The Harridan

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.

We are home again after that evil interminable flight. Every time you check the flight information board, the hours left to your destination seem to get stuck. 15 more hours until we get to Dubai, you say? And no food for Ned because the travel agent forgot to ask? Ohhhh, someone has stepped into the curry residue on the tray on the floor? Ohhh, the baby has been standing in a pool of someone else’s wee in the toilets? Ohhh, the husband has fallen asleep again while the children punch each other and the baby tries to spit at the people in the seats behind us? LOVELY.
But we got home to mild weather and a clean flat (incidentally the size of a doll’s house, which is a bit disappointing – people in the Southern Hemisphere live in Real Houses with Actual Backyards and even GARAGES IN WHICH TO PUT STUFF! Amaze…) and our excellent bed and power shower made us weep a little inside with sensory-related gratitude. And we have been mostly awake in the day, the kids forced to school yesterday, Mark back at work, me managing the sleep apnoea of the little kids. And we are now very grateful for the lovely month spent at home with our family, and we are wondering if we should move closer to them. Hmmmm.
So, Australia was very muggy and there were lots of gumtrees and noisy animals screeching at 5am and geckos who scampered up walls and kangeroos which were quite awful to look at. Kangeroos look like small muscular men with ears and fur and a strong alarming tail. We fed them. Look!

The kids were unaware of the wrongness of the small-man-masquerading-as-a-furry-animal-with-penile-worrisome-tail thing and fed them anyway. And there were snakes and lizards outside the supermarket for kids to stroke. You go for milk, you come back with the whiff of a snake on your hands. Astounding.

We were together with all of my family and their kids, mostly kids we have never met. And there really is a whole part of life that we have been missing out on – one where you have your family around and you do stuff together and you share a bit of the pain. You trash other people’s houses, yes, but they love you so it doesn’t really matter. Probably. And there are older cousins to inspire and intimidate and to play Lego with and to climb on and to annoy, and younger cousins to chase and scare. And grownups who think your kids are ace. This was all a total revelation.
Time for photos. I have neglected to include the ones showing the infected scabs which covered three out of the four children. Sorry for the inaction, little fellas. I will try to up my levels of this-needs-medical-attention-awareness. Ahem.

The beach! On one of the rare days we weren’t inside, sheltering from the monsoons.

Burgers and Uncle Glenn’s chips and fluffies at Schnapper Rock, Tutukaka.

Stinky geysers in Rotorua.

Lovely Aunties and delicious babies.

Stopping at the Karangahake Gorge for some essential stone-throwing

Cousins, uncles, aunties, grandparents, brothers and sisters all along the seafront with icecreams. How excellent.

Dorky beachwear.

Handsome baby Ned in his new Country Road outfit of terry-towellingness.

L&P and a mixed bag of lollies. In the car at Paeroa, naturally.

Grandad and Ned, having a moment.

Ten thousand pounds poorer. 

Merry Christmas!

Ahem. So, we are in New Zealand,some of us on a big marlin-catching glamorous boat, some of us in the living room at our parent’s place while we try not to get too sad looking out of the window at the oily rain while we wonder if the children will stop wetting the camper-van-seat-mattresses that they are sleeping on every night, and while we wonder how to get the weesy-pyjamas washed and dried in time before the Northland mugginess makes everything smell a little like wet dog. 

More Questions Raging Through My Wind-Swept Jet-Lagged Mind:

1. Will the children like it here better than London?

2. Does London miss me? Has it even noticed I am gone?

3. Why does is the bread in New Zealand (nattily named Breads Of The World in the supermarket over the road where, incidentally, I was an ace checkout girl about 18 YEARS AGO) all spongey and soft and white and samey? Did the French teach us nothing? (Actually, I suppose the French haven’t actually visited all that much, but still.)

4.If the rain continues, what shall we do to entertain the children? They will most certainly turn to furtive scribbling on the walls, that that won’t go down very well with the grandparents.

5. Who wants to play Scrabble?

6. Can I eat more of Dad’s baking without getting really fat?

7. Why does my new Christopher Kane tattoo jumper just look like a floral polyester middle-aged-lady’s top in this country? (I know the answer to that one, actually. CONTEXT.)

8. Why am I lacking so obviously in seratonin? Will my vitamin D deficiency get sorted out with all this rain?

However, the coffee has been routinely good, the first week at the bach mostly a ball of joyous fun.The cousins turned out to be excellent, The Salvation Army filled with people I have grown up with, all lovely and friendly and fun, the magazines excellent, the feijoa-related foodstuffs the thing of dreams.There is a little tiny 1940’s beach house we have our eye on. The is pohutakawa everywhere you look. Oh! And we finally found our wedding album after thinking that it was lost forever, hidden amongst boxes of cracking 30-year-old tupperware and mouldering cushions and dead mice in our Storage Room Of Unbelievable Junk.

And we had TWO bonfires at the beach with marshmallows on sticks, no less.

Here are some photos to make all of you in the Northern hemisphere a tiny big bit jealous:

The flight was as unspeakably horrendous as I knew it would be. It was so much worse than giving birth. Instead of a nice new baby at the end of it all, you got New Zealand Customs. They make you take your shoes off. There were tears. The children thought it was the middle of a very long night, having had about 4 hours sleep over two days. We were bleary and cranky and sweaty and sick with clothes that had bits of unidentifiable curry sauce all over in dribbly patches. Dry skin. Red moisture-less eyes that wouldn’t close very convincingly. Breath of the devil. Flat hair, new spots, burgeoning sinus infections, fat ankles, baggy redundant maternity tights, no tolerance for people, customs, relatives or kind friends.

Merry Christmas!

Anyway. There are ways to feel less like you are at the bottom of the Pacific on a rainy grey day. Bidding on Alex Monroe gold bumblebee pendants and putting DVF ipad cases into my shopping cart at matchesfashion.com are all things that soothe the homesick tender self. Buying stuff from amazon that will be sitting for me waiting under the rickety stairs to my basement flat.

Bayswater, I love you more now than I ever did. I will see you soon, after another 36 hour journey with no baby at the end. 

Fish makes me sad, too.

I am a little bit thinner. And I can drink prosecco with abandon. I have retrieved all of my unforgiving pencil skirts and other tight stuff out of the dusty suitcase mentally marked “Not To Be Opened For About Two Years” and put them back into the wardrobe, along with M&S huge underwear that sucks in your gut and redistributes the fat all the way up to your boobs. On the less bright side, I have had to hastily shove the maternity stuff into that same dusty suitcase and hide it away. Not to be used just now, anymore.

Anyway. Here are some things I have learned.

1. When someone tells you that they have had a miscarriage, do not say the following:

a) It was really a blessing, when you think about it, because you are about to fly to New Zealand and it would have been so uncomfortable to do that while pregnant;

b) You shouldn’t have flown. I was going to say to you, when you said you were going to fly to Morocco, that that was a bad idea; and

c) Ah well, there must have been something very wrong. It’s Nature’s way, don’t you think?

These things are a bit awkward and slightly embarrassing for all concerned, once they leap out of a mouth and hang limply, forlornly, in the air. I think, when faced with the conversational topic of a miscarriage, that it is best just to express that you are very sorry to hear it. Listen to the story, if it is offered, then perhaps give the lady a little hug, flowers if you must, a card, cash, whatever. Just a thought. But, please, none of the above Sentences Of Shame.

So, in the aftermath we have decided to go out lots and make ourselves overtired and a bit cold-symptomy in order to soak up some northern hemisphere pre-Christmas festive cheer before we board that Emirates Flight Of Despair and Sadness. A list of going-out-shenanigans:

1. Dinner with our excellent architect friends at the Dean Street Townhouse, where we ate so much rib-eye steak and bearnaise sauce chips and red wine and 17th century pickled grapes and devilled eggs that we staggered home and had to be a bit sick. Which is a bit shameful, really, and a bit gluttonous and deeply, deeply, unstylish.

2. The Shepherd Bush Empire for a nostalgic trip amongst portly New Zealand men in their 40’s to listen to the soft-rock legend that is Dave Dobbyn. We arrived at 8, and heard he wasn’t on until 9:15. Panicky looks passed between us because it meant we had to survive on one G&T for an hour (antibiotics for me, driving responsibilities for him) and we had to chat for one hour and 15 minutes to each other, looking lively and happily married in case we saw someone we knew, or we got hit on. Luckily, in through the door bounded my brother’s wife’s sister’s family, whom we hadn’t seen since 1999. PHEW. Then we got a parking ticket. But Dave was excellent, and hobbity, and made us sing loud student-pub-songs all together. It made us a little bit sad for home.

3. Winter Wonderland. AVOID! It costs thousands of pounds for terrible rides and awful chips.

But there were very nice cinnamon pretzels (see above) and the children cracked a few smiles. Noah poked a lot of tongue, which got boring for us, but not for him.

And a two minute heinously expensive ride which made Casper cry.

(Gratuitous shot of the baby, who is still resolutely good-looking:)

 And more tongue.

4. Out on Friday night to Erin’s 40th birthday. Erin is so good-looking that I want to kiss her face. But I didn’t, I just drank the prosecco instead, and I got louder and MUCH MUCH FUNNIER as the night wore on. I would like to state that I wore a vintage home-sewn dress with a very tight ebay YSL belt which usually makes me feel a bit carsick with the pressure, but that it fitted rather nicely, and I didn’t feel ill at all. I plan to get thinner and thinner until I arrive back in New Zealand, and I will be so thin that the customs officials will swoon and high-five me. But, I digress.  It was in a private room at a restaurant in Portobello, filled with charming bankers and Germans and Scots and French and South Africans and even the Italians. It was ace.

5. Tomorrow night we are off to Chez Bruce for Neradah’s birthday. She is also thin, thinner than me, and makes excellent cakes and brownie. She has raven-black hair and a baby called Fox.

6. Last weekend, Mark spent all Sunday evening at a cage fighting competition in deepest Croydon. He said it was fun. I am baffled, and extremely pleased that the invitation didn’t extend to me. Apparently there were not only women dancing in the cages between fights, but also some small kid. Hmmm.

I have run out of outings to write about now, but this is mostly because I have a lasagne in the oven and I can smell it and that means it is about to burn. I am sure we have done more stuff, but it all has to wait. Until next time, then. But, in the meantime, we are fine, thanks for all of the lovely comments and care and stories shared. xx

Here is Casper wearing Tom Ford Cherry Lush, waving you off:

So. Morocco.

There were some very good bits. Here is our riad – a bit far through the winding alleyways of the old town for geographically-challenged me, but lovely:

And the deceptive riad front door: Who knew there would be a sunny-ish courtyard oasis just inside? With clementines and dates and endless silver teapots filled with sugary fresh mint tea?

And here I am, on my first day in Marrakech, about to eat a decidedly average rooftop lunch, but very happy anyway, even though my dress was a little bit short and my pregnant belly just a little bit too sticky-outy.

The sign for the traditional hammam. We didn’t go to that one, because it looked a bit scary. We went to the lovely posh one. But look! The sign is so lovely!

And more signage of loveliness:

And the old town:

And me, at the Majorelle Gardens, looking smilingly colour-coordinated and a bit posey:

Those things, and the excellent company of Jo and Rebecca, and the souks and the Berber musician-seller-guy who kissed up and made us buy castanets and ugly drums and the terrible charlatan reiki healer who fleeced me £40 and the annoying hotel guide Hakim and the wonderful lamb tajines and the scarves made from 100% pashmina (hmmmm) and the sun and the hammam and the TIME OFF FROM DEMANDING TODDLERS was all wonderful.

The Bit That Gets Unpleasant:

On our first day I started bleeding a little bit. On our first morning in Marrakech I woke up to find a lot more blood. Throughout the day the bleeding continued and I figured out I was having a miscarriage. I thought I wouldn’t tell Mark, or go to a hospital, but just wait and see. By the afternoon, I was cramping and so we texted mark and he wanted me to go to hospital. We called a cab, and just as I was getting ready to go, I stood up and felt something come out in a flood. It was the placenta, along with a lot more blood.

We got to the hospital with me bleeding everywhere. The hospital was scary, and there was very little English spoken. I was seen by a besuited doctor, obviously on-call and mid-way through his restaurant meal when we was called to me. He examined me and said that the fetus was still inside and he needed to give me an operation to remove it. I was separated from Jo and Rebecca and wheeled away, into a room with a young nurse who spoke English. She said I would have another baby, and she would be beautiful. The anaesthetist came in and pumped my arm full of drugs which stung like acid, then I fell asleep for half an hour, only to wake up and start sobbing. The nurses stroked my hair and asked me why I was crying and I said it was because I lost my baby.

I was wheeled back into another room which had nothing in it, no flushing toilet, no supplies, and Jo and Rebecca found me. We stayed there for two hours, and I got cleaned up and was allowed to go back to the riad. I got to take the baby with me in a plastic container.

That part was not good. I called Mark and he was so sad. So was I. So we still are. I have never understood why miscarriages affect people. I thought if you didn’t know your baby, and your baby was small, and not ready, then you would be ok if it died. But I see now that I was wrong. I am really sad about my baby. I feel empty, and wounded, and weak, and quiet.

So.

So, I am not pregnant any more, like I was, on Friday, when I arrived for my lovely weekend off. It was very odd leaving Marrakech thinner, emptier, older, wiser. I am tired, achingly-tired, and ready to sleep. I just thought you had to know.

Tomorrow I wake at 5 and get to Gatwick and board an easyjet flight bound for sunshiny Marrakesh. There is not much to say about how excellent that is. You will just have to imagine.
So I am packing and wondering what to wear and fretting a little, and hoping that the boys will be ok, fed, watered and put to bed on time-ish while I am away. I hope their dad doesn’t go too mental when they break stuff and scream and draw vampire bats instead of doing subtraction equations.

Things that I fear may break my husband:

1. The baby has found a sneaky way to the nobs on the boiler and has been ‘playing’ with them by ‘removing’ them and now we have a boiler only works if you whack it. We have built a complicated system of washing-dryer-racks around the boiler to thwart the baby from his mission, but it seems in vain. He is stealthy like a cat.

2. The children have no respect for rugby matches. Apparently there is an important game on this weekend, but these things can only be enjoyed if the children want to let you enjoy them. And they are so fond of Nickelodeon. I know who will win this one.

3.  I overheard him telling them that they will do some cooking together. HA! If only he knew how small curious fingers (which always feel a little bit wet and suspicious) and cooking utensils/bags of flour/hot ovens Do Not Mix. There will be a few trips to Burger King, I think.

4. The mornings which have to begin at 6:15am. This requires a strong will and a deep fear of getting to school late. I am the only one who has these characteristics.

5. The subtle differences in the packed lunches (salami in one, peanut butter and jam in the other, one kid hates yoghurt, the other is revolted by pears, etc etc) the uniforms, the whereabouts of the socks, the way to turn on the washing machine, the biodegradable rubbish bags which break all over you when you hoist them out of the bin.

And on and on, to infinity and beyond.

Anyway, here are some photos of Waddesdon Manor and the children running amok at the park and autumnal things like that:

Hilarious Question: What is chunky, slightly bilious, tired at 9pm and 9 weeks pregnant?

Hilarious Answer: Me.

Ithankyouverymuch. It turns out that Istanbul was not only good for rugs and apple tea, but also CONCEPTION. Happiness all round, not exactly misty-eyed romantic visions of the future and irrepressible excitement, but a general quiet hurrah. Questions do, however, linger, such as:

1. Is it illegal to have 5 small children sleeping in one room?

2. How will we get the children to school?

3. Is there such a thing as a compact three-seater buggy?

4. Will the police stop me owing to my small-children-girth taking up the whole of Bishop’s Bridge?

5. Will I ever turn into a lean running-type person who says no to carbs? [that is a general question about myself, not exactly related to a new baby, but I thought I would throw it in anyway, BECAUSE I AM TIRED OF BEING A BIT WOBBLY]

6. Are those whispered-about fifth delivery stories really true? Best not to think about it, really.

etc etc. All of which I should probably have posed before the Istanbul Incident (or, as it shall henceforth be known, the Turkey Basting). But anyway, recklessness is my kind of thing.

I went to the doctor and he weighed me and said I was a bit of an enormous fat elephant. That is what I heard, in any case. So I have been attempting ‘portion control” – you know, when you give yourself some cheese on toast, then halve it, then eat that small, lonely bit on your plate, then feel a bit sad, then later get so hungry you eat the children’s soggy roast potatoes that they have half-masticated and then you eat some cooking chocolate because you are so very hungry. So far, my brushes with portion control have been less than satisfactory. I have also been doing tricep dips. I have done about seven. And I walk to school ‘with intent’. Meanwhile, the small grape-sized baby has puffed me up to a discomforting level. And everything smells repulsive.

Enough about that. On the evenings that I do not go to bed at 8:59pm, we have been busy doing London cultural things. On Thursday we went to Bethnal Green, a small south London enclave best known for the Museum of Childhood and for a terrible air-raid-shelter-crush that killed 173 people in 1943. We were there for an odd event where we all sat in a big hall, in the pitch black, and listened to a blind couple from Mali called Amadou and Mariam sing loudly and enthusiastically with an even louder and more enthusiastic clanging band, in between a recorded story of their lives together. They also piped incense into the hall. It was loud, odd, and very disconcerting, sitting in the dark for an hour and a half amid a riot of african electro-folk. And we couldn’t find anywhere to eat, in the gastronomic wilderness that is Bethnal Green. Not even a friend chicken joint could be found.

The last night we had 22 people come over for Bonfire Night sausages and spit-roasted pork. It was lovely, except that our children did some biting of other children, and there was crisps on the carpet, orange juice spilled on the floor, a sick and silent Casper who fell asleep watching the fireworks in the garden, and hardly anyone ate my Nigella brownie. Which means I must, but of course I cannot, because of my new Eating-Plan-For-Non-Chunkiness.

And let us not forget Halloween, which is a bit of a big deal in this hemisphere. We had a party for the vampire-and-witchy-clad kids in a church hall which seemed a little incongruous, and I did some terrible face painting with a sharp little brush which must have taken layers of skin off those poor little formerly-smooth-skinned kids. They were wincing as I dragged the sharp bristles over their roundy cheeks.We then gatecrashed the lovely borough of Hammersmith for the trick or treating. Frankly, it is a better class of chocolate bar to be found there.

So, it has been all go go go. And now we are off to a friends house for an early dinner. She is Sri Lankan, and promises to feed the children with fried rice, and us with spicy national dishes. I will attempt to halve my plate. Or not, actually.

Ahem. AHEM!

*chinks wine glass, pointedly, clumsily, a little too hard and it breaks and so I have to go and find the dustpan and brush and I cut my finger and I sweat a little bit and swear*

ATTENTION PLEASE IF YOU WILL:

The Secret Genius Project was unleashed onto the mildly interesting but mostly modestly genteel world of the UK nursery industry. With a polka-dotted BANG.

Here it is, in all of its trade-show-plonky-storytelling-way:

Yoogobaby slideshow

Ta dah! That is what two years and unmentionable amounts of money will get you. An inflatable travel cot which fits into your hand luggage, no less.

So we entered a competition for new products for the nursery industry and got through to the semi finals, which meant we had a stand at the London trade show and got to show it to buyers, retailers and manufacturers, and try to gauge the interest. We won the competition and got some money and some validation from the industry that it is a good idea. And now we have to get it ready for sale in the european spring.

The trade show was kind of boring but also kind of fun, because we felt like we had a job. And everyone thought we were totally brilliant. There were no chairs, so we had to peddle it standing all day on mid-heels and I got a cold sore from the stress of being a saleslady. It also may have come from the lack of fruit and vegetables that I consumed over the three days. There was only a Tesco store to buy your sandwiches and I may have contracted a cold-sore-type-no-vegetables-scurvy. There was also this odd free cake PR situation downstairs and so every day I grabbed a slice of raspberry and white chocolate mud cake which was awesome but which gave me sugar-manicness, which, actually, helped me a a very enthusiastic saleslady. Practically kissing anyone who came near. I hope they didn’t get any coldsores.

There was also an unfortunate prototype incident where the cot got stuck in FedEx purgatory in Stansted after leaving New Zealand at the last minute. We had to drive there and pick it up on Saturday, the day before the grand unveiling at the show, when we were supposed to be setting up our polka-dot cacophony of matching travel-cot accessories and our plinth, atop of which sat a monitor displaying the exact slideshow above. I am nothing if not technically proficient. Anyway, we got caught in traffic, and arrived at FedEx on a Saturday with no tracking number, and a cold sweat. LUCKY WE HAVE MOBILE PHONES AND IPADS, EH? Phew. So we got that sorted and then proceeded to be glamorous clever ladies all weekend with tidy hair and shellacked nails and a great line in leaflet-presentation. I learned to scan the name-badges for barcodes, because them with barcodes were buyers, and thrust the leaflet into their hand while offering the plaintive cry “Inflatable travel cot?” in a coquettish manner.

Anyway, enough about that. The only other thing to say is that the four days of prototype retrieval/flogging meant that no one else was here to do the dreadful domestic Tasks Of Dullness. And CHAOS REIGNED. No one put the rubbish out, did the washing, made the lunches, bought food, put the rent money into the rent account, opened letters, emptied the school bags, replied to emails or opened letters. We were all very glum and hungry and we missed having mummy around. Even me. So, absolute kudos to working women everywhere who have to do all the working, and all of the boring stuff that make a family actually work. Those dull little details that, once ignored, bring everyone to a miserable standstill. In this case, my 50’s housewifey arrangement actually makes cold, hard sense.

Anyway, I am off tomorrow to Derby to see if our manufacturers want to invest. Hurrah! Wish me luck!

Here it is – the cake. The cake that my husband bought me. Ha! I am clearly loved after all!

Thank you, dear Patisserie Valerie, for your enthusiastic spewy layers of cream and sponge and sauce and chocolate icing and more layers of soft foam and more sponge finished off with strawberries encased in some slippery jelly and chocolate balls and enormous waves of chocolate sheets. It was not a subtle cake. It was a cake that shouted

HAPPYBIRTHDAYLETSBECOMEENGULFEDINSYNTHETICSUGARDSANDFAKECREAM

and then it did a little dance and then it lay down waiting to die. The children were a bit hesitant. Dare I say that they were actually intimidated by that cake. It was a cake of pre-recession excess. It was an orgy of unfashionable Goldman Sachs-type confectionery greed. And this is what it did to our faces and this is why we have shiny sugar-high druggy eyes:

Actually, the baby has a cakemouth, it is true, but he also has a busted lip from falling off his chair and smacking his face onto the corner of another chair, splitting his lip and then bleeding all over himself and me. He did that on my birthday. We were trying to go out to dinner at L’Autre Pied. The timing was a bit off, really.

And that was also the day the double buggy broke into two pieces on our way home from school when we had stopped to peer over the railings into someone’s basement flat to look at their rabbit called Twitch. Twitch was looking entirely unmoved, as usual, as we all hung over the pointy Victorian railings calling his name in high-pitched baby voices. Twitch just stares into middle distance. Sometimes he chews stuff, to be fair, but mostly he stares and stays perfectly still, except for a bit of name-sake twitching. He is really boring, but we still stop by twice a day and call out to him in the vain hope he will give us some sort of acknowledgement. But anyway, this day, the wheels just fell away in an almost Biblical fashion and so we had to get home by angling the front wheels into the air. I was pretty cranky and irrational (sample dialogue “It’s my BIRTHDAY! Can’t you boys stop whining and hassling me? Now the wheels have come off, and I think it was really YOUR FAULT! Because you were ANNOYING! And now I have to push this thing home halfway up in the air! IT’S MY BIRTHDAY!” etc etc in similar illogical and quite mean fashion.)

And this was on the back of a terrible embarrassing supermarket tantrum from Casper which ended up with us walking aimlessly in Hyde Park while kind strangers offered to help me with my screaming hysterical child. It was because I went the wrong way home, apparently. Finally a lady came over with an enormous terrier who sniffed Casper’s face and froze him with terror and stopped his screaming – and prevented him from saying anything at all for about 20 minutes. He finally croaked out a little, wounded, sad, and whispered explanation:

“That big doggy scared me, mummy.”

Top tip: If your kid goes publicly mental, frighten him or her with a huge breathy canine! It is waaay better than squeezing their upper arms.  

And in other birthday news, I got a lovely lotus necklace, a bag for long toiletry items, a Diptyque candle in Rose, a Kate Sylvester tee shirt, tickets to Marrakesh, chocolate, cards, lunch at The Providores, some free babysitting, and I am yet to go and buy myself Chanel’s Peridot. Not too shabby, all in all. Here is me (inexplicably smirking) in my new shirt about to drown myself in my cake’o’excess:

And that, as they say, is a wrap.

Tomorrow it is my birthday, and we are in the middle of an October heatwave. It is very kind of the weather gods to give me BBQ weather and a bit of a shoulder tan and an excuse to wear the summer frocks for a little while longer. It almost eases the pain of being in my middle -30’s. How bloody awful is that? I remember thirtysomething being on telly when I was supposed to be in bed when I was still young and hopeful of a meaningful career/future tamed flaxen locks/eventual thinness and they all seemed like ALIENS because they were so old.

I am now irretrievably thirtysomething. Ach.

The benefits, they say, of this horrible ageing truth is that alongside the grey patches and the sinking decollete and the tentative creases that spring up each time I inspect my forehead with a magnifying mirror will be a new-found freedom. A liberation from feeling like I have to fit in, from caring what people think of me, the sweet relief from calorie-counting and feeling guilty about stuff. Obviously, as my last self-indulgent post in which I moaned about my upper arms and feeling like the big dumb new girl in a bad frock shows that we have not found the elusive 30-something complete liberation yet. But it is coming. I feel it in my ageing waters.

Meanwhile, I have learnt some stuff:

1. The girls who looked groomed at 12 and 13 were actually BORN groomed. And their mothers were groomed. They had no choice but to be groomed. They probably felt terribly jealous of my way with the bed-head hair and the stains in my clothes. You do not just reach an age where you are miraculously waxed/tinted/toned/clean/ironed/blowdried. You have to actually be born into a groomed family and then you will suck up the groomedness by osmosis. If you did not grow up in such a family, you have to TRY EXTRA HARD AND PAY OUT LOTS OF MONEY. And you have to lie to your husband about how much it costs. And yours will be the blowdry that falls out halfway through the evening, and yours will be the heel that snaps and yours will be the sleeve with mysterious dried food-matter stuck on it. Remember the eyelash disaster? A case in point.

2. It is ok to find a style when you are about 23 – you can wear cardigans and fifties skirts and little pumps with a myriad of vintage brooches and plastic beads, only then to decide that you have to change your look when these things make you look absurd. You can also start spending money on buying grownup stuff, like tailored things and excellent makeup. You kind of HAVE to. Those young girls will always look cuter. So you have to look excellenter.

3. You don’t have to dance or go to nightclubs if you feel like a giant dickhead. You can call it a night at 11pm. That’s totally fine with me.

4. You don’t have to be friends with people who make you feel bad. They can go. Hang out with people who read and who make you laugh and who understand that the shape of the shoulders on a blazer could actually be the topic of conversation for a good length of time. People who like food and wine and dressing up and talking about nothing/everything- these are the ones who can stay.

5. Don’t bother reading books that you don’t love. This one causes me much discomfort but I think it is true. Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook – I am looking at you right now, all forlorn and read up until the last 60 pages. You were BORING.

6. If someone invites you to Marrakech for the weekend, you should go. And so I am. Middle of November, in fact. There were cross words spoken, and a bit of needling and whining and sulking but the tickets have been booked. Hurrah! There shall be more souks, apple tea, shisha pipes and enormous swinging breasts in another steamy hammam. Which brings me to my last point:

7. Bodies. Who cares? Just wear that tight sucking-in underwear, pop your boobs out, wear lots of lipstick, be funny, wear a cardigan, no one will notice if you aren’t all 17 years old-esque. Or, more correctly, they won’t care. And women who eat are far more fun to be around. FACT.

Anyway, tomorrow I leave the land of the early-thirties and enter into the far more sophisticated mids. It will be awesome, especially if I get a cake. I will have to get my own, but that in itself is kind of liberating, is it not? You want some cake? Buy it yourself! (Actually, I am not convinced by that one.) I will post some photos of my self-bought cake, and I will list any presents I get. I imagine that the list will be blunt, short and to the point. I am hoping I can grow to be ok about this.