Oh for a ceiling fan

 All this heat… lying on bed (no longer in bed) gently sweating into the sheets, staring at the ceiling wishing there was a fan twirling the air around the room… god it’s hot. How does it feel hotter when the sun goes down? My house, ancient, wasn’t built in an era when it hit 35-degrees for weeks on end. As an old butchers, the meat hooks and bars for hanging giant carcasses off (nice) do nothing to keep the rooms cool. So I lie on bed gently sweating into the sheets. 

The lack of a ceiling fan reminds me of a time in my life when I lived in a house that did have ceiling fans… over in Seikong - Hong Kong mainland - when Dad was posted there with the army in the 80s. I was 7-8 years old and we lived in a jungly army bungalow enclave on the side of a hill, mosquito screens on all the windows and large clunking ceiling fans swirling muggy air around quite a dark house. I remember my bedroom was a sort of lean-to-add-on to the side of my brothers room, and in it I had a tiny little cassette player where I played, continuously, a tape of Beatles music. Can’t buy me love. I also had a collection of Sindy dolls. (Note, not Barbies, which was always the aspiration.) They had shiny dresses, plastic shoes, handbags that didn’t open, hair that could melt if left too long in the sun, disproportionately long skinny limbs… and a male version - who’s name I don’t even know - of which I had 1 doll - a bit puny and underwhelming in equally shiny clothing but with helmet-hair rather than ‘real’ locks. My brothers had some kind of male doll thing too which had a more army-like appearance and when they returned to HK from the UK on the B-Cal flights exporting all the children who boarded to and from school 3 times a year, they would be reunited with these slightly dubious alpha male specimens. 

One time, we became particularly fevered - the word feral works too - and hysterical and created a game, which would be a one-time-only game, given the nature of this invention. The idea was to put the ceiling fan on full-blast - it would make this thwump-thwump noise that got faster and faster as the blades went round and round - dizzying… - At which point we decided the best thing to do would be to throw the dolls into the whizzing blades and see what happened. Total-carnage-mayhem! Bits of Sindy and her boyfriend brutally shredded as they hit the rotators - then peeeeeewwwweeeewwww - they ricochet in parts all over our bedroom - whack splat thwack! Shoes - zoom! Overly-long-leg - weeeeeehhheeee! Our eyes manic with destructive pleasure we would re-chuck the (poor) dolls back in as they became increasingly dismembered and mangled. The grand finale would have been Sindy’s head coming off like a champagne cork and flying across the beds and landing with a thud in a dark cockroachy corner of the room. It was all over very quickly. I kept the clothes but the dolls didn’t make it and had to be dispatched of all together. I think it was worth the moment of stomach-clutching-out-of-control-laughter this gave us at a time when we didn’t see each other all that much (them at boarding school in Sussex, me at the local army school in Hong Kong). It didn’t resolve the issue of the extreme humidity either but was an excellent distraction. 


Thinking about this time in Hong Kong I know now we were living in a different world era, Hong Kong was relatively un-developed, and we would head off, when my brothers were home for the holidays, on adventures on the Ghurka Junk - an incredible wooden boat (seemed enormous to me when I was only 7) that the regiment owned - picture a Chinese boat in your mind and this is what the junk was, full of curves. We’d go off on the junk, the boat being driven (sailed, I guess) by Ghurka soldiers who were so handsome and so kind and patient with us (were we nightmare bratty children who they had to put up with? God I hope not) and smiled with such warmth it could make me cry now just thinking about their kindness and how Dad would talk so fluently and unselfconsciously in this beautiful Nepali language, chuckling at some joke or other. And Mum would put this insane suncream on our noses which was like a strip of thick white paint that would last for hours and later make me think about Adam Ant. We would have a massive picnic - I think cooked by someone in the regiment - maybe some curries - delicious, so normal to have curry for lunch on a massive beautiful boat in unspoiled waters - and splash about in warm clear sea around Plover Cove (I wonder if that even exists any more) - watch out for the lethal jelly-fish (man-o-war!) and home as the sun set, feeling warm and crunchy from the salt water. And then the long drive home back up ‘twist’ the terrifying road that zig-zagged up behind Kowloon where Dad would try his best not to kill us while overtaking on blind corners in a bid to get past some sputtering diesel fumes of an ancient 3-wheel motor. 

It’s funny where the mind wonders when you’re staring at the ceiling sweating gently into your sheets wishing you had a fan. Thwump thwump.

You’ve been snookered!

There’s a funny feeling rumbling around which resembles like when a snooker ball whacks into the triangle of balls in the opening shot. The balls scatter across the green felt and all you see is chaos (unless you’re a snooker player in which case I guess you see the beginnings of a game). I think this applies to life right now, a little bit. I suspect it started in December 2023 when the first shot was played and Dad was, er, potted. Emotional and physical disarray followed.

Beginning the process of clearing the green felt could be described as part of the grief process and one by one the balls kind of started to move in directions which maybe made a little bit more sense. (I’m really bad at snooker mind you and can barely hold the cue, the fun bit is rubbing the nib in chalk - that’s not a dirty metaphor; ball games, for me generally, bring on a frown).

Less jarring flash backs to the hospital and more dipping into photos or memories with accepting wistfulness. And as all the therapists in the whole world say, the start of managing (grief) in a way that is like the careful carrying of a clunky painful heavy bag that you know how to handle the more you handle it, and less clunky and less painful and whilst heavy possibly easier to carry than at first. You find a place for the bag and grow muscles that help you hold it.

But wait! 2023 is YEARS ago now! Yes I know! But these things take a long time. It’s not like going on Amazon and clicking 'purchase' and 12-hours later you get the delivery: the quick Be Gone Grief Kit! You have to go to the emotional gym and work on those muscles so you can say jokes about your Dad being a potted snooker ball without falling apart. He didn’t like ball games either.

So getting to a point where there’s a bit more emosh-balance and fewer trembly chins is like a major milestone! Bravo, you pat yourself on the back and feel a bit stronger and a bit more capable.

But what we don’t know is that this particular snooker table is always resetting and it’s BOOM the triangle is hit and it’s ball chaos over the green felt once again, a mere 18 months later. The Good Ship Family finds itself in high-seas and the balls are flipping all over the place.

And this time because we’re dealing with adult orphanising (possibly just made that word up) it’s not even ‘straight forward grief’ – everything is multiplied – the bag is heavier, more painful, needs bigger muscles to carry it - because there’s an estate which needs to be sorted as well as the bereavy-bit. And I’m afraid no amount of “well it’s a nice distraction from the loss” placates.

When you find yourself and your family in your mother in laws’ house rummaging through time via multiple dusty and crumbly cardboard boxes containing incredible documents possibly last touched in 1852, wondering what to do with barely legible diaries because the handwriting is so Victorian and loopy, finding 3000 photos of building works from 45 years ago, acknowledging that none of us have houses big enough to absorb even a fraction of the beautiful and memory-laden furniture, one feels slightly out of ones depth to say the least.

The dump. The charity shop. The boot of the car. The garage. Visited. Revisited. And will be visited again. Possibly with a white van. There is a lot to sieve through.

Politely we ask each other questions:

Do you want this (pointing to a rabbit-fur-lined-travelling cloak from 1900s)?

Will you use these when you continue to not have smart dinner parties (pointing to an impeccable set of mother-of-pearl-handled-cutlery seemingly made for children)? 

Are you likely to have a sherry party and use those tiny engraved crystal glasses? 

When was the last time you read Shakespeare? Are you planning on reading a Shakespeare play every year until your death?  The house has maybe 3 separate entire collections. I suspect I would die before I even got past the first sonnet. Even the copies with pictures can’t be of help. Please don't compare me to a summers day.

Would you like 25 framed photos of varying sizes of patriarchal figures dating back to 1700- to whom you are probably related? Look at that mans' insane pork-chop-side-burns.

Whose job is it to decide if these are things worth keeping?

We somehow feel it ought not to have been left entirely up to us. We are still children who can't make adult decisions. 

Down to the nitty gritty, we set-to on the freezer, taking out erroneous bits of chicken, tupperware labelled with soup – parsnip, courgette, turkey - from 2025, diligently put aside for a spontaneous visit from a child or grandchild, 8 bottles of (homemade) elderflower cordial, some sad looking sea-bass-fillets, they would never have been promoted to a frying pan. For some reason I couldn’t part with the meatballs. They’re back in Hamsphire making friends with our frozen croissants.

Meanwhile, talking of snooker… An entire snooker table which was in my m-in-laws basement and provided hours of fun (for game-players) in the nineties has been rehomed – for someone else to whack that triangle of reds with hopefully less shattering impact.

We all need a break.

(Like what I did there?)

 

 

Reunions. What are they good for?

   

Time is doing weird things right now. Maybe prompted by returning to Newcastle 30 years after graduation. It was awesome to see the city again and to be with people who I shared some ridiculously seminal years with. 1996 doesn’t feel 30 years ago, and at the same time when I see a photo of myself from those years, short hair, clothes which I can’t remember wearing, a happy anxious probably hungover moment caught on film, I feel a long way from that girl.

 

I wonder, if I was in 1996 now, could I even have vaguely imagined that I’d be back in my childhood village, living in a crumbling 400-year-old-house, with a dog that eats shit like I eat chocolate, a husband who’s the village cricket team captain and children which I noisily pushed out of my own body in the Hackney hospital famous for treating knife-wounds. I didn’t know, in 1996, that 6 years later we’d be showing my father-in-law the first scan of my pregnancy before anyone else because we were worried about his health.

 

In 1996 I didn’t give much thought to the future. 

And in 2026 I try not to think about it too much either.

 

And after graduating, I also wouldn’t have been able to predict that 3 years later I’d be walking down the aisle to marry a boy that I’d met only 3 years earlier.

 

That 6 years after graduating I’d have my first baby and own a house in Harringay. In 1996 I didn’t even know Harringay existed and then it became my home for 10 amazing years.

 

And as I sit here in my 400-year-old cobwebby kitchen thinking about time-warps I recognise that I am about the same age that my parents were when they watched me get married, and that in 23 years time, the age that Mol is now, I will be the same age (roughly) that my parents are now, in their dotage. I say parents. Parent.

 

23 years.

 

And thinking about how long it took those 23 years to unroll is unnerving, veering on uncomfortable because it’s been packed full of great things but has gone at the speed of a juggernaut with no breaks. Mols first birthday party – drunken with pizza and no actual baby present as it took place after bed-time. Liz turning 5 with a lady-bird cake. And then suddenly birthdays are in nightclubs for 50% of the household, and the other 50% celebrate with a long walk and maybe a steak for supper.

 

In 23 years time I will be 74.

When mum was 74 we entered a 2 year pandemic and were locked into our houses, wondering if any of our friends might die from Covid.

How fast will the next 23 years go?

When Granny (my dad’s mum) was 74 she had been a widow for 20 years. Granny, who never failed to turn up to my parents house without a gift – home-made biscuits, a quiche, some green-tomato chutney (I still have her handwritten recipe); a pair of my dads socks she’d darned. I’d hear her chorkle (for that is how she laughed) and maybe we’d tickle each others arms while we talked about school or a fishing trip she was about to go on ("I need to tie some new flies..."). I only ever saw Granny in a tweed skirt. A widow at 54 and never married again. She died in her mid-90s when I was 29 and had a 1-year-old baby.

 

Kiki is going to be 10 (human years) 70 (dog years) in April. I was 42 and Mol was 13 and Liz was 9 when she joined our household as a large-pawed puppy. And now, possibly a little like me, she is past the middle-age line in the sand and moving into another life-chapter. She still eats shit and I still eat chocolate.

What am I trying to say? It’s complicated, but essentially this: if you go to a reunion be prepared for some extremely wonderful heartfelt rebonding with people you love and then a massive dollop of time-warpy-head-whackery and warn your dog when you get home that she needs to look you in the eye and tell you to calm the fuck down.

 

 

Best keep it to myself

  

I was at training on the weekend, learning about understanding and preventing vicarious trauma. It was interesting. But there’s something about having a group of therapists in a room together that could be described as unsettling. By-the-way, the collective noun for a group of therapists is “a worry of…” apparently. Although AI may be playing a little joke on me.

 

There are so many earnest people in the world, and therapists might be near the top the list of earnest-ness; when you are learning about somewhat difficult topics I wonder if what is also needed, running alongside the grizzly truth of how horrid people can be to each other, is a smatter of humour. In these therapy training courses there is much chin-rubbing on a tilted head, the low hum of "hmm-ing", moments of weighty reflection, (unfortunate moments of audible stomach grumbling), and many voices politely trying to have their profound thoughts about their work heard by all.

 

Somehow there is little room for wit on these training courses. And I know – it is because we are talking about Very Serious Things. But when a rather short man in his mid-60s, wearing CND-emblazoned DM-boots topped off with a purple paisley shirt is delivering the hard-hitting content it’s quite testing (especially from the front row because you forgot your glasses) to take everything Extremely Seriously.

 

His DMs squeaked on the hard village hall flooring and the shirt dazzled the eyes with excessive swirling patterns. I am not one to not take these topics seriously, trauma is a hugely interruptive and daunting thing to live with, let alone talk about openly. In this line of work we therapists need to be careful that we don’t end up inhabiting something dreadful that has actually happened to someone else. This is big stuff and cannot be taken flippantly, a person is relying on us to support them with this toughest of material, and the training helped remind me how best to manage with it.

BUT.

Come on therapist colleagues. Please. Just a little loosening of the tight-grip-of-This-Is-Serious.

 

At the start of the training Mr Paisley invited us (we’re always being invited… in hindsight I should maybe have politely declined…) to meditate.

 

We sat there eyes closed, earnestly ‘clearing our minds’ and ‘listening to our breath’ and ‘connecting with the calm beneath the storm’ etc etc and when Mr Paisley said ‘now watch your breath come in and out of your lungs and let your mind be free of … ‘ (something remarkable, I can’t remember what) – when he said the word ‘lungs’ I automatically went into a visual of the recent Silent Witness I’d seen, where Emilia Fox was intently dissecting the lung of a murder victim.

 

And I really got into this replay as it was quite a realistic lung and I remember thinking at the time I wonder if this is fake or some animals lung? Which animal? And then somehow I got to going back in time and thinking about when my dad was in hospital in 1997 after a mega grim operation (called the Whipple Procedure where much of your guts are removed) and when I went to visit him he was in such a terrible state with drips and needles galore and his mouth covered in blood because he kept coughing up gross things from inside… it was deeply disturbing. And then that made my thoughts wiggle (you know how dots join in a funny way in your head, leading you willy-nilly from one place to another) to a conversation I’d had with a friend recently where I’d admitted I not-infrequently imagine the sorts of places you might accidently find a dead body.

 

Oops! I was meant to be clearing my mind and grounding! Not replaying a cheap horror-movie. Mr Paisley invited us to open our eyes and I saw a squirrel zipping up an oak tree that was in the carpark outside the window. Which felt quite normal.

 

Mr Paisley then invited us to talk about our meditation and what nice things we’d encountered.

 

I wasn’t sure that sharing my minds contents at that point would’ve sparked a laugh in the crowd of Earnest Therapists (they may have called 999 and invoked the mental health act 1983), so instead in my gnarly head I laughed like a hyena, while a very clever therapist spent 5 minutes telling us all how marvellously empty her head had been and what a grounding experience the meditation was, thank you so much Mr Paisley.

 

Sliced lung anyone?

 

 

How was yours?

 

I was walking this morning in a fog of thoughts having just returned from a monumental 4 days of Christmas. I began to think of the rhythms of the time around Christmas, the lulls and intensity of activities, the build-up, the crescendos and yes, I’ll say it, the climax… followed by a strange quiet, a sort of letting go, a huge out-breath.

 

What sprang to mind was a tsunami. I haven’t ever seen one but have a vague idea of what goes on. The leaching of the water away from the beach as the earth, miles away, has shifted so radically that it sucks the sea back only to catapult it out in full force, leaving nothing to spare in its wake. I think that’s what I feel like a bit. On a tiny teeny scale.

 

There is this sense of engaging the brace-position even though what’s about to happen is good! It is! I’m part of a brilliant family. There is nothing to not love about being together. Yet... Yet… The preparation required for The Christmas Period is essentially a powerful message telling the body and brain that something quite big – and possibly risky - is going to happen very soon. Prepare yourself – geographically, financially, nutritionally, physically, relationally, and last but not least, at the top of the Prep-Tower – emotionally. This year was another biggy for our family – 2023/4 was the fallout from the death of my dad, 2025 was the fallout of from the death of my motherinlaw. A powerhouse of organisational skills and detail and the epicentre of the family around whom we rotated – like stars circling the sun. The wretched-hole-of-absence was what we were all manically prepping for.

 

So as the waters began to recede from the metaphorical beach and the excitement began to grow, so did the sense of anxiety around getting it right, honouring this insanely generous woman who had produced our Christmasses for decades, pulling out decorations from under the stairs, saving a nick-nack made by her grandchildren or children even (that tinsel twizzle is nearly 50 years old) – how do you STILL have that? – on the tree it goes regardless of its state of decomposure… It's not about a fashionable colour theme, the theme is family… regardless of age or life-status, if it’s family related, it’s IN (or on).

 

The sea disappears over the horizon and our whatsapps pick up a notch: do we have enough cheese? How many crackers did you say there are? Wait, how many beds do we need clean sheets for? How many roulades feed 17? That means how many pints of cream? We need to hoover the dead ladybirds from the windowsills.

 

Meanwhile a car-key goes awol and the prep-plans hit a bump in the sea-bed momentarily. Me and my sisterinlaw sit in the local municipal dump in a strange moment of calm as the car can’t start without its electric key: a flash of peace descends in the Toyota as we realise there is nothing we can do but sit in the unexpected quiet offered by our immobilization, people outside the car determinedly shove bits of cardboard into huge metal shipping containers. We laugh at the idiocy of the situation and the car ends up having a sleepover in the dump.

 

And then the water is on the rise again, and organised chaos picks up another notch. What time are you arriving? Which day? So that’s how many for dinner on each night? Put washing up liquid on the list. And another washing up brush.

Secret Santa complete.

I think we need more cheese.

The water is galloping across the sea-bed, with our two dogs surfing on the crest, great smiles on their hairy noses, anticipating ham and bacon and turkey and sausage and cheese ‘falling’ off plates…

 

And then we’re in it – being tumbled around by time and joyful greetings and unpacking food and laying presents under the sparkling tree with its wondrous array of decorations – and trying to hold it together as we recognise moments in the day when our mother/inlaw/granny would’ve conducted an activity – shit we didn’t do a jigsaw this year – or run around the house trying to work out why the chimney was smoking so extravagantly this year. The water frothing and churning around us, potato basting and Love Actually, the dishwasher on its 28^th run in 3 days, wrapping paper strewn over the floor, I love it so much thank you.

 

Boxing Day, we wake late, it’s like that moment in the Yellow Pages advert from the 90s when the young man wakes up to see a painting with a moustache graffitied over the art, discombobulated, we had a good time didn’t we? The house is in one piece, we’re in one piece, we made it through with love and joy and tears.

 

We resemble the debris on the beach after the wave has crashed down – we’re not at all destroyed, but we’re in a ‘wow-did-that-happen’ kind of head space; a little messy, a little phewee, we tread carefully down to breakfast, relieved we don’t have to get to church for 930am again.

 

I guess every family does their thing, and I guess the power of Christmas is that they do it together and hope that they can lean on each other in those moments when they need support.

 

My moment was the waving goodbye to people as they drove off. Waving goodbye to a carload of people, standing next to my niece I realised that oh crapsticks here comes my own mini-tidal-wave, as my motherinlaw was a stickler for a proper wave-off to anyone from her house, and would wave until the car was out of sight. The absence hit like the second-tidal-wave they always say you need to be prepared for, there’s usually more than one.

 

Boom. Turning to my niece we both craughed (cry-laughed) as we knew exactly what the other was thinking in that moment.

Fuckadoodle doooo.

Did we have enough cheese in the end? Well yes we bloody did. 

 

 

 

 

The Whistling Ghost

When I was little I used to believe in Father Christmas. And the Tooth Fairy. And that icing sugar might be poisonous (mum caught me with my fingers in the box and got angry and said you can't go round licking things when you don't know what they are, they might be poison...  She also told my brother that peanut butter was made from grass and he believed her for years...). And I knew ghosts and that were maybe not real but at times I did believe in them because people I trusted told me about their ghosty experiences, even Dad. My brothers girlfriend told us she'd felt someone sit heavily on her bed (in our family home) when she was asleep, and it definitely wasn't my brother, she said. And Granny's dogs occasionally used to bark at the stairs, apparently, at things she definitely couldn't see. And when we stayed once in Chesapeake Bay (USA) in an old house that was the epicentre of a tobacco plantation in the peak of slavery horrendousness, I had never in my life felt such psychological disturbance, I slept not one wink all night, terrified of unknown shades of intense sadness and fear.

There have been sightings – by reliable sources – of things in the pub next door (an old building with some sad stories to go with it) and lordy lorks when we were little we did not go into the graveyard at 6pm or 12am – no siree.

As I grew older and more sceptical these childish and teenish tendencies diluted and whilst fun to watch a horror movie, there was a ‘yeah, but it’s not real’ defiance. Occasionally a visit to the loo in the middle of the night down the long corridor of my mother in laws house in Suffolk would lead me to keep my eyes shut and my hands out in front of me for guidance rather than risk ‘seeing’ something. I only ever stumped my toe on the bed as a result.

So the other day I was staying in London and running a bath. The day had been long and beautiful, I’d had many treats and was feeling happy and relaxed, a little giddy from sharing a bottle of wine with my daughter and the world was a good place in that moment.

As I sat in the bath, stirring the water with my hands shaped like paddles, I heard this loud whistling coming from the bedroom on the other side of the bathroom door. I thought my daughter must be next door whistling a little tune (we’d just been to a concert). “Lovely!” I shouted above the sound of the running water. More whistling. I’d asked her to bring my toothbrush as I’d left it in the wrong place, “Just leave my toothbrush by the door I’ll get it in a moment, I’m actually in the bath now!” Nothing from my daughter. More whistling. That was odd I thought.

More whistling, so I shouted out “Ha ha! Love the whistling!”

Nothing, again. Weird, I thought to myself. I switched off the tap, and got out of the bath and went to the bathroom door and nakedly peered into the bedroom which was completely empty.

HUH? But someone was literally just whistling in there! I shouted up to Pol – “Er, were you just whistling in the bedroom?” No reply.

?

“POL! Were you just whistling?!” She heard a squeaky urgency in my voice and I could hear her dash down the stairs to where I was peeking out from behind the bathroom door. 

“Mum, what? Whistling? No!” She looked at me like I was a bit mad.

But someone was just in this room Pol, whistling! I could hear them! Clear as a whistle! "Not me" she clarified.

Our neck-hairs prickled.

Our eyeballs got big.

“That’s creepy. Really creepy.”

We didn’t like that at all. Who was whistling? Where was the whistler? Why couldn’t we see them? Ugh. And then the light in the bedroom flickered as though warning us of something. Goosebumps galore. 

With great difficulty we agreed to reconvene after my bath.

I got back into the bath, skin bristling and turned the tap back on, at which point the whistling started, loud and clear, and I realised the sound was coming out of the hot tap! Pol heard it from the bedroom and we burst out laughing.

Lightening strikes.

 

Standing at the window looking out onto the manicured school gardens four stories below I can see the old chestnut tree swaying in the wind. There is a loud and ill- tempered noise as the chestnut branches wave dramatically. The window-panes rattle in their lead settings and I can feel the air squeezing through like needles, spiking my bare arms. All of eight of us are standing at the window. The whole dorm. The dorm captain, a 6^th former of dizzying sophistication, has her left arm around me and her right around the other first year. We’re the youngest, the smallest, the newest to the senior school. She’s feeling protective, perhaps.The others are all standing, clutching the window sill as the purple sky lit up with sheets of lightening, rages. 

 

The noise is unsettling, never heard before. A deep rumble with layers of screeching, crunching, surprise thumps, a dustbin falls on its side somewhere in the near distance and crashes, and the chestnut surges in the extreme wind. Leaves are racing around in mini tornadoes. It’s 3am. 

 

Where are the staff? No one has come to check us at our top floor dorm, the only one on the upper floor of the boarding house. The dorm captain had tried the lights but it seems the power is off. So we stand at the window and watch the mayhem. The girl in the year above me standing in our line of nighty-clad bodies clasps her hands to her mouth in a hidden gasp as what looks like a  black bin bag flaps past our window. It gave me a fright she says weakly. My knees are quivering. It’s cold standing at this window, late October, with pins of wind stabbing our skin. We can’t tear ourselves away. It’s like being inside the TV. An unreal reality. More lightening races across the purple sky. A thrashing of rain against our noisy windows. 

 

I wonder what my parents are doing. I had a postcard from them, they were somewhere in Italy, was it Florence? I hadn’t really paid attention. A picture of a statue looking pious, “delicious ice cream darling” was the message. The unpainted door of our dorm slams shut as the air is sucked through the room – I thought it was shut already said the dorm captain with quivery surprise in her voice. I can feel the warmth of her body through my nighty, I’m glad to feel it. Safe. 

 

Eight intakes of breath as the chestnut bends all the way over and we hear the protest from its 300 year old trunk, I’m not made to bend this way, and as the wind suddenly drops the tree rights itself once more. Relief.

We are all thinking will it fall?

The wind continues with such anger. Swirling. Violent. More things – unidentifiable – whiz by our heads – we are high up – at the top of this old, old house, also straining against the abusive gale. 

 

Eight sets of rigid shoulders and wide eyes.

Still no adults. Where are they? The door to the dorm loudly rattles again and we jump. I flip my head around but no one is there. 

 

There’s always an eye to a storm, isn’t there? Asks the fourth former next to me. There has to be a lull. Surely. I can smell her breath, stale toothpaste from brushing her teeth hours ago. Hours ago we were in bed, listening to Madonna, reading our books, waiting for matron to do her final patrol. Where is matron now? Should we stop looking out of the window? I think we are beginning to feel frightened. Not excited any more.

 

The wind ramps up and we can feel the floor beneath our bare chilly feet vibrate as the glass before our eyes visibly moves.

More sharp breaths: The chestnut. Look. It’s… 

 

There is a howling sound that slices my head between my eyes – I fall backwards and then I hear and see and feel nothing. Just calm and darkness.

 

When I wake, I’m at my Grandmothers house in a room I’ve not been in for years and years. It’s confusing. How did I get here? I thought I was at school.

My eyes come into focus and I see my Granny sitting in a chair beside my bed. The sun is shining in behind her.

Hello sleepy, I’m so glad you’re here.

Hi Granny, and she holds my hand.

At the end of my bed is Willow. She’s curled up in a little yellow ball of soft velvety dogginess. Willow! But how? Granny – I didn’t think Willow was…

Oh, she is my love. She is. It’s just been a while since you saw her.

Everything seems vague and soft and a bit subdued. Peaceful.

Granny says come with me, love.

I get out of bed. I’m in the same nighty I was in when I was watching the storm. I frown down and feel a bit confused again. 

 

We go downstairs and I look out into her garden.

Granny I haven’t seen you for so long, it’s so nice to be here.

She looks into my eyes and smiles.

We go into her garden and start to walk up the hill behind her house. My head feels clear but when I put my hand to my forehead I get a jolt of pain – like lightening – and I fall to the ground. 

 

I wake up again in bed, Willow tucked up on the floor beside me this time. I reach out a hand. Granny walks into the room.
Hello sleepy, are you feeling better?

I think so, I say, but it’s hard to tell. My hand rests on the dog, her body rising and falling beneath. Calm.

It’s dark outside. 

Something is different in Grannys house but I can’t work out what it is.

Then I realise. She’s taken everything off the walls. There are no pictures, no photos, no mirrors. Little furniture. Like she’s cleared it all away.

Granny what’s happened to your walls? She looks at me a long time and then says I’ll tell you when the time is right.

I realise other things. I haven’t eaten anything and I don’t feel hungry or thirsty and I don’t know what day it is and I worry I should be at school and where are mum and dad?

Where are my clothes Granny?

She looks at me again and I notice her eyes are very, very dark.

She holds my hand across the table.

Darling. She says again. 

Something is fidgeting in my head. A flash of a memory. A car smashed into a wall. Police sirens. Mum crying in a church. I don’t understand.

But Granny you’re here. I thought, I mean, I remember the car crash. Willow was there too.

Darling. She pushes a newspaper towards me.

There is an article taking up quarter of the page:

“School girl dies after freak hurricane lightening strike” there is a photo of me next to the article.

I’m dead. 

 

 

Autumn haiku

 

Dog scampers through reds

Autumns' crisp leaves are falling

The ground senses change 

 

Long whiskery nose

Excited by strong fox smells

Darts into a bush

 

Reappears crunching

Old dried bones delicious snack

Low sun glows weakly

 

Through the trees faint gold

Swish swish the close of summer

Happy dog, bones gone 

 

 

 

 

 

Oh my christ Michael

 

There has been a fair amount of time spent in churches of late not for all the happiest of reasons either, but those stories are for another time.

There is something about being in the church which makes it quite hard (for me) to be there being serious and contemplative, and it’s to do with a particular word which tends to come up a lot, because it is church after-all, and the word is Christ. I can’t hear the word now without my brain flicking immediately to a very particular character from a very particular BBC drama. (I wonder if anyone will know where my brain goes when hearing that word before I get to the end of this daft ditty, when I shall tell you.)

But it means if I am sitting in quiet contemplation under the roof of the church and a vicar starts wanging on about Christ, it’s hard to continue concentrating on the job at hand, without a small immature chuckle and a wondering of the mind.

Then when my usually quite empty brain starts moving in this auto-word-association manner, I am launched back in time to prep-school where I was taught science by a man called Alan.

Poor Alan. He didn’t stand a chance against us awful south England uppity children. Alan was from Up North and he had a ginger beard and tight belly squished snugly into what can only be described as golfers-jumpers. We used to laugh at him constantly. He would stand at the front of the class aggressively scratching his ginger beard (don’t get me wrong, many of the absolute best people have red hair, my first ever kiss was in a graveyard with a scrumptious chap with light strawberry-blond hair and a face of freckles).

But we were also quite frightened by Alan, he had a powerful shout and a scorching scowl and we didn’t always understand what he was saying, which grants a bit of authority (because even bratty 10 year olds can’t constantly say what/pardon/excuse me? to find out how to light a bunsen burner via an alien dialect without beginning to feel stupid).

Oh how he disliked us. Going into his science lab was never easy – it smelt strongly of vinegar and he would make us cut up red cabbages to see what colours they were made from by soaking them onto blotting paper. Possibly the most interesting class we had was when he prepared us for the appearance of Hayleys Comet – a once in a 75-year chance - it was very exciting; we didn’t see the comet though as we all had to be in our chilly metal framed beds when it passed over school. (I’ll be 85 when it next passes through our sky, so either dead or on another metal framed bed in a different sort of institution...)

Because we were a fairly foul bunch of kids we gave him the nickname Fungi. And we would howl with laughter thinking about Fungi and draw cartoons of giant red and white spotty toadstools in his class, right under his angular nose. There’s no way he couldn’t have seen them and wonder at the provenance of this name. I suspect it was as basic as the fungi being red and livid looking.

He once got so angry with us (proving to us that red heads really are angrier people) that he shouted loudly over our heads: DON’T BE SO FACETIOUS! And the way he spat out the word facetious has never, ever left me. So when I am having little moments in church tripping over the word Christ and having a chuckle, my thoughts bring me back to that vinegary classroom and Alan yelling (dangly thing in his throat waggling manically) full throttle in his northern accent (proving to us that Northerners really are angrier people); he really lost his shit.

To give him his due, he got us – well, me, at least – back in spades, by showing us the terrifying film Poltergeist a few weeks later one weekend (I believe it was an 18-cert. We were 10.).

I didn’t sleep in my grim metal framed bed for many months after that, in the certain knowledge I'd be taken from my bed by a posessed tree.

(Did you guess? It’s Alison Steadman as Pam in Gavin and Stacey “OH MY CHRIST MICHAEL”, clutching her cheeks with both hands. If you’re called Christ, or Michael for that matter, I’m afraid I can’t take you seriously anymore. Word associations, it appears, stick for a very very long time.) 

 

Ah, it's the change.

Oh no! It's The Change!

And there go the flowers... The gladioli are listing to one side like a tall yacht mast in a storm; roses which got caught unopened in the downpours last week are now melting into brown balls of sad unfolded petals; and the leaves on the trees have started very quietly to turn, the bold beech greens losing out to a murkier pond-like hew. As though if they do it without making too much noise we won't notice and kick up a stink. Shhh. Don't tell them it's time.

Another sign of The Change is the bantams are moulting. There are feathers all over the garden. The cockerel, Buttercup, in particular looks pathetically scrawny, he struts around the garden a bit embarrassed by his feathery discord but trying to remain handsome for his lady-friends who are looking quite healthy and shiny. It's like when you turn up to a party having misread the invite - everyone is in their spangly disco kit and you've come in your old gardening jeans covered in mud, held up with a piece of string. I feel for Buttercup. I know he knows he's in the wrong clothes. It is hard to hold your head up high and crow with confidence when you're in your underwear.

Meanwhile, and I don't tell the bantams this, yesterday I saw four dead pigeons, as though they had just given up on it all. They foresaw 6-months of rain, darkness, muddy footpaths, thunderous gun-fire ricochetting around the valley and just felt it was easier to drop dead out of the sky than stick out another endlessly wet winter.

The Weather is also Changing. It is representative at times of the natural world enacting the experience of a menopausal human woman. The inconsistency of the garden thermometer is a valid starting point. Hitting 18 degrees in the day, dropping to 4 overnight - the sweats to the shivers with the nonchalant rise and fall of the sun. The unpredictable moodiness of the winds - one moment blowing a gale, dropping with no warning to as still as a glassy lake. Trees falling down in rageful surrender as their drought ridden roots can no longer cope with the squalls, while in the boarders of a garden the vibrant dahlias are in full bloom laughing in their joyful mad colourful bursts of energy, firmly denying the pending loss of light and heat. The fields all ploughed and brown and lumpy and barren, yet here are the lawns as green as they have ever been this year, needing to be mown weekly by surprised gardeners. The restless sleeplessness at night - waking to the owls screeching and the mad moon shining in through the crack in a curtained window, the world can't sleep when it's going through The Change...

The mood swings, the highs the lows, the chaos - it's autumnal vibes alright, lunacy almost, contradictions, inconsistencies, fog, the cheeky laughing-at-you-all with the mystery we cannot control.

And talking of parties where you misread the invite, who the heck invited all the spiders to the web-making-party across the doorway, so on the way out to your confusing walk (jumper on, jumper off, jumper back on, no, off again, sweating, frozen, sighing, swearing WTF) you have to get through 8 invisible webs and just pray that the spider hasn't fallen into your hair enroute. I'll tell you who invited them: the f'ing Weathopause (my new name for autumn), that's who.

Next issue: ranting country woman gets sucked into a muddy quagmire and finally there is peace in the valley.

Am I dreaming...

Do you have recurring dreams? I have regular recurring dreams and for some reason they are generally mainly of the anxiety genre. I know I have the daily challenges like getting out of bed in the morning and the work challenges like I ought to work more and harder and the what's actually in my bank at the moment challenges and the oh crapsticks my hair is definitely greyer this morning challenges. But I lead a relatively peaceful existence, thanks to the calming influence of the half Egyptian Pharoah Hound who lives with us, so when I have these dreams I rub my chin and lean on my elbow and question where it's come from. 

There are two main dreams I have. 

The first is about trying to go up a hill and my legs are so tired and malcoordinated that I can't really move, and the hill (it's always an interpretation of the hill I can see out of my bedroom window) seems to bend up steeper and steeper to the point where there is a risk I might actually fall off it. Meanwhile there is an urgency to go up it despite the danger of the climb. But I can't. So I have this wading and heavy feeling over my whole body. In this moment of dreamworld paralysis I also am trying to use my phone to make an emergency call but for some reason I can't work out how to even switch it on. And then the dream ends. My body tense. Probably a little clammy too. Nice.

The second dream is a tooth dream. I'm chewing gum (which in real life is a hateful thing to do, I strongly disagree with its existence) and it fills my mouth. Fuller and fuller to the point where I need to spit it out else I may gag, but I can't get rid of it and as I am chewing I realise there are actual teeth in the hateful gum, my teeth, which are merging into the gum and now such a big ball of crunching chokingness that I can't talk. And I know there are gaping holes in my gums because I am chewing my own teeth. The frustration at not being able to get the gum and teeth out of my mouth is visceral. 

I used to have a whole heap of orthodontic work as a teenager and I think some of the visuals for this particular dream emanate from that period. Rubber bands. Head gear. Double layers of train tracks. Visits to the orthodontist to get them tightened. Headaches. Humiliation. My boyfriend naming me Metal Micky. Bits of food hanging off the tracks. It was a fun time. It's a relief to wake from this dream. No missing teeth. No bits stuck in my mouth.

But now I have a new recurring dream. It's an extremely happy dream that then becomes an extremely sad wake up moment. I dream in a variety of scenarios that Dad is hanging out with me. In a recent dream which is particularly memorable we are walking through some meadows in the village and we are both laughing like drains. We are bent double laughing (so much so that in my sleep I think I can feel myself actually laughing) because we are trying to make a plan to work out how to tell people that he's not dead any more and it's utterly hilarious. We are talking about going on social media to let people know and then cracking up. At one point in the dream I think he's holding my hand and I can feel his slightly rough and dry outdoor-work-man-skin. It's so damned real. It's actually insane what the brain tells you is real in a moment. Waking up from that is a toughy. 

So I looked up 'dreams' on the internet and there was a strange page about 'vivid dreams' which went into the causes of 'vivid dreams' - one being early stages of pregnancy (oh no! what? how did that happen!) or possibly being schizophrenic... Neither of which seem that feasible for me right now. 

I guess Freud may have a point - that dreams might reflect unresolved emotions, hidden desires and fears generally, but I also liked a bit I saw, in a probably unsubstantiated article, around how back in the day the Egyptians saw dreams as divine messages. Without sounding like a total wanker I'd prefer to think I'm receiving Divine Messages. And in that vein my half Egyptian Pharoah Hound is sending me a divine message right now, the message is this: get off that bloody computer and take me for a walk. 

 

Partying at weird times

As we climb the ladder of adulthood there have been 50ths all over the shop - like pop-up cafes in trendy leafy streets of obscure towns. A real buzz. We made it half way! All the jokes come out about getting the fireman on standby for when the candles are lit. All the jokes about forgetting what you were saying. It's a bit daunting getting to the midway point (and it's not really the midway point because we all know that we're unlikely to hit 100). Anyway, what was I saying? I can't remember.

Most recently two particularly excellent parties have - without intention - flanked a period of intense sadness and loss. And the timing of these two parties has been both marvellous and totally incongruous all in the same breath. These parties have been the ones where you find yourself (or it might just be me...  mothersruin and all that) knocking back any sort of liquid that is put in your hand and then sweating it out almost instantly on the sticky (or uneven grassy) dancefloor (depending on the location). 

Everyone around you is a face you know and love and if you don't know and love it, you do in that precise moment simply because they happen to be standing next to you doing exactly the same thing. The music might be a performance of Don't Look Back in Anger by a band from a Portsmouth backwater, or it might be West End Girls by an insanely gyrating DJ from West London. 

Glasses have beer or gin or flat prosecco sloshing over the rim. Choruses are yelled out - teeth-fillings flashing under the glitter ball, eyes shut, arms over the neck of whoever is dancing next to you, swaying, sweaty armpit-on-sweaty-shoulder. What a banger. What's next? Another drink? Yes yes yes. Please night don't end and fling us back to reality.

When these moments of brilliant collective insanity take place I am always thrown back to an infamous 16th birthday party hosted by a school friend. Bear in mind some of the horrors of being 16 have to be taken into account. The teen angst possibly at it's dizziest height. Her Lovely Trusting Parents had almost the entire year group to their house one Saturday night mid-term, and then her Lovely Trusting Parents retreated at some point leaving us to it, and then pretty much all hell broke loose - and we really let go on the dance floor. Or more accurately all over the entire house.  

I woke up in a bed I don't remember falling asleep in, and I had lost my contact lenses and as I dressed (I don't remember getting undressed) and walked through the house (total carnage) there were sleeping bodies strewn carelessly on floors and various bits of furniture, limbs resting at funny angles. I felt incredibly sick and I had very little memory of anything other than I knew I couldn't ever drink Malibu ever again in my entire life ever. Someone had put a foot through an actual staircase. I had to take a week off school and 3 days after I'd woken in that bed, my contact lenses rolled a full 360 around my eyeballs and reappeared back in my eyes. (A small miracle! I can see again!) It was a brilliant party. Brilliant. The stuff of legends and I can't even remember it.

When I did my sociology degree we didn't have a module on why people need parties but I bet there have been some fun studies all about this particular human behaviour. 

All I know is that there are certain times when it happens you know it's a moment and the stars align and the joyometer hits the red bulb BANG and we let it all go. It. All. Goes. Off.

And the amazing thing is that this can happen at any unpredictable moment - and just when you think you couldn't feel anything other than incredibly sad, the DJ puts on Like A Virgin and the joy trumps all. 

Humans are such weird creatures.

It's unconditional powerlessness

Mol and Liz are now technically very much adults - in the eyes of The Gov or The Law they can do things like vote for the next leaders of our country, change their name by depol, get married, pay for their own dental treatments (first find a dentist), they can shake cocktails for a job, rent a car, go abroad without a parent, they can now basically do anything they want without the assistance of us, the parent.

This is a massive headfuck. How did this happen? I lie in the bath trying not to drop my book in the bubbles and wonder where my power has gone. HR just wrote to me to let me know that my job doesn't exist any more (I had this happen to me 3 times... it might explain why I'm now self-employed), I regret to inform you that your Important Parent Role is no longer valid.

What do you mean you're popping to the supermarket? You can't possibly drive a car and have a bank account and independent financial standing and look unwaveringly at the shop assistant as the bottle of £6-prossecco which is for some party of people who's names I don't recognise gets beeped into your bag. 

Parental Supremacy got cancelled.

But actually, I realise -now that the children are these funky autonomous individuals- that this supremacy in fact never really existed. It was a myth! Us parents needed to think that we had all the power... Because goodness knows life was spiralling in many ways in those mad days of early parenting. Thinking we had control was entirely necessary.

And the clever kids, well, it was all reverse psychology my friend, reverse psychology. They nailed it. Make those old people think they're in charge. Hear that wicked toddler chuckle as they prepare their next line of attack (maybe I'll take a shit in my clean pants 15 minutes after we get on the motorway, actually on second thought I'll throw my entire china plate of food on the floor of this restaurant) to bring their unwitting exhausted parent back in line. All eyes on me please.

I may have been the one who cooked the fishfingers (badly) and I may have been the one who transported Kid-A to place-B and Kid-B to place-C, and it's possible that I might have influenced their wardrobes for a few years and between me and the Husband we decided where to go on holiday for at least a decade... 

But all along those crafty children were stringing us along. They weilded the power. They knew from the very outset our weak spots, the chinks in our defences... With their huge blue eyes, a fat tear ballooning over the long lashes... "mummy, please can I have the..." (insert chocolate icecream, fairy writing paper, another episode of Pepper Pig to delay bed...). Or, the collapse on the floor flailing in utter fury at being asked to finish the cheese on toast / move the 18 teddies blocking the doorway / it's definitely bed time now / no you can't go and find a butterfly in the garden / yes you do have to go to the loo before we get in the car. Either way we would have to respond, and it turns out we were putty in their sticky little fingers.

Those crafty little buggers - they were conducting the parents for years!

Those moments where you expressed (any) emotion rendered us powerless. Crying? We love you. Furious? We love you. Awake at 3.30am? We absolutely love you. Snot all over your face? We love you. Shat yourself in the car and it's gone up your back? ....... Yup. Still love you.

You made us feel (so kind of you) at times that we really did know everything and that we really were the oracles. And occasionally we may have had practical advantages (like making sure you didn't get hit by a bus crossing the road or giving you antibiotics when you had tonsilitis) that kept you safe. And in those moments we felt important. Possibly a bit self-inflated "Yes I took Mol to A&E today as she had a massive asthma attack, I think I probably saved her life"... 

And now as they have their own bank accounts so it turns out we defer to those once-were-toddlers for help and advice ("I can't download this app? How does Vinted actually work? But what actually IS an influencer? What skills do they have to warrent 8.5m followers? What is sriracha?"). And so it continues. Putty.

In conclusion to todays mental meanderings: the problem with unconditional love is that it renders you utterly powerless.

 

 

Do people still read?

 It's been a really, really long time since I last added an entry to this blog. 

And so much has happened in those many years.

The children became old teenagers and started dipping their toes into their 20s. GCSEs A'levels Degrees. First jobs. Driving tests. Renting in London.

Grey hair. Wrinkles. Health 'issues'. A dog. The back yard awash with human turds after multiple floods. Some kind of semblance of a career.

The world muddling along with climate crises after violent regional wars after bit coin after social media horrors after unsettling elections. It goes on.

Quite a lot of death.  

Death to pets. Death to plants. Death to the environment. Death to it raining normally. Death to people we love.  Death to collagen filled skin. Death to the brick phone (although this may well resurrect to halt the onset of a world filled with fake news and tiktok addicts). 

I don't have the same material as I did 10 years ago when two young daughters provided much to mull over and laugh about. And with the death of a parent another step up the Adult Ladder is made with a devastating chasm opening up between those halycon days of fishfingers, discussing how puppies are made, and being allowed to sit in the bathroom while a child splashes carefree in the bath. It's a weird homesickness for something that passes so quietly and steadily. I wake up one morning and my daughters are 19 and 22. 

I'm not going to dabble too much in cliches. 

But shit a brick WHERE have those years gone? 

How many bottles of rose-wine and packets of Kettle chips have been dispensed with? 

I overhear friends asking our young What do you want to do when you leave school or uni? What do you want to be when you grow up? And I wince... Because I know that I still don't know myself. My time spent trudging along muddy paths with the dog don't reveal the answer and neither does the bottle of wine and neither does my horoscope (horrorscope). When will that lightening bolt strike and the future reveal itself? It'd be a shame if it literally struck me and I was found on the South Downs Way like a piece of badly cooked gammon, never knowing... always assuming the grass was greener on the hill across the way. Those sheep over there, they're way happier.

In restarting Mothers Ruin I'm going to have a think about this voyage into real life adulthood. It might veer on the existential occasionally. Will definitely involved the dog Kiki (my unjudgemental therapist for the last 10 years). I can't avoid the topic of death. And there may also need to be some fantastical thinking to counter the potential slide into gloominess. 

See you soon.

 

 

 

inside her mind...

I was driving down to Portsmouth to pick up Mol from her 2nd go at netball-after-school-club (she seems to have embraced Team Sport with gusto) (god I hate netball, but mustn't prohibit her total fulfillment of potential by imposing my dislikes upon her... Which reminds me of a loud argument I once had with Husband about how I'd inadvertently told Mol that maths was my weakest subject at school and OH how I'd hated it and sweated and fumbled my way through GCSE ("Is that what you do at university Mum...?" - endless conversations at the moment about what order education comes in, with which exams) and then bloody well failed after all that shit and how I was leaping for joy when I finally got the frickin C grade and could shove my calculater up the teachers self satisfied number-filled-arsehole... And Husband stopped me in my tracks "You WHAT? Oh you should NEVER let them know how much you dislike a subject at school. No no NO! My god woman. It'll ONLY lead to her not liking maths too. You IDIOT! WHAT FUCKING MORON tells their child that they failed at maths? DURRRRRH. (Tongue inserted in bottom-lip to pull stupid-monkey-face.) So now I'm very cautious about what I tell my children. Obviously they both still love numbers because so far it only involves adding up to 100 or telling the teacher that yes, it is a triangle. I enjoy that sort of maths too.)...

Anyway. I got distracted.

So in the car with me was Liz. She sits behind me in her little booster seat and I can just see the top of her eyes, her forhead and her hair... It ruffles in the wind as she sticks her hand out the window.

We chat about who kissed who in the playground and whether Roxy is really (she's one of the dinner ladies) a natural blond or not (Liz suspects not). And once all the big chat from the day is over we fall into companionable silence.

Liz trails her fingers out the window and watches the passing countryside, which looks particularly good today as it's sunny and autumnal. The colours are clear and the air smells just right.

In our silence my thoughts lead back to work, and income and my lack of funding and what happens if Husband should leave me for someone who's actually nice and seems to outwardly show signs of affection, how could I ever find a job that actually pays me money that could feed and house myself and two children, let alone pay for an N-reg car that costs £50 a week to run... I was feeling kind of gloomy as the enormity of my situation came crashing in through the flimsy Peugots' 25 year old windows. Could I survive on my own? Would social services be obliged to take my children away from me and would I have to go and live in a tent on Dartmoor dodging the credit bayliffs?

As the terror of my dependency clouded my head I suddenly came back to reality as I heard Liz say my name (well, she said Mum, because she doesn't call me by my real name, I mean, sometimes I ask her to call me Mrs, or Madam, or to at least curtsey before making eye-contact, but on the whole it's just Mum). She had to say it a few times for me to register that I was in the car, driving, and not in a tent on Dartmoor handwashing my 2nd pair of socks in a stream...

"Mum" says Liz. "MUM".
"Oh, yes! Hello you!"
"MUM! guess what? I think I've got it!"
"What's that Liz?"
"I've finally worked out how to train a dog to skip with a real skipping rope."

Well. Nothing more than dogs skipping to bring me crashing back to real life, eh?

Deep Discussions with a 7 year old

"Mum?"
"Yes"
"Mum, you know One Direction?"
"Yes"
"Did you know they are probably going to split up?"
"Really? How do you know?"
"Well. You know Alice?"
'Yes"
"Well. You know her bigger sister Loopy?"
"Yes"
"Well. She told us."
"Must be true then."
"Oh, yes it is. She's nearly 14 you know."

"Mum?"
"Yes"
"Mum. My jodpurs are too small."
"Oh, really?"
"Yes. They keep falling down."

"Mum?"
"Yes"
"Do you prefer One Direction, Two Direction, or Three Direction?"
"?"

"Mum?"
"Yes"
"Who said Cyclists can't fly?"
"?"

"Mum?"
"Yes"
"Your skin is really white on your legs."
"Really? I was thinking they were quite brown... They're browner than your tummy skin..."
"Really? Oh, yes. But not nearly as white as my BUM"

"Mum?"
"Yes"
"Do you know, I think it'd be really difficult to eat myself?"
"Really?"
"Yes, I tried. But I think it'd be most hard to eat your head. You'd have to cut it off and then leave your mouth so that it could eat the head bit."
"But if you cut off your head you'll be dead and your mouth won't work."
"Ah, I hadn't thought of that."

"Liz?"
"Yes"
"I've got a question for you. Which came first. The chicken or the egg?"
"Oh, that's EASY. The chicken. Oh. Wait. No. The EGG! So easy."
"But who laid the egg?"
"The chicken. Oh wait. No! The egg! HA! Got ya!"

I went round to my parents house the other day to be met by not one but two sausage dogs. One was my mums dog, a girl, or tee-hee, a bitch; the other, a man dog, called Dud the Stud (or Dudley in polite company).
Why Mum, are there two dogs here?
Well, darling! Dudley is here to make babies with Kali! Can you imagine how sweet? Little baby sausage dogs!
Yes indeed, I can well imagine the sweetness, their little wet noses and baggy skin, wobbly tails,  and smelling of puppiness.
Mol and Liz were very excited at the thought and Liz automatically started to egg the two dogs on to get on and make the babies. Bear in mind Liz is 6 and doesn't know much about biology.
Mol, as a cool 10 year old hung back and assessed the situation.
"COME ON DUDLEY! MAKE THE PUPPIES!" yells Liz.
Dudley responds by humping the towel that is on the floor (it's raining outside so there is wet-dog-gear all over the kitchen). Dudley wags his tail and smiles as he looks at his new lady friend with lust, humping away on something that definitely will not produce puppies.
 Dudley's man-parts are very excited too and my daughters eyes are transfixed by the goings on in his nether-regions. Pink and glistening nether-regions. Mol again is quiet, while her sister graphically describes what she is seeing and then decides that she has to draw a picture immediately.
Almost like a court-room artist, she sits down at the table, grabs a notepad and biro, and starts to draw what very much looks like a human penis, with a large circumsized tip.
My mum and I giggle immaturely and wonder where Beth has got this image from, as it's not matching Dudley, who's penis is very dog like and certainly not circumsized. Beth then draws the rest of Dudley around the huge penis that she has drawn and we all laugh outright at the ridiculous image she has conjured up. She won't be exhibiting at the RA in any near or far future.
Meanwhile POOR Dudley.
It emerges that he is in fact a virgin.
"What's a virgin Granny?"
"Well, its when the person / dog hasn't, um, well, had sex before. So Dudley I guess he doesn't really actually know what he's supposed to be doing with his willy".
"Come on Dudley, get your man-willy near Kali!" shouts Liz, very close to the poor confused dog, who is now humping thin air.
"It's actually a dog-willy" snaps Mol who feels the need to chip in at this point - obviously to correct her IDIOTIC moronic sister.
"OH, he's pee'd Granny" observes Mol.
"Uh, actually, that's not pee Darling" informs Granny.
"Its, um, man-juice, um, sperm, its what has to get INSIDE Kali to actually make the babies..." I say, feeling awkward like an adolescent who's just caught her parents having sex.
"?" say my children.
"!" I say.
Kali has pushed her nether regions into a corner and Dudley has got himself into a new position... He's attempting to mount Kali's nose, at which point Mum pulls him away lest his precious and expensively hired out dog-parts see the end of their days during an act of loving (in his eyes) oral sex.

"Granny I don't think it's going to work is it?" says Liz.
Dudley has jumped up on to Mums lap and is about to hump her thigh.
"NO!" says Mum as the dog is returned promptly to the floor.
Mum opens the door and shoves the dogs out into the garden, where Dudley walks like he has a slinky stuck down his back bone, up and down up and down goes his back, such is his desire to hump everything in sight except for the dog he's meant to be servicing.

We left as Dudley was approaching a chicken with his parts all out and ready to go... Probably best to leave them to it. What's a cross between a dog and a chicken? Dicken? Chog?
Anyway - there won't be any sausage-dog puppies in the Meon for a while yet.
But what a splendid biology lesson we all had.

Rewind a few weeks, back to the dizzy heat of Easter Day...
Remember? Waking up to that warm feeling of sunshine and daffodils squeezing their heads up through the hard spring ground... Buds on the trees, bees in the breeze, the countryside on the de-freeze...

The excitement of tasting chocolate again for the first time since Shrove Tuesday was high up my list of Sunday's chores, as well as an epic bike ride over to The Bat And Ball (home of cricket! where all good cricket-widows, sorry I mean wives, should find themselves on Easter Sunday) and a top Easter Egg hunt as the sun set over the woods in the late afternoon.

But before all that could kick off we needed a little visit to the church, to think about the story behind Easter, to think about the real reason we have Easter eggs and the real reason for the Easter Rabbit. Surely this all comes from the christian faith?
(queue coughy-clearing-of-the-throat noise from Mr Cadburys...)

Over Easter we had some friends staying with us. North London friends with black hair, ipads and 2 pairs of wellies between the 4. Not being your usual church-goers, they being of the Jewish(ish) community, Mr C and his eldest daughter M thought it'd be educational to come sit at the back of the church with us for the Easter service.

With the church heaving with over-sugared children and mothers worrying about how long to cook their lamb, the vicar and organist set off at a good pace to get through the service before there was a collective melting in the congregation.

Meanwhile, at the back of the church on the last pew, sat me, Husband, Liz, Mol, Mol's friend and Mols friends' Dad Mr C. Mr C, who'd never been in a church before now.
Husband sits in the pew and rests his head in his hand for a moment of contemplation.
"What's he doing?" a fierce whisper in my left ear and I'm face to face with Mr C, who's looking anxiously at Husband.
"Why's he doing that?" Eyeball to eyeball.
"Um, praying? Maybe? Often people come to church and pray?"
"Hm" and a curious sideways nod of the curly head.
Out comes the iphone.
"?" I look at Mr C.
I see the vicar through the iphone view finder. I see the backs of the congregation through the iphone view finder.
We sing some hymns.
"Not the same sort of tunes at the synagogue."
We read from the service sheet. A lady with a reedy voice reads from the bible.
The vicar makes his Address and waffles about something for 5 minutes.
Then he (the vicar) walks to the rear of the church, metres from where we are sitting. He is standing by the font where I was christened, and where Liz & Mol were christened. Its nearly 900 years old.
"What's he doing?" another fierce whisper this time in my right ear (we've turned around facing the back of the church).
"Not sure."
"Do you think he can tell I'm Jewish?"
"I think you'll be OK."
"I feel really exposed. We're right at the front now."
"I know. Stop talking. You're drawing attention to your Jewfro and your very unHampshire North Face puffer jacket."
"Maybe I should stop taking photos?"
"Shut up."
The vicar starts talking from the service sheet again and it seems that we are re-newing our baptism vows (something to do with rebirth maybe?).
Suddenly out of nowhere, the vicar gets his hand in the Holy Water,
"Why is there water in that thing?" (pointing to the font)
"It's the Holy Water to baptise babies in."
"What's he doing?"
"Not sure."
And before another questions spurts from Mr C's mouth, the vicar is splashing water out to the congregation - renouncing the devil loudly he flings water out towards us.
The water splashes the North Face jacket.
It takes every ounce of bodily control to not let out a loud blast of laughter as Mr C hops back - service sheet flying, water dabbing his puffer...
"Ahhhhh! What's it going to do? What does Holy Water do? Is it going to burn my coat?" (It's like that moment in the opening titles of Sex in the City, when SJP gets splashed crossing the road...)
The vicar returns to the front and we sing hymn number 428.
Mr C looks wild eyed.
"Oh dear, you are really in a religious compromise now" I say... "What will the gods think of you now - a little bit of this, a little bit of that... This is the kind of stuff WARS are made of Mr C."
Mr C soon left the church, iphone in the damp pocket.
He hasn't been back to the church since. Hopefully he'll come again - maybe at Christmas and we can all have a play with the animals in the crib!

And the chocolate tasted DIVINE.