crazy people

Last weekend was a special weekend for me, as it quite often is. This has nothing to do with the fact that Sunday was February 14th however. Mr Boxer Shorts and I don't celebrate Valentine's Day.

We don't hate it. We just don't do it.

I am quite happy for the rest of the world to get all doughy eyed at each other, proclaim undying love and spend huge amounts of money on things that were hastily repackaged in red or pink behind the counter and display massive cards that play tinny versions of "Where do I begin".

I'm not your bah humbugger type of person - I don't rain on other people's parade just because I choose not to march in it.

I do think that it's horrendously commercial and a shallow expression of love, but I will refrain from telling you that.

But as far as I understand it, Valentine's Day is about true love. It's for lovers. Or secret admirers. Or people whose hearts touch in a spiritual way. I remember getting a valentine from my dad when I was very young - for his special girl. I can remember the school's banning the exchange of Valentine's within school time, since not everyone got one. And then the even stranger moments once I got into high school and started to explore "relationships" in that uselessly terrifying way that adolescents do! (I went to an all girls school, but that doesn't mean that my Valentine's cards were from girls!)

What Valentine's Day isn't for - as far as I understand it - is a class full of toddlers.

So imagine my confusion and bemusement as I read posts on twitter about mothers just off to their "preschooler's valentine's party". What's that all about? There was dressing up and decorations and cards.

Or another blog post (a very touching one albeit) about getting valentines's cards from the whole class, since the children's mothers would buy a job lot and address them all accordingly.

That was the one that had me raising my eyebrows the most. If the point of making someone your "Valentine" is to declare your love to them, how is is appropriate for a child to send a valentine's card to every single person in their class?

It reminds me of the movie "The Incredibles", when the villain is hell bent on making everybody special. Because when everyone is special, then no-one will be.

Surely the idea of giving everyone in your class a valentine's card is perfectly aligned with that sentiment. I think it's nicer to be special in a unique way.

I did a bit more research on Valentine's Day and discovered that in the United States, it's actually a holiday. That made the whole song and dance that surrounds it somewhat more understandable. I'd probably be so happy for a day off I'd be willing to send some cards out for my troubles!

But anyway, the Valentine's business was probably booming over here in Britain on Sunday 14th February, just not quite at the fever-pitch all-inclusive modus operandus that the Yankees do it. I wouldn't know. I spent it shopping in Bluewater. And I had a hangover.

I had a hangover because on Saturday 13th February I had a birthday party since I turned 40 - as I may have mentioned earlier. So that's why last weekend was a special weekend. And the party was great fun - tucked away in the corner of our local bar - with great friends, wine and food. And I even got some more presents - which was totally unexpected and at the same time a lovely surprise.

But I need to backtrack and correct a wrongness that I have inflicted on Mr Boxer Shorts.

I wanted an apron for my birthday. I saw the one I wanted in the kitchen shop in our high street. I feared that instead of an apron I would get yet more jewellery. What can I say? I've just cooked up a batch of Nigella's chowder with asian flavours wearing my lovely... old white apron. Yep, no apron appeared.

But guess what - no bling turned up either. 

You see, I am typing this blog post on my kitchen bench, with my new Macbook Pro. It would appear that Mr Boxer Shorts was being particularly attentive to my random ramblings, and took note of my casual search for a new laptop. He noticed my loving glances at the MacBook Air. He actually listened when I speculated at how the Air wasn't featured enough to  do all that I needed, but that Pro was.

The girls were so excited that they had difficulty keeping up the presence as I opened my presents. The first was a running top in blue. It was nice, but I'd seen some great pink and red ones that I'd liked in Sweaty Betty and I was under the impression that we were going to shopping for them so that I could try them on and get one that I liked. This one was a Nike one, and very plain.

The next present was a laptop sleeve - to protect the laptop I was planning to buy. It was a gorgeous purple colour.

Then the girls started making funny faces, one finger on a chin - saying "Oh, is there another present?" in theatrical voices. They are terrible actors! But I didn't catch on. I presumed that they'd wrapped something funny from the cat - because I always do a birthday present for them from him.

But up came a huge wrapped present. No - almost wrapped. Both ends had sprung open, and the Mac apple icon was visible as the present was lifted up. Mr Boxer Shorts is a terrible present wrapper! I knew instantly.

Terrible wrapper he might be, but the surprise was fantastic! And to think, I'd had him marked down for another round of bling.

So here I am - typing a blog post in the social, but frantic atmosphere of my front room (I moved, half way though typing!) The girls, who are on half term holiday, are playing the Wii before bedtime.  Jeez, actually it's kinda mad down here! But I now have choice, which is the main thing!

So here's to my Valentine - the man who keeps my heart and makes me smile. Not just one day a year, but every day.

I learnt a new phrase the other day, when someone noted that they'd just learnt what a certain acronym meant. I hadn't even noticed it in use before this person mentioned it.

The acronym is FML, and apparently the meaning is "Fuck my Life.". I'm sorry mum, there really was no alternative translation for that. It's not like WTF? Which has the gentler version of WTH? which still manages to convey the same spirit.

(But do note that I did try and get it into the second paragraph so that you wouldn't have to see a swear word on facebook, so you can thank me for that later mum!)

So "FML" is something I've seen quite a bit on Twitter lately. "My hair just won't sit flat, FML!" "My dishwasher just exploded, FML!" and maybe even "My other half expects me to entertain his inlaws while he's away for 2 weeks, FML!!"

I don't like this phrase at all. It's very strong. You can't change it to "Screw my life" if you didn't want to use the swear word, because that's the whole point of it in the first place. It's a venomous, spitting expletive. I don't think most people mean it either.

There are a lot of people in the world who could really use this phrase. There always are. Right now a lot of those people are in Haiti. But at any one point in time there are mother's who've lost a child to a terrible disease, or families torn apart by debt or drugs, or whole communities living in poverty who have nothing.

They could say "FML".

And yet, they probably wouldn't.

Today, I turn 40. At 7.20pm exactly. My mother missed out on dinner because she was busy having me, and the best they could bring her was an egg sandwich and a glass of milk because the kitchen was closed. She didn't say "FML!". She was so busy looking at the miracle of life that had arrived. (The little miracle who grew and leant to swear on her 40th birthday, isn't she proud now?)

I am worried that I am going to have a mental breakdown over my age. A blip on the radar, a bout of depression, or a really big cry. Maybe all of those. Because I find it really hard to believe that I am now approximately half way through my life. 

That there are only a finite number of trees left in the world that I can actually pull my own body weight up now. There are the inch-long hairs in my eyebrows that creep in when I am not looking and are just going to multiply, and start growing out of other random places - shoulder, chin, ear.

There are so many things that are now in my past that it scares me. The final thing that's in my future scares me, because it's getting closer. The quiet, slow sagging of my face scares me, as gravity takes hold of the edges of my mouth, or the underside of my eyes and slowly pulls them to herself.

There are the scars in my stomach, and the soft crumply skin that shows where two children and one gallbladder operation have changed my body forever.

But that immediately reminds me of the wonderful things that time has brought. Some are things that I wouldn't have now if I'd remained 16 forever. Others are things that I am just amazed at. And some are both.  

I have two wonderful, marvellous loving miracles. Two little girls whose every day is a new adventure. I always expected to have a family, and be a mother. But the gift of children is just so truly amazing. It's also a little scary - when you have children, you take on a role that has a huge amount of responsibilty. You take on a role that includes hero worship. As a mother, I have two small humans who think that I am the best thing since sliced bread. They love me unconditionally, and hang on my every word for approval and love. 

It's not the responsibility of taking care of the physical needs of children that is daunting - it's the responsibility of their minds and souls that totally blows mine. I only hope I can live up to the role in which they've cast me!

I have one loving soul mate. He farts, he gets drunk and falls asleep at work, he misses the toilet when he pees, he sleepwalks, he doesn't have a musical bone in his body, he likes football, he hates my cat, and he can't stack the dishwasher for toffee. But he also makes me laugh. We like the same movies (sometimes). He'll sit through a Hugh Grant film (almost). He chose the song to dance to at our wedding and did an amazing job. He proposed on bended knee, had the ring ready, and it fit perfectly. He's a fabulous father - mostly because he's just a big kid himself. He is my best friend and I look forward to spending the rest of my life with him.

We are healthy. We are all healthy. There are so many scary illnesses that my girls could have been born with or developed later on. Touch wood, but they've been healthy. And I am healthy, and so is my husband. We might have aches and pains and gallbladderying things going on, but in the big picture, we're fit and healthy.

We have freedom. By luck of birth, we were all born in a country where we can pick and choose where we want to live. We can pack up and move to another country if we like, since we have two nationalities between us. We're not affected by war or natural disasters.

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I've got life, love and liberty. I count my blessings for how lucky I am. I hope that there isn't something lurking just around the corner that is going to turn my world upside down, but I'll look both ways before I cross the road just be sure. 

Because looking at my life, and marvelling out how lucky I am - I also realise how important I am. To those three people I love. My life is precious to me not just because I want to live it, but also because the impact it would have on them if I wasn't here.

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We have a future. There is so much unknown that is still yet to come. I have the true joy of meeting my teenagers when they turn up, and saying goodbye to my little girls. To watching them grow up and flex their independence muscles. I have the difficult task of being both a friend and a mentor. Of keeping an open and communicative relationship between them.

The lines will blur, and where one day I am berated them, or hounding them to do their homework, the next will might be clapping as I watch a graduation ceremony. Or a wedding.

I might be doing what my mother did, and waving goodbye to travelling bags, hoping that they come back, and don't settle down in a foreign land like her ungrateful daughter did. I might be looking at the peachfuzz hairs on the neck of my first grandchild.

I could even be sallying forth across Siberia in a winnebago with my balding hubby. I will probably look like a crumpled sock with white floor lint stuck on the end.

I don't know what my future holds, but I guess if I am half way through it now, then I need to realise that there is still a hell of a lot more to come. And even though it feels like unfamiliar territory, and my knees might hurt while walking it - I am still the same spirit that I was when I was 22.

So I am never going to say "Fuck my Life." That phrase just doesn't do justice to the wonderful life that I have been given.

But I AM going to start using anti wrinkle cream and all that stuff. 

What do you mean, it's too late?

Oh FM... Shoot.

Don't you just love IMDB.com? I do. I know more about what I watch now than I ever did. Because whenever I see someone who looks vaguely familiar, I just leap on IMDB.com (usually on my iphone) and look them up.

You know how it goes - you're sitting there watching something and there is a familiar face looking back at you. You just can't put a name to them, but you're sure you've seen them before. So you look them up, and discover that while they are not a major star, they've been an extra in almost every sitcom you've ever watched.

How gratifying is it to discover that the person you're watching in CSI was in an episode of Magnum, PI? Or that they were in Simon and Simon, and then also in two episodes of ER?

I love it when that happens.

My husband is less enamoured.

We'll be watching a movie, and all of a sudden I am telling him what movies the bus boy was in. He didn't even notice the bus boy in the first place.

What the hell is a bus boy?

We have a running joke when we watch movies - we  spot the people with the least air time - those people who fall over in the background, or look in the door and nod to someone else - and we claim them as our own. 

"That's my part."

This is what couples do. Couples married for ten years. How fun and crazy are we?

So this January we'll have been married for 11 years. I was hoping for that elusive eternity ring for our tenth anniversary, but it never quite happened.

But since I wear the pants in this relationship, the ring not turning up is more my fault than his, since it's up to me to organise it. 

And truth be told -  I already did organise it. Abotu 5 years ago I commissioned it to be made, and then I had to reject it. My God, that was one of the most horrible days of my life. I went without my wedding and engagement rings for a week while they worked on the new one, and then I went to pick it up and it was so so SO wrong. How hard is it to get the details right?

My wedding ring fits around my engagement ring with a cut out curve. All I wanted was the eternity ring to fit into the set in the same way. And yet they made it completely different. A soft curve instead of the sharp semicircle. Plus it was supposed to be in white gold. It was yellow. I rejected it, got my deposit back, and stormed out with my baby (number 1 child). We went to the carpark, and I paid for parking and sat down to bawl my eyes out. 

Suddenly baby shit was running down my arm - she was overflowing with that mustard coloured baby poo. She really must have got into the feeling of the moment.

I changed her on the back of the car, then looked for the parking card. I couldn't find it anywhere. After 10 minutes of searching I finally found where it had dropped, under the car.

I sat in the car and cried for another 5 minutes just for good measure.

Finally I tried to drive out of the carpark. Uh oh - the parking card has now expired because I took too long to leave the carpark after paying for my parking!

So I have a slight stigma attached to my non-exisitant eternity ring. Plus I am never going back to Putney after that confrontation with the parking attendant! I bet he didn't expect that to happen when he woke up in the morning and got dressed in his parking blues with the clip on tie and crappy name tag.

But there is an up side to that - in the 7 years that followed, I redesigned my ring, and now have a really clear idea of how it should look.

When I get it done it's going to look gorgeous - like half of a flower.

All I need to do now is decide if I want it in diamonds, or coloured stones.

I don't suppose IMDB.com can help me there.

Photo credit  CmdrGravy

Our street is a typical outer London street, in that it's not wide enough for two cars to pass each other, without the potential danger of one of them needing a new paint job after the fact.

This leads to the common practise by those of us who live here of waiting at the bottom of the street for a car that is already navigating its way down. And then of course, as the two cars pass at the cross street - a thank you nod from the waitee to the waiter. It's common sense, and it's basic courtesy. Plus it makes us all happy, and no-one needs to buy a can of touch up paint from Halfords in a colour that will nearly - but not quite - match your car's duco.

But sometimes there are people who are not local to the area, and sometimes there are people who are not used to practising common sense or courtesy. Sometimes all three in one.

I was walking back up the road after dropping my girls off at school today when I witnessed one of those events. Three cars were coming down, two were going up. The first car going up was already at the half way point, but luckily for her there was a disabled parking bay that was currently empty - and made a usable passing point.

The other car going up started backing back down the road to the cross road. Now this is where it gets funny. At that road was a woman drinving a Jaguar, who had partially turned onto the road. No-one was behind her, but when she saw the car in front backing slowly towards her, rather than evaluating the situation and putting her own car in reverse, she waiting until the other driver was close, then sat on her horn. And sat.

How do some people live with themselves? This post is starting to cross over into yesterdays - self righteous, self entitled, self obsessed people! The car doors opened, the argument began - I was now too far up the road to see how it was resolved. I am sure it was quickly smoothed and soothed. But in there past there have been some incredible reactions by different people.

One such occasion was related to me by my neighbours, as it was before my time. There evolved a standoff between two drivers facing each other. It was outside our house, which is close to the top of the street. That means that the person who had just turned in from the main road should have backed their car back up to a passing point (and there is plenty of space at the top of the street to do that). But no. Both drivers sat. And one of them sat on the horn. After 5 minutes my neighbour popped out like a very irate jack-in-the-box to tell these two drivers to sort it out and just p%$# off already. They didn't. The hand was removed from the horn, but neither driver moved.

Guess how long they sat there? Nearly one HOUR. Can you get your head around the type of person who is SO self entitled that they won't even move their car for an hour? Other drivers ended up coming up the street, then backing down again, finding alternate routes get around thanks to two ladies who had decided that driving a car was in some way like the battle of waterloo, and each of them was honour bound to win.

They finally moved when the gathered neighbours called the police. Maybe a small spark of sense appeared in one of their heads, but rather than risk explaining themselves to the beat, they left.

Thankfully, that's rare, and has never happened again in my knowledge, but there have been much shorter incidents involving screaming fights and people getting out of their cars to yell at the other, and demand that THEY back up.

So it keeps occurring to me that I should write to the council and suggest that they make our street and the one next to it into one way streets. It seems a logical idea. The only trouble is, that if I write to the council about this, I know who will answer. My sort-of neighbour from four doors down.

When we first moved in here there was a councillor who lived in our road. We didn't know he was a councillor at first, we called him the shed monster. Or sheddie - for short. I have no idea of the complex relationship that he and the lady of the house had, but it had to be "a relationship" because you don't have screaming arguments in the backyard with someone unless there is also passion in the mix. And she would be screaming at him, and he would retreat to the shed and hide.

It wasn't a shed for lawnmowers and bikes like ours, it was more a little garden house. And it's where he lived. Honestly. Day or night, there he'd be in his shed. From our bedroom window we had a great (although unwanted) view of him sitting in the shed, at his desk, watching TV.

Now, he didn't sleep in the shed. Not intentionally, anyway. But one night we were woken up by banging, and looked out the window to see him thrashing about in his shed. He was in his bathrobe and a tracksuit, with a bottle of scotch (or something that looked a lot like a bottle of scotch, but was alcoholic, either way). He was punching the walls of his shed. We watching in painful bemusement as he punched the filing cabinets, the window, the wall, and then the desk. But he didn't punch like a MAN punches. He was doing some whacky kind of backhanded slap with both hands.

It was like watching a trainwreck. We wanted to stop watching, but we couldn't help ourselves! Finally he sat down, aggression spent, and we went back to bed shaking our heads and giggling.

So this is what happened last time I wrote an email to the council about a letter they'd sent us regarding parking permits (because I'm THAT woman, who just has to have her say!). I was getting out of my car when up comes the shed monster and speaks to me: "I got your email."

I was - quite admittedly - lost. When had I emailed him? His balding pate and ruddy cheeks threw me off, I don't think I'd even even spoken to him, or been so close to him that I could see the open pores across his nose. He went on to say that he'd be sending out an amended letter from the council, about the re-evaluation of the the parking system, and then it clicked.

Oh My God, if I send an email to my local council, it goes to shed monster. He's my "government".

To his credit though, the amended letter did get circulated the next week. I wonder if he has any idea that we've seen what might be his darkest moment? (Although in the depths of governments, I am pretty sure there are darker moments to be had!) Could that be why I got prompt attention? Maybe I should take more advantage of that!

I am distracted from typing this by a sudden car horn outside. Is there a new altercation about to erupt? The only thing worse than two people refusing to budge, is the times that they decide that they CAN fit to pass each other in the street. The outcome of that is nearly always the aforementioned paint damage, or completely tearing off the wing mirror from at least 2 cars. I stick my head out the window and no-one is there anymore. But it will happen again soon.

So I guess I need to bite the bullet and write a new email to the council about it before it's too late. Maybe I could mention my love of sheds in order to get a swift response!