Bags Of Fun

That’s it – the third child has finally finished school for the summer. At last we can sit around in our pyjamas all day and watch junk television – which is exactly what I used to do myself at a similar age.
I have spent the last week studiously avoiding eye contact with other mothers in order to sidestep plans to meet up for educational days out or healthy picnics. Unfortunately, my daughter has accused me of stunting her social growth by refusing to plunge headlong into the morass of scheduled events and activities. She hasn’t yet discovered the boundless joys of being unsociable, which is surprising when you consider that she lives with such a great role model.
Each of my kids has come home from school on their final day laden down with at least three carrier bags. These have all been dumped unceremoniously in the corner of the kitchen. It looks as if I have had a supermarket home delivery, but instead of the usual bottles of wine and packets of frozen chips, the bulging carrier bags contain every single piece of work they have done across the school year.
What is the point of all this? Do schools think that parents need hard evidence that their children have been doing something other than picking their noses all year? Are they just pandering to the parental obsession of needing to know everything our children are doing, even when they manage to escape the full glare of our interest for a few hours a day at school?
When I was at junior school, the only thing we brought home on the final day of the school year was a pair of cheesy-smelling plimsolls which had been used for ‘music and movement.’ I vaguely remember that we did those lessons in our underwear, which seems astounding now and makes me feel ancient. I suppose it added another weapon to the armoury of the sadistic PE staff, enabling them to humiliate the weedier children even more effectively.
Anyway, the bags are piled up in the corner, and I’m not sure what to do with them. I really can’t face looking through reams of spelling tests and times table worksheets, or making appreciative noises at A3 sized pieces of artwork which drop chunks of bright red powder paint all over my dressing gown. I know for certain that I don’t want to look in the ‘My Busy Bee News’ book, which is well-known for exposing my intemperance, rather like a tabloid newspaper. Now I know what it must feel like to be a D-list celebrity whose agent has advised her against reading the gutter press. After all, there isn’t much point trying to sue an eight year old for libel.
Other parents tell me that they select a couple of pieces of artwork to keep, and a nicely written story or two. But that is going to involve sifting through the entire contents of each bag, not to mention lighting the blue touch paper of sibling rivalry.
Time to pause and enjoy a glass of Wither Hills Sauvignon Blanc from Marlborough, New Zealand (Sainsburys £8.99). This grassy, gooseberry–and-lime tasting wine is really intense, and offers everything you could ever want from a Sauvignon Blanc. Including inspiration.
I have decided to simply pour myself another glass, and revert to my default mode of ‘do nothing.’ That way, the carrier bags will become just another slag-heap in the industrial landscape of my kitchen. They can blend in with the assorted clutter until they cease to exist in their own right.
I have no doubt that the day my son asks me to retrieve the brightly coloured caterpillar with fifty pipe cleaner legs will be the day after I have finally shovelled the lot into a black bin liner.

Worth The Wait-ing List

Am I the only woman in the western world who owns just the one handbag? I think mine was fashionable round about 2003, when I bought it. Since then, it has steadily amassed so much crap that I think if I were to decide to clean it out, I would need to enlist the services of Rentokil, just to be on the safe side. Needless to say it is the size of a small suitcase, and weighs as much as my left leg. The muscles I have had to develop in my neck and back in order to keep it on my shoulder, have left me with an uncanny resemblance to Quasimodo. Since I appear to be going deaf as I get older, I may as well just get the eye patch, and then the transformation will be complete.

A friend of mine has several dinky little bags to match her several dinky little outfits. My bag is brown, therefore it already matches all my clothes – although the effect is not quite the same.

I have never quite understood why some people are prepared to go on a waiting list in order to buy a handbag. Is it really that mortifying just to choose a bag that is actually for sale in the shops? Yet again, I am probably missing something here. Whereas waiting lists seem to increase some people’s desire for certain things, I find that they have exactly the opposite effect on me. I remember a time last year when a mother urged me to put my children’s names down on a waiting list at a local tennis club. I knew there were other places they could learn to play tennis, should they wish to do so, so I asked her why I should bother with one where there was a waiting list, of nearly five years (apparently). “It’s for the discos” she hissed, “The social side is very good for teenagers!” What? Sign your children up for a sport which they may not be interested in, just so they can snog the ‘right sort of people’ when they hit the teenage years? Apart from the golf club style snobbery, this plan is so obviously flawed, that I cannot believe all these parents are following it so slavishly. Surely everyone remembers the horror and embarrassment of being asked to “be nice to” the gawky teenage son of their mother’s friend? Just imagine being forced to go to a disco where all the totty had been hand-picked by your mother? I have told H that if I ever try and do that to our kids, then he has full licence to smother me with a pillow. Although maybe I ought to retract that, as he probably doesn’t need much encouragement to wilfully misinterpret the pre-requisites.

I am drinking a Nepenthe Sauvignon Blanc (£7.99 Ocado) which is crisp, but not too sharp, in the way that some sauvignon blanc can be. It is a Drunk Mummy favourite.

I can remember, in the Eighties, there were waiting lists for the cleverly marketed and much-hyped Cloudy Bay Sauvignon Blanc. Unsurprisingly, I was never on such a list, but I do remember being given a glass by someone who had been. With his newly-acquired status as one of the chosen few, he poured it out with the sort of reverence normally reserved for religious rituals. I think I must have failed to give it due veneration (probably necked it too fast) because I was not offered a second glass. I can’t say for sure, but I don’t think I belched.

Would I Lie to You?

I am off for the weekend to visit my family. The kids are excited at the prospect of the long journey, because we always stop at the motorway service station for a burger. Its not really the burger they want – just the plastic toy that comes with it. I keep suggesting to them that they would be better off eating the plastic toy, and playing with the food, but they will have none of it.
I am already developing an unhealthy level of anxiety about my role as The Easter Bunny on Sunday morning, when I will have to escape undetected into my Dad’s garden to hide some little Easter eggs for the kids to find. I have always insisted on scrupulous levels of honesty from my children, yet I continue to lie to them in the most bare-faced manner about the existence of the Easter Bunny, the Tooth Fairy, and Santa Claus. I know that any day now they are going to unmask me as the craven liar I really am, and I’m dreading it. As a result, like Madame Bovary, I have resorted to crafting an increasingly tangled web of deceit to cover my tracks. I am seriously considering doing the egg hiding on the Saturday night, when they are asleep, so I won’t be caught red-handed.
The risk is that one of the urban foxes will get to the choccies before the kids do, and I will be faced with explaining away the carnage of empty foil wrappers to my weeping children, who no doubt would be convinced that the Easter Bunny had been eaten along with the eggs.
On the other hand, my family are rather big drinkers (no surprise there) and my children very early risers, so in order to continue the deception, I will have to get up at the crack of dawn on Easter Sunday with a hangover. On that basis, the potential bunny-massacre scene is looking worth the risk – at least I won’t have to lie about it next year.
As I am savouring a glass of citrussy Nepenthe Sauvignon Blanc (£7.99 Ocado) I am beginning to see a form of salvation from my years of gratuitous fraud. How about telling my kids that the Tooth Fairy has retired to a ‘Sprightly Seniors’ Community’ where she operates a successful dental implant business? And Santa? Thanks to global warming and high cholesterol levels, he is now running a celebrity ‘fat camp’ at his golf and leisure complex in Marbella.
Happy Easter! I’ll be posting again when I’m back on Tuesday 10th.