Domestic Delegation

My latest piece of news in a week of monumental developments is this: I have a cleaner!

*Tumbleweed*

Bear with me...

I haven't had a cleaner for 3 years and I have hated every hoover-crumbing-wee-stain-wiping second of those three years but, working part-time, haven't really been able to justify it until now.  Justifying it I absolutely am!  Starting full-time work in June means that I have this dissertation to bang out between now and May.  Employing the cleaner was the first thing I did after popping the champagne on Tuesday evening.

Up until 3 years ago, I always had a cleaner.  Ever since I moved into my flat.  That was pure indulgence and laziness.  Marcela used to clean for Shelley and I and we took great pleasure in throwing dinner parties the night before she came, just so that we didn't have to do the washing up!  Marcela fell out of favour when Stu moved in.  She became the teeniest bit obsessed with me and my arrangements, reading the calendar in the kitchen and then 'coincidentally' turning up at the same gigs as us in London!  Scary.  Bye bye Marcela.

The current cleaner started today and worked like a dog.  I love her.  I am possibly in love with her.  When I was telling Dad yesterday that I had employed a cleaner, his first question was. 'What does she look like?'  I was trying to convince him that I had no interest in her looks, whereas I had a lot of interest in her skills with a feather duster.  My dear Father was trying to infer that a sexy cleaner and a husband that worked at home could be bad combination.  Ahhh - warms your cockles doesn't it?!  Luckily she is no oil painting.

I gave myself a talking to before she arrived this morning about being completely clear about exactly what I wanted from day 1 as bad habits to start with are then quite hard to correct.  That went out of the window when she strode in and started poking about and I realised that she was most definitely wearing the trousers in our relationship.  'Where is the mop?' was one of her first questions.  When I showed her, she continued, 'It's a bad mop.  You need a mop that doesn't spread as much water.'  Oh.  I quite liked my mop.  I was then quaking in my boots when she demanded to see the hoover.  Henry passed the test though with a grunt of approval.  I found my feet again when she told me it was a big house to clean in 4 hours and I told her I managed it quite easily in 3 and a half.  I think I gained a smidgen of respect for this comment and lo and behold she did do an amazing job in her four hours here and I am NEVER looking back again.

I now just need to ensure that my Mondays and Fridays for the next four months are spent on educational discourse and not on sitting in the pub having elongated lunches...

The Bottom Line

This blog post may refer, however tastefully, (if that is possible), to the inner workings of my gut.  Male friends of mine, or those of a more sensitive disposition, may choose at this point to skip this particular post and with my complete blessing and encouragement.  ;-)

I feel better today than I have done since the beginning of November and have possibly just got through a couple of the most stressful days of my life.  The 'piles' issue I referred to in a previous post did not end up being piles but instead is some form of inflammatory bowel disease called proctitis.  For goodness sake don't Google it, as Google then accuses you of being a serial bum shagger with an STD.  (No, that is not true.)

Anyway, it is all treatable and controllable; happy days.  If only I didn't have such an active imagination, which unfortunately I have.  The problem with all forms of IBD is that it completely mimics the symptoms of bowel cancer.  My rational head is fully aware that bowel cancer is pretty much unheard of in people under the age of 40 (yes, Martin Russel, I am).  However, when Googling on your phone at 3am in the morning it is totally possible to convince yourself otherwise.  I have been a complete mess and hiding it well, apart from to my nearest and dearest who have greatly suffered along with me.

It is incredible how an intelligent, relatively sane, human being can overnight become a victim of their own Googling, pathetic self-diagnoses.  I am pretty convincing though, even to myself.  Sam told me on the phone tonight that she has been coming off the phone to me each time telling me to pull myself together and that I'm fine and then crying on her husband over the fact I might be dying.  It's catching.  I am bloody convincing.

Zoe and I have done some black humour counselling sessions in our office.  Kyl is the only man in our department and we have stopped talking on a number of occasions when he has entered the office.  We fed him the absolute bare minimum information about the situation so that he didn't get paranoid about our secret squirrel conversations and the poor man ran scared as soon as he possibly could.  I texted him tonight: 'All good, not dying' and got the reply: 'Ah, that's nice'.  It's as deep as the two of us ever need to go into that kind of discussion.

But this week, I had this procedure today, proceeded by my first ever Head of Department interview yesterday.  To say I look like shit is an understatement and I am inhaling a bottle of wine ready to have passed out by 9pm tonight.  I think I may actually sleep properly for the first time in two months.  I celebrated last night in style when I got the job but all the time with the cloud hanging over me that it was such a shame I was a professional success when I knew really I would have to phone the Head tomorrow and tell him that I couldn't accept the job after all due to my speedily-declining ill-health.  For such an optimist I do a good line in scary black clouds.  Maybe I tempted fate through through all this doom and gloom imagination?  Maybe I just need to get a little more statistical awareness?  Or maybe, as Shelley suggested today, after the week I've had, I should really go and buy a lottery ticket.

All's well that ends well.  High on gas and air this afternoon I do remember telling the consultant that I didn't want a copy of the picture of the inside of my bowel for the family album.  He looked at me as if I was a complete cock.  He was right.  However, I'm a completely alive cock, with a fabulous new job and a rejuvenated attitude towards the insignificant trials and tribulations of everyday, happy, mundane life.  Cheers.  :-) xx

When they were very young...

Stu and I had a discussion this weekend about whether we think we will miss these days with the kids when they are teenagers.  My mother is convinced that we will, but on the days when you are in the park at -1 degrees just because you can't bear to be in the house any longer with them laying into each other, it is hard to imagine.

I don't miss them being babies.  I was just looking back nostalgically at some photos thinking how delicious they were, but that doesn't make me want to go back to those days. Buggies, nappies and not being able to leave the house between 12 and 2.30pm made life a little more restrictive than it is these days.

The only thing I am worried about losing is the physical affection.  How long much longer is Sebi going to grab my face ten times a day and kiss me square on the lips.  I would like to think we have a few more years of that but at the same time he may start getting the shit ripped out of him if it goes on too long.  Zak went off kissing about the time he came out of nappies...

Sunday morning swimming is something I long to give up on and will not miss AT ALL.  At least after 18 months, Sebi has started actually moving forward, all be it with a woggle, and has finally released his orang-utan grip from his poor instructor.  We still have the rite-of-passage tears before he gets in each week but even he doesn't look convinced by them any longer - it is purely for my benefit.

Will the things that they say stop being hilarious as they get older?  I think not.  I think we just then fall into the seriously embarrassing-parents-category when they are teenagers and we will simultaneously lose all sense of fashion and humour and decorum.

We've had a hint of Zak's teenage self this week as he has had a week's ban from the ipad for the first time.  With good reason.  He learnt Stu's password over his shoulder, one letter at a time, (the kid has determination and staying power - I'll give him that), and then bought a whole load of new characters for 'Crossy Road'.  Over £60 in total.  Luckily, Stu was in London on a night out when the emails started coming through as I hate to think of the confrontation if him and Zak had been in the same room!  Apple refunded all of the charges after one phone call with no argument, as they said it was 'unusual account activity', which I thought was pretty incredible and above and beyond customer service requirements really.  It is killing Zak not having any screen time and I am revelling in the control-freak potential of it (shock).  Sebi is still getting to play on the computer or the ipad and if Zak can't control himself and leans over to touch it, he loses another day.  At this rate, he may get it back somewhere during the summer of 2017.

Poor old Zak.  The whole world conspires against him.  He has been trying to convince me that his very lovely class teacher was 21 last week.  This lady is fabulous and attractive but most definitely about my age.  I have tried to convince Zak that she is more likely in her late 30s but he is having none of it as 'she wouldn't lie'.  The fact it could have been a joke instead did not wash with him.  Unfortunately for Zak the teacher and I happened to bump into each other after a few glasses of wine had been consumed on Friday night in the pub and I shared this with her.  I think I howled with laughter just a millisecond longer than she did about the fact that she could possibly, actually, be 21 years old.  Oops.

I love them.  They're gorgeous; but they're getting older and I love that too.  I reckon Sebi will fit into his size 4-5 trousers soon.  Zak takes great pleasure in winding me up by telling me that he is going to go to Sandringham instead of Beaumont when he is 11 as 'then he will get an ipad'.  I reckon he has this rose-coloured vision of secondary school where there are lines and lines of Demon-Headmaster-style pupils playing Crossy Road for six and a half hours every day.  He may have a rude shock to his system in a few years, wherever he ends up going.  If only I could be so decisive about my own next secondary move for such solid reasons... ;-)

Je Suis Charlie

I am rather drunk, probably insufficiently-educated and overly-opinionated but the joy of blogging is that you are only your own filter.

I have been pretty addicted to the news over the last few days and today I have been obsessed.  My 101 year old Nana is convinced that bad things didn't happen as much in the olden days and I don't want to disillusion her by just telling her that these days we have immediate access to everything that is going on, always.  I did feel at some points today as if I was watching a Hollywood Blockbuster rather than BBC News - surely this couldn't be actually happening, right now?

There is no sense, no meaning and no rationale behind this obsessive fundamentalism. After Wednesday's horrific events I found myself hoping that the perpetrators would be found (and killed) as soon as possible so that they wouldn't be able to inflict any more damage on the further population.  How wrong is that though?  That I'm actually hoping that some human beings will hunt down other human beings and kill them and that that would be a success.  Am I a product of the recent media coverage or is this just the world we live in now?

I firmly believe that no human life is worth more than any other human life but still I begin to question how any God can let this happen over and over again.  My thoughts tonight lie with the victims, the families of the victims but also with every peace-loving Muslim in France and in the rest of the World.  Within hours, there were reports that Mosques in France had been vandalised by racist graffiti.  Unsurprising, but depressing, nevertheless.

It just feels as is these kind of attacks are happening more and more frequently and there is no way to stop them.  There is no way to combat radicalised individuals who have access to weapons and there is no way of knowing where they will indiscriminately strike next.

Zak thinks I'm crazy when I overreact to his monologues over breakfast about joining the army and it's 'OK Mum as they have the right sort of guns'.  I don't want a 7 year old to have any idea that any sort of guns are OK.  As far as I can see at the moment, guns are generally a key to people losing their lives. Without access to guns today, those terrorists would have struggled more to take the lives of innocent people.

The absolutely worst part of my soul is that I think tonight, at least three more people who want to kill and maim innocent people are dead.  Surely there can't be that many people in the world that want to do harm to other people?  I think there are though.  I didn't even realise this was a major whole world problem until 9/11, along with the majority of the rest of the world I think.

I worry for our future.  I worry for my children and their future.  I feel ultimately more sorry for every non-radicalised Muslim citizen of the western world however, who will be increasingly more segregated, more scrutinised and more ostracised from the countries in which they have chosen to make their home in this new, terrifying and unpredictable world we live in.