January 2021

I had two very uncomfortable pregnancies as a result of breaking my pelvis in my twenties. As the babies grew bigger it became difficult for me to stand for long and walking became a fecking ordeal. I had to stop teaching well over a month before my due date and sat at home watching the History channel and thoroughly depressing myself. I mean who the f**k does that? What an eejit- someone prone to dark thoughts watching programmes on the Holocaust, while pregnant and emotional. I would ring LSB at work in tears, lamenting about the world we were bringing our baby into. ‘Turn off the television,’ he would say, as firmly as he could without me dissolving further into hysteria.

Anyway, back to the pelvis. The thing about it was this: in the morning, I would wake up and when I couldn’t feel pain radiating outwards from my lower back I’d be delighted. ‘I can walk!’ I would exclaim, like the lame fella at Bethesda. However, within thirty minutes of pottering round the kitchen it would feel as though a small elephant had been hooked to my coccyx and I was pulling it along behind me. Call it either optimism or stupidity, but I’ve gone the same way with this home-schooling lark. Almost every day, particularly on a Monday when the week is all shiny and new, I think to myself that it will go better. How naive of me: wouldn’t you think I’d learn?  This week I even made some changes: I created a centralised zone, or a ‘learning area’ if you will. I located stationery and arranged pens and pencils (sharpened) in little pots. I made sure we had the class novel and ALL the jotters and ALL the booklets in wicker baskets, which slotted neatly into a little dresser in the kitchen.

Well would you believe it, but it still didn’t work. They would take their stuff and hare off up the stairs with unparalleled vitesse because they wanted to do it ON THEIR OWN. Books were then swiftly lost, left down the sides of beds, rulers were mislaid.  My children appear to have the attention spans of a gnat. I tried to make sure the laptops were charged but twice I discovered that the actual plugs weren’t in the socket because we basically exist in a labyrinthine tangle of leads.

‘It’s a BLOODY CONSPIRACY,’ I told LSB, almost weeping in frustration.       ‘I JUST CAN’T DO THIS.’

It’s demoralising, so it is, when you are an actual teacher, and your children respond to your attempts to teach multiplication using dried pasta made from lentils (that was so disgusting that you kept it specifically for educational purposes such as these) with utter derision. And the whining. The f**king relentless whinging from the pair of them. At a rough estimate I think they maintain their good humour for about one activity a day before they start peering at me out of slits of eyes with all the warmth of a rattlesnake.

And the irony of all this running away is that the SECOND I get the laptop out or lie on the sofa and stick on Radio 4, they appear, annoying me. ‘Would you like to hear a joke* mummy?’

No, I f**king wouldn’t because my life is presently a joke.

Or this morning’s treat: ‘Do you like my llama? She’s wearing a dress. I’ve called her Twix. You know, after the biscuit? Or do you think Malteser would be better?’

Dear God.

But listen- it’s all ok, because this Saturday morning Boris has offered us all solace and encouragement in the form of an open letter. Apparently, he is in AWE of how we’re coping and would like to congratulate us for our ability to home school our children. Well, I for one will feel infinitely better knowing that. Thank you Boris. Perhaps if you had exercised some wit and taken appropriate action at the time as recommended by your advisors, instead of flip-flopping about, then we all wouldn’t be in this miserable situation.

1. *Diner: Waiter waiter, there’s a button in my soup.

Waiter: Yes sir, it’s off the jacket potato.

2. What’s black and white and bruised all over?

A penguin who’s fallen down the stairs.

Boom Boom.

Tell me please, Dry January. Is anyone still even trying? Actually don’t answer that because I hate hearing other people’s success stories. Why I contemplated this in the first place, in this current shambolic climate, is beyond me. While one doesn’t want to descend into full-blown alcoholism, now is not is a period for self-denial, and the subsequent self-flagellation when you fail.

I am the kind of person who lurches from treat to treat. I go to bed longing for the taste of my freshly brewed coffee when I wake up, and my day is then punctuated with the thought of cake for elevenses, (to be fair closer to ‘twelve-ses’ in this house). We’ve taken, over this lockdown, to eating at the table and I like the ceremony of pouring a drink  with my dinner, marking the end of the chores and obligations and settling into the evening. Let’s face it, it’s not as though I’ll be rushing to do any of my usual activities. There’s a scarcity of other pleasures  and thus my epicurean habits are one of the few things left.

Having said that though, it’s far too easy to knock back a glass of Sauvignon the size of your head at 6pm while you ‘stir the pot’ and then drain the bottle. I have thus arrived at a compromise: to cap myself, I crack open a can of ‘We are the Uncommon’* wine. I spotted these pretty cans of loveliness in M&S, and am considering asking our local framer to do something fancy with my empties.  It just seems wrong to be chucking a can boasting a giraffe wearing bow-tie and a bowler hat into the bin. Each can contains about two flutes so it’s enough to give me a bit of lift. (As Gerry Anderson said, one drink only annoys you.)

But January did make me take stock after Christmas, and reconsider my habits. In Lockdown it’s just hard isn’t it, especially when I’m home-schooling and suddenly want to take up smoking so I can flee outside for a fag to stop me blurting out obscenities (again) as the children ferret about under the table for a f**king rubber for the nineteenth time that morning. It’s imperative that I have something to which I can look forward everyday, or I’d become even more barking than I already am.

Have you discovered ‘The Letdown’ on Netflix yet? It is an Aussie show which takes an unflinching look at modern parenthood, and while being highly amusing, it isn’t afraid to tackle some meaty issues. In the penultimate episode of Series 2, one of the characters  feels like she’s becoming a bit too reliant on the old ‘Pinot Gri’ as the Aussies like to call it. Enter Scott, a reformed drug addict, who promises her to take her through the steps at record speed. (He’ll even, for a reduced fee, ‘leave out the God stuff.’)

Perhaps you’ve already heard of the concept of a ‘rat park’, but I hadn’t. It’s based on an experiment, involving rats, oddly enough. If, your park, as Scott so succinctly describes it, is ‘shithouse and dull’ you will drink to cope with the monotony. The rats who had a fun-filled cage had no interest in a pick-me-up, while the bored rats just got off their whiskery wee faces on the morphine. So, basically, we have to find our own version of a ‘ratpark.’ Even if you’re not trying to wean yourself off the booze, I just love this concept. I for one, have decided to take back my Saturday nights (for an hour or two anyway). The children have developed fondness for ‘The Masked Singer’ which is  several lightyears beyond my level of tolerance. (I know, I’m odd. I can’t be doing with ‘The Voice’ or ‘Love Island’ or ‘I’m a Celebrity’ with all their bluster and the overacting. I HATE all that bollocks, they actually make my teeth hurt.)

Thus while my children munch their dinner in front of the TV,  I take myself upstairs and chat to someone over a can of wine. Last week I caught up with my friend in Scotland: we go back 29 years and don’t chat nearly enough. The week before that I was on the phone for almost two hours, in animated discussion with a fabulous local poet with whom I’d only had the briefest of interchanges before. Over Facebook we realised we had more than a few things in common, one of which was our dislike of shows like ‘The Masked Singer.’ ‘Seven shades of shite’ was how she described it.

I’m rabbiting on. Anyway. Ratparks- totally essential. Find your own version, be it chatting or dancing or reading or stretching.  And check out The Letdown.’ I  loved it, and as you’ll gather from this, I’m hard to please.

*I feel I have to add here that I am not being paid to promote these guys. (I wish I was, obviously as their wine is LUSH.) But it’s such a great wine and adds a frisson of fun in these dull times.

You know when you’ve left guacamole out of the fridge and it has turned brown and looks a bit like dog faeces? Well, I reckon that if someone was to insert a camera inside my ear and plunge it deep into the limbic structure (the part which controls emotions, apparently) of my brain, it would look a bit like that.

I thought I’d feel better this lockdown because I don’t have to teach from home. I am, temporarily jobless, aside from home-schooling, home management, cooking, cleaning laundry, (always the F**KING laundry) and looking after the animals. So, like, yeah, not busy at all. But last time in March, being plunged into a new situation overnight and learning how to teach via Microsoft Teams when I have all the technical ability of an amoeba, was an excruciating experience. I’m not sure I’ve sufficiently recovered and suspect that my liver most definitely hasn’t.

So why now, when free from that arse-ache, is my head still like mush and everything still feels like a massive effort? Since a vaccination for this bastard virus is at least in sight and a return to ‘normal’ no longer feels totally outlandish, surely I should be feeling more optimistic?  But despite this, I have virtually no concentration skills and the effort it took to get to even write this post was bigger than Trump’s ego.

Perhaps the answer lies in the fact that today is ‘Blue Monday’, a date statisticians worked out when we would feel the most depressed during the year.  If even in non-pandemic times people are typically feeling lousy, how the heck are we went to fare this January? Christmas, and the break it afforded us, (no matter how small this year) has all but receded in the rear view mirror and we’re perhaps still recovering from its excesses, be that the extra pounds on the scales and lack of in the bank account. That, coupled with the dismal weather and the fact that we can’t book ourselves a holiday, could leave us all feeling less than chipper.

Do you know what I’ve just done though? I had a word with myself. ‘Stop being such a grouch,’ I said.  Firm, I was too, because you have to look for the sparks, the joy and the inspiration SOMEWHERE: they are not just going to come flying at you out of your coffee. So, I opened the old Instagram feed and there it was: Martin Luther King Day.* Today, the third Monday in January, is a Federal holiday in the US, to celebrate his legacy. Now, there was someone who didn’t just sit on his backside bemoaning his lot and watching Judge Judy in his y-fronts of an afternoon. ‘Use your voice,’ said MLK, ‘Even when it shakes.’ Be more MLK, I said to myself.

Thus, with King’s deep resonant voice in my ears, I’m going to use my voice on this platform to suggest three things we can take comfort from this week:

1. With the inauguration of Biden on Wednesday, we should be seeing some real, positive changes coming from the States, namely with regard to the Paris Agreement, tensions with Iran, Covid measures and a renewed focus on equality and civil rights. I’ll sleep a bit easier knowing that the leader of the free-world doesn’t want to actively hasten our planet’s demise, aggravate a wannabe nuclear-power, ignore a pandemic and incite racial violence. Having Biden in situ in the White House just makes me feel less defeatist about the state of the world.
2. Last week I wrote a post about people being absolutely useless and leaving their dog shit everywhere. readers then got in touch to tell me lovely things they were doing, picking up litter, visiting house-bound neighbours and supporting local charities. It was so tremendously up-lifting. There are many stellar individuals out there, doing small but purposeful things to help others. Diane picked up some shit that would otherwise have wound up tramped into some one’s living room. Susan took a bag out and collected a pile of rubbish; Rose baked a little girl a cake. See? Lovely stuff, everywhere.
3. The days are lengthening, and this has a massive impact on me because the dark evenings make me  lethargic, my creativity dwindles and I’m ratty as f**k. That extra hour of daylight has a profound impact on my psyche. Suddenly I want to try a new recipe and get out for a jog, not because I feel I should, but because I want to. Everything in winter requires more effort. I feel I should mention here that there are plenty of pictures of me on social media looking active and chirpy, because much of the time I am. I also though, spend rather a lot of time lying in bed beside my fat cat or curled on the sofa. You just don’t get a lot of ‘likes’ on Instagram for pictures with the hashtags ‘lazy’ and ‘introspective’. So, I am looking forward to a boost in my energy levels and more equanimity. (One can always hope). Life eh? I suppose it wouldn’t be nearly so sweet if we didn’t have the sour moments too.

*If you would like to give yourself a bit of time-out this week, you should consider a session with  the girls of Still I Rise Storytelling, where they will be learning all about inclusion and diversity, no doubt with a wee nod to MLK, what with the week being in it.

Do you want to hear about my morning? Shite, so it was. Firstly, trying to get the children to do any sort of meaningful work was impossible. I’ve had bikini waxes that were more fun than doing ‘number sequencing’ with the Small Child. Then the Fat Cat was mewing at me with belligerence because he doesn’t like the fishy selection we’d bought. Raging, he was because the other cat was munching away happily. The dog needed walked so she was following us about with a big face on her and so I said ‘FINE I WILL LEAVE THE MATHS AND GO TO THE F**KING SHOP.’ The Older Child said she’d come for the dander and so we Ieft the other one with her dad and the instruction to: FINISH THAT SHEET! (Spoiler alert- they’d done f**k all when we got home. Naturally).

Now is it just me, or is there an unprecedented amount of dog poo everywhere? When we turned the corner onto the street below us we practically had to hop-scotch our way round all the shit. One pile looked like something a horse might have left. Then there was the litter.: coke bottles and sweet wrappers and then I noticed that some dirty bastard had had a McDonalds and just dropped the wrapping as they’d walked along. Now, I’ve been trying to do eco-friendly things this month and I had entertained the notion of bringing my litter picker and gloves but in my haste to get the hell out of the house I hadn’t. (Plus, I can’t find the litter picker: it’s probably languishing in the shed with the rest of our detritus). So in the absence of appropriate litter lifting equipment, I used a doggy poo bag as a glove and started lifting the rubbish. I got a few bits and put them in someone’s black bin but in doing so dropped the poo bag. So now, I risked looking like one of those ones who lets their dog defecate everywhere. I searched my pockets for other poo bags, but to no avail. I sighed, deeply.

‘Hold her,’ I said to the Older Child, passing her the dog’s lead as I tried to hoke out the poo bag. I am five feet tall and wheely bins are large and cavernous. Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t reach it.

‘Please get out of the bin,’ said the Child. Looking up I saw a woman’s head in the window. She looked perplexed, as well she might have, in fairness to her.

The whinging continued: ‘Just come ON!’

I acquiesced. Happily, I then  remembered my rucksack which I had brought to carry the cat food home in. I checked and there was a whole rake of bags. ‘Phew,’ I said.

But does it seem to you that there is a different sort of a malaise about at the minute, apart from the obvious one? I’m talking about a general kind of ‘dan’t give a fuck-ness’. Either a form of nihilism has descended, or people have just stopped caring, but there is more rubbish and more dog shit and more nastiness than ever before. I can’t even look on Twitter because within a minute of scrolling someone will have declared they’ve had to leave because of the toxicity of the comments directed at them.

I never, ever want to sound didactic on here but it feels as though the goodwill we showed each other at the beginning of all this has dissipated, and now it’s just every person for themselves, in a dog eat dog world. Except where I live, it’s just a dog shit world. Small things really do matter. As any parent who’s had to pick the shit out of of their child’s trainer with a tooth pick should know.

* I would like to thank Sofia Tucker-Blanco for the image of her bull dog Jason.

Lads, totally disgracing myself here, or as The Mothership would say, I am ‘letting myself down a bucketful.’ * But, my children. Dear God, my children. Here’s what mornings are like: They get their books out (or I locate the books after they’ve feen fired under a table/sofa/bed and show them what they have to do. They start and I get told to ‘Go away,’ and off they go. I try to intervene and be helpful which is met with opprobrium. They are working on my laptop so I can’t write anything myself, so I don the marigolds and start to clean. Hearing much chortling and sounds of ‘carrying on’ I go and check their progress. They are rolling about the floor, giving the dogs treats and wrecking the place. The Maths programme on the computer is bleeping away to itself, merrily. ‘DO THE WORK,’ I say, retreating to the chaos that is the kitchen.

Next there are wails of hunger. ‘We didn’t get much for breakfast,’ say the Older Child in a mournful tone. This would be because the Older Child can’t fix her arse to a seat long enough to ingest the food in front of her. Getting her to eat Muller Fruit Corner is an achievement. (And yes, I hate the f**king plastic but it’s the only yogurt they eat and I don’t want them to have a calcium deficiency.) I dole out toast. The worktop is now cluttered and covered in crumbs.

I give up on cleaning and fetch the laptop. The little b*****ds have sneaked lychees out of the fridge and the keys and screen are a revolting, sticky mess.  Cue much shouting. I fetch work books and make them toil the old-fashioned way. Once again, I am told to ‘leave them alone’.

Then, in they trot: ‘Finished!!’ I look. It’s pile of shite. I fetch the rubber and set to.

I have now taken to supervising them. They are not getting near my laptop unless I can see there are no foodstuffs upon their person.  I mean, I’m an ACTUAL teacher. I have also done home-schooling before, like everyone else. Why is it still making me want to gouge my eye ball out with a tooth pick in frustration?

They have been playing outside in the rain too, because I am a great advocate for ‘fresh air’. I am not, however, a great advocate for muddy leggings and wet sock and knockers stashed under beds. They have gone feral. ‘SHUT THE FUCKING DOOR,’ I yelled yesterday, in true fishwife style as they raced in and out in their bogging welly boots for the zillionth time. ‘You shouldn’t use the f-word to your child’ said the Small One, primly. ‘You shouldn’t leave the fucking door open,’ I replied.

I know. It’s terrible. I’m awful. I’m just so bloody tired and stressed and everything is dirty and sticky and there doesn’t seem to be any end to it. HELP ME. Send me kind thoughts. Share me the profanities that you have not only muttered but directed at your children. Make me feel less of a rubbish mum. Please.

*I wrote this post a few years ago when I still called The Small Child ‘Father Jack’ because she was such a fierce three year old and used to run around looking for her bottle shouting ‘ MILK!’ in the sort of enraged tone Father Jack demanding ‘DRINK!”

Last week my post about becoming a Boring Bastard went down a treat, as a number of readers identified with my new found tendency. Last night, however, as we engaged in the gloomy activity of taking down the Christmas tree, I fear I may have peaked.  ‘Let’s colour code the decorations,’ I declared, suddenly finding a use for the big plastic sweet tubs we accumulated over the season of ‘Eat your way to Type 2 Diabetes’.*

I got quite ‘Sergeant Major-y’ about it. ‘Red baubles in here, silver items in the Celebrations tub over there, anything gold in the Miniature Heroes one.’

‘What about this?’ said the Small Child, holding up a green stocking shaped ornament fashioned out of Fimo clay. I was tempted to say ‘Bin’, but gestured towards the newly formed miscellaneous tub instead. The children tired of this activity in approximately six minutes. My enthusiasm too, was short-lived. Celebrations tubs actually don’t hold many baubles, and so the plan was aborted and they were all tipped into the usual box without further preamble. Despite this, the floor downstairs is still littered with lights, tinsel, and a pile of cuddly toy elves and Santas. I’ve decided just to close the door of the living room to deal with this problem for the time being.

I bumped into a friend on Thursday and when she told me about some of the chats that she’d had with her husband of late, I felt a lot less dull.   She’d recently bought up the topic of shower sealant and gone on at length about the topic.

‘Put that in an E-mail for me, would you? he said when she paused to drink her coffee. ‘I think I’d love to read it all again, and take my time over it.’

In response to my prompting, she disclosed their top three ‘Boring Bastard’ chats. In third place was conversations about the weather, with particular regard to just how ‘mild’ it was. They got from their house near Ravenhill Road almost all the way to Carryduff chatting about this, with a brief diversion when they passed Brackenvale where she commented that they do a decent beef stew, although it’s a bit heavy on the thyme. Runner up is her husband’s preoccupation with a ‘good strong bin liner.’ He has never got over the time he sustained a nasty nick from the lid from a can of baked beans through a flimsy B&M own brand bag. Top prize though, has to go to their exchanges about leave in conditioner, versus wash out conditioner for their children’s hair. (I know, I swear to f**k) this was the girl with whom I spent many a riotous evening during our PGCE.

Obviously we can’t talk. Yesterday we went to buy a new front door. That was a riot, I can tell you. LSB has been banging on about a new front door ever since a part of our letterbox ‘fell off’ and subsequently went missing. In a fit of ‘New Year, New Me’ getting things done, he managed to get an appointment with a sales rep in the Door Store over in the Abbey Centre. (Can you imagine how thrilled I was to end up in the Abbey Centre on a Sunday afternoon?) Don’t ever go to buy a front door thinking that you’re going to be in and out in under an hour.  Turns out there’s a lot to consider, when you’re looking a new front door. There’s the height of the threshold, for starters, which was clearly never something the people who installed our original door thought too much about. Many’s the guest hasn’t appreciated the depth of the ridge and has come hurling through into our hall. It’s a wonder no one has put a claim in. There’s the colour and the type of glass you want, depending on how much light you want to come in. Then you have to decide  whether to go for average 40 inch width or fork out for 70 inches which provides more insulation? (Well do you?) Do you want the colour of the frame to match the door or would you prefer just to go for white?  Apparently that can set off the colour of the door quite nicely. FML.

And, to add to the trauma of this experience we had to cart the children along because obviously they can’t be casually dropped off to the grandparents anymore lest they are harbouring a new and decidedly more contagious strain of Covid. Luckily, one of the nice salesman had brought in a bag of all the chocolate his children didn’t like from their selection boxes so they each got two Curley Wurleys and a Chomp. While LSB discussed the finer points of doors,  (Not ‘The Doors‘, just front doors. Rock and Roll eh?) I took them over to the window and made them stare out to see if they could spot any escaped animals from Belfast Zoo. Given our esteemed zoo’s inability to keep its animals enclosed, this should have been relatively easy.

Just in case you aren’t sufficiently bored yet, and fancy reading yourself into a coma, I’m putting up daily posts on Instagram about eco-friendly suggestions for the month of January. I took a notion to do this on January 1^st, at approximately 9pm, so much thought and planning went into the endeavour.  However, recycling makes me happy and there’s precious little else making me smile right now so I’ll take it where I can get it.

*Only two of these were actually ours- I actually rescued the rest from school where I feared they might just have dumped. I always like to keep a tubs such as these for pen or crayon storage, sometimes even cake. Sewing items too. (Oh God. I’ll get my coat.)