The Harridan

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?

No, this is not a Christmas post because we have moved on. There is still a slightly morose tree dominating our small lounge, dropping needles and losing relevance by the hour, and I have been buying 75% reduced decorations from Selfridges and putting them onto the tree much to the confusion of the children, who look up from the Looney Tunes omnibus for a few brief seconds before returning to ignoring everything I say and do once again. But Christmas is over, and it is time to get stuck in to the January sales.

Because, like a car needs petrol, and a dog needs walking, and a fish needs water and a steak needs maldon sea salt, I need to buy stuff. It is sort of like my job.

But first, a very quick rundown of Christmas, just to put it to bed, so to speak.
Christmas Eve we had our second annual party. Fourteen grownups came, 14 children were left to run around from room to room, dropping popcorn as they went, unearthing forgotten toys, bedlinen and petrified apple cores. We ate disappointing ham (Nigella’s festive ham, boiled in apple and cranberry juice, then studded and glazed in cranberry sauce and mustard and honey – quite the effort for slices of boring), slow roasted lamb, crusty baguettes, Israeli couscous salad, baked brie in puff pastry with strawberry jam (so ridiculously awful that it works, kind of) pates, thyme roasted nuts, cheeses, then excellent chocolate cake and trifle from S, who bakes like a Christmas baking fairy elf (that is my highest bakery endorsement, in case of confusion). There was plenty of champagne.

Christmas day itself was a morning of feverish present opening, happy little boys, a baby who got a Scooby Doo Mystery Van and nothing else, a husband who got a Kindle, a Mulberry wallet which turned out to be the wrong kind, and three Steve Irwin “Crocodile Hunter” DVD’s which may cause me to pop my head in the oven if the frequency of playing does not decrease, and a wife who got a white GC watch, which, if you squint your eyes in a very dark room, passes for the Chanel one. Then we had Lovely Friends come around in stages, bearing gifts of microplanes and brownie and wine and beef and tiny gingerbread houses for the boys to assemble, decorate, then bust. (WHY didn’t I take a photo? WHY?)

For the main lunch/dinner hybrid, there was roasted beef and duck and parsnips and brussel sprouts with chalky sweet chestnuts. I overcooked the goose-fatted potatoes and, in another spectacular Nigella fail, unwisely made her gingerbread stuffing which was both pointless and odd. Ugh. N made a lemony roulade for dessert. It was all very merry and lovely and festive and good.

We braved a Boxing Day walk to Winter Wonderland in Hyde Park, which started out well (see the squirrel-feeding and matching duffel coats):

It all turned quite quickly to tears when the cold started to seep through little boy’s skinny leg jeans and mostly ungloved hands. See the frozen Serpentine:

Ouch.

Ok, to the sales tally thus far:

Selfridges – Christmas decorations  reduced to £1 (bargain, but very stressful bunfight into the store);

Westfield – excellent things in COS, but abandoned trip before got to cash register because I accidentally squashed the baby’s foot in the aisle as was ramming double buggy through and bruised it and made him howl and because Custard stood up in his seat and screeched at the top of his lungs at 20 second intervals in order to shame me from the shop)

Online – Mulberry belt, reduced to £50 from £100, and Karen Walker tuxedo jacket for £130. Because a girl NEEDS TWO TUXEDO JACKETS, OK?

Thus far, that is all. But not for long.

Some Decidedly Non Seasonal Things:
1. I just had a kind of crying telephone conversation with a nice Scottish lady representing HSBC. I was a bit rude, and she was mostly not, although I could hear she was a little bit over my ranting and the creeping crying sound in my voice, which I gave up trying to hide. And it was all over a £25 fine. It seemed a worthy fight to have at the time, but now I am not so sure. Perhaps ’tis the season to avoid bank-related rage.

2. Custard vomited today, and we were sitting on the couch, and I was having to use my hand as a spew receptacle, and Barnaby was in the kitchen, and I was screaming out for a bowl, or a pot. Barnaby looked in the utensils drawer, and in the oven, and in the tea towel drawer, and in the washing machine. The pot cupboard was the one cupboard his 5 year old peripheral vision couldn’t quite manage. I think I swore a little bit. It may have been funny-comical if it hadn’t have been my hand.

3. The baby is suffering from separation anxiety. This means, in a literal translation, that he shrieks at me until I pick him up. If I run away very fast and lock myself into the bathroom for a bit, he sniffs me out and shrieks outside the door. Or, Custard whacks him on the head with kitchen utensils (not pots, because, apparently, those under six years old cannot find them) and the shrieks get louder.

4. I am becoming vainer about my appearance, and, as such, not only had a botanical face peel this week, but also had moulds taken from my teeth to whiten them with gels in the night. Ha! How my 23 year old self would have scoffed! How outraged by the walking cliche of a woman in a rabbit fur coat on her way to visit a clinic in Putney for ‘improvements’! What is more, no one told me these things hurt.

The ‘botantical’ face peel was about as botantical as my hazardous susbstances-bathroom cleaning cupboard. It contained salacitic acid, which is the same ingredient we are using to dissolve Barnaby’s montrous veruccas. My face is now red, and spider veiny, and will apparently peel like a scabby roaccutane teenager. All in time for the big Christmas Eve party where we will have a total of 28 people who will come and try not to notice the effects of my ‘exfoliation process’. The teeth mould hurts my gums, which have swollen just a bit, and the gel turns my teeth a little bit porous, and exposes the nerve a little bit, and makes just sitting here typing a bit ouchier than it used to be. The lesson here? I am vain, and deserve a little pain for my first-world ageing angst. As Julie Burchill would say, I would be better off volunteering.

5. It is 1:36pm and there are children in pyjamas everywhere I look. Some of them are a bit dirty. I n some ways, quite truthfully, I wish to be back at the salon having acid poured onto my face, because at least it was quiet.

6. There is no suckling pig to be found in the City of London, which is what happens when you do not put your order in early enough. So it shall be lamb, ham, duck and beef with a bit of gammon to add to our season of porkiness. I am so glad I am not vegetarian.

7. Our year old, broken, crusty, food-stained mouldering double buggy got stolen from outside our flat last week. It is astonishing that anyone, even a hardened thief who really needed some Christmas cash for cider would have bothered to take it. And of course it means that my whole line on not cleaning it, because then the robbers would leave it alone, has been INVALIDATED. So, we had to get a new one, very fast, which is currently chained to the bottom of the stairs. That is all going to make the school run just that little bit more fun, no?

Gripes over. Happy Christmas, enjoy the break, and the love, and if you are anywhere near your family, then be glad, because some of us live too far away to be with ours. JEALOUS.

International Bring Your Own National Dish For Lunch Day Week Thing began on Monday morning. I settled on beef (non-halal) sausages with buttered white plastic bread and ketchup and called it a BBQ, which was cheating, and kind of not-funny, and actually entirely not in the spirit of things. It really didn’t work, sadly, limply, greasily lying in tin foil amongst the tagines and lamb fritters and felafels and carribean donuts. Everyone else’s mum did good. See the array of exotic gastronomic triumphs:

New Zealand – I let you down. Kids – your mother’s sausages are RUBBISH. I am shamed. Witness the dawning awareness on the baby’s face when he realises that his mother didn’t even make the sausages, but bought them from that well-known-non-halal-supplying-supermarket-chain! “Fraud!” he sobs.

And I was sat at a table with Noah, and his Canadian/Filipino little Jehovah’s Witness mate, and their Sri Lankan school buddy, and they ate a bit of everything, except for the sausages.

This morning, the entire exercise was repeated for Barnaby’s year, but with a new and innovative twist: The sausages were (non-halal) LAMB!

And were equally as unenthusiastically received. So, there you go. A little less successful than I had hoped. It started to get embarrassing when I kept getting asked where I was from, and what I had brought.

Ah, New Zealand.

And, ah, see that big pile of sausages? The untouched ones? Yeah.

No, I didn’t make them. I just bought them from the shop.

I started to get into the whole thing about pavlova, and if we could have bought along dessert, I would have smashed it, but it just kind of hung there. Like a limp plate of cold sausage.

Anyway, the school play was all very excellent, and us costumiers got to sit in the front row. I like to think I was channelling Coco Chanel in her Diaghilev days, and wore my (secret new) wool tweedy-esque Joseph jacket in sincere homage. I do not think that anyone noticed, though, because the children, dressed expertly as lambs/presents/shepherds/cats were so transfixing. I would post a photo, but we were warned not to put any photos up on social networking sites and other interwebby dangerzones.

You just have to imagine how cute and vacant-eyed they all were, dazed and confused and only four and five years old. Imagine the tinsel-shredding, the star hats sitting askew, the shepherds’ headdresses slipping over the eyes rendering them sightless and sleepy. I swear I saw Noah dribbling. But, importantly, both boys managed not to wee into their girls’ tights, which they wore with black long-sleeved t-shirts in order to facilitate becoming respective nativity play bit-players. They both loved their tights so much that they have been wearing them as their pyjamas after wearing them as their trousers for the whole weekend. Mark was a little uncomfortable with their adoption of what is essentially pantyhose, and so renamed them “Long Johns”. They all seem happy with that arrangement.

Right, well, it is time for bed. I have some serious Aveda-ing to deal with in the morning, as the Lampshade Hair has grown back. No amount of BaByLiss Big Hairing can fix it. Goodnight, and thank you.

Man flu has struck, but it is worse. It is man-rash, and it has taken over my husband’s entire body and has made him waft about the house in giant terry towelling robes looking a bit Hugh Hefner-esque and a teeny bit predatory. And it requires him to lie down in the dark, in the quiet, but in our house, these things are simply unattainable. So, well, stink for you, dear, but We Must Carry On.

Meanwhile, I have been beavering away (phnarr, phnarr) helping to make polyester approximations of costumes for the School Christmas Play. I have made this majestic list thus far:

1. Angel wings with the help of a glue gun. Glue guns are, quite frankly, more fun than any other thing I have ever played with in my whole life. If they didn’t cause 3rd degree burns and pose a choking/poisonous plastics digestion hazard I would TOTALLY buy each of the children one for Christmas. Although, they would DISRESPECT the magic of glue gunnery and, instead of making proper crafts, would stick inappropriate things together, like my glasses to the fireplace and my driver’s licence to my baby’s forehead.

2. Lamb’s ears stuck on a woolly headband. These involved needles. Not nearly as much fun. Custard was the model, and as he is two years old, and the lamb’s ears are for children from four to seven, I predict there may be a bit of a ruckus at the dress rehearsal on Wednesday. Sorry, The Kids, in advance for the tight elastic uncomfortable feeling around the scalp, but I cannot think of EVERYTHING.

3. Robin redbreasts sewed up the side in big fat unwieldy stitches.

4. Beards for all manner of men, including The Wise ones, Joseph, some elves and, of course, Santa himself:

5. Robin’s feet with wraparound polyester gladiator-esque tie-ons.

It turns out my craft skills are ABUNDANT.

And while I was ferreting away with pins in mouth and scissors in hand, the baby went and ate up all of the old biscuits on the floor in the swept-up-rubbish pile. Look at him:

The shame of it. AND he is in a faux-fur hood. He, of course, has never had a better time in all of his life, and must have made his way through about 17 types of old biscuits, as well as 3 tubes of glitter and one tinsel wreath. See his glee at being left alone in the secondary school resources room while his mother was being some sort of Crafting GENIUS:

“Ha ha ha” (says the baby) “I LAUGH in the face of old-biscuit-germs! I chortle at choking hazards! I guffaw at sharp-pieces-of-cardboard-ingestion!”

And that, fellas, is how you do it. How you do four children five years and under. You just don’t worry too much about anything. You only look up from ipad/glue gun/Grazia magazine if there are severe choking sounds or proper wounds.

Ahem.

So, we are in the throes of end-of-year school stuff, and buying presents for the chilluns and getting ready for our second annual Christmas Eve Party For The Geographic Orphans. If you miss your mum at Christmas because she is actually in another balmy hemisphere, and you are here, cold, and miserable, then you can come! There will be lots of champagne, but there will also be about 12 children, which sort-of cancels itself out.

BaByLiss Big Hairs have been purchased for just about everyone, the children have a Sylvanian Family each, (in the hope that they might become less feral and more nurturing if they have small plastic meerkats to look after) and dear rashtastic Mark has nothing at all, other than a Steve Irwin CD. He is a bit tricky to buy for. He really only wants a boat, a bach in Mangonui or sharp tools – none of which I am much help with, and so crocodile hunter documentaries and calamine lotion it will have to be.

Saturday morning, and the alarm goes and you turn it off and you think life is beautiful because everyone is still asleep. The baby is a bit sick but is not making the hacking cough sound, and the children are silent. So you have about 15 minutes. And you wait.

Then, all of the children not contained by barred cots and an inability to walk more than six steps come in and start wailing that they have broken their curtains “to the wooden line bit”. It turns out to be irritatingly accurate. They have been swinging from bunk top to the floor, through the medium of velour curtains. The landlord’s velour curtains. The little curtain hooks are not just bent, but broken in half. I go in, and do a bit of a rant, and as my eyes scan the room for more evidence of their badness, I see this:

THAT is last week’s Tom Ford broken lipstick drawing. All over the mattress – not just the wall, as previously thought. It is, apparently, a kind of map. A kind of DELINQUENT’S MAP. Delinquents who show no respect for pigment-rich, vanilla-scented, luxurious makeup items which when used correctly, turn you into a Stylish Lady who can rise above the domestic horrors of motherhood. No. Respect. At. All.

This discovery led me on an angry-faced photographic exploration in order to document other bits of boy badness. Behold:

This is a little mural above Noah’s bed. And this:

A bit of doorframe tomfoolery. And this:

Doorknob enhancement. And this:

Sticker Vandalry. More:

Hallway felt-tip wickedness.

And on, and on, to INFINITY. Or, at least quite a few more spots on the walls, carpet (arrows, drawn in felt tip pen, pointing towards the Tom Ford lipstick map, no less), and on the marble fireplace.

My kids. They are AWESOME.

Anyway, onto Other Bad Bits That Happened This Week:

The parent council meeting was a dreadfully misguided and as dreadfully long as I feared. There were about 10 of us, a few ratty children, a cold, lightless room, pamphlets on the Church Street Lights switch-on-thing, and a man talking for an hour on how the budget affects us all. I know I should be in tune with that kind of thing, but, well, I came late to avoid his talk. Unfortunately, I thought I would also miss the next speaker, who was the school nurse, talking about Healthy Eating. I figured that:

a) the parents who bother to come (and who can…these things are not scheduled terribly well for the working parents) to the parent council meeting probably have a fairly good understanding of what to feed their kids (preaching to the converted and all that), and

b) if the parents who were hearing this talk were clueless, then it was probably too late to change them and their free-sugar-flowing ways.

Anyway, I turned up very late, hoping just to be there for the talk about fundraising and school play costumes and traffic and stuff like that but walked in just as Benefits Man was finishing up. And so the school nurse stood up, and got us to play calorie-counting games, and asked quizzed the antipodeans over what we put into the kids packed lunches, and proceeded to counsel us on the Dangers Of The Common-Or-Garden-Variety-Packed Lunch (namely, that the kids will only eat the sandwiches their mothers make. They will NEVER TRY ANOTHER PERSON’S SANDWICH AGAIN!). We had a little discussion over the crafty ways you can sneak vegetables into your kids meals. We were schooled in the hidden calories in coleslaw, and were reminded of our 5 a day. (Astonishingly, an Australian lawyer-mother thought that you were supposed to have 5 of all of the food groups a day. Ah, nooooooo….). And I went a little bit mental inside, with the barely-restrained rage chorusing through my veins. And we had 4 minutes to discuss the Actual Proper Issues. One of which was the International Foods Lunch Day Thing.

Ah, the International Foods Lunch Day Thing. This is a lovely idea, in practice, where all the (non-working) parents turn up at school in the last week before it breaks for Christmas, bringing with us something traditional (main meal, NOT DESSERT because of the sugar-filth) from our homelands. Imagine! We can all go and make kibbeh and butterfried chicken and plantain and gravlax and pizza and sushi rolls. But what, pray tell, does a New Zealand family bring along?

Hangi? No, because that would involve a lot of burning stones and digging. Health & Safety would be very anxious.

Sausage rolls? No, because 70% of the kids and parents are muslim. Big cultural fail.

Roast lamb? No, because it would be difficult to transport in a skanky double buggy along the A40.

Paua fritters? No. No paua anywhere in this cold, wet hemisphere.

So, I am at a loss. Anyone, anywhere….what do New Zealanders eat?

It turns out I never had pneumonia, nor did I have consumption. My self-diagnosis was a little off the mark. I have a lung infection. I am nearly better. Unfortunately, Mark has it now, but he is *sicker*. You know how that goes. I am glad I get to live a little longer. I vow to shout less, have more children, own a rolex and read better novels.

Speaking of novels, this is the week of Two Book Clubs. Which is QUITE ENOUGH of hasty reading, and quite enough of book club liquid refreshments, and enough of dietary complications. Post last post, of course, I was awash with vegetarian options, and I thank you for it. Never before have I been so enticed by non-meat treats! What a deluge of pastry and cheese! I looked at all of the suggestions, and then went back to the Source. (The Source being that thick-tongued, irritating, baby-naming-incompetent Jamie Oliver. Voices in my head kept telling me to do it.) We had his macaroni cheese (or, more correctly, we had scooby doo-shaped pasta and cheese owing to macaroni-buying-fail) and truth be told it was all a bit average. It failed to reach the giddy heights necessary for bookclub cookery because I left out anchovies owing to my 33 year old fish phobia. It was, frankly, missing that necessary umami depth. More parmesan may have fixed it, but I ran out of that in another grocery fail. There was green salad and Gail’s olive bread, which at £2.99 per baguette is wincingly, embarrassingly expensive, but good all the same, and the baby likes it. Then cake, made with aubergines, because you KNOW I am fond of vegetable cakery. I am like a KitchenAid-sponsored witch with root-vegetable-magic-ways.

That they all turned up when I had already made very good progress into a lovely bottle of Monowai pinot noir, at, like, 8:45pm (GASP! That’s nearly thinking-about-bedtime-time in my house!) so by the time dinner started, my tastebuds were lulled into a sort of sleepy numbness, and I was beyond caring about the book,  is a topic for another post. Ack, anyway, who cares. It was fine, and I now have an enormous vegetarian repertoir for next time.

So, today was going to be a love story to London, because before I was in a very happy mood. But I have since had a fight with the children who have been doing naughty things in their bedroom. Specifically, stealing my lipsticks out of my bag and drawing on the walls with them. Pink Dusk has been broken and hastily smushed back onto the case. Ginger Fawn has had the lid dissect it in two. Luckily, True Coral has been unmolested, because it was HIDING in another bag.

How do you attach a broken lipstick stalk to the tube again? I feel it in my waters that there is a way, in the same way that I know you can do clever things with white wine vinegar and baking soda, but the details escape me. I feel like if I lit Pink Dusk with a match, it might melt back together, but then the rational part of my brain tells me that that would be a MENTAL, self-sabotaging thing to do.

So. I asked the bad kids why my lipsticks were MURDERED. They considered the question, then replied

“I don’t know why we did that, mum. We just don’t know.”

Which stumped me a bit, the angry wronged one, because then I reasoned that they are a tribe of feral little boys who generally lack good judgement. The answer, as always, is Move Your Stuff Up High.

BaByLiss Big Hair

I am late to get onto this particular bandwagon, and what else can really be said about a magic hair wand that makes you look expensively groomed and shiny and elegant in about 4 minutes? This, coming from me, who has fluffy hair that looks like this:

But now I have newsreader’s hair. No pics yet, as the battery ran out on the camera. So just imagine me, looking a bit tidy. Which I know is a very hard thing to do.

Christmas in London

Ok, so we don’t have beaches here, or summer, or pohutakawas or people walking around in jandals and vests with sunburnt noses and new freckles, but we do have lots of Christmas Things To Take The Children To. The Marylebone Lights thing was on Wednesday, and there was fake snow, a very impressive Santa, and elves who gave the children plush monkeys. Then on Saturday, the boy’s school all got tickets to gatecrash a BNP Paribas Christmas thing At Somerset House which was primarily for their employees and their kids – free ice skating, free sweet counter, Santa, presents, cakes, face-painting, etc etc. It was ace. The children were really very bad at ice skating, but there was no blood. PHEW.

Next week it is the Connaught Square Christmas thing, and we have the Selfridges Grotto to line up for. Not exactly the same as swimming with dolphins and picnics on the sand, but not bad, either.

Gratutious Shot Of The Baby (who, incidentally, now walks):

I have been sick since Thursday, with these symptoms:

Bubbling, crackling, wheezy lungs
Headache
Tiredness
Hacking cough
Achy chest
Fever

I have been quite Nicole Kidman in Moulin Rouge about the whole thing, coughing up consumptively, quite daintily, and still carrying on with my day job. She with her corsets, obviously, me with my new Levi’s Curve ID skinny jeans that drag the loose mother-flesh up into the mid-waist area which can be nicely tucked away into a very tight singlet. Everyone wins. But I digress.

So I figured by Friday that I had pneumonia, because another mother at school had had it, and it was time I had an Objectively Acceptable Reason for Lying Down All Day. Old school pneumonia, which meant I might die (channelling Kidman again, see), or scar my lungs and always be the last one to walk up a hill/go hiking/do an aerobics class properly ever again. A damaged lung would be a sad, romantic Wuthering Heights-esque problem to have.

So, in order to avoid a terrible outcome such as outlined above,  I have stayed at home, indoors, and lay on the couch and stared into middle distance and sighed a lot. I have outsourced the school run, missed the parent council meeting, missed the assembly (where, incidentally, both kids got some action – Barnaby got a bloody prize for being good and Noah sang some incomprehensible non-denominational Christmas song with his bewildered reception class…you attend these things all year, clap politely for other kids, sit through scared and whispered performances of Frere Jacques by swathes of four year olds you don’t know, all the while waiting patiently for your own to get a certificate, and MISS BOTH their glorious moments while suffering at home with Old School Pneumonia).

On Saturday, I wept a little, as the children did some very bad things, sensing my vulnerability like wolves, terrorising the both of us with noise-pollution and scribbling on the walls, refusing to do their homework and calling me “Lazyhead”. I know I should be above the name calling, but it gets me everytime.

“LAZYHEAD? What did you say? Come here and say that, young man!” on and on to infinity and beyond.

This morning was Mark’s turn to get up and by the time I got out of bed, he was wild-eyed and the children were wrestling each other, variously undressed, the breakfast things piled up everywhere, scratches on all parts of exposed flesh, and he wailed “I can’t live like this!”. Well, no, dude. Four children, five and under, in a 2 bedroomed flat in central London is MENTAL. That’s why people stare! It is for FOOLS, this large-family-schtick. But, you know, mostly happy fools, who normally just get on with it and I HAVE PNEUMONIA SO SUCK IT UP!

Anyway, time for some first world problems.
1. The cleaner has tidied away my Prada glasses and all I can find are the cheap Boots extra pair. I hate wearing glasses, but when I do, my spectacle of choice is by Prada. Now, Alina the Cleaner has HIDDEN them. It is cruel and unusual punishment to be without them, and the Boots pair not only are unstylish, but they are very thick, and make me a little bit wobbly when I walk. #doublefail

2. I cannot get through my Jilly Cooper “Riders” bonkfest in time for The Mucky Bookclub via Twitter because it is just too crap. I cannot read such dated drivel. I know that is not exactly getting into the spirit of things, but I have drawn a line. No Jilly Cooper books ever again. (Erm, admittedly am still only at page 45).

3. I have real actual bookclub with live, non-virtual adults on Thursday at my flat. I am to provide dinner. It is to be vegetarian. The fear of vegetarian cookery has been keeping me awake at 4am. Vegetarian lasagne has been done by the other bookclub attendees, as has vegetarian curry. WHAT ELSE DO VEGETARIANS EAT? Cake? Cheese? A whole lot of cheese? Any suggestions that will help me look sympathetic to the non-meat-eating cause & perhaps look a little sophisticated (but not hard, tis a school night and all…)

Much appreciated.