Beauty and the Beast

I wish I could say that I hold an unrivalled place in Husband’s affections.  That I was his one and only true love, that my chassis was classy enough to make him stop and stare.  But I have a rival.  She’s a few years younger than me too, just to rub salt in the wound.  We do have quite a few things in common; a somewhat unpredictable nature, we both require a fair bit of love and attention when the going gets tough and over the years he’s spent a small fortune keeping us both happy.  I know that he loves me, sure, but HER?  Well, he adores her.  The kids do too.

I used to curl my lip whenever she was mentioned or Husband needed (or wanted, more like) to spend time with her. He says “I’ll only be gone about an hour”.  It’s always, always longer.  “She’s complicated” he protests when I dare to grumble. She’s completely unreliable too, I’ve lost count of the number of times she’s let him down.  I always refer to her as ‘The Beast’ and try to have as little to do with her as possible. 

Recently The Beast and I have been sort of thrown together. We’ve been forced to find a way of getting along.  Husband’s new job has meant that he needs a decent car to get round the M25 – the cue for him to take my lovely motor and disappear off into the sunrise every day.  You’ve probably guessed by now that The Beast is a mechanical rival; she’s a rather old Land Rover, a bone shaker of the highest order.

Sometimes she starts, sometimes she simply can’t be bothered.  Either way she emits a big puff of blue smoke, a sort of ‘Gallic shrug’, you know like the Parisians whenever you dare to complain about anything.  Even if she is minded to start, it doesn’t mean she’ll keep going, oh no.  Last week she had a funny turn at the Bat & Ball traffic lights so I was forced into a kind of hot shoe shuffle as my feet darted between brake, clutch and accelerator while my hand frantically worked the ancient, upright handbrake like I was drawing water from a pump in a drought.  Happy days.

But oh my goodness does she draw attention!  Chugging along I suddenly become aware of many eyes upon me which I always put down to the ghastly noise she makes.  Small children stop and point and wave, sometimes their dads join in too (yes always the dads, never the mums).  The other day I was halfway up the high street when another Landie, a tad shinier than The Beast, was coming in the opposite direction.  As it drew closer I saw the (rather fit) bloke driving it raise just his index finger off the steering wheel in a kind of clandestine salute. Not the whole hand, just the finger. I felt compelled, as if by some unseen force, to raise my finger in return.  I did. He nodded, almost imperceptibly, I nodded and we carried on in our separate directions.  I have a feeling that should The Beast decide to really ruin my day and properly break down, I wouldn’t be stranded for long….

But just as I was starting to feel a tiny bit of affection towards her and was busily making plans for our next outing, we very nearly came a cropper. I’d asked Husband which one of the three coloured levers I would use to put her into overdrive so that an exhilarating top speed of approximately 49mph might be reached.  I’ve seen him do it a thousand times and he did start to explain very clearly but Reader, to be honest in those 25 seconds my irreverent brain had skipped onto a completely different subject and I must confess I didn’t really listen properly.  I was probably thinking that I really must take those sheets out of the tumble dryer before they got all creased up.  Or something like that.

Anyway the next day, trundling along, I eyed the three knobs warily.  Hmmmm, now what did he say again?  Probably not the yellow one, as that has something about 4-wheel drive written on it.  I dredged the depths of my memory and recalled him saying something along the lines of I would have to reach quite far forward to engage it.  So it can’t be the black one then as that’s up near the gearstick.  Right, it must be the RED one all the way down there!  I ease her into 4^th gear on a nice straight bit of road and the familiar whining noise increases as we build up a bit of speed.  I reach down and give the red knob a firm push.  JEEEEEEZUSSSSS. The noise is like nothing on earth; a deafening combination of crashing, grinding, thrashing, grating metal on metal, the lever bucks angrily against my hand.  I’m sure I can see actual sparks flying.

My panicked eyes flick up, we’re still travelling forwards.  Maybe I didn’t push it firmly enough?  I try again. NOOOO!  Wrong decision.  Even more of a racket than before. The Beast is telling me very firmly that I have selected the wrong lever and will I please leave off.  The sweat of fear is now prickling my armpits. I tentatively press the throttle, the engine races but clearly there is now nothing connecting that to the motion of the vehicle, I have lost all transmission.  What have I done?  Thankfully there’s a layby coming up, I indicate and glide to a halt.  Lifting my sweaty, shaking palms from the steering wheel I gently nudge the red lever back to where it was and after a few gulps of fresh air, recover my wits enough to carry on, alert for the possible smell of burning which thankfully doesn’t come.

Husband’s reaction when I tell him later on is so distressing it’s almost comical.  He sits, head in his hands, ashen faced; “you pushed the RED one? As you were going ALONG? You could have broken her” (yeah thanks, not me, her – but I don’t say this out loud) “what were you thinking?  I SAID the black one…blah blah..” and so it went on.  Reader don’t get me wrong, I was truly sorry that my inattention almost resulted in a ruined gearbox, and I am eternally thankful to The Beast that she kept on going and didn’t leave me high and dry with a massive problem to fix.

In fact the past month has made me reconsider. I started off thinking that if she was The Beast then I must be the beauty, but now I’m not so sure. It’s she that is strong, seemingly unbreakable and entirely loved by our family.  It is she that all the children’s friends want a lift home in. It’s she that draws admiring and wondering looks everywhere she goes.  She takes whatever we throw at her, be it muddy bikes, bits of furniture or rubbish for the tip and just keeps on chugging along.  But if she’s actually the beauty, then oh dear, what does that make me?

Waity Katy

I feel for the Duchess of Cambridge I really do.  I mean it’s bad enough being heavily pregnant in the middle of a sudden and rather unexpected heatwave.  But to have the eyes of the world fixed beadily, figuratively speaking, upon your cervix, well it must add a whole heap of extra stress to the mix.  I’ll be amazed if the royal cervix in question actually manages to overcome what must be an almost paralyzing intensity of focus and manages to dilate in the proper fashion instead of yelling ‘that’s it I’m outta here!’ before slapping itself shut and running for the hills.

The poor woman had to endure endless press speculation during her and William’s long courtship about ‘would they, wouldn’t they’ ever tie the knot which earned her the somewhat dubious moniker ‘Waity Katy’.  They duly got engaged, to collective gasps of ‘isn’t she posh?’  ‘isn’t she too thin?’ etc etc as soon as she opened her mouth.  The wedding bells had barely finished pealing when the speculation about when they might breed began doing the rounds.

Her violent and sudden hyperemesis gravidarum (that’s extra crappy morning sickness to you and me) kind of let the cat out of the bag and they were forced to go public early, to a drooling media camped outside the King Edward VII hospital day and night.

As I write this, I have the pleasure (is that the correct word?) of being on call for the BBC for when Kate finally shows a glimpse of being in labour.  When we get the merest whiff of a contraction it’s all systems go and I’ll be one of many journalists camped outside either the hospital in Paddington, Buckingham Palace or Kensington Palace for hours, possibly days on end.  Just like going into labour oneself, it promises to be long, grueling, uncertain and sweaty.  I don’t know about Kate but I reckon we’ll all be needing a bit of gas and air to get us through.

In the newsroom just now, it’s a sort of collective lingering, watching, trying to go about everyday business, calm-before-the-storm atmosphere as plans are checked, tweaked and endlessly discussed.  It reminds me of waiting to give birth to my first born.  I went overdue by two full weeks and basically if Kate does that then we’re all stuffed, as the end of term is fast approaching and the working mums who are essentially the glue holding BBC News together have mostly booked annual leave to be with their own sprogs.

In my own two weeks of confinement (well actually it was more like a whole month because of course you daren’t actually go anywhere leading up to your due date either!) I mostly sat on my backside, swollen ankles elevated, eating giant bars of chocolate and imploring various friends and relatives to nip to the chip shop on their way home and bring me my usual.  I would, occasionally venture from sofa to kitchen to garden then back to sofa.  God I was bored.  I even began to welcome those annoying calls from well-meaning friends asking if there’s ‘any news yet’. NO!  I’m still sat here the size of a flipping whale just like I was the last time you asked.

When it finally happened and I felt the first odd twinges of a contraction, I kind of dismissed it and didn’t even tell Husband as he left for work that morning.  I did some gardening before huffing and puffing my way around Tescos, alarming the poor checkout lady as I wheezed through a contraction and carried on packing my shopping, an odd assortment of cat food, a marrow and a lightbulb if I remember correctly.  Labour had been so elusive I really could not believe it was actually happening.

So now I’m sharing Kate’s confinement in that I daren’t go anywhere too far from London.  We’re all sharing William’s burden of attempting to go about every day life while jumping every time the phone beeps. I’m making tentative plans with friends, school mums for end-of-term coffee and the hairdresser, but on the understanding that I may well cancel at the last minute if the balloon goes up.  Come on Kate love, eat some pineapple, have a curry, get William back down south for, ahem, that other activity that is meant to bring on labour (or do the royals have staff for that kind of thing?), please get on with it before the kids break up!

It's the little things

Husband has two domestic duties; one is to mow the lawn, the other is to put the bins out.  Both of these activities need to happen once a week if we are to avoid any kind of strife/messiness/dubious pongs.  My chores, on the other hand, are numerous and varied and have no set timescale.  They just seem to be ongoing and ever-changing.  I won’t bore you with a list as I’m sure that you are very familiar with the minutiae of every day life involving kids, pets, a job, a hobby, other people’s hobbies, eating food, providing food/clean clothes/transportation/first aid – oh look, I’ve bored you with a list.  Sorry about that.

It struck me as I was heading into work the other day, paid work that is, not the kind of niff-naff and trivia that takes up most of my time (see above), just how much my brain has evolved into a running ticker-tape of ‘things to remember and do’.  As is customary on work mornings, I had got up 45 minutes earlier than everyone else to ensure that I could at least perform my basic ablutions and partially dress without external interference eg; Daughter, coolly appraising my outfit “mummy I haven’t seen THAT dress before” accusatory tone “is it new?” Me: “what this?  No darling, I’ve had it for ages…” Oh crap, one more person to lie to…  I had fed the cats and kids and then reminded Son and Daughter that it was non-uniform day and made sure they were dressed appropriately. 

I had also remembered that one child needed an envelope containing £2, a ‘fine’ for the non-uniform, and the other a bottle of wine for the school fair tombola.  This, the culmination of  a week that had involved two separate sports days (coloured t-shirts and PE kit required – different for each child – natch), a school trip (packed lunch, sun cream, sun hat), an assembly (another coloured t-shirt), and a guitar lesson (guitar!).  The one high point came at 7.30am when my marvelous childminder appeared and because their children attend the same school, I was able to quickly check the finer details before handing over the reins.

As I approached the BBC, dodging those annoying, early-riser tourists meandering about in Oxford St, my work-related thoughts (Mandela, royal baby) were interrupted by my stomach which loudly reminded me that I had not given it anything to eat yet.  When was it exactly that I began to refer to parts of my body as separate entities rather than a whole being? Probably when I became a mother because let’s face it, your body is not really your own after that; “bad cervix, only dilating 3cm after 36 hours of labour – how could you!”.

Nipping into Starbucks (boo hiss, tax avoiders etc – but any port in a storm) I remembered that I hadn’t managed to get to my Taekwon-do class the night before so therefore hadn’t burned my full quota of calories that week.  #Fail.  As I reach for my purse my hand lightly brushes my newly-acquired mini pot-belly. Damn.  There is nothing remotely healthy at breakfast time in a coffee shop – fact.  Reader, I got an almond croissant anyway because by then I was feeling all rebellious and as if I’d already done a day’s work.

The journalist and author Daisy Waugh has a new book out called ‘I don’t know why she bothers’, apparently a guide to guilt-free motherhood for modern women. Daisy I try, I really, really try! I would love to be all laid-back but keep on being overtaken by events, dear boy, events.  I don’t want to be a worry-wort, all creased forehead and endless lists.  I couldn’t be a ‘pushy parent’ if I tried – time and motivation severely lacking there I’m afraid, so it’s not like I’m trying too hard.  I actively discourage my kids from attending after-school clubs as I can’t be bothered going back and forth every night of the week picking them up.  Homework gets done quickly, just the basics, no more, no less.  And if I could exist in a bubble then all that would be lovely.  But I can’t, and because I can’t, I’m party to conversations that go like this: “yes we do about 15 minutes of maths every night, B can’t afford to fall behind…” (B is just six by the way), or “sorry we can’t do Wednesdays as S does ballet, swimming and violin, all back to back). I’m tired just listening to this.

So as we approach the end of term (hurrah), my resolve for September is as follows: keep on making lists – inevitable unfortunately given just how hectic life is, keep getting up super-early on work mornings just so I feel vaguely in control of the day ahead, and remember to smile at my kids just a little more often.  Because as much as death and taxes are the only certainties, I’m pretty sure I’m not going to look back on my life and wish I’d spent more time remembering tombola prizes.

And finally, I’m not going to sweat the small stuff – mini pot-belly going on?  That’s what spanx were invented for. Fact.

Playground Porn

If you don’t want your kids looking at or being shown hardcore pornography in the playground, and I’m guessing it’s not up there on your list of  how to bring up a healthy, well balanced child, there is a radical but simple solution.  I’m feeling quite smug as I’ve worked this one out all by myself.  Can you guess?  Go on, have a go.   How best to prevent children and teens downloading dodgy sites and showing the contents to all their mates?

Don’t give them a smartphone or indeed any pocket-sized device with internet access. There.  Shocking in its simplicity isn’t it?  If you think about it, the rise in the number of underage kids accessing online pornography has rocketed in the past 5 – 8 years, along with the advent of the iphone and all the other copycat androids.  Of course children have had access to computers for much longer than that, and some kids have had laptops which they use in their bedrooms, often late at night, with no parental supervision. Hmmmm.

But think about it for a minute. It’s one thing for a child to take the risk of searching for and viewing pornography on a 12 inch computer screen, within the confines of his or her home.  It’s quite hard to hide what you’re doing if a parent suddenly looms up behind you.  But on a smartphone screen, average size just 4 inches, it’s a whole different ball game.  With an iphone cupped in hand and a few heads crowding round, it becomes a very furtive activity indeed.  Easily disguisable from anyone watching from afar and quickly snapped shut and put in pocket if a hapless adult does suddenly appear alongside.

I simply don’t understand why a child or teenager would need a phone/device with internet access anyway?  Surely the purpose of giving your offspring a mobile phone is so they can contact you or be contacted in an emergency?  The world won’t stop turning if they fail to look at Facebook for a few hours.  Is it because we’re now so addicted to our mobile devices we think our children should be too? Why do they suddenly need to have 24 hour access to the whole universe at their fingertips?  Because that’s what you’re giving them as soon as you let them loose, unsupervised, on the web. 

And on the web you can find out about anything, anything at all. And what is it that kids are naturally most curious about?  Sex.  And when they search for sex related topics what pops up on the browser?  Porn.   And let me enlighten you, porn sure ain’t what it used to be.  If you’ve got some fuzzy memory of a partially clothed twenty-something woman being ‘surprised’ by a ‘plumber’ who’s come to ‘fix the pipes’ and is suddenly finding it ‘very hot in here’, think again.

The videos and images freely available to anyone who cares to conduct a rudimentary search are quite literally beyond belief in their violence (almost always towards women, natch), extremism and graphic, close up, technicolour detail.  For a young, developing brain, these images once viewed, are imprinted there forever.  Children interviewed who  have seen such material, either by accident or design, report symptoms common to PTSD (post traumatic stress disorder), described by the NHS as: “a person (who will) involuntarily and vividly relive the traumatic event in the form of  flashbacks, nightmares or repetitive and distressing images or sensations…and have feelings of isolation, irritability and guilt”. 

But hang on, your child wouldn’t, in a million years want to watch any of this, surely?  Think again.  Here are some stats.  According to an article in this week’s Sunday Times, ‘the average age of first exposure to online pornographic images is six’.  Yes that’s SIX YEARS OLD.  It goes onto say that ‘the largest child consumers of internet porn are the 12 – 17 age group’. What the heck are we exposing our children to?  Forget about non-organic produce, chemicals and pollution, this is a way more serious risk to health.

Now, before you start thinking that this blog is being written by Mary Whitehouse reincarnated (sorry, you have to be of a certain age to know what I’m referencing there!), I’m not of that ilk.  I like to think of myself as a hardened hack; a ‘been there, seen it, got the t-shirt’ journalist of nearly two decades experience who is firmly in touch with reality and certainly not pro-censorship in any way. But this is different.

When my son was just 7, he wandered away from the group of similar aged boys he was playing with at the leisure centre and whispered: “mummy, H says that if you type this into Google you can see a woman having sex with a bike.  What does that mean?” It was at that moment that I truly discovered the meaning of ‘gobsmacked’.  I recollect my jaw literally hanging open for about 5 seconds while I collected my thoughts.  I think I said something along the lines of - well that doesn’t sound very nice and that’s not something we want to see is it?  I then turned to look at H’s mum who was sitting a few seats away and wondered what the heck was the socially correct way to deal with this?

Such was my own dismay and confusion it took me about 20 minutes before I could tell her what her son had said to my son.  She was shocked too of course but said he must have heard that from another, older boy with whom he was playing earlier.  So that’s how it starts folks.

I’ve always discussed, very openly with my own kids how babies are made, what is sex, what is love, what are relationships etc etc as soon as they ask me.  I benefitted from an honest and open relationship with my own mother who imparted to me the mechanics of sex as soon as I was old enough to ask and I realize now how very fortunate I was and try to follow her excellent example.  Yes sometimes the frankness of the conversations with my two make me want to shove my fist into my mouth with cringeworthy embarrassment and I often have to file away some really funny little question or comment in my head to share with Husband later on so we can both have a good giggle.

But discussing pornography?  I never thought I’d have to address and explain that particular issue so early on, but it seems I will, we all will.  Until the internet providers wake up and realize they have a responsibility to prevent young minds being warped, sometimes irretrievably by accessing depraved sexual scenes, I’m afraid it’s up to us.  We do have the power and we can make a difference.  Supervise your kids.  If they’re young, don’t let them on the computer unless you can see exactly what they’re viewing.  If they’re older and not with you for long periods of time, don’t make it easy for them to access the internet or to receive clips sent from friends. 

Children in Syria and other war-torn countries suffer PTSD from witnessing horrific acts of violence.  Do we really, in our comfortable town in this peaceful country want our kids to suffer also?  I don’t think so.