The Harridan

Hark! Here is an accidental gallery filled with photos that perhaps would have been better with a running commentary. But the enormous, bewildering mac had other ideas and so there you have it – instagrammed photos of cakes and me at the hairdressers and boys cutting up vegetables in order to make toothpick and cucumber sculptures. That is apparently a vegetable motor bike. But you knew that.

And below, a photo of the genius baby who won’t wear nappies, only big boy underpants. Even to bed. So we have to affix a nappy AFTER he has put his knickers on. It is complicated, and a bit weesy in the morning, and requires lots of patience and negotiation. In the day, he runs about in his brother’s pants, or naked, with frequent visits to the potty. He returns, triumphant, shows us his efforts and then asks for a handful from the lolly tin. All of this has very little to do with me. He is a Toilet Training MASTER. A motivated self-starter with excellent thighs.

Here he is, feeding the duck at the Serpentine. There was only one duck. And it was on the weekend, where the weather went mental and we all got softly, nicely pink and everyone was happy.

And so what else? There has been many late nights. Dinner at Sketch, an art workshop at The Hayward Gallery, a night at the Southbank applauding tightrope walkers and contortionists, The Rocket in Acton which was extremely hard to find when not in a car – the bus took us to an industrial wasteland where there were NO CABS – (just LOOK at our faces! Actually, my excellently-applied Tom Ford lips steals the show, really, to be PERFECTLY FAIR)

and this incredible school fundraiser in Soho on Sunday where we all got to eat food from The Ivy, Peter Gordon, St John, Quo Vardis, MeatWagon, etc etc and the children played with knives and made the aforementioned vegetable motorbikes. And got their faces painted for free. WHAT an excellent city to live in, eh? And all of these late nights have cheered me up and made me feel very pleased about the world. So all is right with me, and my head, thank goodness.

And tomorrow is a sample sale day. Oh, how I love a sample sale. I am dropping off the children to school and nursery, flicking the (hopefully nappy-clad) baby off to kmmms and then legging it to WC2 for Erdem, Joseph and Alexander McQueen. Ahhhhhhhhhh! And my new jogging body may just fit into something. Maybe. The lumpen bits behind my knees are slowly disappearing but my upper arms refuse to shrink. My husband says that’s because I am not actually using them when I slowly, painfully jog through that park, flicking plane-tree detritus and spit from my sodden pink face, while I attempt to ignore the Bad Voice in my head telling me to Walk! Just walk, dude! No one will know! But of course, the RunKeeper app will know. That little devil records every step I take and every calorie I burn and now I am becoming someone who discusses how many calories I use up  when I do the school run. Sincerest apologies, everyone, because I hate that kind of talk. And anyway, I DO use my arms, when I swing them lustily to help propel me along. There should be some muscles developing very soon, to be sure.

Along with calorie-counting mind-numbing talk, here is a list of Other Things I Also Cannot Abide:

1. People who say “whilst”

2. Being able to see toilet brushes

3. Fish (as you know)

4. Emoticons and text speak

5. Pizza Hut

6. Poems

7. Lipliner

8. That Movies For Men channel on Sky

9. Running

10. Health & Safety

On number 10, I am annoyed by the fact that the baby gets in trouble when he climbs the climbing frame at school. I get told to pull him off, one clinging, desperate arm by another clinging desperate arm, then little tentacle leg after tentacle leg, because the school is not insured for anyone to play on the equipment after school hours. It is about a foot high. That kid can climb, and I am not going to sue. There is something so terribly odd about stopping a kid playing on the playing equipment. Anyhoo.

Any other extremely irritating things that make you want to come over all Michael Douglas in Breaking Down?

You know that conventional wisdom that says you don’t tell anyone about a pregnancy until 12 weeks? That conventional wisdom which I have long-derided as Dreadfully Boring and Anal and Paranoid? Yes, that. Well, now I get it. Totally get it. That same wisdom also probably advises you hold off from buying the lovely second-hand red Bugaboo pram and the Victorian crocheted christenening cap and playing enthusiastic “Name Your Imaginary Daughter” games with your friends on Twitter, until at least you have a scan to make sure your pregnancy is viable and your baby is not developing into a star mole.

All of which unfortunately leads me to this awkward post.  I am no longer pregnant as of yesterday and I am now spending the day on the couch enduring a ‘medically managed’ miscarriage. I am not moving except to refill my cup of tea. Dog on the road? Child hanging from radiator? Mouldering washing? Tom and Jerry DVD stuck on a scratched frame? Too bad. Today, I am just going to suck it up and sit it out under a blanket. I am an island. Or a rocky outcrop. Or something. But I am not moving, nor am I conversational, or very much fun.

I am sorry that this post and others have referred to my fertility, successful or otherwise. Yuck. It isn’t that interesting, or appropriate, and certainly wades forthright into that old chestnut of Too Much Information. It is awkward. But spew it out I must, or I will have to fake a birth in December for faithful readers with long memories. So awkward. Of course, I have also told every single real-life human being I have come into contact with over the last ten weeks so my awkwardness is will keep repeating on me like an oniony burp. Supermarket, school gates, the traffic guy on Bishop’s Bridge, teachers, potential business partners, the staff at Pret. SIGH.

Things that I imagine everyone in the world will say/think, privately or otherwise:

1. It was the worm tablet

2. It was the jogging

3. She carries her groceries home by herself – it was them

4. The school run did it

5. The coffee did it

6. Her body doesn’t want any more children, OBVS

7. She needs a rest anyway

8. She should be grateful for her four healthy kids

9. She should take a hint

10. She should get a cat

11. Her poor husband needs a rest

etc etc.

Yep. Ok. Alright.

Anyway, that is that. I will be fine tomorrow and I will get through the well-intentioned comments from everyone I meet as best as I can. And I promise there shall be no more talk of babies and pregnancy tests and the ‘evacuation of retained products of conception’. OH MY how the NHS has misfired in that particular piece of helpful take-home literature!

And on the bright side, I can resume my enthusiastic efforts to sample much more New World sauvignon blanc, and I can toast the Queen on the Jubilee weekend with something stronger than tea. And I can take my geriatric-speed-jogging up a notch and actually overtake someone. And just maybe fit the Erdem black dress I bought on eBay which just now won’t quite fit down over my middle region. And I can go eat foie gras until I am SICK and spread my toast with stinking cheeses and I can throw away the folic acid tablets and replace them with parma ham! And go do some extreme sports or something. There is always a bright side.

Thank you. I am done – no need to speak of today again. Ahem.

Oh what fun we were supposed to have today at the park! We started out all very sitcom-y, taking scooters and bubble wands to Kensington Gardens for some Springish larking. It began promisingly, looking like this:

and then I decided to take a photo of a tree and fiddle about with Instagram (my new virtual lover) and disappointingly came up with this:

while this sweetly disengaged-from-the-world little guy headed off in the wrong direction, quite possibly thinking very hard about popcorn or cows or screwdrivers:

And we lost him for 45 minutes. We needed TWO police vans to help scour the park until we finally found him with some lovely non-molesting-type grandparents who had decided to save the weeping five year old who said his mother had “probably gone to the shops because she really likes buying things“.

For the record, I didn’t go to the shops, nor did I buy anything. I was searching for my hapless son and calling the police and trying not to panic. All Proper Parental Responses, thankyouverymuch.

Anyway, we had a chat about what to do when you are lost, and the policeman told Noah to stick to us all the time. It was all things at once – relieving, humiliating, frightening, funny, awful. I am waaaaaay too tired for such Sunday Amateur Dramatics.

Too tired to go slo-mo jogging, and too tired to stay awake this afternoon. Much too tired to do any cleaning, although that goes without saying. My tiredness mostly comes from being 8 weeks pregnant. Which I KNOW I am supposed to keep secret, but I cannot. Secrets are also too tiring. And so, hopefully there shall be a December baby, although our flat got visited by WORMS last week, of the itchy-bottom kind (rather than the tropical swimming-through-your-eyeballs-kind, obvs) and we all got a dose of the worming tablet and then I read the small print and it says DONTTAKEIFYOUAREPREGNANT!FOOL!

It doesn’t say what kind of terrible worm-related deformity I may have caused the poor baby but I do lie awake at night imagining. It could be very bad. Like one of those moles with the wormy noses.

Oh man, I just about need a therapy session after that. I am sorry to the baby. You will not look like a wormy mole. You shall be handsome like your brothers, and you will not have a pelt, or live in the ground. These things I swear. Anyway, in preparation, we have bought a Bugaboo, and I have bought an 18th century French crocheted baby bonnet. All sorted then! I hear you cry. There is, however, the small issue of where we shall house said normal-looking-baby, so we have been looking around at houses to buy. I made the mistake of going to the Living Etc magazine’s open home tour last month, where they give you a tour of some of the homes they have featured in the magazine. WELL! Best to remain naive about how other people live, I think. Houses like this:

It killed me a little bit inside. So, anyway, we cannot afford anything actually at all, so the said normal-looking baby will just have to find somewhere to squeeze in. It’s all character-building, as they say.

What else? There was a week in Devon, which was delicious, owing to the daily clotted cream and hevva buns with damson jam. The children had a daily meal of fish and chips in whatever pub would have us, and we watched season one of Breaking Bad. All in all, a lovely little holiday.

Here is Devon:

And Sir Francis Drake:

And a lovely church in Tavistock:

There was a pool and a hot tub and goats and ponies and castles and squashed toads and badgers. It was a kind of Boy Nirvana. There is a post to be made concerning the antique naval shop that we found, and the now gleaming brassy boaty things we have dotted around the flat, but that is for another day. It is a little bit troublesome, this new antique obsession, but what can you do?

Roight. I have to go and think about going for a jog, although I think I can hear rain. Cup of tea and a lie down time, then.

Ah, hello again. Apologies for the absence. Sometimes I fancy I might attempt a stylish LibertyLondonGirl-esque daily post, where I would (hopefully but not very likely) write witty, aspirational things about place settings and wintery walks and adventures with my dogs and my footwear. But I have no discipline, not enough invitations to go out, and a too-close relationship with devices that enable my aimless web-surfing to actually document my daily doings. Besides, much of my life is cleaning up breakfast dishes and putting Casper into timeout. Which makes for boring reading, frankly.

So here we are, nearly April, and I have a bunch of instagram photographs with which to thrill/bore you with.

But first! My husband came to open our linen cupboard, such as it is, and he was heard to exclaim in a loud and frustrated tone

“What the FLIPPING HECK”

as a load of duvets, sheets, pillows and towels fell about his head. That is because I am a Shover. I like to see a space in a drawer/cupboard/whathaveyou and do a bit of Shoving until the thing in question fits. I don’t really Fold and I never Sort. I am the polar opposite of a Tamara Mellon. Those wardrobe sorting-type-people would totally find me repulsive. I think you could safely call me not just The Harridan, for the shameless shouting and mean shrill supermarket admonistrations, but also The Slattern for the very bad housekeeping skills. So Mark, in a fit of rage and shock, reorganised our linen cupboard and made everything look nice and sensible. Nothing falls out when you open the cupboard, everything fits and you can see what you are after. It’s a domestic revelation, I tell ya. And he is so smug. Pah.

So, housewife I am not, but I did make a good cake for Casper’s 4th birthday. And a watermelon shark fruit salad, ripped from one of those good-looking American blogs where the woman makes placenames for everyone and probably folds her clothes nicely. Ah! The creativity! The craft! Pinterest has a lot to answer for, really – this is the new subjugation – we must excel at cakes and party favours and be skinny and have an excellent job and our children should not hit each other in public. There is something a little odd about my new cake-one-upmanship. But that well be a topic for the therapist. See the treasure chest cake of Instagrammed Geniusness:

And the watermelon-shark-fruit-salad GLORY:

Casper had a rotten time at the party, due to some sort of shivery virus, which killed the vibe somewhat. But the others liked the pinata and the Fairy Bread. (Fairy Bread is something New Zealanders make, if they have leave of their senses. It is white processed bread, crusts off, buttered and covered in coloured sugar. And given to children.)

And Casper. He is four now. I am hoping for a better year. Ahem.

So the day after the birthday party, we went off to Harrogate for the day to attend a trade fair. The journey started at 9:00am and we arrived after lunch. I started to feel train-sick about 40 minutes into the journey and ended up doing impressive vomiting into a paper bag which split on the train in front of (and a little bit on) a Hen’s Party in Leeds. They were kind, in their pink tiaras and sashes and tiny bits of my vom on their shoes. It was most unfortunate for all concerned.

We ended up zooming around the exhibition centre while trying to look professional and interested, in between me rushing off to the loos to retch and lie down on the cold tiles. We caught the early train home while I clutched an enormous plastic rubbish bag and sweatily dreamed of Home.

Anyway, enough of that maudlin stomach-talk. It is school holidays and I have every intention to

a. Do the homework quickly

b. Spend quality one-on-one time with all the children, separately

c. Get to the Tate to see the Polka Dot Japanese lady (and finally become a member so I will actually go along rather than just read about the exhibitions in Time Out)

d. Take Noah to the dentist to stop him grinding his teeth away to nubbly little sore nerve-endings.

Wish me luck.

The baby (probably him, but it could be any of the little blighters) took the bath plug and put it somewhere and we have not had clean children for four days now. We have looked everywhere, in drawers, under tables, in rubbish bins, in the shredder. I found a banana neatly tucked away in my pyjama drawer, and quite a lot of rotten apples and other decomposing delights, but no plug. And of course, every evening at bath time we have said to each other that we must buy a bath plug tomorrow. But you never remember that when you are walking past the hardware shop, do you? DO YOU? No.

So, last night I cracked. The big kids have showers but the baby shrieks with demonic abandon when you suggest he gets in there with the others, and so he has had good old-fashioned English sponge-downs but his bottom remains resolutely whiffy and I could stand it no longer.

So last night we tried to find a bottle or a lid that would fit into the 4 centimetre chasm which stands between me and a nice-smelling baby and we could not. Desperate, I was, and so I fished some manky homemade ‘playdough’ (in our house, this means flour and water mixed together until a clay-coloured paste forms with which you can ruin IKEA utensils on by leaving bits to dry and be stuck forever like some wheaten concrete) out of the fridge, wrapped it in plastic wrap and shoved it onto the bath plug hole and the kids had a quick bath to wash their bums while the playdough slowly disintegrated into the water like frog-spawny-pond-scum. And I had to hold it there while the children tried to foil my excellent New Zealand-y ingenuity by pushing their feet into the lump of dough and out of the hole. There was more yelling than usual. And so today, I have in my warm little palms, a bath plug from the shop. It may change my life.

On the subject of yelling, Mark has just informed me that the levels of my street-yelling alarm him, and possibly many of our neighbours and that when I yell, and he hears me from the bottom of the stairs, he is reminded of my younger self who thought that people who screeched at their kids in public were quite bad people who needed to read more books on alternative non-confrontational methods of parenting. OH HA! How I laugh at the memory of myself at 20. What a dick. I also thought that:

1. I would always be a member of a gym – my gym membership would never slide, no matter how far I sunk in life.

2. I would always wear black, because HELLO! it’s slimming! and stylish! and fashion editors wear it! and I look sophisticated in it! Colour is for CLUELESS PEOPLE!

3. I wouldn’t let my kids watch TV, eat crisps, have a buzz cut, wear pink, or swear, and I would NEVER hit them or squeeze their arms in a hurty way in the supermarket, ever.

4. I obviously knew more about stuff like feminism, race relations and Swedish film than older/other people because I studied some papers in my arts degree (actually I was probably right about the Swedish film bit). And I was clearly destined for an excellent career.

5. I thought the only designer I would ever love was Kate Sylvester (she who I stalked one sunny memorable afternoon in the supermarket) and that I had found my shape (50’s inspired, a-line dresses and skirts, cardigans, strong graphic lines. In black).

6. I would share all domestic chores equally. I would never iron, and I would never change my name. HA!

Well, it turns out I was a total meathead and to anyone I have ever been a superior ridiculous moron to, I APOLOGISE. Really. I knew nothing, and I think I may very well know less now. I am moving away from an incorrect assumption of clever wiseness towards a swirling vortex of complete ignorance and oblivion. Aided somewhat by sauvignon blanc, it must be noted. I think I like it better that way.

Photos. To lighten the mood, as it were.

The bath-plug-stealing baby. He turned two, and now acts like a crazed insane person. Here he is, once again refusing to get into the buggy and come with me. He screams and falls out of the buggy, runs towards the Grange Hill-esque brick wall of the school, turns his face away, and stays there for a REALLY LONG TIME. So boring, I die.

And his haircut. I keep ruining it, by snipping away at the dreds haphazardly and unskillfully. The Unfortunate Warhol Years:

Me and Mark, on a night filled with Champagne that somebody else bought. Thanking you, Unnamed Benefactoress.

The new french farmhouse kitchen table, only partially scarred by homemade playdough dried lumps, at use on a Friday night.

The balmy night this week we all ate our dinner in the garden. Spring is here! Kind of.

It turns out that in this glorious city of ours, in addition to eating Rowley Leigh’s burgers in the middle of a movie and visiting the Tate to help obliterate a room by putting stickers all over every surface and go and see Adele play at the tiny Shepherd’s Bush Empire for £16 (ok, that was 4 years ago, but still) you can ALSO go and find all sorts of historical artifacts sitting amongst the shingle at the Thames foreshore at low tide.

May I introduce Mudlarking, the funnest and freest and muddiest thing to do in the capital EVER. Fact.

So, it seems that the Thames is the largest archeological site in the world. It is all a bit tricky to get to, though, because the tides come in pretty quick and leave you stranded up against green algaed walls, and the stairs are unnoticeable rickety steep things dotted here and there. It is a bit dirty, although not like it was, so they say, and you really don’t need much more than wellington boots, babywipes, antiseptic gel and a plastic bag. And I SWEAR it is more fun than you would BELIEVE. So much fun that the childcare aspect of an afternoon is largely overlooked, kicked to the curb in favour of deepest concentration, as you scan the shingle and burrow into mud and bend over awkwardly as you attempt to find Victorian buttons and medieval shoes and Roman coins. So the smallest kids do fall over a bit, and they do cry and show you their muddy hands and despair over their wet trousers and try to pull their little legs from the old bits of rotting planks, but you are TRYING to find stuff and really resent having to look up from the rocks and so it is a bit hard to do both. Mudlarking and being a parent – totes incompatible. WHO KNEW?

Anyway, look at the hoard:

That is a most-excellently-laid-out collection of medieval ship’s nails, old crockery, Roman tiles, and 16th century handmade clay pipes. AMAZE. And a close-up of my treasure:

And yesterday’s attempt, from the same spot, underneath the Millenium Bridge:

And here we are eating fish and chips and drinking gin and tonic in the sun after our first successful anthropological morning poke:

More Boffinery:

The mud in the Thames is anaerobic, which means it has no oxygen and so things are preserved there. Basically, what you can find is just stuff that has been dropped into the Thames, accidentally or not, over a very long time. The tide and the increase of faster boats zooming along the river have slowly eroded the muddy layers and so new old stuff appears all of the time. How supremely excellent is that? You aren’t allowed to dig unless you have a £7.50 permit, and anything that you find which is of historical significance should be passed on to the British Museum. Apparently, the 400 year old clay pipes are so common that they don’t pass for ‘interesting’. That is a very odd concept for someone from New Zealand whose colonial past only goes back a few hundred years. Anyway. I have turned into a mudlarking bore and it is all I want to do with my weekends until I die.

Except for attending London Fashion Week shows, of course. Here is my actual invitation to an actual show. Mary Katrantzou, no less, which by association quite obviously makes me fabulous. See the genius hologram invitation WITH MY NAME ON THE BACK (you have to imagine that part):

And see the badly photographed show, where I was pretending to look like I had a reason to be there, other than desperately searching for a glimpse of the back of Alexa Chung/Anna Wintour’s respective heads while chanting to myself

Be cool, be cool, look disinterested:

I saw neither Chung nor Wintour, although they were there, according to the Daily Mail. Disappointingly, no one photographed me for their blog full of well-dressed fashiony LFW attendees, either. I expect no one was fooled by my ‘edgy’ look of geometric charity-shop polyester frock, old Kate Sylvester boatneck shirt, rabbit coat and babylissed hair. Ahem. Actually, the women getting photographed were all wearing comedy outfits, on the wrong side of ‘wrong’, with big spectacles and ankle socks and 80’s jumpers. So QUIRKY! so IRONIC! And they were all thin, and probably didn’t have dried weetbix smeared on their cuffs. Thanks, the Unsupportive Kids. So I didn’t feel too slighted. It was actually excellent fun – not exactly to the mudlarking degree of funness, but not very far behind.

Here is a model to further prove I was actually there, and not just fantasising:

So. In other news, Casper has become a very badly behaved child, worse than before, calling me an idiot very loudly in public, along with the old “SHUT UP’ favourite of his. I sometimes squeeze his arm, I sometimes ignore him, I sometimes strap him in the buggy, I sometimes yell right back. It is awkward and embarrassing and I think this is what they mean when they tell you parenting is hard work.  He starts school in September. I think I love September.

It is a rainy day but NO ONE IS BORED. That is because we are in London. I am so glad I live here. It is grey and drizzling, but there is stuff to do, and stylish things to be done and excellent food to eat and places to visit and chairs to buy. I am forever grateful. If London was a woman, I would have a girl-crush on her. I may well follow her around in a little bit of an odd way, like the time I spotted Kate Sylvester in a New World supermarket in Auckland, and I wheeled my trolley into aisle after aisle after her, pretending to be very interested in dried apricots and tins of beans, but actually willing her to be my friend. Sweating a little bit about it, maybe. Raised blood pressure, certainly, no doubt a bit of a nervous rash creeping up my neck. Anyway, thats how I would be if London was a lady. If that, er, makes sense.

So. Why? WELL! Look at these photos taken last Sunday. At Ham House, in Richmond. It wasn’t open, but that’s ok. There were the gardens, horses, and the National Trust tea rooms filled with scones and tea and (terrible) baked potatoes and small, clean families with only one or two kids all speaking French and being whispery. That is the kind of thing you can do when you live here.

And Yet Another London Thing

You can even get a babysitter to come at 6pm, like we did last night, and you can saunter down to Queensway with your husband, in your heavy liquid eyeliner and your Cherry Lush and your disintegrating rabbit-fur coat, and you can go to the new poshed-up cinema in Whiteleys where you pay double price for tickets BUT you get to go to a bar first and drink cocktails and then go and sit in the new theatre which has enormous reclinable seats, all leather and machinised, and (this is *amazing*)…you have waiter service all movie-long from staff who get you food from Le Cafe Anglais while you watch your movie! And you can keep ordering more drinks! And the food comes to your little table which is on the side of your huge leather chair (all a bit too much like being on a plane, perhaps) and you eat in the dark, kind of, and you spill stuff down your shirt and on the leather chair and in between the cracks but it is OK because probably EVERYONE does it! And it was too delicious! And too weird. We are TOTES going back there. I liked having three cocktails. It make the movie kind of dreamy and sleepy. It was The Artist. And the lights stay on a little bit, but you don’t really mind because then they bring out excellent desserts, and you want to be able to see your salted caramel ice cream before it drips onto your shirt. It was so excellent.

We ordered salsify fritters and aioli to share which I told Mark were lovely root vegetables which I think had something to do with the sea. He ate one, told me it was fish, I spat mine out, he ate all of it, I came home, googled it, found it it was actually just a root vegetable after all, and told him, and he just laughed and said my fish phobia was mental. It was an evil plan to have the fritters all to himself. So mean.

Anyway, we decided to bid on a farmhouse table this week and we won it and picked it up this morning and I now have a huge old table with which to have big rousing meals around while the kids behave nicely and we will all be so witty and charming we may as well have a sitcom devoted to our excellent family-ways. And so we whipped up to Portobello this afternoon to buy some old mismatched chairs. There weren’t any. But see? London again. There could have been some. There were some cinema chairs and more old tables and quite a lot of fish-smells from the fishmonger. Fishmonger shops are  my kryptonite. I shudder and cross the road to avoid them. But there were also lots of moroccan food stalls and Pizza East and men in bowler hats and the Lisboa patisserie full of pasteis de nata, which I couldn’t buy because I am now a running-type person who doesn’t eat delicious portuguese tarts. Sigh. But see how much fun London is? And look! Here we are eating passionfruit, banana and chocolate muffins from The Providores, the NZ Peter Gordon cafe of excellentness and overpricedness.

Totally ruined my I Love London So There theme, just then, didn’t I?

Yesterday, according to my new iPhone, it was minus 5 degrees outside. All plans of driving to a National Trust property to have scones and tea and play in the gardens or other equally ambitious ideas of going mudlarking on the Thames searching for clay pipes and roman coins were put quietly aside. Going out the door in this current cold snap is like walking into a refrigerator and closing the door behind you, but not in a *fun* way.

And we are all recovering from some terrible flu-esque swollen-gland sore-throat fevery thing which made us all sick last week and which made us wonder again why are we here by ourselves with no one to look after us. Sometimes you really need a mum/sister/cousin/best friend to mind the kids while you go and sweat your fever away in a dark room with only a few lemon and honey drinks to break the delirium. Casper got tonsilitis, Noah’s eardrum perforated and the baby suffered from very bad dreadlocks:

It has been a tough week.

My ‘running’ has been tossed aside for blankets and radiators and two episodes each a night of The Killing. (It is as good as everyone says, and Sarah Lund’s jumpers exceed their hype. And I now believe I can understand Danish.) All evening appointments have been cancelled, the school run has been undertaken in the car. I haven’t eaten anything other than chicken broth since Monday, and we have been through about 7 bottles of Calpol. I am waiting for my jeans to slip down off my hips in a thin snakey sickly kind of way. I thought not eating food for a week would show somehow, but the jeans still refuse to budge, the cheeks remain full, the arms plump like good italian sausages. I don’t even have romantic consumptive hollows under my eyes. WHAT IS THE POINT OF ALL THAT SUFFERING?

Anyhoo. There have been two birthdays in the last two weeks. I made Barnaby a spider cake, which was specifically requested. It was a triumph, if you don’t mind the shameless bragging.

Ned then turned two and he got a supermarket cake. The rule is, if you are too small to notice that your mother bought the cake for you at the supermarket alongside sausages and toilet paper on the day of your Actual Birthday, then you are too small for your mother to feel like she was Bad. Or something like that. There is, of course, no question that birth order has quite a lot to do with all of this, and that each kid after Barnaby gets a significantly less-generous quota of the Mother-Feels-Obligated tasks. Sorry about that, small fellas, but it is biology. Beyond my control.

Here is the Hedgehog cake blazing with all the ferocious intent of an actual furnace with a stunned and pathetically-grateful Ned:

Before I begin, I just want to clear the old potentially-parasitic-ridden air with the lovely news that I don’t have nits, just psoriasis. PHEW. So I don’t have small animals living in my thin blondey-grey head, just red scabby welts. DOUBLE PHEW. That dastardly plane journey from Brisbane to London dried out my skin like a little forgotten dead gecko on a flat rock in the Outback, is all. So. As you were.

This week I have started a running programme which makes me hobble around for days. I suspect this is normal. But maybe not. Ouch! go my little arthritic knees. But I persevere because I want to have lithe limbs like Anya and Amber. So up I get at 6:15am to run around the Round Pond in Kensington Gardens in the dark and hopefully not get either lost or molested. So far, I have only gotten lost. And of course I needed to go to JD Sports to buy full running gear and shoes and sports bras and new Reeboks and I also needed to buy an iPhone so I could get the running app. I am nothing if not organised and nothing if not quick to find a way to go shopping. So I have the shiniest pinkest unstinkiest Nike gear on the planet and I am yet to become lithe. BUT OH! My iPhone has, of course, changed my life, yadda yadda because now I have an app for everything! I don’t have to even talk to anyone anymore. And I can throw away my new diary and all writing instruments and watch and scrabble board and phone and camera and even my own sense of self and judgment because there is probably an app for that too. I love it all. I just need to remember to Act Normally When Real People Are Around.

So my first day of ‘running’ (actually I walk then jog then walk then jog in a painful slo-mo-type-way which must be excruciating for people to witness) I donned my new running trousers and they had a little pocket in them. Kerry who went ‘running’ with me said she thought the pocket was for keys. I thought it was probably actually for the new white iPhone 4s which I had gotten the day before and so I stuffed the new phone into my pants. It bounced out of my pants and cracked the screen. So I took it back and had to pay an insurance premium and then I got another phone after a two hour wait from another Carphone Warehouse store. But they switched over my sim card and so on Tuesday afternoon I had to pick the boys from school and all of us had to get on a bus to Notting Hill to switch the sim card back over. I knew the boys would be a pain but promised them frozen yoghurt if they behaved. We got onto the crowded bus, me with double buggy, them in front of me, and they turned to each other in the aisle, grabbed each other’s heads and immediately and inexplicably gouged each other’s eyes and strangled each other’s necks and screamed like TOTAL FERAL NUTTY PEOPLE. They were so caught up in the pain-induction that they didn’t even move out of the way. They just locked on to each other like weird violent pitbulls, oblivious to the stares and gasps of horror from the public. And I was stuck with the other two in the buggy, having to wheel it along and into the parking bay bit, finally banging the buggy straight into the two weirdo vicious kids and forceably separating them from the Lock Holds Of Public Humiliation.

Then I grabbed a sweaty welty Noah away from the red and bleeding Barnaby and accidentally whacked his head into the pole in the middle of the bus aisle which made him scream and then wail in a very uncomfortable long, loud kind of way. Then when I told them both to stop, and hissed and grabbed their arms in a very hurty grip, and got very angry and told them off in that everyone is looking and listening and I want to DIE kind of way, Noah yelled at me really loudly to “SHUT UP!”.

What a triumph. A moment of pure parental wizardry. High-five to myself for excellent parenting skills.

On Wednesday morning, I asked the headmistress to give them a proper bollocking for the hideous bus behaviour. She cleverly got them both into her office and explained in her inimitable South African terrifying way that someone from the bus had called her, concerned about some very shocking  behaviour from kids in school uniform from her school. She told them that this sort of thing would not be tolerated and she made them cry and said that if they ever behaved in a way like that again in public they would be punished at school through detention. It was genius.

I picked them up from school on Wednesday and Barnaby was red-eyed and sullen and told me that someone from The Public had spoken to the school about what had happened. Noah, cranky-faced and unrepentant, took one look at me and said “Don’t you ever tell on us again”. Nothing gets past that kid.