Level 2 Chi Kung.

Although it was never discussed, I think Nick and I both assumed that part of the deal with my career break would involve me cooking his dinner. In fact, from my point of view, cooking dinner, and cooking in general, was one of the parts that I was most looking forward to. So it has been a surprise to discover that, although I enjoy the cooking in general, I’m less interested in the getting-dinner-on-the-table part. This is partly because Katie now does so many after-school activities that I am out every evening except Wednesday, and partly because, by the time Nick gets home, I will generally have already made three different meals (one for each of the three children) and often given in to temptation and joined one of them if whatever they are having looks good. My solution to this – in order to feel like a good provider without forcing myself to cook when I don’t feel like it – is to make sure that the fridge is always stuffed with food that can easily be transformed into a meal. So, for example, I will often boil up a big pot of new potatoes, so that there are always spuds in the fridge to be quickly warmed through or fried up as required. I do little jobs like this throughout the week, whenever I have a few minutes to fill, but for larger projects, Wednesday, when I don’t have to go out again after school pick up, is my big chance. Today, I really got a bit industrial. I was desperate for soup, but we didn’t have much in the way of veg in the house, so I sauteed some carrots and onions in the soup pot, then threw in a couple of jars of passata, and a big pile of green lentils. When it was nearly done I threw in a big bunch of coriander that was needing to be used up and hit it with the stick blender. Yum! While the soup was cooking, I made a double mixture of Nigella’s Rapid Ragout. These days I increase the healthiness quotient a bit by using less pancetta, adding lots of fresh onions (as well as onion marmalade) and upping the quantity of lentils. It still tastes fab. Kept a few portions out and stowed the rest in the freezer. And for once I also managed to get a proper dinner (roast chicken) on the table for Nick in time for him to eat it before taking Katie to swimming. Yes!

Level 2 Chi Kung.

A hard frost today and, returning from the school run, I noticed this last rosebud, struggling gamely on and looking gorgeous all rimmed in white. I fed the dog and started to tidy the kitchen but Sherlock showed no interest in breakfast and came whimpering up to me with his tail firmly between his legs. I stroked his beautiful silky ears and talked nicely to him but he wouldn’t be cheered up. This generally means that he wants a bath, so I put my gardening clothes on and ran him a bath. With his woolly coat long for winter, it took ages and, as usual, Mr Holmes lapped up the attention, happy to stand or sit placidly in the water so long as I sit there stroking him, telling him he’s handsome and hand-feeding him an occasional piece of kibble. After having done Chi Kung, followed by a really brisk walk to school and then dog bathing, I really needed a nice hot shower, so I was just waiting to make sure the water had a chance to get fully back to heat before I turned on the shower … when my phone pinged to tell me that I needed to be at Dashi’s school for a parent teacher meeting in 30 minutes. Now it takes about 40 minutes to get to Dashi’s school on public transport – if the traffic’s not too bad and you run to the bus stop, so if I left immediately, looking like a wreck and smelling like a damp dog, I could have made it only about 10 minutes late. I did the sensible thing and phoned the school to ask for a telephone conference instead of a face to face. Unfortunately they said they didn’t have the facilities to do this but were happy to re-schedule to next Monday. Although I am unlikely to get carried away and bath the dog again so soon, I have set the alarm 3 hours ahead of the meeting – just in case.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

If you are reading this on your iPad at the breakfast table, look away now.

Checking on Katie late last night, I discovered her lying, sound asleep, in a pool of vomit. Katie has always been a vomiter and now, at the age of seven, produces emissions of a force, volume and sheer vibrant colour that Billy Connolly would eulogise (4:30 for those who want to skip straight to the classic diced carrot riff).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKMQKgSnGy8

She was already in the recovery position, and was clearly breathing, so I left her there. Katie is not a child who takes kindly to being woken from a sound sleep and it would be a brave woman who’d try it for any lesser reason than the house being actually on fire. In the morning I let her sleep until we had got the boys off to school. When she did finally wake, she was astounded to find herself all sticky with vomit and was happy to get straight into a nice warm bath while I changed her bed and dragged all the bed linen, pillows and soft toys downstairs to wash. Although she didn’t seem in any way ill, she couldn’t go to school as they have a 24 hour rule, so we settled down to have a cosy day together. She wanted us to do an art project together, so, as her birthday is just over three weeks away, I hit on the brilliant idea of sorting out the invitations. She wants to have a pizza-making party at Pizza Express again, so, after checking availability with the local branch, we produced this invitation. My role was pedestrian: to type and format the text on the inside of the card (‘Sherlock invites you to celebrate Katie’s 8th birthday) and to make the printer work.

By the afternoon she seemed perfectly well enough to go to her art class and was certainly very keen. So we got rugged up and ventured out into the cold, Katie very carefully carrying the rather beautiful and delicate little nest she found while gardening with her father on the weekend. She was intrigued when I pointed out that we could tell that it was an old, disused nest, and thus ok to disturb, by the fact that all the soft stuff is gone – long since bandicooted to line new nests or, as the tutor put it: ‘the birds have taken their soft furnishings with them’.

When I collected Katie at the end of the lesson, she was keen to show me her progress on creating a drawing inspired by a scene from the ballet of George and the Dragon. The children were encouraged at the start to create a template of a dancer and then use it to create numerous characters. Katie obviously created the template from George – depicted as a knight in full amour and chain mail tights – as all her subsequent characters, including the dragon and the world’s least Disney-fied princess, are basically knight-shaped. Because she depicted George (and hence the others) with one leg kicked high in the air, the resulting line-up has an unfortunate resemblance to a very chunky can-can line-up! I was busy trying to keep to smiling widely and avoid actually laughing when the tutor came up and told me how impressed she was with the sense of movement in Katie’s work. I looked to see if she was taking the Michael but no – completely serious. And I suppose that, while it would be hard to deny that Katie’s characters look like they are doing the can-can, on the plus side, they are, unmistakably, DANCING!

Level 2 Chi Kung.

For the last month, I have been trying to get some fairly fundamental questions answered about the proposed EQC work to my house in Christchurch. Not only has my frustration at not being able to get answers to some fairly basic questions triggered my inner control-freak, but emotional factors are making it hard to approach the necessary decisions in a rational way. I have an emotional connection to the house (it belonged to my grandparents and later to my favourite uncle, and was my childhood refuge) which closes off some options which could, otherwise, potentially simplify my life. So, thinking about the house at all makes me feel anxious about tenants living in it and doing damage… and thinking about earthquake repairs leads me to think about the damned earthquake and how Christchurch is going to be a soulless, centreless, array of shopping malls and bloody sports stadia, with everything that gave it a bit of personality cleared away in the rubble… and then I think about that bloody Canadian Bishop and how I wish I was in range to throw rotten fruit. And of course, other than for sentimental reasons, the OTHER reason I keep the house is for us to use as a bolthole in case of World War 3… and this is all so aversive that my cunning brain has developed this neat way of just sliding off the subject so that… suddenly I’m no longer thinking about all that unpleasant stuff, because I’m happily engrossed in … well anything else basically. Which probably has a useful role in maintaining happiness and mental health, but tends to mean that weeks go past but no decisions are made.

So, when I say that, after several sleepless nights and some helpful conversations with kind friends (Marg Matheson, Ann Eade and Lynn Timpany, take a bow!) I finally got to the point where I just needed one more piece of information to feel comfortable making a decision, you’ll understand that that’s a big deal. The piece of information I wanted was a costed scope – in other words I wanted to know the amount that EQC would pay if I decided to manage the repairs myself. This is my legal right, and EQC had formally notified me in December that a full pay out was one of my three options. So I asked for the figure, and was told that ‘as the repairs had already started’, this was no longer an option. To which I replied that I didn’t know how the repairs could possibly have started as I had been told that they couldn’t start until I had agreed to, and paid in advance for(!) $10K of preliminary electrical work.

EQC: Oh I didn’t mean the repairs, I meant the ‘repair process’ – you know, all the paperwork.
J: But you wrote to me in December saying that the option of a full payout was still open and that there was no rush and I had until April 2015 to make up my mind.
EQC: Then we spoke on the 12th of January and you told me you wanted to go ahead.
J: We have never spoken. I live in the UK.
EQC: Oh.

Over the years I have identified two main ways in which I make really really bad decisions. The first is the ‘I can’t bear to think about this’ method described in para 1. The second is the ‘I know my rights and I will insist on getting them (even if it is no longer what I actually want)’ approach. The trick is not to oscillate wildly between the two, without ever pausing on ‘rational’ long enough to take a breath!

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Horrified when I woke this morning to realise, with a jolt, that I somehow managed to miss Chi Kung yesterday. Made sure to do it with extra focus (though baulked at doing it twice!) this morning.

I received a lovely email from Kate today, in which she apologised for cutting short yesterday’s coffee morning. Kate, receiving an unexpected call to ask her to take her daughter in for an Xray, was obliged to allow Margaret to herd us all out the door and rush off to extract Ettie from school and head for the local hospital.

Invited for a coffee by Kate, one of our neighbours down the road. Arrived to find Susy, Margaret, Catherine, and a lady who has just moved in and whose name I didn’t quite catch. Slightly awkward after Margaret announced to the room that Susy’s husband has just been named the Tory candidate for Essex – a slight conversation-killer in Guardian-reading Blackheath! Things then became more awkward still when X, the elderly lady who lives at number 58, began criticising Sir Ian and Lady Elizabeth, who live at number 60, saying, amongst other derogatory things, that they are very nosey. As our immediate next door neighbours, Ian and Elizabeth have been very kind to us – even kindly turning a blind eye when we accidentally cut down a protected tree – so I felt obliged to speak up and say that, actually, I was quite fond of them. Margaret asked if we had seen much of them lately and I replied that I saw Ian just before Christmas when he poked his head over the fence to chat and then came over to look at the new playhouse. At that point things took a slightly comic turn as X, who likes to hold court, regaled the room with a detailed description of the size, shape, colour, construction method, and general fabulousness of the new playhouse. I was frankly gobsmacked at this – she lives two doors away and hasn’t been to visit since the arrival of the playhouse, and I’m damned if I can think of a vantage point from which she could possibly have seen it through the trees. She must have stood on the roof! I am very fond of X, but I’m afraid that her accusing Sir Ian of nosiness might be a bit of a pot and kettle situation!

Level 2 Chi Kung.

As the halfway point of my career break approaches, I have been feeling vaguely dissatisfied with what I have achieved – this in spite of the fact that achieving things wasn’t really the point! I’m not worried particularly that I haven’t yet got around to making my own yoghurt, it’s more a sense of time being frittered away on things that, while necessary, don’t feel IMPORTANT. Because the feeling is not about specifics, it was difficult to know what it was prompting me to get on with. So I decided to just randomly choose one of the many things I thought I might do, and do it. I chose blogging and, as a result, I have spent the last few days learning about name registrars, hosting services, platforms and themes – all much more complicated than I expected. Quite interesting though, getting a glimpse into a whole geeky new world.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

A lovely visit from Jeannette Njenje and the beautiful Valentina. Lovely chatting to Jeannette and lots of cuddles with Val – a very happy wee girl, greatly amused by Mr Sherlock.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Great excitement amongst the children as the beautiful Madalina came to babysit while Nick and I went to the theatre. It was one of those occasions where I booked the tickets so long ago, that I couldn’t really remember anything about the production we were due to see, so I was delighted when I looked it up on the NT website and was reminded that it was the new David Hare, Behind the Beautiful Forevers.

Sadly, with the exception of the Old Vic’s execrable production of Much Ado, it was probably the worst play I have ever seen. A story of life amongst rubbish sorters in Mumbai, it featured a malevolent woman (with an uncanny resemblance to Sheela Reddy) who seemed determined to make everyone’s already grim lives even worse.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Katie’s three best friends are, respectively, Finnish, Russian and French, and she rather envies her friends’ ability to revert to their milk language when needing to talk privately to their mummies. She would like the two of us to have a similarly secret way of communicating, so, when I discovered the wonderful, and completely addictive, language-learning app Duolingo, Katie was dead keen that we should learn a new language together. We chose Italian – because none of her friends speak it and because we have the added incentive of trying to get to the point where we can welcome Monique, our Italian nanny, back from Thailand at the end of January. A few days later however, it occurred to me that Maori would be the perfect secret language – we are unlikely to run into anyone who understands it, it would be a kind of nod to our heritage, and it would please (or at least quieten!) the more PC amongst my relatives, who complain bitterly about my mispronunciation of ‘whanau’. Sadly, if unsurprisingly, Duolingo doesn’t offer Maori, but a quick search of the app store revealed a Maori language learning app called Te Pumanawa. I downloaded it eagerly but, sadly, it is the exact opposite of Duolingo. It is badly-designed, with a confusing and irritating user-interface, it constantly crashes and, even between crashes, it is the opposite of addictive. Dull in the extreme, it begins, not with vocab, but with screens and screens of bloody vowels. I guess people who learn Italian as a second language do so mainly because they think that knowing a little of the language might allow them to have more fun if they go abroad, helping them to order a coffee, buy a beer, pull a member of the opposite sex, or, for those with children, convey the urgency with which hot chips should be brought to the table! Whereas I suppose adults learning Maori as a second language have more ‘worthy’ motives (cultural sensitivity, employment, political correctness), and a worthy, and very very dull, app is the result.