Stand and stare.

Alan Bennett says he can only write in the house when it's completely empty. He doesn't have three boys then, or workmen going in and out, or a cleaner, or a husband. Not one that we know of anyway. I haven't updated the old blog for ages and one of the reasons is that over the Easter holidays I was hardly ever alone in the house to write, and then I was working (more videos) and then I had workmen coming in and out (new decking, having the kitchen done trashed the old lot). Here it is… And the other reason was that I took a little break from social media, which started by accident over the holidays and then, when I realised I hadn't been on Facebook for a few days, or on Twitter, I continued deliberately.  I think I'll see how long I can abstain for, I thought, a bit like keeping off the booze, just to see if I could. And it turns out I could. At time of writing I haven't been on Facebook for more than two weeks. It has ended up being a sort of monastical online silence. Not that I was chanting. Actually I was planting. This is some of what I was up to… And it was as I was out in the garden enjoying the beautiful emerging spring, rather than blogging or Facebooking, that I kept thinking about the Center Parcs ad, you know the one where they quote the poem, "What is this life, so full of care…" I googled it actually. Here it is in full … Leisure WHAT is this life if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare? No time to stand beneath the boughs, And stare as long as sheep and cows: No time to see, when woods we pass, Where squirrels hide their nuts in grass: No time to see, in broad daylight, Streams full of stars, like skies at night: No time to turn at Beauty's glance, And watch her feet, how they can dance: No time to wait till her mouth can Enrich that smile her eyes began? A poor life this if, full of care, We have no time to stand and stare. W. H. Davies And while standing and staring in the garden I discovered something. I discovered that 'family' is not a constant thing, it is a thing that we make, something fleeting, precious, that requires time and commitment. But most of all, time.  What is a family after all? A group people living individual lives, going off each day in different directions to mingle with other different groups of people and experience different views of the world.  But those moments when we are back together in the holidays, under the same roof, pottering in the garden, eating a meal, watching a bit of TV, going out to the cinema or a restaurant, these are the times when 'family' happens, that curious indefinable alchemy we sentimental types hold so dear. I decided that family is a series of fleeting happenings and shared memories that when woven together make something bigger and more important than the individuals in it. Apart we are just the pieces, the scattered patchwork squares, together we are the tapestry. So you could say I was concentrating on my tapestry for a few precious weeks there, looking inwards at how it is put together and taking care that this fragile thing made of disparate pieces is a strong enough whole, rather than looking outwards at the world via Facebook and Twitter. It has left me strangely calm, sleeping well and deeply each night, refreshed even. Perhaps we all need to take a social media holiday occasionally? Time to just stand and stare. Love E x Twitter @DOESNOTDOIT Facebook https://www.facebook.com/pages/I-Dont-Know-How-She-Doesnt-Do-It/547812378582001

I'm more a Panda Parent than a Tiger Mother.

So Kate Winslet wants to hold on to her children's childhood for as long as possible by banning them from computers and mobiles phones and not allowing them to slump in front of the telly for hours on end. 

If there's one thing I can't stand, it's child-rearing edicts dished out by pampered celebrities who have no idea what it's like to be trapped in the house for days - nay weeks - looking after a multitude of young children by yourself, while staring out of the window wondering where your life went, with one eye on the clock for a suitable moment to pour that first glass of wine. 

Sometimes sticking a child in front of the computer, or letting him have your phone to do a bit of filming or play a mindless game, is a God-send for your average beleaguered stressed-out mum. But then Kate Winslet is not one of those.

Those days are far behind me now - thank God - and I wouldn't turn the clock back and not have spent the time I did with my three boys at home for anything, because of course there were good times too, finger-painting-coffee-morning-playground-lego-building-story-telling-cuddling-away-rainy-afternoon-fun. But it's a tough job to give up work and stay at home with babies/toddlers/pre-school kids and I'm guessing Kate Winslet, with her let them eat cake instead attitude, or rather let them play in acres of her Wiltshire/L.A. garden, isn't really in a position to know that.

Mind you I pretty much resent all child-rearing 'gurus', pampered Oscar-winning actresses or not, especially that Tiger Mother. You know, the Chinese mum with the two girls who accepts nothing less than a A * in every subject and forced them to practice piano every night so that there were actually teeth marks on the instrument where one of them had gnawed on it in frustration. 

I subscribe more to the pandering line of parenting, pandering to their every need that is. Forget Tiger Mother, I'm a 'Panda Parent'.

Can't be bothered to insist they clear the table and would rather just get on an do it yourself because they'll only make a hash of it and wipe all the crumbs straight on to the floor for you to sweep up later? That's me.

Should really nag them to death about picking dirty clothes off the bedroom floor and putting them in the laundry bin themselves, or better still leave it on the floor so it doesn't get washed and they have nothing to wear and 'learn the consequences of their actions', but end up picking it all up and washing it anyway because you'd rather have a quiet life? Yup, me again. Mostly.

Know that you should be telling them to practice the piano when they get in from school because you are wasting your money on lessons every week otherwise but would rather sit and have a nice undisturbed cup of tea while reading the paper? You guessed it.

And the thing is, all that is true and our kids are ok. The eldest two play their instruments (electric/acoustic guitars) morning noon and night and I've never nagged them to do it. (Mind you I did make sure they learnt an instrument that I thought was likely to still be 'cool' when they were teenagers and I think that helps).

They get their homework done without being chained to their desks. I think.

They will do things around the house when they are asked, and sometimes when not.

I let them go on the computer way too much but I make sure I can see what they're up to. For the most part.

And yes I know I pamper them, I pick them up and drop them off from things because I don't like the idea of them walking in the cold and the wet when they are tired. 

I like to bake a cake and leave it in the kitchen for when they get home from school if I know I'm going to be out filming or on a recce or something.

And I hug them and get hugs back. A lot. Does the tiger bully mother get that? I like to think not. But we all like to think we're doing the right thing when it comes to parenting, don't we?

The truth is we're all muddling along trying to do the best we can. Even Kate Winslet.

Love E x

A very mixed neighbourhood.

(New cocktail glasses.)

When I think about the environment I grew up in, compared to that of my own children, I think of the word homogeneity because where I grew up in North Yorkshire everyone I knew was pretty much the same. 

We were all what you might call 'middle class' and we were mostly white. My friends lived in houses much like mine, newly built, or built in the last twenty years or so. Their parents were home-owners like mine. They had cars, sometimes two, like mine. They went on nice summer holidays to Cornwall, or even abroad once a year, like mine. 

I went to a 'good' comprehensive school where I guess there must have been children from deprived backgrounds but I was never really aware of that, and out of approximately one thousand pupils only one of them was black. 

I suppose we were the privileged ones because we were the only family we knew with a dishwasher and that, my friends told me at the time, meant we were 'posh'. 

At the other end of the spectrum I wasn't aware of people with trust funds, or people who went to private school, or people who went on skiing holidays. In fact I didn't come across anyone who had gone to private school until I got to university where I was shocked to discover that these same 'Sloanes' (for that is what we called them in those days), thought nothing of swearing in public, quite loudly, in braying tones - "Oh fucking hell, Emma!" 

I mention this because this week I was confronted with what a very different environment my own children are being brought up in, a long way from the 'sameyness' of mine, indeed a place full of extremes.  And I think that on the whole this is a good thing.

They live in south London, on a road that has people who own their substantial sized houses, who have huge Range Rovers and converted basements and four children at private school and weekend cottages in Gloucestershire, but where there are also people who live in rented housing association flats, or even rooms, and survive, somehow, on benefits. 

And although our boys are fortunate to walk across a pretty common to their 'good' comprehensive school every morning - where they encounter children from every possible walk of life - through an avenue of mature trees, past ponds that are currently being converted into a wetland habitat for amphibians. They also pass the drunks that routinely sit on the benches there, have seen discarded needles strewn along the path, and even, once, a drug deal going on in broad daylight. Indeed Eldest has been mugged on that very lane that leads to his school, in the afternoon.

But there was an incident on Friday last that brilliantly sums up the diversity existing cheek by jowl where we live, better than I could ever manage, and unfortunately it features me in the posh person role here, taking a delivery from that ultimate temple of middle class cliche, John Lewis. 

"Oooo!" I said to the guy who was standing on our front step holding one of those electronic signing pads that indicates something yummy is arriving, (you see I'm even slipping into the suitable vernacular here), "I think this might be the glasses I've ordered for my cocktail party!" 

He smiled, and at exactly that moment, the woman with the wild hair and the ravaged face and all those dogs, who lives upstairs in social housing accommodation over the road, and calls the emergency services routinely in the middle of the night, lent out of her window and shouted "You fucking paedophile!" at some man below who was leaving through the front door.

The John Lewis delivery guy and I exchanged looks and tried to continue our conversation but the woman called out again, "You fucking black paedophile!" 

It was hard to ignore and I felt it needed some sort of explanation. "It's a very mixed neighbourhood," I said to the delivery guy. 

"Indeed," he replied.

And thinking about it later it occurred to me that those Sloaney girls I encountered at university, and the woman leaning out of the window in our street, might come from very different backgrounds, life may have dealt them very different hands, but they have something in common that would have been shocking to a middle class North Yorkshire girl growing up in the 1970s and '80s, and that is that they both swear in public. 

So think on, as they say in Yorkshire.

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Jugs

It was my birthday on Friday (see above) and so I was out living it up having lunch with Husband and then cocktails at home with friends (see below).

Would you believe I was given 5 jugs. Luckily I really love jugs. (Also see below.)

Today scaffolders are here putting up scaffolding to mend the roof. Yikes.

And I need to write two video treatments…

So to keep you entertained until I blog again here are the two videos we just finished -  Year 5 telling you how to pitch. If you click on the Vimeo icon up there on the right you should be able to find them. SHOULD...

Love E x

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The Stars Align

Every so often the stars align, the Gods smile down on us, and things go right. Sometimes almost too right to believe. So it was the other evening motoring down to Somerset with my lovely old friend and colleague, Pat, for a film shoot at a primary school (his production company, called Lightshop Films, I direct, he shoots, we edit together) when we decided to stop off for some pub grub on the way. 

"Google Gastro pub off the A303," said Pat from the driving seat. 

Yeah right, I thought to myself, we're really going to roll into an amazing pub just off this road, in the middle of nowhere, in the dark, in a bit of a hurry en route to bedtime at the Premier Inn, Glastonbury. I think not. But I dutifully did as he said and typed, "Gastro pub, Stonehenge" into my phone. 

Weird isn't it? If you'd told me only a couple of years ago that we would have been able to find the details of a restaurant somewhere nearby, on a mobile handheld device, from a moving vehicle, I think I would have wet myself laughing (a genuine hazard these days). But a pub name duly came up, The Beckford Arms, and I tried to access its many reviews but my phone just did that whirring, whirring thing it does when you've driven away from a signal. 

I thought the pub looked promising from the picture though, and from the details on its website, and so we put the address into the sat nav, established that it was only 6 minutes from the road we were on, and turned off.

Wow. It was amazing. In fact it was like a dream. The pitch dark country road, high hedges on both sides, turned on to a narrower lane that suddenly widened out at the last moment as the sat nav declared we had reached our destination, to reveal a lonely Georgian, ivy-steeped inn. Its many warm glowing windows, un-curtained to the night, revealed candle-lit rooms beyond, a cosy bar, a stunning dining room replete with blonde wood tables and a roaring fire.

We sat at that very table there in the window.

We ordered two ales, sat at a cosy window table, and happily perused the menu immediately brought to us, which included duck breast and guinea fowl. So we had one of each. 

"Life just isn't like this," observed Pat, "you dream of finding a gorgeous pub just off the beaten track on the way to a shoot and it never happens." 

"Stick with me then," I joked, "coz this sort of thing happens to me all the time." (Ha ha, maybe don't mention the appendicitis drama in Italy). And the rest of the shoot went the same way. 

The Premier Inn was new, perfectly serviceable and extremely close to Glastonbury Tor so that as we drove away for the shoot early next morning its majestic tower could be seen floating ethereally above the mist, and now we can both say we've been to Glastonbury. 

The rooms were comfortable. We rose for a cooked breakfast and Pat found somewhere nearby to buy sandwiches for the crew lunch. We met up with our clients, pitched up at the lovely modern school, parked right outside the ground floor library and classrooms we were using (well recced by me, you see), to be met by wonderful teachers who could not have been more helpful and brought us mugs of hot tea and coffee. Twice.

The children we filmed with, some I had already met and some not, were fantastic. We managed to stick to my shooting schedule to the absolute minute, even breaking for a short lunch break (often not possible), with three sequences already in the bag, by dead on 12 o'clock. 

We wrapped early. We drove back in the blazing spring sunshine through unclogged roads. I was home in time for a delicious supper cooked by Husband at 7.00 pm. Plus it was one of these rare days when I felt totally on it. Do you get those? Energetic, full of ideas and enthusiasm, even wearing the right clothes for the job (and let's face it, work days can be make or break depending on what you pull on first thing in the morning). All good. 

The whole thing made me remember how much I used to love directing back in the day before I had children. It's the best job in the world when it goes well, combining organising, coordinating, communicating, storytelling and creating all in one massive adrenalin-fuelled hit, and you get to call action and cut to boot.

The only downside is that I'm feeling a little washed out today. I may have been on a productive high yesterday but getting up at 6.00 am and filming flat out until 4, with at least 20 different Year 5 children, and 3 from Reception (they were great), plus 3 adults to manoeuvre, has taken its toll. I might just need a little lie on the sofa at some point with a nice cup of tea and the newspaper today. In fact, I could probably do with a tiny bit of a snooze...

Love E x

Just googled The Beckford Arms and found it listed as one of the top 50 pubs in England and voted best dining pub of the year for 2013. All part of my master plan of course...

http://www.thegoodpubguide.co.uk/pub/view/Beckford-Arms-SP3-6PX

Glastonbury Tor 

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Italian Job

Forgive me reader for I have sinned, it has been three weeks since my last post, this has never happened before, and this is why…

Italian Job

As I climb down from the ambulance struggling to keep up with Youngest who is being rushed away from me lying on a high wheeled stretcher, the urge to empty my stomach, which I have been fighting through every twist and turn of the vertiginous mountain roads through which we have just passed, becomes irresistible. 

I just about manage to mutter the word "sick" in time for the thank-god-he's-an-English-speaking-paramedic to hurriedly proffer one of those cardboard kidney-shaped receptacles before emptying the contents of my stomach - the delicious evening meal I recently ate with friends back at the chalet, when the world was nothing but warm congeniality and sitting around a table chatting with our three healthy children nearby and not a cold, dark arrival at an unfamiliar hospital on a late winter evening with a frighteningly sick child, a mere hour or so ago - into it. Oh and I wet myself at the same time as well. Just a bit. Well I am a 40-something mother of three, it's par for the course.

A short time later, as I stand in the triage room and they are taking Youngest's temperature and jabbing tiny plastic taps into his thin little arm for blood samples and I am holding his hand and gently stroking his brow and leaning over his face to look into his eyes to reassure him that everything is ok (is it?), the second-nature reaction of every concerned mother who ever found herself with her child in A & E, I happen to glance floor-wards and think: why the hell did I pull on my pair of pink Hunter wellies?

I was in a hurry when we left the chalet, that's why, and couldn't quite believe the turn the penultimate evening of our skiing holiday was taking. Even though every instinct told me that Youngest had appendicitis and not just a bad tummy upset, I still could not quite believe we were about to leave for a hospital in an ambulance together. 

I had worried about possible broken bones, twisted ankles, young heads hitting trees at speed, I hadn't thought to worry about appendicitis. I've never been in an ambulance before, hell, I've barely ever been in a hospital before, two of my three children were born at home. 

Upon arrival it turned out that pink Hunter wellies and slightly damp undies were the least of my problems, but these are the sorts of things you fret about when you are a mother in an emergency and you can't speak the language conducted all around you that is involving life and death decisions about your own flesh and blood.

That sense of surreality, utter dislocation from events, continued for the next five days. Five days that Youngest and I spent together in a symbiotic harmony, sleeping, eating and washing, with little else to do, before and after he had his appendix out, in that northern Italian hospital, at the end of our family skiing holiday, in the stunningly beautiful Dololmites. We never did get back to that chalet.

After they wheeled him off to be operated on at 10 am the next morning, I sat in those same pink wellies (and a stupidly short green dress I had changed into for dinner the night before), now encased in fetching blue plastic bags issued in the sterile pre op room, where I had moments before been telling my baby not to worry, he wasn't going to wake up during the operation as he feared because if he did this nice anaesthetist lady here would lose her job, (she thought this was very funny), and I then sobbed, quite loudly. 

They told me to go down to the coffee bar and get a drink but I couldn't. I sat right there outside the doors of the operating theatre, alone, with people walking past on their way to visit relatives, or start their morning shift, paying no attention to the English woman wailing in her wellies. Why would they?

Over the next few days, never leaving the hospital except to sit outside the front a couple of times in the sunshine to remind myself that, yes, the world was still turning, this sense of alienation was compounded by the fact that I was deaf in one ear the whole time, the result of unpleasant ear wax build up I had failed to have seen to before it reached crisis point and I got water in there from washing my hair in the bath, turning me almost entirely deaf.

So as I padded about those bouncy linoleum hospital corridors, pressing lift buttons that quietly pinged, to open doors that gently swished, all that padding and pinging and swishing was even quieter and consequently even eerier to me than it might have been. 

And when eventually I did venture down in one of those lifts to find the coffee bar on the ground floor and sit in the corner with my cup of incredibly strong coffee, the mostly German chatter around me sounded even more bazaar, to my ears at least, for being conducted entirely underwater.

But let's fast forward a little because if I take you through every moment of the past few weeks, including the holiday itself (very nice thank you) and the appendix operation and the post op recuperation and the frantic and ultimately fruitless phone calls to the insurance company made by Husband and my mother back in the UK, and to a lesser extent by me in Italy, we will be here almost as long as Youngest and I were stuck in that place. 

So here we are five days later - Tuesday lunchtime - I am standing at the Seek Assistance counter at Innsbruck airport. I have Youngest beside me in a wheelchair I picked up at the entrance, just in case he feels tired. A bespectacled lady in front of me, all Austrian-efficiency thin, over-plucked eyebrows, hair suspiciously black for her years, starts to issue our boarding cards. Midway through the process she looks up to say, "Can I have your fit to fly document please?" in impeccable English. 

I don't have a fit to fly document, not specifically. I have documents explaining what has happened, I have his discharge papers from the hospital and from the doctor concerned, but I don't have a fit to fly document. I feel myself go hot and then cold and start to tremble ever so slightly, imperceptibly, I hope. 

Perhaps we won't be able to fly home today after all? Perhaps, having made this hour and a half taxi journey through the Brenner pass from Italy into Austria, which cost me 180 Euros in cash that I had to get out of the cashpoint in the hospital lobby, we will now have to turn back? Or Youngest and I will have to go and find a hotel near by, just the two of us, alone in Austria, as we have been alone in Italy because the others had to fly home as planned on Sunday night while we stayed on?

"Of course," I answer brightly, and hand over the papers I do have, papers that were filled in for the insurance company who in the end did neither arrange, nor pay, for us to get home because they insisted that we stay on in Italy for at least another three days before our case be "reviewed", possibly a total of ten more days, post op, despite the fact the doctor said Youngest was free to go. They should be renamed - Insure and Stay. 

"Oh no," says the efficient Austrian lady, "there is no fit to fly document here. Which was the hospital?" 

Luckily I do have a letter from the hospital, in Italian, with the discharge document, detailing what has happened and that Youngest is recovering well and able to go home. A friend who is a nurse in the UK recommended I get that. I hand it over. 

"Good," says the Austrian lady, "I will ring them."And I head for security leaving her reaching for the phone. 

I wheel Youngest through security and they decide to search my rucksack asking me to turn everything out on the conveyor belt in front of them. It turns out they don't like the First Aid kit I decided it might be handy to have with us on the journey. They inspect it slowly and carefully, and then hand it back. We are through. 

Youngest is wheeled over to a special area where there is a disabled loo and the cafe near by and, joy of joys, free WiFi. The first time in five days we are properly able to log on. I download a short film for him to watch and get a coffee. I eye up the planes on the runway. The bright sunshine is hitting the snowy mountain tops all around. It's a stunning location. We are in an immaculate, modern, glass airport. The drive to get here was through some of the most beautiful landscape I have ever seen, the whole experience could be a delight, but all I can think about is getting home. Never has an orange liveried aeroplane, sitting on some tarmac only a few metres away, held so much promise.

Someone walks towards us. He has something in his hand. It's a piece of paper. This is it, I think, they are going to tell us we can't catch this flight, the last one out of here to London today. My heart is in my throat. "Here you go" he says, "we are moving you further forward on the plane." He gives me the new boarding cards.

A short while later, after placing us in a special bus and clamping the wheel chair to the floor of it, after a special platform on that bus is raised to aeroplane door level allowing us to walk the few steps on to it, we are in the plane. We are walking along the aisle. We are seated. We are fastening seat belts. The plane is taking off. 

It is the best plane ride of my life, and not just because the view of the mountains on all sides of us, as we rise out of Innsbruck, out of Austria, back towards the UK, is utterly breathtaking.

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Appendix

This morning I read a doctor's account of a busy A & E department in east London in the Guardian newspaper and counted our blessings. If you are going to be rushed to hospital while on holiday then I recommend northern Italy/the Austrian border. Looking back I realise that Youngest's care could not have been better. The ambulance came quickly. He was seen immediately upon arrival at the hospital. There was virtually no waiting around for anything. He was admitted onto an immaculately clean, modern, children's ward within an hour of arriving, to a spacious room that we shared with another child for only one night. Mostly we were alone together there, our beds side by side, en suite bathroom nearby. We were looked after by attentive, mostly English speaking, doctors and nurses and fed wonderful food (even if lunch did rather mysteriously arrive at 11.30 am so that I had considerable trouble doing justice to its three courses plus salad at that time of day). The doctor in charge justified the fact that Youngest was not given antibiotics telling me that in the UK we prescribe them too readily, he said he didn't need them, and it seems he was right. The wound is healing well. After a full week off school to recover he is now back at school. I am breathing a sigh of relief and gearing up to try and get something back from the insurance company for our travel expenses. All the health care Youngest received at the hospital is, of course, fully paid for already courtesy of his health card, the E111. Long live the European Union.

Love E x

I really like it when...

I really like it when…

I can actually find the receipt for something and I return it to the shop and get all my money back on my card.

Someone else replaced the toilet roll.

I finally sneeze when I felt it coming for ages and there were loads of false starts.

I take off my bra while watching telly without removing my top.

Someone sent me a text saying let's go for coffee.

It starts to rain and I actually have my umbrella at the bottom of my bag.

I get a seat on the Tube.

I try to book a table and they have one.

I get paid for work I have done.

I've washed up and wiped down and I'm about to sit down.

It's Friday.

I'm reading the paper.

We get the best table in the place.

I hug my children last thing at night.

I've just booked a holiday.

I put the key in my own front door.

A complete stranger smiles at me, but not in a creepy way.

I get into bed and turn out the light.

Someone makes a good joke. Preferably me.

There are only a few pages to go until the end of the book and it's book group tomorrow.

I open my eyes and realise it's Sunday and I don't have to get up.

I'm in the taxi on the way to the airport with all three lovely boys and my lovely husband and we are going on a snowy holiday for a whole week away from all this rain… 

Which is lucky because that is what will be happening tomorrow! 

Hooray!

See you when I get back.

Love E x

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