The Harridan

No one from Social Services has visited me, or called, nor have I had a letter. I am assuming that I will be left alone, provided that no more incidents happen, or more correctly, that no more incidents get noticed. Which brings me to Monday morning. The Monday Morning Of Awfulness And Resulting Sweaty Armpits.

As you may recall, our filthy buggy got stolen a few months ago, and so now we drag the enormous, new buggy  ( although slightly mouldering in places) down the stairs at night, and up again in the morning. It is just another extra difficult job to do when you are trying to get five people dressed and fed and lunches packed and breastfeeding done and ties found and jackets on and then have to walk fast for 25 minutes to Edgware Road, getting stung in the eyeballs by miniscule black pollution-bits which make your eyes water and your mascara run and your hair gets quite fluffy in the panic and sometimes there are taxi drivers watching you (and I don’t think it is with admiration). Anyway, Mark decided on Sunday night to lock the buggy up halfway down the stairs with a bikechain. Presumably, to make things easier for me.

But OH! He also forgot to give me a key. So, he races off to work at 6am (What? Weird. Suspicious and a bit double-life-y, if you ask me) and I am all unusually very sorted with everything under control and we have about 4 minutes to spare in the Great Ugly Race Against Time and then I look for the key and there is none. I call him. It goes to answerphone. I swear a little bit. He calls me back, and says:

Mark: The key is on your pink key ring.

Me (really angry, but without the leisure of time to fully express it): Oh. Ok. Better go find it, then, in the minute and a half I have left! (Hangs up violently, which, of course, can’t really be done with a push button phone. But there you have it).

Of course, there is no pink key ring. It has joined the thousands of other lost, terribly important things that choose to disappear at inopportune moments. I start getting really panicky. (I should point out here that I have never been late for school drop-off, because that is a thing that Other Parents Do. I like getting the approving smiles from the staff when I arrive on time, and I am scared of having to sign the Late Book.  I am also smug, praise-seeking, and probably a bit of a dick.)

Anyway, while I am searching for the key, getting really sweary, I tell the kids to put on their jackets and wait outside but DO NOT GO UP THE STAIRS! Precious minutes tick by. I finally give up, and decide to take the very small pushchair to put the baby in, and Casper The Reckless Wonder has to go on the scooter.  Not good, but what else can I do? I really don’t want to sign the Late-Person’s Book! Because that would be like, failing.  It is 6 minutes past 8. DANGERZONE. I yell at them all to get up the stairs, quickly! NOW! But they are not where they are supposed to be. They have “disappeared”. I hear giggling. They are all rammed together, hiding under the metal, rusty stairs. Cracking up at their miserable, terrible, annoying and ill-timed joke. And the baby……where is the baby? The BABY!

The Baby, Dear Reader, has climbed up the stairs, past his brothers who have been absorbed in their parental trickery games, and is wandering along the pavement, teetering like a drunkard. And who else is in our road? None other than a carload of your local, friendly POLICEMEN. Yes, uniformed officers are just meters away from my unaccompanied little baby. It was another awesome moment of motherhood.

Luckily, though, they were there for some dramatic prostitute-y matter, and had not noticed the small unaccompanied teetering baby. This close, fellas, THIS CLOSE to real and warranted attention from the authorities.

PHEW.

And In Other News:

I have swapped my alarm clock for this Habitat one in black:

It chirps, sort of like a Robot Sparrow, with laser eyes, and a bit of bobbing of the head. It was supposed to be for Casper, but I changed my mind. But last night, on the virgin run, not a wink of sleep was to be had, because Robot Sparrow emits a red, unnerving, radioactive-esque light and bathes you in it. The numbers light the whole room in womby-red and pierce through your shuttered eyelids like a migrane. Turning Robot Sparrow to the wall just makes the light bounce back into your head. And then, when Robot Sparrow wakes you at 6:30 for the Morning Ugliness, you just want to break him. Charmless.

Anyway. So. Time for True Blood, episode three. Does Anna Paquin’s voice get less adenoidinal?

Ah yes, it is high time, I hear you all muse softly to yourselves, that I post something about my recent brush with the law. If you follow me on twitter, you will have a very clear idea of how Myself and The Law had a hypothetical fisticuff and The Law won. For a bit, anyway.

Ouch.

So, it went like this.

I was walking home with the four kids on Friday from school. We were one street away from our flat. We were walking the same route we always walk, that we walk every day, and have been walking for nearly two years now. The baby was in the buggy, Barnaby was walking ahead and waiting at the curb, Noah was just behind on his scooter, Casper was wandering along muttering something about Scooby Doo and little furry animals. A cop walked up to me, asked me if Barnaby was my kid (pointing to him at the curb) and I said that he was.

Cop: He is too far away from you. He is unaccompanied. That is putting him in danger!

Me: No, it is not. He is six, very road-safe, and we live here. We do this walk every day. He knows to wait. Look! He is waiting right now. There is no problem. We live just over there!

Cop: [Visibly outraged] Are all of these kids yours? What do you think you are doing, letting them run around like that? How old are they all?

Me: They are six, four, nearly-three and one. But they live here! This is our neighbourhood! We do this walk every day! And they are not anywhere near the road. Come on!

Cop: You don’t seem to understand me, madam. This is a very dangerous way of dealing with your children. You are clearly not managing them. They should be either in the buggy or tethered to your buggy. The road is dangerous, madam! The estate over there is dangerous! They could get run over, or snatched!

Me: Yes. The earth could also open up and swallow them. But until it does, I still need to get us to school and back, Officer. And unless you can propose a better way of doing that, then I cannot see how I can do things any better. I have four kids to get to and from school every day, and so we have taught them how to ride their scooters safely, and to wait at the curb. I do my very best to keep them safe. You can see that.

Cop: Your best, Madam, is not good enough. I will have to make this official. I will be contacting Social Services, if you continue to refuse to listen to me.

Me: WHAT? That is ridiculous! We are just walking home from school! My kids are responsible and streetwise and they know how to handle the roads, and the cars, because WE LIVE HERE! This is our home! We live in THAT flat, JUST OVER THERE! What is the problem?

Cop’s Partner: Madam, we are just trying to make it clear to you that these roads are not safe, and if you are just distracted for a second, your children could go onto the road and that is what we are trying to avoid.

Me: I understand what you are trying to say, and I appreciate your concern. Why does your partner think this is suddenly a matter for Social Services?

Cop: Because you are not listening, Madam.

[on and on to infinity and beyond, until they get into their cars to take off, leaving me open-mouthed, scared, and furious. I decide to act.]

I go over to the car, knock on the window, ask for the cop’s name and number, then he gets out and makes it official. Which means, Dear Reader, that when faced with the prospect of me following it all up with a compliant, he preemptively strikes by reporting me both to the station, and to Social Services.

It was awesome. A moment of parental glory. All of those years of not killing the children through neglect or recklessness, all of those years of not going to jail for criminal activity, all of those years of behaving well and never once being an arsonist/kleptomaniac/bad recycler suddenly seemed a Proper Waste Of Time.

So, I wait for Social Services to come and pronounce me actually not worth their time. The real tragedy here is that while the police and social workers spend time on our case, someone else who actually may be in real need of help is being left to wait. Some small child.

Saturday was spent marching up to the police station, all six of us, and me laying a complaint for the intimidation and the bullying and the lack of sense and the way that the police now feel like a threat to me and my family and the unnecessary nastiness of involving Social Services when we were actually having a difference of opinion concerning risk management, and crying, and speaking to a sergeant and an Inspector, and being sweet-talked and placated and PR-ed and then, finally, getting an apology for the way that I felt I had been treated. Yada yada yada.

We walked home, me still snivelling, saying that I was not sure how I could go about my normal daily mothery business of ferrying the chilluns around without being scared of policemen who might decide to report me again if they saw something they subjectively didn’t like, and then an unmarked police car pulled up ahead of us and Original Cop climbs out and walks towards us. He shakes Mark’s hand, turns to me, and apologises. I say to him that threatening people with investigation by Social Services is not the best way to handle these kinds of situations, and that perhaps listening to me would have been a better way to deal with things. Snivel, snivel.

And so there it is. My Brush With The Law. Anyone else been involved with the coppers this weekend, then?

This week, the earthquake happened to people we know, and to lots of people we don’t know. It has been so horrible and dislocating to see the footage and to hear the voices of bleeding, shocked New Zealanders and to watch the aftermath of complete ruination. Our family are safe, and our friends are ok, but their houses are cracked and damaged, and so, I imagine, are their spirits. We watch the death toll creep steadily every morning, and scan the reports from The New Zealand Herald, and we keep crying when we see the faces of those people who died on Tuesday. And the babies…oh, the babies. We have been grabbing our own pesky children frequently and randomly this week, feeling grateful that we have them in our arms for at least six seconds before they wriggle away/headbutt us/cry because we are squashing them just that little bit too hard.

So a blog post feels a bit redundant and ill-judged, but you gotta get back on the horse, I suppose. And so a brief photo shoot of us at Jamie Oliver’s new not-quite-right restaurant in Westfield where we had lunch on Friday, the last day of the blissful half term:

The kid’s menus were actually red plastic viewfinders. Weird. The food all looked a bit day-glo coloured and samey. And here is Casper (he is now too old to be called Custard. He turns 3 this month, and we all have to grow up, some time), looking like he has suffered a head wound, but it is only jam, dudes, only jam:

Because clean hair is overrated.

And a few thoughts, if I may:

1. I asked a man for £50,000 today. He may give it. I hope so. (File this curious snippet under “Secret Genius Project Sketchy Titillating Details” if you will).

2. I made a cake with beetroot. I have done it before and it wasn’t very good then – this one, although layered in chocolate and cream cheese (it makes me feel a bit ill just writing that) – tastes like dirt, and metal, and has turned the skin on my hands a pale puce. And now, I must eat it over a day or two because no one else will touch it.

3. When I walk along the grey and drizzling London streets, I practice talking like a Baltimore gangster in my head. I say things like “Yo” and “What’chu been callin’ me?” and “I’ll whip yo ass” and stuff like that, and although I am getting pretty good at it, it will serve no actual purpose in my life in any real terms.

Everybody does that though, right?

Ok, ok, I spelt “Christensen” wrong. Apologies to all pedants, and possibly to the Danes. I should have checked, but I have unshakable faith in my ability to spell all things right, all of the time. After all, my word skills were honed from a tender age at the knee of the very best wordsmith in the Southern Hemisphere (quite possibly THE WORLD) – my mother, who whips me at Scrabble effortlessly, again and again. She may not have taught me lipstick application, but she did school me in the dark arts of Strategic Word Play and Mostly Very Good Spelling. And so my public spelling-shame hurts me more than it does you, Dear Reader. Just so’s you know.

Anyway, there were some triumphs this week. Most notably the Rigby & Peller sale which happens every year just off Portobello Road. It is housed in the 20th Century Theatre, an old, ah, theatre, and it is full of Rigby & Peller lingerie and bikinis and corsets and Spanx and everything is so cheap it makes my heart beat a little bit too fast. So I got a year’s worth of bras and knickers (and one perhaps questionable bespoke 1970’s pink boned slightly mental and not exactly fitting corsetty thing that I imagined would make me look a bit like Madonna in her cone-bra Jean Paul Gaultier phase – which, er, doesn’t) that together were once worth a combined total of £824 exactly. And I paid the measly sum of £150. Oh, how my top drawer now overflows with mismatching lacy things! I would post a photo, but it may be straying into the too-much-information-about-your-intimates area. Or not. In fact, I took a photo of my racy hoard last year. Ahem.

Anyway, the other important triumph (which incidentally proves that I am both Young and Hip and a little bit Stylish) was that we went to see Mark Ronson at the Roundhouse in Camden. SO STREET. It was good, he was deliciously quiffed, and when Simon Le Bon and Nick Rhodes came out and sang “I only want to be in your record collection, wa hoo” I nearly passed out. But then there was some loud DJing and it was like 10.30 and we were a bit tired and my ears were ringing and so we snuck out.

AND WE MISSED BOY GEORGE!

There are no words to describe the horror of missing Boy George. No words. So you get a line of wordless despair:

Ok. I feel  bit better now. Before I go on further though, I have to just one more time refer to EyelashGate. Look at what two weeks of living with them did to me. Princess Wonky Eye from Big Haired NutterLand:

Needless to say, they have gone, and though I sport less eyelashes than I used to before I was MOLESTED by the eyelash shopgirl, I look like a normal person once again. PHEW.

Things I Regret This Week:

Yesterday I was at the lights waiting to go and buy more glasses for our Spanish Party Of Authentic Tapas From The Spanish Deli And Six Bottles of Wine To Taste (more on this later) and I came across a new baby with his mother and father and I asked how old the baby was and smiled and said I had four and then I weirdly followed them up the street sharing all evangelically-like about my Gina Ford love. The dad totally thought I was mental, possibly in a baby-snatching way.  The mum just looked tired. I really regret it.

Spanish Party Of Authentic Tapas From The Spanish Deli And Six Bottles of Wine To Taste

Once back from my new-parent-stalking and laden down with the finest Marks & Spencer £1 wine glasses we got ready for our party. I wore this rather lovely 50’s dress bought yesterday in a ten minute trip to TRAID on Westbourne Grove:

with a flower in my hair, 2 x Spanx and hold-up fishnets. TRIUMPH (although sitting down was out of the question).

And here are some photos of my tapas board excellence:

I was very bad at pronouncing “rioja” and I wasn’t very good at hosting the tasting game, and my cake had a latte cream on the top which separated and looked a bit vomity, but it was FUN! There was the Jackson Five and tales of South American jaunts and an enormous bottle of Veuve Clicquot and mucho red lipstick. It must be noted, however, should you wish to host your own Spanish Party Of Authentic Tapas From The Spanish Deli And Six Bottles of Wine To Taste that all that abundant joyfulness and deliciousness and conviviality leads to the driest of dry horrors at 4am. Just so’s you know.

PS The baby continues to be very goodlooking.

Bad news.

Best be out with it then: Aveda took one look at my face and declared they wouldn’t touch my eyelashes. Because of the whole “that’s-weird-how-they-are-superglued-to-your-eyelids” thing. So I am still sporting them, and I still look mental, but now they are coming apart and slowly lifting off, but not enough to actually LEAVE MY EYES ALONE, just hanging there, looking a little bit leprosy-eque. Wednesday I am going back to them what did it, probably weeping, begging to have them off and to be returned to my former normalness. I am totally traumatised.

So, anyway, we have two things to discuss. Firstly, my cousin and his wife had a baby girl yesterday, in New Zealand, called Anna Josephine. She is their fourth child after three boys. I am delighted for them, and think that is an excellent name, but of course, it all leads me to wonder what I shall do if I never have a girl baby. What will I do with all of my stuff? Who shall I counsel about the dangers of the Eyelash Shop? Whose hair shall I (badly) plait, and who shall I take out for manicures and afternoon tea? The boys REFUSE.

Compounding the pain, I read an InStyle magazine article on the weekend all about Helena Christiansen. She has an 8 year old son, and the interviewer was at their apartment in New York, and Christiansen showed the interviewer her special wardrobe full of archived fashiony gems, bags and shoes and YSL frocks and all the usual fabulous things. But  – and this is the part that chilled me to my very core – these things were not being archived for poor handsome son Mingus. Oh no, because he is a small boy who presumably once grown won’t get into a lather about owning Herve Leger bandage dresses and various 2.55’s.

Christiansen said they were being archived for HIS FUTURE PARTNER!

Ouch, man. That sucks badly.Doesn’t Christiansen know she won’t like his Future Partner? And that said Future Partner will not be deserving of the legendary stuff, and she will be annoying and bratty and won’t fit them anyway? The General Rule Of Daughter-In-Laws seems to be thus: They are a bit horrible and don’t deserve your son.  Why does Christiansen not know this?

And I know this: my daughter-in-laws are NOT getting any of my cool stuff. Let that be written on my headstone. And, also, obviously, I need to have a daughter OF MY OWN. Preferably quite soon. Luckily, I have googled how you do it. After all, this is all very well:

but it doesn’t solve the Archiving Problem.

The other thing I have to discuss is the disturbing and theologically challenging school-run discussion of this morning. It went like this:

Barnaby (scootering along the A40): Christians go in water, don’t they? Holey Water.

Me: Ah, not all Christians. Are you talking about baptism?

B: Yes! We saw a picture at school of John doing it. How many people did he put in Holey Water?

Me: Well, um, lots. And Jesus.

B: Yes, Jesus, too! Why did the people in the Holey Water have faces like this? [makes sour scrunched-up face]

Me: Um, maybe because the water was cold.

B: Cold? Why did they go in the cold water? That was mean of John.

Me: Well, it isn’t always cold. Sometimes it is as warm as a bath.

B: Do you have to wear your swimming togs when you go in the cold baptising Holey Water? Did Jesus?

Me: Ahh, maybe he wore his clothes. It was probably a river.

B: Did they go in the Holey Water to get clean?

Me: Kind of. Symbolically. Do you know  what “symbolically” means? It was to clean their insides. Sort of.

B: But how does the cold Holey Water get into their insides? Does it hurt?

And so on. I think I ended with “ask your father”, while yelling at Noah to hurry up, and wiping the tears away from the merciless rogue eyelash poking. I have no idea how to answer some of these questions. I fear I am about to be Found Out.

The eyelashes are going to be removed on Saturday. The glue bits are losing their blackness, and are looking whitish and lumpy, which I fear may suggest to the casual observer that I am harbouring a very slow-moving type of eyelash lice. They simply have got to go. The orange Essex-y girl who put them in swore I would not only get used to them, but become addicted. Ha! It has not happened yet. I find myself quite un-addicted to things that hurt and make me look scary to small children (including my own). Anyway, til Saturday, that day of sweet upper eyelid release. Hoo-bloody-rah!

On to more pleasant things. On Sunday Barnaby turned six. He got a big plastic Nerf gun from his parents. Once, I would have freaked out about the gun and would have vetoed it, and googled something to thrust at Mark in order to support my tearful and worthy-sounding assertion that it would be bad for him and his development and he would become EVEN MORE violent, but now, six years and three days into this journey of parenting, I couldn’t actually care any less.

“Gun, you say, Boy? Box of matches? Gaffer tape and an illegally downloaded copy of Grand Theft Auto and a can of solvent you want for your birthday? Yeah, ok. Just play with them all in your room where I CAN’T SEE YOU. I am trying to read September’s Vogue/play Lexulous/practice my eyeliner application/buy stuff on eBay.”

And so on and so forth, in the world of disengaged parenting, of which I am the Master Guru.

But I did make a spectacular cake which I have forced everyone who has ever met me, even briefly, to look at, and to make appreciative “ohhhh”ing noises over. I have bandied it about on FaceBook and Twitter because it is a Genius Masterpiece of Enormous Proportions, even if I do say so myself. LOOK!:

I know. It is freakishly good. It tasted good too. It had about three packets of butter, and quite a bit of food colouring. It was not a cake for parents with only one child. It was a cake for parents of multiple children who had crossed that gaping chasm of “Idealism” and reached “Resigned Compromise and a Bit of Shame”. I crossed that one such a long time ago (see para 2).

But the cake triumph and general birthday jolliness all had an unhappy ending when Mark fell ill with a mysterious sleeping sickness, and blamed the food colouring. Which is all very counter-intuitive, because food colouring makes you hyperactive, innit? Not fast asleep on the bed in the middle of the day for hours and hours on the weekend. He did say there was some sort of accompanying stomach-trouble, which is all too uncomfortable to imagine, but the point of all of this food colouring malarky is that one by one, all of us got sick throughout the week.

Mark: Aha! It must have been the food colouring!

Me: Say wha’?

Confused face. Anyway, Ned turned one today, and we couldn’t have a party because Barnaby and Noah were too busy being pale-faced, sweaty and spewy in a delicate collapsed pile of little boy bones on the couch. I had my turn last night, and we suspect little baby Ned will have his turn tomorrow. Woo hoo! How marvellous it is to be part of a big family as we all succumb one by one to the filth and degradation of stomach buggery. As it were. Ahem.

I shall post some photos of Ned’s fake birthday and his cake (which will be colourless, just in case Mark’s food colouring paranoia turns out to be true). And a photo of my blessed, naked eyelids.

Ouch, mine eyes have taken a tumble into a vat of black adhesive and plastic replica eyelashes obviously ripped from a very old and plastic doll. The accident happened because I am vain. Look what vanity does to your formerly perfectly acceptable normal-person lashes:

Subtle? Er, not so much. Not really stylish either, unless footballer’s girlfriends and Liverpudlian women score on your Style Radar. And they hurt, and I can constantly see big black feathery awnings atop my periphery, and they feel like they are made of dirt. I am sure there is a burgeoning cyst growing underneath the glue, but who will ever know? My real lashes and skin have been BURIED ALIVE UNDER PROSTHETICS! They have been glued to my eyelash skin and onto the length of my real lashes. They last for about six whole weeks, but apparently, some will fall off in two, and I will begin to look wonky-eyed. If I try to get them off myself, according to the panicked forums I have (now) read on the subject – (nothing like researching these things, ahem) my poor real eyelashes will come off. In protest, probably. So I wait, looking like an extra from The Boat That Rocked or like I have really tried very hard for the school-run-dress-up show, or just like I am MENTAL and have a very inappropriate and heavy hand with the tranny mascara. Imagine how odd I look at 8:25am at the school gates, in 2-degree weather, puffing and sweating with bits of dried scrambled egg on my rabbit fur coat, with my pale skin and light-coloured brows, shamefully sporting these babies:

I have become a high-maintenance-stay-at-home-mother who is incidentally hosting a private retro-themed disco on her face. The shame.

Did somebody say “Cliche?”

And some cheese:

Another day, another screaming match in a restaurant with a random woman.

It all started off so well…I made cake this morning, we watched telly, we skyped mum and dad, we had bacon and eggs for breakfast, the flat was tidy, the washing was under control, no one was punching or eye-gouging. We are borrowing Rocket The Dog, and we all got dressed ready to take him for a walk with a minimum of fuss. They even had stylish little boy clothes on. And one of the frightening Italian ladies who live on the square actually said to me as I walked past, with dog, two little boys, baby and Custard, that I “made it look easy”. I so should have known it would all lead to a public  rage-filled fracas.

So, we finish walking the dog, drop him off into the nice cakey-smelling basement flat, and wander off to Carluccio’s for a quick lunch. Custard has been a bit of a horrid ranty screamer lately, (well, actually, forever) so I do a lot of prepping on the way, telling them all that I will bring them straight home if there is even a hint of bad behaviour. I have babylissed my hair, it is swishy, I am wearing my rabbit fur nonchalantly, faces are clean, noses are not dripping, I am perfectly in control.

We get there, we sit at the big table with the newspapers, I order quickly for the boys (all four of them – the baby is now capable of eating grisini, penne pasta with pesto, a chocolate teddybear cake and apple juice and a bit of my leftovers) and they eat nicely, quietly, and quickly. I read a bit of the weekend Guardian. So far, so stylishly calm. The waitress comes up and talks about her kid, swaps stories and strokes Ned’s chocolately cheeks. So, for about an hour, I have four children with me, who eat, who get told off only once, who colour in, who are good.

Then Custard, who, if I may reiterate, is a bit of a difficult 2 year old, who does tend to screech and shriek in public in order to unnerve me and get me sweaty and get me moving and generally get me to do what he wants, gets off his chair and does a bit of random fire extinguisher-touching and a bit of screaming. I know it is time to get the bill and get out. Now, for context, Carluccio’s is full of families. Full of small kids, some being very good, some wandering around, some crying, some sticking ice cream on their foreheads. So Custard’s noise is annoying and fairly loud, but almost lost in the general kiddish chaos of it all.

Then, an older woman (ALWAYS BLOODY OLDER WOMEN! Where is the sisterhood, I ask you?) tells me to do something about Custard’s noise. I tell her I am leaving, and I am sorry, in a bit of a weak-laugh-what-can-I-do?-kind-of-way. She then says that her grandchildren would never act that way in a restaurant, and I should think twice about bringing mine to a restaurant ever again. Then she told me she felt sorry for me that I had him. I splutter, and tell her that if she does not like children, she should stay away from family restaurants at lunchtime on a Saturday. And I say “Thank you so much for your thoughtful and helpful comments. I really appreciate them” in a barely contained, violently angry, adrenalin-filled-shaky-voiced way. I tremble with the rage. Then the bloody bill takes an achingly long time to come. I wait, I dress the children up into their coats, I follow Custard around trying to contain his random shrieking,and restaurant-ornament-fiddling, and I pay. As I leave, I go over to her and say:

“I do hope you enjoy your lunch now”

She says:

“Oh, I will, once you leave!”

Then I say:

“You are the rudest woman I have ever met. Why would you come to Carluccio’s if you cannot abide children?”

She says:

“I don’t hate children. I just don’t like yours. You need to do something about that boy. You were just ignoring him. Why don’t you teach him how to behave in a restaurant? I feel sorry for you! There are ways to deal with children like that. My children would never have behaved like that, nor do my grandchildren. Keep them at home.”

So I say:

“You have no idea what you are talking about, you terrible woman. How dare you? I feel sorry for your husband here, having to go out to lunch with an intolerant badly-behaved rude and interfering  woman like you! I hope you feel really good about yourself! I am doing the best job I can do!”………..

And on, and on, to shouty embarrassing infinity and beyond. Then on the way out, all red-faced and shaky and full of righteous anger, I told the waiting staff that she was a terrible rude woman to watch out for, and stopped people on the way in and warned them about the child-hating lady at the back. Ah, me, perhaps not my proudest moment. But c’mon! I attract these nutters like midges to an opened bottle of red wine.

I am like a mama-bear. I am so up for a fight. It is unstylish, I know, but I am powerless in the face of maternal mama-bear-ness. I then waited for her outside, possibly for some fisticuffs. She didn’t come, and I went home, mumbling under my breath like an insane person. I was AWESOME.

So, I went shopping again, and I bought me an alpaca jumper with the silhouette of a skull on it from Zadig + Voltaire, in a desperate attempt to shout to the world that I am a-pirate-mother-still-young-dontcha-know! kind of way. And it is so HOT I am feeling carsick, but carsick in my STATIONARY LIVING ROOM. Who knew alpaca/French designers could be so devious.

Witness me, my new alpaca, an unfortunate shadow cast by a pesky oversized camera lens:

I have been in the pursuit of French things, because I suspect that wearing French things might make me a little bit French, and possibly thin, by some sort of not-quite-scientific osmosis. However, I have discovered that the clothes are cut for small, bird-like women with small bones and narrow shoulders and the ability to wear tiny trousers without their thighs filling out the fabric. As much as I desire Sandro and Maje things in my wardrobe, they just wont fit. I am, as I have said before, a dairy-fed once-blonde enormous-footed heifer from New Zealand. I blame the cheese. And so, that big, hot, woolly jumper was the only thing that fitted my upper arms.

Apropos of nothing, here is a forlorn Custard in a sequinned fabric flower hairclip:

Anyway, onto some of my Current Internal Monologue Topics:

1. It is feeling like time for a new baby.

At this time, 10-ish or so months after I have a baby, I go and get another one on the boil. Except, this time, the father of my existing four children says no. Because, he says, we have no room, and the current children are too loud, and too badly behaved. And we would need a bigger car, as the 7-seater we currently have would be no good for the luggage of seven people. And, like, what about going on holiday? How could we take five small mewling wrestling offspring anywhere? etc, etc, on and on to boring (pragmatic) infinity.

So, I have started an internet search on new places to live. Somewhere with more rooms, so we could simply banish the children away. The screams, yelping and suspicious thumping sounds could stay contained within some far off, sound-proofed room. We could be calm and happy on weekends, there would be hardly any facial scratches to witness, much less yelling, more harmony, greater general goodness all round. We would have a garden, and push them out there year round, and they could throw basketballs out there, rather than at the plasma tv screen (again). It would be awesome, even if it is likely to be in the violent and non-stylish parts of Acton which cause me to hyperventilate every time I walk out the door. I will obviously just have to drove to posh neighbourhoods for poilane bread and sightings of Jason Donovan.

In the meantime, I must satisfy my aching empty womb with diversions. Like tuxedo-jacket buying, Angry Birds excellence, and perhaps some sort of dieting. It is going to be a long, sad winter.

2.We celebrated our 13th wedding anniversary with a sulking fight about the Bad Kids. It was silently vicious, and was related to Christmas break cabin fever and Too Much Time To Dwell On Marital Irritations. It was a waste of the babysitter, and we ran out of time to eat at anywhere, and ended up at ASK, for mournful pizza, then a dose of Johnny and Angelina in The Tourist. And I sat on someone else’s chewing gum, causing me to shift one seat away from my husband, but because we weren’t speaking, I could not say why I was moving, and so it looked as though, mid-movie, my crabby sulking reached such a pitch that I had to physically be as FAR AWAY from him as was possible at the end of the row. Regretable, regretable.

3. New Year’s resolutions. I have none, because it all leads to tears and it is very boring. If I had them, they would be related to buying more clothes and going out more. But apparently, Barnaby does have some, or at least, the school curriculum asks that he does. See below what my eldest child needs to work on:

I particularly endorse his affirmation not to be a “boole”. Because he totally is. As am I.

Happy New Year!

I have had the worst New Year’s news. My husband has decided that I should become his Book Lady. We should sack the proper Book Lady, who is very good, but a little inconsistent, and get me to do her work. That will entail:

Counting

Filing

Typing invoices

Doing maths

Using excel

Thinking about things IN ADVANCE

Not being scared of the tax department

Liasing with the accountant

Not losing bank statements, internet passwords, wads of cash, or entire files off the Mac, at any point.

The reasoning is that I am an intelligent person, mostly, and we could get a babysitter while the work was done and we could do it together. It would be cheaper than hiring another proper Book Keeper. So, the Mighty New Year Plan is to make me Keeper Of The Books, to add to my patchy, overstretched and inelegant portfolio of part-time Secret Genius Projecting, mother of four, cooker of 2x dinner meals a day, infrequent book-club attendee, filthy Angry Birds addict, social media harlot and vegetable baker extraordinaire.

I croaked a little, when he suggested that, because I am Not Skilled In That Kind Of Area. Making me Keeper of the Books would be as fruitful as making me Chief Mechanic, or the House Plumber, or the Default Emergency Heart Surgeon up at St Mary’s. People would die, lose their fortunes, and certainly there would be some serious flooding.

Dear Reader, if this plan comes to fruition, I shall surely accidentally ruin us. I know my weaknesses.

Eeek. Well, if I may change the subject before I break out in panic-induced hives and have to have an emergency lie-down, we had a very quiet holiday, with very little actually happening at all. New Year’s Eve was a little on the sad side, and aside from the whole burnt-lamb-chops-resulting-in-smoke-and-the arrival-of-two-fire-engines-thing, there was very little in the way of highlights. The rest of the evening was champagne-soaked TV watching and then off to bed at about 10:30pm. I had told the children that tonight was going to be very special, and bought the bloody lamb chops for a TREAT, but then the dishwasher broke and started spewing out water and in the resulting ransacking of the flat for towels, the lamb chops started burning and producing so much smoke that the communal fire alarms went off, and then the engines arrived. We pretended it wasn’t us, although the ashen-faced coughing children and the blackened walls may have tipped them off.

Anyway, after that, the night was already a bit ‘special’ and so we bundled them off to bed and ate their ‘special’ dessert ourselves. And I know that you are supposed to stay up when you are grown-up, and you should probably even go out and interact with people who are not your husband and sons, and we blamed our lack of NYE spirit on the fact that all of the babysitters  have fled London for Eastern Europe, but the Universal Parental Truth is that staying up past 11pm is a horrible, horrible idea. Those pesky children misunderstand the ‘holiday’ thing to mean that getting up at 5:40am is appropriate, right and good. Which it is most definitely not.

In Box Set DVD news, we have finished Arrested Development. It was so good I could weep. We have now started Sons of Anarchy, which seems to be the Californian biker-gang version of The Wire. So far, so violent. It gets you through the cold nights, though, eh? What, pray tell, do you fellas do?