We must first take an important lesson from that venerable folk tale: ‘The Three Little Pigs’.  That lesson is not: ‘Never trust anything with a hairy snout,’ or ‘Pigs should stay firmly in their sty or in a packet of Danish bacon where they belong.’  No.  It is that more fundamental truth: ‘Never trust a shonky builder.’

Then I shall tell you a new tale.  A variation on the old chestnut, but with the same moral.

You may recall that I have mentioned in previous posts about the children’s grandmother encouraging them to believe that her garden is being slowly but surely infested by real, live, honest to goodness gnomes? 

Well, in my last post I informed you that winter had been thrust upon us by the sure and certain date of the gnome’s yearly hibernation, as laid down by Tilly, who claims to be an expert in all things gnome.

The gnome hibernation house was duly built with more forethought than the Big Brother house, but considerably less skill.  Gnome food was made in copious quantities and the children gathered round to bid the gnomes farewell until the spring.

Unfortunately, when we visited granny’s house a couple of weekends ago we found this sight:

Gnome devastation.

Some particularly ruthless weather had blown the house over and beaten it to a mostly sodden pulp.  There were large sections of house all over the garden. 

The gnomes had been forced to awaken from their winter repose and leg it to the shelter of the verandah, where they were patiently waiting, along with their guardian eagles, Leera and Sissy, to be rehomed:

There was a great deal of lamentation followed by heated debate.  Tallulah opined that Tilly’s house had been shoddy and a bit rubbish and refused to have anything to do with building a new house along the same lines as the old one.  I have to say that I agree with her, although I didn’t mention it at the time.  It has long been my contention that along with straw and sticks, cardboard is a particularly poor building material for constructing dwellings in this climate.  I have suggested this in earlier years, only to be brutally rebuffed for being negative. 

This year I did not say anything. I merely looked, ‘in that way’, I expect this was why bubble wrap was employed, as a sop to the idiot parent.  Much good it did her.

Eventually the Gnomean People’s Front split from the Peoples Front for the Gnomes and they agreed to separate off and create their own, separate dwelling places.

So there.

Here is Tallulah’s preferred way of keeping her gnomes:

It is even less ideal than a cardboard box wrapped in bubble wrap as a protection against the vagaries of the weather.  It does however, prevent the gnomes escaping and going to employ some more competent builders.  Fair play.

Tilly is still hankering after cardboard.  She can think of no finer building material in the universe, despite years worth of evidence to the contrary. 

Unfortunately for her, even granny refused to supply her with more cardboard and suggested that the gnomes remain huddled on the verandah while Tilly has a major rethink over the housing project.

And this is where they remain.  Under Leera’s beady gaze:

And Sissy’s baleful glare:

Until such time as Tilly sees fit to relinquish her dreams of cardboard cities in the sky and learns how to mix concrete.

In the meantime I am thinking of starting a ‘Save The Gnomes’ charity in order to fund the purchase of a teepee and some toasting forks. 

All donations gratefully received.  Blanket squares, Red Cross Parcels, tiny life rafts in case of flooding.

Even in the midst of chaos new gnomes are flooding to the site, refugees from areas which are worst hit:

Granny informs me that she has given succour to two new inhabitants.  Apparently they’d heard about the eagles.  They’re a big draw.

We could be infested by Christmas.

Oscar has had a couple of spectacular accidents today.  This morning as he was rushing for his third helping of breakfast fruit (have I learned anything from the pear incident of Friday? No, I haven’t) he swung the lounge door and trapped his little toe between the bottom of the door and the floor.  The howling was indescribable. 

He took a large chunk out of the side of his toe, and it swelled rather spectacularly. I did speculate at one stage that he may have broken it.  I considered rushing to A&E and then thought: ‘Meh. They don’t do anything with broken toes anyway’ (unless they are so broken you’re sweeping them up with a dustpan and brush, obv.), so I chucked some arnica down him, gave him a bath in tepid water with lavender oil in and yakked him a party ring to stop him squealing.  Half an hour later all was well.

I did, of course, take the time honoured route of parents everywhere, which was right in the middle of his wailing to announce in superior tones: ‘That’ll teach you to play with doors now won’t it?’  I just could not help myself.  It was as if I was programmed to say it.  I thought about it and was very grateful that he was in too much pain to turn around, punch me squarely on the chin and say: ‘Take that you sanctimonious old prig!’ 

Let’s face it.  We only say these things because these people are smaller than us.  We wouldn’t say it to our grandmothers or to Hulk Hogan, ‘Now that will teach you to take up fake wrestling as a career now won’t it?’ SMACK!  Just because it’s true doesn’t mean it’s o.k. to rub their noses in it, specially if their noses are squirting blood like a geyser.

Later on this evening he managed to trap the flesh on his cheek (his face cheek people. Honestly) in a toy cash register he was playing with.  Don’t ask me how? I have no idea.  I was in the same room as him and I still don’t know.  One minute he was playing beautifully with the cash register and I was congratulating myself on the fact that he was being lovely and not trying to macerate it or obliterate it, the next minute he was shrieking like a banshee and displaying an enormous red welt under his right eye.

Who could have predicted that eh?  You may think that Health and Safety officers are just disgruntled Nazi’s with no outlet or friends, but then something like this happens and you realise what a death trap your own home truly is.  Tsk.

I got into trouble this time because I had difficulty consoling him in a suitably woeful manner because I was laughing too much.  This time I nearly did get a punch in the chin.  But frankly he asked for that one.

I have undoubtedly talked about the following incidents before, but I am creatively a husk at the moment and you must either pardon me or go away until I come up with something new to say.

It made me think about some of the more bizarre injuries I have sustained or inflicted upon myself  during the long, grey  years of my childhood.  To whit:

• sticking a crayon pencil in my mouth sideways, turning it the right way up and wedging it between my tongue and my palette.  This memory was useful when I came to eyeing up a snooker ball and wondering if I could get the whole thing in my mouth because it was so satisfyingly smooth and shiny and resembled an apple, but better.  The lord really does work in mysterious ways.
• My brother giving me a manicure and jabbing one of the manicure tools down into the bed of my thumbnail.  Unfairly I was not allowed to eviscerate him, and even got into trouble for smacking him repeatedly, despite the fact that the thumb went septic.  I got my own back sticking a stick between the spokes of his front wheel as he was cycling round the drive several years later. Revenge is indeed a dish best eaten cold.  The look on his face as he sailed over the handlebars was worth every moment of pus filled agony.
• Playing shaving like daddy using a toy fire engine.  It was one of those toys which you pulled back to make it go forward on its own.  As I was merrily shaving away, the back axle went into overdrive and wound a huge clump of my hair round it, whereupon it ‘drove’ up the side of my head and embedded itself in my scalp.  My mother had to cut the hair away with a razor blade while I screamed the place down.  Then she made me go to school with a giant, jagged bald spot, as a lesson.  Nice.
• Getting a bit carried away with an entire packet of chewing gum and managing to cover myself in it to such an extent that my mother ended up having to stand me in the bath, cover me with butter, and scrape me all over with a kitchen knife.  Naturally, I screamed the place down.  I also vaguely recall having to have some more hair cut out.
• Learning to ride my bicycle and only realising when I had been round and round the drive 9,000 times and was beginning to feel really sea sick, that nobody had told me how to stop.  I eventually got so dizzy I spiralled horribly out of control and rode my bike into a Christmas tree which I then slithered down.
• Deciding that I was going to to be an archaeologist whilst out on a walk with my family.  I found a large, earthenware pot in a field (all of 3 months old), and stuck it in a carrier bag which I swung victoriously as I walked down the road.  I swung it so victoriously that the bag reared up behind me, and attacked the back of my head with the full force of a large, earthenware pot travelling at speed.  I fell over and burst into tears.  Everyone else fell over, mainly because they were laughing so much.  I believe my grandmother actually fell into a ditch because she could not see where she was going from laughing so much.
• Deciding that I didn’t like my sideburns and that nobody would notice if I shaved them off.  Nobody would have if I hadn’t actually given myself an Al Pacino style scar across one cheek in the process and got into trouble for bleeding over the towels and blunting dad’s razor.
• Using the stairs as a kind of ski run and sliding down them on a giant stuffed snake which my dad gave me for my first birthday (It was terrifying. It was still bigger than me at the time of this incident and I was eight.  What was the man thinking of?)  I wiped out at the bottom and managed to tumble headfirst down the last few steps and somehow get my foot, which wasn’t following me very well, wedged sideways in the radiator at the bottom of the stairs.
• Playing a game at school which involved using someone’s belt as a kind of swing affair. Someone would hold one end and spin the other person who was holding the other end round and round.  The person I was with let go of the belt and the belt buckle embedded itself in my forehead, where it stuck, quivering.  One of the dinner ladies had to pull it out. It made a popping sound and I had a hole in my forehead for quite a while.  I was, naturally, a minor celebrity.
• Allowing two so called ‘friends’ at school to hold me face down in the air and swing me.  They picked me up and dropped me, on purpose, to see what would happen (perhaps inadvertent revenge for the stick in the spokes thing).  What happened was my forehead split open and I ended up with bits of asphalt stuck in it.  I had some spectacular scarring.

I guess I should be grateful that it was only a cheek in a cash register really.

Weirdly, despite my predictions of plague and pestilence regarding Oscar yesterday, apart from me having to administer Calpol at one this morning, he slept the rest of the night through and woke up looking pale, but otherwise fine.  No temperature, no spots, no vomiting.  No green skin and mysterious head swivelling.  It never does to dismiss possession out of hand until one has gathered all the evidence.

He is still off his food, which is not like him, but he has been full of beans and bounce otherwise.  I don’t really understand it.  It’s like he started to get sick and then thought: ‘Nah! Just can’t be bothered.  I think I’ll watch Ben Ten instead.’ Children remain a complete and utter mystery to me.  The more time I spend with them, the more I find myself doing that staring at the ceiling in amazement while shaking my head in puzzlement thing.  The international language of ‘What the fuck was that about then, eh?’

Still.  Hooray for lack of vomit.  We love lack of vomit.  We dream of vomit free days in the sun.

I had been all geared up for more Casualty and screaming and it was all a bit bang and whimperish.  This meant that by half ten I was still in my pyjamas and hadn’t quite gotten round to finishing my breakfast.  I was too concerned about where the illness had gone.  Is it in the cupboard under the stairs? No!  Is it lurking in the U-bend? No idea, and I’m not looking.  It was all very mystifying, so I kept lurking about staring at Oscar and asking him how he felt, and prodding him.  He was heartily sick of the sight of me after half an hour or so of this bizarre behaviour.  Mummy dressed as a giant bush, creeping up on him and poking him with boiled sticks.  So when my friend texted me to say she was utterly miserable and hated everything and life was pooh, and I suggested we go round to cheer her up, she and Oscar jumped at the chance.  Oscar in the hope of the crowd effect taking some of the pressure off him, and her because even me and Oscar were better than sitting weeping into the bottom of a tea cup.  Not much admittedly, but expectations were low.

It was her birthday bless her.  I arrived late and presentless (having not known it was her birthday, in my defence), having got lost, and also realising that it would not be appropriate to turn up in my pyjamas and that I really ought to get changed.  Plus, Oscar was investigating.   While we were sorting out his toys yesterday we found his magnifying glass.  So naturally he has been doing quite a lot of investigating.  On the way to my friend’s house he spent quite a lot of time looking for the gang of vampires he swore had scribbled some graffitti on a wall.  I explained that vampires didn’t come out in the day time because they burst into flames and disappeared into a heap of greasy ash on the floor.  He thought this was brilliant, but remained determined that he was going to find one anyway.  Presumably a retarded one that hadn’t read the memo and would appear just in time for Oscar to spot him looking evil with his spray can before he went up with a whoosh.

This is why a ten minute walk ended up taking over half an hour.  We do know how to fanny about.  We could probably turn it into some kind of olympic event.

We had a nice time eating biscuits and Oscar was delighted that he could evade my evil doctoring ways and get on with being a small boy on a mission.  In fact we had such a nice time, we forgot to go home and ended up getting a lift to school.  Hooray for our side.  Especially hooray because yet again the weather has been vile and by this time it was bucketing it down.

When we got home I was buoyed by the success of getting Oscar’s toys all sorted, so I explained to the girls about my plan of tidying and sorting their things so that Santa would have room for their new presents. Like Oscar they were very enthusiastic. I sent them away to do it.  The enthusiasm waned almost instantly.  I cooked tea, fed them and went for a driving lesson, and when I got back at 7.30 p.m. they were still tidying, sullenly. Ah well, at least I got an hour away from it all.  Jason was pulling his beard out by the time I got back. 

We are still in the death throes now.  I wish we had never started.  I have about three broken toys in a box for the charity shop.  Tallulah, to be fair to her, was most diligent and worked really hard.  Tilly has been Kevin and Perry personified.  On the other hand, they swapped roles at dinner time, which is how come Tallulah got so much more done than Tilly because she didn’t have the inconvenience of eating her tea to get in the way.  She started to kick up a fuss about the quality of her dinner so I asked her to get down and sent her away.  It was so liberating.  No fuss, no tantrums, no fighting.  No dinner.  Hooray.

And that’s it folks. I know I still owe you gnome update with pictures.  I will get around to it, I promise.  It will be much more interesting than this Archers style entry, but this is all I have today.  And now I must go and be philosophical about children’s poetry.

I’m going to put the kettle on and break out more biscuits.  One can always be much more philosophical with a biscuit.  Or a pipe.  I don’t smoke, so it’s biscuits all the way.

I couldn’t sleep last night and I didn’t have my usual tolerance for reading.  I kept reading a page of one book and then putting it down, picking up another and then putting it down. I was feeling twitchy.  In those circumstances the best thing to do is get up and watch some mindless television. 

Usually this is what I do.  Unfortunately, despite having access to hundreds of channels of dreadful television, there was nothing that I could stomach.  I have very strict rules about just how dreadful a dreadful television show can be and whether I can actually face watching it.  Nothing matched up to my exacting criteria and I found myself watching something I had Sky Plussed from about a fortnight ago.  It was a Timewatch special about the bombing of Coventry during the Second World War.

I love a good war.  I’m not interested in modern warfare. It’s too antiseptic and has far too much to do with flash technology and showing off four thousand ways to make someone’s life miserable using sand.  I’m particularly interested in the First and Second World Wars, and have been known to sidestep into Vietnam on occasion. 

I’m not sure why I find them so fascinating, because I would hate to fight in one and generally believe that they are ludicrous, pointless, and could all have been solved with a little less chest beating and testosterone and a lot more tea and cakes.   Anyway, I do, and as Coventry is only about twenty miles away and I’ve been there countless times, I was particularly interested in this programme.

Coventry, for those of you who have not had the great misfortune to go there, is one of the ugliest cities in Britain.  It didn’t used to be.  It started life as a prosperous Medieval town, thanks to a thriving wool trade, and many of the original and extraordinarily beautiful buildings were still standing until the Germans smashed them into teeny, tiny bits and then set them on fire. 

So much of Coventry was destroyed during the bombing, over 50% of its civilian housing and 25% of its industry, and so many people were left with nowhere to live, that something had to be done pronto once the war had ended.  Hence the appalling public toilet municipal architecture which sprawls greyly over the city like a permanent fog.

It has one of the worst ring roads in the world, with the possible exception of Swindon and Milton Keynes, and not even a jolly statue of Lady Godiva with her kit off on the back of a horse can do much to cheer it up. It is just horrible, and even though it has an Ikea in the city centre, I still cannot bring myself to go there very often.

There is one exceptional thing that makes it worth going to though, and that is the cathedral.

On the night of 14th November 1940 the Luftwaffe started their blitzkrieg on Coventry.  The reason they picked Coventry, by the way, is that it was a centre for automotive production and most of the factories had been given over to the war effort, producing hundreds of planes for the RAF. It was a prime military target.  Unfortunately most of the factories were mixed in amongst the regular houses in the city, which was why the damage that night was so extensive.

First they dropped tons of incendiary bombs.  These were dropped in order to set fires all over the city and put such a strain on the fire brigade that they would not be able to put them out quickly enough to be effective.  The bombs they used exploded in a shower of bits of molten metal which were white hot and scattered out like dandelion clocks, setting fire to everything they landed on.  The city started to burn, which meant that its visibility as a target was much clearer for the enemy planes overhead.  The narrow Medieval streets, particularly in the middle of the city, meant that the fire could spread across the street as well as from building to building. One of the eyewitnesses spoke about a man who had two shops, one on each side of the road.  As she watched, they both caught fire simultaneously and within minutes the flames were so high they arched over and met in the middle of the street.

After the initial incendiary bombs came the bomb, bombs.  As well as on the industrial targets these were also dropped on places like water works, gas works, etc, so that the emergency services were hampered doing their jobs.  Bombs were also deliberately dropped on the roads to make them impassable.  Over five hundred tons of explosives were dropped in one night, on one city.  Amazingly the figures suggest only about 560 people died.

Apparently the sky glowed red and the city could be seen burning from the South coast.  Coventry is in the East Midlands.  We are the farthest point from the sea in the whole country.  To get to the South coast from Coventry is about 150 miles. 

When I was a child I lived in a small village, about eight miles away from Leicester.  One school project involved us researching the history of the place we lived.  I interviewed an old lady who had lived in our village all her life.  I asked her about her most vivid memories of living there and she told me about standing in the field at the back of her house on the night of 14 November and watching Coventry burn.  I cannot even begin to imagine what it was like.

The cathedral was five hundred years old.  It was hit several times during the night and all but the outside walls were destroyed.  Someone told me that the lead on the roof was so hot it liquified and ran onto the ground.  One eyewitness on the programme had been absolutely fine talking about her experiences until she spoke about the cathedral burning and then she just broke down. It was immensely moving.

Afterwards, when the people of Coventry were picking up the pieces of their lives and rebuilding their city, a decision was made to build a new cathedral, right next door to the old one.  It is an amazing building.  If you haven’t been, you should make the time to go.  I am not a great believer in organised religion, but it is one place I think God would definitely hang out, should he exist.

When they were clearing the rubble from the original cathedral, a workman found two of the iron nails that had been in the Medieval roof beams. They were lashed together to form a cross.  This was used to form what is known as The Community of the Cross of Nails. Its role is to emphasise peace and reconciliation.  A similar cross was given to cathedrals in Kiel, Berlin and Dresden after the war when they were rebuilding their own churches and communities.

Although what happened in Coventry was horrendous, the programme was scrupulously fair in pointing out that we took a lesson from the Germans and developed their ideas of blitzkreig with such enthusiasm that in Dresden, when we did the same thing to them, we killed 55,000 people.  It puts it into perspective rather.

Anyway, back to the cathedral.

The cathedral itself, is, in my opinion, quite an ugly building from the outside:

This is the side view, which you see from the street as you come to it.  To the left, out of the picture, is the ruin of the old cathedral, which has been made safe and you can now walk around.

No, the amazing things about the new cathedral are mostly on the inside, although I have always had a soft spot for the sculpture which you can see on the outside wall.  It’s St Michael kicking the devil’s arse, (not Bishop Brennan after all) and is by Jacob Epstein, one of my favourite sculptors.

At the front of the building is the most spectacular window, which is called The Screen of Saints and Angels and is 70ft high and 45ft wide.  It is made up of panels of glass on which the most beautifully spiky angels are etched.  I cannot find a photograph to do it justice.  You really have to see it.  It’s breathtaking.  They have no colour at all and they just look like they’ve floated there, like feathers or snow flakes.

Inside, the rest of the stained glass windows are kind of fluted into the walls so that you have to stand at certain angles to catch them in the light.  Mostly abstract and just made of these impressionist panes of jewel coloured glass, the sun slants through and lays giant shafts of gleaming coloured light across the interior spaces.

The walls are full of paintings and sculptures from countries all over the world even down to tiny wooden mice that are carved into some of the chair legs.  All of these people worked together to rebuild this cathedral as a symbol of community and peace. It’s quite awe inspiring.

It just shows you what happens when you drop 500 tons of explosives on people. 

It makes me feel quietly hopeful.

My son hasn’t had a particularly good weekend all things considered. 

He’s currently upstairs snoring and heating an entire floor of the house via the power of his body heat.  He is not well.  What it is that is not well about him, apart from his obsessive need for me to read ‘The Tale of Two Bad Mice,’ and his temperature, is unclear. Probably all will be revealed on the morrow. Not something I’m particularly looking forward to, it has to be said.  Although realistically, ‘the morrow’ will be at four in the morning and almost inevitably include vomit, should things go to the normal timetable for the sick child in the house accompanied by wearied, befuddled parents.

Then, on Friday, I poisoned him slightly.  With a pear. Yes. A pear.  Or more precisely, a pair of pears.

He came home from nursery starving hungry and demanding fruit.  He does this a lot.  He’s never going to get scurvy.  He is 40% fruit bat in his genetic makeup.  The other 60% is Jason.  I didn’t get a look in.  I was merely the receptacle.

I asked him what he wanted and he said, ‘a pear’.  I duly cut up the pear, gave it him in a bowl, and he trotted off to smear it over the furniture in the lounge.  I gave it no further thought. My friend was over for dinner and we were onto our second cup of tea.  About twenty minutes later he came in demanding another pear.  I chopped it up, gave it to him and carried on.  Two pears didn’t seem excessive to me.  I’ve seen him eat three bananas in a row to no ill effect, and he can go through a pound of grapes on the way back from the Co-op, and it’s only a ten minute walk.

Just as tea was on the table he announced that he had tummy ache.  I took him to the toilet.  He did his business.  All fine and dandy.  We went back to the table.  Two minutes later, he needed the toilet again. This time it was much speedier.  In fact his exact words were: ‘That was a fast one!’ in tones of triumph.  And so it went on, half a dozen times.  My dinner went cold. We developed OCD from washing our hands.

On about the fifth go round my friend shouted: ‘I bet it was the pears!’ 

Oscar shouted back: ‘No. It looks like pumpkin soup!’

Too much information…

Anyway.  He was fine shortly thereafter, which probably proves the point that it was indeed the pears.  And that I have no moral high ground, as I was interrupted just as I was telling my friend about how a woman in the same ward as me when I had Tallulah, ate an entire fruit basket whilst breast feeding her diabetic new born and then wondered why the child had to be taken up to special care because his sugar levels were insanely high.

Bad parent.

Mea culpa.

Still, I know what to do now should he ever be in need of a wee bit of coaxing in the bowel department. Sod prunes, pears for the win.

I am in the process of panic buying Christmas presents.  It’s all a bit heady.  It’s much easier panic buying Christmas presents on the internet than it is rushing about in real life.  Thank God for the power of technology.

 I think I have sort of got most of the things the girls want, except a purple cardigan for Matilda.  She is always asking for obscure cardigan related gifts.  You may recall my last fashion based present trauma where she wanted a red cardigan in June.  I am doing my best.  I think it is unhealthy for a ten year old girl to be that into cardigans.  Nevertheless I shall try, and thank my lucky stars that she doesn’t want an off the shoulder lycra body con top in neon stripes or some other thing which makes her look like a dwarf harlot.  She looks more like Anne from the Famous Five.  I keep expecting her to present me with a hard boiled egg wrapped in a handkerchief and a piece of seed cake.

I am in the process of trying to buy Oscar a rocking horse, which is what he declares he wants.  Given the drum situation, where he didn’t change his mind for the entire six months of me asking, I am expecting he is pretty firm on the rocking horse front too.  I cannot afford a real rocking horse, which is good because I don’t like them.  I don’t like the fact that they are expensive and safe. You know the ones I mean, the ones with a sort of harness style attachment that stops you going too fast? What’s the point of that?  Nope, I like the really old fashioned ones with the big, curved rockers on the bottoms.  The ones that are really dangerous and will break your neck should you become over enthusiastic. Much like the real thing. 

These ones:

Naturally, these are the most expensive, short of having an actual horse.  Although I was quite tempted by these:

There is a woman who breeds these miniature horses about ten minutes drive from our house.  She’s always advertising them on big placards at the side of the road, and you can see them through the fence. They are smaller than Shetland ponies, and even I, disliker of equines in general, think they are cute.  It’s just something about miniaturising stuff I guess.  The thing that puts me off, apart from their teeth and the fact that they undoubtedly have bad tempers (all small things do. Just look at Hitler. He was only 3 feet tall), is that they probably crap as much as a regular sized horse, and it would be yours truly shovelling pooh from dawn till dusk.

I am currently trying to buy him one of these:

Which are not only hysterically brilliant and amusing, but you can buy a base which turns them into a rocking horse.  I love them. They are made of some strange rubberised material and you can ping about on them.  I actually had a go on one, many moons ago, and thought they were fab.  They are also considerably cheaper.  The horse, plus the rocking base comes to about forty quid instead of four hundred quid.  Nice one.  He also wants a large water pistol.  He can dream on.  There are some things I do draw the line at.

We did a bit more shopping for lounge accoutrements today.  We went to my other shop of choice, T.K. Maxx.  I thought we were quite clever on the old lamp front.  We haven’t found a single standard lamp we can both live with up to this point. Not one we can afford anyway.  So we have bought a rather nice deep heather purple coloured lampshade with grey foliage on it.  It looks lovely.  I bought a throw which has the same colours in it and is made of a loose weave chenille.  I love it, but I accept the fact that it will be wrecked once the children have worked out how to poke their fingers through the weave and pull.  Jason didn’t love it, but didn’t seem to be quite so dismissive, snuggled under it with Oscar watching Indiana Jones this afternoon.  He is coming round to it.

I am very pleased with this new colour choice. It complements the bland notes of the room remarkably well and has the dramatic edge I want, but isn’t too in your face.  It’s quite a feat.

We are currently in negotiations over a rug. I like it.  He’s a bit ‘meh’.  I will win.  He just has to bring himself round to the idea.

We were going to do more, but Oscar was not well, so we came home.  He didn’t want his breakfast this morning, which is unusual.  He was fairly lively if a little pale, so we set out on our voyage of interior decoration.  Things got more serious when I asked him if he wanted to go and look at the toy department in T.K. Maxx as a reward for being so good while we stared at fabric.  He said no.

We immediately laid him on the floor and checked his vitals. I borrowed a glass from the homeware department and ran it over his stomach just in case.  He was fine, just hot.  We were so shocked by the refusal at the chance to play we took him home anyway.

He has eaten a banana, half a packet of Quavers and a square of chocolate all day.  He has spent all afternoon on the sofa half heartedly watching the television.  He went to bed without a murmur.  He says he feels fine. He is just hot. Hmmm. We shall see.

We were very mean and took advantage of his lethargy by clearing out his toys while he was too feeble to protest.  We managed to get rid of four dustbin bags full of stuff, including clothes, shoes, coats, and older baby stuff we had stored in the garage.  We have given it all to Jason’s friends who are currently expecting their first child.  They professed themselves delighted.  Not as delighted as me to have gotten rid of it.  Plus, I expect they won’t be quite so delighted when they’ve looked through it and thought: ‘What the bloody hell are we going to do with all that lot?’

Jason is out with some friends, Oscar is sleeping (for how long, is the question?), the girls are at their dad’s until tomorrow. Now should be the perfect start time for my new lot of study material.  Or I could do what I’ve done for the last two nights, and read trash instead.  I’m going away to finish paying for a rocking horse and wrestle with my conscience.

Just like my great friend, Mariana of the Moated Grange, I am aweary.  It has been one of those Saturday’s where we seem to have spent a great deal of time and effort doing not very much at all.  In the rain. And the wind.  Apparently Shakespeare was spot on when he said ‘the rain it raineth every day.’  Glenfield is not that far from Stratford.  He’d probably been for the day, on the stage coach, East Midlands return, 3 groats.

We went to John Lewis and bought the lights of my choice.  The battle is over and the war has been won.

Oscar has had a tremendous growth spurt and all his clothes make him look like a strangled hobo, so we also went clothes shopping with no success.  I hated everything I saw and thought it was all exorbitant and crap.  I’d rather buy him stuff from George at Asda for a fiver that disintegrates in three weeks, but doesn’t cost me £20 and bring me out in a mutinous rage because it’s still ugly, unimaginative and shit.  Boys really do get a rough deal with this fashion malarkey.  Unless they’re John Galliano and can rustle up a little something in between creating couture gorgeousness for women who look like gyrating pencils.

I have fallen out of love with my lounge, and one of the many little projects I have on hand at the moment involves changing some of the interior decor.  It would help if I could hire a bulldozer to remove the fourteen tons of toys which once took up a neat corner of the room and now mainly are the room.  It is my job next week to edit it down to a manageable heap of plastic junk.  It is difficult because Oscar, like all children, immediately falls passionately in love with whatever I decide is for the charity shop/dustbin.  I may have to drug him in order to do it.

Apart from removing toys I want a new rug, some new throws and cushions and a new lamp.  The lounge is very boring, not helped by the fact that I have chosen a neutral palette of beige, cream and brown.  This is because Jason fears the excessive use of colour and I cannot be bothered to fight him.  In the house I owned with UE I had carte blanche over the interiors.  This is why the lounge was racing green with gold mouldings.  My bedroom was dragon’s blood red and the kitchen (which was twenty feet long) was sky blue.  In first house my bedroom was Yves Klein blue.  I love that colour. 

Anyway, the current lounge is sombre, safe and unlikely to cause divorce.  It is also looking increasingly tatty because the children spend a lot of time in there.  The rug has not been well since Oscar burst a ball filled with fake blood and rubber centipedes over it.  The cushions have some fabulous stains in other colours, and I am not enquiring too deeply where they originated.  The lamp is one of Oscar’s favourite things that he has been forbidden to play with but just can’t quite help himself.  It is somewhat battered where we have spent many a happy morning wrestling and screaming over it.  The throw has been thrown one too many times and is actually falling apart. As this is one of the only things that has saved the oatmeal sofa from going the same way as the cushions and the rug I am getting a bit nervous.    The first pouffe exploded.  The second pouffe has had the stuffing knocked out of it so many times by being repeatedly jumped on, that it hasn’t got the will to explode and has just gone all limp and ineffectual.

I love my home.  It is messy, chaotic and has far too many people with sticky fingers living in it, but it is mostly full of nice things, and it has always been my resolve that eventually, as I make my way through life, that my house will evolve to become a dwelling where every object in it is a thing of beauty to me.  Unfortunately the lounge did not get the memo, and seems to be regressing to the point where it looks like a cross between a student shared house and a nursery.  Not the plan.

This is why, after we had gone home for a breather, we set off in the foul weather and hideous roadworks to Nottingham Ikea.  We love Ikea.  We find it soothing, and it reminds me of my early days of courtship with Jason, where we would sneak off and go and buy something for our home together, and get terribly excited about it.  Sad but true.

I had great hopes of finding loveliness.  But to no avail.  I mean I did not come home empty handed.  That would be impossible.  On the other hand I hardly think that two oversized Christmas tree baubles in the shape of hearts, a green blanket and two very cheap duvet sets for the next time the children douse all the available bedding in vomit, are going to add that certain je ne sais quoi to my shabby lounge.  I doubt even the A-Team could come up with something given those ingredients, even if I locked them in the garage for a week.

Nope.

We did fall in love with the  most enormous light shade.  It was a sphere the size of a pregnant beach ball, made of lots of paper daisies suspended on wires.  It looked awesome.  Unfortunately I don’t think we have a room big enough to do it justice.  Then Jason fell in love with the most amazing rug.  It was also massive, and was, to my utter amazement, patterned in giant, jewel coloured squares of wool in every colour imaginable. It was delicious.  It is the sort of thing I would look at, think: ‘Jason would hate it,’ and not even put it on my wish list.  I was truly stunned.  What with that and the charity work I am beginning to wonder if he has been pod snatched by aliens.  I’m not complaining.  It’s brilliant.  Unexpectedly brilliant.

We left feeling rather wistful and realising that what we actually need is a much bigger house, with much bigger rooms and then we can fill them with huge, vibrant rugs and giant pregnant light shades and all will be well.  Of course that it is all that will be in it, because we won’t be able to afford any more furniture, and we may have to sell the children to get the rug and the lampshade.

Still, one must sacrifice for beauty.

I didn’t dream about Pirates, girls with pegs on their noses or Bruce Forsyth last night. Which, it has be said, was a blessed relief.  Nope. Instead I dreamed about Mrs. Jones.  She has been posting some particularly sumptuous blog posts about her stay in Budapest recently and it has awoken my dormant wanderlust.  So much so that I popped over in my downtime last night and she led me through the streets of Budapest introducing me to the remarkable statuary she is littering her blog posts with photographs of.  It was one of the very few dreams that I have had, ever, which I consider to be nice. So well done Mrs. Jones, a special award for you, and a note that if you fancy restful dreams you should pop over and read her blog before bed time.

What I really wanted to talk about today however, is body parts.

Not dismembered ones.

Remember I told you that my friend Rosalind has a famous bottom? Well, she has.  Her husband works for a company that shall remain nameless.  Nameless company needed a randomly jolly and wholesomely appealing family to take photographs for their new advertising campaign, and Rosalind’s family fit the bill to a ‘t’.  It was quite handy, as it meant a free weekend away and the children being encouraged to show off appallingly doing all manner of bizarre advertising friendly weirdness while people applauded them and took photographs.  I can imagine, as a person who spent her entire childhood trying to cajole her father into taking cine film footage of her doing everything from reading a book to running as fast as Superman with her thumbs held aloft in a cheeky victory stance, that this appealed to them greatly.

Anyway, last week, Rosalind’s husband rang her from work to tell her that she had been awarded a great honour.  Nameless company had been choosing some shots to appear in their latest advert for the Tesco magazine and decided on one with Rosalind’s arse in it as the best one of the bunch.  Clearly it was the perfection of the arse in question that tipped the decision in her favour.  I asked her if she had a best side for her arse, but it is difficult to tell under the circumstances.  Things come out all back to front on photos don’t they?

I am hugely impressed.  I have never had a famous body part.  When the article for the Times was being put together, they sent a photographer round to my house, which sent me into a total frenzy of self-loathing and misery.  They rang me on the Sunday afternoon to tell me that they were sending the bloke round on Monday morning.  I calculated, I schemed, I compulsively ate biscuits until I could see the bottom of the jar.  All to no avail.  I could not think of a single way of getting my hair cut, coloured and straightened by the time he was due to arrive with his camera of doom.  In the end, my good friend B came round with her GHD’s at half past nine at night, while I sobbed and paced and moaned.

The chap duly arrived.  I looked quite tired, due to staying up all night with my skull taped to the headboard to avoid damaging my hair.  He spent two hours farting about rearranging all my furniture, moaning about the fact that I had the wrong sort of kitchen tap and trying to persuade me to smile by tying Jammy Dodgers to strings on sticks and dangling them above my head.  It just made me drool and look cross-eyed.

My photo was in the draft copy of the article.  Then they removed it.  Everyone else was sad. I was delighted.

I wouldn’t have minded if I could have just opted to have a photograph taken of a manageable part of my body, rather than the whole, sodden mess.  My elbows have never been much bother to me.  They do not look like the elbows of a harrassed middle aged woman desperately in need of a month in the sun and a radical rethink in the hair department.  That would have been great.  I could have been mysterious, like the Stig, but more feminine.

There are people who model certain parts of their body aren’t there? I once met a girl who had a modelling portfolio and was very proud of the fact that she had done some hand modelling.  I stared hard at her hands.  They just looked like regular hands to me, but clearly there was something magical about them.  Perhaps I was not seeing them in their best light, wearing Marigolds for example, or briskly but firmly holding a kitchen implement with a sense of authority.  I don’t know.  I do know I could not be a hand model. I don’t do manicures, I don’t use handcream and I write notes all over the crepey skin on the backs of my hands.  I also decided that I could see the emergence of liver spots when I was staring gormlessly at them for no apparent reason the other day (perhaps trying to see if I had written a crucial note on them recently.  Yes I  can even mislay the notes I write on my own skin. It’s a skill).  I also have weird knuckles and curiously misshapen little fingers which look like they have been broken with a toffee hammer and put back together back to front.

Ever since I burned my stomach on my mother’s oven when my t-shirt rose up at a critical moment a couple of weeks ago I have also discounted the stomach modelling thing.  To be truthful, three babies, skin like a collapsed parachute, an overhang due to too many abdominal scars and an exploding belly button from one childbirth trauma too many probably knocked that out of the running quite a while ago.  The culinary scarring was just the last straw.

I do however, like my eyelashes. I have phenomenally good eyelashes.  If we ever get to meet  you can come and have a look if you wish.  They are long, thick and naturally curl up.  I had a friend at university who was very in touch with his feminine side.  He was convinced that my eyelashes were false and that I was lying to him.  Whenever he got drunk, which was reasonably often, he would chase me round the bar trying to rip out my eyelashes to prove that they were indeed false.  It led to me being very fit, and quite adept at dodging people who want to jab me in the eye.  Every cloud and all that.

I will then, try to become an eyelash model.  Or maybe like Jo in Little Women, I can cut off my eyelashes and sell them for filthy lucre.  I wonder how much money you can get for a really good set?

I’ve only gone and bloody well finished it haven’t I?

This might explain the radio silence until now. 

I decided that Ali and Mrs. Jones were right.  I just had to knuckle down and get on with it.  So I did.

Mainly I was fed up of dreaming about the American Civil War being inundated by pirates if I’m brutally honest.  I’d even begun to think nostalgically of those strange haunting dreams with Bruce Forsyth teaching me the quick step, even though I don’t watch Strictly Come Dancing.  It comes to something when you’re nostalgic for Bruce.

It has taken me all day on and off. I had to keep having breaks and going away to beat my head against a brick wall and play with my son, who funnily enough, hasn’t shown the slightest interest in my troubles at all.  No. He has spent large parts of his day trying to add to them.

This morning he scorned me. Yes. Scorned me, for not being his father, and demanded to know what I was going to do about it, and why couldn’t I just bugger off and go and find his father immediately and do my bidding, etc, etc.

Then I got told off for providing the wrong number of yogurts and the wrong sort of toast (even though it was the same number of yogurts and the regular type of toast). He accused me of being deaf and mistaking the repetitive chant of; ‘I want toast. I want toast.’ for; ‘Please mother, would you do me the great honour of providing me with your delicious and nutritious Shreddies for my breakfast this morning?’

Tsk! I must break out the ear candles again.

Then he barricaded himself into the corner of the kitchen and announced that he wasn’t coming out to go to nursery because he had made a ‘Pop Shop’ and was staying there.  I pointed out that his ‘Pop Shop’ was right in the way of me being able to open the fridge, and that if he didn’t get his shoes on pronto, I would carry him bodily to nursery.  This was not how it was supposed to go, and there was much sticking out of the bottom lip and giving me the evils out of the corners of his eyes.

Waving goodbye to him at nursery couldn’t have come soon enough, and I was even grateful that I had a driving lesson that meant I couldn’t linger to make sure he was properly settled.  I just hurled him in the door in the direction of someone who looked like they knew what they were doing, and scarpered.

He was slightly more cheery when I picked him up from nursery.  This had more to do with the fact that I was accompanied by granny, who is best beloved, and that cake was imminent.  Granny is wonderfully soothing to shattered nerves, particularly when cake is forthcoming.

He was at his most appealing for the hour we spent reading Beatrix Potter’s ‘The Tale of Two Bad Mice,’ which I thought he might only tolerate, but which was worth a go after the Squirrel Nutkin incident of last week. It turns out that Two Bad Mice was way more fun than Squirrel Nutkin, and in his present mood he identified very strongly with Tom Thumb who bashes up the plaster lobster with the fire tongs when he finds out that he has been duped out of a real dinner.  We read this shocking turn of events four times before we then had to play at being Tom Thumb and Hunca Munca and hit things with the poker.  I predict trouble ahead, but it was nice while it lasted.

So. I am glad he is going to nursery all day tomorrow.  Very glad.

And that I can start on the next exciting study topic and go back to dreaming about Brucie for a while.

It’s all good.

I would like to report that today has been one of side-splitting mirth, hilarity and wonder.  That aliens beamed down in the back garden and took the children away for experimentation purposes, returning them several hours later with clean hands, shiny teeth and a general willingness to do good.  That Camille Paglia dropped round for a cuppa and finished off my essay for me, declaring it a ‘mere bagatelle,’ and refusing to accept payment in the shape of 3 for 2 Jaffa cakes from the Co-op, leaving them all for me.

Sadly this is not true.

I have trogged about in the howling wind and rain, buying things like dead chickens to be sacrificed on the altar of the god of picky children.  I have impulse bought several christmas gifts of varying states of inappropriateness and realised that if I don’t get my fringe cut soon, nobody will be able to see the three huge spots on the left hand side of my mouth that make me look like a fledgeling glue sniffer.  And who would want to miss that tasty treat, right?

And I have cooked.

I have cooked, and cooked, and cooked.

My son wanted risotto for lunch.  I am supposed to be encouraging him to be a cosmopolitan eater and not fear celery and things with funny names.  I acquiesced.

I realised I had five children and their mother coming round for tea and only enough nuggets and fish fingers for three. No loaves and fishes here. It’s not bloody Galilee, and it’s Wednesday. Beggars can’t be choosers.  Hence galloping about in the rain with a dead chicken jauntily tucked under my arm.

I spent all afternoon peeling potatoes.  To feed eleven people you need a lot of potatoes.  At one point I did think I might actually have been conscripted into the army by mistake.  I did sign that form at the library the other day.  And no. I did not read the small print.  I had a small boy turning the rack of greetings cards by the desk very briskly and no way of pretending he wasn’t mine. I had other things on my mind.

I now have peeler’s thumb.

I could only get a medium sized chicken, so I had to bulk up on veg and spuds and make Yorkshires to cover up the gaps.  By the time I had done all this I had been cooking for about a hundred years.  The good thing was it was appreciated.  The kind of bad thing was that it was all gone in under twenty minutes.  It was like watching a hoard of locusts descending upon the plain.  Then they had jelly. Then they had yogurt. Then they had fruit.  After that they had pudding.  It was insane.  I just don’t get it with children. They either eat everything in sight or sit sighing over a pea for four hours.  Where is the middle ground? Where?

Not in Glenfield, that’s for sure.

Gah.

I am now doing the ‘essay’.  I did more essay yesterday after the bath.  I did more essay this morning.  I dream of bloody essay.  The essay is going very much the way of the cookery.  Endless, dull and not really worth it.  It is only half finished. There are too many words.  I have yet to find a knack of squashing a compare and contrast essay which involves texts with a combined page count of over 750 pages of closely typed text, three critical text books, and a DVD ROM into two thousand words of finely honed critical appreciation.  I used to do it all the time.  I have lost my skill. I have the essay equivalent of peeler’s thumb.

Never mind. It will all be over soon, and then I can moan about other things.

I have many fine blog entries for you this week.  I have yet to relate the crisis of the gnomes and their winter house, with pictures.  I have yet to tell you about my friend Rosalind’s famous bottom.  It will have to wait. I cannot stop thinking about pirates and small American girls with pegs on their noses.  I promise you it will come, but the pirates are bearing down on me, and I have to go.

Let us say adieu and not farewell…