It is day five of the summer holidays and here is the tally thus far:

1. I have cried once in holiday anticipatory fear (though if I am honest, the tears were aided by a little too much summertime prosecco)
2. I lost my temper in the most amazing and novel way ever, which involved me throwing a peach at a boyish leg repeatedly until the peach softened and disintegrated all over the new couch. It was weird and mean and I apologised afterwards, and none of us can quite bring ourselves to touch the remaining peaches because of the traumatic memory of me going completely apeshit so fruitishly and wastefully. Reader, I snapped. With a fuzzy stone fruit.
3. One case of threadworms
4. One violent outburst by a middle-esque small boy in public – the base of the Gherkin to be exact, on a sunny Saturday, at a free architecture festival for children, with all of the kind, modern, youthful, calm parents and cultured, well-dressed and probably stylishly named children who were busy making ping pong catapults and lovely collaborative sculptures aided by busy volunteers and art materials all akimbo. My kid had a fight with another of my kids over a ping pong ball; the first kid had three in his hand and the other kid had none, so the ping pong ball Bereft One took one of the many that the first kid was hoarding and it led to a wrestling hair-pulling bitch-slapping Dynasty-style fight, and one of those kids has a splint because of the broken wrist and three strangers went over to split them up and shout at them in a very alarmed kind of way: “HEY! GET OFF HIM HE HAS A BROKEN WRIST SOMEONE DO SOMETHING” then run run run over there and physically pull them apart. Meanwhile, I was eye-rolling and shrinking into my concrete slab, slow to get up and go over because I see it all the time and it is embarrassing and usually everything cools down after a few scratches and kicks have been aimed and fired and tears have been shed. I know this, but to anyone else who is not me, it looks like some sort of terrible dog-fight, where you might well need a high-pressure water hose because the little buggers are LOCKED IN TIL THE DEATH. Afterwards, once they were yanked off each other by the nice strangers, the broken-wristed one went a bit extra-nuts and went back for more to get his ping pong ball back and I had to restrain him by strait-jacketing his flailing scratching hitting arms in a very ouchy bear hug on my concrete slab of shame, hissing CALMDOWNCALMDOWN and trying not to notice all the eyes on us. But he was pulling and kicking and shrieking and so I grabbed his good wrist and pulled him along to the ping pong ball station and asked for another ping pong ball to BRING HIS TALLY BACK FROM TWO TO THREE, and the nice volunteer man was clearly thinking that this child already had more than anyone else, and besides, they were all out of them at this point, so I dragged him back to the slab and found a rogue ping pong ball on the floor but the wailing he-cat wouldn’t take the random ball, because it wasn’t the actual one that his brother took from him. So I dragged him over to the other brother and swapped the random ping pong ball for the original PING PONG BALL OF EXTREME IMPORTANCE and then he calmed down, but not before a lady came up to me and said “Oh, I see he is autistic. It is really hard to manage autistic kids at these types of things, isn’t it?” and she was kind and I just nodded. And we left.
5.  Played with snapchat A WHOLE LOT. Please note my very tight Stella McCartney flared zippered denim jumpsuit that was in the Selfridges sale for a tidy £150 down from £595. The kids said I looked like I might fix their car:
6. A tenth birthday. That’s a salted caramel chocolate cake right there, that is:
7. Kings Cross Fountains with Nathaniel and Gideon alongside many other English parents in their swimming things. It’s a cultural anomaly, this thing the English do, where they dress as though they too are at the seaside – not just their kids. There were beach towels laid down on hot concrete and even buckets and spades, though no actual sand. Otis thinks it was the beach, anyhow, so I guess it starts young:
8. More inner-city beach dressing, on the kerb next to the Indian restaurant:
9. On the rooftop at Alfie’s Antiques, the sweetest cafe with very nice eggs benedict. Casper came with us and was totally not into it, which says more about him and less about the eggs:
10. Yesterday’s open casting audition for a new Spielberg movie. They wanted boys who looked a bit Jewish and Italian, so naturally I took my blue-eyed pale-skinned kids along. I gave them San Pellegrino lemonade before they went in, because it was hot and it was a bit special, but that made Ned get very fidgety and burpy. He told me the lady said that if he didn’t stop burping she would throw him out. They didn’t get a call back, so we went to Soho and ate Sadness About The Lack Of A Hollywood Career Hotdogs.

How are your holidays going? Thrown any fruit yet?