Colour Me Beautiful

I’ve been skipping about with a spring in my step today! My newly-painted toes are now a summery shade of coral, or, as the nail polish manufacturer would have me believe – ‘Feisty.’
Feisty? The only time I’m feisty is if someone at a party says to me “I think you may have had enough to drink already.” Who thinks up these bizarre names for colours?
A quick sift through my battered nail polish collection reveals a pale pink ‘Sweet Sixteen’ (totally congealed, needless to say) and a rather aspirational ‘Sophisticated Lady.’ Most of the names have no relation whatsoever to the colour of the polish. Why is ‘Pashmina’ a light plum colour? Judging by my school run it could be any one of at least thirty shades.
Maybe Farrow and Ball should bring out a range of nail colours. They could have names like ‘Cartland’s Pink,’ a romantic magenta, ‘Varicose Vein’ a delicate purple shade, and ‘Dandruff’ the classic neutral tone.
The warm weather has got me on a bit of a Chardonnay kick at the moment, so I am drinking a glass of creamy Tesco Finest Oak Aged White Burgundy (on offer at £3.99 down from £6.99, Hurry, hurry!) and getting ready to settle down with the last few chapters of Ian McEwan’s ‘On Chesil Beach.’ I have been trying to sneak a peek all day, as I am tantalisingly close to the end. Instead, I was embroiled in endless tedious arguments with the kids about tidying up the hordes of Action Man and Bratz toys. I did notice that a couple of the nose-less, midriff-baring Bratz (or Slutz as they are known in our house) have painted nails – in shades of ‘Jailbait Jewel’ and ‘Lilac Lolita.’

Twinkle Toes

I was sitting in the garden with the kids this afternoon, enjoying a picnic. Before you picture one of those ‘lifestyle’ catalogue scenarios where we are all dressed in white cotton, and eating home made quiche off Cath Kidston plates, I ought to qualify the term ‘picnic.’ The food consisted of a couple of mouldy cheese sandwiches and a few bags of crisps, with a carton of tartrazine-rich orange drink each. The defining factor, though, was that we were sitting on an outdoor rug. Therefore, we were technically having a picnic. I have recently made the seismic shift into flip-flops on account of the lovely weather, so I stretched my legs out on the rug towards my son. The expression on his face can only be described as abject revulsion, as he regarded my newly-emancipated toes. At first, I thought it could just be an understandable reaction to the cheese sandwiches, but no, apparently the taste of mouldy cheese was nothing compared to the sight of my hooves. Eventually, he cleared his throat and asked me in his most polite voice if I would mind moving my feet away from him, as they were putting him off his food. I would like to be indignant about this, but unfortunately he does have a point - they do look rather reptilian. Therefore, I have decided to tackle my own pedicure tonight. For someone who used to be very high maintenance, this is a bitter pill to swallow. In a previous life, I had well-tended toes and luscious acrylic fingernails with tips so white they looked like they had been dipped in Tippex. They were absolutely rock hard, and if anyone needed to take a door off its hinges, I was the woman for the job. Sitting back in a comfy lounger every month, leafing idly through glossy magazines while someone made your fingers and toes pretty, was hard to beat. Ah, memories......
Anyway, I have a bottle of Mâcon-Villages Chardonnay (£4.99 Ocado) chilling in the fridge which is crisp, peachy and unoaked, and should keep me company tonight. H is out until late, which is good, since I reckon that the ‘secrets of the boudoir’ should remain just that. I’m not sure that watching someone clip their toenails is conducive to great marital relationships (but then neither are scaly feet). A home pedicure isn’t quite the pampering experience of a nail salon, but I can think of one advantage – I was never offered a glass of wine at the salon.

Photo Love

We are back from our Easter break, which was great fun, involving a sort of ‘gathering of the clan’ with my brothers and their families. The strategy of hiding the Easter eggs on Saturday night worked well, although a couple of the sparkly wrappers proved irresistible to some local magpies. I just managed to prevent my youngest son from eating one egg that had acquired its own slug, but I doubt he would have noticed in the general chocolate feeding frenzy.
There is something about returning to the place in which you grew up that brings you down to earth with a bump. As the youngest in our family, I am always at a huge disadvantage in that all my brothers can remember every embarrassing episode from my formative years (and believe me, there were many). As if this wasn’t enough, my Dad’s house is bursting at the seams with photographic reminders of some hairstyles and outfits that can only be described as “experimental”. Here I am in one picture proudly sporting a brand new perm that makes me resemble a blonde Brian May from Queen. In another, I have a fringe that is so aggressively tong-ed that it looks as though a giant sausage roll is taped to my forehead. As the chronological freak show moves on, I am pictured in various sporting team photos – wearing full make up! In fact, plum eye shadow figured so strongly in my adolescence that I am surprised the social services were never called. Even in my twenties, at every family wedding or christening, I am clearly trying to compensate for something by wearing the biggest shoulder pads and largest hats I can find. Lastly, and most cruelly, are my wedding photos. It was only ten years ago, but for both H and I, the years have not been kind. At least they are only head shots, so the full extent of the decay is not immediately apparent. We look impossibly young and healthy in these pictures. For starters, we both had much more hair. Thankfully, after the birth of our daughter, we drop off my Dad’s photo montage completely, to be replaced by pictures of our kids, first as babies, now as children.
I am drinking a glass of Yalumba “Y” Viognier (£6.99 Ocado) which is a little bit sweet on its own but goes nicely with the supermarket Thai curry I will be ‘cooking’ tonight. I am trying to work out when my children are likely to start being embarrassed by the copious holiday photos we have of them messily devouring ice cream cornets. Judging by their mealtime this afternoon, which was more like feeding time at the zoo, that day is a long way off.

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.

Hear, hear!

I took my son (not the grunting one) for a hearing test at the local hospital today. Of course, this meant dragging all three kids along with me. A couple of years ago, a visit like this would have caused teeth-clenching levels of stress, but courtesy of the electronic stun-guns known as Nintendo DS consoles, it all went very smoothly. Instead of them running around the crowded waiting room, or chewing on the grimy one-armed dolly from the toy basket, they had to be roused back into consciousness when my son’s name was called.
Before I had kids I had hardly ever stepped inside a hospital. After three pregnancies, involving excessive levels of medical poking and prodding, I have now got to the stage where every time I see someone in a white coat, I take my knickers off (always causes a bit of a stir at the butcher’s shop).
Anyway, with underwear intact, I explained to the nice doctor that we were here because my son’s teacher had expressed a small concern about his hearing, so I thought we had better get it checked. When he asked if I personally thought my son couldn’t hear properly, I had to restrain my initial response about ‘selective male hearing’, since I doubt he would have been impressed. Instead, I mumbled something about it being impossible to tell in our house, since everyone shouted all the time – he wasn’t impressed with that either.
Thankfully, my son’s hearing turned out to be fine after all, so I am popping the cork off a Marques de Monistrol Rosé Cava (£6.49 Ocado) by way of celebration. Its not at all bad for a cheap fizz, and its pink too! I will make a note to tell his teacher next term that there definitely isn’t anything wrong with his hearing – obviously she just isn’t shouting loudly enough.

Tic-king Off

I was sprawling on the sofa, watching TV with the kids today, when I realised that the youngest was making a slight throat clearing/grunting noise every ten or so seconds. I surreptitiously checked he wasn’t choking, farting or being slowly asphyxiated by one of the others, then sat back again.
Now, I know all the child psychology Fuhrers tell you that you must ignore any nervous tics, or you risk making them worse, so I said nothing and sat there wondering how long he had been doing it – days, weeks, months? I had no idea – couldn’t remember it ever being quiet enough in the house to hear. After about another ten minutes I couldn’t stand it any more, and asked him gently if he was aware of the noise he was making.
“What noise?” he asked, turning his chin towards me, but with his gaze firmly locked onto the TV screen. I explained, doing a passable impersonation of the little grunt, but there was no glimmer of recognition, he just continued gawping at the screen – and continued grunting, only now every five seconds instead of ten. I was left pondering the prospect of his gradual slide into Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and then a full blown case of Tourette’s Syndrome by the time he hits puberty. In the end, I had to leave the room to avoid gnawing on my own knuckles, or yelling “For God’s sake, just stop it!”
This is not new territory, so I shouldn’t really be worried. My older son went through a stage of gurning alarmingly, and also developed a ‘spinning around’ tic that would have put the Jackson Five to shame. At the time, I was convinced that it was a result of dosing him up with cetirizine for hayfever, but now I’m not so sure. It could just have been the stress he was under that year at his Alpha-child school. The tics would stop whenever he had a school holiday, and then gradually build up again as the term went on. He grew out of it eventually, but not before he had left me with a legacy of fretting silently about a possible return.
Therefore, I am tucking into a glass of crisp and tropical Jacob’s Creek Semillon Chardonnay (£5.49 Tesco) in an attempt to restore some common sense. I seem to remember having a similar irritating grunt pointed out to me by a school friend once, so maybe its genetic. I daresay that by the time the boys are teenagers, irritating grunts will be their sole method of communication.

Lady Mondegreen

We were singing along to the radio in the car this morning when my daughter asked why Whitney Houston was ‘bending over’ in the song. It turns out that the song “I’m Every Woman” does indeed sound like Whitney is belting out “I’m bending over.” Given that the next line is “Its all in me” I may have to suggest that she sings the correct words, in order to avoid the rather pornographic imagery.
I am enjoying a leftover glass of lemony Gavi La Madonnina Araldica (£6.99 Ocado) and slowly realising that my daughter has inherited the family ‘mondegreen’ gene – the ability to mishear or reinterpret lyrics at will. I blame my own father, who wilfully sings the wrong lyrics to almost every song he knows. To this day, if I ever hear the opening line of the hymn “Holy holy holy” I want to add “Two full backs and a goalie.”
H is just as bad. Last year he bought me a Bee Gees compilation CD (don’t mock) called “Number Ones” (which does beg the question as to whether there will be a follow up CD called “Number Twos” – maybe not). I was singing away to “How Deep Is Your Love” and got to the line “When they all should let us be” when he stopped me and asked me to sing that bit again. He finally fessed up that he had always thought that line was “When they all showed letters B” – imagining holding up giant letter Bs in the manner of a presenter of pre-school TV. He still hasn’t recovered from the embarrassment.
When I was at school, you had to buy Smash Hits if you wanted to find out song lyrics. Now there is a whole rash of websites dedicated to them, so there is really no excuse any more for singing the wrong words – thus depriving a whole generation of school kids hours of sniggering fun. I recall giggling with my schoolmates at the Boney M song “Brown Girl in the Ring” and the line “Show me your motion” which we thought we had misheard – the original presumably being “Show me emotion”. Trawling the lyrics websites today I am astounded to realise that the correct words are in fact “Show me your motion.”
Boney M, what were you thinking?