The Harridan

Old Napoli

Posted on March 24, 2016 by theharridan

Ok, so, last weekend we went to Naples in search of Elena Ferrante for REALS! Though she wasn’t immediately obvious, because she is anonymous and mysterious and so we went looking for the characters in her book (you know, the tetralogy beginning with My Brilliant Friend, a sell out everywhere, a massive epic tale of two best friends who support each other but who also have these festering underlying jealousies and wish each other dead fairly often, and all about education or the lack of it, lovers, careers, babies, other actual dead people, the Neapolitan mafia, pizza, the way you can’t do lots of good work if you have kids to look after, etc) and we didn’t find them either.

We did convince a raffish and mildly handsome cab driver to take us into what is believed to be the setting for the neighbourhood where the story is set, though the cab driver was very dubious, and said:

“Why do you want to go to the shit zone? The shit zone is shit! We will have to drive extra fast and it’ll cost you ten more euro”

and of course we were all exhilarated like pumped up old book club ladies out on the town (which we totally are) and we nodded and were like:

“GIVE ME SOME OF THAT ITALIAN DRAMA, Sexy Cabbie”

though we didn’t say that out loud, you could just tell, because all of us had shining eyes and were a bit sweaty.

So we drove around to the shit zone, and it was a bit shit, and even though the sexy cab driver had amplified the sense of danger, there wasn’t much more than ugly estate housing and some nonnas shaking rugs out of their stories-high windows. But, you know, it was probably pretty dangerous. *coughs*

We stayed in an airbnb place for my first time ever, thanks to the airbnb wizard that is Celia, and it was just as excellent as you would hope for. An original mid-century modernist apartment five stories up in the old centre of Naples, with motorbikes zipping around every corner and fish mongers hawking their still flapping fish and shellfish in giant shallow pans of water down at street level , and corner shops selling the most ridiculously camp easter eggy things. Everywhere was graffitied, everywhere looked old and dirty and buzzy and alive. We all loved it.

Here we are, in our apartment, worrying about no one but ourselves and our stomachs. Where to eat? Is it time for another aperol spritz? Shall we try on each other’s clothes? Swap lipstick? Finish the fourth Ferrante? Not think about anyone else? Yes. Reader, it was very good.

Here is the street outside with the motor bikes and the european-ness:

AND THE FOOD

Well. It was all cheap and so good, so dreadfully good. The aperol spritzers were very frequent, as were the lattes and MORE PASTRY. We learnt from a handsome Milanese fella that when you go out to eat at a trattoria, don’t order appetisers, primi, secondi, side dishes, and dessert, or you won’t sleep. Just go for the secondi, because it is usually better, and side dishes to share. Otherwise you will be an ungainly digesting fatty, lying awake all night with the pasta sweats, and the dry mouth, reliving the aged goats cheese and oily tomato sauces, despairing over your inability to PUT THE FORK DOWN. So we took on his clever ordering strategy, but too late. We were leaving by then and we were still digesting.

Obviously the seafood thing was a bit traumatising, and I really tried to man up about it, especially when we went to a place called The Miracle Of Fish which was pretty much only fish on the menu. I suppose that is kind of obvious. Anyway, the lovely Miracle of Fish family learned of my seafood phobia through Sue, who did some excellent Italian-speaking from her year of being an Italian babysitter, and they were thrown, frankly, that a) I was scared of fish and b) I went to a place called The Miracle of Fish for my lunch. But they accommodated my glamorous New York-y off piste menu ordering and gave me a steaming plate full of aubergine pasta which was delicious and did not have any fishy smells to it, though I was cautious with every bite, like a terrible food bore with an imagined food allergy.

Here is Sue, with consistent good lip, sunning herself in the sun after doing some Italian and awaiting a huge plate of fish, miraculous fish (see above):

And then the pastries. Well. Because it was Palm Sunday, there were San Giuseppe’s zeppolla in every bar which are round choux pastry circles dusted with icing sugar, with custard and cherries on top. They were in every restaurant, in every bakery, every food stall, all slightly different, some more eclair-y, some a little like portuguese custard tarts, all with a hit of sour cherry and lemony custard. We just ate them and ate them. This is about the seventh one, found in a little bar across the road from the Museo which held the Pompeii mosaics, made by the bar proprietor’s mamma who lived upstairs:

And these, which were also found everywhere, all crunchy and buttery with a lemony orange-blossomy ricotta custard inside. Amazing. Life-changing. Ouchy when the sharp bits stabbed your gums, but totally worth a little gum-bleed:

Here is Vesuvius and views from the apartment terrace, enhanced quite nicely by filters, obvs:

And we did a little spot of shopping because it was sort of research for the book, and because Italian boutiques are tiny and brilliantly curated and cheap, compared to London when you aren’t at a sample sale. I got tiny coral earrings from an old man on the Vomero who was carving out cameos and other lovely things with his chisel, and this dress, a proper vintage number. I am also shimmering from the sunburn and aperol:

Here we are eating out on the first night, in instagrammable surroundings:

It was very female and bonding and lovely. We didn’t find Ferrante, or Lenu or Lila, but we did get a bloody rest from everyone else. And that was perhaps finding Ferrante after all.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged aperol, Ferrante, Naples, San Guiseppe zepolla, Vesuvius | 10 Comments

Solo: cleaner, quieter, lonelier

Posted on March 12, 2016 by theharridan

So I have another five days of solo parenting to go, and it has surprised me. I have never actually ever looked after the children on my own for longer than two days and that was only once and I am sure there were less of them. And Mark and I are a bit co-dependent in general, usually a bit clingy and couple-y and always prefer to do things together. And so this 17 day break has been actually very good as an exercise in learning a few things. Like these things:

I am not cooking elaborate Ottolenghi meals every night in an effort to keep both of us culinarily sated/happily married. And as such, I have much more time and much more money. I eat what I give the children, which is generally dreadful, or I eat some classy combination of eggs and kale/broccoli/spring greens, which I happen to actually love, as opposed to being hypnotised by the clean eaters, and everything is done and cleaned up by 7:30 and I have a long evening in which to do stuff.
What stuff? Well, indeed. I don’t know. This is where it all comes apart somewhat disappointingly. I could read, but I leave that until later. I could watch documentaries with Barnaby, which I did at first but after Making a Murderer we switched to more age-appropriate stuff like The Secrets Of The Tower of London and The Secrets of Scotland Yard and they were badly made and boring. Of course, that was once we could access Netflix again, after we had to order a new Apple TV remote because someone had lost the second one down the crumbly, sandy, hairy sticky side of the couch, which, once you shove your hand down there and dredge it back up, yields fistfuls of detritus and scratchy dried-up things which go under your nails and make you bleed and then you think THAT’S IT I WILL JUST ORDER ANOTHER ONE BECAUSE THIS IS REVOLTING and then I tried to watch The Night Manager on Sky but there was a mysterious PIN number needed and Mark wouldn’t respond when I sent desperate texts asking for the PIN and so it turned into evenings of wistful sighs and many lost hours biting off my split-ends. Also, some shameful hours spent watching Gentlewhispering open plastic packages and tap boxes, boring me rigid but enchanting me in equal measures, all with a tingly head.
We, the remainders, are cleaner, tidier and less yelly than Mark and Casper.
I sleep better by myself but still need to wear earplugs because the silence bothers me.
The dog rejected my advances and still sleeps on the floor, even though I ask him again and again to come up on the bed and I enthusiastically pat the space next to me and I reassure him that Mark isn’t here. He just snorts a bit and sinks down back into his bit of the floor, kind of embarrassed for me.
So it is a bit boring. Today the neighbour walked the dog, another neighbour took two kids and the school took Noah to see Fulham vs Bristol and I was like THANKS EVERYBODY but really Otis and I were very sad to see that everyone was gone. We see a lot of each other, and he isn’t really that keen on hanging out with me because I don’t like elaborate games involving crocheted blankets and hiding. And I wander around the flat, the cleaner, quieter flat, feeling like reading Vogue would be wasteful and self indulgent and so I should sort out things to take to the second hand shop, and Otis is deep in some solitary kind of game about spiders, and it’s really a bit lonely here.
You would think all that kale would make me thin, shining, white in the eye and glossy of the hair, but actually I have spots and conjunctivitis. I have to wear my glasses constantly which slip down my nose all the time and give me tension headaches, and obviously my eyes are un-magnified through the thick blind-person lenses and so they look tiny and wrinkled and weepy and red. And everyone stands quite far away from me once I point out the sickly eye in case I give them the conjunctivitis just from existing. I want to shout NO YOU CAN ONLY CATCH THIS IF YOU STICK YOUR FINGER IN MY EYE JUICE AND THEN YOU STICK YOUR FINGER INTO YOUR OWN EYE JUICE but I don’t because I am weary of medical ignoramuses.
Word on the street was that solo parenting is kind of fine throughout the week, because of the egg/kale situation and because of husbands usually being at work, so no difference, etc etc, but the weekends are a bit long and dire. So last weekend I primed them and bribed them with the 10am cheap movies and brunch at the Skandi KUPP and packets of star monsters, provided they were good and went to kick boxing without crying the whole way there. There is some ‘issue’ with the 100 pushups and sprinting and sweating bigger guys hitting them. Anyway, they went and then we did our movies/brunch/buying extravaganza and it was all kind of calm and good. This is what it looks like in the kick boxing gym, with an added wall of humid kid-sweat.

Here is Otis running up the three stairs at Paddington Basin after our pancakes, in a homage to Rocky Balboa:

And when it wasn’t about children, it was, of course, about me. Luckily I have glamorous women friends who are BAFTA members because they have done some important filmy contribution thing, so they get to watch new movies for free, and they get a plus one, which it quite often me. So last night I went to see Anomalisa at the BAFTA place and there was a veerrrrry dirty cheeseburger and twice-fried chips to get through first and a lot of prosecco to wash it down with, and I got excited and took a photo like a tourist:

So Mark and Casper get home on Thursday, right after I have left to spend a few days in Naples, because of the Ferrante novels. It’s a bookclub Ferrante-hunting-holiday.

To finish, a very profound video of Otis vacuuming in a terry towelling Elsa dress/bathrobe:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged All Stars Boxing Gym, BAFTA, gentlewhispering, home alone, Rocky Balboa | 8 Comments

Lingerie and a Long Journey

Posted on February 29, 2016 by theharridan

The big news: Casper is flying to New Zealand tomorrow evening with Mark, and the baby has developed a daily habit of ferreting through my lingerie drawer and discarding everything with a sassy flick of the wrist until he finds camisoles and singlets and chemises and negligees which he can wear as Elsa Dresses. Anything is an Elsa Dress, provided it has a thin strap, a swinging a-line, and a deep vee.

As for Casper, it seemed a most brilliant idea to send him to New Zealand with Mark, because Mark likes company, and Casper likes attention, and they both need a holiday in the sun. So we bought Casper a ticket without thinking the consequences through too much, and then went to have a quick word with the headmaster about getting approval to get Casper out of school for two weeks.

How do you think that went?

So my argument (in my head) went like this:

The Pros

Casper is seven, and therefore a few weeks out shouldn’t be terribly detrimental to his chances at future success, because, well, he is seven. And so, like, his school work is probably fairly basic building-blocks foundation-y type stuff which shouldn’t be too tough to catch up with….right? Casper is perfectly bright, just a little disinclined to do his work. So, it’s not like a few weeks would permanently knee-cap him and send him spiralling downwards into a dangerous vortex of future substance abuse, unemployment and eventual life on the streets, right? And he could be sent to New Zealand with some homework, right?

Going travelling is good for your brain connections. You learn things that you couldn’t in a classroom, which is the very same rationale the school uses for school day trips and foreign exchanges.

Seeing your New Zealand family (some for the first time, some for the first time on five years) is a good thing for anyone to experience, right? Good for the whole child? A good way to meet some emotional and psychological needs in that tough little challenging boy?

Being with your dad and getting his full attention without having your annoying brothers getting in the way is a really good thing for a middle child who struggles with being part of a big family. And spending time with eager and enthusiastic grandparents who love you is a good thing for a kid who isn’t always sure about the whole love thing.

Going to another continent and hemisphere and being on a plane for about three days there and three days back is something to learn from, I am sure. Like how to sit still and how to sleep in a hard small seat and how to control your need to sing operatically on a fairly frequent basis. And then you arrive and look at the different landscape and people and notice a different language and cultures and maybe swim a little in the Pacific Ocean and get to eat a pie from a dairy and grandad may well take you out to inspect goats and sheep.

TELL ME THESE AREN’T GOOD REASONS TO LET HIM GO

Well, the school disagreed and said some things which made me cry, because they suggested that these good reasons were not bigger than the badder thing of taking him out of school for 12 days. And that the consequences of those missed days would potentially be pretty bad for Casper. And for the teacher and for his classmates and then the WHOLE WORLD. (They didn’t actually make this a global issue, but they may as well have done.) So I panicked and cried two times more and asked Mark to try to cancel the ticket and we both looked at each other with combined parental guilt and shame and then a few friends of ours said

STOP IT YOU IDIOTS

And then we thought, actually, it is the very best thing we could do for Casper and so everyone else can go find a carrot and sit down heavily on it.

As for the baby, I may have gone a little heavy on the Frozen soundtrack in the early days and so he loves a bit of Elsa, and I have never shied away from encouraging him to play with any toy, because I am normal and intelligent. And so his best things are his two baby dollies which he loves to cuddle and put to bed. And then one day he asked for an Elsa Dress and we fashioned a silky knee-skimming gown from an old lacy singlet and now that kid just OWNS the polyester fest that is my knickers drawer. Daily, he takes my hand and leads me to it and rifles through and asks me to tie up the straps with a PWEASE? and I am enchanted and I do it and he flits from room to room twirling with joy. On the weekend, we found some tights and someone plaited the legs and he wore them on his head as glorious blonde swingable tresses.

And to half the world, this is a boring non-story and to the other, it is a bit challenging. Mark was horrified, and cannot be comfortable with it, and says things like

‘You will confuse him’ and then offers him a Spiderman costume and I say

‘How is that less confusing?’ And ‘who’s confused anyway?’

And I imagine Otis sitting there as an adult, head in hands, wondering if he is a woman or a man or a spider, based on the terrible fact that his mother and father gave him various types of clothes to dress up in when he was a kid.

So it seems to me it is all based on some terrible fear of the vagina. An irrational, base fear that I cannot help to dispel except to continue to let my kid be a kid without taking any notice of adults being weird and repressed and making something normal seem to be not normal.

Here he is, playing and dressing up and being unfiltered by adult neuroses:

And that’s my brilliant, funny, gorgeous little kid, in an apricot peplum peeking out from weather-appropriate casual wear. And he is perfect.

Posted in Uncategorized | 11 Comments

Stones

Posted on February 17, 2016 by theharridan

Last Wednesday night we ate Honey & Co’s sabiche. That used to be our favourite dinner, which was good because

it is quick,
it is healthy and full of raw garlic and chilli and roasted aubergine and orange-yolky Burford Brown EGGS, my eggy little loves,
there is no meat in it,
it tastes like the heavenly angels, but with some fiery heat in them. Tough, urban heavenly angels from the middle east, maybe, and
also, it has garlicky tahini drizzled all over it, with flatbreads from the middle eastern shop, warmed and crunchy with the hot garlic chilli lemony cumin honey parsley sauce and the rich delicious posh eggs and aubergine and OH MY.

But then Mark said one night, apropos of nothing:

‘I think I am over sabiche. Eating it every second night for this past year has dimmed the fierce passion I had for it. Could we please have steak and mashed potatoes and cauliflower cheese?’

And I was both sad, and mad. So now we have it whenever I get it through the Dinner Suggestion Selection process, about once a week when his resolve is down, mostly from his being distracted by larger things than Dinner Suggestion Selection. So Wednesday night, we ate it, and we loved it again, because absence makes the heart grow fonder, etc etc, and we got ready to have noisy stomachs from the raw things in it and garlic-extruding pores for a few days, because it is frankly worth it. And after two episodes of Nashville season two, and a chapter of The Luminaries (not loving that book AT ALL) we went to bed.

An hour and a half later, the light goes on in our room and Mark gets up and yelps.

OUCH MY BACK MY SIDE MY N*TS OUCH

and he rolls onto the floor and gets up and splays himself on the bed and clutches his side and rolls back onto the floor and crawls to the bathroom to loudly retch and gets back into our room and moans and goes all clammy and grey. And I pull my earplugs out and look across and see a man having a baby. Or a heart attack or some such other alarming thing and I think:

‘The sabiche is killing him! I have poisoned him with too much raw garlic and chili and now he is going to die because I JUST REALLY LIKE MAKING SABICHE FOR DINNER EVEN THOUGH HE IS PRETTY MUCH OVER IT AND IF I WAS JUST KINDER AND STUCK WITH MEAT AND POTATOES HE WOULDN’T BE DYING RIGHT NOW’

And so, because I am quite calm in a crisis, I ask him if he is, in fact, having a heart attack, or whether he thinks he has been poisoned by the sabiche, but he cannot reply because he is too busy lurching himself from surface to surface, bellowing and making crying noises. So I obviously start googling in order to work out what to do, because with him down, there wasn’t exactly any grownups on the premises to help. Only me, which makes you realise that just because you are nearly 40, you aren’t necessarily very good at being in charge or knowing what to do when someone starts dying in front of you.

The googling thing wasn’t brilliant and my usual sharp researching skills were dulled by my growing panic and that shaky nervy lack of sleep cack-handed slowness. So I called the ambulance, and the guy at the other end was going through the list of questions, asking me to ask Mark whether the pain felt stabby or dull, thuddy or trickling, and I could barely hear the man over Mark’s vomiting, and so we mutually agreed to stop the q&a phone charade and just get him up to the hospital.

And – who knew? – the A&E at 12:30am on a Wednesday night is just FULL to spillage of glassy-eyed, belching, whiffy people shouting at each other. Mark and I walk in, him kind of bending and twisting and stopping and moaning, still grey and clammy, in the zone of pain just like you get when you have a baby exiting your bits. And a blokey triage nurse takes a look at him and pulls him into a room and says:

‘Mate, I think you have kidney stones. And I am sorry.’

And they whip him in and strap him down and give him morphine and oxygen and I ask the doctor if he will ever be normal again and she says yes. I say:

‘Is it like having a baby?’

And she says yes, and I say:

‘I’ve had five.’

and she looks at me and we do a tiny little bit of mental fist-pumping, and she fixes him with kindness and care and drugs and I take photos of myself and the curtains because there wasn’t a lot to do except listen to the heart rate monitor and the drunk guy snoring next door, and Mark said he didn’t want to be Instagrammed. Actually, he didn’t say that, he was still whimpering through the pain at that point.

This is me at 3:30 am:

And the curtain:

We got home at 6:00am, and two kids were up playing on the iPad and they didn’t even notice we were gone. And Mark went to bed and I felt sorry for myself because I was tired, and I realised that I have never before stayed up all night. What kind of nearly 40-year old sheltered clean-livin’ dull-type person hasn’t ever stayed up all night? WHY DIDN’T I JOIN THE 1990’s RAVING YEARS OF MY WORLDLY PEERS? There’s a world of regret in that sentence, although I do like some timely shut-eye.

Mark has recovered very well and I have done my best to be kind and supportive and loving and nice. I am not great with sick people, to my eternal shame, but there was no doubt this was more than your usual man-flu-type situation. And guess what we are having tonight for dinner, fellas?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged a&e, kidney stones, sabiche | 15 Comments

Parental Saturday Sleepiness Enabling System Klaxon Alert

Posted on January 30, 2016 by theharridan

So, I’m lying on the couch, the poor, fake leather couch which is spilling its foamy guts all over the living room floor, bits of yellowy sponge occasionally ripping off and reminding me of old folk’s homes’ ancient uriney interiors, ripped open because it is a) cheap vinyl, and b) the children jump on it every single day, even though we shout

US: “Barnaby/Noah/Casper/Ned/Otis STOP JUMPING ON THAT POOR BROKEN COUCH WHICH ISN’T EVEN OURS BECAUSE (OBVIOUSLY) WE HAVE MORE TASTE AND WOULD HAVE BOUGHT ONE FROM THAT SHOP CALLED ‘MADE’ OR ‘LOAF’ OR EVEN SOME CLEVER EBAY REUPHOLSTERED NUMBER”

and they keep jumping, we repeat, they jump again, Mark says something like

“If I have to get up from my chair, then, well, you are probably gonna GET IT BAD”

and then they say

“We aren’t JUMPING, we are SHIMMYING” and they carry on, satisfied that they have won the little showdown through their sheer mastery of unexpected synonyms. Anyway, I was lying down on the couch, hoping not to breathe in too near the foam, because of the likely urine/toxic fumes/etc, and my eyes start to close and I think about this excellent article I read on the interwebs a few weeks ago about how to do parenting when you are lying down, with your eyes closed. And so I asked them to brush my hair, and to be doctors and to examine me for an irregular pulse, and then, the very best thing – to write on my back their full names, dates of birth, three secrets about how they were feeling on the inside, as well as dinner requests. And it was a total EPIPHANY because I realised I could get a bit snoozy, while showing my interest in both how their handwriting was coming along, get some fresh ideas for their tea, AS WELL AS TAKING THEIR EMOTIONAL TEMPERATURE by engaging with their innermost feelings!

So I thought it was worth passing along. The technique isn’t perfect, because their spelling is patchy, and Ned got his small, hard plastic Hulk to give me a ‘punching massage’ instead, and then they all asked for money afterwards because they felt ‘exploited’ and ‘misled’ once they worked out the whole thing was more about me than them. But whatevs, kids. Welcome to the rest of your life.

Anyway, thanks for all of the lovely thoughts and sensible words of advice after I told the world the terrible truth about our marital impasse in my last post. It has thawed a bit, mostly because it was getting boring and lonely, so now we are just not talking about it. Mark is going to go to New Zealand for a few weeks to hopefully get it out of his system, to arrive and be crestfallen at the rain and mosquitos and the poverty and the terrible TV and literally FALL OVER at the price of ground almonds and imported cheese, spluttering at the house prices and the corrupt government and the people who don’t wear shoes in the supermarket. Or, he will get so excited and find a job and fall in love and will start the process of changing our lives in a big scary way, and hopefully I will cope and not get all passive-aggressive and resentful, carrying around a bitter poisonous stone in my heart which may blossom into a depression or general discontent for years afterwards, turning me hagged and mean-looking well before my time. I’ll keep you all posted, obviously, because there are no secrets with me, and I can only deal with enormous profound issues by telling everyone I meet all about them in detail.

And look! We had a kid turn 11 today, which involved this cake encased in hardened chocolate poured over rapidly deteriorating unseasonal fruits. Cutting into the cake was like cracking into an easter egg, with the soft, oozing, rancid fruits reminding me that sometimes, looks aren’t everything. Yes, it looks too fabulous. But it had a rotting core. A BIT LIKE ME.

And here he is, birthday child liking the cake for its simple cakeness, not knowing that I would manage to turn the cake into a dramatic, tragic, and overblown personal metaphor, sounding a little bit vain in the process and making it all about myself AGAIN:

But, you know, I’m a little like that. And this is what he was like when he was three, all soft and curly and uncomplicated:

Argh. I hate how the kids get older, though the alternative is an early death, so I’d best be thankful and learn to like them as they are and not mourn for those early years of scrappy tiredness and desperate toddler manhandling. It all seems like it was so much fun though, which I think might well be the ageing and desperate biological workings of my inner womanly core, screaming for one last baby. *I hear you, screaming desperate womanly core. I’ll do my best!*

So, back to London on a Wednesday night. Celia waited in line on an unspecified Monday morning for an hour with very enthusiastic pensioners for extremely cheap £10 tickets to see Dominic West and Janet McTeer in Les Liaisons Dangereuses, where we got front row seats, close enough so that I had to swerve out of the way when McNulty did a sword fight with another guy, and I could see the veins on Janet McTeer’s gorgeous uplifted bosoms. £10 and a fifteen minute tube ride. And you all wonder what keeps me here? And beforehand we ate at Peter Gordon’s Kopapa and we had these:

Tamarillo cocktails. So, yep. And Peter Gordon was there, and then we got coffee from Monmouth, and swanned around Seven Dials and both of us said that living here was the best place to live, even better than Toronto and Milan. And both of us have to leave here, sooner or later, and it really bites.

More Reasons To Be A Happy Londoner

Westminster Council do a whole lot of subsidised programmes for the intercity unruly youth, which my boys are, and they get to go boxing at this very old school boxing gym JUST LIKE ROCKY BALBOA DID IN PHILLY, and it only costs £3 and you drop them off for an hour and a half:

So that’s our new thing on a Saturday, while Mark, Otis, Magic and I go wandering along the canal, being all very urban:

And here are Magic’s lips, too perfectly labial and furry not to include here:

There is no neat conclusion here. So I urge you all to find ways to get massages for free, ideally from enthusiastic supple little fingers, and to make cakes and eat unseasonal fruit before it rots and to kiss dog mouths and drink tamarillo cocktails and get your kids boxing like Rocky and go see a play. And find (and share) parenting hacks, because they are awesome.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

A little bit of discord, TBH

Posted on January 12, 2016 by theharridan

Happy New Year. So far, it is a bit of a Miserable New Year, despite a party and a wedding anniversary and the children leaving the flat for hours every day to learn stuff for free and get fed massive English midday post-war dinners with an array of puddings all cooked and served and cleaned up by other people, and despite the Selfridges sale which actually netted me my Best Sale Purchase EVAH. You would think we would be high-fiving each other and celebrating with modest amounts of wine in the evening and booking holidays and basking in the love and warmth and familial chaotic overload of dark cosy January with a grateful face and a rosy glow, lit by a Netflix screen and comforted by a big fat dirty dog. But no. It’s all silences and hissed one word responses and enormous gulfs in the bed. It’s not this:

(But that, to be fair, was a long time ago – 18 years actually, and we were thin and young with more hair and less arm circumference.)

So at my place right now, it’s war.

And that is because we have reached one of those relationship impasses, where we both think a very different thing about something big. One of us wants to leave and return home to New Zealand, like, NOW, and one of us definitely does not, certainly not now and maybe not ever, and we have to figure out what to do about this enormous, fundamentally different point of view. I think we need a spreadsheet and a therapist to work it out. Mark thinks we just need tickets and a shipping container.

It makes me feel panicky and itchy and claustrophobic to think about going home, like the end of school camp where you think you will never be the same again, and while it would be good to sleep in your own bed and get your mum to do your washing, you will never again feel so free and independent and reimagined and grownup, and you won’t ever have this much fun ever again, and you will miss your friends and the camp so much you might die. You’ve gotten used to the compromises like cramped spaces and the cold, and you are in love with the adventure and you don’t want it to end. So, going home would feel a little like that, but with the extra add-ons of no jobs, no money, no place to live, no sensible plans, no idea about schools, with an orange dog in quarantine and five children who are skinny and white and who are completely English with no rugby skills AT ALL.

Mark says (shouts) he is done here, DONE, I TELL YA! He says he misses family and friends and fishing and he wants a house and a garden and he is sick of work and the dark and the difficulty of it all. Then I get psychosomatic nut-allergy symptoms and have to leave the room, to mutter mean things under my breath and to try to remember to breathe. OH, it’s all too late for me now, but there was a time I would have been happy going back, when I didn’t know there was more out there, when I would have been satisfied with doing up a house and going to the beach a lot, when I would have been ok with never getting on a plane, except for the occasional trip to Melbourne to see some musical theatre. The end of how we live and what we do and the fun we have with the people we do stuff with and the things we have yet to see and the restaurants we haven’t tried yet and the sales I haven’t exploited…it just kills me.

So. I have a big globus hystericus which lives in my throat, just like Cheryl Glickman’s in the new Miranda July novel, and it gets massive whenever Mark starts looking on TradeMe for another million-dollar villa to buy in Dannevirke, and whenever he suggests we buy a bed and breakfast to run. I cannot make my own bed and my floor looks like this:

2016-01-12 14.41.06

I didn’t even set that filth up. That filth is always there because I don’t like to sweep because it keeps me from More Important Tasks. So I CANNOT RUN A B&B because they would shut me down for health and safety reasons. And I would be serving people tea in stained chipped teacups and I would be crying and they would want to complain about how I didn’t make their beds with convincing hospital corners but they wouldn’t feel like they could berate me because of my obvious emotional distress and so they would leave some sort of bad review on trip advisor and we would be RUINED! And my kids would get beaten up by the massive shoeless New Zealand kids because their ball and tackling skills would be so underdeveloped, and because they have prissy English accents. And maybe Otis would be ostracised because he thinks he is Queen Elsa:

There’s no good to come of this.

Here are my children in their grey London habitat, eating Saturday crepes at Portobello Market, right after they went to skateboarding lessons. Can you even get crepes in the southern hemisphere? Don’t answer that, because, yes, obvs. And admittedly, Ned looks really sad and cold in that photo, and Casper in the other one looks mightily pissed off, but often they are beaming with the London joy, like their mother does.

Here they are, in Kensington Gardens, climbing a massive tree, enjoying all that outdoor space, the kind of space you might imagine they would get a few minutes from their house in New Zealand, but actually wouldn’t, because it would be more likely to be a highway or a farmer’s paddock which wouldn’t be open to all the kids to just climb trees on, willy-nilly:

See? Practically Hobbiton, but a well-connected Hobbiton with Selfridges down the road and many tube stations to take you around to the free, culturally enriching things EVERYWHERE. On the Selfridges thing, I got a Stella McCartney leopard print wool coat from this season which was £1340, reduced to £150. Yes, nearly £1200 off. You don’t get THAT kind of thing in High Street, do you? DO YOU? NO, mo’fos, you don’t.

Anyway, my globus hystericus has appeared again with all this traumatic talk. I have to go make a convincing spreadsheet and possibly sweep a bit of that crap from under the table.

Posted in Uncategorized | 20 Comments

Golf

Posted on December 29, 2015 by theharridan

It’s been a very long Tuesday, in that twilight zone betwixt Christmas and New Year, where it seems everyone is possibly dead, inside their homes, in front of the TV, or they are on holiday somewhere sunny, but you, alas, are neither dead or on holiday, just eating ham and feeling thirsty all of the time, without any idea of the date.

Mark is inexplicably golfing, in that kind of way where last night, he says “Tomorrow, I’m going golfing” and you say “OH” and then he gets up out of bed in the morning, puts on one of his many Hawaiian shirts and takes off, leaving us all in a puff of exhaust fumes, all wishing we too were sporting unseasonal short sleeved comedy shirts on our way to do some golfing, instead of still here, with a dog to walk and vicious fighting to get bored by. And no one wants to walk the dog, even though they all asked for a new puppy for Christmas.

I’m like “Dudes, you don’t even bother to look after the dog we already have” and they are like “He’s NOT A PUPPY” and they slink off, to the TV, or the iPad, or one of the two new nintendo DS things that I so foolishly bought them for Christmas. There has been a tiny voice of caution and wisdom telling me not to bring nintendo DS things into the house, ever, because they would turn my children into future IT specialists, all pale and unwashed, dorky, with weak arms and maybe some small Dungeons and Dragons models to paint, with special lamps to paint with and general weakened eyesight from the lack of sunlight and bad diet of biscuits. But I weakened, from the sheer exhaustion of five years of pestering and hoping and wishing, and then I went onto CEX, the computer exchange store on Queensway which has a mediumly attractive IT specialist guy with a beard and a beanie but also a knowing little grin, and he said the boys would be fine as long as they went outside sometimes to walk the dog. Well. That’s all very easy to say when you are a CEX salesman who knows how to charm an old nintendo DS skeptic, with your youth and your beard and your superior knowledge of what non-rugby-playing skinny kids actually like to do, without the terrible pressure of having to walk the dog everyday.

Anyway. I see the error of my ways, and I should have listened to that mean little inner voice who said they would be better off with another massive packet of Lego and a book.

We went to Devon again, because staying home over Christmas is just the same as staying here every day, but with more loneliness and more roasting of meats. So we figure we may as well stay in a cottage somewhere with a pool, do the same things but with an air of ‘holiday’ about them, and muck up someone else’s oven with spilt ham glazes and layers of fat. We had duck, ham, roast beef and lamb. Mark made an apple pie but the jam bits leaked through all over the bottom of the oven and he stuck butter all over the top of the pastry because he likes to do things his way, instead of listening to me. There was no good bread to be found in all of Devon and Cornwall, but the butter, cheese and bacon was ace. Here we are, doing some Christmas morning present diving:

And one of those terrible, terrible consoles:

Otis got a barrel of plastic dinosaurs, which were quite the hit:

And I bought myself Acne boots and Tom Ford lipstick on eBay and gave them to Mark to give me. It was win-win, really, and amazingly, the boots slipped over my massive feet with the extra side-bone like they were made for me. All that secondhandedness wore them in over the difficult parts:

Ned opening his Woody:

And here we are on the beach at Looe, getting a little bit cold and underwhelmed:

And us in the pubs, eating massive pies:

Before we took off to Devon, we did a bit of pre-Christmas carousing. We had carols in the local pub:

And a lovely night at Quo Vadis with the bookies, where I wore a massive ballgown and a jumper, just like Sharon Stone at the Oscars with her gap shirt. EXACTLY like that. Then I got hot, and took off my jumper, and displayed my furry armpits, which I have been cultivating since summer. Everyone was disappointed to see how wispy and scanty they were. I didn’t take a photo of them though, because I am not yet awesome enough to document my feminist armpit hair, so here is my ballgown instead, on my artful walk home:

Here is Ned at the school nativity play, wearing a red cape and bearing gifts of frankenseen (?). Just look at that annoyed little guy in the star headband:

Mark has come in from the golfing just now, had a shower, and put himself to bed. TO BED! My face looks just like the boy in the star headband right now.

Happy New Year, all of you who are still alive in front of the TV and to those of you warming yourselves in another hemisphere! I’m off to confiscate some screens.

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Thifty, shouting, ruined stuff

Posted on December 5, 2015 by theharridan

So, today I have been shouting at my children quite a lot. And I no longer feel any sort of guilt about doing it. You know sometimes people share those parenting articles on Facebook about how the family finally came together once the mother learnt to keep her voice down? How she learnt to control her spit-spraying alarming demon shriek into some kind of meaningful, thoughtful, levelled voice, even when the kids do really bloody horrible things, and now no one is scared of her and everyone feels more loved and calm and stuff like that? Well, I call bullshit on that. What a lot of navel-gazing, anxiety-inducing, guilt-indulging rubbish. Sometimes, the kids are awful, and they need to see what happens to people when you are awful, or if you do awful things. People get mad, people get angry, people express that feeling, kids see what happens when other people have had enough, some sort of reconciliation occurs, kid learns forever not to pour whole bottles of Chanel No. 5 EDP onto the carpet, boundaries are redrawn, everyone high-fives each other, they go out for hot chocolates and no one needs a therapy session.

Current Tally Of Ruined Stuff Which Leads To My Shouting:

As above. Whole bottle of Chanel No. 5, poured onto carpet, making a damp, rapidly evaporating mini-pond which stunk out my bedroom for days, a cruel claustrophobic reminder. The baby did it, the others watched, their bright little eyeballs wide with excitement and fear, and then they came out to the living room to confess what they had witnessed, kind of fakely disapproving, but actually triumphant and delighted by the whole thing. They made out they couldn’t do anything about it, because they were ‘down the long hallway’ and could only just see him do it ‘from very far away’. The baby laughed, I shouted at all of them, then I sulked and bought some more on eBay, which turned out to be 100mls of counterfeit and now I am having an ongoing eBay squabble with a lady in Blackpool who refuses to give me my money back.
You all know about the Tom Ford lipsticks. They now have to be carefully applied by dabbing, not swiping, because if you swipe, the lipsticks, now smushed into little crushed pieces of heavily-pigmented crumbs, get spread onto your lips like tiny bits of cake decorations. There is very little elegance in leaving the house with tiny hunks of broken lipstick on your face.
I found my new Balenciaga sample sale heels out of their box and tipped out next to my bed, with the lid of the shoebox missing. I know that the lid of the shoebox is only a bit of cardboard, but it is Balenciaga cardboard and I sometimes have fantasies of myself becoming that kind of person who stacks their shoeboxes into some sort of order and polaroids a photo of the shoes and sticks it to the box and puts it back neatly into the fantasy walk-in wardrobe in which all things are clean and colour-coordinated and so I liked bringing out the box and just looking at it and stuff. I asked the kids where the lid was, and Ned said the baby had been hitting him over the head with it, and I asked him exactly where he had been attacked with my Balenciaga lid and he said the hallway and I walk down there and find my lid squashed, ripped, folded and with jam on it. I shouted at all of them.
They disappeared for a while today and then they all came back out into the living room and told me they had found a Buzz Lightyear. Which, of course, is one of Ned’s Christmas presents. So they had been hiding in our bathroom cupboard, a nice big cupboard which is largely under the cupboard radar and which has, for many Christmases, housed the presents. Not any bloody more. So I shouted.
The old, glorious playmobil nativity set gets smaller every year, as pieces end up flung and vacuumed and eaten and repurposed. This year I have had to replace the animals with old McDonalds’ toys from the Penguins of Madagascar era and other mismatched playmobil sets, which upsets that tiny part of me who wants colour coordinated closets and polaroided shoeboxes. And it is only December 5, and the nativity set has only been out of its year-long hiding place for five days. But worse – the new nativity set that we bought from the big Cathedral in Ghent when we went away without kids a few weekends ago (scream!) has already been compromised – a Wise Man is headless and the tiniest baby lamb is no where to be found. Probably sitting in someone’s lower intestines. I shouted about that too.

There are many things going on here. I am mostly annoyed by their lack of respect for other people’s things. They have a roomful of toys and boxes and a dog and books and they should be fiddling with those things. Not my stuff. So I shout, I vent, I spit a little bit and my voice cracks, Mark gets alarmed and tells me to stop now. I get a lock for our room.

Baking My Way To Parental Redemption:

I made a beetroot brownie which tasted of dirt, so I had to fashion some sort of chocolatey, creamy, buttery sauce to pour all over it which negated all the goodness but it did get the little ingrates to eat. Here they are, before the truth of the six beetroots were revealed to them, signalling their approval for the drowned vege cake:

And then on Friday, after getting annoyed at the remains of the granola, all milky and sloppy and half-eaten:

I scraped it all into a bowl, added some butter, sugar, flour and cinnamon and I baked these rock-hard biscuits and they gobbled them up and I am going to do that every week as long as there are leftovers at my table because thriftiness is next to awesomeliness and therefore I am an awesome mother:

I also keep those half eaten bits of apple, peach and plum which I find under beds and in the soles of shoes and in drawers and I stick them into the fridge until they outnumber all other types of food and when their mouldering becomes finally a bit too off-putting, I bake them in a cake and they eat that up with proper enthusiasm too. Because I am awesome, as I keep trying to tell you, even if I shout a little bit too much.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Balenciaga, chanel no 5, leftovers, natibity set, shouting | 8 Comments

I don’t have a shopping problem

Posted on November 17, 2015 by theharridan

We had a little party on November 5th, which is something we do every year, because across the road from us our garden committee holds a fireworks display on Bonfire Night which is open to the public. It brings through about 2000 people in the gates, and the adults pay £10 and the kids a fiver to watch the fireworks and the bonfire. There is also a beer tent, sausage sizzle, mud, lost kids, drama, ouchy bits of firework debris which may or may not singe your arm a little depending on where you stand, and quite often some rain.

We invite a few people around from after school to our place, mostly neighbours and friends, and I bake brownie, cook sausages for the kids, and something for the adults. This year I marinated and then slow-roasted lamb, because Ottolenghi told me how to, and I would follow him and his cookery jiggery pokery wizardry to the ends of the earth, and then topped it off with Jamie Oliver’s massive sausage roll. And while the sausage roll looked like a Halloween-relic giant severed arm, it was ridiculously delicious and it taught me that all a crowd really needs is a hot bit of pastry ‘n’ meat. All those years of searching wildly through cookbooks to hit upon the Holy Grail of crowd-feeding, where the thing had to be impressive, delicious, and capable of feeding an unknown quantity of people; the wilderness years, where I experimented with chorizo and chickpea stew, and roasted beef and ham and bread rolls and big plates of salad. And it was only ever about a big fat meaty cigar and tomato sauce -what a lesson to learn when you are middle-aged.

Anyway, there was also masses of cheese and chips and crudités and beetroot dip and the weirdest uncooked snickerdoodle biscuit cake thing from the Smitten Kitchen book which was gross and it spread all over the plate in the overheated room and the children uniformly avoided it and a huge lasagne which someone bought along and from which we ate all over the following weekend. And lots of excellent NZ sauvignon blanc from Majestic and more Lindauer Rose than even I could drink.

Some of our guests bought tickets and left the party to go and watch the fireworks, while some stayed in the flat doing dishes and reassuring nervous babies (that’d been me, then) and others watched the display from the top of our stairs with an assortment of other neighbours and randoms who didn’t fancy paying for tickets when you could just look up, for free. Some of the kids from our party sat on the roof of our landrover and watched, in a pre-teen king-of-the-world-type display of nighttime bravado.

All good fun. And then we get an email a few days later from the committee, saying quite politely that they knew many of the residents had hosted parties that night, and not everyone had purchased tickets, and so, it would be MOST APPRECIATED if those households gave the committee a donation. Suggested amount: £10 per adult and £5 per kid, depending on how many people were at your respective flats that night. Which would have meant that we were being asked to pay the committee about £250. I totally choked on my leftover sausage roll and got a bit outraged.

I wanted to write back and say that that would be fine, but I would also like the committee to go some way to pitching in for the costs of the party we had. Suggested amount: £10 per adult and £5 per kid. But I am wimpy and scared of confrontation, so I just dreamt up further fabulous arguments in my head for a few days. I am amazing in my internal imaginary fights with other people.

Then I forgot all about it because it is sample sale season. I have attended so many of the sample sales over the past few weeks, and I have a haul so fabulous that I can’t really sleep well at night for the fevered mental styling that goes on.

A List Of The Sample Sale Things That I Now Own Currently Hanging In My Wardrobe Which Befits Someone Who Has Somewhere Really Great To Go To On A Regular Basis:

1.Balenciaga heels, mid-height, white but cut through with a black leather frill which sits over my massive hobbit-feet and tricks the eye into thinking they are normal sized and elegant.

2. A Christopher Kane black jacket with a python-print silk frilled trim. It is a bit Chanel-like.

3. A Mary Katrantzou silk blue and yellow printed tunic with a little collar and a chinoiserie print.

4. A Mary Katrantzou silk black and white boxy top with a diffused cityscape print. Slightly tight on the upper arms, good with jeans.

5. Erdem red flowered printed trousers, just like my old Erdem blue printed trousers.

6. Erdem white sleeveless embroidered crossover complicated silk top with tiny non-sensical words around the hem and a black trim, just like my old Erdem white sleeveless silk complicated top.

7. A Mulberry granny blouse in a bone colour which I thought was silk but is viscose. Also a little tight on those pesky upper arms.

But There’s An Even Better Thing:

All this though, the great giant haul of ridiculous going-out clothes, pales into comparison when I reveal what I found at the charity shop on Sunday. Walking past the Octavia Trust op-shop I saw a CHANEL JACKET ON A MANNEQUIN AND IT WAS £65 AND IT FITS AND IT IS REAL! I know, because I spent a lot of time googling youtube tutorials on authentication. It has the tiny chain sewn around the bottom hem and silk pleated lining and apparently it is from the Spring 2000 Cruise collection, according to my expert label-decipering skillz. That’s a bone fide hashtaglifegoal RIGHT THERE!

It is a little bit ugly. It is a bit Dick van Dyke in Mary Poppins. Or English gent at the beach in the 30’s. Striped like a canvas parasol in shades of blue, mint and bone. The youtube tutorials assure me that vintage Chanel jackets are *effortless* to style and they look great with denim, but I am not entirely convinced. But CHANEL! Chain trim! Little buttons with interlinked ‘c’s! I’ll wear it anyway! It’s a bluddy sartorial dream come true, fellas.

Photo Essay Time Because I Am Worn Out By The Excitement (And Styling Concerns) Of The Chanel Jacket:

Casper has been marking his own spelling tests. He is very enthusiastic and optimistic. Also deluded:

Here is Casper and Noah on mid-term break, with Sue who is expertly pointing out London landmarks from the Sky Garden. What a funny little place that was, with its airport security and million-pound hot chocolates and security guards who were upset that the children were playing on the soft upholstered fake logs instead of just sitting on them:

Casper in Cliveden last weekend, running fast to avoid the slippery mud:

More National Trust gorgeousness – a rare moment when the boys are tribe-like in a good way:

The pet cemetery in Hyde Park, filled with Victorian monkeys and beloved dogs called ‘Scum’. I bet you didn’t know there even was one:

And the best, saved til last. This is Mark and Otis bonding over their love of Sam Smith:

Adorbs.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

It’s hours later, and I’ve been asked for a photo of the Chanel glory. Here it is – this is for you, Jo. Enjoy my Coco hair:

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Balenciaga, Cliveden, fireworks, Mary Katrantzou, Mulberry, Ottolenghi, sample sale | 6 Comments

Slushy pumpkins and cake

Posted on October 30, 2015 by theharridan

Here’s an annoying word which doesn’t adequately express itself very well:

Playfighting.

PLAY. Playing. Playing = wholesome fun = laughing = farmyardy rough’n’tumble (non-homoerotic, in our case, because they are small, and brothers, and ugh) = ruddy cheeks and healthy-smelling juvenile horsey sweat from the happiness caused from the playfighting. Not crying, ruined furniture, couches splitting open and leaking foam, glass framed photographs hit with flying detritus mid-playfight and now shattered and spread all over the carpet like malicious glitter. Not red faces from fists and shoes and elbows, or little cuts from pushing brothers into sharp-edged service announcement boxes at tube stations. Not shoving on buses, in queues, lying down wrestling matches in shopping market aisles, not scooter-ramming incidents which push one kid into another random person’s ankles, not chasing which ends up one kid on the road, with a taxi having to slow down and beep at them, with the mother going mental and the kid adamantly declaring that they had no choice but to run backwards into traffic, because they were being CHASED by their smaller, weaker brother. There is not much about this that is very playful. It is actually enraging and traumatic and after one week of it, I am a shaking mess who has to eat all the cooking chocolate after they are in bed just to calm down. Also, some wine.

Play fighting: my ass. And I just want to say that if we have ever knocked you over as we shove our way past you, or smashed our skateboards into your tendons, or made you swerve into your own bit of oncoming traffic just to get away from the enormous vicious rioting mob that we have become, then I’m sorry. Its not me; it’s them.

Last week, things were a bit better, because four of them were in school all day, away from each other and away from me. And Kerry, who is awesome, asked me to an Alice In Wonderland-themed afternoon tea at the Sanderson Hotel. I’ve only ever been there once, and I have ideas of it being the kind of slightly faded place you do debauched, YBAs-era stylish things, like take very fashionable drugs while wearing very beautiful shoes behind the mysterious, sexy, enormous curtain netting shroud that separates the Sanderson people from the rest of us.

Anyway, we went at lunchtime, and so treated the enormous selection of cakes and the three glasses of champagne as a kind of actual meal, which quite soon made us feel wrong and sick, but in that tired, calm, sleepy way where you know you have to pick up the kids quite soon, and there is nothing out for tea, but you just don’t care any more.

‘Why yes, I would LOVE ANOTHER GLASS OF THAT PERRIER JOUET’ *claps hands like a bit of an overexcited nutter, empties second glass, feels a bit disorientated, scarfs another tiny posh biscuit, feels cheeks flaming, sweats a bit*

It was lovely, and here are photos of the cakes and biscuits and menus slipped between old hardcover books and ice creams made to look like flowerpots:

There was a gorgeous selection of teas, all presented in little glass bottles for us to sniff and choose. They always smell better than they taste, as everyone knows, but they came out to us in beautiful teapots and by that point, we needed a little hydration.

I have a new appreciation of the Wonderland-related cakey artistry we were presented with because this week is Halloween and I thought I could be a biscuit-maker too. Fired up by a million images of successful Pinterest Halloween baking, I tried to make some finger-shaped bleeding biscuits and they went from pleasingly 3D gnarly doughy embryonic fingers to flat, arthritically misshapen, burnt, fat slugs of dog-turd-like proportions once they exited the fiery womb of my oven. I have no idea why I can’t bake biscuits. Is it the science? Is it magic? It is a lack of patience or correct kitchen gadgetry? Am I missing a biscuit-competence chromosome? They always look a bit rubbish. Here they are:

Also, there is my grouting.

Everyone has been eating them, and I admit they still look cool, but not like those other Pinterest perfectionists. My slightly crap biscuit-making is a little bit like my hair. It’s never quite right. I thought I would get older and these things would just sort themselves out. Like the ironing pile and persistent psoriasis patches and my inability to walk convincingly in shoes with a heel.

And Some More Photos You’ve Probably All Seen

Gratuitous and rare photo of bowl-cut cute baby without his dummy, on the way back from Waitrose which now takes about 47 minutes instead of four, because he keeps stopping to sit down. Here, he is sitting on his filthy naked plastic baby with a greying cotton torso against construction hoardings:

Finally, here we are at Crockford Bridge Farm, picking pumpkins and wandering through the forest following Peter Pan and Wendy and avoiding the poisonous mushrooms.

And then we rushed home, carved our pumpkins, wasted a whole packet of 50 tealights by burning through them all and making towers with the empty ones that are all still under the kitchen table, spilt a lot of wax on the carpet, played with the pumpkins, damaged each other’s pumpkins, complained that the pumpkins were going grey inside, and then I woke up three days later to find the pumpkins had rotted themselves into a slushy wet mound of mould and slime and they had fallen onto the waxy carpet over night.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Alice In Wonderland, Crockford Bridge Farm, Halloween Biscuits, Sanderson Hotel | 7 Comments