Happy Days

I love my own company, always have.  When I'm on my own there are no arguments, no irritations, I am always in total agreement with myself and there is nobody to piss me off. What's not to like?  My liking for my own company has definitely increased since being a Mum.  Obviously it's not as intense as when they were tiny, but still, having to break up an argument whilst on the loo, incessant interrogation on the meaning of life pre-8am and the general level of noise in my house on a weekend makes me revel in my 'me time' when it comes.

My Greek friend is convinced I'm going to be ever so lonely when I don't share an office with himself and Zoe any longer.  He says that in my newly formed department of one I'm going to be crying into a mirror and lamenting the days of Beaumont Banter.  I will, of course, miss them both dreadfully, but actually working on my own doesn't phase me at all. Probably for all the same aforementioned reasons - mainly, I can do things my way with nobody else either telling me what to do or, God forbid, doing stuff wrong.

I had a matinee theatre date with my dearest Deputy Head at the Young Vic this afternoon and set off nice and early on a beautifully sunny day in a fantastic mood.  I revelled in the simple act of sitting on a park bench in Southwark in the sunshine eating my egg and ham baguette and thinking that all was right with the world.  Until I was joined by the beggar.  I was early, it was the only bench in a half a mile radius and I wasn't moving.  It was a particularly awkward social situation as he sat that little bit too close for comfort, (plus he smelt bad), and started a monologue that went along the following lines: 'please, please, please, please, please, please, please, please', (you get the idea), whilst staring at me.  If I was ever have going to have given this particular beggar money, he hacked me off enough within a second that I was giving him nothing.  He was however pretty persistent.  I luckily had my iPod so I plugged in, tuned out, and eyeballed him back.  I began to realise however that us staring into each other's eyes on a park bench, could look from a distance as if we were in some sort of relationship.  So, after enough time had elapsed so that he knew he hadn't bullied me off the bench, I left, and went to the theatre.  Damn you smelly beggar bulldozing me out of the sunshine.

We were watching 'Happy Days' which is an absurdist drama about a couple abandoned in some sort of desert in a sand dune where the husband lives in a cave with horrific sunburn and the wife is buried up to her waist for the first act and up to her neck in the second.  As the house lights came up for the interval, I had Morag in hysterics when I told her that it was all a bit more depressing in the flesh than it was when I read it as a play. 'What were you expecting?' she said.  Fair point really.  The wife character, 'Winnie', keeps up an insistent monologue throughout the play and in the first act refrains that she is so lucky to have yet another 'Happy Day'.  This happy day is fuelled by her lipstick not having run out quite yet, or by being able to read the writing on the tube of toothpaste.  Most of the time she manages to forget the fact that she is buried in sand.  The second act takes on a more sinister feel as she is buried up to her neck so unable to reach into the treasures of her bag or even the gun that could put her out of her misery.  Her husband appears occasionally and towards the end we aren't sure if he is reaching out towards her or to get the gun.  There are maybe therefore certain types of solitude that are not to be relished...

To the lady I met on the train home with two boys aged three months and two and a half years, who is moving house on Tuesday, with a husband who is currently working in China: I hope you listened to me.  Send the big boy to pre-school and put the tele on without worrying so much.  Things will get better a lot sooner than you think.  Throw those eco-nappies in the bin and drink some more wine love.  As the SMA advert keeps telling you - you're doing great.

Nanny-tastic

I have employed the most fabulous Nanny.  She makes Mary Poppins look like Cruella Devil.  I loved her, the boys loved her, she loved us (I hope!) and it is all going to be lovely and wonderful happily ever after.  She is going to do Arts and Crafts with the boys and make sure there is no sign of it left by the time I get home - music to my un-arty-crafty ears.

The whole 'being an employer' thing is a little grown-up for my liking however.  'Yes of course I can sort out your tax', I gushed, whilst inside actually thinking 'Shit - how the hell do I do that?!'  Luckily, there are very efficient Nanny Tax agencies that do all of this for you, for a certain fee of course, and there are a ream of highly efficient sounding ladies with cut-glass accents at the end of the phone answering all my really rubbish enquiries quickly and correctly, and if they have a slightly patronising air about them then I am choosing not to notice.  I was doing really well on the phone to their payroll help department earlier until they asked me if I figure I had just quoted them was gross or net.  'No idea', I said, 'but if I had to guess I would say gross'.  Apparently however guessing is not the way forward when you are sorting out somebody's payroll...

I am doing everything correctly though and have downloaded a very officious contract from the agency.  During the customisation of this contract though, I found myself deleting a clause about never drinking alcohol around the children.  What if I got home early and decided that I wanted to treat the lovely Nanny to a little tipple in the garden one summer's afternoon?  It would be dreadful to be in breach of one's own contract wouldn't it?  Better to be safe than sorry in this house. ;-)

I hope that I am going to be a wonderful employer.  I just need to keep her away from any of you lot.  Particularly Shelley who might tell her the story of how I rearranged the washing up on the drip tray when she moved into the flat and told her 'we don't do it that way'.  I'm not quite sure which 'we' I was referring to... Poor girl - doomed. ;-) x

Jobsworths

I have had a vaguely irritating day full of encounters with flaky, inefficient people not really doing their jobs properly, which never really sits particularly well with me.  As The Greek reminded me earlier, 'Darling', (he didn't call me darling, it will just annoy him intensely if I misquote him), 'you need to remember that not everyone is as good as you'.  I duly stated that they should therefore all be fired with immediate effect.

My rumblings continued after the end of school when I discovered that my Green bin hadn't been cleaned after it had been emptied today.  I pay the princely sum of £3.50 a month for this to happen and it hadn't happened for the second time in six months.  I got hold of the bin cleaning man who told me it hadn't been cleaned as there was a banana skin at the bottom of it.  I retorted that if a banana skin hadn't fallen into the lorry as it was being emptied then it was hardly my fault.  Did bin-cleaning-man expect me to upend myself into the bin and retrieve it myself?  When he started suggesting I found a long stick-type object to remove the banana skin so that the bin could be cleaned I decided to quickly end our standing order relationship.  Jobsworth.

What was therefore going to tip me over the edge this afternoon?  Craft, that's what.  I am not a craft-mother.  There are no paints in this house.  Much of the boys artwork gets recycled without even surviving the walk home.  I am the least artistic person you could meet and remember my art teacher giving up on me at the end of year nine and allowing me to sit on a desk and read a book whilst my classmates charcoal drew me - suited me nicely!  We had a long and detailed email from Sebi's class teacher today telling us (parents) how we needed to provide an inverted box for technology on Monday.  The box could not be resealed with sellotape as this could not be painted on top of so we needed to use masking tape or double-sided sticky tape (neither of which I had in the house, obviously).  There was no way that was going to the shops to spend MONEY on equipment for CRAFT so I decided I would just be clever and make my own double sided sticky tape by folding normal sticky tape over and over on top of each other so that it stuck together.  Read and learn and save yourselves.  It is a really shit solution.  Don't bother. I'm a stubborn cow though and as I'd started I was most definitely going to finish.  Sebi now officially has the most rubbish inverted box with which to start his technology project. If it was Zak I would be worried that it is that rubbish that people would laugh at him.  I don't worry about stuff like that with Seb - he has his mother's eyes...  This is another reason I am looking forward to working full-time again.  In a few months time I would simply delete the aforementioned email as I will be way too busy and important for that kind of caper.  Or I will delegate to the Nanny (yep, Nanny, whoop whoop, another blog post to follow on that one), or the scary cleaner or in fact any of the Ward staff really... ;-)  I'm waiting for Seb's class Mums' Facebook group to start collectively whinging about the box, I may even join in this time.  They love a good whinge - previous whinges including Cathedral visits being too Christian, not being informed about the Year 1s visiting another classroom in the school day etc..,  I have to be sure not to log onto the group with wine in my belly as I may start typing and offend; heaven forbid.  I should just leave the group, but it is useful when it comes to things like finding out about boxes that need creating for craft activities...aha! That seals it then, (not the box, that is definitely still only partly sealed)!

Unfortunately, poor Stu is working away for a few days so I have nobody to take my random grumpiness out on.  Fortunately, I can open the Veuve with no danger of sharesees and let my grumps float away on some bubbles.  Fortunately, I'm still not dying and need to remember the pure joie de vivre that comes with that!

x

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.