what happened to micky?

it's a dark wednesday morning.
the alarm goes off. nicky campbells sweet scottish accent quietly comes to life on the radio.
i lie in bed and enjoy the last minute of warmth before the day starts.
i clamber out of bed, the nice fug from under the duvet slips off my body; quick: slippers on, dressing gown on, glasses on, dis-organised hair scraped back from face, excepting 5-live on Husbands alarm clock the house sounds like it normally does at 7.10am on a weekday: ticking over and quiet.
i pad down the stairs past mol and liz's rooms, enjoying the sound of their heavy breathing, feeling mean that i'm going to wake them soon from their cosy slumber (when i ask liz what she dreamed of last night she always says i dreamed of you mummy. what did you dream of? and if i say i dreamed of a beach and sunshine she'll say did you go to that beach? where was i? when was it? it all becomes a bit confusing) down more stairs, i switch on the kitchen lights and walk towards the kettle.
something on my left catches my eye.
and through my morning blurred vision i see a slash of red and grey. huh? quoi? i turn back and fill the kettle and put the tea things on a tray. lapsang souchong and regular teabags, one of each, in the tea pot. two cups. oh, i need the milk. i turn to the fridge and again this slash of irregular colour on my work surface by the knife rack. i peer, like an old lady trying to work out a train time table, closer. and then AHGHGHGHG!
i recoil like a reverse jack-in-the-box. blurrrrrgh. aaaaagh. gag. this is too much for the morning.
i'd forgotten that husband had set lethal machinery into KILL position last night - slathered in peanut butter, over the sharpest needle with the strongest snapping mechanism since crocodiles - this was a mouse trap no mouse would survive (or human finger for that matter).
micky is dead.
but the aftermath of this shocking act of murder (i quite like mice; i was thinking we could've trained him to bring us tea in the morning and i'd pay him with crumbs - seemed like a good deal for the winter?) was sorded! not only did mickey bleed torrents of ruby red mouse blood, like everywhere, he also took part in a mouse-death-explosion-trick, whereby some of his bloody-parts, presumably during the snap-section-of-murder, had flung themselves far afield to other places on the work surface. it was like a scene from a tarantino movie, but in miniature.
anyway. my peaceful morning-zombie-state was fairly shattered. i turned my back on the death-scene, filled the pot of tea, remembered the milk (had to look one final time at mickey - who did he leave behind? was his wife with him? what if his teenage son had seen it? he'd be back for revenge, surely...? i felt a small pang of guilt...) and went swiftly back upstairs to alert husband to clean the gore before breakfast so as to not risk damaging the mental stability of our impressionable and innocent girls.
mol asked why the kitchen smelt so 'clean' when she came downstairs. she probably thought i'd had an attack of anal-cleaning-frenzy during the night - nothing that odd about it i suppose.
(actually she didn't but i like the idea of her inadvertently sniffing out the crime scene. she only asked me tonight in her bath if we'd trapped anything... i said, hm, i think maybe we did, anyway, don't forget to clean your cheesy feet, monkey!)
RIP Mickey. A mouse family somewhere will miss you. Our fruit bowl, however, will be a cleaner place.

doh a deer

i really mean 'do', as in the sound of music kind of a 'do' not a homer-simpson 'doh'. mol had her first ever piano lesson on monday and she has 3 notes on her head: C,D,E. Do Re Mi.
and now its do a deer a bloomin' female deer at every passing the piano moment. i am not going to scream impatiently one day in the near future "LEARN ANOTHER BLOODY TUNE MOL!" because that would be deconstructive and mean of me. i must nurture her musical talent and one day she'll be up there, wembley stadium, under the spotlight, dancing to the songs she has written and recorded earlier in a trendy soho studio with dudes from the backstreets of n8 - the dudes who weren't kicked out of the room for having smelly dog-shit-feet that is. you can't go into a cramped recording studio with dog shit on the soles of your feet. it'd ruin the soul of the song. yeah, maaaaan.
but before i project great talent i have to deal with the learning part. mol's teacher is a flame-haired-eastern-european with a sharp accent and finely painted lips. the lasting impression mol has of her after one lesson is that she left a lot of her lip-make-up on mols' favourite mug with a hedgehog. 'what's this mummy?' 'oh, it looks like L's lipstick.' 'oh. its very red and slimy.' can you respect a teacher who leaves such a mark on your favourite mug?
i'm already quite scared of L but i will try not to let mol know about my fears. although L is smaller than me in size i fear that she could argue me into allowing mol into being pushed through the music tube like toothpaste out of its nozzle. i have a feeling L likes RESULTS and RESULTS come from EXAMS and you don't PROGRESS unless you do EXAMS and why would you not want this?
I had to remind her 3 times in the first 10 minutes of MEETING her and taking this red-lipped-vixen into my house that music is surely meant to be pleasurable, especially at the tender age of nearly7?
although mol is much more casual about trusting her teachers, for me, the jury is still out...
roll on monday and lets see if we can get mol fast tracked to Grade 2 level. STOCCATTO! NOW! DO RE ME.
DOH?

oh.
and book clubber-wanna-be's...
so, talking of fast tracking.
I finished Lucky Jim to tremendous applause in my head as he got the bird and the job and didn't fall into the ditch labelled useless alcoholic.
and then I moved swiftly onto The Road (Cormack Mckarthy) to change genre and get modern and down with the kidz. i finished it last night (prune like and glued to the final pages in the near-cold-bath) and i went to sleep sobbing. don't read it if you've recently had a relative die on you who you very much loved or if you fear the end of the world. whatever the reviews say on the back it has to be The Most Depressing Book I've EVER Read.
I'm going to read Charlie and the Chocolate Factory next to cheer myself up.
Imagine. Owning. Your. Own. Chocolate. Factory? And more importantly - a whole tribe of OOmpa-Loompa's?
Sleep well readers.

late nights

Mol had her latest night EVER in her nearly 7 years of existence last week. Courtesy of Granny Darling who ventured up from dark Hampshire to The Big Stinky Smoke of London Town and treated us to a night at The Snow Queen. A night of dazzling glitter and sequins and pointed toes and painted faces and men in tights proudly flaunting their nether-regions splendidly emotive music a sweaty conductor in a cummabund that looked like it may explode off into the First Violins at any given moment strawberry ice-creams wine gums chocolate rolls (cadburys) (of course) a pint of orange juice a wide-eyed Mol with every new dancer that leapt slid twirled plied lifted crept hopped skipped and jumped onto the gigantic Colliseum stage.
The dancing was gob smacking. Little Kay who is one third of the main characters - not a big man - was on stage nearly every scene lifting and sweating and lifting and spinning - like the ever-ready-bunny but more together about his position in life; and our seats were so incredibly close to the stage that apart from being at risk of his sweat spinning off and giving our wine gums a salty coating we could actually see his muscles rippling under the strain of heaving the waify ballerinas about for nearly 3 hours.
Usually we're in seats so far from the stage that its more like watching multi-coloured fleas hopping around a distant tray of colour. Even bino's don't help in those circumstances. But on this night - Mol could have hopped from her seat, over the lady with the jingly bangles and joined Kay and his eternal heavings. Magic. At one point Mol said "Look Mummy!" I thought something very exciting had been observed. "Look! It's the Snow Queens ZIP" as though Snow Queens and Ballerina's [period] were exempt from such mundane clothing accessories.
At 9.30pm when I realised Mol was in it for the long haul - and with another act to go it dawned on me that somehow we'd have to get home, through the rest of the theatre-rush-hour and it dawned on me that an over exited over tired over sugared 7 year old may not find the piss-heads on the Piccadilly Line very fun at 11pm. So I craftily texted Husband who obligingly - a loving gift - booked us an Addison Lee which was waiting for us outside the Colliseum at 10.25pm steaming with heat and what felt like at the time, the softest seats in the world.
Mol was so over-wine-gummed that she didn't fall asleep in the car; instead a long discussion was held about who I would want to dance if I was in the Snow Queen, who Granny Darling would dance if she was in the Snow Queen, and much debate was given to Mol as to which character she'd play: the conclusion, at 10.52pm was that she'd be the Snow Queen herself, because she's the main part so the most important and she got flowers at the end, and also because she gets to wear the biggest spangliest diamonte tiara any of us had ever seen in our lives.

Good news that my plea for the snow to melt worked, huh? I'd say it's pretty much down to me, entirely. If I hadn't done my plea we'd still be sliding down the hill and breaking our skulls every five minutes. Seriously. Every five minutes.

ground hog day

bleedin' hell.
here we go again.
opened the blinds this morning and OH piss off already - snow? MORE?
can't you get the message: we don't want you here any more. now go away. melt. do whatever you do snow when you're asked to leave politely. down the drains. clear off. else we'll set the grit on you.
(well, maybe not, because the rubbish council (who owes us a rubbish collection talking of rubbish) doesn't have any salt. but snow doesn't know that we don't have grit, does it?) well, we can threaten you with hot water and table salt instead. but please, just stop this white business and go snow up in finland or somewhere where people own real fur coats and snow shoes.
we're not interested any more.
sick of chapped lips and toes which have white tips (early onset of frost bite).

even mol has got a bit blaze about the whole "lets make snow angels" story.
its old news. like pete & katie - we just don't care.

bring on the buds and the bulbs of spring. please. now.

what to do when...

What do you do when you've imposed a no-alcohol January?
I feel bereft as the clock strikes 7pm and the kids are brushing their teeth or fighting over who gets to sit on the loo first or pretending to suddenly have an urgent appointment with another Mr-Man book downstairs and therefore develop deafness which reminds me of our old dog Polly who used to run away on walks and we'd all end up shouting ourselves horse (ha! that looks so funny. to shout myself horse! oh sadness that I find myself funny, no one else does... its like my own support group, run by me) trying to find her... and I am wondering around the house without a wine glass in my hand or a bottle of something tasty in the fridge.
However. Although I feel bereft of the habit (so, what I miss essentially is the action of opening the fridge and filling up a large glass and hearing that noise of the wine leaving the bottle and glubbing into the glass and taking a greedy sniff followed by a greedier gulp followed by a long sigh of relief - as it generally signals the end of the working day) I actually don't really miss the feeling of having drinking the stuff.
I am really surprised that I don't miss it more.
However. (Again) I realise too that my social calendar for January is sparsely populated with appointments which I think makes the imposed embargo a whole lot easier.
Being the socially inept shy day creature that I am, I do find that holding a well supped glass of wine (I'm not really too fussy about the colour, although if its fizzy that really is a bonus point to the host) helps bring out the well hidden night time party animal that I keep shrouded behind glasses and cheap jumpers from TU.
So what do you do instead of getting a bit tiddly?
Well, January is a time for Thank you letters (an art that I fear is fast fading from the etiquette of present giving and receiving and hosting and hostessing or general just being a brilliantly helpful friend / relative / employee... - thanks seems to very readily be given via text or email now. Which is fine if its just a 'cheers for the cuppa' but y'know, when something big has taken place, a letter (hand written, remember what that's all about? Pen! ink! Paper! Stamps!? quoi?) encapsulates an emotion so perfectly... I don't know, I think maybe I was bought up in the wrong decade), so I have been doing some thank you letters.
Other things to do when not out on the lash releasing the inner night-owl:
sort the photo album (I bet yours is more than a year out of date?);
clear out the basement full of rotting old furniture;
try and get in touch with a structural engineer to reassure one that the house isn't going to eat itself due to subsidence;
make phone calls to friends!
empty out the kids drawers full of tat and clothes for 12month olds;
eat chocolate as a booze replacement;
and finally have long hot baths whilst reading latest novel.
Oh - my book club book is now: Lucky Jim (Kingsley Amis). Oh me. Its making me laugh out loud (LOL!!! as text speech would have it - oh, get me a vom bucket). You should read it. And then we can discuss it. Or as in the past, I'll just discuss it on my own because no one invites me to their book club.
No booze January is actually doing me lots of good and I really do feel like my halo is beginning to glow again very dimly.
Oh, and also, I do feel a bit more clear headed and able to think in a bit more logical way. Which is why I've decided to go and have a boob job and a tummy tuck.

ice ice baby.

Yo! Vip! Alright, stop collaborate and listen... ice is back and there ain't no grittin.
Hey!
Home-girl!
I is rappin, awight?
Actually, this is a complaint against the council. Official. Harringay you are useless, useless USELESS.
The school texts us at 8am "School is open, we expect you to bring your children to school for normal hours, do not skive despite the fact that you will probably break your legs / wrists / skull in the attempt to reach us. We don't care, we have attendance figures to create. See you in 45 mins, or else... Love, Headmistress from the House of Officious Kitten Heel."
Or its something like that.
So, dutifully obeying the powers that rule, we tog up to the nines in tights, trousers, vests, long sleeved t-s, jumpers, jumpers over jumpers, coats over jumpers, scarves over coats and hats/gloves over other exposed parts. Boots on. Door open. We face the ice.
And this is not ice that you take out of the freezer and put into your G&T at 5pm. Oh no. This is ice that is out to get you. It wants you to slip. It wants you to fall across its black shiny brilliance. And there must be a reason why the council therefore has left it on the pavement and roads? They're either trying to kill us outright (population booming out of control) or they want to teach us to pay our council taxes accordingly and not fair dodge on the number 29 bus. Whatever, it seems an extremely harsh way to teach us lessons.
So, we hobble slip stamp screech our way down our ice-piste, clinging onto each other, laughing out of fear, watching the cars career totally out of control down our road (its very steep, I may not have mentioned before that it's a bit like a ski jump but instead of landing in powdery snow at the bottom with an adoring audience you land in Tesco Metro or their double-length delivery truck that blocks Green Lanes at critical moments of the day) - I've seen one bump into another car (parked only in front of mine - I was ready to step in the way to protect my poor inert Volvo, but I was flat out on the floor eating wee-d on ice...) (not really, I fell over later, but I like to exaggerate for effect). Mol really loves it. Adventure! Snow! Ice! It's like being in a film mum! Liz really hates it: 3 year olds with short legs who are wrapped in 12 layers are not made for walking on slippery ice death traps. Poor Liz. She was actually trembling with fear. So after walking a little bit I did the charitable motherly thing and picked her up.
It was all going OK-ish, (a walk that usually takes 5 minutes took 15 because of the councils LACK OF CONCERN FOR ITS RESIDENTS) and slowly slowly we were approaching the Institution of the Kitten Heel Mistress crossing the last road - when WOOSH - and I'm on my knees, Liz is flat on the floor beside me, school bags galore, and an exhaust pipe but 10cm from my nose.
Sore sore sore knees. Pride - where have you gone? (up the exhaust I should think) Liz - completely hysterical (doesn't like cars, now is ice-phobic, has a sore back where we fell). Mol a bit like: where's mum gone? Oh, she's on the floor.
School bell ringing.
And the cloak of death sweeping over us as cars skid towards us uncontrolled over the perma-ice covering the road.
Some kind gentleman scraped me up, and Liz up, and my bags up, and I unbended my bent knee, and we hobbled on through the school gates... Where La Mistress de La Heel Kitten was waiting, all smiles and red lips and Mrs Adams-Family strange grey hair streak...
Did she realise what she was calling us to?
The journey home was even more bloody. Although no one in my party fell - it, and here I exaggerate not, took 1/2 hour to get home.
She, the messenger of the Council, summoning us to our near-calamity accidents... She rocks up in a nifty sports car to school. Us parents stupid enough to bring our kids to school when summoned suffer the consequences, not she:- well, tomorrow, unless there is a big thaw (in my mood and the ice) she can shove attendance figures up her squeaky little kitten heeled arse.
Read it and weep authority!
PS grit the bloody pavements. If not for us young-er ones, at least for the oldies who must be getting low on denture securer by now. Its just not on.

how they grow...

oh I suddenly feel a bit sad. my little baby (liz, age 3.5, so technically not a baby at all) is off on her first all-growed-up tripette with her granny. to the theatre they have gone! no room on the broom (ah, julia donaldson what would we do without you? apart from read other books?). a cat and a hat and a long ginger plaite... (how do you spell it?). and liz who usually wails and clings to my legs and has to peeled off me like a plaster that's been on a verucca for too long and leaves those horrid black marks round the edges - she just waltzed into granny's house, gave a mandatory kiss and let us shut the door no fuss. no sticking or wailing. i wonder if i should check her forehead for tempretures or her skin for mysterious rashes when she gets back.
i just felt a bit sad. for a moment, as i made her little tiny person sized bed, i realised that she's not a smally any longer. but a small-to-middly. which is a massive difference. and i felt a tiny small person sized pang of 'oh'. its all irreversible. she'll only go up (maybe out a bit depending on when she discovers Mc-vomit-donalds) and get wiser and cheekier and start drinking cider.
these small things. i also cut her hair on new years day (such a bad day to do it! with a hangover!) and now she is wearing a long-bob as opposed to a long-straggle and so she looks more growed-up too.
ah. how they grow. i must savour these rose-tinted moments for soon it'll all be door slamming and 'i hate you mum its so unfair', like every day all day.

anyway. check this out its quite funny. albeit 2 weeks too late we wish you a merry christmas!
and this one too: pogues new york tale

happy hangover!

why oh why oh why oh why?
new years has two predictable paths: path one: find some friends and get really drunk; path two: bah-humbug the whole thing and wake up the next morning feeling smug that you're not hungover.
this year i chose path one and
a.) found some friends (yes, i have them, despite the fact that i probably piss them off royally for most of the year)
b.) got really drunk and...
c.) had a super duper time getting drunk with said friends (there was laughter! merriment! mohito's made by husband! wine tasting game provided by efficient slightly-less-drunk than us at the time neighbour! lots of food! more laughter!)
d.) clonked up to the loft to check out the fireworks over london town drunkenly clonking past mol & liz's bedrooms shouting expletives and general clonkiness (usually am a wee bit anal about not clonking past their bedrooms less they wake from their beauty sleep, not that my little beauties need it... nothing to improve on their faultless perfection. not sure if you can have faultless-perfection in the same sentence?)
e.) wondered about my new years resolutions... (maybe try to get my head around the sodding child-tax-forms i keep getting sent mend the puncture in my bike so i can get to work by my own power not that of the increasingly stinky over priced driven by madmen/women bus oh and the predictable no drinking in january maybe no cheese because i'm more addicted to that than anything else in the world - maybe east enders a bit...) work out where a ' is supposed to go so that my sentences become more grammatically correct
f.) and then passed out at 1.10am - a record late night for me - i actually don't think i've stayed up that late more than 3 times since i became a mother.
g.) woke up this morning parched with a snotty nose that was blocked (possibly the worst sort of nose issue to sort out - how do you blow a blocked yet very snotty nose? nearly impossible) and thought to myself: how long will i feel like this? the answer is: at 6pm my hands are a bit shakey so i guess the hangover is beginning to kick in. it was merrily postponed by a long walk on hampstead heath and the discovery of a cafe called MOL's which nearly made me cry with amazement at the pure coincedence of the name! i'm easily made cry. i'm clearly not with it as i can't write english right now.
and oh my god! have you been to the heath recently? its like a dog-off circus! everyone is there with crazy animals on leads. from tiny little things you nearly get stuck in the tread of your shoe (even if they wear hi-viz jackets - which they mostly do - you still don't see them) to GIANTS which liz screams at as they loom towards her as though she's about to be kidnapped by snakes - giants with muzzles on their snouts, giants with huge bollocks that dangle just at liz-head-height, giants with mad looking owners who carry dog-brushes and spades with which to shovel the elephantine-size shits off the paths with. and when you follow the lead up to the hand that is holding it and then look at the owner... it often says it all. all the rich hampstead-highgate nut-cases wearing matching barber-jackets that their doggy-woggy is wearing... its just plain bonkers.
i could have put liz on a lead and she very possibly could've been mistaken for a new bread of hairless hind-leg-walking puppy. (wouldn't sell very fast as its taken over 3 years to potty train and sadly this bread of dog answers back.) they'd've been queuing up to have a stroke and ask who the breaders were...
ANYWAY. hangover ramble.
liz & mol have watched the railway children and are having a quick bath before they go on to watch charlie and the chocolate factory.
in't near years day tv smashing for hungover parents?
what is your new years resolution i wonder?