Adventures with old stuff

I am very, very excited.

Very excited.

Following on from my NCT sale bargain Fisher Price campervan, which went down extremely well with Thomas, I did a bit of casual Ebay searching for old  Fisher Price and Playmobil toys (I refuse to call them “vintage” because it’s just a bit, well, wanky really) that I remember from the 70s and 80s.

And there it was.

Amongst the Playmobil pirate ships and Fisher Price airports I found something that made me bounce up and down and squeal a little bit.  I nearly scrolled straight past it, but something about the little picture must have registered and I backed up and clicked on the link.

It was the mysterious green plastic tile toy that I have been whinging about since Thomas was old enough to start playing with “proper” toys.  I had a very clear memory of a toy that I loved as a child.  All I could remember was that it had a series of green plastic tiles with cogs that locked together and turned with a handle, setting some sort of playground equipment in motion.  I couldn’t remember exactly what it looked like or what brand it was but I knew I wanted it for Thomas, but I couldn’t find it. 

My google search terms became increasingly complex:

            Green plastic tiles vintage playground toy cogs handle round turn

            Green jigsaw plastic playground cog handle toy 70s roundabout

            Tile game 70s playground cogs turn with handle green patterns fairground playground   
             roundabout ferris wheel green toy 70s 80s bloody hell just tell me what this is

But there it was.  On Ebay.  Being offered for sale by someone slightly bemused about its provenance -  “The only markings I can find on this playset is the brand "Bandai", Japan so I have no idea what this was originally called”.

Suddenly it became clear.  My granddad was a merchant navy captain and regularly brought home unusual toys or gifts from overseas.  He must have brought this back from Japan for me, which is probably why I have never seen it anywhere else.  But wherever it came from, I had to have it.  It is now winging its way to me and I may actually explode with excitement.

The only problem is that this old toy hunting is addictive.  There are so many toys that I now want to track down.  I am willing to consider the possibility that the rose-tinted specs are colouring my slightly fuzzy, soft-focus hindsight, but toys seemed so much better back then.   Does anyone remember the Palitoy treehouse?  I spent many a happy hour playing with this, although the family in mine was incomplete as the little plastic boy had somehow managed to finish up underneath the lift where he rattled around for the rest of my ownership of this toy.  I could never figure out how he had got down there, but now, with a small boy of my own rampaging around the house, I can understand it.  I assume the naughty step in plastic world was no longer doing the trick and plastic boy-child found himself being stuffed down the lift-shaft by his long-suffering plastic parents.

And Playmobil.  I loved Playmobil.  My bedroom was populated with little bendy people, clad in their primary coloured uniforms, like some kind of extreme, and strangely cheery, communist horde who indulged in strange, cross-cultural encounters.  Like the unfortunate incident when the medieval knights stole the hats from the pirates and much carnage and destruction ensued.  Fortunately the cowboys remained strictly neutral and were able to ferry the wounded to the operating theatre by covered wagon.  Unfortunately the theatre staff had to operate under appalling, open-air conditions since my mum had declined to give into my nagging for the rest of the hospital set.  This was the cause of much plastic suffering.  Bad times.

Thomas and Ben’s gran had the exceptional foresight to hang on to several toys and the Fisher Price village has been a huge hit with the next generation.  Unfortunately, I am no longer in possession of any of my favourite toys due to a very unfortunate misunderstanding about which side of my grandparents’ loft the things I wanted to keep should go.  The left, incidentally.  That is the left as you stand with your back to the hatch, not the left if you squeeze into the far corner of the loft and balance on the roof struts.  Failure to appreciate this not-particularly-subtle difference led to the loss of an entire collection of Rupert the Bear annuals, my substantial Playmobil collection, two boxes of foreign dolls and several boxes of assorted toys and games.

My late grandmother and I had Words. 

Several times.

At least it gave me a come-back to her oft-repeated “And remember the time you crashed the car while learning to drive and your granddad lost his false teeth?  And we’ve NEVER gone on about it.  Which we could have done.”  I no longer had to point out that if she hadn’t applied the handbrake while I was doing 30 mph things might have ended differently.  Or that “we’ve never gone on about it” actually translated as “we’ve mentioned it on every remotely relevant occasion and on several completely irrelevant ones too”.  Now I could simply come back with “Remember the time you gave all my stuff to a charity shop?”

I still live in hope that someday I will be idly browsing Ebay and I will find a listing for “Large collection of assorted items, some labelled with the initials “AC”, including a Playmobil pirate ship, a Fisher Price airport, a large pile of Rupert the Bear books and a very fancy Brazilian doll with layered silk skirts”.

But until that happy day, I have my campervan and my Japanese green tile thing is on its way.  Yippee!

The Lanes

This week has been a little fraught.  What with a tongue-tie being diagnosed and snipped (Ben), new methods of mother-baiting being discovered (Thomas) and much wailing and gnashing of teeth (me), not to mention a run-in with an insufferable arse of a paediatrician (I am a MAN and a CONSULTANT.  See my shiny shoes and the letters after my name.  You are a silly woman who understands nothing.  Give him some formula and stop wasting my time), there was probably a small mushroom cloud visible over our house by teatime yesterday.

 So all things considered, I am currently not in a mood to suffer fools gladly.  So why, oh why, have a swarm of fools descended upon The Lanes?

The Lanes are the little network of roads that run between Bath and one of the main roads to the south, serving three tiny villages and a couple of farms.  Whenever anyone talks about these roads it is in ominous, doom-laden tones with audible capital letters.  This is because The Lanes, despite being some of the narrowest roads known to man, attract a daily horde of frenzied commuters and school-run mums, all desperate to avoid the crawling traffic on the main road into Bath.  Since the presence of these rat-runners renders The Lanes all but unusable for anyone foolish enough to attempt to drive in the opposite direction, the residents of the villages have pretty much given up any journeys between the hours of eight and ten on weekday mornings.

Unfortunately, I appear to be the only villager who has no choice but to brave The Lanes, since Thomas’s nursery is a couple of miles down the main road.  Twice a week I therefore cause panic and consternation by driving against the flow of the traffic, leading to multiple near-collisions as rat-runners screech to a last-second halt after hurtling round blind bends at about 60 mph, secure in the knowledge that there is no way that anyone will be coming from the opposite direction.

But it isn’t actually the near-misses that wind me up into a homicidal rage when driving in The Lanes.  It is the fact that the vast majority of rat-runners are apparently so incensed by my sheer gall in daring to impede their hugely important progress that they refuse point-blank to reverse, even when the nearest passing place is about two feet behind their back wheels.  This means that I spend considerable periods of time sitting in the hedge, watching half the driving population of Somerset sweeping past me without so much as a twitch of a finger by way of thanks.  Thomas recently asked me “Why you say ‘you’re welcome’, mummy?” leading to an intensely complicated conversation in which I tried to explain both sarcasm and the concept of motoring courtesy.  He now joins me in shouting “You’re welcome” at ungrateful drivers who fail to observe the niceties.  Although he generally misses off the “Pillock!” bit.

When I say I spend considerable periods of time sitting in the hedge, I actually mean I used to spend time sitting in the hedge.  A few months ago I began a concentrated campaign to retake The Lanes.  I used a very simple tactic – I refused point blank to reverse unless I was extremely close to a passing place.  I had suddenly realised that the very fact that the other drivers were trying to take a shortcut round the traffic probably meant that they had somewhere to be pretty urgently.  I didn’t.  Yes I needed to get Thomas to nursery at some point as I was working from home at the time, but I wasn’t on a clock as such.  I therefore adopted the technique of sitting smiling inanely at glowering, mouthing, gesticulating drivers until they gave in and reversed. 

Word got round.  People started reversing for me.  My morning journey became considerably smoother.  The balance of The Lanes was restored.

And then I met her.  The Queen of the Non-Reversers.  I don’t know whether she was a very bad driver or just unutterably arrogant.  Whatever the reason, she had me beaten.  She would see me coming and accelerate past passing places in order to meet me in the narrowest part of the road and then glare at me until I backed half a mile down the road to let her pass.  Then she would shoot me a venomous stare and shake her head in disbelief that I had dared to drive through my own village.  This went on for some time.  I met her pretty much every time I did the nursery run.  And every time I backed down.  There was something compelling about her absolute belief that she was in the right.

And then, one day after I had reversed down a hill and round a blind bend with this woman revving and muttering about 6 inches away from my front bumper, only for her to mouth something at me and back it up with the inevitable shake of her head, something changed.  I decided I had had enough.  The next time I met her I did not reverse.  We sat there, eyeballing one another, while the traffic piled up behind her and I wondered how many cars I could realistically expect to back up for me.  Suddenly I heard a rumbling noise from behind me and the local farmer came jolting over the hill in his tractor.  I looked at it and then turned back to the woman and smiled.  It was like that moment in Lord of the Rings when the riders of Rohan appear over the crest of the hill just as it looks like all is lost.  I felt like hanging out of the window shouting “Ride now for ruin and the world’s ending” or whatever it was that accompanied all the shaking of spears. But even as the row of sulky commuters backed down the road out of my way, there was a certain hollowness to the victory.  I realised that, in order to extract full satisfaction from watching her stroppy little face disappearing backwards down the road, I needed to win the encounter myself, without the unarguable back-up of the farmer.

So I armed myself.  I put a book on the front seat ready to turn my engine off and begin casually reading when I met her – I chose a copy of Tales from Disney on the basis that it would be so much more insulting to be roundly ignored by someone reading a large-print Disney book then by someone reading The Odyssey, for example.

I encountered her in the perfect place.  She was just clear of a passing place and I had a lengthy reverse behind me.  She screeched to a halt in front of me and glared at me as usual, while yakking into her mobile phone.  I looked at her.  She looked back.  I scratched my nose and looked out of the window.  She took the phone away from her ear and gestured at me to get out of her way.  I smiled and made a little shooing gesture at her.  She stared at me open-mouthed and made another get-out-of-the-way gesture.  I picked up a notebook and pen from the passenger footwell and made a big show of writing down her numberplate.  She looked as though she was about to explode and made a “What?  What?” gesture.  I pantomimed talking on a mobile phone and shook my finger at her chidingly.  She stared at me for another few seconds before hurling her phone onto the seat and reversing at speed into the passing place.  I drove past slowly, my window wound down, and as I came along side her car I smiled graciously. 

“So kind,” I said.

I don’t know whether she spontaneously combusted with rage or whether she decided to cede control of The Lanes to me, but I never saw her again.  The Lanes were mine.  To the victor the spoils and all that.

Until now.

This morning I once again found myself sitting in the hedge as car after car swept by, glaring and shaking their heads.  I can only assume that an entirely new generation of commuters have discovered this handy little shortcut, and that they have not heard that The Lanes are my patch.  This kind of insurrection needs to be stamped out and quickly.  I need a plan.  Or possibly everyone I know to come and drive around in a non-reversing convoy with me.

This is only a minor blip in my domination of The Lanes.  In the words of Beyonce, they must not know about me…..

Shaggy dog tale

I think I inadvertently managed to disrupt some dogging this evening.  I don’t know whether to be proud or embarrassed.

We had a fairly clear run down the M4 from London with Thomas asleep for pretty much the entire journey, and Ben kicking his feet and making happy noises for once.  I stopped for petrol at the last services as I interpreted the media’s exhortations to avoid panic buying of fuel as “Panic!  All fuel will soon disappear!” and I felt I should indulge in a spot of running around and waving my arms. 

There were, disappointingly, no hordes of frantic motorists trying to loot Leigh Delamare Services.  There wasn’t even a queue.  Well, there wasn’t a queue when I arrived.  There was a queue when I left but that might have had something to do with the fact that I accidentally paid for someone else’s petrol and the cashier had to give chase across the forecourt before trying to undue the transaction with the aid of a calculator and a pencil.  In my defence, his car looked very like mine. 

Okay, so it didn’t look like mine.  It was a different make, model and colour and considerably cleaner, but it had four wheels, a bumper and some windows so it was an easy mistake to make.

Unfortunately the delay at the services gave Ben just the extra time he needed to copiously fill his pants and start complaining about it.  Within five minutes he had worked himself into the kind of crescendo of fury that Ghengis Khan would have thought a little over-dramatic and we had to find somewhere to stop urgently. 

The only place I could think of was a picnic site on the road into Bath.  It has nice views and I thought that I could change him and feed him while admiring the sunset.  Yes, there are rumours about the use to which this picnic site is put after dark but I figured there really couldn’t be that much dubious activity going on at quarter to seven on a weekday evening. 

That being the case, there seemed to be an awful lot of middle-aged men sitting on their own in cars, not, as far as I could tell, admiring the view.  We parked and I retrieved the screaming, flailing baby and got out of the car to change him on the back seat.  Cars kept pulling up alongside us and then reversing rapidly to the other side of the car park.  When I got back into the driver’s seat to feed Ben this pattern continued.  A car would pull up, the driver would look at us before disappearing backwards across the car park.

It would seem that dogging starts early on nice evenings. 

Or it would, if it wasn’t being scuppered by the presence of the random woman and the two small children.  I did consider letting Thomas out to wander round, asking “What you doooing, that man?”

In fairness, I wasn’t the only party pooper there.  The elderly gentleman taking photographs of the pretty sunset might also have been putting a bit of a dampener on things. 

Eventually we got ourselves sorted and headed off.  I resisted the urge to give the patiently waiting would-be doggers a cheery wave and left them to whatever it is that they do.

For obvious reasons there are no photos for this blog-post....

NCT-gate

Today I was going to post about the virtues of NCT nearly new sales, about the vast amounts of money you can save, and the piles of jigsaws, books and clothes you can come away with.

Instead I am just going to rant.  Again.

So I thought it would be a good idea to go to a local NCT sale with both children in tow.  This is despite having done this once before and swearing never to do it again.  It started relatively well.  It was a small sale and Thomas was persuaded to sit against the wall with a book while I ran round the stalls, speed-buying 3-6 month baby clothes, Thomas-sized t-shirts and an old-style Fisher Price camper van that I remember playing with 30 years ago.

Having promised him cake and squash if he behaved himself, we decamped to the café area and I sat down feeling rather smug about a successful trip.  Thomas clearly sensed this and decided it was time to bring me back down to earth with a bump.

His previous record for bad behaviour is generally known as Healthvisitor-gate.  NCTsale- gate was much, much worse.  At least while rampaging and running amok at the baby clinic, there were relatively few witnesses – although a health visitor is obviously one of the people you would prefer not to be there when your two year-old decides to throw himself on the ground and scream “please don’t put me in the boot, mummy!”

At an NCT sale, however, you are surrounded by brand, spanking new parents, who cannot possibly imagine that their angelically slumbering bundle of joy will one day turn into the kind of kicking, screaming, biting ball of fury that Thomas became this morning.  I am not entirely sure what triggered the deterioration.  There was a minor dispute about the correct way to eat a cupcake, but this was resolved with intense diplomatic negotiation.  And then Thomas decided to do his Spawn of Satan impression.  Unfortunately we were sitting right next to an NCT group, having a mini-meetup with their tiny, new babies who were all stunned into judgemental silence as Thomas rolled on the floor, screaming and attempting to bite me in my ankle.  When this was unsuccessful (I was wearing boots which led to wails that he had hurt his teeth) he resorted to emptying my bag over the floor.  I was reduced to hanging onto him by the ankle as he tried to escape commando-style across the floor, while Ben dangled backwards out of the sling, wailing about his interrupted feed.

One of the new dads decided this would be a particularly good time to start holding forth, loudly and at length, about the fact that his personal choice of carrier, the Baby Bjorn, was the only safe one.  Other slings, he explained, nodding in my direction were extremely dangerous and had been withdrawn from sale, and while he could quite understand why some people might find it easier to use on, he didn’t personally feel it was a risk worth taking.  The rest of his group nodded vigorously while gazing disapprovingly at the woman with the dangerous carrier and the delinquent toddler.

I could, I suppose have explained politely that he was mistaken.  However, I was slightly distracted by the screaming child who was at that point firmly wrapped around my leg, occasionally reaching up to flail and swipe at me, and I was fairly sure that I was incapable of coming out with anything that did not end in “you utter arse of a man”.  So I contented myself with giving him that tight, insincere smile that I very much hope clearly conveyed “I look forward to seeing you here in two years when your precious firstborn is grinding purple-iced cupcakes into the carpet and kicking you in the shins, but in the meantime, please feel free to shove your Baby Bjorn where the sun doesn’t shine.”

As Thomas rampaged through the carpark with me in slightly lukewarm pursuit, a nice, elderly lady came over and gave me a glimmer of hope.  “It gets better,” she said.  “One day they grow up and leave home.”

Only 18 years to go then……

Oh what a circus....

Roll up!  Roll up!  See the incredible non-sleeping baby!  Watch as he overcomes every attempt to persuade him to snooze!  Marvel at his stamina as he enters his tenth hour without napping!  Watch his mother go slowly mad as his eyes ping open after no more than two minutes.  Every single time.

Yesterday I would happily have sold Ben to any passing circus.  Actually I would have given him away. 

Scratch that.  I would have paid them to take a detour to come and take him.  Travel expenses and everything.

He wouldn’t sleep.  At all.  It started off as mildly irritating when he didn’t have his usual long morning nap, but the day rapidly degenerated into carnage, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth.  Ben found the whole thing highly entertaining to start with, beaming and twinkling at the elderly ladies at the local community café as I listed his shortcomings through gritted teeth.  As the day went on, he became grumpier and grumpier, glowering and flailing with his little fists.  Clearly, my failure to make him sleep earlier in the day was hugely unreasonable and fell far below the level of service he expected in a mother.

He therefore set out to impress upon me that my conduct was not acceptable.  The rest of the day was set to a soundtrack of low-level whinge, occasionally crescendoing into full-throated wails and howls of fury whenever I dared to do anything particularly outrageous like putting him down, or attempting to eat or wee, or in fact anything other than sitting gazing at him adoringly.  Even Thomas, master of the art of moan, found himself outclassed and was reduced to staring at Ben in stunned silence. 

By 9pm I was giving serious consideration to getting in the car and going in search of somewhere quieter – like a bagpipe convention or a rave perhaps.  Ben clearly realised that he might have pushed his luck a little and, after final few wails, he calmly rolled onto his side and went to sleep, assuming the angelic expression worn by all babies who sleep soundly, secure in the knowledge that they have fulfilled their primary function of driving their parents completely and totally insane.


Today was better.  I have, touch wood, succeeded in establishing bedtime.  I have an evening again.

Unfortunately I have also discovered Game of Thrones.  Bye bye evenings....

Row row row your boat....

So.  When you haven’t participated in a particular sport for at least two years, haven’t competed in at least three and a half, and had a baby a matter of weeks ago, how would it possibly seem like a good idea to agree to sub in for the biggest race of the season, in a city you no longer live in, in a sport which involves weighing as little as possible and being able to fit your behind into a very small space?

I can’t answer that question.  But it did.  It seemed like such a good idea at the time that I found myself running about the flat at ridiculous o’clock on Saturday morning, trying to co-ordinate the military-style arrangements involved in disengaging me from the permanently hungry Ben for at least four hours.  Somehow it worked.  I threw a bowl of cereal in front of Thomas and immobilised him by turning on CBeebies.  I lined up the bags of milk and the sterilised bottles and had a last, frantic tot-up of how many ounces were required to avoid Simon having to fulfil his threat of standing by the famous “second lamppost from the left” on Hammersmith Bridge and dropping a screaming baby into my lap as we came underneath.  Finally I woke Ben and added speed-feeding to our existing speed-burping technique which involves sitting him up and patting his back as fast as humanly possible while chanting “burpburpburpburpburp” – it works, I assume, by throwing him into such a state of panic that burps, and possibly more, are inevitable.

Somehow, at 7am I closed the door behind me and resisted the urge to run down the road, performing Dick Van Dyke-style leaps of joy and screaming “I’m free!”

After a brief blip when I attempted to pay for bus travel with an M&S gift card instead of my oyster card (This isn’t just a slightly grubby London bus full of grumpy early-morning travellers and a bus driver who has had his sense of humour extracted – this is M&S travel) I made it to Putney.

As soon as I reached the embankment the realisation set in that this might, just possibly, have been an enormous mistake.  Fishing in the pocket of my London Rowing Club splashtop, I found a weighing slip from Metropolitan Regatta 2008.  This was presumably the last time I raced.  There it was, in black and white.  I was nearly four years out of practice and nearly four kilos over coxing weight.  Everywhere I looked I could see bouncy little nineteen year-olds, all sporting sleek, skin-tight kit and the well-known “coxswain’s swagger” – you can’t describe this, you have to see it, but it is essentially a way of walking that somehow manages to convey “Don’t mess with me – I may be small but I am perfectly capable of reaching your jugular if necessary”.  I tried a half-hearted swagger but only garnered a couple of looks from people clearly wondering if I was drunk or just really desperate for a wee.

Since I was running late, I thought it sensible to hurry.  Just before I came into sight of the club I broke into a run and arrived trying to look like I had sprinted the entire length of the embankment.  I was helped by the fact that a 100 yard jog managed to reduce me to the kind of wheezing, sweaty mess that you normally see being treated by St John’s Ambulance half-way through the London Marathon.

Upon arrival, it became clear that I was not the only one suffering from a bad case of the WhatwasIthinkings.  The crew I was coxing were primarily “retired” rowers whose recent training has mainly consisted of a weekly amble down the river followed by exercising their pint-arms in the Duke’s Head.  On race morning the standard form of greeting was a long look at the four and a quarter mile course followed by a shared, slightly hollow laugh.  Part of a coxswain’s job is to generate the kind of cheesy line that would earn you endless mockery if used in everyday life, but are somehow filtered through a combination of adrenaline and exhaustion into something Churchill might have come out with on the eve of war.  One favoured technique involves reference to it being “time to start asking the big questions of ourselves”.  In this case the big questions were likely to be “why in the name of arse are we doing this?” and “shall we stop at Hammersmith and go to the pub?”

We were slightly buoyed by the London head coach’s whole club pre-race pep-talk, although there was noticeable eye-twitching around the time he started talking about the many hours of hard training and high levels of fitness.  Spirits continued to rise with the traditional “clapping out” of each club crew as they carried their boats down to the river.  Unfortunately, as the final crew to boat we were clapped out by a veteran rower, two random women who were loitering near the clubhouse and the burger van man.

The Head of the River race has over 400 entrants, all men’s eights – a total of over 3500 individual competitors.  The boats line up along both sides of the river and make their way slowly up above the start-line where they turn and set off at 10 second intervals.  A very large number of these crews are novices and the potential for carnage is huge.  An inexperienced crew with an inexperienced cox on the fast-flowing water of the Tideway is a recipe for disaster at the best of times.  When that crew is surrounded by several other equally inexperienced crews, all trying to keep their boats stationery while waiting for the start, it’s not so much a recipe for disaster as a fully-cooked, ready-to-serve, three course meal of disaster.  You know things are not going to go smoothly when you have uttered your first rude word before you are even out of earshot of the boathouse.

Photo courtesy of Ian Weir

We eventually reached our turning point and after a brief moment of excitement when the novice crew ahead of us decided on a novel method of turning their boat which nearly led to us inadvertently docking with them and rowing the entire race as a sort of strange, multi-oared catamaran, we got going.

I was brilliant.  It was some of my finest work.  Seriously.  The Churchill-esque eloquence that poured from my lips was unparalleled.  And no-one can prove otherwise as English was the second language of the stern pair and the cox-box microphone stopped working on stroke two of the race, meaning that no-one else could hear a word I was saying.  Except the bit about “Getoutofmywaygetoutofmywaynow” which was delivered a teeny bit louder than the rest due to the fact that a novice crew had decided to make a 45 degree angle dive across the river right in front of us.
Our aim in the race was to finish higher than we started.  We started 216^th.  We finished 215^th.  I like to think I added value.

And Thomas had fun....

A tale of two towns - part two

Now under normal circumstances, a shopping trip like that would set the tone for the weekend.   Fortunately, this was not a normal weekend as we had the use of a friend’s holiday home in Fowey for three days.

I think I can safely recommend a Cornish seaside town, out of season and enjoying unexpected warm weather, as a cure for Frazzledparentitis.  It was very, very nice.  Even allowing for the fact that Thomas was suffering from a recurring case of Chronic Whinge, it was still very restful.

 
 
Two of the three days started with thick fog that burned off within a couple of hours, leaving clear blue skies and unseasonable temperatures.  We caught the little ferry across the harbour to Polruan and ate local teacakes and bacon sandwiches in Crumpets café, open out of season to process a bulk order of bacon and egg butties for the large group of teenage girls catching the ferry back from a party in their pyjamas.  We walked out to the little castle on the headland and admired Dawn French’s rather nice house on the far side of the harbour.  We mooched about the shops and bought some beach-hut fairy-lights for Thomas’s nautical-themed bedroom.  We spent an inordinate amount of time watching the little car ferry go backwards and forwards across about 200 yards of water, as Thomas strenuously resisted any attempt to remove him.

On the second day Thomas managed to fulfil his sole objective of the holiday which was to “take my socks off on the sand”.  He paddled happily around in water that was cold enough to give me bone-ache.  He clearly has asbestos feet.

The final night saw a near disaster after the appropriately named “Smelly Doggy” went missing during our search for somewhere for dinner – Sam’s on the main street is highly recommended, particularly after they joined in the hue and cry for Doggy – but he was eventually located propping up the bar in the King of Prussia pub.  I am pretty sure I saw a slightly sulky look in his little plastic eyes as he was removed.  It was probably the best night of his life.

So we returned home refreshed and laden down with beach-hut fairy-lights, a bag of teacakes and a chocolate Cornish pasty.  All the hallmarks of a great mini-holiday.

A tale of two towns - part one

Saturday was a game of two halves.  Having managed to forget half the things I went into town for the previous day, I decided to brave the Saturday morning shopping and tourist frenzy with two children in tow.

It started well.  Thomas obligingly climbed into the buggy and remained there.  He refrained from his usual practice of issuing loud instructions about where I should and should not go, and practically exploding with rage if defied.  Ben took one look around at the crowds and burrowed into the depths of the sling where he huddled for the rest of the trip.

I will admit that Thomas’s co-operation was largely secured by the simple technique of bribing him with the promise of cake if he behaved.  The problem with this approach is that once the aforementioned cake is safely in the bribee’s greedy little tummy, the incentive to continue behaving is effectively gone. 

Things went downhill fast.

Quite literally.

We went into Marks and Spencers and I made the catastrophic mistake of assuming that Thomas would act like a normal human being when asked to apply himself to the task of getting from one floor to another.  So I ejected him from the buggy and told him to get on the escalator.  Which, to be fair to him, he did.  Sort of. 

Unfortunately the problem with bunny-hopping onto an escalator is that if you don’t time it just right, you are liable to finish up sprawled upside down with your feet waving around several steps higher than your head.  Which is of course exactly what happened.  Carnage ensued as the other occupants of the escalator tried to climb up or down to help.  Thomas screamed blue murder while I yelled helpful things like “WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING?” and “IS THAT HOW YOU GET ON AN ESCALATOR? IS IT? IS IT?” and eventually resorted to picking him up by his waistband while clutching the buggy with the other hand.

When we reached the top, we had Words.  We discussed the matter and he agreed that he would walk onto the escalator in a normal manner on the way back down.  Having secured this promise I purchased pants (which is, after all, the only thing anyone goes into M&S for, unless it is Christmas and a Belgian biscuit selection is required) and we headed back to the down escalator. 

He attempted to crawl onto it.

This time he managed a sort-of sideways sprawl which wasn’t too disastrous until he decided to try to climb back up the escalator towards me.  This did not work out well and once again he found himself upside down.  On this occasion there was a nice man up-escalator from us who took the buggy so I could pick up a kicking, screaming Thomas and pin him under my arm.  Ben stuck his head out briefly to see what all the fuss was about and made the wise decision to retreat into the sling once more and pretend it wasn’t happening.  Aware that I was being watched disapprovingly (and no-one does disapproving like the average M&S shopper) I felt the need to assert some parental discipline.

“There will be NO MORE ESCALATORS for you,” I announced as we stepped onto solid ground.

At which point Thomas threw himself onto the floor and lay there wailing “I want escalatooooooors” over and over again.  People were now stopping for a good, solid bit of disapproving rather than just indulging in fleeting disapproval as they passed.

I was firm.  “No more escalators,” I reiterated, and left the store carrying Thomas in the approved tantrumming-toddler fashion (hands under armpits, child dangling like a sack of uncooperative potatoes), attempting to push the buggy ahead of me with my foot.

We returned to the car and I breathed a sigh of relief as Thomas had a brief resurgence of cooperation and climbed into his car seat himself.  As I started to put the buggy in the boot, there was a blood-curdling scream and I turned round to find him dangling upside down out of the car-door, one leg wedged improbably between the front seat and the side of the car.  There is only one thing that can be said in those circumstances.

“How did you manage that?”

He didn’t know, he informed me, peering up at me from about three inches off the carpark floor.

At this point a woman pulled up beside us, clearly about to wait for the parking space.  Now I should point out that the carpark wasn’t completely full.  It was busy, I grant you, but there were other spaces to be had.  No.  She wanted this one.  Despite the fact that she had children in the car and could therefore be expected to have some inkling of the time required to load small children and buggies into a car, she decided she wanted the parking space currently occupied by the woman with the upside down toddler, the buggy that had tipped over under the weight of shopping bags, and the sleeping baby.

I righted Thomas and left him to climb back into his seat while I unloaded the bags, got the buggy upright again and began the complicated process of collapsing it.  Allegedly this buggy can be put down with one hand.  I am sure it can, but not by me.  There is presumably a separate set of instructions for buggy novices which begins “Get down on your hands and knees and take hold of the bit you are supposed to be able to operate with your foot before using your head to push the seat along the chassis….”

I eventually had everything loaded in the boot and I strapped Thomas in before going round to the other side to start unwrapping Ben.  I can only assume that the other woman did not realise I had a second child.  That is the only charitable explanation for what she decided to do next.

She wound her window down in order to stick her head out and inform me “I am waiting for this space, you know.”

“Yes,” I said. 

“Could you take much more time?” she asked.

I gave this a moment’s consideration before replying.

“Yes,” I said. 

I unloaded Ben from the sling, at which point the woman put her window back up.  I like to think she realised by now that she had made a complete arse of herself.  I then carefully folded the sling and took care finding the best part of the boot to store it.  I checked that everything was just where I wanted it before closing the boot.  I then walked around both sides of the car to make sure that Thomas and Ben were properly strapped in, before making my leisurely way to the driver’s seat. 

Unfortunately, after I had got in and put my seatbelt on, I realised that my bag of Thornton’s toffee was still in one of the shopping bags.  Clearly I could not possibly be expected to make it all the way home without toffee to sustain me.  So out I got again and made my way round to the boot.  I extracted the toffee after a bit of rummaging and held it up triumphantly, sure that the other woman would share my pleasure.  Finally ready, I gave her a beaming smile, got back into the car and vacated the space, having demonstrated to her satisfaction that yes, I certainly could take more time.

Stuff wot I made

I have completed a home project.  I am very excited about it.  I read other people’s blogs and admire their photo tutorials about all sorts of home improvements and clever recycling ideas, and I envy their organisation in actually planning and finishing their project while remembering to keep a record of their progress.

To be fair, this wasn’t exactly a difficult project.  Essentially, I bought something and put things in it.  But I am pleased with the results and intend to share them.  And sulk if no-one likes it.

At home I have two large, wooden chests full of family and personal memorabilia.  The kind of things you can’t really do anything with, but which you would never dream of throwing away.  My great-grandmother’s toy tea-set.  My sea-captain grandad’s papers with lists of his ships and his qualifications.  My school magazines.  My first birthday cards.  Flyers from old concerts and university balls.

When we moved to this house and found ourselves with a lot more space, I decided that it was time that some of these things saw light of day, rather than languishing out of sight.  My first idea was to make memory jars.  I saw these in a magazine a few months ago – the writer kept small items from each holiday she took and stored them in old-fashioned jars.  This website contains similar ideas.

I used three large jars from Ikea and used one to store “old” things, another for my items from my own lifetime, and a third for things collected during our family life, the idea being to add to this last jar on an ongoing basis.  The jars are currently being used as bookends and while I like them, there are items in the “old things” jar that are rather lost in the tangle of bits and pieces.

While browsing for something unrelated on ebay, I came across multiple listings for these old printers drawers.  They tend to sell for around £20 each and are essentially storage trays with lots of different sized spaces, once used for storing the letter templates used in the printing process.

I bought one a while ago and this weekend I finally got round to putting it to its intended use as a display case for some of those little family items.  This is the end result.  Among the things that have found a home here is a sewing bodkin that belonged to my great-grandmother, a seamstress, the first present my granddad gave to my gran, a four-leafed clover I found as a small child, the pen presented to my granddad when he took the captaincy of the biggest merchant ship in the UK, my mum’s pilot’s wings and various other bits and pieces.

So there we go – a completed and recorded project.  Now I just need to get on with the other major family history task – the giant family tree.   Watch this space....

Houston, we have a problem

Today's post was going to be about a little project for the home that I completed recently.  It was going to be nice.  It was even a little bit instructional.  There were going to be pretty pictures and everything.  In short, it was going to be just what a blog post should be.

Unfortunately, my wish to show off my recycled printer's tray project is less compelling than my intense need to rant until I can rant no more.

Sorry, tray-appreciaters of the world.

THE KEY'S THE THING

This morning Thomas hid the car-key.  Despite being told a million and one times to leave it alone, he decided that he just couldn't resist the urge any longer.  Because of course none of his toys are anywhere near as much fun as a small bit of black plastic with a flicky-out metal bit.

So just as I was rejoicing in the fact that I was going to make the vital pre-7.30 deadline for  getting out the door (after which the traffic mysteriously trebles) I discovered that the only car key had disappeared. 

"That was me," Thomas volunteered helpfully.

I enquired as calmly and pleasantly as possible about the location of the key.

"Oh," he said, looking about vaguely.  "I don't know."

I could feel my teeth trying to grit.  I forced a smile and asked him to try to remember.

"Baby Ben's smiling," he announced cheerfully.

Baby Ben was indeed smiling, but I felt it worth pointing out that mummy was most definitely not smiling.

"Oh.  Yes."

Could he possibly see his way to helping me look for the key?

"Oh yes."  And off he went to the bedroom.  I began to get my hopes up.

He stuck his head through the door.  "Not in here," he shouted.

It was inevitable.  Within five minutes there was not the slightest trace of calm, reasonable me.  She had been replaced by sweating, foot-stamping, shouting me.  I waved my arms.  I jumped up and down and demanded that he sit down and think about where the key might be.  I am prepared to accept that this might have been just a teeny bit unreasonable given that he is two and a half with the attention span of a gnat with an unusually short attention span.

This went on for forty minutes, during which time Thomas and Ben mainly sat and grinned conspiratorially at each other, which eventually raised my suspicions so much that I searched Ben for the missing key.

I finally located it under back corner of the sofa.  It could only have got there if Thomas had crawled under the table and placed it there.  I refuse to accept that he had no recollection of doing this and I told him so.

"Oh.  Yes," he said.

We were on our way.  Unfortunately we were now substantially on the wrong side of 7.30 and therefore doomed to spend at least twenty minutes trying to get through the roadworks that have entirely cut off this corner of London for the last 6 weeks.

'Lots of traffic,' Thomas remarked with an air of surprise. 'Why it stopped?'

IT'S ALL OVER THE FRONT PAGE, YOU GIVE ME ROAD RAGE......

Now I am willing to admit that, on occasion, I am capable of reaching the kind of incandescences of seething rage that are probably visible from the space station. This being the case, you would think some kind of alert system would have been put in place.  You would think that somewhere up there above the earth, a Russian astronaut would be pushing a big red button to inform the good citizens of London that I was coming. If such a system does not exist, it bloody well should do.

So why, in the name of arse, have the commuters of London conspired to wind me up even more?

You would think that the woman who decided to create an extra lane on an entirely normal, single-lane road in order to squeeze to the front of the queue might have considered not then going into a frenzy of mouthing and gesticulating her displeasure at finding me in her way and therefore having to remain on the wrong side of the road, blocking all oncoming traffic.

You would think that the Very bad Driver might have had the sense, given that I am still grieving for my poor little Ford Puma, lost in an unfortunate M4 engine disintegration, not to weave all over the road in his shiny Puma right in front of me.

You would think that the school run mum in the enormous car might possibly give some consideration to not double parking and bringing an already congested, central London road to a grinding halt in order to get her offspring about ten feet nearer the school gates.  You would also think that she would avoid adding insult to injury by glaring and shaking her head at the van driver who dared to toot at her.

You would think that word might have got out somehow.  But no.

And all this to a running commentary from the back seat of “No, that way, mummy.  Turn left here.  Why you stopped?  You going right way?”  With occasional bursts of righteous indignation at the actions of other road users.

“Indicate, woman.”

“Come ON!”

“What you doing?”

“It’s thirty.  THIRTY.  Not twenty.”

Thomas regularly holds up a sobering mirror to my constant state of low-level road rage.  I was relieved when he abandoned his driving critique and simply began to drone a strange version of Baa Baa Blacksheep that involved thanking every day of the week individually.  “Thank you Saturday, thank you Sunday, thank you, Wednesday, three bags full.”

There’s nothing like a spot of repetitive, tuneless toddler droning to calm a rage.  Yes, you lose the will to live, but at least your blood pressure comes down a little bit.

Anyway, as fraught as the morning has been, it was nothing compared to the distress and horror of the story I read in Metro this morning. 

Woman in “almost loses something but doesn’t” shocker.  Must be a slow news day.

And yes.  I am fully aware of the irony of this sarcasm given that this post could be entitled “Woman almost loses something but doesn’t” but at least I didn’t ring Metro about my missing car-keys.

Besides, in the immortal words of Ally Mcbeal when asked why her problems are so much bigger than everyone else’s, it’s because they are mine.