The Good-Mood One

The hormones have delivered, I'm cheerful today! The offspring are back from their two-week jaunt: tanned and exuberant, babbling in Italiaise and bearing gifts of food and wine. Sometimes I sit back and marvel that I; a short, round, antisocial, misanthropic Hair Monster managed to produce two such sophisticated, sociable, culinary-enabled polyglots. If it weren't for the obvious height genetic influence, I'd assume a mix-up at the maternity ward.

Anyway, they've swept off to play with their little step-brother & sister for a few hours and I plodded off to the shops. I live at the bottom of the hill, at the cheaper end of town - to get anywhere interesting on foot, one has to perambulate past the posh houses and tackle the gradient. A couple of years ago, this was a challenge to which (to my shame) I was unequal. Attempting the hill would leave me breathless, panting and with stabbing pains in my shins. Eventually I decided that if that was the state I was in in my mid-thirties, how much pain and discomfort would I be storing up for myself come retirement? So although Hair Monsters are not gerbils, and the treadmill is not their natural habitat, a gym membership was lashed out for, and some determined exercise and stretching routines mean that I can at least now nimbly nip up the hill. Still. But only just, 'cos that membership has been collecting dust for the last 3 months.

I'm in a money-spending mood, unfortunately. This isn't fantastic, considering my newly straitened circumstances, but occasionally, needs must and in celebration of my newly single status, some new makeup and extra perfume was purchased. This is in addition to the £100 frittered away over the web at Figleaves during the week. Those little scraps of silky nothingness arrived this morning, and are delightful. I have a major presentation coming up at work in just over a week. We each have our own version of smoke and mirrors. Mine will be to distract the audience from criticism of my proposal with subliminal consideration of whether I'm actually wearing suspenders under my new dress. Oh the delights of working in a male-dominated industry!

Whilst in town, I scoped the coffee-shops for pulling potential. I chose one on a corner, with plenty of windows for people watching opportunities and ensconced myself at a window seat with a cappuchino and a book. This is part of my longer-term plan for the single life - become a regular and force myself to talk to people. There were a couple of blokes there together, obviously there to pass the time and watch the world go by. I was idly wondering if they were straight, mentally discounting the one with the facial fungus, despite his rather dishy bum, when a woman in a wheelchair manoeuvred her way into the cafe. She charmed the staff, clocked the other one as someone she recognised from her gym and chatted them both up for the next half hour. Well, if she can do it with gammy legs and a speech impediment, I've really got no excuse. Its humbling when a cripple is doing better at pulling than I am! So on the mental checklist - make the cafe a regular stop, and go back to the gym.

Curry & Chocolate

Last night marked the first hotel-based escapade I've managed with D in a couple of weeks, what with the moving out of K. There have been a couple of car-seat shenanigans, which makes one shake one's head with minor embarassment that all these years further on, you're still acting like a randy teenager. But there's nothing quite like a full-on, mattress-enabled hotel-room fuck to remind you that age has its compensations.

The entrance and egress to the hotel was complicated by the fact that half the senior management team were staying there again, and at some point someone will twig that D & I keep shuffling off to dinner by ourselves. As I pointed out, after a staggered, comedy-routine escape, we were either going to have to pack it in, get a bit smarter at booking hotels or just take out a full-page ad on the company intranet and have done with it. As it was, I had to smuggle out the gift of the chocolate egg he'd bought me, if only because he'd been out at lunchtime and met a colleague who'd stayed with him while he bought it. Eventually we escaped, for a pie & a pint for him, shiraz & curry for me.

But the necessary irritations of the mechanics of work affairs aside, the compensation is the moments of time-arresting pleasure. The countless orgasms are delicious, the novelty of cumming through having my neck kissed, my nipples pinched, helped along with penetrating fingers, tongue and cock is joyful. The memory that sticks with me though is D falling asleep; two fingers still buried deep in my warm wetness, head resting on my breast where his teeth had been teasing my nipples. Pulling him to me, cradling and rocking him to temporary oblivion makes me wistful - that urge to protect, tend and nurture is so strong. I have to remember that like a library book, I'm only borrowing him for a few hours - I have to give him back.

Still, back indoors for the long Easter weekend, I'm embarking on that enterprise that traditionally marks the time of year or the end of a relationship - decorating!

Like it says up there

This week has been rather stressful and I have reacted to it mostly by focusing on the two items up top - curry & chocolate. Which is quite nice, but I've eaten too much and drunk too much and not slept enough. That will all have to be reversed, but I don't reckon March will be the month to do it....

Politics of Food

They say the personal is political, (they being 1st generation feminists) and these days, it seems there is little in the UK more political than food. From the junk that we feed our kids to  the sleeping arrangement of the chickens we consume, there's a celebrity figure or a government spokesman waggling their finger at us.

Now Delia has weighed in contraversially, saying that plenty of people can't afford organically reared chicken and you shouldn't make pensioners or the low-paid feel guilty about buying the food they can afford. I have to say, I see her point.

This morning I was whipping round Tescos, in my usual whirlwind of efficiency, when I ruefully grinned at how bleddy lower middle-class the contents of my trolley were. From the natural, fat-free, bio-yoghurt to the type of bagged salad that doesn't contain iceberg lettuce. From the wholemeal bread to the branflakes. From the imported raspberries I agonised over due to the airmiles and carbon footprint they represented to the processed meat products that I walk straight past without a second glance. Even slim-line tonic for splashing over the gin. You'd think I'd been brainwashed by some Whitehall numpty telling me what's good for me.

Of course, it wasn't always like this. It used to be Aldi & Iceland - cheap white bread, fishfingers & oven chips. Yes, I fed my daughters that sort of crap - is there a support group I can join where we beat our breasts in guilt? Back then, I bought what was on special, haunted the BOGOFs, and concentrated on what I knew they'd eat, as opposed to what was good for them and might get wasted. Organically reared, corn-fed chicken didn't come into it.

What's more, food inflation is shooting up, so thank goodness the government were sensible enough to move away from the nasty old target of RPI at its current rate of 4.2% and concentrate on the much more benign CPI. Its current rate of 2.2% is drifting further and further away from the old-fashioned RPI but that's because we spend lots of money each month on cheap Chinese dvd players. Not food, energy, petrol, council tax.... you know, those tempting extras of life. As wage inflation tends to follow CPI rather than RPI, we're all getting poorer, so pretty soon, it won't just be pensioners living on tins of dog-food or single mothers with 5 kids on the breadline who will treat themselves to the occasional intensively reared clucker - it'll be me too & those like me.

Perhaps the subtext of Delia's comments are, or should be that we could do something about human overcrowding before we bleed over chickens that we're going to kill and eat anyway. In the UK, babies under 1 do not count at all. Officially, they require zero space. Anyone who has a baby is patently aware of how much space they and their stuff require, but according to government statistics, its not even a square inch. Children between the ages of 1 and 10 count as half a human. This is a national disgrace, not the social lives of chickens.

Heart or Stomach

K and I haven't been getting along too well recently - probably no surprise there. However, one of the major souce of rows is around food. He gets home several hours before I do & prefers to eat early. He likes cooking, I don't - should be perfect, no? No.

Somehow this has transmogrified into a control issue. If he is cooking, then I must be at home at the time he decides. There is no option (without a row) of, "Oh I bumped into a friend - if you want to cook, leave mine in the microwave - if you don't, I'll ring a pizza when I get in or knock something up." This is allegedly totally acceptable, as long as I let him know in advance. The problem with spontaneity is that you can't always diarise it, and spontanteity that doesn't include him is apparently selfish.

Likewise, meeting friends for a walk on Sunday mornings, maybe ending up at a pub, maybe having something to eat, depending how we feel is selfish. He might have to sit at home waiting for me to come in and that's not right because he does too much of it. My view is that if he chooses to work unusual hours, that is not my problem and it is more than unreasonable to expect me to have no social life in the evenings, just because he's already been home for a few hours.

The problem is fundamentally that I told him that I no longer care about his behaviour - on or off line since the last little episode. He has realised that its perfectly true - I don't care, and is scared witless. Which is making him cling, which is pissing me off. He feels insecure, I feel smothered. The problem is, he just adds tension to my life. I can't go for a drink after work with my daughter without planning how I'm going to "manage" him when I get in. I'm rushing out of the pub because I know he will have the arse because he wants to cook and we must be in the house before he starts. The smell of frying onion must be mingled with the stench of burning martyr. He can't accept it's controlling. I can't be doing with it. It ain't good.

...and wine

The esteemed Dr Thomas Stuttaford in his column in The Times proclaims that giving up chocolate and wine for lent is ridiculous, and potentially fatal. Your blogger could have told you that for free. Wine, obviously along with curry and chocolate form the 3 most important food groups and should be consumed every day for optimum cheerfulness.

Now the offspring came back from uni with some very strange ideas. Having survived for 3 years on lentils and organic veg boxes in the vegetarian, Jewish, hippie commune one found herself in, (an amusing contrast to the Catholic convent school she'd just escaped from), they arrived back post-finals with the glassy-eyed fervour of the born-again proselytiser, determined to convert me to the sanctimonious worship of brown rice. But then I reminded them of steak, and they got a lot more bearable.

Nevertheless, they cling to an unhealthy obsession with fruit and vegetables. I have no personal objection to these harmless botanical growths, I just don't feel the need to count my cauliflower florets to ensure I have assembled sufficient to meet the government-busybody-determined amount for 1 portion, and hyperventilate if they aren't joined by enough other garden rubbish to meet the 5-a-day target.

The other defining quality about one particular of the offspring is her wind. God help us all, its foul. I don't just mean a bit stinky. I mean Porton Down manufactured biological weapon. She's lost count of the times she has cleared supermarket aisles, shop and even pubs. She is particularly sheepishly proud of the time she cleared a Post Office on pension day. Old people generally have no sense of smell left. The highlight of their week is queuing at the Post Office. Yet they melted away like summer snow when Sprog 1 let rip her silent killer.

It is sufficiently bad that a contingent of her co-workers approached personnel and asked the unfortunate woman to "have a word - or don't renew her temp contract." So to save her blushes (and her workmates' concussion as they bang their heads on passing out), she now tramps the streets of the Barbican at lunchtime.

It was suggested to her during this squirming interview that she might like to visit her doctor for a second opinion. This she duly did, into the face of a silently astonished GP, who referred her on to a nutritionist. After a month, appointment day arrived. Off she tramped, food diary clutched in hand. The nutritionist was very thorough, went through everything with her and her verdict? You eat too healthily - too much fibre. Eat more crap for a while and see if that helps. Less veg. White bread. White rice.

Ha. Should have listened to your mother!

Curry 'n' Elvis

Who could resist? Just got back from a curry house in Rayne in Essex where they had an Elvis impersonator. Let's say he enjoyed his job! I think he was paying them in the end, but he put on a good show and the restaurant was packed. Cheesy but fun!