Flying the flag

Everyone has gone out. Jason has taken the children swimming, and I am all alone waiting for mother in law and contact lenses in that order.  It is wonderfully quiet.  Just me and the clicking of the keyboard.  Bliss.

I shall, of course, seize the moment to blog.  I am in full spate at the moment. As you may have noticed.

I have noticed that Canadians are incredibly patriotic.  They are all unbelievably proud to be Canadian.  Many people here drive around with Canadian flags attached to some part of their vehicles, and outside schools are big billboards that say things like ‘Go Canada! Go!’  Olympic fever is now waning, but it is still a hot topic of conversation and a great source of national pride.  We are receiving a bit of a kicking because of the U.K. press’s negative reporting during the first week of the proceedings. I find this very entertaining.  People archly say to me things like: ‘Hmm! Let’s see how the U.K. does in 2012.’  And then wait for me to rabidly leap to the defence of my country.  They are slightly non plussed when I announce: ‘Yes. We will undoubtedly make a gigantic balls up of the whole thing.  We are generally crap at this sort of thing. I am looking forward to seeing how badly we make a hash of it.’

I am not a fervent patriot, and other people’s fervent patriotism is somewhat baffling to me.  How can you get so worked up about something which is entirely to do with an accident of birth?

Now, don’t get me wrong.  Canada is a beautiful country, and as Mrs. Jones commented in an earlier post, Vancouver is consistently voted one of the best places to live on earth (voted for by most earthlings).  There is a lot to be proud of.  It’s the in your face fervour that I don’t really understand.

I’ve seen it visiting other countries too.  The Irish are fanatically proud to be Irish.  Mostly I’ve found, it’s most virulent in Irish people who live elsewhere and simply go home for holidays.  It may explain the proliferation of naff Irish theme pubs across the globe in the dark days of the late ninteen nineties.  They wear their patriotism like a badge that says: ‘I belong, and I’m proud to belong.’

I have to say that as an Englishwoman I am not particularly patriotic.  I do like being English in a terribly English and apathetic type way. I like the fact that we have contributed two very important things to the globe, 1) swearing properly (nobody does it better, or in more colourful ways) and 2) a finely honed sense of sarcasm.  Cheddar cheese is up there too, I think.  Otherwise I cannot get enthused about the Englishness of England.  Yes, we have Shakespeare, but we also have the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in Europe.  Yes we have glorious architecture, but we also have Swindon.  Swings and roundabouts, see.  I would never dream of sending someone something quintessentially English as a gift, unless they requested it, of course.

In Canada though, it is very different.  I have had family over here for about fifteen years now.  For a long time on every Christmas, birthday or seasonal celebration which required the giving and receiving of gifts, I would receive something emphatically Canadian through the post.  Although I had to draw the line when they tried to send Celine Dion airmail.  The customs charges were excessive, and then I had to send her right on back again.  Bastards.  Every country has something they have to be ashamed of and they should just learn to lump it like the rest of us. I have no excuses for Engelbert Humperdinck.  Only apologies.

Yes, so we would receive these packages of joy and they would invariably contain things like mukluks made of maple bark and deer droppings, bizarre native art, cd’s of ‘very popular’ Canadian artists who are huge in the Canadian hit parade these days doncha know, maple syrup (which is good. we like this), and the ubiquitous salmon.  For a long time our school fetes were full of handwoven Canadiana.  I thought about trying to send back things which were quintessentially from the Midlands.  I came up with Red Leicester cheese (which is unpleasantly mild and virulently orange) and the anti-nausea device, Sea Bands which were invented in the town where I lived for a long while. I felt that was suitable revenge for Celine, but after that I was fairly stumped.

Salmon is everywhere here, everywhere.  You cannot set two feet inside a store without some form of salmon product looming at you from somewhere.  And until you arrive on these shores, you have no idea what you can do with salmon. None.  You can have it pickled, boiled, grilled, slowly roasted on different types of wood chips (I kid you not), poached, smoked in four thousand ways or wall mounted for your viewing pleasure.  I am lucky in that I like salmon.  I prefer to eat it than look at it, but I do like it.  Unfortunately, apart from Tallulah who has a highly developed palate for smoked salmon, none of the rest of the clan approve.

This can turn out to be quite tricky if you are going round to someone’s house for dinner.  Their highly developed sense of being Canadian means that it is practically de riguer for them to serve you salmon in one or more forms during the meal, which is much like me inviting you round to my house for a steady diet of boiled beef and carrots.  It’s not too bad if a) you like the taste of salmon, and b) you are not doing a whistlestop tour of all your friends and relations over the duration of your holiday.  But if you are not keen in the first place and have forty three people to visit in the space of a fortnight it can be somewhat overwhelming. 

The difficult thing is that the people are lovely, and very welcoming.  Their hospitality is superb and when you get invited round to someone’s house they do everything in their power to make sure you are comfortable and happy.  And they buy the salmon to please you, and to show you how wonderful Canada is.  Saying that you don’t like it is a bit like kicking the Andrex puppy in the face.  It’s just not done.

So my advice would be, if you are visiting, and you don’t like salmon, get your doctor to write you a note to say that you are allergic before you come out.  Then have it photocopied and send it to all the people you plan on visiting so that they can be prepared and find other ways of welcoming you with true Canadian hospitality.  Like with a surfeit of pancakes with maple syrup for example.

As a post script.  When we were in Seattle at the Pike Place market, there were some very fine fish stalls.  The children are fascinated by these, because of all the live lobsters and crabs, and like to get up close and stare into the poor creatures eye stalks, just to cheer them up before they are brutally boiled alive.  One one stall they had an incredibly ugly looking fish laid out on the ice.  It looked like a kind of skate with huge fangs and googly eyes.  A hand written sign announced: ‘I am a monkfish’.  Oscar went up closer to have a look at it and it reared up at him like it was going to bite him.  Understandably he burst into tears, and we all cruelly  burst out laughing.  The man whose stall it was, had threaded the monkfish tail through the ice to where he could reach it and yank on it every time someone went up close to view it.  Anarchist fishmongers.  Who knew.

Toilet Humour

Today, while we were in Walmart buying wellingtons and staring at kettles we had to take the children to use the toilet, or restroom as they politely call them here.  Although given their general levels of hygiene in this store, I did not find myself longing to rest in one overmuch.

I took the girls, and Jason took Oscar.  Unusually we were out first, and were hanging arounde looking suspicious waiting for the boys to appear for some minutes.  Jason emerged, red in the face and laughing so hard I thought he might die. 

It turned out to be rather a full men’s restroom, which is quite unusual, given the speed with which most men pee.  All the stalls were full, and as Jason and Oscar were having their pee, Oscar turned to Jason and said:

‘My goodness dadda.  Haven’t you got a ginormous willy?’

At which point every single male in the bathroom exploded into gales of laughter.

Fabulous

Watched Pots…

All the utility appliances in Canada are enormous.  I think that’s why everyone’s houses are so much bigger too. You have to have such a whopping place to fit in your four foot wide fridge, cooker, washing machine and tumble drier.  They are Huuuuuge.

This place is no exception.  The drum on the washing machine is so vast that I could get Oscar inside it should I so desire, although we will not mention this to him because he would be way too keen to try it out.  The oven is the size of my range at home, even though it only has four rings, and the fridge is about the size of Scotland.

And did I mention the gadgets?  In this place they have gone gadget mad.  The kitchen is enormous and filled with cupboards, yet when I came to put my groceries away I ended up having to store them on the counter tops because the cupboards were all full of stuff with plugs on the end.  Stuff that allows you to do other stuff.  Popcorn makers, blenders, dicers, choppers, pounders, liquidisers, grinders, waffle makers.  It is terrifying.  I have looked at some of the things and found them so baffling I have just shut the doors again and decided not to think about it.  It makes my head hurt.  Not as much as finding three, count them, three, cupboards stuffed to the rafters with tins of chickpeas. Should there ever be an international chickpea shortage you will know where to come.  I like chickpeas. I can pack away a lot of chickpeas in various forms, but there must have been about seventy cans in there.  The mind boggles.  Maybe they’re going to have a hoummus convention in the summer?

One gadget that is sadly missing from this smorgasbord of kitchen technology however, is a plug in kettle.  They do sell them over here, it’s just that not many households seem to have them.  This household certainly doesn’t.  And I really miss it.  There is a coffee machine, which I have tested to capacity and found suitable, and then there is a kettle which sits on the hob of largeness and requires boiling using fire.

I love the idea of this.  I have a hob kettle at home actually.  I use it in the rare event of a power cut.  One must never be without the wherewithal to boil water, and cups of tea made from saucepans never do taste right, even if it’s your saucepan, your water and your fire.  They are charming and quaint and lovely.

They also take a bloody age to boil.

And that’s not good if you’re used to filling the kettle, flicking a switch and getting boiling water in under two minutes.  The kettle on this stove takes a good ten minutes to boil, by which time we are lying on the floor, dramatically grasping the tiles and shouting hoarsely for ‘teaaaaaaaaaa!’

We were in Walmart today buying the kids some wellingtons.  The garden is soaked through and very boggy by the tree line, so this was quite urgent if we didn’t want them to develop webbed feet.  We looked at the electric kettles and thought about buying one.  Then I remembered.  In the last house we rented here there was a kettle.  The chap we rented it from came from an Indian (as in India, Indian rather than Native American) family, and had been trained in the ways of constant tea making at all hours of the day and night.  We were thrilled.  Then we used it. 

It took a bloody age.

The power supply here is much weedier than in the U.K., which is why you will find electrical sockets in bathrooms and under water etc.  It is almost impossible to electrocute yourself to death, unlike in the U.K. where you merely have to wave a wet wipe in the direction of a bare wire to be fried to a crisp.  Here is much safer and more humane, except if you want a cuppa in a hurry, in which case you will turn into a raving psychopath whilst waiting for the kettle to boil and kill everyone in your tannin deprived rage.  If I ever moved here I think I would have to smuggle my own power cables under the ocean.  That would solve it.

Anyway, in revenge for the crapness of our kettle we have actually managed to melt it.  It is made of metal mostly, which is good, on a hob.  But it has a plastic whistle type thingy.  I plonked it on the hob and turned the gas up to nuclear to get it boiling quicker.  I then waltzed off to stop the children killing each other, safe in the knowledge that I had at least half an hour before the kettle boiled itself dry.  Jason wandered past a few minutes later and wondered what the acrid, burning smell was.  Turns out it was the kettle whistle thing melting, where I had failed to place it squarely on the heat and the gas flames had licked up the side.  Whoops.

We have confessed to the house owner who seemed singularly unimpressed at our stupidity.  We refrained from mentioning the stupidity of having to wait for ten minutes for a kettle to boil, feeling rather sheepish, and will now have to go out to purchase a new, unmelted kettle to make amends.

So now we know.  A watched pot never boils, but sometimes it melts…

Seattle

We flew into Seattle on Thursday evening, mainly because it was considerably cheaper to fly into Seattle than it was Vancouver, although given the palaver over security, we will not be doing that again in a hurry. I’d rather pay the extra fifteen hundred quid and not be jumped through so many hoops next time.

We’ve never been to Seattle before, and I have to say that first impressions were not fantastic.  It was bucketing it down with rain when we drove out of the airport, so hard in fact, that the water was bouncing off the roads and you could hardly see anything.  The road systems are chaos and the traffic is really, really heavy.  It didn’t help that the sat nav kept cutting out every time we went under a bridge or there was a particularly fierce rain drop.

Mostly things looked grey. Grey and industrial.  Our hotel, a bog standard, beige block by the side of a busy road and opposite a working boat yard, with the freeway running at the back, did little to cheer us.  Particularly as they had not made up the kids’ bed, supplied extra bedding of any kind, nor extra towels.  Even when we asked for bedding so we could make the kids’ bed ourselves, it still took them twenty minutes to bring any.  Any consisted of one pillow and two cotton sheets between three children.  Jason went down to get some in the end.  It was quicker.

There was no restaurant and no room service either, which meant that once the kids were asleep we were left with a bunch of take out menus to supply our needs.  By this time I was ready to cry.

Luckily the menu we plumped for served delicious food, albeit after a long wait and two phone calls over the money because we only had hundred dollar bills and they were suspicious.

The food was the only good thing about the entire night.  Oscar rolled under the bed in the night and woke screaming at three, totally disoriented.  That also set Tallulah off.  By the time we calmed them down we were both wide awake.  Then everyone woke up for good at half past five.

Jason, who is either a saint or demented, took the children to the hotel pool at quarter to six.  By quarter to seven we were having breakfast.  The hotel did actually serve breakfast, and it wasn’t too bad at all, contrary to what we had been led to believe from the woeful service of the night before.  The children were incredibly impressed because they had waffle irons so you could make your own waffles.  So, jetlagged to the nines and scratchy eyed I learned to make waffles in the dull, Seattle dawn.  It’s a skill.

We set off, fortified with waffles, to explore Seattle.  I was not hopeful, but throughout the day I was won over, moment by moment, until I was charmed.

First up was the market at Pike Place.  I thoroughly recommend it.  It’s a lovely, Victorian covered market selling everything from fruit and vegetables to antiques.  Each stall is owned and run by family businesses, and no corporate business can operate from there.  The architecture is wonderful, the stall holders are all delightfully friendly, and happy for you to try their wares and there is something for everyone.  Plus they have a giant shoe museum.  It was closed while we were there, but they claim to have a shoe from the tallest man in the world, and an impressive collection of clown shoes.  And I don’t doubt it for an instant.  There is also a fabulous bookstore on the bottom level of the market, run by a really friendly guy who knows his customers inside out. He tried to sell Oscar a copy of a book called ‘Everybody Farts’. Smart guy.

All the streets around the market are full of quirky little shops of all descriptions.  There is a cheesemakers, where you can actually go in and watch them making the cheese before you buy, cheek by jowl with toy stores and vintage clothes shops, and all the sort of places I love, and that you don’t usually find in large, American cities.  We had a fantastic morning pottering about, buying fruit and sampling home made jams and chutneys.  There is a huge tulip festival taking place in Washington State at the moment and the flower stalls were a riot of colour.  I love tulips and the temptation to buy a few hundred blooms was quite overwhelming.

At lunch time we headed to the  famously designed Music and Sci Fi museum by the architect Frank Gehry, which stands next to the Space Needle, a classic Seattle landmark.  We didn’t go up the Space Needle because I hate heights and Jason hates paying over inflated prices for tourist attractions, but we did go to the museum.  I have to be honest and say that it wasn’t my cup of tea.  I love the outside of the building, but the exhibits were fairly blah, and it was really expensive to get in.  In the music side there were lots of hands on exhibits, which could have been fun if most of them hadn’t been broken and the rest hadn’t had large queues outside of them.  The Sci Fi side was mainly traditional in that it was just wandering around a great many glass cases looking at things.  There was the odd interactive exhibit, but I was surprised at how few there were given the fact that it was about Science Fiction and the future.

The best part of the day was when we decided to go on a Duck tour.  Ducks are armoured vehicles which are a car and a boat, and were used in WWII.  They do Duck tours in London too, so if you fancy one you won’t have to hop on a plane to Seattle.  But if you happen to be here you really should go on one.  Your driver takes you around for ninety minutes, about an hour on land and the last half hour on the water, and you visit Seattle’s landmarks while they do the usual history type speeches.  But then it’s all livened up by the fact that you have to sing, and dance and have quizzes and all kinds of fun stuff.  The kids, and us, absolutely loved it.  Our driver was called Captain Johnny Throttle, and had the largest collection of novelty hats I have ever seen.  It was huge fun.

Saturday we headed to the oldest part of the city, Pioneer Square.  Someone had recommended that we do the tour of Underground Seattle which kicks off from there every half hour.  It was fantastic, and I highly recommend it.  Basically Seattle, when it was first settled was built on a plain which got flooded by the sea, and all the sewage that the first settlers poured into the sea, twice a day. This made it quite an unsavoury and rather squishy place to live.  Then in the late 1800’s the whole of Seattle burned to the ground after an unfortunate incident with a vat of hot glue and a spark.  This gave the founding fathers a chance to rebuild the city at a higher level.  The plan was to blast all the earth from the surrounding hills, and then build on that.  The building was going to take ten years, and the business owners who already lost their businesses in the fire, refused to wait ten years to re-open them, on the grounds that they would starve to death in the mean time.  So they built their businesses, and the city fathers built the streets around them.  This of course led to some difficulties. Like the fact that the ground floor of the buildings were between 8 and 33 feet lower than the street level.  People kept falling down holes and killing themselves a lot, which wasn’t great for business either.  Eventually they filled in all the holes and evened out the levels, but this meant that there was a whole chunk of the city which was underground.  And it’s still there.  And in the nineteen sixties, a newspaper man and keen historian, Bill Speidel, started tours round these underground areas, which you can still go on today.

There was a bit of the tour where the guide was telling us about how they had a terrible rat problem, when people started dropping all their waste into these underground areas and it became a breeding ground for the rats.  Apparently the city hall put a bounty on rat’s tails and for every rat’s tail you produced you got ten cents.  It all went horribly wrong when unscrupulous people started breeding rats and cutting their tails off for extra funds.  Then they noticed that the rat’s tails grew back so they could use one rat for many bounties.  A chap who was on the tour with us got terribly confused and thought she had said that if you cut a rat’s head off it would grow back and insisted on asking her lots of questions about it.  Jason and I had to back track into another area of the tunnels while this was going on, because we were crying with laughter.  I thought I might actually pee my pants at one point, or at the very least be sick.

In the afternoon we went out of town, about half an hour down the highway to an outlet mall which some friends had recommended.  We like to shop, and we love a bargain, so all went well, and Jason bought me a very nice Marc Jacob’s watch for a ludicrously small sum of money.

By our last night we were quite sad to leave.  There were lots of bits of Seattle still left to explore and we had almost trained the hotel staff.  Plus we had had excellent food while we were there and there was no shortage of coffee. I do love a city where every third business tries to sell you caffeine.

So, overall impressions, much better than we first thought.  Atypical of American cities, quirky, fun, subversive and excellent coffee.

I’m Back…

The eagle has landed. 

Yes, we are here.  In one piece, and with multiple pieces of luggage, all of them our own.

The internet connection is not brilliant, but it is an internet connection, for which I am entirely grateful.  I had visions of having to light fires and waft blankets in order to communicate with you all.

It is also wireless.  It is temperamentally wireless which is how come I am typing this perched atop the kitchen counter with one elbow out of the window, but at least I am not hitch hiking down to an internet café and handing over my life savings.  Things could be worse.

We have had a very eventful few days, and it is quite difficult to know where to start after so long away.  I have made copious notes, most of which I have lost in transit, or have found again, only to look at them in baffled amazement and wonder when I took up writing in code.

Let’s start with the flight. The flight itself was fine, surprisingly enough.  The children were incredibly well behaved, and we did not have to resort to drugs or disciplinary hearings for any of us.  We had a fabulous steward who was as camp as Christmas and who had the most expressive face I have ever seen.  He was fantastic value for money, and oohed ,and aaahed his way through the entire nine hours, discussing air sickness with an elderly lady to such a vivid degree half the cabin was heaving by the time he had finished empathising with her.  He was not impressed by the strike action at all, and kept talking about it sotto voce with lots of expressive quotation marks flying from the ends of his fingers.  He decided the plane we were on was also a disgrace and marched up and down shouting: ‘Oooh! Look at that! Will you look at that! It’s a mockery of a sham.  This plane should be CONDEMNED. CONDEMNED! Yes! I’ll put that on my list.’  He was brilliant, and much better than watching Twilight New Moon on endless repeat.

I sat next to a lady from Idaho who turned out to be an avid quilting fanatic, and we had a lovely chat for about two hours all about craft and quilting, and how we had both lived in Oxford, which was also fun.

The only thing that put a damper on the whole experience was the American’s fanatical obsession with airport security.  It meant that once we had passed through the regular security checks at Heathrow we had to empty out all our hand luggage and go through a physical pat down before we boarded.  This included the children, which was tedious, annoying and frightened Oscar and Tallulah who thought they were being arrested.  Once we disembarked at Sea Tac airport we then had to stand in line forever to go through passport control.  We were waiting for over an hour, because now they finger print and retina scan you as well as all the usual palaver and all the systems were running slow.  Then we picked up our luggage only to have to hand it all in again after customs control while they checked it yet again, and made us pick it up from another baggage carousel.  In all it took two hours to leave the airport, which I thought was totally unwarranted considering what we had already been through at Heathrow.  The children were so exhausted by the time we left, they were grey.

Still, we made it, which was the main thing.

Stay tuned for the next exciting instalment of What I did on my summer holidays…

Oscar turns into Alan Partridge

Last Friday afternoon, Oscar got into his first confrontation.

I picked him up from nursery at 3.00 p.m. as usual.  Then we wandered round to the school to pick up the girls.

Mole was in the playground, and he and Oscar zoomed off to play some elaborate game  with some cones that the teacher had left out after P.E.

It was all going swimmingly until a bigger boy, who should still have been in class, wandered over.  He has a reputation as a trouble maker, and Mole’s mother and I kept a weather eye out, unsure as to what the boy was doing. He started to pick up the cones. We relaxed a little, assuming that the teacher had sent him to pack up.

Then I noticed that Oscar was right up in the child’s face, talking very earnestly.  I paid closer attention, but nothing else happened except that the bigger boy looked faintly bemused.

Children started pouring out of classrooms and I called Oscar to walk round to pick up Tallulah. As we were going round the corner I tuned in to what Oscar was saying. I thought he had been singing, but no.  He was hollering:

Buggerhead!

Bugger HEAD

You are a BUGGERHEAD!

I asked him to stop swearing and reminded him that swearing was not allowed.

He looked at me very earnestly and said:

But mama.  That boy was being horrible to Mole.  So I just had to stand up and say to him: YOU ARE A BUGGERHEAD! Because he was hurting my friend.

I never realised before what a peculiarly aching sensation the mixture of pride, shame and amusement was.

The buggerhead thing made me laugh, because it is his entirely new invention.  It reminded me so much of that sketch in Alan Partridge where he has the political debate.  If you forward it to about eight minutes you’ll find it:

you, you, you…..buggering…..shit

Nice weather for ducks

In this country we talk about the weather. A lot.

It is not a stereotype.  Well it is.  But it is a true thing.

We have a lot of weather, and even though we have had a lot of weather since time immemorial, it still takes us by surprise.

So we chat about it.

And we watch weather forecasts, even though we moan about them because they are almost entirely erroneous and I  could do better with a pine cone some seaweed and a false beard.

But we persevere.

For many years we also had very little television.  Until I was in my early teens we had only three television channels.  Then we had four, but only for some people.  Then everyone got four.  Then we had five, but only for some people, and then everyone had five.

Then there was a televisual revolution and we had gazillions of channels ALL THE TIME.  Which now means that if I want to watch: ‘My Gigantic Breasts are Killing Me’ or ‘I had a Tumour the Size of Sussex’ at three in the morning all will be well, and all manner of things will be well.  I don’t know how I ever managed before frankly.

Anyway, back in the olden days everyone watched the same things, because there wasn’t anything else to watch.  And there were a batch of regular weather forecasters who we became somewhat obsessed by.  They were what we now call, National Treasures. 

There was one chap called John Kettley:

and another one called Michael Fish:

Note his groovesome weather forecaster sweater.

Michael Fish was particularly famous for erroneously forecasting a particularly bad hurricane style wind storm, as nothing more than a light breeze.  He has never lived it down and I saw him interviewed recently and boy, is that man bitter about it.  Bless him.

At one point in my teens there was a band called A Tribe of Toffs who produced a superb ditty called very appropriately: John Kettley is a Weatherman.

Here it is for your audio pleasure:

The chorus goes as follows:

John Kettley is a weatherman

 a weatherman

a weatherman

John Kettley is a weatherman

and so is Michael Fish.

As you can imagine it is a timeless pop classic, and I shall be having it played at my funeral.

This morning Jason wandered solemnly into the kitchen as we were eating breakfast.  He kissed the top of my head and said, totally straight faced:

John Kettley is a weatherman.

I kissed him back and said, equally straight faced:

And so is Michael Fish.

And we were very happy together.

And this readers, is another reason why I love him.  For who cannot love a man who makes references to obscure pop songs before a molecule of caffeine has passed his lips?

Tallulah said:

Who is John Kettley?

to which we replied:

A weatherman.

Tilly said:

Who is Michael Fish?

To which we replied:

A Weatherman.

Oscar said:

I think it was him who was making all those noises in my bedroom this morning. He woke me up.

So, Michael Fish. 

You have more than just the mis-prediction of the storms in 1987 to atone for now.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being With Tallulah

Tallulah: ‘Mama?’

Me: ‘Yurs’

Tallulah: ‘If I died, could I come back to life as someone else instead?’

Me: ‘No. Categorically not. No. No way. Don’t try it. Right. No. No. No.’

Tallulah: ‘What does categorically mean?’

Me: ‘IT MEANS NO. DO NOT ATTEMPT TO KILL YOURSELF TO COME BACK AS SOMEONE ELSE. O.K.? NOT EVEN AUDREY HEPBURN IN BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S.’

Tallulah: ‘Alright.’

Tallulah: ‘Mama?’

Me: ‘Yeeees’.

Tallulah: ‘Would you ever murder me or Tilly or Oscar.’

Me: (sorely tempted) ‘No.’

Tallulah: ‘Why not?’

Me: ‘Because…’ and I ramble on for ten minutes about the unbearable guilt and inhumanity involved in taking another person’s life and how they would never be able to become a concert pianist or have a gerbil, or eat lobster bisque and it would all be my fault, and how I would be crushed, crushed, crushed, under the weight of doom and anguish and turn into a teeny, tiny, lunatic dwarf woman who ate her own hair if it ever happened. …’O.K.?’

Tallulah: ‘Yes.’

Tallulah: ‘Mama?’

Me: ‘Yeeeeeessssss’.

Tallulah: ‘Do you dye your hair that colour?’

Me: ‘um. Yes. Yes I do.’

Tallulah: ‘O.K. then. Thanks.’

In which I do not talk about it, a lot.

It has been a day.

Really that is the best that can be said of it.

Here are the reasons why I cannot go into things too deeply or I will wail:

• Tallulah covered herself almost entirely in toothpaste ten minutes before leaving the house and had to be chipped and shouted at in equal measures this morning.
• Tallulah and Matilda had a giant fight on the stairs about a DS game two minutes before I came home from dropping Oscar at Nursery (I had only been five minutes all told), and woke up Jason, who was attempting, very badly, to have a minor lie in this morning.
• I have spent all day, and most of my evening wrestling my essay into some kind of shape I am happy to leave it in before I go away and forget everything I ever knew.  It has taken about eight hours so far, but it is half written.
• Oscar had a spectacular temper tantrum leaving nursery this afternoon resulting in him wailing, whinging, moaning and crying all the way to school and back and refusing to say goodbye to any of his nursery friends who he now won’t see until May.  I think they are glad to see the back of him after that.
• Tallulah refused to try a mouse’s fart’s worth of garlic cheese, even though she likes garlic and she likes cheese.  I lost my temper and sent her to bed.  It was not a good tea time.
• I helped the girls sort out their packing. Nuff said.
• Oscar had a tantrum because I refused to let him wear reindeer slippers in bed.  Then I had to relent because it turned out that Jason had said he could wear them, only I wasn’t listening when he said it. Pah.
• Even though we are flying with BA on one of the days there is no strike, we may get delayed, cancelled, thrown into the air via a trebuchet anyway, just because they can.  Bastards.  And they sent us a cheery e-mail to tell us.
• I am still sore.  I have declared a fatwah (fat being the operative word) on all biological functions that include buckets of blood. I have gone off the whole thing.  I was never that on the whole thing in the first place.
• My glasses have steamed up, got rained on, slipped off my nose and generally got on my nerves all bloody day.  Plus, I am sure I need a new prescription because I am squinting like Mr. Magoo.
• Jason is in hyper efficient list mode. He is driving me nuts.  He keeps ringing me to tell me all the myriad things we still have to do, and then running about at the end of the phone shouting; ‘There is no time. Noooooo time.  Aaarghhhh.’ Then comes the sound of rending beard.
• This is not helped by the fact that I am at the totally indifferent phase where as long as I have plastic, emergency pants, a good book, the passports and something vaguely edible, I am thinking things will be alright.  Plus I am worrying more about teenage political fiction.  I am vague, woolly and entirely irritating to my better half.

All I wish to do is dive into the comforting virtual reality that is the internets and make the other, shouty people go away.

Which is why I am hiding upstairs with the door shut while they all gallop about like the Lippizaner horses in a muck sweat.

Hide, hide with me.

It’s nice in here.

Oscar’s First Party

You may recall that Oscar was rather nervous about going to his first ever birthday party, and Jason was co-opted to go with him, to help out when he felt nervous about dancing.

Today was the day.

As I was on my way back from town with the girls this afternoon Jason rang me.  It sounded like he was in a fox hole in ‘Nam.

Jason: (at volume 11):’ THIS IS HELL. THIS IS JUST UTTER HELL.’

Me: (soothingly): ‘I know dear.’

Jason: (unsoothed): ‘HOW DO YOU KNOW?’

Me: (soothingly and smugly): ‘You may recall I have done this before a few times.’

Jason: (slightly mollified at the thought of all the years he hasn’t had to go to children’s parties): ‘Oh. Yes! I suppose so.  BUT IT’S STILL HELL.  AND…AND…I’M HERE WITH ABOUT TWENTY FIVE WOMEN AND I DON’T KNOW ANY OF THEM.  AND THEY’RE ALL LOOKING AT ME.’

It’s no good telling him that I don’t know any of them either, and if forced to go to these things I generally take a book and sit near the biscuits in self defense.

I get home and he still has an hour to go.  I take pity on him.  I set the girls on with their homework and wander down the road to the hall where the party is.  I send Jason back and share the pain.  This is true love, pop fans.

Oscar is having a blast.  His Ben Ten nylon extravaganza is wringing with sweat and his blonde hair is dark with the same.  He is running round and round the hall in ever decreasing circles like a whippet on crack.  Occasionally he dives past the refreshments, lobs a jammy dodger into his open maw and keeps on running. 

There is a bouncy castle.  Sometimes, he and another young man dressed as Sportacus, including an impressive fake moustache, ping onto the bouncy castle, bounce uproariously for two minutes and then ping off again.  They keep running.

The only time he sits down is when there is the chance of a prize for pass the parcel.  The lady who is hosting the party has split the pass the parcel into two groups, girls and boys.  There are only four boys.  Their game is over very, very quickly as they are all keen to get back to running.

At five o’clock, after he has ignored me for an entire hour I actually have to physically plant myself in front of him like a human shield.  He stops running long enough for me to put his shoes on.  Then we run home with his party bag and he runs off to the trampolene in the garden with Tallulah, because he hasn’t really had enough exercise yet today.

I ask him if he had a nice time.  He runs past, shouting: ‘It was the best day of my whole life, with jammy dodgers and daddy.’

What more could a boy want.