Level 2 Chi Kung.

Knackered. I made a rather newby error last night – it must have been close to 10pm when I finally got the Christmas cake in the oven, and since Edmond’s no 2 cake takes 4.5 hours… There was a point – when the butter and sugar were creamed, the fruit was prepped and steeped in brandy, and the flour was sifted – when I looked at the time and realised that continuing would mean a very late night, but I decided to plough on. I took this decision partly on the basis that, provided all the children went to school, I would be able to have a nap at some point today. Unfortunately I was forgetting that the new cleaner would be here from 10 am to 2:30 pm, thereby effectively wiping out any napping opportunities. No sooner had I farewelled the cleaner, than I got a call from Katie’s school. They are obviously aware of how anxious-making calls from the school are for parents, because they always start the conversation with ‘Nothing’s wrong. Your daughter is fine.’, then, presumably when they hear you breathe, they continue with the purpose of the call. Today it was to ask if I could possibly pick up Agnes, a little autistic girl in Katie’s year, as her family had called to say that they had had a medical emergency and ask if the school could keep Agnes for a couple of hours. The staff, who haven’t a clue how to handle Agnes, were disinclined to do this and asked James, Agnes’ father, if there was any parent he would trust to take Agnes home. I was happy to help out – Agnes is a lovely wee girl and Katie is fond of her – but I could have wished it wasn’t on a day when I was running on less than four hours sleep!

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Stir-up Sunday and I woke with Christmas cake very much on my mind. I took Katie to the Christmas Fair in the village, which was great fun and much better organised than last year – though sadly the mulled wine had run out by the time we got there! When we got home, Katie, who must have heard me mention it to Nick, eagerly demanded to know when we were going to start making the Christmas cake. My heart sank. For me, recreational baking with the kids is a very different headspace to cooking for the purpose of getting something cooked, while at the same time tidying the kitchen, and attacking the laundry mountain! Fortunately, when I explained this to her, she seemed to understand immediately and modified her ambitions to having a stir of the cake. My wee girl is growing up. I assured her that, in fact, everyone in the family would have a stir of the cake for luck. She immediately asked if that included Sherlock but I’m afraid I drew the line!

Level 2 Chi Kung.

For some weeks now, Katie has been seeming reluctant to go to Stagecoach, while at the same time insisting that she wanted to continue. Finally today she confessed that she was continuing because she thinks it costs a lot of money to stop. I am guessing that she heard some of the other mummies grousing about having to give, or pay, half a terms’ notice and misunderstood it as some kind of fine. Of course even if there was an actual fine I wouldn‘t want her to continue if she isn’t enjoying it! Originally I was happy for her to go to Stagecoach because a) she loved it and b) it seemed to be really helping her confidence. Then, hearing Katie talk about how great it was, Clara and Arina talked their mummies into letting them go. And sadly, thinking back, the arrival of her school friends seemed to mark the end of it being a positive experience for Katie. This is sad – Clara and Arina only stayed a couple of terms but it seems to have been long enough to stop it being a safe place for Katie – and it means that, if Katie takes on something new, I may have to restrain my natural urge to share and keep it quiet from the other mummies.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

One of those rare occasions when we use a car – one hired for the morning from the car club we belong to – reminds me how good it is not to own one the rest of the time! Driving is by far the most efficient way to get to Jack’s school, but now that I am hardly ever in cars, the motion sickness is pretty bad in heavy traffic. A good meeting with the new deputy head, to plan for a smooth transition to a new school when Jack turns 16 next year. By the end of the meeting – which took over two hours – I was starving, and suggested to Nick that we have lunch on the way home. I then enquired innocently as to whether we might be in the right part of town for Odette’s. Nick was initially dubious: Odette’s tends to be rather spendy in the evening – but I pointed out that they do a very reasonable set menu at lunch time, plus with Monique in Thailand we haven’t been out for ages. He was (as usual) not hard to persuade! Fabulous mushroom soup (oh, what a symphony of subtle flavours), poached salmon with lightly curried mussels (surprisingly yummy) and then chocolate mousse for Nick and caerphilly with bara brith and quince cheese for me. Hit traffic on the way home and were very slightly late for Dashi’s bus (yikes!). Did some admin then headed out to collect Katie from after school club. Afterwards Katie and I headed straight to a restaurant for our monthly meal out together (that Katie instigated in November). We are on a quest for penne as good as Carluccios and are working our way around the Italian restaurants in the village. This time we tried Bianco 43. Katie pronounced the penne acceptable but my bruschetta was dreadful. Hey ho, the search continues.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

An unsatisfying start to the day. Sometimes during the week I, for various reasons, end up going to bed later and later and becoming correspondingly sleep deprived. Because the weekends don’t usually offer much opportunity for catching up on sleep, and given the strong evidence base for the health, wellbeing and productivity benefits of naps, I will sometimes take the opportunity to get a bit of extra sleep when I get home from the school run. I tried this today but, unfortunately I had only been asleep for 20 minutes when I was woken by the phone. Now, it’s bad enough to be woken by someone you want to hear from: friends or family or a tradesman who’s call you’ve been waiting for. It is significantly worse to be woken by one of those scam computer repair calls where they tell you that your computer has been sending out viruses every time you turn it on and you need to give them X amount of money to fix it. I recognised at once that it was a scam. Of course, having married the tech support, I would never pay someone else to fix my computer, so I was quite safe even if I had believed the caller to be genuine! Annoying though – I loathe scammers who call people at home, as they so often end up preying on the elderly and other vulnerable people. I spent the rest of the day wading through the hundreds of responses to my ad for a cleaner. I was really tempted to avoid this by getting someone from an agency but the problem with that is, you end up paying £10 an hour but the poor cleaner only gets minimum wage. Far better to give the £10 directly to the cleaner. It can be heartbreaking though – having to turn down people who could obviously do the job and are clearly desperate – but I can only take one.

Things perked up in the afternoon as I had agreed to help out Sinniqua, the mother of Katie’s little Finnish friend Elias, by collecting Elias from school and bringing him home for some dinner before taking him and Katie to their trampolining class at 6pm. Elias is a nice little boy – white blond and a little chubby, he looks rather reminiscent of Moomin Troll! – and very easy to have around. Unfortunately I had forgotten that we had a social worker coming to discuss additional support for Jack. As we got home from school, the social worker had just arrived, early, on a bike. In the darkness, Katie saw a tall thin man in a reflective jacket, cried ‘Daddy!’ and raced over and threw her arms around him! I rescued the SW and told him that he was welcome to put his bike through the garden gate for safety. He said that would be great and then, in spite of having been warned about the dog, swung the gate wide open. Dash then hurled himself through the gate in front of the SW and the SW made some remark indicating he thought that was a bit rude. Of course it was actually very quick thinking on Dash’s part as he had raced through in order to stop the dog from escaping. I can’t now remember which science fiction writer named his house ‘Chaos Manor’ (Carl Sagan? Isaac Asimov?) but I sometimes wish I’d got there first!

I got everyone inside and started the process of trying to brief the SW while preparing three different dinners for Jack, Katie and Elias (Dash fetched his own dinner). By the time everyone was fed, the SW was just about finished so I left him with Nick and started bundling Katie and Elias back into their coats to go out to trampolining. Katie and Elias had been chattering non-stop about a Christmas party due to take place at Clara’s house after trampolining, but, given Katie’s history of arranging parties at our place without telling me, I had been unconvinced. However, when we got to trampolining it turned out that there really was an impromptu party planned, so I left Elias and Katie in the care of the other mummies and raced home to gather up whatever I could find for our contribution: a couple of bottles of wine for the mummies, and hot chocolate and marshmallows and crisps for the children. Back to trampolining again just in time for everyone to decamp to Clara’s for pikkujoulu – the Finnish tradition of ‘small Christmas’. We were certainly an international group: a Finnish actress, a Russian journalist, a French childminder and her Italian husband, and me. I mentioned how impressed I had been with the impact on my niece of going to an international school, and how I had felt a bit wistful about that – until I realised that Katie’s school pretty much is an international school – without the hefty fees!  We drank mulled wine and ate lovely food and the children put on a show for us (with little Elias taking his role as the only male dancer very seriously). We all agreed that, although we all love and sometimes miss the countries we come from, we are very lucky indeed to live in this lovely, leafy part of London.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Katie was very reluctant to get out of bed this morning, with the result that, although I woke her at 06:45 as usual, she was still not ready to leave for school two hours later. We finally got to school at 09:35 for an 08:55 start. After dropping her off (having got a late note from the office!) I jumped on a train into Charing Cross, en route to the Ideal Home Show at Earls Court. The purpose of my visit was to investigate an outbuilding we are thinking of buying. In the end, the company was indeed exhibiting but only had one building on show – not the one we are considering. Still it gave me an opportunity to have a careful look at the build quality etc and I then managed to get a bit more Christmas shopping done.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Lovely autumn sunshine. Home from dropping Katie to deal with some admin, then off to Lewisham to buy socks and underwear for the boys (to replace those eaten by Sherlock) and stock up on fruit, veg and that other essential staple: hot cross buns. Yes, I know it’s nearly Christmas but hot cross buns have been a year-round fixture at M&S for more than a decade now! Continued just that bit too long to allow me to drop everything home before collecting Katie, so ended up showing up at the school gate with a huge pile of shopping.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Monday morning and the fact that all three children have gone to school feels like a novelty! Didn’t manage to do Chi Kung before the school run because Dashi’s bus was late, so had just finished and was about to hop in the shower when Susan Laborde arrived – catching me all dishevelled! Lovely morning with Sue and stress-free on account of having so much food already prepared. No cake though – ‘the tins’ were empty! Sue left at 13:30 and, by the time I had cleared away the dishes there was only time to do a couple of minor things off the to-do list before it was time to pick up Katie. Katie was slightly late coming out but, even so, we should still have been home in time for Dash’s arrival. So I was surprised to hear urgent tooting and have a big white bus pull up and disgorge Dash while we were still en route. Apparently they had already attempted to drop him off (it seems the four kids who are normally dropped off before him are all away, so they got to us super early) and, finding the house empty, had continued on, only for clever Dash to spot us a couple of hundred meters down the road.

At 5:10pm I had a GP appointment to get the results of the knee x-ray. I had tried to get an appointment with the doc who referred me for the x-ray in the first place (and was so open-handed with the opiates!) but she is away until the 8th of December, so I ended up seeing Dr P – a very charming, if sometimes disconcertingly jolly man I have seen a couple of times before. The good news is that there is no bone damage. The less good news is that, in addition to what he described as ‘routine wear and tear’, there is medial damage (presumably from the dislocation) and osteoarthritis. He asked if I was taking anti-inflamatories and I started to say that I had been taking ibuprofen but had been told to stop and given codeine by the other GP, but I only got halfway through the sentence before he interrupted to cheerily announce ‘good gracious you need something far stronger than that, oh and a referral to the knee clinic’. Then, still cheerily, ‘if you need a knee replacement…’. Now it was my turn to interrupt: having only just heard about the osteoarthritis, I was a bit alarmed that the talk was immediately turning to knee replacement. Fortunately he explained that he wasn’t implying that I would need a knee replacement but pointing out that, for people who do go on to eventually need a knee replacement, the ones who HAVEN’T taken lots of anti-inflamatories and pain killers have the worst outcomes because they tend to stop taking exercise (because it hurts too much) and therefore have very little muscle structure to buttress the new knee. On the other hand, the people who take the drugs tend to get on with their usual activities and have plenty of muscle. Which explains why they are so open-handed with the drugs. It would have been helpful if the original GP had explained this logic as, although I have continued to do Chi Kung, I have been avoiding hills and cutting down a bit on the amount of walking I do, not just because it hurts, but because it felt like I was doing more damage.

Because they were running 25 minutes behind schedule and there were people still in the waiting room behind me, I had gone into the appointment conscious of needing to be quick, but, as soon as I mentioned Chi Kung, Dr P lost all sense of urgency and wanted to hear all about it. He used to do Tai Chi when he was younger, can’t think why he ever stopped… then when I mentioned Matala, it turned out he had been there in 1986. Finally, feeling guilty about the patients still waiting, I stood up, thanked him and left the room, whereupon he followed me out to the waiting room still chatting and then saying ‘Oh yes, must remember to do that referral’. So I hope he didn’t get so carried away with reminiscences of good old Matala that he forgot to do the referral to the knee clinic.

So, the anti-inflammatory he has prescribed is called ‘naproxen’. Anyone had any experience of it?

Tackling the laundry mountain in the evening, I was surprised to find several pairs of Jack’s underpants with large holes in the back. It briefly occurred to me that they might be evidence that Jack, like his fictional namesake Jack the Bodiless, has developed the ability to actually (rather than metaphorically) fart flames. On reflection however, I think they are evidence of Sherlock’s extreme lack of discernment in what he chooses to gnaw on.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

Nick’s turn to have the morning off, so I made gingerbread pancakes for the kids. I have great difficulty getting the ancient gas hob to maintain a pan at a steady low heat and have been trying various pans and griddles. I had high hopes for a heavy pan I bought a while ago which is the kind you are meant to season, so that, having started off shiny steel, it gradually goes completely black and becomes that holiest of grails – an effectively non-stick pan that can be used on a very high heat. The pan was gradually blackening up when poor Nick used it to make chilli one night and the next day timidly presented me with a pan which was, once again, all shiny silver. I thought at first that he had scoured it, but no, the it seems that the chilli itself had dissolved the coating! I don’t eat chilli, so I can’t attest to the impact, if any, on the flavour.

Level 2 Chi Kung.

A normal Saturday, with Stagecoach and guitar. On the way home after Stagecoach, Katie and I were discussing the fact that it is now less than a year until I have to go back to work. She has previously suggested (several times!) that I should become a childminder, like Clara’s mum. but she has gone off that idea after returning from a play date at Clara’s a couple of weeks ago saying “that house just has TOO MANY BABIES’. This time she suggested that I should write children’s books. I said that that would be lovely except I have no ideas at all for children’s books. She replied that that wouldn’t be a problem, as she had plenty! Later that afternoon, I found her in the living room: