearly thirty seven if I didn’t want to do bloody homework I wouldn’t do bloody homework, rah, rah, rah, and stomped to school.  The children trailed behind me in shocked silence.

Consequently I was quite pleased to see Tallulah fighting her own, small tights war.  She was struggling into her ensemble under my baleful eye when a gaggle of small girls approached me.  One of them said: ‘Are those tights part of Tallulah’s school uniform?’  I looked at her and said: ‘No. They’re just the tights Tallulah chose to wear today.’  The small child said: ‘But they’re the wrong colour. That’s not allowed.’  I looked at her and said: ‘So. What do you want me to do about it?’  She looked puzzled.  Another child stepped up to the fray; ‘Is Tallulah going to wear those tights with her shorts?’  I looked at Tallulah.  She looked at me.  We both looked at the child, slightly pityingly, as it was clear that as Tallulah was already wearing shorts and tights, that this needed no further explanation.  I said; ‘Yes.’  Second child said: ‘But that’s not allowed.’  I said: ‘Tallulah knows that, and if she wants to get into trouble for her unorthodox costume choices that’s up to her isn’t it?  She has to learn things her own way.’  They all looked at me.  I looked world weary and full of ennui.  I announced philosophically; ‘Life is too short to worry about the rights and wrongs of tights/shorts combos.  Let us move on.’  They parted like the Red Sea to let me pass.

As I was leaving another child came up to me and tugged my coat.  ‘Katyboo?’ she said; ‘I turned to her; ‘It is my birthday. I am six today.’  I said: ‘Congratulations.  Will you be leaving school and getting a job now? I hear that climbing chimneys is still a good option for small girls?’  She looked at me and said: ‘No. My mum won’t let me.’  Fair answer.  I said: ‘What did you get for your birthday?’  She said; ‘A doll.’ I said; ‘Good. That’s good. Not a pipe and slippers then?’ She looked baffled and said; ‘No.’

I left.

I like to keep them guessing.  I am training them up to be more interesting adults.  Hopefully when they get to the school gates they won’t have to spend their lives talking about grade four flute and potty training.

Tallulah’s award ceremony is tomorrow morning.  I have a doctor’s appointment at the same time as the award ceremony where I shall be baring my hormones for the awed respect of the NHS. Tallulah went from being proud to being upset in a nanosecond this morning when I announced that I could not go to the assembly. This is so annoying because if they had given me a little bit of notice I may have been able to book my appointment for later on in the day. As it is, telling me on Thursday morning at nine o’clock is not a lot of help to me, or to her.  Why they can’t postpone it for a week so that I can go I’m not really sure.  Still, like the tights/shorts thing, it is something she’s going to have to manage on her own.  Hormones win over handwriting whether she likes it or not.

Love is also…

Knowing that their angelic behaviour won’t last and that you will spend your afternoon remaining cheerful in the face of:

• Small boy refusing to have a nap because he is quite categorically not tired despite being hideously shouty and repeatedly rubbing his eyes.
• Small boy registering his protests at his mother’s refusal to believe a word he says and putting him to bed anyway by taking his nappy off, going to sleep and peeing all over his bed clothes.
• Small boy waking up just in time to go to school and only then doing the big wee ‘reveal’, hence distracted mother dragging slightly wee smelling boy to school at the speed of light, making it to the school gate by the skin of her teeth.
• Small boy hitting his sister on the head with a rolling pin because he didn’t want to share said rolling pin with sister and making her cry.
• Small boy sneakily eating big lumps of Play Doh, having a good chew and then angelically announcing that he would never eat Play Doh because Play Doh was really ‘hobble’ mama.
• Small boy trying to steal everyone else’s pudding and flicking the Smarties he doesn’t like at the ‘hobble’ people who do not give in and give him their nicer pudding, despite the fact that small boy chose Smarties in the first place,
• Small boy putting toilet roll tubes on both arms to pretend to be a robot,  cornering his sister by the bunk beds and lamping her one in the eye with the corner of his robot arm.
• Small boy having at some point in the distant past snuck under daddy’s desk in the study and done something horrible with his ’scroop’ driver to daddy’s hard drive, thus ensuring that when daddy comes to turn it on this evening that it has died the death of a thousand scroops and will never work again.
• Small boy having to be dragged upstairs to have a shower to avoid daddy battering him with scroop driver.
• Small boy having no future in higher education because daddy has had to spend his college fund buying a new p.c.