My salad dressing days

‘I’m a bit concerned…’ he says.

Oh God, I think.

‘Why?’ I ask.

‘Well, let me show you.’ [He opens out a map as if he is about to brief me on the rules of engagement for an imminent airstrike on Pyongyang.] ‘Do you see this small patch of land? Just here? Without any cross-hatching or diagonal lines?’

[The patch of land, even for my geographically- and mathematically-challenged brain, appears to be 25cm sq.]

‘Um, yes…’

‘Well, it’s unaccounted for! It’s neither part of the public highway nor is it part of the private road leading up to your house!’

‘And this is a problem because…?’ I query.

‘Because you will have to cross this piece of land whenever you want to get from the road to your house.’

‘And?’

‘And…supposing the person who actually owns this piece of land decides he or she wants to start charging you to walk or drive over it?’

I recoil in horror. For some reason, I am imagining this person as the three billy goats gruff’s nemesis.

‘What are we going to do??’ I wail.

‘Well, I’m going to talk to the developers and we’ll see what comes back on the local authority searches.’

*******

[A few days later.]

‘So…? What was the deal with that patch of tarmac? Is a nasty troll going to charge me three gold bullions each time I want to drive to my own house?’

‘Eh? Oh…that piece of land! It was a drafting error. It’s part of the public highway. Nothing to worry about!’

but if you are it helps.

Why else is it that the only English newspapers we can buy at our Alpine campsite are The Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail?

It’s enough to make a gal choke on her morning pain au chocolat.

So she sticks to Liberation and a dictionary.

Friend #1 calls. She’s worried about her three and a half year old. He’s very defiant. He won’t listen.

Tell me about it, I say. We have four year olds. Who are defiant. Who won’t listen. 

I tell her I have bought a book. It has one of those long-winded titles so beloved of American self-help authors: ’How to talk so kids listen and listen so kids talk’.

(To be honest, we’re after some more listening from the kids and less talking. But we’re willing to give it a whirl.)

Friend #1 comes over all excited!

‘Will you read it and tell me what it says?’

‘Yeah, OK. But I’m only ten pages in. Don’t hold your breath. After all, I’ve only read six novels since giving birth four and a half years ago.’

‘Well, I don’t have time to go and buy it, let alone read it, so just do your best’, says my friend, somewhat impatiently.

*******

We meet some weeks later with Friend #2, who also has a defiant four-year-old with selective hearing issues.

I confess sheepishly that I have bought a pop psych book on the matter.

When I tell her the title, she (equally sheepishly) confesses that she has bought it too.

‘What did you think?’ I ask (hopefully).

‘Oh, I dunno. I’ve only read ten pages.’

‘Me too!’ I squeal.

‘Yeah, well, I just haven’t got the time’, she complains.

‘I know…’, I reply.

(I consider that we may have hit upon the crux of the problem.)

*******

Friend #2 is a clinical psychologist.

There is no hope. For any of us.

“What if the Hokey Cokey is what it’s all about?”

[The reported dying words of the father of a family friend.]

The party, it seems, is in a high street bank near you.

Yes, really.

I had to make a secure phonecall to my bank from a branch of my bank because there was no chance at all I could talk to a real life human being face to face. Go figure.

I walked into my bank and Coldplay was blaring out of a multitude of speakers. A handful of perky, lipsticked twentysomethings were hanging out chatting with their perky, lipsticked twentysomething mates (the staff). They looked startled when I approached them and pointed me wordlessly to The Secure Telephone.

I dialled the number and made my introductions.

‘Now, are you sure you can’t be overheard by anyone?’

‘Whaaaaaaat?’

‘ARE YOU SURE YOU CAN’T BE OVERHEARD BY ANYONE?’

‘I’m not sure I can hear myself. There appears to be a radio station pumping out of the speakers in here!’

‘YOU’RE IN A RADIO STATION?’

‘No! There seems to be be a radio station playing in here, VERY LOUDLY. So, no, I don’t think I can be overheard.’

‘Right…’

So, there we go. If you’re a time-poor, zonked-by-7pm thirtysomething mother-of-two, the place to go for a quiet boogie is your high street bank.

(NOT a nightclub, which is high on hen and stag nights and low on emergency exits, and where you will have three square inches of dancefloor on which to get on down.)

(And NOT your partner’s mate’s 40th birthday bash, where you will have a square mile of dancefloor on which to shake your groove because all the guests are clock-watching in case they’re late for the babysitter and because, with the lapse of decades, everyone has forgotten how hard it is to dance to Joy Division.)

A programme I accidentally clicked on whilst browsing the BBC iPlayer archives:

Find Me The Face: Yummy Mummy

Duration: 60 minutes

Two of the UK’s top model scouts compete to find new talent. In this episode they search for mothers in their thirties who may be up to industry standard.

*******

There’s an industry standard?

Yikes.

You spot a bird in your garden.

An aspirant ornithologist visiting your home speculates (excitedly) that it could be a song thrush but she is not sure.

You type “thrush” into the Google Images search engine.

BBC iPlayer is plain marvellous, not to mention life-changing. (Who, in an era of iPlayer, Listen Again and Amazon DVD rentals, would fork out for Sky? Pas moi.)

BBC3’s Gavin and Stacey not so much. (The reviewers, they were unjustifiably over-enthusiastic IMO.)

HMRC owes me nine hundred squids. (Tax rebates are one of the few perks of having virutally no income to speak of.)

HMRC is owed nine hundred squids by The Husband. (And the cheeky sods have already charged him 1% interest for not having paid it the instant he submitted his tax return online…on, um, the day before the deadline.)

Every mother knows that you surrender your dignity at your first midwife’s appointment, but truly, the glamour associated with parenting never ends.

This week, some backroom IT support assistant at Netdoctor is sniggering as (s)he looks at the websearches that resulted in clicks through to the site (’can nits migrate to pubic hair?’*). Whilst his or her counterpart at BioMed Central is quietly guffawing at the late night Googling of a university-educated British woman for whom ‘O’ Grade Biology is a distant memory (’do headlice reproduce asexually?’**).

* It was important to know this. Because - believe me - I was itching everywhere.

** Nope, it takes two to tango. So the little bastards were bonking 24/7 on my scalp.

Farmer Duck - a digested read: the Duck does all the work on the farm, whilst the farmer lies in bed all day eating himself towards morbid obesity. The other animals recognise this gross injustice for what it is and chase the farmer away. The end.

My daughter: “But why did the aminals (sic) chase the farmer away?”

Me: “Honey, it’s a classic example of the workers seizing the means of production. You want me to explain Marxism to you?”

My daughter: “Is that where you get your knickers from?”