Monday 21 January 2013

Is it time for the sex chat with Mol yet?
She's only nine. Well, nine, about to be 10 in just under one months time.

I'm trying very hard to put myself back (the brief 15 years) to when I was 10 (have you done your maths yet?) and remember whether or not I had knowledge of sex and the like.

When I was 10 we didn't have things like advertising and we didn't have pre-teen-bra's and we didn't have DS's or instant SMS or morning TV (well, we did have morning TV but my parents fooled us into believing that there wasn't morning TV - which meant that we missed out on legendary programmes such as Saturday Swop Shop and trendy music shows... Instead we were out in the garden playing "Show Jumping" with the dog) and boys and girls played stuck in the mud (if they played together at all) and sometimes, if we were feeling really crazy, kiss chase may have been experimented with tentatively - all very chaste.

When I was 10 I didn't see TV shows with pretty girls sporting long black eyelashes and pink lips and finely quoiffed hair. The girls we saw back in the day barely wore make up and if their clothes came from Top Shop it wasn't a fashion statement it was out of necessity. Top Shop now is a hive of sexy little t-shirts and H&M is, god, well, it's plain scary. I am thankful that I don't have a local H&M and thankful that Mol therefore doesn't see what hangs in their shops for the 10 year olds. I know she'd 'av'em'all if she could.

Having watched a couple of reality TV shows with Mol (Strictly Come Dancing and 'So you think you can dance' and 'Lets Dance'...) she has seen how big people can promote themselves through their bodies, and increasingly she likes to replicate what she sees, (so far mainly at home). Recently the pelvic thrust and hip-gyration and the multiple-lash-bat have become rather popular moves in our kitchen, whilst dancing to The Killers or Kings of Leon or The Beatles... (Which in turn gets Liz out on the dance floor looking like she's swallowed a large tab of acid, jerking her little marshmallow legs around with her eyes rolling - that's funny, really funny to watch. But somehow it's OK for a 6 year old to do this because she really is only copying what she sees and has no idea of what it is saying.)

Mol gyrates herself around the kitchen batting her lashes and asking for my old blusher and mascara, and, 'mum, do you really need this eye shadow?'. Occasionally a leg whips up past her ear when the beat gets just one step too exciting.

The reason I ask about the sex thing, is that I know it's coming and I wonder if I should just pre-empt it? I remember an excrutiating conversation between my parents and me when I was somewhere between the age of 8-11. I was sitting at the piano bored out of my brain ("I hate this its SO unfair ugh it's so cold in this room oh I can't do this stupid piece my teacher is going to kill me why can't I go riding?") when BOTH of my parents suddenly appeared in the room and sat on the sofa, quietly crossing their legs and looking pointedly at me.

Then my mum said "Darling." I turned to them, wondering what I'd done wrong.

I stared at them.
They stared at me.
This is awkward.
"Darling." She continued. "Do you know about the... about the... you know... the..."
I stare some more.
"...the... birds and the bees?"

WHAT?

Well, dear god, thankfully, at this point in my life I must have had some sort of sex-ed at school (like, formal) because I remember, apart from nearly melting from embarrassment, saying, mumbling, coughing, "er, yes, yes yes... school... class... teacher..." turned around and started banging on the piano.

Conversation over. Sex chat closed. Not mentioned again until I was pregnant with Mol.

Mol asked me yesterday what celibacy means. We were watching Mrs Doubtfire. There is a rather understated chat about sex - which I was hoping went above her head, however, just as the scene drew to a close... Celibacy.

I ask you.
Extend the innocence, or get down with it and the quicker the better, no pain no gain?
Answers on postcards. I thank you.

Saturday 12 January 2013

Mud.
It's everywhere.
Some wisecrack once sung a song "mud mud glorious mud...".
Honestly. There really is nothing glorious about mud.
I mean, yeah. It's fun sometimes to splash around in a muddy puddle a-la-Peppa-Pig and have a jolly frolic. Bear in mind that Peppa Pig is a pig. Actually Peppa Pig is a cartoon so doesn't have any nerve endings or senses so doesn't actually know that she is in a puddle. It is the animators who tell her she is in a muddy puddle. And then make her react appropriately... or... do they?
It maybe easier avoid this kind of philosphical positing (does a cartoon pig have feelings? If you're not looking, does Peppa Pig still exist? Will Peppa Pig and her obese Dad with the fat voice be made into Walls Bangers?...Think how many people would be fed as a result. Could solve many problems, as long as 50% doesn't get thrown away by dodgy best-before-dates... that would be wasteful) as it tends to do your head no good. Well, not mine anyway.

But there is a lot of mud around here at the moment.

We moved to the green fields and rolling hills of Hampshire in April 2012. I can count on 2 hands the number of sunny days we have had since then. So it's not too surprising that there is a lot of mud around. What with tractors racing through the village; cows tip-toeing on the hill; walkers tramping the National Park paths in their special walking clothes (oh god, don't get me started on walkers clothes, and their little walking sticks that are retractable...); crazy scramblers ripping up the tracks; dogs rolling in the brown icky mess; wellingtons up to the brim in the stuff; rivers are voluptuous and, yes, brown - there are no clean puddles to wash the wellies, it oozes it's way under your front door into your house, and before you know it your stair carpets are covered, like the antithesis of nutella:- mud: it's the housewifes' worst nightmare.
Not even Flash Superior can solve this mud problem.

I walked up a hill the other day. And at the top it was flooded. How does that happen? Why had the water not run down the hill like other normal water? What was special about this water? I surveyed the scene with an inquisitive, scientific eye, an eyebrow raised, a welly stuck in a deep squelching brown mess. I thought I was about to have an Albert Einsten moment and was close to taking the Nobel Peace Price for Brilliance.
And then I realised - like my welly, even the water was stuck in the mud! Wow! Epiphany! I'll take the money thanks! Don't worry about a trophy!

Mud isn't very glorious.
It's very big and it's not clever. It's a bit like the irritating fat-boy at school that no one really likes, unless he is waving a chocolate bar around at playtime.
Even playing games like pretending it's the biggest doggy doo in the world plopped on our county, or the worlds largest country-pancake, or Willy Wonka's factory having a technical problems, or imagining if it somehow flooded Waitrose... - it doesn't really help.
In fact it is depressing because all these giant flooding poo references are so close to the truth.

You want the truth? You can't handle the truth!

The wellington boot industry must LOVE this weather.
I wish I'd had the foresight to buy shares in Dunlop and those little kiosks in Undergrounds that sell umbrella's on rainy days and suncream on sunny days. Man, I'd be rolling in it (not the poo, more likely in the sea, in Barbados...).
 
Meanwhile, as the wellington boot manufacturers laugh out loud (LOL!) - recession? What recession?! and sales in rubber protection (foot, stop being dirty...) rocket, us country folk slop around, looking at the sky, looking at the floor, looking at each others mud-splattered rubber protection and weep another tear (into a bucket, to avoid further ground saturation) as the brown waters rise and the mud waves trickle closer to our homes.

Anyone know any good sun-dances?