Family Affairs and other matters

SMURFS INVADE LONDON

My entire house is streaked in blue.  My white towels are blue.  My bath is blue.  My pillows and cushions are blue and indeed even my son is blue.  My 17 year old son and six of his mates went to a party last night dressed as Smurfs. They all had white smurf hats, blue faces, blue tights and white shorts and frankly looked ridiculous.  The weirdest thing of all was that they went to a birthday party that didn’t have a theme at all.  They just decided to turn up like that.  How strange. There is evidence, going up the stairs that little blue pissed smurfs bounced off my walls on their way to bed.

This morning boys kept appearing to say goodbye from various rooms in my house still covered in blue paint.  I offered them cleanser but no, they all decided to take public transport home looking like I’d beaten them half to death.  Clearly an attempt had been made to remove the colour from their arms and face, but whilst quite a lot of it came off in my house, they hadn’t done a very good job. Here they were getting ready at a friend’s house:-

It’s been a busy weekend.  I had a friend’s birthday party last night which was really fun.  LOADS of good friends all squished together in a club with lots of alcohol and a great band.  Just brilliant.

Today I took my children shopping and it all went wrong.  My youngest child had a total fit  (through boredom I suspect) and stomped off in a department store, whereupon I lost him for about 20 minutes which began to panic me somewhat. My daughter finally found him but was very heavy handed about dragging him back to me and by the time they arrived they both looked like they’d been in a major fight.  Well.  They had.  Then, typically, when you least want it to happen, we bumped into someone my daughter knew – with her mother.  ”OMG!!  What’s happened to you??” she said.  My daughter’s hair was all mad and the front of her chest had red scratch marks all over it.   My son was puce in the face and crying with a bright red neck.  I went into overdrive with the mother who I’d never met saying that my children were delinquents and that I couldn’t go anywhere without them fighting and she said “oh you’ve made me feel SO much better, my daughter has just come out of The Priory after a month, so you really have nothing to worry about”.

Good grief.  Other people’s lives.  You forget how most of the time they are as bad, if not worse than your own. Sometimes it helps to remember that.

My youngest child for some reason is now manically planning his birthday party and it was all he talked about on the way to the shops.  I’ve got another six months of this.   He wants a football party followed by a cinema party followed by fireworks.  All fairly extravagant, but at least he’s not requesting Ronaldo’s presence at the football party like he’s done in the past.  ”OK.  I’ve been thinking that I’ll just have the boys for the football bit and then the girls can arrive at my house for the cinema party and fireworks.  I am going to print out tickets to get into the film and then maybe we could do a prize – I was thinking maybe we could have popcorn and sweets and somewhere we could have a “Charlie and The Chocolate Factory” golden ticket that somebody wins and maybe the prize could be like a holiday in Spain or something”.

So.  Now have to spend the next few months downsizing his expectations without major disappointment.  F*CKING HOLIDAY IN SPAIN????? What is he thinking of!!

DIARY OF A MARATHON RUNNER

Having asked my lovely friend to write about her experience and her training regime over the next eight weeks or so leading up to the marathon, here are her first thoughts on the matter:-

Marathon training

I should start by explaining who I am and how extraordinary it is that I am even thinking about writing a blog on marathon training let alone actually running one.

I am a 40 year old mother of 4 girls who are 13, 12, 10 and 2 and I have spent my entire lifetime avoiding any serious physical exercise and by just doing the bare minimum to get by without being 25 stone. The closest I got to exercise was regularly drinking copious amounts of wine and dancing in a ridiculously embarrassing manner with my friends.

Anyway that’s all changed. After having my youngest daughter and really not looking that great in a bikini having had 4 caesareans I realised I really should do something about it. So a friend suggested I join her and some other friends in the park one morning with her new trainer. The trainer being an ex-para who now made a living making middle-aged suburban housewives lie down in the mud in all weathers doing press ups, squats and burpies combined with huge amounts of running and sprinting.

My first session didn’t go that well as I was wearing a grey cashmere jumper and yoga pants with 4 silver “Tiffany”bracelets up my arm. It’s not easy doing the “seal” crawl on the soaking wet muddy ground in December without getting your afore-mentioned jumper seriously muddy and then clogging up your bracelets with mud too. When I mentioned this to the ex-para he wasn’t exactly sympathetic. I also told him I hadn’t run since I had been at school and then I had been quite smart at avoiding doing it during PE too. He told me I would change. I didn’t believe him.

So that was a just over a year ago. I have been training with him 2/3 times a week since then. I have lost a stone and a half and I am running the London Marathon in April.

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“THE REAL VAN GOGH” EXHIBITION AT THE ROYAL ACADEMY

You have to go and see this exhibition – it’s on until 18th April 2010. It is a fascinating insight into the life of Van Gogh. You get to see many of his early sketches and drawings and letters – I was amazed to see how technically correct and powerful these were. It made me realise that when he suddenly leapt into a blaze of colour a few years later he wasn’t the impressionist I thought he was, he was just using the brush strokes that he saw as clearly rooted in nature.

He died at 37 after starting his career as an artist only 10 years before. He was clever, lucid and passionate. He read Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. He spoke and wrote in three different languages. “Books and reality and art are the same kind of thing for me” he wrote. It was hardly surprising he suffered from severe bouts of mental illness. Imagine trying to get everything he wanted to say and feel down on paper in so many different mediums in so short a period of time.

The exhibition takes you through the various stages of his development, from the sketches, to some paintings of the Dutch landscape and the focus on the peasants working in the fields moving from the rather bleak landscape to Paris where he suddenly became a daring colourist. Then there are the portraits which were the most important part of his work where he tried to capture the “je ne sais quoi of the eternal”.

There are many of the paintings we know already, but the story it tells is completely different when you see all of his artwork together like this.

He shot himself in a field, through the chest and then took two days to die. How hideous. He died in Auvers on 29 July 1890.

Paul Gauguin, with whom he lived for a while clearly unhinged him even more. They clashed really badly apparently. It was during this time he chopped off part of his left ear lobe. He sums up the difference between them by painting portraits of them each represented by chairs:-

“Portrait of the Artist as a Chair”:-

Van Gogh’s chair is all rustic and basic, sitting on a tiled floor. Simple with a pipe and a bit of old tissue on the chair itself and painted in the yellow light of day. Whereas Gauguin’s chair is depicted in night light, all dark red and green and lush with a candle on the chair. Completely the opposite in fact:-

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DYSLEXIA OR ATTENTION DEFICIT DISORDER?

According to my youngest son’s trumpet teacher he has dyslexia. Diagnosed because he struggles with learning the notes. Personally I think it’s more a question of CBA* to learn the notes, but I couldn’t risk ignoring his diagnosis because I suspect that music teachers probably can tell a huge amount about a child by the way they learn. So. I have had to talk to the teachers at his school, who have said they would be surprised if that was the case because he can read and write, but they will do a brief initial test and if after that I am still concerned I will have to pay a fortune to an external educational psychologist for a full report.

Because I wasn’t sure whether a full report was a good idea/investment and whether labelling a child helps or not I spoke to another teacher who knows him well. She said “he definitely doesn’t have dyslexia, but I think you should get him tested for Attention Deficit Disorder, I am quite sure he has issues with concentration and short term memory”. THEN she said “there is usually obsessive, compulsive tendencies which might suggest his obsession with food and therefore you will need to be careful for the future because those children with food obsessions quite often are the ones who move on to have serious drink and drug problems”.

Great. So now, I don’t think there is any point in bothering with secondary school options, I might as well just book him a place directly into The Priory for when he’s 15.

EVERYBODY agrees that he is the most gorgeous, engaging, gentle, kind child, “I mean he has SO much more emotional intelligence than my teenage son – who basically has none”, I told her – to which she replied, “you mean that he’s just an average bloke then?”. She thinks he’s going to be a hairdresser.

Funny really, what people say to you about your children. If he was my firstborn I’d be freaking out by now. From experience (and exhaustion) I know that I need to take all the above advice with a seriously large pinch of salt (or glass of wine).

*CBA – Can’t Be Arsed

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IPHONE LOVE

This is sad. I am in love with my new iphone and must monitor how much time I devote to it before it becomes a full on obsession. I am in danger of becoming an Enid Blytonesque mother figure (without the success or the talent) in years to come where my children remember me bitterly as somebody who spent more time with their phone than with them.

I keep wanting to put it over my shoulder and burp it. Perhaps that means that I should either have another baby or get a dog. But the iphone is SO much better as a substitute for my maternal cravings. I wonder whether there are nappies one can buy for iphones – I’ll download that swishy poo app after all and see if there’s one that imitates a crying baby.

Yesterday my youngest said to me “what would you do if I accidentally knocked your cup of tea all over your iphone?”. “Well” I said, “first I might cry, then I’d have to wrap it in clingfilm and rush it to A & E where I would insist on an overnight bed in the third degree burns unit”. “Maybe there should be a special section called the ‘pod’ unit” he said. Which I thought was a really good idea.

Which means I have lost the plot.

Must get a grip.

Off out for the day – but the really exciting thing is I CAN STILL CHECK MY EMAILS ON THE TRAIN! Hooray.

You see? SAD.

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STUFF FOR YOUNG BOYS TO DO IN LONDON

OK. So I have been asked what would be of interest for a 9 year old boy who hasn’t been to London before – I asked the person who would know the best answer to that question – my 9 year old son. It seems to me that although there is a lot of information [...]

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GAP YEAR TO CHINA

As of yesterday, I have a NBF called Wendy Wu. She is the UK’s leading China specialist and has a company that offers tours not only to China, but also to Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and India.

She was brought up in and around China and then moved to Australia where she set up her company. Since then she has established an office in the UK and later this year is opening her NY branch. She’s very excited about this and it was really interesting to talk to her about her business and how she manages to juggle everything around her 21 month old twin boys who travel with her.

I was talking to her about China. I love it. I’ve been a couple of times and was saying that I’d love my son to go there for his gap year (obviously he has no say in the matter). I think it would be great if he could spend 3 months in Shanghai learning Mandarin and then travel to other areas of China that spoke the same dialect and spend some time working in villages and so on. She thought it was a brilliant idea.

When my son came back from school I bombarded him with questions – “if you were to go to China for the year and learn Mandarin would you prefer to be with a family or on a campus?” “Definitely a campus” he said…I asked him so many questions he got bored. “Mum, I can’t learn Mandarin in three months obviously, I don’t even know if I want to go to China, I’m really hungry AND STOP ASKING ME QUESTIONS”.

So. I gave him his final choice. “OK. On your Gap year you either have to go to China for a year and learn Mandarin OR you have to let me come with you on your Gap year”. He mumbled something about “I’d rather die” whilst eating a marmite sandwich and I gave up.

Anyway. Rubbish. Can’t get a thing out of him. Several other friends, with teenagers almost ready to go on a Gap year think the idea of an organised educational tour to China which Wendy could help put together is a brilliant idea. I need to give her some proposed details of what we would want it to consist of. So over to you guys.

ANYBODY OUT THERE WITH A VIEW ON CHINA FOR GAP YEAR STUDENTS AND WHAT SORT OF THINGS THEY COULD DO?

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