Ah, you know those days which are long and filled with the anxiety about getting to school on time/tidying up for the cleaner/paying that annoying old mobile phone bill so that the debt collectors don’t come around to take the new mac/wondering which thing to cook for the kids dinner and then yours/trying to find the baby’s wetsuit which is wet and rotting somewhere and failing and then you come to the end of the evening, and you think – PHEW. There is Oyster Bay sauvignon blanc in everyones’ glass, Daniel Merriweather is playing stylishly in the background, dinner has been popped in the oven and every single person in the whole household is behaving charmingly. Homework has been done, emails sent, the baby is happily whacking his doll repeatedly into the cupboard doors, the flat is still tidy from that lovely cleaner.

And then.

And then Charlotte, Houseguest with Extras, comes in to report on Two Bad Things.

1) Noah, far from being happily ensconced in some PlayMobil-related pirate drama in the bedroom, is hiding away under the bed smelling of poo, and

2) the belgian waffles have gone.

!!!

I had to drop my glass of wine and shake my fuzzy head and march into the boy’s bedroom and force open the door and there he was! Naked! With a whole packet of Sainsbury’s Belgian Waffles, stolen from the kitchen bench and spread about the (newly vacuumed) carpet in various degrees of munchedness, and amongst that, was a whole lot of little boys’ poo. And Noah, naked and crumbed-faced, with one gumboot on, one gumboot defiled forever, sort of grinning, sort of panicked-looking, said “Poo!”. Ah yes. That capped things off rather nicely.

But I do have some actual cheering good news. I have three enormous letters to start hanging on my wall. After Monday’s very pleasant Carluccio’s lunch with one of Twitter’s finest @ClareHR, I wandered back along Westbourne Grove and noticed The Standard Indian, a long-established Indian restaurant which had been closed for months, was having its lovely sign taken down. And so I hovered and went back and forth and looked for someone in fluoro to ask for some share of the booty – eventually a big Polish guy came around and hacked off the “S”, “a” and “n”. I know, the letters do not spell anything as such, but they are very stylish and one day can hang proudly on my wall. Along with “E”, “R” and “N”, similarly taken from  another Westbourne Grove bankrupted establishment. So Stylish it hurts. Here is the sign before Polish Man did his worst:

Note the poised chisel.

Anyhoo, I am soooooooo going to bed. The poo and the waffle thieving have done me in.

PS If my apostrophes are behaving erratically, that is because I do not know my grammar rules as well as I should do. This is an ESPECIALLY unfortunate thing as I cracked and told Barnaby’s teacher she had been screwing hers up in the school newsletter. Of course, karma being what it is, I now no longer have any recollection of when and where they are supposed to go and are DOOMED grammatically to look like an apostrophe hypocrite forever.