What's the magic number?

The first sign I see every day -
 it's a conspiracy

According to De La Soul's 1989 hit, "3 is the magic number". According to my least favourite author, the number that makes the world go round is 50 (and let's face it, it's worked for her given that's probably how many millions of £s she's made from peddling questionable mummy porn). But I have discovered evidence to the contrary. You know how, when you buy a new car, every second car you see is suddenly the same? Now that I'm only two days away from my milestone birthday, the number 40 keeps assaulting me from all angles.

It starts when we're born. The average pregnancy is 40 weeks. We're born, go to school, learn that it rained for 40 days and 40 nights during the great flood (Noah's Ark, not the one in Lynmouth in 1952), spend 40 days every Lent being coerced into giving up something we truly love, maybe end up with a job that gives us the pleasure of paying 40% tax, develop a 40 a day habit, monitor our football team to make sure they achieve the 40 points they need to avoid relegation, get done for doing 48 in a 40 speed limit and then we die. Admittedly that's much later on (hopefully)  but the average life expectancy in the UK is 80 which means I am 2 days away from being half of my potential average.

How depressing is that? If we look on the bright side, apparently life begins at 40. Whoever came up with that? It is actually a modern saying because until the early 20th century, life expectancy was indeed only 40. Death begins at 40 may have been more appropriate then.  I can't imagine that everything is suddenly going to change on Wednesday. Unless the meeting I have in Park Royal on Thursday is going to have great significance for my future which I very much doubt.

The shoes - lasted about 40 seconds

It's not all bad though. On Saturday I was whisked off to a "surprise " party. You know it wasn't a total surprise because I'd already mentioned that my good friend had copied me in on an email replying to the invitation. Which, in hindsight, was very fortuitous because on Thursday The Monkey asked "Mummy, do you know you're having a surprise party at the weekend?" Don't tell a 5 year old anything. He assumes that because he doesn't like surprises (carrots in his shepherds pie, spiders in the bath, trips to Legoland etc), no-one else does. So I went to my surprise party intending to act very surprised. No need. There were people there I genuinely had no idea were coming and how much of a bonus is that? I was surprised though that I had to remove my unfeasibly high heels at the table. You know you're getting on when you can't even sit down in them.

I did prove that I still have staying power though and managed to drink 40 glasses of wine and stay up until 4.40 am (give or take 40 minutes). Then I was up at 8 with the kids, had 40 cups of tea in quick succession, savoured a medicinal Bloody Mary, made a Meccano motorbike (thanks dad) and watched 40 Year Old Virgin. I lied about that last bit - I've never seen it so can't comment on its artistic merit or otherwise but it would have made quite an appropriate end to the day (apart from the virgin bit). Didn't manage to squeeze in 40 winks during the day though which is something I think all 40 year olds should probably do.

Oh and, before I forget, forty is the only number whose letters appear in alphabetical order. You're never too old to learn something new.

Another fad bites the dust

Remember how I mentioned I can be a little bit faddish? Another fad has bitten the dust.

Hell hath no fury like a woman caught
up in the French house-buying process.

So, we got back from Ooh La La Land and I did indeed manage to persuade The Boy to pursue one of the properties. The owner of the house we really loved was English so we reckoned we knew what we were dealing with and we played hardball for a couple of weeks, starting with a silly offer but intending to meet his negotiated price if we had to. I really hate to say I told you so but when the owner finally accepted an offer for the amount he had made clear he always wanted and from someone who didn't increase their offers in €50 increments, I bellowed I TOLD YOU SO! and then didn't speak to The Boy for the rest of the day. Unfortunately we were due to meet in Trafalgar Square at 5.30 to go for an anniversary drink and meal (this is the anniversary that I forgot and he remembered in a very good example of complete role reversal). We met, me still slowly emitting steam from my ears, and he asked me to suspend my fury. I couldn't not really  - it turned out he had arranged a surprise birthday meal for the friends who can't come to my actual surprise birthday meal next weekend. With The Boy fully redeemed we are now back on speaking terms and have thoroughly suspended the idea of a French house.

And so to the evening next weekend that I don't know anything about. I know I'm having one because a good friend copied me in on his reply to The Boy's invitation email entitled "Boo's Surprise Birthday Party". Normally curiosity would have got the better of me but I actually deleted it without reading it. I almost wish I didn't know anything at all about it because being in the dark has given me a sartorial planning nightmare. At first it was going to be a little black dress which I last wore when I was 30 but I would need suck-it-in pants and they only serve to spew the fat out elsewhere like under your armpits or as a third breast. Then it was going to be a a lovely blue dress I got that I thought was pretty cool but a friend ordered me not to wear it with the warning words " You're turning 40, not 50" and " we all know you have 3 kids but you needn't dress like it ". (Sometimes you need a blunt-talking mate). Now it's going to be my favourite best jeans (which I bought when I was 30), a new top and some impossibly high snakeskin heels. My justification for these is simply that I remember opening the under stairs cupboard when I was about 6 and finding a pair of identical ones (mum's not dad's). Given I don't have my mum I think it is only right that I replicate her choice of footwear. She would want me to, I know.

So, 10 days till I turn 40. 10 days to eat protein only and run 70 miles, wrapped in clingfilm or 10 days to give in gracefully and admit that it's about to happen and I don't even have time to get my teeth whitened.

Living in Ooh La La Land

This is what I want.....

Bonsoir tout le monde

This week I have been mostly tearing around France. The Boy and I decided to go on a half hearted attempt to look at potential holiday homes - deep down it was probably more of a full-hearted attempt at getting some child-free peace and quiet for a couple of days and to avail ourselves of cheaper wine. However, as we all know, the female of the species can be far more conniving than that and I went with the express intention of bullying The Boy into upping our mortgage and shelling out for a nice pad, whether he was aware of that or not. I suspect he was.

This is what I'll get. Only 90% of my time is
spent in cloud cuckoo land - the other
10% is on property porn

It didn't bode well from the start really. One of the first things you do pre-trip is book your hire car. If you do it on one of the generic websites that offers to find you the best deal,your car hire company isn't indicated until the booking has been made. Unfortunately, ours turned out to be Hertz which was indeed unfortunate as The Boy has been banned from hiring from them for life. (He didn't commit a heinous crime, merely wrote one of their cars off the day after proposing to me in Scotland - an omen of things to come perhaps? The crime wasn't even writing the bloody thing off - it was crawling from the wreckage in Glencoe at 6am and minus 10 degrees and hitching to the nearest village rather than freezing our (his) balls off. ). Either way, we thought Hertz might have forgotten by now so we tried it on only for the woman to pronounce "you 'av a problemme wiz Herrrtz end I cannot igh-ur you zis carrr". By you she meant either of us. I quickly corrected her on that point and asked not to be tarred with The Boy's brush. She relented which was fine but it meant I had to do ALL the driving, all 700 km of it and the French now have v strict drink-driving laws so not even a solitary beer at lunchtime.

The boding didn't get much better. We met the first agent, a lovely guy called, rather preditably, Jean-Pierre and agreed to follow him out of the village square to the first property. Unfortunately I followed the wrong guy - easily done given all the French drive Peugeot 106s. There's a reason I'm in the wine trade and not a private detective.  Issue rectified - found the right guy and spent an enjoyable afternoon with him. He even bought us (The Boy - I was adhering to the law) a beer and asked me if I'd do the Lac de Vassiviere Half Marathon with him next July. He's such a nice guy I probably will.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, viewing properties in France is a very interesting experience. They all speak excellent English, apparently because 80% of their clients are English. And I thought we were all selling up and coming home? They can be very charming of course and some of them buy you beer. But the decor is bloody awful. Where else would you get floor to ceiling dark brown flowered wall paper that has somehow managed to find its way between the ceiling beams aswell? In every room. Honestly, I googled "very bad 1970s French wallpaper" and couldn't find anything as bad as the stuff we saw up close.

If The Boy doesn't aquiesce
to my demands I shall decorate
our entire house like this or make him listen to
Rolf Harris on repeat

So, we saw 11 properties. Some were complete shockers, a couple were pretty cool, one was amazing. Then we came home and I tried to push The Boy into making a plan. He's really making me work for it and spouting stuff about exchange rates and other such nonsense that frankly I don't care about because a) I'm a woman on a mission, b) we need another venue for a book group weekend and c) I'm a woman on a mission.

I shall keep you posted.

13 miles of awfulness

I've surprised myself.

I'm rather like my sister in that we both have fads that last a nanosecond before we find another far more interesting one. She moved from learning Japanese to horticulture to tap dancing within a month and I'm sure she won't mind me saying that. The one thing we did stick at together was learning the Charleston which, I'll have you know, is actually very difficult. Plus you never get to display your skills in public unless you deliberately engineer a 20s themed fancy dress party at which you're the only pair dancing.

Anyway, the point is, today was the long awaited and much dreaded half marathon. Given that I've spent two out of the last three weeks away from home and probably peaked a bit early in my training, it didn't go too badly. I started the week with an enforced version of the Atkins diet. I've never fancied doing that because apparently it makes your breath smell but by far the worst thing about not having any carbs is the rabid hunger that comes with it. No matter how much fruit or omelette you eat, you cannot fill up. Plus the very fact that you can't eat carbs makes you want them even more. Never has a child's soggy marmite on toast that's sat on the floor for 3 hours looked so appetising. The sogginess was from my drool as I gazed lovingly upon it from my bowl of melon (3 types just to make it a bit more interesting).

After that followed three days of carbo-loading. Given that I spent three days desperate for the pasta-fest to start it couldn't have been more disappointing. I was so delighted that three days of protein-only had shed me 3lbs that by the time I was officially allowed to eat again, I didn't want to. I felt my face balloon into the shape of my breakfast as I forced down my marmite bagel. Followed by toad in the hole for lunch and lasagna for dinner. Come to think of it, perhaps that was overdoing it a little.

So, the morning finally dawned. After a bowl of porridge the size of Lake Victoria, I crawled onto the Jubilee line at Stratford looking forward to a nice sit down. It seems 5000 other runners also had the same idea - so I stood, wishing I hadn't lost those 3 lbs and still looked 7 months pregnant. And when I got to the race area, I stood some more in the mile long queue for the toilets which incidentally is all psychosomatic. No-one needs the loo that often.

There was no turning back then.  I stood at the start, gazed at the heavens, muttered " I hope you appreciate this, mother" and set off. And, wow, how easy it seemed. It looks like living in an area of unfeasibly steep hills pays off when training for a race on the flat. My hips gave in, my toes started to hurt (strange) but I swore I wouldn't even think about walking until 10 miles and then I made a terrible mistake. At ten and a half miles I reached round to try and remove the super-power-giving gel pack (that The Boy had lovingly donated) from my back pocket and found it had stuck to the jelly babies I had been storing to give me energy. In order to get energy you're supposed to eat these things, not just store them, but I hadn't been able to because with all the sweat and heat I was giving off, they had fused into one gelatinous mess. So I had to walk while I tried to remove the gel pack, wrestle with it's tab and try to stop myself from gagging on it's vile, warm contents. I looked at a poor guy prostrate on the floor being attended to by paramedics and thought "you lucky sod, you're having a lie down". Hope he was ok. Walking made my legs seize up so it was an almighty effort to get started again but what's the choice? Crossing that finishing line was the best thing I ever did. And then my sister thought I was having a heart attack. Nothing a nice cold pint didn't sort out though.

And now I'm home and I can eat what I want and drink what I want and wallow in a nice hot bath.

And then the real world will begin again tomorrow. But at least I have proved to myself that I can decide to do something new, train for it and do it.

But I've turned down the London Marathon the charity offered me for March. Don't want to let a good thing go bad.
Sorry, no photos, too tired! And before you ask - 2 hours 18 minutes....

Dublin without the black stuff this time

"I told you I love her more than you do"

Um, I've racked my brains long and hard to think of something new I've done since last posting and I've really struggled. Which I suppose, in itself,  is new. Problem solved.

It's been two weeks since the last post and that's mostly because I haven't really been at home. I come home for a night and then disappear for two which seems to have had a great effect on the children - in that they're pleased to see me and not hurling toddler abuse. I've never really had anyone fight over me unfortunately so it's nice to see the twins arguing over whose mother I am. "She's my mummy!" "No, she's my mummy!" I don't expect it to last.

The last few days have been spent in Dublin which is a great city. I've only been a couple of times. The first was on a university history society weekend. Obviously we didn't go for the history. That's like assuming someone joins a university wine society because they want to learn about wine.  But I did, perhaps misguidedly, think that the weekend might involve some long boozy sessions in proper Oirish bars with my then relatively new boyfriend. Not so. The minute we arrived he disappeared and spent the whole weekend with his ex - a flame haired girl called Yvonne from Londonderry which isn't even proper Ireland. The rest of it is unsurprisingly a blur but we did end up going out for the next two years and I did end up seeing The Committments (it was 1991) in its home town for which I'll always be grateful to him.

Dublin Airport Terminal 1
or Sat Nav error?

Anyway, the point is, as we were going to drive around Dublin for two days this week visiting wine shops (work, not play), I hired a sat nav. This was the first time I have ever used one and will most likely be the last. If you hire a car and a sat nav, presumably you get the cheapest and most unreliable on the planet? I mean, for gods sake, it couldn't even register our planet in its system. We were lucky I suppose that it recognised Dublin when we keyed it in because it didn't recognise anything else. Apart from 32 different Vernon Avenues in a city that doesn't have postcodes. You would think that of all the places it would help you get to, it would be "Europcar Car Rental Return". But no. Having already abandoned our last two meetings because it lost us half an hour on a journey by sending us almost to Limerick, we changed tack and plugged in the rental returns office which, incredibly, was an option in the system. Instead it sent us to the main door of Terminal 1 where abandoning cars isn't usually encouraged. As Thomas Paine, the well known 18th century radical and philosopher once said, " Attempting to debate with a (sat nav) who has abandoned reason is like giving medicine to the dead". Warning lights should have flashed when I picked up the bloody thing. It was a Garmin. I have a Garmin app on my phone which is supposed to track my running routes. I have Garmin to thank for the amazing feat of running 15km in about 4 minutes. It doesn't seem to be known for it's reliability. Bizarrely I did actually end up doing around 15km in 4 minutes when I ran from security to the gate as my flight closed. All part of the training.

Talking of which.....only 10 days till race day. I have got to the point where I am past enjoying going for a run. I'm resenting having to clock up miles each week. It used to be quite enjoyable in a sado-masochistic kind of way but now I'd rather stick red hot knitting needles in my eyes than get my trainers on. So I was delighted to hear today from someone who is much more of a seasoned runner than me that, yes, I can start to wind down now. In fact, I need do nothing from next Tuesday other than eat pasta and mashed potato.  I knew there was a reason I was doing this.

May as well ask - if you want to sponsor me you can do so at http://www.justgiving.com/Elizabeth-Wilson5

It's all in a good cause or at least that's what I keep telling myself.......

Boys will be Boys

So, the week didn't get that much better.

Poor grandad turned the lights out 9 minutes after I posted that last blog so then I was feeling a bit bad about being relatively jovial when he had breathed his last in hospital. What is astonishing is that he and Nan have been married for 72 years. When I mentioned this to The Boy he made a funny groaning noise and asked if I realised how old we'd be when we got to that stage (the answer is him 107, me 103 - first calculation had it as 164 for me which is very wrong or I look extremely good for my age).
I said "don't worry, I'll have killed you by then". He said "don't worry, I'll have killed myself".

The Boy's arrival home from a hard day
in the office while I pray for the
redemption of my smaller boy
(missing from picture) who is
outside stoning someone's Hillman Husky

Oh happy married life! It made me think of those lovely nuclear families that you used to get in the 50's (I've been watching too much Mad Men), when women wore petticoats and torpedo bras and spent all day putting pineapple and cheese on sticks and men drank manhattans for breakfast.

Borstal - reforming naughty boys
by donning aprons and learning
how to gut rabbits

One thing that also existed here in the 50s was "borstal" which, for those of you outside this wonderful land, was a form of youth prison run in the UK by the prison service and used to "correct" seriously delinquent young boys. Obviously girls can't get seriously delinquent because we're just too nice. Girls were sent off to convents instead and I'm pretty sure they were also run by the prison service. Borstals were for offenders under the age of 21. I'm not sure they catered for boys as young as 5 but that's where my boy would be heading today if he'd been born 70 years earlier. 


Last night he broke his first car windscreen. Or rather he broke a very big and scary friend's car windscreen.  I'd taken him for tea and to play with his two best friends from his old nursery. This is the triumvirate who, even when they were three, were separated at lunchtime and were put in opposite corners of the room on a more than frequent basis. So, they were busy being boys outside and throwing stones at eachother (which is fine apparently) when said big and scary friend came in and asked for masking tape to mend his rear windscreen. I knew instantly my boy was the culprit. I didn't shout and scream, merely gave him a stern talking to, made him apologise and had a glass of wine (me not him). Then I took him home and asked him to tell his father what he had done. Later on I asked The Boy what he thought of this transgression and he said "Well, I don't know what he was thinking because he knows not to throw stones at people". Um, so he didn't mention the windscreen then.......

It must run in the family because when I traced my family tree a couple of years ago I discovered that my great uncle had indeed been sent to a "home for delinquent boys" at the age of 8. That's the Irish side of my family. Funnily enough my great grandmother was also sent to a prison, I mean convent.

I was mortified at the time. I'm just lucky it was a company car and big scary friend wasn't that fussed or I'd be facing a large bill instead of owing 15 quid for duct tape to hold it all together so he could drive to the Isle of Wight. A little part of me was a tiny bit impressed that my boy has fire in his belly.

Although I gather that fire is another thing that little boys like to learn about so I'm just going to turn off all the gas before I go and watch Mad Men.

Up, up and away

Back in the dim and distant past of 1997, I read one of the best books I've ever read but the first chapter or two have haunted me ever since. Well, I say haunted. Not constantly but in a way that has always been there though not necessarily at the surface. Until last night that is, when we were bouncing along in a land rover looking for our launch site for the long awaited balloon flight and I suddenly had this blinding memory of the scene that has lain semi-dormant in my subconscious for 15 years.

Funnily enough I've always, always wanted to go in a hot air balloon so what better excuse than someone else's birthday. Obviously I didn't want The Boy to have to experience such a generous gift on his own, where's the fun in that? So I martyrishly stepped in and treated myself to one at the same time. It was only about a month after buying the vouchers that it suddenly dawned on me while I was brushing my teeth that I actually have a morbid fear of big drops / sheer drops / massive heights. I'm the girl who burst into tears and handed the keys of my soft-top over to The Boy because I couldn't handle the drive up St Bernards Pass in The Alps. But I tried to overcome that only for the sudden flash of memory from Ian McEwan's "Enduring Love" to take its icy grip in the middle of Dorset. It was an unfortunate moment for this to hit me because it's about a hot air balloon accident where one unlucky victim falls to the ground and is found in a sitting position with his spine sticking out of the top of his skull. Nice. Thank god there was going to be champagne on this flight.

Almost as fascinating looking
up as down

It's a strange feeling to think that there's only a layer of wicker separating you from an absolutely certain and very messy end. But weirdly, as you take off it all melts away. It's so silent up there (apart from the woman next to you threatening to throw her partner out because he got lost en route) that you suddenly feel that, actually, if you fell out, there might be worse ways to go. Until you hit the ground at least.

Anyway, the upshot is that a) I have overcome my fear of big drops/sheer drops/massive heights, b) being a martyr is a wonderful and selfless thing and c) it makes you bloody hungry. Shame then that the KFC in Wincanton that we started fantasising about (I know, a sad existence) 10 minutes in, was closed on the way home on account of not actually being built yet.

Not scary in the slightest.
Seriously.
Not our house though unfortunately

Today is Friday. I know we still have two days of the week left but already that has been the absolute highlight. The rest of it has been pretty pants and a series of firsts (other than the balloon) have been thwarted by far superior powers. After a day of meetings in London on Monday and just as I was due to meet my sis, BIL and dad for the Paralympics Athletics, we got a call summoning us to the hospital 3 hours away - Grandad was critical and not expected to last the night. So we drove like the wind up the M40, made a mess of dad's car with our noodle and doughnut picnic and then spent the entire night in the hospital which also blew our plans for breakfast. As Tuesday was the first anniversary of mum's death we were going to go for a swanky breakfast in London to "celebrate" (in the nicest possible sense, not that she ever really ate breakfast). Instead, Dad and I had a greasy fry-up in the hospital canteen at 7.30 having stared at our watches for at least 4 hours, counting down to the minutes till it opened. It was cheap. So are tattoos in Bangalore but neither of them are recommended by the World Health Organisation.

So mum's anniversary passed almost unnoticed which is tragic considering its enormity (to us). How ironic it would have been if the nurses had been right and Grandad had shuffled off his mortal coil on Tuesday. Now it's Friday and he's still clinging on but it can't be long now.

In a funny way I didn't really miss-out on the anniversary. The Boy pointed out that being 1300 ft over Dorset was 1300 ft closer to her which in its own way was quite comforting.

If you believe in all that......