For it is good.

Also, as she says in her blog post; a lot of other most excellent bloggers are also back, which also makes me extremely happy.

Her blog post is based on this blog post by Non Working Monkey, who is, as Emma says, back too.

The premise of the post is to write down a list of things you are good at, and things you are bad at.  Emma has invited you to write in the comments box, but as we know, one of the things I am good at is writing A LOT.  Consequently it is just easier to write a post and do linky stuff.

Here goes:

Good

Writing a lot, about anything or nothing or everything. I am not necessarily talking about quality here, but by God I’m your woman if you’re looking for quantity.

Talking.  See above.  The words ‘hind leg’ and ‘donkey’ spring to mind.

Appreciating my food.  By rights I should be at least twenty stone. I am like a basking shark.  I zoom through life with my mouth open and my jaws whirring,  and my internal dialogue is mostly me going ‘nom nom nom,’ when it is not me going ‘rrrraaagh’.

Getting irritable about things that don’t really matter.  I spend a great deal of my life, when I am not eating, letting things get on my tits.  I can get irritated about almost anything you like, pretty much at the drop of a hat.  This leads to me being very good at writing letters signed: ‘Outraged of Broughton Astley’ and ranting on, while the children sigh and ignore me.

Reading.  I am never without a book.  I usually have at least six on the go at any one time.  The day I stop reading is the day I am either dead or pod snatched by aliens.  I am also good at reading out loud to small children, as Emma mentions. I get a lot of practice at this.

Finding life very, very funny.  I cannot quite reconcile this with the fact that I also find life very, very fucking annoying, but there you go.  I am either shouting at it, or laughing at it.

Shopping.  I am fantastic at shopping, except when I actually need something. Then I’m crap.

Being bone idle.  Some people worry about not working, or what they would do if they didn’t work, or feel guilty if they’re not zooming about all day achieving things, ticking stuff off lists.  I do not feel like this at all.  I can mostly do all the things that other people like this do, but generally I choose not to.  I thoroughly enjoy being feckless and lazy and refuse to apologise for it.

Being a mad cat lady.  I excel at this. In spades.

Stealing the duvet.  It is a natural talent.

Bad

I am dreadful at being employed.  I am the world’s worst employee. I do not see why I should do things that don’t make sense, for people I generally wouldn’t bother to spend time with, even after an apocalypse.

Sustaining things.  I get terribly enthusiastic about stuff and go into them heart and soul. Then I burn out.  Then I get terribly enthusiastic about something else. The only things that have bucked this trend are eating, reading and writing this blog.

Going to parties.  This should really be under the banner of socialising.  I am, it may surprise you to know, excruciatingly shy.  I hate meeting new people and generally feel totally naked, weird, freakish, in their company. I always talk too much when I first meet someone, always. Inside, while I am jabbering away on the outside I am having hysterics about my unfitness to be out in human company.  I always go home after a first meeting feeling appalled and ashamed of myself in equal measure.  After that, if we get to meeting number two, things are better for me (if not for them).  Third meetings generally involve me adopting whoever it is I am with for LIFE.  Parties, and the fact that they provide so many new people to meet, cause me to implode with trauma.

Doing anything competitive.  This includes board games. I hate thinking that what I am doing might mean success or failure for someone else. Although obviously I like people to succeed, but it seems like such a responsibility. I’d rather not join in thanks.  I just don’t care that much about it all. I know it is now becoming fashionable to believe in trampling on other people’s heads on the way up the greasy pole again.  I can’t like it.  I much prefer sitting at the bottom of the greasy pole with tea and biscuits and having a chat.

Learning something new.  I have got to the age where I rarely have to stretch my brain any more, and only in directions I please.  When forced to do something out of my comfort zone, like say, learning to drive;  I make a gigantic, Violet Elizabeth style melt down drama of it.

Being a girl.  It’s a bit of an effort isn’t it? I think I’d have done much better as a boy.  My breasts are a trouble and a burden to me for the most part and let us not delve into the world of lady gardens.

Keeping pot plants alive.

What are you good and bad at?

Write me a blog post, or drop comments in my comments box, Emma’s comments box or NWM’s comments box.  They started it.  It’s their fault.

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with Spring rain.’

I am a bit torn about T.S. Eliot.

I was thinking about him today because someone was talking about hyacinths on Twitter, and they always make me think of Eliot’s lines in The Wasteland:

‘You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;

They called me the hyacinth girl.’

- Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,

Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not

Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither

Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,

Looking into the heart of light, the silence.’

The poem is very long and at times totally impenetrable.  I studied it at university. I wrote several essays on it.  I learned to quote large chunks of it off by heart (none of which I can now remember, save the odd line here or there).  I still could not tell you what it is all about.

Bits of it work for me, and are some of the most powerful, gutsy, disturbing lines I have ever read in a poem:

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning standing behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.’

Bits of it I find fearfully tedious and annoyingly obtuse, although I am willing to concede that it might be down to my own stupidity rather than Eliot’s lack of lucidity.

Having read about him as a person I think I would have found him unpleasant, difficult and probably quite irritating.

I’m sure he would have loved me dearly.

Mostly though, I think it doesn’t really matter if you don’t understand poems, or the poets that write them. You can savour the words like holding a smooth pebble in your mouth and just having the pleasure of turning it over with your tongue.

That’s mostly what I feel about Eliot when I read him.

I don’t read all the poems in all their entirety any more. I just dip in and out, savouring the best lines on my tongue.

I’ll leave you with a few from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.

Let us go then, you and I,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a patient etherised upon a table

…

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

…

For I have known them all already, known them all;

I have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

Beneath the music from a farther room.

So how should I presume?

I’m sure I’ve blogged about this before. Look on it as a refining process.

Or go and have a cup of tea while I bang on for a bit.

I include myself in these feelings of guilt, by the way, although as time goes by and my children turn out to be surprisingly articulate, sometimes pleasant and socialised members of society, I feel less so.  By the time they’re forty, and the therapy has all been paid for, I suspect I shall feel entirely guilt free (ahem), unless I am visiting them in prison.

I wonder if it is because these days there seem to be so many variations on what are considered good or bad methods of parenting, that people feel overwhelmed and threatened rather than helped?

I have been reading about this supposed wonder book that is the new media darling of the child rearing world: ‘French Children Don’t Throw Food’ by Pamela Druckerman.  I have never read it, so I can’t really comment, except that I will.

I stopped reading parenting books when Tilly was born and I realised that no book was ever going to adequately equip me for the visceral journey to come.  I did try reading Gina Ford’s ‘Contented Little Baby’ book when I was expecting Oscar.  I remember laughing hysterically, and throwing it out of the window, where it joined the now mulched down Annabel Karmel and Penelope Leach manuals.

From what I have read it seems that Pamela Druckerman has concentrated her studies on a small percentage of French children, rather than French society as a whole, and has conveniently left out all the exceptions that undermine her rule. I am not saying that I disagree with some of the things she seems to be preaching, especially the idea that it is alright for your children to be a) bored some of the time b) ignored some of the time and c) thwarted some of the time.  I adhere to all these parenting methods regularly.  I have always put it down to indolence rather than my hitherto undiscovered Gallic nature.  But if that’s what she wants to call it, I shrug my shoulders and say; ‘Bof!’

In the olden days (I think) everything seemed so much simpler (note that I do not say the word ‘better’).  Generally you had your family to help you a lot more, and you parented the way your parents taught you.  Occasionally, if things went spectacularly wrong with your childhood, I expect you parented in diametrically opposite ways to your parents.

Also, there seemed (and I may be wrong), to be much less variation on parenting back then.  In the Seventies when I grew up, most families I knew and grew up around, practised the same basic parenting tenets with a few in built quirks of their own.

It was all much more black and white, which, if you are suddenly overwhelmed by the sheer fact of having a child and all that comes with it, is a remarkably soothing prospect.  If your child is going purple and wailing like a klaxon, you could simply think: “I either do this, or this,” rather than ‘Gawdelpus, which one of the forty seven manuals do I turn to now?’

These days you can parent your children in hundreds of different ways, and there are books and videos and courses to help you with all of them.  You can have a Gina Ford automaton baby, or a free willed, free range bohemian child who sleeps in a bed made of your hair in the same room as you for the first forty years of its life.  You can have babies who play the Rach 3 on the Fisher Price keyboard from the age of four.  You can have babies that have unlocked the secrets of Grand Theft Auto by the time they are two.

Except you can’t.

I think it is an illusion that you can shape everything your child does and thinks, which is what the books seem to promise.

This is because babies are entirely themselves, and they do not conform to type.  They might seem to, for a while, but eventually they will break out and be pretty much whatever they want to be, regardless of how many books or courses you go on.

A baby is not your property or your pet.  A baby is not a plant you can train to grow up a wall or sit in a pot just where you want it. A baby is a gift and a responsibility.

That is not to say that I think you should let them do as they please, because just as a baby is not your property, you are not solely a parent, or slave to your baby’s needs, whatever it feels like when you are in the thick of it.

I think you can train children in the very basics, the building blocks of society.  The rest is pretty much out of your control.  The best you can hope for with the rest is getting in several years of reasonably undiluted parental influence before the child goes to school.

I think the basis of parenting is fairly simple.

1. You need to ensure that your baby grows up to be healthy.
2. You need to ensure that your baby grows up into an adult that can function within the society it has been born into.  This means using things like discipline and boundaries and teaching them about manners, social mores, etc.
3. You need to ensure that your baby grows up as happily as possible without it being Violet Elizabeth incarnate.

None of these things can wait.

It is no good trying to instill any of these things into a child ‘later’.  It might seem like hard work to insist that your child says please and thank you when it is a toddler, but it’s going to be a damn sight harder when he’s sixteen and towering over you, cracking his knuckles.

What is cute in a toddler or baby, is not at all cute in an older child.  The amusing tantrums, the half lisped swear words that have us all creasing with merriment as they trip out of the mouth of an eighteen month old, are not amusing when your eight year old turns to his grandmother with the instruction to ‘fuck right off’, or lays on a cinema floor having a spasm because there are no more Cornettos left.

How you go about achieving these things is up to you.  I don’t think it really matters.  My experience has shown me that over the years the things I have needed most were:

Commitment – If I offer an ultimatum to a child I need to be prepared to carry it out. They can sense weakness like a lion eyeing up a wounded antelope. If I ever back down over something I have promised/threatened they will keep pushing me to the brink of madness, and it is at this point they have won.  This is bad.

It means thinking very carefully about what I say, even in a fit of all consuming rage.  If they are behaving badly at a friend’s house where I want to stay, it is no good me threatening to take them home if they keep misbehaving.  I have been caught out like this on a few occasions and bitterly regretted having to follow through on my threats, not for them, but for me.  I try to have a few disciplinary plans up my sleeve for every eventuality, ones that still leave me with the upper hand.  Imagine you are playing chess, with a psychopath. It helps.

Flexibility – The naughty step, which I stole directly from Supernanny, worked fabulously, to a point. Then, when they realised that if they didn’t sit on the naughty step the apocalypse would not begin, it lost its power.  I learned that I needed plans b through z in case of such emergencies.  Children, in my experience, are incredibly bendy little buggers, mentally and physically.  You, as the one in charge, need to be bendier, if you’re going to stay in charge.

A High Boredom Threshold – Small children are very, very resilient. They have an awful lot of time on their hands and they do not need to be anywhere. Consequently it matters not to them if they spend four hours a day chanting; ‘Wanna biscuit!’ in ever increasing tones of shriekiness until you are half crazed.

Small children are also very committed to getting what they want and they do not care how they get it, because until you manage to teach them that it is unseemly to lie on the floor in Sainsbury’s jam aisle showing the world their pants and their tonsils simultaneously, they just don’t care enough not to.  They are immune to embarrassment.  Unlike you.

Saying something once is rarely enough. You just need to get used to this. You will find yourself saying: ‘Say please’ or ‘let me check that you have really brushed your teeth,’ myriad times in the course of the daily grind.  I sometimes wish I had a tape recorder with all these phrases on, and when they start I could just press the play button and leave the room until it’s all over.

The Element of Surprise – As with the whole naughty step discovery, children get wise to any parenting methods you might wheel out, and they do tend to lose their sting after a while, no matter what.  I have found that mixing things up works wonders, whether it be letting them off the hook about something every now and again (very, very effective), or instead of disciplining them, mirroring their behaviour for example.  Once, when all three of them were on one, instead of trying to calm things down, I proceeded to have a humongous meltdown, small child tantrum stylie, in front of them.  After three minutes they were rendered speechless.  Then they asked me why I was behaving so badly!

I don’t think you need to be French or Lithuanian, or run everything by clocks.  I think you need to do what works best for you, with some thought about what results you are going to get if you keep pursuing a particular practice or method in the long run.  You are responsible for them until they are adults.  If you can get the basics taped by the time they start school, the rest of the ride is going to be so much easier.

Until they start their teens, of course…

My friend noted the other day that my use of photographs in blog posts is sporadic in the extreme.  Sometimes I use loads, sometimes none at all. She asked me if there was any pattern to this.

I said: ‘Yes!’ I love taking photos, but only if there is something I think is worth photographing.  In London there is always something worth photographing.  My usual, daily routines however, (sketchy though they are), do not really take me to places where photographs are worth the aggravation of rootling around in the bottom of my handbag for my camera for.

Yesterday, for example, I got up when it was dark.  Drove the children to school in the half dark, came home in the grey drizzle and spent all day scrubbing squelchy bits off the floor, dressed in my pyjamas.  The dinner I had planned on cooking did not work, as the lovely sausages I had chosen were still resolutely frozen solid, despite having been out of the freezer for hours.  I made spaghetti bolognese instead, in a random and disorderly fashion due to being in a complete tizz over the sausage failure of 2012.  By the time I had finished cooking, serving and eating dinner we were awash in tomato sauce.

It was carnage.

I consider it a kindness that I did not take any photographs.

This morning it was slightly lighter when I got up.  It was significantly colder.  I was also significantly more crippled.  After not sleeping the night before, I passed out at about half nine last night and must have slept in the same position all night. I woke up with a cricked neck.  I am fine as long as nobody wants me to look  to the right.  Driving has been interesting this morning.  I made lots of ‘oohya’ noises as I progressed.

In the meantime I have made three breakfasts, cleaned out the cat litter tray twice (Derek is OCD about litter trays), made the cat’s breakfast, shouted about cardigans, frisked book bags and hurtled to school.

I say nothing about the laundry. Just take it as a given that every day there is laundry. All day there is laundry.

The car windscreen was frozen this morning.  Although it didn’t look frozen at first. It looked like dew fall.  Then it froze.  I scraped the car, jarring my twisted neck muscles, interspersing my ‘ooohyas’ with bellowed instructions at the children to turn the stereo down (the neighbours are not keen on the Stereophonics at breakfast I surmise), to stop hitting each other, to stop eating their sleeves (why? just, why?) etc.

After the school run I went to B&Q to look at paint swatches and colour charts. Half way down the aisle they turned all the lights off.  I wondered if it was last orders for paint?

Someone else, stumbling about in the gloom like a paint addicted moth, collared what looked like an employee (recognisable only by the glow of their lurid, orange uniform), and asked why the lights were off.

They shouted: ‘Energy saving.’  And ran off.

It’s a bit much when you’re trying to look at forty seven different shades of eau de nil in the twilight.

I gave up, shoving fistfuls of colour strips (always remind me of pregnancy pee sticks in a weirdly surreal way) into my handbag like a colour thief, and bumbling blindly towards the exit.

On the way home, to add insult to injury, it started to snow.  It started to snow in the way that I would snow if I were snow (I know. Verb. Noun. eh? Who knows?), half heartedly, without putting its back into it snow. The odd flake awkwardly flopping onto the car windscreen and then sort of flailing about before giving up entirely and melting.

What is the point of that?

I felt a bit like Basil Fawlty in that episode of Fawlty Towers where he is so frustrated he gets out of the car, uproots a sapling and batters the car with it.

Snow, if you’re going to snow then just do a better job of it. Put some energy into it or bugger off back to whichever cloud you came from.

Yes. I know. It seems an irrational response to weather, given that we have so bloody much of it here, and there really isn’t anything to be done about it, but this is how I roll.

Awkwardly, with very little sense of purpose, and a great deal of pent up aggression.

I sit here now, surrounded by shades of ‘Jungle Fever’, ‘Royal Regatta’, and ‘Steel Symphony’, mesmerised by the stupidity of the names they give to paint these days.  It reminds me of the time I wrote to Constance Carroll the shitty, cheap make up makers of my youth, asking for a job as an eye shadow namer.

It would have been fabulous.

Sadly they never replied.

So you can see that it is shaping up to be another, no pictures day.

It is for the best.

Not only do lots of my friends use their phones for phoning people and the now ‘normal’ texting. They use it as their organiser, calendar, camera and to take notes with. This might sound normal to you. To me it is akin to witchcraft.

I cannot get used to this multi tasking of devices thingy, despite owning a very nice iPhone that Jason strong armed me into getting, all the time muttering about my Luddite ways.

I like it more than I thought I would.  I now use it for phoning, texting, some photos and as an excellent alarm clock.  I do not use any of the rest of its functionality though, including Twitter, despite being a prolific Tweeter (and sometimes Twatter). I do not use it to search the internet for stuff, I have uploaded absolutely no apps. I have no music on it at all. I am hopeless.

I did try googling something on it once, in a fit of desperation, but I hate the way the page doesn’t fit the screen and you have to slide about all over to read everything. It makes me feel slightly sea sick.

The thing I hate most about it though is the idea that I might want to use it as some kind of notebook.

I don’t know why it fills me with horror, but it does.

A notebook is perfectly good for taking notes with, is my immediate thought.  And by that you will gather that I do not mean a small laptop. I mean an actual, physical bunch of paper between two covers.

I know, I know. I am practising for old ladyhood well in advance of my time.

This weekend I packed light. I got everything I needed for two days in one reasonable sized hand bag.  I felt very chuffed with my ninja packing abilities and allowed myself a warm glow of superiority as I watched people trundling up and down Euston with cumbersome luggage.

When I was lurking about somewhere or other I overheard a lovely conversation that I wanted to write down. I reached into my bag only to find I had not packed a notebook.  I was bereft.  I hate travelling without pen and/or paper.  It’s a bit like being naked.  ALL WRONG.

I knew I could have fiddled about for forty minutes with my phone, cursing and sweating, and smearing my fingers over it, but the thought just made me sad.  I was right by the British Library by this point.  They have an excellent shop (where they are currently offering 10% off an ‘Electronic Beowulf’, which made me laugh immoderately).  I dashed in to purchase a notebook.  Surely they would have a notebook facility in a library, however high tech.

They did.

Frabjous day.

I am, it will not surprise you to know, rather fussy about my notebooks.  I do not like novelty notebooks that have cutesy pictures of kittens on, or scented pages, or little locks and keys.  I find them irritating.  They are pretend notebooks.  I think I feel about them the way most alcoholics think about social drinkers. ‘Waste of bloody space.’

I like a good, stout notebook.  The word ‘serviceable’ is key to my notebook purchasing activities.  I prefer them plain on the outside. I also like them plain on the inside (there are exceptions to this, but not many).  I cannot write in straight lines without ruled lines to guide me, but this hinders me not. I often write my notes sideways and upside down anyway, so I’m much happier with blank pages.

It can be quite hard to find such sensible note pads, particularly if you don’t want spiral bound or exercise books, which I don’t.

For a long time I used to buy myself lovely notebooks and then not write in them. I was sorting out a cupboard one day and found that I had about ten, all beautiful, none written in.  I had a word with myself.  I realised that when I bought a beautiful notebook, I felt I had to write beautiful things in it, and because I undoubtedly would not be able to write beautiful things in it, I simply didn’t write anything at all.

It took me a long time to get over this.  I am now firmly of the opinion that it doesn’t matter what you write (or where), as long as you write, and the more you write, the more comfortable you will be with your writing.  You might guess this from the rambling, unscheduled, mind flitting nature of the blog.  Partly it is like this because this is what my brain is like, but mostly it is like this because of the above revelation.

In my opinion, writing works a bit like taking photos. If you take hundreds of photos, some of them will turn out to be exactly how you imagined they would be, and all will be well.  If you take one or two, there is so much riding on the expectation, they will probably disappoint you.  You can sieve for gold after you’ve collected all the gravel.  You can’t sieve for any if you don’t have anything to sieve in the first place.

A peculiar metaphor I grant you.  I probably won’t send it to the metaphysical poets’ society, but you get my drift.

I also think how excited future generations will be, if my writing ever becomes famous, and they discover my higgledy piggledy notebooks.  It will afford future academics endless hours of fun boggling over what ‘Fucking Hell! Subs.’ means at some deep, philosophical level, when it is actually a note to self that Brownies need me to sell a kidney again.

Anyway, back to the British Library shop. I faffed about, disregarding numbers of things with pictures of Alice in Wonderland on, or ones that had specific labels for things I was supposed to do with them.

Right at the back of the shop was a stand of Moleskine notebooks.

I REVERE Moleskine notebooks.  Ever since I had a total infatuation with Bruce Chatwin in my late teens, I have coveted a Moleskine notebook.  Chatwin wrote all his books and travel writings in Moleskine notebooks.  I don’t quite know why I find this fact so alluring, but I do.

It suddenly dawned on me that in all my years of reverence and notebook purchasing I had never owned a Moleskine notebook.  I examined my conscience. It appears that a) I had been put off by the price, which is indeed a little steep for what is essentially a bunch of paper (about £13 for an average sized notebook, although they start at about £8), b) I was daunted by the ghost of Bruce (would I live up to his exacting standards), and c) I generally didn’t have the funds when I came across them or had the funds but didn’t come across them.

Reader, I married him.

I bought myself a plain, black, soft bound Moleskine notebook with blank pages inside.

It felt like the height of decadence.

It was the height of decadence.

I ripped the covering off in the shop and rushed off to write notes in it immediately.

Imagine my joy when I fumbled in my bag for a pen, and pulled out my favourite, violet inked fountain pen.

My image of myself as an eccentric woman of letters was complete.  It would only have been bettered if Bruce himself had come sweeping up the library steps and gallantly escorted me to tea.

Sadly, as he is long dead, this is unlikely to happen.

But it’s nice to dream.

I managed to catch up on all my weekend blogging due to two simple facts. The first being that I was constrained to stay at home today and tackle the festering mess that our house had become, and I couldn’t face doing it all at once, there was so much of it.

Regular breaks had to be taken.

The second was that I had one of the worst night’s sleep I had had in ages last night.  My brain was totally buzzing by the time I got in from the station, and I just could not switch it off.  By the time I got to bed I was jittering like I’d had a triple espresso.  I finally dropped off somewhere between two and three.  Jason said I kept waking him up with nightmares, and just as he had soothed me to sleep and I seemed quite peaceful, the geese who live on the lake which is about 100 yards from our house decided to honk in unison.

I do not remember this, but according to Jason I was massively perturbed by this, and insisted that it was the children honking.  We had a small altercation until I finally accepted that it was in fact geese, whereupon I became quite indignant.

Mixing up the noise of your children with the noise of geese honking is quite normal, by the way.  They are very alike.

I am grateful I was asleep for this conversation.  Although I would have been more grateful if I hadn’t had to get up at 6.45 a.m. to get the children to school. I have been too tired to be competent today at anything other than scrubbing floors and pounding the keyboard.

I was supposed to be helping Andrea sort out some colour swatches and testers for her house.  She is having some serious house renovations done, which means repainting eventually.  She has asked me to help. Not with the painting itself. She is not that desperate.  No, I am to help with the naming of parts and choosing of colours.

I’d much rather have been helping Andrea play with paints than scrubbing the kitchen floor.

I don’t know whether I will actually be any help to her in the long run, but it would be nice to try.  Luckily for me, she agreed I could pop by tomorrow instead of today.

I only have two schools of thought with regard to wall colours.  They are a) paint everything cream and hang up a lot of pictures to hide it, or b) paint everything in super bright colours and then hang up a lot of pictures to hide it.

I don’t know whether she knows this yet.

She will after tomorrow.

I have said this before, but there is always a price to pay if you run away and pretend you don’t have children/family.  It’s like the people you have left behind have some kind of sniffer dog skills which they employ to scent the fact that you are having far too nice a time, and therefore they must completely trash your house as a punishment on your return.

I confess that I didn’t leave it in the tidiest of states.  Last week was mostly spent by me, idly propping up the sofa cushions while reading books.

Despite this it didn’t quite look like the windswept, hurricane style stickiness that I came home to.

Apparently Jason had tidied up somewhat before I got back.

I am profoundly grateful, albeit rather sceptical as to what he tidied, and where.

I should be thankful that the devastation before me finally spurred me on to abandon the sofa and my book and make the house habitable again.  Even last week I would have been ashamed to accept visitors for more than a fleeting, ten minute chat in which it would have been better for all concerned if they had stayed standing up, and not moved about too much.

Am I grateful?

Am I ‘eck as like.

Way back in the day it was a Tudor palace, apparently.  It was extensively remodelled in the 18th Century (i.e. knocked down and rebuilt) to be the home of the Navy board and various Royal societies.  It is an insanely large building built around an insanely large courtyard.

In the summer they have concerts and events in the courtyard. I once went to a Lambchop concert there, back when I was aspiring to be hip.  In the Winter they turn it into an ice rink.  Yesterday it was mostly empty.

Nowadays the building is used for all kinds of things. There is a deli, and a restaurant and a book shop.  You can visit some of the grandest rooms and wander about.  In other areas they have exhibitions of various kinds, most of which are free.  Yesterday I visited the Dazed and Confused retrospective.

It was alright.  It was messily curated, the curators preferring to go for visually hip and artistic rather than giving you any real sense of what was what.  Each room was banded into decade time slots, but the rooms were small, the hanging was haphazard and the labelling fairly arbitrary.

I recommend it if you like looking at pictures of Kate Moss with her nipples like chapel hat pegs, and Chloe Sevigny looking petulant in a bath tub wearing some vintage lace.  Otherwise I’d give it a miss.

Some of the Rankin photographs were fabulous, in fairness, but then they’re not uncommon, and if you want to see them better curated I’d advise you to go somewhere like The National Portrait Gallery, which is also free.

Disappointed with this, I made my way to the front of the building to visit The Courtauld Gallery, which has been on my to visit list for a number of years now.

It is a tiny art gallery, which, for its size, has some impressively famous paintings lurking within.  It is not government sponsored, and as such you pay to get in.  The fee for adults is £6, with concessions.

I thought it was a great deal of money for what is essentially a rather small space. I would perhaps have been more enamoured if they had been displaying more paintings that set my heart on fire, but sadly it was not to be.

There is a room on the ground floor which is full of Medieval icons and triptychs and the like, which were really rather beautiful, and which I enjoyed very much.

From there on in my enjoyment waned as I got higher up the building.

If you like the Impressionists you will be very happy. There are some good Monet and Cezanne paintings, some famous Degas and Lautrec paintings, some nice Degas sculpture and a lot of Seurat.  If you like Manet, they have the world famous ‘Dejeuner Sur L’Herbe’, which was a lot smaller and more dreary than I expected.  They also have a few of the lesser known Impressionist painters on display including my first, live to view, Berthe Morisot.

There is a good selection of Fauvist paintings and some unusual Matisse and Dufy  paintings that I hadn’t seen before.  There was a Matisse sculpture of his daughter that I loved very much and would have liked to take home.  There was a disturbingly pedestrian Picasso of a jug of daffodils, and some equally traditional Braque landscapes, pre Cubism.

There is a Hepworth which looks like the leg off a bed, but which the labelling was trying to big up as organic and suggestive of complex metaphysical shapes.

Right.

All in all I got the feeling that apart from a couple of show stoppers, they had collected the early or late or obscure works of lots of well known people because they couldn’t afford anything more ground breaking.

It is a great place to go if you are an art student and you want to see things which are not the usual run of the mill gallery fodder, and which will give you things to talk about in your essays, but I was not keen.

Which was a bit of a shame.

By the time I got out it was half past three and I had had no lunch.  I took a brisk five minute walk to The Real Greek in Covent Garden, and spent a happy hour and a half pushing meze into my face and reading my book:

before making my way back to Euston, where I collapsed onto the train in a heap of sweaty exhaustion.

‘You don’t know?’

To which I replied:

‘Clearly not.’

She said:

‘That’s Darren Hayes’.

I said:

‘Oh! Is that good?’

She said:

‘Don’t you know who he is?’

I said:

‘Mostly I live under a stone.’

She said:

‘He used to be the lead singer of Savage Garden.  Now he’s doing a walkabout film with his fans.  I’m his greatest fan.’

I said:

‘That’s great. Enjoy your afternoon.’

I set off walking away.

She said:

‘Where are you going?’

I said:

‘To the toilet.  I cannot cope with fame…even other people’s.’

Let’s talk about the lovely things I did on Sunday instead.

Starting with a long, leisurely brunch type breakfast at Keith and Noreen’s I sloped off back to town at about eleven o’clock with the intention of going to the V&A.

Mrs Jones advised me to go and see one of their latest acquisitions, a silk cape made from spider silk.

It is rather stunning, and the work that went into it was immense.  Apparently the spiders are recalcitrant beasts who are a bit bone idle, difficult to rear and prone to cannibalism, so getting silk out of them is a herculean task.

It seems fair to say that there are never going to be spider silk sweat shops.

The detail is amazing, and I was very impressed by the spider motif.

It was definitely worth a visit.

While I was there it seemed rude not to see some other things, although I did take my own advice and kept it simple rather than trying to see everything.

I went and visited the netsukes, all of which I wanted passionately.  I waved at the Buddhas as I went past:

Then I popped upstairs and visited the jewels, which are stunningly displayed and quite, quite marvellous.

I bumped into an angel on a stair case:

I snuck a look at a mini exhibition in a corridor that showed a load of Beatrix Potter’s original drawings and paintings.

I moseyed through the performing arts section, including what to me was an utterly pointless and dismal exhibition called ‘The House of Annie Lennox’.  Ga Ga it aint.

It was redeemed by this magnificent costume for the absurdist play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco:

I have always wanted to see this play performed.  I hope they revive it soon.

Then I came back through the stained glass gallery and went out into the afternoon air with my head bursting.

I had wanted to go to the fashion galleries but they’re all being refurbished at the moment.

I can wait.

My advice regarding these high footfall destinations is to plan ahead.  Go early and turn up before things open, so you can get a head start.  The children and I did this when we went to The Tower of London.  We were first in, first out.  By the time we left there was a queue for the crown jewels so long they were putting up barriers.  We walked straight in and had the place virtually to ourselves.  Going at the end of the day is also a good idea, although you can be more pushed for time as people try to shut things round you.  Visiting things at lunch times is also a good idea.  I have found that most people are alarmingly regular about feeding times, and there is usually a mass exodus between twelve and two when everyone gallops off to eat.  An ideal time to see something that would otherwise be madly busy.

As far as this goes I would also recommend that you eat at unorthodox times.  If we are going to try and get lunch somewhere touristy we generally try to sit down for about 11.30 or after 1.30 to avoid the crowds.  It works a treat.

If you really feel that you must see as much as possible in one day then a tour is the thing for you.  I generally avoid these like the plague, but here are my top tour tips.

Bus tours are O.K.  They are not cheap, but they are flexible and you can get on and off when you please and use one ticket all day, which takes the sting out of it a bit.  You will be stuck in traffic at some point, so be patient.  You will almost certainly be cold. Most of the buses are open topped, and even those that aren’t are bloody freezing.  Wrap up warmly and shed layers if necessary.  If you are trapped on a bus for three hours in sub zero temperatures while you turn blue you are less likely to be paying attention to the sights.

Bus tours will not show you everything.  They will show you what is available to see only within a small area of central London.  You will probably get to see Buckingham Palace and the Mall, quite a few London parks, which are entirely uninteresting from the outside, regardless of the delights within.  You will see Trafalgar Square and Nelson’s Column and a few other things.  You will miss more than you see. I guarantee it.

Boat tours are fine but only if you want to see what’s on the river. Do bear in mind, and again I am stating the bleeding obvious here, that not every major London tourist attraction is visible from the river.  In fact, most things are not. Things you can see from the river include:

• The Tower of London
• All the bridges (surprisingly)
• The ex Millenium Dome (if the tour goes that far up)
• Bits of Greenwich (if it goes that far up), but not The Cutty Sark
• The London Eye
• The National Theatre
• The Royal Festival Hall
• The Houses of Parliament and Big Ben
• Tate Modern
• The Globe Theatre
• Bits of St. Paul’s Cathedral.

Once you are on the boat tour, again with the bleeding obvious, you cannot get off, so if you don’t like it you are stuck for the duration.  Check how long the cruise will last if you are unsure as to whether you will enjoy it.  Again, it will most probably be freezing.

I am usually a big fan of pre booking things, but in the case of the boat tours I would say that you should play it by ear.  If it is widdling it down or foggy then you will see bugger all and have utterly wasted your money.

I would advise against Rickshaws unless you are a) young b) foolish c) only going a short distance d) have a death wish.  Having seen a rickshaw driver nearly kill three people by cycling them round Marble Arch it has put me off for life.

I would recommend trying some of the other, more unusual methods of touring though. The Duck Tours are supposed to be excellent and I am hoping to go on one this year.  They are amphibious vehicles that drive you through London and then drive you into the river. Rock on.  We did a duck tour with the children in Seattle and it was brilliant.

Walking tours are fantastic. There are hundreds of them. They are on all subjects from The Beatles to Jack The Ripper, and take place at all kinds of times and places.  The only proviso being that you obviously have to be fit enough to walk for the duration of the tour. I do not advise doing these with small children unless they are a) hardy b) used to walking long distances without assistance and keeping up with adults c) not going to whinge when they get bored.  Having said that, I took my kids on a ghost walk two years ago and they loved it.

If you are thinking of taking in a show I advise pre booking your tickets strongly. You can talk to the booking agent and make sure you have a seat that suits you at a price that suits you and a time that suits you.  There are places you can go to pick up last minute tickets, and yes, there are deals to be had, but to be honest these are few and far between.  My experience of last minute impulse theatre is usually that I get a dreadful seat with restricted view and still pay more than I am entirely happy with.  Not only that but I have had to queue for a considerable time for it.  Cut price ticket booths are generally always busy as hell.  Queueing for returns outside an individual theatre can work, but it is a gamble and you will wait for a considerable time if the show is popular.  Ticket touts are a flat no, as are the shops that promise tickets for all the top shows. They charge a fortune.

I know I keep going on about balance, but I really do believe it makes for an easier and more enjoyable experience if you can balance what you are doing wisely. Another trick I favour on this front is interspersing doing the really popular stuff with more off the beaten track things.  There are plenty of books and websites which recommend things to do which are generally lumped under the heading of hidden London.  I highly recommend most of the things they offer up.  Some of our best experiences as a family have come about through doing the quirky and unusual stuff rather walking the well beaten paths of the tourist attractions.  Off the top of my head I can think of:

• The Denis Severs House
• The Columbia Road Flower Market
• The Hunterian Museum
• The Fashion and Textile Museum
• Coram Fields

In terms of things to do I will mention a few places that I found utterly disappointing despite them being on the world tourist destination route:

Madame Tussauds - They aint fooling anyone. The place is surprisingly small, the effigies are unsurprisingly unlike their celebrity counterparts and you are hurried in and out like you are on a giant conveyor belt.  There is no time when I have been past when the queues have not been truly horrific in proportion and you will be crowded, jostled and ripped off. It is incredibly expensive for what it is.

Buckingham Palace - I confess that I have never been in.  I am not a huge fan of the architecture, what I have seen of the interior design, or the Queen. It is not my go to destination.  When it is open, it is very expensive, so you really have to want to go.  If you are not actually going in, then you are going to see exactly what you see on the television, a bloody huge grey building with a flag outside, bristling with guards.  That is all.  The changing of the guards is alright, but it will be crowded, and unless you are right at the front you are not going to see much at all.

Anything for tourists based around Piccadilly Circus/Leicester Square.  There are  Ripley’s Believe it or Not type things and Rock Museums and Rainforest Cafes and the like. I have been to some of these things and they are plastic, expensive rip offs of the worst kind.

Going to the cinema in Leicester Square.  You will pay twice the price you do at home to watch the same film in usually shabbier surroundings.

The London Dungeon: Tacky, expensive and silly.  It is utterly unscary if you are grown up.  If you are a child you will probably have to be carried out screaming, thus proving no fun to man nor beast.  I speak from experience.