Let Them Eat Cake (from M&S)

I am always slightly behind the times. But even I can’t fail to notice that baking has suddenly become the height of fashion.

I know this because it was not only on the cover of my Daily Telegraph, but also on the cover of my secret vice, The Lady. Yes, I was hoping to read another nice interview with Gareth Malone with my morning coffee – and instead I find yet another person generously sharing their secrets for creating the perfect Victoria Sponge.

It did not inspire me to get my mixing bowl out.

I blame my mother, of course. Every year, we had to take a home-baked cake to Guide Camp. Every year, she would send me off with a supermarket version that she hadn’t even tried to disguise in Bacofoil.

One despairing Girl Guide friend did try to teach me to bake a cake. I fear I was not a natural, as I didn’t try to bake another one until my son’s first birthday, around 18 years later. Annabel Karmel said the recipe was foolproof. It wasn’t.

But even if it had been: why on earth would I want to bake anything? Maybe in another universe, I would have smiley children who took turns and waited to lick the proverbial spoon. But in real life, baking means:

Drawing up battle-lines in the kitchen and counting out grains of flour, lest one child feel that the other has had preferential flour-treatment.

Mess. Two children plus one hand-mixer equals yet another thing for me to clean up. If the children try to clean up, I then have to clean up their cleaning attempts.

Washing up. Why does baking always require 35 bowls and 150 spoons?

Attempted manslaughter. When my son was obsessed with Chemistry, his baking powder (contaminated by copper sulphate) somehow got muddled up with the one we use for baking. Our guests found the blue flecks inside the scones somewhat unappetising.

I’m sure that I ought really to like baking. All real mummies like baking. But in that case, I will remain an unreal mummy – and when my children’s birthdays roll around again, I will send up yet another prayer of thanks to Marks and Spencer.

The Lady’s Not For Turning – Not

Thanks to last night’s news, I have been reminded that U-turns are a Very Bad Thing. Ed Balls said so, so it must be true.

To my mind, this proves only that he spends more time at work than he spends with his children.

All real parents know that U-turns are inevitable.

Dummies, toddler reins, television, computer games, Annabel Karmel, Disney … you name it, I have U-turned on it. Schools, puppies, where to live … yep, you’ve guessed it. If it weren’t for U-turns, my son would have been under a bus, and my daughter would be bottom in Horrible History.

We don’t even save our U-turns for little things like where to live, either. They even extend to McDonald’s and Pizza Hut. Mr Balls has obviously never been trapped in a Cornwall-bound car with my children for 12 hours if he thinks that  fuel duty, static caravans and Cornish pasties represent a serious change of policy.

I like to think that my U-turns demonstrate my admirable flexibility and willingness to listen and take into account the situations as they are, rather than as I imagined they might be (cue ludicrous visions of well-mannered children daintily nibbling home-made organic cous-cous). They are obviously not the result of having made rubbish decisions in the first place.

I think the only thing we haven’t U-turned on is having children. Though that’s probably only because it’s too late.

When it comes to everything else, this lady is very decidedly for turning.

Fug off!

As former university teachers, my husband and I are never ones to miss an opportunity to bore our children senseless in the name of increasing their vocabulary.

And so it was that we found ourselves in the car chatting about the word ‘fug’ (as you do on the way back from a day out in the sun).

“Nobody talks about fugs any more,” my husband mused.

“My father does,” I said helpfully. They are of a similar same vintage and similar boarding-school background.

“I know what fug off means,” our just-turned-ten-year-old son said even more helpfully.

“I know what fug is too,” our seven-year-old daughter added.

Uh-oh. Last time we had an F-word conversation, it was about ‘foot’ not being a swear word. As the word had been used in their presence by someone with a Yorkshire accent, I could see how the misunderstanding might have arisen.

“Okay,” I said carefully. “You tell me what fug means.”

Our daughter gave me a withering look.

“A fug is one of those teenage boys who gets drunk and behaves badly in the street.”

We laugh. Not least with relief.

The Facts of Life

My guinea pigs have decided that spring has sprung.

I know this because they have spent the entire day waggling their bottoms and growling at one another. Oh, and they’ve also been trying to hump one another’s heads.

As a good mother, I have decided that this is the perfect opportunity to enlighten the children about the birds and the bees (and the piggies).

As they (the children, that is) are nearly 10 and nearly 8, some might think that I should have done this already.

I have tried, honest: I bought a How Babies Are Made book and left it oh-so-casually lying around on the kitchen table. It was ignored, so I left it oh-so-casually on the bathroom floor. I’m not sure the captive audience was captivated.

So when my daughter finally asked why the guinea pigs were playing piggy-back, I seized the moment. They’re not playing piggy-back, I explained. It’s the time of year when want to start making baby guinea pigs, and they’re feeling frustrated because they haven’t got a girl guinea pig to make them with.

“Are they gay?” my son asked (thanks to the older boys, ‘gay’ is the talk of the playground).

No, I replied. Guinea pigs can’t really be gay.

“Why not?”

This is not going quite the way I’d planned.

“Well, I don’t really know. Anyway, they’re brothers.”

As if that explained everything.

I congratulated myself for having enlightened the children without causing undue excitement as they sloped off to the trampoline.

But what is this? They weren’t heading for the trampoline after all. They were heading for Daddy’s Workshop.

“Daddy, Daddy, guess what? The guinea pigs are standing up and fighting, and MUMMY SAYS THEY’RE HAVING SEX.”

I fear I still have some explaining to do.

Melting Moments

When my seven-year-old daughter said “Mummeee…” on Friday night, my heart sank.

The children broke up from school last Wednesday, so we had had what felt like several light years to get ready for her Beavers trip to a local fire station. So at 5.55 pm, I was of course losing my keys and fighting with my hair straighteners.

“What do you want?” I asked suspiciously.

“You said you were going to iron my Beavers scarf.”

“I did?”

“Yes. You promised last Friday.”

My heart sank even further. I did promise, and I had failed to deliver. Again.

“I know I promised, but we haven’t got time now,” I said.

“But you said you would iron the folds in. I won’t get the Smartest Beaver award without ironed folds.”

Well. There was only one solution. The hair straighteners.

“Right. Ironed folds are what you will have,” I declared.

Only they weren’t. Why doesn’t it say in the hair straightener instructions “not to be used on polyester Beavers scarves”?

Fortunately the fire brigade did not have to cancel our Beavers trip as a result of the scarf-meets-hair-straightener scenario. But if my hair develops green and blue polyester stripes, I will know why.

A Pair of Smashers

Kate Middleton is sitting in a limousine on my work surface.

Oh, go on then: it’s not the real Princess Catherine of Middleton. It’s an egg sitting in an egg-box. But my daughter swears blind that it’s Kate.

“Can’t you see her hair?” she says indignantly, pointing to the brownish splodge somewhere near the reddish one (that’s her lipsticked mouth, apparently).

“Ohhhh … yes,” I say dutifully, nestling her back into her egg-box limo.

My daughter was very proud of her egg-princess. Until, that is, we got to Beavers.

There, we were greeted by the most astonishing range of eggs you could ever encounter. The Eggs-Factor (complete with wigs, stage and disco lights); an Egg-splosion (a Chemistry lab with an egg-head professor); an egg flying a Lancaster bomber. Some parents obviously have too much time on their hands.

“I don’t think I’m going to win,” my daughter sighed.

Unsurprisingly, she didn’t. That honour went to the egg-doctor and his eggs-ray machine. But as I look at Princess C on my work surface, I think that she and my daughter are both simply smashing.

 

You Know You’re Your Mother When…

The marvellously wonderful Anna Tims (Adventures of a Middle-Aged Matron) has alerted me to this week’s listography at Katetakes5. The topic is ’Five reasons I know I’m a… [mother/bag lady/prevaricator - you choose!]‘. Sadly, there is only one thing I know I am for sure – and that is my own mother.

So – you know you’ve turned into your mother when:

You start quoting the Daily Mail as the source of all wisdom.

You tell your children that life is grim, life is earnest – just to annoy them.

You start watching programmes about gardening and antiques.

You iron your tea-towels.

You start growing sprouts for Christmas dinner.

QED!

We Must Be Barking

As Neil Tennant once sang: I want a dog.

I have been trying to persuade my husband to consider getting a dog for 15 years, to no avail. His objections have known no bounds. A dog would stop us from going on foreign holidays. It would need walking. It would cost us a fortune in Pedigree Chum. It would need taking to the vet.

However, my daughter is obviously more persuasive than I am. She is dog-mad (she sleeps with an entire army of stuffed dogs), and has managed to convince Daddy that she needs a dog for her eighth birthday this summer.

Now that my wish might be coming true, I am now not sure whether to jump for joy or hide under a duvet and never come out again. I grew up with dogs. They are like children, only they never get to the stage where they can go into town for the day with their friends. It’s true that the only place we’ve been on holiday for the past 15 years is Whitby – but a dog would definitely put paid to day-trips to John Lewis (infinitely preferable to any foreign holiday).

But now that we have agreed to get her a dog, we have to agree on the type.

We do agree that it can’t be too big, too hairy, too yappy, too smelly, too moulty, too girly, too diggy, or too jumpy-uppy. It definitely can’t be too slobbery.

This rules out … most dogs, actually.

In fact, it leaves us with whippets. I would gladly have another whippet – only my husband deems them ‘too bony’.

It also leaves us with border terriers. Husband would gladly have a border terrier – only I deem them ‘too terrier-y’.

Fortunately we still have three months to find the perfect dog. But I fear it might be in the toy department.

Newspapers, poospapers

It’s Monday morning – so it’s time to read last week’s newspapers.

Well, that’s not strictly true. It’s actually time to clean out the guinea pigs. But as lining their cage with old newspaper is my sole opportunity to catch up on all the news I’ve missed for the past week, cleaning them out takes a while.

While it’s quite good fun finding out what happened a week ago, it’s even more fun deciding who the guinea pigs get to wee on. When Gordon Brown was still PM, there was no competition. However, that was just a teeny bit dull. Now I get to choose. Is it going to be Wayne Rooney or Anne Robinson? A foreign dictator is always a good poo-receptacle. So is a Miliband (any one will do).

Sometimes I get a nice surprise, and some forgotten object of irritation presents himself to me. Today’s was Paul Daniels. There is no satisfaction quite like it.

Tee hee, I think to myself as I launch the piggies back into their nice clean cage.

Then my mother calls.

“I’ve just seen your  last Daily Mail article,” she says.

“Oh goody,” I reply. “How nice it must be to sit and have coffee and read the Mail.”

“Yes. I just retrieved it from the chicken coop. I’m afraid you’re covered in chicken droppings.”

I think I have got my come-uppance.

Hermann the German

I have a horrible feeling that I am about to commit  murder.

I have a house guest for half term. Hermann only arrived five minutes ago, and he is already dominating my life.

He is sitting on my worktop covered loosely with a tea-towel.

Hermann, lest you wonder, is a German sourdough friendship cake. The idea is that you add to him, then give bits of him to your friends and eat the remainder.

As my daughter has lots of friends and likes cake, I agreed to let Hermann into our kitchen. He comes with instructions, which are always scary.

‘If I stop bubbling then I am afraid I am dead,’ the instructions declare gloomily.

Oh no. I have my family squawking for food. I have my guinea pigs bellowing for veggies. Now I have to remember to feed Hermann as well. I really do not want the death of a sourdough cake on my conscience.

But then I remember the last German house-guest I had. He used the mixing bowl for his cereal. A mega-pack of Shreddies lasted two days.

Compared to that, the cup of flour, sugar and milk that Hermann requires is a doddle. Long live Hermann!