Stuck on a Bank Holiday?

Stuck for ideas this Bank Holiday? Not me, I was bursting with ideas of how to entertain Lily and Poppy while Bill went to watch the annual August Bank Holiday football game of our local team. Don’t get me wrong, he goes every week, it’s just that the Bank Holiday game can never be missed, and I know from bitter experience that unprepared, the Bank Holiday football afternoon with the kids alone can be a hellish battle right out of the Peterloo Massacre, far worse than anything two third division football teams can muster between them on the pitch.

So while Poppy was taking her afternoon nap Lily and I nipped out to stock up on supplies of Rice Crispies and cocoa, syrup and butter. When Poppy woke an hour later, ready to embark on one of her post-nap full on tantrums, hurling milk beakers and books around the front room for half an hour, I jumped in quickly before she could even summon up the energy to put on a performance, with the magic phrase: ‘Shall we make some crispie cakes?’

The next hour was spent blissfully bashing bowls full of innocent puffed rice with wooden spoons, screwing up paper cup-cases and eating a gooey melted concoction of sugar and chocolate.

Sated for a short while, they cleared off to watch Dora on Nick Junior, and I set about tackling the bombsite that was the kitchen. Just then a vision of Poppy diving face first onto our cream settee, covered from nose to chin in chocolate goo, had me rushing to the rescue clutching a pack of baby wipes. And I don’t mind telling you I was feeling very smug having managed to escape that disaster, get the kids clean and do the washing up after our crispie cake orgy, all before the closing credits of Dora were rolling.

Once Dora was over we decided to do something else creative, and Lily went to fetch her favourite book with ideas for how to make everything from an octopus to a bonfire out of little more than some PVA glue and a few sheets of coloured paper (must have been written by an ex-Blue Peter presenter from the 1970s before it went all pop music and fashion).

Having settled on the shimmery fish with wavy tails, we set about gathering our supplies of tissue paper and milk bottle tops to embark on our next project. Just then I remembered we had no glue. A frantic search in the kitchen drawers confirmed my worst fears, there was nothing remotely sticky apart from a flea-bitten tube of superglue and I wouldn’t let Poppy loose on that – even I’m not that irresponsible.

On an ordinary day, when I’m feeling dishevelled, browbeaten, inadequate and exhausted from motherhood, I would have told the kids we needed to abandon the fish idea and switched the TV back on again. But no, today was a Bank Holiday – I was coping fine with my kids alone for the first time in ages and the sun was even shining. Hell, I was going to take the bull by the horns, pile them into the car and go shopping for Pritt Stick.

Going for the quickest option, I headed for the local row of shops – I can leave the kids safely locked in the car, nip in and still see them from the shop window. I say safely locked, because this row of shops is on a council estate which was the location for some serious sociological investigation into anti-social behaviour, drug trafficking and vandalism in the 1980s. They even wrote a book about it. Things have improved a little, but not that much, so I had to make this quick.

A quick sprint round the first shop revealed nothing in the way of handy Blue Peter style materials. So double checking the central locking on the car, I raced for the next shop door. Still panting from my first exploration, rather than trying to search the shelves in this place, I ran straight to the back of the shop where I could see the shop girl having a quick fag break out the back while things were slack.
‘Have you got any glue?’ I splutter at the girl, like a woman possessed.
She looks slightly taken aback, flicks the ash off her cigarette, and shakes her head slowly.
My eyes widen in horror – ‘Not even Pritt Stick?’ I gasp in disbelief.

It’s only as I turn to exit the shop that I catch sight of myself in the mirror hung up over the counter to allow the shop keeper to see what’s going on at the back of the shop - and I realise I have not been such a perfect domestic goddess today after all. I self-consciously eased myself back into the car and looked closely in the rear view mirror. In my haste and concern for the furnishings, I may have wiped the kids clean enough to attend Sunday School and saved our tatty settee, but I had completely forgotten to clean my own face.

A flash back to our orgy in the kitchen reminded me that Poppy had been feeding me handfuls of crispie cake from her bowl. Stuck to my chin were several very crusty looking rice puffs, and my lack of attention to person presentation today had extended to not bothering with make-up, and forgetting to brush my hair before leaving the house. So although I had remembered just in time to change from my slippers to my trainers, the overall effect was still that of someone not quite in control of her faculties and just a little deranged.

As I drove away I spotted a group of teenage girls sitting on a wall not far from the shop, and I realised sadly why no shop on this estate was going to make access to glue free and easy. But you’d have thought they could have made an exception with Pritt Stick – I can’t be the only desperate mum around here on a Bank Holiday.

Beaten by our local retailers, I raced to Sainsbury’s five minutes before they were due to close. Grabbing Poppy under one arm and pulling Lily reluctantly along by the other, with no shame I headed straight for customer services and demanded to know where they kept their glue. And finally our search for the Holy Grail was over. There in front of my eyes was a big bucket full of Pritt Sticks – I could have kissed the young man who had led me to this treasure. The icing on the cake – it was ‘buy one get one free’ – perfect, no fighting over one stick of glue. Even I joined in the chorus of ‘We did it’, the Dora song, on the way home in the car.

So it was an afternoon of relative calm from the kids, but clear signs of depravity from their mother. Ok, so I was publicly humiliated and will never be able to show my face in that row of shops again, but the kids were happily entertained with an afternoon of covering themselves, the house, and me with chocolate goo and silvery fish scales. So I still feel like its 1-0 to me this Bank Holiday!

Right, Bill’s back, so I’m off for a well-earned (and much needed) soak.

Daisy x

By the way – in case you were wondering, we won the football 1-0 too!

DAISY RETURNS!!!!!

Hi there tiddly-peeps (A Hoobs reference for all you wonderfully amazing parents who manage to survive early mornings without the aid of Channel 4). I feel like I’m starting all over again, I’ve been away so long. I must thank Pops for holding the fort during my absence.

It’s been a crazy few weeks. And not the usual summer madness that school holidays and unexpected heatwaves bring, but another level of madness altogether. Pops hinted at the situation – I’ve been stuck in various hospital wards, attached to an array of monitors and drips, enduring an assortment of tests and investigations, and basically have lost touch with the world completely. But I’m back! Well sort of…

I’ve never spent time inside before – in any sort of institution. And for the first time I started to understand how prisoners actually make it through sentences that last for years on end. I know there are some differences – prisons have televisions that work, hospitals don’t – but I should imagine there are also a lot of similarities between long stay in a prison and long stay in a hospital. For a start, breakfast arrives ridiculously early to the sound of clattering on iron railings; secondly the staff get to submit inmates to a range of unexplained ritualistic procedures at periodic intervals throughout the day; and finally, there are strict visiting hours with controls on numbers, suitability and type (children usually not welcome). But I dare say smoking rules are more lax in prison, as Pops pointed out (I never thought I’d live to see the day Pops stood up for the rights of a smoker!).

I’ll tell you more about the details over the next few posts, as I start to orientate myself around the keyboard again. Suffice to say for now that what has always been a healthy suspicion of all things in white coats has now grown into an active distaste. I always knew that historically the world of doctors and medicines was designed to control and subjugate the patient, but I had kind of hoped things had moved on a bit in the 21st century. I was wrong.

More of that to come. But the whole experience has changed me deeply, and this morning when I found myself interrupting a game of doctor and patient between Poppy and Lily, a crisis of conscience quickly ensued. Dr Poppy was administering to patient Lily, by searching for a migrant heartbeat in her lower digestive cavity, with the aid of a plastic stethoscope. At this point, patient Lily intervened, shouting, 'Duh, Poppy! It's my foot that's hurting, you don't have to listen to my heart!' – rounded off with her best 5-year-old impersonation of a teenage grunt.

Dr Poppy simply looked up, made an absentminded adjustment to her stethoscope, and got back to what she was doing, completely ignoring the patient's interjection, as if it had been nothing more than the buzz of a passing fly.

Afraid that the whole thing might escalate into a doctor-patient uprising - as Poppy is going through a very determined stage at the moment, and Lily does her best to provoke her - I urged Lily to let Dr Poppy do what she wanted to her patient. ‘After all’, I heard myself say, 'the doctor always knows best!'

And then I almost choked on my words! Here's me – still reeling from the shock of dealing with a consultant who thought the world revolved around him and no patient had the right to speak - and there I was trying to train my child, already showing very positive signs of rebellion and self confidence to question authority, to abandon all sense of control and give in to the power of the dominant regime. Aarrghh!!

Don’t worry – I will explain all very soon. It’s getting late, and I have a heap of medication to get through before I can go to bed…

It's nice to be back.

Daisy x

Mediterranean Diet

Hi again from Daisy's Dad. The good news is that Daisy and family are taking a break at the seaside. All the hospital tests so far have proved negative, which is good news but means there is still a puzzle. She is due to have some further tests as an out-patient, but at the moment is soaking up some sun and relaxing, and tells me it's time I made another blog post for her!

I thought I would write about my hobby, which is enjoying serendipitous synchronicity, or in plain English waiting for interesting links between unrelated ideas to pop up. And funnily enough, one happened as I was sitting here at my keyboard thinking about how to explain it.

First, a little background. I live in the United Kingdom and over the years I have taken many self-catering holidays around the Mediterranean. Self catering because one of the holiday high spots for me is being able to buy fresh ingredients for a Mediterranean Diet daily. When I get to a new place, the first thing I want to know is the location of the produce market. Now that I'm retired, I've been mulling over whether to reverse the holiday process - live near the Mediterranean and take occasional holidays back in the UK! So I've looked at all the variables, cost of property, location of airports with low-cost airlines and so on, and decided that the ideal location would be in Italy, probably in Tuscany. And that's as far as it has gone so far - the next stage will be to take an off-season holiday in Tuscany to do some research locally.

Back to Serendipitous Synchronicity. Sitting at my keyboard looking at Daisy's blog, I clicked idly on the link in the right-hand column that says "Break free - how to turn your passion into an income". Sounded like the subject line on a spam email, but I wasn't going anywhere in a hurry and I'd just made a fresh cup of coffee, so I clicked. And there, right in the middle of the page, was a photograph of a Villa which was obviously in Tuscany! So I clicked on the picture, and it gave me the fascinating story of a young couple, Fiona McCardle and Jim Andrew, who did turn their passion into an income, and set up a web business Rent a Villa in Tuscany - if you read their story, there is a link to their site at the end of it.

And that's what I mean by Serendipitous Syncronicity - now I have no excuse - the pieces are falling into place! Oh, and Daisy and company love the idea of holidays in Tuscany...

A surprised defence of smokers rights!

Hi – this is Daisy’s Dad learning how blogs work. Unfortunately, Daisy has been in and out of hospital over the last couple of weeks, and hasn’t had the time to do much on her computer. I’ll let her tell the story, because I know she has been making loads of notes – in the meanwhile, she asked me to post something to show that her blog is still live, and left the topic up to me to choose. Brave girl!

As it happens, I do have something I want to say, because on my hospital visits I observed a couple of cases of unfair treatment, almost victimisation, which have made me hopping mad.

Our local hospital has a no-smoking policy, and as a lifelong non-smoker who lost both parents to smoking-related disease, I agree with it totally. I am saddened to see hospital staff hanging around in the grounds taking a furtive drag, even though the ban extends in theory to the grounds as well, but I know that they are dedicated and caring people who work long hours for ridiculously low pay, and a cigarette helps them through the day.

But heaven preserve the smokers who end up as patients! They come into hospital because they are ill, and their crutch is kicked away as soon as they are admitted. There is not even a smokers’ day room available to them. One elderly man set himself and his bed on fire trying to have a surreptitious puff during the night shift, but the case that really annoyed me was that of a young mother who was in for investigation of severe abdominal pain.

After a number of tests, they determined that it would be necessary to remove her gall bladder, which would mean going onto a waiting list for the operation. She couldn’t go home immediately because there were some other tests to be carried out, but she was promised an appointment with the Pain Control Team before leaving hospital, as the pain was spasmodic but crippling when it hit. But Oh No! The appointment was cancelled. And why? Because when not in pain she could walk out into the grounds to text her children and, yes, have a cigarette. As she said, she would "crawl over broken glass" to keep in touch with her children, but mobile phones and cigarettes are not allowed in the hospital buildings, and the fact that she could make her journey to the grounds was taken as proof that she was not in sufficient pain.

Sufficient pain! She described the intensity as being like childbirth, and in childbirth it is possible to move around between contractions. I don’t know, I’m only a man, but as a Mum with four children she would know what she was talking about, and I got the impression she was a tough cookie, not someone to make a fuss without reason.

I do not know who took the decision to cancel the Pain Relief consultation, but I do wonder what went through her/his mind while doing it. Where did the compassion go? I would be delighted if all smokers could give up the habit tomorrow, but surely nicotine dependency is a part of the patient’s problem which could be established at admission and taken into account during treatment – for example by offering patches and counselling. Or am I making the mistake of wanting to see a holistic approach to treatment rather than a one-thing-at-a-time conveyor system?