Saturday 5th January – I Saw Gandalf’s Knob!

Today was what could be described as a ‘good’ day.  Although Jason is still poorly, Lee came over to help him with the kids which meant that I was still allowed to go out.  As Jason himself whispered into my ear (his throat hurts, he wasn’t trying to be seductive); ‘It’s not every day you get to see Gandalf in person.’  Indeed not.  Although if it hadn’t have been for Lee I would have had to stay at home anyway and just Google pictures of Gandalf, because Jason is now actually properly poorly and not just man flu poorly.  He thinks it might be toncilitis.  I have no idea what it is but he looks impressively unwell, and I’m just thanking the good Lord on bended knee that I don’t have it.

Andrea was picking me up from my house at eight o’clock and I managed to surface early enough to drink coffee and eat toast before she arrived rather than as we were leaving.  As she was half an hour late herself I can’t give myself total credit for being bright eyed and bushy tailed, but as I was on my second cup of coffee when she arrived I feel I can still claim some credit.  I was inordinately proud of this fact. 

There have been trips which we have undertaken where I have drunk my mug of coffee in transit, whilst balancing my toast on the electric windows.  I have always managed to get dressed before stepping out the door, but as most people manage this on a daily basis it does seem a small thing to be grateful for.  I don’t always get dressed properly either, and have been known to wander round in great discomfort all day only to find eight hours later that my pants are on sideways.

We didn’t get lost on the way.  We didn’t get stuck in traffic, even though we had to use the abomination that is the M25.  We arrived at her friend’s house on time and as arranged.  Despite ominous signage about bus links to replace the tube, it was still running and we caught it.  I felt left out because I was the only one who didn’t have an Oyster card, but I tried not to let it bother me too much.  One day I may even be allowed an Oyster Card of my own, and in the mean time I shall try to be satisfied with a one day travel card.  It’ll be hard, but them’s the breaks.

Travelling the Piccadilly Line gave me ominous and sweat inducing flashbacks to my days as a commuter.  I used to live in Hendon and work in South Kensington for a while.  For those of you who don’t know London this probably doesn’t mean a thing, but for those of you who do, this signifies an ominous trip of hellish proportions.  I would catch an overland train to Kings Cross, then use the underground to go from Kings Cross to South Kensington on the Piccadilly Line.  On a good day this could take forty five minutes.  On a bad day it could be anything up to two hours.  Some days it would take me fifteen minutes to get onto the tube platform at Kings Cross.  I can count on the fingers of one hand the days I actually got to sit down on the way to work.  The day there was a bomb scare it took three and a half hours to get in.  I don’t know why I bothered.  I should have rung in, told a hideous fib and gone shopping.  I was just too honest in those days.  I must have been mad.

I used to work at the Victoria and Albert Museum.  I worked in the sponsorship department.  It was basically our job to ring up lots of very old, very rich people and ask, cajole and beg them for money so that we could buy new ‘stuff’, put on new exhibitions and get money to build giant bedouin tents in the gardens and stuff.  In exchange we would take photographs of them which would then get published in Hello! Magazine.  Fair exchange and all that.  Friday was my worst day.  Friday was when the death notices came out, and it was my morbid duty to pore over them. 

Basically, rich people often leave money in their wills for ‘charitable donations’, which they then leave their executors to sort out because while they’re sure they want to leave eight billion quid to the retired donkey home, and fifty thousand to the silver spoon society, they have a few extra thousand they’re just not sure what to do with (if only I had that problem).  When this happens, all the details of the people who have left this money are put together on a big list, with the amounts available, and circulated to all the institutions that would normally be eligible for this kind of money.  My job was to go through this list, circling all the appropriate entries.  I would then wait for my boss to ‘okay’ my choices, and my job was to write what was a delicate balance between a: ‘Dear Lord Chumleigh, we are so sorry to hear of the death of your mother’ letter and a: ‘Dear Lord Chumleigh, give us a million quid so we can buy a bit of faded old tapestry which won’t see the light of day for another eight years,’ letter.  This is not as easy as it sounds.  Particularly not last thing on a Friday afternoon when all you want to do is go home via the pub.

I was never very good with the landed gentry, which is probably why I hated the job as much as I did.  I had always wanted to work at the V&A, so when it came up I was like a pig in muck.  That feeling lasted approximately one day, and then I loathed it for the rest of my stay.  There is enough etiquette to choke an ox.  Everything has to be filled out in quadruplicate (I am not kidding) and ordered a month in advance, and there are twenty six miles of corridors in the building, most of which you end up walking on a daily basis.  It used to take twenty minutes to get from my office to accounts just to fill out a petty cash slip.  Madness.

As for the posh people, they were bloody everywhere.  It was worse than having ants, mainly because there is no powdered repellent to deter posh people, and it’s illegal to pour boiling water on them.  There was always somebody important coming to visit.  Someone with a triple barrelled name which wasn’t pronounced anything like it sounded, someone with twelve titles, but who had to be called something totally different because traditionally you call The Rear Admiral, Mavis, but you only know that if you’re posh.  Apparently, in my spare time I was supposed to be reading Debrett’s peerage so that I wouldn’t make faux pas.  I didn’t have any spare time because funding was so tight I was already doing three people’s job and working four hours of unpaid overtime a day.  Clever people, I was told, would be able to read and inwardly digest it whilst traversing the miles of corridor in between jobs.  As it took two hands to hold the paperwork to request four cups of coffee and some malted milk biscuits, I didn’t quite know where I was supposed to be balancing a book the size of the Concise Oxford Dictionary.  I expect that if I were posh I would have worked it out.  Sadly I was too common.

I was always making mistakes.  One day my boss said: ‘Now be a love and ring Bertie and ask him if he’s coming to this bash on Friday because he hasn’t replied to his invitation.’  I duly picked up the phone and asked for ‘Bertie’, only to have a very snooty lady on the other end of the phone say: ‘That’s Lord Toffeenose to you, peasant,’ or words to that effect.  I did this kind of thing on a daily basis, along with getting lost. 

My other ‘job’ was to use my lunch hour to navigate my way around the museum so I knew where everything was.  Problem was, I was quite hungry when lunch time came around (It’s another way you can tell I was common, always starving), and I used to sneak out to Pret A Manger instead.  Consquently whenever important people came to our office (which was in a broom cupboard somewhere five miles away from the museum proper), I would be told to take Little Lord Fauntleroy over to ‘Dresses of The French Empire’, and we would invariably get lost.  I would always end up by a carving of a medieval donkey no matter where I was supposed to be going, or how long I had been wandering for.  I did wonder at one point whether it was actually following me round.  Eventually the stress got to me, and I left after three months. 

I’m sure everyone else was as delighted as I was.  One day when someone very important was coming for lunch with the Director, and his PA was going mad because the florist had sent lupins as a table arrangement, over which the guests wouldn’t be able to see each other, I suggested cutting them in half with a pair of scissors and saying they were ‘art’.  The silence was deafening and it was definitely one of those, ‘I’ll get my coat moments’.

Back to the day in question I think.  I felt much better when I navigated us to Drury Lane without the aid of a map and with no mistakes.  I may not have lived in London for years now, but I can still find my way around without looking like a tourist, and that’s what counts!  I know Drury Lane very well, not because of its theatres, or its grand and ancient history, but because it has a first rate chemist that I used to come up to town specifically to use (Farmacia), and it also has/had (times change, things move on) a very good Oxfam shop.  It’s almost as good as the one in Hampstead.  The one in St. John’s Wood also has its moments for those of you wanting to go up to London for the day just to browse second hand shops, or vintage clothing emporiums as I suppose they must now be called.

The play was excellent.  I would suggest you get a ticket, but as they were queuing half a mile down the road for returns I happen to know that there aren’t any.  Some lady behind us was bragging that she was going to see Ewan McGregor as Iago at the Donmar Warehouse and she’d had to sell her house and her husband to get the tickets, so I know there aren’t any for that either.  I’m not too disappointed.  Apparently McGregor isn’t very menacing as Iago, and I hate Othello, although I have seen it for the sake of completion (I am determined to see all Shakespeare’s plays before I die.  I’m not doing too badly so far).  Her bragging was wasted on me.

The only weak point in Lear was Cordelia.  The actress who plays her is a woman called Romola Garai, who I had the misfortune to see in Chekhov’s, The Seagull a few months ago.  She’s been in several films as well, and I just can’t warm to her.  I’m sure she’s a lovely person.  She probably donates money to the silver donkey society and eats all her crusts, but she’s a very shrill actress who emotes grief by screwing up her face and wailing loudly in the manner of a woman who has had the misfortune to have both sucked on a lemon and stood on a piece of lego simultaneously.  She also likes to flap her hands around in the manner of the dingle, dangle scarecrow (for those of you who have the misfortune to attend mums and tots you will know exactly what I mean).  I just can’t like it, as Tallulah would say.

Luckily this is a minor problem here, as Cordelia is only in a few scenes and has very little to say.  This made things more bearable and the rest of the play was superb.  McKellen’s performance did not disappoint in any way, and I can honestly say that when I was watching him I forgot that I was watching Shakespeare and felt like I was watching something real.  It was the best theatrical performance I have ever seen in my life and I feel very priviliged to have seen it.  A true high point in my life.

As you can see from the title of the post today, he also got naked on stage, which was quite surprising.  Especially as he was being chased around by Sylvester McCoy at the time (he hadn’t parked his tardis in the wrong place, he was playing the fool).  It’s not every day that you get to see Sir Ian McKellen in all his glory being chased round a stage by an ex-time Lord wearing a smoking cap.  Although the appendage was a sight to see I have to say I don’t think it added anything to my understanding of King Lear, although I thank it for providing me with material for blogging purposes.

Although the calibre of the acting was never in question, the calibre of the audience was rather dubious (we were there!).  As we were waiting for it to start, a lady behind me said pointedly to the man sitting next to her: ‘It isn’t a comedy you know.’  As they’d just shut all the doors and were about to dim the lights, I thought it was a bad time to tell him not to expect any laughs, but there you go.

Thursday 20th December

I am in mortal agony and it’s all the children’s fault!  Tilly had a temperature again last night, so I threw them all into bed at seven o’clock on the grounds that I couldn’t be doing with them all being poorly over Christmas because my goodwill simply doesn’t extend that far.

I was going to watch some television with all my extra free time, but the effort of flicking my eyeballs around was too wearing, so I made myself some tea and lay down on the sofa to think about things.  Jason had gone to see Lee (who does actually have a flat of his own, for entertainment purposes only you understand), so I could have it all to myself and took full advantage of the spreadability factor.

I woke up two hours later feeling incredibly disoriented and ashamed for having confirmed my descent into middle agedness so appropriately. I wrenched my cheek from where I had welded it to the pillow with dribble.  I drank my cold tea in a reflective mood, trying to decide whether I could be arsed to have a bath before I went to bed or not. 

Usually I do the shower thing, as the bath is on the kid’s floor and if they hear the taps going they tend to need to come and have fourteen wee’s each while I’m having a bath and try to engage me in existential chit chat, thus making it far less relaxing.  Jason had recommended a bath because I’d had a stiff neck for the last couple of days, probably due to the fact that I carry Oscar round all day and he weighs as much as a Shetland pony. 

I have nothing against baths, in fact I love having baths, but I do like a nice ambience. We have quite a nice bathroom, compared to others I have owned (particularly the one up six flights of stairs fitted into a cupboard full of galloping mould), but I like to imagine myself surrounded by Diptyque candles and up to my ears in Jo Malone scented bath grains.  The reality is me sitting with my head butting against a large plastic box with Tinky Winky leering out of the top at me and eyeball to eyeball with some spitty Disney toothbrushes. 

The Disney toothbrushes are electric ones, and an incentive to get the kids to be more thorough about brushing their teeth.  Their concept of brushing for two minutes is rather elastic and they turned the toothbrushing timer I gave them into a time machine, so I thought this might work instead.  As it is I caught Tallulah in there the other day carefully brushing her teeth but without the electric bit.  I pointed out that the electric part was to help her teeth get properly brushed and asked why she wasn’t using it.  She said: ‘I don’t like to turn it on because all the toothpaste just comes rumblin’ off the brush.’ And carried on brushing sedately.  Another cunning plan foiled. 

When I was a kid someone bought my brother and I an electric toothbrush each.  This was the early seventies so they aren’t the glorious pieces of technology they once were. In fact they were the size of a giants alarm clock with a wire and a toothbrush attached.  I was amazed and astounded by this piece of kit, and desperate to try it.  When my mother showed me how to work it I turned away in disgust.  I was so disappointed.  I thought that because it was electric all I had to do was open my mouth, turn on the toothbrush and the toothbrush would creep into my mouth, creep out again and turn itself off neatly.  I was outraged that I was still expected to hold it and move it up and down.  Absolute rubbish!

Anyway.  I had just decided that I was so tired I really wasn’t going to have a bath and wake myself up all over again.  I felt good about this executive decision.  I sat feeling smug that I had been forthright and had put my good decision making trousers on, when I realised that I had been idly scratching my head for the last five minutes.  My immediate thought was: ‘Oh God! Nits!’ 

This focussed my attention quite sharply and had the added bonus of shocking me into alert wakefulness (much like hearing a noise in your sleep, and waking to the utter conviction that there is a mass murderer helping himself to your comestibles).  I hurtled into the kitchen, dug out the dreaded nit comb and pulled it through my hair.  At this point my neck muscles seized completely and locked my neck into a rictus of absolute agony. 

I was, as I’m sure you will imagine, quite cross. I rent the air with my choice language about small children, nits and the unfairness of life in general, and my life in particular.  The only good things to have come out of the whole debacle was the sure knowledge that I didn’t actually have nits, and that I would definitely have something to write about in my blog, although at the time this too seemed strangely unfair. 

I then had to have a bath in order to try and unlock my rigid neck muscles enough for me to even attempt to go to bed.  I crept about like a crab, trying not to swear too much and wake the children up.  The last thing I wanted was for them to sympathetically offer me a glass of water.  I thanked my lucky stars I had made Tallulah get up for a wee earlier, as the thought of shinning up the ladder to her cabin bed and giving her a fireman’s lift down to ground level was enough to make me cry.

I had an unsatisfactory and entirely unromantic bath, covered my neck and shoulders in Ralgex and retired to bed with a hot water bottle, smelling like an old lady and not at all like Jo Malone.  Bah! The only things that would have made me smell more like an old lady was the aroma of cat wee and tannin.

I really don’t like the smell of Ralgex (it smells like something I should be putting on a car engine, and not all over my skin), so I had the cunning plan of putting a blob of Vicks’ on the end of my nose, thus blocking out the smell of Ralgex.  Cunning eh? It was the only thing I had to hand that was smellier than the Ralgex.  I couldn’t be bothered to creep downstairs and get the Marmite which was the only other thing I could think of.  Also, I was worried that if I rolled over I would stain the sheets and it would be hard to explain the next morning.

 I was lying there in agony, bored out of my mind and tired to death when I decided, just for fun, to read the label on the tub of Vicks.  Turns out its use by date was 2005!  This sent me into a total panic in case it was now going to eat through the end of my nose and I would wake up looking like The Elephant Man.  I rubbed it off as best I could, but I still stank to high heaven, so I had to accept that the damage was probably already done. 

This set off yet another unpleasant train of thought.  I realised that when I’d grubbed the tube of Ralgex painfully out of the back of the bathroom cabinet, it hadn’t got a lid on.  Now at the time I was in too much agony to care, and just casually slapped it on.  But with this new, and possibly horrifying news about the Vicks, I was forced to rethink my blasé attitudes and crept crablike into the bathroom where I had to crouch on my knees to get to the appropriate level of the Ralgex related shelf without having to turn my head.  I found that it had no sell by date on at all.  This was probably on the packet the tube came in, which I had thrown away in a carefree moment when I had been tidying up some time long, long ago.  This meant that I had no idea at all if the Ralgex was going to kill me. 

I lay in bed and worried about it for another hour, intermittently being burned by the hot water bottle which I was trying to manoeuvre between my ear and shoulder for the best possible pain relief.  By this time I stank of both Vicks and Ralgex.  I had hot water bottle burns all over one side of my neck and head.  My hair was looking like medusa’s dreadlocks where I had taken a more than casual approach to drying it, due to the fact that every time I touched my head with a towel it felt like someone was trying to rip my head off.  My pyjamas were as ever, held up by bits of baler twine, and I had rings under my eyes that made me look like I’d lost a nasty fight. 

I spent the next hour worrying about what Jason would say when he got home, and interspersed that with generalised worries about what would happen if we got burgled while he was out.  I felt that although I couldn’t possibly tackle the burglar to the ground in my current condition, and the smell would give me away before I even set foot on the stairs, my strange crab-foetal approach and wild eyed demeanour would probably be enough to frighten him away. 

Then there was the problem of the pillow.  When I first met him, Jason was the proud owner of a Tempur mattress.  For those of you who aren’t blessed with encyclopaedic knowledge of the world of mattresses, these are the Rolls Royce of the mattress world and cost ten guineas an ounce.  They were apparently developed by Nasa, and are what the astronauts sleep on when they’re zooming off to bring back some more drab bits of rock from alien worlds.

Jason suffers from a bad neck and shoulders (many years riding motorbikes and hunched over a PC, nothing too exciting) and our friend Peter, who is a wizard osteopath, suggested that he invest in a Tempur mattress to help him sleep better.  Now it is an investment, as it costs about as much as a small car and weighs about as much as a Volvo estate car.  Next to his BMW M3 (which has, much to his chagrin been replaced by a series of increasingly sensible family friendly cars and an ever dwindling sense of manhood and virility), it was Jason’s pride and joy, and certainly in the early days, if he were forced to choose between me and the mattress I’d have been stalking the inventor of the mattress with a view to revenging myself on him for my failed romance. 

We also have a strange Tempur pillow which Jason got as a free gift for being such a wonderful customer, and which for some reason I have inherited.  It is a very odd sort of flattened S shape and is supposed to be wonderful for dodgy necks etc. I dug it out the bottom of the wardrobe, using a bit of the slatted window blind that had fallen off, so that I didn’t have to crouch, swearing the whole time (I am turning into my own grandmother, and will soon start develop a fondness for Dick Van Dyke and deposit small bags of cat litter under my bed for no apparent reason). 

I spent a considerable time thereafter trying to figure out how to use the pillow effectively.  I tried it both ways up, fat part of the S first and then thin part of the S.  I tried it sideways and back to front.  Then I tried throwing it across the bedroom whilst swearing violently, and I have to say that I felt much better after that.  Perhaps I have found its true purpose after all. 

It took me until one o’clock to get to sleep.  Oscar started to stir as soon as I turned the light out, with the use of his preternaturally acute hearing for such matters as light switches and snoring parents.  He woke fully at precisely ten past one with a raging temperature which we did battle with until five thirty this morning when he and I passed out in an exhausted Calpol strewn heap. 

I should have known that this was going to happen.  He has been eating nothing but fruit for the last three days and hasn’t wanted to bite down on anything harder than a grape.  It’s usually a sign that he is either a) turning into a fruit bat or b) his gums are rumbling.  I was just in denial about the possibility of more days of childhood illnesses coming my way.  God, it’s depressing. 

As you can imagine, I was a little bit tetchy when I woke up this morning.  I had a billion things to do today, mainly because I’ve spent the weeks I should have been doing them looking after poorly children instead.  I felt that life had truly wrestled me to the ground and smashed me over the head with a particularly unattractive vase.  I hadn’t even had time to pick the bits of plaster out of my hair before the day got hold of me.

 Tallulah announced at breakfast that she thought Oscar had ‘angel delightis’, which was why he was so poorly.  Tilly poured scorn on this theory because: ‘You are an idiot Tallulah.  Angel Delight is a pudding and nobody is ill from a pudding.’ (I declined to mention the Christmas she ate three helpings of pistachio kulfi when we went out with my friend Rita, and cried all the way home).  Tallulah said that she meant the thing where your tonsils hurt.  Tilly flicked her hair scornfully, pronounced: ‘Toncilitis. Toncilitis. Toncilitis.’ and left the room, superiority of older sister fully intact.  I quite like the idea of angel delightis though.  It forced me into buying a packet of Butterscotch Angel Delight when we went to the Co-op this afternoon, just for old time’s sake.

My dad came over at lunch time because he rang me to see if I wanted anything from the farmer’s market and the girls put in an order before I even got to the phone.  He is much more obedient to them, and turned up forty minutes later with crusty bread and sausage rolls bless him.  He’s still making plans for his ginger pig and has now found the recipe on the internet, after mum bought Nigella’s book and couldn’t find the recipe in it.  You have been warned.

We commandeered dad to take us out to do our chores today as it was foggy and freezing.  He took us to the farm shop down the road to get some veg and bought some brussells for his christmas lunch.  Tilly looked at them and said: ‘Grangrad?  Mum says that brussells smell and taste like old people’s farts.  What do you think?’  He looked at me wearily and said: ‘Well Tilly.  Your mother has always had a way with words.’

As it is Christmas they are advertising turkeys left right and centre at the farm shop.  When we were leaving we passed a field with a load of low level horse jumps in it.  Tilly said: ‘Is that for the turkeys so that they can exercise?’  I bit my cheeks and said: ‘yes’, to which she said: ‘It’s so that they don’t get so fat that they explode isn’t it? Is that why you have to exercise too grangrad?’  The poor man!

Oscar has been poorly all day.  In between he is very cheerful, which is one of the good things about babies.  They don’t know they’re supposed to be miserable while they’re ill and it makes life so much better for everyone.  He’s a very cheerful boy, although he has no right to be and I am expecting a one a.m. wake up call anyway.

My shoulder and neck are regaining some mobility, which is why I am now talking to you instead of wincing about moaning like an old fart.  The world is gradually returning to as normal as it’s ever likely to for us, and I have done my christmas cleaning, changed all the bedclothes and done the laundry.  I feel good about this, but that it heralds disaster, and we are likely to get hit by a tsunami, or a giant mudslide tomorrow, because surely things can’t be allowed to go this right for this long?