The Harridan

Toothbrush of Shame (take 2)

Posted on June 23, 2014 by theharridan

Sometimes my parenting reaches new levels of aceness. See, for example, last week’s Tale of the Toothbrush of Shame – I wish I had been secretly filmed by a documentary crew with really good lighting technicians so I could play my mothering triumph over and over and over, and then the footage would go viral and then I would become a motivational speaker like the Clintons and then could afford holidays to Martha’s Vineyard and Cape Cod.

So, as everyone with children will know, mornings are always very shouty and unpleasant when you have somewhere to go to and a Red Book Of Tardiness to sign if you don’t make it on time. I have to set the alarm for 6:30am, I turn on the light in the kid’s room, they pretend to still be asleep. Mark takes the dog for a walk, I have a noisy shower in their room, bellowing at them to get up, they slowly crawl their way to the bathroom and wee all over the toilet seat, they start kicking each other, they lie back on their beds, I come in and say something menacing, they get up, lie back down, on and on to the most boring degree of ever. Twenty minutes before we have to go, I take their faces in my hands, get right up close to them and say

“FACETEETHSHOESFACETEETHSHOESFACETEETHSHOES”

and then I go and do something important like save the baby from eating batteries and then we are ready to go and out the door, once the shoes have been found, etc etc.

And we get about four minutes up the road and I turn to them and I say

Show me your teeth!

And they do, and invariably their teeth are speckled with tiny orange cornflake bits, or there is still a huge smear of jam on their cheeks and their breath smells like a throat infection. And so, last week, I got really really mad about it. I asked them why they didn’t do it and they all had some eloquent pre-thought-out excuse – they got distracted with the act of zipping up their bags, they remembered right up until it was time to go and then they just forgot, Barnaby wouldn’t let them or I hadn’t reminded them to quite their level of acceptable reminding. Which is all just naughty little kiddie lies, lies, lies. So I’m thundering up the road and the rage inside of me is threatening to take hold, and I am ranting at them about their breath smelling like a poo and that they will never get girlfriends if they don’t clean their teeth and even their friends won’t want to hang out with them if they can’t be bothered to clean themselves and WHY WON’T YOU DO IT, FOR THE LOVE OF BASIC HYGIENE?

And so, fuelled by the Fury of the Self-Righteous, and even though we were a tiny bit late, I got near the school, crossed over the Edgware Road, parked the buggy outside a newsagents, went in, bought a toothbrush and stomped them to school and when I got there, I ripped open the packet and I told them in a very loud voice that I would brush their teeth with this Toothbrush of Shame every time they left the house without doing it, starting with NOW. And I began with Noah, who had inconveniently run away, but I told him that if he didn’t come over and open his mouth that I would sit on his chest in the playground in front of everybody until he opened it, and so he slowly came over with big blue eyes brimming with moistness which I took to be shame (but could well have been hay fever) and I brushed his teeth vigorously in front of his curious classmates and teachers and I whispered to him like a pantomime villain:

That’s the last time you forget to clean your teeth, young man!

And I went around to the Junior Entrance and did the same thing to Casper and I swear there was the roar of the crowd in my ears and maybe there was a theme song in my head called The Triumph of Good Hygiene Over Bad and I high-fived myself all the way home.

And now the Toothbrush of Shame lies in the bottom of the buggy, and the threat of another public toothbrushing by your mother in front of everyone at school has been a most charming catalyst for change.

Here is the baby at the Summer Fair, where I face-painted quite badly for four hours. He just sat in the shade and ate a few round pebbles and let the little girls stroke his fuzzy hair.

And here he is today after scoffing some strawberries from the man at the Lebanese shop next to Waitrose, who is leaving because Queensway is about to undergo some dreadful £500 million sex-up, which can only mean bad things for the locals. Where will I buy my za’tar when he flees?

And here are three of my kids participating enthusiastically and only a little clumsily in a sack race in the garden on the Open Garden weekend. How English does that look? There was some sort of mobile gin van set up, and all these Open Garden ticket holders who used our garden for an afternoon and I was reminded how lucky we are to have keys to it, just across the road.

And to finish, a photograph of a most perfect Providores flat white. I know that makes me sound like a wanker, but it is true. It made me a tiny bit sweaty and a lot shaky – unlucky, as I had two just before I started the face painting. I’d like to think no one noticed.

Posted in Uncategorized | 24 Comments

Magic has been at it again – embarrassing the family and turning our thoughts to the mythical farmer who could take him away and put him to genteel work on a farm where he could play games with other kind dogs and sweet horses and small, farm children who would love him and let him sleep on their beds. It would be really nice to have a little rest from the shameful deeds of Magic so we could go back to being embarrassed only by the children, and not the animals as well. (I say animals, but we don’t really have any more, except for the fish, who have been slowly dying off. I wish I felt bad about that, but I just don’t. You know how I feel about sea life, and brown little fish in a tank send me into an ennui coma.)

So on Saturday we all went to Hyde Park – me for a jog and the others for a walk. I finish, red-faced and a tiny bit wet-trousered, which I really hope looked like jogger’s sweat, although it was curiously missing from the armpits and the back, but anyway, I called the others up to see where they were and Mark answered, all a bit sweary, saying the was down by the Serpentine trying to get Magic out of the water. So I get there quick, feeling like it might be a heart-attack-from-the-stress kind of crisis, knowing that Mark doesn’t deal very well with the terrible humiliations you have to face when out with the kids and the dog. And we get to the bit opposite the bank with the Henry Moore sculpture, and my boys are just impotently staring out into the water, calling for the dog, and Mark is holding the buggy and there is a crowd and he is talking to a rambler-lady who is going off her nut and in the distance, I can hear Magic’s high-pitched excited bark echo across the water. The woman says:

“Is that your dog?”

“Why is he in the water?”

“Why wasn’t he on the lead?”

“Are you Australian?”

“You have to do something!”

“Are you a New Zealander?”

“You’re all the same!”

“You should fuck off back to your country!”

To which Mark variously replies:

“Yes.”

“He jumped in.”

“He ran all the way from Kensington Palace where he was off the lead which is ALLOWED.”

“No.”

“I am TRYING to.”

“Yes.”

“No we aren’t.”

“What are you talking about, you old bat?”

Then she took off, rattling the railings as she went, all angry and outraged and vicious, while the assembled crowd stole glances at each other and stood, silently watching us to see what we would do next.

So, Magic at this point was stuck – he had run off and jumped in, gone swimming loudly with much barking and splashing, swam down towards the Lido, gotten out, gotten stuck, went back into the water and just stood in the shallows barking and barking and barking and drawing people over to us from both sides of the Serpentine and from the bridge. Finally someone gave Mark a hand over the pointy railings and I thank the guy, who turned to me, all angry, saying that we have to DO SOMETHING! THE DOG IS DROWNING! And then Mark returns with the dripping dog, and reassures everyone that the water only went up to his dog-elbows and he wasn’t drowning, he was having loud fun.

And so we slunk off, after I mentally told everyone that THE SHOW IS OVER, FOLKS, and I maybe gave some mean looks, but probably not, because I was actually too embarrassed to look up. Besides, I still had damp jogging trousers so I was hardly going to draw more attention to myself. It was horrible.

Then things improved with frozen margaritas and lamb shanks. And Sunday we went to the Soho Food Feast, the school fundraiser for the Soho Parish School which is the very best thing ever. Over the weekend they have nearly seventy of Soho’s most excellent restaurants selling little delicious things to eat and drink for about £2 each, and lovely cocktails and music and face painting and shade and vegetable sculpting, and Kiera Knightley and Jude Law were there, and so was the really big tall woman from Game of Thrones, and I was a tiny bit stalky. But when you hold a baby, I think your stalkiness goes largely unnoticed. I can report that Kiera had really good swedish plaits over her head and she smoked a lot.

Here we are in Soho, eating very well, all summery and happy and calm after the Dog Shame had subsided:

I think they raised about a million more pounds than we are going to do at our Summer Fair. And we are just going to have halal beef burgers and squash. And I’m going to do the face painting again, and frankly, I haven’t improved since last year.

Posted on June 10, 2014 by theharridan | 5 Comments

Sweet Camp Virginity

Posted on June 3, 2014 by theharridan

This morning, the dog ate a baby turd, and the children cried. It was just way too much for them to bear. And then Magic sauntered on over them, presumably for a loving lick, and they screamed and hid. I chuckled.

Here he is, the night before the poo-incident, looking reflective, and a tiny bit sad. I think he may have been wrestling with his dog-demons, and perhaps coming to terms with his inappropriate binge-eating and lack of self-control.

So that’s where we are on Tuesday morning. Barnaby has gone away to his first school camp, and I am quite relieved. I have no anxiety about it – I couldn’t summon any up if I tried. All I know is that everyone seems a little quieter, and I don’t have to make three lots of packed lunches. We had a calm dinner last night and the children all said they preferred it when Barnaby was away, and Mark and I had to hastily turn the conversation to less karmically-damning utterances. It was all too similar to the first bit in The Labyrinth when Sarah gets sick of the baby and asks the goblins to take him away. Be careful what you wish for, small Brothers-Of-Barnaby – we may well have a giant-crotcheted mullet-haired sexy David Bowie-owl-goblin-king come through the window talking in erotic euphemisms to your mother, if you aren’t careful.

Anyway, he will be back on Wednesday, and the pre-pubescent scowling and surreptitious bullying shall resume again, and all will be right again with the world. And, as I have been reliably told, he will come back a pseudo-man. Taller, tireder, with stories of abseiling and communal halls and bunk beds and probably some whinging about the food. But there will be a puff to his skinny chest and a manly glint in his eye, and it will all amount to another little shift away from being my baby and to becoming a bit more of whoever he is going to turn out to be. Which is all good, and right. Luckily I have four more boys to project my neediness onto. PHEW.

And look, you never know. There may well be more. Mark said that if I make £100k this year, I am welcome to have another baby. Which means I only have to make another £96,500. And, let’s not forget – there is always Kickstarter.

So, half-term. You know we went to Wales and stayed with some lovely friends and attended a christening for their baby daughter who may well marry Otis, if I can engineer it. We went to St Fagans National History Museum, which is a peculiar, fantastic place filled with re-erected historic Welsh buildings where you can wander into and around, with some fairground rides and an archery range and everywhere there were signs in Welsh – marvellous words which look made-up, consonant after consonant, ‘g’s and ‘w’s strewn hither and thither, like the aftermath of a drunken alphabet party with hardly any vowels invited.

Here is Noah posing outside a re-erected post, emblazoned with my mother’s maiden name:

Then we went to the beach and threw stones and ate ice creams and fish and chips and there were hardly any dramatic, sweaty-moments – just a few children-going-crabbing-right-on-the-rocky-slippery-cliff-far-away kinds of things. We stayed in a hotel with huge beds and terrible, terrible bacon. The kind of bacon which isn’t really at all. It was pink protein. And the scrambled eggs! Oh, why are there powdered eggs in the world? Could we not join together and eradicate powdered eggs? Eggs aren’t hard to manage – they’re a meal in a shell, dammit. They’re already uncomplicated. And our children get the posh orange Clarence Court eggs, and so, when faced with pale yellow hard powdered eggs, with pink protein on the side, well, it all gets a little bit beneath them. Which could well be a parental failing, setting them up for breakfast disappointments to be had again and again, for as long as they live. I’ve done the same with bread. It’s all Poilane or Gail’s bread here. They’ve only ever known a firm crust and a long-proven dough.

I have ruined them. Anyway, here’s the baby looking winsome in the hotel bath:

Then we came home. Here is Casper in Tom Ford’s Wild Ginger and some blusher:

We were at Ham House building dens. Here is Casper in the den. You can barely see him without his face on:

And all the children outside Ham House, where no other children were. That’s a funny little thing about London – there is so much stuff to do, and room for everyone. Ned is doing a Kardashian bum pose:

Theres always got to be one, right?

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Ham House, school camp, Wales | 1 Comment

In Which I Declare My Self-Love

Posted on May 27, 2014 by theharridan

It is half-term, and we have been in Wales getting a sprinkling of half-arsed sunburn, in that northern-hemisphere kind of way. It was gorgeous and lovely, and we had excellent company. And I will get to that, but first. Here’s a funny little thing to post. You remember how I promised that it was very likely that I wouldn’t mention that Dove ad again? Well, it turns out I was LYING.

Because a thing happened about a week after it got aired. As I was googling the ad obsessively, with the kind of dogged dedication and sheer hard work that would have made me an honours student at Law School fo’ sho’, I came across an article in The New Statesman http://www.newstatesman.com/media/2014/05/dove-s-mother-s-body-ad-idealises-motherhood-exploit-women-s-bodies (still can’t hyperlink, obvs) which was all a bit ranting and so I drafted a response. And so, if you fancy a few pages on bodies and exploitation and hurt feelings and quite a lot of self-lovin’, then read on. It would be interesting to see if there is a debate to be had here. Do we all hate our bodies? Is this version of motherhood a dupe? Thoughts on an envelope, please.

A Mother’s Body – Mine

A few weeks weeks ago, I was shot for a new Dove ad with three of my small children as part of Dove’s wider ‘Real Beauty’ campaign. The ad, directed by Amanda Blue, was a kind of visual accompaniment to the words of UK poet and spoken-word artist Hollie McNish. Her poem was about, and in tribute to, a real mother’s body – and its stresses, aches, tendernesses, exhaustions, and beauty.

I was asked to be in the ad because I am a mother of five little boys, and my body bears the marks of pregnancies, births, breastfeeding, weight gain and loss. In short, they wanted authenticity, and my three kids and I could give them that. I felt really proud to be in the ad, and was made to feel beautiful, which is something that doesn’t happen all that often. My body became the focus. There were scenes where parts of my body show – a t-shirt riding up to expose my hips, my jeans tight on my stomach, still showing the signs of my last pregnancy in September, bare thighs and upper arms – bits that I sometimes feel like hiding. The camera just rolled.

The result is a short film of a few minutes, beautifully shot, edited tightly, focusing on many different parts of my body from my feet, to my skinned knees, to the muscles in my shoulders, following me interacting with my kids on a typical day. My body appears imperfect, a little roughed up and worn, albeit with a kindly soft-focus. I was brave to show it. It was an empowering experience for me.

Following the airing, an article appeared in The New Statesman written by Glosswitch, a writer with a “feminist take on parenting and politics”. In it, she said that the “sickly and patronising” ad idealises motherhood to exploit women’s bodies.

Her article begins by stating that women are taught to hate their bodies, a hatred that becomes embedded and trivialised, and that advertisers take advantage of this, packaging up creams to sell back to us. The Dove ad, she says “hones in on two key insecurities: the fear of women that they are unattractive and the fear of mothers that their work is of no value.”

She said she watched the ad as a mother herself, and she noticed, among other things, that I have a “slightly fat tummy”, and an “arse”, and that I was energetic with my kids, and those things and the questions they raised within herself made her feel bad. “I keep coming back to this: is Dove basically saying that it’s okay to be a tiny bit podgy if you’re an ace, devoted mummy?” Essentially, my body on screen first made her feel better about herself, then worse. It wasn’t quite real enough – she was being sold a con, and my body, (not quite thin enough, not quite fat enough) doing the things a mother tends to do, was part of that con. She goes on to say she feels the ad swaps the usual, unrealistic view of a mother to this new one – one that is sold as ‘real’, and ultimately limiting.

I read this, and was surprised and saddened that that is all Glosswitch takes from the film. And, for the first time in this whole experience, I began to feel bad about my body. While she certainly raises some important points, her words about me, the Mother, felt like judgement and objectification.

The loathing that she says women feel for their bodies is simply not true for me – my body is what it is, it is healthy, it has housed and fed my babies, and it keeps trucking on. I long ago made peace with my stretchmarks and by extension, with myself, but when she looked at me in her terms, I suddenly felt exposed, and started to see my body in pieces, as a series of parts that were unacceptable. I had thought that those bits of my body were actually really wonderful to see and to show. The film works as a visceral portrait of a Mother, and when I became that Mother, I didn’t feel I had to make excuses or justifications for my shape and size. I thought I was being brave, and maybe helping other women to feel brave too.

Yes, it is an ad for a beauty company. Women have complicated relationships with their bodies, and the beauty industry benefits from this. But this ad isn’t really trying to fool anyone. It just might be attempting something new. Caitlin Moran in her March column for The Times Magazine, writing about the ‘imperfect’ films 12 Years A Slave and Fifty Shades Of Grey, said that:

“the thing is, when you are starting a revolution, by which I mean, altering a landscape, so that new voices become dominant – you have to take the longer view. Because the history of change is someone has to start the conversation. But if we attack those who start valuable new conversations for not delivering the perfect revolution, straight off the bat, we scare the next generation of writers, directors and actors. We end up having no new conversations at all.”

Amanda Blue, her team and I took a small risk in the ad. It showed a different version of motherhood, and it placed on screen something a little bit more honest than we usually get to see. It is still an ad. But it was a brave one, an empowering one. Let’s not let that get lost before the conversation begins.

As Glosswitch writes, “Above all, I want mother’s bodies to be seen as the bodies of human beings: not objects, not tools, but flesh, blood and endless possibility.” That is exactly the way I see mine. There was no con – that Mother’s body is mine, and it is unapologetically beautiful.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Amanda Blue, Caitlin Moran, Glosswitch, Hollie McNish, The New Statesman | 15 Comments

Back to blonde

Posted on May 15, 2014 by theharridan

Since my last post, I haven’t featured in any more Dove ads. There have been no makeup artists, no lighting crew, no runners, no more cabs taking me to huge houses in South London, no one insisting I have coffee, water, bacon baps, resting, no one doing my hair or telling me that the camera loves me. I don’t think one single person has given me an outfit to wear, or ironed anything for me. The mani and pedi are chipping off, the clothes from the shoot they sent me home in are getting stained by pureed baby-food. Two beautiful, enchanting, spoiled days of being a Queen Of Commercials Land and it’s all over.

I am changed, though. I now know the power of reflective light. I have tried asking the kids to carry around tinfoil rolls, ready to whip out and unravel and aim at my face at crucial times in order to make my skin look all flawless and awesome. And I have asked them to play a game called Let’s Be Runners. The kids wear body-warmer vests, beanies and cargo pants with lots of pockets, and they have to go and fetch me things, and not talk back. They won’t play it, though, and the only thing they do with tinfoil rolls is hit each other with them. They are also really sick of the ad. Possibly because I watch it many times a day. Frame by frame. With my eyes welling up. And they recite the poem without even knowing they are doing it. It’s like a kind of cool post-modern spoken-word pro-mother brain-washing.

For the record, Gwyneth has it all wrong. It is waaaaay better to be on a shoot than any other thing in the entire world. She’s just forgotten what a drag it is to be a normal person.

So, anyway. I got the job because I am friends with the director – hurtling over the usual auditioning steps. I didn’t actually try to get it, which is very lucky. And so, delighted to be there, I was more than happy to show off my muffiny bits, and I even took off my spanx pants. You are seeing my ‘problem areas’, and yet, in the context of that ad, and with the help of the lighting and camerawork, they don’t seem very problematic. Which is a win, right? Yay for bodies, mothers’ ones, all ones.

And now, photos. The slightly purple brown hair has gone, replaced by my usual wonky greenish blonde. Here’s the hair straight after it was done, right about the time my husband didn’t recognise me:

My makeup looks like a kid did it, but I was confused. When confused, I throw blusher at my cheeks. It usually works. Also, the eyebrows suddenly looked grey and sad and old. Like a pair of tiny little cobwebby apologies. The brown, incidentally, was for the Latinos. Somebody decided they’d had enough, already, with the white blonde ladies! And instead – let’s have some white purple brown ladies on our youtube channel! And so they did, and I thank them all for it.

Here is a syrup-sodden Pomegranate and Orange cake I made. My teeth whimper a little every time I sample it:

And here is a rhino in the fog at Whipsnade Zoo:

and elephants in the fog:

and little boys in charge of dressing themselves for the park:

Apparently, he’s a ninja.

Casper and Barnaby didn’t get to go on the ad, and I suspect they will one day tell a therapist all about it. Casper, meanwhile, keeps walking onto the road in front of cars and taxis. I do hope the two aren’t related.

Wrong Lyrics

I cannot segue these wrong lyrics into this post, so I’m going to make a whole new headed paragraph instead. Casper sings Lorde’s Royals like this – not

“We’re driving Cadillacs in our dreams” – but

“Let’s chillax in our seats”

OH HOW I LAUGHED. He swears they are the right words, even when faced with the right lyrics in the CD insert. His stubbornness is admirable, except when it comes to walking across the road by himself without looking both ways.

Ok. I have a nappy to change, and an ad to watch. I promise I won’t mention the ad again. Probably. x

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Dove, Lorde, Mothers Day, Pomegranate and Orange Cake, Whipsnade | 4 Comments

Happy Mother’s Day, y’all

Posted on May 9, 2014 by theharridan

I hope your day is really lovely with no shouting and quite a lot of Chanel No. 5.

Here’s my contribution:

Its a little bit AWESOME

Posted in Uncategorized | 17 Comments

Devon again. It’s kind of a Thing.

Posted on April 19, 2014 by theharridan

It is Easter! Here is Ned modelling his plain but effective Easter Bonnet, looking kind of pensive in his wolf onesie, but nailing it. He OWNED that makeshift cardboard red carpet:

Easter has also come to mean a week away in the country, and so we decamped to the wilds of rural clotted cream Devon to stay in a farmhouse and pat the ponies. We left after school broke up on Friday and drove straight down with a dirty little stop at a KFC for dinner and only one incident involving the dog, his vomit and my jeans. The jeans in question are rated no.2 on my Jeans Hierachy, meaning they are better than the Seven For All Mankind jeans which are a little bit big but not so good as the really tight size 30 Levis skinny ones which I believe gives me a better bum. The vomit jeans are in between those other two, kind of relaxed and casual, teetering dangerously close to the ‘Mom Jeans’ category of Sadness and Despair. Anyway, Magic spewed green bile quite early on in the seven hour traffic-jammed journey, sitting as he was between my legs in the front passenger seat, but I was cool about it, and let it dry and tried not to think too much about it. It was more a case of working out the Jeans Hierachy reshuffle. You don’t wanna peak too soon, you know, bringing out the tight bum jeans on DAY ONE, and then letting everyone down with your creeping bum and slacker thighs while you wait for the Mom Jeans to dry. Anyway, this is Magic, possibly quite relieved, and me, being cool about my warm patch:

On the long drive, the kids were silent, owing to the DVD player installed on the roof of the truck, and so Mark and I listened to an episode of This American Life, via the medium of the modern podcast, and part of the show was about ASMR – Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response – something I had never heard of. A girl was talking about how, when the conditions are right, like hearing a whispery voice, or watching something really boring like napkins being folded, she gets a tingly head sensation. And I asked Mark if he gets the tingly head sensation, and he was totally clueless and said he didn’t know what she was talking about. Because I get that tingly head when I am tired and the children talk in whispery voices. So, apparently, I have ASMR! A new condition to google obsessively, and OH! The ASMR videos on youtube are totally mental. You learn something every day, etc, etc.

Devon was, of course, all things lovely. There was a pool and our own jacuzzi and a variety of beaches where we scoffed fish and chips and ice cream. It was sunny enough to have a few barbecues and the dog was allowed to run around and he met some friends and they sniffed together and barked at the ponies. Magic got a little cocky, and came into the pool house while we (and other cottagers) were there and jumped right in. His dog friends stood at the door and watched, kind of horrified, kind of admiringly, as I heaved him out of the pool and back out the door. I think Magic was probably pretty embarrassed about the whole thing. I know I was.

Here’s the view from the cottage:

Here’s the dog swimming in the fishing pond. I think he was allowed to swim in there. Maybe.

Here’s a selection of beaches, from chips at Looe, to the gorgeous sand at Bude. We also stopped at Widemouth for a few hours, but we became overwhelmed by the stench of chicken manure and had to leave. There was also a sign warning the casual Easter-beach-goer that sometimes there is a toxic fatty substance on the shore, which kills dogs. And there were stingy beetles finding their way inside our shirts. Disconcerting, to say the least.

And the rarest thing ever – the first photo of us all. Here we are, me with enormous hair, the others in varying degrees of enthusiasm, at the gorgeous tudor house at Cotehele, ALL TOGETHER!

Unfortunately, the baby took the week as a chance to regress, and so he is waking again at 3:30 for bosoms. He is also a little bit snotty, and one night he woke every few hours. Here he is the morning after:

Gleeful. I was less so.

We got back yesterday, and the boys raced into their room and started playing with Lego, and Mark and I lay down on our enormous bed and wept happy little internal tears of contentment. Happy to go away, but very happy to come home. Something must be right, eh? Anyway, Happy Easter to you, Dear Reader. I wish you many egg hunts and roast lamb and sunshine x

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged ASMR, Bude, Devon, dog, Easter, jeans | 9 Comments

Dirty Baby

Posted on April 4, 2014 by theharridan

The Baby is eating solid food and it kills me. I hate it. I hate the dumb pureeing and the bits that fall onto the floor and having to remember to take it in small containers where ever you go and I really hate bibs, so don’t have any, and so his clothes get like this:

and then, because I my skills lie in non-domestic arenas, I forget to rinse them off and they go into the washing machine and come out with colour-less, squashy bits of banana and carrot still attached. He’s down with it though. Just look at that face! He’s very happy because he ate a raspberry. Imagine what a beautiful place the world would be if we could all just eat raspberries and be happy. There’d be no more wars, probably. Or anti-depressants or wrinkles.

This new phase just makes me long for the days when my bosoms were enough, and I was immersed in hormally-drenched love and he was still new. I keep saying to Mark that I would prefer to have a permanent five-month old baby, although that would make him effectively retarded and me continually sleep-deprived, but you know what I mean, right? Kids are fine, but babies are properly, sniffily, softly divine.

Two weeks ago, the kids had a day off school because of a strike, and so I teamed up with K and S and their (nice, calm, non-violent) girls and we took them to the Museum of London. Which should have been a perfectly pleasant outing. But from the moment we left the flat, it was apparently that the mysterious Switch Of Awfulness had been turned on, and there was not only the usual kicking of each other and darting across busy roads without looking and huggy/wrestly games that lead to them knocking people off the pavement, but also lying-on-the-tube-floor-tantrums, tipping the buggy over while going down the elevator, climbing up onto museum exhibits and throwing of food in the museum cafe. So I frogmarched them out of there in an embarrassed fury, and made them walk around and around a few streets in the City, passing the same patch of the Roman Wall for an hour and a half in the pathetic hope that they would get tired and stop being such awful children, before I would let them get onto the tube again.

We found Guildhall Square and they ran around like dogs for a bit, yelping and playing tag while people on their lunch break stuck their headphones in a little deeper:

It was weird, distressing and humiliating, and I thought that this parenting job really sucks and you get no pay and your clothes get dirty and no one thinks you are very interesting and you can only wear converse sneakers and there is always bits of kinder surprise foil wrappers in your sensible handbag and I QUIT.

But no one notices when I quit. I kind of quit on Mother’s Day. I told everyone the night before that all of Sunday I was going to

1) not walk the dog

2) not wipe down any benches

3) go out for breakfast

But when I got up, the dog was all sad and waiting to go out, the kitchen was strewn, there was no time for breakfast because the clocks had been put back an hour and we had a birthday party to go to, and NO ONE LOOKED UP FROM WATCHING TV. So I ate a banana and scowled at everyone. I did get some interesting cards from three of them, complicated collages of cardboard, too much PVA, feathers and mis-spellings, so I guess there was some sort of an attempt to say thank you for all the hours of unremarkable, thankless, dumb chores that I don’t actually want to do, but have no choice, because without me and my dishcloth/washing line/Ottolenghi cookbooks/dog lead/car keys/disinfectant they would all slowly die.

So one must reward oneself, if no one else will. I cleaned up a corner of the kitchen just the other day, sorting through one of my artful piles of papers, hidden under Vogue and on top of the reissued Teasmade which Mark refuses to put into the bedroom because he doesn’t understand the beauty of a bedside tea-making machine, and I found a department store gift voucher someone gave us for Otis, and so I drove to Westfield and bought myself a Clinique Colour Correction foundation-thing with it. The hygienic and conscientious among you may be thinking I could have used that money to buy bibs, but no one is a winner with more bibs in the house. So now I have dewy skin, which quite possibly makes me a better mother, and the entire family benefits.

You have to take these things where you can get them, I reckon.

On that note, Dear Reader, there is a Stella McCartney sample sale on Thursday and I am going to strap that baby upon my increasingly-redundant chest and get in there and elbow the other lovies out of my way and go buy some blazers, dammit. Maybe TWO.

Here’s a double-whammy of Casper, firstly in my scratched Tom Fords looking like an early Elton John (thanks, Ellen, good call), secondly with sellotape around his head.

And the fat dog, on the couch, relaxing:

And, at last, the baby. Cleanish:

Bibless, and all the better for it.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged bibs, Clinique CC, guildhall, Mothers Day | 21 Comments

Ice Balls

Posted on March 25, 2014 by theharridan

Ah, Stats, you shame me. What, no one is checking in to see me write the exact same thing about my children, post after post after post? CONFUSED FACE. Why, doncha wanna know that their bedroom smells of wee and the dog runs away and lipsticks are really good if they have high pigment and that I like to make cakes?

Of course you do. Which is just as well, because here I have another photo of a CAKE.

That’s sand made of digestive biscuits, you know.

Casper turned six, and wanted a pirate-y birthday, with a spy-gear influence and a sprinkling of sweets. It was supposed to be in the garden, and so we all took the food outside, rugged up, sat near each other to stave off the cold, and then it hailed big old ouchy ice balls and so we took the party home, and drank a fair bit of prosecco to numb the pain of having an accidental Inside Kid’s Party. Because I hate those. Because of the odd places you find decaying cake weeks afterwards. And the crunchiness underfoot, and the fact that the kids end up playing some sort of Under The Bed type game with the contents of your secret bedside drawers. You know what I mean. And how everyone gets kind of flushed and sweaty and full of cheese. But it was kind of fun, and Casper didn’t notice that his birthday party ended up a Saturday Social Club for the grownups. Just as well, because that would have become another excellent topic for the therapist of his foreseeable future.

That’s him, still only five, on a Sunday afternoon walk in the Chiltern Hills. In camouflage, cos that’s how we roll.

More

Since I last had a stats spike, we have been mudlarking a little on the Hammersmith foreshore, and dredged up more clay beer bottles and pottery and clay pipes. The dog came, but his mudlarking skills are pretty undeveloped, because you can’t eat old sharp bits of crockery. So we dig, he lies in the mud and dreams of human food to steal. And I have secret conversations in my mind about whether we should give the dog to a kind farmer who doesn’t mind constant food theft and yellow patches of wees in his farmer childrens’ bedrooms. I nearly dropped him off to the imaginary farmer last week when Magic magically escaped out of the back of the Landrover while I was driving, jumped out and ran all over the road, all the way back to school, barked at some small children, wagged his tail, stole some food and then waited patiently for me to come back. He had been in the back of the truck, then we drove off down the road, and then the back door slammed shut. And no dog was there. I had to get off the Edgware Road, find a park, and run back to school, calling out his name and looking for his squashed body all over the tarmac. A big crowd had drawn up outside the school gates and a lady held him and she told me not to let him run away again.

YES, LADY. THANK YOU FOR YOUR SAGE ADVICE.

How did Magic get out of the truck? Secret opposable thumbs? Did he smell days’ old fried chicken remains and burst through the door and then tidily shut it again? IS MAGIC A DOG AT ALL? Did Ned do it? A prankster passing by? AM I ON THE TRUMAN SHOW AND THE PRODUCERS WANTED TO PLAY WITH MY MIND?

It’s hard to tell. And he wasn’t giving any answers away.

So after the mudlarking, we found a completely lovely pub on the riverfront called The Black Lion (aren’t they all, really?) which is owned by a New Zealander called Buzz (aren’t we all, really?) and we ate and drank in the sun and then, to our amazement and delight, they built a hangi and we stayed and watched the fire and tried to keep Casper out of it and feasted upon smokey chicken and sweet potatoes and smiled to ourselves. And tried to remember how to speak in Maori but failed. And the children got moko tattoos:

And here we are, lining up in a very calm and sensible way (parents of the children at school, please take note – lining up can actually be fair, civilised and rational):

And here are the children on World Book Day, dressed in a mashup of Amazon last minute costume purchases, old shields, swords we found hidden away from the last violent time they had been confiscated, a cheeseboard tray and pyjamas:

And two weeks ago, on a very sunny Saturday, eating fantastic chicken burgers from Broadway market, and a little street dancing:

And The Really Good News

You totally thought I was going to say I was going to have another baby, didn’t you? You probably didn’t, actually. Well, that’s not it.

Mum and Dad are coming to stay for summer! The children can talk to them in real life rather than the Skype chats that keep cutting out after three minutes. We can all go to the Vikings exhibition and visit the Tate and talk about ancestral things and they can meet the current baby. VERY PLEASED.

So pleased, I am tempted to dress Ned up in a checked shirt and fancy necklace to celebrate. Oh, wait:

He does that kind of thing voluntarily.

In baby news, Otis has a crusty eye and a soft fuzz of new downy blonde hair atop his baby head. He has huge thighs and an appreciation for poached pears and kale. He squeals a lot, mostly in a happy way, and we all swear he can say “dad”.

Righto. Time to watch Game of Thrones which I am secretly kind of liking. Especially the rude bits.

Posted in Uncategorized | 19 Comments

Penelope Wears It Well

Posted on February 25, 2014 by theharridan

London. I Love You

Yesterday it was an INSET day, tacked on the the end of a mostly good, not-overly-shouty half term holiday, and so we spent our last day getting liberally SHOWERED with both otherworldly Springish sunshine and Spanish ‘slebs.

At the pirate park, the park with the pirate ship and sand and organic pizzas and teepees in the grounds of Kensington Gardens, where we have played for so long and for so many years that I can take you on a personal tour of places where the children have lost a fingernail in the orbiting spinner, the preferred tree house where they eat their pizza, the toilets to avoid, the best places to dig in the sand for other people’s forgotten toys, the bush that Noah got lost in and then a woman found him and told me off for neglect, etc, etc, well, yesterday, Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem and their two kids were there. SCREAM! And here they are!

Right in the middle of that oh so casual snap, but of course, mindful of not being too much of a freakish stalker who annoys them on their holiday, I took it very fast. And so Penelope’s head, which was in a very lovely floppy hat, the kind of hat that only those who are a bit famous can wear, is obscured by a big leaf. And Javier is texting, and he looks like a lumberjack. And in any case, they are so small I could be making it all up, the delusion brought on by ten days of sole charge of the five boys and the overweight dog and their endless fights over food, small Lego pieces, positions on the couch and lost magnets. Which I am sure you could forgive me if I did, but I SWEAR that is they. And then, to top off the day’s rich celeb sighting, Jason Donovan cycled past us on our way to the Science Museum to buy more magnets to replace the lost ones. He sooooo should have married Kylie.

Also, London is loveable because you can entertain yourself, and the children and the dog for free for ten days and never do the same thing twice. And you can walk or take the bus and the tube, and mostly, it is safe, and mostly, they kids don’t fall down the escalators at Charing Cross station. Only once, they do that. Pulling the buggy halfway down with them, and making me get very shout and red and panicked and threatening to take them all home to SIT IN THE DARK! And do NOTHING! But MAYBE TIDY UP THE LEGO PIECES WHILE WE THINK ABOUT SAFETY! But we continued on, and made it to the Transport Museum to run around without reading any of the information, just looking for the stamp machines to stamp their passports and then go get babyccinos while having learnt nothing at all about Hackney carriages and trams.

And what else? We spent a morning getting muddy and rained on in Holland Park, and saw three peacocks who wisely ran away from the boys who had decided they were on a peacock feather hunt. Here is a peacock having fled the children, on a roof, taunting them with his plumage:

And we watched street performers at Covent Garden, spent £50 at Borough market buying mushroom pate, bread blessed at Southwark cathedral, roast pork and brownie, walked from Borough to the Southbank alongside the river and stopped to mudlark and picked up ancient mussel shells, 400 year old clay pipes and shiny worn glass, then found farm animals to hold outside the Royal Festival Hall.

And the boys even found the time (and the balls) to tell the teenage skaters at the half pipe to “Fall Off!”. We hastily left.

And it was birthday cake season again, with two kids turning nine and four in a week. Here is the Rainbow Cake Of Joy:

Filthy, stomach-lining-staining, but a vessel of ROYGBIV happiness, none the less. It never gets tired.

And here is the Dog, who steals food and rubbish whenever he can. The vet kindly scolded me for making him 7kg too fat, and said he should have a waist. Well, shouldn’t we all, really? So now he only gets fed once a day, and he is very sad about it. Although, in that photo, I believe he is smiling. He is smiling, to hide his waistless-fat-dog-shame.

Annnd finally, here is a series of notes, passed to my by Noah who was refusing to speak to me. He had attacked Casper for something, and I clipped him around the ear, and he was horrified and said he would never speak again and would never forgive me. I was doing the online supermarket food shop at the time, and asked everyone for their favourite dinners, and when it got to him he couldn’t have his turn, and so he relented to writing notes. He chose Spisy Chickn Raps, for the record. And then he passed me these:

And so, just like that, he gave up his principles for a pair of 78p metal handcuffs with a key. HA!

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Borough Market, Mudlarking, Penelope Cruz, Southbank | 17 Comments