The Harridan

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.

We went to Istanbul last week for five days with no children.

(That, frankly, is worthy of a sub-heading).

We nearly didn’t go because we thought our darling lovely friend Evelyn (who was the babysitter) was having a heart attack. BUT after a day of asthma inhaling and chest infections and heart monitors and a long day of tests at St Mary’s hospital, she was ok, and she looked after the children very well, and no one died. It was all ok. PHEW.

So. Istanbul was wonderful, but we were surrounded by younger-than-me-no-children-thin-upper-arms energetic young people who not only could stay up for two consecutive nights past 12am, they also dressed entirely appropriately for the evening boat cruise along the Bosphorus for the wedding reception we were all there for.

I became sickeningly aware, within minutes of exiting the hotel room and lining up with all of the others waiting for the minicab to take us to the ferry, that I looked completely WRONG. The Youth all understood that they were to look sharp and eveningy and all work cocktail frocks and the men were in stylish suits. The women had their hair all proper and they had high heels and shawls and they had evening bags and they glistened with RIGHTNESS. I was wearing a crepey tea dress that was a bit 40’s and not at all evening and then I forgot my McQueen blazer in which to add a stylish punch and had very little makeup and NO HAIR PRODUCTS and only that morning we had been to the hammam for thorough naked-lady-cleansing and the enormous-breasted Turkish naked lady in parachute knickers had washed my hair in banana shampoo (no conditioner) which had dried in the taxi-ride-wind home like a crinkly wooly lamb. It was all a bit awful. And my upper arms, which have begun to let themselves go, were a bit white and soft and lumpy. I thought it would be too hot for sleeves. HOW WRONG I WAS.

Here are some pictures. (I must add, though, that because the whole uncomfortable thing is still so fresh, that I won’t put those photos in which show the wind pressing my dress very tightly to all of the lumpen parts. You just have to imagine those.)

Here I am, hiding, shamed.

So. Other than that sartorial crisis, and the after-reception nightclubbing which I spectacularly failed at, moaning about my sore feet and the music being too loud, and looking so cranky and miserable that one of the thin and appropriately attired girls  came up to me, rubbed my arm, and shouted through the house beats “OHHHHH, ARE YOU MISSING YOUR KIDS?” to which I cackled shrilly and said “NO WAY, JOSE!”, the actual five days in Istanbul sans children was brilliant.

Here are some pomegranates which the man juiced for us so we could drink:

And photos from the Grand Bazaar:

Aaaand there was a turkish delight shop so lovely, I ACTUALLY died for a short while:

It makes me feel a bit sick, because I like to eat about five pieces in one go, and your teeth sting a little bit afterwards. But it is heavenly, all the same.

Coming home was funny, because while we didn’t miss those pesky kids, it was a relief to get back to them. Awful as they are, they are ours, and we have gotten used to the awful. The awful is ok, actually. It might even be quite fun, depending on how you look at it. And the baby was weaned, cold-turkey-like, while we were away, which means that he now screeches at me even more and I feel sorry for him and I carry him around while trying to load the dishwasher/wipe down the weetabix-encrusted table/pay bills online etc. The only consolation is that my upper arms may remember their former youthful tone so that I can wear them exposed the next time we are invited to cruise the Bosphorus on a late summer evening in a glamorous manner. SIGH

Last Sunday I forced us all to get into the car and drive to castle. As you do, when it is the last weekend of the Longest School Holidays In History and it is raining and you cannot face more indoorsy screaming and weetabix underfoot and the cushions getting taken off the couch to make huts. I cannot understand it – those boys wake up, get out of bed, go straight to the couch, take every cushion off, lay them on the floor, then walk away again. Every day of our combined lives. You go to sink down into the couch and whack your head against the wooden leather-covered frame. Is nothing SACRED? NO.
Anyway we were supposed to drive for an hour and a half to the castle and then we could use our new National Trust membership cards to get in free. But there was some cycling thing on near the river and all the roads were closed and the GPS sent us in ways that were long and mental and illogical and it rained heavily and we arrived at a pub at about 1pm and it was torrential and we had lunch and the children upset all of the locals because they had been strapped into the car for THREE HOURS. And it was extremely average Sunday Roast.
But then the rain cleared and look! A photographic essay of fabulousness:

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Did you notice the technological slideshow wizardry? Another triumph, which I can add to my mastering voicemail on the phone this morning. If you call me, and you leave me a message, I will TOTALLY be able to locate the message and hear it. I am impressing MYSELF with my knowhow.

So. The kids are back at school, I have accidentally sent someone a YSL jacket without them paying for it (another ebay FAIL), I have been up to Chesterfield to see a manufacturer and been away a whole day and then been locked out of the flat for an hour and even then no one noticed I was gone, I had a fight with a designer and a fight with a lady from the head office of the nursery and I currently have a little bit of poo juice on my leg thanks to the baby.

But.

It is all ok, because this afternoon Evelyn is coming to stay in our lounge and she is going to be our babysitter when we fly off to Istanbul for four days on Friday. That is so monumentally fantastic that even the poo juice doesn’t matter much.

Meanwhile the Rugby World Cup is on, and everyone in the house must be quiet and must not fight each other around the TV or distract Mark from the games. If these rules are not obeyed, somehow I am responsible and I get black looks and people yell at me. So I must get the children dressed and take of the poo juice pyjamas and leave this house of interminable rugby and go out in search of tasty cake-like treats to fool Evelyn into thinking this babysitting gig was a good idea.

I shall leave you with this:

A baby who is playing in a puddle. It was ok with me. Other parents looked on in horror. When will they stop with the horrified looks? Chill out, Passers By and General Populace. Dirt and water and sand and soil is good. I draw the line at glass, ok?

This is how bored I am:

I just washed my hair at 2pm.

I am considering going through my clothes, ironing the unloved, photographing them, listing them on ebay.

I am ‘supervising’ the holiday homework. (I am secretly actually AGAINST holiday homework. Who cares if they cannot write their name when they get back to school? Who cares if they have forgotten how to hold a pen/sit at a desk/count? Not me. But that is because I am an apathetic middle-class parent who is a bit lazy and disengaged. At least I am self-aware, if not actually good at the hard parts of parenting).

I am not only bored, but I am sulking. Because I would like to spend the last 12 days we have left of these holidays staying somewhere where there is

a)a sun

b)no rain

But we are not going anywhere. And so I will have to get used to wearing jeans and weatherproof boots. IN AUGUST.

We are all so bored and sulky we are making involuntary low moaning sounds. We are half-dressed, we are cranky, we are finding toothpicks and are making small holes in the leather couch with the pointy end. We are also wetting our pants and then hiding.

That is what happens when you are five weeks into a holiday but you go NOWHERE. Bad, bad things.

Anyway. Sigh. Low moan.

Kerry sent me this, and I am to post ten interesting things about myself. This may just alleviate the deep pain of my holiday ennui but it may not be interesting.

1. I studied film and art history at university. Swedish Film was the best. It involved long Friday afternoons in the AV department basement, watching Ingmar Bergman movies. I was “learning”.

2. We own a property in Auckland. It has two houses on it, some chickens and some rotting verandas. We used to think we would like to come back to it and live there. That was before we had hundreds of children who now will not fit. Planning ahead FAIL.

3. I have no parental panic button. It is entirely missing. When the children do dangerous things, I merely shrug, if I bother to look up at all. Two years ago, Noah fell from a cafe chair into a small Greek harbour. I just kind of watched, interested. Mark dived in and saved him. I think this lack of panic may be our downfall.

4. I am seafood-phobic. It all disgusts me. I won’t touch chips if they have been wrapped up in newspaper close to fish. Prawn crackers are revolting. I am nervous of fish sauce. Anchovies are the devil. Seafood, in all of its slimy stinky guises, is my krypotonite. (As is maths, to be fair).

5. My mother is a very good landscape painter. I used to be fairly good at art at school. Now my genius six year old firstborn is impressing me with this kind of stuff:

Meanwhile, his brother, who is perhaps less artistically gifted but no less perceptive, has come up with this lovely drawing of him and his enormously-wide-girthed dad:

So.

6. I had a very large mullet while growing up. It started off quite flicky and manageable, but, post-puberty, my short mullety bits grew outwards from my head like a bushy lion’s mane, with long silky wavy brushed pony hair running down my back. It was a bit like this:

It was a very difficult mullet to deal with. So at about 12, I sacrificed the long pony hair at the back, to allow the lion’s mane to ‘join in’ with the rest of my head. It worked. I have been mullet-less for 22 years now. *proud, sheds a tear, high fives self*

7. I speak no languages other than English. I know little about politics and I am embarrassingly ignorant of current affairs. Yet I think I am quite smart. It may be all relative.

8. My parents took me to Disneyland in California twice when I was a child. My much older brothers and sister stayed home. I cannot comment on it all really, except to say it was awesome. For me, not so much for them.

9. I met my husband when I was 14. I used to think I was somehow disadvantaged by meeting him when I was so young, but I now think I am lucky.

10. I believe in God, and think that that is why I am not often glum. My cheery disposition is directly related to my thoughts about God, or so I think. I used to be a Sunday School teacher but I was a bit rubbish. I also used to play this rather averagely:

In a group a little bit like this:

But I was younger, and sporting a mullet.

There has only really been pyjamas til midday and a smattering of brotherly suffocation. All in all, a very elegantly spent summer holiday, thank you very much, even if we have not been to the continent like every other self-respecting Londoner.

Of course, there were the riots last week, which initially seemed to be happening Somewhere Else, like south of the river or somewhere indistinctly north in some place that I have never been to, on account of being spoilt in my rich-person’s enclave of W2, where the most damage that may befall you happens to your credit card and just perhaps some old lady will yell at you, but not real damage damage.

But then the riots happened in Queensway! Like, two streets away! Look:

Aaaaand so that was a little bit too close for comfort. Now there are police everywhere, and in the days that followed the Notting Hill smash-n-grab there were cops dramatically arresting the local hoodies, and sirens going all the time. And everyone kept inside. Very apocalyptic, although also very short-lived. The shop windows had been boarded up, but the last few are now being replaced, and the show has gone on.

We were never really in any real danger at all – shopkeepers and small businesses were the ones who have been hurt, although patrons at The Ledbury were apparently robbed of their wallets and jewellery. PHEW lucky we weren’t there, spending a fortune on small but delicious puffs of parsley-flavoured souffles and tiny terrines.  We ate all that stuff at Maze on Saturday night instead, and had the kitchen tour, which was extremely awkward.

“Hello! How has your evening been? Please come over here (mind the boiling hotplate even though you are on your seventh small glass of perfectly matched Greek/South African/Austrian wine) and look at these sweating chefs who would really rather you moved out of the way so they could do their work, and LOOK! a bit of meat and another HOTPLATE! Thanks and byebye.”

Gordon was of course not there. And Neradah says I choose the wrong dessert, and she may well be right. The hazelnut parfait, NOT the lemongrass panna cotta! I am a pudding FOOL. Lessons learnt.

Anyway, the holidays are rapidly whittling away, week by non-productive week, and we have yet to go Camping. Mark thinks that it would be lovely. I disagree, but who am I to say that rain, three small violent boys, a hot gas cooker with a flame, thin nylon walls and a violent baby don’t bode well?  So we wait for a break in the weather and a lapse in the loft-conversion-industry to drive to Wales/Isle of Wight. We wait. We hope.

MEANWHILE

Casper had his booster shot yesterday, and he hardly whimpered, but shed silent, brave tears. When he got out of the nurse’s office, he turned to Barnaby, Noah and Ned and declared

“I nearly DIED”.

It was sweet. They are funny, when they are not garrotting each other with bits of string, which unfortunately happened in front of alarmed and vociferous teens in the garden while the babysitter was soothing a screaming Ned. We were trying to go out to Maze, trying to find dresses that would fit the upper arms without sleeves splitting at the seam, etc etc, and so sent them all out to the garden while we got dressed. Three minutes later they all came trooping back in, with a very shaken babysitter, a cross Barnaby and a red-eyed ashen-faced Noah. Barnaby had him pinned down on the ground and had a string around his neck. There was choking, there were strangers intercepting, there was yelling, there was another episode of PARENTAL SHAME. I get a bit sick of being known as the neighbourhood freakshow.

BUT. They did behave very nicely on Friday when we went to Southend-On-Sea for the day. Casper unfortunately tumbled headfirst down the escalator at Liverpool Street station, and there was some blood and some interaction with the First Aid team, and it was all before 9am, but then we decided that his head injury was quite mild and so a trip to the seaside would be the best thing for him. They swam and played in the fountains and ate fish and chips and had ice creams and I refused to let them play at the funfair.

“PLAY WITH THE SEAWEED! BACK TO THE WATER! NOW! No, we did not spent two hours on the tube and train for you to play arcade games and go on small and very average rollercoaster rides! Get back in the sea for a bit, and put a jumper on if you are cold!”

We are New Zealanders, after all. We are totally FINE about feeling cold and wet. We don’t need shoes. We are HARD. And we do not spend money on arcades and funfairs at the beach, because that is MENTAL.

Anyway, it was awesome, and I got to read about seven pages of my magazine. The rest of the time was taken up with Casper’s frequent trips to the public toilets. He kept telling me he needed to do a poo IMMEDIATELY and so we would wait in the queue, nervous, willing the people in front of us to be fast and not part of a huge and complicated extended family with weak and synchronised bladders only for Cas to sit on the toilet and fart. Small waste-of-time-and-emotional-energy farts. Again and again.

Enough bottom-talk. I have to go and clean the floor because the boys have been playing “Watermelon ShopKeeping”. It involves knives, watermelons, and shot glasses.

I have just been into Waitrose very quickly, mainly to get bread because my husband has expressed his consternation that sometimes there is no bread in the whole house, and it makes him despair and weep a little on the inside, and so we raced in, all five of us, after a long and productive Monday morning at the Pirate Park annoying no one and actually behaving quite well, to get the bread that keeps Dad from Carb-Related-Sadness. But the boys were a bit shrieky when we went into the supermarket, because they HATE shopping, even for crusty posh Gail’s bread, and they were tired, and so all of them were making loud noises in which to ricochet around the tiled cold supermarket walls. And I knew we had to hurry because the noises were not going to get much quieter any time soon. So we go down the first aisle (THE FIRST AISLE) and some AWFUL DREADFUL HORRIBLE old cow of a woman marches straight up to me and says:

“Please do something about the noise that your children are making. It is a supermarket; CONTROL them for goodness sake!”

And I just do an inward sigh and I hold my tongue and I crouch down to them and ask them to be quiet because “THAT WOMAN” pointing and talking loudly “is very mad at you” and then we walk around and we most unserendipidously happen to tail her aisle for aisle and she is really mad and I am really embarrassed and then Barnaby starts to fling his scooter around and she marches up again and tells him to stop and that it is dangerous and that there are other people in the supermarket and he must behave and all the while I just blank her. Really, awesomely.  Like she is imaginary. Or she is just a small insignificant irritant like a persistent fruit midge. And I walked around and kept bloody well passing her or finding myself in the exactly the same part of the cheese aisle, reaching for the same packet of halloumi. It was all deeply uncomfortable for everyone involved, except for the troublemaking children who persisted in being LOUD, aisle after long echoing aisle.

We continued the awkward tailing of each other even at the checkout, but it all became simply too much for her to bear and so she took her self-righteousness and her trolley and her air of  disgust and hid in the wine department. I then loudly told the checkout staff (who LOVE me and the boys, I promise, probably because we startle them awake and our charming antics involving the tossing of blueberry punnets and the squashing of yoghurt pots are endlessly amusing) all about her mean comments and the various sisterhood behind me were all wide-eyed with empathy when I explained what she said. We then (of course) found ourselves at the same traffic light outside. But we each looked into middle distance and I refrained from telling her to have a lovely day in my most sarky voice. Then I followed her home.

Nutty? Yes! The actions of the unhinged? For SHO’! But she was mean, and you can’t cross me. Or you will get shrieking children follow you to your door.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHAHHAHAHA!

A (Less-Mental) List Of Week 2, School Holidays Of No Plans And Bravely Winging It

1. We have been to the Lido, we have played with the hose in the garden, we have been yelled out twice by another old cow in the third story who leans out of the window screeching at the oblivious children who were variously watering some steps/touching dead leaves lying unloved on the grass to “STOP! STOP doing that! Get Your MOTHER here NOW!” while I cower behind the picnic tables waiting for her to stop.

2. We have been out to the Kensington Roof Gardens  where they do actually have pink flamingoes living seven stories above Kensington High Street in a garden which  has uneven paths and odd little bridges over strange little streams. How do I know the bit about the uneven paths? It is because I wore these:

Lovely new Stella McCartney wedges. Impossible to walk in, and very possible to make you fall over, twice. In the gardens, seven stories up in the air, on a still Tuesday summer night in the capital. The Wither Hills Estate marathon didn’t help much. Anyhoo. I hardy felt the gouged knee at the time.

3. Susan and I have progressed rather nicely with our Secret Genius Project and we are through to the semifinalist round of an industry competition. We are pitching to some safety experts in a ten minute prototype-less-but-heavy-on-the-powerpoint-presentation in three weeks. A bit like Dragon’s Den, but without the making-us-weep part. Probably. WHAT will I do with my HAIR???

4.I have branched out in my vegetable baking cannon to include Beetroot Brownie. It was a little bit like someone had made a perfectly normal and delicious brownie, promptly buried it unwrapped in the garden, only to retrieve it weeks later, brushing off the obvious clumps of mud, presenting it with a loving flourish. Unexpectedly, the children loved it. MORE CHOCOLATEY SOIL! MORE CHOCOLATEY SOIL! they clamoured. It was a win, more or less.

5. Noah has relinquished his cuddle blanket. It started off as a very intricate, lovingly woven blanket for the Baby Barnaby, was claimed by Noah, and was taken to bed for years. It looked like this:

It has gone to the Great Cuddle Blanket Resting Place In The Sky. R.I.P.

Hello! Again. Here it is:

1. My FACE! My face is very normal. See:

My hair is less so. That is because of this:

Moroccanoil. It is supposed to make your hair look like a luscious Middle-Eastern belly-dancing queen but it makes me look a bit bald. It also smells of claustrophobia, decay and hippies. Up close:

Lank, dry and you can see my scalp. Which brings me to the next point:

2. My tooth. It got worse, it got bigger and redder and I cried, and so I was packed off to the emergency dentist for a bit of devil-may-care Sunday morning lancing with a scalpel and some suction and no anaesthetic. I am still too scarred from the gum-trauma to go into too much detail, but, frankly, birthing the 11lb babies hurt MUCH LESS.

3. Noah turned 5. We had two cakes. A plastic spider one:

and better-looking cupcakes:

On his actual birthday, cruellest of cruel twists of fate, it was Sports Day. He runs in slo-mo. He runs as though he is underwater. It was painful to watch:

He is not in that photo. He is still intently staring at his shoelaces at the starting line. Welcome to the rest of your life, Dear Son-of-Mine.

And he gave away almost all of his birthday presents. Attached to nothing, bothered by nothing, interested only in TV, sugar and lying upside down on the couch. Preferably without pants on.

Like this, but even more vertical, and even more naked.

However, the party in the garden was lovely. See my lanterns, my bunting, my friends:

So as you can see the garden is looking exceptionally fine, and conspicuously empty, seeing as all of the regulars are off on Euro-jaunts and French farmhouse stays. Bastards. So we practically own it, and we are both weeing in the garden and jumping on the frail garden furniture while we can.

4. We bought Woody Allen’s movie that he made in London two summers ago, using the garden and a flat a few doors away as locations. It was called You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger and it was teeth-grindingly dreadful. Do not buy. But you knew that.

5. The baby has done something mysterious with the La Pavoni coffee machine handle. It cannot work without the handle. The baby refuses to answer my questions about where he has put it. He, conveniently, maintains he DOESN’T SPEAK YET. We are at loggerheads. I am caffeine-free, and I don’t like it ONE BIT. A new one is coming in the post, and it cost £60. That baby is going to pay, someday.

6. Mark’s osteopath came around for cannelloni on Tuesday night. He launched into a story about his detox, which I only heard snippets of because I was doing parenting things. But I heard him talk about a 6-inch long clay-based ‘evacuation’. Mark wants to try. Not on my watch, dude! It made the cannelloni much less appealing.

6. I went a bit mental in the sales. I have (among other questionable purchases) a pair of apricot patent leather Miu Miu raffia sandals which, as you may be able to ascertain, are awful, and some very high and heavy wooden pleather Stella McCartney wedges which will be most excellent in Istanbul in September. You can’t win them all, as they say.

And I shall leave you with this.