Woss garn on?

I've come home from work.  The Shah is at home (unusually).  He is opening the accumulated post that has been gathering dust in the hall for ever.  


And shouting at it.


A Building Society statement?  'Bastards!'  A renewal of his subscription to The Economist?  'Fuckrrs!'  Two identical letters from Her Majesty's Revenue & Customs?  '*&^%£$@*!'


There is also the biggest television I have ever seen in my life sitting on the kitchen floor.  What looks like a stand for said TV is beside it.  It is clearly not a new TV - it is a bit dusty.  WTF?


I follow the sound of cursing and come upon the Shah, red-faced and harrumphing.  He waves some sort of bill at me and, all of a sudden, his facial expression changes to one of an idiot savant.  He offers me a toothy smile and whines "Secretary?" with a ghastly, ingratiating smirk across his chops.  I make a dash out of the room before I can be trapped into this nightmare.  I mean WTF x 2?  Does he now expect me to deal with all his mail like a feckin' Secretary while he is cutting a swathe through the Midlands all week?  Er, yes he does.  As if.


A little later, I ask about the TV.  "Oh yes, that!" he says as if it is something of such minuscule consequence that he had quite forgotten all about it.  Adrian's moving house and he doesn't want it, so he's given it to us."


This is undoubtedly a generous gesture.  However, I'm sure there are certain Health & Safety recommendations regarding how far away you should sit from monster tellies and, in Crap Cottage, I think we may end up having to sit in the garden just to view the damn thing safely.  


Needless to say, TD is delighted, declares the whole thing "sick" and demands that the Shah give up shouting at the mail and set it up for her.  This he does with some alacrity because he too is v. excited by giant tellies as only a boy can be.  It is massive - 50".  Mind you, even I have to admit that the picture is amazing (HD or some other term I have no comprehension of) but that Sue Barker's wrinkles are much worse than I thought.  We sit and watch a programme on ancient buildings or something similar for a while.  This allows the Shah to indulge his passion for Malapropisms.


A shot of an ornate coffin fills the screen.  "Oh look," says the Shah with great excitement.  "There's an oesophagus..."


FML.

My Gap Years

We've done it!  We have finally disgorged our first born, chucked him out of the nest and palmed him off on an unsuspecting University.

He has had around a month to sit about admiring the wallpaper in between his summer job ending and Uni kicking off – his Uni seems to be the very last on the planet to get going – so you might imagine that, in between the socialising, the relentless facebooking and the chauffeuring duties we have demanded of him, he might have given a little bit, just a teensy weensy bit of thought to the adventure ahead.   Don’t be daft.  In that time, he has been fun to be around, helpful in carrying out the odd favour, driving his sister around, fetching her from school after late-finishing rehearsals or netball matches and genially referring to himself as the “house husband”.  Boy, am I going to miss that extra pair of hands to nip out for a carton of milk or some cat food.  And the relentless facebooking has meant that he has been able to make contact with many other prospective Undergrads and has ready-made mates before he even arrives.  His preparations, however, have differed somewhat from some of his peers.

One girl has been so excited by her impending freedom that her facebook status has been a countdown day by day for the past month...28 days till Uni!  27 days till Uni!  Needless to say, my son and his new chums think such a blatant display of enthusiasm is the uncoolest thing on the planet.  On Saturday, when I suggested he might like to think about maybe, just maybe, gathering up some of the clothes and other kit he wanted to take with him, his response was “Yeah, I suppose I could throw some shit in a suitcase.”  He then proceeded to stay up until 5 o’clock in the morning, sorting out the paperwork he has had a month to assemble.  Insurance?  What’s that then?  The Shah ended up arranging it for him (very grumpily) that evening.  I was despatched to Tesco to buy heaps of well, just stuff (I won't bore you with the details.)  I tramped around, smiling grimly at all the other harassed-looking women, marked out as mothers of Freshers by the disinterested-looking teens slouching along three steps behind them.  The women were all trying to look and sound bright and interested and saying things like “look – those are nice tea towels – why don't we get you a set of those?” and the response from the inevitable teenager was the inevitable grunt.

Eventually, it all came together.  We loaded up two cars (why did we ever get rid of the people carrier?) and set off.   Happily, he has chosen a Uni not a million miles away so we were there reasonably quickly.  Bloody hell!  Have Halls of Residence changed since the days of the Shah and me?!  I didn’t go to Uni but I went straight into a Nurse’s Home which was almost Victorian in its set up. I had a tiny room with a cupboard and a sink in the corner and a lovely view over a humming generator.  There were three bathrooms to serve a corridor of approximately 40 rooms –showers that only ever seemed to run cold and baths that nobody cleaned out.  The kitchen was revoltingly Spartan and everything always felt slightly sticky.  It was pretty much pointless keeping anything in the fridge as it just got nicked and it was impossible to tell which one of your 39 neighbours had done it.  The one pay phone (no mobiles in those days) was always hogged by a scrawny girl called Val who spent hours sobbing down it to her boyfriend back home.  The Shah, by contrast, messed up his University application to the extent that he arrived in Wales with nowhere to live and spent the first two weeks camping out on the floor of the Sports Hall until he could sort out a room in a shared house.  Compare and contrast with the student accommodation that is today’s offering.  Our boy is sharing a flat, within a Hall of Residence (are they even called that these days?) which consists of six ensuite rooms with a large, communal kitchen.  The kitchen features 2 labelled cupboards and a drawer for each room, a large fridge and a gigantic freezer, built in oven and all the little extras like a toaster and microwave supplied along with cleaning equipment, ironing board etc.  His room has more cupboard space than our bedroom at home, internet connection, a full length mirror, you name it.  He is in one of several blocks arranged around a central green which features an attractive duck pond.  At least he pronounced it “sick”.  Had he said otherwise, I might have been tempted to smack him one. 

It all seems a million miles from the days when he had to be physically peeled off my leg every morning and dragged howling like a banshee into his Reception class, lunchbox in hand.  His  academic career has not always lived up to expectations – he was the only boy in his first school to have his own behaviour book which had to be signed by the teacher at the end of every lesson.  I have already mentioned his ignominious school experiences, so I won’t go into them again here, but somehow those years which appeared, at the time, to stretch before us forever now seem to have gone by in the blink of an eye. 

But whilst the Shah and I might be able to rationalise it and (eventually) get our heads around his moving on, his sister is feeling the pain much more keenly.  Their sibling rivalry notwithstanding, she adores her brother and hates being what she calls an ‘only child’.  One of her closest friends is in the same boat and they spent yesterday evening texting their woes to each other. 

And so I move into my Gap Years.  Right now, there is a huge gap, a yawning chasm where my funny, handsome, sarcastic (he is his mother’s son after all) boy used to be.  It feels strange – he’s been away from home before for a couple of weeks at a time but this is obviously different.  He says he is coming home in three weeks for a party, but I wonder if the attractions of Uni life might prove too much and he might “ceebs” it after all.

You've come a long way baby!

The Name Game

I had intended to write a piece decrying Jamie Oliver for calling his unfortunate son Buddy Bear Maurice.  But I actually quite like Jamie Oliver – he seems to be a what-you-see-is-what-you-get type of guy, few airs and graces and is clearly passionate about what he does.  And he produces nice books and recipes that work.

So I thought I would let him off – which was big of me, I’m sure you will agree.  Besides, if I’m going to write a(nother) really narky piece, I’d rather concentrate on the real irritants of the world – Bob Geldof or  Bono or George Michael, for example but Bob’s choice of names for his daughters is just silly, I have no idea what Bono’s kids are called, assuming he even has some and George Michael, well, ahem, he is unlikely ever to have any.

And anyway, if you just Google “stupid celebrity baby names” the search engine, in its majesty, presents you with 166,000 results which is slightly worrying.   And when you start to browse through some of those names, you come up with “Pilot Inspektor” (son of Jason Lee and Beth Riesgraf, whoever they may be), and “Reign Beau” (daughter of Ving Rhames –er, who?), not to mention “Speck Wildhorse” and “Moxie Crimefighter” – yes, both real and belonging to the son of John Mellencamp (80’s singer) and the daughter of Penn Gillette (the talking one out of Penn & Teller) respectively.  What the hell is wrong with these people?  What’s wrong with a good old fashioned Mary or James?

It gets better worse.  Imagine having to live with the moniker “Jermajesty”.  You would if your dad was Jermaine Jackson.  Or try “Audio Science” or “Diva Muffin” (which sounds vaguely obscene).  Some bloke called Robert Rodriguez was either fixated with the letter R or simply devoid of all imagination when he chose Rocket, Racer, Rebel, Rogue and Rhiannon for his kids’ names.  So what next?  If his wife has a tough pregnancy he could go for “Reflux” or maybe “Regurge”.

And then there is the celeb who went for O’shun for her presumably longed-for baby.  If she ever gets pregnant by accident, she could always try O’shitt for its sibling.

But perhaps the names “Whizdom” and “Bow-Ty” take the bis-kit?  Or maybe the prize should go to a guy called Rob Morrow who eschewed all fancy nomenclature and simply called his kid “Tu”.  I'm guessing he's American because why else would you name your child after a line of clothing in a supermarket?  It's the equivalent of having twins and naming them Florence & Fred 


 Let’s hope the poor mite never auditions for a part in Annie...

You're calling me WHAT??

Cat woman...

I came across this today...it made me laugh and it's just so true.  Any of us can be in the foulest mood, in the midst of a rancid argument with any one of our parents/children/siblings and as soon as a cat enters the equation, we are reduced to soppy, dribbling creatures.

Daddy Dearest...

In contrast to the mummies so frequently seen on the school run, or clustered around the gates anytime after 3pm, the school run Dad is a much rarer animal.  Not possessed of the soft heart of the Mummy, he can cheerfully dump and run, leaving little Cameron/Lexi sobbing into the voluminous skirts of the teacher on duty and scarper for the 8.15 to Waterloo without so much as a backward glance.

Dads don’t have a great deal of patience with the school run and the delicate nuances of female competition.  They prefer to bulldoze their way up the pavement, yanking a near-hysterical child behind them and tough tits if you’ve forgotten your show and tell for today and left your lunchbox at home.  If you're lucky, he might stop off at the newsagent and buy you a packet of crisps and a family sized bar of fruit and nut to keep you going.  As soon as you crack that open at lunchtime, half the class reaches for an Epipen and the dinner ladies become hysterical.

Even worse is the Dad who is late and decides to try and drive right up as close to the school as possible.  One such got caught behind a friend of mine who was trying (pretty unsuccessfully) to reverse her car into quite a tight spot.  It took her two or three goes and, once he was able to get past, he stopped his car alongside hers, lowered the window and yelled “you stupid f*cking woman” at her for precisely no reason at all, other than he reckoned himself because he was a newsreader on some feckin’ dismal little satellite channel that nobody watched and a giant tosser into the bargain.  So, naturally, he was far too important to wait for someone else to park.  We consoled ourselves by reassuring each other that his wife was thick and his children were fugly.

We have already encountered competitive dad who, on the school run as on Sports Day, is inclined to turn up in a tracksuit and the very latest Nike trainers.  He jogs on the spot whilst waiting for the gates to open and insists that Ben and Ella run home, even though it's pouring with rain and Ella turned an ankle in Gym earlier on today.  He hares off through the puddles, splashing anyone too slow to get out of his way with a cry of "It's only rain - you won't melt!" as Ben and Ella trail miserably behind, trying not to look at their school friends steaming past in the Mercedes 4x4, making big L's with their thumb and forefingers and mouthing LOSERS! through the window at them.

Weekend Wally is the divorced Dad who picks up from school on a Friday night.  With no idea at all what to do with his offspring while their mother is re-enacting scenes from ‘Cougarville’  in All Bar One, he relies on forced jollity to get him through.  He is inclined to greet Joshua with a hearty “Hey BUDDY!” and Lottie with “how’s my little Princess today?!” which makes both children cringe and blush.  Minutes later in the car, Josh receives a text from the class bully, Troy.  It reads “Ur dad is a spaz and a gaylord”.

At one time, my kids attended the same school as a certain now-famous TV chef.  Of course, he wasn’t famous in those days and he never once roared “school doesn’t get any tougher than this” as he let his kids out of the BMW on the double yellows in the morning. 

Dads also have little regard for the rules.  Viz the Shah who, at our kids’ first school, took on the role of Santa at the Christmas Fair with great gusto.  Needless to say, he was totally politically incorrect and allowed, nay encouraged, children to sit on his knee and/or give him a hug.  I was living in fear of his being branded a Plastic Paedo* but he was having none of it. 

It was probably just as well that it was deemed to be too onerous (ie sweaty in that beard) for one person to do the whole shift, so there would be an interval in the proceedings and someone else would take over.  Who should volunteer but the Shah’s mate Jim?  Nothing funny about that until you find out that Jim is actually Jewish.  So (as he delightedly recounted to a Board meeting the following week) there was him (Jewish) and the Shah (Hindu) sharing the Father Christmas robes at the very Christian school’s Winter Fair.  The Headmaster didn’t seem too bothered, not a single child commented on the fact that the morning shift Santa had acquired a deep tan from somewhere and, in case you're wondering, a Plastic Paedo* is a sorry excuse for a real one.  Sorry Shah!

Back to skool...

Ah, it’s that time of year again, when we head back onto the school run with death in our collective hearts.

Believe me, those of you who are either male or child-free, there is no arena so competitive as the school gate and it has been the downfall of many a knackered mummy who has (ahem, like my good self on occasion) turned up to drop off or collect, still in her pyjamas.  In fact, the school gate is positively tribal.  One practised glance at your fellow mummies and you can tell precisely which tribe they belong to.  They come broadly as follows:-

Cashmere Kate

The Cashmere Kates are usually tiny in every sense of the word, blonde and pretty in a cream-and-pink sort of a way.  Kate is always immaculately turned out and her clothes are expensive and classic, if not particularly trendy.  Kate never swears or uses vulgar language.  She is inclined to brush her hair and renew her lipstick before hubby arrives home. She drinks Earl Grey out of a china cup and saucer (never a mug!) and usually wears pearls.  She never raises her voice to her children or on any other occasion.  There is generally a vapid little smile on her lips.  She has an O level in Home Economics and another in Art.  She married well.  She is oblivious to the existence of...

Ballbreaker Belinda

Belinda has a job in the City, a massive mortgage and an Architect husband who can’t keep it in his trousers.  She is convinced he is shagging his latest PA.  Added to this, Joshua keeps calling the bloody Australian Nanny (what’s her name again – Charlene?  Raelene?) “Mummy”.   She strides down the road towards school, dragging Joshua behind her, ignoring his wails whilst clicking away on her CrackBerry with her free hand.  The sodding nanny should be doing this but the cow is hungover again.  She has no idea how it all ended up like this.   She has no time at all for Cashmere Kate but secretly envies...

Earthmother Ellen

Ellen has long, curly hair and freshly-scrubbed features.  She wears lacy layers or vintage nighties as dresses with wellingtons with a strawberry print all over them.  She cycles to school on her old fashioned ‘sit up and beg’ bike with a large pannier on the front, containing a Jack Russell puppy.  The children (Gaia, Atticus and Tertia) are hauled along behind in a three man buggy.  On very rainy days, she grudgingly drives a Toyota Pious, sorry Prius.  She always has dirt under her fingernails from the Organic Allotment.  She never shaves her armpits and is inclined to publicly haul one massive, leaking boob from the depths of her vintage lace layers and plug it into a beatific baby, quite unabashed.  Circling fathers find her either gross and slightly unwashed-looking or thrillingly sexy.  She has absolutely nothing in common with...

Susan the Social Experimenter

There is normally only one of these in any school and that is generally considered to be one too many.  Her children are given old-fashioned names, but not trendy ones, just bloody awful ones like Prudence and Gwendoline.  Her 11 year old daughter is still made to wear Doodles and Jelly shoes and Susan frowns upon little girls who wear jeans and shorts as they’re so unladylike.  They do have a television, but it’s just a little black and white portable and they only use it on special occasions like the Proms or a royal wedding because the picture's quite fuzzy really and the only way to get it clear is for Keith to stand and hold the aerial all the time.  Instead of watching TV, they play Grandmother’s Footsteps and What’s the time Mr Wolf?  Susan is sneakily proud of the mobile phone she bought second hand (for emergencies only).  It is 8 inches long (not including the aerial) and weighs 10lbs.  She truly cannot understand the likes of...

Gym Bunny Jenny

Jenny and her ilk are always dressed in the latest designer gym duds.  She is perma-tanned and fearsomely toned because she spends literally all day at the local David Lloyd, where she works out like a demon and then indulges in a tough sports massage.  After this, she meets a few of the girls in the Restaurant for lunch where they vie to see who can chase a lettuce leaf around a plate the longest.  She has had a bit of work done but would rather die than admit it.  Marcus must never find out!  She is terrified of losing him and (more to the point) his hedge fund manager salary.  She has given Marcus two adorable daughters – Poppy and Saffron – but knows he is desperate for a son.  She would like to have another baby but the potential effect on her 37 year old waistline gives her night terrors.  She looks with pity upon...

Average Eva

Eva is in the middle.  Middle class, middle aged and muddling along.  She does her best with two unruly children and a largely absent workaholic husband.  She works four days a week but would love to cut down to three, if only they could afford it.  She could do with losing half a stone or so because she drinks more than is strictly good for her but hey, what the hell?  If someone gave you the bottle of wine it doesn’t count and if someone else pours the glass, that doesn’t count either.  Consequently, she and her friends spend a lot of time pouring for each other.  She is constantly harassed and downtrodden by her children who inform her that every meal she produces is “like, puke innit?” and refuse to lift a finger around the house sighing “ugh, effort,” when asked.  She wishes she had Jenny’s body and Ellen’s insouciance but knows she will never have either and the bloody cat’s brought another mouse in.

There was one famous occasion when a friend and I went to watch our sons play football for the school. We got to the ground only to find that the newsreader Mark Austin was there – and jolly handsome in the flesh too – because his son was on the opposing team.  Blimey!  Poor bloke hardly saw any of the match, because he was constantly surrounded by Cashmere Kates vying for his attention.  And he was charming and didn’t tell a single one of them to “feck off, I’m here to see my boy play” which I would have been tempted to do.

There are probably more mummy types than this but I feel quite exhausted by this lot.  Watch this space – the Daddies are coming!