Esme Update

Esme's class made pirate hats at school today.

Nothing commands respect on the mean streets of South London like a pirate hat and a small paper flag, and no one messed with her turf all afternoon.

She wanted the pirates on her hat to look especially pugnacious and hardcore,

so she drew them with sticking-plasters on.

PS Thank you for all still being here. x x

I wonder if anyone still reads this stuff

That basket again

In case you were wondering, this is what has happened to this blog:

My laptop has expired. Even Ian could not fix it, although you can see how thoroughly he investigated it. It is dead and gone.

Despite what you might think, having two children is often easier than having one. Once you get past the initial six months of complete and utter inhuman hell, the baby begins to move around, and it follows its older sibling.

Living with Esme and Oscar is like living with live cartoons: they love each other, play together, snuggle together, and run around being complete lunatics together; or they did, until she started school. Then he felt her absence keenly, and followed me around instead. All the time. If I sit, he sits on me. If I stand, he rugby-tackles me. He is my constant companion. This is wonderful, and all part of the rich tapestry and etc etc, but I don't get an awful lot done.

When Esme gets home from school, she and Ossie snuggle up and watch Looney Tunes on my PC in return for my grasping 60 minutes' daylight, peace and quiet with my laptop. Or: they did. Just as I got used to this Golden Hour Or Two, the laptop went pfffft.

By the time my laptop went pfffft, my PC had sunk to the status of The Family Computer, ie the property of the children during daylight hours. My previously private portal to cyberspace is all Safety Searches, sticky fingerprints, and discarded crusts.

If I try to use it, Oscar climbs onto me like a 30b sack of shit that plays with its navel while making huffing noises through its nostrils; meanwhile, Esme asks how soon I will have finished using my computer, and whether she may have a honey sandwich with the crusts cut off, or some apple juice with a green straw, and have I finished using my computer yet? I have to stalk my PC, wait until it is unoccupied, and leap on it to use it as much as I can before the children appear like cats to a tin-opener.

The only time I have to use my PC in peace and quiet is this late hour between Ossie's bedtime and mine. By this time of night, I am shattered.

Ian's parents are coming to the rescue with an old laptop they no longer use, so I will be back, but not until they come to visit later this year and bring the laptop with them. Bear with me. Try to find comfort in this basket of concerned eyebrows. See you soon.

For Esme - with Love and Squashing

It's about time I wrote another blog post, isn't it

Here, look at this.

This is a Creative D100 "boombox", as I am led to believe young people call them. I don't expect for a second that young people use the word boombox: I expect it is used by people of my age who want to sell D100s to other people of my age who want to feel like they still know what's going on.

The D100 boombox is a Bluetooth device that talks magically and wirelesly to another Bluetooth device, like my laptop, and plays the laptop's music through its speakers. It is claimed that it works right out of the box. I do not believe this either, as the silence in this room is testament to the sad fact that it doesn't. Perhaps it would, if my laptop were not so old and set in its ways; but my laptop will not allow any other audio output than its tinny little speakers. It acknowledges that the D100 is in the house, but it will not speak to it. My laptop also mutters about the increasing number of foreign people in the neighbourhood, and gets tetchy when the keys to the back door are not returned to their specific hook.

When I was thirty-one, I took a job in the City, in the proofreading department of a law firm. It was a splendid department, and I was very, very happy there. Most of my colleagues were about fifty-five, closer to my parents' ages than to mine, and it was in that office that I realised my generation had become the capable one. Nothing defined this more sharply than information technology, with which my oldest colleagues struggled, becoming stressed when trying to open an email in Microsoft Word. This, of course, is the computing equivalent of trying to fry an egg in the fridge. The older generation were no longer people we looked to for help and guidance: they began to need our help, and we helped them, although not without giggling into our sleeves at their stupid questions.

Now, I have become what I used to mock: a parent defeated by modern technology. I will be forty in October. It is not twenty, but it is not old, and I am feeling all right about it; or I was, until this boombox turned up and my laptop refused to speak to it. No: I am still feeling all right about turning forty. After all, Ian is forty-one, and he says he will be able to fix the problem when he gets home tonight, by arguing with my laptop's subconscious. So I am not really frustrated by boomboxes or advancing age, just by incapability.

I bought the boombox so that I could listen to Shit FM during the day. I listen to Shit FM over the internet through the tinny speakers of my laptop, in the kitchen, the splendid new kitchen that is not finished, but finished enough to sit in while baking gingerbread and listening to Shit FM. Here it is:

Last time I wrote - I'm sorry it was so long ago - was the first weekend of July, which was also the most frustrating weekend in history. I had measured out our summer in weekends, found that there were nine of them, and, knowing how long it takes this family to get its act together on weekends to do anything, I felt an urgency to get on with the kitchen at once. I had measured out our time in weekends because weekends are when Ian is here, therefore the only time that things can get done.

I wrote a long post about that weekend, but won't paste it here. In summary: we went to B&Q; we went to B&Q AGAIN; we had a brief row; I left the house, bought cigarettes for the first time in six weeks and walked in a furious straight line for five miles out of London until the trees took over from the buildings; I smoked a cigarette on a bench, under a tree, beside a rushing stream and a squirrel going through a box of greasy chips; I caught the Tube home; Ian took a 10cm square out of the wall; we went to bed; Monday came; Ian went to work, and I knocked down a quarter of the wall with a hammer and chisel.

The thing I've found most frustrating about having children is the feeling that I cannot do anything any more. After the initial rush of childbirth, the triumph of squeezing out a human being that leads one to feel temporarily invincible, one finds that one cannot do the things one used to. I found I could not go and pee as often as I wanted to. I could not answer emails immediately. I could not sleep as long as I needed to, or remember words, or hold a thought for more than five seconds. I could not just nip upstairs, or just nip to the shops, without half an hour of preparation, and having done this full-time parenting thing for almost five years now, I have allowed a robust, fat-arsed, can't-do attitude to crush almost every idea I have had.

I have learned a lot about the inside of my head, this summer, and have been very happy to find that the only reason I cannot do things is that I tell myself I can't. It was an indescribable joy to knock the wall down, to prove to myself that I did not have to measure our time in weekends any more. I demolished over three quarters of that wall while Ian was at work that first week of July: he helped me in the evenings, when I ached everywhere, my hair was full of brick dust, and my hands were rigid claws from throwing a 7lb sledgehammer repeatedly over my head. At the end of the week we took the last bits down together, and shared a joyful, dusty, sweaty hug in celebration. For the remainder of July, we worked every free minute of the day that the children would allow. We worked so very, very hard: mixing cement; laying a floor; plumbing; sanding; sawing; swearing; and laughing, more than we have laughed in forever, because it was exhausting, but brilliant, back-breaking, fun.

There were moments at which I briefly questioned the sanity of rebuilding a kitchen with two little children in the house, but I banished these questions quickly and just got on with it. Twice a day, I cleared the rubble and cooked the children's meals. They had no bath for a month: I swabbed the dust from them with wet wipes. I taught Esme to crowbar bricks from a wall; Oscar treated the kitchen as a playground, and ran into it excitedly every day to climb over exposed water-pipes and drive toy trucks through the dust. It was lunacy, but it was exhilarating. Knocking down walls does wonders for the subconscious and the self-esteem. Do it today!

After six weeks, we were exhausted, the children were YouTube addicts, and we hadn't been anywhere out of the house together or seen any of our friends since June, so we spent time out of the house, played with the children, and went to a party. We still had the ceiling to do. We still have the ceiling to do as I write. It has a Tetris-block gash in it from the zigzag of the demolished wall. I rang a plasterer, who promised to come and assess it but never turned up. I rang another, who turned up, and who promised me a quote within two days, two weeks ago: he never rang back. Weeks can go by if you wait for some man to turn up and fix things. Then Ian's car ran up a £650 bill, and we decided we will have to do the ceiling ourselves. We have had a break, now, and proved we can do anything: we can do this.

And that's why I feel good about turning 40 in October. I meant to learn a Chopin piano piece this summer, in time for my birthday, so that I could enter a new decade with new skills. I have not learned the Chopin, and I cannot get this boombox to work, but I have demolished a thick wall of brick and mortar, and repointed another one, and plastered yet another one, and done a splendid carpentry job on a fiddly plate rack, and lifted floorboards and re-wired mains electrical circuits, and my hands are so stiff from all this that I shall probably never play Chopin again, but I probably won't care until I'm about to turn 50 and having another crisis linked to the onset of a new birthday decade, for which there is probably an elegant, eighteen-syllable German word.

The kitchen is finished, look

Please watch this with a Philip Glass soundtrack: preferably Knee 1, from Einstein on the Beach. I couldn't get it to work.

60W Separation Anxiety Light, £399

So: the kitchen wall is soon to be pulled down. This weekend, Ian will be removing an Experimental Chunk: I find this more exciting than Christmas. I find dental surgery more exciting than Christmas, so it is more accurate to write that I find the Experimental Chunk more exciting then Esme finds Christmas.

The kitchen wall is also the bathroom wall. The back half of our basement is divided into kitchen and bathroom. The bathroom will move: the wall will come down, and the kitchen will double in size.

The bathroom is moving to Ian's bicycle workshop. The workshop has moved to make way for it, otherwise one would get pranged in the uncomfortables by power tools while trying to shower.

Ian's workshop has moved to the shed, at the end of the garden, where he can make all the noise he wants, without me shouting ARRGH! FUCKING BICYCLES five feet away. One day, we will tear down the shed and replace it with a bigger one, with room beside the workbench for a little wood stove and an armchair, so that we can hide in there from our teenage children or they can hide in there from us.

For the moment, we have a little empty room at the front of the house: a bathroom-in-waiting, which fills with sunshine at around 5pm.

It is nice, having a bare, empty, room attached to the house: somewhere to go and think clearly. Esme likes it in there. I just like looking at it. I wish we could always have the luxury of a little empty light-filled room, but I wish we had a big kitchen more.

Now that we know the kitchen/bathroom wall is doomed, now that we have spent weeks planning how the kitchen will look without it, weeks imagining a larger space, more cupboards, more light, that kitchen/bathroom wall seems really intrusive. When you eat at the little flip-up table in the kitchen, you feel the wall is leaning in on you, going Oh hello. Don't mind me. What are you eating? MmmMMMmm. Can I have some? What is this wall doing in our kitchen? Ian says it reminds him of that scene in Brazil with the desk that goes through the wall shared by two offices.

After the last post I wrote, I defaced our kitchen wall with thick black paint. One element I particularly love about the anarchy of a work-in-progress house is the liberty to scrawl on condemned walls.

I painted the outline of the massive, dark, bleak, aesthesticle light, just to see what 52 cm of oppression looks like in relation to Everything Else. I painted it in a spot that will one day translate as hanging over the new kitchen table, except that the actual middle of the kitchen table will be 30cm east of that picture, on the other side of the wall.

It is pretty big. I have since conceded that although I love it, it will probably not work in the kitchen. I wonder what my soul finds so innately comforting about the idea of sitting under a squat, ominous, giant fig of matt black metal. I can't answer that one.

Inside it, in less enthusiastic pencil, I drew the outline of the smaller, black, 50% less oppressive aesthesticle.

Then I imagined Ian's voice in my head, pouting that I didn't draw HIS idea on the wall.

So I drew his idea on the wall.

Ian was very pleased when he arrived home, and added lasers to it.

Over dinner that night, in the shadow of the looming, doomed, Oh hello, don't mind me kitchen wall, we invented the Separation Anxiety Light: a white ceramic light moulded to resemble a basket of kittens, with glowing halogen lights for spooky eyes, that plays We've Only Just Begun by the Carpenters when you get near it, and that cries and screams when you try to leave it. I wish we had a workshop big enough to make such a thing.

Here is something else from inside my brain:

This is Martha Graham Barbie. I spawned her last night with liquid eyeliner and old nylons, and she throws parties that Tutu Barbie will never be cool enough to even hear about.

Here is Ian, waiting for me to stop dicking about with Martha Graham Barbie so that he can turn off the light and dream of 60-watt kittens.

Right. More coffee.