Taxing

98% of my life is the back of two (rather dubious) looking white vans awaiting the keys to our new house (which, incidently, we get at some point tomorrow). My husband is 200 miles away (as is my father – ahhhh the blessed peace). I’ve driven 500 miles in the last 48 hours. I’ve run out of money and can’t get my hands on any more for 48 hours which isn’t great when you’ve got not petrol……I could go on (and on). What you DON’T need to find in the middle of all this ‘no fixed abode’ business is that your tax disc has fallen off the front windscreen of your car and DISAPPEARED.

They are pretty hot on tax discs these day. Don’t display one and you could get thousands of pounds of fine or even worse, your car towed away and crushed.

Crushing my car wouldn’t really help me right now. Especially as the 2% of my life that’s not in the removal vans is in the boot……

So when I realised it was no longer stuck to the window I somewhat freaked.

First I took the car apart looking for it.

No luck (I found 'other things', things I would rather have not have found, but alas no tax disc).

Second I interrogated the children:

‘Now listen, mummy has a really really REALLY important question for you. You know that little bit of round paper stuck to the front of the car windscreen? The one with the shiny bits on? Have you seen it at all? I PROMISE YOU YOU WON’T GET TOLD OFF but it is very very important you tell mummy if you have played with it/eaten it/posted it down a siblings earhole/rolled it into a ball and thrown it out the window? No? ARE YOU SURE? Promise me that’s the truth? If you know where it is and you’re not telling me the car could be CRUSHED! DO YOU HEAR ME CRUUUUUUUUUUUSED!!!!'.

(Que tears and deep distress. I've gone too far).

Next I rang the vehicle licensing people (in a rather desperate state as I have no proper registered address and no money to pay for anything). I got to speak (at length) to a machine. I was not happy and I was none the wiser.

So that just left?

Becoming very foul tempered and ranting a lot. And I mean A LOT.

Shortly after this low point my mother walked in to the kitchen:

Mother: Darling I thought you said you’d lost your tax disc?

Me: YES! AND!?

Mother: It’s stuck to the windscreen..

Me: (in a very sarcastic voice): Errr, what!? I don’t think it is! Thus why I’ve just wasted several hours trying to obtain a new one.

Mother: No it is. I’ve just seen it. It’s just that it’s not at the bottom, it’s at the top. It’s stuck on up by the interior mirror.........

Oh.

Oh Oh Oh Oh Oh.

Obviously this is good news. Very good news but yet….but yet it somehow smarts a bit.

In fact it reminds me of the time I drove the whole way from London to Somerset with windscreen wipers that wouldn’t spray water (getting out of the car at every service station to wash them by hand. BY HAND I TELL YOU) and then took the ‘fault’ to be investigated only to find? To find that I’d been pressing the wrong button all along……

So there we are - it's just not the kids or the parents - I can easily embarrass myself.....

Mr Mussel

So, being a diligent and helpful daughter, I agreed to go and fetch my dad’s dry cleaning from Morrisons (it’s all rock and roll and champagne lifestyle here I tell thee).

This being a ‘very helpful thing to do’ I wasn’t expecting my mother to go all bulgy eyed and twitchy and start making odd jerking movements. Movements which indicated ‘stop talking and come outside’ (either that or she was suffering withdrawal from the Chardonnay).

I went outside (slightly intrigued I have to say – Morrisons doesn’t normally provoke quite such fervent excitement).

It appeared there was a problem.

My mother (who refuses to put her glasses on unless she’s fulfilling her daily Suduko fix) had thrown away the dry cleaning ticket. She hadn’t (technically) lost it because she knew exactly where it was. She had mistaken it for a redundant receipt and tossed into the kitchen bin.

Unfortunately, shortly after this, we’d had mussels for dinner and thus approximately 105 mussel shells and various other fishy detritus were sitting on top of it. She was sure she could retrieve it (given time, rubber gloves and, presumably, a strong stomach) but she needed to do so without ‘father’ noticing – or else there would be a rumpus. A large one. Mainly focusing on her lack of eye-glass wearing and general ineptitude at life, the universe and everything. This ‘rumpus’ would run and run and in fact probably become part of family legend (under the heading ‘the day your bloody mother threw away the dry cleaning receipt because she refuses to acknowledge she needs glasses’). We could do without such drama.

And so it was that my mother smuggled the kitchen bin bag out into the street, concealed herself behind some conifers and ferreted around until she found it.

This is what 30 years of marriage (can) do for you.

Crisis averted.

All I had to do was hand the fishy offering to the dry cleaning shop, smile and pray.

Lovely.

So you see it’s not just my kids that cause me embarrassment. It’s also my parents.

Sandwiched between the two you can kind of see how it's all ended up the way it has.......

Covert Blogging from the Home of the Olds

So I've made it West.

And I have to say it's wonderful.

Even if, for the moment, I don't actually have access to our new house, my OH is on the otherside of the country and I'm living with my parents.

Now before I go on I have to say my parents have been absolutely wonderful and beyond helpful and generous. I feel like I'm having (finally!) some respite from the last few months. Lovely food, loads of space, laundry done (LAUNDRY DONE!) - it is marvellous. Well the toddler taking off his nappy, filling the travel cot with icy piss (my parents don't believe in central heating and it appears wee cools pretty quickly under such conditions - take note) at 1am and then spending the next 3 hours wide awake and crying, wasn't a high point - but other than that I'm loving it.

However, living with my parents does make blogging pretty damn hard. They like to know what's going on and for reasons I am sure you understand I don't really want them becoming avid fans of this blog. My father doesn't need to know about my piles......Or the fact that half the internet have read about the needle through his testicle incident......

He spends a lot of time on the internet (avidly checking the weather forecast 90% of the time - 'MOTHER!' he bellow, 'FROST BY MONDAY NIGHT!'. 'Oh' she responds. Ten minutes later - 'MOTHER!', 'WINDS OF 50MPH IN NORTHERN IRELAND'. Crucial. Obviously) and he uses it in a way which means that anything you have EVER typed into Google or the address box will come up when you start typing that first letter of the word. So even accessing this blog was hard - I had to find another way in. I couldn't type the address and I couldn't Google 'Slightly South of Sanity'. He would get curious. Even it wasn't about the weather.

So I had to find a back door in, so to speak.

And then I recalled that large numbers of (unfortunate) people find this blog by Googling 'Iggle Piggle Birthday Cake' and, in fact, this blog comes up on page 1 of Google if you type those magical words. Who would have thought it? Famous in baking spheres...... It must have been the RegalIce Placenta that did it.

Having found a way in, I still couldn't type anything as my father's security settings were a tad extreme (well you never know WHAT might come up if you Google 'BBC 7 day forecast, do you?') so I've had to, erm, change them. Don't tell him. Ever.

But other than that it's going swimmingly. As long as you tread carefully and don't antagonise him.

This can take a lot of strategic planning.

For example this morning he was coming downstairs when my mother noticed a large brown rat dangling off the bird table.

Large brown rats tend to antagonise him greatly (this is, after all, the man who ran through the house on the morning of my brother's wedding shouting 'FETCH A GUN! There's a rat on the f'cking nuts!' Put a whole new spin on 'shot-gun wedding' that one did).

And for some reason their raiding of the bird food is my mother's fault.

I had to therefore provide a strategic distraction until the rat had passed.

And then there was the incident of the dry cleaning receipt and the Mussel shells - but that will have to wait until tomorrow - he's coming down the stairs so I must flee and leave no evidence. Let's just hope he's not planning on baking an Iggle Piggle birthday cake......

Woooo hoooooooooooooooo!!!!!

WE'VE DONE IT!

WE'VE DONE IT!!

Well November is already a hundred million times better than September and October.

Just took the call - all the contracts are exchanged - there is no going back. The house move is ON!

Goodbye Land of Dave.

Hello Somerset.

Oh. My. God.

I'M GOING HOME!

I go to stay at my mum's tomorrow night (my eldest starts his new school down there on Wednesday - talk about making it by the skin of your teeth!) and then I come back here at the weekend and then the lorry comes on Tuesday 10th November and off we go for the whole next chapter in our lives......

See you there!

(I can't stop grinning, need to calm down, might just need to crack open some cider......).

Behind the Scenes at the Museum

Well Half-Term has been pretty ropey to say the least.

The veritable pinnacle was getting my toilet fixed.

The rest was, erm, crap.

All the stress about the house move, various other stuff that's occurred, living out of boxes with no proper food, not having any plans or places to go as we thought we'd be gone by now - and THEN on Thursday I woke with the most splitting headache imaginable and spent the day under a duvet being sick.

I think it was actually my body/mind saying 'this is it - enough - I'm SO over this'.

Anyway I decided enough was enough and my kids needed ONE happy memory of the holiday (I don't think watching mummy vomit and listening to her shout at estate agents is really stuff for the scrapbook?) so I asked the eldest what he really really wanted to do on Friday and he said 'go into London on the train'.

Cool.

So I decided to go to the Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green (I couldn't quite face the tourist spots of Central London alone with both of them - taking the toddler out is a bit like being accompanied by slightly wild unbroken colt. That can cry).

Anyway as I look back on the day I wonder what my children will make of their childhood and growing up with me as a mother.

Will they just accept the, erm, 'strangeness' of some days as the norm or will they think 'mother? What a case she was.......'.

The day went something like this:

Negotiating rail system into East End with 2 kids and buggy - no problem.

Negotiating roads/streets to find museum - no problem.

Day in very crowded museum - no problem (Ok I won't tell you how many times I lostthe toddler but he's still here so, as I said, no problem!).

Number of times I had to drag the toddler away from the glass display cases containing toys he couldn't play with, which he was trying to bust open by means of giving them a good kicking - too many to count but again, no problem!

Lunch in crowded cafe with 2 kids, no help, hot drinks a go go - no problem.

And then we (tried) to leave.

Before leaving we took a toilet trip. The toilets are in the basement area and they were RAMMED. I haven't seen that many people in a toilet since I was skirting puddles of vomit in the Leeds branch of Ritzy's Nightclub.

I managed to squeeze us all into one cubical and just as I was standing up from the toilet to pull my pants up (waaaaaaayyyy too much information there but you are probably used to it by now) the toddler decided to ram the bolt back across the door and throw it wide wide open.......

And opposite the toilets are a room long length of sink to ceiling mirrors........

There was me and my foof - reflected and refracted around the room in all our glory, several dozen times over......

We left.

Promptly.

On leaving I couldn't be doing with tackling the stairs (again - and this time with people who had just seen my pubic hair watching......) and there was a huge queue for the lift so, seeing a small door to my right with daylight on the otherside, I hurriedly opened it and we left.

Or we tried to leave.

To cut a long story short we ended up, quite literally, behind the scenes in the museum.

We had entered an outdoor area around the side of the museum only meant for staff and there was NO WAY OUT. Up and down we went, weaving along the sides of the building, inspecting the staff car park, looking at the cargo lift, skirting over grating, pushing through bushes........ and as my eldest stated 'mummy - you have got this ALL wrong'.

Sometime later I began to fear we'd be there all night so I had no choice but to go and knock on one of the building windows, behind which sat the slightly bemused back office staff.

'Help!' I mouthed.

'How did you get out here?' the lady asked.

'Erm, I opened a door' I replied.

'The WRONG door' added my son.

The wrong door indeed.

Oh well - if you're going to have a day out, you may as well make an adventure of it......

RIP Earl

Ho hum.

Well first of all - no we haven't totally sorted the house move yet. I hope it is inching closer though.

Secondly, I swear someone is sticking vodoo pins in my life or I've offended a gypsy or something because I went out to feed my rabbit yesterday (the same rabbit that wrote about here: the annoying rabbit I really loved ) and, erm, he's dropped dead.

Personally I blame the fireworks.

Either that or it is a conspiracy/my life is doomed.

Either way we will miss him greatly. He's been part of our life for years - he was sat in a flowerpot giving me the evil eye when I was in labour with my second son and god knows what we are going to do with the spare time in the evenings when we used to be chasing him round the lawn.

Don't ask what we're going to do with his body - we haven't worked it out yet.

R.I.P Earl - you rocked.



Edited to add: Just in case anyone is concerned, in the photo above he is alive, just sleeping. I might be slightly eccentric but I draw the line at going round photographing corpses of dead pets posing in flower pots.

On the postive side....

....amongst all the doom and gloom and chaos something wonderful happened today.

I went to the toilet and (wait for it).......




WAS ABLE TO FLUSH IT AFTERWARDS BY SIMPLY PUSHING DOWN A LEVER!

A small thing to most people but please bear in mind that it's been something like 7 weeks since I haven't had to fill the toilet cistern using a small jug and then put my hand to the bottom of it to pump a rod up and down (now now, no rude thoughts) and form a vacuum to make it flush. It get kind of tiresome after the 99th time.

This morning (unsurprisingly) I finally lost the plot and called a plumber. In fact by 9.30am I had called a plumber, the solicitor (twice), an estate agent, the removal company, my mother, a friend, another plumber, my mother (again) and my husband (just for good measure).

I didn't mange to get the house move off the ground (and breathe) but I did mange to get the toilet fixed.

Now I don't have a good track record with tradesmen and small children (anyone remember the poo on the carpet in front of the Virgin Engineer?) but I was hoping my luck had turned.

It hadn't.

The plumber arrived. He was about 22 and 'trendy'. I felt about 109 and decidedly un-trendy as I helped him wend his way through the Lego and discarded socks up to the filthy bathroom, littered with bath toys and constipation medication (not mine I hasten to add).

No sooner had I started giving him the Brief History of the Toilet in My House (a somewhat troubled history) then my eldest appeared and declared.........



'MUMMY! I NEED A POO! AND IT'S URGENT! IT'S HANGING OUT MY BOTTOM!'.

Where is that constipation when you need it?


The toddler is standing next to him. Crying.

The plumber is standing next to the toddler and looking, erm 'awkward'.

I didn't quite know what to do so I panicked and bellowed 'WHERE THE HELL IS YOUR PIG SEAT?' (if you haven't got small kids then a 'pig seat' is a sort of little padded seat that goes on the big toilet and stops small children falling down the big hole and drowning. The cheap one from Tescos is decorated with pigs - god knows why - thus 'the pig seat').

Pig seat was found (in the bath) and placed on the toilet. Pants were pulled down. Poos were dealt with. The toddler howled. The eldest described how the poo consisted of '3 nuggets' and therefore wasn't a 'big clearout'. The plumber stood in the doorway, facing outwards and trying to pretend he wasn't there. I faced the wall and closed my eyes and tried to pretend I wasn't there And then? Well then (for some god only knows reason) I turned to the plumber and said 'could I get you a cup of tea?'.

Funnily enough, he declined.

Sometime later when he came downstairs and asked to be paid the toddler hit him in the eye with the horsewhip (the horsewhip is now their second favourite toy, after the placenta). I blushed and said 'I don't know WHERE they got that from!'. Oh well - maybe he won't think it's all boring in suburbia.........

Anyway - another day done - another day with no good news on the house. Another day of excruciating embarrassment.

And my abiding thought?

NOBODY PAYS YOU FOR THIS.

Nobody.

I'm off to flush the toilet. Small things keep you happy.