Mrs M's Country Life

2012-01-15T01:53:00.000-08:00

Been quiet here, hasn't it?

It's not like I'm expecting anyone to be tapping their fingers and at a complete loose end, thinking "where's that Mrs M with her incisive and witty ramblings?" But there is a sense of guilt about not blogging for such a long time.

I'm one of nature's blabbermouths. I've always been someone who has to gob off about stuff incessantly. I know I've always made up stories, and that I make things that happen into anecdotes to make sense of them.

Recently I've been on a midwifery placement that I can't really talk about. It's not top-secret midwifery or anything like that. Not MI5-wifery. Just an area where confidentiality is even more important than in other places. I've had a head full of the things I've been doing and nothing else has seemed to be able to come to the surface past it.

It's difficult, when you see things that put trivial worries into perspective. Helpful in a way, but then it makes you impatient with other people's problems which actually are serious and need sympathy. Just because someone's leg has fallen off it doesn't mean your ingrowing toenail doesn't hurt after all.

But now the year has turned and I'm off to catch babies again and hopefully I can get closer to the target of 40 which I need in order to be a real, proper midwife and qualify for a darker blue dress. There's nothing to be said for the uniform, by the way. I do wonder why we still have this kind of uniform, a version of an old fashioned nurses' dress which is impractical, uncomfortable and not entirely flattering. Some people like the uniform because it looks professional and it identifies you as belonging to a particular group of people. I don't like it for the same reasons really; it is divisive, a way of pulling rank over some ("do as I say, I'm in a uniform") and being subservient to others ("yes, doctor").

I do sometimes hanker over a swishy cloak and a starched hat though. Good for keeping things under.

Waiting for the news

2011-08-17T22:56:00.000-07:00

Waiting for exam results sucks. Especially when they aren't yours. It is A levels day, the sun has risen and we are into the last few hours where they are like Schrodinger's cat, in a state between good and bad where all possibilities are still in play.

I remember my A level results day. That whole summer seemed to go on for years - I know, a dreadful cliche. I finished my last exam and walked home all the way from Muswell Hill, probably a good 5 or 6 miles, through the park where we'd played as children and sat on the swing. I remember that day so clearly because it seemed to me that everything changed then; my sense of myself, my friendship groups, even what I wore and where I went. The Day The Results Came was sunny and I had to wait for the postman as the results came directly to candidates. I sat downstairs and watched bits of "The Wall" on video repeatedly until the post clattered through the door.

My results were all wrong. One grade higher than I'd expected - insanely good for the effort I'd put in (none). But the grade for English was too low, not the A I needed to get into my first choice of University. So I wandered out of the house, not entirely sure where I was going, and went down the road. Carried on for a bit and got to the tube station and so to Colchester, where I sat in that park on my own taking it all in.

I think I'm more nervous this morning. D and I were talking last night, he complaining that he was the last one left out of the loop; his school, his university choices and UCAS know by now what his fate is but we don't. Somewhere someone has put a tick or a cross by his name and that will affect everything from his eventual qualification and employability down to how much petrol we burn in the next few years.

My role as mother today is to be on immediate alert for lifts to school to get results and to give advice when asked but otherwise to stay Sssssssshhhhh and let him get on with it. As one of life's fixers, this is hard. My instinct in any situation is to suggest something, do something, not just nod and smile. I'm far better at it than I used to be; being at births teaches you a lot about the value of just waiting. As one of our lecturers says "don't just do something, stand there!"

So that's what I'm doing, mentally rehearsing reactions good, bad and indifferent. Having my car keys in my pocket and my hand near the TV remote for when the inevitable reports of how easy A levels are start polluting the airwaves.

At least I didn't have that to contend with, the media scrum around A level and GCSE results days. The endless TV shots of comely independent school children opening their envelopes, screaming and hugging. The pundits on the breakfast telly sofas and the newspaper columns talking about how easy it all is. I've taught GCSE and A level, and they're not easy. You know, they are really not that easy. And waiting for those results for someone else is also hard.

I'll go back to fretting now. The sun is a little higher in the sky and the UCAS website could update any time now; the words "confirmed" or "rejected" next to his offers telling him what he really wants to know ahead of the actual numbers and grades. At least he's not waiting for the post because in these degenerate days there isn't an early post and I don't think any of our nerves could stand waiting to see Postman Pete striding down the hill in his GPO issue shorts at the crack of 3pm.

Camping it up

2011-08-07T10:38:00.001-07:00

As good ideas go, maybe this wasn't. It remains to be seen. There is a bit of pre-holiday excitement building up but for me and Mr M it is definitely tempered by a sense of foreboding.

We are going camping. In August (usual season of typhoons, floods and other biblical plagues). With a total of six children and one dog. Granted there will be six adults, and not just any old adults but the ex-door neighbours and their eldest daughter and son-in-law, so good times are guaranteed. But still. My friend K and I are making increasingly anxious phone calls to each other about the logistics, I have emailed the campsite and double checked that we can use wind breaks and a gazebo around our tents. They have agreed but whether our planned stockade will be frowned upon is another unknown.

The campsite has a 10.30pm curfew, which is exactly what we want. Having been camping in places where people find it amusing to play music and shout and holler into the small hours I have a deep-seated loathing of noisy campsites. But Eva's current sleeping habits make me worry that we will be turned off the field, a noise abatement notice pasted to the side of our tent after a night or two of her waking up and yelling every couple of hours.

I have a love-hate relationship with camping holidays. In theory, I love them. I suspect that in practice I mostly love them too. Just in the days and weeks immediately beforehand I get decidedly cheesed off with the whole prospect. Insecure accommodation and escaping children - eek. No electricity - and no internet - pah. Twenty minutes to make a cup of coffee which you have to drink from a plastic mug - meh.

My first brush with camping came courtesy of the BBC's "Holiday" programme, which showed a sunny paradise that was camping in Norway. My parents and our cousins felt that this would be a good wheeze so off we went. To be fair I think we enjoyed it; by "we" I mean the four children. I know the adults were less enthralled to the point that my cousins' family bailed out after one too many nights of tinned meatballs and sheeting rain and went home. We spent the last night or two in a hotel. After a respectful interval the gigantic frame tent was sold and it was Never Spoken Of Again.

I think the next outing for me was a Guide camp, complete with trying to cook over an open fire (we had sandwiches) and about as much fun as a gang of pre-adolescent girls under canvas sounds, complete with bitchiness, tantrums, hormones and all.

So, what will this trip bring? Who knows. We are preparing for the worst, with a car full of wellies, umbrellas, colouring books and an ipod loaded up with Maisy Mouse and Peppa Pig episodes. Secretly hoping for the best. We'll see.

different hats

2011-06-24T11:42:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about this a lot recently, about all the different roles we inhabit. Specifically for me at the moment I'm mulling over my midwifery hat and my NCT hat - which you can see was made for me by one of my student midwife colleagues when I was in the slightly odd position of guest lecturing to my mates about the NCT.

Part of it is that I am cursed always to see other people's point of view, or almost always. (I struggle with "he's different, throw chairs at him!" or similar). But it's rare that I can't see where people are coming from even if I disagree with it. I remember Cherie Blair getting in bother for saying that she could see suicide bombers' points of view. I was surprised that a lot of the reaction was so negative because to me it's a no brainer; of course one can see how a particular set of stresses on top of a certain world view can lead to blowing yourself up. But perhaps not.

So I almost always get stuck on the fence when I'm between two points of view about pregnancy and birth. I'm totally passionate about antenatal education but I accept the evidence that it doesn't actually *do* much by measurable standards (perhaps we're not looking at the right things?) After all, why should antenatal education lower rates of epidural use? It's a perfectly valid choice after all, to decide that in the full knowledge of the potential downsides you're requesting that at the first opportunity. Is that a failure of antenatal education? I don't think so.

Then I start thinking that maybe it is, when I go into a room with a woman with no epidural or other drugs on board and see her birthing her baby in SUCH a different way.

Not that I feel that strongly about epidurals by the way. Except when I'm with someone who does when I immediately start seeing exactly why they're passionate...

So why do I need a midwife hat (starched, white) and an NCT one, hand knitted from lentils and hairy string. After all we want the same things, don't we? Similarly my friends who are doulas - professional birth companions. Why is there a tension between midwives and doulas? I'm mulling that one over too. Why would midwives feel threatened by someone else being there to provide a level of support which hand on heart rarely happens in an NHS labour ward? But then, why should someone without any requirement for training or regulation be in a position to advise a pregnant woman when a midwife has studied for years to do just that, and has a regulatory body to answer to if deemed to have acted improperly.

Don't know. In the meantime I'll keep giving myself a headache trying to balance multiple hats.

One Corner

2011-06-13T06:59:00.001-07:00

Another favourite thing here, a new one this time. This is one corner of the kitchen, the only bit of the house we've decorated since being here. We decorated the whole room obviously, but this particular corner just caught my eye the other day and I stood and looked and realised that I loved it. It's a little right angled promise to myself that one day I'll feel like that about the whole house.

What is it about this corner that makes me go all uncharacteristically houseproud? Partly it's a typical Mr M bit of lateral thinking; using up the offcuts of worktop to make satisfyingly chunky shelves, using an otherwise useless space and getting the collection of cookbooks off the top of one of the bookcases in the living room.

It's a collection of books as well, that's always a winner for me. And it's all the cook books. It's not a hugely impressive collection but it goes back all my life. There are handwritten notes of granny's yorkshire pudding instructions (I had to phone her from my university halls to get that) and the recipe for pastry she always used, learned from some French pastry chef somewhere in London sometime in the 1930s. Another handwritten recipe from my student days, lentil curry, written out by my legendary mate Pete who died almost a decade ago now.

There are also my Grandma's set of the Delia Smith cookery course, three volumes with an absurdly youthful pic of St Delia in 70s polyester on the back of each. We used to flick through those when we went to stay (usually volume 3, the one with the puddings in) and choose something to make. Chocolate mousse, cakes and one one occasion pavlova. Check the egg whites are whisked enough by holding the bowl upside down said the instructions. I was about ten and my brother eight or so, we were impatient and using hand whisks - how well do you think it went?

I still can't make meringue worth a damn.

The Delia cook books came to me perhaps ten years ago now, along with all Grandma's other cook books, when it became clear that the macular degeneration she'd kept quiet to the point of driving to the hospital appointment where it was diagnosed was progressing and she was effectively blind.

These sit with books I've bought myself. The Madhur Jaffrey book of vegetarian curries was the first I think, followed a while later by the Good Housekeeping book of chocolate recipes, which started a love of making ridiculously faffy puddings and cakes. I remember my brother watching me pipe a model of the Eiffel Tower in white chocolate and asking "have you ever thought you might have too much time on your hands?"

More cake books, a couple of Nigella classics - she may be a simpering caricature on the telly but she can write a mean cookbook and some Nigel Slater are more recent additions. Mr M and I bought his gigantic veg growing and cooking bible for Christmas last year and one day we might even use it.

The sad truth is that like most busy families with small children we have a repertoire of five or six dinners we cook again and again. This isn't helped by Mr M's notorious fussiness about food. So I like having my cook books, to read and sigh over occasionally, before another sausage- or chicken- based plain meal.

I also love the shelf for the old irons, Granny M's, which she had forever and which hint at a traveller/canal background which has caught my interest. And finally the garland of paper flowers. Is this for artistic reasons? No. It's to remind us that the shelves are there when we go to put something in the bin which is directly underneath, and which we both forgot incessantly in the first couple of days before we dug the flower garland out and found a use for it.

Nothing's perfect.

All change

2011-06-08T00:15:00.001-07:00

Well, this shows how long it is since I flew anywhere. Mr M and I both failed to get through airport security without incident; he foolishly tried to keep some manky old tissues in his pocket ("excuse me sir, I can see you have FULL POCKETS!" There's no getting things past these guards). I had the brass neck (and buckles, as it turns out) to keep my boots on. This resulted in a surprisingly thorough frisking by a humourless woman who seemed determined to twang my bra underwires as hard as she could.

Then there's the iris recognition thingy. Which doesn't recognise short women in glasses. So I've been standing on tiptoe and squinting at poles all the way through the airport and it still doesn't know who I am. Maybe we should have booked the VIP lounge, then I'd be someone

Champagne Lifestyle

2011-06-04T04:41:00.001-07:00

It's elderflower time again. The house smells of lemon and elderflower and we've used about a ton of sugar in one morning but if the gods of homemade stuff smile on us we should have a supply of elderflower syrup to last us the year - it freezes really well in little plastic water bottles - and some elderflower champagne.

This is a new departure for us, as we've never tried making anything alcoholic before. To be honest both Mr M and I are massive dullards who very rarely have a drink and it's always seemed a bit daunting. But the sight of Hugh F-W gamely making a dustbin of the stuff on the telly inspired us and we've been waiting for the first of the white flower heads to appear to give it a go.

When we lived in the old house we used to joke with the ex-door neighbours about making all kinds of strange and wonderful homemade hooch. The one we were always going to try was marrow rum which would certainly be as vile as it sounds but was the only sensible use for massively outgrown courgettes we could think of. After all, marrows are horrible and stuffed marrow doubly so. We had it all planned out; the garage would be an ideal place to make experimental booze as it was built like a firework factory (very thick walls, paper thin roof) so the resulting explosion would all go upwards and not flatten the town.

It never got done, but this year the ex-door neighbours have started brewing their own beer so clearly we need to keep up with them and have a go on some homebrew of some sort.

I'll let you know.

Meanwhile we're dying under a spinach glut so if anyone can suggest anything nice to do with that I'd be grateful.

Just What We'll Do

2011-05-30T03:02:00.001-07:00

Sigh. I've really lost my blogging mojo lately. It's not that I don't want to blog it's just... busy busy, you know how it is. So I thought I'd kickstart myself by blogging about a few of my favourite objects around the house and garden.

First up – my walking boots.

I thought of this when a forum buddy asked about favourite shoes. A thread full of pictures of beautiful footwear ensued, leaving me wishing not for the first time that my fat little feet and crappy ankles would allow me to wear shoes of gorgeousness like the beauties from Irregular Choice.

But no. I am forever doomed to sensible shoes, having inherited the weak knees, cankles* and wonky feet that plague the rest of the women in my family. I managed to be fashionable round about 1988 when suede brogues were all the go, and again during my DM and converse wearing salad days but otherwise I'm one of the croc wearing ugly sisters at the fashionista ball.

So my answer to the favourite shoe question was my walking boots. Not that they're beautiful or glamorous, far from it. Not even that they've done what they were designed for particularly; have I walked up Snowden or across the Pennine Way in them? Have I buggery. But we go back a long way, these boots and me.

I bought them for a sponsored walk in aid of the free Tibet campaign which a friend of mine was organising, eight years ago or so. Eldest son and I went into the camping shop and bought a pair of boots each, both size five. His dark blue, mine a rather lovely forest green. I turned up at the sponsored walk in them and my friend spent five minutes showing me how to lace them properly (NOT with the laces wrapped around the tops as I'd done) and off we wandered, a hot day across the fields and through the city which taught me the virtue of breaking in boots before using them properly.

While they were still young and smart-ish I wore them to work. Day in, day out running about a school from 7am until whenever the day was done. I've never been one for dress codes so where the other middle management wore suits, I crashed about in my walking boots. By then I was pretty sure that I didn't ever want to carry on up the greasy pole of promotion so being the Head of Year dressed as if I'd just done the garden didn't really matter to me. It should have done, but what became obvious a few months later was that I was suffering with the slow-burn form of ME so actually just getting up, doing a stressful job and being a lone parent was as much as my brain could manage without dressing (in my dad's words) like a pox-doctor's clerk for the privilege.

Then we walked up a hill in the Lake District; me, my newly engaged fiance Mr M and my boots. A gorgeous autumn day in half term, the trees all shades of pink through gold and the sky a clear blue. The path was hardly steep but we were overtaken by everyone else as I stopped to sit on a wall with my head between my knees every couple of hundred yards, trying to stop the faint woozy feeling and carry on. Families with toddlers and intrepid octogenarians strolled past us as I shuffled painfully to the top.

The next week, back in school, I went to stand up at the end of morning break and my legs wouldn't work. I fell back onto the chair, my heart pounding painfully, my head spinning and my legs just not there any more. I went home for what I thought was three days to rest but that was the end of my teaching career, more or less. We limped back a few months later, the boots and me, for 2 or 3 hours a week, my head still spinning. By then I'd forgotten how to write or spell properly so the bottom set year 9 class helped me write stuff on the board before I was driven home again to spend the rest of the day in bed in a dark room.

Now my boots are far too horrible to wear for anything other than actually going out walking. They are faded and rusty, the laces knotted where they've broken. We walk and walk and walk, nowhere very brave or hardcore but without thinking about it I spend the day on my feet, running after the children or walking around gardens and fields when I'm not at college or on placement training for my new career.

We've come a long way.

*In case you were wondering, cankles are calves plus ankles; ankles which are thick and ungainly and not really any different from the rest of one's lower leg.

catching up

2011-04-17T01:17:00.000-07:00

So it's been a long time since I blogged anything meaningful, mainly because everything I started writing sounded a bit Eeyore-ish recently so I decided to hush up until the sun came out and everything seemed a bit brighter.

In the meantime, here's what we've been up to.
Eva has developed an obsession with OUTSIDE. Even when she can't get at it, she is determined to climb onto any window sill she can reach and shout "quack quack" at the chickens. I say her fearless clambering about is the fault of her father's athletic genes. ("He was a right little... hmm, you know" says my mother in law, reminiscing about his habits of exploring everything possible, usually busting it in the process.) Mr M thinks she has somehow inherited being a towny from me, it's the only explanation for her unshakable belief that chickens say quack.

The chickens moved from their winter quarters to a new bit of garden. We knew they would be destructive which is why they are firmly fenced in away from the veg plot. What I hadn't realised is that they would gleefully dig up every single thing that had ever been lost in a given patch of land. They scritch and scratch about unearthing old buttons, drill bits, half tennis balls and long forgotten gardening tools. This was only a half move as the coop and enclosed run stayed put, Mr M, father in law and Isaac just shifting the fence around a bit.

Isaac took the first opportunity to lose his welly and come within an ace of treading in a gigantic chicken poo.

I watched all this from the former granny annex - now dining room, office and general glory hole - and avoided writing essays.

Sunny days mean venturing outside in our endless garden centre weekend trips.

And we have made the acquaintance of Jack. He's a rather lovely Welsh mountain pony belonging to a friend of mine who is kind enough to have let us bring the children over a couple of times to meet him. The first time wasn't a massive success as Isaac wobbled slightly as he settled into the saddle, decided it wasn't for him and demanded to get off. So we took Jack for a walk anyway with Isaac running behind and Eva dragging Mr M into the duck pond (shouting "quack quack!" At least she's right some of the time).

A second visit proved a huge hit and Isaac proudly rode Jack most of the way around the field, swapping with his sister for the last little bit. You'll be amazed to hear that she showed no fear, sitting up there as if she had been there forever. Clip clop went Jack along the path, unpeturbed by the small girl waving the reins and bouncing. "Quack!" shouted Eva.

The D-word

2011-04-16T01:56:00.000-07:00

This is not a blog about depression, which is why I've been a bit quiet of late. I could write about it all, about how it feels, the effect on those around me of the constantly lurking black dog. But I'm not going to. Partly because other people do it so much better than me ( look over there -----> at the blogroll and have a read of Claire's "knitted back together" for starters) but mainly because part of the treatment I've found most effective is to see myself as a well person. Basically, not keep winding on about it all.

But I keep seeing my blog looking all lonely and unloved, with nothing in living memory but a five-second post from a garden centre.

Normal service is about to be resumed. Just as soon as I find my camera. Depression comes and goes, but being a disorganised idiot is for life.

Mother's little helper

2011-03-25T03:51:00.001-07:00

It used to be gin. Nowadays the all purpose sanity saver is soft play.

All weather, tea and cake on tap (for a considerable price) and, god bless em, free wi fi.

Infinite Monkey Boy

2011-02-27T06:28:00.001-08:00

Isaac missed the school year by three days. If he had arrived on his due date, he'd have been born on the twentysome of August. To be fair I never set any store by that and always assumed he'd arrive two weeks late, as his big brother had. In September he will be one of the oldest in the year group - probably the oldest, unless someone sneaks in with a 1st or 2nd of September birthday.

I'm glad. Well, mostly I'm glad. I do sometimes have days where I think wistfully of full time school for him, but on the whole not. It will come around before we know it and the days of doing not much and just being at home will have gone. One thing about having a much older child as well is the perspective it gives you on how fast a childhood goes when you're watching it from the outside. I watch him playing, running around with the chickens or cuddling up to us on the sofa and think that it's right he's here with us, he would be too young for full time school just now.

He loves watching me type things on the computer and regularly has his turn, typing reams of gibberish in the colour of his choice onto the screen. He looks at books, knowing the stories and catching us out if we try to abridge a little in the interests of getting to sleep. He does all the stuff that children his age should be doing, which is a new one on me.

Dan is dyslexic. He couldn't read at all until he was nearly at the end of primary school, and credits his love of Pokemon cards for teaching him to read then. I knew something was up from an early age, and I was pretty sure it was dyslexia by the time he went to primary school but in the way of these things it took a while (and money thrown at it) to get a diagnosis, then much longer for it to be addressed meaningfully by his school. Strange things happened, like me being told in simple language that I MIGHT READ SOME BOOKS TO HIM and asked if we had any books. This in the Oxford flat I lived in at the time, surrounded by piles of paper and books I was using to do my Masters degree in Literature.

There's a whole load more blog posts, a whole old blog in fact, about the process of school failing Dan and how we ended up home educating him. So Velcro Mummy's blog post the other day rang some bells and made me wonder about the whole thing again. We took Dan out of school for pragmatic reasons rather than ideology, and it was the best option at the time. We've applied for primary school for Isaac and don't anticipate home edding either of the small ones. It's always an option though, and it's good to know what your options are. That's what education does for you after all. Ideally.

One day this month we should hear about his primary school place, which should be in the village school which his dad and aunt went to. I'm reasonably relaxed about him getting in as this particular school has never had anyone appeal to get in, and has never turned away anyone who put it as a first choice. I'm hoping that there wasn't an amazing North Oxfordshire baby boom in 2006 that I don't know about and that he gets his place without fuss.

In the meantime he's banging away on the keyboard, writing who knows what. While I write essays, case studies, competencies. Mr M is doing his Open University science degree and Dan has his A levels in a few weeks.

Look to the light

2011-02-13T06:19:00.001-08:00

It is too soon to declare it sprung, but spring seems to be winding itself up ready. Two weeks back at college have meant some early starts for the 20-something mile drive into the city and the notorious traffic and parking issues that go with that. The other morning I noticed something. As I started the engine and put the lights on full beam, the sky was light. Not properly light but not pitch dark any more. I hadn't had to stumble down the front steps, feeling for each with my heel and inching forwards on the path to be sure there wasn't one last drop to catch me out.

There are snowdrops out, but none in our garden. Last year I remember sitting here with Granny M and telling her the bulbs were coming up, that there were snowdrops. She shuddered and told me never to bring them into the house because they bring a death with them. Perhaps that's why there aren't any in her garden either. She said the snowdrops were out when they buried her father and she'd never liked them since.

It's hard to say whether she'll notice the flowers this year. It's her 91st birthday tomorrow. Last year she walked into the village hall for a surprise party packed with family and friends. This year she will celebrate sitting in a wheelchair in the nursing home she has been in since November.

She might be right about the Snowdrops; certainly this time of year has been when people have died in my experience. Two weeks ago I went to the crematorium for the funeral of someone I used to work with. It was one of those strange occasions when you're pleased to see so many old faces and catch up a bit, but it's terribly inappropriate to say how lovely it is to be together again. Because my colleagues were all terribly inappropriate most of the time, we stood at the back, resurrected old jokes and giggled. I like to think Linda would have been pleased, or at the very least not surprised.

Appropriately perhaps, we used to call the dark arse-end of the year after her. Linda's weeks, the worst point in the school year when the shine had gone off everyone's new pencil cases but long before there were exams looming or the promise of longer days and time spent outside. The first flowers and spring half term, another school year will be done before we know it.

For me, the end of the academic year will bring 200 hours on the delivery suite of the busy hospital, a tertiary unit which takes women with complicated pregnancies for the surrounding counties. This will coincide with Dan's A level exams. I don't know which of us feels least prepared but we're both nervous already. With luck we'll both be finished by the middle of June and have the summer to look forward to.

Unreasonable Jam

2011-01-17T03:44:00.001-08:00

The freezer is full of blackberries and raspberries, picked from the garden and the hedges by Mr M and Isaac during the autumn. At the time I had no ideas about what to do with them all, so we put them in bags and boxes and froze them.

It's been getting steadily more annoying, not having much space to fill with oven chips, Mr Brains Faggots and all the other detritus of a family fuelled by rubbish food most of the time. So out they came yesterday, at least just under a kilo of them, and were made into jam. I initially referred to it as "unseasonal jam" but an internet weirdy friend of mine (I'll charitably assume she's sleep deprived with a new baby) misread it as unreasonable jam. So unreasonable jam it is.

Unreasonably time consuming to do on a whim, really. Taking up the oven to sterilize jars and the hob with me hovering anxiously over the madly boiling fruit and sugar, peering at the sugar thermometer and wiping up splashes on the worktop before Mr M went mad with anxiety about the dark red gloop staining the new wood.

In the end I chickened out, when the required time had been and gone and the thermometer still read a few degrees below the "jam" setting. But the frozen plate test showed jam cooling and wrinkling when pushed, as instructed. And it worked. I'm delighted, it feels like the sort of thing I should be doing (in between oven chips and faggots) along with collecting the eggs and dillying about the place in a floral apron.

It is unreasonably gorgeous. Proper thick, intensely fruity home made jam. Next stop the WI and the village fete.

Glut

2011-01-15T09:17:00.000-08:00

The chickens didn't enjoy the snow. We moved them to new, bigger winter quarters at the back end of last year as they were starting to look a bit woebegone in their run once all the grass was gone and it got really muddy. Even so, I worried about them in the snow and ice. My chicken book and other chicken keeping buddies assured me they'd be fine and would just spend most days inside their little shed, huddled up together but I still fretted a bit.
Amazingly they carried on laying. It's been a rare day that we haven't had 8 eggs, so one each for the remaining chickens. We only ever got 8 eggs a day and one of the little red ones died suddenly a couple of months back, so we realised she'd probably never been laying.

8 eggs a day. That's 56 a week, fact fans. Even with 2/3 of them belonging by rights to my parents in law, that's a lot of egg sandwiches. It works brilliantly for me as I'm not a hyper organised alpha mummy and even Mr M's domestic abilities don't extend to actually having enough food to last us to the next shopping day. So at least there's always eggs for lunch for the children while we sit around procrastinating about going to Sainsbury's.

Egg sandwiches. Scrambled eggs. Omlettes. Yorkshire pudding and toad-in-the-hole (and what a difference using mega-fresh eggs makes; they rise to amazing heights). But there's a limit. We have used as many as we can, I even made an extravagant Nigella cheesecake which uses six eggs, just for the sake of it. And yet we're still completely stacked up with eggs. Ideas gratefully received.

Same but different

2011-01-11T01:45:00.001-08:00

Antenatal class at the community hospital. Midwife and I doing a double act, seeing how we approach things differently to try to do the same impossible thing - prepare people who have never had a baby for the reality of birth and the newborn days.

It was different to my NCT teaching; all in one long morning, such a short time to try to get so much done. But the questions were the same, the ones you can't answer. How long is a labour? How much will it hurt? How much sleep will we get? When will I know why my baby is crying?

If I could answer them honestly I'd make a fortune, but I can't and neither can anyone else. It's one of my ongoing rants that anybody who writes a book or does a TV show which promises that life with a new baby will be predictable, easy, ordered is possibly not telling the whole story.

We had lots of fun, but seeing my teaching "baby" all wrapped up in an NHS stretchy blanket in the hospital crib and comparing its unnatural smoothness to the wonderful reality of the day old baby we saw later on just brought it home to me all the more. I'll keep doing it because I believe passionately in education, including antenatal education, and I'll keep passing a plastic dolly around the group of expectant parents, acknowledging with them that it's not realistic. What else can we do?

Rubbish Photography

2010-12-11T01:16:00.001-08:00

A few days ago, one of my oldest friends (and we're getting very, very old now) complained that the worst thing about the snow would be the spate of rubbish photos of it clogging up the internet.

So, I decided to take the camera out one very cold morning when I went to do the chickens and take some pictures to prove him absolutely right.

There's a satisfying sense of full-circleness about this, as I remember blogging about the snow at the start of this year, taking pictures out of the window at our old house of a group of people milling about trying to stop foolish drivers hitting parked cars by sweeping and shovelling the snow and pushing the cars as they came along. A bit like curling.

I wish I could take good photographs. I'm a bit further on than I was a couple of years ago, in that I can recognise good pictures when I see them and can even tell you what's good about them (and how they differ from my hamfisted snapshots.) So I look at pictures taken by my internet weirdy friends Spud and Vix and marvel. Then take my little point-and-shoot thingy out and get things out of focus, or upside-down, or with a child in the background picking their nose or something. Sigh.

Mr M takes a good picture though. I would post some of his, just to make this blog look better, but unfortunately his hard drive is currently being "mended" - ie given to my friend Simon to smack it with a spanner in the hope that we can salvage some of the stuff on there. So you're stuck with me.

pelvic floor? Don't make me laugh

2010-12-05T02:02:00.001-08:00

If you've ever wondered what stopped all your internal organs falling straight out of your bum, that's them. Only not actually plasticine, in the same way that real pelvises don't have plastic bolts to loosen and tighten up the joints. Could have done with those, mind you, with the pelvic girdle pain in pregnancies two and three.

Making plasticine muscles came at the end of a run of ten days without a break for me, on placement then back in college. So hysteria levels were pretty high, even before a colleague decided to make the anal sphincter muscles brown and I saw the haemorrhoid purple strip still sitting in the packet. I am loving everything about midwifery but the scope for endless jokes about bodily functions is an unexpected bonus.

It's a family failing. Get me, my brother and my dad around a dinner table, give us a couple of glasses of wine each and mention farting. Instant helpless laughter. It's not big, it's not clever but bloody hell it's funny and sometimes that's what you need.

When I worked in a difficult inner-city school, the Friday afternoon hilarity was what kept us all going from week to week. Driving home with my eyes still streaming and stomach muscles aching made it all seem not quite so bad. I don't have many fond memories of teaching, but the gang of us known as the Slackers' Tea Club falling about the staffroom at 4.30 on a Friday is an exception.

Meanwhile, family life goes on. Dan's school bus got stuck in the ice and Mr M had to go and rescue him at 7pm from the village they'd finally reached, having got on the bus at half three. Eva is up on her feet and walking and at least I didn't miss the first shoe shopping even though I am missing so much else. Do I feel guilty? Don't know. I genuinely don't know. Perhaps it's a kind of meta-guilt; feeling guilty about whether or not I should feel guilty. After all as we all know a mother's place is in the wrong, whatever choices you make. I can't feel bad for enjoying time out of the house learning new things and doing new stuff and Mr M is having a fine time being a domestic goddess, counting his chickens and making pies. Sometimes I'm jealous of his time with the children, but then I'm an awkward sod because four months ago I couldn't wait to get out of the house.

Still, you've got to laugh.

Minus Eight

2010-11-28T15:33:00.000-08:00

We have no snow yet, but we have ice. Lots and lots of frost and ice on the roads. The outside tap was frozen solid this morning and so was the chickens' water. Mr M was stomping in and out of the garden as I was defrosting the car, persuading myself that driving ten miles or so on probably ungritted country roads would be just fine. I would have wussed out completely and not gone in if I didn't need to count the hours on placement (and if I hadn't had a scary conversation about professional behaviour with a scary midwife yesterday)

I would have wussed out halfway and driven around the very, very long way via the nearest town except that the road there is closed all week for roadworks.

But, I got there surprisingly easily. It turns out that there are a few things that community midwives shouldn't leave in the boots of cars overnight in this weather, among which are alcohol hand gel - so cold it burns isn't a good thing - and surgical gloves. Again, trying to put them on with the fingers making cracking noises isn't reassuring for the woman whose post-baby belly you're about to prod.

Erratum Notice

2010-11-01T11:35:00.001-07:00

In yesterday's post, I reported that the only things left growing in the veg patch were Jerusalem artichokes.

MrM would like it to be known that the following are also available:

- parsnips
- swede
- pak choi
- the last of the raspberries (ready frozen, seemingly)
- some ropey old peas that even the chickens won't eat
- next year's garlic

I apologise for any confusion.

Timeslip

2010-10-31T02:20:00.001-07:00

The last time I looked out of the window, it was summer. There were leaves on the trees and the pears were nearly ready. We were still getting salad in from the garden and every day involved a detour from the chickens' run to the raspberry canes and the tomato plants to eat greedy handfuls of whatever was ready.

Look at it now. The only thing left in the veg patch are the gigantic Jerusalem fartichoke plants. We think they're ready to eat, we're just not sure we dare, or at least not within 24 hours of being in polite company. In my experience, home grown veg are more like themselves than the supermarket equivalent; lettuce tastes like rocket and the homegrown version of that blows your head off. We're still working our way through the plastic bag of dried and flaked red chillies that we grew in the old house about four years ago. A scant teaspoon in a vat of curry to last us all two days is more than enough of that. So I am pretty concerned about home grown artichokes and their well known gastric side effects.

The clocks went back last night. I was on call so slept fitfully, my clothes and car keys laid out in the bathroom and my bag, ID badges, comfortable (and washable) shoes and hand gel ready by the front door. As usual nothing happened and I'm confident I'd hear the phone. Mr M will tell you I'm a light sleeper, woken into a rage by cars driving past, the boiler firing up or by his trying to eat something anywhere in the house while I'm sleeping. Yes, that's weird, I know that's weird. I never could listen to people eating without getting the shudders and the merest hint of crunch or slurp will wake me up instantly. So I'm sure I would have heard the phone, but it didn't ring.

I was momentarily confused by looking at the clock and seeing it was 1.13am when the last time it had said 1.48. Then more confused that the heating timer had magically gone wrong by an hour. It took me a while to work that one out. So it's probably just as well no one expected me to be awake and alert last night. Awake, inevitably. Alert? Not so much.

I know it's a dreadful cliche to ponder how fast time goes, so I'm not even going to try to find anything original to say about it. But, bloody hell, where is the time going?

Why I love IKEA

2010-10-17T04:36:00.001-07:00

Well I must be pretty fond of it, as we've been two Saturdays on the trot. Last week we bought the kitchen cupboards for the wall along one side and yesterday we returned (minus children) for the rest, up to and very much including the kitchen sink.

The woman in the depot looked doubting as she checked out our three flat-bed trolleys full of boxes and packets. "You've got a van coming as well, haven't you?" she asked, watching Mr M flatten the seats down in the back of our car.

"It'll be fine!" I replied breezily.

Between you and me, I wasn't so sure. Looking at the amount of stuff, plus the obligatory bags of Daim bars, packets of sauce for meatballs and lingonberry jam. But we did it. Well, I say "we". My contribution was muttering about how it wasn't going to fit, through a mouthful of green-marzipanned cake.

It's not a journey I'd care to do too often. It did all fit, but necessitated me sitting in the seat behind Mr M, with the sink across my lap and boxes poised to slide forwards and decapitate us should we need to stop suddenly.

But yes, I have to confess, I do love IKEA. Ever since the first trip to the newly opened one on the North Circular sometime in the late 80s, bringing back the first of many Billy bookcases, and the first allen key to get lost in the back of a drawer somewhere.

It's not just Billy bookcase and green cake that gets my vote. It's the free childcare - which frankly is enough to get most parents flocking there I should think. It's the lukewarm meatballs, jam and chips in the cafe with the teeny weeny cups of coffee. All those tempting baskets all the way round the shop, offering you 69p cushions and frying pans for a quid that you never knew you needed - and that's before you get to the Aladdin's cave that is the market place.

Despite Mr M and I sneaking off child-free for a hot date over the meatballs yesterday, I'm a huge fan of IKEA's family centred approach. The NCT award for the most breastfeeding friendly place in the UK was well deserved in my opinion. Not just for the semi-secluded little baby places in the cafe - with a more hidden, comfortable chaired little corner behind it. Bit of a contrast to some of the "helpful" baby feeding rooms hidden away in shops, with a single chair next to a stinking nappy bin or worse still a suggestion that the appropriate place for a breastfeeding baby is in the toilets.

I have fond memories of a trip to Milton Keynes IKEA when it first opened, with K the ex-door neighbour. Her daughter was a few weeks old and I was heavily pregnant with Isaac. It was high summer and I was hobbling around on crutches, so progress was slow. We got most of the way around but then the baby woke up and my achey pelvis packed up, so K and I sat on the display of rattan garden furniture (on a fake grass covered plinth if memory serves) and she fed her baby while I sat, swearing and grimacing, waiting for the SPD pain to fade. A member of IKEA staff approached, a man. I mentally steeled myself for a battle. But no. He did ask if we were aware that there was a breastfeeding area in the cafe, then made it quite clear that we were welcome to sit on their conservatory chairs, and did we need anything?

So hoorah for IKEA; allen keys, stupidly named furniture, meatballs and all. Daim bar, anyone?

A Trip to the Islets of Langerhans

2010-09-30T11:15:00.000-07:00

Sounds nice, doesn't it? A remote set of rocks off the Scottish coast, I'd have guessed at, if you'd asked me last week.

Nah-uh.

They turn out to be bits of pancreas. The important bits apparently. How do I know this? Because I have my first essay to write, and for this I need to know lots and lots about diabetes.

I am starting from a position of knowing the square root of nothing about diabetes. This is one of the downsides of starting a BSc - yes folks, a bachelor of SCIENCE - degree when one's background is in the arts. First time around it was all Lake Isle of Inisfree and four hours' light lectures a week to fit in around the drinking of beer and smoking of Embassy No1. I am pretty daunted by the hours and the workload for this course. This week has been about taking in massive quantities of information from practical work and lectures, with dire warnings about the software used to detect plagiarism thrown in. I have discovered that I might have the large bust and fondness for bum jokes required for midwifery, but that taking blood pressure or putting sterile gloves on without making a bish of it are going to take work.

(I don't have any of Mr M's photos of Scilly or the Lakes or anywhere on this computer so took this image from the Wikipedia page about the Isles of Scilly. Which are very nice, and a much better holiday destination than the Islets of Langerhans)

getting old quickly

2010-09-21T09:31:00.000-07:00

Day two back at college, and I tried going by train. I'd looked forward to this, actually. In a sad way it seemed an affirmation of being out in the big world again. Stay at home mums with rolled up trousers and crocs covered in chicken poo don't queue up in the station in the mornings. Useful, working people do. (And yes, yes I'm being ironic. Being a stay at home parent is far too much like hard work for me and I am so happy to hand that particular baton over to Mr M.)

So. To the station. Narrowly avoided getting on the wrong train in my haste to appear useful and efficient. Then looked at the departures board to sort out which train I should really be on.

Delayed by 20 minutes.

Back up to the main concourse (big, efficient, working person's bag starting to feel heavy already) and decide to hang the expense and blow £1.20 on a cappuccino. Having forgotten my book, watching the other useful people coming and going quickly got boring. I would have bought a paper but it would have added more weight to the efficient bag which I was horribly aware I'd have to carry from the station at the other end.

Then my phone rang. The mechanic, looking at my car for the past few days, had finally caught it cutting out. Just the once, but the once was enough and he concurred with our feeling that it was an engine fault and one that would prove fatal. I've left him looking out prices for second hand and reconditioned engines. Damn thing is only six years old.

But having fallen out of love with the train as a form of commuting, the rest of the day was brilliant. Particularly the freshers' fair. Not that we joined any of the socs, groups, churches or otherwise. I wandered through the noisy, dark, smelly hall that functions as the University's main social venue, walloping passing 18 year olds with my big bag if they got in my way. Then we sat on the grass outside, drinking tea from our thermos flasks and cackling with laughter about it all. My fellow mature student is also a previous graduate and we realised how much bloody better it all is this time, sitting and watching the teenagers jostling for social position from a vantage point of a grassy bank, with comfortable big bags and a flask of tea, not caring what we looked like or whether we'd fit in with anyone.

Back to School

2010-09-19T12:03:00.001-07:00

It's autumn. Today was a thick-tights-and-boots day, a trip to a woodsmoke smelling country pub to fuel up on rare roast beef and tiramisu before term starts.

I'm off to be a student again tomorrow. I have my school bag (bought in a tearing hurry this afternoon, twenty minutes before the shops shut) my thermos, my pencil case with a Hello Kitty pen in it, all the documentation I need to prove who I am and that the NHS are stumping up the cash to train me, and a galloping case of nerves.

There are things I can and can't blog about during the midwifery training. The Nursing and Midwifery Council is pretty hot on midwives and students making a menace of themselves online and saying things they shouldn't. So I'm hoping I can talk in general terms about my own thoughts and reactions, but I won't be able to share gorey details with you.

I'd love to write a midwife blog like a pale imitation of Spence Kennedy's "Siren Voices" (I think he's an ex English teacher too!) but if I do, I won't be able to link you to it or even tell you about it, because then I'd have to shoot you.

Wish me luck.

Moving On

2010-09-19T03:43:00.001-07:00

My parents have moved house. This in itself is A Big Deal, but especially so because it means we now have no family home in London. I grew up in North London and even though I left years and years ago I've always been able to go and stay with the parents and go to see all the old haunts.

Not that I have, not for ages, but I could have if I wanted to. That's the important thing. If I'd suddenly taken it into my head to go to the pub in High Barnet where I did most of my underage drinking, or drive past our now unrecognisably extended old house I could.

But no more. Mum and Dad bit the bullet and took the decision to leave the metrop. and start a new life in NotLondon.

The new house is gorgeous, though I did a bit of sneering about how it's not real countryside. Streetlights? Pah. Illumination for urban lightweights. Gas? GAS? That makes it practically Zone 1. We'll draw a veil over the shops and the train station.

The new house is new; a bit of 21st century, double-glazed and insulated marvellousness. My parents may be the only people ever to want to move to the country yet shudder with horror at the pictures of Delightful Period Properties and Little Pieces of Village History in the estate agents' windows.

They've just left that behind, original tiles, pebble dash, painted-shut leaded lights and all.

The house they moved from was built in the late 1920s, bought by my great grandfather who was the first person to live in it. My father has always known that house, as his grandparents' place, later to live in as a child and then inherited when his parents died. Lovely to have so much family history in a place, but not necessarily in the form of all the accumulated toot and rubbish of decades in the cupboards. Because no one ever actually moved out of the place totally, things were just pushed a little further back as the new owners' possessions took over. Going through the books with Mum we found the multple copies of Tennyson, Dickens and the Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam owned by various defunct Victorian lady relatives. The kitchen was stacked up with Spode dinner services and 1920s coffee pots.

The pebble dashed exterior was the reason we were not allowed to have upstairs windows open when we visited as children. Granny was given to worrying about things and one of her major fears was that squirrels would shin up the pebble dash, through the open window, up her nylon slacks and bite her throat. To my knowledge, this isn't something squirrels are especially given to doing but in a spirit of safety first, the windows were painted shut.

But now, it's someone else's. It's always sad thinking that you'll never go back to an old house, but in so many ways you can never go back anyway. The London my Dad grew up in is long gone and the house will always be part of our lives. I'll always be a Londoner in some ways - certainly, I'll always be only a pretendy country person at best, constantly open to good-natured mutterings of "bloody towny" from Mr M and his parents when I say or do something unwittingly urban.

Fete worse than death

2010-09-05T11:12:00.000-07:00

Torrential rain all morning. A field, gate propped open and three or four women with St John's Ambulance uniform sitting on camping chairs beside it. Two or three stalls selling books, toys, a tombola. In the centre, a little ring made of hay bales. The dog show is three teenage girls walking their dogs round and round, one dressed unaccountably as Tinkerbell (girl, not dog).

Coconut shy, Aunt Sally - the local game involving chucking lumps of wood at a little dolly thing on a post - and a bouncy castle. Someone leads a pony up and down, a different child on board at every turn. There is only one riding hat; on the smaller ones it tips forward-back-sideways. For the more adventurous traveller, a go round the block in a horse and cart, involving a right turn across the main road back into the car park.

Mysterious balloon animals given to small children by a wandering magician type wearing a striped blazer. Morris dancers lumbering into a creaky trot to bash their little sticks together and jingle their knee bells. Their fiddle and accordian combo fights against the hurdy gurdy which is playing a medley of Andrew Lloyd Webber tunes.

And some damn fine Gloucester Old Spot pulled pork in a roll, chunky coleslaw and smokey beans on the side. Leisurely wandering around, saying hello to people we've not seen for ages. Isaac jumps ecstatically on the bouncy castle, buys a 5p Spiderman toy from the white elephant stall, loves the pony. It's the end of summer and an English village fete. Love it.

Virtually Inseparable

2010-09-03T07:37:00.000-07:00

Most of my friends are imaginary.

As the years have gone on and things have got more busy it's just happened that my real (or "IRL" friends) are less a part of my daily life and the pretend people who live in my computer have assumed more importance.

I sometimes hear people lamenting the way relationships are conducted via the internet, as if it's somehow not actually real. As if those friendships aren't as genuine as those which happen face to face. Not so, in my experience. Some of my friends started off as IRL ones; school, college, work or whatever. Time and distance mean we see each other less and less often, but I know what's going on in their lives through twitter, facebook, flickr - photos and little verbal snapshots, the odd direct message, blogs. Some of my friends have gone the other way, in that they were initially a nom-de-screen and are now people who I would recognise if I saw them in the street. In fact, I go out of my way to see them if at all possible. And some will probably always stay as virtual mates.

Recent interactions have included driving to the other side of the Cotswolds to deliver some TENS machine pads to a forum buddy about to have a baby. Her 39 week pregnancy bump reassured me that she still wasn't actually a 50 year old male lorry driver called Jeff (always a worry). The rest of the TENS machine is currently with another friend I originally met on a forum. Tuesday afternoon was spent in the post office, queuing amongst the hordes taxing their cars with a parcel of Marks & Spencer mini teacakes to send to Switzerland.

In return, I've had parcels of stuff arrive. Support, advice, a kick up the bum when needed and lots of real tear-pouring belly laughs.

So, mostly they're not fifty year old male lorry drivers called Jeff. Or at least, the ones who claim to be thirtysomething mums, academics, writers, teachers, students... all the stuff we all are.

In seventeen days, I'll be a student midwife. I know this without counting on my fingers because one of the websites I frequent tells me so. It's also led to me knowing most of my cohort of fellow studes before we even start. As ever, some of them I've now met IRL, some I've yet to clap eyes on properly - but we're already sharing hopes and fears, laughs and anxieties and lists of what to take on day one. So different from my first trip to Uni almost two decades ago, when I turned up never having seen the place and not knowing a soul.

The UCAS form (or UCCA as it was in those days) had to be photocopied, so I could practise writing out my personal statement without spelling mistakes, blots or running out of room. This time I filled it in online, tweaking the statement until it fitted exactly, then firing it off at the click of a mouse with only my credit card details for company. We've just finished writing Dan's personal statement as well, ready for his electronic applications to Uni in the next few months.

A lot of the essays for my first degree were hand written, side after side of black ink pen. Information came from books from the library. A real library that you had to, like, actually go to. Now, various subscriptions deliver me journal articles by email or post. No more essays written using whatever sources happened to be left on the shelves after everyone more organised had roared through and taken what they wanted.

Sure, the internet isn't perfect. It's neutral, like any other type of technology. It's a gigantic library and meeting place, it also allows spurious credibility to any nutter who can build a website. It enables groups of people with bonkers ideas or strange interests to congregate and give themselves a sense of acceptability or normality. Which is why it's important that us dullards clutter it up with ordinary stuff, with journal articles, with blogs and facebook and photos on flickr. So it's just like real life.

splash

2010-08-27T09:47:00.000-07:00

This picture was taken last year, at about this time. So it rained a lot then as well.

It chucked it down from mid afternoon on Wednesday, pouring off the gutters all night. The chickens were pathetic little bundles of wet feather, their food turning to a horrible mush at the bottom of the feeders. The road was a river.

I lay awake listening to it all. Wondering what we would see in the morning in the way of waterlogged garden, chicken hut sliding down the slope, the whole world washed away. In the event it was all OK once the sun came up, as it always is, but middle of the night worry is so much worse without streetlamps somehow. The dark out here is properly dark - well, except for the security lights on the front/side/back of Granny M's annex which she sometimes leaves on, sometimes off, mistaking them for the bathroom or kitchen lights.

I found myself planning for how to get to University when term starts if we are snowed in or the road flooded. Half dreamed half imagined myself setting off to wade through knee deep puddles and mud, unable to make the 20 mile journey. My course starts on 20th September, less than a month away. I might have run out of things to fret about by then. Maybe not. In my experience, a rainy 3am in the dark will always throw up a few new worries whilst letting the old favourite nightmares out for a canter.

Nothing To See Here

2010-08-20T03:25:00.001-07:00

I keep avoiding blogging because I can't put pictures on at the moment. Well I could, really quite easily, but it would involve going out of the front door and down to the shed/office to get the card reader from Mr M's computer desk.

And it's cold.

Summer seems to be over for the moment. No more watering of the garden needed, which is good, but that has been swapped for sliding around in mud whilst doing the chickens and looking gloomily out at the same line of washing getting wet/almost dry/wet/almost dry for the third day running now.

Edible Greens (and reds, purples, yellows, pinks...)

2010-08-02T07:21:00.001-07:00

Look at those colours, and they're so much better in real life. I've never been at all fussed about petunias - ditchwater dull bedding plants surrounding everyone's patios circa 1980, I've always thought. But we went to an open day at a local plant nursery the other evening and I just fell in love with this gorgeous lime green and raspberry striped number.

Similarly, I've never much seen the point of dahlias, but these were lovely. Proper dark foliage, almost as if they were made of metal.

In the centre of the trial beds, they had a kind of obelisk. They were obviously trying to flog us this rather impressive grow-stuff-up-the-walls device. And looky look - a wildflower meadow, only vertical. OK so it's tricksy, takes a lot of doing (and probably a lot of water) but isn't that what buildings should look like? How cool would it be if you wandered through cities which were full of vertical lawns, meadows, veg gardens?

I'm such a bumpkin these days, I get all twitchy if I'm away from greenery for more than a few hours. I had to go to a suburb of London to teach on Saturday and I hated it. I grew up in North London and I still get a stab of homesickness whenever I see the London Underground line-through-circle logo or a gasometer - but I'm afraid I couldn't live there any more. I'm too used to notLondon. I need trees and flowers and grass and stuff in my immediate vicinity.

I think it's good for people, actually. I think we're supposed to be near plants. After all, without 'em we'd be hard pushed to breathe. I first noticed my born-again bumpkin state when I was expecting Isaac. Due to unpleasant pregnancy related stuff I wasn't able to walk. Mr M had to push me around in a wheelchair whenever we went out. We were limited as to where we could go as there's only so many places that will give you wheelchairs, plentiful loos and a tea shop. So we did what all the other oldies do and went to garden centres. Lots of garden centres.

One trip out, Mr M abandoned me in the middle of some plant display or other and I found myself leaning towards the leaves, desperate to feel as if I was surrounded by greenery.

A church hall in London didn't do it for me. It was a nice one, but the windows only opened six inches and the only green around was a single tree in the courtyard. I tried sticking my head out of the window to get some air but all I could smell was traffic.

The plant nursery gave us each a little blue flag to stick in our favourite new plant. Much as I loved the petunia, this got my vote. Again, my rubbish photography lets it down but trust me, the mix of subtle parchment/pink/yellow on the one plant is stunning.

And they're named after a space ship full of space cowboys. GeekLove took over, and the flag was planted.

The next old fogeys' daytrip was Hidcote Manor.

Nick tried to show Isaac how to play croquet on the lawn. He didn't think much to the idea of keeping the mallet within striking distance of the ground, but eventually gave it a go. It didn't seem to be as much fun as waving the mallet around his head.

Then he got in a strop and ran away.

I nearly didn't see the hoverfly.

People are brilliant

2010-07-26T03:49:00.000-07:00

Isn't this great?

http://www.comicsalliance.com/2010/07/22/super-heroes-vs-the-westboro-baptist-church

The highly unpleasant Westboro Baptist Church decided to picket ComicCon.

I love it when things like this happen, when people get together to fight against hate and ignorance with humour.

Crossed Wires`

2010-07-21T11:00:00.000-07:00

Granny M's phone is on the blink. If you phone her number, you get Mrs Perkins, four doors up. Granny M has been answering calls for Mrs Perkins all day. Just now granny's phone rang. After a couple of minutes of obvious confusion she passed the phone to me. It was Mrs Evans from over the road, except Mrs Evans wasn't over the road, she was in the Lake District.

Mrs Evans (from the Lake District) was trying to call her 18 year old son, home alone while they were on holiday.

I went over the road to her house, knocked on her door and told the son that mummy wanted to speak to him but he'd have to call her.

Then back to Granny.

For the third or fourth time she asked me what day it was. Then looked confused when I said I was going to get dinner. She'd just had her breakfast, in the certain belief that it was Thursday morning. That's why she'd given Isaac a plateful of biscuits earlier, because he obviously hadn't had his breakfast yet and was hungry.

I showed her today's paper, and put the telly on. Six o'clock news.

Then told her again that it was Wednesday, and I was going to have my dinner. She Looked at the phone. "It's not working right," she said. Then, as I left, "what time is it? Morning?"

Fourteen

2010-07-17T12:42:00.000-07:00

Is the egg total so far, five full days in. Which means we're down to just under £20 an egg, Isaac went to school with £40 worth of sandwich this week (not including the bread) and I've just burned sixty quid's worth of cupcakes to cinders in the unpredictable oven.

The chickens seem to have settled in. They are happily coming out of the pop hole every morning and putting themselves to bed in the evening. This is a relief to Mr M, who had to put each one into the chicken house on the first night while I let the little portcullis up and down on its bit of garden string. He soon wished he'd had the foresight to put the chicken shed at the tall end of the run, after trying to carry a panicking chicken and avoid the beshitten bits of grass whilst crouched right down. Nine times.

Eva finds them endlessly fascinating as well.

clucky

2010-07-11T10:41:00.001-07:00

We have got some chickens. 9 hybrids of various types, all promising to be friendly, prolific layers and free from the various disasters that beset chickens (except foxes.)

Luckily we have an amazing chicken shop within easy reach so it wasn't too traumatic driving home with two large cardboard boxes full of hens clucking away in the boot. Luckily we have a people carrier, so we could even fit the hay and sawdust bales, feeders, sacks of feed and various other bits that the chickens need. We were even lucky in that the man from the chicken farm had a portable air compressor to pump up our car tyre which seemed to develop a slow puncture on the way there. Having to stop by the side of the road and change a tyre with two crates of chickens in the boot (on top of the spare wheel, obviously) didn't appeal much.

Turns out chicken keeping involves whole new worlds of stuff which need buying.

And paying for. Whilst waiting for the attention of the chicken man (who knew they'd have a queue in the chicken shop?) I got talking to another family who had come to top up their little flock after a visitation from the fox. They've been keeping hens for around five years now, they told me. "We think we've got the unit cost per egg down to about three hundred pounds now," said the father, resignedly watching his wife and daughter trying to decide between different types of pretty chicken.

They are pretty you know. My first foray into chicken husbandry was being shown how to clip their wings, then clipping 8 of the 9 myself before we were allowed to take them away. Only clip one wing, by the way. This is important. They need to be off balance. If you clip both they can flap furiously and still fly, after a fashion. The things you learn.

Chapters of Accidents

2010-06-29T22:57:00.001-07:00

Chapter One: In which a stiff upper lip is indistinguishable from being a stubborn old cuss.

Grandma seems to be uncomfortable and rubbing her chest a lot. When questioned about it she says she thinks her bra is too tight.

When she finally admits to feeling a bit poorly, it takes a bit of questioning to discover she actually means chest pains radiating down her left arm and pins and needles.

She's well into her eighties, the only one of my grandparents left alive. She's been a widow for twenty years now, still in the house that she shared with my Grandpa although her sight has all but gone due to macular degeneration (she wouldn't own up to that one either until the mistakes she made were getting too obvious. She drove herself to the hospital appointment at which the specialist pronounced her blind and reluctantly agreed to hang up her car keys as soon as she got home from that trip.)

In common with many of that generation, the ones who went through the war, she's retained that sense of pride in not making a fuss. It's an admirable trait, but not when she's downplaying the fact that she can't see anything, or that she's having all the symptoms of a heart attack.

She appears fine, as it turns out. ECG and blood tests show nothing major. Just one of those things that happen when you're an active octogenarian. She's been told to slow down a bit, at least set off up the road to the shop with her white stick at a less cracking pace and take a bit more rest.

Chapter Two: In which another stubborn old cuss gives cause for concern

I drove home from work last night after a 9.30 finish. It was lovely; a few minutes pottering about in the church hall I teach in, putting tables away and closing the windows, locking the gates into the quiet churchyard all in the shadow of the church itself. Then off cross-country back home. Once you're out of the market town I teach in it's rural all the way for 40 minutes except for a roundabout across an A road. I still feel ridiculously lucky to have such a restful commute, listening to Radio 4 and driving along tree lined lanes between villages.

Mr M met me at the front door. "Umm..." he said, which is his usual awkward preface to telling me A Bad Thing.

Granny M had fallen over and hit her head. I went in, she was sitting in her chair looking a bit pale, with an obvious large egg on the top of her skull. In the next hour or so, I had three or four different versions as to how it happened, compounded by yet another when my sister in law arrived. So she may or may not have fallen, may have been on the ground for an unspecified time. It might have been in the bathroom or by the front door. Possibly she was watching the football, perhaps opening the door to an imaginary caller.

In any case, she was a 90 year old woman with a bang on the head and some confusion about how it happened.

Would she go to hospital? Would she heck as like. I left her with a promise to phone us or shout if she felt sick or dizzy and a strict injunction to see the doctor in the morning.

She won't.

Chapter Three: In which the author is tempted almost beyond endurance to say "I told you so"

Isaac is a boistrous three year old boy. He does that boy thing of being a super hero and wanting to hit people. I tell him not to. I get a bit pursed lipped and disapproving when Grampy overrules me and encourages him to smack people in fun.

Granny was in the garden, one foot up on a tree stump to tie her laces before climbing over the back fence to walk in the fields. "Go smack granny's bottom," said Grampy. Isaac did.

Hard.

Granny lost her balance and put out an arm to save herself.

There was a loud crack.

She's having her wrist operated on this morning, to put the shattered joint back together.

My poor father in law is beside himself with guilt and worry.

Epilogue:

I spent the day with the ex-door neighbours yesterday. K and I in an unusually quiet house; Eva playing on the floor, one of K's daughters in the playroom making insane pretend meals for us to eat, the Heston Blumenthal of play doh. K's two year old son folded double on the sofa, his head between his feet. He has hypermobile joints as a result of his Down's syndrome and one of his favourite things is to thoughtfully lick his toes while watching the world go by. Even the puppy was still, flat out on the cool kitchen tiles.

K's mother in law has been ill for years, since I've known them. She is at home now, drifting in and out of consciousness, surrounded by her family on and off. K is waiting for news, all the time. Underneath the calm of the day we were both on edge, but the phones stayed quiet.

Time passed.

What I Did On My Holidays

2010-06-28T11:43:00.001-07:00

An almost-last-minute camping trip to Cornwall. Making a virtue of necessity as Mr M hasn't got much work on at the moment and going to the seaside with the two little ones.

We did the usual Cornwall things of Eden Project and Heligan. Third visit for each of them, and I could happily keep going back and back to both. Of the two, I have to say I prefer Heligan. We see a lot of gardens, not least because we're determined to get our money's worth from the National Trust membership. A wander around one of the many NT gardens local to us is a fairly standard day out. So we see a lot of gardens, but my absolute favourite has to be Heligan.

This time, Isaac was old enough to notice the giant and the mud maid (and the new grey lady) in the woodland walk, and has been reading his copy of the book about the Heligan giant ever since. It got us around Eden as well, playing lets-look-for-giants and then actually finding one unexpectedly in one of the little corners that Eden is littered with.

Then a bit of coastal path walking, some bucket and spade action on the beach and a gallon or two of ice cream each.

Meanwhile, Dan had his first go at being left on his own in the house. There appears to be minimal damage, all things considered. A bit of heatstroke from his spending the weekend in a field with his friends, but the house is still standing and he wasn't arrested or forced into any shotgun marriages. So far so good.

happy hooker

2010-06-16T01:26:00.001-07:00

Remember the hat from a few posts back? Here's the finished version, and I use the word loosely (rather like I croched the baggy monstrosity). Apologies for yet more bloggy photos of Eva, by the way, but she's the only member of the family who'll sit still at the moment.

So. Crochet. It isn't going to be my strongest suit, I can see that. I have never ever been good at crafty things although I keep on trying. When I was a little girl I had a beautiful sewing box given to me and access to endless bits of fabric courtesy of my grandad's job as a salesman - he always had loads of those books of samples at the end of every season, and they made their way into my needlework box. Did I ever manage to make the lovely dolls' clothes and things I aimed for? Did I hell. My Sindy dolls were doomed to wear ill-fitting sacks with droopy hems.

Granny taught me to knit, and to her credit it must have stuck because I can still do it now - but all I made was one scarf, red as I recall, which curled in on itself in the way of stocking-stitch scarves and which I gave up on before it was actually long enough to be of any use.

I tried again in adult life; when Dan wanted Action Man toys I didn't want him having one in army uniform or with guns. The solution? Child Psychologist Action Man! Yes, Dan was the only boy in his class who had an action man who wore jeans (made from a too-small pair of Dan's) and a stripey woollen jumper ineptly knitted by mummy. I'm amazed he ever forgave me for that.

And now it's crochet. Today I have finished the Magic Scarf! A bit of what's known as stash busting, using up all the manky coloured wool I bought when I decided to make a granny-square blanket before I'd any idea what I was letting myself in for. How did I end up with quite such a grim collection of mixed-plasticine colours? Well, I half-read the Attic 24 blog and picked up on the idea of using the colours from the garden. I thought of all my favourite plants and went out and grabbed the nearest approximations in horrid itchy acrylic that Hobbycraft could supply. They say that colours don't clash in nature. This may be true but by crikey they do in crochet.

Lucy at Attic 24 justifiably describes herself as "heart-skippy happy" with a lot of her projects. Jaw-clenchy cross is all I've managed with a lot of mine.

Anyone need a big bag of grotty green acrylic yarn?

No one?

Thought not.

She's got a smile

2010-06-10T09:59:00.000-07:00

That it seems to me
Reminds me of childhood memories

Funny thing, having a daughter. Particularly as she seems so utterly familiar. She looks like me, but she also seems to be like me. Her habit of staring intently at people who interest her is just like me as a baby, or so someone told me last weekend. Apparently my mother had to get off the bus on occasions, so embarrassed was she that people were being fixed in my unflinching gaze. She sits on the floor and scolds things that annoy her, shouting “yaa yaa yaa” at them and frowning. If anyone tries to amuse her and fails, the look of withering contempt is straight out of my repertoire (and my mother's, and her mother's.)

Eva comes from a long line of formidable women, so my father says. Which is a marginally polite way of saying scary old battle axes who don't suffer fools gladly and are poor at hiding it.

So when I was in a coffee shop the other day, sharing biscotti with her, and that song came on... A wistful and more sedate cover version as suited to the late thirties sensibilities of those of us who were teenagers when the original came out. The Guns n Roses one is a man talking about a girlfriend. This one, because it's sung by a woman, says mother/daughter to me, possibly with a particular resonance because I first heard it when Eva was tiny and I was just starting to get my head around having a daughter.

We didn't find out her sex before she was born. One of the reasons there is a three year age gap between Isaac and her is because I needed to be sure I didn't mind whether I had a boy or a girl. I had to know that I would be just as delighted, whoever emerged from the birth.

I think it's a good thing that I had a daughter last, and that she waited until I was old enough and tough enough to be a mother to a girl. Particularly one who seems so like me, at first glance. There's a danger I think, for mothers to see daughters as another them, a second chance. Someone to be them but with all the mistakes and mishaps ironed out, all the good bits and none of the bad. I certainly never felt that sense of identification with either of my boys.

So, like the song says, she has a smile that reminds me of childhood memories. And while my childhood memories aren't bad, there is an ambivalence about the idea of her being like me. Like a lot of women I've struggled with chronically low self esteem for a lot of my life. I had some pretty grim times as a teenager, not least because it was obvious from pretty early on that I would be short and round in a world that told me I should be tall and slender. In some ways that's even worse for girls growing up now than it was for me, and that's terrifying. At least for me, in the 1970s and 1980s, feminism was still current rather than being seen as something outdated and laughable which is the sense I get now. There weren't the sheer volume of images of near-naked young women on billboards, in mainstream papers and magazines, on TV. And not everything was pink and sparkly.

Don't get me wrong, I'm quite enjoying the overwhelming pinkness of baby girl accoutrements. Being able to choose between a dress or trousers for her is great, but I want her to be able to make choices as well (and between more important things than dress or trousers) and I worry that the ideal of femininity she'll grow up with is even more restrictive in some ways to the one I was exposed to. It's probably something all parents do, worry about the world their children are growing up into, and I fret about all three of them, the boys as well. I don't think young men have an easy ride at the moment either, far from it.

Oh, sweet child(ren) of mine. You're not mine, you're yours, and don't you forget it.

Here we go

2010-06-06T12:16:00.000-07:00

An early summer day, a bluebell wood, a baby sling so we can go off road, and time to take it all in. It doesn't get a lot better than this.

Letting them go

2010-05-30T13:37:00.000-07:00

The world is a dangerous place. Let me refine that a bit; when you have a baby, the world suddenly seems like a much more dangerous place. When you have babies and one of the gifts the PND gives you is anxiety - then you live in a howling wilderness where every car journey is a potential disaster and every time you wave your children off to school or even out with daddy, you find yourself wondering when you'll hear the dreadful news.

On the whole I'm on top of it. PND and anxiety don't blight my life on a daily basis like they did when I had my first son. But they are there, bubbling under.

I think every parent feels like this to an extent. Getting that balance right between protecting them and shooing them out into the wide world. Because Dan was home educated for four years, the shooing has maybe taken longer and been a bit harder for both of us. This academic year he's returned to school, done what boys do in year 12. So top marks for beer, fags and girls. Not so much on the dedicated hard work. But the year has been a roaring success as far as I'm concerned, not least seeing him head off on the school bus every morning. With bad grace, grumbling all the while as is only right, but heading off nontheless.

The school bus isn't something that featured in my youth; growing up in London we walked to primary school and then got on the 84A service bus to High Barnet for secondary. In those years that I was standing at the bus stop waiting for the infrequent and sometimes altogether absent red double decker, Mr M was getting on various rickety old coaches and rattling about the country lanes on his way to the school he went to, one so rural it had (and still has) its own farm - how cool is that?

Isaac and Eva will follow in his footsteps, pretty literally as they'll get on the school bus to the same primary school two villages away and then the same secondary a village or so in the other direction. Things have changed since he was there; then everyone got on the school bus unless they walked. Now every primary school is clogged up with cars in the morning and evening school runs. Children get out into the middle of a country road, just around a bend and just where the road goes from a 60mph limit down to 30. Last week I was held up by a parent carefully reversing onto the grass verge opposite a school, taking three tries to park her large car right between two of the police "no parking" bollards.

It all seems horribly dangerous. But so does the school bus. A few years back, a local school lost a pupil in a school bus crash. A couple of days ago I was dozing off a headache in the passenger seat as Mr M drove us to collect Isaac when I was awakened by the seatbelt tightening against my neck as the car slid to a halt; we were practically nose to nose with a school bus around one of the numerous narrow bends in the villages. But it has to be safer to go on the bus, right? Statistically? I'd persuaded myself of that.

Until this week's news of a school bus crash in the Lake District. Two children dead, one on her sixteenth birthday. Shudder.

Dan had an AS Physics exam on Thursday. I went out for a chat with him while he leant against the front gate smoking a rollie. Partly to be nosey about his exam, partly to register again my lack of approval for this new hobby of his. "By the way, the school bus crashed," he said. "That's why I was late."

Apparently the combination of yet another new driver, taking his navigation cues from the sixth formers on the bus (yes, those ones, the ones who you'd not trust to find their arses with both hands and a satnav) a stupidly tight corner and a fast car coming the other way... Someone's garden wall is now no more, the car sped off before anyone could get the registration number and my nerves are in shreds.

Apparently the AS Physics exam was "meh". Just in case you were wondering.

Cakefail

2010-05-19T10:43:00.001-07:00

It's a bit of a tradition that I make the birthday cakes around here. Generally I think I'm pretty good (she says, in a simpery false-modest way, hem hem).

It's Mr M's birthday today. I thought it would be nice to make a cake for him, with Isaac's help. I had fond visions of us mixing the batter, watching the sponges rise through the glass oven door then decorating them in an endearing yet semi-competent way. The first part went well; Isaac in his little apron mixing, pouring and even cracking an egg in without adding either shell or snot. Win, as Dan would say. We got 90% of the mixture into the tins without mishap. Isaac set to work eating the last bits out of the bowl while I put the cakes in the oven.

It occurred to me that I possibly should have tried the oven's cake baking credentials out before this. It does seem to run a bit hot, so I turned it down from the usual heat, put the tins in and waited.

Inside ten minutes, thick smoke was pouring out of the oven vents and the cakes were blackened ruins. Luckily my mother in law was able to make a substitute sponge in record time and so birthday tea was rescued. Isaac decorated it with an abstract pattern of plain icing, candles and sugar strands and all was well. Mr M is now celebrating his birthday by going mano a mole in the garden, defending his veg plot from the first lot of predators to threaten the potatoes.

I'm still crocheting hats. Eva seems to like the joke hat and I'm even managing to make a reasonable job of a proper one for her. One day I'll get the hang of this domesticity business.

pre-emptive revenge

2010-05-17T14:23:00.000-07:00

A long time ago I took photos of my eldest son. He was somewhere between six and twelve months old and I'd shampooed his already tufty hair into a mohican. "Those will make me laugh when he's a teenager and driving me mad," I told my friends.

I've no idea where they are now. Which is somewhat of a bummer as Dan is now a teenager and driving me madder than I ever thought possible.

But I think that's what I was doing when I created Isaac some Harry Hill glasses to go with the shirt with a too-high collar, and it's certainly what I was about when I realised I'd started making a crochet hat yesterday. I was just fooling around with some horrible thick acrylic stuff, making and unpicking flat circles. Then it kind of turned into a plate, then a bowl, then a hat.

Then she ate it.

Undaunted, I carried on and made it into actually a passable (if thick and itchy) baby hat, with a frilly brim and everything. It looked familiar. Later, upstairs, I realised where I'd seen that exact pattern before. It's Granny M's crochet bogroll cover. By that time I'd already rushed to the knitting shop for expensive yarn to make a real version of it for Eva. So maybe in years to come, when she's driving us mad with boyfriends, fast cars, smoking, drinking or voting Conservative I can console myself with the fact that she spent her first summer sporting a titfer that looked like a bit of old lady's lavatory decoration.

At long, long last.

2010-05-15T12:22:00.000-07:00

It is a long, long story but finally we own a house in the country. The house needs a lot of work and it took a lot of plotting, planning and stress - but it's done. All the things I thought I'd do; run around the garden (see last post), drink champagne, jump up and down, write a huge blog post about it all... none of them happened. I just felt a bit faint on the phone to the solicitor and then the months of stress resolved themselves into a killer headache. So I'm not going to write more now, but have some pictures to look at in the meantime.

This is the garden as it was, before Mr M got to work on it:

And this is today, from the same place:

We have a system of raised veg beds:

(AND a washing line in the background!)

We have a cut lawn for a little girl to sit on a rug on:

We have pear trees in blossom, with the clematis we took three illicit thumbnail cuttings from in the Lake District two years ago twining up them:

And a toad. We have a toad. Possibly more than one, who knows. There is a brook going past the bottom of the garden after all and a satisfying amount of cool, dark, toady type places. There are also grass snakes, says Mr M, and it's prime adder ground as well. Isaac is being drilled in not going anywhere near any snakes he sees - as he weighs next to nothing he's less likely to disturb them than an adult's footsteps vibrating through the ground. This is probably the only type of wildlife this holds true for; he's desperate to see the fox cubs who are just emerging into the fields but can't appreciate that running arms-outstretched down the hill bellowing "where are the foxes?" lessens his chances.

fretting

2010-05-14T02:04:00.001-07:00

I am waiting for the phone call to tell us that we've completed the house purchase and that New House is finally ours.

If it all goes through, I will be running up and down the garden with my t-shirt over my face like a michelin-man shaped footballer (poor neighbours)

If not... well, there's nothing remotely funny or entertaining to say about that scenario.

I am given to fretting. I come from a fretful family. It has some good points, in that we're all careful planners and fairly meticulous about doing things properly. The bad things in my case are the anxiety and tendency to depression which have dogged me since I was in my early teens. The ME that floored me in 2004 and ended my teaching career is a first cousin to depression and anxiety, or at least that's the theory that makes most sense to me.

It went away, but right now I can feel it lurking again. The stress of the move and the uncertainty about the final outcome combined with a non-sleeping baby, a sporadically sleeping pre-schooler and a teenager with his own battle with depression (SAD in his case) affecting his school work have all combined to give me nightmares and persistent anxious thoughts, which in turn make me tired, achey, jittery.

All this can get better if there's a phone call. Come on, Mr solicitor. For the sake of my health, my teeth (several of them are cracked from my grinding them in my sleep) and my husband's sanity.

Idyll

2010-05-09T00:48:00.000-07:00

In our old house, if you walked down the garden and out of the back gate you came to a car park. On the other side of that was an alley, then another row of houses, more alleys and finally out into the promised land of the co-op, Blockbuster Video and the pub. When I first moved there, we went to the pub every Sunday night to do the quiz. In those halcyon days of 2002 we were the young guns, my next door neighbours and I. Mere striplings of thirtysomething in the squelchy-carpeted, nicotine ceilinged White Horse.

In latter years, some idiot decided to revamp it (probably because most patrons, like us, turned up once a week and survived on a pint or two all evening. Damn this free market.) Overnight, or so it seemed, we were too old, too staid and too quiet for our local. It had become a kind of sports bar designed for those just over the legal drinking age. There was still a quiz, but it quickly became apparent that old gits like us who were more likely to recognise Tommy Steele singing "Half a Sixpence" than Fifty Cent were not the target audience.

So we stayed home and gradually as our families got bigger and our disposable income smaller, we drifted into a routine of a nice cup of tea and some biscuits while small children trashed one or other of our houses.

From New House, if you walk through the scaffolding yard parallel to our garden you come to a stile, then a bridge over the brook. This first bridge has no handrail, it's simply a metal footway less than a metre wide. Over that in single file, Isaac in the middle, and you get into a field. The brook runs through it, past the back of our row of houses to a better bridge. A wooden one, with handrails, and a satisfying number of trees around it to provide pooh sticks.

Mr M can catch fish in Isaac's net, and it's cheaper than going to the pub. I miss K and her family (now known as the ex-door neighbours) terribly, even though we see them a couple of times a week. But I can't say I miss the car park, the co-op, Blockbuster Video or even the White Horse.

Veg Out

2010-05-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

Look! A teeny, tiny salad from the garden!

Thinnings of chard (already bright yellow and red stalks) with spinach, rocket, salad leaves, broccoli and desperately trendy pea shoots.

There's more to come, a lot more to come. We've got about 14x the amount of veg growing space we used to have and Mr M is getting all Charlie Dimmock at every available opportunity

bonfire

2010-04-28T01:27:00.000-07:00

We're nearly finished with the extension. The building controller is almost happy (one more extractor fan and he'll be ecstatic) so as far as I know it's not about to fall straight down again. The walls are painted, the curtain poles up and the tiles grouted. I did that. I grouted away like billy-oh, using first my finger then a cloth and nearly resorting to a teaspoon but still managing to make it look like a dog's dinner.

Mr M took a look at it, then suggested that I return to my usual activities of nominally caring for the children whilst faffing around on the internet. He finished the grouting in an efficient few minutes, making less mess and doing more tiles than I'd managed in a couple of hours.

Today we have the carpet men here. Later on, mother-in-law and I will be taking a bucket of hot water to all the surfaces, hanging the curtains and starting to move furniture in.

Outside, there's a bonfire. Daddy and Isaac - as ever - are out there, throwing plasterboard, ends of spare timber, branches cut off the trees onto the fire. Unfortunately another thing on there is some of Granny M's furniture, which not only fell to bits when we moved it, but turned out to be riddled with woodworm. That's why the bonfire has to be lit today, regardless of wind direction (we'll be unpopular with the neighbours) because Granny M will be arriving home on Friday and the sight of her furniture on the bonfire heap would be too much to expect anyone to bear. At least the woodworm was confined to one or two pieces and everything else has been treated and cleaned up ready to be put into place in her new rooms.

I going outside with Daddy!

2010-04-27T14:42:00.000-07:00

Is mostly what I hear from Isaac these days. At every opportunity he puts on his Thomas the Tank Engine wellies (old, now covered in brick dust, plaster and paint as well as mud) often as not on the wrong feet, lets himself out of the front door and swings through the railing down the steps and runs down the slope into the garden to find his daddy.

This evening I watched them from the back window while the sky darkened and the cars coming past on the road started to have first sidelights then full headlights on. They walked up and down past the raised veg beds carrying the watering can, tools and seeds. Isaac stood still, obviously told to be careful by daddy, gravely holding out a handful of veg seeds and watching as they were put into the ground.

It was way past bedtime, but some things are more important than bath and bed on time every evening. It's been a long time coming, and this is what we moved for, to be able to see a little boy (and later on, his little sister) running up and down a garden in the country.

onwards and upwards

2010-04-21T04:26:00.001-07:00

We're here. Finally.

Well, to be accurate we've been living here in new house almost a month now, but it's taken until two days ago to get broadband installed. After many phone calls to our new ISP and BT, someone has finally put 50p in the meter in the exchange for us and lo and behold, we are back in the 21st century.

We also have a working boiler, as of yesterday. As part of the granny flat building, the boiler has had to be moved from what will be Granny M's bedroom into the kitchen. We were told it would take a day "or so," but in the event the "or so" turned out to be a week. As is always the way with these things every part of the process has taken far longer and been much more of a pain in the arse than was originally bargained for.

In the meantime, we have been getting used to living here. The house isn't quite ours yet, but we should complete soon. It is feeling like home now. I am becoming familiar with the way the sun moves around the house, where the warm places are (sunshine full through the back windows in the morning; open the curtains on the landing and bask while looking out at the garden) and what the usual creaks and noises are as the house settles for the night.

Visiting K, now known as the ex-door neighbour, our old house looks as if the new people have always lived there. Different curtains on the windows, new ornaments on the sills. The "sold" sign finally taken down. I'm surprised by how little I mind seeing it. Perhaps nostalgia for it will creep up on me over the years, as it has for other houses I've lived in. Last night I dreamed of the house I grew up in, walking through it and seeing tiles, wallpaper - things I'd forgotten in my conscious mind - and crying with relief that I was "home".

Then I wake up and I'm 37 not 17, and I am married with three children. I haven't lived in London properly since 1996. So why does that house still form my pattern of "home?"

I hope you like my new stair carpet by the way. I'm inordinately proud of it. One of Dan's friends sneered at it and I told them I'd had it imported especially. From the 1970s. "As late as that?" they asked.

You haven't seen me

2010-03-21T03:17:00.001-07:00

I shouldn't be here, as I'm at home on the premise that I'm packing up the kitchen and getting ready for moving on Thursday. But I'm feeling guilty about not blogging, so here I am. Don't tell Mr M, will you?

He's at New House, doing the garden. As his dad has pointed out, we're not moving into the garden - so perhaps making sure we had, I don't know, some heating, some plumbing for a washing machine or some space to put our furniture might also be a plan. However, the garden is also a priority. As you can see, the potatoes are chitting away and need to be got into the ground so we can have 3 lots of homegrown spuds through the course of the year. He's also agreed to grow rhubarb and Jerusalem artichokes just for me, so I can't complain.

I'm really excited about spring coming this year. There are lambs bouncing about in the fields on the way from here to New House. The flowers are finally coming out; snowdrops a couple of weeks ago giving way to the first crocuses now, with daffodils and tulips promising to be here soon. It's a good time to move, with all that promise in the air and the sunshine and longer days making everything seem better.

It's the first day of spring, the equinox and incidentally my aunt's birthday today. Dan needs the laptop to write his Philosophy A level essay; the academic year has turned as well and suddenly the exams are not far away. Before we know it, it'll be another summer. Our first summer living in the country.

But first, I have to pack the kitchen. If you see me here again before next week, kick me.

Fly in the Ointment Documentary

2010-03-01T00:15:00.000-08:00

I admit it, I'm a birth junkie. Like pretty much every other wannabe student midwife and/or NCT teacher around, I'm just stunned by the whole thing. So when I saw the trailers for Channel 4's series “One Born Every Minute” I looked forward to a whole load of legitimate birth-obsessing. And I have to say I've enjoyed it immensely. But, but, but... It was trailed as realistic. A real insight into a real maternity unit. So why have we seen only one normal birth on it, and even she came in by ambulance, for no known reason (something that Suzi over at NeeNaw would probably have something to say about!)

We've seen one little tiny bit of a good birth. Aside from that it's been fascinating – but atypical. And, I suspect, hammed up. I was properly cross at the way last week's episode added dramatic music over film of a newborn being taken to the resuscitaire, then went to an ad break. Oh it kept us on the edge of our seats alright, but for those of us who have been that mother, waiting for that first cry while all you can see is people in scrubs working over a tiny, grey body...

I am cross that there was no warning that it showed scenes of a baby being resuscitated. I am cross that they used that baby's condition as a hook to keep us watching. But most of all I am sad and furious that this is what is being portrayed as “normal” - as what happens, in their words, “every minute”

Because it's not.

OK, so I'm a lentil knitter. I'm an NCT teacher, I have more than one pair of Birkenstocks, I'll admit it. I know that birth isn't always a wonderful calm experience, that there are situations where it's fabulous that we have modern hospital units stacked up with brilliant doctors and technology. I also realise that Channel 4 have to keep us watching, and to do that they have to knock the hours of footage into story-shaped chunks with easily recognisable characters; the unsupportive dad, the young mum who is “making a fuss”, the new father left waiting to see what will happen as his wife goes for an emergency caesarean.

But why pretend that's “every minute?” Why continue to peddle this idea that is so pervasive in our culture that birth is inherently dangerous, horrible and above all that it's something women have done to them rather than being a part of, and that we're lucky to have a live baby (no mention of a healthy mother here) at the end of, because that's just not the reality of day-to-day, one-every-minute birth in the UK in the 21st century.

(What on earth is the picture at the top of this post? It's me, pretending to be a fat, geriatric version of Millais' Ophelia whilst trying out the inflatable birth pool that Eva wasn't born in!)

you probably get the picture

2010-02-20T01:05:00.000-08:00

3 year old + norovirus.

[use your imagination here]

Be glad there is no photo for this one.

That is all.

I Have Put My Husband In The Cellar

2010-02-17T11:31:00.001-08:00

Not really. Not even in the doghouse (we don't have a dog.) And "cathouse" has rather a different meaning, if I recall correctly from all my years of teaching "Of Mice and Men" to year 11.

Here he is, then, Mr M wielding pickaxe and spade in the bottom bit of the extension, which is actually just a giant plinth for the main part to rest on. That was one of the bits of fun and games we had, trying to ascertain what was actually meant by the maximum height of 4m for an extension (are you yawning yet? Losing the will to live? Welcome to the world of planning permission.)

It seems straightforward, doesn't it? 4m is, well, 4m. But in our case, the plot is on a massive hill. So 4m from the ground level at the front would just about get you to the top of the ground floor inside the house. At the back, not a chance. The planning department didn't know. The surveyor thought he knew but wouldn't swear to it. The architect was fairly sure. We did finally get it sorted, and the 4m is in fact from the floor level inside the main house. Or perhaps from the highest point of the ground level outside as long as it's immediately adjacent to the house. And it's a Tuesday. And there's a "y" in the month.

If we've cocked this up, it could be very, very expensive. And very, very embarrassing.

I don't think we have, but it's the only thing left to fret about. We signed contracts earlier this week, so come what may we have to move out of old house. It's always pleasant seeing the solicitor, and I'm glad we went to someone local who seems to know what he's doing rather than to the conveyancing firm that the estate agent pushed very hard to us. But then, part way through an affable conversation, I remember the eyewatering amount I'm paying him per hour and find myself thinking "come onnnnnnnn!" in a Paxman-type inner voice.

My dad sacked his accountant for this reason, he tells me. It was bad enough mentally watching the cost mount up through the lugubrious pleasantries, but when the accountants hearing started to go dad drew the line at paying to have to say everything twice, loudly.

Resurrection Most Beautiful

2010-02-16T03:03:00.001-08:00

I've thought for a couple of days about posting this. I mentally wrote this blog post two nights ago, sitting in the passenger seat of our car as Mr M drove us home in the dark.

It's not my story, and it's not my grief. I know nothing of it beyond what I've read on a computer screen. But it's happened in our little online community, a web of strength that's held me up on more occasions than I can tell you. How can it have the strength to hold up a grieving mother? I don't know. But I hope the words of strangers on a computer screen can bring a tiny bit of comfort at the worst moments of someone's life.

A child should be a bright flame leading towards the future, not such a brief spark.

Her name is Anastacia Callisto. It means Resurrection Most Beautiful.

I'm a livin' in a box

2010-02-16T02:47:00.000-08:00

We signed contracts yesterday, so we're really moving. Really moving out, that is. Really moving into new house? I hope so. God I hope so. Straight in would be good, otherwise I'll be going on tour with the children and staying with any friends or relations who can put us up for a night or several while the house is got ready and Granny M is moved through the doorway into her new abode.

All the books are packed, or nearly. All the novels are boxed and lots of them are already in the in-laws' office. My pile of cookery books will be going in a box a bit later, then I'll start on DVDs and CDs, which seem curiously obsolete now in the age of spotify, youtube and iplayer. There's a shelf of vinyl records as well, if we're going properly retro.

I have to confess to making one bish so far; in a fit of enthusiasm I sent most of my clothes to London with my parents, including any which even verge on smartness. So when I had a job that should have involved a gesture towards professionalism last week I had to turn up looking as if I'd just done the gardening, and hope they thought I was an eccentric academic type rather than just being rubbish.

Question Everything

2010-02-11T10:08:00.001-08:00

I love my job. I sometimes find myself wondering how I can be getting paid for doing something that is so enjoyable and, well, so me

But I'm having a bit of a wobble with it at the moment, and the very fact that I'm wobbling is making the wobble even wobblier. If that makes any sense. Something happened recently which has made me question myself, and more importantly it's made me lose trust in my clients as well. I was teaching the other day and realised I was being quite guarded and cautious. Normally I'd trust my judgements about group dynamics and assume that what I was seeing was what I was getting. A group of happy, laughing people would be a good thing (as long as I wanted them to laugh, obviously. A group falling around in hysterics while we discussed PND wouldn't be ideal.) The other night I was wondering who in the room wasn't comfortable, who would be going home unhappy with what we'd done despite being positive to my face about it.

I don't think this is a job you can do if you don't believe the people you are teaching, and if you can't trust your instincts about what's going on in a group. Experienced teachers can and do change what they're doing on the hop in response to how well it's working and the feeling in the room. I am used to doing that, but the other night I was obsessively sticking to the written plan even when I'd normally have happily gone off piste a bit.

Then something else happened. Nothing much, just an online discussion about breastfeeding. Not a bad tempered one, not one of those when people retire with hurt feelings having chucked accusations around. So why did it get to me, when these don't usually? Because I think I saw myself as others might see me; an "older" mother, shabbily dressed, hair that hasn't been cut for a year or more, no make-up... a typical, stereotypical even, breastfeeder and natural birth nutter. I don't mind being a cliche, I don't (much) mind being laughed at as long as it's not to my face. I mind terribly the idea that who I am gets in the way of what I am. That what I believe in so passionately isn't something I can communicate because I'm too old, fat and scruffy.

I don't want people to want to be like me, but I hate the idea that the fear of being like me would stop people breastfeeding, or having a homebirth, or thinking about something other than an epidural.

Maybe I should have a spray tan and straighten my hair before going to work, wear make-up and buy more fashionable clothes. Try to look like a stumpy and clapped-out WAG wannabe rather than a stumpy and clapped-out old hippy.

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7... oh

2010-02-07T02:25:00.000-08:00

In case you thought I was lying when I said I was a cackhanded twerp when it came to crafty things.

This was supposed to be a crocheted granny square. To be specific, a summer garden granny square as done properly by Lucy at Attic24 (and blogged properly by Spud at Chez Spud). I thought I'd try my hand at crochet, inspired by all the yarny loveliness I see around me at the moment. It really is all the rage amongst thirtysomething mums right now; it seems everyone is knitting, crocheting, embroidering or sewing fit to bust and I was a bit late to the party.

So in a triumph of hope over experience, I broke the self imposed rule of spending no money at all on ourselves and bought a crochet hook and some cheap acrylic wool to learn on, and sat down in front of the laptop to follow the instructions at meet me at mike's.

After several hours I'd got the inner layer of a granny square, a room that looked as if a litter of kittens had gone critical in the wool bag and a painful wrist.

Some time later, I managed a summer garden square. Or 7/8 of one. Not enough petals, that was the problem. Being a mathematical idiot who can't count and crocheting at the speed of continental drift don't mix.

I keep doing this. The house is dotted with half done craft projects. In the bottom of my sock drawer is a bag with the blanket I nearly knitted for Isaac before he was born, which ran out of steam at the first complicated bit of pattern. I can knit in straight lines, and even increase and decrease but I can't follow a set of instructions and count stitches at the same time, especially when suffering from pregnancy brain, which incidentally doesn't exist either.

For some reason, the embroidered flower kit I started is stuffed in the top of my "office" - a plastic box full of journals, folders and books by the likes of Michel Odent and Ina May Gaskin about normal birth. The flower is from the Quaker Tapestry which I saw on holiday in the Lake District last year. We went because it was a rainy day and mum and I needed something to do, and it was one of those happy accidents where you find something amazing that you could have just walked past.

The tapestry is a staggering bit of work, detailed and beautiful and witty, all stitched onto a multi-shaded background fabric made of the undyed wool of many types of sheep. More than that, the stories depicted are humbling and moving. I smiled at the picture of Quaker women handing out needlework kits to women being transported so that they had a chance of making a living from something other than prostitution, and cried buckets in front of the panels showing the non-combatant stretcher bearers of the first world war. If you can see it, go.

The Unbearable Glumness of Teething

2010-01-31T10:40:00.001-08:00

Dribble? Check.
Fever? Check.
Red cheeks? Check.
Nappy rash? Check.

She's teething. As I walked the school route with my friend K from next door (AKA Superwoman) we compared babies. Her grandson - sleeping in the baby sling on this journey - seems to be teething too. K has five children and is a childminder as well. On this particular school run she was pushing the double buggy; her own 20 month old son in the front, minded child in the back. Isaac ran ahead with K's two daughters and another minded boy.

We talked about teething babies. I told her about Eva's grouchiness, dribbliness and all round grot. We all know the signs, we agreed. Except apparently her son's paediatrician. Who says that research has shown that teething babies do not have fevers, or nappy rash, or dribble, or get grouchy.

Apparently.

Building Blocks

2010-01-28T05:17:00.000-08:00

So, three generations of the family getting stuck in and building the Granny flat. Isaac being taught how to handle a trowel by Grampy. Daddy in the background making up the muck (with too much water, said Grampy, and the usual raised voices ensued.)

It's nearly up to floor level. Which is a big achievement as that's actually a storey up at the back of the house. The blocks are going up quickly, and a couple of cold days have given way to warmer weather so the bricks should be started as well.

Isaac has loved being in the garden/building site. He has learned that the red button on the mixer turns it off, that mixing up the piles of sand and rubble with a trowel will make Grampy cross and, most importantly, that the sound of a few half-bricks going around in the cement mixer mean that it's time to put the kettle on because they're clearing up. He's seen the blocks being laid, played around with the muck and now shouts "they're making my house!" whenever he sees Mr M and father in law at work.

"He's going to be another builder," said Granny M.

"Not if he's got any sense." Grampy, hugging his tea mug to get warm and sitting awkwardly to try to ease his painful back.

Mr M is lucky that the job hasn't really started catching up with him yet. He's pushing 40 (only slightly harder than me, it's true) and so far isn't crippled physically by it. A few weeks of bad back over the past couple of years, but not much. His father's hands are mangled from the knocks and bashes. His knee joints have disintegrated from years of climbing up and down ladders, kneeling, lifting. But the joy of being self employed means that he can't take the time off to have his worst knee replaced.

That's why it's down to me to go back to work full time, to let Mr M get off building sites before he damages himself. Hopefully Isaac won't ever get on one, other than to climb on top of a pile of sand age three and shout "I'm the dirty rascal!"

Empty Spaces

2010-01-21T03:02:00.000-08:00

This bookcase was always one of my favourite things in our house. Possibly my single favourite little corner. It's not a beautiful bit of furniture or anything. In fact it's fairly terrible; a boxy, sub-Ikea bit of chipboard and veneer. But it's stood in the corner of our bedroom since Mr M moved in, piled high with books and photos as well as keys, phones, bits of paper... all that stuff that gets taken out of pockets at the end of a day and put back in the next morning. Mr M's wedding ring is often on one of the top shelves, usually mixed with a handful of change.

(Actually it's not his wedding ring, he lost that within a year of our marriage. It's his gold ring which he had when we met. The second gold ring, his mother tells me, he lost the first one... Not that I can talk as I don't wear mine either but that's a story for another day.)

It's nothing special, but what I love about that bookcase has always been the chaos of it. Once upon a time all my books were organised into categories and then alphabetical order, but over the years books have been shoved back into any space that would fit. Because this is the bookcase nearest my side of the bed, Mr M has periodically cleared the pile of things I've finished reading onto those shelves (and bless him for it. I'd have been squashed in a bookquake long before now without him.) It's a mixture of his books and mine, fiction and non-fiction. Penguin Classics from my English degree are next to £3.50 impulse buys from Tesco, in between 1960s Georgette Heyers rescued from my Granny's charity shop pile and Mr M's collection of science fiction and geeky history.

Until a couple of weeks ago, this bookcase was crammed to busting. Books lay sideways on top of other books and there was a double layer of them on top, reaching to the ceiling. Now there are gaps. We had to start somewhere so we started here, packing books into cardboard veg boxes from the supermarket and taking them to be stored in the in-laws' spare room.

One day I'll get my bookcase back and I'm sure I'll be able to lie in bed looking at the familiar spines, the change pile, the not-wedding ring, the keys and phones and bits of paper. It seems like a long way off if I'm honest. But we had to start somewhere. So we started here.

The Road

2010-01-18T13:50:00.001-08:00

Not the staggeringly gloomy looking film of the staggeringly gloomy looking book. Though I yield to no woman in my appreciation of Viggo Mortensen in Lord Of The Rings, I'm happy to give that one a miss. No, not that Road, but the real road. Just black tarmac, no snow or slush or ice left. Only a few new potholes to remind us of snowmageddon. How quickly things change. Last week it was impassable and only a couple of days ago I drove gingerly up it in freezing fog, sliding sideways and brakeless with 10mph feeling too fast.

It's a road near the in-laws' house, the one that leads to New House. So for us it's a metaphorical as well as a literal road, a new part of our life. I walked up and down that road a lot today, pushing Eva in the pram and with Isaac running behind-beside-in front of me (mostly he was being a bat and flapping his arms, until he ran out of steam on the steep bit of hill and had to be carried.) I walked to the village pre-school group where Isaac zoomed about on a too-small bike with the children he will hopefully go to nursery and then school with. Eva sat on my knee while I spoke to two friends I've made in the village, each of them pregnant with a child which should be in the same school year as she is.

I walked from the village hall up to the churchyard, to get a mobile phone signal, and stood in the sunshine looking at the names on the gravestones. The same few family names repeated again and again, including ours. Granny M's late husband is there, as well as his parents and siblings.

Later, sitting with Granny M as the mortgage valuation surveyor banged about upstairs and nosed around the bedrooms where her children once slept, I became acutely aware that this journey of ours is also one for her. Only our journey is a positive one and for her it's ambivalent at best. Old age and frailty have robbed her of the ability to look after her home. She isn't safe to be there on her own now, not with the steep stairs and no downstairs bathroom. The front door gets left open, and yesterday a rice pudding was left in the oven to go black and smoky. So the road which brings our young children to the village, which brings me to the country life I can blog flippantly about, takes her out.

“I walked into this house just as they finished it,” she told me. “The boys were so excited, they all wanted a bath first. I had to go down the garden and fetch some sticks up for the fire, then they could have a bath.” Her accent is strong from 90 years living in the same few square miles. “I had to go down” comes out as “oi etta goo deown.”

She was the first and only tenant the council housed here. It had a bathroom, with running water. The three sons were used to the space, the fields, the brook at the bottom of the garden. But a bath was a marvel.

Her memory of her children, some time in the 1950s, is perfect. She conjures up an image of my father in law as a little boy, running over the fields and not coming back even though he knew he should, leaving her to have to go and help with the lambing. The way she tells it, I could be there. Then, as there's another bang from the surveyor upstairs, she says “who on earth's that?”

Even though she smiled and nodded as he walked past her less than five minutes ago.

Oh the Weather Outside is Frightful

2010-01-13T00:51:00.000-08:00

Children poorly, also frightful
We're all pig-sick of snow
Make it go
Make it go
MAKE IT GO!

But Mr M's photo of the snow in the field behind the in-laws' house makes it look all lovely. You will have gathered by now that any decent pictures which appear on this blog are taken by him. I am a hamfisted idiot with a camera.

Deja Vu

2010-01-12T08:01:00.000-08:00

It's been said before, but when I was sixteen I was sure I knew more than my parents did about everything. Now I have a sixteen year old I am gaining respect for my own parents, and cringing about what I put them through. Mum and Dad, rest assured that it is all being paid back. With 20 years' interest.

At sixteen, I was waiting to learn to drive. For me it wasn't a case of necessity as we lived in North London and were plentifully supplied with buses and tube trains, and anyway my boyfriend of the time had a car. OK it was a geriatric white cortina, but it was his own car – gasp! But I knew I'd learn to drive as soon as I hit seventeen, and then I'd have my mum's car to drive. After all, what earthly use did she have for a car? Her red fiesta was wasted on things like going to and from work, shopping, all that boring adult stuff. I would use it for important things like driving around in the middle of the night to see friends whose emotional crises just couldn't wait the few hours until school.

Now Dan is sixteen, and waiting to learn to drive. It scares me witless that he'll be living in a rural area when he learns to drive, and young lads pelting about on those roads is a nightmare. At least for us in London the worst that tended to happen was hitting other cars pretty slowly. Out here there are blind curves and big ditches, large trees and stone walls to hit at forty, fifty, sixty miles an hour.

That's my worry.

His worry seems to be how he'll get to have a car to drive everywhere. When we first talked about it, he said “I can have the blue car to go to school in, can't I?” As if there was no question, as if the only possible response on my part was “of course, darling. The fact that Mr M needs a car to drive to the arse-end of nowhere every day to build stuff and that I have two small children to ferry around is as nothing compared to your need to drive to school, past the bus stop outside New House and park next to the place the school bus stops.”

What I actually said was “yeahriiiiiiiiight.”

Anyway it's now a moot point (or a “mute point” as my old boss would have said) as a series of unfortunate events has deprived us of the blue car. Those events being, in no particular order:

1.Mr M
2.a difficult junction
3. the back end of a flat-bed truck
4. sleep deprivation, and
5. somebody who can't bear sitting in traffic and gets impatient (see point 1, above)

So now we have no second car for Dan to despise my need for and his chances of driving my beloved silver beast of a people carrier in this life or any other are zero.

At sixteen, I would have thought that was the height of unfairness and muttered to myself about how Nobody Understands Me. I believe Dan is doing roughly that.

Also at sixteen I was a confirmed smoker. It was all just faaaaaar too stressful not to smoke. All that sitting around in the Terminus Cafe in High Barnet agonising about boys wouldn't do itself you know. It needed a constant stream of cups of milky coffee, salty roast chicken sandwiches and Marlboro lights to make it bearable.

And, guess what, he's taken up smoking. This is a tricky one for me. I gave up some years ago, but he grew up in a house where I smoked. He and I both know I have no moral high ground here. I can't possibly rant and rave about it. He and I both know what the health risks are, and that I knew them full well when I took up smoking too.

Smoking is stupid, smoking makes you ill, it costs you money and stinks something awful. But that first delicious drag on a cigarette... that ritual around lighting it... the cameraderie of smokers. I can see why, I really can.

But because I am old, and a parent, and because I owe it to my parents (and most of all because it's funny) I told him I reserve the right to go several kinds of ape at him if I ever, ever catch him smoking out of his bedroom window after he thinks I've gone to bed again.

I may regret this, but...

2010-01-10T10:20:00.000-08:00

All this milling around waiting for things to happen with the house move has to stop. It's time to take our courage in our hands (like Isaac with his snowball) and just make things happen. I'm sure we'll get another few custard pies in our faces before we're finished with it all, but sitting about dithering isn't doing anything except increasing the number of sleepless nights we have about it all.

So. Things to do this week are:

- finish the paperwork to sell Old House
- find some tradesmen to do the bits of the extension we can't do, like an electrician, a plumber and a plasterer.
- continue packing books into boxes.
- continue collecting flat fruit boxes from Sainsbuggers. I have discovered that if you go in there and ask the Nice Young Man from the produce department, he will give you more flat boxes than you can shake a stick at.
- keep fingers and everything else crossed that the snow goes away soon. We're bored of it now, and at this rate our beautiful, building-controller-approved trench will collapse. Which will be galling as we've had to stump up the best part of £500 to get the building controller to come and look into said trench and say how nice it is.

Who I am...

2010-01-09T08:58:00.000-08:00

(with thanks to Lyndsay/Violet of the “Little Girl, Lost” blog, whose idea I just nicked)

This is who I am:

mother, for the past nearly 17 years
teacher
writer of drivel, fiction (unpublished) non-fiction (published, still drivel)
wife, for the past four years
daughter, for the past 37 years
sister, for the past 35 years
friend
a long-term depressive, on and off
a fabulous breastfeeder of my babies
but rubbish at giving birth
opinionated
diplomatic
stressed
lover of relaxation and yoga breathing
really terribly embarrassing when drunk
fat
untidy
recovering from ME
a future midwife
an ex secondary school teacher
an ex home educator
addicted to the internet
moving to the country
not, in fact, known as Mrs M

The Obligatory Snow Blog

2010-01-06T03:45:00.000-08:00

Snow! Lots and lots of snow! Luckily it didn't really start until we'd got back last night but it tipped it down all evening and we woke up to a good 6 inches of it. More on our path, as MrM discovered when he went out to the car and over the top of his boots in it. Fortunately (for him) he was wearing Dan's biker boots thus not ruining his own footwear.

The road outside is completely flat but that hasn't stopped people failing to drive up and down it in any sensible manner all morning. At one point a committee had formed to push stuck cars away from all the parked ones as they drifted towards them and got stuck.

MrM is still out there with Isaac at the moment. He was sure they'd only be gone a couple of minutes and as soon as the Thomas the Tank Engine wellies were overwhelmed that they'd be back in for hot tea (Isaac) and computer games (MrM). Clearly this is not so. Perhaps it's snowy karma for wrecking Dan's boots rather than his own.

The cheek of these youngsters!

2010-01-05T10:09:00.000-08:00

Bah, pah and indeed phooey. Just had a phone call from the teenage mutant ninja estate agent asking about progress on our house sale. Which is a bit bloody rich, given that it was his insistance that we used their conveyancing service that has held it all up (this time).

Not only did said service do exactly naff all towards getting the sale moving, they neglected to tell me that they didn't handle shared ownership properties. So, for 3 weeks or so I thought they were preparing contracts when in fact they were doing nothing. Or nothing except laughing at the enormous forms they'd made me fill in, slapping their thighs with mirth at the idea of me chasing around trying to find a working phone number for Thames Water or the date the boiler was last serviced I imagine.

So you'll understand why I'm a bit irked by the immortal cheek of phoning me up to see what the delay is.

The Kneebone's connected to the what now?

2010-01-05T01:01:00.001-08:00

For my new incarnation as student midwife and oldest undergraduate in town, I have to get my Biology knowledge from none to A level standard by the time I start. No official qualifications required, which is a blessing as I've had enough of trying to sort out private entries for exams to last a lifetime with Dan's GCSEs (home education is great, but doing a full raft of GCSEs with no school to enter you is emphatically not.)

The GCSE textbook has been a breeze. I've actually really enjoyed going through it, copying out little diagrams and starting to work out how we're put together. I've skipped over all the bits to do with plants on the grounds that I probably won't need to know about transpiration in order to catch babies. Do correct me if I'm wrong. Anyway, I now have a notebook full of scribbles and drawings and – I thought – a pretty sound knowledge of it all.

Then I offered to help Dan revise for his AS Biology test. And it's all different. All my lovely little pen diagrams turn out to be not like that at all and, in the words of St Ben of Goldacre “a bit more complicated than that.” So enzymes aren't lock and key shaped at all, but more like hands in gloves – stretchy gloves, but still locks and keys, but only if the glove (or the lock) is made of a mad collection of twisty string...

Thank goodness for Dan and his science brain. And Mr M and his science brain. Both tried to explain matters in a way that my poor humanities graduate mind could get, but it's not sticking. Which is fine for me, but a bit more urgent for Dan as he needs my help. Not with the concepts, but with the language. That's the problem with being bright but very dyslexic. He can tell me how things happen and why – but he'll never in a million years see the difference between words like MITOSIS and MEIOSIS. So all the complicated and startlingly similar words involved in A level Biology are a massive problem for him. I can see some big posters being made on flipchart paper and stuck on the walls of New House when we get there.

They'll cover the flowery wallpaper and the patches where Granny M's photos and spoon-and-thimble collections have been taken down if nothing else...

Number One's Fallen Over

2010-01-05T00:49:00.001-08:00

Eva sat up. At sixteen weeks and two days, while I was asking Mr M if he thought we'd need the baby chair down from the loft, I realised she was sitting next to me on the bed. I don't know if this bodes well or not. She's certainly ahead of where the boys were at this age, and neither of them are exactly dimwits. Though it's fair to say that Dan has inherited my family's sporting prowess, ie none whatever, so it's a marvel he ever learned to sit up without falling straight over again.

Luckily Eva seems to have got Mr M's body shape, as has Isaac. Finally my knock-kneed, splay-footed shortarse genes have met their match and been beaten by his Prussian aristocratic (hem hem, allegedly) ones. Whatever their origin, I'm delighted for the children that they look as if they'll be long leggedy beasties like their dad rather than stumpy like me.

So Eva sat up, for a few seconds, then slowly her nose met her knees and – still grinning broadly – she rolled over sideways. “Number one's fallen over,” I thought. Then realised that no one else in the world would know what I was talking about if I said it. Well, unless you're one of the people who has been privileged to hear my father's hysterical but decidedly off-colour faith healer joke. I can't possibly repeat it here, but anyway I've ruined it for you now by telling you the punch line. Ever since I was a kid, anyone falling, stumbling, slipping or faceplanting the floor has been greeted by someone saying “number one's fallen over.” I suppose every family has these traditions, don't they? Things that would bewilder anyone else but that have become so implanted that you don't notice them until someone looks at you and says “eh?”

They're going down the generations now. I caught Isaac saying “Gordon Bennett!” with exactly the same inflection that I learned it from my dad – then roaring with laughter. Dan comes out with them all as well. Maybe Eva won't find it at all funny, but given the humorous look she already has, I don't like our chances.

Gigantic Tool

2010-01-02T04:41:00.000-08:00

Ever since I've known him, Mr M has wanted to drive a digger. When the in-laws were extending their house, he wanted a digger to drive. Despite our leaving post-it notes all around their kitchen giving cogent and compelling arguments as to why a digger should be hired (“it will go BRRRRRRRMMMMM! And be fun”) there was nothing doing.

Now that we've finally got this project off the ground, it would seem churlish for me to have vetoed it. On a more practical note, new house is built on much more rocky ground than the in-laws' and we are under some time pressure in that if we don't build the extension for granny M, we have no house to move into when ours is sold. So on the Saturday before Christmas, a very cute little digger arrived on a lorry and Mr M set about taking down the garden fence and digging a trench. Isaac stood on Granny M's hostess trolley and watched the digger being unloaded which made it worth the faff all by itself – what little boy isn't excited by the sight of a digger? Mr M senior arrived to help out, and the children and I went back up the road to the warmth and cream cakes offered by the in-laws' kitchen. As I left, there was some discussion going on about the location of the water pipe. I should tell you that vigorous discussion is a feature of Mr M's working relationship with his dad and the usual raised voices and body language suggestive of exasperation was being deployed on both sides.

A couple of hours later, the phone rang. Mr M. “uh...” he said.

I know that voice. It's his “I've got something really bad to tell you but I'm not going to say it,” voice. After some cajoling and a lot of silence I got the news. “You know that water pipe...?”

Fortunately as I got off the phone to him, the in-laws arrived home from their shopping trip. I met Mr M senior in the hall as he was taking his coat off. “You know that water pipe...?” I said.

“Oh he hasn't! Bloody idiot!” Mr M senior cast a longing glance towards the warm kitchen, the tea mug ready prepared, the boiling kettle and the cakes, then put his coat back on and drove back down the road.

Mother-in-law and I drank more tea. Visions of enormous invoices danced before my eyes as I phoned the water company.

Luckily it wasn't that bad. And I should say in Mr M's defence that the water pipes weren't where you'd expect them to be, although that doesn't bode well for the whole renovation project. After all the current house has been plagued by a constant stream of things not being where they should be in terms of wiring, pipework and pretty much everything else. At least it was the house's water supply he went through rather than the mains as I initially thought, so it didn't involve the water company and it didn't cut the water supply off to the whole village which would have made us mighty popular the weekend before Christmas. It was sorted out fairly quickly and at minimal expense by the arrival of the plumber from over the road, a few minutes' hacking at the path outside with a pick-axe to find the stopcock and a bit of new pipe.

So Mr M got to drive his digger and didn't take long to work out that the controls were back to front. Luckily he has lightning reactions so didn't actually drive himself and digger down the trench whenever he forgot. The foundation trench was pretty much finished and approved by the building controller just before Christmas, so the next thing is going to be filling it with concrete.

OK, come in

2010-01-02T04:39:00.000-08:00

Welcome to my country life. I've got you here under false pretences, as we don't yet live in the country. Hopefully we will do soon. At the moment we are selling our house in a little town and should be moving in the new year. That's if we can get the mortgage, build an extension on the new house, find enough boxes to pack our million books into and borrow my brother to drive a van with all our possessions in it. Right now, there's snow on the ground (and in the foundation trench for the extension which Mr M has been digging) and no sign of exchanging contracts for house sale, a mortgage offer or enough boxes. All these things should change in the next few weeks.