It’s brilliant this.  Every time I’ve fallen behind in my bid to bring you the latest news, views and opinions of mine from the world of popular culture, I bimble into an article by Caitlin Moran in The Times Online.  God love her.  She toils along for twenty pence an hour being a comedic genius and sweating her tiny socks off.  I rampage haphazardly about the internet like a tetchy hippo thinking, ‘I must think of something witty to say or nobody will love me and my blog stats graph will look all rubbish and droopy.’ I invariably get interrupted at the point where the magic might actually happen by some child whinging about the fact that it’s the summer holidays, they’ve been vomiting into a tea towel for three hours and can I hurry up and act like a mother before they ring Esther Rantzen and her new teeth?  I dis my gruntle, press a button and find that the genius woman has been and gone and done it for me already.

Here are her thoughts on Ms. Amy Winehouse for your delectation and delight.  Press here

I’m off to wash the tea towels and bask in reflected glory.

I have always been a huge Abba fan, which is probably why despite my well documented loathing of the musical format, I found myself going to see Mamma Mia at the cinema with Andrea and her mother last night.  When I was in primary school I got given Abba’s Greatest Hits Volume II (there never was a Volume 1. Don’t ask me.  Those crazy Swedes!).  It was my second ever LP.  My first was the gatefold sleeve version of the Grease Soundtrack.  You can tell how sophisticated my musical tastes were, even then.  For the sake of completion, my first single was either ‘Chirpy Chirpy Cheep Cheep’ which was I think by a band called Middle of the Road (I still sing this song to my children I love it so much), or Some Girls by the Seventies teen sensation Racey (Racey who? I hear you cry.  Exactamundo!)

Anyway.  We used to play at being Abba in the playground.  This basically involved us fighting over who was going to be the blonde one, who we thought was gorgeous, and who was going to be the sour faced brunette, who we didn’t think was gorgeous.  We would scrap all playtime, I would lose and end up being the sour faced brunette, and then the bell would go before we had donned our imaginary silver loon pants for top chart action success.  We used to play at Grease, Star Wars and The Dukes of Hazzard in much the same way.  I would always end up as: a) Rizzo, b) Chewie and C) Roscoe P. Coletrain.  I also always got picked last for netball.  Such was my lot in life as a gobby, short sighted misfit with a self inflicted Richard III haircut.  It only lasted until I was eighteen and embraced my inner weirdo.  Unfortunately most of school, which I thought of as a living hell of B movie bit parts was over by then. 

Anyway, my love affair with Abba continued unabated.  I was most into them by the time they had become wildly unfashionable and everyone else had moved on to other things.  My favourite album of theirs was called The Visitors, which when you mention it to most people just causes them to look at you in blank surprise because they’ve never heard of it.  I played it endlessly on my dad’s giant German stereo with his groovy Cliff Richard ‘Wired for Sound’ type headphones clamped to my small, sweaty ears.  It really was a German stereo.  I think he’d bought it cheap from a bloke in exchange for a car or something.  All the knobs and instructions were in German and you could only get it to work by accidentally pressing the right button.  We lived in the middle of a field in the Midlands.  None of us knew how to speak German.  My gran wouldn’t even talk about the Germans let alone in German.  What with that and the Fifty Steel Guitars of Tommy Garrett and 100 best Sousa Marches, which were my dad’s contribution to the world of pop excellence during the seventies, you can see how hard it was.  No wonder I was picked on at school.

At university Abba was a retro cool type thing.  We used to have washing up parties to Abba in our flat.  People used to come round and fill the kitchen, prancing about with their tea towels and scouring pads to the strains of the thumping bassline of ‘Does Your Mother Know?’  I used to do an excellent impression of Benny’s piano playing at the kitchen table.  It was only exceeded by my very drunken impression of Mick Jagger.  The Jagger was a rare one, because I had to be so drunk to do it it was a fine line between Jagger or throwing up in the ornamental cabbage plants.  Quite often the cabbage plants got it before Jagger reared his ugly head.  On reflection this was probably a good thing.  It hurt my lips a lot and I would wake up with both a hangover and feeling like I’d been stung by a thousand angry wasps.  Not an ideal state of being.

After uni, Abba got swallowed up in all that seventies and eighties school disco revival swill and I discovered Britpop, hanging out with bands and house music.  I would occasionally go to a nightclub with a friend and Abba would come on, but they would invariably put on Dancing Queen, which is my least favourite of all Abba songs and one I would cheerfully relegate to Room 101, along with Gloria Gaynor’s I will Survive and Bright Eyes by Simon and Garfunkel.  I put my Abba days behind me and put my teeny tiny raving pants on.  Then I had children and put everything behind me in favour of big pants and bigger duvets.

I rediscovered Abba with my kids.  They love it.  Tallulah has their first album on CD, I think it’s called Arrival.  They put it on and have what they call a ‘pants disco’.  This involves wearing pants on your head and clutching pants in each hand whilst bounding about maniacally shaking your booty.  It always has to be Abba for the disco win.  They can’t get enough of it.  They have wide musical tastes.  Tallulah likes the Black Eyed Peas (my lovely lady lumps, check it out, mama!) and The White Stripes (Do you know Mama? I do love Jack White like a little brother.  I do. I really do.).  Matilda likes Phantom of the Opera and High School Musical.  Oscar likes The Rubber Dubbers.  But they are all united in their love for Abba.

They were very jealous that I was going to see the film without them.  I promised them that if it was suitable I would take them to see it on Friday when Oscar was in nursery.  I prayed a lot that it would be or I’d never hear the end of it.  Luckily it was and they are very happy indeed.  I am praying that none of them vomit before, during or after and that will make me happy.

Basically it was rubbish, but it was excellent, self referential, funny rubbish that celebrated how rubbish it was and really got on with having a brilliant time.  I’d pay again just to see Julie Walters in a silver lame jumpsuit with kick flares and platform boots.  It certainly made a change from Mrs. Overall.  Colin Firth can’t sing, but was lovely because he is Colin Firth, and no matter how portly he gets (and he too wears sparkly jumpsuits if you wait for the credits at the end) he will always be Mr. Darcy to me.  Although it has to be said that Mr. Darcy would be rolling in his literary grave at the choice of outfits given his penchant for tasteful buckskin breeches.

Suspend disbelief, enjoy the singing and the fact that it is blatantly a movie where they had way more fun making it than you will ever have fun watching it, and all will be well.  The audience, as my reviews always include an audience review, were fantastic.  It was packed to the rafters, which for a seven thirty showing on a Tuesday night was unusual.  It was packed to the rafters with women of a certain age.  Andrea and I were probably the youngest ones there and I thank God that there were no co-ordinated menopausal hot flushes or the cinema would have gone up like a fiery inferno.

As it was, my neighbour was the wrong side of sixty and had a lovely blue rinse.  My nan used to have blue and pink rinses on alternate weeks and I haven’t seen a blue rinse like it since she went to live with Cheezus.  It was quite alarming.  She was a very noisy neighbour, and if we had been watching the latest in experimental Danish Dogme cinema or at the theatre I would have had to stab her dead with a hat pin, but as it was she was almost as entertaining as the film.  It’s clear that she doesn’t get out much and she was having the time of her life.  She had totally forgotten that she was in a cinema full of strangers and was so absorbed that she still thought she was at home watching Corrie.  She kept giving excited little squeaks and clutching the arms of the seat whilst uttering the most ridiculously obvious statements: ‘Oooooh! She’s putting down a plate.  Maybe she’s going to have dinner.’ ‘Aaaah! That’s nice, she’s got to choose which one her dad is!’  ‘Ooohh! I wonder if she’s going to marry him?’  I didn’t have the heart to tell her off she was enjoying herself so much.  To be honest I’d be hard put to say which I enjoyed more, her or the film.  Good value though when you think about it.  Two entertainments for the price of one.  Abbatastic.

I didn’t get to sleep until two this morning.  I get this random insomnia sometimes.  I am not dreaming mad dreams on the heath, tearing tights with my teeth or thinking about greasy insomnia a la Faithless.  It’s not that glamorous.  For once it wasn’t the children’s fault either.  I don’t know what it was.  I just couldn’t turn my mind off, then my hips hurt, then I was too hot.  I took the duvet off.  Then I was too cold.  Then I decided that there was probably something terribly wrong with me (something I think about a lot in the wee small hours). 

Then I started thinking about Abba, due to watching Mamma Mia earlier.  I wondered why I wasn’t a Swedish pop impresario and then thought about the fact that I don’t like roll mop herrings and I’m not very organised.  Then I had a big argument with myself about just getting out of bed and going downstairs and doing something less boring instead in a Why Don’t You type way. Then I decided I was too tired.  After that I had a mild panic attack, because I was so stressed at the thought of being too tired to look after the children.  This then made me ponder how lucky I was to only have been broody for about half an hour yesterday.

I finally fell asleep in a sweat strewn tangle only to wake up again almost immediately, except it wasn’t immediately, it was half past eight.  Oscar was calling, Tallulah had crept into bed with me and her bear who was disconcertingly dressed as a giant furry butterfly.  She was staring at me with beady eyed expectation and the phone was ringing because the Ocado man wanted to deliver the groceries early.

I sent the children to get dressed.  Scooped Oscar up and let the Ocado man in.  I only managed this by sticking my hair in a rubber band and going for the rumpled look, wearing yesterday’s clothes, which were covered in rock cake crumbs, but better than nakedness.  I have not progressed from this state since then and it is now half past two in the afternoon.

While I was wrestling with a consignment of loo rolls and Rice Krispies there was a god awful noise from upstairs.  The girls, instead of getting dressed, had made the executive decision to fight over who was in charge of the Lily Allen CD that their friend had left behind when she came to visit on Monday.  They were naked and screaming into each other’s faces, just before throwing the cd to the ground to indulge in a giant, no holds barred fight.  Apparently some men find the thought of two naked women fighting each other erotic.  Ha! is what I say to that.  Clearly these are men that never had sisters.  I did not find it anything at all except wildly annoying.  I shook my box of Rice Krispies and shouted a lot.  They came downstairs to fight over some toast.

Their father came to take them away for the day.  I was very grateful.  He stayed for coffee while they fought over the television control in the lounge.  He did not look too happy to be taking them out.  I on the other hand was delighted.  I had just waved them off and spoken to my mother who wanted to come round for coffee as refuge because my father has taken up house painting (shortly before invading Austria) when they all appeared in the drive again.  Apparently Tallulah had had a tantrum because she didn’t want to do any errands before being taken to Borders for lunch and then to see Wall.E at the cinema.  She was furious.  Jamie looked bewildered.  She stormed all over the driveway shrieking.  Tilly looked bored.  I sent them to do their errands and whipped her upstairs to bed where she kicked the walls and screamed ‘NOOOOOO!’ a lot.

Oscar was fascinated.  He has now learned how to open doors, so kept breaking into her bedroom and shouting; ‘Tula? Tula? Too cross! Poor Tula!’  It didn’t help.  She was making so much noise it was a wonder she heard him at all.  She kept shouting at him to go away so she could finish her tantrum in peace.  By the time Jamie came back she was exhausted and suitably chastened.  He took her away with dire threats.  I don’t know if it will work, but as long as they don’t come back before tomorrow morning I don’t mind one bit whether it does or not.

Mum arrived shortly afterwards.  My dad should be avoided at all costs when DIY commences.  He is a menace.  He gets very enthusiastic about doing things but has no real idea about how to do anything on his own.  He is also wildly disorganised.  He doesn’t believe in moving anything out of the way, planning anything, checking he’s got all the right bits and pieces before he starts, or cleaning up after himself.  Add to that the fact that he ropes in anyone within a six mile radius to help him when things invariably go wrong.  That he shouts at them as if it were them who were cretinous enough to start painting the back door in thunderstorm with only a tester pot and a paint brush that looks like Basil Fawlty’s moustache.  And then he inevitably gets bored before the end of any job and leaves it in order to have a lie down.  Where you will then find him snoring, two hours later surrounded by stiff paint brushes and painty paw prints where the cat’s been playing at being a painter in much the same way as my dad.  She too will be asleep with a tail full of gloss paint and a bemused look on her face.  You will see why mother was beating a path to the front door.

I have only ever done any kind of decorating with my dad once.  It was when he was hanging wallpaper in our dining room and decided that the experience would be good for me.  He assumes you know exactly what you are doing, despite the fact that you have never hung, or had the desire to hang wallpaper in your entire life.  Even when he doesn’t assume, he is not good at instructions.  He works along the lines of; ‘Hold that thing can’t you?’  ‘No! Not that thing. That thing!’  ’Not there! There!’  ‘Are you deliberately being thick?’ etc, etc.  Then he gets huffy when you shout at him and explain that a little more detail on the instructions might help.

He does everything in feet and inches.  I do everything in metric.  Neither of us told the other.  My dad can’t measure anything anyway, and is well known for reading the tape measure back to front.  I don’t think a single pair of curtains in our house were ever put up in one successful operation due to either being too long, too short or for portholes only.  He also has a shocking eye for colour and can’t really do lining things up either.  During our abortive paper hanging session,  he also assumed that we were the same height and couldn’t understand why my end of things drooped a lot.  I am about half a head shorter than my dad and had also been relegated to the use of the wobbly kitchen stool with the wonky leg.  It did not make things easier as he shouted at me while I stood draped in several metres of wallpaper dripping large lumps of itch making wallpaper paste onto my delicate and pissed off skin.  We decided never to become a father daughter decorating team on that day.  It’s something we’ve always stuck too and I’m proud of that.

Being as how my mum is both married to him and lives in the same house she has no choice but to help out.  She ran away to me instead.  A much more successful option and one which may mean they actually make it to their fortieth wedding anniversary next year.

Oscar was so pleased to see his granny that he didn’t miss the girls one bit.  He did nine hundred wees and poohs in his potty for her, demanding a round of applause for each one.  He watered the plants, luckily not with wee.  He ran round and round in ever decreasing circles on the trampolene and then ran around generally showing off appallingly, stopping only to say; ‘Are ‘oo aright grammy?’ with a cheeky grin every five minutes or so.  He ate all her lunch and ignored his own and then instructed her in the arcane ways of Balamory.  He was quite tired after that, which is why I’ve been able to write this uninterrupted.  It is lovely and peaceful and although I am knackered it seems such a waste of time to spend it asleep, so I am making blog while the son snores.

1. Why am I unable to resist the lure of rock cakes even though I ate too many yesterday and made myself feel sick and am now wolfing down my third one of today, crumbs cascading down my bosom like a tiny avalanche in the bosom pyrenees and in the full knowledge that in about half an hour I’m going to go to the cinema and scoff myself silly?
2. Why am I drinking my second cafetiere of coffee of the day even though it is now half past six in the evening and I promised myself that I wouldn’t do that any more because I stay up fretting and having weird caffeine induced twitches?
3. Why am I unable to explain coherently to Tallulah that if she keeps poking her head in her brother’s face he will inevitably get pissed off and try to wrench her brains out through her eyebrows and it’s nobody’s fault but her own because although he’s very clever he isn’t yet two and doesn’t understand the principle of non violence as a retaliatory option?
4. Why, when my friend told me that it was perfectly fine to freeze milk, because she was sure she’d heard all about it on Radio Four, did I not stick it into Google and have a good look before I whacked six pints in the freezer with a cheery wave, only to find out today that despite defrosting in the fridge since yesterday we now have a milk arctic and I must drink my coffee black and eat my shreddies dry?
5. Why do the hairs on your bikini line seem to be the only human hairs that have no sense of direction and decide that the only thing to do is to grow backwards into your skin leaving you with an unsightly festering pustule right where your knicker elastic digs in?  Ow! Ow! Fucking Ow!
6. Why does Oscar have a fatal fascination with the theme tune from The Rubber Dubbers and keep demanding that I sing it, despite the fact that I can remember almost every single CBeebies theme tune except that one?
7. Why am I going to see Mamma Mia when I categorically loathe and detest all musicals except Cats?
8. Why does Oscar hold his wee in like a dog and do mindless widdles everywhere? Does he have a bladder the size of Jupiter?  He is quite small.  I don’t understand?
9. Why did I put too much garlic in the dinner knowing full well I would be going out on a social occasion later?
10. Why did I start this when I knew I would have to go out but couldn’t resist the siren lure of blogging once more just for old time’s sake anyway?

After I hauled myself away from the coal face of blogdom yesterday Oscar puked in the bath.  I was in two minds about this. In one way it was neatly contained and easy to clean.  On the other hand I had to send the two girls upstairs to have a shower to wash off all the puke.  There’s always a catch.  I sometimes think at these times that I wish I’d bred owls.  Owl puke after all is dry and comes neatly wrapped.  Perhaps I can breed the children with owls and produce children that vomit small neat pellets of nuggets and fish fingers.  It’d be something to do for the rest of the holidays.

I cleaned everyone up and then escorted them all downstairs.  Oscar threw up all over Jason’s chair.  Luckily it’s leather.  It’s the only leather chair in the house, as I don’t like them unless they’re either custom made or a hundred years old, or from Batman’s library.  All our other chairs are cloth.  I’m glad he puked on the leather chair because a) I hate it and b) it’s much, much easier to clean puke off leather than almost anything else.  I cleaned everyone up and started again.

By the time Jason got home from work Oscar was asleep on my chest and we both smelled of sick.  The girls had been watching television for two hours because they were listless, fed up and every time I gave them something else to do they ended up battering each other, and there was no tea ready.  Oddly I had gone off the idea of tea altogether due to the all pervading odour of sick which was following me round like a halo.  Jason was mildly mollified by my tales of woe and the offer of what was left of the rock cakes.

Poor Jason, who had been up since six and looked dead on his feet, now had to rustle up tea for the kids.  Oscar slept on my arm until six, whereupon he bounded to life, wiped his nose on my breast and demanded spaghetti hoops because he was hungry.  I had a dead arm, sticky boobs and still wasn’t hungry.  I wondered about whether to starve him and then thought how difficult it would be to explain to a small, ravenous boy that starvation was the way forward.  I caved and gave him hoops which he polished off with great gusto and then ran round the lounge until half past seven playing at being Bob the Builder and having the time of his life.  It was exhausting to even watch, and slightly annoying that he just got better ‘bing!’ on the other hand, would I really want him still puking and insisting on wall to wall cuddles? I think not.

Tallulah was still running a temperature, so she got some calpol and an early night.  When I went to get her up for a wee I couldn’t wake her at all, but she was talking away in her sleep, counting things; ‘Three, Four, Five……Six, seveneightnineten, Eleven, THREE.’  All in a frantic whisper. I asked her what she was counting.  She said; ‘Shhh!’ and carried on counting.  I shh’d. I know my place.

Today I woke up with a real feeling of dread in the pit of my stomach.  Three poorly children, vast acres of holiday stretching before me and crappy weather.  I feel like I’ve been cast into some Dantean circle of hell.  I needed a plan, but one which didn’t involve me spending vast amounts of time, money and effort getting to some place of entertainment only to have them all cry, fight and vomit over me before me having to reverse the process and get them back home again.

Luckily they are still into the wonders of the postage system, and presents from Canada had arrived, so they did thank you letters and cards.  Oscar was not very good at helping, so I took him upstairs with me and we had a long shower so that I could keep him contained and away from potentially glorious works of art.  He spent a long time crouched in the bottom of the shower with various potions and stirrings and stuff.  I know he still isn’t quite well yet because half way through his frantic efforts he got overcome and had to come and rest his head on my stomach for a moment.

I watched him for ages.  That is one of the joys of having children.  They do let you watch them for long periods of time and people are so fascinating, why wouldn’t you want to watch them? It wouldn’t surprise me if Desmond Morris had twenty eight children and spent years staring at them all.  They are so graceful when they are absorbed in what they’re doing.  They have that wonderful ability to concentrate with alarming intensity and yet be almost relaxed about it.  They’re really not very far removed from animals at all.  Watching him stirring and measuring and concentrating so hard at playing reminded me of watching my two kittens learning to hunt years ago.  Thankfully Oscar decided to forgo the sparrow feathers stuck between his teeth and leaving me dead vole’s heads on the doormat.

It’s moments like these (not the vole head thing) that remind me why I had children in the first place.  I remember when we first took Tilly to the seaside.  She ran down the sand and into the water with no fear, no hesitation and this enormously gleeful face.  A wave knocked her over and I expected her to burst into tears, but she just picked herself up, laughed her head off and kept on running into the waves.  I cried.  It was one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever seen.  She was so happy, she was bursting with happiness and it was all so very simple and easy.

I sometimes feel like that again when I watch them sleep.  Their faces are so smooth and clean and relaxed.  I love the way they sprawl out and make those starfish hands.  Everything they do is so enthusiastic and whole hearted, even sleeping.  It’s a shame they don’t do more of it.  Maybe I would love them more if they were in a coma until they were twenty one.  It’s something to think about during the long dark tea time of the soul that will be adolescence.

While I was watching Oscar in the shower, the curve of his ear, the way his water washed eyelashes look like stars bursting, the hair smoothing into the nape of his neck, the angles of his shoulder blades, it struck me that this time is really very precious, however much I moan about it.  They let me share so much of themselves (too much usually), and I am in such a privileged position to be able to see and share and know them, and as they grow up this will get less and less.  This will undoubtedly be a good thing.  I have many plans for things I want to do without them as they get older and more independent, but I will miss that intimacy, that connection and that sense of wonder that they provide.  I already dread the day that Oscar will not want his cuddles anymore and I won’t be able to bury my head in his hair and get a big sniff of whatever it is that makes babies smell so delicious.  It made me all a bit A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu.  But with rock cakes instead of madeleines.

Then when he got out and insisted on doing five wee’s in the potty in quick succession, emptying the games cupboard all over the landing while I got dry and rampaging through my bedside table drawers I lost that sense of fragile wonder for one of deep and lasting frustration and annoyance.

This was compounded by the fact that I then had to remind the girls how to get ready to go to the post office as they had forgotten things like having a wee, wearing shoes and making sure their hair was brushed.  By the time we got out the door I would have sold them to the nearest rag and bone man for a fiver for the three of them.

We posted our letters and went to the supermarket because horror of horrors we had run out of Shreddies and Tallulah was nearly catatonic with trauma.  We had lunch in the Co-op cafe which was long, drawn out and tedious due to them all being on day release from Strangeways and unused to the concept of food in general.  The children had a wonderful time and because it takes so long to get served with anything remotely approaching food it meant we were occupied for hours.

On the way home I threw them in the hairdressers and they had a trim and their hair straightened as a treat.  Tallulah has hair like Shirley Temple and her greatest ambition in life is to have hair as straight as tap water.  She was delighted and it passed another hour.  Oscar was wide awake and had to be entertained for the entire time as his hair is too sparse to be cut or straightened.  He untwirled all the stools, played going to the shops, took his shoes and socks off to make foot monsters and ate handfuls of dried shreddies.  They were very relieved when we left and I tipped heavily.

The girls are now playing spies.  This seems to involve wearing dark glasses and creeping around muttering things in code through the side of their mouth, rather like Humphrey Bogart.  I thought their dad was coming to pick them up tonight but it turns out that we had our wires crossed and he’s not coming.  Thankfully the spy game is keeping them so occupied that they don’t care overmuch.  I do.  I had planned tea for three, and now have to make tea for five.  Plus I had wangled Jason into babysitting because I was going to see Mamma Mia with a friend, on the basis that he would only have one child to deal with.  Now he’s coming home to three.  Ah well, at least they haven’t thrown up all day.

Today the children have decided to carry on their revenge for me daring to spend twenty four hours without their company.  They do this much like cats, not in an obvious sort of way.  You know how a cat likes to punish their owner by seemingly ignoring them and yet being wrapped around their ankle at every moment of the live long day for about seventy two hours after returning from a trip?  This is my children.  There’s nothing you can actually accuse them of doing that they don’t already do.  It’s just that they seem to do it more and louder and in a particularly aggravating kind of way that both heralds your return to your nest and is a veiled threat should you ever try to leave it again.  It’s mental torture of the worst kind.  Those Guantanamo Bay chaps could learn a thing or two.

Oscar went to bed at seven last night and then stayed up until nine thirty chuntering, wailing and generally hell raising in his cot.  He has animals on his cot bumper and when he is particularly grumpy he likes to shout at them in a motherly way.  Last night in between moans for ‘mink’ and ‘dummy’ and ‘blankin’ and anything else he could possibly think of and shouts of ‘OUT! OUT! OUT!’ he was shouting at his elephants and monkeys which he refers to as emits and moinkins.  There was lots of ‘Oi! Moinkin! No!’ and ‘Emit! No! Naughty!’ as if it were their fault for being too rowdy that he could not get to sleep.  I tried throwing a blanket over their leering faces, but to no avail.

I tried everything short of actually taking him out of the cot.  He finally collapsed in a sweat strewn heap at half past nine simply because he couldn’t think of anything else to do.  I hate that cot bumper.  I never had to have cot bumpers with the other two (for the uninitiated, these are padded material you drape round the cot sides to stop the child poking its limbs out between the bars).  Unfortunately Oscar is a great one for limb poking and even with the cot bumper, regularly gets his thigh jammed between two cot bars and has to be extricated before he snaps his femur.

By the time he settled I was knackered and stressed.  Jason had gone for his poker lesson and I had visions of watching crap television and reading my book.  I didn’t even sit down until ten o’clock.  I then spent thirty minutes jumping like a spider at every noise, convinced it was either Oscar strangling himself with boredom or Tallulah vomiting into her slippers.  It was just the opposite of a restful evening alone and I was rather depressed about the whole thing, despite finishing my book, which was rather excellent (Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman).

Tallulah had a peaceful night but woke up grumpy and has been in a filthy mood all day.  She has picked away at everyone, trying to get them into trouble and whingeing when the only person who has gotten into trouble is her.  She has decided that she hates everything on the face of the planet.  The only thing that has made her even slightly happy today was a half an hour episode of Horrid Henry at ten this morning.  Since then even fishfingers and potato waffles with mint choc chip icecream has failed to lift the storm clouds from her head.  Apparently she had too many fish fingers and not enough ice cream.  Isn’t that always the way of it though?

We had some friends round for lunch and play time.  She decided she hated them and spent most of her time shouting at some poor child about three millimetres from her nose and screaming: ‘You can’t tell me what to do!’  She then burst into tears because nobody wanted to play with her and it wasn’t fair.  I pointed out that playing with people did not involve screaming at them, nor did it involve demanding that if they didn’t do it her way it was the high way, and perhaps playing had more of a sharing element in it.  She looked at me as if I were a total mentaller and went off to jab sticks into her gro bag in a menacing way.  I decided to do some baking which usually puts them all into an excellent mood.  We made rock cakes.  she sulked outside on the trampolene for half an hour until everyone else had nearly finished and then demanded to be allowed to come in and make them.  I chose rock cakes because they’re easy and nice and messy.  They all decided, apart from Tilly, that they hated mess and loathed getting messy.  They squeaked and grumbled and moaned and spent most of the cake making time locked in the toilet washing their hands like someone with OCD.  It was an unmitigated disaster.

In Tallulah’s defence, she does seem to be running a slight temperature, and although she hasn’t exhibited any more signs of mumps, and when I rang my mum to say did Tallulah complain of a swollen face yesterday, mum did say that Tallulah ran into one of the display cases at the museum, which might explain that slightly, she still seems under the weather.  All she wants to do is have a hug.  Oscar too is very huggish and has been bursting into tears and being rather ill tempered all day.  Tilly is alright but tired and just wants to snuggle up with her book. Luckily she doesn’t want lots of hugs.  Even though I have two knees and enough room on them for Tallulah and Oscar they have been jockeying for position as chief huggee all day and they now want to assassinate each other more than anything else in the world.  I hate this kind of lingering non illness type illness.  It drags on for ages and yet they’re not ill enough to take to their beds and just ill enough to make everything seem terrible and horrible and awful.  Please, please, please let them be well again soon.

The girls have both requested an early night tonight which is very startling indeed.  This holiday is not going at all as planned.  So far ill health has meant that when I have them all we do is stay at home or take gentle, health giving walks to the library.  When other people have them and they are well, they rush around doing all sorts of exciting things.  I am grateful, but now wondering whether in future therapy sessions they will recode this as; ‘Mama never did anything with us.  We had to rely on the charity of others for even the most basic of treats.  It was a shockingly negligent time and is burned into my brain forever.  No wonder I am obese/anorexic/alcoholic/crack addicted/in need of a good wash.  It’s all her fault.’

I tried dear reader, I really tried.  I had great plans for today.  Apart from the abortive rock cakes, of which I have now eaten twelve, and feel rather sick for, there is nothing to show for it.  I have thrown the children in the bath with the Lush bath bomb of their choice so that I can have ten minutes peace and quiet before they try to drown each other in a cascade of mimosa sparkly bubbles.  At least they will be beautiful smelling corpses.

Here we are again, not as happy as can be.  It is quarter past six.  We have been home since about two o’clock this afternoon.  I am feeling like I have both been away forever and not actually been anywhere at all.  It is very disconcerting.

The morning went beautifully slowly.  I slept in until nine, which is a fabulous lie in for me.  I woke naturally, voluntary and entirely peacefully, which is so exciting I will mark it down in my diary as something to be remembered and called upon in times of stress for the rest of my life.  I had a frighteningly brisk deluge of a shower with nobody commenting on the state of my sagging stomach, my bedimpled arse cheeks or trying to pumice my knee caps.  I got dressed slowly, in a leisurely fashion and then read my book for half an hour until breakfast beckoned.  It was a triumph, a positive triumph of a morning.

We decided not to risk the hotel for breakfast and ambled over to Cafe Rouge where we drank coffee and lime presse, and ate lots of French pastries, which because they were weeny, didn’t count as calories at all, which is why I had three and some toasted French bread with lashings of butter.  It was glorious.

Jason wanted to read his book and I wanted to shop, so I deposited him in a cafe and spent two hours drifting about trying things on and making compilations of things and generally having a brilliant time.  I bought three t-shirts in the end.  This was whittled down from my shortlist of twenty five things.  I think I did well.

I had a Pret smoked salmon and crayfish salad for lunch, which was scrummy, and then we came home.  The house looked like a small, sticky bomb had hit it, but at least everyone was out.  Granny and Grandad had taken them to the Wallace and Gromit exhibition at the local museum and then out for lunch.  They all appeared at about three o’clock in a sticky, enthusiastic heap, just as we’d finished tidying up the sticky heap that was the house.  Oscar was covered in tomato sauce and tired.  Tallulah was feeling tired and shouty and Matilda was very excited because she’d been allowed to go on Bin Weevils on granny’s computer and had saved up enough Bin Weevil points for a Bin Weevil bed, which she enthusiastically shouted about for twenty minutes non stop.

Tallulah is running a temperature and complaining of a tummy ache and a sore face (I am wondering if she has mumps)  Oscar has refused his tea and just wants to watch Charlie and Lola and pull Tallulah’s hair.  Matilda is angling to go on my p.c. and win herself more bin weevil goodies but has been fobbed off with some extra curricular bouncing on the trampolene while I throw the others in the shower.

I am feeling slightly mardy because I want everything to be like it was last night, but without the badly cooked steak.  I realise this cannot happen and that my children are rather lovely and I must have missed them because I phoned them three times while we were away and got regular updates by text.  Nevertheless I am now under no illusions that I may be going deaf.  I am definitely not deaf.  Daft maybe, but not deaf…

With the aid of my trusty time machine I am here reliving my fabulous Saturday.  And fabulous it was.  No children, no stress, no deadlines, nowhere to be except in a very glamorous hotel room in Birmingham.  We had booked a suite at the Malmaison and it was just lovely. Not perfect, because my hyper critical hotel reviewer side came to the fore, but it was bloody lovely anyway.

We left just before lunchtime, with the children in the capable hands of eldest son and ambled our way to Brum, had a lovely lunch in Wagamamas and then did lots of shopping.  We love shopping.  I am very lucky to have a husband that likes to shop and feels much the same way that I do about all kinds of sporting events (they bring him out in a rash, and he has to have a lie down).  I resisted the temptations of the glorious Jimmy Choo shoes that were still on sale in Selfridges, even though they had been reduced even more.  I did not resist the call of the dress in Monsoon that I’ve had my eye on all season and which was reduced from £85 to £35, because that would have been churlish and silly.  I was impressed that I spent an hour in Borders and didn’t buy a book.  It nearly killed me and I had to have a little slump against a bench afterwards, but it was very good for a person of my low tolerance for denial.

I normally pack the Mr. Kipling French Fancies for a trip away like this, but I decided to ratchett things up a knotch on the decadence stakes and before we checked in I went for a little wander through Selfridges Food Hall.  I came out with two extremely glamorous cakes which looked a lot like Philip Treacey hats but tasted a lot better (due to the lack of straw).  I also bought a box of a dozen Krispy Kreme doughnuts for my beloved.  He was wildly impressed of me.

I spent the remainder of my afternoon in a huge double ended claw footed bath, filled with bath oil, eating cakes and reading Harpers Bazaar and wondering how anyone could justify spending £10,700 on a pair of boots, and what kind of rich you would have to be to not even blink an eyelash at such a ridiculous sum of money.  That’s £5,350 per leg.  It seems a tad excessive, even for me, and I like being decadent.

We ate at the Malmaison restaurant in the evening.  It was sadly disappointing.  The steak was chewy.  The bearnaise sauce was absolutely pathetic and the chips were tepid.  The sommelier got stroppy because I refused to pay £9.50 for a glass of Veuve Cliquot when you can buy a bottle for thirty five quid from the supermarket and I wasn’t impressed because they didn’t stock Stoli.  The pudding was nice but ridiculous.  I decided to have gooseberry fool.  It’s an incredibly rich dessert and a little goes a long way.  Mine was served in a half sized kilner jar.  There was so much of it I barely ate half and I was nearly sick.  It was just way, way too much for such a rich dessert.  Nothing to do with the fact that I had decimated my cake hats of joy earlier in the bath.  It was just silly.

Apart from that all was great and all manner of things were great.  The greatest thing was the lack of children which was so very, very peaceful and quiet.  I thought I might have gone deaf at one point.  Hooray.  I will hold on to the memory for a very long time.  I will have to.  It’s unlikely to happen again in the near future.

I’ve had a little time to go poking about on the galactic interweb today.  I was looking for some of my famous non-news stories to write blogs about for your and my amusement.  Luckily for me, given that it’s now twenty past eight in the evening, there are pools of wet towels all over the landing and the kitchen looks like a bomb, albeit a bomb made entirely of sausage and mash, has exploded in it, someone else has done it first.  This means I can do a cunning link to her article, tell you how brilliant it is, and slope off to watch Location Location Location before anyone finds out.  You can hardly see the join the plan is so perfect.

Caitlin Moran is a columnist for the Times.  I would quite like her job.  It seems to be her musing about the sort of non-news style events that I find amusing, interesting and slightly baffling.  Rest assured, as I have no desire to have a real job, she won’t have to spend the next six months frisking boxes of Shreddies for razor blades or tiny bombs made of sharpened twigs.  Plus, as far as I’m concerned, the more amusing people out there in the world filling the newspapers with entertainment rather than dreary stories about how if you venture three millimetres from your own doorstep someone is likely to hammer you to death with a sharpened shoe, the better a place the world will be.

Here is the article that made me laugh so much.  I liked it so much I read it twice.  If you do not like it however do not blame me, as I am not about to give you your money back, or set my personal TARDIS to give you back the five minutes of your life you have wasted.

If you do like it, I also suggest reading the comments on the bottom of the page from other readers.  There are a few rather strange people who most joyously for me, read it as if it were actually a piece of serious news and seemed to get their knickers in an unholy knot about it.  This was almost as fantastic as the piece itself.  It is sometimes a great comfort to know that there are still people out there who we can point and laugh at for being total twits, even in these days of wall to wall danger and sharpened shoes.  Hoorah!

Firstly. I forgot to say in my last blog entry that all my darlings are now better and vomit free (I am touching quite a lot of wood while announcing this fact.  In fact I am now a tree hugging kinda gal).  I am very grateful to all you sympathisers out there who were kind enough to pop into my blog and wish me well.  I am also feeling rather well myself, and with less than twenty four hours to go before my imminent escape from the children I am keeping everything crossed and trying to quarantine them in a small pen hoping that my wellness will remain well.

My friend has yet to turn up yet.  Children have been fed.  Golden Compass is still compassing.  I thought I’d crack on with the weekly question time while I still have some relatively free time.  We are ignoring the giant pile of washing up in the sink. It will give me something to do while Nicole and Tallulah stab each other with knitting needles.

It has been a slow week blog wise.  I haven’t got the usual plethora of mad requests, ideas and random tat that usually appear in my stats list.  I think this is because a) everyone is still reeling from the shock of it being the summer holidays and b) my prolific blogging has shrunk to a mere trickle and I am not being as topical as usual.  Nevertheless I have culled what I can and here are the results of the Luxembourg jury:

Alien Fizz Pod Instructions:

I don’t know. I don’t know.  I can’t even hazard a guess.  I’m just so excited about the thought of alien fizz pods and what they might be, and why you might need instructions that I couldn’t wait to share it with you. I presume that reading any links my blog would have thrown up did not solve your problems, as to my knowledge I have never provided instructions to alien fizz pods, and this is not the sort of thing I am likely to forget.  Where my car keys are, yes! How many beans make five, definitely.  But not instructions of the alien fizz pod variety.  So.  If I don’t know the answer, why am I mentioning it?  Because, because, because I really, really want to know what the instructions are/were.  I am hoping that you, the instruction hunter, may want to look such things up again, type it into Google, come across this plea, and mail me to share with me your fizz pod joy.  I want to know if it’s something you eat.  I like things that fizz.  Although maybe not aliens.  I suppose it depends entirely on what flavour aliens they turn out to be.  Turnip would be bad.  Raspberry would be amazing.

Blueberries with dentures.

Fantastic.  I just have this mental picture of these teeny, tiny blueberries with huge false grins.  Grins bigger than the Cheshire Cat.  Grins which split their tiny juicy bodies in two and which are exhausting to carry around.  Or blueberries tucked up in bed with tiny Wee Willie Winkie style night caps and glasses of water with humungous denture based smiles poking out of the top.  Perhaps blueberries can get free dentures on the NHS, along with support tights and trips to see their loved ones in high security prison.  Awesome.  Again, why this person was directed to me I have no idea.  I have never owned a blueberry with dentures.  In fact I detest blueberries because they taste all bitty and gritty and perfumey and wrong.  They also stain things a worrying colour.  Perhaps I’m being unfair to them. Perhaps the ones with dentures are delicious.  Maybe they taste of raspberries, or turnips.  Maybe they’re a hybrid and taste of turberries or raspbnips. Maybe I should shut up now and answer another question.

How many carbs does chess have?

I didn’t realise that you were on the Kasparov diet.  How’s that working out for you?  Are you on a black day or a white day?  I would imagine that the board may be more carby than the pieces, depending on what the pieces are made from.  I’ve always imagined that cardboard was quite densely packed with carbohydrate.  Erroneously in all probability. After all my only nutritional guideline here is the fact that they both begin with the word ‘car’.  The fundamental problem here is that you’re just not giving me enough to go on.  I need information.  Are you looking at a teak board with ivory pieces.  Are you looking at a cardboard board with plastic pieces.  Are we thinking of a chess board created entirely from remoulded doner kebabs, or maybe one made with Mr. Kiplings French Fancies.  Write to me immediately and let me know your thoughts.

How to make a dog pooh.

Get down on your knees, look it in the eye, abase yourself and say: ‘Dear dog (or insert name of your choice if you are indeed on first name terms with the canine), I would really, really like you to do a lovely pooh for me.  I would be very grateful if you could produce one when I blow into this whistle and shout; ‘Ready, Steady, Go!’  If you do this for me I will give you an entire box of Scooby Snacks and a dried pig’s ear as a gesture of my appreciation.  Yours truly (insert your own name here).’

Melt a Snickers bar in the microwave.  Scoop up the remains in a kind of log shaped puddle kind of way and then let it harden in the fridge.  Now throw it on the lawn, walk towards it, step on it, scream and then spend half an hour shunting your shoe along the grass verge whilst moaning. 

Help, I want to meet Celine Dion.

You do need help.  I would advise a dash to the nearest hospital with a secure psychiatric unit and suicide watch.

Free French Grannies.

Is this a BOGOF offer? Buy one Ukranian granny and get a free French Granny.  Maybe you know something we don’t and the reason for the upswing in the French economy is the fact that Sarkozy has all the French grannies locked up in a giant granny asylum and is feeding them air and turnip juice.  This would free up all the pension money to allow his lady love to become a supermodel nude French rock star extraordinaire and boost the economy by millions with the profit from her debut album, entitled: ‘I am a supermodel nude French rockstar extraodinaire and if you don’t buy my record I will kidnap your granny and feed her turnip juice.’  Or maybe the lorry drivers who are taking the French grannies to the asylum are striking and burning granny carcasses by the side of the road, demanding the return of their sheep.

Do goats eat pickles?

In my extensive experience of the world of goats (my ex boyfriend’s mother had two nanny goats and two baby goats) they will eat bloody anything.  Pickles are the least of your worries.  Pickles are a mere bagatelle in the world of goat based cuisine.  Just make sure that your clothes line is strung up between Mount Everest and K2 and that you like the blitzed wasteland look for your garden.

Paul Weller doesn’t like Jimmy Page.

What can you do though eh?  They’ve never been the same since that game of table football in 1975.  Just because Jimmy had the most agile fingers in rock doesn’t mean he won’t mess up his defence if he’s wasted on smack.  Everyone knows that smack makes for sloppy table football players.  Weller should never have gone there in the first place.  He was a fool to himself.

My child has a nit, can she go swimming?

Just the one?  Are you sure it’s a nit and not a goat? Or a turnip?  It’s unlikely to be one if it is a nit.  Nits tend to herd together in packs you know.  Still I’d let her go swimming.  If there are other nits around they will run to the top of her head and form a nit pyramid to escape the incoming tide.  That way you will definitely know one way or the other.  If it’s a goat she’ll probably sink when the goat hysterically tries to leap for the shore, thus ridding you of your problem neatly.  You’ll have to keep her in for a long time if it’s not goats.  Nits can hold their breath for about an hour apparently.  They’re in the Guinness book of World Records.  They have photos of nits with little puffy cheeks and starey eyes.  Obviously taken with the aid of an electron microscope.  Goats, for the record, are not very good at holding their breath.  It’s their little beards.  It tickles them and makes them involuntarily open their mouth to have a good giggle.  That bleating is actually the hilarious sound of goat laughter echoing through the hills.  Just ask Heidi.

What does Celine Dion look like?

1. A menace to society
2. A spoon in a wig
3. A French Canadian pop diva wearing some dressing up clothes for a bet.
4. All of the above