The Harridan

We are two men down and everything is quiet, so quiet. Barnaby is having a most excellent time at university, enchanted by learning Russian and being introduced to art history and Wagner, although less enamoured by the liberal arts part of his degree which seems to be mired in self-congratulatory existential twaddle. I love a bit of self-congratulatory twaddle myself but there needs to be a balance and I suspect this hasn’t been struck. But it’s early days and the sweet young man has to bed himself down and figure out a whole lot of stuff around his new life and what looks good and what doesn’t, and what matters and what doesn’t. A massive part of this will be getting a job which seems to have fallen quite far down (or off) the to-do list. Money is always very handy when you have to fend largely for yourself, so I shall be reminding him that being broke sucks more than going to your fun student job where you learn things you will benefit from forever. Ahem.

The other fella to have jumped ship is the husband who has flown to New Zealand to be with his family and to see his mother. He has had a rough few weeks – waking me at 3am three weekends ago after we had been at a party, lights on, moaning and mooing and sounding very much like a woman in labour/a man with kidney stones. This was all a bit familiar as he has had them once before, so I called for an ambulance in a jaded sleepy kind of way and asked him if I really needed to come along too. Unfortunately he said yes, gasping it out before another wave of pain hit.

I am a terrible, terrible nurse. Let’s just get that out of the way sharply.

So the ambulance came and I just sat there in my trainers and my jeans, little bag packed with newspapers and phones and chargers, face all old and puffy, hair horrible, watching the men give Mark morphine and making really shit jokes. We were taken to St Mary’s and basically both fell asleep on a wheely bed and a hard plastic chair respectively in between blood tests and more morphine. At some point someone came in to tell us there was an obstruction in the kidney and then all of my peri-menopausal anxious tearful, fearful unhinged emotions came out and I spent the next many hours just crying like a massive baby, convinced that it if were ‘just’ kidney stones’ then that’s what they would have said, and that it was no doubt some terrible kidney cancer and he would die and we hadn’t really sorted out affairs yet and he never ever did hang all my artwork onto the walls like I’ve been asking for for years and he still hasn’t sold the truck and OH NO I am not really up for being a widow and my children are too young and why haven’t you looked after yourself properly and this sucks and I’M SO TIRED.

But it turns out he had a small 2mm kidney stone which took five days to pass and one ultrasound to check it had passed before he boarded the plane because who wants a kidney stone attack while you are flying over the Middle East? No one, that’s who.

Mark was horrified to hear from his specialist a day before he flew away that he needs to become a vegetarian for three months to fix his body up a bit. I mean – we have SOOOOO much venison in the freezer. Ironically, venison is the WORST for kidney stones and Mark is a meat man from way back and this news was like telling a voracious reader that they have become allergic to paper and kindles. Devastating. But I said go with it – it’s a simple rule and for a finite time, and it may keep you alive and certainly it should help you avoid five days of racking pain. He seemed unconvinced, particularly as he would be staying with family in New Zealand and who wants a guest who doesn’t eat meat, he asked me. I’m like, that’s actually not really a thing – you just swerve the sausage. But he thought it might simply be too much to ask of people to pop the chicken to the side and so….er, let’s just say the Great Vegetarian Experiment is limping along rather than a gallop. Or a jog, or a feeble ramble.

Sample dialogue:

How’s the diet going darling? I ask.

Good, he says. I’ve only had one steak and cheese pie.

SHAKE MY HEAD AND SIGH HEAVILY.

Anyway. Since my last post I have turned 46, travelled to Porto without children but with a meat-hoovering husband ignorant of the small sharp crystal making its way down his bits, finished the pottery course making us the proud owners of disproportionately large handled mugs and unpleasantly textured bowls and sculptures of people who are not at all reflective of what people actually look like, and probably had nits. Annoyingly for me, Mark ended up being a bit of a pottery maverick star and each project of his emerged so full of character and spirit and joy that I have been forced to examine why I think I was going to be so much better than him at it. This stuff is so humbling! So awkward! So irritating!

And half term came and went and I have barely looked at the children who have spent the week playing Minecraft together, racing out to Tescos for forbidden snacks, watching terrible TV, fighting each other when I am on Teams calls, and singing loudly. We are trying to make the most of Dad not being here and so are hitting the meat/cheese hard, and watching movies that Mark would refuse to see. Remi is sleeping with me which feels rather nice as he doesn’t snore and only takes up a tiny part of the bed but he does tend to wake at 6am on weekends asking me if it is time to get up. It isn’t, but we do it anyway.

In the Culture section of this post, I can report I have been to see the Marina Abramovich exhibition at the RA (wonderful but I missed the naked people as they had clocked off), saw Bafta screenings of The Holdovers (great, sweet, a little forgettable) and Past Lives (overrated but who am I to say?), and I became a member of the V&A so I can go see the Chanel exhibition whenever I want. I will go, once I stop being very busy with mid-life crises and upheavals and feeling so tired all of the time.

Thanks to our private healthcare at work I went to see a gynecologist about my hormones and when I arrived and sat down and he asked me how I could help, I burst into tears and told him snottily that “I am 46 and I just don’t think I am very well!” and the way he calmly pushed the tissues over to my side of the desk showed me he has seen it all before. So there were bloods done and an examination that showed indeed I am somewhat worse for wear after all those babies (prolapse, hernia, etc) – the poor old undercarriage is a little ramshackle in places. Anyway, just give me the drugs.

Here’s a fleshy cheese hand I made for Halloween:

And a nice photo of Mylie and me out on Friday night for her birthday:

Some ceramics for your visual feasting pleasure:

Noah and Otis crocheting together:

Tuesday night winning pub quiz vibes:

That’s it – that’s all I have. Happiest of Halloweens and Guy Fawkes and the return to school and the Christmas runway, y’all!

Today, I bought one packet less of the fresh bagels on my way back from the Portobello Sunday morning run/crawl, because this morning, we are one person down. Last night, when I once again rolled up the window blind in our middle bathroom, letting in the light and undoing the paranoid blind-unrolling habit each of the boys cling to (in case someone from another higher-up flat manages to manoeuvre themselves into some kind of impossible viewing position from their upper windows that overlook our lightwell, purely, they say, to spy on them while they pee), Barnaby’s precariously-placed electric toothbrush did not come crashing down onto the bathroom tiles like it has been doing every night for years. This is because the toothbrush, and his razor, and his shaving cream have all been relocated to a university hall in Nottingham. As has he.

The changes are small, though also massive and human-sized. He doesn’t like cheese, so every weekday meal for the last 18-ish years has been an exercise in avoiding cheese. Imagine – six kids but no cheesy pasta, no quick’n’easy pizza, no thrown-together jacket potato with grated cheese on top. No lasagne. No cheesy omelettes or cheese on toast. No parmesan chucked in for flavour, no feta for the sharp salty tang. No mozzarella for the pleasing stretch, no pasta bakes, no macaroni, no mascarpone-enhanced tomato sauces. But now? Now there’s a whole new world opened up to me, though it doesn’t exactly feel like opportunity – it feels like a loss.

There’s no one to empty the dishwasher, traditionally Barnaby’s job. There’s nothing really left of him here. One extra seat at the dinner table (which is good, because I’ve been perching on a step-ladder for years). There’s an extra sort-of-bedroom opened up in the old coal store, but that’s been taken swiftly by kid no. 2, because nature obviously abhors a vacuum, and which means there’s a vacancy for Remi opened up in the big old dorm room where the others sleep. Remi, right now, is helping Mark dismantle his cot as he prepares to move out as well.

So far, we are ok. This emptying out of our home and of my mothering load isn’t the opposite of the initial filling up. Before Barnaby, there were two. Barnaby’s arrival was over a long weekend – it was sore and shocking and bloody and unfathomable. Then there were three, and the life we once had was blown up spectacularly, delightfully, sleeplessly. It reshaped eventually, bits of us and him settling into something else entirely – a new build, one that we loved so much that we kept at it. Blowup after blowup, reconfiguring what life and tolerances and expectations and Christmas present budgets and car sizes and sleep-ins and space looked like. As we grew, all this made a kind of a sense, a chaotic, messy, noisy, overwhelming, joyful, impossible sense.

The other side of this is much tidier. Where once there was a cot is now dust, a virgin rectangle of untrodden carpet, and the ghost of all that bruised and wounded newness and hope. Where once there was my son, my first son, big and beautiful and clever and mistaken and prickly and loving and wonderful, is now a little more space in the flat, some discarded books, a few photographs on the fridge. It’s a slimming down, a quietening. I am that little old woman in ‘A Squash and a Squeeze’, but with kids, not farm animals. I am losing people as I reclaim some room, but I don’t exactly like it.

I didn’t cry when we said goodbye yesterday because he was happy and excited, and he has a whole life to begin living that isn’t with us anymore. That is good and right. And just as it took a weekend for him to arrive all those years ago, it took just a weekend for him to leave us. Just a few days. I tried to throw in some last minute advice to eat apples and get enough sleep, to know your limits when experimenting, to be kind, to look for bargains and to wear a helmet when on his bike so he doesn’t fall off and get brain damage and live as a pirate until the rest of his days. But he knows all that, because he’s many steps ahead of me. He’s been honing best practice for years, thinking about things, watching and learning and trying stuff out, all while I thought he couldn’t care less. He wants to have his turn now. He’s ready. And so are we, for better or worse.

It’s been quite the month

A few weeks ago we got told we would have to move out of our flat because the landlords want to renovate and let the flat out for higher rent. This is news we have known would come one day, but after 15 years, you kind of push the thought of impending UTTER DESTRUCTION OF OUR LIVES under the Turkish rug. I was at first numb, then sleepless, then tearful, then panicky. It seems rents are high out there in the real world, and flats are small, and it is entirely possible that no one will be delighted at the prospect of renting to a big family with a fat dog, and that even if they were, it would be very far away from our friends and schools and neighbourhood and support systems and doctors and haunts and things that make a life really sing. So we asked if there were any way we could stay, at least until we could figure out what to do, and it seems that they will consider that. We have no idea under what conditions, but we are hoping something will work.

Then there was a sniff, a hint, a teeny tiny possibility of a role shift at work. These are nothing new for me – I am spookily prone to role shifts, as I am bouts of psoriatic arthritis and coldsores. These things linger, benign, undetectable, me foolishly thinking that I have grown out of them, but they come at me periodically to strike me down and render me weak and sore, powerless and sad. Embarrassed. I thought that it was a case of here we go again, and floated the idea to our nanny and the kids just so they could readjust their expectations in case the shift came. Change is always horrible, but right now, with the threat of having to move, and a kid needing to be supported at university, and the tax problem still hanging around in the form of repayments until next year, and the cost of living meaning that literally stepping out of this flat causes HSBC to send a flurry of panicky notifications to my phone, was just too much. White-knuckled panic, bloodshot eyeballs, big ol’ existential discussions of what it means to live and to thrive and whether we just need to shut up shop and scuttle home to New Zealand – all this for a few days.

But LO! It seems I got the wrong end of the stick – decisions made by people above my pay grade were made and I get to stay in my role – in fact, I get to stay with a few more most excellent role changes that equal challenge and opportunity and chances to stretch like that long-desired-for mozzarella. This, on the same day that a doctor at Chelsea and Westminster told me that my psoriatic arthritis has probably ‘burned itself out’ and that I am not needing any long-term plan for rheumatoid arthritis as they had thought. The stiff neck that I sport like an unoiled Tin Man is just a mystery they are happy to put down to an anomaly which may get better by doing physio exercises diligently. That news felt good, but also odd – someone telling you your long term thing that you’ve begrudgingly learned to live with is actually…not a thing at all. Those years of blowup knee joints where movement feels like shard of broken glass replacing cartilage and bone, where getting up and around on mornings in the midst of flareups sees me hobble and grasp for support until the joints warm up and calm down…what even were they?

Lastly

Mark and I started our pottery classes. It turns out that Mark is good with his hands, I am impatient and prone to internal tantrums when I think I am not the best in show. I think the universe is trying to tell me something, and that I desperately need some HRT.

Anyway. Here’s some photos from the last few days:

Go well, my son. Thank you for everything.

I thought, when I was a younger person, with a neck that still swivelled gracefully and hair that hadn’t yet begun to thin, that having a lot of children wasn’t going to be very expensive. The rationale was that they could share clothes, they could sleep in bunkbeds, I would make simple lovely one-pot meals that everyone would eat (thus capitalising on the economics of crowd-feeding – cheaper by bulk and batches), and that we would entertain ourselves instead of needing trips to Thorpe Park and Legoland. That we would eventually save on babysitters by getting the older ones to do it. We would borrow things and share things and everyone would learn to have cheap brotherly home made fun. That we would reuse the cots and the car seats and the buggies and the sleepsuits and just get on with it.

I didn’t bank on quite a few things, in this early, sweetly naive financial assessment, such as how often those now big people break my stuff, or incur needless costs in big, dumb ways. I didn’t think much about future holidays where everyone brings friends and everyone is now adult-sized (with adult-sized luggage and adult-sized fares) and everyone has inherited their parent’s snobbish attitude to food and wine and everyone equals a minivan. Our holiday to Gozo has been over for a week but OH THE COST will be with us for a jolly long time after.

Here’s some annoying money-related things that irk me, roiling my guts with the pain of it all:

To save on costs, we all went for the early flights there and back and that meant 2am and 3am violent unnatural wakings and terrifying vomit-inducing coach and taxi rides to airports (if you are Otis, that is – the kind of kid who routinely vomits just as soon as we pull up to Gatwick’s unloading bay after looking pale for the hour long drive, or chucks up in the sea after the boat ride has well and truly concluded, or sticks his head out of the cab and spews into the wind that blows it all back into the car). These early morning trips probably ended up saving up about £10 each and we are STILL feeling the aftereffects of travelling all night last weekend to get home. Reader, this kind of economising is just not worth it.

We also went for the soft hand luggage under-the-seats-in-front-of-you option rather than cabin bags but Casper was determined to take his favourite hard cased square bag with him even though we said ‘no – take a backpack like everyone else’. Easyjet are wankers, obviously, so when we got there the Easyjet woman took one look at Casper’s boxy bag and said ‘That will be £48 for your oversized bag” and when we said “NO WAY, it is certainly not oversized because when using your VR online tool it seemed to roughly fit,” she said “Put it into the wire cage over there to see if it fits then” with a kind of sigh. It fitted into the cage perfectly except for a millimetre of plastic hard wheels poking out of the top. We pushed and we rearranged but she remained steadfast in her conviction. “Oversized”, she said, taking our payment and (the kids are adamant about this) ending with an under-the-breath throwaway burn at them: “IN YOUR FACE!”. I wasn’t so sure, as she was an actual middle-aged woman, but who really knows?

Casper also left his phone in the transfer van at the end of the holiday and by the time he realised, the van had sped off. I emailed the transfer hire company to send it back to us once they had found it and it has so far cost us £125 for couriering and ‘admin’. We might also be stung at customs.

There were ten of us on holiday and that meant we couldn’t all fit into the biggest minivan on the island, a 9-seater. So we had to resort to buses and eventually cabs for the older kids. The older kids also got quite keen on a refreshing glass or two of Maltese wine at every meal which, though cheap per bottle, quickly added up. One night the little buggers ordered cocktails each and I nearly exploded with euro-related rage.

They broke two lampshades at the villa. The first was because one teenager got skittish and outraged about a fly being in his room and he chased it around while trying to swat it dead with his tshirt, and the tshirt caught the glass lampshade and it shattered all over his bed. The second lampshade got broken because the other teenagers decided to throw hard balls around in their room and misfired, hitting the glass lampshade and shattering it all over the beds. I mean, FFS.

The breaking of things continued today because another teenager of mine throw a pillow at another brother but it missed the kid and hit a vintage mid century ceramic vase which smashed all over the kitchen. At this point I was a bit sick of hearing the unnecessary and unbudgeted for costs incurring by my large and unwieldy thoughtless oafs, and have today constituted a policy whereby the suckers have to pay for breakages (and oversized luggage and lost phone courier charges) themselves. This has caused a lot of tears and handwringing and outrage but how else will they understand this stuff?

The other thing the children do now is that they eat all the things. But not the things I would like them to eat. On Gozo, the watermelon was left to go drippy and soft, the thoughtfully quartered plums and peaches turned brown. My tomato salad got optimistically rejigged until the heat and the juices combined, turning it into a kind of terrifying prison hooch. The massive tub of locally-made gelato, asked for repeatedly, got ignored once bought and transferred from the little bakery down the road into our villa freezer, inexplicably losing its appeal on the walk home. The cherry croissants were rejected as being ‘too sugary’. Mark, who ALWAYS buys a chunk of smoked processed cheese whenever we go anywhere, despite my protests that no one else likes it, ghosted the little cheesy stump until it grew a smoke-infused fur all over its surface. He also bought sad mushrooms that sat in a bag getting funky and damp.

But then we went out and the children’s appetites returned once in Gozo’s main tourist square, trying to order steaks and pork ribs and chips and two drinks each at least and I was DYING – the cost! I said. Why don’t you eat the watermelon? I said. Keep your costs down! I said. The budget is FINISHED! You’ve spent it all, you little hungry pests! But it was no good. I was outnumbered and overspent.

Here’s some photos though because actually, who cares? I can always sell a vehicle.

Gelato. Eaten at the bakery, but no where else:

A beach with red sand, rocks, waves, and a taverna with expensive things to order from:

A little bit of Catholic awesomeness:

More of the above:

The bluest sea:

Beloved and a big boat:

For the Bishop of Gozo:

Beheaded:

Me contemplating the money running out and deciding to smile anyway:

The inland sea in Dwerja Bay:

Spending money:

Remi has become frightened of the toilet. He says that while he was at nursery, someone flushed the toilet that was filled with way too much toilet paper (every parent of a small child recognises this scenario) and the water began to rise. He now will only do a wee outside or if you come into the toilet with him. He won’t flush the loo unless you are in there with him, and he asks you to watch the water while he turns his back and washes his hands. He’s like, KEEP WATCHING. Don’t look at me. Watch the water!

Obviously this is not a sustainable situation. It makes me wonder if he has seen more overflowing toilets than I actually realise. There’s that incredible act two in the Triangle of Sadness where everyone in the superyacht gets vomity and the toilets overflow with the most revolting and slippery wastewater, and there’s an overflowing toilet in Rose Byrne’s bathroom in Platonic. How much does this kid see? I used to have a good handle on these kinds of things but the whole cadence and tone of this family has shifted now that the teenagers have gained in power and number. They watch things and listen to things and say things that I cannot do much about, and the culture and morals of the family have shifted in response. Mostly I accept this. We are, in any case, overrun. There is usually a teenager somewhere in my eyeline. They tend to lie down quite a lot. Ned constructs Esher-like cushion-to-couch stairways and other soft furnishing platforms to splay his newly-hairy body over, along, and in, while the others are often plugged into a device and just sit for hours. They come and go, to school, out with friends, babysitting, walking the dog. I never quite know who will be home for dinner. Dinner might be for four, and might easily swell to 12. No one bothers much to articulate any of this in advance, and as such, my powers in the kitchen are simply unparalleled. I whip up meals like magic and always manage to pad the table out regardless of the unexpected extras. I keep telling the children that one day they will marvel at my skills, but right now they think everyone gets served three Ottolenghi salads plus a traybaked chicken and warmed sourdough of an otherwise unremarkable Tuesday evening. One day they will understand.

What do those kids do when they are not littering the couch with akimbo limbs? Last night one kid was at a party, another had one babysitting job which segued into another babysitting job as a neighbour went into labour and off to the hospital, another kid was at a WWF wrestling match with friends somewhere, another was babysitting another lot of neighbours kids. Two kids were with us, one asleep, one trying on my high summer heels. It’s like The Babysitters Club series here right now, but in real life and with absolutely no girls. The Square in which we live is awash with neighbours needing ad hoc and regular babysitting, and what better people to know than the family with lots of kids who have been looking after each other for years? They’ve nearly all had experience looking after kids from all ages, from tiny babies onwards…and there’s usually one kid here who hasn’t gone out to a party/isn’t in the middle of GCSEs or A levels/unwilling to each a tidy £10 per house for sitting down at someone else’s place for a few hours. It’s a goldmine, I tell ya.

Clothes update

The Tax Situation has curbed many, many old spending habits, and forced new ways of meeting my new dress needs. Two weeks ago I got all het up and panicky and sold a Chanel jacket which felt very much like ripping a baby from my arms. It wasn’t a jacket I had ever really worn, so not really like a baby at all, but it felt like I was making one of those rash decisions you rue, for years later. Like I do the Alexander McQueen jacket with the 40’s shoulders and slimmest of lines that I let go on a whim one day stupidly, rashly, mindlessly. Anyway, the Chanel jacket sold for £510, along with some Charlotte Olympia heels (£71) and two Roksanda blouses at £60 each. The money was quickly deposited into my account where it burned and ached and screamed at me…SPEND ME BEFORE I GET USED UP ON HAIRCUTS AND PE SHOES AND HYDROCORTISONE CREAM AND MOBILE PHONE BILLS! And so I spent a good week obsessing about finding a new Chanel jacket to ‘reinvest’ into. The only good one was on a US site but there are horribly expensive customs and duty taxes these days. So I came up with a plan to get the jacket via a complex system of friends and friends of friends and other people’s sisters and new accounts and shipping addresses and various countries and I may well have lost a week of my life and tried many good people’s patience. And it probably won’t fit because of the upper arms situation which shows no signs of resolving.

I also went to an Erdem sample sale after work this week and found dresses reduced from £1500 to £150 and so now I have more dresses to sell to ensure I adhere to the ‘one on, one out’ policy. Which I have to do three times. I also think I have a bit of upper-arm-induced body dysmorphia because one dress I bought is a size 16 and another is a size 18. I was like ‘ohhhh I shall belt it in and look all swishy and a bit like Audrey Hepburn in ‘Roman Holiday’ with all this fabric’ but Mark said WHY IS THAT DRESS SO BIG AT THE BACK? IT LOOKS LIKE YOU ARE STORING A TAIL.

On Mark

He has been struck by a mysterious swollen set of feet/lower legs. They have been hurting him so much that he can’t walk without crutches and he has to put them up on cushions and moan a lot. I was my usual brittle self about it because I kept telling him that if he didn’t do something about his generous tum then his sciatica would get worse and he would turn…immobile. Which he has been, all week. I said I will not prematurely become your carer. It’s all a bit tense. So he has had xrays and blood tests and emergency visits to the blood test clinic to check for clots and it turns out his current cocktail of (not fun) drugs may have exacerbated latent gout.

Talk about sexy times in Cleveland Square.

He also had a wonderful birthday party before the gout attack where everyone told him he was a most excellent and loved man, and they gifted him pottery lessons which he shall get to once he can walk again unaided. (Roll my eyes).

Anyway. here we are at the party:

Here’s his cake which the dog got to first:

And Barnaby, Ava and I at his Year 13 Leaver’s service in a chapel in Westminster Abbey. Oh yes, that’s how we roll here in Londontown:

And more party photos from last weekend on a penthouse apartment balcony with lovely, lovely friends. Mark had to go lie down with his legs up in the air in the living room so missed out on *quite* a bit:

Lastly, the baby, Barnaby, Otis, and Mark:

It’s the 4th of June, a Sunday morning, at 7:25am. I have been awake for a few hours and no one but the dog is yet conscious. Magic, though sleepy right now, is pretty much well except for fatty lumps all over his torso. A cursory google suggests it is quite normal for an old overweight dog to be this fatty lumpy, though he has a particular massive one which is coming out from his chest and feels and looks quite Ripley in Alien – it keeps growing and seems to be straining to come out through the skin. So we will take the old fella to the vet. A vet, hopefully called Evette. Colin gag right there – it’d never happen in real life though, right?

May was quite a month. Mark and I went with our friends Ben and Gaby for a few days to Valencia, apparently the third largest city in Spain. We went to celebrate Mark’s 60th birthday. When your husband turns 60, you have to take stock for a moment. 60 is the kind of age you expect your own parents to be. 60 is greyish and sore back-ish and comfortable shoes and free public transport. It is high blood pressure and no getting up ladders. Forgetting things more often and glasses. Various pairs of glasses. Hearing aids. Flat caps. Slacker jaws and age spots, funny little skin tags and unexpected dry bits. Wiry geometric hairs that come out of ears and noses. Sciatica, bulging discs, MRIs and pain specialists. A fondness for early nights and sleeping. More snoring.

It’s a bit weird, all this. So we went to Spain to elevate the man and to make the birthday feel more like an event (Evette) because 60 is a milestone. After all, I went to New York at 30 and Portugal at 40 and so it is quite right that the milestones coincide with a trip on an airplane.

Here’s what eating things in Valencia looks like: tapas at every opportunity, a big old glass of Agua de Valencia which tasted like very nice fresh icy orange juice but was enhanced vai the medium of cava and gin and some kind of mysterious herby Valencian spirit. Tortillas and ham ham ham! Such ham. Warm melty salty ham. Ham that makes all other ham feel pallid and imposter-ish.

A saint’s preserved forearm and some monks. General religious battiness was everywhere and a’plenty. Also, a photo of us at the City of Arts and Sciences complex after walking our 25k steps with niggling sciatic pain. One of us trying to smile through the pain fug:

We stayed at a lovely hotel in the middle of the old town with an impressive buffet breakfast with proper coffee and green juices and more meats! So many meats. Mark was insistent on paying a little more for the buffet breakfast though I tried to weasel out of it because I was being all thrifty and budget conscious and decided the buffet was a bit of a hotel ‘have’ and we would be better off finding a little cafe down the road. I was wrong – the Valencians didn’t really do breakfast other than a coffee and a pastry so PHEW we were locked into absurd feasts every morning. Fortified by meats, we could march through the day on only a little bit of extra strong ibuprofen and a keen eye for the next tapas place with another tray of ham and a fried cheese croquetta.

The whole weekend coincided with a religious festival which saw, on the last day, a march through the town of about 1000 maidens dressed in lace followed by their mamas and grandmothers in serious widow garb:

It was a Spanish-y dream and made me remember when we went to evening Spanish classes with Amber and Glenn at a night school in the olden days, in the olden country. Twenty-five years ago, surely. I do not know what has really happened since, or how we all got so close to/actually reached 60.

So that was May Part One.

May Part Two.

A few days after coming home with my packets of chorizo and nougat, pleased to see the children hadn’t burned the flat down in the powercut, I flew home to see my parents, brothers, sister, brother-in-law, and sister-in-law. It was a gathering of some importance, urgency, and of note, as Dad and Mum aren’t well and we felt we needed to see them soon. We managed to settle on a date and all flew in around the same time to spend a week together. For me, the trip was so long overdue that the not-going had really crystalised into a normal thing. The thought of the trip back home was always dismissed because of all the reasons – babies, breastfeeding, pregnant, covid, money, Mark’s turn, Mark’s turn, Mark’s turn. The ost of the trip back home, in all of the senses, always seemed too high. I was scared, I think. But the call home this time was clear. So I found a cheap flight with an 8-hour layover in Shanghai, and I got onto the Heathrow Express and 40 hours later, found myself with my family, at home, a long way from home.

The last of the guavas and feijoas from Dad’s garden:

All together at the Fat Camel drinking very good coffee and snafling very good ginger crunch:

Mum and Kerry

Actual burial plot – Mum and Dad took us there so we would know where they were. A funny old excursion to have, but a good one. Dad is talking in a typically animated way:

Me and Dad on a walk past our childhood home. It looks much greyer and smaller than I remember. That’s a tree he planted:

All together for dinner at the old butter factory:

Dean:

Most excellent sister and sister-in-law:

At the airport, about to leave on a windy day on a very small airplane:

So. We were together for a week, and talked and went out and saw things and laughed and ate jammy doughnuts and crusty rolls with ham and butter and crisps inside. I remembered what it is to have family just beyond your own, and it felt good. I know what we have been missing.

I hesitated writing this post as I am in a bit of a funk about AI. Last week I had to do some research into ChatGPT and Large Language Models for work and went to a webinar thing about it and listened to about three podcasts on the topic. Fuelled with all this terrifying, thrilling, depressing information, I went to book club, drank much of the cremant and then three of us had a marvelously spirited slightly shouty book club ‘discussion’ over it and what it means for our jobs, and what it might mean for our kids. By then I was thinking of myself as somewhat of an AI expert because, as I was busy telling everyone,

“I’ve been reading about this for THREE WHOLE DAYS!”

Three whole days probably does not an AI expert make. I see that now.

Anyway, the book club dynamos and I didn’t really come up with much of a solution to the AI problem – more like a kind of resigned despair. The tidal wave is about to hit: what do you do? Prepare, I guess. By being more human? What does that even MEAN? Bleed more? Emote more expressively? Fail and screw up and get things wrong and fall up stairs more frequently? (although I think AI and robots do all those things too except for bleeding).

So in the week since I have been wondering about writing which is what I do for a job, and writing here which is where I play with words and settle my thoughts and reorder my recollections. Writing here is about catharsis and connection. I have been thinking about what it is to tell stories and bring people into a world through words and cadence, through choices of tone, lightness and jokes, and writerly embellishments that segue into not-exactly-true for the betterment of a story, and those more honest little bits that always find themselves woven through the waffle like a bobbly bit of Chanel fantasy tweed. Can AI do that? My funk prevented me from trying, but this morning I gave it a go, asking it to write me a post about a mother who lived in a small flat in London with six sons.

Reader, it was reassuringly total banal shite. Kind of skimming things, no depth, not interesting. Like a wikipedia page but more glossed over. Trite. Absolutely real estate marketing copy in tone. It then wrote me a poem for Mark’s impending 60th birthday and it was delightfully bad – my prompt mentioned him hunting deer and fishing and his sons and it created a rhyming horror. An excerpt for your pleasure:

“He loves to hunt those graceful deer

And fishing too, it’s very clear

He’s spent his life enjoying the great outdoors

With his sons, he’s made many memories and more

Their bond is strong, it’s plain to see

A father and sons, as tight as can be…”

…and on and on into interminable nothing drivel.

But, oh…..if only that were the end of that, and I could shake off my AI-related dread. The AI will only get better. The shite gap will close and that robotic smarmy nothingness that stood for a ChatGPT blog post will learn to mimic more closely human meanderings and silly things and fun things that stand for heart and warmth. Probably. Luckily I am well-skilled in making wonky cakes and churning out lesser Ottolenghi salads. There’s hope for my ability to monetise myself yet.

TV situation

The TV situation is very healthy at the moment, with many shows that we are halfway through – the kind of shows that at 8:30am, just as you are setting up your uncomfortable bedroom work desk with the thinly cushioned chair in the tiny space that your husband kindly lets you have (still causing pressure points where the office cupboard door hook digs into the upper thigh), you think…ONLY 12 HOURS TO GO BEFORE I CAN WATCH TELLY!

Best things right now:

Colin from Accounts (Australian joy, thank you Charlotte)

Big Door Prize (Chris O’Dowd in a slightly silly show about unfulfilled potential – natch)

Succession (obvs)

Blue Lights (Northern Irish police show with excellent reviews)

Beef (a little bit pleased with itself and a bit too mean)

Ted Lasso (for the kids and husband more than me – I think it is a little daft-not-in-a-good-way. I also cannot stop thinking about Harry Styles when I watch it, and that Keeley is becoming too thin).

Reading situation

Unsatisfactory right now. Finished The Rabbit Hutch by Tess Gunty (cold, clever, unmoving, about a block of flats and the people within it, connected and all a bit doomed) and Girl A by Abigail Dean (a faster read, engaging but still a little hollow, all about a family of seven kids whose nutty religious parents starve and chain them up until one of them escapes). Next on the list is The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka. On the to-be-read pile are masses and masses of books that I compulsively buy from charity shops, though I do have the Susannah Constantine memoir at the top of this pile, which my very delightful friend helped to bring to fruition. I shall read it because it’s certainly funny and I know it’s got a poo story in there somewhere which is always a massive plus.

Clothes situation

I’m selling things so I can buy more things. The tax situation shows no sign of becoming any healthier so my former life of willy-nilly sample sale fritterings is but a mere memory (and has resulted in a wardrobe full of silken gowns and many things that don’t go over my arms). The arms thing is a mystery. I look at myself in the mirror and think “You aren’t really that fat as such”, particularly considering all those pregnancies and the undeniable fact that I have Big Bones, and then I go to put on a shirt and by the end of the day it has ripped a bit at the seams or puckered the upper arms where the fabric has been stretched beyond acceptable capacity. Every time I run I stop at a park bench and do at least six pressups. I mostly don’t have breakfast. I have eaten all the Easter eggs, so they are no longer a problem. Why the arms thing?

Does perimenopause give you fat arms? That’s really my question here I suppose.

Anyway I sold a Batsheva dress to someone in Canada (bit tight in the arms) and a Vilshenko paisley column dress because the last time I wore it I had an altercation with a past nemesis and so it felt tainted. Then I went on ebay and bought a Roksanda shirt (terrible colours on me and I suspect I once had the same shirt but no longer so may have sold it on ebay in a strange circular economy kind of way) and a Vilshenko flowery tuille-y skirt which makes me look old rather than like Carrie Bradshaw in a tutu AND IT’S A LITTLE TIGHT IN THE WAISTBAND!

Does perimenopause give you a fat waist? That’s really my question here I suppose.

In other news

Otis got invested at cubs and so the fifth kid enters his Paddington Cub and Scouts years. I was supposed to sew badges on his sweatshirt but even though I am extremely poor I paid someone at the laundromat to do it for £36. That’s because I am bad at sewing and think it is sexist that no one else is expected to do it.

Easter was fun:

And here’s Ned at the Hockney exhibition and on the way home from seeing the Grenfell film at the Serpentine Gallery as proof that we don’t spend all weekend in front of our phones playing Penguin Run (though we do quite a bit of that too):

Sometimes, when you live with a bunch of people who are small and a bit prone to filth/lax hygiene, you get hit by gross stuff. A barrage of parasites. Here’s a recent unfortunate list – most, though not all, happening to me as well as affecting a good chunk of the rest of the family members:

worms

nits (x2, possibly still current)

stomach bug throughout half the family (featuring vomits and unmentionables)

cold sore on lip

back rash (mysterious, still present, halfway between an eczema splodge and shingles patch)

ear ache/strep A/tonsilitis

mice infestation

constant cupboard moth infestation

silverfish in the bathrooms (constant)

warts

athletes foot

ringworm

Most of these things have been resolved/slathered in oldish creams from under the bathroom sink, though a few stubbornly remain. Like this morning, I got up with Remi at 6ish to find Ned, the Perpetual Early Riser, telling me that he has seen a ‘dark shadow’ run from under the couch back into the kitchen. I wish a ‘dark shadow’ was a mystery but we all know it’s yet another interloping mouse. Apparently they have a new lot of babies every 21 days so it’s like this race to track them down and extinguish them before they take over your kitchen entirely.

The worst of all these modern-day plagues is probably the mice, followed by the worms, then the nits. I found out I had a head full of nits the evening after returning from a day at Soho Farmhouse. I had been lording it up there, swimming in the lovely pool and using their towels and sitting close to people in the sauna and then having the longest lunch amongst Chipping Norton’s finest media types (there were a LOT of them and they all didn’t seem to have proper/pressing jobs on this particular Friday and it did leave me scratching my head in wonderment though that could have been the nits) and then I came home to discover my poor old scalp was a louse playground. Nay, a louse breeding ground. Cue the tiny nit combs and oil treatments and a general feeling that we were all a bit unclean. Remi, of course, was Patient A. He had fat bold lice and the very worst see-through hair the exact color of the nits and lice as well as curly knots which don’t comb out that well. He ended up with a hair cut with George the Barber and now all his curls have gone along with the lice. I think they have gone anyway. My eyes can’t quite manage the strain of checking like they once could.

He was thrilled with his haircut. ‘Thrilled’ isn’t a word I use often but in this case it is a perfect choice. Also ‘chuffed’. It was like his real self was a boy with shorter hair but he just hadn’t known it. He smiled broadly the whole way and checks in the mirror in the morning to make sure the cut is still there. He gets worried if you ruffle his head in case it somehow brings back his former knotty bonce. He is also, in the photo above, sporting a faint leftover eyeliner moustache from World Book Day outfitting the day before.

In other news

Barnaby has a tattoo. I have mixed feelings about his tattoo.

I booked flights for our summer holiday which turned out to be horribly stressful as the flights kept going up each time I looked and the flight times get worse but I didn’t have a credit card with which to buy the tickets and so I just had to witness the brutal increases. A credit card did eventually come in the mail (that’s a whole other story about balance transfers and Martin’s Money Savers) and I came home late from work and felt the ticket-purchasing was critical to be done late on a Thursday night rather than on a day where I could be rational and calm about it and I ended up booking us flights home at 7am in the morning. This means a lost day, a terrible night-before, a shocking early morning transfer, and general discontent. I did this because of the Flight Purchasing Pressure. I would add this particular pressure to the emotional burden of women’s work. Mark doesn’t get involved in this kind of domestic chore thing. He did look up from the TV when I directly (loudly/aggressively) addressed him once I found out my booking error but his only contribution was to tell me he thought I said the flights were really cheap and he doesn’t want to fly home that early. No one engages in the boring hours of bloody flight searching but I SHALL EAT MY HAT if they don’t all moan when they have to get up at 4am the last day of the holiday.

Emotional labour is taxing.

Speaking of tax, how has our new-found allegiance to not-spending going, I imagine you asking?

Not very well. If there was some sort of ‘out of ten’ ranking awarded to people based on their new-found not-spending habits, I would give myself about six out of ten, ten being still blowing money like there’s an infinite supply, and one being like abstemious prudent people – the kind of people with apps that track their spending and ISAs and even weekly envelopes stuffed with cash that equate to exactly what they need for the week and once they run out they simply stop spending – the same people who use everything in their freezers and cupboards and who do a weekly delivered shop via Tescos rather than constantly run up to Waitrose from cremant and bacon and who go on shorter holidays in off-seasons and who borrow books from the library rather than buy and who do not buy Batsheva dresses from ebay on a bored whim. So I’m a six but I used to be an eight so I think that’s progress by anyone’s estimation.

I don’t buy coffee out anymore and I tell the children they must not steal any of my coins because they are very necessary. I try to cook up what we have in the fridge, drink less in the week, haven’t seen the inside of an uber for a month, and I returned a Solange Azagury Partridge cherry red lip ring because I thought the £150 would be better used on food. I fret about the accounts constantly and have anxiety dreams every night. I cry a bit more than I used to. Mark says YES THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT’S BEEN FREAKING ME OUT ALL THESE YEARS and I feel much kinder towards him and his tax-related stress wrinkles.

The lapses have steadily crept back in however and I am somewhat ashamed about this week’s excesses. A beauty treatment that shall not be named ended up costing me more than I had budgeted for, and I am also off this morning to get my silver roots turned back into golden blonde because the silver hair is threatening to take over my head. I accidentally ordered a game of Linkee from the evil Amazon because it felt like a fun thing to do, and I paid for a backgammon board because Barnaby said it was a good game to learn. I went out for pizza twice this week, bought a round for old friends accidentally (because sometimes it’s just the thing to do) and we stumbled upon a local quiz at The Mitre pub on Tuesday and bought wine and chips. Obviously, I bought tickets to Malta. None of this is helping.

In other other news

I have given up on intermittent fasting because it makes no difference to the girth of my arms. I am instead eating kefir yoghurt in the morning to make sure I have outstanding gut health. I am also stopping my run midway to do five pressups on various park benches in order to address the upper arm girth. Last night I split a shirt because the arm girth stresses out my seams. I imagine this is some sort of perimenopausal as-yet-unconnected symptom.

Ned had a birthday:

Spectacular World Book Day efforts and a magnificent video of the children helping their dad butcher, mince, label and vacuum-pack the deer he shot last month:

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It’s Bagel Sunday again, which means I have spent another £21.50 on five bags of fresh mixed bagels from the new Jewish deli on Westbourne Grove which I pop into at the end of my morning run. I never bring a backpack because I think if I ran with a backpack I would collapse from the strain of carrying it, or would get sweaty along my back or would look like I was running to work with some sort of polyester creaseproof suit shoved into the backpack to get changed into later like I imagine corporate people in the 80s did, and I just don’t like the idea of any of those. Instead, I run home grasping two paper bags that always rip. But these bagels are really good with bacon, so there you have it.

Bagel Sunday also involves everyone sleeping off their Friday and Saturday night socialising and very often we have nothing to do except read the papers and attempt some homework. I think these are my favourite times of the week, each couch accessorised by a lanky boy, the ever-so-slightly too strong smell of teenage boy coming from their bedroom, cups of coffee to drink and washing to do and some sort of cake perhaps to make, but nothing pressing us too deeply. I hope the boys take something from these mornings into their own lives, a slow and sleepy end to the weekend with reading and quietness except for Debbie Harry singing French Kissing in the USA somewhere in the background pleasingly like she is right now.

It’s not always about the bagels

Last weekend we did a non-Bagel Sunday thing. We drove to Burnham Beeches for a session on forest bathing which does not involve actual swimming. Rather, it’s a Japanese discipline where you go and get a hit from the air, sights, smells, texture and the light from the forest, slowly walking through it in silence. It was quite marvellous and we all felt better afterwards but were also a bit embarrassed when we had to close our eyes and smell the soil and normal families walked on by. The soil smelling was an active thing, meaning we knelt down and scrabbled the ground to get a proper nosefull. Mark thought this was one step too far for him, and said he felt like laughing out loud when he peeked open his eyes and watched us get too near the base of trees to scrabble and sniff because, ‘that’s where a dog pisses’. Sure. One of us did seem to develop an allergic reaction on the lips after something fell on her or bit her during the smelling part, but, sure. Nature. Bugs. Dog piss. All probably better than an overheated basement flat and the whiff of a badly washed 16-year-old, right?

There’s been more birthdays – three weekends in a row, so that has exhausted us all by the singing and the cake making and the amazon packages arriving. We have four teenagers in the house now which is fun except for when it is not. Moods are boring, meltdowns are boring, and so are the times that they get offended by stuff we say and do and attempt to ‘call us out’. My eye-rolling right back at them doesn’t go down very well.

This is what three weekends, three different kids, assorted girlfriends, three cakes, various reused candles and a dwindling budget looks like:

The dwindling budget is a bit of a thing. I got an email late on Monday night from our accountant telling me that I personally owe HMRC a hunk of GBP, the same amount as my student loan added up to after five years of studying. Which is, frankly, a whole lot of GBP. I thought it was a mistake, but apparently it is not, and now I have to do some terrifying growing up in the money department. We have to budget, figure out a replayment plan, stop taking ubers willy-nilly, give up cremant, stop subscribing to Vogue, never order a cocktail again, go out a lot less, return things, pay the children less, give up gym memberships, sell our truck, never buy another dress again, stop Amazon packages every darkening our door. No more hair coloring, no more Soho House dinners, no more buying gold like an Italian heiress well might. I’ll say no to sample sales, late night ebay trigger-happiness, weekend trips to Portobello’s food market, too many TV channel subscriptions. No more sending the kids up to Waitrose to buy stuff and have them come back with sushi and individual Cawston Press fizzy drinks. No more Waitrose? Certainly no more bagels. Today was a send-off, of sorts.

I did a big cry, fretted, got ashen-faced, told everyone, panicked, cried again, checked the calendar and realised with some relief there won’t be any more birthdays for at least six weeks, so we are over the latest expensive hump. I used to think that having more kids simply wasn’t an economical consideration because they could just share clothes and shoes and books and we could make traybakes for everyone but it seems that my understanding of economics was, and is, fundamentally lacking. 2023 looks like to be our family-wide Year of Austerity and it’s probably not a bad thing. But oh, to be 45 and financially stupid is a bit shit.

To cheer me up, and perhaps any of you who enjoy bad haircuts, here’s a selection of my most intense mullety-looks. The first two were taken before puberty where the main bits of hair had a wave, but not an uncontrollable one, the kind of hair you would brush softly and maybe push back to half stand up. There was possibly some hairspray involved to keep the ‘shape’. Please note the same jumper in both photos over two years. My mother knitted it, I loved it, it was worn purposefully for school photo day. My mother is a wonder.

Back to the hair. Puberty brought out the big powerful curls and it all became simply unmanageable as a mullet. See below for evidence of this:

A few years later my mother took me to Wendy Moser, an at-home hairdresser and part-time opera singer, and she cut the long bits off. My cool older brother, I remember, was quite relieved.

Enough of that. When I was feeling more flush, before the Terrible Tax Sitch, I went to see Babylon for a Bafta screening not because we thought the movie would be any good but because Brad Pitt was going to be there for a Q&A. Just look at him:

All sexy and thin in his nice-fitting suit. It was pretty much the best thing that has happened in 2023 thus far.

We did celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary which was nice and involved cocktails before we instigated the new, brutal cocktail embargo. This is us, all free and financially uncompromised in a land far, far away:

Lastly, but never leastly, here is Chris in a Christmas present shirt that features Magic the communal dog:

It’s a Sunday and the smallest child has just hit his 9 year old brother around the head with a plastic beaded necklace and refuses to say sorry. Casper has taken off with his friends with a £10 note and the aim to eat at a Gordon Ramsey restaurant to try the Beef Wellington.

Noah is cutting onions and peeling garlic to help Mark make burgers out of the deer he stalked and killed late on Thursday night in the freezing temperatures somewhere in Kettering. I was out at a Bafta screening that night scoffing canapes, popcorn and drinking as much of the flowing Piper Heidseick champagne that I was allowed while stuffing my bag full of the complimentary sherbert discs and oat milk chocolate drops to take home to the children, and so did not have to witness the deer being hauled onto our kitchen table and being cut up into red meaty chunks. When I got back, everything was wiped down nicely although the overflow fridge was literally overflowing with stainless steel bowls of newly-dead deer. It is hard to stomach. But there are burgers to be made, and Noah is helping mince and season, chop and shape.

Ned is watching a movie but is nursing a terrible ingrown toenail because no one has noticed that he has a habit of picking his toes to shreds – not noticed until now when the fleshy mess is bad enough to make him hobble. He says he has to keep his socks on all the time because it is too sore and too embarrassing to be let out. I have suggested a plaster and tea tree oil and have made a mental note to look closely at my children more often. Barnaby has just made an excellent joke about Shakespeare and Otis has made his packed lunch ready for Tuesday when he will sing Christmas Carols at Kensington Town Hall for “an audience of thousands”. The bagels will be stale, the ham kind of warm, but he won’t be dissuaded. I’m also not sure who will constitute the “thousands”.

I, meanwhile, have not gone for a run because I have another chesty pink-eyed snotty coughing thing. Instead, I got ready to go with Charlotte for a hotly anticipated church fete in Camden where she and I would most likely buy ourselves vintage trinkets, books, antique lace things, mid-century lamps and costume jewellery to hang whimsically on the tree but alas, when we arrived at the church, it seemed that church was actually still going on rather than the fete, which had, once we reread the flyer, been held the day before. Which makes sense, being a Sunday, etc etc.

This is us trying to find it. A day late:

But no matter as we pootled around the shops and drank coffee and ate brunch and bought things from charity shops which wasn’t quite the same but close. And I was a bit excited to be in Camden because the shows we have been watching – Everything I know About Love and Trying – are both filmed in Camden and it felt quite movie-set-ish today with the trees and people in hats and frosty winteryness everywhere.

Because, Christmas. Last week was notable for the school Christmas fair held on Friday. I baked three cakes frantically on Thursday – one banana chocolate cake for the fair and two others, another banana chocolate and one coconut for us to eat – because one is never enough. But on Friday during the school run the dog finished the cakes off. The rage! The fury! The wasted eggs and butter and desiccated coconut. All gone into the furry belly of that fat, naughty dog. He must have really worked at it, fishing for the cakes on the tray in the middle of our huge table, willing those paws and claws to stretch further, aim higher! He was very sleepy all the rest of the day, way beyond shame. I think he just doesn’t do shame anymore.

I had a sample sale triumph last week – there was a bit of a strange sale with mostly stupid shoes at the Music Room but also some Roksanda clothes on a rack which sounded far too small but massively discounted. I raced in and bought a big pink and black floor-sweeping gown in heavy double-lined silk, hoping it might fit, and which was listed on the Harrods website at £2600. I got it for a measly £80. I wore it to a lovely friend’s farewell at the pub and nearly tripped up on my way to the loos. Practical for nothing, but I shall endeavour to continue to wear it anyway.

Here’s Remi at the school Christmas fair, foregoing a jacket and snacking one of many packets of popcorn:

Yesterday, in the spirit of Christmas tradition, we met up with a group of friends and took the Elizabeth Line to the Prince Charles cinema to a Sing-a-Long Muppets Christmas Carol and then to dinner with 24 other people at a Chinatown dim sum place. It was magical and heartwarming and lovely and only a little bit dampened by my constant coughing and strained vocal chords. The energy required in singing all those Muppet songs was taxing. We passed a Santa pub crawl as we made our way to the theatre:

The coughing has been a problem – Mark is coughing too – and every night it has been a struggle to work out how to get past the tickly throat thing to start getting sleepy. I’ve been having hot showers for the steam and then wrapping up warm and pouring on Vick’s Vapour Rub in the old skool tradition and remembering how my dad says you must keep your chest covered up. It has made me think that coughing is like eating crisps. If you give in to one you are just screwed and you’ll eat the whole packet/cough the whole night. I tried to be mindful and talk myself out of the tickling throat – to decide it was just an illusion. It hasn’t worked very well.

This is the last week of work and school – a few more days of strange pickup times, badly thought-out present buying, more sample sales, Canary Wharf visits, pink-eye, and snot – before we drive to Devon to swim and make pavlova and panic-buy more presents and watch all the great, crap films. I cannot wait!