the maund is dite

Me and the fat bag of fur have been out walking.

She is dim, and slow to equate lusty jumping in the stream with the concomitant horrors of the hose when we get home. It is a brutal business requiring a bought-in dedication to the task of cleanliness, and leaving us both soaked and harrowed and nursing resentment one against the other.
Once thoroughly wet, Lolly is in a better position to absorb sawdust. Oh good.
For finally, expensively, desperately we are on the last leg of our house improvements, namely the hurling of banisters and an inner wall thing into the skip and resurrection of much the same, only hopefully nicer and involving scary cheques. The carpenter has just been quoted £1000 for root canal work, and I fear for our Extras bill.
But soon we will be civilised again.
Damn, the downside is that I'll have to start hoovering on a serious basis. And me with an A in Greek ‘O’ Level. That it’s come to this.

Only 2 of us took it, Greek, schooled by a vicious old trout who had been a vicious old trout when she'd taught my mother Latin 20 years before. And when I say only 2 of us took it, really it was only me, since the other girl was plagued by convenient migraines. Particularly on double Greek day. Even now, because of this, the name Felicity is sullied somewhat. Lightweight. Migraine, my arse.
I would stare, wretchedly, at the happy souls sauntering into mere Greek Civ, the easy one, with stories, in English. And with a heavy heart trudge solo to rendezvous with the old trout, who was slow to smile, quick to criticise and found tiresome the little things I would do to cause merry diversion. Just call me Bunty.
Never did she chortle at the chalk tin, poised precariously on the flap of the raised desk, ready to fall and reverberate when her tread went upon the step scattering dusty chalk and clanging tin, and not once did she see the wit in trapping the cat in the desk and playing Hunt The Miaow. Even now, both memories cause happy sighs. We had to find our fun where we could in those days, remember; no daytime TV, no internet. Time could drag in a quite extraordinary fashion.

Luckily my mother (clever) had taken Greek O Level a couple of years earlier. It was the same course and all. Handy. She'd got an A. She was one to watch, and copy.
I consulted her exercise books, tiptoeing into the room where they lay, avoiding creaking floor boards. Initially it was purely under the guise of 'checking my work' but pretty soon I learnt to bypass the whole “ὁ ἡ το, τον την το” do-it-myself process, and just copied the lot before sidling off to watch Banana Splits, a fine piece of programming my mother and I never quite agreed on. Her critical thinking involved the off button, mine the aggrieved squawk.

The old trout was resentfully impressed by my homework, and had to give me ticks which must have hurt. But things became trickier when the curriculum split, the trout selected different texts and thus we reached The Maund is Dite stage. This refers to Loeb, translations bound in green (or red for Latin) and useful primarily for amusement value (amusement value of a most relative kind, it must be stressed, for, really, Loeb / Banana Splits? Loeb / Grange Hill? Decisions decisions). In Loeb, not only were tricky, nasty things like homosexuality consigned to the footnotes but, to fit syntactically, the translators dipped heavily into arcanity, pursuing scansion over sense and making the English frequently more difficult than the Greek. But still one read on, fuelled by a compulsion to cheat, to grab the easy route rather than struggle girlfully, to grapple with The Text. And in one such, we were informed that the maund is dite. I think it was about then that I gave up on my brief affair with Loeb. Sometimes it really is just easier to do the work than avoid doing it.

What exactly is a maund and what does is diteness mean? I could get existential and ask what does anything mean. Instead, I’ll tell you tomorrow.

Meanwhile I want to be here again:

Want sun. Bored of cold weather by now. And dark mornings. And the sound of hammering. (And why does the formatting change on Blogger without you telling it to?)
So to this end I have been disturbing myself with looking through photos on the computer. It’s that or fret about Laura being voted out of The X Factor.

This is one of a series in which the boys decided to marry each other, in and out of an old top I'd glittered up when one of them was a fairy in the school play. Sometimes the past can snap round and bite you on the nose and it's painful. Those days have slipped through my fingers like the cat from the desk.

Otherwise, my hands are cold and I'm a bit bored: there's lots I want to blog about, but can't. Self censorship means that although my head is teeming with neighbours and friends, sisters-in-law and the man at the post office, they have to remain mere fine phrases buzzing, going nowhere, confined by sense and manners, 2 things I struggle with.
The fear of being stumbled upon is great so there's too much one cannot say, but dare not risk going further than the whispers of, "Bits. Of me teeth. Dropping off me. Like from a glacier. I'm on medication." Nor can I mention the ducks in his bath, ("The feathers! You wouldn't believe!") That's the man in the post office. The waste of him is painful. I gnash my own super dooper gnashers in frustration.

Nor can I expand on what’s behind snatches of conversation, like
"She said, 'I've bought her a shrug,'" E said, and then asked me, "What's a shrug?"
"An inefficient cardigan," I said.
"Christ," he said, "starts half way up the back? What's she thinking of, it's in December."
And that’s a shame, too. The full story's funny.

No wonder I'm dogged off, bogged off, blogged off.
If I could, I’d skew 'em all slightly and turn them into a novel. But I'm moronically faithful to a tee, my imagination is stuck in mud and I can't do it: these characters, my family and friends and shopkeepers, are so perfect as they are that to tweak them, to give my sister in the law the rotting teeth rather than a penchant for purchasing strange knitwear, just wouldn't work at all. And to contemplate post office man edging his meaty shoulders into a shrug is just de trop. My maund is dite, overflowing even (now there’s a clue) and I can't use it.

I’m left with the dog, and God knows that’s not something I would wish on anyone, even the old trout.

scared? yup. and found wanting

The devil was kind last night and left me alone. I was growing fearful of going to bed so this was good.
It happened on Friday. Hallowe’en if you believe in that kind of thing - and I never have before - when I was woken, presumably by a child, and lay there crossly knowing that that was that. It was 4 am. I consoled myself with the normal guff that it didn’t matter, I was resting, it was good Thinking Time, etc etc, but the truth was that I was cross; a dream had been lost and I like a good dream.
The room was quite hot thanks to our defunct heating system. Being brand new and efficient, it doesn’t work reliably. Before going to bed, I busily turn off the timer and down the thermostats, to about ten, just to labour the point. Come 2 in the morning the radiators are fit to fry eggs on. Another thing to fume about. So I did, creating angry letters in my head.

And then I felt it. A truly malign presence just to my right rustled out of nowhere. Just hovering there. I did not need to look to know it was the devil. And I did not look because I was frightened beyond any normal sense of fear, worse than when I was attacked in a locked underground carpark. Worse than half way through childbirth, half out, half in. Bleak, soul-destroying, defeated fear, a capitulation with any sense of self denied.
I could sense but not see dark red and black.
I lay pole-axed in terror, thinking that if I barely breathed he would go, that I would be spared from having to deal with it, that I could evade it. I like evasion. Seconds spent in denial are seconds I don’t have to act.
But he didn’t, he stayed there, very still, and I did not know what to do. So I set up a rapid account with God and crossed myself busily and endlessly, muttering like a possessed loon in a film from the ‘70s. I was feeling by now a quite enormous pressure on my torso which I visualised for no good reason as large tubes of air woven haphazardly, strewn casually by the devil and constituting a killing pile. I felt myself sinking and mashed and helpless. Unable to breathe. I continued to cross myself. And all this time I was awake.

Time passed, maybe half a minute. Don’t laugh. Think back, that’s a long time in a chemistry lesson, or being crushed by the devil. Then it passed. The devil evaporated and I could go to sleep again. He was there and then he was gone, and the fear went, too, although I continued to lie very still.

Bold stuff appears in quotes – oh, yes, I’ve been on-line – about the devil. Confident lies where the boastful claim of despatching him or shaming him, of the routing of him by fair means. Shakespeare reckons the devil is seen by the poet, the lover and the lunatic. A cheering thought when you know which prong of the triangle you’ve been left.
My inner Cowardly Lion would like to re-write events, to say that I saw him off. But we both know that that ain’t true. So instead I ticker-taped through my recent history trying to establish what I might have done to deserve this. Or was it the product of an accrual of unpleasantnesses, mean thoughts, glowers at Lolly, small irritations resulting in this visitation? Had Lolly herself had a paw in it? Anything's possible, the rules seem to have changed and it would be just like her having a hotline to hot places.
I’m more of a carrot girl, as a rule (praise is us), than one who responds to a stick but I felt cowed and chastened and don’t like it much.

The next night I placed my mobile phone by the alarm clock. E is stern about things like mobile phones and unnecessary use thereof. Texters had always had a special place in hell reserved for them. Such imagery no longer amuses.
“It’s in case the devil comes,” I said. “I might need to call someone.”
It sounds stupid, but it was about all I could think of. T12 would understand. He’s a child to derive comfort and security (and too many renditions of Scouting For Girls) from tawdry plastic.
I would offer, naturally, Lolly as some sort of sacrifice, should that be the devil’s bag. I can see her on an altar, fulfilling a greater purpose. But he didn’t ask and she meanwhile seems to suffer no such visitations. Is this fair? Indeed, just now, ha, how much self control can one person exercise? I had to walk past her. She was asleep in her basket, splayed, steeped in that familiar stench of satisfied eau de dead badger following a ninety minute romp with her friend near the race course (gratitude sent my way? none). I was carrying a spade through the hall. As you do. The sweet juxtaposition never realised: fetid beast, sharp blade, a marriage made in heaven divorced before the banns were published.
Ah me.
Who would know? The devil would know. Foul thoughts scare me now. I must go and charge my phone. That and lock in the shed the temptation of a shiny spade.

ring ring

“Right! What are we? We’re winners, OK? Say it then. Shout it!”
“Winners,” mumbled the boys, their minds more on the fair sharing of the biscuits than motivational chanting. Their hair is long, it’s curly, they have names like Harry and Luke. We play against teams with shaven heads, Deans and Shanes.
Junior football is a strange land I've occupied for decades, which makes me wonder why I look forward to Saturdays.
“Can’t hear you?” The coach mocked a panto hand to his ear. “And again!”
“WINNERS.”

Us parents cringed with embarrassment, bent double in disassociation.
The parents of the other team looked on with frank amusement. Pit bulls strained at short leads. A touching scene of snarling and merriment, a long way from home.

“WINNERS!” The coach hurled his flat cap in the air.

A fine gesture, wrecked only by the small technicality of our losing so very dramatically. More rugby the score than football. The first game had gone to 11-0.
“NO!” shouted F9, “We got 2!”
“Own goals,” I muttered, “Stop going on about it.”
A pink faced lad burst into tears.

(My phone kept going. Funky Town bursting into the field as back at home, far from the footie shift, E prepared for T12's rugby, increasingly frantic as it transpired T12 could not find his proper rugby shorts... then his gum shield ... then his boots … )

“Good luck, darling!” us mothers trilled and, “Oh well done, chicken!” as lambs to the slaughter they embarked on match 2, a game F9 and I were lucky enough to have to leave early, when poised at a crucial will-we /won’t-we stage (ie: merely on 3-0).
The coach rang me at the end to say that we had lost 12-0. After a scant four matches we flounder at the bottom of the league table. Goals for? 0; goals against? 34.

What could I say but, “Oh.”
In the background of the call, I could hear unconvinced warbles of “Winners!”

A heartbreaking e-mail emerged later from the coach. He is still chipper, but fearful that he has let the boys down. He blames himself. His responsible disappointment left me feeling mean for laughing at his flat cap and shying from his too wet lips.
I then felt cross for having to feel mean.

Meanwhile we defected to T12’s rugby trials, given his need for boots. Both he and his friend W12 are sure that a space in the A team is theirs, despite neither of them being much cop at rugby, nor even liking the playing of it much, preferring to chat.
W12’s mother, M, and I are puzzled. Being anxious and destroyed by uncertainty ourselves, we cannot source our children’s sense of entitlement in the face of negligible talent. M was still smarting over a run in with her mother about her hair, "You can't go to London looking like that, dear."

T12 slithered into F9’s football boots. F9 took T12’s trainers and looked like an orphan, trailing round the ground, muttering. His football strip out-Stanley Matthews Stanley Matthews. The coach had delivered it the night before, neatly wrapped in bronze Christmas paper. The shorts are mid-shin, the dress floating just below his knees. I was almost sick laughing. I needed mirth.

My father had phoned.
“Stop blogging about the bloody children,” he said. “Move on.”
Not much love in that, I thought.
“Put something nasty in, make it sinister. You’re quite good.”
“Darling,” my mother chipped in on the extension, “you need a job. Not an Avon lady, I don’t think, but you could become a Weight Watchers’ Team Leader.”

Where Had That Come From.

I didn’t like to think.
A very long, chilling, silence followed. The sort of silence from which great damage could emerge if the wrong thing was said. Naturally “she” saying the wrong thing would be me.
“You’d be very good,” she continued gamely, “you’re kind, and would get them going.”
I was utterly, totally horrified.

The statement had been offensive in so many ways. No fattypuff in crisis should ever have to put their faith in me, but there were clearly Other Issues at play here. In the end, I bowed to the inevitable, like a badger thinking ‘Sod it’ and lying down ready in the middle of the road. Bring on the lorry.

“I imagine you’d have to go to Weight Watchers first, mother,” I said, with the tiniest bit of bold ice in my voice, a squeak of despair valiantly repressed by the shards of my dignity.
“You’d feel marvellous,“ she breezed, “get a nice big belt and pull it tight. It’s opportunities, you see, you have to be awake to them.”

She was off to Ypres at the weekend again. Graves and war, who can resist?
“I love it,” she says.
I was tempted to tip the driver a tenner to knock her in, plonk up a white cross all of her very own. One amongst so many. Who was to know? What? Poor Mum Dead?

She phoned me before she left.
“Now, you’ll need to phone your father each morning when I’m gone, to check he’s not died in the night.”
“Why?” I said.
“The dog [blight of our collective lives, surely, this one being a borderline incontinent Newfoundland, in severe need of Weight Watching] surges past one on the stairs so. She could send him flying and of course no-one would pass, no one would know.”

She sent me fierce texts from the coach. Buoyed by distance, I tartly reminded her she was meant to think gin, not drink gin.
She claimed, like Sairey Gamp, “not a drop has touched my lip in days but leave the teapot on the mantelpiece and I will put my lips to it when I am so dispoged…”
For a senior, she’s quite dapper with the texting. Sort of Team Leader savvy. I must tell her. She could make a career of it.

I rang my father.
“Not dead yet, then?” I asked. We were at Prescott Hill Climb – I had won tickets, winning things in raffles being quite a reliable second income, for some reason. Cars roared by endlessly. The air was dense with petrol and burnt rubber, and the sensation of fielding an imminent insult; rarely a long wait, I find.
I told him about the football.
“Christ,” he groaned, “Modern bloody parents, you’re mad. You’d have died if I’d come along to any of your hockey matches.”
“It wasn't hockey,” I said, I had to shout over the roaring cars, I probably sounded mad, desperate. “It was netball.”
Then, “You’ve never appreciated me,” he said munching heartlessly on what sounded like a parsnip, “You’ll be sorry when I’m dead. I could be so dull. You’re so lucky. You have no idea.”

An image of an apocalyptic blot on my horizon, things on the road ahead I dread: my parents’ death. A landmine first strewn in youth when long, long ago, when I was fifteen, I sat next to him at a James Bond film. I don’t remember which one, since it was spent silent and wretched in tears, for he had just told me cheerily how he’d read in The Times that the 40s were a perilous decade for men, rife with heart attacks and strokes and, for men blind in one eye, the chances of making 50 were slim. It goes without saying that he is blind in one eye. And now 73.

I was plunged into a familiar despair: that of being misjudged.
I pictured the killer instinct of black fur bustling down in urgent need of a wee, the misplaced slippered foot, the glasses flung out of reach, the hope of reaching the phone all spent. The 2-for-1 pile up at the bottom of the stairs for my mother to encounter, all teapotted up, on her return.

“You haven’t got a bloody clue,” I said.

-----------------------
It has become necessary to add that the Prescott Hill Climb is nothing, but nothing, to do with the MP, although trotting up dat hill may do wonders for his tum, Lord, don't tell my mother. It's a car thing, bugattis and formula something, and converted jalopies and swish porsches all roaring up Against The Clock. Lots of old duffers and young lads taking notes and endless photographs. As I say, we won tickets.

mrs hope

“Oh, Mummy, you’re just like Anne, never happier than when you’ve got a needle and thread in your hands,” sighed F9 with dubious contentment. “Yes, you make a house a home.”
He placed his sun-glasses firmly upside down on his nose and went outside to talk to the grass.
(Anne, for those not on first name terms, was last seen on the steps of a caravan letting Timmy lick the plates clean while Dick, Julian and George sorted out some filthy gypo. And since F9’s own haven of choice, his filth-packet bedroom, is a place a troll would hesitate to enter, his idea of domestic perfection is possibly insulting.)

Still, it’s true that I’ve had my fill of needle and thread recently, in sewing a million labels onto rugby tops and navy shorts, to the point of grinding a hole in my finger. Something the Victorian novelist Mrs Oliphant did for real, to more lasting effect in that her books will be read rather longer than my labels will, though not for want of strong stitches.

For T11 became T12 last week which means Secondary School.
F9 expressed his wishes for a good day in typical bizarre fashion.

T12 already looks two years older than he did a fortnight ago by dint of donning a different school uniform. [photo removed] Nylon blazers, slippery ties, oh yes, the lad is growing up: he has 73 new songs on his mobile phone to prove it. Pray God you’ll never have to hear them. We do. 2 bars of a tinny Funky Town at 6.45 in the morning tests parental love to limits the NCT kept quiet about.
A step up the school ladder is a big stride for us too.

For starters, there’s the continuous flushing of cash: not merely the usual wild splurging on Extras but endless new uniform and then £86.50 (horribly specific, as if they added it up and everything), on a bonding trip. A bonding what? one is eager to splutter. £330 went on an end of primary school jolly and now one gets stung for a beginning of term one.
Then we got a sharpish letter reminding us that we haven’t put in for Ball tickets. At £40 a pop, no, we haven’t, love. My eyes are quite giddy with rolling. We endured death by Speech Night last Friday, am I really ready to bop in a big frock, jostling with strangers and pay £40 for the pleasure?

Then there’s the unGodly hour. We have to get up as if we’re about to catch a plane, at 6.30, to ensure T12 catches his bus, a grimy soup of ring tones and tossed plaits and who fancies whom, and representing another £740 flying from the account.

Home schooling was never contemplated, thank you, but a frown did flicker at glancing at a map he’d filled in, and spotting that his confident placing of Gloucester (his school town) firmly in Wales, a shifting down and to the left by a couple of crucial centimetres that threatens Cardiff’s free run at the south coast. There was no busy, red correction from the teacher. My fingers itched, but my attempts to re-establish the relative locating of Cheltenham, Bristol, Gloucester and Cardiff were met with the disdain of one who
a) knows my reliance on sat nav to get out of the drive in one go
and
b) being 12, knows it all anyway.

Still, education, eh, marvellous thing.
It’s paid for, moreover, in long, long days, days where breakfast takes place in the dark and 11ses feels like lunch time.
It is easier, the hellish rising, than I had feared, but it underlines why I am a night-person. By night you can be with those whom you choose, those you love. Come the drilling of the alarm clock and we are fractured, dispatched via endless mini-roundabouts and roadworks, by an obligation to earn money or sit in a classroom.
Well some of us are, some of us stay behind and hang things crossly on the washing line and wish we’d thought of being a doctor, pound signs zinging in our greedy, lazy eyes. Until the realities of the mouth ulcers of strangers, gummy teeth and furry tongues ping in and I am content instead to take comfort in serene contemplation of two more rooms being all but finished: the house becomes a home indeed.
An ex-garage has been converted into a room housing most of our books and 2 sofas you could swim on


and we have a sitting room, (with normal sofas)

No curtains yet, nor are all the pictures up but to wander about at will without crashing into motley furniture or piles of boxes is so pleasing as to make one weep.

Consolation for being torn apart again following the lovely long holidays, for being left with the dog for company. [photo removed]

Although, when wearing her bomb, her obedience collar, she’s almost pleasant to be with. Words I never thought I’d say.

Today, we went picking blackberries. (Oh God, "we" is me and the dog, shudder.) I filled a bag full and then leant – very Aesop – towards the only plump cluster I had seen so far, just out of reach, only to plunge down a rabbit hole – very Alice. My foot was clutched by roots, my hands steeped in nettles, the bag split, the blackberries scarpered and I swore. Not very Anne.

I stood there, suddenly knee high, fearing moles and bats permeating my boots, feeling strange, feeling like Mrs Hope. She who knew that Help Was Coming. A clumsy pensioner with a propensity for living on the edge who, in a range of press ads in the ‘80s, frequently found herself poleaxed on the floor: stumbling on the stairs, stiff across the lino, prone against the back door. Was there an ill-advised attempt to take on the attic ladder? I think there was. She never learnt. Anyway, a twit on her pins, Mrs Hope cannily clung to her zapper and could ping for Help. The tools of my rescue were merely the detonator for Lolly’s bomb and my mobile phone which at that point swarmed into life with a lusty toot of Funky Town (courtesy of T12). I glanced at my hands and arms, resembling those of a self-harmer and discussed lesson dates with the piano teacher at the other end of the line. I whispered, fearful of being come upon in a hole and shouting.

Then I clambered out of the hole, undignified and rather foolish. The crumble will be slim on blackberries, and still it's not yet time for lunch.

c ya

One of the more interesting things about having children is, no, not catching glimpses of what they might become (though for the terminally bored, F9’s going for world domination, unless prison claims him first; while at some stage in his future T11 will be spotted leaving the country, hopping along in one sock and doing his tie as he runs, a hundred weeping women in his immediate past and a clutch of irate fathers and husbands and sisters in hot pursuit, Rrrraaouuuooh!), not that – yawn – not them, but what they show you of yourself.
For, let’s bring it happily back to ME: oneself is always far more interesting.

So, E and I both hurl the hot potato of F9’s more troublesome traits back and forth.
“Straight down the distaff,” E will say in a ‘that’s that’ sort of way when F9 is to be seen maundering round the garden singing tunelessly and talking to the grass.
“Pure spear,” I’ll shriek when F9, fierce and proud upon the floor, roars his little face red. No doubting paternity there, methinks.

Over the years, E has had to own up to a certain genetic baton passing made gloriously apparent with regard to the strange trouser choice replicated in F9.
Not E’s fault, perhaps, that Leisure Pants are thus dubbed, an item which have become, entre nous, A Leisure Pant or, if bold, A Golfing Slack.
My, how we laugh.
No trip to M&S is complete without a collapse section up against the cargo pants. (It's one thing, Kitty B, lamenting A knicker, involving a mere scrap of over-priced material, but for one thing, when did pants as trousers slide across the Atlantic unannounced, and for another, something that size should warrant the plural.)
F9 favours bizarre black slippery things of a sporting nature. Truly hideous, particularly peeking beneath the swish of a fetching dressing gown, where they are designed to upset, and inherited from someone or other in a bag of mixed stuff – someone who clearly doesn’t like us much.

And sadly, though I choke to do so, I will admit that I do find it the tiniest bit hard to say sorry. As does F9.
The difference being, however, that I have so little to practise on.
For I am simply rarely wrong. Else I would say it, natch, the S-word. Of course I would. While F9, being so much more like his father, resides in Wrong Land for a hefty proportion of his waking hours, but still he will not assay it.
“Suh,” I say, “Try it, Suh-ohh-reee.”
His lips purse and his eyes gleam.
He would argue that blue is pink long after the cows have sauntered home. And God knows, sometimes I find myself convinced. His sense of permanent utter rectitude is exhausting.
Pure spear.

T11 apologises all the time, a rolling alibi to stuff he has done / might be doing / has up his sleeve to do. A child to get away with murder, but with a smile.

Other than that, my only flaw is not liking soup, although I am dutiful at dinner parties and conceal my distaste in a clatter of busy spoon-work. Therefore, I decided to grasp the nettle of this particular failing by making some myself. For lunch, then, we have eaten recently (to the point of over-dose, actually) abso-bloody-lutely the most delicious Gazpacho ever. Delicate, but punchy, it could – and does – make one squeal with excitement, and is rivalled only by the memory of one on a dusty hill in Spain. And that’s probably only fond recall.
I am now, officially fault-free; although wary of looking another tomato in the eye.

One of my many wise moves is refusing to resort to txt-spk. Up with which I will not put. It confuses spell checks and it’s just not nice. Full sentences R Me, and Churchill would approve.
I made adhering to this a condition of T11’s mobile phone ownership: the pitiful pissing in the wind of one desperate to cling to an idea of authority, and I thought - fool - that his obedience was secured, by the evidence of his texts to me. Commas, apostrophes et al. But in a swift scuffle over his bill, I had an outraged rummage through his outbox and found it appallingly full of “l8rs” and “c u at da park 4 tnnis” and and “g2g brb.”
You can just imagine what a painful falling of the scales that was. How hard I had to sit down, gasping. By night I have been catching up on “The Wire” locking into new and random crib-talk (where ya'r'at, bro, yo? most def) and bracing myself against floodgates of swearing, such as render my own attempts mimsy. And now, by day, g2g!
A friend said that when her son texts “dear Mother,” it is mere prelude to demands for cash.

The children might well want to spend all da time at da park, but this is not the stuff from which interesting diaries are built so, it being the holidays, we have had a few days out to places like the Cotswold Farm Park, the sort of place I panic that they have grown out of, clinging embarrassingly to their tender years, but where, once there, all of the children can run off for hours and we mothers can sit and chat.

A few of us agreed to meet at Mrs Northern Posh’s immaculate country cottage and travel in convey, re-distributed to save a car. On this particular day, either I was early (unlikely), or I had got the time wrong (spot on), but I walked up Mrs NP’s pristine front garden (last encountered here) to find a window open and her in full shout at her children. I tipped my head sideways for a good listen.
“Get the fuck off the fucking sofa,” she was yelling. “Shoes on. Now! F’fucks’ sake!”

Ah, how it does a soul good to encounter another so fully out of control, and rapidly approaching meltdown.
I rang the doorbell immediately, thinking it only kind to let her know that I had heard, rather than make her fret either way. Or, worse, hope, that perhaps I hadn’t.
“Problems, love?” I asked. Then, “That sofa’s a bit of a mess.”
We laughed.
Her face was not slippery with the rage I had heard, but its normal smiling self despite that her woeful offspring had dared to bounce on newly-plumped up furniture. Well really. Does it get much worse than that?
Mrs NP wishing to return to a pristine house (something that remains in the realms of impossibility for me) because her parents (fuss-pot, thin-lipped variety) were coming to stay had been idiot enough to try to effect just that. This is not my world, not with half a fireplace and several random buckets on the floor of the sitting room it’s not, but I nodded nicely and felt her pain.

We bumbled in, out, up and down the perfect path, packhorses bearing picnics and rugs and cool-boxes of grub, suntan lotion and fleeces, plasters and wipes. We were, after all, travelling a good ten miles and might be away til four.
“Is that everything?” she asked, her mind not what it was.
“Fucking children?” I reminded her.
“Shit,” she said.

Our other friends were waiting. Chatting at the end of the drive. Car doors open to cool the interior, and irritate passing motorists. I frowned.
Just – what – was – going – on!
As expected, one of our number was impossibly, easily, glam, but the other one had morphed most terribly into a sudden enigma. The capacity to surprise is important, but – the but is big. Heavens I’m not judgemental, but no friend of mine wears that!
For S had turned up in the oddest of garbs. No make up, for starters, and trussed into a strange pinnie-type frock (wholesome), fashioned, moreover, from gingham (gingham!), and bringing horribly to mind Mother Burrr.
Looking for all the world like a well-plumped up sofa, the sort on which no children had carelessly frolicked (tending as she does, towards the traditional build, despite the constant dieting, bless). Moreover, being enviably rich, that apron pocket would be full, and she would dip her paw in ceaselessly all afternoon, a fruit machine of pound coins doled out in obedience to her son’s eternal desires for cokes and ice-creams, toys and sweets, desires to which the rest of us are deaf.
Nothing like a mother who doesn’t know the rules and is clinging to the youth of her third child.

(Although that afternoon I did weaken and bought F9 a squadgy cat. He was being so very sweet. There’s something about a terrible child with skew-whiff hair and fistfuls of fur that softens my heart.
“What are you calling it, sweetums?” I asked, a fiver the poorer, my purse mewling in sorrow.
He replied.
I misheard.
“Oh! Toffee! How sweet,” I trilled.
“NO. Toughie,” he growled. He pinged ToffeeToughie’s nose with peremptory masterfulness: a man in control of his charges; I could learn a thing or two, sharpen up my pinging. “I need bullets,” he said, “For my gun.” He slung the cat in his pocket.)

She normally works full-time all suited and booted does S, and clearly harbours barking thoughts as to what constitutes At Home Mom wear when out on crazy days with our children.
J should be in Vogue, Mrs NP scrubs up fine when she puts down the F word and forgets her sofas, and I was in what I am sadly proud to call my groovy gear. Since this consists of 4-year old Capri pants from M&S you may form your own opinion just how Down With Trinny and Susannah I might be. I fear that Hot Chick is not inscribed through me like a stick of rock. But it sure as hell ain’t there, S, in Mother Burr, so think again, dear girl.
I took a step back, fearful of contamination. (Mother Burr for the temporarily bewildered and enviably unaware, is mother to Li’l Burr, forever wise and calm and tidying up.)
It raised serious questions: it’s not just what it is but what it might be – just what else is in that wardrobe of hers, what shocks lie ahead? A headscarf? A tartan-lined Mac? Slacks? A slack?

“Are we ready to go?” S asked sensibly.
Sartorially misguided thus, like a trucker from Leeds taking the piss, and beautifully in charge, S suddenly resembled a TV version of our joint mother ushering three unlikely siblings, the glamorous J, me and the swearing Mrs NP.

Which of her own parents, I wondered, claimed that particular hot potato, their anxious faces pressed against a window pane, aghast, while studying a sturdy S frolicking on the lawn.
“No, no, not gingham, darling, gingham’s on your side of the family.”
Pure spear.
Most def.

Soz (see! I can say it! teehee) gtg 2 Spain. L8rs.