Family Affairs and other matters

WHAT ARE YOUR HOPES FOR 2010?

Would love to know from all you divorced and separated people out there what your plans/hopes and fears are for next year….

Mine? More of the same. Sticking with the kids. Need to do a bit more travelling. Hoping all goes OK as I get through the marriage of my ex to my ex boyfriends ex wife!!

THINGS TO DO BEFORE END OF THE YEAR.

Shit. Time is running out. LOADS to get done before the end of the year.

Got to send out my Christmas cards – too late?
Throw all my Christmas food away – brandy butter mountain – making me feel sick
Get engaged so not too far behind ex in happiness stakes (will have to remember not to be too picky about hair, shoes, height, age, in fact even whether male or female at this late stage)
Get fit enough to pull someone tonight that wants to marry me (could be tricky given my New Year’s Eve celebration is turning into a mother and daughter party)
Buy and cook food for tonight
Buy lots of alcohol as need to drink entire content of January’s intake tonight so don’t miss it throughout the month
Cover garden in fleece – where do you get fleece? before next snow onslaught
Talk to all my friends and family

Oh bollocks. Forget it. I got through Christmas by DELEGATING, relaxing and buying most of the food from Marks and Spencer’s ready made, so will do the same again.

Who can I delegate next year to?

Even worse is that I’ve got to go and see bloody Avatar with youngest child which is deeply stressful because it’s very long and l haven’t really got the time to sit about wearing stupid 3D glasses.

Anyway, if you don’t hear from me again today it may be because I’ve passed out with exhaustion.

I hope you all have a wonderful New Year’s Eve and that 2010 is everything that you want it to be. A friend sent me a text yesterday that I thought I’d share with you:-

Life is too short to wake up in the morning with regrets,
So love the people who treat you right,
Forget about the ones who don’t
and believe that everything happens for a reason.
If you get a chance, take it
If it changes your life, let it
Nobody said life would be easy,
They just promised it would be worth it.

HAPPY NEW YEAR ALL YOU LOVELY PEOPLE OUT THERE XX

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JAMIE OLIVER’S ITALIAN RESTAURANT REVIEW: OXFORD

My nine year old wanted to do the review of the Jamie Oliver restaurant given that he’s such a huge fan. As I mentioned in my previous post, our entire journey consisted of him saying “IMAGINE how great it would be if Jamie is at the restaurant and his brother saying “well he won’t be”, “yes but IMAGINE if he was…” and so on for hours:-

“hi i’m going to tell you how nice jamie oliver’s food was firstley i had a starter wich was crispy squid with a little lemon on it and that was very nice secondley i had a burger with cheese in it and my brother had a steak my sister had the same thing as me and my mum had seabass in a bag which she said was lovely. They had a very cool kids menu and for pudding me my sister and mum had a sorbet wich was lovely.

Here’s a picture of me using the children’s menu which just has pictures and no words:-

and here’s a picture of one of the burgers:-

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“WORLD’S BEST JOB” MAN STUNG BY A JELLYFISH

One of my invitations for Christmas was to join some friends going off to Australia. Being divorced makes this difficult, not only financially, but because I couldn’t justify taking my children away from their father for three weeks over Christmas.

My friends spent about 5 days on Hamilton Island, meeting up with Ben Southall, the man who beat 34,000 applicants to secure the position of “Best Job In The World” for a BBQ one evening. I’ve been following my friend’s blog and have seen her pictures of them all together. I have also seen the pictures of the suits you now have to wear whilst swimming to avoid getting stung by jelly fish. It makes them all look like Tellytubbies:-

However, they are clearly essential because poor old Ben was stung during his last week in the job.

The culprit was the peanut-sized Irukandji jellyfish, whose venomous sting can be lethal.

In his blog, which he keeps as part of his job, he describes the incident as “a little sting on the beach”.

But it was his progressive symptoms of fever, headache, lower back pain, chest tightness and high blood pressure that led doctors to diagnose the sting.

“I thought I’d done particularly well at avoiding any contact with any of the dangerous critters that consider this part of the world their home,” Mr Southall writes in the latest update to his online diary.

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STAYING IN OXFORD WITH THE CHILDREN

I may have just found the perfect solution to single parent holidays. Instead of taking them away for an expensive 7 day trip, take them away for 24 hours and then go straight back home – much better all round. My kids didn’t get bored, I didn’t get stressed about being somewhere on my own with my children and in my head it was a much less expensive holiday and so I could spend a bit more than usual on staying the night in a hotel and having a meal out with them without having a major problem about how much it all cost.

We have just come back from 24 hours in Oxford. It was a chance to do something all together after Christmas and it wasn’t too far away from home. We stayed at The Randolph Hotel in one large room which is incredibly central and impressive in a slightly faded sort of way. The plan was always to eat at Jamie Oliver’s Italian restaurant because to my food obsessed youngest son, Jamie is the biggest celebrity on the planet. Even though we kept telling him he wouldn’t be there he kept saying “just imagine if he was there’, to which his older brother just kept saying “well, he won’t be”,

“YES, but just imagine if he WAS there, I’d like go completely MAD, how great would it be to ACTUALLY meet Jamie Oliver”,

“well, he won’t be there….”

“YES, I know, but JUST IMAGINE IF HE WAS….”

…and so it went on, all the way from London to Oxford in my teeny weeny car, with limbs and luggage oozing out of all the windows.

Sadly, he wasn’t there, but it didn’t matter. We had to queue to get in for about 15 minutes and then wait at the bar – the restaurant was packed. But we had a really good meal and enjoyed every minute of it. We then all went to bed early ready (unfortunately) to hit the shops running rather than the quadrants and university buildings and beautiful architecture that Oxford has to offer.

My kids were all on a mission. Christmas money coupled with Christmas returns AND the sales meant that there was no way I was going to get them to do the cultural tour of Oxford. Generally speaking it is not at all satisfying shopping for three huge children. No tiny weeny not very expensive baby-grows anymore. Full size, full price garments, seemingly every three months. “STOP GROWING” I want to shout at them. They all have bigger feet than me. There is nothing more depressing than having to walk into a lovely shoe shop, spend ages and a fortune in there and come out with three big bags, in the style of Carrie from “Sex In The City” BUT NONE OF THEM ARE FOR ME.

In addition, my daughter has the annoying habit of making anything I like look 1,000 times better – if I try a hat on, I look like a knob. If she tries the same hat on she looks completely stunning. Effortlessly so. She does a “this is nice, why don’t you buy it thing..” when what she really means is “I love this and it really doesn’t matter that you are going to look awful in it, because once you get it home I’m going to steal it from you anyway and because it looks so much better on me you won’t want it back”. Looking at make-up with her is even worse – she says things like “oh you should buy some of this, it’s really good, it’s cream eyeshadow that is crease free and it really works” and then I point out that she hasn’t got any “creases” so of course it “really works” and then she tries it out on me and goes very quiet as she realises it clearly doesn’t work on my way-too-many-creases-eyes.

Anyway, even after they had sucked the life out of my wallet and I had to wander round with rubbish eye make-up stuck in “creases”, we all had a really brilliant time. We all stayed together which is rare these days – my children giving each other their valued opinions on various outfits such as “that makes you look gay” and other equally helpful comments.

I tried to fit a bit of culture in – but my kids are not very good at trying to feign interest in something I am pointing at. The closest I got to germinating a flicker of interest was when I showed them a Pret-a- manger coffee shop housed in a tudor building. Quite by accident I managed to get them to climb the tower in the church (127 steps) and whilst I silently tried to stop myself from having a heart attack at the top, we surveyed the gorgeous ariel view of Oxford and I hoped that although I was unable to speak, they were drinking in all that history and beauty from our birds eye view – however, the only comment my son made was “I can’t see Primark from here though, can you?”:-

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JAPANESE BOYFRIEND PILLOW

Oh and clearly I need to add this to my list of things to do next year and order myself one of these – although not sure – think it looks a bit creepy and I’d probably have nightmares about one armed men with no legs and no head:-

Japan’s single women are being offered the ultimate sleeping partner – a comfort to cuddle up to, but one which does not snore or make demands.

The Boyfriend’s Arm Pillow, shaped like a man’s torso with one sturdy arm, has been on sale since December and has so far been snapped up by 1,000 singles.

One woman, Junko Suzuki, told AP: “It makes me relaxed… I can hold the arm and feel something warm at my side”.

The pillow is only available in Japan so far…

Ms Suzuki, who is separated from her husband, says the pillow has other advantages.

“It keeps holding me all the way through. I think this is great because this does not betray me,” she told AP.

That’s a bit of a sad quote….

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NEW YEAR’S RESOLUTIONS PART 1

Beginning to think about my plans for next year – got a lot to do….

Need to detox big time. Get fitter. Start running again. Travel more, eat less. Become a lesbian. Can that be a New Year’s Resolution? Think might be answer to all my problems. Much easier as generally on the same wave length. Only setback is that I don’t find women attractive in a sexual way. Just in a friend sort of way. But women not much older than me quite often start living with female “friends” don’t they? Write book. Move to Australia. Buy shares in Touche Eclat. Make more use of London. Visit grandmother more. Have a face lift. Hair extensions? Failing all that perhaps it’s OK to want to meet the man of my dreams, fall in love, agree to marry him and live happily ever after all in the course of 2009. Well, it’s not impossible clearly, it’s just happened to my ex husband. Last New Year’s Eve he was completely miserable and alone. Now everything has massively changed for him. OR perhaps it’s OK to be on my own. Perhaps what I should write on my list are things I want to do by myself (not including knitting own boyfriend).

Got a photograph sent from Zambia of the football kit I sent. Would have preferred them to be looking a little bit happier about the whole thing, but nevertheless, it’s arrived and in use which is great:-

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