(Folks I started this last week, before our wonderful granny passed away. I just finished it this morning as I think Anne would have liked it, especially the bit about her being well organised.)
People I am melted. Pure melted. Hot on the heels of ‘Dress your little darlings up as a Fairy Tale Character’ comes ‘World Book Day’, so head directly to Sainsbury’s and buy another fucking costume so you can create more clutter in your house and empty your wallet in one fell swoop. Now, I am a ‘stay-at-home mum’ so perhaps you are thinking, what has got her goat this time? MAKE something you lazy article.’ But alas, I may be able to fling a few words at a page, but artistic I am not, and sewing is not one of my skills. I think before we built the extension I had a needle and thread but in sooth I know not where one is to be found these days. Long gone. Anything in need of fixing is sent directly to my mother or mother-in-law. In fairness, if it goes to my mum it is set upon ‘The Chair’ and is then retrieved and sent to the mother-in-law where it comes back fixed within the week. I come from a line of procrastinators. (‘Doing me down again,’ I can hear my mother say.)
In first form at Glenlola Collegiate, the Home Economics exam entailed a sewing exercise whereby we had to sew around a circle, square and triangle on an A4 sheet. My sewing machine was at the back of the room on a funny little desk and I recall my foot getting stuck on the pedal. When I handed up the massacred sheet of paper the teacher looked on agog, before enquiring if I was making some sort of feminist statement about girls being forced to do needlework. (I went on to win the prize for Home Economics at A-level, for which I was awarded a silver teapot so clearly feminism had never been on my agenda).
But you know by now that I’m mad about the reading. It’s why my house is bogging, and why I never get round to gardening because if I’m not writing or cooking dinners I’m engrossed in a book. The children are never out of the library and the poor critters are read to morning noon and night. But does this mean that I want to so spend my evening sewing a fecking costume? It does not.
So back to World Book Day. The small child wants to go in dressed as a koala bear after the book ‘A day at the Animal Airport’ (which is pure genius and has been penned by someone as demented as me by family life and the trauma that is flying with small children.) ‘Righteo,’ said LSB as he started looking up koala costumes on Amazon. I nearly had a fit. ‘Houl on a minute there, we have no more need of another costume! sez I. Upstairs we have two child sized and one adult reindeer outfit, three rabbit ensembles, one polar bear suit and a giant banana. There are numerous girly princess dresses and a clatter of other random fancy dress paraphernalia. ‘I WILL NOT BOW TO CORPORATE GREED,’ I yell to himself, who nervously closes the laptop and mutters, ‘and me only trying to help.’
The older one wants to be ‘Plop, The Owl who is afraid of the dark’. I remember that LSB’s reindeer suit was next to wrecked after the Castlewellan Christmas Cracker and start contemplating cutting it up into bits and sticking brown fuzzy scraps on to cardboard wings.
In the end, after the week took a horrible turn, on Wednesday evening LSB says ‘What about World Book Day and I say ‘Oh fuck it,’ and we march the little people into M&S and one gets to be Rapunzel and the other is Alice in Wonderland. And then it snows, so they don’t even get to wear them into school on Thursday. We are forty quid down, and there is YET MORE CLUTTER. But as I watch the kids don their outfits and dance away some of their sadness for a moment,I don’t really care. ‘Come here til we have a story,’ I say and we cuddle on the sofa and give ‘Animal Airport’ another whirl.
