Let the train take the strain

We’ve had a fabulous Christmas with my parents in York and now it’s time to go home. Coming up on the train on Christmas Eve was a pleasure: an almost empty concourse at Kings Cross, a quiet carriage sparsely populated with cosy little family groups all smiling benignly, but now it occurs to me that the journey back might not be so relaxing, especially when I read in the paper that Tuesday will be the busiest day by far – and we’re travelling on Tuesday.

I thought I was so clever having Amazon deliver the presents up north but of course there’s no delivery service to get them back… only us. I spend a couple of fraught hours packing, shouting up and down the stairs to boys and Husband as I remove gifts from packaging before crushing and bending them into the enormous suitcase - and still there's Middle One’s telescope to contend with, its huge cardboard box looming in the hallway, taller and wider than Youngest, and Eldest’s full size acoustic guitar in its new hard case…

Approaching York station we get the first whiff of trouble: traffic backed up so far we can’t turn off the road. We consider jumping out in the middle but judge it too dangerous, what with luggage to wrestle out of the boot and three children. So we spend precious, sweaty minutes watching the hands on the elegant Victorian clock face make their slow but inevitable progress until finally mother squeezes the car through a gap and we jump out. The train leaves in four minutes.

We throw everything on the pavement: bulging suitcase, enormous telescope box, guitar, family rucksack full of packed lunch, three more rucksacks, one for each child, Penguin suitcase Youngest takes everywhere with us, my handbag, and the children of course. Youngest removed his shoes in the back of the car so more valuable minutes are wasted as he fumbles to get them back on.

We run for the train, trailing children and grandparents behind us and this is when the horror hits: it’s already there by the platform, like a black and bloated corpse, its entrails hoards of people spewing from every orifice. Great. As we run husband spots a luggage carriage with doors open and flings the gargantuan suitcase and telescope box into it. “They’re not labeled!” I shout and now we’re committed: we have to get this train. The whistle blows. My heart pounds. Middle One and Youngest search our faces for reassurance - and find none.

Desperately and inelegantly we push our way on, Eldest holding the guitar case above his head, me wedging Youngest with Penguin suitcase and bag out in front like barricades. We have reservations but when we finally inch our way to them (ten minutes out of the station) other travellers are sitting there (of course). Thankfully when politely challenged they move without a fight and we flop down, hot, trembling and exhausted. Less fortunate passengers, clutching small animals and bags and cases and rucksacks, tower above and around us like brooding sentinels.

After a few minutes I pull out the packed lunch and that’s when I remember the beer - I grabbed a bottle from my parent’s fridge at the last minute. “Do you have that bottle opener you got in your Christmas cracker by any chance?” I ask Eldest. He pulls it from his rucksack with a flourish. Thank God.

Spinal Tap

Tiny beads of sweat are running down the back of Husband's neck. He's bent double, trying to get This is Spinal Tap to play as ten twelve year-old boys (and one thirteen year-old and a nine year-old) leap and twirl across the floor behind him. One boy picks up an empty plastic water gun and hits another over the head with it. Like a pair of clammy hands on a steering wheel, we are in danger of losing control.

I look at my watch: 5.10. Can the party really have began only ten minutes ago? The parents won’t be back to collect the little darlings for two hours and fifty minutes and I didn’t plan any games. (Middle One, whose party it is, says they are ‘way too old for games ’.) I always plan games. Lots of them. Usually back to back activities to take up every single minute. I have a great line in marshmallow and dry spaghetti sculptures. Now I'm beginning to regret saying they could, “just hang out, watch a movie, have pizza and eat pop corn…"

I ring Eldest, who has inconveniently gone out. “Where are you? We need you to get the DVD to play in your X Box.”

“I’m at D’s house. Surely one of those boys knows how to do it?”

“You would think so.”

He asks to speak to Husband. Husband says, “what the hell are you talking about?” and, “I already tried that,” over and over again down the phone. Then he abandons trying to get the X Box to play the DVD and tries to get the DVD player to play the DVD instead. We need a scarp lead, apparently (he is muttering this to himself). Or is it a scart lead? I have no idea. I dash over to friends, who live opposite. “Do you have a scarp lead?”

“You mean a scart lead,” says unflappable friend (he’s Australian). At this point I really couldn’t care less what the last consonant is, I have nothing with which to entertain ten 12 year-old boys and a desperate desire for alcohol.

When I get back with said scart lead the DVD is finally playing and order, of sorts, has been restored. Thank God. But then it starts glitching. “The DVD is glitching,” says Middle One, stating the bleeding obvious.

I ring Eldest again. “Now it’s glitching.”

He sighs."It only glitches if it’s an old or damaged DVD."

But the DVD is neither old nor damaged. It is brand new. It was one of Middle One’s birthday presents.

I run over to friend’s house again and stand, panting, in their hallway, noting how peaceful it is with hardly anyone around, only two little boys, quiet and motionless as freeze-frames, watching a DVD in their front room - ironically.

“Have you got This is Spinal Tap?” We start to look for it in their collection, then I realise I left our front door open so dash home to close it. Then friend’s daughter appears on the doorstep with the DVD and I scramble downstairs at top speed to the basement clutching it in my sweaty little hand. Half way down I am hit by an auditory wall of hooting and wailing.

“I have another one!”

“Another what?” asks Husband.

“Another copy of This is Spinal Tap.”

“Why?”

“Because it was glitching.”

“It’s not glitching, it’s fine. What are you panicking about?”

I look at my watch. Only two hours and forty-five minutes to go.

A Tale of Two Suppers

1. A rubbish meal

We’re on an economy drive, trying to use everything in the freezer. It’s one of Husband’s peccadilloes. He says we use the freezer as some sort of food purgatory until it’s too old and we throw it all away. And he has a point.

I go along with it for a quiet life (I go along with a lot of things for a quiet life), and now we’re down to the last few chicken breasts. Husband is getting ready to go to an evening work thing while I decide how to cook the defrosted chicken.

There are some vegetables kicking around but not much else so I decide to fry the chicken in red onions and peppers, then I lob in some tinned olives along with some stock and a bit of fresh thyme and some lemon and garlic and seasoning and it’s all coming together rather nicely. At the last minute I add a bit of leftover cream cheese I found lurking at the back of the fridge and have a taste. It’s bloody marvellous. I decide we’ll have it with pasta. I’m feeling pleased. Husband will love this when he get back from the do.

But as I’m filling a large pan with water I hear a strange popping/groaning noise coming from the hob. I ignore it (big mistake) and as I’m carrying the pan over there’s a very loud bang and the glass lid on top of my wonderful chicken concoction shatters into a million tiny pieces. I freeze, staring at my lovely dinner. The lid is still in one piece but now there's a fragile crazy paving barrier between us and the food.

Eldest and Middle One arrive. Eldest pulls gently on the metal handle and we all watch, horrified, as the shattered glass rises up and back again like bendy plastic. We can’t get the lid off like that so instead I use a pallet knife to gently slide it away as Eldest and Middle One, and Youngest too (who has just arrived to view the spectacle), bellow contradictory instructions. I manage to get the lid off and on to the worktop - but have any tiny bits of glass gone in the food?

Eldest and I run our fingertips across top and bottom: it feels gritty. I stare lovingly, you might even say wistfully, at the dinner... then throw the whole lot out and spend £26 ordering pizza. The boys are delighted, and at least there’s no washing up.

2. Cauliflower cheese

It’s early Sunday evening and I’m making cauliflower cheese to go with the roast. Eldest has requested it. He loves cauliflower cheese. But before I start I have to clean up his pancake mess from earlier. I’ve asked him to do it three times and can’t be bothered to ask again as it will involve climbing three sets stairs to his room where he’s busy ‘doing his homework’.

I’ve forgotten what a faff cauliflower cheese is, there are so many processes. I get on with part 1: steaming. Eldest bounds in. “Where’s the Pritt stick!” he thunders. “There’s never a Pritt stick in this bloody house! I need one for Art.”

“It’s wherever you left it last time I gave it to you,” I say, looking for the flour somewhere in the back of a high cupboard.

“You didn’t give it to me, we had some old ones but they’ve all run out. We never have a decent Pritt stick.”

“No, I bought a new one, a big one, in W H Smith this week. You can’t have used all that already.” I’m well into part 2 now: melting butter…

“I have.”

“I don’t think you have.” Adding flour…

“Where is it, then?”

“It was in the Perspex pencil box on my desk last time I looked.” Some milk and a little grated cheese… “Where I keep it.”

“In the what?”

“The Perspex pencil box.” And now a bit more milk…

“What the hell is a ‘Perspex’ box?”

“Perspex is a type of plastic, you know what it is; it’s see-through.” I’m becoming increasingly frustrated as I stir the sauce. I season it and add more cheese. “I bet it’s still there.” I prod the cauliflower with a knife: it’s done. I take it off the hob and look for a large oven-proof dish to put it in.

“Well I can’t find it, “ he says, “and I really need it for my Art homework.”

“Oh God,’ I sigh, arranging the vegetable in the dish, “Just give me a minute and I’ll come upstairs and look.” I add more milk and turn the sauce down, very low, and stamp up to the office with Eldest behind me attacking the stairs several at a time.

He’s right of course, there is no sign of the Pritt stick in my Perspex pencil box. “Well it was here, ” I say, rooting around. “Someone has had it.”

“Not me,” says Eldest, folding his arms.

“Really?” I tramp up to Eldest’s room. He is hard at my heels, forcefully protesting his innocence. He hasn’t had it, he doesn’t know where it is; someone has obviously taken it... I push things around on his desk - it’s an absolute tip - all the while ranting and moaning and complaining about pancake mess and cauliflower cheese and things never where they should be and then I see it, the Pritt stick, large as life, the one I just bought in W H Smith last week, sitting under his art folder, the art folder he has just been using.

I yelp. I scream. I am so frustrated that I really want to hit him - especially when he says he didn’t put it there - but I mustn’t so I jump up and down and shout, very loudly (it hurts my throat) and he laughs. He actually has the nerve to laugh so that I have to laugh too, just a bit, despite myself.

Then I leave the room to go back to the kitchen, to my burning cheese sauce, and I hear him muttering, “You. Are. So. Mad.”

Help!

“Help!” Comes an urgent voice from upstairs. I can hear water running. “Help! Mum! Dad!" It’s Eldest in the shower. What’s happened to him? Is he scalded? Has he slipped and broken something? A thousand different disasters flash through my mind, I’m nothing if not imaginative when it comes to possible catastrophes to befall my children. Home a bit late from school? Obviously abducted by one of those drunks who hangs out by the dried up pond on the common - no matter that they don’t have the coordination to pee in a straight line, let alone to steal a child. Still asleep at an unnaturally late hour on a Sunday morning? It’s one of those rare older child cot deaths, or meningitis - like with Michael Rosen’s son (so unbelievably tragic).

No, I’ve guessed it: he’s got trapped somehow, like my father did all those years ago. He was just taking a shower at home prior to flying off somewhere to a conference. He was alone in the house and the shower door jammed. Imagine it: naked and freezing with a sheet of impenetrable glass between you and freedom. I think he remained like that for some time until he managed to scramble his lanky six-foot frame up and over the top, squeezing between the tiny space and the ceiling with the knowledge that it could all crash beneath him at any moment. It didn’t, thank goodness.

So, lying in my bed first thing this morning, clutching the cup of tea Husband has kindly brought for me (as usual) and listening to the whole world going to hell in a handbasket on Radio 4 (as usual) that’s what I decide has happened to Eldest. He’s trapped in the shower. But hang on a minute - it’s an over bath shower up there, there’s no door…

“Help!” Comes the desperate voice again, “I need help! It’s urgent!”

“What!” Husband calls, dashing to the rescue as I scramble from under the duvet, grabbing at the dressing gown strewn on the floor (can’t appear naked in front of eldest son any more, he’s 15). I get to the landing just in time to meet husband coming down again from the top floor. There's a grim look on his face.

“What’s the matter? What is it? Is he okay?”

“He’s fine,” he says. “He’s run out of shampoo.”

Death of a pet (s)

One of the gerbils has died. Thank god it’s Cinnamon and not Emily. Emily was named after one of Youngest’s favourite classmates.

I had my suspicions last Tuesday when Cinnamon failed to stir at feeding time, confirmed the next evening with the discovering of a tiny rigid corpse. Middle One sobbed. I thought he might be immune to pet deaths by now - there have been so many.

First the tropical fish, we killed a lot of those, not quite sure how, they just kept disappearing. We’d go to bed with a tank full of pretty fish and wake up to fewer. Sometimes a lot fewer. That was after the night of the Tiger Barb massacre. We’d just bought some lovely stripy specimens from the Morden Hall Aquatic Centre. Turned out they weren’t so lovely. When we got up next morning all the other fish had gone. Vanished. Vamoosed. Foolishly we thought Tiger Barbs got their name from the stripes.

Then the hamster died. This was a few years back now and Middle One was distraught. We did all the right things: talked about her a lot, held a funeral, buried her in the garden, drew pictures, even baked cakes for the wake. Still Middle One’s nightly sobbing continued until, by day seven, I snapped. “Enough already with the hamster grief. It’s dead, it’s sad, now move on.”

With Cinnamon it’s Groundhog Day all over again. Or should that be Groundgerbil Day? Much crying and wringing of hands. Not that anyone actually does anything with the poor little thing. She just lies there in the bottom of her cage quietly decomposing because I’m too busy to deal with it. Emily seems oblivious. Seems oblivious…

Finally, after two days, I summon up courage, snap on a pair of Marigolds and dig around in the sawdust. It’s a gruesome task but someone’s gotta do it. All I find is a tail with some matted fur attached. Gross. Perhaps Cinnamon and Emily weren’t as close as we thought?

We bury Cinnamon in the garden in a cardboard box as Youngest and Middle One cry.

Then on Saturday Eldest comes downstairs with a strange look on his face. “Lee’s dead,” he says. Lee is his Leopard Gecko. “Oh,” I say. I imagine Eldest will be secretly quite pleased about this, he is 15 now... Eldest, that is, not the gecko, although he might have been too, he was old and had lately become, quite frankly, something of a burden. What with the constant internet orders for more live crickets and the regular hassle of finding a non-vegetarian to feed them to him every time we went away.

But what am I thinking? These were our problems. Eldest, whose pet it actually was, did virtually nothing. He took no interest in the creature at all. So we’re rather surprised when he sheds tears too.

Still, no one’s actually taken the trouble to bury the lizard yet: he’s lying outside the backdoor in an iPhone 4 box. It’s the perfect size for his coffin.

Starbucks

“You don’t even know how to order coffee,” Eldest hisses, as we stand in the queue in Starbucks.

“Er…I think I do, actually,” I reply.

“You are so embarrassing!” chips in Middle One.

My crime? I’ve been handed a small hot chocolate with caramel for Youngest and I didn’t order him a small hot chocolate with caramel. I merely ordered a small hot chocolate. I’ve just pointed this out to the barista – politely, I think – and while I was at it reminded her that we are still waiting for the cappuccino, and the two lavish frappaccinos with cream that the two older boys added to the order...without asking me first.

“Look,” I say, “I am just asking for what I have ordered. I’m not being rude. Don’t tell me what to do, I’m an adult.”

“But you don’t know how to do it!” he repeats.

“No, you don’t!” adds Middle One.

“I think I do. Believe it or not I was ordering coffees long before you two were even born.”

I can’t believe I just said that, that’s the sort of thing my mother said to me when I was 15. OMG, I’m turning into my mother.

A discussion ensues, between the barista and me, about the hot chocolate. I insist that I couldn’t have asked for one with caramel because I had no idea such a drink existed. She claims that I did, even though she is not the person who took the order; she is the person who makes the drinks. I say that as we are in a hurry (we are at a service station on the M4, trying to get to Wales for a surfing weekend with friends by lunchtime) I don’t mind having the hot chocolate with caramel on this occasion, as long as I won’t be paying extra for it, because I didn’t order it. It is all quickly resolved.

“You are a nightmare,” says Eldest.

“Listen,” I say, as we begin to walk away. “You cannot speak to me like that, especially in front of other people, it’s outrageous. Put yourself in my shoes, I had this baby and that baby knew nothing, he was completely helpless and vulnerable. He relied on me entirely for everything, for his very survival. I fed him day and night, I changed his nappies – lots of them. Fast forward a few years, okay 15 years to be precise but to me it feels like five minutes, and now that baby is standing next to me in the queue at Starbucks, while I buy him a very expensive sugary drink, telling me how to order hot chocolate..." That’s it. That’s my case. I have nothing more to say. I’m rather pleased with myself. We are walking across the car park now and I look at Eldest for the light bulb to appear above his head. It doesn’t.

“I don’t care,” he says, “You cannot boss that girl around, she is serving coffee to people, you have never served coffee to people!“

“Actually, I have,” I interrupt, “when I was at university I had a part-time job in Norwich, at a café called Mange Tout and…” but Eldest isn’t interested in my colourful past. “You still can’t tell her what to do because she has a job,” he says, “and you don’t.”

That’s it. I snap. My reasonable self floats free from my body like a departing soul from a dead person, I grab the expensive sugary drink from Eldest’s hand. “Right!” I say, “you apologise to me for that remark or you won’t get this back.”

He doesn’t, and so he doesn’t, and we’re only at junction 16...it’s still a long way to Wales.

Post holiday blues

I wake, and it's as if I can feel the weight of the house bearing down. All those bricks, all those walls, all those rooms with so many things in them. So much stuff. Why do we need it all?

Instead of light and space and warmth there is darkness and clutter and cold, and it happened overnight, all it took was a ride in an aeroplane. Now, the sounds that had become so familiar between sleeping and waking - light footsteps on gravel, the creak of a shutter - are replaced by bin lorries and sirens. I open my eyes to a room that is dark, oppressive, no warm tendril rays feeling their way through the cracks, no mountains to marvel at after I rise and push back the shutters, only mountains of dirty washing in dark piles across the floor, whole ranges of them.

How did we live this life BH? Before Holiday, that is. I can’t remember. What were our habits? What used we to eat for breakfast before there was hot chocolate with pastries under the loggia starring out at the breathtaking view?

On this first morning we struggle to find our places now that one of us is missing, gone to work. How did this happen before? What did we do? All seems too busy, too much, too indoors. We slink off to converse with machines instead of each other, televisions, computers, dishwashers...to watch, to load, to surf, instead of to swim, to read, to eat.

I stand alone in the kitchen, cold tiles beneath my feet, sideways rain clawing the windows. There are so many jobs to do I'm inert. I close my eyes and I’m there again: warmth on skin, church bells ringing, the call of cicadas, a splash from the pool.

I leave the cheerless kitchen with its unloaded dishwasher and a lunch to be made, piles of grocery bags to be unpacked, and go upstairs to find my friend, my salvation.

Within minutes keys are clicking furiously under my fingertips: "I wake, and it's as if I can feel the weight of the house bearing down…"