I may get to keep him for another day, mind you.  He’s cultivated a nasty cold that left him sounding like a retired miner come bed-time, so a rare ‘sickie’ might be in the offing.  And I mean rare, mind.  I’m not your ‘soft mum’ who keeps the little darling tucked up in bed at the merest sniffle.  That’s not how we were brought up.  As a child, even if one of us had managed to sever an arm at the shoulder we’d have been packed off to school, provided a couple of tendons remained intact to keep the thing dangling inside the sleeve of our shirt in the manner of a stringed mitten hanging down its duffle coat arm.

  No, the reason I’d keep the Boy at home would be to avoid the displeasure of his teacher.  Pushing forty, I still worry about upsetting the authorities, and the Boy has mentioned Miss __ complaining of sniffling (or was it snivelling?) children bringing their infections into the classroom.  I don’t want to upset her.  Mind you, my card’s probably already marked because the Boy didn’t give her a Christmas present.  There seems to be a growing trend to give teachers lots of stuff at various points in the school year and I intended to participate but kept swithering about the right gift.  One of the mums-in-the-know said she likes Vodka Mules but that didn’t seem appropriate.  Sending my six year old to class with alco­-pops clinking in his school bag might have given the wrong impression of his home life, and the teacher may have been a little disturbed to think that the parents are wise to her drinking habits.  I was also told she smokes and for a brief moment was tempted to wrap up a packet of Lambert and Butler but she’s actually quite nice and that didn’t seem fair.  And again, there’s the ‘questionable home life’ issue.

  So in the end, rather predictably, I ran out of time and Miss __ got nothing from us, save the card the Boy was organised enough to write himself.  Despite scrambling around in cupboards on the last morning of term I couldn’t even find an intact packet of mince pies to be wrapped up hastily.  And of course then she gave each of the children in her class a present.  Sigh.

I’ll just have to pull out all the stops come the Summer holidays.

Vodka Mule, Miss?

Much as my mother bemoans the loss of the happy meaning of the word ‘gay’ from common parlance, I bemoan the loss of days when small children staggered about the pavements at night-time in cardboard cut-out monstrosities or mum’s nightie held together with safety pins and wishful thinking, some dribbling ‘blood’ suspiciously similar in shade to Yardley’s ‘Cherry Bomb’ lipstick.  Now you can deck your kids out as a Tesco zombie, or an irresistibly pretty, pink net pirate for half the cost of the amount of lipstick you’d have needed back then.  And as for finding a cardboard box big enough to make a Rubik’s Cube these days, well, if you haven’t bought a new fridge in October you might as well forget it and kids today don’t know what that is anyway.  I remember my makeshift Witch, my Queen of Hearts, my (last-minute) Cleaning Lady (WTF??) all beginning to fall apart three houses in, and I’m quite sure even the most patient of our neighbours was dismayed by my determination to complete T.S. Elliot’s ‘Skimbleshanks‘ in its entirety* before they were allowed to throw some monkey nuts and 20p my way and get me the fuck out of their house.  Nowadays, however, you’re lucky to get a joint rendition of that bloody ‘Christmas-is-coming‘ rhyme before they stick their sweaty paws into your sweetie bag for a gluttonous rummage; cherry-picking the good stuff and muttering fibs about being allergic to nuts.  Well, HA!  I know how to deal with that particular porky:

“Aaaah, what a pity I’ve mixed the wrapperless sweeties in with the peanuts. Looks like you’ll be leaving empty-handed.  Wouldn’t want your mothers to sue me when your tongue swells up like an inflated airbed.  Shame.  Cheerio now!”

You know, them ruddy kids take all the fun out of Hallowe’en.

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*Actually, I’ve just read that poem and am pretty sure it was only the first verse.  Still bloody long though.

Actually, I don’t think I am but having spoken at length to, ooh, at least two other mums of Boy’s school friends, it seems I am.  When it comes to homework at any rate.  No, I don’t smack his fingers with a ruler as he runs them below his Stage 6 Oxford reading book (Stage 6, did you hear that? Top group, you know!) which is currently ‘In the garden’ [sic], starring the oddly-named Biff, Chip, Kipper and Floppy (guess which one’s the dog?  No?  I struggled with that one too.  It’s Floppy.  And Biff is a girl.  Go figure.).  Neither do I withhold food and/or other ‘treats’ for poorly-formed phonetics.  I do, however, get a bit arsey with him for scenarios such as this one:

Boy – “They.  Went.  Into.  The.  Garden.”
Pushy Mum – Really?  Now, tell me what you did half an hour ago with your football.
Boy – “I went into the garden.”
Pushy Mum – Did you?  You didn’t, “Go.  Into.  The.  Garden.”?
Boy – *laughs* No, Mummy, “I went into the garden”.
Pushy Mum – Well, say it that way when you read then.  Go on, try again.
Boy – “They went into the garden.”
Pushy Mum – Good stuff, mate!  You’ve got it!  High Five!!  (I know, I know.  I avoided it for so long, but that bloody High Five is just so damn useful as a physical ‘Gold-Star-and-a-VG’).

So.  He now understands what I mean when I ask him to read it as he’d speak it.  I know he can do it.  He knows he can do it.  He doesn’t do it and I ask him to try harder.  He tries harder, reads it more naturally and voilà!  Bob’s his and my uncle (which throws up any number of uncomfortable familial relationships more commonly found in my Highland homeland, but essentially means he’s got the hang of it).

So tell me, is that being pushy?

I don’t think I’m a pushy mum.  But that doesn’t mean I’m never going to push.

Discuss.

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*Clearly it isn’t.

And being unutterably lazy, I’m not doing another one here so, in the nicest possible way, do bugger off and read that one.

About me

Working in the basket-weaving department of a small arts and crafts company in Edinburgh and enjoying the recent balmy weather now the scars have healed and I can wear short sleeves again. Occasionally miss the cameraderie of the ward – more so during the recent Countdown finals – but Scary Mary and the rest of the gang have kept in touch, courtesy of Crayola, and we’re planning a reunion when my prescription runs out.
Hope to catch up with some of the Dingwall Academy staff one day – in particular, I’ve a rather impressive collection of road kill to post to Springers* – if anyone has his address, let me know.

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*Obnoxious, flabby-lipped head of PE, known for both terrorising and (allegedly) touching small boys.  The only teacher with whom I ever had a stand-up, nose-to-nose screaming match – spittle and all – signalling the end of my not-so-illustrious-anyway running and swimming career.

I’m not going to update this.

“Now they were de-li-cious chips.  Frites. You don’t get chips like that over here.  You see they don’t like using fat anymore…”
And he’s off.  His nostalgia will prompt a long soliloquoy regarding some aspect of the food in question, of little or no interest to his despairing audience but entered into with unquestionable gusto on his part.

Sitting down to a meal with guests, our mother will throw topics for discussion out across the table with a kind of wild-eyed desperation; be it horror stories of maimed patients brought into the Recovery unit where she worked as a nurse, or the colour of the buttons in the lift at the new shopping centre.  Anything to prevent my father broaching the subject of the meal on everyone’s plates.  And despite her best efforts dad will wait no more than a few initial mouthfuls before blundering in with a culinary interruption, unrepentant of its irrelevance to the conversation.  Like a drunk rugby player bursting through the doors of a playgroup, clutching his slopping pint glass and bellowing about the consistency of the gravy.

Dad can spend hour upon hour in Tesco, to the point that he is now dispatched alone to do the weekly shop because my mother simply cannot bear it.  Boy will on no account enter a supermarket with Grandpa unless there is a strict promise of toys en route, and even then the trip will be punctuated with heavy sighing and pantomime bored faces as Dad agonises over which piece of fish to select.  My father’s food compulsion has haunted all of our family holidays,  particularly in Germany where he tried gamely not to let the language barrier impede his foraging.  With the single-mindedness of a truffle pig, he sniffed out giant olives at the market in Freiburg, which with one bitter suck were identified as something to cook or make oil with, certainly not carry around in a tub with a toothpick and nibble at.  His strawberry jam from the Netto was selected for its higher price tag, the reason for which was later identified by its bland taste and the large Für Diabetiker label stuck to the front of the jar.  And his delicious soft cheese, with  its unpleasant, grey hue, elicited some raised eyebrows as he sunk his teeth into the crusty bread; my dad, it transpires, does not know the German for ‘yeast’.

In the end, we have learned to ignore dad’s obsession.  One or other of the family members at a meal may still get embroiled inadvertently in his food conversations, realising too late that they are discussing the merits of soda farle over pan loaf.  At this point the unwitting victim will look beseechingly toward the rest of the diners.  Their response, however, will mirror that of a group of friends in a tube carriage trying not to acknowledge the existence of the psychotic-looking chav sporting a Burberry hat and a bottle of Buckfast: they will continue talking animatedly with each other and – at all costs – avoid eye contact.

However, what is both an annoyance and a joke to his family and friends, is a clear and unswerving passion for my father.  And having no passions of my own, bar the kids, I can’t fault him for his.  I don’t doubt that the dates of his children’s and grandchildren’s birthdays remain a mystery to him, but at the end of the day I bet he could describe in minute detail each and every one of the cakes.