Before I begin, I just want to clear the old potentially-parasitic-ridden air with the lovely news that I don’t have nits, just psoriasis. PHEW. So I don’t have small animals living in my thin blondey-grey head, just red scabby welts. DOUBLE PHEW. That dastardly plane journey from Brisbane to London dried out my skin like a little forgotten dead gecko on a flat rock in the Outback, is all. So. As you were.

This week I have started a running programme which makes me hobble around for days. I suspect this is normal. But maybe not. Ouch! go my little arthritic knees. But I persevere because I want to have lithe limbs like Anya and Amber. So up I get at 6:15am to run around the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens in the dark and hopefully not get either lost or molested. So far, I have only gotten lost. And of course I needed to go to JD Sports to buy full running gear and shoes and sports bras and new Reeboks and I also needed to buy an iPhone so I could get the running app. I am nothing if not organised and nothing if not quick to find a way to go shopping. So I have the shiniest pinkest unstinkiest Nike gear on the planet and I am yet to become lithe. BUT OH! My iPhone has, of course, changed my life, yadda yadda because now I have an app for everything! I don’t have to even talk to anyone anymore. And I can throw away my new diary and all writing instruments and watch and scrabble board and phone and camera and even my own sense of self and judgment because there is probably an app for that too. I love it all. I just need to remember to Act Normally When Real People Are Around.

So my first day of ‘running’ (actually I walk then jog then walk then jog in a painful slo-mo-type-way which must be excruciating for people to witness) I donned my new running trousers and they had a little pocket in them. Kerry who went ‘running’ with me said she thought the pocket was for keys. I thought it was probably actually for the new white iPhone 4s which I had gotten the day before and so I stuffed the new phone into my pants. It bounced out of my pants and cracked the screen. So I took it back and had to pay an insurance premium and then I got another phone after a two hour wait from another Carphone Warehouse store. But they switched over my sim card and so on Tuesday afternoon I had to pick the boys from school and all of us had to get on a bus to Notting Hill to switch the sim card back over. I knew the boys would be a pain but promised them frozen yoghurt if they behaved. We got onto the crowded bus, me with double buggy, them in front of me, and they turned to each other in the aisle, grabbed each other’s heads and immediately and inexplicably gouged each other’s eyes and strangled each other’s necks and screamed like TOTAL FERAL NUTTY PEOPLE. They were so caught up in the pain-induction that they didn’t even move out of the way. They just locked on to each other like weird violent pitbulls, oblivious to the stares and gasps of horror from the public. And I was stuck with the other two in the buggy, having to wheel it along and into the parking bay bit, finally banging the buggy straight into the two weirdo vicious kids and forceably separating them from the Lock Holds Of Public Humiliation.

Then I grabbed a sweaty welty Noah away from the red and bleeding Barnaby and accidentally whacked his head into the pole in the middle of the bus aisle which made him scream and then wail in a very uncomfortable long, loud kind of way. Then when I told them both to stop, and hissed and grabbed their arms in a very hurty grip, and got very angry and told them off in that everyone is looking and listening and I want to DIE kind of way, Noah yelled at me really loudly to “SHUT UP!”.

What a triumph. A moment of pure parental wizardry. High-five to myself for excellent parenting skills.

On Wednesday morning, I asked the headmistress to give them a proper bollocking for the hideous bus behaviour. She cleverly got them both into her office and explained in her inimitable South African terrifying way that someone from the bus had called her, concerned about some very shocking  behaviour from kids in school uniform from her school. She told them that this sort of thing would not be tolerated and she made them cry and said that if they ever behaved in a way like that again in public they would be punished at school through detention. It was genius.

I picked them up from school on Wednesday and Barnaby was red-eyed and sullen and told me that someone from The Public had spoken to the school about what had happened. Noah, cranky-faced and unrepentant, took one look at me and said “Don’t you ever tell on us again”. Nothing gets past that kid.