The Harridan

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?

Ok. So here is an extremely annoying thing that happened to me today.

Barnaby, who is my Type A seven year old, needs grommets put into his ears because of recurrent glue ear and intermittent deafness. He mishears everything and says ‘huh?” a lot, which is boring for him and me and everyone else. Grommets, doncha know, are small little round plastic donuts that get put into eardrums to equalise the ears properly and help drain fluid from behind the eardrum. Noah had the operation last year and it was Barnaby’s turn on the NHS free-health-providing-fairy-godmotheryness today. It’s school holidays, so there are four kids at home, and the operation has meant dramatic and extended childcare arrangements for the pre-operative assessments and the operation.

The hospital first asked us to come on the wrong day, when there were no ENT specialists working, then asked us to come two days later but an hour before ENT opened, so sent us away again. We walked back and forth to the hospital, navigating the Olympic chaos and road closures and heaving tourists and once we got there, took seven flights of stairs up and down as we got redirected from ward to ward because the elevators are slower than walking up a massive building.

But anyway, today arrived, the day of the operation, and it was made very clear that Barnaby couldn’t eat anything after 7am this morning until after his operation or the operation would be cancelled. Type A Barnaby was totally cool about this, and used his watch to make sure he ate well before 7am, and made big dramatic announcements about how he couldn’t eat, and how his stomach was so EMPTY. We packed his bag full of essential kit, such as 18 bakugan plastic balls and a fake velociraptor claw necklace and spare clothes and a book on The Simpsons, and endured a painful special trip to the supermarket with Ned and Casper on scooters, one of whom had wet his pants and the other behaving psychopathically, in order to fill his bag with his favourite food post the operation, as the hospital had ordered. (Favourite food, when you are seven, apparently consists of San Pelegrino limonata, a scotch egg and a packet of blueberries).

Anyway, while we were at the supermarket, getting stuff for later, Casper and Ned in the supermarket trolley ripping the top off a packet of raspberries and scarfing them, Barnaby turned to me and said, sort of surprised, “I just ate a raspberry.”

Which was uncharacteristic for him because it went against the rules which he likes to know and adhere to. And of course, it meant that when we arrived at the hospital for admission, I had to sheepishly tell the nurses, who told the doctors who told the anaesthetist, who told me, after an hour of sitting alongside Barnaby in the hospital bed, numbing cream daubed on his little boy-hands, after his weigh-in and his blood pressure being taken and the play specialist going through the operation with him, that the operation was cancelled. Because of the bloody raspberry. Tiny, squishy, full of about 10 seeds and some juice. Aaargh. I tried to be nice to Barnaby about it, because he is seven and a bit of a doofus, but it was hard. Really hard.

Other Things That Have Annoyed Me:

1. Not being able to watch the Olympics all day long. I watch them NEARLY all day long, but that’s not quite enough. Who knew I would turn all Justin Singleton about them? They are my new crush. All thoughts of Walter White and the blue meth have (mostly) dissipated.

2. Waitrose has employed a big security guard who came up to me this week expressly to tell me that no scooters were allowed in the shop, which I knew anyway, and then today, on the same ill-fated raspberry shopping jaunt, told me that Casper wasn’t allowed to sit in the trolley because of HYGIENE reasons. HYGIENE. What? Every kid since the dawning of time has sat in a grocery shop trolley. It is against the law of nature to make this an issue of hygiene. I say we reclaim the shopping trolleys for the children of the world. It’s so much better than them pulling stuff off the shelves and stealing the grapes, is it not?

3. The excellent, clever Serpentine Summer Pavilion, built by Ai Weiwei and Herzog & de Meuron has, until yesterday, been a lovely place to go to. But yesterday, we were told off by the security guard for playing on the irresistible soft and bouncy uneven cork surfaces. Like we have done for weeks. With no one telling us off.

PHEW For The Olympics

They are so lovely and good and make me cry every evening when we watch the same footage over and over again of British athletes being humble and marvellous. I love it. The weather is lovely, the roads are quiet, there are free things happening in the park, we get to feel patriotic for two countries, we get to see Olympians on our morning run, even! Well, today I did, through Hyde Park. It was some sort of cycling technical thing, but I burst into enthusiastic cheering for the New Zealanders and ran for an extra three minutes in homage. The kids mostly love it, except for the baby who screeches at the TV when we turn it on at 6:30am so as not to miss A THING and who screams “NO LIMPOCS! NO LIMPOCS!”. I say, suck it up, little fella. It only happens every four years.

So that’s kind of it. We have tickets to see the New Zealand women’s hockey next week, and some semi-final football, and we are taking the bigger kids to see the taekwondo. We have been crashing Kiwi House in King’s Cross fairly often, although we have found the whole BBQ-food-runs-out-at-8:30pm thing quite traumatic. Here are some photos, instagrammed and filtered and already posted. Apologies.

Two gay dogs at Portobello Road, in the rain, cranky but about to buy fair-trade coffee and browse the vintage film poster stall.

Noah turned six and asked for three cakes. Batman, Superman and Spiderman. They were pretty rubbish, really just a riot of M&M’s and plastic figurines bought hastily from Amazon when I realised I wasn’t actually able to craft superheroes out of cake. Except for Spiderman. He was a webby triumph.

Here is Casper at the Wishing Tree at the forest-bit at Benjamin Disraeli’s country pile:

 The children in Hyde Park, practising for future greatness.

The children, again, immersed in a video installation of a Brazilian artist digging a hole. It was 16 minutes of total silence. Thank you, Casa Brasil.

A life-size inflatable bouncy Stonehenge. Of course.

Casper bravely entering the duckish water at the Serpentine Lido. Just like those triathletes are going to do tomorrow.