Elijah Wood in The Guardian Q & A:

“What would your super power be?
At a restaurant once, I noticed that the waitress – a beautiful waitress – had a nose that, when she was growing up, maybe people picked on her for. But it was a defining feature and made her unique. It would be an amazing super power to be able to make every person you meet feel better about the thing that makes them insecure.”

Level 2 Chi Kung. Microcosmic orbit.

Nick wanted to swap Sundays with me so that he can do an organised bike ride next weekend, so I had a nice sleep in, then did Chi Kung.

A year or so ago, it became clear that I needed a new desk, as the old IKEA one was falling apart. Instead of another IKEA desk, I was really hankering for something a bit more solid and we ended up choosing an oak dining table that happened to be about the right size. Bizarrely, it was cheaper to buy the table with 6 oak dining chairs than to buy it on its own, so we ended up with a set of oak chairs which, fortunately, Nick and the children really like. I however, think that they are the most uncomfortable chairs ever made, so we have kept one of the old dining chairs (£10 from IKEA in 2005!) for me. The big snag with the table – and I only realised this after several months – was that it was about 3cm too high to be comfortable as a desk. As a result, even with a footrest, my posture wasn’t ideal and I often ended up with a sore back. I have therefore been keen for some time to have Nick slice 3cm off the bottom of each leg but he, very sensibly, warned me to be sure I could ‘see the whites of his eyes’. In other words, I needed to be sure he really had time to do it before starting to dismantle the computer and remove everything from the desk. Well, this afternoon we finally struck the right moment and I am typing this at a much more comfortable height! Hopefully back problems will now be a thing of the past.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Saturday, with the usual round of Stagecoach and guitar. Lately, Katie has been less than cooperative about getting ready in the mornings. Implementing Katie’s suggestion of getting her her own alarm clock appears to have helped on weekdays, so I was unprepared for a re-emergence of problems on the weekend. On weekdays she has to get up quite early and the problem is that she doesn’t want to wake up and get out of bed. On Saturdays, we don’t have to leave the house until 0930 and today the problem seemed to be more that she was lying around the living room playing with her iPhone and didn’t want to stop! My normal approach with the children (within reason!) is to allow them to experience the consequences of their actions. I don’t take it as far as my mother. When we were young she had a small wood burner in the kitchen which flickered most alluringly when lit. Crawling children were inevitably fascinated by it and, as each of us crawled across the floor towards the fascinating flickering, Mum said: ‘No’, ‘Don’t touch’, ‘Hot’, ‘Burns’. Inevitably the child would ignore these warnings and, reaching out to touch the stove, would burst into outraged sobs, having learned exactly what ‘Hot’ and ‘Burns’ meant. Mum would then pick up and console the infant, probably by putting butter on the burned fingers, knowing that they would never touch the lit stove again.

I don’t have a lot of flexibility on school days – I am legally obliged to deliver Katie to school on time. On the weekend however, while I would always prefer to be everywhere on time, that is more a value rather than a need. It doesn’t really matter if Katie is late for Stagecoach – it doesn’t matter if she goes at all. She has been complaining recently about not getting enough sleeps-in, so I reminded her that she can give up Stagecoach anytime or, if she still wants to go, she can transfer to the afternoon class. She didn’t want to do either of these things as she has friends in the morning class. Anyway, there she is, lying on the sofa, declining to get dressed, and I realised that I could just relax about it – there are no consequences for being late to Stagecoach that are worth stressing over. So I pointed out that we needed to leave very soon if she wanted to be on time, and then went into the kitchen and did some cleaning up (sadly hadn’t internalised the ‘relax about it’ approach to the extent of being able to sit down and have a cup of tea, but hey – baby steps!). Katie eventually got dressed and I brushed her hair. She then announced that she hadn’t had anything to eat so Nick made her some toast. We finally left about 20 minutes late but, thanks to Sherlock setting a blistering pace, we made up 5 minutes on the journey and delivered her at 10:15 for a 10am start.

Home from dropping Katie and just enough time for something to eat before it was time to take Dash to guitar. A good lesson – he has been practicing conscientiously lately – though at one point when he was trying to explain what he was finding difficult and Mr Baulch kept on joking around, he put his hand out in a ‘stop’ gesture and said “Please, just let me speak.’!

In the afternoon, Nick took the boys for a haircut and then for a post-haircut treat at Costa coffee.

Almost forgot in the chaos of Saturday that I had a ticket for the Met Live screening of Mozart’s Le Nozze de Figaro. I was kind of regretting it – all cosy at home and then suddenly remembering that I needed to go out – but it was so worth it. Wonderful music and voices, gorgeous costumes. and moments of laugh-out-loud physical comedy. On the bus home, I found myself wondering if Wodehouse wrote the first Jeeves and Wooster story after a night at the opera. It’s all in there: the clever and endlessly scheming valet, boys dressing up as girls, men hiding in wardrobes and jumping out of windows, mistaken identity, the need to avoid the terrifying prospect of an undesirable marriage…

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Friday and Sherlock was very relieved to be included in the school run again! Although Jack isn’t ill in any discernable way, having him home from school seemed like a good opportunity for some pampering so, after I had dropped Katie at school, I encouraged him into a nice hot bath and then cosy lying-around-home clothes and let him spend the day on the sofa watching DVDs. Normally the computers are set up so that the children each get an hour of log in on week days, and two hours a day on weekends – but I see no harm in letting them ‘binge-watch’ on a sick day.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Sherlock can’t come on the school run on Thursday mornings. Dogs aren’t allowed on the school grounds and, in preparation for film club on Thursday afternoon, I am required to drop Katie’s iPhone (Nick’s old one with the SIM card removed – we make trickle-down economics work in this house!) at the office to be stored securely for the day. Katie isn’t allowed to take it to the office herself and, while I would normally be happy to leave Katie to look after the dog while I nipped into a shop for example, this isn’t feasible in the chaos of milling mummies and screaming kids. Unfortunately poor Sherlock is inclined to take this personally. From his point of view, Katie and I must come across as total teases – we do all the rushing about, locating of bags and coats etc that normally precedes clipping his lead on to his collar and embarking on the morning’s wonderful adventure, and then we sneak off without him. Even though I had given him some human food (toast) as we left – a rare treat – he whined piteously and threw his little furry body repeatedly against the gate as we walked down the drive. 🙁

Taking advantage of the fact that I didn’t have the dog with me, I decided to go shopping immediately after I had dropped Katie, mainly to stock up on fruit and veg. Nick has expressed an interest in trying out more flavours of pate de fruits (he has previously made apple – from our own apples – and plum), so I got a huge bowl of limes (20 or 30) for £1. Fortunately I don’t have mint in the garden, otherwise I might have been tempted to turn them into mojitos instead! I got various fruit and veg – though no courgettes sadly – and also found some useful stacking wire boxes which I hope to use to re-organise the very old-fashioned chest freezer the neighbours passed down to us when our much more modern freezer (with drawers) stopped working. I am looking forward to having the freezer organised, but I’m not looking forward to doing the organising! In Smokey House (my favourite children’s book of all time), the character Jessamine never has to do any housework because ‘the good people’ (like elves) come and do it in the night. Well, I’m still waiting and if they are ever going to put in an appearance, sorting the freezer would be a very good place to start! Of course Jessamine also has two sons and two daughters (who, much to the consternation of her new husband, arrive all at once, a couple of weeks after the wedding!) so, by my reckoning, in addition to the absence of elves, I am still one daughter down.

Having bought too much for the shopping trolley, and carrying the overflow, I was about to pick up some blackberries and start for home when I got a message to say that Jack was feverish and lethargic and needed to be collected from school again. I was unimpressed – the last time they sent him home he was barely warm and, since he hit his teens, lethargic is pretty much his natural state. I abandoned the blackberries and arranged for a taxi to collect him – another £45 but there is little choice when he won’t go on underground or overground trains.

By the time I got home, a miracle had occurred and the sun had come out. This was too good an opportunity to miss so, after I had put the shopping away and cuddled the aggrieved Sherlock, I got into gardening clothes and got to work moving the remainder of the pile of prunings. This was hard work as, unlike the first pile I moved, which was mostly ivy, the remaining pile consisted of several small holly trees Nick had grubbed out. As well as being sharp, they made for an unwieldy, springy load to keep on the wheelbarrow, particularly going down the narrow path between the house and the garage. As I tried to manoeuvre the wheelbarrow through the gate, Sherlock shot past into the front garden. I was nervous as he has very little road sense, but I just called ‘Sherlock – come and help Mummy with the sticks’ and he immediately returned and, trotting alongside the wheelbarrow, grasped one of the holly branches in his mouth and ‘helped’ me get it down the back. Very cute! After I had removed the hollies, I swept all the leaves off the drive and got them into black bags ready for the slow journey to leaf mould. All this took nearly 4 hours (big driveway, lots of very wet leaves), so, by the time I finished, I had just enough time for a hot shower before I had to go and collect Katie from film club.

Thursday night is the night we go out but we didn’t have any theatre booked and couldn’t find a film we both wanted to see, so we agreed to just have dinner at a local restaurant (Cau – very disappointing). I was relieved as I was starting to stiffen up. Given all the bending and stretching I do every day in Chi Kung, I wouldn’t have expected gardening to give me any problems but I was wrong and, by the end of dinner, my back was killing me. I said to Nick that we should get the bill and go, but he was keen to sit for a while. I reflected on how far I’ve come in the 27 years we have been together – in the past I would have just sat there in agony and felt resentful, too polite to express my own needs – but now I just said ‘My back hurts, this chair is really uncomfortable and I want to get home so you can rub tiger balm on my back’. At which point he agreed immediately and we paid and left.

When Katie was younger, I had a lot of back problems and she must have heard tiger balm mentioned many times. She has always pronounced it ‘tiger bum’ but I didn’t think anything of it until, a few months ago, she expressed revulsion at the idea of it being either made from, or coming out of, tigers’ bums. She was quite relieved when I told her that it is just made from cloves and such!

Finally got all the stuff from the en suite vanity sorted and put away – great to have it done and also to have my room looking civilised again. I loath mess.

Level 2 Chi Kung. Microcosmic orbit.

I haven’t had a chance to buy an alarm clock yet, but I lent Katie my battered old one (bought for £2.79 in 1991 and still going strong!) and it did seem to have a beneficial effect. Though she is such a heavy sleeper that it does need to be placed right on the pillow beside her head before it has much impact. I had also managed to get her to sleep a bit earlier the night before, so that no doubt helped too, and things went quite smoothly this morning. We did have a slight glitch at the school gate though. Dogs aren’t allowed on the school premises, so Sherlock and I usually watch from the footpath until Katie is safely on the way to her classroom, but today Katie elected to stay cuddling with Sherlock and I until the bell rang. In the middle of this cosy scene, she grinned at me and I saw that her teeth were really quite startlingly yellow.

Level 2 Chi Kung. Microcosmic orbit.

Katie, who is, at the best of times, slow to wake in the morning, resisted bedtime for hours last night and was correspondingly tired and grumpy this morning. I failed to find the right words to motivate her out from under the duvet and we had a tense, shouty, discombobulated morning. By the time we left the house to walk to school, we were barely speaking (to each other that is – we were both still speaking to Sherlock!). Then we arrived at school and she informed me that I should have remembered that she needs her ukelele on Tuesdays (first I’d heard of it). I wasn’t keen on the ukelele from the start – it is an instrument I dislike second only to the recorder and I would have thought cello and piano were sufficient – but the school insists that all children learn the ukelele. Heaven knows why – I can only think it is because they are cheap, it certainly can’t be for love of the irritating little sound they make. When I collected her in the afternoon, she had clearly had a good day and was in a much better mood. Walking home we chatted about what we had each done during the day and then I raised the subject of the morning and asked her if she had any ideas for improving the way we do things in the morning. She said immediately that she thought it would help if she had an alarm clock of her own, as she would be able to set it to go off early and then wake up slowly. I was privately dubious but kept my reservations to myself – you can buy an alarm clock for £1, so it’s not exactly a huge investment! I also suggested that she might find it easier to wake in the morning if she got to bed earlier the night before. To my surprise, she agreed.

Level 2 Chi Kung. Microcosmic orbit.

A couple of weeks ago we did some cutting back to make way for the new kakabeak and kowhai trees but were interrupted before we got a chance to deal with the debris. It has rained on and off more or less ever since, so the pile of prunings has just been sitting there looking messy. Today I decided that I could no longer wait for a break in the weather so, as soon as I got back from dropping Katie and fed the dog, I started sweeping up the prunings and carting them around the back ready for shredding. I had only done a fraction of the pile when a plumber arrived to fix the upstairs loo and install some new taps in the en suite bathroom (the hot tap gave up the ghost weeks ago and a previous repair lasted all of five minutes). The plumber opened up the toilet (which we had taped shut to discourage the children from absent-mindedly using it while it wasn’t working) and flushed it and it worked perfectly. He sat on the side of the bath and repeatedly flushed the toilet for the next five minutes, after which I suggested that flushing the loo was probably within my technical capabilities so he might as well get on with installing the new taps. Unfortunately, he immediately announced that we had bought the wrong kind of taps for the basin and he wouldn’t be able to install them. So basically we paid £75 plus VAT for a guy to flush the loo a few times. During the hour I spent faffing around with the plumber, I had got dry, so it was hard to motivate myself to get back out in the rain but I did and spent another couple of hours sweeping up and shifting the prunings. Got about 70% of it done, which made a huge difference to the general appearance at the front of the house. Long hot shower, then started on the tedious process of putting everything back in the bathroom vanity unit, which I had emptied ready for the plumber. But one of the plastic storage boxes had gone brittle with age and basically shattered under my hand and, in the process of removing the contents, I realised that much of this stuff needs to be sorted and thrown or given away. Of course that is a rather bigger task than just shoving it back in the cupboard, so it was still lying all over my room when I had to leave to get Katie and, evenings being what they are (feeding everyone, supervising homework etc) remains there still.

Level 2 Chi Kung. Microcosmic orbit.

Nick’s turn on morning, so started the day with a very welcome sleep in. Roasted a chicken for dinner and started in on the laundry mountain again.

A couple of weeks ago, Katie announced that she wanted to put a special shoebox just outside the door of my room, so that, if any member of the family was feeling worried or anxious about anything, they could write their worry on a piece of paper and put it in the box. I restrained myself from asking why they wouldn’t just talk to me about their worry and went along with her plan. I was instructed to open the box and read the worries only on Sundays. Well, two Sundays in, here’s the crop of worries so far.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

After a week’s respite, an unwelcome return to agonising knee pain last night – but the good news is, I think that I have now identified the problem. I’m pretty sure that it is the steep downhill sections of the route to school that is stressing the injured knee. If I’m correct, then I should be able to get back to long walks quite soon – so long as I avoid the steep bits (not particularly easy given where we live). I will start by taking the longer but less steep route to school via the village and build up from there.