Blue and gold

London - MY London - today is grey, cold, and rather gloomy, and not a little emotional. It feels as if it might burst into tears at any moment, rather like a premenstrual teenager. As if nobody understands it. As if it stayed out too long at the weekend and it's parents have withdrawn priviledges for the rest of the month.

The many tourists are banked up on street corners, shivering as they stub their cigarettes out on the pavement, and muttering mutinously to each other "But zey told me zis was a party town! 'Ave you seen ze prix of zat pastry? And Starbucks is much too bizzy! Excuse me, madame, where is ze tube station?" "That would be the building behind you. And please don't - spit your gum out on the street. Too late, I see..." At which point they look at me uncomprehendingly and I stomp crossly off down the road.

Maybe it's not London feeling pre-menstrual. Maybe it's actually me.


But yesterday, MY London was blue and gold.

The sun shone, glinting off the windows, reflecting back from the white paintwork, and warming the light brown bricks to a pale gold colour. The sky was a washed-out wintry blue, the blue of my convent-school summer dress (the one with a rather kinky zip down the front, which always caused much amusement and hilarity amonst the grammer boys from the school up the road. We loved that, of course. We were convent school girls, after all.) There was not a cloud to be seen in the high arch of the sky.

In our garden square, following 3 days of unseasonably warm weather, the birds were welcoming an early spring, making plans for redecorating their nests, earmarking plots where they could raise their hatchlings in safety. The French Mafia were absent (their off-spring all no doubt causing mayhem on the snowy slopes of the Alps), so there were no chic wrap-around sunglass clad mummies pushing Bugaboos, sipping lattees, and ignoring their nasty older children fighting and bullying each other on the swings, and we had it blissfully all to ourselves. The Boys ran around shrieking, playing Power Rangers (or Power Aynjers, as Boy #1 insists on calling them), hide and seek and football. The football, of course, ended in tears when as usual, Boy #2 missed the point and ran away with the ball.

I bought pretend cookie after pretend hot chocolate after pretend sausage roll from the two year old shop keeper in the playhouse. Trousers were muddied, wellington boots were lost and found, and crocuses studied.

Blue and gold.

I love London.

Despatches from the Frontline

We experienced the brother of all tantrums at dinner this evening.

Boy #2 is not often mentioned on my posts. Not because he's not cute; he is, oh he certainly is. I've lost count of the number of times complete strangers have been bowled over by his big brown eyes, giraffe-length eyelashes, cupid's bow mouth, perfect profile and cheeky grin. And not because he's always pushed into the shadows by his more verbally able sibling; he's more than capable of holding his own in brotherly spats with a look, a frown, a shove, a tug of filial hair or a well placed 'nee' (Dutch for no, in case you hadn't guessed) when required.

No, it's more that he is generally a sunny tempered, even-keeled, easy riding kind of a bloke. He just goes with the flow.

Fancy a late night? Boy #2 is fine with that. Need to kick him out of his comfortable travel cot at a friend's house for a post-dinner party trip home in the car? 'Wow, what an adventure.' An injection required? 'OW - but that chocolate sure is good Mum, got any more?' Going to drop him at nursery for the first time? 'Oh - are you still here, parent-person?'

You get the picture.

But there's one thing that is guaranteed to start his lower lip trembling. Strapping him into his high chair.

It's not that he doesn't want to eat. A more robust little weeble you'ld be hard pushed to find. Compared to his brother, he is Monsieur Mange-tout. But he values his freedom. He likes to be able to get down from his Stokke high chair, trot off and fetch the car / train / comic that has caught his eye, and bring it back to the table to join in the fun. But it's not very restful for the rest of us when he takes off across the wooden floor, scattering cous-cous from a pelican bib in his wake, smearing greasy hands over the furniture and walls. (Wipe clean or not...). So when he did this for the 3rd time during dinner this evening, I decided that enough was enough, and when he came back, gave him due warning that this was not acceptable.

Hostilities commenced as follows....


Me: "The next time you get down, Boy #2, I will strap you in."

Cheeky grin in reply. Subtext; "Yeah, right."


Within 2 minutes he gets down again.


Me: "That's it, darling. I'm strapping you in."

Boy #2 laughs. At me.

Stupidly, I laugh back. I can't help it. I know this is a mistake. I should appear tough, parental, in control. But he's so damn cute! However, consistency is all - so I pick him up, sit him in his chair, and start to do up the straps.

A look of incredulous horror crosses his face. Subtext; "You've got be joking. Come on, sweetcheeks, look at this grin. Can you lock me up, really? She's locking me up, really. I can't believe it. Boy #1, look at this! I said, Look At This!"

Boy #1 concentrates on shoveling salmon and cous-cous into his mouth (inexplicably for such a normally fussy eater, this is one of his favourite meals - as long as he can fastidiously pick out the olives and avocado and surreptitiously put them on my plate, anyway), and ignores his brother, no doubt thinking; "About time the little tyrant got his come-uppance at the table. That'll teach the little show-off to eat bananas and fruit and other shxt like that."

I continue to struggle with the straps, whilst Boy #2's tantrum escalates and I start to worry whether any passing police car may hear and assume infanticide happening inside.

Me: "Come on, darling. I warned you what would happen. Now it's time to stay put."

Boy #2 struggles, screams, and flails about. You'ld think I was putting him in a hair shirt rather than just doing up some rather loose straps and fastening a tray on the front of his high chair. Tears roll down his plump rosy little cheeks. He gets louder. For some inconceivable reason I start imagining the sound of dull booms and sirens in the distance.

I watch him and can almost hear, through the rattle of gun-fire, him dictating over the telephone; "I tried everything. Stop. She wouldn't listen. Stop. No matter what I pulled out of the hat, she was immovable. Stop. Who was this dictator? Question mark. At what point did a toddler's intrinsic right to roam free during a meal get taken away by a mother's passing whim? Question mark."

Every now and then there was a momentary lull in hostilities whilst he cast sidelong glances in my direction, through spiky lashes wet with tears, to judge the impact his performance was having. I didn't budge. He ratched it up a notch. I stayed put, calmly (outwardly at least) eating my dinner. Boy #1 handled the pressure well, although was forced to put down his fork and spoon at regular intervals to put his hands over his ears when the shelling got too much.

Note : for those of a nervous and sensitive disposition, at no point was I forcing Boy #2 to eat. My concern was simply that he should understand that meal times are for sitting at the table, not wreaking havoc around it.

Eventually he started to calm. Maybe his ammo was out, I don't know. More likely, it was that he saw Boy #1 and I were finishing our meals and calculated he was wasting bullets when C-beebies and Story Makers were just around the next bend in the road. In any case, the fusillade stopped.

I looked at him. He looked at me. There was a new respect in his eyes. A look that said "Oh, so you meant it then?"

Me: "Yes, I meant it. Do you have anything to say to me?"

Boy #2 uttered one of his (still relatively) few words; "Sowweee."

My heart melted, I undid the straps, and gave him a kiss. He kissed me back, and then sauntered off to the living room, empty ammo belt swinging from his hips, Bob the builder helmet jammed firmly on his head. I glanced up from clearing away the rubble as he reached the door. He turned and gave me a look that said, as clear as day:

"And I'm certainly going to learn how to run faster before breakfast."

You're a liar, and a cheat, and an unfit mother, Sue-Ellen...

(That post title has dated me somewhat, hasn't it?)


Am still feeling rather sorry for myself, so I may have to break off soon to mountaineer to the kitchen for more supplies of Kendal Mint Cake and Lempsip (no, actually, only the latter. As I can't resist it, to have the former in the house would be tantamount to Bird suicide - if you get my drift from my previous post). But Husband is off travelling again, so I have no-one to rage at and I have to get this one off my chest...

I'm afraid I'm one of those sad cases who buys supermarket magazines. Not just any mag, I hasten to add; the Daddy. The Sainsbury's Magazine. I know, shocking when there are so many better quality reads out there that I never get round to - The Spectator (see Reluctant Memsahib for a summary of what this provides), The Economist (see Dulwich Mum), National Geographic (anyone want to put their hands up to this one?) , The Ecologist (I have my suspicions about Nunhead Mum of One), and Grazia (Frog in the Field and Mya, obviously) - but I'm just a sucker for the pretty pictures in The Sainsbury's Mag.

Of food.

I love food.

Mmmmmmmmm.


Now, it's a rare day that I actually get to cook my way through an issue, in fact, more often than not I never get round to a single recipe, but it's nice to know that I could. I'm not a bad cook, to tell the truth. Not in the realms of Pig in the Kitchen (gosh, this is turning into a name-drop-fest of a post, isn't it?), but pretty OK. An invitation for dinner or lunch at our house is usually accepted pdq.

So, I like cooking. Husband and I rarely eat a take-away or a ready meal, my Boys eat well - that is, I cook 'proper' food for them, no turkey twizzlers here - and on occasion I have been known to turn my hand to home-made shortbread and biscuits for them to nibble on. (But not that often since, as I've mentioned before, I can resist anything but temptation. A biscuit is not safe if it isn't nailed down when I'm peckish...) I've even been asked at Boy #1's birthday parties where we bought the cake (Nigella's chocolate - it never fails).

So when I bought the Sainsbury Magazine yesterday, I was interested to see on the front cover that Delia Smith - 'the guvnor', as Jamie Oliver calls her - is featured in an article about her new series and book on 'cheating' in the kitchen. No, not that kind of cheating. Just the foodie make-believe kind. And all sorts of culinary luminaries are quoted.

I read it.

And apparantly, I am a sham. A cheat, of the first order, m'lud.

I had been expecting all sorts of interesting ways of cheating with food. I don't know, like, like buying a pot of ready mashed potato at Waitrose, decanting it into a tureen and talking loudly of how the King Edward's are so easy to peel this year. Or maybe buying a pre-cooked chicken and stuffing and serving it up with lofty claims of having picked the chicken yourself at your local free-range butcher and following their cooking instructions to the letter. You know, outright lies.

We've all told them, right?

Or even useful cheats like putting a banana in the same paper bag as wood-hard pear to speed up the latter's ripening time, or cutting an onion vertically crossways not quite to the root in both directions (so it looks like a chess board from above), so that when you slice it horizontally you end up with pre-chopped pieces.

But no. Just look at the list of things that proper chefs see as 'cheats'. All this time you thought were cooking 'properly' for your family or yourself. You have been living a lie. You are great big fat cheater if you use any of the following;

• Stock cubes. I'm sorry, have you TRIED making this stuff yourself? I have, and it isn't pretty. Husband threatened to leave home on a number of instances when post-baby madness convinced me that boiling up a chicken carcass with vegetables, scraping the fat off the top, cooling, then decanting into freezer bags was a good use of my time. Life is too short
• Ketchup. KETCHUP? IS A CHEAT? Sod it, I don't care
• Hellmann's Mayo. Anyone who thinks throwing ketchup and mayo together to make a sauce for prawn cocktail is a cheat is just to itsy for words
• Colman's Mustard. Good grief. Does that mean that if you go to the trouble of making your own Shrewsbury sauce and use Colman's Mustard, then it isn't the real McCoy?
• A TIN OF TOMATOES. Yep. A TIN OF TOMATOES. That did it for me. Are you telling me that whenever I want to make a pasta sauce, shepherd's pie, lasagne, chili, etc etc, I have to source freshly grown tomatoes and peel them myself? In England? In February?
• Frozen peas. Give me strength.

And to cap it all, one chef - who I shan't name, for fear that sensible women might be tempted to roll up at his restaurant and plaster him in the stuff he comments on - even had the audicity to comment that he allows his wife to cheat occasionally at home: 'I let Tracy use gravy browning!' The exclamation mark is his (or the magazine's), not mine.

Well, isn't that big of him.

I'm off now to start grinding my own flour and milking my own cow.

Or, at the very least, to start growing my own lemons, making my own paracetomol, and distilling my own whiskey. (What? You don't have whiskey with your lemsip?)

It's got me!

The dreaded lurgy has struck, so this is going to be a short post. I won't bore you with details of how the week started with a little bird driving me crazy (damn those thrush's), how normal medicine has - yet again - failed to send the pesky critter packing, or how I got sucked in to the Organic Pharmacy in an attempt to find an 'alternative' remedy and came out £85 lighter (they definitely saw me coming).

I also won't tell you how my body has now added insult to injury by allowing me to pick up Boy #2's recent cold and transmuted that into Mummy Flu. That is, you feel really rough, have a temperature, can't speak, but can still muster up enough energy to do the laundry so everyone thinks you're OK. This is as opposed to Man Flu - which results in Husband lying prostrate in bed, sniffling loudly, saying "I might be OK if I could just watch the match this evening / the latest Jean-Claude van Damme monstrosity on 5 / etc etc.

So, I will just say tell this joke (in an Iota styley), in an attempt to cheer myself up as much as anything else. Remember The Wombles? I think this came from them around 30 years ago, but who knows through the fog in my Lempsip-soaked brain...:

Womble 1: I say I say I say. My dog has no nose.

Womble 2: Your dog has no nose? How does it smell?

Womble 1: Terrible!

I thank you.


PS - if this post is too UK / London-centric, apologies - I have put links on the things that may not translate outside South Kensington. Now let me sleep! (As if...)

Reality TV Bites

So, more rubbish tv at the gym this morning. But something took my eye on the text at the bottom of one of the screens whilst I was pounding away on the treadmill, glowing prettily.


(OK, I was sweating like, like, a very sweaty thing, but I was always taught that ladies glow, gentlemen perspire, and horses sweat. Old fashioned, I know, but then so was walking around the room with a book on my head saying 'Faaahthers caaah's a Jaaaaguaaah, and Paaaa drives raaaaahther faaaast. Caaaahstles, faaahms and draaaaaughty baaaahns, we go chaaaaahging paaaahst' during my speech and drama lessons. What can I say? It was a convent school in Gloucestershire during the 1980's...)


Anyway, one of the programmes that the BBC kindly spend the license fee on (£135 at the last reckoning, so not chicken feed) is a gem called 'A New Life Down Under', or something. If you don't know it, I'm sure you have something similar where you are: a family who have professed the wish to make a new start in Australia are given the chance to spend a week there (at the expense of the programme, which, consequently, means; you and me if you live in the UK) to see if they are prepared to put their money where their mouth is. Reality tv. Yuck. Give me rose coloured spectacles through which to view my fellow Brits any day.

So this morning a rather (sorry, raaaahther) unattractive family of 3 - mum, dad, 11 year old girl - were the subject of the programme. As is normal for most families, the parents were constantly reiterating how their prime concern was their daughter's happiness, that they wouldn't make the move if she wasn't happy with it, etc etc.

Must admit that I wasn't really watching since I was concentrating on not falling over, having reached the milestone of continual movement for - oh, 10 minutes or so - but I suddenly realised that the mum had just admitted that she and her partner weren't actually married - any more. They had been, but had split up for a few months when their daughter was very young, and got divorced. They then got back together, but had never bothered to remarry. As the mum said "We've never been happier than we are now. Why go to all the expense of a big wedding?" (Well, she didn't use those actual words. I paraphrased to cut out all the um's, aaah's and other prevarications). A good point though, however she put it. I have no personal axe to grind with people who don't think a piece of paper is that important, it's their choice, none of my business.


But.


But then the camera panned round to the daughter, and they asked her how she felt about this. And it came out that she hadn't known until very recently that her parents weren't actually married, and that for her this was a very big issue. She felt that they weren't a 'proper' family, that it was all a bit makeshift, and and as a result, since she had found out, had felt very insecure. And she wanted them to get remarried - so much so that she was prepared to hold them to ransom and not support them on the move to Australia move unless they did.

I know what I think about this.

What about you?

(And by the way - I don't know what their final decision was, as I finished my workout and NOTHING was going to keep me on that instrument of torture any longer....)

I would like to thank my mum, my dad, my sister, my nursery school teacher....

It is clearly the weekend - because the television is SO rubbish that there is no way I'm prepared to sit in front of it this evening, and have resorted to brain-dumping (such a charming expression, a hangover from my corporate days I'm afraid) on my blog again...


Here are some interesting facts:


Did you know that woolly mammoths, far from trumpeting like modern elephants, made calls that resembled nothing so much as a howling timber wolf with a blocked nose? And that they had two trunks not one, which they would use interchangeably? Or that quite frequently they travelled in pairs, with one of them riding a Thomas the Tank Engine push-along truck? And I bet you weren't aware for a moment that a mother's toes are fair game for train-riding mammoths, whilst she stands unawares in the kitchen waiting to get some milk out of the microwave in an attempt to calm down the pesky creatures before bed-time?


Neither was I. But I found it all out this evening, without even switching on the Discovery channel...



Now, I need to say a big thankyou. When I started blogging, back in the mists of July 2007, it was because I had inadvertently come across Pig in the Kitchen whilst searching for some nut free recipes to feed the Boys. I read the most current post. Then I read a few more. And whilst I was wiping tears of laughter from my eyes, I started to think; maybe I could do that. Well, not that, exactly. I can't cook like she can, write recipes like she can, or photograph the results like she can. So actually, not really like that at all. But something like it. As in putting words down on a page. And after thinking about it some more I took the plunge and set up my own blog.


For the first few weeks I posted and commented, and found there were a few blogs that I kept coming back to. Now it's more than a few, but at the time I was more restrained. Less addicted, you might say. And back then one of those blogs was Omega Mum's at 3kidsnojob. So for her to pass this award on to me - without getting too effusive about it, I am English after all - is a big deal.













I am well chuffed.


She writes that this award originated with a Canadian blogger, who stated:


'I love being a part of the blogging community and part of all the friendships that I've formed, so I wanted to give a blog award for all of you out there that have Excellent Blogs. By accepting this Excellent Blog Award, you have to award it to 10 more people whose blogs you find Excellent Award worthy. You can give it to as many people as you want but please award at least 10.'


So, in no particular order, here are the first 10 people I would like to pass this on to. Deep breath...


Dulwich Mum (black and white goes with Everything, don't you think?), Big Blue Barn, Pig in the Kitchen (assuming she doesn't have it already), Tattie Weasle (when she finishes her tax returns), Reluctant Memsahib, Nunhead Mum of One, Expat Mum (new on the block since January and great), Rebecca James (although her blog-holiday to the middle of January seems to be getting a little out of hand), Debio at The Land of Sand, GuineaPig Mum, and last but by no means least Mya at Missing you Already...


That wasn't so hard now, was it? Of course the fun starts here since I need to get in touch with them to let them know to come and take a look.... Still, like I said at the beginning of the post, there's nothing on tv anyway...

Not in front of the children...

It's Friday night - again. I'm sitting here on my lonesome - again. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't resent my beloved for taking yet another weekend out, this time with his oldest friend. They've been trying to get some 'bloke time' together for the last year, but events have conspired against them, and they were unable to do so until now. And before some smart alec out there suggests they just get together for a drink, Husband's best mate lives in Holland. So 'male bonding time' is not quite as simple to achieve as it would be if he lived down the road. Or even in the same country...

But I do resent him for something. Namely, for leaving me alone to deal with 'The Question'.

Which Boy #1 asked me today. The answer to this question is fraught with difficulty, and if I get it wrong in any way, I could scar him for life. And that question?


"Mama, where do babies come from?"


I thought I had a headache before this one popped out in the middle of the supermarket. To buy time, I set a sharp course for the ice-cream cabinet and a subsequent discussion of the merits of vanilla vs chocolate, whilst I cast my mind back to my own childhood. I remember my sister and I had a similar talk with my parents, but not until my mother was around 6 months pregnant with my younger brother and we started to get curious about her burgeoning stomach.

Just to put this in context, sis and I are 7 and 9 years older respectively than our younger brother. I know, I know. I can only think we got that far without being interested in this thorny subject because my parents were (and still are) staunch Catholics and any nonsense in that department was usually dismissed by a stern "That will do!" from my father. At the time he was so open on the subject of sex that if a semi-clad person was shown on television he would get up (this was pre-remote controls, so all the more impressive for it) and switch channels. It must have been exhausting for him as we got older and were allowed to stay up past the 9.00pm watershed...

Anyway, realising the questions regarding her stomach were not going to go away, my mother went out and bought my sister and I a book on the subject. Bearing in mind this was the mid 1970's, it was actually quite descriptive. I can remember the cartoons showing cross sections of people making babies, even now. The man had very curly black hair, a beard and glasses. (He was clearly very short sighted because he kept them on ALL the time). Funny how men with beards were never on the menu for me...

But apparantly the book didn't do the trick in terms of filling our knowledge gap, because - and I remember this very clearly - one evening mum decided, at bath time, to go through the whole thing again with my sister and I. (Perhaps she was getting fed-up of fielding questions in supermarkets, who knows?).

She told us more or less the same thing the book had, but coming from her rather than being in print, it had more impact. Or so she thought.

"Right" she said when she had finished. "Do you understand? Have you got any questions?"

"Yes" replied my 7 year old sister. "I have a question."

Can't you just imagine my mother's heart sinking? "Yes?" she said.

"I would like to know...." began my sister, spinning it out in the style of radio host announcing a competition winner.

"Yes?" said my mother, encouragingly, no doubt thinking in the same way I did this morning, I must tread carefully here, one mis-step could lead to all kinds of trouble...

"I would like to know... how do gliders stay up in the air?"

Breathing a sigh of relief, my mother said "Ask your father."