The Harridan

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.

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.