The Harridan

The flat is dying, and so are its innards. The boiler keeps turning off by itself, so the hot water runs out, and the radiators are working intermittently. The oven broke, so we have to have meals from the stove, which are confounding me and making the children nostalgic for fish fingers. The washing line has pulled out from the wall, so things are not drying, just getting stinky, like a wet dog. And the dog tripped me up a week ago on my early morning waddle/run, onto gravel just outside Kensington Palace, and I have bloody hands and knees and I look a little like a self-harmer.

But LOOK! the sun has been coming out a bit and I can now wear mid-warmth jackets. PHEW. Here is me at a wedding a few weeks ago with the dapper father of the groom:

I mostly include that photo to show the sun, to show my 5 month pregnantness, and also to show my awful shoes which caused much hobbling and sadness and welts. I also have awful nude tights on, the kind that have a sausage-skin sheen to them. The wedding was lovely and all of the women wore long gowns or short cocktail frocks with salon-ed hairdos, enormous shelves of fake eyelashes, spray tans, huge, high shoes, wraps, and the biggest fascinators this side of Race Day. See if you can spot them:

It’s not very hard. And we stayed here:

We are duck confit and braised beef and chocolate mousses with honeycomb icecream, and we were entertained by a video booth, pick and mix sweet table, disposable cameras, lipstick-and-loveheart lolly favours for the laydeez, hidden soprano singers, endless champagne, Marines in uniform, and a big communal breakfast the morning after. It is quite a different scene, this English wedding thing, after many New Zealand weddings where the local community hall is booked and everyone brings a plate to share for the wedding breakfast, and you do your own makeup and quite possibly buy a second-hand dress.

Its been a month of stuff like that, with the children being looked after by kind babysitters and extremely kind friends two weekends in a row. There was a wine-tour through the Denbies estate in Surrey (a cold, cold day with a bonus few hours after the tour where we ransacked the market town  of Dorking looking for antiques in between sheltering from the rain) and a day in Legoland and today, a magnificent thing – all four children were dispatched to school or nursery and we had a few hours off in Acton to drink coffee and eat cake! Here we are, all alone, and excited, sitting in the sun. (What you can’t see in the photo is a big piece of raspberry stuck to my top lip which Mark couldn’t see because he is useless without his old-man glasses and I didn’t notice until we had visited all of his friends and colleagues in the entire street).

So Ned is going to nursery three mornings a week and I must use the time to be sensible and productive and not bid for Tom Ford sunglasses on eBay. Ned kind-of likes going to nursery, but weeps a bit first.

BAD THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED

1. On Sunday afternoon, while we were all battling with the bigger kid’s homework, Ned put a football into our microwave oven and set it on fire and once we had put out the flames, the communal alarms went off and made the neighbours stand outside their own flats owing to the noise until the landlord came to turn off the alarms, after about a two-hour wait.

2. The 20-week scan came and went, and the baby seems to have large testicles. So Mark thinks he could be called Jed. I said that that wouldn’t be ok, because it rhymes with Ned. He looked at me as if I was mental, and said that it was no different than having a kid called Noah and a kid called Ned. Because they both start with ‘N’. Its very hard arguing with that man, when he makes NO SENSE AT ALL.

3. The dog has turned from a skittish cute small fluffy puppy into a big thick mental untrained nutter. On Saturday morning after chasing a dog, while I was talking to a handsome man about (ironically) dog-training, Magic ran out of the park and into Bayswater Road, dodging buses and taxis, and tried to find his way home.  Some woman grabbed him and I ran after him, and there was quite the crowd gathered to see who was responsible for the cute, untrained, nearly squashed-on-the-road boofhead canine.

“He’s Mine! He’s Mine! I’m his incompetent owner!” I shouted to the assembled and disapproving crowd, all pregnant and useless-looking. It was deeply shaming.

4. I’ve moved into fat jeans.

GOOD THINGS THAT HAVE HAPPENED

1. We are going to Turkey for two weeks in summer to stay in a villa that has a huge pool, an outdoor barbeque, an outside shower, and is close to the lagoon of Oludeniz and the ghost town of Kayakoy. I can barely contain myself. There will be reading on the loungers and meals out and coffee and browned bellies and hopefully no earache like last time. Also, it would be good if Noah didn’t fall into the sea or the rapids.

2. The sample sales have been kind to me. The Stella McCartney one had knickers for £5 and bras for £10, and lots of terrifyingly well-dressed rich women who were talking about Aspen and New York and weddings in Tuscany. And it took an hour to queue to get in and an hour to queue to pay, but my underthings are so silky and new, it doesn’t matter. And a trip mid-week to Bicester saw me buy a Prada lace collar which, sadly, doesn’t do up. But it could, if only I knew how to sew things. Here’s the queue and a smattering of rich girls in their pilates gear:

3. Barnaby won a short story competition at school, and got given a notebook and a pen in assembly. He can’t remember writing the story, which I find odd, but we’re just going with it.

Casper, on the other hand, needs a haircut:

I’m now off to pick up Ned so we can hang out in the garden and not pick flowers or turn the taps on and off or pick all the figs off the tree. Wish me luck.

Usually, when I think it is time to post something, I think about what we have been doing and try to dredge something interesting from the photos I take on my phone. A recall, a bit of help from the diary, a bit of trying to remember, a bit of an exaggerated retelling of what we get up to. This time though, since my last post, we have been in the middle of having a kid in hospital with meningitis – a new kind of experience that has swallowed up everything, and left us all a bit shrunken and small and deflated and with a bit of the shakes.

In mid-term break last month, Barnaby got sick, and vomited and went to bed for days and days and didn’t eat or drink or move. The doctor said he had had a virus and would get better with rest. He didn’t go back to school after the holidays, but stayed in bed, asking to be lifted from his top bunk when he wanted to move to the couch or go to the loo. He had constant temperatures, he was asleep most of the day, he wouldn’t eat and wasn’t interested in drinking. He got skinny fast. NHS Direct said that as long as he was drinking, he would be ok, but it had to be monitored, and he had to be peeing, or else he would have to go to A&E. So he drank a bit more with encouragement, but still had temperatures and wouldn’t really move. Then one morning on his way shuffling down the hall in his baggy pyjamas and sweat-slicked brow he said that he couldn’t see anything – he was grasping at the walls and his pupils were dilated and he was panicking. We took him up to Paediatric Outpatients and they said he wasn’t going to be going home. He went in straight for a CT scan, and that night, once they found a contained cubicle for him in the paediatric infectious diseases ward, he was given anti-viral and bacterial drugs, an IV for fluids, a lumbar puncture and the tests began.

And he looked like this:

Small and skinny and sweaty and so tired. We stayed with him alternate nights, dispatching the kids to school and various friends, and we waited for him to get better. The doctors were trying very hard to identify what was wrong with him, and came up with viral meningitis and encephalitis, possibly caused by a dormant glandular fever or even (but not likely) TB. By the fifth day, he was ok to go home.

Ned came up with us to collect him after not seeing him for five days. They were very pleased to see each other.

All the other stuff took a backseat. We are tired but very pleased to be back to normal life. Barnaby is back at school and managing well, and he is losing some of that painful thinness. It was horrible and hard and exhausting for everyone. I have a fresh perspective on stuff now, I think. And I am very glad my smart, tough and good kid is well again.

Meanwhile, we are all struggling through a repulsive Spring. Everyone is cold and wan and lined with wintery leathery skin and dead eyes. Even the dog is depressed.

Casper turned 5 today, and we went to Bramley’s indoor play area, which was just as well as it is snowing a ridiculous blizzard outside. Every year we have had Casper’s party in the garden. This year, we had to huddle somewhere inside for sanity’s sake. Here is Casper recovering from an altercation from a Dad who marched up to us all and demanded to have ‘a word’. I said ‘Yes?’ and he told me in a very angry way that his daughter told him that he had punched his kid and that was unacceptable and that if he couldn’t be controlled he shouldn’t be allowed in a public place.

Casper was hiding under the table, looking pretty guilty, and so while I was all outraged because I thought that there were better ways to handle this thing than coming up to me all aggressively and scary, I defensively apologised and asked what else he wanted me to do to remedy the situation. Mark very wisely began placating both the man and me in an impressive project manager stylee. Casper crept out from under the table and cried, very embarrassed and wounded, and then it turned out upon grilling the kids who were there at the time that the man’s kids were being annoying as well and it wasn’t a punch in the face, but a rogue ball in the eye, so I had to sneak off to the toilets to cry a little bit, before muttering lots of offensive swearwords aimed in the man’s direction. It is best not to cross mama bears, especially when they are a little bit unbalanced and four months pregnant. And the bescarfed man went back to his book, which was some uptight tome on the dangers of Vitamin K, and I shot him looks every now and then, and ate four slices of this to calm me down:

That’s Casper’s birthday cake, homemade, and a tiny bit mental. You are looking at a lot of late-Friday-Night obsessive liquorice-cutting and icing-related anxiety. But it was quite awesome. Not awesome enough for me to shake off the mean man though.

When you have a kid like Casper, who is prone to being a pain in the ass, who is impulsive and who gets silly and who playfights and fair thwacks his brothers, who hits first, thinks later, and who is generally a difficult child, what are you to do? Not take him out? Or take him out, and hope for the best, and get involved and apologise when you need to? And what about the man – he gets told some kid hit his kid – should he get steamed up and get at me, or should he tell his kids to keep away from the mean boy? Doesn’t this kind of thing happen in these indoor playgrounds filled with sweaty fiery kids who have been housebound for months? I think my perspective on acts of violence between kids has been a little bit skewed, perhaps. I suppose I think the man and his kids should have sucked it up and stayed away from the confrontation, if only because it’s the poor kid’s 5th birthday today.

Humph. Anyway. Parenting sucks sometimes. On that note, I’ m off to eat a drawbridge.

Yesterday, while pretending to supervise teeth-brushing but actually usuing the time to study my reflection in the mirror in the boy’s room which shows up all the bumps and pigment damage and new lines, I discovered I am getting furry on the face. There are quite long blonde fine wispy hairs which, frankly, constitute a blonde man’s ‘tache, and some downy bits covering my lower cheeks. Which came from nowhere, and probably have to do with some man hormones combating my woman hormones and WINNING. So, ageing is also a tiny bit about morphing into maleness. WHO KNEW?

OTHER UNWELCOME DISCOVERIES

We noticed this on our hallway wall:

And we asked the boys who did it. They all looked completely surprised that we even asked, and each mumbled something about it not being them. We figured out that Ned couldn’t do it because he’s too small (note short tawny head in the bottom of the photo) and Barnaby wouldn’t have done it because he takes his drawings very seriously, and that one in any case would have shamed him with inaccuracy and roughness. So it was one of the middle kids, neither short, both a bit free with the wall-decorating compulsions. So a few days later Mark was wandering down the hall with Casper, and he pointed to it and said

“Whoa, that’s really awesome! Who did that?”

To which Casper proudly said “ME! Its a melting snowman, can you see?” And Mark turned all wolf-like and told him he must never draw on our walls, and Casper got all indignant and said that Ned must have done it.

They are all a little bit thick.

Here’s the dog, who is similarly a bit thick, and a tiny bit annoying. I’d say the piechart assessment is for Magic The Excitable Biting Puppy about 25% annoying, 25% really lovely, 10% gross-clean-ups, 40% hides-under-the-kitchen-cabinets-and-we-forget-about-him.

Cute though, and so ultimately forgivable for the damage done to our stuff, the poo-chores, the wee, the barking and bad dog-bone meaty smells which have begun to seep from the couch where he sits. The couch which is now getting foam torn from its insides, piece by piece.

We had two birthdays. Barnaby turned 8 and asked for a volcano cake with velociraptors on it. He designed it, and we tried to make it. It got a bit over-embellished for my clean aesthetic (controlling) tastes, but it wasn’t about me, ahem, and so I let it turn into this:

See? And that is a little kid-hand in the bottom of the photo, not toes, as my dear friend Elizabeth had thought. Even I draw the line at feet in cakes. You see how the cake looks violently assembled and a tiny bit vomity? It kills me.

Then we had a day in Paris without children or dogs or even luggage, just ourselves, a lunch date, and hours in which to explore Les Puces for French vintage ephemera. Here’s the brasserie:

And us, all excited to be on a date in Paris BY OURSELVES!

We fell asleep in the Eurostar going there, and fell asleep on the way back, and the incredible, beautiful, amazing babysitter had them all asleep in bed when we got home at 7pm. It was like a gift from the heavens. And we brought home bread and a pear tart and high-fived ourselves for days.

And now we are halfway into a mid-term break, and we are crossing off our Holiday List with trips to the Science Museum, the Hayward Gallery for the Light Show, the cinema, hours of uninterrupted Lego playing, sleep-ins and trips to the park to sit on logs and fall in mud. Here’s the chopped-down tree which has provided the children with hours of boyish passion:

In other news, my running has been scaled down to 21kms a week, I am eating a bit more cake than I should, we are looking at houses to buy in Acton, and I am desperately trying to persuade Mark that we need a holiday in Sicily in July. He is a stubborn, stubborn man.

Right, me and my glistening ‘tache are off to feed the blanketed TV-watching children some eggs and to rescue some shoes/modem wires/bank statements from out of the dog’s mouth.

Happy New Year! And Merry Christmas! Here’s a badger to start you off!

Im sorry that it is a dead one, but it is the first real badger I have ever seen, and it made me realise that

a) the English countryside is quite wonderful, and

b) badgers are real, not just cooked-up magic animal/human hybrids who talk and frolic, like unicorns and fawns. So, all in all, even though he slowly got bloated and more rotten each day as we passed him on a narrow country lane in rural North Devon, it was good to meet him.

So, we rented a cottage for a week in Devon, and there was a big heated indoor pool and a spa pool and a tennis court and enchanted woods with ancient crumbling stone walls and quite possibly elves hiding in the pine trees. And this church for Christmas Day:

It was beautiful, and small, and filled with creaking pews and 14th century walls and stained glass and headstones covering the sloping floor. And my boys were a little reluctant to keep quiet during the service, and Ned started to climb over the pew in front to get closer to the Vicar and her tempting box of Quality Street, and a woman in front tried to stop him, and lifted him up and back over to us, and he was outraged by her interference and so he whacked her in the face with his Pillow Pet dog. They also shouted quite a bit, and sang loudly during the carols, but as two of them cannot read, they just kind of shouted in falsetto. It was all a bit embarrassing. So we made quite a quick exit, but not until the Vicar had said, very generously, that she had enjoyed our ‘contributions’ to the service. Very kind indeed.

Things I Belatedly Learnt This Week:

I think everyone else knows about podcasts, so I may be about seven years late in coming to the podcast party. But, aided by an excellent Vogue article on running, I downloaded via The New Yorker lots of short stories from the magazine, as read and chosen by authors I either have a crush on (Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Franzen, Monica Ali) or I have never heard of (Tessa Hadley, Hisham Matar) and while I ran 10k around and through Hyde Park this morning, I listened to the stories and hardly felt the HIDEOUS PAIN of running for an hour and five minutes. I didn’t notice my surroundings, either, or give any other runners the cheery half-smile, or pay much attention to the muddy bits, but the PAIN WAS LESSENED! I came back home from my run, and announced loudly to the assembled crowd of pyjama-clad boys and husbands that I was holding in my hand THE FUTURE. No one looked up from the couch or away from the TV but still. I have found a way to enrich my cultural life while getting smaller thighs and increasing my lung capacity! Amazing.

And here’s my new bag:

Self-gifted. Half-price in the Mulberry Christmas Eve sale. A Mini Taylor Satchel in Sycamore. I virtually high-five you all.

Here’s the most exciting thing of all though. On Saturday we drove to Nottingham to see the puppies, and to pick our first and second choice of boys. It was hard to decide because they were all like heavenly angel dogs with russet fluff and sweet breath. I nearly died. Here is our new dog. We just don’t know which one yet. FEAST YOUR EYES ON THE OUTRAGEOUS CUTENESS!

They do have bitey little teeth, but just LOOK AT THAT FACE! Sigh. Next weekend, we bring Magic home. I hope he will be ok.

Annnnnd it must be time for a Christmas Eve photo. Here’s all of us, mostly without clothes, about to pull our crackers and eat Gressingham duck (which was actually rather delicious, thanks to Hugh Fernley-Whittingstall and his giblet gravy).

And a wedding photo, because we had our 15th year anniversary last week. We were so sweet then, and we had so much time to do nothing, and no one annoyed us all day long. The Kids, I’m talking to you.

Sweet, though, right? And then this one, taken at The Lounge, just before we went in to watch The Life Of Pi for our anniversary date, while scoffing babaghanoush and lamb kebabs and an Alabama Slammer or two followed up with sticky toffee pudding and a bit of cheeky hand-holding:

Older, tireder, less hair on us both, a teensy bit fatter. But heyho, it’s been fun.

Anyway, that’s 2012/2013 for you. All good. How was yours?

I am sitting here on a purple broken couch while Ned the Superbaby eats tomatoes and yabbers to himself. We have been at school all morning, hand-sewing Angel dresses and hot-glue-gunning star hats for the Nativity Play dress rehearsal this afternoon, in front of an audience including the local elderly and 60 four year olds.  THE PRESSURE! Ned didn’t actually do any of the hot-glue-gunning or hand-sewing, as he was too busy shouting that he wanted to go home and that everyone was an “Idiot Bum Head“. He shames me.

Meanwhile, I am suffering from a persistent flicky eyelid and the vague uneasy feeling that I haven’t bought enough Christmas presents for all of the support teachers and teachers assistants at the school. Because new ones keep appearing, or the kids mention someone I have never seen, but whom they swear they see every day for science/drumming/rhythmic gymnastics lessons, etc. It is so tiring. Yesterday I dropped the presents off and I swear I got blanked by the three-days-a-week-teachers-assistant-guy on the way out of the gate. So today he, the poor bugger, is getting regifted vodka chocolates that were given to us. This Christmas present gig is a giant karmic circle of rewrapping and recycling and eventual disappointment, especially if you are the three-days-a-week-guy.

Anyway, Christmas. We are off to a cottage in Devon to go swimming and sit in the hot tub. It all sounds lovely except the children are a bit annoying and my poor husband may find a week in close quarters with them a little bit heart-attack-inducing. I really hope not, because as we know I am a source of zero income and so if he keels over, we shall be in dire straits. So we have to manage the week by keeping everyone happy and everyone alive, heart rates at a sustainable and healthy level, children run like dogs, sugar levels sensibly maintained, lots of swimming and hopefully lots of pubs with playgrounds. I plan to rug the children up and push them outside. I like a physically exhausted kid, me. Warm and rested – meh! overrated.

TALLY OF REPORTABLE THINGS

Famous People Spotted This Month:

Pixie Lott

Tom Parker Bowles

Lulu Guiness

Donna Wallace from Elle magazine

Tolkien Hobbits/Dwarves I Have Either Followed Around One Night When I was  Student Or Who Still Owe Mark Money For Renovating Their Flats:

Two

eBay Activity:

Very High

Successes include a Miu Miu tunic for £23, a Karen Walker leather jacket for £25, Miu Miu studded stilettoed boots for £145 (beautiful), sales of a dress, two jackets and a shirt that netted me £190.

Failures include those Miu Miu studded stilettoed boots (too high, the zip broke and my fingers bled during the futile zipping effort), a Miu Miu jacket I sold to a woman in South Korea who wants to return it because she says it has faint brown spots on it, and an odd Marc Jacobs blazer that makes me look like Meryl Streep in Out Of Africa (not in a good way, either).

All in all, I think it’s fair to say I lose more than I win, but I CANNOT STOP. Ahem.

Here is a photo of the boots, minus the bleeding fingers:

Santas Visited:

Four.

See below evidence of an extended Santa vista through the pine forest, beginning with a visit to the Elf at the Wishing Tree, and ending with a log cabin and a properly robed Santa with a sense of humour:

Average Kilometers Run Per Week:

25

Advent Calendars:

Only one. This was a grave mistake, thinking they could ‘share’ a Playmobil one. Oh how I have longed for the days of Christmas past when they all had a Cadbury one each to rip into. This taking turns gig is ridiculous, and is resulting in far too many tears and miscalculating of dates. The Playmobil nativity scene is fantastic however, even though Baby Jesus always gets caught up in the crochet blanket covering the purple broken couch.

Where’s The Baby Jesus?

Somewhere in the rug holes.

Sample Sales Attended:

Erdem (one dress, one shirt for me)

Alexander McQueen (nothing for me, but Sue got some excellent jeans which unfortunately turn her legs a shade of indigo)

Christopher Kane (one cashmere hat, one cashmere scarf for Mark for Christmas made in the same Scottish mill that Chanel use – a fact perhaps a little bit lost on the intended recipient)

Career Crises:

Ongoing

No change there, then. And still my eyelid involuntarily morphs and wriggles around.

More pics from the family most recently described as “a bit wild”:

New glasses. Note how my very strong prescription renders my eyes and face absurdly shrunken:

Viola practice

Frozen camels at Whipsnade Zoo

Children behaving perfectly calmly and unwieldily at Whiteleys, testing toys in a well-behaved manner. SUCK ON THAT, HATERS!

Ahem. Apologies. My spastic eyelid, myself and Ned are off to pick up the boys from school. I shall write more soon, I promise.

A few weekends ago, we went to the Dog Show at Earl’s Court to see the lovely dogs and pat them and swoon and love them and show the boys how nice they can be. And we were there for a bit, and Barnaby tackled Casper to the ground, and Casper refused to get up, and so I ordered Barnaby to go and pick him up and apologise to him and come along quickly, and  then they did and then they both fell behind and got lost. Casper was found wandering the aisles a few minutes later, but Barnaby was swallowed up by the hoards and even though I could hear his nervous little voice calling me, I couldn’t get to him. Damn those wire cages and slavering Dobermans. And so, once again, we were that family with the lost kid. Amazingly, there were no police involved this time, and social welfare were none the wiser, but security did have to be called, and they were like a SWAT team, closing in on the kid with the green boots and the red hoodie. FOURTY FIVE MINUTES LATER (ahem) we were reunited with a red-eyed, cranky kid who told me I was very bad to lose him like that. And he went on, and on, all afternoon, in an effort to erase the panic and the embarrassment and the fear that had clearly gripped him, and made it all my fault. And so we went home, and decided we all felt a little bit grumpy about dogs and exhibition centres and should have stayed at home and thumped each other. Muuuuch more fun.

Anyway. The big news. What do a family of four rowdy annoying rapidly growing boys who live in central London in a two-bedroom rented basement flat with two busy parents do with themselves after they have been to the Dog Show and lost kids and come away all wounded?

They get a DOG! A PUPPY! We are going to get one of these:

Oh my giddy aunt, I am going to EXPIRE OUT OF SHEER LOVE when one of those little fellas finally gets here. They are Nova Scotia Duck Tolling Retrievers, and ours (born two days ago) has been named Magic by the children. I would rather we went for Gordon or Timothy, but it’s not all about me. Really. Only most of the time.

BOY NEWS

Barnaby is teaching himself to whistle. It is awful, a truly soul-destroying, miserable thing to live with. Everywhere you go, you hear a single sharp note puffed through his lips again and again and again. Its worse than the joke-learning phase, and on par with the constant penis-talk. He also, weirdly, has a six-pack. I have no idea how that developed, seeing as he does a lot of Lego building and a fair bit of telly-watching.

Casper, on the other hand, woolly-headed and obstreperous, got in some serious trouble at school, for play-fighting with his two mates which apparently ended in a communal riot of bum-smacking. His teacher was a bit horrified, and so things escalated to a Serious Red-Card Level Of Missed Playtimes And General Shame. He didn’t seem too worried when I picked him up, and we were going off to the Marylebone Christmas Lights Switch-on, and so I didn’t want to ruin things for all of us. So we didn’t talk much about the Red Card incident, and instead, waited in line for an hour in the dark and the cold to see a fairly convincing Father Christmas and to receive identical stuffed lions. When we got home, Casper, in his loud and serious voice, who had clearly been thinking deeply about things, declared that if you get a Yellow Card at school, or a Double-Yellow card, Santa won’t give you presents at all, because you have been too naughty. But if you get a Red Card, then you definitely get something, because red, after all, is the colour of Christmas. Thus spoke my genius son.

And there have been more Cultural Activities attended to, such as seeing Gotye play on a Monday night, and a film screening of The Silence of the Sea with a Q&A afterwards with Kazuo Ishiguro, also on a Monday night. This Friday we are off to a secret dinner location somewhere along the East London line, where we all have a dress code and last minute directions sent by text. Last Saturday, we went to a friend’s farewell at a private room at Maze. There were canapes! And champagne! And handsome young lawyers who had all passed the New York Bar Exam! And later, more champagne-with-sparklers at a private club. At 11pm on the dot I got hit with the tired stick and had to go home. That’s basically how we roll these days.

Here are the children with their new moustaches:

Anyway. What about that dog, eh? Too, too mental, or, frankly, the best idea we have ever had?

We’ve been on mid-term break this week and it has been a riot of violence, pygmy hippos and pumpkin-gathering. Barnaby has had a bit of homework to do, mostly stuff to do with Black History Month, where he was asked to choose a Black role model then do some research on him or her and make a poster. I mooted Muhammad Ali, B.B. King and Malcolm X but Barnaby was unmoved. So I asked him who he would like to write about, and he said was very interested in Black chameleons. Which was a bit odd. I patiently asked him to think of a Black chameleon as an example so I could understand what gibberish he was spouting, but he said he didn’t know of any actual chameleons, only that they would be funny.

He meant COMEDIANS, you fools.

So I suggested Eddie Murphy but the YouTube clips were a little too sweary for seven-year-old ears and then I thought of Richard Pryor, but the whole freebasing-cocaine-setting-himself-on-fire-with-lots-of-rum thing loomed pretty large on his Wikipedia entry and so he was out. So we settled on Stevie Wonder. Barnaby listens to his music without whining for us to turn it off, and nods his head appreciatively in an rudimentary small-boy-dance movement, and occasionally asks to hear Superstitious and so Stevie it is.

And that is a little unexpected bonus of the parenting gig – the dawning awareness that I can teach my boys about some cool stuff. Stuff that I like, stuff that I can introduce them to for the very first time. It’s a good, good thing.

Unlike the bad, bad thing that has happened in our living room. We have inherited a fish tank, four identical small brown fish, a big snail and lots of small snails (maybe his small snailish children, but who would KNOW) and a noisy ugly filter and a plastic replica Model T Ford for the fish to explore and some stones and some fish food. And it KILLS me. The fish (named by default as Fish, Fish, Fish and Possibly Pregnant Fish) and their big loud tank have taken up one of our precious shelves and the fish food smells like cat food stays on your fingers after you feed them and someone, probably me, should clean out the tank but can’t/won’t and so that makes me a BAD FISH ABUSER. Even the knowledge that I am a Bad Fish Abuser doesn’t move me to clean their tank, and I feel a tiny bit bad and the fish feel cross with me and a vicious cycle of discontent has begun.

And what is worse is that the fish have been causing martial strife. Mark has decided that the current tank, which has been planted firmly on my kitchen shelf which used to house trays filled with bits of unfiled bills and spare batteries and hair clips, is not big enough and he needs a MUCH BIGGER ONE with which to fill with more brown fish called Fish and possibly a plastic treasure chest/pirate ship/anchor and more stones. And so I have put my foot down and said that there will be no more fish-investment until we have a bigger flat/another room/a shed where he can instal wall-to-wall aquariums if he so desires, just as long as they stay out of my sight and out of my remit. Because fish give nothing back, just cat food smells and cleaning and feeding jobs to do.

Am I right? He doesn’t think so. We have now had two weekends of sulky silence owing to the tank trouble, and finally he washed his hands of the fish entirely, and said they are my problem. So I’m giving them away. Because I prefer marital harmony, and I want my shelf back.

Here’s our holiday list, written down so intriguingly by Barnaby after a small-child-meeting, chaired by me. We pretty much did everything, except the camping (too cold), the sweatshop visit (too hard to come by in Central London) and the ‘concers’. I’m not really sure what the concers are. Concert? Cancer? Conkers? Probably conkers.

 So, along with boyish fighting which is becoming increasingly intentionally harmful and vicious, and trick or treating on Halloween in the American Banking Suburbs which were completely mental with fake spiders draped over five-storied Georgian mansions and Filipino maids dolling out candy while the young Ralph Lauren-esque Banker Mother smiled beatifically at the hordes of small vampire brides and werewolves queued up at their cobwebbed gates, we did a bit of this (in our nana jumpers, naturally):

And gathered pumpkins for carving at Crockford Bridge Farm:

And visited the zoo twice, mostly for the pygmy hippos who were enchanting. So much nicer than fish, any way.

Hoi. This post has been hastily edited. Apologies. Sometimes your blog catches you out. Let’s gloss over the details, shall we?

So, in non-controversial bloggish news, I have been running a bit more each week, fitting into smaller jeans (my current pair are so tight I think there may be some internal bleeding, and certainly quite a bit of abdominal bruising), booking tickets to gigs and film and experimental dinner theatre in order to get us through the long, cold, soul-destrying winter. Our Autumnal/Winter Mental Health Cultural Programme begins on Saturday with a Muttonbirds’ gig at the Shepherd’s Bush Empire. Most New Zealanders will subconsciously start singing “Dominion Road” softly and fondly to themselves right about now. YOU KNOW YOU ARE!

All the children had good reports from school, which means that out in public, away from the bosom of the home, they are not mental. And that’s enough for me, so they are going to get a McDonald’s Happy Meal on Friday. High times, high times. And I shall be all middle-class about it, and feel ashamed to be in the queue.

Here is Ned, getting his hair cut at Costas Barbers. They are Greek Cypriots who cut hair for £8 and they give the kids KitKats afterwards. See how the excitement at the thought of the KitKat turned to sadness when the reality of the new hair set in:

Not a happy customer, alas.

He got over it though, especially when he saw his enormous RABBIT HEAD that I thoughtfully bought him, to tide him over while the haircut grows out.

And now, I am off, to stand up again and start the blood flowing in my middle-section, and to apply arnica on my waist-band wounds.

This week I turned 35. Sigh.

Everyone 35 and over trills lightly when I whinge about my birthday, sitting, as I so delicately am, on the cusp of Youth and Oldness, and they say, wistfully, that I am still Young. Everyone under 35 knows the truth. I’m on the slide to 40! Which is much older than I was ever going to get! There will be facial implications, upper arm ruination, and, in my case, a GIANT LUMBERING ELEPHANT stomping about the room signifying my lack of a job. I had such potential, I really did. Now my grand life-skills and achievements include churning out children at factory-level numbers, nailing a good number of recipes nicked from Jamie Oliver, and the ability to drink. I have a book club, I have mastered lipstick, I don’t feel intimidated in Aveda anymore. I get stroppy with people and occasionally confront them. I use eye cream. I get the odd wax (and yesterday I went to a nail bar and got my fingers OPI electric blu-ed by an Asian lady who told me my cuticles were dry and who tsked at my little finger-cuts that I have on two fingers from our one very sharp knife  and she snipped away at the flaps of skin covering the cuts and I nearly fainted from the horror of it all). I drive perfectly well, I’m on the parent council at school, I can always find something to buy at a sample sale, I always finish my antibiotics course, I have six pairs of stylish sunglasses. I still can’t wear heels.

No job though.

That’s kind of it. There aren’t any more little privileges/rites of passages/quirks that I can claim to be my own from the lofty heights of Mount Mid Thirty. It’s all very well and good, but I FORGOT TO GET A JOB. I was going to be something really good.

Anyway. It was a lovely birthday. A day of restaurant-crawling and a little overspending. I started off eating this:

At Grangers & Co, the newish Westbourne Grove brunch place with all the weird ladies. The Notting Hill ladies who share a simultaneously pinched and puffy face and who wear workout gear in public. It does a very good sweetcorn fritter though, with a very small but outstanding flat white. Then we went on to this:

That’s an endive, rocquefort and walnut salad from Brasserie Zedel, a huge basement Art Deco grand dining room. I met Jo there, and she bought me lunch and champagne and then we ate chocolate profiteroles with a jug of warmed chocolate sauce. Then we went on to The Grazing Goat to eat this:

That was jerusalem artichoke foam with a quail’s scotch egg and some crispy things…the first of many excellent small delicious things to gobble up.  We had dinner with Neradah and Leigh, and they asked the chef to make us a degustation menu with no fishy bits. THAT’S HOW STYLISH I AM. There were seven courses. And Billecart-Salmon and Veuve Clicquot champagne.

And there was a sample sale in Eastcastle Street where I became a “YES THANKS” person and just bought the stuff I wanted – a Nicole Farhi dress and coat, an American Retro shirt, new converse.

It was excellent, and TOTALLY worth the ageing-depression-first-world-problem crisis.

Here are some happy faces:

That’s a most impressive cake that Neradah made for me. Lucky, really, eh? And Sue brought around a damp and delicious Claudia Rodin Orange and Lemon cake, no flour, all almondy and aromatic, with lemon cream spilled all over the top. So we ate that too. And the children promised to be well-behaved all day, and they made me a card addressed to “Jodi Bartle“, which was just as well, because it could easily have been given to their other mother. And they were pretty good, which must have taken quite a bit of exhausting effort, because the day after, they stabbed the leather couch with a knife, poked the new fish with a knitting needle, spilt water on the mac Time Machine and broke the iPad. And I cried and asked around for a child psychologist. It was the lowest point yet in my 36th year.

Now, I must go and tear the children away from watching inappropriate youtube clips on a cracked and sharp iPad screen. I shall leave you with this – Spiderman Baby and his Ted:

The summer! It’s kind of over! And it has been the most wonderful summer of them all. Today I am clad in jeans and an oversized knobbly cotton jumper and outside feels a bit brisk. ‘Fresh’, say the Brits, inexplicably. Not like juice, but fresh like, cold. Last week, in Turkey, we only wore swimming costumes and bathed in the sea. And only got stung by jellyfish the once.

Anyway, school started back yesterday and already the boys have had homework and already I have shouted at them to “hurry up forget about your shoe coming off we have only 12 minutes to deliver you to your new teacher who FORBIDS YAWNING” and stuff like that. It’s a dark, dark world out there in our state schools. Of course, it is Noah, the most reluctant school-attendee who has been blessed with the Anti-Yawnist for a teacher. He is the one kid who you have to drag out of bed. The one kid who likes to stare into middle distance and unfocus for long periods. And he is aware, unfortunately, that his new teacher is the toughest in Year Two. The kids have been talking – he told me that she was the “griftest teacher in the whole school” which, apparently, upon further examination, translates as “strictest“. So. This should all get interesting.

Here he is, with his brothers, on the first day, in varying states of school-keenness. See if you spot him:

Poor old Noah. Over the past seven weeks of lovely, unmolested holidays where we could do what we wanted, he had a few unfortunate mishaps. Just before we went to Turkey, we were at the Pirate Park (a gated, patrolled, large kid’s park with various areas to get comfortably lost in, with a huge sandpit, water areas and a huge pirate ship sunk into the sand) and he lost the rest of us, thought we were heading home, and so (according to the CCTV footage) wandered out past the staff while the gate was unlocked and wandered around in Hyde Park for 45 minutes while I stayed in the Pirate Park, circling and calling and enlisting the help of staff and strangers to look for my lost kid. A woman noticed him, shoeless (because he had been playing in the sandpit and had taken them off), and wet and dirty, and alone, and she asked where his mother was and he said, quite unfairly,  “she’s at home“, so the woman called the police about the wet, dirty and shoeless abandoned child and we finally got reunited, three police cars and seven officers later.

Because he did this awkward lost-in-Hyde-Park-thing once before (see Policevan! Or Instagram: A Cautionary Tale), it became a matter to be passed on to social services. The police officers were fairly interested in us by this point, and were quite concerned about the number of kids I had with me, and took some time to understand that they were ALL MINE. I felt like I should stay indoors a lot more. Just hide.

Then, in Turkey, Noah fell into the icy mountain river water while we ate our lunch. Here he is, minutes before slipping in to his armpits.

He maintains that the weakling baby pushed him. He also started screaming about ‘THE GLASS! THE GLASS IS CUTTING ME!‘ when he was swimming in our pool at the villa. It turns out he was being bitten three times by a wasp that flew into his swimming shirt. That child is hapless. He also grinds his front teeth to teeny little nubs. And often has a rash. Dribble? WHO CAN TELL?

But. The Olympics. We went to the taekwondo, triathlons, hockey, boxing finals and football. The kids came to a few things, got bored, asked for drinks, spilt them, climbed under their seats, played Angry Birds, cried, wet their pants. That part was a bit painful. But the hockey games were the sporting highlight of my life, and I am totes in love with Mo Farah. We went to Kiwi House a few times,  but it did sadly burn down, in a slightly embarrassing and regrettable kind of way. Our Olympic-ing was the best week I have had in this city (or any other) in my LIFE! What a comedown.

Here are some photos of us being excited outside Wembley Stadium:

And a glimpse of the torch relay:

A beautiful and talented NZ hockey playing Olympian IN MY GARDEN one day after the match against Team GB (!):

And the most excellent game ever, between NZ and the Netherlands. Note the nearly nekkid Kiwi supporter and her peeling tantalising peeling body paint:

And Olympic Park. A triumph.

And on and on to sporty infinity. Then Turkey was extremely wonderful. For two weeks we swam and sat by the pool and read and ate turkish delight and drank gin and peach juice and mostly ate wraps. I got swimmer’s ear, which is earache caused by too much fun in the water, which was deeply annoying and a bit babyish. It still hurts, and I am deaf in one ear. I am finding this to be quite useful.

Here is a sample of the daily ice cream delights:

And here are all six of us, standing above the breakwater in Kas harbour:

There was an awkward incident at the hammam whereby I got landed with a man-masseuse (*i don’t know how to spell masseuse), who was only wearing a little hammam towel. I was in the buff too. Neradah got the lady-masseuse who was the man-masseuse’s wife but she was wearing CLOTHES. So the Man gave me a good, er, scrub-down and flung me around like a fish on a stainless steel bench and I kept trying to see if my western fair nakedness was causing his hammam towel to rise in suspicious places but I couldn’t look too closely or it would look like a filthy come-on and then I would sometimes try to rub my eyes from the soapsuds and accidentally fling my fingers into his hammam-towelled crotch which was only ever centimetres from my head. Neradah was keeping watch over me in case it all got too much, while she was getting slapped by the wife and sent sliding over to my side of the marble slab by her soapy feet. It was all a bit odd, vaguely traumatic, but mostly very cleansing.

Then we came home at 2am on Sunday, bronzed and rested. Casper started school and seemed to be going well on day one, but I picked him up today and was told he spat at his teacher, had a punch-up with his best friend, refused to go to time out and ended up in the office of Noah’s Anti-Yawnist Strictest Teacher to shame him into better behaviour. This is on day two of a very long scholastic journey, mind. AWESOME. Here he is, before the rot set in:

I think this bodes badly. Anyway. Enough about me. How was your summer, North Hemispheriands?