God what a weekend. I don't know who invented them but after a week of working and heaving kids around London like a regular skivvy I like the idea of sitting on the sofa drinking Lapsang Souchong (some people say its actually cat-pee, but I like to beg to differ) reading the magazine of the Guardian (its the only part that makes sense to my brain-cell-deprived head). Instead what happens at weekends is that it's suddenly really really really really majorly important to fill every waking moment with activities cooking friends car journeys shopping trips swimming golf theatre meeting new babysitters stressing out the toddler getting to D after making stops at A-B-C arguments about taking public or private transport... and the thing is everything is really good fun and really wholesome and refreshing from the norm of the week previous or following but it doesn't permit for sitting on the sofa drinking cats pee and looking at bonny photos arranged elegantly by the Guardian staff. So its Monday night and I just want to run through a few of the highlights and low-lights of the weekend.
Saturday started with a hangover (low) - (4 people 5 bottles of wine strange carb-free supper = painful head in the morning) but hangover was soaked a bit by (high) croissants and toast supplied by MotherInLaw.
Then there was cooking (soup / cake) and friends for lunch (high). That's nice friends for lunch. Sit around chatting and controlling kids and not allowing them cakes (high) until they're near breaking with frustration (they all know which cupcake they HAVE to have... and little dirty fingers keep prodding them and putting stick and ugsome marks on them... OK! please! take! stuff in face! don't choke! and if you do, please choke the crumbs onto your parent not my table or floor...).
Then there was walk in park (avoid dog poo don't fall over on skin-grating pavement, if you do please put snotty crying face on appropriate parents leg). Parking ticket (low).
Rain (low). Cold (low). Tidying house (low). Appreciating clean house (high).
Argument with neighbour about lift to Sadlers Wells (low). Trip to Sadlers Wells (extremely high). Admiring Akram Kahn (very extremely hot and therefore major high).
Sleeping badly because of rain (low). Needing loo in the night (low). Being car-less on Sunday whilst Husband plays golf in the rain in near-hurricane conditions (low). Taking kids swimming (low for me, high for them).
Tea with friends who have a fresh baby which has a very sweet head of black soft fuzzy hair and smells very fresh (high).
I watched a bit of X-factor last night (about 30 seconds before Husband rants "not this shit...") and during the first 20 seconds I realised that a friend of ours has a Simon Cowell Hair Cut (SCHC). I find this alarming. Was it intentional to have an SC? Fair enough that many older men have SC waistbands, but that's generally not intentional and just the hand of fate... but to go to a hair dresser and actually come out with a SC... I wonder how sane said friend is and whether he (at least it wasn't a woman coming out the hair dresser with an SCHC) needs to stop watching the programme. Or maybe he just needs to buy a wig. Anyway. The good thing about blokes hair is that it seems to grow quickly so maybe next time I see him he'll have a Louis Walsh or a Dermot O-Leary or a Gordon Brown. Strange though. Could be a new wave (ha ha) of do's. Thank goodness Sianiad O'Connor (click on this one all fans of 90's music...) isn't a major celebrity any more.
And so now I'm wondering if I can take my weekend early? Like, tomorrow and Wednesday? Anyone want to join me? It could be the new Simon Cowell Weekend In the Week trend.
hm.
Must go eat some food my brain cells clearly need some food.

things that are flat

Being a small person, relatively, in this day and age that is (maybe 600 years ago I'd've been considered freakily gigantic and people would've put me in the ducking chair and I'd've survived (I'm good at holding my breath) and then I'd've been hung drawn and quartered and burned at the steak for being a witch...(I can't say I'm burn proof - not if the burns on my hand from the oven are anything to go by) I like to wear shoes which give me a bit of extra elevation... And when I'm out on the razz, which I less and less frequently am, I slip my feet into a pair of high heels and I strut around for a few hours ignoring the strange dead-toe sensations that get more and more dead-toe-like as the night progresses (which is also why I like to quaff a few bottles of wine or beer or absinthe...).

But I'm not here to write about those sort of flat(or not) things. Or the flatness of my wash-board stomach. Or the flatness of Suffolk. Or the flatness of a lake with no wind. Or the flatness of those televisions called flat-screens. They're really flat, I've been led to believe.
None of that.
Today I write of the flatness of my tyre on Wednesday afternoon when I went to climb on board my trusty tank of a bike (my brother kindly told me that "its the worst bike I've EVER ridden on in my life you should leave it in the street and see if a bus can run it over") which I love and its served me well for the 4 years I've owned. Anyway. On Wednesday I had one of those mad dash horrors of an afternoon where I had to leave work a little bit early to get to Liz's nursery which was shutting early (so the staff could go bitch about our bratty kids for an hour or so) and then rush like a mad haggered over-wrinkled-35-year-old up to school to get Mol before she starts to believe she's been abandoned by her family and is off to the Annie-style-home... So step one was to get home from work. Which was smashed to small biscuit-crumbs used on cheesecake bases when I saw the extent to which my back wheel was punctured. Holy shit. And a lot of other obscenities came out of my mouth as I threw my now not trusty tank of a bike (hate you you bastard crap thing of all the days to get a puncture you're out for the rust... etc.; bike gives me sad look of rejection). So then I run for the bus like aforementioned mad haggered over wrinkled 35 year old and get the bus and get to nursery just in time, panting, and then sling Liz over my shoulders like a bag of spuds, and limp my way, panting like a half dead haggered over wrinkled unfit 35 year old and get to school just as the Orphan Minders are about to load Mol up into their van and take her off to some Victorian Institution. Or do I mean after school club? Anyway. I made it. Just.
And that night it rained and rained and all I could think of was, oh, poor bike, out in the exposed open air, rusting and crying with pain. And I did feel a bit bad.
So the next morning as I walked to school (that means pushing Liz on her scooter that has no brake whilst carrying her bag and Mol's bags) trying to maintain a bit of cool, when I mention in passing to the local bike guru (LBG) that my bike is trashed at work and I'm wondering because I'm a pathetic girl how I'm going to get it home with its puncture. And then we talked about a friends daughters' "bring a pony party" and the subject was dropped.
At work, 1hour later: said LBG rocked up at the garden centre in his fluorescent bike gear, clasping an inner tube, a spanner and a very pumping pump.
And now I have a new hero.
Thank you LBG. My bike is snug under its rug like a bug and I feel no more guilt and don't have to spend any more money on overpriced London buses.
Beer courtesy of me next time we're in a public house at the same time... (Xmas drinks...?).

hanging on...

I was walking back to my car after work today (Sorry. I drove. I know I shouldn't. But. Too dark. Too wet. Too wintery. Too tiring. Carbon Footprint goes up one more size...) and I heard the sound of birds chirping cheerily in the trees, probably just tucking themselves up for the night as the sun (somewhere behind the greyness) was setting and the sky getting dark. But as I looked at the trees I noticed that they were not swaying in a nice calming to-and-fro sort of way. They were way-jerking around, flapping almost, with wind whistling through them cruelly tearing the last crackly leaves off the branches and all I could think was: shit I'm glad I'm not a bird right now. And then when I was lying in my bath tonight with my book (hey. Because no one ever asks me to join their book club - I'm too stupid / get drunk / inarticulate / wouldn't complete the homework / would just want to talk about Politics and Tax rather than the sex lives of the fictional characters in the book being studied - its ok, I've accepted my isolation: I've decided to start my very own Mothers Ruin Book Club. I can only read and assess my books in the bath, after a round of East Enders and 1/3 a bar of Sainsburys Own Brand Belgian Milk Chocolate; and if I get distracted its OK! No one there to tell me to get back to the point! I can just bark on at the steamy walls, the towels and the kids' rubber ducks: they won't mind!) which is still really good and really readable (Zadie Smith On Beauty), the sash windows in the bathroom were totally clattering (and still are as I type) and I wondered to myself: I know that the whole of Cumbria is underwater, but how many birds actually get blown off their perch in this wind?
Their little gnarled claws clinging onto twiggys for dear life. Their feathers ruffling and their eyes blinking in the hard wind. I felt a bit sorry for them, personally.
Talking of hard wind. OMG. Who got caught in the bad weather yesterday? Oh fuck the birds falling off their perches in this instance. What about ME? and Liz? And my mum who made her annual pilgrimmage to N8 to "see you darling" and stupidly I decided to go-green and walk to Liz's Fun Fit Gym Class with Granny Darling and Liz. And within 10 minutes, in the most exposed part of Hornsey, a major howling roaring like a Caterpilla-Digger sheet of hail & rain & wind whipping in circles came at us like an animal from HELL.
And this bastard in his people carrier laughed at us as we cowered (I know! Call myself a sturdy country gal? We were so completely cowering) behind a skimpy hedge that did nothing more than, well, nothing frankly. Liz had total-humour-failure; Granny Darling gritted her teeth and muttered something about 'never seen anything like it in all my life' and I think I just swore a lot at the fucker in his silver car flashing his great white teeth in the luxury of dryness.
Mol just told me she's got a part in her Christmas sorry, WINTER (no religious words allowed, ever, in the multicultural North Harringay Schools...) Play. I'm going to brain wash her to go on the stage and start singing Hark the Herald Angels Sing! Glory to the new born King! just to see how many members of staff faint with shock. Such audacity.
So. I've done birds. I've done book club (sorry guys, its for me only). I've done weather. I've done smug bastards. And I've done Christmas, no, WINTER, Play.
Think that's all for now.
Oh - no - Spooks. They killed Jo. Husband very upset. No more bottom to watch. She had a good one. Although he claims to never have noticed it.