The Harridan

Apparently this week is Maths Week at school. I was told this through the medium of earnest, enthusiastic newsletters and even more earnest and enthusiastic teachers who persuaded me to come to a Maths Week meeting this morning. There were about three of us parents in total, who had been rounded up before we had a chance to scurry off to our real lives, looking around kind of nervously. It still feels new, being on the teacher/parent side. Anyway, I have to confess that maths and I are not friends. So the prospect of Maths Week is about as enticing as Fish And All Seafood Week. Both topics leave me both a bit sweaty and sick-feeling. Anyway, Maths Weeks is going to involve lots of raffles and counting marbles in jars and workshops for parents and sponsored walk-a-thons around the football field. I reckon reception class will manage about 100 meters before they start crying. Which is going to be a cost-effective sponsorship, if nothing else.

One of the activities the kids are doing involves a matchbox. They have to fill it up with as many little things as they can. They could do this, if their brothers had not ripped the naked little unfilled matchbox on Friday afternoon. In the meeting this morning I had to raise my hand and ask the teacher what I should do now that there was no matchbox. She frowned and said there were no more. I felt like I should try to control those little hooligans a little better. Meanwhile, Noah and Custard were rampaging the library and running into the hall with books to shove onto my lap. They were really enjoying the acoustics in the hall and ran with deafening stomps. Everyone was wincing. I was sinking lower into my chair. Then the leaflet went round for Good Parents to sign up for the workshops. Maths workshops, mind. One of the tough parents who runs the committee and who smokes outside with his gang of punk parents asked me if I would like to sign up. I said, in a weak voice, that I couldn’t. Because (and I quote)

“I have too many dependants” (pointing to the Bad Kids with the clomping and the books and the baby). He was wearing denim cutoffs and had a blond quiff. He was not impressed.

Anyway, I got a meme today from Belgian Waffling. I am a little bit excited. I decided to wait until those children were properly asleep (not just screaming in their bedroom and taking their nappies off and using Noah’s mattress as a slide) until I could concentrate on the answers properly. Here goes.

What experience has most shaped you and why?

As much as I do not want to say this, because it makes me seem a bit dumbass and twee and sad and erm, inexperienced, it has to be the birth of all those pesky kids. I really, really like the job, and it suits me, and I find it mostly fun and actually a bit of a privilege. I have become much less wimpy. I have a much stronger sense of myself, and have figured out all sorts of Humble Human Truths, like those girls at school who were groomed and thin – they would always be that way. You do not grow into that – you are made like that. And that your perspective on life is the difference between a fun one and one that is a bit of a drag. I also think birth order is crucial (sorry, Middle Children – I get it now), and that Gina Ford speaks the truth. Being a mother has been a very liberating experience – and I think I can still say I am me first, then their mother second. Which maybe makes me less cranky about it all. I am not completely lost in the chaos and the filth, I am in there somewhere, admittedly swearing and squeezing little upper arms a bit too tightly. But there, you know?

If you had a whole day with no commitments what would you do?

Do my makeup properly, in the LIGHT.

Have breakfast with Mark in Harlem with some sort of alcoholic drink.

I would then ditch Mark and go looking in the second hand shops on the Kings Road and Kensington.

Lunch at the River Cafe

(I would in real life get all tired now but let us continue this complete and utter fantasy of freetime)

Home, for coffee with the La Pavoni and some online scrabble with my mother. Then off to Beach Blanket Babylon for drinks, via SCP and Coverture then to The Ledbury for the tasting menu. Home at 10:30 for some reading.

I would be really fat and tired but so, so, so happy.

What food or drink could you never give up?

Bacon and eggs. I love bacon and eggs and would be happy to have them every day for the rest of my (shortened) life. But of course it must all be posh – Poilane toast and Abel & Cole’s farmhouse butter and well-looked after eggs and proper expensive organic bacon. HOW uncouth is THAT?!? Should have said sushi or something.

If you could travel anywhere, where would that be and why?

Unequivocally NOT New Zealand because I am flying there in 2 weeks for a Mysterious Reason (something to do with the Secret Genius Project) for one week. That is a topic for another blog post. If I could travel anywhere, it would be New York. I am entirely unoriginal in this. But New York has an energy unlike anywhere else I have been before. I would like to go find some salt beef and pickle place and listen to the customers and drink some bad coffee and do all the touristy stuff and then do the non-touristy stuff. I have been there once, for six days and was (of course) pregnant.  How lovely to not be, and swan about.

Who do you have a crush on?

Mary Portas. But I wish she didn’t ruin the charity shops. I shall never forgive her for that.

Mark Ronson. Oh, I LOVE that man and his hair and his suits.

Unfortunately, all men, in some form. Witness me with the husbands of friends/Mark’s workmates/the waiter at The Commander/fathers at nursery. I can be a bit minxy and it can be embarrassing.

If you were the leader of your country, what would you do?

Make us all bi-lingual – the Maori language would have equal standing with English. Kids would grow up, go travelling, and would meet europeans with the command of three or four languages, and we would have our own, and not feel like language dunces.

Do something about violence towards children.

Then I would cry in a corner, whimpering “This is too hard. Just let me be a TV presenter instead”.

Give me one easy savoury recipe that does not include cheese.

Bacon and eggs. Toast the poilane, butter it, cook the bacon, cook the eggs.

And my question:

What did you think you were going to be when you grew up?

I am going to tag Foxymoron, Art By Anya, Halfway Down The Stairs and Paisley Jade.

IF ONLY I KNEW HOW TO HYPERLINK AND STUFF. But I don’t. Sorry.

The kids have a deep, inappropriate love for Lady Gaga. There is a whole lot wrong with little two year old boys waking up from their nap, sitting themselves down by the MacBook and asking for “Lady Gaga, Ra Ra Ra”, I think. Who can I blame though? Who said, in a desperate bid to stop them doing hurty things to each other/taking apart the couch/stabbing the bananas in the fruit bowl “Let’s all watch some Lady Gaga on YouTube!”. That high-pitched plea would have been me. It worked, they liked, we all now have Gaga songs living inside our minds. They have begun to ask for Lady Gaga during the day and so there we all are, sitting inside round the kitchen table in a basement flat, silently staring open-mouthed at her armadillo McQueen clogs and smoking sunglasses. As you know, she swears, and she is a bit lesbiany and a bit wrapped-in-police-tape-doing-suggestive-hip-movements, and she mostly wears just sparkly knickers and a bra. Which is all very well, but I am left wondering at which point I try to turn them to some Bon Jovi or something else suitably soft rock and manly, or at least to a female singer who puts clothes on.  I am aware, as mother of 4 boys, that I am in a unique position to teach them to love women, to respect them, to clean up after themselves and to cook more than just mashed potato and steak. So is Gaga-Encouragement a bad thing? Should I shield their eyes from the bonkersness and the near-nipple sightings? I quite fancy that we bond over a bit of Family-Gaga-Appreciation. Any thoughts?

Anyway, yesterday we went to the Connaught Village Festival. “What is that?” you ask. Well, I am not entirely sure, and I have been attending for the last three years running. It seems that the Village (a.k.a two small streets with a large amount of real estate agencies) likes to close itself off, put some live music on a bandstand in the middle of the road, plonk two food stalls and one face-painting tent on the tarmac and lets the punters go mad. The ‘punters’ in this case are really just some mothers with kids tearing around on scooters. Everyone else is at work. Which is just as well, because yesterday there was a fair bit of alcohol going around. I spied glasses of Pimms at estate agency no. 1, and sidled up quick smart to get one for me and helium balloons for the kids.

REAL ESTATE AGENCY FESTIVAL STALL LESSONS FOR LIFE:

1. Tie string to helium balloons SECURELY. Otherwise, the balloon will come off, float high into the air, and kids will be left with tight string cutting off wrist circulation, a loud annoying wail and a life-long wariness of estate agents.

2. Only give the woman with the multiple kids ONE glass of Pimms/Prosecco. Any more, and she will stop paying attention to her offspring. The woman will start dancing to the B52’s on the stereo system. It will not be stylish.

3. Do not bother with competitions where you ask people to guess how many blow-up footballs can fit into a taxi. It will not increase sales. It is not much fun, either.

But OH! how that Pimms glass and then the two sneaky prosecco glasses cheered my entire afternoon. It was a beautiful thing, really, that the more I sipped, the less I cared about the boys racing off on their scooters and the shoving and the crying and the extra-balloon-retrieval. It was as if I was immunised from stress. It was awesome. Until I grinningly gave Barnaby our house keys to ‘hold’ on the way home. They were not still being held by the time we got to the top of our stairs. Apparently, he had dropped them but did not think to pick them up. As you do, when you are 5 and strung out on free estate agency lollipops. Custard also lost a shoe on the way home. I was totally cool about all of it, thanks to the estate agents and their free-flowing ways. WIN.

England is playng the US in football tonight and it seems the whole of central London has gone quiet. Clearly everyone is watching the game – good on them – I too have felt the collective pull of sport-watching, but only for netball. Football leaves me cold and bored and fidgety. All well, then – so I have been on the NZ Herald site, having a look at what the news are in Old New Zealand Town. Unfortunately, it seems the teachers are having sex with pupils and watching porn while the 5 year olds draw very odd looking things and lisp to each other. At least the headlines are not screaming about horrific child abuse, although there is a fair bit to be found about 12 year old prostitutes. Sigh. Then, further scrolling down the headline news into the Lifestyle section leads you to articles nicked from The Independent, quoting Aldo Zilli give his take on dining with children in the UK. And it makes me feel a bit sad because it can feel as though I live in the centre of the world here, in W2, with Annie Lennox frequenting Tom’s Diner and the V & A a walk through the park and the Selfridges sale a 10 minute bus ride on the 92. One day we will go back home…and will I keep looking outward, back to London? Longing for London? I would like to think that life in New Zealand will be enough, but I am suspicious that it won’t be.

Anyway, these are the things I miss:

1. My parents. They are funny and brave and clever and when I think of them, I think of Scrabble and silverbeet from the garden.

2. Amber and Glenn. They are having a baby and I would like to be there to BOSS THEM AROUND.

3. The beaches and the camping and the warmth and the singing cicadas and the green, green Waitakeres.

Things I don’t:

1. Being a bit poor

2. Longing to travel. Feeling like the rest of the world is moving along on a stylish, fast-moving train and you have been left at the station, looking a bit dorky and sad with wildly inappropriate luggage.

3. The mosquitos.

4. The driving everywhere.

I am often wondering what we should do with ourselves. We have been here a little too long – I have been a grown-up here, we have had all our children here, I have had a few fun jobs and really gotten to know cocktails and tasting menus and seen proper theatre and been in the Brick Lane Festival crowd and felt deliciously swallowed up and always felt so anonymous. When we first arrived with backpacks and no where to stay and £1500 in our bank accounts with no jobs, it felt as though London was a tightly-closed, secret, unwelcoming scary place that would not let us in. I know now that it is a place that is forgiving, and complex, challenging, and beautiful. If we actually had tickets booked to go home, I think I would feel very scared. Palpitations scared. So we are a bit stuck. In the best kind of way. Kind of.

Enough of that. Here is my new teapot:

That *was* my new butter dish, except one of those pesky kids broke it. They are ugly ceramics with people in leotards doing jazzercise printed on them. Excellent. The DVD player is also broken, because Noah put a pen inside it. And I am waiting for my Alexa strap to be ruined, because Barnaby is obsessed with wearing it as a belt. He loops it to his trousers, then uses the hook to attach himself to trees/bunks/car doors, etc. Why do I let him, I hear you exclaim in a worried, perplexed tone (especially those who googled what the bag actually cost). Frankly, sometimes you take the path of least resistance. That is the only answer I have got.

And on that note, my last, here is a picture of what *was* my feathered headband, al la Lohan:

The feathers were pulled off, one by one.

Today I made a sneaky trip to Selfridges with Susan and Neradah and associated squealy annoying children (mostly mine, actually) to buy Products’O’Beauty in the shiny, clean, quiet loveliness of the Beauty Hall. HURRAH! There is nothing like a bit of sparkly eyeshadow to make a mam feel girlish and pretty again. My plan (conceived over weeks, laboured over, savoured, while I stared into middle distance willing the sound of whinging and crying to fade out) was to sashay my way to the Tom Ford counter (as well as you can sashay with a baby tied to your chest and a two-year old throwing his shoes at the security guards) because it has come to my attention that I need a TF lipstick. Really NEED one, because I am a lady and there is some very impressive pigment in there and always, when people write nice memoirs about their mother and/or their gran, they remember the lipstick. (And their lavender sachets and their pound cake. And their cheeks are always chalkily smooth and they have dancing dresses in their wardrobes. And enormous grand, old-lady rings that they will pass on.) Anyway, I digress. I have come to understand that:

a) lipstick is more than just a tube of wax that you inadvertently eat. Rather, it is an chance to try out the woman you thought you might have become when you grew up. It is the memory of women you read about in novels, the thing your mother turned to when she dressed up, the idea of all those things you aspired to become when you were a girl. For me, anyway. It is grown-up, elegant, luxurious, dangerous, show-offy, confident, and stylish. And you know how I love a stylish thing.

b) Vogue said they were the best. And I believe Vogue, in a blindly devoted kind of way.

So I sashayed, and asked the lovely TF salesgirl who was wearing big black spectacles and the reddest, glossiest, most delicious cherry-red lips if I could try the pinky one and the  blush one. And she said they were sold out. Just like that. But I had already mentally bought one, and there was a TF lipstick-sized hole in my Alexa and so I decided to cast my previous nude-toned selections aside. I pointed to an orange lipstick (unfortunately named “Ginger Fawn”) and tried it on. It was very orange, very stainy, very, very grown-up. Bold, a bit nutty, and completely perfect. And if you decided to do the cost-per-wear equation, it was FREE. Here it is:

And the enamelled tube is too lovely for words. Gold and white. Too, too lovely.

And so I have been wearing it all day. It does stain and so you look a little like you have been mainlining popsicles. I have not been shy when people have mouth-stared; rather, I have been wearing my orange lips with complete pride. I LOVE Tom Ford and his pigment-rich masterpieces. And I also love Gina Ford. I am a Ford-Lover. If I had twin siamese cats, I think I would call them Tom and Gina in a Ford-homage, and I would let them sleep on my bed. Tom would be sleek and a bit homosexual, and Gina would be a bit fluffy and hefty and she would scratch the children. Butt they would deserve it.

Here they are, being a bit bad. They need a scratch from Gina Ford The Cat.

Lucky the baby is nice. Please excuse my balloon arms. They will become thin, when I stop eating cake. And I am wearing a Paul Smith dress. So there. This is in our garden. There will be illicit plum-taking very, very soon.

Oh I was going to launch into a blow-by-blow account of a certain humiliation today, but have decided against it. Why reveal my failures to the world? I may wait until I find it funny. Which may never happen. Actually, nothing is funny at the moment, because I have a sore back. I hesitate to say ‘bad back’ because that only serves to make me sound very middle-thirties and I like to think of myself as very fresh and young and girlish and 25-esque. But sore it is, due to Incorrect Baby-Handling. You would think I would have gotten a handle on this by now, but no. You have a baby, they give you pamphlets, you think you should probably read them, so you tuck them away somewhere, then you throw them out when the charade is up and you acknowledge to yourself that Pilates for New Mummies and Don’t Hit Your Baby and You and Your Pelvic Floor and How to Put Your Baby Into His/Her Cot Without Giving Yourself a Bad Back were never going to top the reading priority list when you subscribe to Vogue and Elle and so sadly they are put into the recycling bin. And slowly everything the pamphlets were alluding to, or warning you against, or were begging you for the Love of God to take notice of, come true and you feel a little bit DUMBASS. And, quite sore in the lower back. And your sense of humour disappears and you cannot tolerate your children.

Like yesterday. Ah yes, 6:10am on a Thursday morning. Everyone is asleep, because that is the Natural Order of Things as Decreed by God and Nature. Then that bloody Custard comes tearing out of the boy’s room, one flat foot slapping loudly onto the wooden floor after another, banging into the washing piles and skidding over trains and bursts open our door, waking the baby, sidling up to my bedside table, drinking my water, dropping my earplugs into the lipbalm pot, throwing his stinky blanket onto my face and then asking for some ice cream. The other two wake, come crossly in, ask to hop into bed with us, lying still for at least two and a quarter minutes until Barnaby says “Noah is touching my elbow” which naturally leads them all to kick, cry and wrestle. Out we all go, into the living room, where they hoover up the last of our previous night’s tea-and-biscuity remains and assume their positions perched at the end of the couch, close enough to the plasma screen to count the pixels, suck thumbs, and begin selling their little souls to Tom & Jerry.

Then we had breakfast. This should have been a simple meal, as we go through the same thing every day, but to keep it fresh, they like to mix it up a bit for me. So it went a little bit like this:

Barnaby: When he says “I want a boiled egg, chopped up on toast with no butter”, it transpires he actually means he is horrified by eggs, and will push aside the plate when the chopped up boiled egg on unbuttered toast arrives and ask for weetbix and jam toast instead.

Noah: “I want chocolate toast and a movie about Strawberry Shortcake”. This means that all foodstuffs will be refused and/or ignored until three minutes before we have to leave for nursery. At this point, he asks for peanut butter, milk, cereal and grapes. And decides to take all his clothes off and goes to the loo.

Custard: “Egg sick” . This means that although he is allergic to eggs, and he has been told repeatedly that eggs will make him sick, he asks for them every morning, and hovers dangerously around any egg left unattended.

Mornings are so horrible here. School holidays + mornings + sore back + Mysterious Humiliation = more horribleness than I can bear. I need my mother.

Last week, I had a hair cut. My lovely indiscreet gay Irish former-ballet dancing stylist with teeny tiny hands and a very smooth forehead confirmed that indeed I do have a patch of grey hair at the top of my head on one side only. Then he coloured it all in a lovely shade of yellow and now I am a grey-haired woman in an expensive Aveda disguise. And while he talked to me of such lofty topics as:

a) Glee;

b) Gucci shoes (his);

c) his mother’s botox overdose (think Quasimodo, apparently – one eyebrow at the top of her head, the other falling down, the bridge in between collapsing under the weight of all the frozen muscle);

he also let it slip that he is the Principal Blow Dryer of a tall, well-proportioned lingerie-designing Australian model with long chestnutty hair (made from the castoffs of poor Russian flower sellers) who lives in the Notting Hill ‘hood. Now, as it turns out, I am married to her builder, and we now share the same teeny tiny hairstylist. So I am PRACTICALLY HER. So close, and yet so far. That is what you get from living in Central London – whiffs of fabulousness. And this is very important, because mostly, I get by on whiffs of hastily wiped bottoms and baby sick. A little bit of stylishness goes a long way.

The Kind Of Thing That Makes Me Cry #1

Last weekend, that warm and sunny springtime aberration, I made a cake to take to Barnes in order to share the message of Vegetable Cakery. There were two shiny, purple aubergines in the vegetable drawer and they were practically begging to be transformed into cake and so I got up on Saturday and got to work. Mark had a sleep-in then went out to a meeting, Claudia the Cleaner was scrubbing away, the children were intermittedly hitting each other/watching TV, the baby was staring at his reflection in the oven door. My cake came out broken and a bit stuck to the sides, but as it was made almost entirely of dark chocolate and, er, aubergine, it smelled very good indeed (and drowned out that vaguely vomity smell of the vaccuum cleaner). It was put out of the reach of the still-pyjama-clad children and I went around the house ranting a bit about getting to Barnes on time.

I had a shower, made some hair/animal hybrids, tidied up the room in an effort to fool Claudia then went into the living room. There was my cake, my former beautiful Vegetable Cake, which had been drowned in a small cupful of water by Noah and Custard, both of whom had wet cake all over their faces. The cake had a watery moat. They were eating the bits that melted off and went floating off in the moat. I wept.

He did it:

And him, too:

They looked sort-of ashamed when I continued to sob, and slunk onto the floor in a dramatic-movie kind of way. But then they got bored and went off to unroll all of the toilet paper to get to the cardboard tubes. SIGH.

Anyway, I have to go make lasagne now, because it has gone all wintery and we need cheesy carbs.

It is surely time for a roundup of some Devastatingly Interesting Things.

The baby can fit into a Bumbo. Here is this morning’s evidence. From that, we can take that Ned is very handsome, and he has a strong neck, and his bottom is wide. Hmmm.

The weather has gone all wintery, and we are not prepared any more, and it makes us all want to weep salty tears of springtime disappointment. Where have all the winter coats gone, anyway? It must have been in some deranged, sleep-deprived domestic efficiency that I put them somewhere. I certainly cannot remember.

I have fallen for the charms of Ocado delivery. That means I do not go out and get stuff everyday, like the old days Before The Pushchair Died. It also means that we run out of food alarmingly regularly. Sorry about that, Large and Burgeoning Family, who suffer stoically with the absence of toast and jam of a morning.

I am mastering the art of vegetable cake making. Yes, I have found that I can create a mean chocolate cake out of butternut squash, and brownie out of aubergines. You get thin and full of nutrients and yet you get cake. Sort of. (Neradah tells me that just because there is some 400 grams of butternut squash in the cake, and no butter, it is not an “everyday” food. You do not “get thin” eating slices of it throughout the day. KILLJOY!). Admire my brownie below:

My hair is falling out in alarming clumps in the shower every morning. I know this is normal, and it happens after having a baby, and I had just forgotten about it. But I has also forgotten the fun that can be had when you weave interesting little tumbleweed/animal hybrid shapes out of the clumps in the shower and stick them on the wall in a hair gallery for your husband to muse over. I have considered asking him to guess what kind of animal hybrids they are, but then he might get cross. So they are just going to stick there until Claudia the Cleaner comes. She might like to guess. Or not.

We have booked summer holidays in Turkey and Greece. It is costing about 5 million pounds to get all 6 of us there and back. Mum and dad are going to come. I hope we do not all die, because hardened Turkish people have been suggesting we might well perish in the 50 degree heat. I keep thinking we are New Zealanders, and New Zealanders are very tough. It may not be enough though, and I am not ready for my parents to die. Mum has to at least teach Barnaby to knit first.

Even though the weather is so cold and windy that the children sob when we go outside, Barnaby is afflicted with springtime eczema. The kind of eczema that leads the school receptionist (the mean one – see “The Owl and the Villager” post) to draw in her breath loudly at the sight of him in the hallway and declare “You, my boy, have ECZEMA.” You think? You think the raw fingers and the flaking cheeks and the bleeding knees were for fun? The irony of being struck down with defective springtime skin in the pseudo winter! Donations of hydrocortisone cream gratefully received.

My husband has a birthday on Sunday. What gift to give the poor man? I suspect he will decide he needs a rowing machine, to fit awkwardly into our hallway and to trip us all up and put an end to the scootering-alley and yet never be actually used for the purposes of rowing. That, or a CD of Garth Brooks. Shudder. I think I would prefer the rowing machine.

Barnaby has taken a shine to my rabbit fur coat. Here he is, looking a little Studio 54, a little “The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe”-esque. This is the only coat which has not apparently disappeared into ill-timed storage.

And that is kind of it.

It occurred to me on the weekend in a moment of flashback that Custard – platinum blonde, fluffy, pale, and ancient-looking –  is a spooky spitting image of a man who used to come into Titirangi New World when I was a checkout girl there in my first year of university. He was a very old man, with long, polished fingernails, the worst comb-over than humankind has ever seen, and I think I can remember him wearing badly-matched foundation that caught in his wily eyebrows. The combover has to be explained – his creamy-hued remaining long strands of hair were combed up from the base of his skull, plastered thinly and evenly over the back of his head, over the top of the scalp and then met in the middle in between his powdered eyebrows in an arrow shape. Sort of like a pointed superhero skullcap, made of his own ancient hair.  Among the supermarket staff it was rumoured that he was the painter of those awful black velvet paintings of bare-breasted sultry Polynesian women that were once to be found in very bad-taste homes, then to be found in ironic kitschy cafes and bars. We didn’t believe it – not really. But then Titirangi is a funny place, and the supermarket had a few other customers who were worthy of note – one being the chain-smoking short woman who had 15 children and was running a successful international baby-wear company from home (now supplying Harrods) and the occasional sighting of some famous-in-NZ soap star/band member on his/her way to Piha.

Anyway, this weekend, I thought of him, and realised that Custard could have been his lovechild.

And it turns out his name was Charlie McPhee, he died in 2002, and he did indeed paint lots of quite brilliant, politically questionable velvet paintings as quite a lot of googling revealed.

Tell me, could Custard be the reincarnation of Charlie Party-Boy McPhee?

And here is the Dusky Maiden:

And that, Dear Reader, is what I have done today – watched a documentary on velvet paintings in an effort to find a shot of McPhee to prove my hunch that I gave birth to his doppelganger, occasionally stared into middle distance, and googled quite fruitlessly. As well as made a lasagne. And ate some cake.

The weekend was hardly more productive – on Friday night I was persuaded to venture into Acton, and was persuaded to have a few (ahem) glasses of Prosecco, and before you knew it, I was telling the bar staff they were very handsome and was telling Mark’s assorted gang of business partners/contractors/accountant and mechanic etc, etc about how old I was when we met, and how much my Alexa cost, and other better-left-unsaid tales. I was AWESOME! And did that thing where you look at yourself in the mirror of the loos and kind of grinningly chuckle and tell yourself you are very funny and beautiful and best get out there to share more deeply private things about your marriage, before smearing on lipgloss that ends up near your left earlobe.

Does anybody else do this? Needless to say, I am in no hurry to get back to Acton.

(Shot of McPhee shamelessly taken from “Velvet Dreams”. Here’s the link http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/velvet-dreams-1997).

First up, best I spit my exciting news out.

I have a Mulberry Alexa. Yes. And now it has sold out again. I am so zeitgeist, it hurts. One day, when iPhoto actually works, you will see my Alexa, and you may feel a twinge of envy. You may also think it is a completely average brown bag, but then you would be missing out on the MAGIC. The magic that is an overpriced, celebrity-endorsed bag. Is it a satchel? Is it a shoulder bag? Is it a squashy reference to the Bayswater? Do normal people care? No, probably not. Ah well. Sigh SIGH happy sigh of love…I stroke you, Alexa, in manner of a precious fluffy cat.

But anyway, enough about my new fabulous illicit purchase. I was having a think the other day, and I remembered this:

There was an old woman,
Who lived in a shoe;
She had so many children,
She didn’t know what to do.
She gave them some broth,
Without any bread;
She whipped them all soundly,
And sent them to bed.

Doesn’t that sound uncannily like it was written about me? (I know the world does not ACTUALLY revolve around me, but still). It is practically My Own Personal Theme Rhyme. Broken down, let me extrapolate:

1. I am not yet an old woman, but I am 32, which puts me in my fourth decade, and it is undeniable that my face over the past year has begun to slip downwards. It looks like it is falling off my face a little bit, stealthily and sneakily. And that mean hair stylist did point out a patch of grey. So not ‘old’ yet, but getting closer and closer to the cliff-edge of non-youth.

2. I do not live in a shoe, but the six of us do live in a two bedroom flat. It is quite roomy, but it would not be entirely wrong to talk anecdotally of this being a ‘shoebox’, would it?

3. I have four children, and we are looking after a dog. That counts as ‘so many children‘, I think. I do not really suffer from not knowing what to do though. I am perfectly busy buying stuff online, and screeching, and thinking about new babies. I sometimes bake, and read magazines. I totally know what to do.

4. The kids are not keen on broth, admittedly, or soup, mainly because the food bits are not separated out enough. I do give them pasta and pesto a lot though.

5. We run out of bread frequently, and I am often found trying to fob the boys off with rice cakes and other long-life carbohydrate-foodstuffs which have fallen into the back of the cupboard.

6. I do not ‘whip‘ the kids as a rule, but I do grip their wrists a little bit tightly when they do bad stuff in public. Sometimes I even run them over in the pushchair (see “Regrettable Things”) but I always stop short of actual whipping. Mark threatens to ‘whip’ them, but is yet to actually do it. They know this. It is fairly ineffective as a threat, it must be said.

7. We do send them to bed, and at the same time every night because I am  Gina Ford lover. And they are not allowed in our bed at night, because then no one sleeps. My favourite time of the day is when they are in bed and we get to drink sauvignon blanc and watch Battlestar Galactica without anybody squealing, kicking, moaning or whinging.

It is uncanny! My next task I have set myself involves finding My Story, rather than simply My Nursery Rhyme. There must be some classic epic novel which I can read as actually being about me. In the meantime, I shall go gaze at my new bag, which Mark has identified as ‘a new purse’. I said ‘yeah, it is’ in a shruggy and coy ‘what can you do? Me and new purses!’ kind of way. I have Gotten Away With It. Result.

Yes today I locked myself out of the flat for the third time in two weeks. We had a long, tiresome walk back from school with a broken pushchair  – the aluminium frame snapped last night and so it has been badly and hastily ‘fixed up’ (in the loosest distracted-husband-terms) with electrical tape and much hope – and horrible, horrible children doing bad things to each other. We did the grocery shop on the way to school, as sometimes I am wont to do when I go momentarily INSANE and I forget that the whole way home the bags will slip out of the bottom of the buggy onto the road and i will run over the packets of lamb chops and the fizzy water will roll into the patches of unspecified wet and then will explode when I open them. The bit at the bottom of the buggy where the shopping is meant to go is ripped so putting stuff in there means stuff just slides out the other side. It is really great. Each curb I lift the buggy over means something else slides out. Up, slide out, run over, bend over, pick it up, put it in again, up, side out other side, etc etc to infinity and beyond.

So we get home after this predictable little grocery/buggy dance, and of course the baby has been yelling and scratching my neck and so I am feeling quite hot and sweaty and tired. We get to the top of the stairs and there is no key. And Barnaby and Noah and a little bit me are busting for a wee. And Mark is Somewhere A Bit Far Away. So Noah runs down the stairs and takes all his clothes off and wees up against our front door. Barnaby holds onto his crotch and circles the broken buggy with increasing speed and a mad look in his crossed eyes. I do a bit of swearing, and Custard walks out into the road. I call Mark and he says “Why haven’t you remembered to hide the spare key?” and I say “Now is not the time to debate the possible reasons which have led to me having made the regrettable hid-the-key omission. PLEASE JUST COME!”. And he does, and everyone empties bladders/puts clothes back on/spits fizzy water onto the windows, etc etc. And it is all a big FAIL.

What I Have Learnt From Today:

To put the spare key somewhere outside where I can get it when I next lock myself out. Probably sooner rather than later.

Not to do shopping in the real world ever again. Order everything online. Make myself a cosy nest out of ripped-up telephone books and just lie there with the Mac and let stuff come to mama.

To get a new pushchair. Faster than you can say “I have too many kids for inner city London”.

There are, of course, happier things to report. Namely, that there is a pub called The Commander in Hereford Road. It used to be a Slug & Lettuce. Now it is a beautiful Oyster Bar and Chop House, or something. It has two marvellous things – firstly, a free creche on the weekends, so you can slurp your wild garlic soup while the offspring are watching telly upstairs with a probably vastly underpaid babysitter (almost like a date in the day), and secondly, there is a waiter there who is Uncommonly Goodlooking. Like a mix of Jason Patric from The Lost Boys days, Mark Ruffalo and a little bit of Johnny Depp, all mixed together in the most saucy of ways. Honestly – go there, eat the soup, lose the chilluns and fall in love. I did.

I have also ditched BookClub tomorrow night because I have something else Very Important on. A Skype meeting. Which is a lame excuse, but the book was decidedly average and the women scare me a bit.

I have excellent toffee-coloured toes and fingers. I went to the salon on Sunday to tidy up my feet after a long, pregnant winter and got up-saled to an embarrassing degree. I am the unintentional new owner of Decleor moisturiser, Jessica nail polish and cuticle cream. But what was most astonishing about the salon visit was that I seriously considered Botox. Yes, seriously thought it may be time, and I may be able to justify the cost. WRONG, WRONG, WRONG.

Oh, Madonna night on Glee. Gotta go!