Today has been slightly less exciting, which I for one think is a very good thing indeed. I’ve kept both girls home from school, Tilly because she is still covered in interesting spots, and Tallulah because she seems tired and washed out from yesterday, although her temperature is back to normal, which is a blessed relief.
It also meant that I didn’t have to dust off my trumpet for the reveille this morning and hoik them all out of bed so that one of them could go to school with the rest of them trailing behind announcing how ill they are in world weary tones and leaning into the hedgerows because they’re too weak to stand up. Even though the school is less than five minutes walk from our front door, on days like that it seems as if we’re going on a polar expedition with only some Kendall Mint Cake and a pair of socks between us. Oscar did wake us up at 8.30 with a full fanfare and the gobbledegook equivalent of the words: ‘Party on Wayne and Garth’, but as this was a positive lie in for us, it didn’t matter too much.
I notice that Kendall Mint Cake seems to have fallen out of vogue with explorers recently. On QI last week they had a question about an expedition to some ridiculously inaccessible place in Peru where there was only a statue of Lenin and several thousand penguins. Some blokes had gone there using kite skis and one of them was in the audience. When asked what they ate he said chocolate, with nary a mention of the mint cake. Now, as you know, I’m a huge fan of chocolate, but surely something is wrong with the state of exploration today if you can’t travel four billion miles using a wooden spoon and a raft and surviving only on some minty sugar? I might write to the National Geographic (worried of Glenfield). Standards are declining everywhere.
I am now concerned about the good people of Kendall. What are they to do if the mint cake market is in decline? For years the production of said cakes has kept generations of families in work, slaving away in the mint mines, hacking out lumps for their women folk to package up and sell to Sir Edmund Hillary, Sherpa Tensing and their crack pot descendants. It’s a pretty specialist skill set, and it’s not like you can segue smoothly from that to say, knitting bobble hats or weaving rope ladders.
They will either have to go into a steep decline and take their place shoulder to shoulder with the great unwashed, or turn the entire of Kendall into a retro explorers theme park (Explorama), in which you and your family can kit up like mountain climbers and ascend a recreation of K2 made out of loose Kendall Mint Cake chippings whilst chewing away on a few bars. They could also make quite a bit from dentistry I imagine, as the stuff is more corrosive for your teeth than dipping them in sulphuric acid for a few hours. It’s a little known fact that all explorers from 1800 onwards had splendid pairs of false teeth made from finest ivory, so they could chomp their mint cake without having to worry about finding a dentist at 30,000 feet.
Perhaps that’s why they don’t use Kendall Mint Cake any more. After all, since the ban on ivory and ivory related products, it might be hard to find a good substitute for the false teeth that would weather the stresses and strains the life of an explorer would put on a pair of gnashers. That’s probably it.
I’m fascinated by what drives these explorer chaps to do such things. Why, why, why travel using a kite ski for goodness sake? I didn’t even know there were such things, let alone think about travelling to South America on one. It could be the adrenaline rush they’re after, but if they want that they should come and look after three children under the age of nine for a week with all their attendant ills and dramas. They’ll never complain of boredom again.
I crave boredom like a monkey craves a bunch of bananas. It’s top of my Christmas list this year along with some more fluffy socks (I’m slightly obsessed by fluffy socks at the moment) and a panettone!
Perhaps I could go to school every day using a different exploring technique? On Mondays we could go cross country, pushing our way through people’s bushes and leaping across their zinnias, commando stylie. We would need some kind of anti-canine device, possibly water pistols filled with orange juice, as it would be a shame to get savaged three gardens over and have to call in the air ambulance.
On Tuesdays we could try going via the waterways, or in this case, garden ponds and Charlie Dimmock style water features. I’m less keen on this idea because of the neoprene wetsuits, which would of course be mandatory. I outlined my problem with these in another blog entry, so we shall simply draw a veil over it.
We may have to go back to the drawing board for Tuesdays, possibly a subterranean attack might be best, although the girls scream when they see worms, and they’re both pretty rubbish at digging. My brother and I were always very enthusiastic at digging, much to my mother’s chagrin. We had a large garden in which, as you know, we were forced to spend quite a lot of our time, consequently we considered the garden our territory, regardless of the fact that my parents spent large amounts of time creating rockeries and vegetable patches and other such landscaping ideas.
We often sabotaged many of their finer plans by trying to build war bunkers with the rockery stones, or using all the carefully constructed pea canes to make burning brands, or wrapping ourselves round the ornamental Christmas trees during a particularly disastrous bike ride. We also had pet rabbits which didn’t help.
They had a large run in the garden which my mother considered mandatory. She hated the idea of animals being incarcerated, so the run took up half the garden. The rabbits were delighted as it gave them plenty of scope for their escape plans, and they were forever forming committees and digging furiously, hiding the loose earth down their britches and whistling nonchalantly so that we wouldn’t know their plans were coming together.
My brother and I were very pleased that they dug so many deep holes as it saved us the difficult job of starting off and getting through the tough grass. We would wait until the rabbits felt their plan had been discovered and abandoned that hole in favour of a new one. We would commandeer the old hole and dig like maniacs in the universal childhood belief that eventually we would pop up in Australia wearing cork hats and shouting ‘g’day!’ The rabbits didn’t mind, because they thought as long as we were occupied that we wouldn’t notice them drawing maps and creating false passports out of dock leaves. Everyone’s a winner, except my dad, who would go bonkers about the state of the lawn.
Eventually we were banned from aiding and abetting the rabbits, and then the rabbits took full advantage of the fact that we weren’t watching their every move and escaped over the Swiss border on a motorbike fashioned from vegetable matter, so we had to find other digging methods to amuse ourselves. Our next great digging adventure was brought on by the fact that with the rabbits gone, we wanted more pets, which we were not allowed to get from a pet shop, as my mother had had enough.
By this stage we had some fish (Dr. Who and Layla), a canary which flew in the kitchen window one day and decided to hang out with us (I’m not kidding. It was very impressive). The canary was quite good because it was clearly bonkers in the first place. My mum called it ‘Twee’, because contrary to popular belief about canaries being fabulous song birds that was the only noise it could make. It was also orange.
It had a cage with a little bath house attached to the side, in which it used to splash around shouting every morning. When it didn’t like its food it used to protest by kicking it out of the bottom of the cage, also shouting (like everyone in our family, he was never quiet). Some of the seed fell into the cracks in our freezing stone floor and sprouted months later, much to my mum’s embarrassment. How do you explain that your kitchen floor is yielding crops? It’s not easy.
Twee was allowed a lot of freedom, due to my mum’s soft nature. He would fly about the house and when he was tired he would sit on your head, gently pulling strands of hair through his beak in an affectionate, yet highly alarming manner. One day when my dad was on the phone, Twee perched on his head and did a huge pooh, much to my dad’s annoyance and our total glee! It was tremendously exciting. My dad shouted and waved about and Twee sat calmly on his head, holding onto his hair and riding him like a bucking bronco! Awesome.
We also had lots of cats. We had one cat called Boots, which my parents had had since before we were born. She was very old and had a gammy leg, so she wasn’t very exciting. She spent most of her life sleeping in a dog basket by the fire. Occasionally she would have fits of insanity where she would hobble into the kitchen, crawl onto the table and attack things. Why the kitchen table I don’t know, perhaps she was an explorer at heart, despite the leg. She once shredded a lettuce to bits and we found her in a panting heap of spit and iceberg lying on the table. Mum thought she’d had a fit and took her to the vets, but it turned out she just had a mortal aversion to lettuce. After that we had to put it in the fridge for safe keeping in case she had a heart attack whilst mauling a Cos.
Our other cats were more free range. We lived next to a farm which had stray cats. My mum used to feed two of them, who she called Bubble and Squeak. Squeak ended up having lots of litters of kittens which she would bring over to our house because she knew that my mum wouldn’t be able to resist them and she could have endless supplies of food. We loved it because there were kittens everywhere.
Mum insisted on feeding them outside so that Boots’ feelings wouldn’t be hurt. We did everything we could to smuggle them indoors, and she was forever shooing kittens out of every corner of the house. In the cold weather they would find the strangest places to hide, which we thought was brilliant, but mum and dad found quite stressful. One of their places was the log basket in our porch, which despite not having a door was more sheltered from the elements. My dad would go out in the dark to get a log for the fire and shriek the place down because he’d picked up a warm, sleeping kitten! He really wasn’t very good with wildlife. I think he only put up with the pets because of my mum. He did a lot of shrieking all the years we lived in the countryside!
Their other best place was to climb up the wheel arches of mum’s car and clamber into the engine, where it was nice and warm. Many is the cold and frosty morning where we would be sitting waiting to go somewhere while mum picked cats out of the engine. Better than flaying them alive I think! Although I’m sure it crossed mum’s mind after endless weeks of de-catting the carburettor. At the next service the man was amazed to find that the engine was gummed up with enough cat hair to knit a jumper.
Anyway, back to digging. We decided that what we really needed were mice. Mice would be cool. The cats often brought us mice to play with but they either tended to be dead or half dead. We would invariably try to nurse the half dead ones back to life, so that we could keep them as pets. This insistent nurturing would finish them off completely, and a lot of mouse funerals took place at which Rob and I were the chief mourners. Parts of our garden were set aside as graveyards for all the things the cats killed. We had a fine selection of mouse, frog and shrew (it’s very easy to kill a shrew. All you have to do is look at it in a funny way and it dies of fright. I have the feeling that shrews will never inherit the earth, despite their meekness) gravestones. We even had one mole grave, but I feel that the mole was mortally ill before the cats pounced on it, as it was rather smelly when they dragged it over to us. It didn’t stop us loving it dearly though! We were disgusting children. We never buried the rats because we hated them. We used to lob them over into next door’s garden using the coal shovel. I’m sure our neighbours loved us dearly!
The only way we could think of to get a healthy mouse was to dig. We knew that mice lived in mouse holes, so the logical thing was to dig until we found some mouse tunnels. We dug like fury all over the garden in what we had established were likely mouse areas (the ones with the softest earth probably). We established that once we had caught our mice, we would keep them in Dairy Lea Cheese Triangle Boxes on the side of the bath and feed them on the ends of soap that my mother didn’t want any more. Why we decided that this was the best way to keep mice I really don’t know. I expect it was because mum had refused to aid or abet us in our quest and we had to use what we had to hand at the time. We were resourceful as well as disgusting.
Needless to say, our mother wasn’t worried too much about the impending mouse citadel we were planning, and after a fortnight of fruitless digging and blisters the size of Latvia, we gave up our plans and spent the next few months sulking about how cruel she was, and how it wasn’t fair, etc, etc.
The next great dig came when my parents bought Robert a metal detector for his birthday one year, and we were naturally convinced that we were in line to discover the Mary Rose but better, right at the bottom of our garden. There was no Time Team in those days, but we were sure of a spot on Blue Peter, and riches beyond our wildest dreams, naturally.
Given the fact that mum and dad used to go mental every time they saw us approaching their beloved garden with a spade, the idea of giving Rob a metal detector seems slightly odd. I expect my dad had swapped it with a man he knew for a Citroen 2CV or some such nonsense. That’s how we got two pairs of over-sized roller boots with no stoppers and took half a yard of skin off of our shins and embedded gravel in our foreheads anyway, so it seems a logical progression.
Needless to say, the finding treasure kick was even more of a disaster than the finding mice thing, and we ended up with a five pence piece, a rusty tin can and a bead. We also had muscles like an Irish navvy from all the digging, and mum had no beetroot crop at all that summer. After that we were forced to do our digging elsewhere.
As I have said before, we lived in a tiny village with no shop and two whole street lights. There were about six kids in the village and we used to hang out with each other in the holidays. One day when we were very bored and I had been reading Swallows and Amazons, we decided to be explorers and look for the source of the stream that ran through our village. We donned wellies and cagoules. We took sticks for poking things, we took spades and we took biscuits. We had no Kendall Mint Cake, so we had to improvise on the supplies.
We spent all day splashing around and poking things in hedgerows. Eventually we found a place where the stream went under the ground. This was terribly exciting and we imagined subterranean caverns full of cave paintings and jewels, and possibly a skeleton or two. We prodded it heartily with our sticks, and when we didn’t fall down into a vast bejewelled cavern, and I had filled my Wellington with water and lost the other one in some particularly sucky mud, we started digging.
We dug hard and long and soon the water from the stream started spilling out all over the road. This was both magnificent and exciting, and we felt that we were really getting somewhere. Where we were really getting was in hideous trouble. The lady who lived in the cottage opposite had been watching us through the windows (small village, nothing to do), and had now realised that a tidal wave was building which if left unchecked, would potentially obliterate her cottage. She came shrieking out of her door, down the path and lambasted us heartily standing in a pool of water up to her ankles.
We were amazed that when we explained our mission that she didn’t get excited, take her squelching Hush Puppies off and find a spade of her own. Instead she threatened to tell our mum’s if we didn’t start putting back all the earth and make good the damage immediately, and stood over us chattering like an enraged magpie the whole time we were doing it. Mean, just mean!
Back to exploring I think. On Wednesdays we could attach giant kites to the buggy and glide down to school, although my kite owning history is chequered to say the least, and I sympathise a great deal with Charlie Brown and his exploits with the great kite eating tree. I have lost many a good kite that way.
Thursdays would be climbing day, where we scale the pavement using crampons and ropes (a la Monty Python). Fridays we could sky dive in from a helicopter. It would certainly make life more interesting, and perhaps I could get on QI and meet Stephen Fry, where I could broach the adoption idea with him over a bar of Kendall Mint Cake.
Right, I have to go and do something wondrous and exciting with potatoes to feed the ravening hordes who are massing downstairs. Pooh! Catering is extremely boring and monotonous.
Must share with you a couple of Tallulah gems before I go. Last night when we were waiting in the hospital for them to discharge us, I was getting a bit fed up. We had been waiting for many hours and I had had only an egg sandwich and a cup of coffee which tasted like engine oil to sustain me. Tallulah looked at me and said: ‘Mama, are you illustrated about going to hospital with me?’ I explained that illustrated probably quite the word she was looking for. After much debate it turned out that she meant ‘irritated’! I like the thought of being illustrated much better however, and will adopt it from now on.
It put me in mind of the time when she was very small and she had discovered the joys of playing hide and seek. She would do the usual small child/ostrich thing and merely cover her head with some handy item, thus rendering herself completely invisible! Just to make sure that she had in fact, totally disappeared from view she would shout: ‘There’s nobody hee yerrr!’ at the top of her lungs, and voila, would immediately become totally invisible. A good tip with which to leave you if you ever need to escape from an impossible situation I think.
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