Day in Life of the Remarkably Idle Milla

(this was done, as did we all, for a thing on purplecoo, and I have transported it just because I'm slightly OCD and like all my toys together. It was done last week or so, hence the reference to dear Masterchef, for the loss of which I am already in mourning:)

My day begins hours too early, at 7.46, with a thump at the clock radio.
Having been awake all night, it is during the next 7 minutes that I have the best dreams in the world before being cruelly snatched back into the world of things to do. I have always loathed mornings and getting up but, once up, I adopt a scornful stance towards any filthy lie-a-bed who might still be wallowing in their cot. I wonder whom I can phone and stir from their slumbers.

The next hour is one of high octane adrenaline. No wonder I hate getting up when first up is dealing with Lolly’s nocturnal turds (if necessary, says hopefully). Then bustle through to kitchen to enbreakfast children and hound: Lolly last in an attempt to establish a pecking order with her right at the bottom of it. Don’t all gasp, purplecooers, it’s what The Books say: dogs come last. By now she is outside trying to grasp the concept of lavatorying 'neath the big bad sky. Her besom face, perplexed at all things to do with rules, will be held at an angle and berate me through the glass of the door: Why am I outside. I hate rain, I hate wet grass, I don’t like getting my knickers wet, I won’t squat here, there’s a perfectly serviceable carpet inside. I will glare at her. She will rise like a bear and throw clattery claws at the glass.
In.
Now.
I toss my head and turn on the kettle. It is a little early for a true battle of wills, but I am the one with opposable thumbs who can grapple with the handle, while she is not.

Lunch preparation happens now, too, with endless little goodies piled into my offspring’s lunchboxes.
I make no apologies for being unbearably smug about these lunchboxes: they gleam with good intentions which have actually been carried through.
How rare is that.
Tiny pots of olives, raspberries, carrot, mango combine to approach their five a day without even trying and, God knows, I need to feel good about something I do. As often as not, too, the biscuit or cake is homemade although I may let the side down with a baby sausage roll rich in dodgy bits of pork knees.
Sandwiches are a bore since peanut butter is not allowed, up there with guns and knives on the prohibited list: one boy in another year “might” be allergic; one child in Reception has a kiwi allergy: therefore no children in the school are allowed kiwi fruit. I know, I know, yet again how very unsympathetic I sound: how much of a “bore” would I really feel if some child or other slipped into a coma because of a naughtily smuggled-in peanut butter sandwich made by me. But still sandwiches *are* a bore and seem to bring out the worst in us all.
I shovel in some rice cakes and oat cakes instead.

By now I am onto my second cup of black coffee of the day, technically, perhaps, my fourth, since each cup takes 2 strong teaspoonfuls.
As an impoverished student, I would only drink real, now I will only drink instant, but only Costa Rican and exact almost to the point of grain count. A bad cup of coffee is so disappointing. E calls my coffee slippery muck, I jeer just as unkindly at his foul brown liquid which is mere Gold Blend and not the nectar of the Gods which is mine. Needless to say we nurse our own jars fiercely.
I don’t bother to eat, unless E hasn't gone into work nastily early but is busily getting in my way making worthy porridge and then I tut, and make a big deal of working round him in a huffy manner and ungraciously allow him to make me a baby bear bowl-ful of the stuff. No sugar, however, can’t abide porridge with sugar. Yuk. He takes my wincing at his rounded spoonful of the same as indicative of my desire to ring a divorce solicitor.
He might be right.
He tuts back.
Happy families.

Round about now I regroup with an aaaaah moment, leaning back against the walnut cupboards, upper bottom cold against the granite and enjoy a full-on love-in of the most glorious kitchen in the world.
Truly it is a dream. It is big and stylish and fan-bloody-tastic. It inspires kitchen-envy in all luckless females who come to admire, and it is mine, mine, mine, mwah ha ha.
After 20 months of squalor and grime and ancient formica belonging to another, I am now truly spoiled. But at least I know it. 30’+ long, it is 2 old rooms knocked into one plus an extension. The old dining room end, which we used to call the caravan, takes a monstrous huge charity shop sofa – a raft of a thing; also tucked in are piano; large oriental rug; bookcase; 2 sets of drawers; and view. And the wall light is quite groovy.
The middle bit, divided from the caravan by a much-used (to my surprise) “breakfast bar” is actual dream kitchen from heaven. As I gaze lovingly at my empire, a jewel in a unfinished house still ceiling-high with boxes, my 2 boys are at chomp, chatting to me or annoying each other, or reading The Beano. Thumping big island, double-doored larder, bookshelves, L-shaped units. Enough cupboards to lose a dog in – and God knows I’d like to try sometimes.
The far end has an enormous oval table in smoked oak with 8 diddy chairs, quite terrifyingly modern, planted round it, and with one of my father’s most beautiful paintings on the yellowy wall.
Have I mentioned that I love our kitchen?

This admiration session possibly accounts for the next bad-tempered few minutes when I realise, AGAIN, how late we are for although we sort of thought we had masses of time, inevitably we don’t, the promised safety net of 15 minutes to go having disappeared in a flash. Mother sets up a screech. F9 roars that he’s “doin’ somethin’” and T11 stands shiny and a little put out that he is booted and coated and bagged and teethed but that no one else is. Lolly, who has been let in by a boy eyes the front door anxiously, again lamenting her rubbish paws which won’t let her fasten her own lead and establish herself outside and ready to go. She has 2 high points of the day: 3 minutes ago which was eating breakfast, and the next hour of her main walk. Sometimes I feel sorry for her. And then she’ll run off like a delinquent teenager, and I want to turn her into gloves.

So a raggletaggle quarrelsome quad we make barging out of the door, dog like a furry bullet first (despite best attempts to keep her greasy slipperiness at the rear, where she should be, as advised by The Books) a hint of her massively irritating and incapacitating inter-leg weaving walking up the road to come. I wear my sunglasses in all weathers to avoid catching the eye of all the good parents driving away while we still have a five minute walk ahead of us. I kiss my boys, giving thanks that they have never (yet) had a problem at public displays of affection: surely that is the deal with children? Your scars, their kisses.

Then I chat with the other mothers about nothing for 20 minutes but still we laugh, and then walk Lolly in the fields with another mother and her dog who is most sub-standard dog. For she won’t play with Lolly being obsessed instead with impressive ball chasing which also involves hogging 2 sticks as well as stuffing rancid tennis ball in mouth too. How greedy. She shames, too, by being horribly good at coming back when called, compared with my mad bag of insolent fur who ignores me being far too busy bustling up, all swaggery bum and flying fur, to any random dog going. These invariably yap and hiss back which drives her to seek refuge instead rummaging unpleasantly in hedges. A girly girl my Lolly, I call her hedge work “shopping”.
Other mother talks the entire time about her various sporting prowess or boasts about her dog, underlining the line which cannot be crossed in obedience terms. So I switch off and pray for a thunderbolt from heaven to catapult her and her mutt into the stream on the bottom field.
It is Lolly, though, on whom all the children from school fall, carolling “Lollllllleeeeeee!” in delight, so that, perhaps, is my reward. Other mother probably hates me.

Once home it’s time for a necessary cup of coffee and a check of the post and any phone messages. A good day is none of either. I hate post and messages, truly the worst thing, up there with laundry. Goodness, it might mean that I have to respond to something.
The next hour should be spent in routine dullness. You know the sort of thing, desultory tidying, resentful hoovering, Putting Things Away, plumping sofas. Whistle while you work stuff which sears my soul, but instead I find myself lured by the computer and Just Checking A Few Sites. I will have to lie to E about this later. I intersperse this self-indulgence with showing a polite interest in the washing machine and dabbing the brush at high-maintenance Lolly who, like every member of the family, inwardly cries out for staff.
The enormous elephant in the day of this life is that I possibly need a job. I used to work for The Biggest Advertising Agency, and then for The Only Radio. It seems a lifetime ago. Strange thing, jobs, though, and how little actual work you have to do while there. Truly just turning up and being in the building tended to be enough for most of us. But I don’t want to do that anymore. And I reckon I'm unemployable by now anyway.
At some stage into young children, I was press ganged by a virtual criminal into designing and creating his garden, and then his wife’s, and then into looking after them. It was terribly well paid, but I was never comfortable with the strange comings and goings, nor his attempts to shove his tongue in my mouth, although the smart wine he routinely gave me slipped down a treat and few gardeners, maybe, get given Laurent Perrier champagne when knee-deep in mud. I was naughty and just stopped going. Besides, my back hurt too much by then.
And I’ve done some half-hearted editing of the most spleen-crushingly boring reports for a woman who thought she couldn’t write. She could write well enough, but of a strangled, committee-speak sort that did your head. Eye-blinkingly painful for a wannabe-purist like me who squeals at a split infinitive and flinches at the word “situation.”
Recently I’ve had to be sort of project managing here (chokes at the notion of such self-importance) but, with the end in sight, I need to get real and get a job, but of the kind that doesn’t exis:. 10-2.30, well-paid and term-time only and able to take a day off at the drop of a hat to look after the children. Or if I need a little lie-down.

This is long and have only reached 11ses so will resort to phrases for the rest:
Pfaff around, time disappears, feel busy, achieve nothing.
Another day looks set to drift by without having filed my life in filing cabinets. Paperwork is the carpet.
Maybe I’ll garden, if it’s nice.
Collect children at 3.15. Maybe a friend back, maybe not. Maybe they go to the park and play, or to piano, or ju jitsu, or rugby or not. Chat, to whoever will have me.
Wince at badly-written letters home from school, hand poised, again on phone to ask headmaster if he wants help in sentence construction. Resist. Wisely.
Make supper. At least I cook. That’s something in my favour.
All eat together at about half past six. Work on the house. We all sit watching Masterchef, roaring “Cooking Doesn’t Get Tougher Than This” en masse at the TV. After which children are despatched quickly to bed and disappear upstairs in a crosspatch of teeth-brushing and blame.
If in, watch rubbish on TV. But virtuously knit or sew or read at the same time and look up occasionally, irritating E by asking “which one is that …?” or “Is he the one who …?”
Go to bed.
F9 will still be up. This will be the fault, it seems, of the deep-in-dreams T11.
Read.
Sleep.
Tomorrow is another day.